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Sunday, December 28, 2008
Israel responding as it must
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I’ve never been a fan of Israel’s policy of responding to extremist attacks by punishing civilian populations. Among other problems, it hasn’t seemed to work. However, Israel’s decision to strike back decisively against Hamas in Gaza over the weekend was necessary and appropriate. It is ludicrous to argue that a country under regular rocket attack from a neighbor does not have the right to defend itself. The Bush administration is correct to put responsibility for the attacks on Hamas.
The attacks have the added benefit of striking mainly at military/governmental targets, with the Israelis apparently taking out large numbers of Hamas officials and party infrastructure. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports how that was achieved:
“Sources in the defense establishment said Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for the operation over six months ago, even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas. According to the sources, Barak maintained that although the lull would allow Hamas to prepare for a showdown with Israel, the Israeli army needed time to prepare, as well.
Barak gave orders to carry out a comprehensive intelligence-gathering drive which sought to map out Hamas’ security infrastructure, along with that of other militant organizations operating in the Strip.
This intelligence-gathering effort brought back information about permanent bases, weapon silos, training camps, the homes of senior officials and coordinates for other facilities.”
The attacks are also being interpreted by some as dooming any intermediate-term chance of progress in settling the Israeli-Palestinian problem, as the Washington Post reports:
“Israel’s airstrikes on Gaza yesterday, in retaliation for a nonstop barrage of rocket attacks from Hamas fighters, raised the prospect of an escalation of violence that could scuttle any hopes the incoming Obama administration harbored of forging an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.
“If the casualty reports are accurate, Hamas is going to respond. And this isn’t a two- or three-day deal in which the genie is put back in the bottle,” said Aaron David Miller, a Middle East scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and author of “The Much Too Promised Land.” “This takes the already slim chance of an early, active and successful Obama engagement on Israel-Palestinian peace and lowers it to about zero.”
I’m not sure I agree with that assessment. A strong Hamas would not tolerate peace. A Hamas chastened enough to cease rocket attacks on Israel would be less capable of interfering. As Miller notes in the Post, the odds of making progress were already slim. But I doubt this does much to make those odds worse.
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A one-word explanation? Greed
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The secret to capitalism’s success is its ability to take one of mankind’s most powerful emotions — greed — and harness that emotion to drive economic progress. By greedily pursuing our own individual self-interests, the theory goes, each of us contributes almost accidentally to greater prosperity for everybody.
And for the most part, that’s how it has worked. The innovation and risk-taking encouraged by capitalism have given billions of people a quality of life and security that would otherwise be unimaginable. If there is a better, more productive system for meeting the physical needs of human life, we haven’t found it yet.
But then comes a year like 2008, a year in which capitalism has faltered and the security of millions of Americans is threatened. Trillions of dollars of wealth has disappeared in a remarkably short time, along with millions of jobs. Fear rather than optimism dominates the landscape, and everyone from economists to hairdressers to members of Congress is wondering just what went wrong and how to fix it.
There are technical explanations, political explanations and folk-wisdom explanations. There are explanations that attempt to get down into the nitty-gritty details and those that offer a big-picture analysis.
My own one-sentence assessment? Capitalism works by getting the best out of greed; it fails when we let greed get the best of us.
And that is a constant, never-ending problem. We have always known that greed is dangerous. Going back into time as far as the written word can take us, every major religion, every major culture has warned against the dangers of greed.
In a capitalist system, the knowledge of greed’s dual nature — its power when harnessed, its danger when it is not — sets up a permanent, enduring tension. The trick is to give greed enough play to reap its benefits while minimizing greed’s danger. In that sense, a greed-powered economy is like a nuclear-powered submarine. Both are driven by a potentially boundless but destructive source of energy that must be kept within bounds to operate safely.
But greed by its nature is seductive. Greed always seeks more, a little more, just a bit more, please. And greed can cause us to rationalize things that cannot and should not be rationalized.
(As one measure of its power, for example, greed has helped to transform a religious celebration of the birth of a poor, humble baby in a manger into a festival of consumerism and consumption. But I digress.)
As the economic crisis continues to play out, a lot of attention is being focused on the failure of legal and regulatory controls on greed. How can a $50 billion Ponzi scheme go undetected for years? How can rating agencies give their most-secure rating to high-risk bonds? How can Wall Street financiers collect hundred-million-dollar bonuses on profits that weren’t really profits in the first place?
The short answer is that people who know better begin to not know better. They convince themselves — or allow themselves to be convinced by others — that a little lighter touch on the reins will produce even more riches, that previous controls on greed are really unnecessary or counterproductive.
And in the end, legal and regulatory controls on greed will always be subject to manipulation. That’s because laws and rules are merely formalized expressions of the underlying and unwritten cultural, moral and ethical attitudes toward greed.
And it is those attitudes that have changed so profoundly in the past generation or so.
Left unchecked, greed overwhelms any sense of proportion, fairness or morality. We as a culture and as individuals came to believe that if greed is the engine that drives progress, any attempt to curtail greed thus curtails progress. We thought that since greed is good, unrestrained greed must be an unrestrained good.
What we’ve discovered — yet again — is that when properly harnessed, greed makes an effective, productive servant.
But it makes a terrible master.
