No, I have not become a conspiracy theory nut. But I have just been made to think by an Argentine gentleman I won't name who alluded to a possible collusion between "terrorists" and spies to push countries like Syria to a self-destructive boil.
Yes, it sounded crazy to me at first. There are so many folks who will tell you the CIA was behind AIDS, the crack epidemic and hell, the hangnail they woke up with, that such claims can't be taken at face value. In my experience, and I have personally met at least a good half-dozen actual CIA officers and perhaps more that I didn't know were CIA, that's not how the world works.
However, once you pose the ancient Roman lawyer's question qui bono (who benefits?) it begins to be a bit less absurd. Why wouldn't intelligence services of the post-Cold War era seek to invent enemies to keep their budgets fat? It's not like that hasn't been done before.
Remember Vietnam? The United States would never have gotten so deeply enmeshed in, nor so wrongheadedly misdirected, the fate of the Republic of South Vietnam were it not for the CIA careerists who set in motion the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, albeit with the well-documented casual consent of President Kennedy.
And what about that splendid little anti-Soviet revolt in Hungary in 1956, with Czech weapons supplied by MI6 and the French DGSE as a political distraction during the Franco-English seizure of Suez?
And so on and so forth ...
My friend included drug cartels in the mix, a not implausible partner, as the Iran-Contra scandal taught us. Or should have.
It makes perfect sense that Al-Qaeda, whose founder and leader Osama Bin Laden was demonstrably CIA trained and supported, might collude with the guys at Langley.
What's the use of an intelligence service if there is no war? What's the use of a Jihad without endless money and weapons? It's win-win for both.
Now we have an endless "war" against an invisible "enemy" that can justify anything the spooks want to justify.
The "terrorists," who frankly do not inspire terror in me, are clearly a useful Boogeyman; they enjoy the role.
So do the hundreds of thousands of (mostly) men who get good pay to do everything from running the security theater at airports and federal buildings, to concocting new ways to blow up Third World countries.
These countries are handpicked because their governments refuse in some way to be client states, cheerfully handing over their national resources to Western corporations, often under thinly veiled "democracies" run by leaders bought and paid for by ... the CIA, MI6, the Mossad and who knows who else.
It doesn't have to be outright refusal, either.
Iran's Mossadegh in 1954 was merely a nationalist. Not pro-Soviet by a very, very long stretch. Saddam Hussein, like Tito, was a classic Bonapartist dictator who had made himself indispensable to keep his country together within admittedly artificial borders. Iraq was invented in 1931 and its borders drawn in London by the Foreign Office. Yugoslavia was a creature of the Versailles Treaty (as was Czechoslovakia). Look what happened when the dictators were removed (can anyone reading this spell S-a-r-a-j-e-v-o and F-a-l-l-u-j-a-h?).
The capital sin of these tin-horn dictators was not that they were Communist. No, they just weren't wildly enthusiastic cheerleaders of Western profitmaking at their countries' expense. (Plus, overthrowing them helped the careers of many intelligence officers at little political expense to the players in question.)
So, what do we do with this thought? Unfortunately, here is where I fall short. I don't have an intelligence service of my own to overthrow the CIA, MI6 and their pals.
Still, there is one thing of which, my experience as a journalist has taught me: government wrongdoing abhors the light of day. And humor. And respectful, civil disobedience. And common sense.
Showing posts with label international. Show all posts
Showing posts with label international. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 08, 2014
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Why History Is Not About Lara Logan
The fluid developments in Libya remind one that political history runs on wheels bigger than the latest gossip about one telegenic American. History — and Machiavelli — teaches us that every ruler, democratic or otherwise, has a relationship with the ruled and faces a critical decision when discontent sets in and an angry mob arises: kill them all and rule from fear or quell discontent subtly without changing the order of things.
The problem usually comes when the ruler changes horses in the middle of the river — which sometimes can't be avoided.
In my view of the French Revolution, for example, Louis XVI's appointment of Necker and the end of repression, marked the king fit for his eventual decapitation. Every subsequent show of force was only a demonstration of a lack of real power.
That's because every people form a compact with every ruler, whether it is written or implicit.
Stalin could kill millions, but he had to put offer secure jobs and stable wages and prices (e.g., Russian rents in the 1920s were the same as they were in the 1980s). The demise of stability under Gorbachev and later is what gave the post-Communism Stalinists the gumption to attempt a coup and even to praise the "good old days" of Uncle Joe.
Of course, sometimes the compact is itself finite: lead us to a defined "Promise Land" (the development of a modern technocratic class, for example). When such an intelligentsya finally takes consciousness of itself, the compact ends and the ruler must step down.
For Egypt, for example, simplifying much, one could argue that Nasser promised national pride, Sadat offered peace and Mubarak offered continuity amid turmoil — until society Egyptian stabilized, didn't need a hallway monitor any more and people were willing to forge some new balance of power based (we think) on elections.
As to the ballot box, let's not delude ourselves into thinking that democracy abroad — we in the United States really have a republic in which the elected officials are representatives primarily of the already powerful — is either a panacea or the only way in which people and ruler can communicate and make the necessary deals.
There are a variety of imperfections that can invalidate electoral results.
In the United States, most major party candidates of the last century easily represented 40 percent of the electorate, at a minimum. What does that mean, though? Ronald Reagan's "landslides" were predicated on the votes of no more than a third of those eligible to vote.
By and large, a rather broad majority goes unrepresented in Congress, or much less the White House. Indeed, the disunity, anger and frustration of Americans with all politicians is rooted in this fact — which the chattering class of Washington (which I mostly observe for a living) refuses to acknowledge, for good reason.
Real democratic revolutions yield results that none of us who are riding the applecart want to see.
In Iran, it was the Ayahtollah Khomeini. In Afghanistan, the mujaheddin CIA-armed rebels became the Taliban, riding on the shoulder of enthusiastic crowds; let'snot forget that the Taliban was (is?) very popular.
There is no guarantee that modern revolutions will automatically lead to Western liberal "democracy." Should there be? History renders the question moot.
The problem usually comes when the ruler changes horses in the middle of the river — which sometimes can't be avoided.
In my view of the French Revolution, for example, Louis XVI's appointment of Necker and the end of repression, marked the king fit for his eventual decapitation. Every subsequent show of force was only a demonstration of a lack of real power.
That's because every people form a compact with every ruler, whether it is written or implicit.
Stalin could kill millions, but he had to put offer secure jobs and stable wages and prices (e.g., Russian rents in the 1920s were the same as they were in the 1980s). The demise of stability under Gorbachev and later is what gave the post-Communism Stalinists the gumption to attempt a coup and even to praise the "good old days" of Uncle Joe.
Of course, sometimes the compact is itself finite: lead us to a defined "Promise Land" (the development of a modern technocratic class, for example). When such an intelligentsya finally takes consciousness of itself, the compact ends and the ruler must step down.
For Egypt, for example, simplifying much, one could argue that Nasser promised national pride, Sadat offered peace and Mubarak offered continuity amid turmoil — until society Egyptian stabilized, didn't need a hallway monitor any more and people were willing to forge some new balance of power based (we think) on elections.
As to the ballot box, let's not delude ourselves into thinking that democracy abroad — we in the United States really have a republic in which the elected officials are representatives primarily of the already powerful — is either a panacea or the only way in which people and ruler can communicate and make the necessary deals.
There are a variety of imperfections that can invalidate electoral results.
In the United States, most major party candidates of the last century easily represented 40 percent of the electorate, at a minimum. What does that mean, though? Ronald Reagan's "landslides" were predicated on the votes of no more than a third of those eligible to vote.
By and large, a rather broad majority goes unrepresented in Congress, or much less the White House. Indeed, the disunity, anger and frustration of Americans with all politicians is rooted in this fact — which the chattering class of Washington (which I mostly observe for a living) refuses to acknowledge, for good reason.
Real democratic revolutions yield results that none of us who are riding the applecart want to see.
In Iran, it was the Ayahtollah Khomeini. In Afghanistan, the mujaheddin CIA-armed rebels became the Taliban, riding on the shoulder of enthusiastic crowds; let'snot forget that the Taliban was (is?) very popular.
There is no guarantee that modern revolutions will automatically lead to Western liberal "democracy." Should there be? History renders the question moot.
Monday, May 31, 2010
A Strategy to Honor the Dead
In Memorial Day weekend news, the U.S. military brass is weighing plans for an attack on Pakistan in case a Pakistani smarter than the Times Square would-be bomber has a deadly success. Wouldn't it better honor the dead to mount an effective response, rather than add one more unwinnable war to our already overladen plate?
I have, you might have guessed, a modest proposal:
Take 9/11.
If we had had a military capable of deploying, lickety split, elite commando units in Tora Bora and vicinity, they could have quietly gone in, torched Osama bin Laden and everyone with him, leaving everything to be found by some clueless non-English-speaking shepherd.
"Torching? Osama? I know nothing about it," the White House press secretary would have said.
Quietly, Al Qaeda's numbers 2s, 3, 45s, would began to drop like cockroaches caught in an insecticide commercial. Sooner or later, the bad guys would get the message: don't mess with us.
No invasions, no thousands wounded and killed, no collateral damage, no prisoners, no Guantanamo, not even a war deficit.
A smart president -- oops, we had Bush -- would have tried it.
I have, you might have guessed, a modest proposal:
- Get rid of the expensive toys that go boom, leaving only a nominal nuclear rocket arsenal for deterrence and the new, very destructive sub-nuclear bomb, along with a skeleton air, water and land deployment vehicle lot.
- Demobilize 90 percent of the active duty 1.4 million military personnel from the top down.
- Use the remaining 140,000 in uniform develop a top-notch planning staff and elite commando units, along with a small unit for the conventional deployment lot.
Take 9/11.
If we had had a military capable of deploying, lickety split, elite commando units in Tora Bora and vicinity, they could have quietly gone in, torched Osama bin Laden and everyone with him, leaving everything to be found by some clueless non-English-speaking shepherd.
"Torching? Osama? I know nothing about it," the White House press secretary would have said.
Quietly, Al Qaeda's numbers 2s, 3, 45s, would began to drop like cockroaches caught in an insecticide commercial. Sooner or later, the bad guys would get the message: don't mess with us.
No invasions, no thousands wounded and killed, no collateral damage, no prisoners, no Guantanamo, not even a war deficit.
A smart president -- oops, we had Bush -- would have tried it.
Tuesday, May 04, 2010
"Regime Change" We Don't Want to Believe In
In the past week or so, the talk in Washington among journalists and think tank wonks outside the Obama Administration has been bubbling with the phrase "regime change" in reference to Iran. We've seen that movie before, new euphemism notwithstanding, and it has no happy ending.
As much as I would prefer an Iranian president with a name that was easier on the English-speaking tongue (5 syllables is way too long!), I don't think that a Western-inspired, or much less funded, overthrow or a coup, or any of the names we use for the forcible removal of a ruler, is what we want to do. Here's why:
As much as I would prefer an Iranian president with a name that was easier on the English-speaking tongue (5 syllables is way too long!), I don't think that a Western-inspired, or much less funded, overthrow or a coup, or any of the names we use for the forcible removal of a ruler, is what we want to do. Here's why:
- the coup d'etat is most un-Jeffersonian and never a good path to democracy;
- pushing for "regime change" in another country invites reciprocity and, last I heard, folks in the Middle East would like to turn ours into ... ahem ... an Islamic theocracy; and
- the cure is almost always worse than the disease (think Chile 1973, Brazil 1964, and oh, Iran 1954).
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Iran: The Other Side
The news is everywhere that Iran wants to build a nuclear weapon and is deceiving the West (meaning the USA mainly) about this. But why shouldn't Iran have nuclear weapons and why should Iran be accountable to the USA or anyone else on this matter?
I mean -- and I say this in the first entry of a new blog topic: antipode* -- isn't Iran a sovereign nation? Don't all sovereign nations enjoy ... um ... sovereignty over their government and what their government decides to do within its borders?
Sovereignty is, after all, a nation-state's supreme power within its borders. The United Nations charter explicitly states that "The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members" (article 2, para 1).
So where does President Obama get off telling Iranian President Ahmadinejad what to do with his country's nuclear facilities. Isn't that a matter for the Iranians to decide? You might say the Iranians decided when Iran ratified the Non Proliferation Treaty in 1970.
But wait a minute ... who was in power in Iran in 1970? Wasn't it none other than the Shah Mohammad Rezā Pahlavi, installed by a CIA-run coup in 1954, the one whom Amnesty International identified as holding and torturing 2,200 political prisoners, the one whose secularization and modernization plan gave rise to the Shi'ite rebel movement of one Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979?
To say that Iran should be held accountable to treaties signed by a dictatorial monarch, who was opposed to everything mainstream Iranian society today stands for, is tantamount to saying that the United States should respect slave tenure in Virginia, since it was once sanctioned by the Confederacy.
Why shouldn't a contemporary Iran, which repudiates everything the Shah stood for, not be able to repudiate a treaty ratification by that long-deposed monarch?
Besides, who says the United States government has the moral authority to tell any other governments whether they should build nuclear weapons? What makes the USA special? Not its restraint.
Not only did the United States bomb two Japanese cities, killing millions in a flash, with nuclear weapons. At least one presidential candidate -- Barry Goldwater -- advocated doing the same in Vietnam.
What makes the nuclear club -- Britain, France, Russia and China -- so virtuous? They haven't had empires and enslaved millions and been brutal and arbitrary? What reason do we have to believe that if they had had a nuclear monopoly, as the United States had for three years, they would not have bombed their own Hiroshima and Nagasakis?
OK, so Ahmadinejad rigged the elections. Didn't George W. Bush get "elected" in 200 and 2004 by fraud? Wasn't it alleged that Mayor Daley's deceased voters had put John F. Kennedy over the top in 1960?
Let the politician who has never made an unsavory deal, never taken money from companies opposed to every item of his public agenda, never arrived to power thoroughly sullied and compromised stand up and throw the first stone.
The Iranians are wild and crazy? Look at the other nuclear nations that might be at one time or another deemed "crazy" and "wild": India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea. Why pick on Iran?
Why not ask all of them to stop?
Indeed, why not follow the South African example -- it disassembled its nuclear arsenal -- and have the United States government provide an example of peaceful behavior in the hope Iran might rise to the occasion?
* Antipode is a new topic on this blog in which I will attempt to pay attention to the opposite of the prevailing conventional wisdom.
I mean -- and I say this in the first entry of a new blog topic: antipode* -- isn't Iran a sovereign nation? Don't all sovereign nations enjoy ... um ... sovereignty over their government and what their government decides to do within its borders?
Sovereignty is, after all, a nation-state's supreme power within its borders. The United Nations charter explicitly states that "The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members" (article 2, para 1).
So where does President Obama get off telling Iranian President Ahmadinejad what to do with his country's nuclear facilities. Isn't that a matter for the Iranians to decide? You might say the Iranians decided when Iran ratified the Non Proliferation Treaty in 1970.
But wait a minute ... who was in power in Iran in 1970? Wasn't it none other than the Shah Mohammad Rezā Pahlavi, installed by a CIA-run coup in 1954, the one whom Amnesty International identified as holding and torturing 2,200 political prisoners, the one whose secularization and modernization plan gave rise to the Shi'ite rebel movement of one Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979?
To say that Iran should be held accountable to treaties signed by a dictatorial monarch, who was opposed to everything mainstream Iranian society today stands for, is tantamount to saying that the United States should respect slave tenure in Virginia, since it was once sanctioned by the Confederacy.
Why shouldn't a contemporary Iran, which repudiates everything the Shah stood for, not be able to repudiate a treaty ratification by that long-deposed monarch?
Besides, who says the United States government has the moral authority to tell any other governments whether they should build nuclear weapons? What makes the USA special? Not its restraint.
Not only did the United States bomb two Japanese cities, killing millions in a flash, with nuclear weapons. At least one presidential candidate -- Barry Goldwater -- advocated doing the same in Vietnam.
What makes the nuclear club -- Britain, France, Russia and China -- so virtuous? They haven't had empires and enslaved millions and been brutal and arbitrary? What reason do we have to believe that if they had had a nuclear monopoly, as the United States had for three years, they would not have bombed their own Hiroshima and Nagasakis?
OK, so Ahmadinejad rigged the elections. Didn't George W. Bush get "elected" in 200 and 2004 by fraud? Wasn't it alleged that Mayor Daley's deceased voters had put John F. Kennedy over the top in 1960?
Let the politician who has never made an unsavory deal, never taken money from companies opposed to every item of his public agenda, never arrived to power thoroughly sullied and compromised stand up and throw the first stone.
The Iranians are wild and crazy? Look at the other nuclear nations that might be at one time or another deemed "crazy" and "wild": India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea. Why pick on Iran?
Why not ask all of them to stop?
Indeed, why not follow the South African example -- it disassembled its nuclear arsenal -- and have the United States government provide an example of peaceful behavior in the hope Iran might rise to the occasion?
* Antipode is a new topic on this blog in which I will attempt to pay attention to the opposite of the prevailing conventional wisdom.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Anti-Chavez Rabies Shows Up in Honduras Mixup
Hither and yon one gets a glimpse on the 'net of people who seem morbidly rabid about anything connected to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. One does not have to carry water to notice it.
He may be boring on television, but Chávez (stress on the first syllable, please) was elected and re-elected far more cleanly than George W. Bush. Now, the overthrow of Chávez-supported Honduran President Manuel Zelaya has conflated Chávez hatred with Zelaya hatred.
People are going around the blogosphere saying that the Honduran military brought "democracy." Clearly, they are more educated than the majority of Venezuelans, which in my experience isn't saying very much, as well as the majority of Hondurans, a nation with a still lower rung of deficient education.
And even supposing that these foaming critics were right -- that Chávez and Zelaya are demagogues who've managed to fool majorities that they are on their side -- whose fault is that? Aren't the wealthier educated people of those two countries somehow responsible?
He may be boring on television, but Chávez (stress on the first syllable, please) was elected and re-elected far more cleanly than George W. Bush. Now, the overthrow of Chávez-supported Honduran President Manuel Zelaya has conflated Chávez hatred with Zelaya hatred.
People are going around the blogosphere saying that the Honduran military brought "democracy." Clearly, they are more educated than the majority of Venezuelans, which in my experience isn't saying very much, as well as the majority of Hondurans, a nation with a still lower rung of deficient education.
And even supposing that these foaming critics were right -- that Chávez and Zelaya are demagogues who've managed to fool majorities that they are on their side -- whose fault is that? Aren't the wealthier educated people of those two countries somehow responsible?
Saturday, April 25, 2009
The Ugly American as a Nunny Bunny
You know how when you notice something it's suddenly all around you? This is happening to me with international do-gooder women and their irretrievably imperious Ugly American attitudes.
One of them is a nun who writes an innocent enough blog, La Paz de Susan. What could be wrong with that? Plenty. Sister Susan jetsets back and forth from El Salvador to the States and lives in obvious luxurious digs with a complement of paid guards. A Poor Claire she is not. There's more.
She has gone to help the benighted Salvadorans delivering volunteer health care. But she hasn't bothered to learn the language beforehand. Oh, how "cute" she is speaking pidgin Spanish! Salvadorans who mess up her name or make some other mistake concerning her status are ridiculously silly and subject to mockery.
Of course, being a Catholic nun she's not above the occasional fund-raising scam based on -- wait for it! -- a needy child. And let's not forget to post the picture of the woman with the basket on her head to delight the folks back home with a picture of the "natives."
Reading her blog I have no doubt why the Salvadoran military men knew they could murder four American religious women in 1980 with impunity. Without a doubt, these insufferable, self-absorbed dogooders have no clue as to their surroundings.
All they want is to feel good allegedly helping the poor subhumans.
One of them is a nun who writes an innocent enough blog, La Paz de Susan. What could be wrong with that? Plenty. Sister Susan jetsets back and forth from El Salvador to the States and lives in obvious luxurious digs with a complement of paid guards. A Poor Claire she is not. There's more.
She has gone to help the benighted Salvadorans delivering volunteer health care. But she hasn't bothered to learn the language beforehand. Oh, how "cute" she is speaking pidgin Spanish! Salvadorans who mess up her name or make some other mistake concerning her status are ridiculously silly and subject to mockery.
Of course, being a Catholic nun she's not above the occasional fund-raising scam based on -- wait for it! -- a needy child. And let's not forget to post the picture of the woman with the basket on her head to delight the folks back home with a picture of the "natives."
Reading her blog I have no doubt why the Salvadoran military men knew they could murder four American religious women in 1980 with impunity. Without a doubt, these insufferable, self-absorbed dogooders have no clue as to their surroundings.
All they want is to feel good allegedly helping the poor subhumans.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
The Next Power
One of my favorite speculations since the end of what Walter Lippmann famously called the American Century concerns the country that will "own" the 21st century. In my last post I proposed the European Union.
Naturally, a European was the first to doubt it. China worried her, as she gave voice to the terror of yore concerning what my parents' generation called the "yellow peril." At the beginning of this decade I thought this would be the Chinese century, too. After all, even now the Chinese are upset their GDP growth slowed to a positive 9 percent last year, poor darlings.
Yet, in the end, modern China is really a bustling coastal shell with a huge very underdeveloped, very poor, very backward inland core. Good luck with that.
And let's not worry about Inja, shall we? India will undo itself. How long can a modernizing country sustain a socioeconomic canyon bolstered by ancient prejudices before it all explodes or the country enters what Marx eurocentrically called "the Asiatic mode of production"?
That leaves the EU, with a landmass about half the size of the United States and a population about one and a half as large, composed almost entirely of skilled workers. Their natural resources include arable land, bauxite, coal, copper, fish, hydropower, iron ore, lead, natural gas, petroleum, potash, salt, timber, uranium and zinc.
Who can beat Italian shoes, French wines, German engineering, Spanish olives, skilled and cheap Eastern European labor and British bullshit?
Moreover, because of their 20th century experience of self-annihilation (and their similar history in the 19th and 18th and ...), the Europeans have finally learned the wisdom of nonpower and the prowess of nonmilitary leadership. Who but the Europeans to usher in the eventual EU to end all EUs, the Earth Union?
Ladies and gentlemen, I present you the 21st century, the European Century.
Naturally, a European was the first to doubt it. China worried her, as she gave voice to the terror of yore concerning what my parents' generation called the "yellow peril." At the beginning of this decade I thought this would be the Chinese century, too. After all, even now the Chinese are upset their GDP growth slowed to a positive 9 percent last year, poor darlings.
Yet, in the end, modern China is really a bustling coastal shell with a huge very underdeveloped, very poor, very backward inland core. Good luck with that.
And let's not worry about Inja, shall we? India will undo itself. How long can a modernizing country sustain a socioeconomic canyon bolstered by ancient prejudices before it all explodes or the country enters what Marx eurocentrically called "the Asiatic mode of production"?
That leaves the EU, with a landmass about half the size of the United States and a population about one and a half as large, composed almost entirely of skilled workers. Their natural resources include arable land, bauxite, coal, copper, fish, hydropower, iron ore, lead, natural gas, petroleum, potash, salt, timber, uranium and zinc.
Who can beat Italian shoes, French wines, German engineering, Spanish olives, skilled and cheap Eastern European labor and British bullshit?
Moreover, because of their 20th century experience of self-annihilation (and their similar history in the 19th and 18th and ...), the Europeans have finally learned the wisdom of nonpower and the prowess of nonmilitary leadership. Who but the Europeans to usher in the eventual EU to end all EUs, the Earth Union?
Ladies and gentlemen, I present you the 21st century, the European Century.
Saturday, January 03, 2009
Zionism and the Diaspora
The Israeli lobby has learned to play the Jewish diaspora in the West with a virtuosity rivaling Isaac Stern on the violin. The phenomenon is reminiscent of the way the Republican Party successfully snowed Catholics and the evangelical right on the issue of abortion.
An instance of unthinking, knee-jerk support for Israel was on display in comments posted on my blog this week by individuals I know to be Jewish. It reminds me of the pro-lifers who chose to vote for right-wing politicians who show contempt for life outside the womb..
The issue is not whether Israel should exist or whether abortion should be legal.
The question is whether it makes sense to support a politician or a country unconditionally -- no matter what they do -- simply because they claim to represent a single position or identity about which one feels strongly.
There's a slippery slope once one goes down that route. For reasons of common identity Italian-Americans would be duty bound to support the Mafia and non-smoker Adolf Hitler would be a suitable poster boy for anti-cigarette campaigns.
One need not be anti-Israel or anti-Semitic to conclude that the present government of Israel is engaging in a transparent ploy to look tough to its electorate just as the hard-line Likud Party is making gains in the polls.
Israel is plainly in the wrong in its military adventure in Gaza on any number of counts and stands to lose -- once again in a very short time -- in the court of world public opinion. That's not just me speaking: you can read a similar assessment from Shmuel Rosner in the Jerusalem Post.
Yet the diaspora -- meaning the Jewish communities outside the traditional Jewish homeland -- embraces unquestioning, unstinting, uncritical support for Israel no matter what. Go to the Anti-Defamation League's website and you'll find one link after another pointing to the wrongdoing of others and to the support that Israel supposedly deserves.
That kind of blind support, especially when it involves killing by the hundreds, is unconscionable and reprehensible.
There's a difference between the Israeli cabinet and any random spiritual descendant of Abraham. Folly -- or worse -- on the part of the former should not command blind, goosestepping loyalty from the other.
An instance of unthinking, knee-jerk support for Israel was on display in comments posted on my blog this week by individuals I know to be Jewish. It reminds me of the pro-lifers who chose to vote for right-wing politicians who show contempt for life outside the womb..
The issue is not whether Israel should exist or whether abortion should be legal.
The question is whether it makes sense to support a politician or a country unconditionally -- no matter what they do -- simply because they claim to represent a single position or identity about which one feels strongly.
There's a slippery slope once one goes down that route. For reasons of common identity Italian-Americans would be duty bound to support the Mafia and non-smoker Adolf Hitler would be a suitable poster boy for anti-cigarette campaigns.
One need not be anti-Israel or anti-Semitic to conclude that the present government of Israel is engaging in a transparent ploy to look tough to its electorate just as the hard-line Likud Party is making gains in the polls.
Israel is plainly in the wrong in its military adventure in Gaza on any number of counts and stands to lose -- once again in a very short time -- in the court of world public opinion. That's not just me speaking: you can read a similar assessment from Shmuel Rosner in the Jerusalem Post.
Yet the diaspora -- meaning the Jewish communities outside the traditional Jewish homeland -- embraces unquestioning, unstinting, uncritical support for Israel no matter what. Go to the Anti-Defamation League's website and you'll find one link after another pointing to the wrongdoing of others and to the support that Israel supposedly deserves.
That kind of blind support, especially when it involves killing by the hundreds, is unconscionable and reprehensible.
There's a difference between the Israeli cabinet and any random spiritual descendant of Abraham. Folly -- or worse -- on the part of the former should not command blind, goosestepping loyalty from the other.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Cut Off Israel Now!
We in the United States have been giving more government aid to Israel, an advanced industrial nation, than to all of Africa combined. In return, Israel goes on sporadic bombing binges -- this time to the south of its borders -- whenever it seems like good electoral politics.
The claim that Israel is acting in retaliation to rockets hurled by Hamas is
The old argument that Israel was democratic and the Palestinians were not doesn't work here. No argument works except for a complete and immediate halt to this outrage.
We have the means to make it happen. Pull the plug on the billions the U.S. government gives Israel until Israel stops its military adventure.
The claim that Israel is acting in retaliation to rockets hurled by Hamas is
- disproportionately absurd -- there's currently a 100 to 1 ratio between Palestinians killed by Israel and Israelis killed by rocket fire; and
- false -- the four rockets were not hurled by Hamas but by the Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The old argument that Israel was democratic and the Palestinians were not doesn't work here. No argument works except for a complete and immediate halt to this outrage.
We have the means to make it happen. Pull the plug on the billions the U.S. government gives Israel until Israel stops its military adventure.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Tomorrow, 40 Years Ago
Tomorrow, 40 years ago, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia and Alexander Dubček, architect of the liberalizing "Prague Spring," was hustled to Moscow for what I imagine must have been some very high intensity conversations. The world of 2008 was unimaginable then.
The snake-shaped Czechoslovakia has recently been in the news thanks to John McCain, who apparently doesn't know its two ethnic and linguistic regions split up peacefully in 1992. To be fair, what I know about the country is just enough for this one post.
For example, years ending in 8 were fateful for Czechoslovakia:
It was my last year of secondary school, the year of the French student-worker general strike in May, the year they killed the dreams of a Martin and a Bobbie, the year of Khe Sahn and the Tet Offensive when the possibility of the first military defeat of the United States in history became possible.
It was the year that, in my unending quest to define historical periods, I decided that the World War II postwar era -- that epoch, the heyday of my parents', always recalled in grainy black-and-white celluloid -- had ended in front of my very eyes.
I lived the Prague Spring in the movie houses of Buenos Aires, which were modern Plato's caves for me as I watched the still highly redarded majestic Czech film Closely Watched Trains and it's much less well-known Loves Of a Blonde.
Could socialism have a human face, after all, Mr. Dubček? Why were the students and workers of Paris troublemakers while youths throwing stones at Soviet tanks in Prague were heroes?
These were the questions I could no longer avoid 40 years ago tomorrow, when near midnight Soviet tanks slipped into Prague.
The snake-shaped Czechoslovakia has recently been in the news thanks to John McCain, who apparently doesn't know its two ethnic and linguistic regions split up peacefully in 1992. To be fair, what I know about the country is just enough for this one post.
For example, years ending in 8 were fateful for Czechoslovakia:
- 1918, foreign powers gathered in Versailles carved it out as an independent republic from the carcass of the Austro-Hungarian Empire;
- 1938, Neville Chamberlain famously handed over the Sudetenland and Bohemia (aka, the head of the snake) to one Adolf Hitler, who proceeded to invade it;
- 1948, the Communist Party staged a coup d'etat in February and took over the government; and
- 1968, Dubček, the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion.
It was my last year of secondary school, the year of the French student-worker general strike in May, the year they killed the dreams of a Martin and a Bobbie, the year of Khe Sahn and the Tet Offensive when the possibility of the first military defeat of the United States in history became possible.
It was the year that, in my unending quest to define historical periods, I decided that the World War II postwar era -- that epoch, the heyday of my parents', always recalled in grainy black-and-white celluloid -- had ended in front of my very eyes.
I lived the Prague Spring in the movie houses of Buenos Aires, which were modern Plato's caves for me as I watched the still highly redarded majestic Czech film Closely Watched Trains and it's much less well-known Loves Of a Blonde.
Could socialism have a human face, after all, Mr. Dubček? Why were the students and workers of Paris troublemakers while youths throwing stones at Soviet tanks in Prague were heroes?
These were the questions I could no longer avoid 40 years ago tomorrow, when near midnight Soviet tanks slipped into Prague.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
"I must not intervene in other countries"
It's a lesson that comes home to anyone who has observed U.S. foreign policy for long enough to see patterns, be it Asia, Latin America or even Europe: in every country our government has intervened politics have become hopelessly polarized. A blogger I've added to my regular reading, An Arab Woman Blues, tells it succinctly in a recent post on Iraq.
Layla, of whom I only know that she is "an Arab woman," that she is educated, multilingual, sometimes a tad frothy, a woman with anger to bristling to be "blues," as she titles them. I found her recent post, offering snippets of commentary from obviously middle or middle-upper class Iraqis in Baghdad full of items worth remembering about Iraq.
In particular, I was amused by the following:
However, if you examine Layla's admittedly unscientific sampling of opinions, you clearly get the idea that Iraq has gone from a strongman who was laying the foundational ground for progress, admittedly at some civic cost, to bands of extremist traditionalists.
In other words, all the U.S. invasion has achieved is the decapitation of a regime and its replacement with ... nothing. The middle class is fleeing, fled, or -- as Layla's relative found -- merely keeping their head down.
Nature, and politics, abhor a vacuum. Yet the U.S. diplomatic-military establishment keeps creating vacuums that suck in the worst of the worst. It was done in El Salvador, Vietnam, attempted in Chad and now in Iraq.
There are literally hundreds of other examples, which I pointed out before here and here in posts with themes depressingly similar to this one. So, Uncle Sam, you get to stay in detention this afternoon and write the title of this post on the blackboard 100 times.
Layla, of whom I only know that she is "an Arab woman," that she is educated, multilingual, sometimes a tad frothy, a woman with anger to bristling to be "blues," as she titles them. I found her recent post, offering snippets of commentary from obviously middle or middle-upper class Iraqis in Baghdad full of items worth remembering about Iraq.
In particular, I was amused by the following:
Overall, most Baghdadis he met, both Sunnis and Shias are totally fed up with the Mullahs and their doctrines. Most Iraqis really want a "secular country" and a "secular government." (Well they had a secular country before their "liberation" - bunch of Idiots!)According to my understanding, the Baathist Party (which flourished in Syria as well as Iraq), has been a pan-Arabist, secular, anti-Communist, social democratic and modernizing movement. This explains why Saddam Hussein brought about one of the most modern public-health systems in the Middle East, which earned him a UNESCO award.
However, if you examine Layla's admittedly unscientific sampling of opinions, you clearly get the idea that Iraq has gone from a strongman who was laying the foundational ground for progress, admittedly at some civic cost, to bands of extremist traditionalists.
In other words, all the U.S. invasion has achieved is the decapitation of a regime and its replacement with ... nothing. The middle class is fleeing, fled, or -- as Layla's relative found -- merely keeping their head down.
Nature, and politics, abhor a vacuum. Yet the U.S. diplomatic-military establishment keeps creating vacuums that suck in the worst of the worst. It was done in El Salvador, Vietnam, attempted in Chad and now in Iraq.
There are literally hundreds of other examples, which I pointed out before here and here in posts with themes depressingly similar to this one. So, Uncle Sam, you get to stay in detention this afternoon and write the title of this post on the blackboard 100 times.
Monday, December 03, 2007
Democracy in Latin America
The champagne must be flowing in the White House over the vote in Venezuela. The vote cheered me for very different reasons: to me, it shows that while Latin America wants systemic change, people no longer believe a strongman is needed to achieve that.
For as long as I've been politically aware -- and I started young -- I have known that the key political issue in the region was, and remains, the redistribution of income and wealth from the neofeudal socioeconomic structures that have persisted for half a millenium to ... something else.
What else, and how, has been a widely debated and hotly contested question.
In the 1930s, movements such as the APRA in Peru proposed a kind of socialism with autochtonous flavor and revindication for the peoples of the Inca Empire. In Nicaragua at that time a peasant rebel named Augusto César Sandino, who conceivably never read Marx, prompted the intervention of U.S. Marines.
During the 1940s an 50s individuals like Juan Domingo Perón of Argentina and Getúlio Vargas of Brazil offered a different way -- a right-wing form of anti-imperialism and labor power and redistributionism. It was an era of strongmen.
In the 1960s and 70s came César Augusto Pinochet's theory of "the national security state," which he proposed in a military journal in 1965, just as the Brazilian military regime that most successfully embodied it began to take shape. By the decade's end, with the connivance of the CIA-run "traffic school" torturers wearing military boots were in power in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Santiago and other Latin American capitals.
With the 1980s democratization began. We are still in the democratic era. One in which almost all countries have tried wild and extreme laissez faire policies -- in Buenos Aires the municipality went so far as to privatize parks! -- and abandoned them.
Now Nestor Kirchner, soon his wife, in Argentina, Michelle Bachelet in Chile, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil along with others, represent a wave of social-democracy, expanding rights from the civic realm to social and economic arenas. These are reformist, pro-union, pro-worker leaders who nonetheless recognize the need to rule from consensus and compromise.
This is what people have long wanted. Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, along with Evo Morales of Bolivia, represent the vanguard of Latin America's "new left" -- neither is too far apart from what solid majorities want. At least in their ideals.
What the Sunday vote in Venezuela showed, however, was a new maturity. Left-leaning majorities have learned that power foes not grow from the barrel of a gun, as Mao and a good number of guerrilla leaders have suggested. They have also learned not to trust even the greatest of saviors, such as Chávez.
In Sunday's plebiscite Venezuelan voters rejected by a 51 percent to 49 percent the proposal to expand Chávez's powers and accelerate his move to socialize the economy. The slim margin suggests that the country is deeply divided and that his program has not been resoundingly defeated.
Instead, it seems clear to me that Venezuelans are quarreling mainly with the strategy. They want economic and social democracy. But without a strongman. Cuba without Fidel and one-party rule -- or perhaps merely Sweden.
To me, having watched decades of blood flowing in the streets to no good end, over strongmen and guerrilla strongmen-wannabes, over militaries and ideologies, it is heartening to see Latin Americans choosing, indeed forcing, peaceful debate and the ballot box on their own leader. Chávez looms greater also in my esteem for accepting the verdict.
For as long as I've been politically aware -- and I started young -- I have known that the key political issue in the region was, and remains, the redistribution of income and wealth from the neofeudal socioeconomic structures that have persisted for half a millenium to ... something else.
What else, and how, has been a widely debated and hotly contested question.
In the 1930s, movements such as the APRA in Peru proposed a kind of socialism with autochtonous flavor and revindication for the peoples of the Inca Empire. In Nicaragua at that time a peasant rebel named Augusto César Sandino, who conceivably never read Marx, prompted the intervention of U.S. Marines.
During the 1940s an 50s individuals like Juan Domingo Perón of Argentina and Getúlio Vargas of Brazil offered a different way -- a right-wing form of anti-imperialism and labor power and redistributionism. It was an era of strongmen.
In the 1960s and 70s came César Augusto Pinochet's theory of "the national security state," which he proposed in a military journal in 1965, just as the Brazilian military regime that most successfully embodied it began to take shape. By the decade's end, with the connivance of the CIA-run "traffic school" torturers wearing military boots were in power in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Santiago and other Latin American capitals.
With the 1980s democratization began. We are still in the democratic era. One in which almost all countries have tried wild and extreme laissez faire policies -- in Buenos Aires the municipality went so far as to privatize parks! -- and abandoned them.
Now Nestor Kirchner, soon his wife, in Argentina, Michelle Bachelet in Chile, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil along with others, represent a wave of social-democracy, expanding rights from the civic realm to social and economic arenas. These are reformist, pro-union, pro-worker leaders who nonetheless recognize the need to rule from consensus and compromise.
This is what people have long wanted. Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, along with Evo Morales of Bolivia, represent the vanguard of Latin America's "new left" -- neither is too far apart from what solid majorities want. At least in their ideals.
What the Sunday vote in Venezuela showed, however, was a new maturity. Left-leaning majorities have learned that power foes not grow from the barrel of a gun, as Mao and a good number of guerrilla leaders have suggested. They have also learned not to trust even the greatest of saviors, such as Chávez.
In Sunday's plebiscite Venezuelan voters rejected by a 51 percent to 49 percent the proposal to expand Chávez's powers and accelerate his move to socialize the economy. The slim margin suggests that the country is deeply divided and that his program has not been resoundingly defeated.
Instead, it seems clear to me that Venezuelans are quarreling mainly with the strategy. They want economic and social democracy. But without a strongman. Cuba without Fidel and one-party rule -- or perhaps merely Sweden.
To me, having watched decades of blood flowing in the streets to no good end, over strongmen and guerrilla strongmen-wannabes, over militaries and ideologies, it is heartening to see Latin Americans choosing, indeed forcing, peaceful debate and the ballot box on their own leader. Chávez looms greater also in my esteem for accepting the verdict.
Friday, November 16, 2007
Never Intervene Again
It's astounding to learn that U.S. military commanders in Iraq are wringing their hands over what they describe as the "intransigence" of the Shiite-dominated government. What did they expect? Moderate European-style liberal democrats crawling out of the rubble they made?
The real fact of U.S. intervention since 1945 has been that whenever the United States has meddled in another country's politics, that country's ideological spectrum has polarized into two irreconcilable extremes and the centrist, compromising, moderate middle has fallen out.
Chile was a model democracy in the 1960s until the CIA, through the program of Jesuit Roger Vekemans, decided to intervene, destabilizing the centrist, moderate Christian-Democratic Party and ushering in first, in 1970, socialist Salvador Allende, who was never quite the Marxist-Leninist his successors painted him as, and then in 1973 the draconic right-wing regime of Gen. Cesar Augusto Pinochet.
In 1970 Cambodia was a neutralist peaceable country run by an ancient monarchic dynasty until the USA decided that it was time to plug up a supply line of the Viet Cong and bring the Vietnam war into its neighbor's territory. Prince Norodom Sihanouk was overthrown by a CIA-led military coup, in turn overthrown by the Khmer Rouge, who killed an estimate 2.5 million of their own people.
Much the same had happened with South Vietnam, which was run by a neutralist, Ngo Dihn Diem, overthrown in 1963 by the CIA simply because he was perceived as not being rightist enough, although he represented a moderate, Catholic elite that was Western-oriented. We all know how successful that turned out to be.
What did they expect in Iraq when they removed Saddam Hussein? After all, he was the only figure who -- through admitted utter ruthlessness -- held together the three major segments of the Mesopotamian territory dubbed Iraq by the British in the 1930s.
Of course, the Shiites are intransignet. Of course, the Sunnis would love to slit their throats. Of course, the Kurds would like independence. Of course, the middle class, secularist professionals have all fled, by the millions, to Jordan and elsewhere.
What did anyone expect?
Until the United States learns to be more subtle, more agreeable to compromise, more respectful of other nations, there's not a snowball's chance in hell that any U.S. intervention, however well-meant (and this one was not), will succeed at really contributing peace and stability to any other region of the world.
Perhaps we ought to make a national pledge: never again intervene. Never.
Monday, October 29, 2007
American Evita?
In the U.S. coverage of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the president-elect of Argentina, the fluffiness of the American mass media has been on embarrassing display: Does she wear too much makeup? Is she the Argentine Hillary Clinton? Nothing about whether she can tame inflation or her plan to reverse the ravages of globalization.
Of course, American reporters never ask whether Sen. Clinton wears too little makeup or speculate whether Hillary is the American Evita. That might suggest that the USA is not the epicenter of the world -- Zeus forbid!
In fact, the newly elected president of Argentina is a politician in her own right, unlike Hillary she has been a legislator for decades and a principled advocate even to the point of getting expelled from her party briefly for holding fast to her positions.
She has had to navigate immensely more difficult waters than Hillary.
Just take a look at her name Christina Fernández (maiden name) de (literally "of") Kirchner. It's the middle- to upper-class nomenclature in Argentina, less common today in Spain, denoting the woman as the consort of the paterfamilias (see here, starting with the 6th paragraph).
In Argentine common use, men will call their wife "mi mujer" (my woman) rather than "mi esposa" (my spouse). Perhaps it has to do with the other meaning of esposa, hand-cuff. No woman gets away with calling their husband "mi hombre" (my man).
Argentina thinks of itself as a cultural suburb of Paris, but at some level it remains locked in the mental corridors of old Spain's Escorial, Philip II's monastic palace, and in the magical archetypes of Italy, from which more than half of Argentina's population hail.
As to her challenges as president, they are many.
Since the implosion of the Argentine economy at the beginning of the decade, a catastrophe incumbent President Nestor Kirchner inherited four years ago, the country has gone from near Depression levels of unemployment back to its traditional underemployment, or actual shortage of skilled labor, heating up the economy.
The government says inflation runs at 8 percent annually, the Wall Street Journal predictably claims the "leftist" administration is halving the rate, the International Monetary Fund estimates 12 percent -- I'm sticking with the IMF figure. For a country whose inflation once ran in the hundreds of percentage points a year, surpassing even the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany, this is quite modest.
Let's also not forget the "leftist" baiting. President Kirchner, her husband, is widely hated for taking the side of the victims of the military dictatorship of 1976-83, which kidnapped, tortured and murdered an estimated 30,000 people and a precisely documented 8,900. (See here for the story of one I knew.)
He pushed for and sought the overturning of amnesty laws for military officers accused of torture and assassinations. On the 30th anniversary of the coup that launched the bloody regime, Kirchner toured the former places of torture with survivors.
Two years ago, in a spectacle typical of Peronism, Sen. Kirchner spoke at a rally commemorating Evita and asked, in the spirit of the cult of the late wife of the late Juan Domingo Perón, "What Would Evita Do?" in the face of globalization.
Can she fulfill the enormous expectations and meet the challenges? This is the question that American journalists should have explored.
Argentina, after all, has long competed with Brazil and Mexico for economic first place in Latin America and has a cultural and political influence all its own within the Southern Cone subregion.
From the pundits in Buenos Aires one can glean that this election may mark the beginning of new politics.
Cristina Kirchner's win (45 percent of the vote in a field of 14 candidates) was enough to secure the presidency in one ballot (Argentine law calls for a second round among the top two candidates when the plurality is smaller). But it's a bit of a squeaker for the undisputed majority party since 1946 when Himself was the candidate.
Still, she will pose a challenge to a fragmented opposition, which won largely in the big cities, Buenos Aires, Bahía Blanca, Mar del Plata, but lost nearly everywhere else. This represents a bit of a class divide between the educated urbanites and the poorer rural inhabitants who are still the majority.
All that lies in the future. For now, I toast to an attorney of seeming conviction and vigor, a woman who may yet show the way to her sister Hillary.
Of course, American reporters never ask whether Sen. Clinton wears too little makeup or speculate whether Hillary is the American Evita. That might suggest that the USA is not the epicenter of the world -- Zeus forbid!
In fact, the newly elected president of Argentina is a politician in her own right, unlike Hillary she has been a legislator for decades and a principled advocate even to the point of getting expelled from her party briefly for holding fast to her positions.
She has had to navigate immensely more difficult waters than Hillary.
Just take a look at her name Christina Fernández (maiden name) de (literally "of") Kirchner. It's the middle- to upper-class nomenclature in Argentina, less common today in Spain, denoting the woman as the consort of the paterfamilias (see here, starting with the 6th paragraph).
In Argentine common use, men will call their wife "mi mujer" (my woman) rather than "mi esposa" (my spouse). Perhaps it has to do with the other meaning of esposa, hand-cuff. No woman gets away with calling their husband "mi hombre" (my man).
Argentina thinks of itself as a cultural suburb of Paris, but at some level it remains locked in the mental corridors of old Spain's Escorial, Philip II's monastic palace, and in the magical archetypes of Italy, from which more than half of Argentina's population hail.
As to her challenges as president, they are many.
Since the implosion of the Argentine economy at the beginning of the decade, a catastrophe incumbent President Nestor Kirchner inherited four years ago, the country has gone from near Depression levels of unemployment back to its traditional underemployment, or actual shortage of skilled labor, heating up the economy.
The government says inflation runs at 8 percent annually, the Wall Street Journal predictably claims the "leftist" administration is halving the rate, the International Monetary Fund estimates 12 percent -- I'm sticking with the IMF figure. For a country whose inflation once ran in the hundreds of percentage points a year, surpassing even the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany, this is quite modest.
Let's also not forget the "leftist" baiting. President Kirchner, her husband, is widely hated for taking the side of the victims of the military dictatorship of 1976-83, which kidnapped, tortured and murdered an estimated 30,000 people and a precisely documented 8,900. (See here for the story of one I knew.)
He pushed for and sought the overturning of amnesty laws for military officers accused of torture and assassinations. On the 30th anniversary of the coup that launched the bloody regime, Kirchner toured the former places of torture with survivors.
Two years ago, in a spectacle typical of Peronism, Sen. Kirchner spoke at a rally commemorating Evita and asked, in the spirit of the cult of the late wife of the late Juan Domingo Perón, "What Would Evita Do?" in the face of globalization.
Can she fulfill the enormous expectations and meet the challenges? This is the question that American journalists should have explored.
Argentina, after all, has long competed with Brazil and Mexico for economic first place in Latin America and has a cultural and political influence all its own within the Southern Cone subregion.
From the pundits in Buenos Aires one can glean that this election may mark the beginning of new politics.
Cristina Kirchner's win (45 percent of the vote in a field of 14 candidates) was enough to secure the presidency in one ballot (Argentine law calls for a second round among the top two candidates when the plurality is smaller). But it's a bit of a squeaker for the undisputed majority party since 1946 when Himself was the candidate.
Still, she will pose a challenge to a fragmented opposition, which won largely in the big cities, Buenos Aires, Bahía Blanca, Mar del Plata, but lost nearly everywhere else. This represents a bit of a class divide between the educated urbanites and the poorer rural inhabitants who are still the majority.
All that lies in the future. For now, I toast to an attorney of seeming conviction and vigor, a woman who may yet show the way to her sister Hillary.
Monday, September 24, 2007
Free Speech at Columbia
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, spoke at Columbia University with thousands of protesters in attendance. Spurred by comments by my blogosphere friend Chani, I got into a decided difference of opinion with Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt. Rather than clog Lipstadt's blog with an argument from a nonscholar, let me respond to her response here.
In brief, Lipstadt had berated a student who supported the presence of Ahmadinejad, arguing that it was a good way for students to become informed. From what I have gathered from her blog, Ahmadinejad's cardinal sin in Lipstadt's book is hosting and encouraging a Holocaust denial conference.
I responded:
Denying the Holocaust is, first of all, silly. Of course the Holocaust occurred. One might as well question, as Macauley once jokingly did, whether Napoleon existed. However, denying the Holocaust, even with malice forethought rather than merely stupidity, is not identical to advocating it (although many deniers do), or being morally or psychologically capable of replicating it (although some deniers suggest they are).
Here's where the free speech problem begins.
No one is asserting that Ahmadinejad should be granted the right to fire Jewish professors at Columbia, much less kill them all after squeezing the last bit of useful physical labor out of them under inhumane conditions.
Thus, although we all know what the Nazis did to Jewish professors, barring someone from speaking at Columbia is not appropriately compared to the entire Holocaust. It's only comparable to the censorship of academia (and other sectors of society) imposed by the Nazis.
The Nazis denied Christians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Romano Guardini free speech in their preaching and teaching, precisely because neither one accommodate his ideas to the Nazi "new order." What happened to either Bonhoeffer (who was killed) or Guardini (who was removed from his chair) was immeasurably less than what happened to their Jewish peers in death camps. Similarly, Ahmadinejad speaking at Columbia is much less than what Nazis did at death camps, too.
Speech is either free for all, even -- or perhaps especially -- for those with whom we disagree, or it's not free at all. A university in which the spectrum ideas to which a student is exposed is limited to what professors think is within a pre-determined correct range ceases to be a place of learning and becomes merely an institution of indoctrination.
I understand the vehemence of feeling against Ahmadinejad. I applaud the protesters (who are exercising their right to free speech). I understand Lipstadt's assertion that Holocaust denial is not merely a "lonely opinion"; to me it is a fool's errand often carried out by people with malicious intent of the worst order.
Yet bad ideas, lies and distortions are never satisfactorily answered by muzzling them. Like pus in an infection, they will ooze out or spread. They are only properly replied to with good ideas, truths and accuracy in the open marketplace of ideas in which speech is free.
This is what scholars such as Lipstadt have done in their admirable public rebuttals of deniers such as David Irving. It puzzles me to see such a noble figure take up the wrong side of free speech as the weapon of choice.
In brief, Lipstadt had berated a student who supported the presence of Ahmadinejad, arguing that it was a good way for students to become informed. From what I have gathered from her blog, Ahmadinejad's cardinal sin in Lipstadt's book is hosting and encouraging a Holocaust denial conference.
I responded:
You're on the wrong side of freedom in this one, sorry. Barring someone from speaking at a university is precisely what the Nazis would have done -- and did.Lipstadt graciously replied:
Ahmadinejad is not as simply reduced to five points as you did. He represents a form of anti-Semitism that is quite different from European hatred of Jews, that is in part related to some versions of Christianity -- about which all of us in the Western world are familiar.
Asian anti-Semitism is a phenomenon all its own. You find it in the Arab world for obvious reasons, but you also find it as far away as Japan and China. Iran is situated in the middle of Asia and Ahmadinejad's mixed policies reflect a straddling that requires some mental gymnastics to understand, let alone perform.
You can read U.S. newspapers and still be left empty. Students are well served by exposure to this peculiar form of odious speech. To beware of it, to understand the subtleties of the adversaries of our way of life.
What is the difference between your denying him a platform at Columbia and his denying you one at his Holocaust denial conference?
I never said my list was complete. Believe me I know it is not but I wanted to keep it simple for this student.Setting aside issues of the he said/she said variety -- I will grant Lipstadt that one can never outline one's thinking on complex issues fully in a blog -- I find the substance of her reply wanting and her rebuttal imprecise.
Your comparison to my wanting to "deny" him a platform to the Nazis is staggeringly off base.
First of all the Nazis [and the many many professors who supported them] did not just deny Jews platforms at universities; they fired all of them [prior to killing as many as they could].
Unlike Ahmadinejad, these Jewish academic had not attacked anyone [verbally or otherwise]. They had not called for Germany or any other state to be wiped off the face of the map. They had not denied history. They had not jailed academics who they believed challenged the regime. They had not arrested women for smoking in public. And so forth and so forth.
Denying a platform to Ahmadinejad as a head of state is completely different than denying him a platform because of his faith or ethnic identity [which is what the Nazis did to the Jewish professors].
Finally there is no difference between him denying me a place at his Holocaust denial conference, except that he would not invite me to his conference and I would not go.
What you seem not to grasp is that Holocaust denial is not a "point of view" or a "lonely opinion." It is based on lies and distortions. Why would I go to a conference which was based on falsehoods? It would be like going to a conference which argued that men were inherently to women or whites to blacks or….
If you have any questions about that familiarize yourself with David Irving v. Penguin UK and Deborah Lipstadt at www.hdot.org or take a look at my book History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving.
Denying the Holocaust is, first of all, silly. Of course the Holocaust occurred. One might as well question, as Macauley once jokingly did, whether Napoleon existed. However, denying the Holocaust, even with malice forethought rather than merely stupidity, is not identical to advocating it (although many deniers do), or being morally or psychologically capable of replicating it (although some deniers suggest they are).
Here's where the free speech problem begins.
No one is asserting that Ahmadinejad should be granted the right to fire Jewish professors at Columbia, much less kill them all after squeezing the last bit of useful physical labor out of them under inhumane conditions.
Thus, although we all know what the Nazis did to Jewish professors, barring someone from speaking at Columbia is not appropriately compared to the entire Holocaust. It's only comparable to the censorship of academia (and other sectors of society) imposed by the Nazis.
The Nazis denied Christians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Romano Guardini free speech in their preaching and teaching, precisely because neither one accommodate his ideas to the Nazi "new order." What happened to either Bonhoeffer (who was killed) or Guardini (who was removed from his chair) was immeasurably less than what happened to their Jewish peers in death camps. Similarly, Ahmadinejad speaking at Columbia is much less than what Nazis did at death camps, too.
Speech is either free for all, even -- or perhaps especially -- for those with whom we disagree, or it's not free at all. A university in which the spectrum ideas to which a student is exposed is limited to what professors think is within a pre-determined correct range ceases to be a place of learning and becomes merely an institution of indoctrination.
I understand the vehemence of feeling against Ahmadinejad. I applaud the protesters (who are exercising their right to free speech). I understand Lipstadt's assertion that Holocaust denial is not merely a "lonely opinion"; to me it is a fool's errand often carried out by people with malicious intent of the worst order.
Yet bad ideas, lies and distortions are never satisfactorily answered by muzzling them. Like pus in an infection, they will ooze out or spread. They are only properly replied to with good ideas, truths and accuracy in the open marketplace of ideas in which speech is free.
This is what scholars such as Lipstadt have done in their admirable public rebuttals of deniers such as David Irving. It puzzles me to see such a noble figure take up the wrong side of free speech as the weapon of choice.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
That 70s War Is Back
The year 2007 feels, as Yogi Berra put it, as deja vu all over again. Specifically, it's somewhere between 1971 and 1973. The country as a whole is fed up with a foreign military entanglement. The Democratic Congress is mired in its speech-infested swamp. The Republican president is lying and stonewalling. Remember?
One ... Two ... Three ... Four,
We don't want your f*cking war.
Somewhere between the May Day 1971 demonstration and the beginning of the televised Watergate hearings we hovered in an endless conflict in which -- whatever the purity of the original democratic impulse -- our national behavior negated its purpose and worthiness.
In the case of Iraq, of course, the whole thing was a charade from Day One. Democracy? Specious. Weapons of mass destruction? False. Al Qaeda link? Totally made up. Profits for Halliburton and the defense industry? Ding, ding, ding!
Back then, Henry Kissinger memoed Richard Nixon that beginning a withdrawal too soon would become like "salted peanuts" to the American people (imagine Henry the K with his paw deep into a snack bowl in the Oval). Last Thursday the foreign policy furies -- the K himself, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, former national security advisers all -- warned ominously on Charlie Rose about sudden moves.
Surprise, surprise, the negotiators proposed negotiation.
Remember the K's "peace is at hand"? Days before the 1972 election -- the one Nixon didn't really need to burglarize the Democratic National Committee to win but did it just for so -- Henry the K is negotiating with Le Duc Tho and he lets the phrase slip to reporters.
Little chance of that repeating itself. There's no adversary to negotiate with and there's no re-election (um ... re-ballot box stuffing) to win.
The Bushies -- as even they call themselves in Justice Department memos, we now know; you saw it here first (see this post)-- think if they can keep saying "Al-Qaeda" and claiming that things are just like an open-air market in Indiana, we'll pin a medal on them. They're wrong.
Still, there'll be hell to pay for when this one winds down.
Oh, maybe the worst won't come to pass. Maybe left to their own devices the Shiites (how close to a curse word that name!) and the Sunnis (did any of them go to school in New Paltz?) will get scared out of their wits that they'll really have to kill or be killed -- and decide to go for a truce.
Or maybe not. Anyone remember Yugoslavia, where there used to be a strongman dictator. He died and ... um ... what happened again? Ethnic what? Ah, yes, cleansing. So hygienic.
What we should've done is stay the hell out of Iraq. Shoulda, woulda coulda.
Now we're stuck with the mad logic that if our troops stay, more of them will get killed for nothing of any value to us. Certainly not to keep the price of gas down.
On the other hand, if they leave, there's always the chance of a bloodbath in Iraq, revolts in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, and Iran eventually getting the idea to stabilize the Middle East by dropping Da Bomb. (Ya think they don't have it already? I've got a nice bridge in Brooklyn for you at a rock bottom price.)
Of course, there's always the office pool concerning when U.S. troops will march into Iran. Who knew? I just found out about the pool: I was more inclined to bet on Syria being next.
It would almost be easier to declare Iraq a U.S. territory. We couldn't: that would be colonialism.
One ... Two ... Three ... Four,
We don't want your f*cking war.
Somewhere between the May Day 1971 demonstration and the beginning of the televised Watergate hearings we hovered in an endless conflict in which -- whatever the purity of the original democratic impulse -- our national behavior negated its purpose and worthiness.
In the case of Iraq, of course, the whole thing was a charade from Day One. Democracy? Specious. Weapons of mass destruction? False. Al Qaeda link? Totally made up. Profits for Halliburton and the defense industry? Ding, ding, ding!
Back then, Henry Kissinger memoed Richard Nixon that beginning a withdrawal too soon would become like "salted peanuts" to the American people (imagine Henry the K with his paw deep into a snack bowl in the Oval). Last Thursday the foreign policy furies -- the K himself, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, former national security advisers all -- warned ominously on Charlie Rose about sudden moves.
Surprise, surprise, the negotiators proposed negotiation.
Remember the K's "peace is at hand"? Days before the 1972 election -- the one Nixon didn't really need to burglarize the Democratic National Committee to win but did it just for so -- Henry the K is negotiating with Le Duc Tho and he lets the phrase slip to reporters.
Little chance of that repeating itself. There's no adversary to negotiate with and there's no re-election (um ... re-ballot box stuffing) to win.
The Bushies -- as even they call themselves in Justice Department memos, we now know; you saw it here first (see this post)-- think if they can keep saying "Al-Qaeda" and claiming that things are just like an open-air market in Indiana, we'll pin a medal on them. They're wrong.
Still, there'll be hell to pay for when this one winds down.
Oh, maybe the worst won't come to pass. Maybe left to their own devices the Shiites (how close to a curse word that name!) and the Sunnis (did any of them go to school in New Paltz?) will get scared out of their wits that they'll really have to kill or be killed -- and decide to go for a truce.
Or maybe not. Anyone remember Yugoslavia, where there used to be a strongman dictator. He died and ... um ... what happened again? Ethnic what? Ah, yes, cleansing. So hygienic.
What we should've done is stay the hell out of Iraq. Shoulda, woulda coulda.
Now we're stuck with the mad logic that if our troops stay, more of them will get killed for nothing of any value to us. Certainly not to keep the price of gas down.
On the other hand, if they leave, there's always the chance of a bloodbath in Iraq, revolts in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, and Iran eventually getting the idea to stabilize the Middle East by dropping Da Bomb. (Ya think they don't have it already? I've got a nice bridge in Brooklyn for you at a rock bottom price.)
Of course, there's always the office pool concerning when U.S. troops will march into Iran. Who knew? I just found out about the pool: I was more inclined to bet on Syria being next.
It would almost be easier to declare Iraq a U.S. territory. We couldn't: that would be colonialism.
Monday, June 11, 2007
A Marshall Plan for the World
After this latest misadventure, it's time perhaps to reassess what has gone wrong since the end of the Cold War. Part of it is that the USA forgot about postwar reconstruction.
Sure, the Cold War did not have definable fronts -- although Korea, Hungary, Cuba, Vietnam, Czechoslovakia, the horn of Africa, Nicaragua and El Salvador might reasonably pass for battlefields. At the end of the Cold War, which -- pay attention, conservatives -- did not occur on Ronald Reagan's watch, all that was left was a gulf between the wealthy capitalist First World and everyone else.
In an impoverished Russia and Eastern Europe the joke went: "What's worse than Communism? Post-Communism." And an impoverished Third World, a variety of would-be leaders -- including one Osama bin Laden -- observed how local elites were enriching themselves through the sale to the First World of non-renewable resources, which are the patrimony of entire societies.
If 9/11 had not existed, someone would have invented it.
Why? Because we won the war and forgot to win the peace as well, as the USA did after World War II.
Osama and Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez and others have in common that they are irate that the First World continues to wage economic war on their people.
Sixty years ago, this past June 5, Secretary of State George C. Marshall delivered the commencement address at Harvard and in his speech outlined the need for an economic recovery plan to lift Europe out of the ruins of World War II. "It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace," Marshall said.
By the time the European Recovery Program (the official name of the Marshall Plan) began to wind down in 1951, the United States had sent $12 billion to 17 countries and Europe was beginning to recover. In 2006 dollars, that sum would amount to $119.7 billion, or about an average $29 billion a year -- about a third of a year's cost of U.S. military occupation of Iraq.
Our present development assistance does not exceed $13 billion a year and almost half goes to Israel and a quarter more to Egypt. Meanwhile, Africa has become a basket case, disparities are growing in Latin America and in fast-developing, resource hungry Asia the life of each individual continues to be far too cheap.
Moreover, now we have the means and the technology to eradicate the most serious depredations on human dignity, such as hunger. We may not know exactly how to turn every nation into Ohio -- not necessarily a worthy goal -- but the most abject forms of poverty need not exist.
The benefits of doing so are manifold. Greater prosperity brings liberalization of governance and greater public participation in peaceful, constructive ways. Prosperous nations cooperate with one another.
Is there any reason why we should not launch a new Marshall Plan, this time for the world?
Sure, the Cold War did not have definable fronts -- although Korea, Hungary, Cuba, Vietnam, Czechoslovakia, the horn of Africa, Nicaragua and El Salvador might reasonably pass for battlefields. At the end of the Cold War, which -- pay attention, conservatives -- did not occur on Ronald Reagan's watch, all that was left was a gulf between the wealthy capitalist First World and everyone else.
In an impoverished Russia and Eastern Europe the joke went: "What's worse than Communism? Post-Communism." And an impoverished Third World, a variety of would-be leaders -- including one Osama bin Laden -- observed how local elites were enriching themselves through the sale to the First World of non-renewable resources, which are the patrimony of entire societies.
If 9/11 had not existed, someone would have invented it.
Why? Because we won the war and forgot to win the peace as well, as the USA did after World War II.
Osama and Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez and others have in common that they are irate that the First World continues to wage economic war on their people.
Sixty years ago, this past June 5, Secretary of State George C. Marshall delivered the commencement address at Harvard and in his speech outlined the need for an economic recovery plan to lift Europe out of the ruins of World War II. "It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace," Marshall said.
By the time the European Recovery Program (the official name of the Marshall Plan) began to wind down in 1951, the United States had sent $12 billion to 17 countries and Europe was beginning to recover. In 2006 dollars, that sum would amount to $119.7 billion, or about an average $29 billion a year -- about a third of a year's cost of U.S. military occupation of Iraq.
Our present development assistance does not exceed $13 billion a year and almost half goes to Israel and a quarter more to Egypt. Meanwhile, Africa has become a basket case, disparities are growing in Latin America and in fast-developing, resource hungry Asia the life of each individual continues to be far too cheap.
Moreover, now we have the means and the technology to eradicate the most serious depredations on human dignity, such as hunger. We may not know exactly how to turn every nation into Ohio -- not necessarily a worthy goal -- but the most abject forms of poverty need not exist.
The benefits of doing so are manifold. Greater prosperity brings liberalization of governance and greater public participation in peaceful, constructive ways. Prosperous nations cooperate with one another.
Is there any reason why we should not launch a new Marshall Plan, this time for the world?
Friday, June 08, 2007
Lesson of Vietnam and Iraq
There are two Ss in the lesson of Iraq and Vietnam and both of them stand for what has been sorely lacking in the American foreign policy establishment for at least two generations: subtlety.
The dictionary phrases that I have in mind for defining subtlety are "acuteness or penetration of mind" and "delicacy of discrimination." We Americans are not famous for either one.
We can come up with something remarkably big, such as the notion of and resources for constructing a harbor so we can invade a France beach, then bring the port for supplies along with us. This was done 63 years ago this month.
We can push each other hard -- often too hard -- creating a dynamism of sweat and anxiety that keeps us all going at a pace unmatched elsewhere. Hence U.S. dominance in terms of average annual work hours over all OECD nations, our socioeconomic peers -- the declining quality (and more recently quantity) of output be damned.
We really believe in our beloved Constitution -- except when we don't or don't even know it (go read it here).
We really want to trust people enough to leave our doors open, although we haven't now for some time.
We were really at our best in the world when we were lumbering hulks handing out Hershey bars to scrawny European children in bombed out cities. Ours is the only empire whose most decisive war did not result in territorial expansion, enslavement of others, plunder -- even if, in neo-colonial terms, some version of all those things took place under U.S. aegis.
The fundamental fact of the American era is that our country has been so remarkably necessary to the world economically, militarily and even politically, for so long, that there has been little need for the traditional historical harshness of empires.
Why goose-step, purge your satellites or enslave vassals when you can seduce them with Coca-Cola, Marlboros and blue jeans (at a profit)?
This is what makes Vietnam and Iraq such crass errors on the part of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. We had the wind on our backs at the beginning of each of these misadventures.
Ngo Dihn Diem, the Vietnamese president the CIA helped assassinate just 20 days before our own president was killed in Dallas, was a nationalist, an aristocrat, a traditional Catholic (his brother was an archbishop) and somewhat of an autocrat.
He was not a saint, by any means; a politician in serious conflict with an important segment of his population (Buddhists). No Jefferson, but certainly no Castro.
"I can scarcely believe the Americans would be so stupid," Ho Chi Minh is reported to have said upon learning of the assassination.
There is absolutely no question in my mind that had Diem lived, had South Vietnam been allowed to evolve on its own terms, without a U.S. occupation, today it might be comparable to South Korea: corrupt for many years but slowly democratizing as a byproduct of prosperity.
Much the same is true of Iraq. For all the propaganda, now taken on blind faith, that Saddam Hussein was a monster, he was really a relatively pedestrian Third World dictator.
Hussein was a classic modernizer of the type who believes in breaking a few eggs to make omelette. He won UNESCO prizes in the 1970s for programs to raise the literacy of his country. The Baathists were mildly left-leaning secularizers who believed in technology and learning to develop their country.
Had Hussein been left to live and die in power, Iraq might have found its own way to a modern future with some facsimile of a democracy; again, as a byproduct of prosperity. The foundations had been laid by Hussein himself.
I've lived in dictatorships, I've known people who died in them. I'm no friend of dictatorship. But I understand the distinction that Reagan U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, no darling of mine, was trying to make when she compared dictatorships with totalitarian regimes.
The problem is she used the wrong terms. The opposite of dictatorship is not totalitarianism, as Kirkpatrick put it, but tyranny.
A dictator, Latin for "one who issues commands," was in ancient republican Rome a figure chosen by the Senate to take all powers needed to overcome an emergency. When the crisis was over, the Roman principle went (although not always the history), the dictator stepped down and the Senate, the gathering of the senex or elderly (and supposedly wise) men, retook the reins of State.
In the limited Roman sense, both Presidents Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt could be seen as American dictators. Both assumed extraordinary powers at times of grave national crises; although both died in office, there is little question that they would have handed their powers back to the polity, had they lived.
In contrast, a tyrant (from the Greek tyrannos, meaning "lord, master, sovereign, absolute ruler"), is a despotic ruler, often harsh and cruel, who serves only his own interests or those of a small oligarchy, and most often seizes power by force or deceit.
Greece's Thirty Tyrants were a pro-Spartan clique that installed itself to rule Athens; among other things, they condemned Socrates to death. Stalin, Hitler and Cromwell were tyrants.
Hussein was edging toward tyranny when the world rightly showed him the cost of acting bigger than his britches by invading Kuwait. Diem was thought to be headed in that direction, too, but his society had enough corrective institutions without U.S. intervention.
This is what the U.S. foreign policymakers have refused to understand for about two generations.
The world's not ours to play with; our country has not been chosen to act godlike with national histories and societies much older and more complex than our own. Sometimes it is better to leave things that are not perfect to work themselves out by themselves -- without the 500-pound gorilla of the CIA and the U.S. military.
The lesson of Vietnam and Iraq comes from ancient Greece.
The Gordian Knot, according to legend the one that fastened the cart of King Midas to a post, was so complex that he who untied it was destined to be king of Asia. Alexander the Great, in the year 333 BCE, cut the knot with his sword. In the next decade, Alexander built an empire that stretched all the way to India, then he died suddenly and the empire collapsed.
Cutting, while expedient, is far less effective than untying.
The dictionary phrases that I have in mind for defining subtlety are "acuteness or penetration of mind" and "delicacy of discrimination." We Americans are not famous for either one.
We can come up with something remarkably big, such as the notion of and resources for constructing a harbor so we can invade a France beach, then bring the port for supplies along with us. This was done 63 years ago this month.
We can push each other hard -- often too hard -- creating a dynamism of sweat and anxiety that keeps us all going at a pace unmatched elsewhere. Hence U.S. dominance in terms of average annual work hours over all OECD nations, our socioeconomic peers -- the declining quality (and more recently quantity) of output be damned.
We really believe in our beloved Constitution -- except when we don't or don't even know it (go read it here).
We really want to trust people enough to leave our doors open, although we haven't now for some time.
We were really at our best in the world when we were lumbering hulks handing out Hershey bars to scrawny European children in bombed out cities. Ours is the only empire whose most decisive war did not result in territorial expansion, enslavement of others, plunder -- even if, in neo-colonial terms, some version of all those things took place under U.S. aegis.
The fundamental fact of the American era is that our country has been so remarkably necessary to the world economically, militarily and even politically, for so long, that there has been little need for the traditional historical harshness of empires.
Why goose-step, purge your satellites or enslave vassals when you can seduce them with Coca-Cola, Marlboros and blue jeans (at a profit)?
This is what makes Vietnam and Iraq such crass errors on the part of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. We had the wind on our backs at the beginning of each of these misadventures.
Ngo Dihn Diem, the Vietnamese president the CIA helped assassinate just 20 days before our own president was killed in Dallas, was a nationalist, an aristocrat, a traditional Catholic (his brother was an archbishop) and somewhat of an autocrat.
He was not a saint, by any means; a politician in serious conflict with an important segment of his population (Buddhists). No Jefferson, but certainly no Castro.
"I can scarcely believe the Americans would be so stupid," Ho Chi Minh is reported to have said upon learning of the assassination.
There is absolutely no question in my mind that had Diem lived, had South Vietnam been allowed to evolve on its own terms, without a U.S. occupation, today it might be comparable to South Korea: corrupt for many years but slowly democratizing as a byproduct of prosperity.
Much the same is true of Iraq. For all the propaganda, now taken on blind faith, that Saddam Hussein was a monster, he was really a relatively pedestrian Third World dictator.
Hussein was a classic modernizer of the type who believes in breaking a few eggs to make omelette. He won UNESCO prizes in the 1970s for programs to raise the literacy of his country. The Baathists were mildly left-leaning secularizers who believed in technology and learning to develop their country.
Had Hussein been left to live and die in power, Iraq might have found its own way to a modern future with some facsimile of a democracy; again, as a byproduct of prosperity. The foundations had been laid by Hussein himself.
I've lived in dictatorships, I've known people who died in them. I'm no friend of dictatorship. But I understand the distinction that Reagan U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, no darling of mine, was trying to make when she compared dictatorships with totalitarian regimes.
The problem is she used the wrong terms. The opposite of dictatorship is not totalitarianism, as Kirkpatrick put it, but tyranny.
A dictator, Latin for "one who issues commands," was in ancient republican Rome a figure chosen by the Senate to take all powers needed to overcome an emergency. When the crisis was over, the Roman principle went (although not always the history), the dictator stepped down and the Senate, the gathering of the senex or elderly (and supposedly wise) men, retook the reins of State.
In the limited Roman sense, both Presidents Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt could be seen as American dictators. Both assumed extraordinary powers at times of grave national crises; although both died in office, there is little question that they would have handed their powers back to the polity, had they lived.
In contrast, a tyrant (from the Greek tyrannos, meaning "lord, master, sovereign, absolute ruler"), is a despotic ruler, often harsh and cruel, who serves only his own interests or those of a small oligarchy, and most often seizes power by force or deceit.
Greece's Thirty Tyrants were a pro-Spartan clique that installed itself to rule Athens; among other things, they condemned Socrates to death. Stalin, Hitler and Cromwell were tyrants.
Hussein was edging toward tyranny when the world rightly showed him the cost of acting bigger than his britches by invading Kuwait. Diem was thought to be headed in that direction, too, but his society had enough corrective institutions without U.S. intervention.
This is what the U.S. foreign policymakers have refused to understand for about two generations.
The world's not ours to play with; our country has not been chosen to act godlike with national histories and societies much older and more complex than our own. Sometimes it is better to leave things that are not perfect to work themselves out by themselves -- without the 500-pound gorilla of the CIA and the U.S. military.
The lesson of Vietnam and Iraq comes from ancient Greece.
The Gordian Knot, according to legend the one that fastened the cart of King Midas to a post, was so complex that he who untied it was destined to be king of Asia. Alexander the Great, in the year 333 BCE, cut the knot with his sword. In the next decade, Alexander built an empire that stretched all the way to India, then he died suddenly and the empire collapsed.
Cutting, while expedient, is far less effective than untying.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
What War?
According to the major news media, President Bush has vetoed a bill passed by the Democratic-led Congress that would put a deadline to end the Iraq War. Ladies and gentlemen, what war?
In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq on pretexts that were merely more elaborate fabrication than the staged "Polish attack" on a German border post in the late summer of 1939. Just as the invasion of Poland ushered in war, the invasion of Iraq was unquestionably an act of war.
As with 1939, in 2003 there was much hand-wringing over it in Europe. The pope pointedly said it did not meet the criteria for a "just war," a dubious concept in any case.
Just as the invasion was clearly warlike, so was the war's ending. Even Bush proclaimed "mission accomplished."
The war ended four years ago.
What the U.S. government is engaged in now is a military occupation, the justification for which is even more questionable than that for the invasion.
Using the parallel I launched at the outset here, it might be argued that Germany was, after all, formally occupied for nearly 50 years.
True, the invasions of Poland in 1939 and Iraq in 2003 were remarkably similar:
-- a major military power attacked a nation that had no reasonable chance of defending itself;
-- the victim was a minor state of recent composition (Poland had not existed for centuries prior to 1918, just as Iraq was invented by the British Foreign Office in 1931);
-- neither attacked country presented a realistic threat to the attacker;
-- the real reasons for the attacks -- other than brutish megalomania -- have remained murky and likely to be debated by historians for years to come;
-- the heads of state of each attacker had come to power through flimsy, pseudo-electoral means;
-- both heads of state embroiled their nation in a pointless "crusades" using rhetoric worthy only of the legend of Nicholas Chauvin.
Yet World War II was vastly dissimilar to the splendid little war of 2003.
There was scarcely a corner of the globe left unaffected by the six-year World War II and by its end the attacker had shed the flower of its leadership on the battlefield. By comparison, the Iraq conflict lasted months, the rest of the world managed to ignore the misdeed and the U.S. Republican elite was too busy trading oil futures to shed a drop of blood to seize Baghdad.
A new elected government has been constituted. No matter how much they may hate one another, Iraqis have demonstrated their near-unanimous desire to see U.S. troops leave.
Besides, the war is over. It has been over for four years.
In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq on pretexts that were merely more elaborate fabrication than the staged "Polish attack" on a German border post in the late summer of 1939. Just as the invasion of Poland ushered in war, the invasion of Iraq was unquestionably an act of war.
As with 1939, in 2003 there was much hand-wringing over it in Europe. The pope pointedly said it did not meet the criteria for a "just war," a dubious concept in any case.
Just as the invasion was clearly warlike, so was the war's ending. Even Bush proclaimed "mission accomplished."
The war ended four years ago.
What the U.S. government is engaged in now is a military occupation, the justification for which is even more questionable than that for the invasion.
Using the parallel I launched at the outset here, it might be argued that Germany was, after all, formally occupied for nearly 50 years.
True, the invasions of Poland in 1939 and Iraq in 2003 were remarkably similar:
-- a major military power attacked a nation that had no reasonable chance of defending itself;
-- the victim was a minor state of recent composition (Poland had not existed for centuries prior to 1918, just as Iraq was invented by the British Foreign Office in 1931);
-- neither attacked country presented a realistic threat to the attacker;
-- the real reasons for the attacks -- other than brutish megalomania -- have remained murky and likely to be debated by historians for years to come;
-- the heads of state of each attacker had come to power through flimsy, pseudo-electoral means;
-- both heads of state embroiled their nation in a pointless "crusades" using rhetoric worthy only of the legend of Nicholas Chauvin.
Yet World War II was vastly dissimilar to the splendid little war of 2003.
There was scarcely a corner of the globe left unaffected by the six-year World War II and by its end the attacker had shed the flower of its leadership on the battlefield. By comparison, the Iraq conflict lasted months, the rest of the world managed to ignore the misdeed and the U.S. Republican elite was too busy trading oil futures to shed a drop of blood to seize Baghdad.
A new elected government has been constituted. No matter how much they may hate one another, Iraqis have demonstrated their near-unanimous desire to see U.S. troops leave.
Besides, the war is over. It has been over for four years.
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