Quote/Unquote 2005 June

WEEK OF June 27, 2005

Re: Iraq and President Bush's Reputation

If democracy plants itself in Iraq and spreads throughout the Middle East, Bush will be remembered as a plain-speaking visionary. If Iraq fails, it will be his Vietnam, and nothing else will matter much about his time in office. For any president, it must be daunting to know already that his reputation depends on what Jefferson once called ''so inscrutable [an] arrangement of causes and consequences in this world.''

Re: Evolution

George F. Will

Eighty years ago Scopes, 24, a high-school football coach and general-science teacher, attended a meeting in Robinson's drugstore in Dayton, Tenn. There, to the satisfaction of community leaders who thought that what was to come would be good for business, Scopes agreed to become the defendant in a trial testing Tennessee's law against teaching ''any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals."
So began ''the most widely publicized misdemeanor case in American history." That is Edward J. Larson's description of the ''monkey trial" in his 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning ''Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion." ...
Since the publication of Charles Darwin's ''Origin of Species" in 1859, religiously motivated critics of the theory of evolution by natural selection had stressed the supposed failure of paleontology to supply the ''missing link" that would establish continuity in the descent of man.
Darwinism did not ignite a culture war until the 1920s, when high-school education became common in the rural South, where Christian fundamentalism was strong. When school seemed to threaten children's souls, fundamentalists sought and found a champion in Bryan, a three-time Democratic presidential nominee and star of the prosecution team in Scopes's trial.

Re: Paul Wolfowitz on History

From a news story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

At a breakfast meeting with reporters, [Paul] Wolfowitz said he hasn't read the [Downing Street] memos because he doesn't want to be"distracted" by"history" from his new job as head of the world's leading development bank. He returned this weekend from a tour of four African nations."There's a lot I could say about what you're asking about, if I were willing to get distracted from the main subject," Wolfowitz said."But I really think there's a price paid with the people I"ve just spent time with, people who are struggling with very real problems, to keep going back in history."

Re: Iraq/Vietnam

Kenneth Pollack:

IRAQ is not another Afghanistan. Notwithstanding what President Bush said in his speech on Tuesday, our primary problem in Iraq is not terrorism, and the administration's single-minded focus on terrorism may help explain why we have not yet adopted a true counterinsurgency strategy or properly tackled so many of the country's other problems. Nevertheless, critics of the president who make parallels between Iraq and Vietnam are equally wrong. Iraq is far more important. Because of its oil wealth, its location in the most politically fragile region of the world, and its importance in the eyes of Arab nations that wonder if democracy is possible for them too, Iraq is critical to American interests in a way that Vietnam never was.

Re: Iraq

Dan Bartlett, White House communications director:

The past is the past. The president is addressing the question of what we are doing now, and we can all agree that we must finish the job.

Re: Religion

Editorial in Christianity Today:

George W. Bush is not Lord. The Declaration of Independence is not an infallible guide to Christian faith and practice. Nor is the U.S. Constitution, nor the U.N. Universal Declaration on Human Rights."Original intent" of America's founders is not the hermeneutical key that will guarantee national righteousness. The American flag is not the Cross. The Pledge of Allegiance is not the Creed."God Bless America" is not the Doxology. Sometimes one needs to state the obvious—especially at times when it's less and less obvious.

Re: Lincoln

Peggy Noonan:

This week comes the previously careful Sen. Barack Obama, flapping his wings in Time magazine and explaining that he's a lot like Abraham Lincoln, only sort of better."In Lincoln's rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat--in all this he reminded me not just of my own struggles." Oh. So that's what Lincoln's for. Actually Lincoln's life is a lot like Mr. Obama's. Lincoln came from a lean-to in the backwoods. His mother died when he was 9. The Lincolns had no money, no standing. Lincoln educated himself, reading law on his own, working as a field hand, a store clerk and a raft hand on the Mississippi. He also split some rails. He entered politics, knew more defeat than victory, and went on to lead the nation through its greatest trauma, the Civil War, and past its greatest sin, slavery. Barack Obama, the son of two University of Hawaii students, went to Columbia and Harvard Law after attending a private academy that taught the children of the Hawaiian royal family. He made his name in politics as an aggressive Chicago vote hustler in Bill Clinton's first campaign for the presidency. You see the similarities.

Re: Donald Rumsfeld/Indians/Vietnam

Patricia Nelson Limerick:

Much of what we have taken to calling"the lessons of Vietnam" - perhaps especially the difficulty of sequestering noncombatants from violence, as well as the complex moral choices raised by confronting guerrilla war - could just as easily have been learned as"the lessons of the Indian wars." If Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ever hints at even the slightest interest in exploring the historical meanings of the Indian wars, I will be on the next plane to D.C.

Re: Karl Rove

E.J. Dionne:

In the 1950s the right wing attacked liberals as being communists. In 2005 Karl Rove has attacked liberals as being therapists. Thus is born a kinder and gentler form of McCarthyism.

WEEK OF June 20, 2005

Re: Potomac Fever

David Brooks:

Since 1961, more than 50 senators have run for president and they have all lost.

WEEK OF June 11, 2005

Re: Russo-Japanese War

Bruce Menning, in an interview with the Daily Yomiuri:

...Tsushima is seen as the ultimate expression of the triumph of U.S. naval officer Alfred Mahan's views over the importance of having a large battle fleet that eventually can do what he calls the" command of sea." The Japanese generals, at least one particular general, Marshal Iwao Oyama, were very conversant with the techniques and the outlook of Prussian Army Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, because Oyama, as a young officer, had been a military observer with the Prussian forces when they encircled and annihilated the French forces at Sedan in 1870.
And his most particular intent in the mobile ground war in Manchuria in 1904 and 1905 is to reproduce in Far East a copy of Prussian victory in Sedan. What is particularly significant about the course of the Russo-Japanese War is that the Japanese, at least initially, prove themselves master of using Mahan and Moltke, their thinking and method in conjunction with one another...
...When you look at the military commanders of any country, of any nations, or the great national heroes, I think if you go far enough into backgrounds, far enough into the details of the situations in which you are involved, these people are human, so you are always likely find either a shortcoming or insufficiency.
Gen. Maresuke Nogi is given a mission. And Nogi will expend all of his energy, all of his troops energy to accomplish that mission, even when the cost runs so high that he loses his own sons. So in that respect, one must admire Nogi's record very much. At the same time, if you look at his situation, he in some ways is a victim of two circumstances or two things.
One is time. Because once Japanese intelligence understands that a second pacific squadron is being assembled in the Baltic, then the clock is now running. Now the problem becomes for Nogi to resolve from the land.
The second thing is technology. He has taken Port Arthur 10 years before--everyone expects him to reproduce the miracle in short order. But now what happened, he is facing a much different foe. A foe that is well-equipped with machine guns, repeating rifles, rapid fire artillery.
When they get into the second, third, fourth assault, they begin to assume the character of the siege warfare--they begin to look much more like what occurred on the Western Front in France between 1914 and 1918 than any kind of ground maneuver war, such as occurred in Manchuria between the main forces of Oyama and Kuropatkin.

Re: Textbooks

Tristram Hunt, from the Guardian:

...While Tim Collins might not have demanded the detention of subversive historians by Interpol (as leading Indian politicians have done), there is no doubt that his calls for a clear national narrative signal a rejection of the pluralist tradition in British history teaching. As ever with Westminster fads, the fashion seems inspired by America. Just as we followed their citizenship ceremonies, now we must have their history.
For in US classrooms a highly prescriptive syllabus, of the type Collins proposed, offers students an uncritical, uplifting story of the triumph of American liberty. Citizenship and history are seamlessly meshed into a simple-minded morality play designed to nurture blind patriotism. The textbook titles tend to give the game away: The American Way, Land of Promise, Rise of the American Nation, and The Challenge of Freedom are among the more subtle choices. And, as James W Loewen has pointed out, the consequence of this unerringly patriotic tale of US heroes and epochs is that African-American, Native-American and Latino students all tend to perform exceptionally poorly at high-school history....
...But in the midst of this drive for narrative, we should not lose sight of the virtues of our critical, pluralist approach. The concentration on primary sources, the analysis of competing accounts and the writing of in-depth essays help to generate a more critical approach to the meaning of the past than the unquestioned heroism of the US model. At the same time, our more reflexive engagement with history has meant that we have avoided the worst of the Kulturkampf textbook wars that have engulfed US school boards...
...It was a wish to avoid precisely that kind of bombastic sentiment that caused many UK historians to balk at plans to revive certain teachings of British imperialism. Despite the pleas of Niall Ferguson fans, it is intellectually deficient as well as culturally damaging to present the history of the British empire as a triumph of nation-building and free markets. The only way to de velop this essential topic is through the kind of pluralist framework that engages with both the crushing of the Mau Mau and the"good governance" of the Indian civil service.
For even if we might not fully value our approach to history education, other countries certainly do. The Council of Europe is currently nurturing history teaching in post-Soviet and eastern European nations. In countries where nationalism and ethnic strife is ever present, the developing British tradition of non-prescriptive, critical enquiry is regarded as especially valuable. For the terrible consequences of state-sanctioned national narratives - with their attendant myths of victimhood, ethnic cohesion or divine mission - were there for all to see on the streets of Srebrenica.
None of which is to suggest our system is perfect. We stop teaching history at too young an age (14 rather than 16) and the 1980s trend for multiculturalism downplayed many elements of British history that are only now being reversed, while the quest for balanced interpretations can perhaps go too far when pupils are asked to note down"five good things the Nazis did"...

Re: The White House Vs. Buckingham Palace

John Keegan, from the Financial Times:

The great historian John Keegan heaped praise on the White House in his book Fields of Battle yet had unkind words about Buckingham Palace:"The White House is like the grandest of grand hotels, where the major domo pounces unforgivingly on the slightest failing by the kitchen or the waiters", whereas of Buckingham Palace, he says:"There is a certain knockabout quality to palace life, old retainers grown saucily familiar, odd bits of obsolete serving equipment parked in corners, polished silver boxes full of spent matches, beautiful liveries but shabby shoes."

Re: Russo-Japanese War

David Schimmelpenninck, in an interview with the Daily Yomiuri:

...In Europe, there was a tradition of a ground tour, in Russia as well. It was a great idea of a ground tour for young men when they reached maturity--20 or 21 years old. [Russian Czar] Alexander III thought Russia's future was in Asia. So he wanted the future czar to know something about Asia. Instead of sending him [Nikolai II] to Paris, Rome or Greece, he sent him to Asia. During his Asian tour, Nikolai became a celebrity, like Madonna or Michael Jackson today. Wherever he visited, local authorities arranged crowds to cheer for him. So he thought that everybody in Asia loved him. And he began to have this fantasy. Maybe he thought he eventually would rule a large part of Asia. War Minister [Alexei] Kuropatkin said the czar always had the ambition and dreams of becoming emperor of China and Persia and the mikado of Japan...
...There was one unwritten rule of diplomacy during the era of high imperialism. That was you should make a deal with the rival powers if you want to grab southern areas in Africa. You would say if you were France,"We'll take this part, but England can take that part." The Japanese kept asking the Russians,"Let's agree [on] a division." But some people in the Russian government didn't (like the idea). I want to emphasize that there were many Russians who were in favor of reaching an agreement with the Japanese, especially in the foreign and finance ministries. But they could never reconcile the czar--sit down and sign an agreement. Some said let's share, others said,"We want it all." He kept agreeing with the last person he spoke to. Russia's East Asian diplomacy was highly erratic. That is a major reason for this war. The czar met a Japanese diplomat before the war. Desperate negotiations were held between the Japanese and Russian foreign ministries. The Japanese envoy said,"We hope for peace." And Nikolai II, of course, replied politely,"Yes, I hope for peace between our two countries." But after the Japanese diplomat left, Nikolai II said,"What a fool [he is ]. Look at the map--see how big Russia is compared with Japan?" So they thought Japan was not so dangerous and said they should keep everything as it was and maybe take Korea as well.The war could very easily have been avoided, had the Russians taken the Japanese seriously and thought of them as a modern power. Compromise may have been possible even at a late stage, but it was impossible because the Russian government could never compromise.

Re: Janice Rogers Brown

David W. Blight, responding to"Seeing Slavery in Liberalism: Janice Rogers Brown" in the NYT :

Janice Rogers Brown's up-by-the-bootstraps personal story may be moving enough for the 55 Republicans and 1 Democrat who voted to confirm her for the federal appeals court. But her likening of the history of liberalism to"slavery" and the use of government power as"a warrant for oppression" is bad history and an insult to generations of Americans, black and white.
They turned to federal authority in times of crisis to free slaves, protect workers from injury, regulate unbridled corporate power, prevent millions from starving and save capitalism during the Depression.
They turned to federal authority to create equality before the law, spread public education to the masses, and reinvent the right to vote and to live honorably in civil society for African-Americans.
America's history with slavery is far too serious, its legacies too deep, to denigrate it as both a word and an experience, as Justice Brown has, in the service of the principles of individualism and private property.

Re: Textbooks

Thomas C. Reeves, responding to a call for solid textbooks for the U.S. survey course:

I would submit my own Twentieth Century America: A Brief History (Oxford University Press, 2000) as a textbook that goes right down the middle. Thus it was doomed.

Re: Russo-Japanese War

John Steinberg, in an interview with the Daily Yomiuri:

...This idea of war of attrition is that you continue to fight as long as you have men and bullets. This is an aspect of 20th century global industrial warfare. All of the things that you need to fight this war have to be paid for. Where did the money come from to fight the war? This gave it another global aspect. The Russians were borrowing money from the French to fight the war, and the Germans to a certain extent. The Japanese wanted to borrow the money from Great Britain. But the British were kind of nervous about loaning money to the Japanese, despite the treaty between Japan and Great Britain. And so the Japanese were fortunate to find a banker in New York who was interested in loaning money to the Japanese--in part because he didn't like the Russians. The Russo-Japanese War, if you find it in a textbook, is usually linked with the Spanish-American War and the Boer War [in South Africa ] as colonial conflicts. We are trying to separate the Russo-Japanese War from the Spanish-American War and the Boer War because it is something that was greater than a colonial conflict. There is certainly no question in the minds of the Europeans that they cannot apply this old imperial formula. The imperial formula is to go forward into the world and gain control over economic resources and to use those resources to make the European country wealthy. They justify this by talking about such things as the"white man's burden." This means to go out into the world and teach a higher level of civilization to all people of color. After the Russo-Japanese War, the Europeans had to say, 'Well, maybe the Japanese don't fit into this scenario and maybe the Japanese will be some force in the world that other Asians will look to.' [In] the Russo-Japanese War, World War Zero, there's two major political trends that were bearing fruit. One is imperialism, and with imperialism, the fruit is ripe--some would even say rotting. The other is Asian nationalism. Nations believing that Asia belongs to Asians, and that it is important that Asia [nations] can govern themselves and manage their own resources, which is another way of saying manage their own wealth without European interference or influence. This is the message that was sent across Asia.Now the question becomes how the Japanese are going to manage this situation--are the Japanese going to become imperialists just like the Europeans or are they going to develop an Asian union like the European Union today? I think it took Japan at least until the 1930s to sort out what they wanted to do. And tragically, at that time, the Japanese government decided that they were going to act as imperialists"

Re: Deep Throat

Hal Holbrook, in a interview with the NYT:

But for many, Deep Throat will always be Hal Holbrook, the actor who portrayed him as a shadowy, vaguely menacing figure in the 1976 movie"All the President's Men." Mr. Holbrook, now 80, said he wished things could have stayed that way."My feeling is that this is an idealistic myth that has been thrown into the rubble of public opinion," said the actor by phone in New York, where he is appearing in"Mark Twain Tonight!""We were better off when we didn't know who this was," he added,"because it was possible to create some illusions about it." Mr. Holbrook's own illusions about Deep Throat involved inventing a character, based on a real person, whose life was nonetheless almost entirely a mystery."The back story I created for him was based on a question of morality," he said."This man was breaking the rules of Washington by telling on the president. I thought, 'What kind of man might do that?'""I figured," Mr. Holbrook added,"he'd served in administrations of both parties - an adviser like Clark Clifford. And now he was faced with the choice of loyalty to his president or loyalty to his country. He chose his country. But it was so distasteful to him because he was a person of character and here he was, passing information along in a garage."