Quote/Unquote 2006 March

The President and the members of his war cabinet now routinely wave at the horizon and speak about the long arc of history’s judgment—many years or decades must pass, they suggest, before the overthrow of Saddam and its impact on the Middle East can be properly evaluated. This is not only an evasion; it is bad historiography. Particularly in free societies, botched or unnecessary military invasions are almost always recognized as mistakes by the public and the professional military soon after they happen, and are rarely vindicated by time. This was true of the Boer War, Suez, and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and it will be true of Iraq. At best, when enough time has passed, and the human toll is not so palpable, we may come to think of the invasion, and its tragicomedy of missing weapons, as just another imperial folly, the way we now remember the Spanish-American War or the doomed British invasions of Afghanistan. But that will take a very long time, and it will never pass as vindication.

During his March 7th “book” tour on C-span, Horowitz claimed that college professors only work five hours a week. God knows where he gets his evidence for yet one more lie on national television. If any of you know any of these institutions where I may work 8 months a year, five hours a week, please contact me directly.

Marty Kaplan says Bush & Co."want to prove to the press corps that it's unfair to demonize the President as a liar, ridicule him as an ignoramus, stigmatize him as being in a bubble. They want the Big Feet of the Washington Press corps to think this: If the President can thrust and parry with someone as smart and skeptical as I am, then surely he can't be as deluded as I thought."

The proto-fascist mini-state of Massoud Barzani in Arbil [Irbil], northern Iraq, has sentenced an Austrian-Kurdish journalist to 18 months in prison for criticizing Massoud Barzani.

Barzani last allied with Saddam Hussein against fellow Kurds as late as 1996, only a decade ago. And you can't criticize him?

If Syria or Iran had done this (not that they don't), there would have been a huge squeal of outrage from the American right. I challenge Instapundit, Andrew Sullivan, and Christopher Hitchens to intervene effectively to get Kamal Sayid Qadir out of Barzani's jail. Here is something all of us, left and right , can agree on, and I hope the Left blogs the hell out of it, too. Will someone please start a blog to count the days Qadir is not free?

American blood was shed saving the Kurds from Saddam, and this is not right. It is not right.

Once the public loses confidence in a president's leadership at a time of war, once they don't trust him anymore, once his credibility is sharply diminished, how does he get it back?

All hell broke loose in Iraq on Sunday, but I'm darned if I can figure out most of what happened or why. It seems possible that the US committed two major military blunders that will worsen its relationship with Iraqi political forces.

WEEK of March 20, 2006

Ronald Reagan, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill reside in the Valhalla of great communicators, but Bill Clinton and Harry Truman thrived as mere mortals, not only connecting with the mythic" common man" but somehow bonding to them. George Bush joined that class in Wheeling on Wednesday.

HISTORICAL amnesia has always been with us: we just keep forgetting we have it. How is it that societies can block out or deny whole chunks of their past for which there may be cartloads', libraries', mass graves' worth of reminders? Maybe this kind of knowing and not-knowing is a necessary thing for a people's sanity: in order to move toward some decent future, we have to turn our gaze away. There are, of course, nastier possibilities.

A Third Term for Bush: Make Condi veep. Move Cheney to defense. And Rove? Why, party chairman, of course.

Over the last four years, the FBI has repeatedly spied on the Thomas Merton Center, a Catholic peace organization in Pittsburgh. The American Civil Liberties Union made the case public last week, with documentation. One 2002 FBI memo defined the center as ''a left-wing organization advocating, among many political causes, pacifism." Oh my. I confess that I felt a little light-headed on reading this news; déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra would say.

The Thomas Merton Center, named for the great Trappist monk, was an antiwar beacon of hope beginning in the early 1970s, and it was a target of FBI harassment even then. Unlike most Vietnam-era peace organizations, the center is still going strong. Hanging on my wall is a citation I received from the center in 1972, and last week's news makes me prouder of it than ever.

Turning our backs on postwar Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis. It would be as great a disgrace as if we had asked the liberated nations of Eastern Europe to return to Soviet domination.

WEEK of March 13, 2006

I believe it is fair to say most Republicans did not think George W. Bush was motivated to run for the presidency for the primary reason of cutting or controlling spending. But it is also fair to say that they did not think he was Lyndon B. Johnson. And that's what he's turned into.

[Elie Wiesel's] Night is the most devastating account of the Holocaust that I have ever read. It is devastating first because of its simplicity. The basic outline is this: after the Germans invade Hungary in 1944, the teenaged Eliezer and his family, religious Jews who live comfortably in their community, are deported to Auschwitz. He and his father, separated from the rest of their family, are assigned to hard labor. As the last days of the war endlessly tick by, they survive transfers, work assignments, selections, illnesses, and all the other daily threats of life in the camp, while watching their friends and neighbors fall dead all around them. In January 1945, Auschwitz is liquidated, and they march through the snow for days before being transferred to Buchenwald. There Eliezer watches his father slowly die.

It would be nice if the AHA went away. I dropped out and do not miss it. For me, the AHA has become intellectually useless and politically embarrassing. I did get a nice letter asking me why, oh why, had I let my membership lapse. I probably should have answered but I didn't want to hurt feelings by saying high dues, high conference fees, dull conventions in crappy Hilton hotels, silly political posturing, and repeated prompts to kiss the asses of people I don't like. While I was [department] chair, I had to go to the conventions. While there, I kept wondering, why can't I do something more honorable, like traveling town to town selling shoddy house siding to ill-informed elderly consumers. If only there were a way to wrest control of hiring advertising and the hideous annual meat market away from the AHA, it might disappear without anyone noticing.

When President Bush argues that"we will not lose our nerve" in Iraq, he runs the danger of falling into what Leslie H. Gelb and Richard K. Betts in their book,"The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked," called the"stakes vs. leverage" problem.

Simply put, the moment a president says that the"stakes" in Vietnam or Iraq are too high for the United States to withdraw, we lose the"leverage" necessary to make the host government undertake reforms.

Hence we see in Iraq, as in Vietnam, continued squabbling over who should be in the government, serious corruption, police misconduct and bewildering delays and disasters in the training of local forces.

Announcing that American forces will leave Iraq by a specified date may or may not lessen the insurgency. I'd be willing to bet, on the other hand, that it would help us encourage the anti-insurgent forces to shape up.

WEEK of March 6, 2006

It's been a bad couple of weeks for Aryans. The news from their favorite obsessions—archaeology and genetics—hasn't been good. First there is the conclusion of researchers that Kennewick Man was not a white man. Scientists examining K-Man's 9,000-year-old remains at Seattle's Burke Museum put that notion to bed....

Which brings us to the second bit of bad news for Aryans. The Times of London reports that evolutionary scientists have concluded that blond hair evolved rather quickly over a very short period in what is now northern Europe about 10,000 years ago. It was a rare mutation that was a sexual turn-on for male Ice Age hunters, who were in short supply because of their nasty, brutish, and short lives. Blond hair and blue eyes gave some cave gals an unfair advantage in finding rare male mates, and soon the mutation spread. (Aren't you glad science is so free of male fantasies?)

The bad news: If blond hair evolved quickly, it can also presumably disappear quickly.

I think the biggest problem we've got in the country is people don't study history anymore. People who go to school in high schools and colleges, they tend to study current events and call it history.... There are just too darn few people in our country who study history enough.

The Vice-Presidency isn’t what it used to be. No one bothered to rate the favorability of Garret Hobart, Charles Dawes, or Alben Barkley. But the clout of that once legendarily insignificant office has been growing for half a century. In his time, Walter Mondale was history’s most powerful Vice-President. So was Al Gore in his. But Cheney is an order of magnitude different. For a number of reasons—his bureaucratic ruthlessness, his domineering influence over a feckless President who seems fated to remain forever inexperienced, his will to power combined with an alleged lack of ambition to succeed his nominal boss—he is universally agreed to be one of the two most powerful officials in the executive branch of the federal government, though it is not universally agreed which one. Truly, this is the Bush-Cheney Administration, in alphabetical order. The hyphen looks like a coy equal sign—not the towhook it was for Clinton-Gore, Reagan-Bush, Carter-Mondale, and Nixon-Agnew, to say nothing of Hoover-Curtis and Roosevelt-Garner.

THE passing of Mr S. Rajaratnam is reactivating lingering censure about Singaporeans of the cash-and-carry generation knowing little about the work of the pioneers in the making of the nation. As the ranks of that generation dwindle, so would the gaping holes in Singapore's contemporary history impoverish the nation's heritage. The Straits Times ran a test in 2004 after the death of Mr Fang Chuang Pi (The Plen) - a communist emissary in the early struggle for survival - to gauge how much young people knew of the recent past. Answers offered on The Plen, Mr Rajaratnam and Dr Goh Keng Swee were distressing. There is a consistent ignorance among the very young and the older of the post-independence cohort about the milestones of the Singapore story and of its principal characters. Is the deficiency important enough to think about? Most assuredly, yes. What can be done?

The teaching of history in schools is problematic the world over for all sorts of reasons. Here, a non-utilitarian subject would not get a look-in unless it was made a compulsory examinable subject for university entrance. No Education Ministry planner would recommend such a drastic step. A programme called National Education started in 1997 was designed partly to correct young people's blind spots. As the flunk grades in random tests such as ours show, National Education is a work in progress. So much for the prescriptive approach. Now for the osmosis approach. This newspaper would argue that the thin bibliography available on the pioneer figures (not only in politics, but also in business and civic affairs) and course-setting events of the post-war period is Singaporeans' greatest intellectual impoverishment. Few retired politicians, civil service chiefs and business tycoons have the discipline to write about their experiences. Commissioned biographies need not be disdained. (If Mr Rajaratnam had been fit enough in his retirement to write a memoir, it would have made an invaluable and immensely readable account.) Academic historians publish rarely. One waits patiently for narrative accounts and critical appraisals of events dating from the Japanese invasion. Television histories are seldom made, archival records hard to access. Unless a people developed a habit of leaving published records behind, their descendants can have no sense of history. Young Singaporeans could hardly be blamed for knowing so little.

British PM Tony Blair may well believe that he will be judged by both God and historians (''God will judge me on Iraq, says Blair'', 6/3). Unfortunately for him, however, the latter are unlikely to be as forgiving as the former.

If we allowed the cause that the Confederate soldier fought for to be condemned, it would be impossible to defend their good name. You all know there's a vicious campaign against all things Southern. It's not really the flag they hate, it's not really the Confederacy -- it's us, it's the South.