A modern Greek tragedy – that could have been foreseen.
As I tried to point out in a recent Learning From Dogs post, foreign policy is an extremely complicated thing. This sounds self-evident, but it’s amazing the extent to which certain officials think they can control events occurring around the world.
I like to characterize US foreign policy in the Middle East as throwing rocks at a hornet’s nest, and then expecting to be
able to control the hornets when they emerge. The consequences of intervention are so many, so widespread, so complicated, and so unforeseen that no one can hope to be able to manage them, without inevitably intervening even more and thus fueling even more unintended consequences. (You can see a strong parallel between the overconfidence of government officials in the area of foreign policy and their attitude in areas of attempted economic control. But, that’s a separate discussion.)
Thanks to the wonderful (in my opinion) people at WikiLeaks, we have been able to see a much more realistic picture of the war in Afghanistan than has so far been available. CNN reports on one element of these reports that is none other than one of these most unintended of consequences — some of the most advanced military technology in our country’s arsenal falling into the hands of…well we’re not really sure who. CNN reports:
When unmanned aircraft crash in Afghanistan, scavenger hunters frequently aren’t far behind, U.S. military incident reports published by WikiLeaks suggest.
On several occasions, military units sent to recover the aircraft — known as tactical unmanned aerial vehicles — have arrived to find the aircraft stripped of valuable parts.
In April 2007, a parachute deployed on one that had maintenance issues, one report says. Troops sent to recover the aircraft couldn’t reach it until the next day, when they discovered it was missing some of its electronic components and its payload.
Is this a surprise? For me, no!
For those who oversimplify foreign policy to international powers moving on a chess board, yes. Government officials often forget that at the end of the day we are not dealing simply with “the Taliban” or “Al Qaeda” — we are dealing with individual human beings.
And while the Taliban and Al Qaeda as groups may seem predictable, individual human beings are essentially the most advanced supercomputers ever to exist on this planet. To think that one can predict the actions of human beings on the other side of the world, especially human beings whose culture and background one hardly understandings, is nothing but the highest form of hubris.
And, just like in Greek tragedy, the hubris comes just before the fall, when it turns out that the prideful character did not have everything under control, and in fact is the victim of consequences that he was too prideful to foresee or even consider as a possibility.
By Elliot Engstrom
Learning from Dogs 
That is exactly the kind of hubris and over simplification that led the current generation of financial regulators who were brought up playing Gameboy to believe they could control the financial world by pushing the knobs of capital requirements and credit rating agencies. Their amazingly naïve innocence brought us this crisis.
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Thanks Per,
Would love your comment to a Post coming out on the 2nd about the terrible lack of integrity in financial reporting.
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There is no innocence, and there is no naivety. They are just feigned. The same crowd, two generations before, supported Hitler (there is plenty of this on my site, I am not talking out of no knowledge, Per can look how and why the BIS was created).
Their specialty is making a bad situation worse, and then wait for carrion.
President Wilson was a racist. He sent his right hand man to propose an alliance to the Kaiser (grand son of Queen Victoria) with Britain, against France (an inferior race, the envoy told the Kaiser). 3 months later, to the day, imperial Germany attacked Russia, France, Belgium and Luxembourg, and was very surprised when the day after, Britain declared war in turn… to fascist Germany. The vultures had advised the stupid Germans tyrannical leaders to engage in a European wide massacre, because they knew the decimation of Europe would make their fortune, and it did. Then they rebuild German fascism, ASAP, because somehow the Europeans had kept their empires.
Afghanistan is more of the same sort of mess. Americans and their agents (ISI, bin Laden and his Arab cohorts) have been killing Afghans for four decades. Now they whine they cannot do it alone anymore, and that 9/11 was unfair. So many Afghans, and so hard to kill! And it’s so unfair that, after teaching bin Laden to attack schools, bin Laden forgot that employees are not supposed to fire their masters.
The USA supported Hitler massively before, and at the beginning of WWII. The USA government and its demented racist Congress even proclaimed Britain and France “belligerent countries” in 1939, and intervention by USA corporations allowed the Luftwaffe to stay in the air in 1939.
In 1940, the USA outright refused to help, although it was formally asked I have all that documented on my site. Then some ignorant Americans have the impudence to come and talk about “anti-Americanism”. As if their ignorance made them naive and innocent. Instead, it is a scheme.
In light of this sort of facts, Europe ought to pull out of Afghanistan, and worry more about its own backyard, Africa. Afghanistan is a place where the USA has waged war for 40 years, using its poodles at the Pakistani ISI, and the cohorts led by bin Laden. Now the USA leadership wants to kill ever more. Let them to their own butchery.
It is time for European democracy to realize that American plutocracy is not a friend.
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/
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