Roundup: Historians' Take
This is where we place excerpts by historians writing about the news. On occasion this page also includes political scientists, economists, and law professors who write about history. We may from time to time even include English profs.
Jonathan Tremblay: Russia Tampers with Time - A History of the Time Zone
Willy Lam: Equals at Last, for Better or for Worse (China and the US)
Tom Engelhardt: This Administration Ended, Rather Than Extended, Two Wars
Maura Cunningham: The Good, the Bad, and the Boring: Barack Obama's China Trip in Review
Stephanie Coontz: 47 Years after Housing Anti-discrimination Bill ... Where Do We Stand Today?
Victor Davis Hanson: Why Obama’s America seems so self-centered?
Timothy Garton Ash: Beyond Berlin: Europe's new chapter starts now
Yuki Tanaka: Tokyo, Washington and the Missing Nuclear Agreements
Larry Berman and Edward Miller: Obama, learn the lessons of Vietnam -- from JFK, not LBJ
Alfred W. McCoy: How America's Wars Are Systematically Destroying Our Liberties
Jonathan Tremblay: Russia Tampers with Time - A History of the Time Zone
Source: The End is Coming (History Blog) (11-19-09)
[Jonathan Tremblay is a historian and is currently an intern for the History News Network]
Russian president Dmitry Medvedev recently announced at a conference that his country had too many time zones. From their current 11, Medvedev would like to standardize them all into 4 accessible time zones for the benefit of the Russian people, businesses and regional politics. Subsequent uproar, locally and internationally, has centered around one crucial question: would this change be truly a useful shift for the people and the economy of the country or is it simply a political whim aimed to strengthen the power and standing of the Kremlin?
Firstly, there are several difficulties of implementation and practicality that would be immediately obvious with such a change. There of course would be the problem that the sun wouldn’t necessarily obey the edicts of Moscow and may simply rise around 3:45 in the morning in some places and at 9:30 in others. The other immediate difficulty is that of acceptance. Medvedev can announce the change, have it diffused through television and newspaper but it is not until everybody has been informed that this change can take place. Consequently, it will be no easy task to reach everyone from the Ural mountains to inner Siberia and over to the very last eastern city of Magadan bordering Alaska (and Sarah Palin’s house presumably*).
Despite these difficulties and assuming everyone would be on board, perhaps the proposed change would be as beneficial as the president has claimed. Medvedev affirms that business with Europe would be greatly improved and that business hours in Russia would now coincide whereas the business day in the east used to close hours before the business day of the west would open. President Medvedev also cites a stronger rapport with local governments, keeping in mind that Russia is governed in a highly centralized manner but that many provinces have to operate while Moscow sleeps. “It could explain why Russia has so many problems with governance” Medvedev says about the current 11 hour difference, surely corruption and organized crime have a part to play in it too but Medvedev affirms the time shift will change everything for the better. That being said, there doesn’t seem to be any incentive for the majority of Russia’s rural population. Business and governance are certainly important but it is the poorest and least-involved of farmers that will have to start cultivating fields for hours in the dark.
Indeed, Mr. Medvedev may be thinking that the people were the prime factor when we devised our time zones in the first place. He would be wrong to think so; the time zones were motivated by, like in the Russian case, a speculation in favour of business and governance. Before 1929, sundials mostly indicated the “correct time” based on solar position for each city and village. This meant that everyone on earth got up at precisely 7 AM with the sun but it also meant that neighbouring cities were minutes apart in time. The invention of the locomotive, railway system and advanced telecommunications made the whole endeavour obsolete and a standardized measure needed to be adopted. Thus, following 1929 most nations adopted the system based on Greenwich Mean Time that delimited time zones based on Longitude and which made international communications and business possible. It came with the concept of Daylight Savings time introduced formerly in 1916. This was actually a wartime measure to conserve coal but it stuck nonetheless and many of us contend with it twice a year thinking that productivity or comfortable living may have been the point of it. With tweaks here and there, we now have 40 time zones around the world, very few of which have the people, much less solar position, in mind.
Why 40? Well, 24 would make more sense but over the years, many governments have used the intangible concept for political legitimacy and power. Afghanistan runs 30 minutes ahead of its neighbours and Nepal even runs 15 minutes faster than the actual time zone it was given. 15 minutes don’t help anyone, it may very well help business and governance in some small way I can’t see but no Nepalese goat farmer is better off this way.
Political whim was our second option for this proposed change in Russia and there are indeed a few examples of this in History. In 1949 for example, to legitimize the communist leadership of China and to prove the supremacy of the Chinese Communist Party over time itself, the nation’s five time zones were unified into one. This single hour is of course the one that is correct on a solar level only with Beijing in the far eastern part of the country. The sun rises four hours late in Tibet but at least everyone knows Beijing and the Communist Party are the important ones.
More recently in 2005, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela moved his country’s time 30 minutes ahead claiming that it would make his population more productive. This makes no sense once we realise that he didn’t create 30 more minutes of time during the 24-hour day, he simply shifted around the time of sunrise and sunset. With this he showed that he had supreme power over the governance of Venezuela, this, despite the opposition of the United-States to his socialist leanings.
Jonathan Betts of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England summarises the political motivation of time zone tampering as such: “It is an ultimate statement of power to show your people that you have control over nature in this way.”
Other analysts even claim that President Medvedev just threw this crazy notion into a conference where he had to announce some very unpopular measures. He only wanted to distract people and has no intention of even proposing this measure in government that would eventually cost millions in implementation. Touché Mr. Medvedev, touché.
Willy Lam: Equals at Last, for Better or for Worse (China and the US)
Source: NYT (11-18-09)
[Willy Lam is a professor of China studies at Akita International University, Japan, and an adjunct professor of history at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.]
While no breakthroughs came out of the Barack Obama-Hu Jintao summit meeting, the U.S. president’s maiden trip to China will go down in history as a pivotal event in the relations between the two most powerful countries of the 21st century.
For the first time, the leaders of the United States and China talked as equals. And the rough parity between an apparently declining superpower and a fast-rising quasi-superpower has major global implications for issues including regional security, nuclear proliferation, trade, climate change and human rights.
The problem is that while its new-found power has emboldened Beijing to assume a much higher profile in world affairs, the Chinese Communist Party leadership has a radically different interpretation from the United States of what China’s international role or responsibility should be...
... These positive aspects aside, the summit has reinforced the fact that China will use its clout to advance its agenda — not America’s. It is clearer than ever that for Beijing, strategic and business ties with its major allies come first.
Unfortunately for the Obama administration, this means that when it comes to cooperating to halt nuclear proliferation, the U.S. and its allies should not assume that Beijing will ever play hardball with either Pyongyang or Tehran.
A key reason why Mr. Obama has adopted a conciliatory stance toward Beijing — for example, snubbing the Dalai Lama last month — is that Washington hopes China will use its vast influence with North Korea and Iran to prod the two pariah states toward denuclearization...
Tom Engelhardt: This Administration Ended, Rather Than Extended, Two Wars
Source: TomDispatch (Website of Tom Engelhardt) (11-19-09)
[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.]
The Afghan Speech Obama Should Give
Sure, the quote in the over-title is only my fantasy. No one in Washington -- no less President Obama -- ever said, "This administration ended, rather than extended, two wars," and right now, it looks as if no one in an official capacity is likely to do so any time soon. It's common knowledge that a president -- but above all a Democratic president -- who tried to de-escalate a war like the one now expanding in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan, and withdraw American troops, would be so much domestic political dead meat.
This everyday bit of engrained Washington wisdom is, in fact, based on not a shred of evidence in the historical record. We do, however, know something about what could happen to a president who escalated a counterinsurgency war: Lyndon Johnson comes to mind for expanding his inherited war in Vietnam out of fear that he would be labeled the president who "lost" that country to the communists (as Harry Truman had supposedly "lost" China). And then there was Vice President Hubert Humphrey who -- incapable of rejecting Johnson's war policy -- lost the 1968 election to Richard Nixon, a candidate pushing a fraudulent "peace with honor" formula for downsizing the war.
Still, we have no evidence about how American voters would deal with a president who didn't take the Johnson approach to a losing war. The only example might be John F. Kennedy, who reputedly pushed back against escalatory advice over Vietnam, and certainly did so against his military high command during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In both cases, however, he acted in private, offering quite a different face to the world.
We know that there would be those on the right, and quite a few war-fightin' liberals as well, who would go nuclear over any presidential minus option in Afghanistan. Many of them will, in fact, do so over anything less than the McChrystal plan anyway. And we know that a media storm would certainly follow. But when it comes to how voters would react, especially at a moment when unhappiness with the Afghan War (as well as the president's handling of it) is on the rise, there is no historical evidence.
Sometime in the reasonably near future, President Obama will undoubtedly address the American people on whatever decision he makes about the war in Afghanistan. Every sign indicates that he will hew to Washington's political wisdom about what a war president can do in this country.
Ever since late September when someone leaked Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal's report to the president on the disastrous situation in Afghanistan and the counterinsurgency war he wants to wage there, we've been all but living inside Obama's endless comprehensive review of war strategy. After all, we get daily reports from "the front," largely in the form of a flood of leaks to the media, on just what's being considered -- from General McChrystal's estimated troop escalation numbers, to Ambassador Karl Eikenberry's private cables to the president suggesting no more troops be sent, to recent outbursts by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the president decrying all the leaks and rumors.
This, of course, is what happens when your deliberations drag out over months while the key players, military and civilian, jostle, jockey, and elbow each other for advantage. In these last weeks, we've grown accustomed to previously esoteric terms like the "hybrid option" and "counterterrorism-plus." While we don't know what exactly is going through Obama's mind, or just when or in what form he will address us, we do know something about what his conclusions are likely to be.
While there may be "off-ramps" and an "end game" for the Afghan War lurking somewhere in the distance in his plan, we know, as a start, that he's not going to recommend a minus option. We have long been assured that any proposals for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan were never "on the table." And despite Ambassador Eikenberry's near zero-option position, we also know that the president is likely to choose some form of military escalation (even if these days, unlike in the Vietnam era, the word used is usually "surge"). We don't know how many U.S. troops will be involved or whether they will be weighted toward trainers and advisors or combat forces, but it seems clear that some will be sent. It's not for nothing that the Pentagon is ramping up new Afghan bases and reinforcing old ones.
Undoubtedly, the President's speechwriters are already preparing the text for his Afghan... well, we don't really know whether it will be "remarks," an announcement as part of a press conference, or a more formal address to the American people. In any case, we -- the rest of us -- have had all the disadvantages of essentially being in on the president's councils, and none of the advantages of offering our own advice. But I don't see why we shouldn't weigh in. Personally, I prefer not to leave the process to his speechwriters and advisors.
What follows, then, is my version of the president's Afghan announcement. I've imagined it as a challenging prime-time address to the American people. Certainly, the subject is important enough for such an address, even if the last time Obama did this, in March, it was via an unannounced appearance on a Friday morning. So here's my President Obama -- in, I hope, something like his voice -- doing what no American president has yet done. Sit down, turn on your TV, and see what you think. Tom
The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
A New Way Forward:
The President's Address to the American People on Afghan Strategy
Oval Office
For Immediate Release
December 2nd
8:01 P.M. EDT
My fellow Americans,
On March 28th, I outlined what I called a "comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan." It was ambitious. It was also an attempt to fulfill a campaign promise that was heartfelt. I believed -- and still believe -- that, in invading Iraq, a war this administration is now ending, we took our eye off Afghanistan. Our well-being and safety, as well as that of the Afghan people, suffered for it.
I suggested then that the situation in Afghanistan was already "perilous." I announced that we would be sending 17,000 more American soldiers into that war zone, as well as 4,000 trainers and advisors whose job would be to increase the size of the Afghan security forces so that they could someday take the lead in securing their own country. There could be no more serious decision for an American president.
Eight months have passed since that day. This evening, after a comprehensive policy review of our options in that region that has involved commanders in the field, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Security Advisor James Jones, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden, top intelligence and State Department officials and key ambassadors, special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, and experts from inside and outside this administration, I have a very different kind of announcement to make.
I plan to speak to you tonight with the frankness Americans deserve from their president. I've recently noted a number of pundits who suggest that my task here should be to reassure you about Afghanistan. I don't agree. What you need is the unvarnished truth just as it's been given to me. We all need to face a tough situation, as Americans have done so many times in the past, with our eyes wide open. It doesn't pay for a president or a people to fake it or, for that matter, to kick the can of a difficult decision down the road, especially when the lives of American troops are at stake.
During the presidential campaign I called Afghanistan "the right war." Let me say this: with the full information resources of the American presidency at my fingertips, I no longer believe that to be the case. I know a president isn't supposed to say such things, but he, too, should have the flexibility to change his mind. In fact, more than most people, it's important that he do so based on the best information available. No false pride or political calculation should keep him from that.
And the best information available to me on the situation in Afghanistan is sobering. It doesn't matter whether you are listening to our war commander, General Stanley McChrystal, who, as press reports have indicated, believes that with approximately 80,000 more troops -- which we essentially don't have available -- there would be a reasonable chance of conducting a successful counterinsurgency war against the Taliban, or our ambassador to that country, Karl Eikenberry, a former general with significant experience there, who believes we shouldn't send another soldier at present. All agree on the following seven points:
1. We have no partner in Afghanistan. The control of the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai hardly extends beyond the embattled capital of Kabul. He himself has just been returned to office in a presidential election in which voting fraud on an almost unimaginably large scale was the order of the day. His administration is believed to have lost all credibility with the Afghan people.
2. Afghanistan floats in a culture of corruption. This includes President Karzai's administration up to its highest levels and also the warlords who control various areas and, like the Taliban insurgency, are to some degree dependent for their financing on opium, which the country produces in staggering quantities. Afghanistan, in fact, is not only a narco-state, but the leading narco-state on the planet.
3. Despite billions of dollars of American money poured into training the Afghan security forces, the army is notoriously understrength and largely ineffective; the police forces are riddled with corruption and held in contempt by most of the populace.
4. The Taliban insurgency is spreading and gaining support largely because the Karzai regime has been so thoroughly discredited, the Afghan police and courts are so ineffective and corrupt, and reconstruction funds so badly misspent. Under these circumstances, American and NATO forces increasingly look like an army of occupation, and more of them are only likely to solidify this impression.
5. Al-Qaeda is no longer a significant factor in Afghanistan. The best intelligence available to me indicates -- and again, whatever their disagreements, all my advisors agree on this -- that there may be perhaps 100 al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan and another 300 in neighboring Pakistan. As I said in March, our goal has been to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and on this we have, especially recently, been successful. Osama bin Laden, of course, remains at large, and his terrorist organization is still a danger to us, but not a $100 billion-plus danger.
6. Our war in Afghanistan has become the military equivalent of a massive bail-out of a firm determined to fail. Simply to send another 40,000 troops to Afghanistan would, my advisors estimate, cost $40-$54 billion extra dollars; eighty thousand troops, more than $80 billion. Sending more trainers and advisors in an effort to double the size of the Afghan security forces, as many have suggested, would cost another estimated $10 billion a year. These figures are over and above the present projected annual costs of the war -- $65 billion -- and would ensure that the American people will be spending $100 billion a year or more on this war, probably for years to come. Simply put, this is not money we can afford to squander on a failing war thousands of miles from home.
7. Our all-volunteer military has for years now shouldered the burden of our two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if we were capable of sending 40,000-80,000 more troops to Afghanistan, they would without question be servicepeople on their second, third, fourth, or even fifth tours of duty. A military, even the best in the world, wears down under this sort of stress and pressure.
These seven points have been weighing on my mind over the last weeks as we've deliberated on the right course to take. Tonight, in response to the realities of Afghanistan as I've just described them to you, I've put aside all the subjects that ordinarily obsess Washington, especially whether an American president can reverse the direction of a war and still have an electoral future. That's for the American people, and them alone, to decide.
Given that, let me say as bluntly as I can that I have decided to send no more troops to Afghanistan. Beyond that, I believe it is in the national interest of the American people that this war, like the Iraq War, be drawn down. Over time, our troops and resources will be brought home in an orderly fashion, while we ensure that we provide adequate security for the men and women of our Armed Forces. Ours will be an administration that will stand or fall, as of today, on this essential position: that we ended, rather than extended, two wars.
This will, of course, take time. But I have already instructed Ambassador Eikenberry and Special Representative Holbrooke to begin discussions, however indirectly, with the Taliban insurgents for a truce in place. Before year's end, I plan to call an international conference of interested countries, including key regional partners, to help work out a way to settle this conflict. I will, in addition, soon announce a schedule for the withdrawal of the first American troops from Afghanistan.
For the counterinsurgency war that we now will not fight, there is already a path laid out. We walked down that well-mined path once in recent American memory and we know where it leads. For ending the war in another way, there is no precedent in our recent history and so no path -- only the unknown. But there is hope. Let me try to explain.
Recently, comparisons between the Vietnam War and our current conflict in Afghanistan have been legion. Let me, however, suggest a major difference between the two. When Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson faced their crises involving sending more troops into Vietnam, they and their advisors had little to rely on in the American record. They, in a sense, faced the darkness of the unknown as they made their choices. The same is not true of us.
In the White House, for instance, a number of us have been reading a book on how the U.S. got itself ever more disastrously involved in the Vietnam War. We have history to guide us here. We know what happens in counterinsurgency campaigns. We have the experience of Vietnam as a landmark on the trail behind us. And if that weren't enough, of course, we have the path to defeat already well cleared by the Russians in their Afghan fiasco of the 1980s, when they had just as many troops in the field as we would have if I had chosen to send those extra 40,000 Americans. That is the known.
On the other hand, peering down the path of de-escalation, all we can see is darkness. Nothing like this has been tried before in Washington. But I firmly believe that this, too, is deeply in the American grain. American immigrants, as well as slaves, traveled to this country as if into the darkness of the unknown. Americans have long braved the unknown in all sorts of ways.
To present this more formulaically, if we sent the troops and trainers to Afghanistan, if we increased air strikes and tried to strengthen the Afghan Army, we basically know how things are likely to work out: not well. The war is likely to spread. The insurgents, despite many losses, are likely to grow in strength. Hatred of Americans is likely to increase. Pakistan is likely to become more destabilized.
If, however, we don't take such steps and proceed down that other path, we do not know how things will work out in Afghanistan, or how well.
We do not know how things will work out in Pakistan, or how well.
That is hardly surprising, since we do not know what it means to end such a war now.
But we must not be scared. America will not -- of this, as your president, I am convinced -- be a safer nation if it spends many hundreds of billions of dollars over many years, essentially bankrupting itself and exhausting its military on what looks increasingly like an unwinnable war. This is not the way to safety, but to national penury -- and I am unwilling to preside over an America heading in that direction.
Let me say again that the unknown path, the path into the wilderness, couldn't be more American. We have always been willing to strike out for ourselves where others would not go. That, too, is in the best American tradition.
It is, of course, a perilous thing to predict the future, but in the Afghanistan/Pakistan region, war has visibly only spread war. The beginning of a negotiated peace may have a similarly powerful effect, but in the opposite direction. It may actually take the wind out of the sails of the insurgents on both sides of the Afghan/Pakistan border. It may actually encourage forces in both countries with which we might be more comfortable to step to the fore.
Certainly, we will do our best to lead the way with any aid or advice we can offer toward a future peaceful Afghanistan and a future peaceful Pakistan. In the meantime, I plan to ask Congress to take some of the savings from our two wars winding down and put them into a genuine jobs program for the American people.
The way to safety in our world is, I believe, to secure our borders against those who would harm us, and to put Americans back to work. With this in mind, next month I've called for a White House Jobs Summit, which I plan to chair. And there I will suggest that, as a start, and only as a start, we look at two programs that were not only popular across the political spectrum in the desperate years of the Great Depression, but were remembered fondly long after by those who took part in them -- the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration. These basic programs put millions of Americans back to work on public projects that mattered to this nation and saved families, lives, and souls.
We cannot afford a failing war in Afghanistan and a 10.2% official unemployment rate at home. We cannot live with two Americas, one for Wall Street and one for everyone else. This is not the path to American safety.
As president, I retain the right to strike at al-Qaeda or other terrorists who mean us imminent harm, no matter where they may be, including Afghanistan. I would never deny that there are dangers in the approach I suggest today, but when have Americans ever been averse to danger, or to a challenge either? I cannot believe we will be now.
It's time for change. I know that not all Americans will agree with me and that some will be upset by the approach I am now determined to follow. I expect anger and debate. I take full responsibility for whatever may result from this policy departure. Believe me, the buck stops here, but I am convinced that this is the way forward for our country in war and peace, at home and abroad.
I thank you for your time and attention. Goodnight and God bless America.
END 8:35 P.M. EDT
Harvey J. Kaye: Palin's Unlikely Hero
Source: The Daily Beast (11-17-09)
[Harvey J. Kaye is the Ben & Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Social change and Development at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. He is currently writing The Four Freedoms and the Promise of America.]
In Sarah Palin’s blockbuster new memoir, Going Rogue, the former Alaska governor quotes from Thomas Paine, but she’s not the first conservative to embrace one of America’s original radicals.
For 200 years, conservatives despised Paine and scorned his memory. And we can understand why. Through his revolutionary pamphlets Common Sense and The Crisis—and words such as “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth,” “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” and “These are the times that try men’s souls”—he turned Americans into radicals.
And yet, ever since liberal-turned-conservative Ronald Reagan quoted Paine’s “We have it in our power to begin the world over again” at the 1980 Republican National Convention, conservatives have become Paine’s greatest champions. Just this year came Bob Basso’s YouTube videos “The Second American Revolution” and “We the People,” Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine, Newt Gingrich’s novel of the American Revolution, To Try Men’s Souls, and now Palin’s Going Rogue.
Eager to appeal not just to reactionaries but also to anxious middle-class Americans, today’s conservatives enthusiastically harness Paine’s scathing assaults on royal and aristocratic tyranny and privilege and his grand projections of America’s prospects and possibilities if liberated from the British state’s imposts and controls. Conservatives committed to cutting taxes, limiting regulation, and blocking new public initiatives like national health care and the Employee Free Choice Act, if not actually reversing the progressive advances of the 1930s and 1960s, especially love to recite his attack on existing governments: “Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil.”
Of course Basso, Beck, Gingrich, and Palin do differ in their efforts. Purporting to channel Paine’s patriotism and anti-British revolutionary rage, Basso rails against the past generation’s celebration of American diversity, arguing for, among other things, English-only laws and immigration controls. Claiming Paine’s anti-statist inspiration, Beck vehemently warns against the new cadres of progressives who would raise taxes, grow government, and redistribute wealth. And in his—admittedly successful—retelling of the “miracle” at the Christmas night 1776 Battle of Trenton, Gingrich essentially puts into story form the poetic line of Continental Army chaplain Joel Barlow: “Without the pen of Paine, Washington’s sword would have been wielded in vain.”
Conservatives seem to adore Paine, but have they really embraced him? Hardly. Basso, Beck, Gingrich, and Palin do no more than their hero Reagan did. Instead of trying to bury Paine’s life and labors, they now are trying to appropriate and render a version of them that they can use to counter his persistent radical-democratic memory and legacy, a task made all the more urgent by the 2008 elections. Conservatives have changed their tune about Paine, but their ambitions remain what they have always been—to constrain or control, and ultimately discharge, the democratic impulse that Paine inscribed in American life in 1776, an impulse that, contrary to the best efforts of powerful and propertied conservatives and reactionaries, has propelled generations of progressive movements and campaigns to extend and deepen American freedom, equality, and democracy.
Struck by America’s magnificent possibilities, and moved by the spirit and determination of its people to resist British authority, the English immigrant Paine not only emboldened Americans to turn their colonial rebellion into a war for independence. He also defined the nation-to-be in a democratically expansive and progressive fashion—which included a celebration of American diversity and a vigorous call to both separate church and state and make the country “an asylum for mankind.” All of this was just the beginning: Envisioning an Atlantic democratic revolution, he went on to apply his pen to European struggles. In Rights of Man he defended the French Revolution, challenged Britain’s monarchical order, and outlined a social security system to address the economic inequalities that made life oppressive for working people. In The Age of Reason, he lambasted the claims of Scripture and the power of churches. And in Agrarian Justice, he proposed taxing the landed rich to provide grants to young people and pensions to the elderly.
Fearing the popular appeal of Paine’s works, the powerful, propertied, and pious naturally sought to suppress his memory and limit the influence of his ideas. But they could not. His contributions were too fundamental and his progressive vision too firmly imbued in the American spirit. Moreover, there were those who would not allow Paine’s life and labors to be forgotten. Refusing to accept that history had come to an end, freethinkers, abolitionists, suffragists, anarchists, populists, socialists, labor organizers, and community, civil-rights, and anti-war activists drew inspiration and ideas from Paine’s works, renewed his presence in American life, and served as the prophetic memory of his radical-democratic vision.
Of course, the right-wingers’ “Paine” just doesn’t make historical sense. Paine was a freedom-loving radical and social democrat whose writings clearly attest to his progressive commitments and aspirations. He would never have supported policies and programs that place corporations and the rich before working people and the public good, undermine the wall separating church and state, seek to homogenize Americans and punish immigrants, and give the state an unlimited license to spy on its own citizens.
Nevertheless, as much as we can debunk the conservatives’ use and abuse of America’s Painite revolutionary heritage, it is not enough. The problem is not simply that the right is poaching and twisting Paine for its own ends. That is to be expected. Far more so, it’s that they apparently continue to appreciate what liberals and leftists, of all people, seem to have lost sight of: Americans remain radicals at heart.
Barack Obama quoted Paine in his inaugural address last January: “Let it be told to the future world… that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive... that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].” But while conservatives have been trotting out and promoting their eviscerated renditions of Paine and the American spirit, Obama didn’t even mention Paine’s name when he spoke his words from The Crisis.. .and so far it seems that it represented more than a simple omission.
Maura Cunningham: The Good, the Bad, and the Boring: Barack Obama's China Trip in Review
Source: The China Beat (11-19-09)
[Maura Cunningham is the associate editor of China Beat and a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine.]
Barack Obama spent fewer than three days in China, but his first trip there has been a week-long story in the news world, as countless journalists, academics, and pundits have shared their thoughts about what this visit could do for U.S.-China relations. Now that the president has left the PRC, how did it all go? Obama Administration officials are speaking highly of it, claiming that Obama was forceful in private meetings with Hu Jintao and the rest of the Chinese leadership. And perhaps the devil is in the details, as political scientist David Shambaugh says, speaking favorably of the joint statement of cooperation that Obama and Hu issued on Tuesday, which he thinks sets a positive tone for future Sino-U.S. relations.
However, most of us weren’t privy to the Obama-Hu conversations, and my reading of the joint statement is somewhat more pessimistic than Shambaugh’s. On the whole, I’d say that Obama’s trip was anti-climactic, and even a bit disappointing. While most commentators didn’t really expect that Obama would accomplish all that much during his time in China, a survey of what happened on the trip, and what’s been written about it, reinforces the general sense among China watchers that very little got done. Below, a review of Obama-in-China, both the trip itself and the discussion surrounding it:
The Good:
1. The town hall meeting in Shanghai took place on Monday as planned. At one point last week, we were hearing stories that both American and Chinese officials had reservations about the event, and there were rumors that it might be canceled due to conflicts over who could attend and whether or not the meeting would be broadcast in China. Thanks to what I assume was a weekend full of closed-door negotiations, the town hall went ahead as scheduled. If it hadn’t, Obama’s trip would have been even less interesting — and both sides would have appeared unwilling to cooperate with the other. As for Obama’s performance in the town hall meeting itself . . . well, see below for more, under “The Bad.”
2. My Google Reader has been full of great writing this week. A trip like Obama’s generates a lot of press, and those of us in the China field have been feasting on it. A few of the pieces I like the most are Isabel Hilton, on internet censorship in China (hat tip to China Digital Times); Paul French, comparing Obama’s arrival in Shanghai to that of Ulysses S. Grant when he visited China in the late 1870s; and all of the short takes that Evan Osnos has posted at his New Yorker blog. Yale Global Online has two thoughtful pieces about Obama in Asia, and there are some interesting essays at The Daily Beast — one by Peter Beinart on the shifting U.S.-China dynamics that few people seem to have noticed, and another by Richard Wolffe summing up “Obama’s Bad Trip.”
3. While nothing spectacular happened, at least the trip went smoothly. Sometimes, that’s enough — we shouldn’t discount the importance of maintaining the status quo, which I think is more or less what Obama managed to do on his first visit to China. Ian Johnson speaks in a video at the Wall Street Journal’s site about the somewhat ambiguous nature of Obama’s relationship with the Chinese leadership, but also points to the fact that the two sides have agreed on a “framework” for future cooperation on some of the world’s biggest issues. Obama has either three or seven more years to move the U.S.-China relationship forward, and the uneventful nature of his visit means that’s still a possibility.
The Bad
The town hall meeting itself (video of the full event available at the White House website). My feelings about the town hall were initially somewhat mixed, but I’ve come down on the side of being less than impressed. Although I knew before the meeting that it was going to be a carefully scripted affair, and therefore didn’t expect anything terribly interesting to occur, I still think it could have gone better. I cringed when Obama quoted a “Chinese proverb” in his opening remarks — really, isn’t there a way to ban this tired speechwriting standby? — and groaned when he called on Ambassador Jon Huntsman to ask a painfully pointed question about internet censorship. Given that the “should we be able to use Twitter freely?” query was pre-planned, Obama showed a surprising inability to answer it in a coherent manner. “I’m a big supporter of non-censorship” probably wasn’t the sound bite that Obama wanted to stand out from the hour-long town hall, but it’s representative of the stilted manner in which he tiptoed around issues. It was clear, I thought, that Obama wanted to talk about topics like Tibet and human rights, but held himself back from taking a hard stance on anything that could cause a confrontation with his Chinese counterparts.
The Boring:
Pretty much everything else. The most potentially dramatic event, the town hall meeting, occurred on Day 1 of Obama’s trip; the rest of his time in China was divided between meetings with state leaders and sightseeing at the standard can’t-miss spots, the Forbidden City and the Great Wall.
In the absence of interesting stories, the trivial took over. A few examples: The students who attended the town hall were hand-picked by Communist Party officials — maybe I’m a cynic, but I never expected otherwise. Obama sped through his tour of the Forbidden City — well, he’s a busy man. And Jon Huntsman called those of us who aspire to be China experts “morons.” I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that joke sounded funnier in his head.
As Obama wraps up his Asian tour and heads back to the U.S., what will be remembered about this first China trip? Most likely, the answer is “nothing.” There weren’t any standout moments — good or bad — and Obama missed several opportunities to send a clear message to activists in China that he supports their work (check out this “Room for Debate” blog at the New York Times for more on that issue). Instead, he seemed to drift genially from one staged event to the next, politely toured a few famous national landmarks, and met with his half-brother for five minutes.
Few know what was discussed in private meetings with Chinese leaders, but no impressive public announcements emerged to indicate that the U.S. and China will be collaborating on anything major in the coming years. Perhaps, however, this was the Obama Administration’s goal all along: to pull off a short, polite visit that didn’t make any waves but didn’t raise any problems in the Sino-U.S. relationship, either. If that’s the case, mission accomplished.
Jim Sleeper: Stanley McChrystal's War on Poverty
Source: Dissent Magazine (11-12-09)
[Jim Sleeper, a writer and teacher on American civic culture and politics and a lecturer in political science at Yale, is the author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (W.W. Norton, 1990) and Liberal Racism (Viking, 1997, Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).]
GENERAL STANLEY McChrystal’s recently announced counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan overturns many of the doctrines that the United States brought to Iraq in 2003 and expands others that were developed after 2006. But if it’s anything like the publicity its neoconservative cheerleaders are giving it, it has the possibility of resurrecting a set of policies that failed not only in Vietnam but also in LBJ’s “War on Poverty.”
The biggest obstacle to the strategy isn’t the supposed invincibility of the Taliban or an American liberal failure of nerve; it is achieving McChrystal’s ambition to do in Kabul what Americans couldn’t or wouldn’t do in New Orleans.
In his recent “interim assessment” for the White House and his “counterinsurgency guidance” for the troops in Afghanistan, McChrystal rejects what the conservative foreign-policy pundit Max Boot calls the “conceit that an army can defeat an insurgency simply by killing insurgents.” Never mind that until recently that was the conceit of law-and-order conservatives and “present danger” neocons; now, McChrystal sidelines it along with the more liberal “culture of poverty” that he says characterizes NATO’s disorganized efforts in Afghanistan.
McChrystal hopes to transcend the policies of both the militarist right and the social-welfare left by expanding the war to “embrace the people,” be “a positive force in the community,” and “use local economic initiatives” to displace the insurgency. With massive new resources, his new doctrine would integrate “military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency.”
But whose government? Hamid Karzai’s has proven to corrupt as well as feckless. And America’s is responsible for a decades-long disintegration of the “actions” McChrystal mentions—a disintegration that left New Orleans patrolled by Blackwater guards in a perfect storm of unchecked global warming, failed infrastructure, corrupt politics, laissez-faire economics, and social disarray. It’s not so easy to tell what model the NATO coalition would be fighting for now.
THE FAILURE of the Bush administration’s militarized free-market fundamentalism to win hearts and minds at home or abroad may explain the neoconservatives’ leap to social engineering and subsidies for dubious characters posing as popular leaders.
For half a century conservatives have derided and defunded such strategies except when they could be billed to “national defense,” like the U.S. Interstate Highway System and the first federal student loans. Small wonder, then, that people who so recently scorned “nation-building,” “community organizing,” community policing, and public jobs are now rhapsodizing them in the name of national defense.
Here’s Max Boot, just back from Afghanistan:
Next to the combat outpost is a brand-new district center built with foreign aid money. Inside we sit down to chat with the district governor, Mohammed Yasin Lodin, a natty man with frizzy black hair and a thin mustache, and the police chief, Colonel Amanullah, who is (unusually for an Afghan) clean shaven. Yasin is overflowing with praise for the improvements wrought by the Americans.
The Americans later tell me that the governor… is doing a good job, spending far more time than he used to in the district (his family lives in Kabul) because it is now safe to do so… The Afghan soldiers and police also receive praise.
And here’s David Brooks, touting the Afghan National Solidarity Project, that helps “villages elect Community Development Councils. Western aid agencies give the councils up to $60,000 to do local projects, but it’s not the projects that matter most. It’s the creation of formal community structures. These projects are up and running in 23,000 villages.”
The results are “astonishing” and “surprising,” Boot claims; and they are outpaced only by press releases and glowing reports that read like the publicity for the inner-city programs that Richard Nixon once chided for merely “throwing money at problems.” For McChrystal, reports like those of Boot and Brooks are fruits of the “strategic communications” that are essential to “policy development, planning processes, and the execution of operations.”
The general also requests massive new resources to “fight corruption and improve the delivery of basic services such as clean water, paved roads, electricity, education, and a functioning legal system.” He wants to raise Afghan government salaries because “the notoriously low wages...are a major inducement for corruption.”
War on Poverty strategists wanted all this, too. So do American local and state governments. Right now...
Stephanie Coontz: 47 Years after Housing Anti-discrimination Bill ... Where Do We Stand Today?
Source: Council on Contemporary Families, University of Illinois at Chicago (11-18-09)
[Stephanie Coontz, Professor of History and Family Studies, The Evergreen State College; CCF's Director of Research and Public Education]
Forty-seven years ago, on November 20, 1962, President Kennedy signed Executive Order 11063, prohibiting federally-funded housing agencies from denying mortgages to any person based on their race, color, creed or national origin. Kennedy was fulfilling a campaign promise to make "one stroke of the pen" that would allow millions of black American children "to grow up in decency."
Nearly five decades later, Professor Richard Williams of Notre Dame has presented a discussion paper, attached below, to the Council on Contemporary Families, reminding family scholars about how far we had come -- and how long it took us to get there -- before the current economic crisis. By 2005, 56.2 percent of Hispanics and 49.4 percent of blacks owned their own homes, lower than the 76.1 percent home ownership rates of non-Hispanic whites, but an all time high for these historically disadvantaged groups.
Since that historic high point, however, many families have lost their homes.
* Between July 2007 and August 2009, 1.8 million homes were lost to foreclosure while another 5.2 million homes began the foreclosure process.
* One in eight mortgages is currently in foreclosure or default.
* More than two million children have already been affected by foreclosures, leading to emotional stress, depression, and often to family crisis, since school relocation is a bigger threat to school achievement and a more frequent predictor of delinquent behavior among teens than divorce.
Williams argues that unless we correct some widespread myths regarding the causes of the housing market collapse, we will not be able to resume our progress toward achieving housing security for American families once the current economic crisis subsides. For the full discussion paper, with academic references, go tohttp://www.contemporaryfamilies.org/subtemplate.php?t=briefingPapers&ext=housingdiscrimination
'One Stroke of the Pen':
The 47-year struggle to end racial discrimination in housing
A discussion paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families
by Richard Williams, University of Notre Dame
November 18, 2009
Forty-seven years ago, on November 20, 1962, President Kennedy signed Executive Order 11063, prohibiting federally-funded housing agencies from denying mortgages to any person based on their race, color, creed or national origin. Kennedy was fulfilling a campaign promise to make "one stroke of the pen" that would allow millions of black American children "to grow up in decency."
Many strokes of many other presidents' pens followed, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1968 Fair Housing Act, the 1975 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, and the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act. Yet for more than 30 years after Kennedy's order, whites were much more likely to receive home mortgage loans than blacks with the same qualifications. As late as 1996, the Federal Reserve Board of Boston found that even when two mortgage applicants were financially identical, a minority applicant was 60 percent more likely to be rejected than a comparable white applicant.
Starting around 1995, however, there were dramatic signs of change. Home ownership rates for minorities started rising rapidly enough to close some of the historic gap between minorities and whites. By 2005, 56.2 percent of Hispanics and 49.4 percent of blacks owned their own homes -- still lower than the 76.1 percent home ownership rates of non-Hispanic whites, but an all time high for these historically disadvantaged groups.
Much of this growth was due to heightened use of the Community Reinvestment Act, which encouraged depository institutions to meet the needs of borrowers in all segments of their communities consistent with safe and sound banking practices. In the 1990s, citizen groups and governmental entities increasingly used the CRA to pressure lenders to reach out to qualified borrowers who had been underserved in the past. As a result, some traditional lenders expanded their outreach efforts to minority markets, sometimes offering not only loans but home ownership programs that helped borrowers improve and manage their credit.
Today, however, there are some who argue that government efforts to promote minority home ownership caused our current economic crisis, forcing banks to lend to unqualified buyers and eventually pulling all homebuyers down. This is a misconception that could hamper future efforts to help families find secure, affordable housing.
The CRA has never required that lenders make unsound loans. Indeed, studies by the Federal Reserve Board show that the CRA has promoted safe and profitable lending to low-income markets that were underserved in the past. These studies also show that CRA-related loans to low-income borrowers have had significantly lower foreclosure rates than loans made by independent mortgage companies not covered by the act.
It was not government regulation that paved the way for the current crisis in housing but government deregulation, which increased the range of products and services that banks and other financial institutions could offer, eliminated interest rate ceilings, and greatly expanded the geographical areas in which individual companies could operate. As a result, the banking industry became far more competitive, attracting new investors, speculators, and financial institutions. There were some positive results of such competition, of course, but there were also some very negative ones. The proportion of loans that were subject to the requirements of the CRA and other regulatory safeguards decreased.
Historically, there had been more or less only one mortgage rate for all borrowers. A borrower was either granted a loan at that rate, or the loan was denied. Starting in the 1990s however, as new lenders proliferated, borrowers who feared they could not get a conventional loan often found that subprime lenders would give them home loans, though at less favorable terms than traditional banks and with higher interest rates. Partly because of neglect by traditional lenders and partly because of the intense marketing efforts subprime lenders made in low income and minority neighborhoods, minorities were especially likely to end up with higher priced loans - even though as many as half of subprime borrowers had credit scores that would have qualified them for lower-cost conventional loans.
Meanwhile, the climate encouraged by deregulation and speculation led to the development of several other new and risky practices targeted toward both higher-income and lower-income borrowers alike. These included no-doc loans, where borrowers were not required to provide proof of income, and interest-only loans, where the principal was not paid down. Further encouraging irresponsible behavior by lenders was the fact that the maker of a loan often did not have to bear the consequences if that loan defaulted. By selling and reselling loans, lenders could collect fees and then pass the risks posed by questionable lending off to others.
Many of these practices were based on the assurances of financial "experts" and speculators that housing prices would continue to rise. When these assurances proved wrong, and when unemployment rates more than doubled, the current economic crisis developed.
That crisis is a major threat to the American dream, not just for minorities but for everyone.
* By the fourth quarter of 2008, real home equity was 41 percent lower than it had been at its peak a few years earlier, according to estimates by The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.
* Between July 2007 and August 2009, 1.8 million homes were lost to foreclosure while another 5.2 million homes began the foreclosure process. One in eight mortgages is currently in foreclosure or default.
* Between 2004 and 2008, African American home ownership fell from 49.4 percent to 47.5 percent, a 1.9 percentage point decline. The Latino home ownership rate fell even more, from 56.2 percent to 53.6 percent, a decline of 2.6 percentage points. Non-Hispanic whites also suffered, as home ownership rates fell from 76.1 percent to 74.9 percent, a 1.2 percentage point drop.
It would be tragic if the economic problems caused by irresponsible lending practices caused us to abandon efforts to end discrimination against minorities and to increase residential security for all Americans. New home ownership can still be encouraged by fair interest rates and by programs designed to help people manage their finances. For those who cannot or should not become homeowners, the provision of quality affordable rental housing should be a top priority. Children, families, and communities all fare better when neighborhoods have a stable core of residents who take pride in their homes and have hope for their future.
For further information, contact Richard Williams, University of Notre Dame Dept of Sociology
OFFICE: (574)631-6668, (574)631-6463
HOME: (574)289-5227; CELL: (574) 360-1017
EMAIL: Richard.A.Williams.5@ND.Edu
For information on how the physical and mental health of low-income parents and their children are further compromised by the current economic crisis and on the impact of the housing crisis on families, contact Linda Burton, James B. Duke Professor of Sociology, Duke University.lburton@soc.duke.edu; (919) 660-5609.
For the social-psychological effects of income loss, unemployment, and housing insecurity on marriage and children, contact Dr. Joshua Coleman, psychologist and Co-Chair, Council on Contemporary Families.drjoshuacoleman@comcast.net; (510) 547-6500.
On the risks associated with home and school relocation for families, contact Stephanie Coontz, Professor of History and Family Studies, The Evergreen State College; coontzs@msn.com; 360 352-8117.
About CCF: The Council on Contemporary Families is a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to providing the press and public with the latest research and best-practice findings about American families. Our members include demographers, economists, family therapists, historians, political scientists, psychologists, social workers, sociologists, as well as other family social scientists and practitioners. Founded in 1996 and based at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Council's mission is to enhance the national understanding of how and why contemporary families are changing, what needs and challenges they face, and how these needs can best be met.
To learn more about other briefing papers and about our April 17-19 Conference on Recent Research and Best Practice Findings, including complimentary press passes for journalists, contact Stephanie Coontz, CCF's Director of Research and Public Education: coontzs@msn.com.
Victor Davis Hanson: Why Obama’s America seems so self-centered?
Source: Private Papers (Website of Victor David Hanson) (11-18-09)
[Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture.]
The liberal writ was that a strutting “bring ’em on” George W. Bush for eight years did what he pleased on the international scene. His “unilateral” America supposedly did not consult with either allies or international organizations, as he rammed through democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan. President Bush’s “my way or the highway” personal credo resulted in an America alone.
Obama, of course, was hailed as the multifaceted antidote to all that. The new nontraditional America would reach out to the world. We would now listen rather than lecture. This was a welcome reflection of Barack Obama’s own cool and tolerant approach to politics, learned as a seasoned community organizer in Chicago.
But things have not quite worked out as planned. Barack Obama to all appearances is certainly more relaxed than Bush. And he resonates abroad as a nontraditional American. Indeed, Obama is now the paradigm of America’s ongoing metamorphosis into something more like the rest of the planet.
Yet in his own way Obama projects a far more prissy, self-indulgent America than we had under Bush. And that self-centeredness seems a logical extension of the new commander-in-chief himself.
How can that be, given Obama’s well-known apologies — for everything from slavery and our treatment of Native Americans to being imperious toward Europeans and Muslims? In obsequious fashion, we have sought to assure the Russians that we won’t deploy anti-ballistic missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic. Obama has reminded the Chinese that they enjoy sovereignty over Taiwan. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, the Castro brothers, Hugo Chávez, and assorted other old enemies of the United States are suddenly considered either neutrals or friends.
It seems counterintuitive, then, to suggest that Obama’s America is increasingly self-absorbed.
Global Penitent
But consider first the nature of his apologies. America deigns to apologize to Muslims without much mention of a murderous Islamic radicalism that almost daily fuels a terrorist attack on some portion of the world’s civilian population.
Left unsaid by the global penitent is that Russia flattened Grozny and butchered hundreds of thousands of Chechens in serial wars. No need to talk of the absorption of Tibet by China or of the 70 million Chinese who were killed or starved to death under Mao. Will the adjudicator Obama not say who was at fault in Rwanda, who needs to apologize — and how?
Obama is conflicted over Hiroshima, but not so much over the millions of Chinese, Koreans, Australians, British, and Americans who were slaughtered by the legions of the Co-Prosperity Sphere — and were desperate to find a way to stop Japanese militarism.
The point is this: When Obama takes it upon himself to adjudicate, in quite ahistorical fashion, who is culpable and who not, the resulting verdicts are consistent only in terms of the president’s own Chicago-style race/class/gender politics.
Detention in Guantanamo is Bush’s transgression against the Constitution, but the incineration of terrorists and their families by judge/jury/executioner Predator drones in Waziristan is Eric Holder’s approved cosmic justice...
Victor Davis Hanson: Thoughts from the Later Republic
Source: Private Papers (website of Victor David Hanson) (11-15-09)
[Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture.]
Contrast Recent Media Coverage
The furor over Dick Cheney’s past severed involvement with Halliburton — the meowing over Bush-critic, liberal icon, ex-diplomat Peter Galbraith’s present, ongoing conflict-of-interest as profiteer and pundit/advisor involving a multimillion-dollar oil scam in Kurdistan.
The son of share-the-wealth John K. Galbraith, Galbraith Minor barnstormed the air waves in the dark days of Iraq, in solemn tones predicting the end of Iraq, why Iraq must be trisected (e.g., giving the Kurds an independent country), and in general (in two books) predicting the end of constitutional Iraq. He ritually was slamming Bush, predicting ruin — all at a time when the U.S. was trying to reassure the Iraqis we supported the territorial integrity of their country and would not abandon them. Ok, fine, well and good, it’s a free country, and pessimism is sometimes warranted.
But now we learn that a possible pay-off for opposing U.S. policy of Iraqi unity was a stake in a Kurdish oil field worth, according to some reports, a potential $100 million. (When did stone-faced diplomats and finger-in-the-wind pundits turn into Texas-style oil tycoons or Russian oilocrats?) Why did not Galbraith from the very beginning disclose his financial interests so that his readers, other diplomats, and those who consulted him might factor his profits into his prognoses?
(And what is it with these liberal utopians and money? Do they think their sniff/sniff, aristocratic disdain for a dirty coin allows them to pile them away in the basement — couldn’t Al Gore have made, to use a liberal trope, $10 million rather than a $100 million out of scaring the daylights out of Western suburban society? I think we are in the age of the solely symbolic: you buy the gas-guzzling Volvo SUV, but put an “Impeach Bush!” sticker on the back, or put a few solar panels on the roof tiles over the 10,000 square foot addition).
For all of Galbraith’s sermonizing about the Bush disaster, the hopelessness in Iraq, etc. I think the only major politician to buy into his “divide Iraq into threes, give Kurdistan its autonomy, and me an interest in an oilfield” line was, yes, Joe Biden.
Remember, after Biden was swearing that we should trisect Iraq, Obama inexplicably sent the VP over there to reassure the Iraqis of our commitment to their unity, sovereignty, and future (sort of like having Timothy Geithner oversee tax policy at Treasury or a Charles Rangel at Ways and Means).
The furor over the inept federal response to Katrina — the quiet about the current mess with the federal government’s current swine flu vaccine.
I don’t quite know to what degree, if at all, yet the federal government is culpable for the vaccine shortage, or why it was solely culpable for the Katrina mess, given that Mississippi’s local and state response averted the sort of social chaos we saw in New Orleans under its mayor and the Louisiana governor.
I do know that had Bush been President during the current vaccine furor, and had Obama presided during Katrina — well, you can again fill in the blanks. (I just talked to two doctors who said the inability to get swine flu vaccine for staff, pregnant women, etc. was quite astounding, given the promised delivery dates).
The hysteria over the decisive decision to surge in 2006-7 — the ‘reasoned’ debate over the dithering over the Afghan surge.
Where are the “General Betray Us” ads, offered at a reduced rate in the New York Times? Are we going to see an entire subculture — Michael Moore, novels, docu-dramas, comedians, etc. — slamming Obama on the war? Or, in contrast, an entire populist, in-the-streets, protest over Obama voting “present” while he goes to Copenhagen instead of meeting with Gen. McChrystal? Cannot the media see that the surge in Iraq — little public support, defections in Bush’s own party, a hostile media, demagoguery from the left, campaign distortions by the likes of Obama himself — was the far harder call than granting a troop request in Afghanistan? Why was Bush’s tough call “doomed” in a “lost” war, while Obama “present” vote seen as sober and judicious?...
Victor Davis Hanson: Is Fort Hood Really a "Tragedy?"
Source: Private Papers (website of Victor David Hanson) (11-14-09)
[Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture.]
Something has gone terribly wrong in the entire reaction to the Ft. Hood massacres, as evidenced by the media, the administration, the military authorities, and perhaps the public at large. There seems almost a dreamy disconnect from the terrible fate of the slain — as if we are innately impotent to stop such mayhem, or are above the fray and so like Platonic Guardians must remain deep in contemplation about how in theory we can persuade the Hasans to cease and desist — as if our therapeutic stance in the first place did not encourage and embolden such monsters to act...
... Bottom Line
Hasan’s cause is a vicious war to promote a 7th-century vision, ours is seen as not much of a defense of a hallowed tradition of 2,500 years under dire assault.
Something more than moral lectures?
Can we hear something more from the President than assurances that we will not rush to judgment or that Hasan will not please his god?
Is that not an insult to the American people, to suggest hours after the killings that we have to be careful, as if not to give into our innate national tendencies to form posses of vigilantes roaming the country to kill Muslims — Americans being incapable of distinguishing a Major Hasan boasting about killing infidels from a Muslim neighbor talking over the fence about the dangers of crabgrass?
How about some passion, or at least promises of a gargantuan hearing, a federal inquiry, Tailhook- or 9/11-style, to investigate how this extremist passed all sorts of red lines — starting with the promotion process and ending with questions of firearm security and use on bases, touching on immigration policy from the Middle East, FBI policies, and political correctness?
Something is needed from our military and civilian leaders other than platitudes and warnings not to blame “all Muslims” and be shock at “unimaginable” crimes — as if red-neck Americans in retaliation after September 11 had killed hundreds of Muslims in the fashion that Islamic radicals in the last 98 months have frequently targeted the innocent, or as if Major Hasan flew in from Mars and without warning shot the innocent. (How strange, given the elite rhetoric — once butchered Americans did not in mob-like fashion hunt down innocent Muslims to take out their rage, but were often sermonized to as if they were on the verge of doing just that, while after 9/11, on dozens of occasions young Muslims were caught trying to trump the 9/11 death toll, even as they were assured they were safe and protected from a possible mob-like Neanderthal America.)
So What’s Next?
Are we to be sacrificed in dribbles of twos and thirteens? The present status quo alternative of complacence is rather frightening and amoral in typically postmodern fashion. About every three months since 9/11 we have witnessed another foiled plot (23-4 by now), or a lone-wolf sort of attack on a shopping mall, Jewish center, military installation, or university campus (20 plus), whether a shooting or a run-over.
The apparent logic is that the plots will continue to be foiled (while we caricature the Bush illiberal Homeland Security policies that allow us to be so vigilant), and the lone wolves will kill someone far distant and in twos and threes, or as in the Maryland Sniper and Fort Hood cases, tens and thirteens — until another 9/11 comes around and for two to three years shocks us out of our pretensions...
Jonathan Dresner: About Obama's Bow
Source: Froginthewell (blog) (11-16-09)
[Jonathan Dresner teaches Asian and World history at Pittsburg State University and blogs at http://froginawell.net. He is an Editor at HNN.]
Via my old friend Scott Eric Kaufman I learned that President Obama’s visit to Japan was drawing criticism from the American right (I also learned that President Eisenhower bowed in public to a number of heads of state) due to Obama’s bowed greeting to Emperor Akihito.
Most of the commentary (this is an excellent roundup) hinges on whether it’s inappropriate for an American Head of State to bow to another Head of State. This is, of course, why Kaufman was noting Eisenhower’s bows, none of which were, apparently, mutual; other commenters have noted Clinton’s bow fifteen years earlier, and Nixon’s bow/handshake greeting with Emperor Hirohito. Some of the criticism is nuanced enough to note that mutual bows are appropriate greetings in Japan, but suggests that Obama’s bow was inappropriately deep and therefore servile and inappropriate.
Part of the problem in discussing this is the assumption that there is a stable protocol: Japan’s modern Imperial institution is younger than the American Republic, and interactions with other heads of state have always been somewhat improvisational. Before the Meiji Restoration, the Emperor didn’t meet heads of state. For centuries, the Emperor basically met nobody who wasn’t a member of the court aristocracy or high officials of the shogunal state: there was no public protocol except for a vague tradition that required the Emperor be above the gaze of anyone, not to be looked down upon. That tradition was revived in the Imperial era, but it wasn’t much guidance in dealing with modern crowds, photography, diplomatic visits. Even Meiji’s coronation ceremony was an innovation, purged of Chinese elements and enhanced with Shinto rituals. (See Keene, ch. 18) The first head of state to visit was Hawaiian King Kalakaua, but he was actually preceeded by a visit from former President U.S. Grant who greeted the Emperor with handshakes. Every time an aristocrat or diplomat met the Emperor, protocol had to be negotiated in advance, and it shifted over time: when and how much to bow, whether handshakes would be permitted, whether foreign women could enter the Emperor’s presence with their diplomat husbands, etc. But this wasn’t yet the great age of state visits: that doesn’t come until the 20th century, and the rise of air travel.
Before the next America presidential visit with a Japanese emperor, though, WWII intervened: the Japanese Emperor was demoted from sacred and inviolable to the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people. More importantly, perhaps, Japan became a neo-colonial extension of American power for a time (when that time ends is a matter of debate, of course) so that Presidential courtesies like Nixon’s bow were harmless to American power. By the time of Clinton’s gesture, though, Japan’s economic power was a threat to American dominance (well, with the 90s recession, not really, but pundits had spent a good portion of the ’80s talking up the Japanese threat, and the impression stuck), and the Imperial transition of 1989 took away the American sense that the Emperor was someone who had been defeated and disarmed. Even Clinton’s gesture towards a bow was too much for some, apparently: the very concept of monarchy raised spectres of pre-Revolutionary attitudes, though bowing is not necessarily a subservient act when done between equals (or by a superior) in the Japanese tradition.
Obama’s bow is a very formal one — formality and hierarchy are two different things — and in the context of a handshake. It doesn’t change the nature of the US-Japan relationship as much as the election of Japan’s new non-LDP PM, as much as the rising nationalistic culture, as much as the ongoing shifts in the economic relationship between two of the largest — and most obviously struggling — economies in the world.
Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick: The End of Chimerica
Source: NYT (11-16-09)
[Niall Ferguson, a history professor at Harvard, is the author of “The Ascent of Money.” Moritz Schularick is a professor of economic history at the Free University in Berlin.]
A few years ago we came up with the term “Chimerica” to describe the combination of the Chinese and American economies, which together had become the key driver of the global economy. With a combined 13 percent of the world’s land surface and around a quarter of its population, Chimerica nevertheless accounted for a third of global economic output and two-fifths of worldwide growth from 1998 to 2007.
We called it Chimerica for a reason: we believed this relationship was a chimera — a monstrous hybrid like the part-lion, part-goat, part-snake of legend. Now we may be witnessing the death throes of the monster. The question President Obama must consider as he flies to Asia this week is whether to slay it or to try to keep it alive.
In its heyday, Chimerica consisted largely of the combination of Chinese development, led by exports, and American overconsumption. Thanks to the Chimerican symbiosis, China was able to quadruple its gross domestic product from 2000 to 2008, raise exports by a factor of five, import Western technology and create tens of millions of manufacturing jobs for the rural poor.
For America, Chimerica meant being able to consume more and save less even while maintaining low interest rates and a stable rate of investment. Overconsumption meant that from 2000 to 2008 the United States consistently outspent its national income. Goods imported from China accounted for about a third of that overconsumption.
For a time, Chimerica seemed not a monster but a marriage made in heaven. Global trade boomed and nearly all asset prices surged. Yet, like many another marriage between a saver and a spender, Chimerica was not destined to last. The financial crisis since 2007 has put the marriage on the rocks. Correcting the economic imbalance between the United States and China — the dissolution of Chimerica — is now indispensable if equilibrium is to be restored to the world economy.
China’s economic ascent was a result of a strategy of export-led growth that followed the examples of West Germany and Japan after World War II. However, there was a key difference: China made a sustained effort to control the value of its currency, the renminbi, which resulted in a huge accumulation of reserve dollars.
As Chinese exports soared, the authorities in Beijing consistently bought dollars to avoid appreciation of their currency, pegging it at around 8.28 renminbi to the dollar from the mid-1980s to the mid-’90s. They then allowed a modest 17 percent appreciation in the three years after July 2005, only to restore the dollar peg at 6.83 when the global financial crisis intensified last year.
Intervening in the currency market served two goals for China: by keeping the renminbi from rising against the dollar, it promoted the competitiveness of Chinese exports; second, it allowed China to build up foreign currency reserves (primarily in dollars) as a cushion against the risks associated with growing financial integration, painfully illustrated by the experience of other countries in the Asian crisis of the late 1990s. The result was that by 2000 China had currency reserves of $165 billion; they now stand at $2.3 trillion, of which at least 70 percent are dollar-denominated.
This intervention caused a growing distortion in the global cost of capital, significantly reducing long-term interest rates and helping to inflate the real estate bubble in the United States, with ultimately disastrous consequences. In essence, Chimerica constituted a credit line from the People’s Republic to the United States that allowed Americans to save nothing and bet the house on ... well, the house.
Nothing like this happened in the 1950s and 1960s. At the height of postwar growth in the 1960s, West Germany and Japan increased their dollar reserves roughly in line with the American gross domestic product, keeping the ratio stable at about 1 percent before letting it move slightly higher in the early 1970s. By contrast, China’s reserves soared from the equivalent of 1 percent of America’s gross domestic product in 2000 to 5 percent in 2005 and 10 percent in 2008. By the end of this year, that figure is expected to rise to 12 percent.
The Chimerican era is drawing to a close...
Timothy Garton Ash: Beyond Berlin: Europe's new chapter starts now
Source: The Globe and Mail (11-11-09)
[Timothy Garton Ash is professor of European studies at Oxford University.]
Well, they did it beautifully. Despite the rain, I found the official celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall a genuinely moving affair. The organizers, presumably guided by Chancellor Angela Merkel, got almost every accent right. Freedom, Europe and the wider world were the themes, not German unity.
Everyone was given their share of the credit: the East German woman from Leipzig who had been locked up by the Stasi for carrying a banner demanding “an open country with free people”; Poland's Lech Walesa and Solidarity; the Hungarians; Mikhail Gorbachev; the United States. (Oddly enough, the one person who did not receive adequate acknowledgment was Helmut Kohl.) And how good to put near the end of the celebration an interview with Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi pioneer of microcredits, who talked about the wall still separating rich north from poor south: die Mauer der Armut , the Poverty Wall.
So, three cheers for Germany and three cheers for Europe. Looking at the searchlights piercing the night sky above the Brandenburg Gate, we could reflect on the extraordinary distance travelled in a city that was at the heart of two world wars and the Cold War. But then it was over. The police started clearing away the crowd-control barriers; and at dinner, we were told, the leaders of the European Union were quietly conspiring about who should be the next chair of the European Council and the new high representative for foreign and security policy...
... We will still be able to create the institutions, notably a new European foreign service. And what we do with those institutions depends, with the Lisbon Treaty as without it, on the political will of member states and their governments. If they want it to happen, it will. If they don't, it won't.
They should want it to happen, because whether Europeans have anything much to celebrate in another 20 years will depend on whether they get their act together in their relations with the rest of the world. Of course, there are still vital things to be done inside the frontiers of today's EU: the creation of new jobs, the integration of Muslim fellow citizens, to name but two. But, increasingly, the key challenges for the EU lie not within its own borders but beyond them.
Geographically, the agenda starts with the rest of Europe that is not yet in the EU. Enlargement fatigue is palpable at every turn, but there is still a lot of Europe to be brought in, before “Europe” is really Europe: the rest of the Balkans, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, perhaps Georgia and Armenia, and, as a strategically vital special case, Turkey. Provided they meet all the conditions for membership, we should want these countries to be EU members, in our own long-term enlightened self-interest, as well as in theirs.
Then there is Russia. If the EU does not have a Russia policy, it will not have a foreign policy. And to have a common Russia policy, it needs a common energy policy. To the south and southeast, there is the question of how we help the modernization, liberalization and eventual democratization of mainly Muslim countries that are not, in any foreseeable future, going to be members of the EU. Although the Berlin Wall has gone, there is still the wall separating Israelis and Palestinians...
... Europe has a great story to tell from the past 60 years, and it was told brilliantly in Berlin on Monday night, but that story is mainly about what we have achieved inside Europe. The next chapter will depend on what we do outside it.
Robert Rozett: Murderers can't be heroes
Source: Haaretz (11-13-09)
[Dr. Robert Rozett is the director of the Yad Vashem Libraries, and author of "Approaching the Holocaust, Texts and Contexts," Vallentine Mitchell (2005).]
The celebration is over, and the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall has come and gone. Now is the time for more sober assessments. Especially with regard to the place of the Holocaust in much of the former communist bloc, some serious issues remain to be resolved.
In the search for a usable past, dissidents, anti-communists and nationalists are generally regarded as heroes. In some cases, they were indeed just that. Andrei Sakharov comes to mind as one such courageous individual, who fought for freedom at great personal risk and is worthy of emulation as a humanist. Others, however, may well have strong anti-communist credentials, but fall far short of having displayed the kind of humanism embodied by Sakharov. During the Holocaust era, some of these so-called heroes took part in the persecution and murder of their Jewish neighbors, and of others. Despite this, they are frequently glorified as patriots and paragons.
Father Jozef Tiso, the head of the Slovak puppet government established by Nazi Germany in early 1939, is a clear example of a figure who has often been adulated in spite of his crimes. Tiso presided over the first, at least nominally, independent Slovak entity, and for this he is commonly revered. The regime he headed, however, played a crucial role in the murder of Slovak Jewry. The same could be said of Ante Pavelic, leader of the Croatian Ustase government, another Nazi puppet that engaged in wholesale murder. Although such men were fervent nationalists and anti-communists, they can hardly be regarded as patriots, since they fostered the murder of their peaceful, innocent neighbors. Not all people living in the former communist bloc have fallen into the trap of lionizing such criminals. But significant elements, either through ignorance or meanness of spirit, have...
... Lastly comes the conflation of the crimes of the Nazis and communists. Although both systems committed mass murders in an overlapping time frame, they were different. Vastly different ideologies motivated them. And they chose their victims for widely different reasons. There is no question that the crimes of both are worthy of discussion, research and commemoration. But when melded together, the distinctions between them blur - and blurred distinctions do nothing to further our understanding. They neither do honor to the memory of the victims, nor ensure that those responsible are held accountable...
Elaine Tyler May: Reflections on the Great Depression
Source: Organization of American Historians (November Issue) (11-15-09)
[Elaine Tyler May is a historian of the United States in the twentieth century whose work centers on the intersections of gender, sexuality, domestic culture and politics. ]
This October marks the eightieth anniversary of the 1929 stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression. I thought I would mark that occasion by reflecting on then and now. I asked several historians who have written on the culture and politics of the 1930s if they would be willing to suggest ways in which that era might help us understand and respond to the crisis we face today. A few of them generously took time out of their busy lives to respond to my request.
Robert McElvaine noted that the warning signs were obvious as early as the 1980s to anyone familiar with the excesses of the 1920s, but that nobody noticed because of the mesmerizing complacency of the Reagan era. McElvaine commented, “Since 1981, policymakers have been systematically unlearning the lessons of 1929. As the zombie arguments that the Market is God, any regulation is evil, and it is good to concentrate wealth and income at the top, arose from the dead and began to walk among us again, the conditions of the 1920s were recreated. By 2007, the share of national income going to the richest 0.01 percent (each making at least $11.5 million) had risen to 6 percent, well above the previous high it had reached in 1928, and the end in a consumption-based economy was, predictably, the same. The question now is whether President Obama can break away from the influence of his Goldman-Sachs advisers and do at least as well as FDR did in reversing the consequences of glorified, unfettered greed.”
While McElvaine focused on greed at the top, Lewis Erenberg commented on downsizing everywhere else, and how the popular arts reflect the change in circumstances: “The first thing that strikes me is that while there is a major difference between a Great Depression and a Big Recession, one of the key similarities is the theme of downsizing. Not only are men and women (this time) let go, but people were then and are now forced to downsize their lives. Hence the drop in SUV, Hummer sales, the slowdown in home sales and construction, and for people more on the margin, turning to rummage sales and community sales to outfit their children for school rather than buying new items. The emphasis on the economic troubles has diminished the power of the culture warriors, and heightened the emphasis on economic issues and policies. We see some of this in the music business in both eras. In the 30s record sales collapsed, partly due to the new format of radio. Today we see the CD market down because of the recession and the new format of downloading. Touring has been affected as has the big music festivals. Many artists are dejected as the music business melts down, which bears some similarity to the early 30s. While it is hard to tell where music is going, there are signs that the recession has affected the themes, much as we had Dust Bowl ballads and ‘Brother Can You Spare a Dime’ in the ‘30s. Along with that, there’s real anger toward the wealthy Wall Street stock brokers and big bankers in general. For example, Neil Young’s Fork in the Road CD mentions that we’re all being downsized, including his sales after ‘The Crash of Bucks,’ in which he asks, where did the money go? In the song ‘Fork in the Road,’ he sings, ‘there’s a bail out coming, but it’s not for you/ It’s all for those creeps hiding what they do.’ In country music there’s more common man themes, and in rap, there’s less emphasis on glitz and misogyny and fancy cars and Rolexes. In Rugged N Raw’s new CD and video, they are playful about empty pockets, and the video ends not with bucks showering down like rain, but coupons. Perhaps we’ll see more movies like Public Enemies which retells the John Dillinger legend of the last American outlaw who robs banks and expresses the anger of ordinary people against the banks. At the same time, there’s the merging of politics and pop music with Obama’s posters everywhere, including on T shirts, the jazz pieces dedicated to him, and the ways rappers, soul artists and some rockers make reference to him. Is this the hopeful side of the day, parallel to FDR’s unprecedented appearances on radio and his picture in so many movies? This will depend on how the economy and his policies fare and where the Afghanistan War goes.”
Like Erenberg, Lary May comments on the ways in which the popular culture expressed political ideas. He observed that “in the last depression, those who had dominated public life saw their power and ideas failing. People who had formerly been excluded generated a cultural renaissance in the popular and high arts that helped to reshape American politics and identity itself. In the 1930s, the most dramatic example was Will Rogers. Born and raised a Cherokee Indian, he became by l935 the major political commentator, film star and radio personality of the day, known as the ‘Number One New Dealer’ and ‘Citizen Rogers.’ And he did not pull any punches. He expressed his radical views in his newspaper columns, radio shows, political speeches and movies. Typical was his message to radio listeners in l934 that it was ‘not the working classes that brought on the economic crisis, it was the big boys that thought the financial drunk was going to last forever, and over bought and over capitalized.’ The result was that ‘the difference between our rich and poor grows greater every day. The Big Men tell us there is as much as we had and all that. But what they don’t tell us is what’s the matter with us is the unequal division of it. Our rich are getting richer all the time.’ Today we have a similar crisis, after thirty years of a ‘financial drunk’ that led to an ever wider gap between the rich and poor. Yet what appears to be different is the lack of social movements or popular art animated by the desire for a more equal distribution of wealth. After a long cold war and conservative ascendancy, the popular language of Americanism that Will Rogers evoked in the 1930s is now seen as ‘communist’ or ‘socialist’ and thus “Un-American.” One could despair at this political vacuum, despite the great appeal of President Obama. Yet one thing that the study of the last depression and the recent election can teach us is that American life and culture is incredibly creative and filled with surprises. That alone gives one hope that out of this depression we too can seize the chance, as Will Rogers said, to ‘reorganize and redeem ourselves.’ ”...
Yuki Tanaka: Tokyo, Washington and the Missing Nuclear Agreements
Source: Asia Pacific Journal (11-9-09)
[Yuki Tanaka is Research Professor, Hiroshima Peace Institute and an Asia-Pacific Jurnal coordinator. He is the coeditor with Marilyn Young of Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth Century History. He wrote this article for The Asia-Pacific Journal.]Related Links
Robert A. Wampler: The Documents
At first glance, the Liberal Democratic Party’s decades-long denial of clear evidence revealed by the U.S. government that it had secret agreements allowing the introduction and stationing of US nuclear weapons in Japan appears absurd. This was the reality, however, for the nation that long proclaimed the “Three Non-Nuclear Principles,” barring the production, possession or importation of nuclear weapons, as a bedrock of national policy. With the fall of the LDP looming in the September 2009 election, several former top officials of Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who were well informed of these secret deals, came forward to disclose the deal. Their motive was not protection of Japan’s “Three Non-Nuclear Principles.” To the contrary, their view is that, as the “Three Non-Nuclear Principle” did not effectively prevent the entry of nuclear weapons into Japan, they should be scrapped.
Okada Katsuya, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Japan’s new Democratic Party government, has repeatedly said that he has instructed senior staff of his Ministry to conduct a thorough investigation to reveal the details of the secret deals that previous LDP cabinets made with the U.S. Yet, he has thus far avoided answering the question of whether the Hatoyama administration will maintain the “Three Non-Nuclear Principles” as national policy. Confronted with this persistent question from journalists, he repeats the same illogical statement that a thorough investigation of this secret affair must be completed before discussing the “Three Non-Nuclear Principles.”
One of the Democratic Party’s campaign pledges during the September election was establishment of an “equal partnership” with the U.S. based on Japan’s national “independence.” When Robert Gates, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, visited Japan in late October, he pressed Okada and Kitazawa Katumi, the Minster of Defense, to make sure that Japan’s official investigation of the secret deals would not harm the U.S. policy of nuclear deterrence and the U.S. – Japan relationship.
Okada (left) and Gates
The revelation of the details of the secret agreements on nuclear weapons in itself cannot bring about a decisive solution to Japan’s nuclear problems, above all since irrefutable evidence has long been available in U.S. documents and circulated widely among Japanese journalists and researchers. The most important question is not the secrecy concerning the U.S. nuclear weapons program in Japan, but the foundations of that secrecy, i.e., Japanese support for the U.S. policy of nuclear deterrence. In the absence of a clear DPJ policy on the issues, it can be expected that similar secret deals will be made to sustain Japanese support for the U.S. policy of nuclear deterrence, including the presence of U.S. nuclear weapons in Japan.
The cabinet of Sato Eisaku, who served as Prime Minister between 1964 and 1972, was critical in framing and implementing the U.S.-Japan nuclear framework. In January 1965, he urged President Lyndon Johnson to place Japan under the American nuclear umbrella under the U.S. – Japan Security Treaty (Ampo). Johnson immediately agreed. With this arrangement in place, at the end of 1967, Sato proclaimed in the Diet his government’s adoption of the “Three Non-Nuclear Principles.” Moreover, as is now widely known, in November 1969, Sato also entered into a secret agreement with President Richard Nixon, as part of the negotiations that led to the 1972 reversion of Okinawa to Japan with U.S. bases intact, that the U.S. military was free to bring nuclear weapons into Japan in an emergency situation without prior notice. Ironically, Sato was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1974 for having established the “Three Non-Nuclear Principles.” For Sato and many other LDP leaders, including Nakasone Yasuhiro, Abe Shinzo and Aso Taro, the principle was simply a political showcase. The core of U.S.-Japan security policy was and remains “nuclear deterrence” predicated not only on the U.S. nuclear umbrella, but full U.S. nuclear access to Japan. There are as yet no clear signs that the new DPJ administration, while proclaiming the desire for a more independent foreign policy, is reconsidering the nuclear relationship.
Against this background, it is important to recall U.S. uses of Japan as a base for nuclear war planning dating back to the Vietnam War. In 1967, the Commander of the Pacific Command established the Pacific Operations Liaison Office (POLO) in the Fifth Air Force facilities at Fuchu Air Base just outside Tokyo. For the following five years, POLO was responsible for formulating the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) - i.e., the plan to utilize both aircraft and warships carrying nuclear weapons for the Pacific Command. Moreover, based on SIOP, in 1965 the Yokota and Kadena Air Bases were designated as bases for the U.S. Strategic Air Command's new airborne command, codenamed BLUE EAGLE. According to the Nautilus Institute’s report of August 1995, ‘During the 1970s, the BLUE EAGLE aircraft flying out of Japan practiced transferring nuclear launch orders to strategic nuclear submarines and nuclear-armed aircraft carriers operating in the waters around Japan. Such nuclear command and control exercises continued well into the 1990s, and probably continue even today.’ [1] The existence of POLO and the BLUE EAGLE were secret until the Nautilus Institute published the relevant official documents in 1995.
Nuclear evasion took other forms, too. Kyodo reported that Declassified U.S. documents found at the U.S. National Archives and Records by Shoji Niihara, a Japanese specialist on Japan-U.S. relations, reveal that the Japanese government voluntarily set narrow territorial sea limits of three nautical miles in five strategically important straits despite being legally entitled to extend its territorial waters to twelve miles. As Kyodo News reported in October 2009, based on archival documents and interviews with former vice ministers of foreign affairs, this was to avoid political issues arising from the passage of U.S. warships carrying nuclear weapons. [2]
Thus, the question that requires urgent attention is not whether U.S. nuclear weapons have been or will be brought into Japan secretly, but the entire structure of U.S. nuclear deterrence deployed in Japan. It is precisely this structure that leads American policymakers to view Japan as a “vassal state”; without transforming this policy it will remain impossible Japan’s democracy and freedom of information to function autonomously. If Japan’s new Democratic Party government genuinely wishes to establish an “equal partnership” with the U.S. based upon the principle of national “independence,” it must seriously consider freeing Japan entirely from the U.S. nuclear umbrella and its nuclear deterrence strategy.
It is important to recognize nuclear deterrence policies for what they are: a “crime against peace” as explicated in the Nuremberg principle. This is because “nuclear deterrence” effectively means planning and preparation to commit indiscriminate mass killing, or in other words a “crime against humanity,” using nuclear weapons. In this regard, “nuclear deterrence” is no different from the “nuclear terrorism” that the U.S. and other nuclear powers so strongly condemn.
Notes
[1] http://www.nautilus.org/archives/nukepolicy/Nuclear-Umbrella/index.html
[2] Kyodo News, “Japan limited sealanes at behest of U.S. Claims on five straits likely cut to let nukes pass: Archives,” October 12, 2009.
Larry Berman and Edward Miller: Obama, learn the lessons of Vietnam -- from JFK, not LBJ
Source: NY Daily News (11-13-09)
[Berman is professor of political science at UC Davis and author of "Planning A Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam." Miller is Assistant Professor of History at Dartmouth College; he is writing a book on the United States and the politics of nation building in South Vietnam during the Diem years (1954-1963).]
In the Obama administration's review of strategic options in Afghanistan, the debate over the "lessons" of Vietnam has loomed large. But which Vietnam lessons are the most relevant? Instead of drawing analogies to the policies and strategies of the Johnson and Nixon years, it may be more useful to consider the Vietnam dilemmas and choices faced by John F. Kennedy from 1961 to 1963.
Upon taking office in January 1961, Kennedy learned that conditions in South Vietnam were much worse than he anticipated. Recent gains had given the communist-led Viet Cong insurgency control over large portions of the countryside and the population. Equally worrisome was the deteriorating political situation in Saigon. South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem was a long-time U.S. ally who had once been hailed in Washington as the "miracle man of Southeast Asia." By 1961, however, Diem's authoritarian rule had alienated large numbers of his compatriots, including many fellow anti-communists. The loudest complaints concerned the power and privileges wielded by Diem's brothers and other family members - complaints not unlike those heard today about Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
More than most of his advisers, Kennedy sensed the dangers that lurked in Vietnam. Although he admired Diem, he feared that the Vietnamese leader might be repeating earlier mistakes made by France during its futile colonial war in Vietnam in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Kennedy therefore ordered a thorough review of U.S. policy. In late 1961, after months of discussions and fact-finding missions, his advisers recommended a major expansion in the scope and nature of the U.S. involvement - a strategy referred to as "getting on with the war."
Kennedy rejected some proposals, including the dispatch of U.S. regular combat forces, but he approved deliveries of modern helicopters and armored vehicles to the South Vietnamese army, as well as more aid for Diem's nation-building programs. The number of U.S. military advisers also rose sharply, from fewer 1,000 in 1961 to more than 16,000 in 1963.
At first, the new strategy seemed to work. The South Vietnamese army's battlefield fortunes improved during 1962, thanks in part to the U.S.-supplied advisers and equipment. By 1963, however, the communists had devised new tactics and showed signs of regaining the initiative. At the same time, Saigon was plunged into political crisis by the emergence of an anti-Diem protest movement led by Buddhist monks. When Diem cracked down on the protestors, the calls for his ouster intensified. Kennedy's advisers were split between those who believed that Diem must go and those who deemed him the best chance for victory. Kennedy himself was conflicted and unsure of what to do. In the end, he allowed the U.S. ambassador in Saigon to encourage South Vietnamese army commanders to overthrow Diem. The coup took place on Nov. 1, 1963. Diem was captured and killed the next day - just three weeks before Kennedy's assassination in Dallas.
In retrospect, Kennedy's ambivalence about Vietnam was understandable. In both 1961 and 1963, the debate within his administration focused on false choices between different paths to escalation, rather than on the critical question of whether large-scale escalation was necessary or advisable...
Alfred W. McCoy: How America's Wars Are Systematically Destroying Our Liberties
Source: TomDispatch (website of Tom Engelhardt) (11-12-09)
[Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of A Question of Torture, among other works. His most recent book is Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (University of Wisconsin Press) which explores the influence of overseas counterinsurgency operations throughout the twentieth century in spreading ever more draconian internal security measures here at home.]
In his approach to National Security Agency surveillance, as well as CIA renditions, drone assassinations, and military detention, President Obama has to a surprising extent embraced the expanded executive powers championed by his conservative predecessor, George W. Bush. This bipartisan affirmation of the imperial executive could "reverberate for generations," warns Jack Balkin, a specialist on First Amendment freedoms at Yale Law School. And consider these but some of the early fruits from the hybrid seeds that the Global War on Terror has planted on American soil. Yet surprisingly few Americans seem aware of the toll that this already endless war has taken on our civil liberties.
Don't be too surprised, then, when, in the midst of some future crisis, advanced surveillance methods and other techniques developed in our recent counterinsurgency wars migrate from Baghdad, Falluja, and Kandahar to your hometown or urban neighborhood. And don't ever claim that nobody told you this could happen -- at least not if you care to read on.
Think of our counterinsurgency wars abroad as so many living laboratories for the undermining of a democratic society at home, a process historians of such American wars can tell you has been going on for a long, long time. Counterintelligence innovations like centralized data, covert penetration, and disinformation developed during the Army's first protracted pacification campaign in a foreign land -- the Philippines from 1898 to 1913 -- were repatriated to the United States during World War I, becoming the blueprint for an invasive internal security apparatus that persisted for the next half century.
Almost 90 years later, George W. Bush's Global War on Terror plunged the U.S. military into four simultaneous counterinsurgency campaigns, large and small -- in Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and (once again) the Philippines -- transforming a vast swath of the planet into an ad hoc "counterterrorism" laboratory. The result? Cutting-edge high-tech security and counterterror techniques that are now slowly migrating homeward.
As the War on Terror enters its ninth year to become one of America's longest overseas conflicts, the time has come to ask an uncomfortable question: What impact have the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- and the atmosphere they created domestically -- had on the quality of our democracy?
Every American knows that we are supposedly fighting elsewhere to defend democracy here at home. Yet the crusade for democracy abroad, largely unsuccessful in its own right, has proven remarkably effective in building a technological template that could be just a few tweaks away from creating a domestic surveillance state -- with omnipresent cameras, deep data-mining, nano-second biometric identification, and drone aircraft patrolling "the homeland."
Even if its name is increasingly anathema in Washington, the ongoing Global War on Terror has helped bring about a massive expansion of domestic surveillance by the FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA) whose combined data-mining systems have already swept up several billion private documents from U.S. citizens into classified data banks. Abroad, after years of failing counterinsurgency efforts in the Middle East, the Pentagon began applying biometrics -- the science of identification via facial shape, fingerprints, and retinal or iris patterns -- to the pacification of Iraqi cities, as well as the use of electronic intercepts for instant intelligence and the split-second application of satellite imagery to aid an assassination campaign by drone aircraft that reaches from Africa to South Asia.
In the panicky aftermath of some future terrorist attack, Washington could quickly fuse existing foreign and domestic surveillance techniques, as well as others now being developed on distant battlefields, to create an instant digital surveillance state.
The Crucible of Counterinsurgency
For the past six years, confronting a bloody insurgency, the U.S. occupation of Iraq has served as a white-hot crucible of counterinsurgency, forging a new system of biometric surveillance and digital warfare with potentially disturbing domestic implications. This new biometric identification system first appeared in the smoking aftermath of "Operation Phantom Fury," a brutal, nine-day battle that U.S. Marines fought in late 2004 to recapture the insurgent-controlled city of Falluja. Bombing, artillery, and mortars destroyed at least half of that city's buildings and sent most of its 250,000 residents fleeing into the surrounding countryside. Marines then forced returning residents to wait endless hours under a desert sun at checkpoints for fingerprints and iris scans. Once inside the city's blast-wall maze, residents had to wear identification tags for compulsory checks to catch infiltrating insurgents.
The first hint that biometrics were helping to pacify Baghdad's far larger population of seven million came in April 2007 when the New York Times published an eerie image of American soldiers studiously photographing an Iraqi's eyeball. With only a terse caption to go by, we can still infer the technology behind this single record of a retinal scan in Baghdad: digital cameras for U.S. patrols, wireless data transfer to a mainframe computer, and a database to record as many adult Iraqi eyes as could be gathered. Indeed, eight months later, the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon had collected over a million Iraqi fingerprints and iris scans. By mid-2008, the U.S. Army had also confined Baghdad's population behind blast-wall cordons and was checking Iraqi identities by satellite link to a biometric database.
Pushing ever closer to the boundaries of what present-day technology can do, by early 2008, U.S. forces were also collecting facial images accessible by portable data labs called Joint Expeditionary Forensic Facilities, linked by satellite to a biometric database in West Virginia. "A war fighter needs to know one of three things," explained the inventor of this lab-in-a-box. "Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?"
A future is already imaginable in which a U.S. sniper could take a bead on the eyeball of a suspected terrorist, pause for a nanosecond to transmit the target's iris or retinal data via backpack-sized laboratory to a computer in West Virginia, and then, after instantaneous feedback, pull the trigger.
Lest such developments seem fanciful, recall that Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward claims the success of George W. Bush's 2007 troop surge in Iraq was due less to boots on the ground than to bullets in the head -- and these, in turn, were due to a top-secret fusion of electronic intercepts and satellite imagery. Starting in May 2006, American intelligence agencies launched a Special Action Program using "the most highly classified techniques and information in the U.S. government" in a successful effort "to locate, target and kill key individuals in extremist groups such as al-Qaeda, the Sunni insurgency and renegade Shia militias."
Under General Stanley McChrystal, now U.S. Afghan War commander, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) deployed "every tool available simultaneously, from signals intercepts to human intelligence" for "lightning quick" strikes. One intelligence officer reportedly claimed that the program was so effective it gave him "orgasms." President Bush called it "awesome." Although refusing to divulge details, Woodward himself compared it to the Manhattan Project in World War II. This Iraq-based assassination program relied on the authority Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld granted JSOC in early 2004 to "kill or capture al-Qaeda terrorists" in 20 countries across the Middle East, producing dozens of lethal strikes by airborne Special Operations forces.
Another crucial technological development in Washington's secret war of assassination has been the armed drone, or unmanned aerial vehicle, whose speedy development has been another by-product of Washington's global counterterrorism laboratory. Half a world away from Iraq in the southern Philippines, the CIA and U.S. Special Operations Forces conducted an early experiment in the use of aerial surveillance for assassination. In June 2002, with a specially-equipped CIA aircraft circling overhead offering real-time video surveillance in the pitch dark of a tropical night, Philippine Marines executed a deadly high-seas ambush of Muslim terrorist Aldam Tilao (a.k.a. "Abu Sabaya").
In July 2008, the Pentagon proposed an expenditure of $1.2 billion for a fleet of 50 light aircraft loaded with advanced electronics to loiter over battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq, bringing "full motion video and electronic eavesdropping to the troops." By late 2008, night flights over Afghanistan from the deck of the USS Theodore Roosevelt were using sensors to give American ground forces real-time images of Taliban targets -- some so focused that they could catch just a few warm bodies huddled in darkness behind a wall.
In the first months of Barack Obama's presidency, CIA Predator drone strikes have escalated in the Pakistani tribal borderlands with a macabre efficiency, using a top-secret mix of electronic intercepts, satellite transmission, and digital imaging to kill half of the Agency's 20 top-priority al-Qaeda targets in the region. Just three days before Obama visited Canada last February, Homeland Security launched its first Predator-B drones to patrol the vast, empty North Dakota-Manitoba borderlands that one U.S. senator has called America's "weakest link."
Homeland Security
While those running U.S. combat operations overseas were experimenting with intercepts, satellites, drones, and biometrics, inside Washington the plodding civil servants of internal security at the FBI and the NSA initially began expanding domestic surveillance through thoroughly conventional data sweeps, legal and extra-legal, and -- with White House help -- several abortive attempts to revive a tradition that dates back to World War I of citizens spying on suspected subversives.
"If people see anything suspicious, utility workers, you ought to report it," said President George Bush in his April 2002 call for nationwide citizen vigilance. Within weeks, his Justice Department had launched Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System), with plans for "millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees and others" to aid the government by spying on their fellow Americans. Such citizen surveillance sparked strong protests, however, forcing the Justice Department to quietly bury the president's program.
Simultaneously, inside the Pentagon, Admiral John Poindexter, President Ronald Reagan's former national security advisor (swept up in the Iran-Contra scandal of that era), was developing a Total Information Awareness program which was to contain "detailed electronic dossiers" on millions of Americans. When news leaked about this secret Pentagon office with its eerie, all-seeing eye logo, Congress banned the program, and the admiral resigned in 2003. But the key data extraction technology, the Information Awareness Prototype System, migrated quietly to the NSA.
Soon enough, however, the CIA, FBI, and NSA turned to monitoring citizens electronically without the need for human tipsters, rendering the administration's grudging retreats from conventional surveillance at best an ambiguous political victory for civil liberties advocates. Sometime in 2002, President Bush gave the NSA secret, illegal orders to monitor private communications through the nation's telephone companies and its private financial transactions through SWIFT, an international bank clearinghouse.
After the New York Times exposed these wiretaps in 2005, Congress quickly capitulated, first legalizing this illegal executive program and then granting cooperating phone companies immunity from civil suits. Such intelligence excess was, however, intentional. Even after Congress widened the legal parameters for future intercepts in 2008, the NSA continued to push the boundaries of its activities, engaging in what the New York Times politely termed the systematic "overcollection" of electronic communications among American citizens. Now, for example, thanks to a top-secret NSA database called "Pinwale," analysts routinely scan countless "millions" of domestic electronic communications without much regard for whether they came from foreign or domestic sources.
Starting in 2004, the FBI launched an Investigative Data Warehouse as a "centralized repository for... counterterrorism." Within two years, it contained 659 million individual records. This digital archive of intelligence, social security files, drivers' licenses, and records of private finances could be accessed by 13,000 Bureau agents and analysts making a million queries monthly. By 2009, when digital rights advocates sued for full disclosure, the database had already grown to over a billion documents.
And did this sacrifice of civil liberties make the United States a safer place? In July 2009, after a careful review of the electronic surveillance in these years, the inspectors general of the Defense Department, the Justice Department, the CIA, the NSA, and the Office of National Intelligence issued a report sharply critical of these secret efforts. Despite George W. Bush's claims that massive electronic surveillance had "helped prevent attacks," these auditors could not find any "specific instances" of this, concluding such surveillance had "generally played a limited role in the F.B.I.'s overall counterterrorism efforts."
Amid the pressures of a generational global war, Congress proved all too ready to offer up civil liberties as a bipartisan burnt offering on the altar of national security. In April 2007, for instance, in a bid to legalize the Bush administration's warrantless wiretaps, Congressional representative Jane Harman (Dem., California) offered a particularly extreme example of this urge. She introduced the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, proposing a powerful national commission, functionally a standing "star chamber," to "combat the threat posed by homegrown terrorists based and operating within the United States." The bill passed the House by an overwhelming 404 to 6 vote before stalling, and then dying, in a Senate somewhat more mindful of civil liberties.
Only weeks after Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, Harman's life itself became a cautionary tale about expanding electronic surveillance. According to information leaked to the Congressional Quarterly, in early 2005 an NSA wiretap caught Harman offering to press the Bush Justice Department for reduced charges against two pro-Israel lobbyists accused of espionage. In exchange, an Israeli agent offered to help Harman gain the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee by threatening House Democratic majority leader Nancy Pelosi with the loss of a major campaign donor. As Harman put down the phone, she said, "This conversation doesn't exist."
How wrong she was. An NSA transcript of Harman's every word soon crossed the desk of CIA Director Porter Goss, prompting an FBI investigation that, in turn, was blocked by then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. As it happened, the White House knew that the New York Times was about to publish its sensational revelation of the NSA's warrantless wiretaps, and felt it desperately needed Harman for damage control among her fellow Democrats. In this commingling of intrigue and irony, an influential legislator's defense of the NSA's illegal wiretapping exempted her from prosecution for a security breach discovered by an NSA wiretap.
Since the arrival of Barack Obama in the White House, the auto-pilot expansion of digital domestic surveillance has in no way been interfered with. As a result, for example, the FBI's "Terrorist Watchlist," with 400,000 names and a million entries, continues to grow at the rate of 1,600 new names daily.
In fact, the Obama administration has even announced plans for a new military cybercommand staffed by 7,000 Air Force employees at Lackland Air Base in Texas. This command will be tasked with attacking enemy computers and repelling hostile cyber-attacks or counterattacks aimed at U.S. computer networks -- with scant respect for what the Pentagon calls "sovereignty in the cyberdomain." Despite the president's assurances that operations "will not -- I repeat -- will not include monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic," the Pentagon's top cyberwarrior, General James E. Cartwright, has conceded such intrusions are inevitable.
Sending the Future Home
While U.S. combat forces prepare to draw-down in Iraq (and ramp up in Afghanistan), military intelligence units are coming home to apply their combat-tempered surveillance skills to our expanding homeland security state, while preparing to counter any future domestic civil disturbances here.
Indeed, in September 2008, the Army's Northern Command announced that one of the Third Division's brigades in Iraq would be reassigned as a Consequence Management Response Force (CMRF) inside the U.S. Its new mission: planning for moments when civilian authorities may need help with "civil unrest and crowd control." According to Colonel Roger Cloutier, his unit's civil-control equipment featured "a new modular package of non-lethal capabilities" designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals -- including Taser guns, roadblocks, shields, batons, and beanbag bullets.
That same month, Army Chief of Staff General George Casey flew to Fort Stewart, Georgia, for the first full CMRF mission readiness exercise. There, he strode across a giant urban battle map filling a gymnasium floor like a conquering Gulliver looming over Lilliputian Americans. With 250 officers from all services participating, the military war-gamed its future coordination with the FBI, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and local authorities in the event of a domestic terrorist attack or threat. Within weeks, the American Civil Liberties Union filed an expedited freedom of information request for details of these deployments, arguing: "[It] is imperative that the American people know the truth about this new and unprecedented intrusion of the military in domestic affairs."
At the outset of the Global War on Terror in 2001, memories of early Cold War anti-communist witch-hunts blocked Bush administration plans to create a corps of civilian tipsters and potential vigilantes. However, far more sophisticated security methods, developed for counterinsurgency warfare overseas, are now coming home to far less public resistance. They promise, sooner or later, to further jeopardize the constitutional freedoms of Americans.
In these same years, under the pressure of War on Terror rhetoric, presidential power has grown relentlessly, opening the way to unchecked electronic surveillance, the endless detention of terror suspects, and a variety of inhumane forms of interrogation. Somewhat more slowly, innovative techniques of biometric identification, aerial surveillance, and civil control are now being repatriated as well.
In a future America, enhanced retinal recognition could be married to omnipresent security cameras as a part of the increasingly routine monitoring of public space. Military surveillance equipment, tempered to a technological cutting edge in counterinsurgency wars, might also one day be married to the swelling domestic databases of the NSA and FBI, sweeping the fiber-optic cables beneath our cities for any sign of subversion. And in the skies above, loitering aircraft and cruising drones could be checking our borders and peering down on American life.
If that day comes, our cities will be Argus-eyed with countless thousands of digital cameras scanning the faces of passengers at airports, pedestrians on city streets, drivers on highways, ATM customers, mall shoppers, and visitors to any federal facility. One day, hyper-speed software will be able to match those millions upon millions of facial or retinal scans to photos of suspect subversives inside a biometric database akin to England's current National Public Order Intelligence Unit, sending anti-subversion SWAT teams scrambling for an arrest or an armed assault.
By the time the Global War on Terror is declared over in 2020, if then, our American world may be unrecognizable -- or rather recognizable only as the stuff of dystopian science fiction. What we are proving today is that, however detached from the wars being fought in their name most Americans may seem, war itself never stays far from home for long. It's already returning in the form of new security technologies that could one day make a digital surveillance state a reality, changing fundamentally the character of American democracy.
Maura Dykstra: China's Monetary Challenges
Source: China Beat (11-10-09)
[Maura Dykstra is a graduate student in Chinese history at UCLA.]
When I first left to study in China, I asked around about what presents to bring. I took the advice of a professor, and boarded a plane to Shanghai with two bottles of Johnny Walker and two cartons of Marlboro cigarettes. I had heard tales of men and women in China beseeching their foreign friends to purchase such items at Friendship Stores, and had been reassured that these name-brand products would be eagerly consumed by deprived whiskey-drinkers and smokers on the mainland. I wasn’t in China for more than a week when, stepping into a local convenience store, I was confronted with a very inconvenient truth: behind the counter, well-stocked shelves of alcohol and tobacco – including the products that I had schlepped across the Pacific – silently testified to the difficulty of understanding, predicting, or characterizing the relationship between U.S. and China markets.
My personal revelation notwithstanding, there is no shortage of truisms about China’s development in the US. Grandmothers and grandfathers complain that everything these days is made in China, and widely-read periodicals peddle a portrait of China as the dragon awakened from its slumber. Graduate students used to living easily even in China’s most expensive cities comment wistfully on how much less a U.S. dollar buys, and agitated members of Congress cry out for aggressive reevaluations of the RMB. When I tell a neighbor, or a friend of the family, that I study China, they often wink at me, and hint that they approve of my crafty and timely decision to study the world’s next greatest up-and-comer.
But despite all obvious signs of China’s success and fears of what this means for the U.S., the nature of China’s development, and its import for the U.S., Asian, and world economies, is poorly understood. Richard C. K. Burdekin’s volume ($75.00 from Cambridge University Press) is a sound step in introducing the curious scholar to the complexity of the issues behind China’s domestic and international fiscal policies from the 1930s to the present. This work is a collection of essays on a wide variety of topics related to China’s monetary history and contemporary financial trends. It includes narratives of the inflationary crises of the 1930s, 1940s, and the early PRC period (Chapters 5, 6, and pp. 12 – 14 of Chapter 1, respectively), as well as extensive detail about China’s response to the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 90s. Burdekin’s keen summaries of government policy approaches to economic trouble at different periods allow him to characterize current policy in a rich and meaningful context. This background is juxtaposed against in-depth coverage on contemporary fiscal issues, ranging from questions central to the debate over the USD/RMB exchange rate (Chapters 1 to 4), the financial repercussions of China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization (Chapter 7), and China’s changing role in the wider Asian economy (Chapter 8 on Hong Kong, and Chapter 9 on Taiwan).
Burdekin’s volume is slim for the price – running only 260 pages including the bibliography and index – but it is chock-full of yummy goodness, with a heaping of crunchy tables and rich with nutritional data. Despite the promise on the dust jacket that this work “is intended to be accessible to non-economists and does not assume prior immersion in the underlying former models,” it is indeed a work that requires both time and effort to digest. I suspect that many scholars not naturally interested in economics and financial markets will balk at the technical difficulty of this work, but those who find a way to take the time required for non-experts to reflect on what the author has offered will find it a seriously rewarding experience.
For those interested in China’s history, Burdekin’s representation of the financial crises of the twentieth century is a fascinating revisit of the time-honored refrains about the importance of silver in the Ming and Qing economy. Burdekin outlines the devastating impacts on the Chinese economy of the U.S. decision to buy up silver specie in the wake of the Great Depression, tracing the massive outpour of silver bullion from the mainland despite the GMD’s efforts to stanch the flow. He also reviews the difficulties of the inflation crisis in Taiwan in the 1940s, and the CCP’s rationing and nationalization policies after 1949 as a prelude to the current government’s approach to banking, finance, and market control.
Burdekin’s analyses of contemporary monetary policies are informed by his historical characterization of the approach of Chinese governments to economic intervention. Although his citation of Confucius as proof that earlier forms of government in China, like the CCP, favored the rationing of important goods may be slightly romantic, this does not detract from his other arguments, based on historical precedent and contemporary data. Burdekin lays out a convincing portrait of many contemporary problems emerging from past experiences.
For example, in his review of the banking sector (Chapters 4 and 7), Burdekin links the inflation scares of the early twentieth century to the PRC’s contemporary preoccupation with control over the market. A good deal of time has already passed since China’s vaunted open-door policy was first introduced, but legacies of government concern about the privations of market influence on society persist. The government retains an unchallenged influence over interest rates, and continues to discourage lending in the most developed sectors of its economy. This consistent policy flies in the face of neo-liberal faith in the powers of the market to distribute items of scarcity, but Burdekin’s observations, at the very least, provide a way for readers to understand the importance of the reasons behind PRC policies intended to keep inflation under control and forcefully direct resources to areas noted for their underdevelopment.
Burdekin’s approach is reminiscent of Randall Peerenboom’s distinction between an idealized rule of law system of legal disposition in Western countries, in contrast to PRC’s rule by law, according to which the needs of the society – as perceived by the Party – come before the technical aspects of written policy (for more, see Peerenboom’s 2002 China’s Long March toward Rule of Law, also from Cambridge University Press). In a similar manner, Burdekin sees the overriding needs of the state as one of the main obstacles to market liberalization. Rather than simply attributing this observation to the Communist style of government, however, he presents the dilemmas facing the state in a way that is both informative and observing.
The complicated balance between government needs and market forces are most obvious in Burdekin’s discussion of the banking system in China, which receives a thorough and fascinating treatment. The four large state banks – The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the China Construction Bank, the Agricultural Bank of China, and the Bank of China – are continually hampered by non-performing loans given reluctantly to state-operated enterprises. Social concerns about unemployment and the government’s unwillingness to close down large nationalized operations leave banks with no choice but to continue to issue huge loans to enterprises that consistently default on their lines of credit. By far the most beleaguered bank of the four largest is the Agricultural Bank of China, the only one of the large state-owned banks to still not have gone public (in contrast, Goldman Sachs brokered the public offerings of the Bank of China May 2006, and 10 percent of its stock was bought up by Royal Bank of Scotland and Merrill Lynch for $3.1 billion USD, and the Industrial Commercial Bank of China sold $3.78 billion USD in shares to Goldman Sachs, Allianz, and American Express).
The problems faced by the Agricultural Bank of China, Burdekin notes, are related to the fact that most of its investments are funneled to the poorest provinces and cities – a reminder that China’s impressive growth has not extended equally to all corners. The problem of non-performing loans, Burdekin points out, is a sign that China’s banks are still as much tools of government objectives as they are organizations for profit.
In a brief review on the problem of corruption in the banking industry (p. 148), Burdekin notes that cases of embezzlement from the early twenty-first century cannot be considered terribly surprising in light of the fact that even the highest bank officials only took home salaries of less than $5,000 USD per year, recalling some of the principal-agent problems faced by the imperial bureaucracy: when the state paid sub-par wages to its employees, non-corrupt officials were naturally the exception to the rule.
In light of these challenges to the success of the finance market in China, Burdekin discusses the increased foreign investment since China joined the WTO in December of 2001 and the PRC’s slow, but sure, move towards more liberal economic policies as signs of China’s further opening up to global markets (Chapters 7 and 10). He also reviews the extent of modern-day economic incorporation between Taiwan and the PRC (Chapter 9), and the relative statuses of Shanghai’s and Hong Kong’s stock exchanges in the wider world of global trade (Chapter 8) as a measure of China’s economic position in Asia and the world. In each of his analyses, China remains distinct from other economies as the market most influenced by government – rather than economic – mandates, but shows more and more signs of increased integration with other economies. Although the government’s intervention in the distribution of market resources strikes the average US expert as overbearing and generally negative, the PRC’s 2004 move to discourage a lending craze driven by desires to purchase real estate may lead some readers to concede that such control may have at least accidental positive repercussions.
On the problem of RMB reevaluation and the staggering trade imbalance with the US (reported by the US government as $232.5 billion USD in 2006), Burdekin cautions against rash accusations of a Chinese drain on the U.S. economy. Similar concerns about Japan in the 1980s were not, he reminds the reader, solved by a reevaluation of the yen, which only had negative repercussions for Japan’s domestic economy, rather than discouraging exports to the US. Statistics on the US-China trade imbalance, he notes, do not distinguish between the cost of Chinese imports sold by Chinese corporations and those sold by multi-nationals, so a good chunk of the ‘trade imbalance’ actually reflects the activities of U.S. enterprises operating factories in China’s trade zones. Chinese export statistics also reflect the activity of Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese companies who contract much of their assembly work to factories in China. Fears about China’s ‘unfair advantage’ – the low evaluation of the RMB – should actually be reframed as structural changes in the way that goods from Asia (even those produced by US companies) have begun to filter through China.
Perhaps even more importantly, the worried insistences of some political figures in the US that an RMB reevaluation would strengthen the US economy by raising the cost of Chinese imports overlooks two important considerations: the history of US-China currency relations, and the contemporary position of the US dollar in larger international markets. On the first topic, Burdekin’s review of China’s monetary issues in the twentieth century puts the US-China relationship in a new perspective. It was the 1934 US silver purchasing rush that first set China’s currency system on a staggering inflationary spiral, and after the 1951 Bretton-Woods establishment of the US-backed gold standard failed in the 1970s, China was the only country involved in the Asian Financial Crisis of the 1990s to hold fast to the US dollar as its currency standard. China’s efforts to maintain a reasonable balance between the threats of inflation and deflation in the face of world market instability have led to the widely-publicized stockpiling of US debt, but this move came with dangers to China’s internal market stability. These have only been offset by continued purchase of US debt, and complicated government interventions in the market.
Burdekin’s work presents a complicated and fascinating picture of the complex relationship between China’s fiscal policy over the years and the vicissitudes of the world market, paying particular attention to the role of the US at key moments, and with heavy emphasis on China’s emerging role in Asia. Although the author wisely refrains from grand predictions about the future of China, he presents such a compelling portrait of the past and present that, although many questions about China’s markets remain unanswered, the reader cannot help but wonder at the complexity and drama of China’s monetary past and present. The book may present problems for those of us who cringe at the sight of tables and elegant mathematical equations meant to illustrate things like “the relative importance of exchange rate expectations and sentiment effects on the H-share discount” (p. 185), but it is well worth the effort for even a fragmentary glimpse at the nature of modern-day monetary entanglements between China and the world. It is, at least, enough to convince this reader that the days of Johnnie Walker and Marlboro bringing Christmas-like joy to the faces of expectant men and women in China are, for better or worse, long gone.
Tom Engelhardt: Drone Race to a Known Future
Source: TomDispatch (Website of Tom Engelhardt) (11-10-09)
[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. To listen to a TomDispatch audio interview with Engelhardt accompanying this piece, click here.]
For drone freaks (and these days Washington seems full of them), here's the good news: Drones are hot! Not long ago -- 2006 to be exact -- the Air Force could barely get a few armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the air at once; now, the number is 38; by 2011, it will reputedly be 50, and beyond that, in every sense, the sky's the limit.
Better yet, for the latest generation of armed surveillance drones -- the ones with the chill-you-to-your-bones sci-fi names of Predators and Reapers (as in Grim) -- whole new surveillance capabilities will soon be available. Their newest video system, due to be deployed next year, has been dubbed Gorgon Stare after the creature in Greek mythology whose gaze turned its victims to stone. According to Julian Barnes of the Los Angeles Times, Gorgon Stare will offer a "pilot" back in good ol' Langley, VA, headquarters of the CIA, the ability to "stare" via 12 video feeds (where only one now exists) at a 1.5 mile square area, and then, with Hellfire missiles and bombs, assumedly turn any part of it into rubble. Within the year, that viewing capacity is expected to double to three square miles.
What we're talking about here is the gaze of the gods, updated in corporate labs for the modern American war-fighter -- a gaze that can be focused on whatever runs, walks, crawls, or creeps just about anywhere on the planet 24/7, with an instant ability to blow it away. And what's true of video capacity will be no less true of the next generation of drone sensors -- and, of course, of drone weaponry like that "5-pound missile the size of a loaf of French bread" meant in some near-robotic future to replace the present 100-pound Hellfire missile, possibly on the Avenger or Predator C, the next generation drone under development at General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. Everything, in fact, will be almost infinitely upgradeable, since we're still in the robotics equivalent of the age of the "horseless carriage," as Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution assures us. (Just hold your hats, for instance, when the first nano-drones make it onto the scene! They will, according to Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, be able to "fly after their prey like a killer bee through an open window.")
And here's another flash from the drone development front: the Navy wants in. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Roughead, reports Jason Paur of Wired's Danger Room blog, is looking for "a robotic attack aircraft that can land and take off from a carrier." Fortunately, according to Paur, the X-47B, which theoretically should be able to do just that, is to make its first test flight before year's end. It could be checking out those carrier decks by 2011, and fully operational by 2025.
Not only that, but drones are leaving the air for the high seas where they are called unmanned surface vehicles (USVs). In fact, Israel -- along with the U.S. leading the way on drones -- will reportedly soon launch the first of its USVs off the coast of Hamas-controlled Gaza. The U.S. can't be far behind and it seems that, like their airborne cousins, these ships, too, will be weaponized.
Taking the Measure of a Slam-Dunk Weapons System
Robot war. It just couldn't be cooler, could it? Especially if the only blood you spill is the other guy's, since our "pilots" are flying those planes from thousands of miles away. Soon, it seems, the world will be a drone fest. In his first nine months, President Obama has authorized more drone attacks in the Pakistani tribal borderlands than the Bush administration did in its last three years in office and is now considering upping their use in areas of rural Afghanistan where U.S. troops will be scarce.
In Washington, drones are even considered the "de-escalatory" option for the Afghan War by some critics, while CIA Director Leon Panetta, whose agency runs our drone war in Pakistan, has hailed them as "the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al-Qaeda leadership." Among the few people who don't adore them here are hard-core war-fighters who don't want an armada of robot planes standing in the way of sending in oodles more troops. The vice president, however, is a drone-atic. He loves 'em to death and reportedly wants to up their missions, especially in Pakistan, rather than go the oodles route.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates jumped onto the drone bandwagon early. He has long been pressing the Air Force to invest ever less in expensive manned aircraft -- he's called the F-35, still in development, the last manned fighter aircraft -- and ever more in the robotic kind. After all, they're so lean, mean, and high-tech sexy -- for Newsweek, they fall into the category of "weapons porn" -- that what's not to like?
Okay, maybe there's the odd scrooge around like Philip Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, who recently complained to the press that the U.S. program might involve war crimes under international law: "We need the United States to be more up front and say, 'OK, we're willing to discuss some aspects of this program,' otherwise you have the really problematic bottom line that the CIA is running a program that is killing significant numbers of people and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant international laws."
But as Christmas approaches, somebody's always going to say, "Bah, humbug!" And let's face it, just about everyone who matters to the mainstream media swears that the drones are just so much more "precise" in their "extrajudicial executions" than traditional air methods, which can be so messy. Better yet, when nothing in Afghanistan or Pakistan seems to be working out, the drones are actually doing the job. They're reportedly knocking off the bad guys right and left. At least 13 senior al-Qaeda leaders and one senior Taliban leader (aka "high-value targets") have been killed by the drones, according to the Long War Journal, and many more foot soldiers have been taken out as well.
And they're not just the obvious slam-dunk weapons system for our present problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan, they're potentially the royal path to the future when it comes to war-fighting, which is surely something else to be excited about.
The Wonder Weapons Succeed -- at Home
So why am I not excited -- other than the fact that the drones are also killing civilians in disputed but significant numbers in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, creating enemies and animosity wherever they strike, and turning us into a nation of 24/7 assassins beyond the law or accountability of any sort? Thought of another way, the drones put wings on the original Bush-era Guantanamo principle -- that Americans have the inalienable right to act as global judge, jury, and executioner, and in doing so are beyond the reach of any court or law.
And here's another factor that dulls my excitement just a tad -- if the history of air warfare has shown one thing, it's this: it never breaks populations. Rather, it only increases their sense of unity, as in London during the Blitz under Winston Churchill, in Germany under Adolf Hitler, Imperial Japan under Emperor Hirohito, North Korea under Kim Il Sung, North Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh, and of course (though we never put ourselves in such company, being the exceptions to all history), the United States after 9/11 under George W. Bush. Why should the peoples of rural Afghanistan and the Pakistani borderlands be any different?
Oh, and there's just one more reason that comes to mind: it so happens that I can see the future when it comes to drones, and it's dismal. I'm no prophet -- it's only that I've already lived through so much of that future. In fact, we all have.
Militarily speaking, we might as well be in the film Groundhog Day in which Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell are forced to live out the same 24 hours again and again -- with all the grimness of that idea and none of the charm of those actors. In my lifetime, I've repeatedly seen advanced weapons systems or mind-boggling technologies of war hailed as near-utopian paths to victory and future peace (just as the atomic bomb was soon after my birth). In the Vietnam War, the glories of "the electronic battlefield" were limned as an antidote to brute and ineffective American air power. That high-tech, advanced battlefield of invisible sensors was to bring an end to the impunity of guerrillas and infiltrating enemy armies. No longer capable of going anywhere undetected, they would have nowhere to hide.
In the 1980s, it was President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, quickly dubbed "Star Wars" by its critics, a label that he accepted with amusement. ("If you will pardon my stealing a film line -- the Force is with us," he said in his usual genial way.) His dream, as he told the American people, was to create an "impermeable" anti-missile shield over the United States -- "like a roof protects a family from rain" -- that would end the possibility of nuclear attack from the Soviet Union and so create peace in our time (or, if you were of a more cynical turn of mind, the possibility of a freebie nuclear assault on the Soviets).
In the Gulf War, "smart bombs" and smart missiles were praised as the military saviors of the moment. They were to give war the kind of precision that would lower civilian deaths to the vanishing point and, as the neocons of the Bush administration would claim in the next decade, free the U.S. military to "decapitate" any regime we loathed. All this would be possible without so much as touching the civilian population (which would, of course, then welcome us as liberators). And later, there was "netcentric warfare," that Rumsfeldian high-tech favorite. Its promise was that advanced information-sharing technology would turn a Military Lite into an uplinked force so savvy about changing battlefield realities and so crushing that a mere demo or two would cow any "rogue" nation or insurgency into submission.
Of course, you know the results of this sort of magical thinking about wonder weapons (or technologies) and their properties just as well as I do. The atomic bomb ended nothing, but led to an almost half-century-long nuclear superpower standoff/nightmare, to nuclear proliferation, and so to the possibility that, someday, even terrorists might possess such weapons. The electronic battlefield was incapable of staving off defeat in Vietnam. That impermeable anti-missile shield never came even faintly close to making it into our skies. Those "smart bombs" of the Gulf War proved remarkably dumb, while the 50 "decapitation" strikes the Bush administration launched against Saddam Hussein's regime on the first day of the 2003 invasion of Iraq took out not a single Iraqi leader, but "dozens" of civilians. And the history of the netcentric military in Iraq is well known. Its "success" sent Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld into retirement and ignominy.
In the same way, robot drones as assassination weapons will prove to be just another weapons system rather than a panacea for American warriors. To date, in fact, there is at least as much evidence in Pakistan and Afghanistan that the drones are helping to spread war as that they are staunching it.
Yet, the above summary is, at best, only half the story. None of these wonder weapons or technologies succeeded in their moment, or as advertised, but that fact stopped none of them from embedding themselves in our American world. From the atomic bomb came a whole nuclear landscape that included the Strategic Air Command, weapons labs, production plants, missile silos, corporate interests, and an enormous world-destroying arsenal (as well as proliferating versions of the same, large and small, across the planet). Nor did the electronic battlefield go away. Quite the opposite -- it came home and entered our everyday world in the form of sensors, cameras, surveillance equipment and the like, now implanted from our borders to our cities.
True, Reagan's impermeable shield was the purest of nuclear fantasies, but the "high frontiersmen" gathered and, taking a sizeable bite of the military budget, went on a decades-long binge of way-out research, space warfare plans and commands, and boondoggles of all sorts, including the staggeringly expensive, still not operational anti-missile system that the Bush and now Obama administrations have struggled to emplace somewhere in Europe. Similarly, ever newer generations of smart bombs and ever brighter missiles have been, and are being, developed ad infinitum.
Rarely do wonder weapons or wonder technologies disappoint enough to disappear. Each of these is, in fact, now surrounded by its own mini-version of the military-industrial complex, with its own set of corporate players, special lobbyists in Washington, specific interests, and congressional boosters. Each has installed a typical revolving door that the relevant Pentagon officials and officers can spin through once their military careers are in order. This is no less true for that wonder weapon of our moment, the robot drone.
In fact, you can already see the military-industrial-drone-robotics complex in formation. Take just one figure, Tony Tether, who for seven years was the head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which did its share of advanced robotics research. When he left the Pentagon in September, it was, according to Noah Shachtman, who runs Wired's Danger Room blog, to join "an advisory panel of Scientific Systems Company, Inc., which works on robotics projects for the Pentagon. In June, he joined the board of Aurora Flight Sciences, Inc., developers of military unmanned aircraft." He has also become "a part-time technical consultant and 'strategic advisor' for the influencers at The Livingston Group" which represents some large defense contractors like Northrup Grumman and Raytheon.
The drone industry, too, already has its own congressional representatives. Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter, for instance, is a major drone booster. In April 2009, he insisted that "we must also press forward with the development of the next generation of UAVs, including the Predator C. During my service in the Marine Corps, I engaged targets with the Predator A and B Series, and I recognize the advantages offered by Predator C." In 2008, General Atomics, whose "affiliate" makes the Predator drone, gave $6,000 to Hunter's election campaign committee, making it his 13th largest contributor. That company was also the number two contributor to his Peace Through Strength political action committee.
In the American Grain
This, then, is the future that you can see just as well as I can. When the Obama administration decides to up the ante on drone use in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as it's soon likely to do, it will be ensuring not the end of al-Qaeda or the Taliban, but the long life of robot war within our ever more militarized society. And by the time this set of robotic dreams fails to pan out, it won't matter. Yet another mini-sector of the military-industrial complex will be etched into the American grain.
Whatever the short-term gains from introducing drone warfare in these last years, we are now locked into the 24/7 assassination trade -- with our own set of non-suicide bombers on the job into eternity. This may pass for sanity in Washington, but it's surely helping to pave the road to hell.
Haven't any of these folks ever seen a sci-fi film? Are none of them Terminator fans? Are they sure they want to open the way to unlimited robot war, keeping in mind that, if this is the latest game in town, it won't remain mainly an American one for long. And just wait until the first Iranian drone takes out the first Baluchi guerrilla supported by American funds somewhere in Pakistan. Then let's see just what we think about the right of any nation to summarily execute its enemies -- and anyone else in the vicinity -- by drone.
Is this actually what we Americans want to be known for? And if we let this happen, and General Atomics is working double or triple shifts to turn out ever more, ever newer generations of robot warriors, while the nation suffers 10.2% unemployment, who exactly will think about shutting them down?
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