It is well to remind ourselves, in the context of this discussion, that the Bush / Cheney / Rove / neocon approach to “ugly truths” is to deny them, and attack them, including slandering and outright lying. Remember the incredible hubris of “We create our own reality, and while you’re studying that, we’ll create a new reality.” Which makes the first six paragraphs of this article extremely interesting, as it clearly shows the intent to go to war with Iran next:
http://www.motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2007/11/freedoms-watch-iran.html

It is this approach that has transformed politics; as one observer whose name escapes me at the moment said about the rise of neo-conservatism and the Christian right, “the delusional is no longer marginal.” Truth and reality have become merely pawns in the marketing campaigns of media politics.

Now, on the question of development economics, I believe a large part of the problem is that most of the large projects were sold under the rubric of development economics, but were, from the initial conception and design, intended solely as neo-colonial projects, especially to reap the advantage of labor arbitrage of operating in low-wage countries. The best explication of this is John Perkins in his book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Which is doubly interesting, because Perkins also discusses his role, as part of a secret U.S. Treasury team, in persuading the Saudis, to establish the petrodollar market to recycle the billions of dollars pouring into the Middle East after the 1973 oil embargo.

So perhaps development economics were never actually applied in the first place? Only the platitudes were mouthed. Which makes it interesting to recall the incident between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at “Atlantic Conference” aboard the U.S. cruiser Augusta in August, 1941. According to FDR’s son, Elliott Roosevelt, in his 1946 book, As He Saw It, there was major disagreement over the policies to be followed after the war. Roosevelt was determined that the colonial economics of the British Empire be terminated once and for all. As Elliott Roosevelt relates it, FDR

remarked, with a sly sort of assurance, “of course, after the war, one of the preconditions of any lasting peace will have to be the greatest possible freedom of trade."

He paused. The P.M.'s head was lowered; he was watching Father steadily, from under one eyebrow.

"No artificial barriers," Father pursued. "As few favored economic agreements as possible. Opportunities for expansion. Markets open for healthy competition." His eye wandered innocently around the room.

Churchill shifted in his armchair. "The British Empire trade agreements," he began heavily, "are…“

Father broke in. "Yes. Those Empire trade agreements are a case in point. It's because of them that the people of India and Africa, of all the colonial Near East and Far East, are still as backward as they are."

Churchill's neck reddened and he crouched forward. "Mr. President, England does not propose for a moment to lose its favored position among the British Dominions. The trade that has made England great shall continue, and under conditions prescribed by England's ministers."

"You see," said Father slowly, "it is along in here somewhere that there is likely to be some disagreement between you, Winston, and me. I am firmly of the belief that if we are to arrive at a stable peace it must involve the development of backward countries. Backward peoples. How can this be done? It can't be done, obviously, by eighteenth-century methods. Now-"

"Who's talking eighteenth-century methods?"

"Whichever of your ministers recommends a policy which takes wealth in raw materials out of a colonial country, but which returns nothing to the people of that country in consideration. Twentieth-century methods involve bringing industry to these colonies. Twentieth-century methods include increasing the wealth of a people by increasing their standard of living, by educating them, by bringing them sanitation-by making sure that they get a return for the raw wealth of their community." (See pages 35-39.)

Which, in turn, makes the following fact interesting:

The global foreign exchange market, easily the largest financial market, is dominated by London. More than half of the trades in the derivatives market are handled in London, which straddles the time zones between Asia and the U.S. And the trading rooms in the Square Mile, as the City of London financial district is known, are responsible for almost three-quarters of the trades in the secondary fixed-income markets.

How do you say in French, that wonderful French witticism, “The more things change, the more they remain the same”?

Just to broaden the topic, consider the paradigm of four dimensional spacetime; Three dimensions are nothing more then the coordinate system of the point the three lines cross. While it is as necessary to have some frame of reference to define space as it is necessary to have a starting date for a calendar, it is still an arbitrary point of reference. The fact is that any number of such points and frames can be used to define the same space. Competing frames of reference and the systems of organization they represent are the cause of conflict. You might say Arabs and Israelis use different coordinate systems to define the same space. This is largely the basis of Chaos Theory, where the rules may be determined, but the outcome cannot be predicted because intersecting processes yield unpredictable results, even, as experiments with cellular automata have shown, where it is feedback within the same initial structure. While any given map of space may be three dimensional, the reality is infinitely dimensional.

Is time a dimension, or process? Consider; If two atoms collide, it creates an event in time. While the atoms proceed through this event and on to others, the event goes the other way. First it is in the future, then in the past. This relationship prevails at every level of complexity. The rotation of the earth, relative to the radiation of the sun, goes from past events to future ones, while the units of time/days go from being in the future to being in the past. To the hands of the clock, the face goes counterclockwise.

So which is the real direction? If time is a fundamental dimension, then physical reality proceeds along it, from past events to future ones. On the other hand, if time is a consequence of motion, then physical reality is simply energy in space and the events created go from future potential, to present, to being in the past. Just as the sun appears to go from east to west, when the reality is the earth rotates west to east.

With reality as energy just moving around, previous information is constantly being recycled by and giving structure to the present, as the energy by which it is recorded continues on its path. Rather then the straight line of a dimension, time is a loop, where the new is being woven out of strands pulled from the past. The result is also a state of constant chaos, since it is energy from opposing frames that often comes in contact.

Time as consequence of motion means it has more in common with temperature, then space, which certainly is not intuitive, but it is logical, since they are both descriptions of and methods for measuring motion. Scalar and vector. A fractured and fractious political landscape lacks concern for the future and consideration of the past, so it is best defined by the level of activity that is temperature then the linear progression of time.

Using time as a dimension is like dissecting an organism. It lays everything out there for you to look at and poke and examine, but it’s rather lifeless. What if there is no dimension of time and reality really is just that ethereal energy radiating and clumping in space, with history and all the intellectual structure we attach to it as nothing more then the metaphorical tail of a comet. Is it any wonder that the more we poke at it, the more illusionary it all seems?

Rather then dimensions being reality, they are a crude tool for prying it apart. Math is a model of reality, not the ideal form of it.

This relationship defines life as well. The element of awareness is attached to the energy and moves forward in time, but our intellectual comprehension is information that is constantly receding into the past. Ultimately we are cells of a larger organism that is constantly moving on to the next generation and shedding the old like dead skin. It is the units of time that are our individual lives which start in the future and end up in the past.

Remember after 9-11 when some on the right decreed that 'relativism' along with 'irony' had come to an end?

Seems more like it was the total embrace of nihilism by the right.

For them 'relativism' was equated with 'blame America first,' and blame America first was a pejorative for anyone daring to recount recent history. Forget about Iran in '53 - what about BOTH Bin Laden and Hussein being one time "allies?" Yet anybody - say Studs Terkel - who even dared to hint that, hey, maybe if we didn't engage in so much skulduggery with such unsavory characters, we wouldn't get the 'blowback' (read: Karma). You couldn't suggest overthrowing legit democracies - like '53 Iran - would lead to bad outcomes - it was too PAINFUL to tell the truth.

You saw this notion of "Faith = Fact" - the GW Bush method of governance in the fascisto trope among the right to assign blame for military failures to 'defeatist' leftists. The same thing was done to labour unions and even the Catholic Church under Mussolini. Literally if you thought the war was a bad idea - then that meant you were 'hexing' the war somehow and causing it to fail - even though, in the Iraq case, the 'hex' actually came BEFORE the war (big protests in November '02 and February '03).

So to go back to the classical Athens theme, this quote from Plato:

"They count him as their worst enemy, he who tells them the truth."

I guess I don't buy the notion of 'post modernism.' To me the Bush years smack of both a dystopian, Orwellian future, yet evoke the classical tragedy of a fall from grace through hubris.

It seems though, in Bush's case, Freud enters the picture, because he's so willfully obtuse and, pathetically, prone to denial. I think that's why he must be prosecuted and punished for war crimes. Maybe at the gallows he'll finally see what he has wrought.

A model based upon expanding into new areas, and bringing in the economics of Rome, the currencies, the laws. With all the surface 'benefits' Rome as protectorate was without peer, and tribal warfare in the areas occupied indeed declined. A sort of peace. The rich in these areas benefiting, but the poor being taxed (in Rome the rich never were).

But the blending of disparate cultures never worked, and the purpose was nothing but the exploitation of these areas, drained the soils of agricultural products, animals, minerals, metals, wood. The excessive wealth that flowed from the edges of the empire into the center had nowhere to go except to Palatine, for ever more lavish lives. But there was food, and there was entertainment and throughout Rome the populations grew. Those from the outside of Rome wanted in, and pressed against the borders. An early colonialism.

The religious fixation of Rome in decline, the decorum and purity. The religiosity. Oddly opposite of Rome ascendant. The mercenary army, because of an inability to get the Roman citizens to join the military.

The hollowing out of the middle class with fees, and taxes, and rules, and bureaucracy. The lending to the poor and middle class by the upper class landowners, and the way they would confiscate the small houses when the loans could not be paid.

A Republic in name only. All power with the executive. A Senate that did nothing at all.

The shortages of grain, cement, lead, wood, stone at the end.

The ever strengthening noble estates (our equivalent of corporations) who could bend the politicians to their whims. The early breakfast/pubs (the Starbucks of their age) in Rome where the politicians would sit down with the estate owners and drink and eat together, and be given their marching orders for the day.

The fateful year the Rhine froze and the Germanic tribes could cross into Rome in numbers that defy description, but probably more than 50,000 running through the Roman soldier mercenaries, running for Rome. Alaric standing at the gate, met by messengers of Caesar (who no longer lived in Rome but a palatial estate to the north eternally on vacation). Telling the crowds they would be destroyed, and Alaric calling the bluff. What do you want, he was asked. All the gold, the furnishings, the cloth, the spices, anything that can be moved. What can we have in return they asked. He answered, your lives. It was the end.

Ian, your argument holds if you believe that the public goals of the policy-makers you criticise are really the goals of the policies. But it's not like you to put so much faith in right-wing economists and politicians!

I know that you know that most of these stated goals are politics. No conspiracy theory here, far from it. But there is plenty of everyday political diversion and obfuscation behind a lot of the situations you describe above, and I think the US actually succeeded more often that it failed in many of them.

I'd suggest that trying to replicate Japanese economic success acros south-east Asia, South America or Africa was more or less the very last thing most US economic advisors or politicians wanted.

In fact, there's been a pretty good outcome to a lot of this development from the US corporate right's point of view. Plenty of low-wage, low-rights economies in the developing world - even Vietnam - where multinational corporations can base production while much of the the profit ends up back in (private) American hands.

Likewise with the WMD and 'hailed as liberators' memes. They served their purpose, up to a point, though even I imagine from Dick C's perspective the project is off-course now. But as far as I remember almost nobody - not, according to the record, even some Bush regimers like Condy - held those views, believed those 'truths' in summer 2001, so it's not exactly lack of knowledge or failure to appreciate that knowledge that was at stake.

I think you're right when you say 'Now this system of “knowledge” or “truth” breaks down under two circumstances. The first is when the surplus/power isn’t sufficient to support incompetence - to overwhelm the fact that you’re doing things stupidly. The second is when players refuse to play and your power isn’t sufficient to roll over them. If you add the two together, you’ve got a recipe for disaster.'

The one caveat I have is that though a lot of the actions look stupid and incompetent, those are just descriptions, not explanations.

I think it's very important to try to get a deeper understanding of the processes at work in all this, and I think you've opened a really important point for discussion from an interesting perspective.

But I kind of disagree with your invocation of post-modernism here, at least as I understand the broad aims of the theoretical tools you're talking about.

The most useful post-modern political/philosophical/cultural theorists don't offer relativism as a new ethical model, but the opposite.

The aim is to uncover the hidden assumptions, unspoken aims and power relations that lead certain knowledge to be created, framed or used in the construction of 'truth'. In other words, to demonstrate the ideological nature of this 'truth'.

This is the difference between your analysis above, which in part frames these things as honest mistakes that follow from flawed methods, and an analysis that sees them as temporary 'truths' created by power.

This isn't a situation caused by 'post-modernism', it's a situation about which (at least certain) post-60s theory actually more often makes an accusation - a precise, ethical accusation about abuse of power and abuse of 'truth'.

I disagree that US failures as you describe them are due to lack of appreciation of reality. They're due to (mostly right wing, and corporate) ideological aims and a faith in power - military power ultimately - over-riding competing interpretations of known facts, multi-lateralist and domestic democratic concerns and leading to a particular construction of 'truth'.

Of course every interested party in this discussion - an international discussion that is basically politics and its military twin - has its own version of the 'truth'.

But the fact that these ideologies blind their participants to some of the potential outcomes is not due to a failure to understand some basic underlying dynamic. They are not interested in deeply understanding 'real' situations or underlying trends, because they are not following historical patterns but trying to break them.

This faith in power is always a gamble. Even the most power-obssessed politicians, emperors, dictators and demagogues understand this. History is littered with examples of hubris backfiring. The point is that they can't not try, given an ideological conviction and access to the levers of power. 'Truth' is just something manufactured along the way.

The underlying reality remains real, but in plain language there are facts and there are the interpretations of those facts.

The point about 'post-modern' (i actually kind of dislike the term itself) approaches to those interpretations is that they don't concede the judgement of ethical rights and wrongs to manufactured 'truths'. Instead they try to take those assertions apart.

Ethics and beliefs remain unchanged and, in the grand-scale cases you're talking about, history still unfolds. But then the dominant ideology puts its interpretation on that history - 'Mission Accomplished' - and that interpretation itself has real-world effects.

As an antagonist to these dominant processes, you're not opposing them with 'truth' but with a different set of values that give a different interpretation and even a different way to define the facts to be considered. Those values are not 'reality' - they're not generated from the sum total of all positions and experiences, for example. But they nonetheless have a real-world constituency, rational arguments and plausible hoped-for outcomes to back them up.

Ultimately, there's a power-struggle over 'reality'. It doesn't matter that the whole is too comlex to grasp, because total apprehension is never the goal. Marx famously wrote, 'the philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point is to change it.' But the interpretations are part of the process of change, that's where politics begins to function.

Truth is beyond tricky. Your view of truth tells more about you than you do about truth. Bush's truth is a platonic, even Augustinian Truth. It is also blended with the Truth of the old testament. Augustine's view of truth was a 'feeling,' and like Plato it was something that was contained entirely within your thoughts. There was no concept of an external test of truth, truth was above the body, above the visible world. It resided in your spirit in the spark of your soul.

That is entirely compatible with Bush's Truth, the way he says "I know it in my Gut." Or, "I feel it in my Gut." Or, "I KNOW its True." He needs no external verification. He also says, "God Talks to me." In those very words. God is communicating with Bush, telling him what is true, telling him he is where he is for a fateful reason. Old Testament Truth. God tells his people to tear down the walls of a town and kill all the men, women and children, and they MUST obey. It is gods TRUTH. That is old testament truth.

That is an ancient, classical, medieval Truth. It is not Renaissance or Modern Truth however.

It is utterly flawed to view Modernism or Post-Modernist truth as relative in the sense it seems to imply nothing, or wishy washy, as in social relativism.

Renaissance and Modern Truth is based on what can be seen. Testable, measurable. As in Peak oil, as in Global warming. These truths also have their flaw because it does not deal with what we do not yet know, it does not deal with what we cannot know. Modern truth has given us more food than we can know what to do with, something unthinkable just 100 years ago. But it has also given us obesity, climate change and declining water supplies.

That the modern view sees little difference between Muslim 'faith' and Christian 'faith' in my view is a potential immeasurable good. Seeing the syncretism of all faith, the common elements. Because we are human. We are social creatures who need one another, all the faiths build on that. So then there is something else, and it isn't truth - it is perhaps compassion, or hope. That that is lacking in modern truth speaks not to the truths, I think it is more to do with the isolation of the wealthy from the poor, or the learned from the unlearned, the healthy from the sick, even the old from the young. Not the fault of truth, just an unwillingness to see the world from the eyes of another - which is compassion. To feel the pain of loss even though you don't know that person.

So Bush follows a truth, but it is devoid of compassion. He could just as easily been following a modern truth philosophy - probably been more effective. But, I would argue without the essential compassionate spark, probably the results would be even worse. In that we would probably be in Iran by now, having taken the oil of Iraq. Or who knows what else?

Following rules to follow rules, is neither truth nor compassion. It is abdication, and very common. The old studies where people were instructed to give shocks to others belies the lack of humanity in large swaths of people, who think neither of truth nor hope nor compassion. It is a scary feature of us all. We are collectively capable of just about anything.

Relativism is not the death of a society. I believe it is the window to a better society. Loss of compassion is the death of society. The hyper individual who cares nothing for the common good. The one who believes he can get through life with no one. It is inhuman. It is the INABILITY to see the relation of everyone to everyone else that kills off society, community, family.