Thursday, July 20, 2023

To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq by Robert Draper

     I can say without a doubt that this is one of the best books I've read this year. If you are wondering why America invaded Iraq, look no further. Draper does an amazing job of charting the path of the major players involved. Most of the book is told chronologically, but also by character. Starting with Paul Wolfowitz, Draper moves through key figures in the administration in each chapter, like Rumsfeld, Rice, Cheney, and Bush himself, giving some backstory and then progressing through the time from 9/11 through the invasion in March of 2003. As we get to the time Congress gets involved in late 2002, the narrative shifts to focus not on these key players, but the faulty intelligence that created the justification for invasion. Draper lays it out clearly. Not only were the weapons of mass destruction never found, but the experts were saying it from the beginning. Administration officials willfully disregarded intelligence they didn't like so that they could focus on bad sources that justified their plans. Bush administration officials were far less concerned with facts than they were with optics, and they were so sure of themselves that they never even planned for what would come after the invasion. It wasn't until the eve of Shock and Awe that Bush and others at the top started to ask what would happen after Saddam fell. And even after American troops landed in Iraq, Bush administration officials would answer that question by assuring one another that the Iraqis yearned for freedom and would create their own thriving democracy. They didn't think it would be necessary for US troops to be in Iraq for more than a couple of years. By the time Bush was running for re-election in 2004, they knew that they had been wrong.

The Buildup

    Draper starts and ends the book with chapters on Paul Wolfowitz, who is popularly considered to have been the "mastermind" of the invasion, although that is somewhat misleading. Wolfowitz, writes Draper, spent "ten years evangelizing" about the need to bring down Saddam Hussein, and finally got his wish when he was Deputy Secretary of Defense to Donald Rumsfeld on September 11, 2001. Wolfowitz and others used 9/11 to build a justification for their long-desired invasion of Iraq by first fabricating a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam (which did not exist) and then by promulgating the idea that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (which he did not). It is hard to miss the fact that the Iran-Iraq war's end, the First Gulf War, the Fall of the Soviet Union, and the "End of History" all coincided at the end of the 1980's to the beginning of the 1990's. And it is a radical form of the end of history mindset that dominated the Bush team's foreign policy. They went further than Fukuyama's declaration that liberal democracy was the final form of History, which would defeat other forms of government. They took that as a prescription, thinking that it would be possible to easily install such a liberal democracy as long as they toppled the dictator preventing that from happening. And the unconcern went all the way to the top. In December 2002, just four months before the invasion, Bush was asking "how are we going to be running the postwar Iraq?" In fact, there was a total disinterest in what came after the invasion, with one staffer saying that General Tommy Franks' attitude was "We don't escort kids to school, that's Clinton stuff."  Iraq would end up collapsing back into insurgency and then religious extremism under ISIS.

    And so while Paul Wolfowitz had been pushing to depose Saddam long before most others, it was already on Bush's mind. When George W. Bush debated Al Gore on October 17, 2000, he was asked about the attack on the USS Cole by Al Qaeda. Draper writes that "Bush did not reply with any thoughts about terrorism. He did, however, observe, 'Saddam Hussein is still a threat in the Middle East." Another interesting note is relayed from Jeb Bush by way of Joe Manchin. The Bushes had gone to Kuwait in 1993 and were targeted for assassination by Saddam. The plan had been to blow up a car bomb, but the plan was foiled by ineptitude. That certainly didn't help mitigate any feelings of animosity. But while Bush considered toppling Saddam important--a matter of "when," not "if," he remarked to a CIA briefer in the spring of 2001, Draper relates that Iraq was still a problem to be managed and ignored where possible, as the President wanted to focus on his domestic agenda. However, once 9/11 came, everything changed. On September 15, at Camp David, Bush was already thinking about Iraq enough to poll his advisor on it. He asked Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Cad (chief of staff) whether to Iraq in addition to Afghanistan. But the mood wasn't right yet. All opposed except for Rumsfeld, who abstained.

    In his first year in office leading up to 9/11, Bush missed the warning signs of a major Al Qaeda attack. The CIA even took an "unusual step" of joining with the FBI to create a brief on August 6, 2001, entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US." The analyst who authored the brief, surprised at the lack of follow-up questions to the brief, remarked to Draper, "So what is this--you're not even curious?" Once the 9/11 attacks occurred, Bush of course completely reversed. Soon he was immersed in nonstop reports of every attack or possible attack.

    Iraq's dictator didn't help himself when he said on September 12 that America "reaps the thorns its rulers have planted in the world." But it was all bluster. Although there had been a no-fly zone over Iraq that Saddam was contesting, his regime went silent after September 11, preferring not to risk a provocation by continuing attacks on US aircraft enforcing the no-fly zone. The regime sent missives through backchannels to the Bush team that they weren't looking for trouble (from Tariq Aziz to Frank Carlucci to Bill Burns). Meanwhile, American focus was dedicated far more to Afghanistan as 2001 came to a close. But American victory was swift, and with the Taliban crushed (for the moment), Bush felt comfortable turning his attention elsewhere. And Saddam didn't want to totally object to the idea that he had WMDs. As long as he thought Bush would never invade (which he did until the end), he preferred to let other Iraqi elites, generals, and the Iraqi people think he could have the power to destroy them all.

    On December 28, General Tommy Franks of CENTCOM led a briefing for Bush at his Crawford, Texas, ranch about a possible Iraq invasion. Unlike Wolfowitz's modest scheme that he touted of taking over the oil fields in the south and letting the Iraqis overthrow Saddam while the Americans hammered Baghdad with air strikes, Franks proposed over 100,000 troops engaging in regime change and WMD removal. On January 29, 2002, Bush told Congress (I assume this was at the SOTU) that the War on Terror had just begun. He claimed that intelligence revealed that tens of thousands of terrorists had been trained in Afghanistan (hyperbolized by speechwriters over CIA objections) to jar Americans out of complacency. He dedicated one line each to North Korea and Iran before five sentences of condemnation on Iraq, culminating in the declaration of all three as an "axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world."

    The great irony is that Iraq made more sense as an American ally, at least to those in the foreign policy establishment dead-set on opposing Iran. Iraq had fought Iran to a standstill in the 1980s, and while the US remained officially neutral, Reagan switched to the Iraqi side when it looked like Iran would be victorious in 1982. The CIA ended up with a semi-regular presence in Baghdad. But that all ended when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990

    All the meanwhile, Iraq was going through weapons inspections that had begun back in the 1990s to find WMDs. However, as CIA Special Advisor Charles Duelfer said later, "Saddam's compliance had been going up, while at the same time our confidence and willingness to give him the benefit of the doubt was going down." There was no "trust but verify" because there was no trust at all.

    And at the White House, there was a bad atmosphere affecting analysis of the facts.  Bush emphasized keeping a professional and disciplined work environment, but it veered into a groupthink environment, in which conflict was suppressed. That meant that thoughts weren't challenged enough, and especially not in front of Bush himself, who rarely heard greatly diverging views in the same room. Even Powell and Rumsfeld, who shared mutual hatred of one another, maintained collegiality in front of Bush. That might have been good for a work environment. But it was exactly wrong at a time when  the President and the Secretary of Defense's urges to invade Iraq needed to be challenged. This was not how the Clinton administration operated, so we shouldn't imagine that this is just how things are. While Condoleezza Rice actively tried to insulate Bush from debates that she thought would waste his time, staffers to Clinton and Obama recalled to Draper that there were frequent debates aired by cabinet secretaries in front of both presidents. But Bush wanted a single recommendation that was issued by the team arrayed before him. So while he called himself "The Decider," Bush really preferred to just endorse or not endorse the recommendations of his staff. But his staff, generally, were giving him recommendations that confirmed what he wanted to believe.

    No one major had the nerve to confront Bush until August 5, 2002, when Colin Powell spent two hours telling Bush what no one else would: "If you break it, you own it." Bush asked him what to do, and Powell told him to go to the United Nations. This would happen. But Draper points out that Colin Powell really missed his opportunity here. He went for the smaller ask that he was more likely to get, and not the bigger ask that was more likely to fail--to tell Bush plainly not to invade. Draper writes that, "Instead, by advising Bush to go to the UN, Powell had provided the president with the only politically feasible pathway to war."

The Evidence

    In the buildup to the Congressional authorization to invade and the UN vote, the intelligence community put together a National Intelligence Estimate on the issue of Iraq's WMDs, meant to combine and summarize the information held by all the intelligence agencies. While most NIEs would take months if not a year, this one was done in three weeks. 

    Although large amounts of evidence existed to show that Osama Bin Laden wanted weapons of mass destruction, nothing made mention of Iraq as a potential supplier of such weapons but one. The US captured an Al Qaeda senior operative named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi in December 2001. After getting little in interrogations, he was handed over to the Egyptians. Within days he "confessed" that some unnamed associate had told him that two Al Qaeda recruits were sent to Baghdad the year before to be trained in using chemical and biological weapons. He had been kept in a tiny box for an entire day at one point before being taken out and beaten. That confession was uncorroborated by any other detainee and was considered highly suspect by the CIA and DIA. It was later determined to be a fabrication to end the torture at the hands of the Egyptians, but that was only announced in March 2004, far too late. And the idea of a connection between Bin Laden and Hussein was nonsensical. Bin Laden was a radical Islamist. Hussein was a nationalist and secular. To the end, Hussein was mystified by the idea that the Americans thought he was a closet religious extremist.

    The charge that Saddam had biological weapons began with circumstantial evidence. First, it was thought that Saddam used to have five hundred metric tons of biological weapons from the 1980s, although this was never proven. Since BWs tend to degrade, scientists had to be hard at work making more, which explained the movement of lots of trucks, although no one had ever seen inside them. Then, it was guessed that whatever the Iraqis would produce would be as big as their last stockpile. And so Larry Fox, who analyzed BWs for the NIE, told the author in charge, John Landry, that Iraq had zero to thousand metric tons of BWs. Landry said, "Zero? What do you mean, zero? Our assessment is that he has something." When Fox responded that there was a ten percent chance he had nothing, Landry said that wasn't very helpful (although he was unconcerned about the estimate of a thousand). Seeing that the floor was raised, Fox lowered the ceiling too, and made a guess at 100 to 500 tons of BWs. A guess. And that made it into the NIE, which declared in October 2002 that "Within three to six months these units probably could produce an amount of agent equal to the total that Iraq produced in the years prior to the Gulf War."

        With nuclear weapons, the analysis was not any better. There was a complete fabrication that went around about Niger providing yellowcake uranium to Iraq, but that was also decisively debunked only too late. In fact, a Google search would reveal that the forged letters of agreement between Iraq and Niger listed a Nigerien foreign minister who had left office more than a decade before th instrument in question was "signed." There was also concern about tubes that could be used for missiles, although the experts all determined that the tubes were too small, and were not heeded. Shortly before his speech at the UN, Colin Powell asked State's in-house intelligence bureau, the INR, to evaluate the claims of Iraq's possession of WMDs. He got back six single-spaced pages on thirty-six items deemed weak or unsubstantiated. He gave the speech to the UN anyway in February 2003, but made some adjustments to eliminate what he viewed as the most egregious fabrications.

Politics

    Unfortunately for the more sober-minded, things were reaching a fever-pitch by late 2002 when Congress would vote to authorize the invasion. By fall, shortly before the midterms, the majority of Americans believed, falsely, that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. In Congress, those who were leaders in the Democratic Party who should have been the leaders of the opposition, were engaged in hand-wringing. Richard Gephardt, Tom Daschle, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John Kerry, and Bob Graham were all looking beyond the midterms to 2004 and 2008, when they planned to run for president. They recalled the cautionary tale of the First Gulf War, when most Senate Democrats voted against the resolution, fearful that it would be another Vietnam. Instead it was a huge success, and it was considered to have tanked the presidential aspirations of Sam Nunn, the Georgia Senator who voted against it. It also made Gephardt, who opposed the First Gulf War, decide not to run for president in 1992.

    Real leadership in opposition to the war is identified by Draper with Senator Carl Levin, who led the Democrats in the minority on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Assured that the war was not an urgent necessity, Levin carried around a prop tube around the Capitol to show Senators that the tubes Saddam was accused of using for nuclear weapons could not be used as such. Levin still drafted a war resolution, but his wasn't a blank check. It required the president to show that Iraq represented an immediate threat, the standard used under international law for the use of force. It also mandated the president to seek authorization from the UN, and that Congress would convene to discuss unilateral action if Bush failed at the UN. Levin got some support, but not from the most prominent Democrats, who all worried it would make them look weak. Bush rejected Levin's multilateral approach on October 1, as well as a less restrictive approach favored by Biden and Republican Senator Richard Lugar that would require the president to seek approval at Congress a second time to show that Saddam was an imminent threat. But Gephardt ensured Bush would not have his hands tied. Gephardt, Lott, and Hastert all went to the White House and agreed to a resolution cosponsored by Democrat Joe Lieberman, infuriating Democrats in the Senate like Daschle and Biden. But Biden decided to give Bush the benefit of the doubt, and announced that he would support the deal. Bob Graham, who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee, had studied the NIE carefully and understood that Bush wanted to go to war no matter what. He was the only major presidential aspirant to oppose the war because he could tell it was all fake. But others did support it. John Edwards ardently supported the war as early as February 2002, attempting to draw a clear distinction between himself and Hillary Clinton, his likely rival in 2004. Clinton would also cast a vote for the war ("with conviction"), just like top Senate Democrat Tom Daschle, but by March 6, 2003, she was already heard to mutter, "I can't believe I signed up for this fucking war."

Shock and Awe

    The invasion itself went very well. Within weeks, the United States controlled most of Iraq. But critically, the plan called for Iraqis to rise up and create their own democratic self-government. That was not happening. The United States installed the Coalition Provisional Authority to govern, but the CPA made two critical mistakes: dismantling the Iraqi Army and banning Ba'ath Party members from serving in government. This meant that 350,000 men who derived their income from military service went home without any work, but lots of military training. They quickly formed an insurgency. Then, those who were in the Ba'ath Party supported the insurgency. And being in the Ba'ath Party wasn't exactly special; you needed to be a member to hold normal jobs like being a teacher, so there were plenty of non-ideological party members who were forced into opposing the American presence by the fact that we took their jobs. There was also a third mistake, made later on: the decision to rotate out all the troops who had originally arrived. While everyone surely wanted to go home according to the pre-established personnel policy, Draper compares it to taking out the entire police department of a major city and replacing it with a bunch of new guys. It gave the insurgency time to breathe.

     By December 2003, it was clear to anyone paying attention that after ten months of war, there were no WMDs to be found. While troops occasionally came int contact with residuals of mustard gas from the Iran-Iraq War from the 1980s, there was nothing of more recent vintage. Bush decided that this was splitting hairs, and that it was proof of WMDs. In the end, the War in Iraq would cost 4,400 American lives, wounding over 32,000. 300,000 of the 1.5 million Americans who served returned home with PTSD. The war would cost $2 trillion over its course. 405,000 Iraqis were killed.

Miscellaneous Facts:

  • Not really a fact, but its interesting that Draper says the majority Muslims voted for Bush in 2000 (although he would lose almost all that support by 2004). Bush was even endorsed by the American Muslim Political Council. It's interesting to think how different things could have gone seeing where the Republican elite's relationship went with the Muslim community by the time Trump was elected. Bush said that the teachings of Islam "are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah. The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying in effect, to hijack Islam itself. The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends."
  • In 1985, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta unwittingly provided Iraqi scientists with shipments of West Nile Virus thinking it would be used for vaccine research purposes, but instead they were probably used for making biological weapons.
  • Condoleezza Rice had the most access to the President during his first term, being in the Oval Office seven times a day (by her own estimation).
  • Abroad, America's only major supporters were the UK and Spain. Tony Blair in particular fought hard for Bush's war.


Sunday, July 9, 2023

Stormbird (War of the Roses #1) by Conn Iggulden

     Not going to do a full reflection on this one. I read it for pleasure and enjoyed it. I thought of doing it after reading the Tuchman book. It was great although I kind of lost interest towards the end as it was more about Cade's Rebellion. I enjoyed the parts from Margaret of Anjou's perspective. Potentially interested in more.

Wednesday, July 5, 2023

Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America by Angie Schmitt

     Angie Schmitt has been such a good follow on Twitter for me and I'm so happy I finally got around to reading her book. I was lucky to meet her at CNU Orlando this year and so I had already learned a lot from her, but the book was a good solidification and expansion of that knowledge. I loved it as a quick read that was also super enlightening. I feel like I want to send chapters of it to my friends it's just so persuasive and fact-based.

    Schmitt starts the book with "The Geography of Risk" and "The Profile of a Victim," two chapters that lay out where pedestrians get killed and who they are. The worst region of the United States for pedestrians is the Sun Belt, which contains more cities built after cars were invented and started to dominate streets. These cities have fewer crosswalks, wider roads, and incomplete sidewalks. The victims tend to be poorer people, children, and the elderly. 75 percent of pedestrian fatalities occur at night, and 73 percent occur outside of crosswalks, usually in places where there are no crosswalks for long distances, parking lots, or driveways.

    Then, Schmitt proceeds to analyze the factors that cause pedestrians to be killed in streets. They involve killer cars, bad incentives for transportation planners, victim-blaming mentalities, and laws that actually criminalize pedestrians. It also doesn't help that more people behind the wheel and on foot are distracted than ever. Owners of smart phones use them on 88 of every 100 trips, and average about 3.5 minutes per hour driving on their phone (only counting physical manipulation, not voice commands). But the size of cars is the worst. With higher hoods and heavier weights than ever before, our cars are deadlier than ever, especially SUVs and pickup trucks, which have become way more popular. Between 2010 and 2016, pedestrian fatalities involving SUVs increased 80 percent. This was largely because they were adopted far more after making up just 3 percent of vehicles sold in the US in 1983. They grew slowly and then suddenly in the 2010s, making up 48 percent of sales by 2018. These cars have much larger blind spots, which put children at the most risk. While Toyota Camry drivers can see a child three feet away, the Dodge Ram needs nine feet. And blind spots are often responsible for "bye-bye" deaths, when children run out to say goodbye to their parent, who doesn't see them and runs them over. Schmitt writes that lots of people prefer sitting up higher, and also like that they are safer in a bigger car; but of course that means that people outside of the car are less safe. Outside this book, I've also read that the increase in SUVs is a result of exceptions for SUVs and pickup trucks in environmental regulations and safety standards that don't take pedestrians into account.

    Schmitt did really good analysis of "jaywalking," a term created by drivers in the 1920s to try to stigmatize what had been totally normal behavior before: walking in the street. They were successful in stigmatizing pedestrians and pushing them into small sidewalk spaces and then banning them from entering the street. Now, when pedestrians are killed anywhere outside of crosswalks, they are treated as the culpable party. However, Schmitt points out that in serious crashes, pedestrians are in the crosswalk 25 percent of the time, outside of the roadway 8.6 percent of the time, alongside the road where there is no sidewalk 9 percent of the time, and most of the others in driveways that split the sidewalk (although 25 percent are struck mid-block). While some politicians try to put the blame on pedestrians, those who do cross at the "wrong" places are usually not doing so because they like being in danger. In fact, the pedestrian's thinking has almost nothing to do with it. The Federal Highway Administration can look at environmental factors and determine with 90 percent accuracy whether or not a pedestrian will cross the street mid-block. So if we have these predictive capabilities, why aren't we building for them? In St. Paul, Minnesota, researchers even found success by putting up a sign on a crosswalk, listing the percentage of drivers who yielded in the past week alongside the "record." That increased yielding from 32 percent into the 70s. The reason for a lack of action isn't for want of money, but for want of attention. The people who walk and bike places are usually poorer people without influence. And instead, they are blamed as "jaywalkers" and even ticketed just for walking. In a study of jaywalking tickets in Jacksonville, FL, police officers were discovered to be ticketing people erroneously in half of jaywalking tickets. Officers thought that jaywalking was crossing the street anywhere without a crosswalk. But even in Florida, which has stringent jaywalking laws, Floridians can cross the street anywhere as long as they are yielding to cars, crossing at a right angle, and not crossing between two signalized crosswalks.

    I'll just end by saying this is a fantastic book, and it should be required reading for any public city official or person working at a department of transportation.

Miscellaneous Facts:

  • Police chases kill about 355 Americans annually, and 1/3 of those are innocent bystanders.
  • European regulations are requiring speed governors in new cars.
  • In 2019, Oslo, a city of 673,000, had only one person killed in traffic in city limits, and he was a driver.

Monday, July 3, 2023

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson

     In so many other books, I had seen references to Imagined Communities, but my immediate cause for reading the book was listening to Timothy Snyder's lectures on the formation of the Ukrainian state, in which he mentioned the book. So I finally picked it up and read it all in one day. Obviously I thought it was very interesting, and despite having heard a lot about it, there were a lot of insights in the book that I hadn't heard of by reference before. In the book, Anderson says he is trying to deal with three paradoxes:

(1) the objective modernity of nations to the historian's eye vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of the nationalists. (2) The formal universality of nationality as a socio-cultural concept--in the modern world everyone can, should, will 'have' a nationality, as he or she 'has' a gender--vs. the irremediable particularity of its concrete manifestations, such that, by definition, 'Greek' nationality is sui generis. (3) The 'political' power of nationalisms vs. their philosophical poverty and even incoherence. In other words, unlike most other isms, nationalism has never produced its own grand thinkers: no Hobbes, Tocquevilles, Maxes, or Webers. This 'emptiness' easily gives rise, among cosmopolitan and polylingual intellectuals, to a certain condescension.

Anderson defines the nation as "an imagined political community--and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign." Limited because no nation claims to be universal over all people on earth, like Christianity may promote itself as the one true world religion. Sovereign because the nation claims legitimacy over the people that belong to it. And a community because, regardless of whatever inequalities it has, the nation is conceived as a comradeship that inspires its members to kill and die for it. 

    Anderson argues that nationalism arose from three primary causes. First, the rise of vernacular languages and the declining belief in the idea that some local languages were insufficient for scholarly or diplomatic communications lead to more pride in the nascent nation. Second, the end of the legitimacy of dynastic monarchs leads to people believing that they are the sovereigns, rather than the subjects. And third, the printing press made it possible for people to standardize their languages, schedules, and other parts of daily life so that people transitioned from isolated communities into larger societies. But there are also some more particular causes. One big one is that colonized peoples developed nationalism in response to the nationalism/racism of their colonizers, who wouldn't let them rise through the ranks in empires. So when an Indian civil servant realized he couldn't make it to the Raj's highest levels, or the Spanish criollo realized that peninsulares would always be favored, they developed their own nationalistic ideas.

    I would say one of the most interesting discussions in the book is that of Latin American nationalism. It is interesting because it comes earlier than most traditional histories of nationalism start, and it also has colonial and bourgeoisie narratives that make it similar to a lot of other national sentiments worldwide. It makes a lot of sense when you consider that American colonists in the Thirteen Colonies and Spanish America both initially felt like Englishmen and Spaniards, but then realized they didn't have the same rights. So even absent a linguistic difference, the bourgeoisie of each place developed national identity based on their state or provincial borders due to subordination to those born in the "mother country." So there's something interesting there about how those early ingroup-outgroup biases are felt by the outsider and lead to the outsider developing a stronger national identity than the insiders may have hd to begin with. Then, comparing the Latin American nationalism that emerged in the 18th century to 19th and 20th century nationalism in the Old World, and there are two big differences that Anderson notes. The Old World nationalisms generally involved "national print-languages," whereas the New World nationalisms emerged without distinguishing the languages of the colonists from the mother countries. And the Old World nationalists could also work from visible models from the New World and the French Revolution.

    The natural conclusion, I think, from the way nationalism spreads, is that nationalism begets nationalism. When one group of people become a nation and exclude others, those others that interact with them will start to develop or accelerate in developing their own group identity. That is a big contrast with socialism, which we could probably say is the other major force of the last two centuries in competition with nationalism, as people decide whether their class or their nation is their most important identity. Nationalism creates a need for a parallel nationalism in those it does and does not protect, as everyone wants the benefits. Socialism, on the other hand, sort of defeats its own purpose. By providing a higher standard of living for the lower classes, socialism reduces the desire of poorer people for more redistribution. Nationalism does just the opposite since it generally offers only immaterial benefits to those who are "members" of the nation. But maybe there is something to be said for how socialism in one state will lead to a stronger state, which could encourage other surrounding states to strengthen themselves as well. Not sure that I can really articulate this that well, but it feels like the historical record shows nations forming in response to other nations, and that doesn't appear to happen with socialism, communism, or redistributionism generally.

    The thing I would most like to ask Anderson about if he was alive today is about the comparison between the printing press and the World Wide Web. He cites McLuhan and Eisenstein a lot about the printing press, and says that "Print-language is what invents nationalism, not a particular language per se." By bringing everyone in contact with one another, lots of linguistic identities form into national identities based on who we can communicate with. As English dominates as a world-wide language and the Web brings us all together in communication, it will be interesting to see if technology continues to separate the nations as blocks, fragments them further, or brings people together in even larger identities.

Miscellaneous Facts:

  • The first Ukrainian grammar appeared in 1819, only 17 years after the first Russian one.
  • I thought it was interesting that Anderson identified the global government as changing from the Congress of Berlin to the League of Nations, implicitly recognizing the primacy of the nation after WWI. Also interesting as a moment in history because WWI led to the toppling of several super-national empires in Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Germany/Prussia; and then WWII's end led to even more national liberation movements from the French an English colonies. Reading the book really makes it apparent that national feeling is the driving political force of the 20th century, and it is not over.