US Right-Wing Meltdown Watch: “I’m so American I don’t want the President Talking to my Kids!”

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(I must credit a friend for coming up with that title.)

I am getting really nervous about what is happening to the American Right. The paranoia is getting really, really bad – Death Panels, Obama the racist non-citizen, Hitlerian healthcare. Now Obama is feeding “Marxist propaganda” to the nation’s schoolchildren?! Does anyone really believe that? WTH is happening to US conservatives? He’s black with a funny name so he’s a Muslim socialist Nazi whatever? How did we possibly get to this point?

And this is starting to leak out to the rest of the world now, you know. South Koreans heard about that guy who brought a legal firearm to a health care townhall, and it’s downright embarrassing to try to try explain it: ‘well you know, that’s the way we are; those wacky Americans.’ The ‘Obama is Hitler’ riff from the summer is also starting to filter downstream.

You can’t talk like this and expect people to take US superpowerdom seriously. If we are going to lead, and not just be some sallow, pathetic, self-involved empire-in-decline (like 1914 Austro-Hungary), we gotta clean up this kinda stuff. Don’t conservatives see this? They love American empire and dominance more than anyone, yet their post-Bush rhetoric tells the world we aren’t fit to lead, or at least, they aren’t fit to lead the US. Most rich countries have state health care; they think it’s kinda weird we don’t. That doesn’t mean we have to have it, but it does mean when opponents flip out and say ObamaCare is the beginning of the Fourth Reich, they think we’re bananas. Last week some guy got his finger bitten off at a health care townhall?! C’mon! Please! I have to explain you people to Asians out here, and it’s killing me!

Democratic systems need healthy coherent opposition parties. Especially in a 2-party system, a functional, serious opposition is a crucial check & balance. But the US conservative freak-out just goes on and on, even after 8 months of Obama’s presidency. Andrew Sullivan argued in The Conservative Soul that the GOP was at risk of becoming the first religious party in US history. In similar manner, one might say it is becoming a regional party, as it contracts to a Southern rump. Christianist rural paranoia has replaced reflective seriousness.

And stories like this are exactly why the GOP continues to contract. Does the Fox News right really believe the POTUS should not speak to the nation’s children? Isn’t that going wildly overboard? And besides, isn’t it kinda cool that the president wants to talk to kids? Isn’t that good for citizenship? And when he says he is asking for their help, doesn’t that have a ‘we’re-all-in-this-together,’ ‘ask-not-what-your-country-can-do-for-you’ vibe to it? Isn’t that a GOOD thing? Besides he’s the POTUS. Doesn’t he have the right to to speak to the citizenry, including the next generation? He did get elected; he is the PRESIDENT, right?

Oh, I forgot… he’s not a citizen, so of course he shouldn’t talk to the children! How nicely one conspiracy theory dovetails into another to create that FNC echo chamber.

*Sigh* I am running out of things to say on this. It’s just too weird. Go read Richard Hofstader’s classic The Paranoid Style in American Politics. You’ll learn about all the other wackjobs in the history of the American right – like Father Coughlin who thought the New Deal meant FDR was in league with Stalin. How nice.

Give McChrystal a Chance in Afghanistan

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In the last week, Steve Walt, George Will and Charles Hagel have all come out to say that Afghanistan is a losing effort and that we should get out or retrench in one way or the other.

Isn’t this jumping the gun a bit? Obama has only been in there 8 months, and McChrystal for less than 2. I know we all think it could become like Vietnam or the Red Army when they were in Afghanistan 25 years ago. But not necessarily. Presumably US planners can read history and learn from previous mistakes. Heavy and indiscriminate use of firepower was the big civil relations problems faced by both the US in Vietnam and the USSR in Afghanistan. But we seem to have learned not to do that (although the Russians haven’t – look at Chechnya). Predators and local airstrikes, for all their errors, are not like Arclight in South Vietnam or, worse, the Soviet scorched earth policy in Afghanistan.

It is true that large bureaucracies learn slowly, and the the US Army seems particularly insistent on fighting war in only one way. However, the Army did learn counterinsurgency after 4 years in Iraq, and it did, sort of, turn things around there.

I am also not so sure that if we leave AfPak, it wouldn’t cause so much trouble that we’d have to go back in again later. Walt is correct that the ‘safe haven for al Qaeda’ argument for staying in South Asia is weak, but it does hold some water, and there are other reasons for staying.

1. Without a US commitment, Afghanistan will melt-down, and that will increase the chances of the same thing happening in Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons, and a lot more people, conventional weapons, and jihadis.

2. Without the US in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence will almost certainly go back to its old tricks there. It will make trouble so that Pakistan can semi-control Afghanistan and gain greater ‘strategic depth’ against India. (This was the Pakistani strategy before 9/11.)

3. India will flip out if we cut out of South Asia. It will certainly feel less secure, and so be more likely to build more nukes, not compromise on Kashmir, and strike a much harder line on Pakistan and terrorism. Do we really want India to feel isolated and hence pressed to use military force next time they are targeted by terrorists with Pakistani connections? India is an emerging US ally, and if we leave South Asia just like that, we will lose them.

4. If we can get some kind of stable government in Afghanistan and more or less defeat/repress the Taliban, we might then be able to interrupt the huge flow of opium out Afghanistan. Even if you believe in light drug liberalization (I do), it is hard to be comfortable with legalizing opium, which is the base of heroin.

5. Just like in Vietnam, US credibility is at stake. The biggest problem we have in counterinsurgency is that the Afghan locals don’t think we’ll stay, so they won’t rat out the Taliban. If we bail, the Afghans will never trust us again, and we’ll have trouble convincing other similar populations (Muslim, tribalized) should we have to fight somewhere else (like Somalia or Yemen). So yes, we may have to give up later, but let’s at least give it a try before we burn our bridges so badly in South Asia. It will be a lot harder to fight there later if we give up now.

I realize that saying we have to fight for credibility can be a black hole. If you have to defend every domino to defend anyone of them, then you have to fight everywhere. That’s what happened in the Cold War and lead to Vietnam. But we are nowhere near that point in the GWoT. The Cold War pulled us all over the world, but the GWoT is mostly limited to the Middle East and South Asia. We have only just begun to divert resources to Afghanistan from Iraq. As the cost of the latter goes down and the former goes up, hopefully we won’t have to pay any new costs. Yes, I realize the GWoT has already been a budget-breaker, but our Afghanistan venture will likely be less expensive than Iraq. Our costs should begin to decline.

In short, there are costs to giving up in Afghanistan, and benefits if we win. In Vietnam, we learned after Tet, that the benefits of victory no longer outweighed the costs of the effort. In other words, by 1969 it was cheaper to lose in Vietnam. But we are not near that point in Afghanistan yet. Bush basically ignored the place as Iraq took over his presidency. Obama has only just begun the effort that should have taken place in 2002. So let’s give him and McChrystal a chance. Deployments and wars are not forever. If the costs balloon, and benefits recede and become ever more ethereal (as happened in Vietnam), we can always leave. This is not the end of the discussion. But for right now, let’s give Obama a chance, as we gave W his hail mary pass with the surge.

Russian Imperial Paranoia Update – Putin Thinks He’s Rambo!

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Ah, the entertaining hysteria of Russian imperial decline. A few months ago, it was Stalin battling aliens to save the world. Today, it is another machoismo photo-op by the Pootie-Poot (George W Bush’s nickname for Putin). Now he’s shirtless in Siberia. Cuttin’ brush just like W! I bet the ladies just love this sorta stuff…

I’ve written before about the psychology of resentful post-imperial Russia. Vice-President Biden basically nailed it this summer when he said the Russians were suffering from a severe postimperial “hangover,” and Philip Stevens at the FT gets it right too, that endless, tiresome Russian bitterness has made it friendless. Another FT op-ed basically tells you why 20 years after the USSR, eastern Europeans still want NATO as a bulwark against Russian neo-imperialism.

Old glories die hard – although ‘glory’ hardly defines gray, dingy Soviet imperialism – and in Russia’s case the ‘hangover’ has been more severe than normal because the fall from imperial greatness happened so fast – less than 5 years. This rapid fall followed by a consequently more extreme nationalist reaction characterized Weimar Germany too, so this is pretty worrisome actually. At least Britain had a long time to retrench from empire, so Britain’s public and elites could slowly adjust to its declining power. Even Enoch Powell, who loathed the Americans during WWII for their secret intention to break up the Empire by releasing India, came to advocate no further British commitments east of the Suez.

By contrast no figure in Russian political life speaks this way. It is competitive, macho, one-upsmanship in foreign policy. Bullying and bitterness are the order of the day, and national ideology is Weimar-esque resentment. Even as Russia is depopulating, the strut and overconfidence insecure powers require in IR now dominates Russian foreign policy. This is the route to national suicide, and given how unhelpful Russia has been for 15 years on everything from NK to Chechnya to Iran, I guess we should be ‘happy’ they’re on this kamikaze course. Still, they are one of the great cultures on the planet, having produced Dostoyevsky, Shostakovich and the rest, so it is disturbing and tragic to watch them destroy themselves. Sad…

Does State Hostage-Taking Work ?

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An interesting quirk of authoritarian states’ foreign policies is a tendency to take western hostages when they wander onto their territory. Iran, China, and North Korea do this quite regularly. Burma too has gotten into the act lately.

Iran has repeatedly detained Iranian-Americans and journalists on all kinds of ridiculous charges like threatening the honor of Islam. Right now, it is holding three US hikers, who incredibly were hiking in Kurdistan and accidentally wandered into Iran. Call their destination choice a brain failure – a chronic disease among Americans traveling.

NK this year alone held two Americans for 3 months and a South Korean for 6. In the 1990s, after Tiananmen, China used to imprison Chinese-American human rights campaigners.

The first, most obvious question, is how these people wind up in these places. Usually, it is out of stupidity. It looks increasingly like Laura Ling and Euna Lee did in fact land, if only for a moment, on the NK side of the Yalu. And the American who swam to see Aung San Suu Kyi probably deserved some jail time or a fine. And the same goes for those hikers now held in Iran. Who goes back-packing for leisure along the Iran-Iraq border?! One can only imagine Bill Clinton or Jim Webb shaking their heads in disbelief when they are called upon to get these people out.

But there is a larger IR question here too. These accidental penetrations are usually mishaps or stupidity. So when they are convicted as ‘spies,’ it is almost always farcical, and the West knows it. This begs the question then, why do it? The process has become ritualized: arrest, followed by CNN & world news overexposure, then lots of backroom haggling, finally a trip by some dignitary to ‘win’ the release, concluding with a weird photo-op in-country, and then another overexposed media frenzy on the ‘prisoners’ return. (I heard Lara Ling is already looking for a book deal.) Here are a few thoughts why authoritarian states draw out this song-and-dance as much as possible:

1. The more closed your state is the more paranoid you become about any foreign intrusion, no matter how ridiculous, minor, or foolish. This is why the USSR was able to casually destroy KAL 007 in 1983, and Iran accused the BBC of sparking the recent post-election riots.

2. In the world of globalization and the Great Recession, no one really cares much for the bad behavior of NK or Burma. They are international headaches most of us like to forget about. So these sorts of incidents, with all their ritual, hysterical family outbursts, and Larry King interviews, are a great way for small, irrelevant states to garner rare global attention. Use whatever you’ve got to whip up a storm of attention. When China used to do this in the 1980s, China hands called it ‘gong-banging.’

3. Authoritarian states can simultaneously use these accidental intrusions for domestic prestige-taking. North Korea and other rabidly antiwestern regimes can periodically demonstrate to their own people the importance of the struggle against the US. This stuff helps justify the deprivation and international isolation.

4. Your can always garner a few nice concessions by trading these people back. If you are dirt-poor North Korea, you can trade SK or other hostages for all sorts of goodies – whiskey, dollars, cigarettes. If you are Iran, ask for spare parts for you collapsing industrial plant.

TV Review: “24” Season 1 – If “24” is even Close to Accurate, then We are Deservedly Losing the GWoT

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I have been teaching terrorism for about 5 years, but I am not a big fan of serial television. So I had never actually seen an episode of “24.” But my students always reference it in class, and ‘Jack Bauer’ has become synonymous with a no-holds-barred approach to the GWoT. GOP officials occasionally refer to the show, usually in praiseworthy or pseudomethodological terms – as in, ‘we need try to the Jack Bauer-approach to counterterrorism,’ or ‘Jack Bauer wouldn’t let politics stand in the way.’ (It always amazes me how congressmen, who we think have greater access to good or secret government information, nonetheless draw ‘knowledge’ from the same media flim-flam as the rest of us do. Please don’t tell me Congress gets its sense of counterterrorism from movies and TV!) My sense was that such Jack Bauer references meant we need to bend the rules, torture, and otherwise wander into Cheney’s famed ‘dark side.’ And so it was when I watched the show for the first time. I watched season 1 on DVD over the summer, and I was genuinely disturbed and depressed.

1. It is entertaining TV. It watches like a page-turner novel reads. Lots of twists and turns, and plots and counterplots. But this is the first error compared to real life intelligence. If the CIA, FBI, NCTC, etc, had as many moles, rogues, and traitors as the 24’s ‘Counterterrorism Unit’ (CTU) then the agency would be closed and cleansed, and lots of people would wind up in jail.

2. The plot, at least of season 1, bears little resemblance to the actuality of contemporary US counterterrorism (CT). Most of the work of intelligence is bland trolling through information, trying to piece together something useful for policymakers, and providing good, hopefully somewhat predictive analysis – i.e., a lot of reading and writing at a desk. And the cases are far less grandiose and exciting. Actual US CT is a lot more like busting those losers who were supposedly going to blow up the Sears Tower and those Lodi Muslims who were probably entrapped. The show depicts extremely well organized, well-funded, and elaborate plots. Planes blow up, cops get shot with abandon, traitors abound. This unhelpfully feeds the American paranoia of sleeper cells and incipient plots; I see now why the left disliked the show so much during the Bush presidency. It reinforced exactly the kind of hysteria that Bush stoked to get reelected. But actually, it is increasingly likely that 9/11 was an exception and that the domestic terrorist threat is quite minimal.

3. The Bauer character pulls straight from the disturbing Bush, do-whatever-it-takes playbook. So in one episode Bauer says both ‘forget the warrant,’ and ‘ignore the chain of command’ (!). In the real world this should get him disciplined and fired. In another, he shoots a superior with a tranquilizer gun. In the conclusion, he shoots the bad guy terrorist multiple times after he has emptied his gun and raised his hands. All this stuff may feel emotionally fulfilling, but of course, going out of bounds so regularly is exactly what lead to Abu Ghraib and torture. It may look necessary and heroic on TV, but in practice, breaking the rules around violence creates snowball effects, ambiguity, and bad precedents. If US CT staff is acting like Bauer does, with all the gunfighting, hyperventilating, and rule-bending, then our institutions are corroding because of the GWoT, not in order to win it.

4. Somehow the show’s CTU can get whatever doorcodes, email passwords, or other electronic access necessary. Again, this is terribly unhelpful. It suggests that your private life is unsafe before easy and unscrutinized government intrusion (PATRIOT Act, NSA illegal wiretaps). It feeds the paranoia.

5. The office staff seems to acquire and collate huge amounts of information quite quickly. Here is another slip with reality. As the Iraq intel debate showed us, most US intelligence agencies have little hard and secret information, and they struggle a lot to put it together properly. Most of what they use is the same ‘open source’ stuff that the rest of us see. (A friend at the CIA once told me that 95% of what they look at is open-source). The show wildly exaggerates the amount of good and covert information; the staff’s ability to sort it out from all the other noise and chatter that the intel agencies monitor; and perhaps most important of all – as the pre-9/11 investigation of the hijackers showed – how hard it is to connect all and only those dots. In short, the show wildly overrates the effectiveness of intelligence services.

So yes, it does channel the zeitgeist of the Bush-era GWoT well. As a trip down memory lane to the bad old days of torture and intel snafus, it is ‘enjoyable.’ As a teaching device, I suppose it is useful as the illustration of one manner of CT (do-whatever-it-takes), and the one the US (unfortunately) looked the other way on in the wake of 9/11. The show’s violence and law-breaking method feels to me like what Cheney had in mind when he said we must go ‘over to the dark side’ to fight terrorism. All-in-all I was pretty disturbed. If ‘24’ is our approach, then we deserve to lose.

Korean Political Science Association 2009 Biannual Meeting: “American Dual Containment in Asia”

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The KPSA had its biannual meeting from August 20 to 22. Unlike the APSA, the KPSA meets only every two years, because of its size. It was a pretty good conference, but the papers generally feel short of APSA standards. This is the first one I attended. A few thoughts:

1. Just about all the attendees – Korean and foreign – got their PhD in the US. The elite universities in Korea are filled with people who got their PhDs in the US. I rarely meet people who attended those schools, only people who work at them. This speaks volumes about the very high quality of US education vis-a-vis the rest of the world. It also suggests graduate education is a major export sector of the US economy, but no one ever seems to conceptualize it that way.

2. Most of the papers were heavily focused on policy analysis and the day-to-day of Korean and regional politics. In this way, it didn’t feel like political science often to me, but like public policy. I guess this is ok, but it allows a lot of room for sheer opinionating and bloviating. But then again, many have complained that US political science is so theoretical and methodological that regular people can’t access it, it has become irrelevant to politics, and it is just another academic world unto itself. That’s true too. My feelings on this are mixed.

3. IR was vastly overrepresented among the political science subfields (theory, comparative, domestic [Korean], IR). At APSA, US politics’ seminars outweigh all the other sections combined. Not here. I think IR was a majority of the panels. I bet this reflects, 1. the general stasis of Korean domestic politics (interrupted by outbursts of violence on the streets or in the National Assembly), and 2. the immense international pressures on a small country like Korea, especially one surrounded by such large powers. It is a luxury of US politics that our internal politics feels so autonomous. As a superpower with good geography, we don’t have to pay attention to foreign opinion much. (Obama’s use of external anti-Americanism as a campaign tool was quite extraordinary.) Korea does not have that luxury, and the PS reflects that.

4. The geographic focus was solely on NE Asia. I didn’t see a single paper about another area. I find this a growing and disturbing trend here, especially when the state slogans are Global Korea, Dynamic Korea, Korea Rising, etc. I almost never meet anyone who knows anything about the ME, Africa, Latin America, or South Asia. In the context of topics like terrorism, religion, or development, one would need some exposure to these areas. But then again, I almost never see work by Korean academics on topics that are not immediately germane to NE Asia. I suppose this East Asiacentrism is forgivable given how small Korea is, but it speaks poorly of Korea and Korean political science that it seems so disinterested in the rest of the world (US excepted). I have met Korean IR political scientists who didn’t know the capital of Canada or that Iran is Shiite. Yikes!

5. About 40% of the participants were foreign – mostly Chinese and Americans, plus a few Japanese and Europeans. This tells me two things. One, there just aren’t that many political scientists in Korea. Two, they believe in recruiting foreign participation, even if the work proffered is pretty poor, because it serves the larger goal of Korea promotion.

6. The Biannual Meeting was used as another venue to, well, propagandize the Korean miracle. Speaker after speaker, both in the panels and in the general sessions like the dinner speakers, told us again and again how Korea grew from nothing to become the world’s 13th largest economy and a global ‘player.’ (I am so sick of hearing that last word.) There were a few government officials invited to speak as well, and they too went through this. It almost feels like a requirement from any serious personage in Korea, particularly when they speak to foreigners. The English language press here is filled with this story too. This incessant Koreaphoria suggests two things to me. a) They are nervous that their gains are tenuous, because they were so rapid. So perhaps telling the tale again and again, and telling foreigners too, and then expecting the foreigners to echo back the same story (and we are expected to repeat this party line), psychologically reinforces the solidity of the miracle on the Han. b) Koreans are extreme nationalists. Such constant self-celebration eventual begins to suggest arrogance and egomania. I try to be tolerant and simply smile as I hear the story told a million different ways. I try to understand why the story is so often repeated (because it feels so unreal, especially after the first 3/4 of the 20th C was so hard on Korea). But at some point, you just have to give in and say it is an example of the intense nationalism so many scholars have noted to exist outside the West. I am unaccustomed to this. My own feelings about the US hardly mirror the intensity of Korean feelings for Korea. It makes me uncomfortable.

7. The panels were far too short and too crowded. I am not sure how to interpret this. A very cynical friend said the answer is the image-consciousness of Korea. It is more important to list the panel and be able to mention it on your CV or in an TV interview, than to actually have it be a substantive process. So you cram as many people into as many panels as possible. Inevitably the panels are too short (75 minutes) and too crowded (1 panel leader, 4 presenters, 2 discussants). This is certainly what happened to my panel. A 20 minute presentation was chopped in half, and I got no meaningful feedback or discussion.

8. My presentation, what there was of it, argued that the US will ally with India in the near future. India is the only country that is also facing China and Islamism, and is democratic too. Here is my abstract, and the relevant graph on US alliance picks:

US grand strategy after 9/11 has turned from post-containment drift to preemption. But the costs are high – suspicion of American power, hedging by traditional allies, expensive, go-it-alone ventures like Iraq. Tried-and-true containment better reflects American values. While forward in the world, containment is also defensive. It reassures skittish partners and reflects liberal, anti-imperial US preferences. In Asia, containment could hold the line against radical Islam and Chinese nationalism without encouraging a global backlash. Democratic India shares these same two challengers with the US; it is the likely pivot in a US-backed neo-containment architecture in Asia.

Thoughts on Miguk-land after 1 Year

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I went back to the US this summer to see my family. The culture shock was, predictably, deeper than when I returned to the US while I lived in Europe in the 1990s. The cultural gap between Korea and the US is deeper than that between Europe and the US. So I feel like I noticed more this time. So here are a couple of thoughts.

1. Americans are really fat. I struggle with junk food as much as anyone, but my fellows citizens seem to be just giving up. Koreans are the slimmest people in the OECD (or at least, that’s what they tell me, and they look it), and the difference with Americans is really apparent. My girlfriend came home with me, and she was routinely shocked by the sheer girth of so many of us. We both picked up on it almost immediately as we entered the airport. A news report I saw said that 40% of Americans are obese now, not just overweight. A doctor friend said this is evolving into a ticking time bomb. In about 30 years, when all these people hit 60, the public health burden will be staggering – on top of all the other entitlement/health care problems already. The IR scholar in my can’t help but think this is bad in the long term for US power. As hegemons age they are supposed to become more sluggish and complacent, and they US population is certainly showing that. How can you lead when half your people struggle to get off the sofa? My only consolation is that Europeans and Asians especially smoke a lot. That is their own public health drain. Is it macabre to suggest that US tobacco exports to China aid long-term US power?

2. Fox News and the American Right is even more insane now than I have read about. I made a point to watch Glenn Beck, O’Reilly and Hannity while I have was home. One of the most important consequences of the GOP’s defeat last year is the opportunity for a post-Bush reconstruction. When parties suffer from major defeats like the GOP in 2006 and 2008, or the Labour Party from 1979 to 1997, it calls for a serious philosophical rethink. Labor did this and successfully modernized itself (i.e., dropped socialism after Thatcher and the end of the Cold War) under Blair. But the GOP seems to want to drive itself further and further into the wilderness. The lesson the GOP has drawn from the defeat of Bushism is that it was not pure and conservative enough. Instead of tracking to the center, the GOP is vearing even further to the right to purify itself. Instead of coming to terms with the major social changes brought on by Obama, his postracial challenge, and the Great Recession, the GOP would rather recite dated, toxic bromides. So Glenn Beck is saying Obama is a racist; Palin calls ObamaCare ‘evil’ and says it includes ‘Death Panels’ (i.e., end-of-life consultations); and the bloggers are claiming he is not a US citizen. Are you serious? This is the state of conservative commentary at a time of massive government expansion? Even the WSJ’s op-ed page is staggeringly uncreative. If this persists, serious middle class professional people will abandon the GOP. These kind of people voted for for Bush because they thought Clinton was sleazy and then to fight the GWoT. But if the GOP becomes regularly indentified with managerial ineptitude in government (Iraq, Katrina, ‘evil’ healthcare), then serious professionals will vote for Democrats. I consider myself in this group. I voted and worked consistently for Republicans in the 90s, since W’s election, I have drifted further and further. And if Fox News and talk radio become the ideological organs of the post-Bush right, then I will never go back.

3. The Great Recession is far more noticeable in the US than Korea. First, it is in the news a lot more at home. Second, people talk about it a lot more in the US. My parents and friends at home made regular reference to it in conversation, but friends and colleagues here rarely do. Third, one can see all those ‘house for sale’ signs all over the place. The real estate market in Korea does not work this way, so this very obvious and public marker of the GR is not evident. Koreans mostly live in high-rises, as I do. In general the GR has been lighter and shorter out here than at home. No one talks about 10% unemployment here; they’d be rioting in the streets (be sure to look at the picture).

4. American food is not that bad after all. Food is an important part of Korean identity, and Koreans occasionally cite as healthier and tastier than US food when they need something to throwback at an American in a conversation. And indeed, the American food in Korea is awful; its almost universally junk food chains like Burger King. So I had forgotten how good some American food is – deli sandwiches, microbrews, summer BBQ chicken. Korean food is certainly healthier on average than US food. I accept that, and I don’t care much. (Koreans do; they are nationalist about food, along with almost everything else). Unfortunately the American food that is exported is almost always the worst fast food, like KFC or McDonald’s. My sister laughed out loud when I told her that even Popeye’s Chicken is in Korea. This is unfortunate, because it gives the impression that most US cuisine is that sort of greasy, salty junk. But my family, friends, and colleagues in the US rarely ate fast food; most Americans seem to be aware of how bad it is for you; and there are a lot of non-fast food restaurants in the US. So the Cheesecake Factory, e.g., is unfortunately not in Korea, and I have never seen a proper (Jewish) deli here either. I always thought one could make a fortune in Korea if one opened a good western restaurant.

Movie Review: Transfomers 2 – Michael Bay Misses the Cold War

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A traditional review of this film is redundant. By now you already now how ridiculous it is. (If you don’t, read this laugh-out-loud link.) It includes racist, gansta rapper robots reminiscent of Jar-Jar Binks. The women in the film are either idiots (the mother) or supermodels shamelessly exploited by the camera. Its treatment of college life is moronic, even by the standards of a film this bad. And the story is such a convoluted mess, its hard to know what is going on. Instead I want to focus on the politics of the film, especially its outdated understanding of military conflict. If this sounds unnecessary, its worth noting that Bay has better relations with the US military than any other director working. His films frequently showcase US hardware and show its use in ways flattering to, and approved by, the US military. Particularly, his relationship with the Air Force is strong, so you always know his films will treat you to kinetic displays of our coolest tools.

1. Bay fetishizes military hardware, and he has been rewarded with unparalleled access. Transformers 1 was the first movie in which the F-22 Raptor and the Predator drone were shown in a film. The second has even more real-life hardware on loan, including the M1 tank, B-1, F-22, F-117, and Predators. Across Bay’s ouevre (Pearl Harbor, Armageddon, T1 & T2), he has stressed big airforce hardware in such a glorifying way, that they feel like commercials for the military-industrial complex.

2. Bay’s particular interest in the airforce is comic given the slow erosion of the airforce’ actual role in America’s combat operations. Specifically, no power in the world is really ready to take on the US, and in the air least of all. The macho, fighter pilot cult of the airforce makes for cool movies like Top Gun and Stealth, but this does not actually fit what the airforce has done in US conflicts since Korea (the last air war with frequent, serious dogfights). The airforce is a victim of its own success. US air dominance is greater than on the ground or the seas, so the actual use of US airpower against other airpower is minimal. Instead, the US uses the airforce as a part of combined arms for ground support. This irks the AF brass, so Bay’s films are a nice chance to pitch the US public on the continued, but bogus, need for fighter jets. On the actual role of the US airforce in combat try here; compare that with the image you see in film.

3. Another obvious clash between the film and reality is the straightforward, good guy-bad guy action of the film, vs. the reality of US counterinsurgency & third world operations since Vietnam. This is another way in which Bay channels the military’s preferred view of itself. In Bayworld, the airforce is the dominant branch of the military. Also, the bad guys are easy to identify, so difficult questions surrounding the use of American force for the last two generations don’t exist. The Decepticons are just evil so the Autobots can, yes, behead them, and it is ok. There is no sorting between VietCong and local farmers, no accidental killings, no torture, no intercultural misunderstandings.

4. The final delusion of military conflict in Bayworld is the requirement of massive firepower. This is another US preoccupation. Part of the traditional American way of war is to use overwhelming force. The Decepticons are large, metal, hardened, military-only targets – exactly the sort of Cold War-era targets the airforce prefers to attack and which scarcely exist anymore. But the reality of US micro-operations in mixed, combatant/civilian third world environments is quite the opposite. The Decepticons are the Soviets or the Chinese. The Americans need to use all their super-cool advanced firepower to bring them down. This is the way the US military wants to fight wars. But the reality is different, and has been since Korea. We scarcely use huge, indiscriminant firepower anymore (that failed terribly, with awful civilian consequences, under Westmoreland in Vietnam). Instead everything today is geared around micro-bursts of extreme precision – the Kosovo air campaign of 1999 or the Predator strikes in Pakistan since 2008. Our most recent Iraqi dalliance with the Michael Bay, ‘blow-‘em-all-to-hell,’ approach to conflicts ended in a ‘fiasco.’

5. The film includes a cheap shot at the Obama administration. His national security advisor tries to kick the Autobots off earth, and after the Decepticon attack, Obama goes into hiding. I guess this means that Bay is a Republican. I wonder if he believes he is channeling US military discontent about Obama as C-in-C. Either way this was poor taste.

Bay’s film is silly but it tells us some important things nonetheless, as bad US action movies usually do.

A. Bay is clearly the foremost advertising vehicle of the US airforce and the US military in general. When people complain about the socially corrosive effects of the military-industrial compex, movies like this are exactly what they mean. Bay channels the US flirtation with militarism and celebrates jingoism. I find it a pleasing irony, that for all Bay’s military technology porn (long, loving shots of military metal), SecDef Robert Gates recently ended the wasteful and unnecessary F-22. Outside of Bayworld delusions of asteroids and robots from space, real US military needs are far more mundane – more soldiers, more cultural experts, better veterans care, better body armor, etc.

B. Bay also reflects the way the US military wants to fight wars and the way it wants to be perceived by the public. He avoids the messy reality of the small wars that have characterized US military conflict since Korea. The bulk of these costs are carried by the army; they involve small operations and targeted force; they require cultural sensitivity and good intelligence; there is rarely ‘moral clarity.’ Instead Bay presents simplistic good/bad moral clarity and super-sleek airshows. Awful.

Movie Review: Terminator Salvation, or What John Connor Learned in Iraq

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This is how franchises die. What a let down. In my review of T3, I said you would pumped for T4. I was wrong. This beast is heading into the sequelitis of the Matrix, Robocop or (old) Star Trek. What a shame. For a run-down of the ‘plot,’ try here. You don’t really need to see T1-3, as this one doesn’t use the backstory too much. Its basically an action movie, with none of the heart or interesting themes of the earlier ones.

I have always been a fan of the Terminator series as action movies. The first one was pretty clever. It had an offbeat time-travel idea (not the usual Star Trek time-travel silliness, once again on display this summer), and it smartly capitalized on the angst of the 80s about computers and war (Wargames), and postapolcalyptic life (Mad Max). The second one is probably the most intelligent action movie ever (granted, that’s not saying a lot), and continues to be the base of the popularity that eventually catapulted Schwarzenegger to the governorship of California. Even the third one was pretty good. Unfortunately this one walks away from most of the nifty and fun stuff of the series; its basically a mish-mash of every war war movie you’ve seen and videogame you played. A few thoughts:

1. On the up side, the action is pretty intense and serious. There is a grit and edginess to the shoot-outs that feels more battle-realistic than the first trilogy. It was also a nice touch that Linda Hamilton returned at least to provide the voice of John’s mother. I was always disappointed at how lamely her cool character was dispensed with in T3. I also thought the idea of putting the resistance HQ in a sub was a pretty intelligent move that flowed well from the narrative, but it prompts the obvious question (discussed below) about how the resistance to machines was able to get and maintain such fancy equipment when the whole planet was nuked. Finally, I didn’t mind that the film was set in the Skynet future. At some point the franchise had to catch up with that conflict, so I didn’t miss the time-travelling terminators that were becoming pretty repetitive by T3.

2. The acting is passable, and the sets are solid. Nothing looks ‘stagey.’ Thankfully too the CGI is good, although the Blu-ray release will be the real test of that. But wth has happened to C Bale? He was fantastic in American Psycho. The scene were has almost has a heart attack over another yuppie’s superior business card is hysterical. In T4, he basically yells all the time. And what’s up with a bald H B Carter showing up in a Terminator movie? That just didn’t work for me at all.

3. But the bad is, well, pretty bad.

a. the action scenes are so loud (as is the ear-splitting soundtrack) that they overwhelm the narrative. The story of T1 and T2 particularly were pretty compelling, and the action flowed from pretty well from narrative demand. That’s not the case here.

b. The movie pulls from all sorts of war films and video games. So, it doesn’t feel too original, and you aren’t really surprised much. The postwar future looks like – well you already know – Mad Max. The Road Warrior is a great film, and its influence just rolls on and on, even 30 years later. Battle scenes with Huey helicopters are straight from Vietnam pictures. The machines created slithery ‘hydrobots’ ripped straight from, of all possible sources, the videogame Resistance 2. The tall robot that attacks the resistance at the gas station could be a transformer. The penetration of Skynet central at the end feels like a videogame ending when you have to go after the big boss character to end the story.

c. I found the level of sophisticated military hardware and deployment wholly unconvincing after the awfulness of a nuclear exchange. The combat scenes frequently felt like a video game version of the Iraq war. So much of the hardware is taken directly from the contemporary US military that we see regularly on TV in Iraq: body armor, grenade launchers, M-60s, M-16s, A-10s, radar, rocket launchers, humvees. In the first film, the resistance is running around in basements with funky ray-guns. In this one, they have enormous above-ground installations that can support helicopters, subs, and aircraft. So its pretty much the US military versus the machines, and we’ve seen that already in Transformers. Wouldn’t the machines go after such facilities? And how could you possibly maintain such elaborate hardware in the postnuclear future? Where does the fuel come from, the spare parts, the dozens of mechanics necessary to keep the hi-tech, logistics-heavy US military in the field? And someone should tell the director that last Huey was built in 1976 and the last A-10 in 1986. It is unlikely these aging platforms would survive into 2018, through a nuclear war, and still be serviceable.

d. maybe I am too hard about the sophisticated technology, so here is some miscellaneous silliness:

i. The hot fighter pilot babe (how come they’re always super hot, btw?) falls in love with a cyborg after about 2 days. Nobody but reality TV show contestants fall in love in 2 days, and wth falls in love with a robot?! To quote the greatest line from the underappreciated comedy of Robocop 2: ‘ I don’t know anyone who wants to be a robot.’

ii. Two nuclear explosions occur in the film which the main character survives. In both, helicopters are close enough to feel the blast wave. Depending on the yield of course, you might survive the blast, but then there’s fallout too. Too unrealistic.

iii. At the end, John Connor gets a heart transplant in open air from that cyborg. Even more ridiculous, Connor had recently restarted that cyborg heart with – I am not lying – jumper cables. Hah! I am sure its ready for transplant.

iv. Why does Skynet have offices and hallways if it is a robot AI?

e. Finally, the director succumbed the easy patriotism of US action movies. In first two, the resistance was planet-wide and looked futuristic. In the third film, Schwarzenegger needed to get elected to the CA governorship, so suddenly the US military was at the heart of the resistance. And in this fourth installment, its basically the US military versus the Transformers. US military hardware now dominates the resistance; gone are the ray-guns. The resistance leaders are all Americans and the action all takes place in CA. The difference is subtle but clear. James Cameron (the director of the first two) was never a nationalist, but I guess now, after 6 years of the Iraq war, T4 had to look this way for an American audience. Too bad.

Foreigners Should Not Intervene in Korea’s Multiculturalism Debate

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This an unpublished letter to the editor at the Korea Times.

The poor treatment of Bonojit Hussain (http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2009/08/117_49537.html) is a sad commentary on race relations in Korea but is no crime and certainly not a ‘human rights’ violation. Mr. Hussain should do all us foreigners here a favor and drop his complaint:

1. Racism is not a crime, and neither is stupidity. Open societies like Korea do not criminalize thought, even repugnant foolishness. Mr. Hussain was not physically assaulted, and his Korean harasser is entitled to his beliefs and prejudices. It makes a mockery of the notion of ‘human rights’ to charge a drunk ajeossi on a bus for 60 seconds of vulgarity. Racism is overcome in the marketplace of ideas not by an orwellian ‘opinion police.’ The US went down this road into the political correctness wars of the 1990s, and Mr. Hussain’s home country, India, is balkanized by exactly such racialized law-making. We should hardly encourage that among our hosts.

2. We foreigners are guests in someone else’s house. The Korean harasser’s behavior was improper, but we foreigners do not have the moral standing to take legal action on our hosts’ opinion of our presence. As voluntary guests, there are limits to our claims against our hosts, and exaggerating racist vulgarity as a human rights violation certainly crosses them. Barring physical intimidation, we have no claim to an ‘appropriate’ Korean opinion. We have chosen to come to Korea. We are not a conquered or coerced population (like Canadian francophones or Native Americans) with a moral claim to special rules, much less a ‘human rights’ committee. It is part of our duty as willing guests to absorb Korean ambivalence, and occasional resentment, about our presence with aplomb and restraint.

3. Korea is scarcely a ‘multicultural’ society, and we have no right to demand or describe it as such. For all the talk of ‘globalizing’ Korea, Korea is still quite ethnically homogenous. Over 97% of the ROK population is Korean. Over 90% of the foreigners here are other East Asians who blend in more easily. Most others, such as the hagwon teachers or US military, are transients. Hence, Koreans expect us to either assimilate or leave at some point. There is no permanent, unassimilated minority here that demands a multicultural restructuring of Korean society (as there is, for example, in India or Switzerland). More importantly, it is not at all clear that Koreans want their country to be a multi-culture. And this we must respect. This is their country, and we must honor and abide by their choices. It is terrible bad faith for us to come voluntarily and then promptly demand multiculturalism as our due. It is not; the burden of obligation lies the other way. It is our responsibility to integrate, learn Korean (god help us), eat our kimchi, and otherwise behave well, including respect for our hosts’ ambivalence on the foreigner question.

As Koreans accustom themselves to non-Korean faces, attitudes will change. But we may not demand that change, nor try to shame our hosts into it. Polyethnicity is a change for them to make at their own pace and in their own way. As a democracy, any shift toward multiculturalism in Korea must have public opinion support. It cannot be the product of lawsuits by guests. Koreans may get there, but then again, they may not, and they may not want to. However the debate ends, it is not our place to intervene.