The fatal flaw

I have been thinking about recent American actions - in Iraq and Pakistan and Afghanistan and North Korea and Guantanamo, with the stimulus package, the climate bill, and the currently-being-assembled health care bill. Stepping back and looking over all these recent actions, three things seem apparent to me:

1. President Obama is a wonderful orator, but in fact he seems to have ceded to the Democratic majority in Congress the shaping of all major policies and the details of all major bills. It appears he will be satisfied if he can claim to have passed bills addressing his stated priorities, without too much worry about what form they finally take. That is probably politically very astute for his party, but in the long run probably very bad for the nation.

2. Congress is, quite naturally, in the thrall of the special interests that pay for their campaigns, so the bills that are coming out are carefully crafted to appeal to all the special interests. Wall Street reform stops short of really affecting the high-paid CEOs or reining in the high-flying hedge funds. The cap-and-trade bill ends up giving - not selling - the permits to politically well-placed industries and companies. The stimulus bill doled out money to all sorts of politically well-placed groups, without much regard for whether it would really provide quick and effective stimulus. The military is being forced to buy more F-22 fighters and C-17 cargo planes, even though they don't want them, because they are built in the districts of powerful Congressional advocates.

3. Underneath it all, this administration has so far outstripped the already-appalling deficits run up be the previous administration that the Bush administration looks fiscally responsible by comparison. That is some achievement! Of course someday all this debt has to be paid off, or defaulted, or reduced by allowing high inflation.

I don't find any of this surprising. Students of history can find the same sort of parochial political behavior throughout history, back at least to the Roman Empire. But I do worry that our current political process is inadequate to handle the complexities and dangers of a modern, dangerous, nuclear, multipolar world.

It's not that I hope for a change in political party - looked at over the past 50 years or so, the Republicans have shown themselves to be no better (and no worse) than the Democrats at running the nation. I hope for something more fundamental - a return to statecraft in Washington and to strategic thinking in military affairs. But I have no idea what could unseat the current incestuous Congressional-Military-Industrial complex and replace it with a more disinterested and objective form of government.

Perhaps that is why empires, like people, eventually die. They reach the point where their systems cannot be repaired, and the only remedy is to bury them and let another younger and more fit generation (or nation) take their place.