10 Most Important Stories of the Decade

As we near the end of 2009 it's time to look back on the decade of the 2000's. These past ten years are often being referred to as the "oh-ohs," a nod to the number of things that went wrong. Here is my list of the most important happenings.

10-Spirit and Opportunity missions to Mars. The brilliantly successful NASA rovers landed in January, 2004 and discovered abundant evidence of oodles of water on the Red Planet, both in the past and frozen under the surface now. This keeps the door open on whether life may have developed there or may still exist underground, perhaps dormantly. When we get around to colonizing Mars, which we eventually will and must unless we destroy ourselves on this planet first, these findings show us the raw materials to survive on and terraform the planet are there. If so, a thousand years from now this story may be considered the most important one on this list.

9-Beijing Summer Olympics. The 2008 international athletic extravaganza was China's true international coming out party. From the incomparable opening ceremony through the unsurpassed competition, China showed it is most definitely back. The games themselves were simply a showcase of the epochal events taking shape in the globe's most populous country. 500 years ago the Middle Kingdom had the largest economy in the world, and it is on the way to regaining that position once more. China has 1.35 billion people, one-fifth of the world's total. With a GDP of $4.6 trillion in 2008 it will soon eclipse Japan as the number two economy. That could happen this year. The USA's $14 trillion is still three times as great, but if current trends hold, China will go past the Americans by 2030. That is definitely something to think about.

8-Hurricane Katrina. The mammoth storm slammed into the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts on august 29, 2005. With 1,836 confirmed dead, 705 declared missing and at least $75 billion in property damage it was among the worst natural disasters ever to strike the United States. The abysmal response to the emergency discredited the competence of the Bush administration and led directly to Democratic control of Congress in 2006. Bush's, "You're doing a heckuva job, Brownie!" to FEMA Director Michael D. Brown as TV reports showed thousands marooned and bodies floating in the flooded streets of New Orleans, 80% of which were underwater, spoke to how completely out of touch he was. After this crushing blow to his credibility the majority of the American people finally began to see through his charades in Iraq and the economy as well.


7-Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize. On December 10, 2007 former Vice President Al Gore accepted the Nobel Prize for Peace in Oslo, Norway for his body of work alerting the world to the escalating dangers of global warming. The award signifies broad consensus in scientific and international governmental circles that adverse climate change is an extremely serious human-caused problem that needs a human-designed solution. In short, 9.1 billion tons of greenhouse gasses were emitted into the atmosphere last year-almost all of them due to human activity-and natural processes such as ocean absorption and plant respiration could remove only 5 billion of those tons. Sea level rise, the increasing ferocity of major storms, drought and disease expansion are some of the consequences already under way that promise to get worse. This is another item that will likely seem of greater importance in hindsight, particularly if not enough is done in the next couple of decades to address the threat.


6-Bungled Campaign in Afghanistan. Following the terrorist attacks against America in September 2001, U.S. forces commenced operations in Afghanistan on October 7 against the al-Qaeda terror organization based there and the Taliban government that hosted it. Unfortunately, the Bush Administration disastrously bungled the operation, limiting U.S. involvement primarily to air and cruise missile strikes and the introduction of a few hundred special forces troops who served primarily as forward observers to coordinate the bombings. The ground campaign was left in the hands of the Northern Alliance, a collection of anti-Taliban forces who held only a few remote valleys in the country's far north. As a result of the failure to commit sufficient American forces, the leadership cadres of al-Qaeda under Osama bin Laden and the Taliban under Mullah Omar were able to effect their escapes. They remain at large to this day, probably across the border in Pakistan, plotting, scheming, recruiting, training and killing.


5-Financial Crash/Recession of 2008-2010. Brought on largely by reckless practices and deregulatory nonsense in subprime mortgages and derivatives trading, the effects of the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression have spread worldwide. The outcome of the 2008 presidential election was clinched when giant investment house Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 14, 2008 and Republican candidate John McCain stated the next day, "The fundamentals of the economy are strong." Since a total implosion of the financial sector was averted, the public at large is not fully aware of how close we actually were to Great Depression II. The Fed bailouts, unpopular though they were, under both Bush and Obama, were necessary to preventing catastrophe, though there certainly should have been much stronger accountability. They are beginning to be paid back now with interest. The Obama $787 billion stimulus has also been crucial to staving off a depressionary downward spiral. The situation calls for more. As usual, Republican prescriptions are to return to Hooverism by cutting taxes and spending. If their ideas are adopted they will achieve their customary results.


4-Invasion of Iraq. The worst foreign policy blunder in American history began in March, 2003. The imbroglio is a trenchant reminder of how easily a frightened public can be stampeded into belligerent foolishness, even by a leader who is neither particularly intelligent nor a very good communicator. To date, the official American dead are 4,500, the wounded 31,000 and Iraqi civilian casualties stand at 87,000. Actual numbers may be much higher, particularly of the civilians. The direct cost to the U.S. has been $628 billion. There is little question now that the Bush administration sought conquest in Iraq before it even took office, and that the mood created by 9/11 provided the opportunity. The lies, mismanagement, baseless justifications, misdirected effort from the nation's real enemies, abandonment of moral and constitutional principles America has stood for since its inception and loss of respect in the world are the legacies of the fiasco and cautionary portents for the future.


3-Election of 2000. We will probably never know the real winner of this election. The Supreme Court as much as admitted the political motivation of its ruling in Bush v. Gore by declaring the decision did not set a precedent for the future. It turned out to be of immense importance, for imagine the policy differences that would have attended a Gore presidency. We would probably have eliminated the al Qaeda and Taliban leadership rapidly and decisively. We would never have gone into Iraq. We would have made substantial progress on energy independence and global warming. We would not have squandered the budget surpluses (remember them?) on tax cuts for the rich, and would instead have put Medicare and Social Security on a permanently sound footing. We would not have begun contracting out our defense to a mercenary army, nor would we have been torturing people.


2-Election of Barack Obama. Given the nation's history, the election of the first half-minority president, especially an African-American, is an axial event. The United States is the first major Western nation to do this. If he is a fairly effective president there is a good chance he will be featured on national currency someday. Another thing to keep in mind is how bad things had to have gotten under the perniciously venal and incompetent Bush-Cheney administration for this to take place. Obama has begun his first year taking a tack to a more moral and progressive stance. He has not been as liberal as his base would like, but there is an immense load on his plate and political realities are what they are. This has been evidenced by moderately progressive achievements on the budget, stimulus, and health care up to now. The country and the world are already far the better off thanks to his election rather than his opponent, who agreed with Bush on every major policy question.


1-September 11, 2001. Most of the negative events in this list are associated with the fallout from that horrendous day nine years ago. The national fear provided cover for Bush-Cheney's sinister depredations on the Constitution and their fiasco in Iraq. It gave them a narrow re-election victory in 2004. It undermined the economy and national finances, worsening the effects of the meltdown and constricting Obama's and the Congress's options on the budget, stimulus and health care. It worsened the response to Katrina, with funds unavailable to improve the levees and National Guard equipment and personnel diverted to Iraq. It has badly hurt the airline industry and, partly because of Bush's chosen response, kept the volatile Middle East a cauldron.

More on Irrational Disbelief

Last time we looked at "manufactured doubt," manipulative advertising campaigns designed to make people skeptical of the findings of science. They are often mounted to protect the interests of industries whose products or practices are threats to people's health or safety, such as the campaigns run for the tobacco, asbestos and coal industries. This is one reason it is often difficult to secure popular consensus when scientific consensus is more or less settled.

But other reasons lie within the minds of the target public itself. One main reason is denial. There is a tendency not to want to believe bad news, particularly if it means one needs to change one's behavior to address the problem. "Temporal relativism" is another. This relates to personal perspective and the slowness with which things may seem to change to the anecdotal observer. A gradual decline may not seem so noticeable within the time frame a person is paying attention to something. For instance, there were an estimated 450,000 lions in the wild in Africa in 1950. There are fewer than 30,000 now. Someone who has been going to Africa only in the past 10 years may not see the extent of the problem.

Anti-intellectualism is another reason. America seems particularly cursed among advanced nations in the high percentage of its populace who are extremely skeptical of the scientific method and quantitative analysis. The society is really rather schizophrenic in this regard. On the one hand we led the space, computer and genetic revolutions and on the other we have a higher percentage than other advanced nations of people who feel the earth is only 6,000 years old. This goes back to an early nineteenth century anti-aristocratic bent captured by Andrew Jackson. After him for the next few decades you had better have been born in a log cabin and display the "common touch" if you wanted to get elected president. It largely explains the appeal of counterfactual and even defiantly illogical figures like Sarah Palin today. An aura of authentic simplicity equates to credibility with this group.

America's "culture wars" have generalized the divide. Without a tradition of familiarity with classical education any more, figures like St. Thomas Aquinas, who sough to bridge faith and reason, are largely unknown in this country. Instead, science and adherence to its findings are often dismissed as threats to religion among traditional culturists. It need not be so. The Roman Catholic Church, since an encyclical by Pope John Paul II in 1996, is now tacitly in agreement with the idea of human evolution, for example.

Finally, there is the phenomenon George Lakoff identified as "frames." Click on the link to see a five-minute discussion from Lakoff himself. The writer of the incisive books "Don't Think of an Elephant" and "Moral Politics" posits a conservative frame of reference that cannot, for example, conceive of societal factors for behavior, such as a link between poverty and crime, but must ascribe all behaviors to individual choices, and thus cannot accept the efficacy of "social programs," no matter what statistical data is attached to them. These causes are also important factors in explaining why fact, science , data and even self-interest are frequently rejected in favor of irrational disbelief.

Junk Science: Manufactured Doubt

Have you ever wondered why it is that substantial blocs of people refuse to believe certain things, even after they have been considered "proven" by the findings of science? Galileo, for instance, was put on trial in 1632 for teaching the heliocentric (sun-centered) doctrine 89 years after Copernicus convincingly first proposed it and 22 years after his own telescopic observations confirmed it. In the nineteenth century Joseph Lister had great difficulty securing acceptance of the principle of antiseptic surgery and the need for surgeons to wash and disinfect their hands and instruments. For much of the twentieth, many Americans clung to the unfounded view that women and African-Americans lagged behind white men in intelligence.

More recently we have seen how persistent has been popular opposition to a range of questions regarded as conclusively settled by the overwhelming opinion of the scientific community. Among these stand such precepts as biological evolution by natural selection, the futility of "abstinence only" sex education and the occurrence of global warming as a result of human activity. Regardless of the findings of research, millions seem steadfastly wedded to debunked ideas. Why is this so?

In this piece I'll link you to an excellent synopsis showing one facet of the reason, the existence of well-funded disinformation campaigns by special interests who stand to lose a great deal of money if the facts of science are heeded. In a future issue I'll explore other attitudinal and psychological reasons.

But today I'd like to introduce you to the "Manufactured Doubt Industry," a thriving subset of the public relations or advertising industry. Pioneered by the tobacco industry campaign directed by the firm Hill and Knowlton beginning in 1954, this very company went on to sow obfuscation and delay on behalf of cancer-causing asbestos and ozone-layer destroying chlorofluorocarbons. All succeeded in delaying the implementation of urgently needed protections by many years.

Then, beginning in 1988, the fossil fuel industry followed up the strategies developed by Hill and Knowlton in a now twenty-year-old campaign to pull the wool over gullible eyes in order to limit regulation of the effects their products are having on earth's climate and web of life. For an eye-opening insight, read the well-written and researched article "The Manufactured Doubt Industry and the Hacked Email Controversy" by Jeff Masters in "Common Dreams" here.

For a preview, the basic steps of disinformation used in "manufacturing doubt" are included in this article on the ozone hole issue. It has been called the standard package of tricks. It remains disappointing that the media too often fails to differentiate between the objectivity of legitimate peer-reviewed scientific publications on the one hand and reports by in-house shills and thinks tanks in the pay of industry such as the Science and Environmental Policy Project on the other. But now you know better.

Day of Infamy

December 7 this year marks the sixty-eighth anniversary of the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor. If you go there you can see models and mementos of the ships lost that day, photographs of the wreckage, the hulk of the U.S.S. Arizona and on its memorial inscribed the names of the fallen. You can also see a moving film of the attack and its aftermath, made more moving yet because it is introduced by one of the survivors of that fateful Sunday morning. If you want to see the site yourself, I would urge you to go soon. The time is approaching when those who lived it will no longer stand as testament to the reality of that day's shock and loss, for even the youngest sailors of late 1941 are now entering their upper eighties.

That famous "day of infamy" was an event that profoundly changed the United States in a seemingly permanent way. Up to that time the United States basically hewed to George Washington's farewell injunction to avoid "foreign wars and entangling alliances." Even after being drawn into the Great War of 1914-1918 its conclusion saw the U.S. return to its shores, demobilize practically its entire army, sever its alliances and resume its customary stance of "isolationism."

It wasn't that America shut itself off from the world. American business and commerce remained heavily engaged around the globe. Americans travelled to foreign countries in growing numbers. U.S diplomats eagerly sought to open up opportunities for the American economy and often stood ready to use their good offices to help ameliorate tensions between countries. But in terms of alliances and military power politics outside its traditional head-cracking zone in the Caribbean, the U.S. stayed aloof.

The "Lessons of Pearl Harbor" changed all that. After involvement in a Second World War, and this time sparked by a surprise attack, a new internationalism became the consensus. "Never again" would the United States be caught unaware, unprepared and without alliances firmly in place. The developing Cold War with Soviet Russia amplified the Lessons tremendously.

Ever since, America has sought bases, intelligence and allies everywhere. No threat was too small to notice and act upon. The thinking was that if the United States did not mould the world to its liking then others would. The former tiny peacetime military is now a permanent mighty force costing hundreds of billions with outposts in over 100 nations. The former Great Isolationist has been directly involved in at least 16 conflicts in the past 60 years and attempts to be the guide and police force for the rest of the world. December 7, 1941 was the catalyst for this new perspective. The world and America have never been the same.

Obama on Afghanistan

President Obama has so far had to spend the greater part of his first ten months in office cleaning up the Stygian mess left him by George W. Bush. His speech last night on Afghanistan certainly falls into that category. As a candidate Barack Obama said Iraq was the wrong war. He said he would wind down there and ramp up in Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda had been based and where its Taliban enablers had ruled and were once again regaining strength. There is some semblance of sense to this. Iraq was indeed a colossal blunder, and there was reason to pursue Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Once becoming President, Obama augmented the 30,000 troops he inherited from Bush with another 30,000. Now, after after long study and consideration, he has settled on sending another 30,000 and plans to keep them there until beginning to draw down in July, 2011. It's an Obama Afghan "surge," if you will, designed to pacify the countryside and allow time to train up competent Afghan security forces to take over the work themselves. Will it work? Well, that depends on what you mean by "work."

There is no doubt another 30,000 American soldiers will tamp down violence around the country. There will be increased casualties as they enter hostile ares to establish a presence. If they stay and hold for awhile, the losses will then decline. That was the pattern in Iraq, and in areas in Afghanistan where the increased personnel has already been committed.

But the real problem will be to establish anything lasting. The Taliban is indigenous and we are transient foreigners. Tribal leaders will determine the long term situation, not the United States. The only way to change that would be to keep a lot of troops there for ten to twenty years and to spend a couple of hundred billion dollars in aid. Obama realizes that is something the American people will not stand for. Nor should they.

Pakistan will determine the regional fate of Al Qaeda, not us. Al Qaeda is no longer in Afghanistan, anyway. Intelligence testimony is that there are no more than 100 al Qaeda in Afghanistan. They are across the border in Pakistan. The President paid attention to that in the speech, saying repeatedly that the security of "Afghanistan and Pakistan" is a vital interest of the United States. The limitation, of course, is that Pakistan is a sovereign country that does not want an American army on its territory. For its success, therefore, the goal of eliminating Al Qaeda in Pakistan's western tribal regions depends on the Pakistani Army being the hammer while the U.S. presence across the border in Afghanistan is the anvil. That places great reliance on an army and a government that have proved much less than dedicated to actively prosecuting any such sustained effort.

In this light it is little wonder Obama took such a long time to come to a decision on strategy. He has no good options. He has seemingly settled on the political expediency of not leaving too early to anger the hawks while trying not to stay too long to anger the doves. With a year and a half to play with, who knows, maybe he could even get really lucky and have a Predator strike nail Osama bin Laden. In the meantime, he will hope that a period of relative quiet in Afghanistan will be accompanied by enough progress in Pakistan to claim success and get the whole miasma behind him in time for the 2012 election. That's about what it comes down to.