Writer Joshua Holland Asks whether Americans Are too Stupid for Democracy — He Says No, but His Facts all Point the Other Way — and Supporting Examples Provided by Our Leaders’ Foolishly Incomplete Discussions about Iraq’s Once Suspected WMDs, Iran’s Suspected Bomb-Building, and Syria’s Alleged Chemical Weapons Use

20 March 2013

Citation — to the essay that I start with

Joshua Holland, Are Americans too stupid for democracy? Salon (19 March 2013)

America’s penchant for fact avoidance, combined with stupidly incomplete analysis, now characterizes most of what we do — which has us teetering on the edge of witless self-destruction

Today, three simultaneous political stirrings are in the air:

(1) One looks back at the mistakes we made in going to war in Iraq

(2) Another consists of President Obama’s refusal to consider the option of nuclear containment in regard to Iran — in preference to getting sucked into an attack on its territory

(3) And the lasts comprises escalating support for attacking Syria’s Assad regime because of its alleged inclination to resort to using chemical weapons — in propping itself up against Syrian rebel forces

Each of these demonstrates America’s inability to question its outcome-determinative initial assumptions.

First — Joshua Holland’s essay about public ignorance

Mr. Holland wrote:

A 2009 study in the European Journal of Communications looked at how informed citizens of the U.S., UK, Denmark and Finland were of the international news of the day, and the results weren’t pretty (PDF).

“Overall,” the scholars wrote, “the Scandinavians emerged as the best informed, averaging 62–67 percent correct responses, the British were relatively close behind with 59 percent, and the Americans lagging in the rear with 40 percent.” We didn’t fare much better when it came to domestic stories.

Widespread ignorance of objective reality poses a genuine threat to democracy. The people of the United States have ignorance in abundance.

Disturbingly — from the point of view of self-knowledge — as Holland points out, psychology experiments have demonstrated that the most ignorant performers (those in the bottom 10-15 percent of performers) rate themselves as above average in their knowledge and competence.

In other words, the stupidest among us think that they are better than their noticeably more competent peers. Which may help to explain “Ignorant America’s” arrogance in world affairs.

Mr. Holland goes on to list a series of indicators that show just how skewed from reality our political perceptions are. His essay is worth reading.

Joshua Holland, of course, doesn’t give up on American democracy

He writes instead: “Are Americans too stupid for democracy? No, but they could be a lot smarter.”

It appears to be de rigueur for pundits to support the American experiment, even when it is obvious that it has gone horribly awry.

I am less politically correct than Mr. Holland is. Our combination of ignorance, poor reasoning, and arrogance is going to do us in — unless we begin to recognize the problems that we create for ourselves.

Following are three examples of what I mean.

Example One — War in Iraq

This month has seen a good deal of analysis regarding the merits of the United States’ preemptive war in Iraq, which began on 20 March 2003.

Most of the discussion revolves around the “lies” about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that the Bush II Administration sold us, so as to garner support for the invasion.

Completely missed, then and now, is the initial question that should have been asked — “Would Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction negatively and significantly impact American security — enough to cause us to abandon our historically held moral objection to waging preemptive wars?”

Instead, “everyone” assumed that Iraq and WMDs (together) was such an evil than we had no choice but to mount an initial strike to prevent Saddam Hussein’s regime from obtaining them.

So, instead of questioning our flawed reasoning process at the time, people are letting themselves off the Stupidity Hook by blaming President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for lying to them.

Note — for a brief calculation of the sum of these mistakes, see:

Neta C. Crawford, The Iraq War: Ten Years in Ten Numbers, Foreign Policy (20 March 2013)

Example Two — Iran and its bomb

President Obama — and seemingly the entirety of Congress — have displayed equal analytical blindness in skipping the first step of an intelligent review of our options in regard to Iran and its alleged nuclear bomb-building.

The President last year announced that nuclear containment — like that which President Truman initiated in regard to the Soviet Union during the Cold War — was not an option in regard to Iran:

"Make no mistake, a nuclear-armed Iran is not a challenge that can be contained," Obama said in his address to the General Assembly in New York on Tuesday morning.

"It would threaten the elimination of Israel, the security of Gulf nations and the stability of the global economy. It risks triggering a nuclear arms race in the region and the unraveling of the non-proliferation treaty. That is why a coalition of countries is holding the Iranian government accountable. And that is why the United States will do what we must to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon."

Here again, the United States is blindly assuming that Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons is somehow going to tilt the world’s balance of power such that the new balance threatens American survival. And, if not that, the assumption that an Iranian nuke virtually guarantees the elimination of Israel, thereby posing a concordant threat to American interests in the Middle East.

That’s all nonsense.

The whole point to containment was how effectively it worked in preventing nuclear and large scale wars for more than sixty years.

President Obama’s irrational assumption seems to be that Iranians have a deep-seated death wish, which makes them less amenable to containment pressures than:

(a) the demonstrated lunatics, who now run bomb-possessing, missile-testing North Korea

(b) the obviously unstable Pakistani government, whom America indirectly helped get the bomb.

As with Iraq, the United States has painted itself into an unnecessary corner — again based on prejudice against Reality’s facts.

Example Three — Syrian chemical weapons

We are evidently doing the Stupidity Display a third time, now in regard to Syria.

The President, assisted by some members of Congress, has announced that the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons (in its civil war) marks a demarcation — in Syrian President Assad’s behavior — that will presumably cause an American intervention:

Appearing before a military audience at the National Defense University in Fort McNair, Obama declared, “I want to make it absolutely clear to Assad and anyone who is under his command… If you make the tragic mistake of using these weapons there will be consequences and you will be held accountable.”

“This is a red line for the United States,” Clinton said earlier in the day after a meeting in Prague with Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg.

“I’m not going to telegraph in any specifics what we would do in the event of credible evidence that the Assad regime has resorted to using chemical weapons against their own people, but suffice it to say that we’re certainly planning to take action if that eventuality were to occur,” Clinton warned.

And the Commander in Chief’s rational for this policy?

We simply cannot allow the 21^st Century to be darkened by the worst weapons of the 20^th Century.

What does that have to do with protecting American security interests?

How does the use of chemical weapons distinguish itself from slaughtering thousands of people via all the other horrific means of maiming and death that President Assad has already used?

Do chemical weapons occupy a pedestal of unusually efficient death and harm dealing?

Is murdering innocents by chemicals somehow morally more reprehensible than murdering them in other lingering ways?

If Assad uses chemical weapons, does that necessarily mean that terrorists will get hold of unused samples of those munitions and then cleverly use them against U.S. troops or ship them to the United States?

Does the use of chemical weapons present a cloud of amorphous horribleness that could, via some unexplained means, drag the United States to its national demise?

Here, President Obama — as President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney did in regard to Iraq — has short-circuited the analytical process that should go into delineating intelligently constructed American foreign and military policy.

As is the Obama Administration’s wont, it has announced a poorly considered policy, without first considering its long term implications for American interests — apparently in order to expediently and temporarily seize constantly changing domestic political advantage.

The moral? — We are indeed too “stupid” for democracy

Clouded by ignorance and an unwillingness to observe the rules of rigorous analysis, we let our leaders consistently reflect our inabilities to think constructively and efficiently in matters of governance and foreign policy.

So far, we have “only” killed hundreds of thousands of “foreigners” and thousands of our own troops — and incurred past, present, and future financial costs for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars of “only” about 7 trillion dollars.

But the day is coming, when the cumulative load of our military and financial wrong-headedness is going to consume the whole of America.

Stupidity has its price.

PeteFree.com