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domingo, julho 30, 2006 

Dúvida existencial

Será que estou a ficar "conservador"?
Assalta-me esta dúvida ao ler este artigo de Michael J. Mazarr publicado na circunspecta Policy Review.
Um especialista militar discute os novos conceitos da moda, como a 4GW (fourth generation war) e a "War on Terror", e aponta, de uma forma muito mais articulada e informada do que me é possível, ideias que na prática, não andam muito longe do que escrevi de forma mais tosca na parte final deste post.
O artigo é longo e a sua leitura requer ao não especialista como eu, algum esforço para compreender as teorias militares expostas, mas compensa. Quanto a mim é um dos artigos mais interessantes que li nos últimos tempos sobre estas questões.
(nota: nesta página procurar o artigo "Uma Guerra Imoral" da Constança Cunha e Sá no Público de ontem)
Algumas passagens que estão longe de esgotar a leitura:
(...The odds are, of course, that we will not do these things. The American popular understanding of war and national security are firmly lashed to images of Iwo Jima, laser-guided bombs, and tough, bearded special operators to allow any political leader to broaden self-defense in these apparently social-worky ways. The notion of substituting grand, society-wide therapeutic efforts for the 82nd Airborne — and justifying it with the use of terms like identity, alienation, and grievance — is not a challenge most politicians will tackle on the campaign trail. The domestic sustainment of the social effort needed to wage conflict has always relied on brute invocations of the need to “hit back at evil.” And so, in all likelihood, we will continue to militarize conflicts that are essentially psychological in character, continue to burst onstage in a Freudian drama dressed up as Bismarck. The result will be — the result is today — to exacerbate rather than calm the grievances, alienations, fears, and resentments that feed conflict.

Practice the greatest restraint possible in foreign policy. We must keep two stubborn facts firmly in mind: a number of psychologically-induced conflicts are likely to be underway at any given time in the world, and each of them will be devilishly hard to resolve. Staying out of their way is the most reliable avenue to safeguarding U.S. national interests, and as often as not this means adhering to a narrow definition of those interests. It suggests, then, something close to the opposite of a global crusade on behalf of democratic reforms, something that may easily worsen rather than alleviate psychological stress. In Russia, Germany, and Japan alike, ineffectual, short-lived parliamentary democracies were the precursors to radicalism; the combination of governmental ineffectiveness and corruption with the dashed hopes for a better and freer society has played a leading role in bringing down a host of emerging democracies.

Do not become the focus of the alienation. Adopting policies in the name of geopolitics that place us in the crosshairs of psychopolitics — supporting a repressive regime beset by an exploding antimodernist social movement for “pragmatic, strategic” reasons — will almost always work to our disadvantage.

Crush the true extremists. When we encounter a group that is truly beyond reach, who have gone so far down the road of alienation and humiliation and rage, there is no alternative but to capture and kill them as rapidly and completely as possible.

Note again the contradictory requirements of this agenda. Our task these days is not the linear requirement of destroying a given percentage of enemy forces; it is a fluid, nonlinear undertaking strewn with paradoxes and dilemmas. How do we crush extremists without generating humiliation? How do we accelerate economic growth to create avenues for identity formation without aggravating the specter of “Westernization” that helps spark alienation in the first place? The paradoxes of this challenge are on vivid, and often tragic, display in Iraq today — the need to destroy insurgents without mistreating innocent Iraqis; the desire to hasten economic and social development without creating even more cultural disquiet; the effort to liberate the Iraqi people while making them feel as if they’ve done it for themselves. These are dilemmas with which we are sadly stuck because, in taking on this intractable challenge, we violated the principles of restraint and avoiding humiliation — reasons why a psychopolitik approach would have argued, on balance, against invading Iraq in the first place. (It would also argue, for reasons that ought by now to be obvious, that we should do everything in our power to avoid a military showdown with Iran.) ...)
Note, too, that this agenda disputes the idea that we are engaged primarily in a “war of ideas.” Certainly, ideas and ideologies play leading roles in the psychodramas of modern life, and a vastly upgraded public diplomacy effort is in order. But we must not fool ourselves: Ideas are the product of circumstances, and unless those circumstances change, all the glossy pro-American magazines and graduate school scholarships in the world will only serve to harden perceptions about callous Western propaganda. This is a conflict with roots in the condition of societies — issues like opportunity, effective governance, status in the world community, and so on. Fighting it as a “war of ideas” will merely be to treat, once again, a symptom rather than the cause.
And note, finally, what this perspective has to say about the claims of our national leaders that we are “at war,” with all that that has traditionally meant: an effort to mute dissent “during the war”; the breathtaking escalation of executive powers, free from any legislative restraint, “during the war.” The fact is that we are not “at war” in the way the framers of our Constitution understood that concept when they wrote the document. We are engaged in a different enterprise entirely, one that overlaps only a little with war as it has been traditionally — and politically — understood. More than any well-honed constitutional theory, it seems to me, this simple distinction hacks the legs out from under the assertions of executive privilege in wartime being made today.
Vendo bem as soluções propostas vão no caminho de ideias que têm sido debatidas desde o 11 de Setembro de 2001, mas sempre etiquetadas de "antiamericanas" pelo aparelho de propaganda do lobby militarista.
Passados três anos de desastre, e exposto o beco sem saída, a incompetência e a hipocrisia dos "nation builders" comece a ser possível aos países civilizados assumirem-se como tal.
Nota: Link encontrado no Haaretz. Bolds e cores meus.

8:45 da manhã |

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