On Foxes, Henhouses, and the Fog of War
One of the greatest feats of media indoctrination happens young, when we’re given stories of good guys and bad guys in books or on screen. Sure, some of the low-level “baddies” might not know what they’re doing, but the whole thrill of fighting an enemy comes from the enemy being clever. They have a plan! Yes, they’re doing something awful—but for a coherent reason, and they’ve often anticipated most every possible response. Only a truly clever and dedicated person could defeat them.
This is part of why we have so many conspiracy theorists: they’re people who grew up without shedding the conviction that there must be someone in control. Awful things couldn’t just happen on their own accord, could they? Some big brain has to be behind the scenes, orchestrating everything—because the alternative is terrifying.
Chaos?
Death and destruction without rhyme or reason?
Without purpose?
And yet, most of us face it as we grow up.
For me, it was the start of the War in Iraq. I was 17. The year, 2003. We’d already been through a year and a half of the War in Afghanistan, with all the racism and xenophobia it had emboldened—but that was an issue with the masses, for me. I’d spent the past two years grappling with the everyday hate of my fellow human beings: how shops with any Arabic lettering went quiet, or had been vandalized, in my neighbourhood. How TV was overrun with caricatures of a cave-dwelling, primitive enemy, and how the internet flooded with low-grade games where you could beat up Osama bin Laden or otherwise attack terrorists/brown people. How a classmate who wore hijab found her life transformed on two fronts: her parents extra strict about curfew out of fear that she’d be attacked on the streets, and her classes filled with dehumanizing rhetoric whenever current events came up.
People had gone war-mad. My grief was primarily over that.
On a state level, though, there was still a lot of grace given to a country that had been attacked on 9/11. US President George W. Bush had strong bipartisan support for months, and a coalition of the willing to help in his “War on Terror”.
Then came the pivot to a second war—a blatant overreach. Even then, though, it wasn’t the bald-faced lie about Weapons of Mass Destruction, sold by Colin Powell to the UN, that changed me. Nor was it the fact that the whole performance was a mere box-checking maneuver, because the UN didn’t have any power it was ready to exercise against the US, even if it didn’t believe the ruse.
No, all of that gamified politicking on the world stage still suggested leaders who knew what they were doing, even if what they were doing was awful and wrong, or hamstrung by international power relationships.
But then I heard one of Bush’s speeches on the brink of this new war, and I was struck by how similar it sounded to what I’d heard before, in history classes: the nigh-on giddy rhetoric around the idea of a great war, a swift and righteous outing. Bush’s speeches on the cusp of Iraq gave the impression of someone whose military history had stopped after the Boer War, the last outing in which Westerners could confidently treat war as a gentleman’s sport: a domain in which people with far greater technology could go out and slaughter others for their lands’ resources, and put their own lives just enough on the line to make participation a rewarding rite of passage.
As I listened to Bush’s tone at that strange turning point, it dawned on me that it wasn’t enough to learn history (with no fault to George Santayana, whose original quote stressed retention). You could read, and read, and read—but what lessons would mere reading ever guarantee? Was the ability to recite facts and demonstrate familiarity with the chronology of world events ever enough to prevent their next terrible manifestation?
At 17, after a year and a half of everyday people gone absolutely mad with hateful rhetoric, I was discovering firsthand what we as adults then ruefully shore up as hard-won knowledge whenever we look at the next generation: the fact that some lessons will only be retained once they have been lived, not just studied or received.
Although our collective history runs long and deep, each individual has only a finite time-span in which to learn it, and plenty of societal impediments shaping what history is even available to be learned early on. Furthermore, most people who lay the groundwork of history are young—half of humanity is estimated not to have made it to twenty years old—and military action favours an age range where prefrontal cortex development has very little chance of keeping pace with generational wisdom.
Many people die in others’ wars, that is, long before they had a chance to learn much for themselves: carried into battle by biochem-boosted nationalism or situational poverty more than by good reading, and a careful consideration of war’s costs.
After his terms in office, with the impact of two wars still smoldering in his wake, Bush would go on to work with vets, and even try to atone for the slaughter via portraiture. But first—at cost to so many—he and his generation had to have their war. Their firsthand lesson in history, at others’ expense, in order to learn that war is hell.
Now, obviously, if I could despair at Bush’s tone and remark to my friends that it sounded like his history had stopped in the early 1900s, I had learned from the past without needing to embark on a land war myself. But therein lay the terrible schism:
What was the point of studying history, if there would always come along someone who had no interest in learning it to the same, preventative ends?
In peace, as in war, there are always “foxes” in the henhouse
Six years later, in January 2009, I’d wrestle with a related conundrum. In the throes of the Great Recession, with a massive bail-out from the US government for key financial and industrial sectors, newly elected Barack Obama would select Timothy Geithner as the US Secretary of the Treasury. Geithner was responsible for allocating funds in the Troubled Asset Relief Program, for restructuring the financial industry, and for putting into place better consumer protections and stronger tax reforms.
The problem, for many of us watching these events unfold, was that Geithner had been President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 2003 to 2009. He had been at the helm when hedge fund chicanery first led to the collapse of mortgage-backed securities, and when related gambles destabilized the economy at cost to everyday citizens losing their savings and homes. Geithner wasn’t going to stop the devastating run of foreclosures directly—bail-outs were for banks and businesses, not civilians—and there was a great deal of ire over his willingness to let financial institutions set their own value on assets to be bailed out (a practice that shifted the risk of market devaluation heavily onto public ledgers). In those early days, too, it was believed that Geithner had facilitated the massive bonuses being paid to major execs of failed firms from public debt relief funds.
(Later, it would come out that he had not been aware, and would even negotiate to get some of that bonus money returned—but I’m capturing a moment here.)
To the average viewer, then, Geithner was a “fox” who for years had been holding open the henhouse to let others slip in, steal the eggs, and slaughter the chickens. And now, as his reward? He was tasked with designing better security for the henhouse, and brokering a more equitable deal between hens and foxes. Geithner’s selection also dinged Obama’s reputation right out the gate. This was “Yes, we can” change?
In retrospect, I saw plenty to suggest that Geithner sincerely thought he was doing the best he could. He wasn’t a blatant grifter, like the Sam Bankman-Frieds of our day and age, and the Bernie Madoffs of his own. He was just someone with far too much confidence in the private sector seeking equilibrium with minimal oversight, and far too little estimation of the damage done when major financial players got it wrong. Kneejerk neoliberals aren’t malevolently destructive: they don’t need to be. They’ve simply come to their economics from an upbringing that operated much like a rail-shooter game, ferrying them within certain givens to a preset outcome. They tinker within bounds because tinkering is all they’ve ever known—and because tinkering gives them a good quality of life, so why shouldn’t it help everyone else?
(Never chalk up to conspiracy what can be explained by ignorance—and never chalk up to malevolence what can be explained by incuriosity: though incuriosity might be worse.)
But at the time, as a twerpish 23-year-old, I was reflecting on Obama’s choice of treasury secretary philosophically. Even though he had stressed on the campaign trail that change would take a sustained collective commitment, the moment that Obama was in office a lot of rhetoric from US Democrats switched from “we” to “you”. When Obama wanted to close Guantánamo Bay, for instance, states needed to be willing to accept prisoners for transfer—but that’s when every state’s NIMBYism came out in full force. Yes, yes, we want to end the human rights nightmare, but you have to figure out how to do it without getting us involved. What, do you want us to lose our upcoming senate and gubernatorial elections by being the elected officials who brought terrorists into our constituencies?
Similarly, many didn’t want Geithner to be in charge because of his past deference to private-sector priorities… but amid all that heated criticism, I wasn’t seeing many good alternatives. Moreover, there was something to be said about leaning on the expertise of a fox who’d helped other foxes slip into the henhouse. Was it possible that Geithner might actually be the best person to identify the exact loopholes, the vulnerabilities in surveillance, that needed to be addressed in upcoming legislation?
It came down to a question of whether the fox was reformed.
Did Geithner want to fix the system? Had he learned enough from his own history with the Fed to recognize that more than a little tinkering was needed now?
One more factor, to drive home how little our leaders ever know what they’re doing:
Geithner, US Treasury Secretary, had failed to notice that he hadn’t paid all his taxes for a couple of years, when working for the International Monetary Fund. He’d been relying on TurboTax software and didn’t realize that the IMF hadn’t docked him a part of his necessary contribution to social security. He was $35,000 in arrears on account of that oversight.
It was a simple error, which he owned up to and paid back once it was pointed out to him, but one that serves as an important reminder:
All our lives are in very human hands. There is no grand Overmind concocting all the evil in our world. We do what we can with the knowledge we have. We hope to all heck that our overconfidence hasn’t gotten the best of us in the process.
And when we get it wrong? When overconfidence blinkers us to deep history, and we screw up to the tune of ruining tens of thousands, if not millions of lives?
Then, if we have any conscience at all, we join the ranks of those who forget history differently—who forget that history often cannot be learned until it’s been lived—and we try to disrupt the cycle of violence with the voice of our own experience… just as our elders tried with us, to no avail, long before.
Without further ado, then, let’s dive in to the main human of today’s essay:
Robert S. McNamara, US Secretary of Defense for the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations: a critical actor in Cold War standoffs like the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, and a significant cause of the escalation of the US Conflict in Viet Nam.
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