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.
Jamie Glazov: Thank You, Glenn Beck, for Exposing Communism’s Evils
Jonathan Tremblay: Howard Zinn and JD Salinger: The History of Passing Writers
David Silbey: The Philippine War is Not So Different from Afghanistan
Ashley Cruseturner: Are the Two Major Parties Too Lost to Right this Ship?
Juan Cole: Was US-Iran Rivalry Driving the Exclusion of Candidates in Iraq?
Bruce J. Schulman: House Should Pass Senate Health Care Bill
Ira Berlin: The Changing Definition of African-American
Source: Smithsonian Magazine (2-1-10)
[Ira Berlin teaches at the University of Maryland. His 1999 study of slavery in North America, Many Thousands Gone, received the Bancroft Prize.]
Some years ago, I was interviewed on public radio about the meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation. I addressed the familiar themes of the origins of that great document: the changing nature of the Civil War, the Union army’s growing dependence on black labor, the intensifying opposition to slavery in the North and the interplay of military necessity and abolitionist idealism. I recalled the longstanding debate over the role of Abraham Lincoln, the Radicals in Congress, abolitionists in the North, the Union army in the field and slaves on the plantations of the South in the destruction of slavery and in the authorship of legal freedom. And I stated my long-held position that slaves played a critical role in securing their own freedom. The controversy over what was sometimes called “self-emancipation” had generated great heat among historians, and it still had life.
As I left the broadcast booth, a knot of black men and women—most of them technicians at the station—were talking about emancipation and its meaning. Once I was drawn into their discussion, I was surprised to learn that no one in the group was descended from anyone who had been freed by the proclamation or any other Civil War measure. Two had been born in Haiti, one in Jamaica, one in Britain, two in Ghana, and one, I believe, in Somalia. Others may have been the children of immigrants. While they seemed impressed—but not surprised—that slaves had played a part in breaking their own chains, and were interested in the events that had brought Lincoln to his decision during the summer of 1862, they insisted it had nothing to do with them. Simply put, it was not their history....
...Before 1965, black people of foreign birth residing in the United States were nearly invisible. According to the 1960 census, their percentage of the population was to the right of the decimal point. But after 1965, men and women of African descent entered the United States in ever-increasing numbers. During the 1990s, some 900,000 black immigrants came from the Caribbean; another 400,000 came from Africa; still others came from Europe and the Pacific rim. By the beginning of the 21st century, more people had come from Africa to live in the United States than during the centuries of the slave trade. At that point, nearly one in ten black Americans was an immigrant or the child of an immigrant.
African-American society has begun to reflect this change. In New York, the Roman Catholic diocese has added masses in Ashanti and Fante, while black men and women from various Caribbean islands march in the West Indian-American Carnival and the Dominican Day Parade. In Chicago, Cameroonians celebrate their nation’s independence day, while the DuSable Museum of African American History hosts a Nigerian Festival. Black immigrants have joined groups such as the Egbe Omo Yoruba (National Association of Yoruba Descendants in North America), the Association des Sénégalais d’Amérique and the Fédération des Associations Régionales Haïtiennes à l’Étranger rather than the NAACP or the Urban League.
To many of these men and women, Juneteenth celebrations—the commemoration of the end of slavery in the United States—are at best an afterthought. The new arrivals frequently echo the words of the men and women I met outside the radio broadcast booth. Some have struggled over the very appellation “African-American,” either shunning it—declaring themselves, for instance, Jamaican-Americans or Nigerian-Americans—or denying native black Americans’ claim to it on the ground that most of them had never been to Africa. At the same time, some old-time black residents refuse to recognize the new arrivals as true African-Americans. “I am African and I am an American citizen; am I not African-American?” a dark-skinned, Ethiopian-born Abdulaziz Kamus asked at a community meeting in suburban Maryland in 2004. To his surprise and dismay, the overwhelmingly black audience responded no. Such discord over the meaning of the African-American experience and who is (and isn’t) part of it is not new, but of late has grown more intense.
After devoting more than 30 years of my career as a historian to the study of the American past, I’ve concluded that African-American history might best be viewed as a series of great migrations, during which immigrants—at first forced and then free—transformed an alien place into a home, becoming deeply rooted in a land that once was foreign, even despised. After each migration, the newcomers created new understandings of the African-American experience and new definitions of blackness. Given the numbers of black immigrants arriving after 1965, and the diversity of their origins, it should be no surprise that the overarching narrative of African-American history has become a subject of contention....
New circumstances, it seems, require a new narrative. But it need not—and should not—deny or contradict the slavery-to-freedom story. As the more recent arrivals add their own chapters, the themes derived from these various migrations, both forced and free, grow in significance. They allow us to see the African-American experience afresh and sharpen our awareness that African-American history is, in the end, of one piece.
Andreas Umland: Ukraine and the EU Need Each Other
Source: Foreign Policy Journal (2-9-10)
[Andreas Umland has been published in The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Prospect Magazine, the Moscow Times, and elsewhere. He is general editor of the book series “Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society” (www.ibidem-verlag.de/spps.html).]
Zbigniew Brzezinski’s dictum that, without Ukraine, Russia is no longer an empire is well-known in Europe too. Yet, its topicality for European security seems insufficiently appreciated in Brussels. While the EU cannot directly influence relations between Russia and Ukraine, any more than it can solve her problems, its Eastern policies do nonetheless affect both Kyiv’s foreign affairs and Ukrainian domestic politics.
Whether it likes or not, the EU exerts influence on the whole process of Ukraine’s post-Soviet transformation – as it did in post-communist Central Europe. To be sure, the successful Central European transformations of the ’90s sometimes led pro-European observers to overestimate the relative weight of EU membership conditions, within these post-Soviet democratisations. But for Ukraine today, the Brussels-Kyiv relationship and the policies of the EU Delegation in Kyiv have an impact that goes beyond mere foreign relations.
While the EU, of course, supports current Ukrainian reforms with various programmes and agreements, Kyiv is still being denied any official membership perspective. For EU politicians and officials the difference between intensive cooperation and targeted preparation for joining may be philosophical.
But for Kyiv’s elite, as for many ordinary Ukrainians, the difference between an official “yes,” on the one side, and a “perhaps” or even “no,” on the other, is considerable. Moreover, it has relevance for the future of Ukrainian statehood – and, thus, for the security of Eastern Europe as a whole....
Recently, however, the enthusiasm of Ukrainians who were once outspokenly pro-European has started to wane – presumably because of the EU’s restrictive visa policy, and the way it has continued keeping a distance to Kyiv....
Sooner or later Ukraine will have to choose one of the politico-economic blocs. Kyiv will be unable to carry on for long with its current many-vector policies, although the EU is pressing it to do just that. NATO in its turn will in the medium term be unable to offer Kyiv an alternative integration model: for several years now the possibility of NATO membership has, unlike EU membership, been refused by more than half the population....
There is a danger of this happening in respect to Ukraine’s European perspective too. If the EU continues to lose favor in Ukraine, parts of the population, especially the political and economic elites of the east and south, might start supporting the idea of a new alliance with Russia. This might seem acceptable or even desirable to some Western observers and EU officials. But it would be a risky course of development – not only for Ukraine.
Scepticism, if not antipathy, towards the current Russian government has become deeply rooted in many members of the West and Central Ukrainian political and cultural elites, because of the two countries’ controversial common history.
In addition, more and more Ukrainians, especially the young, see a resumption of the Russian connection as being inexpedient, not only for national-historical reasons. These people have become socialized under democratic conditions: they have pluralistic views and recognize that the current authoritarian Russian model of development has no future, and that Russia is thus an unreliable long-term partner....
Worrying though this sounds, such a development cannot be completely ruled out. A deepening crisis in Ukraine combined with continued EU uncertainty could lead more and more Ukrainians to question their country’s ability, in isolation, to continue operating as an effective state.
This would encourage separatist tendencies in places like Crimea where most of the population is of Russian extraction and ambivalent about the peninsula being part of the Ukrainian state.Were tensions to escalate and to draw in ethnic Russians, not to mention citizens of the RF, this could lead to Kremlin intervention along the lines of the Georgian conflict of August 2008....
The alternatives to a gradual integration of Ukraine into Europe through provision of official prospect of EU membership are uncomfortable. Against such a background, current West European policies towards Kyiv appear as short-sighted. A continuing neutral status, a new liaison with Russia, a formal division of the country: none of these are acceptable futures for the territorially second biggest state in Europe. Were Ukraine to disintegrate, this would surely ignite Russian irredentism and at worst lead to the resurrection of the Russian Empire as being feared by Brzezinski. The consequences for European, or even world, security would be grave...
David M. Kennedy: What Would Wilson Do?
Source: The Atlantic (2-1-10)
[David M. Kennedy, a professor of history at Stanford University, is working on a book about the historical determinants of the American national character.]
...[A]s the 20th century dawned, the United States was no longer so easy to ignore. It had grown to be the most populous country in the Western world, save Russia. It was the leading producer of wheat, coal, iron, steel, and electricity. It would soon command the world’s largest pool of investment capital. The Spanish-American War in 1898 and the subsequent annexation of Puerto Rico and the Philippine Islands dramatically announced that the United States had acquired the means to project its power well beyond its home continent.
That America now wielded immense potential strength to work its will in the world was evident. But when, if ever, and how, if at all, would that potential be realized? And what, exactly, was America’s will? Those questions excited an intense discussion in the 20th century’s opening decades, one with resonant echoes in our own time.
Anti-imperialists like Mark Twain advocated a return to isolationism. Unapologetic realists like Theodore Roosevelt urged the country to start behaving like a conventional great power, pursuing worldwide interests commensurate with its capacities. But Woodrow Wilson, whose ideas would eventually triumph, did not want his country to become just another great power.
The ideals of the Founders illuminated Wilson’s entire diplomatic program. His proposals, he said, constituted “no breach in either our traditions or our policy as a nation, but a fulfillment, rather, of all that we have professed or striven for.” When in 1919 he presented to the Senate the Versailles treaty, which included the Covenant of his beloved League of Nations, he declared: “It was of this that we dreamed at our birth.” But like John Quincy Adams, Wilson understood the difference between ideological aspiration and historical possibility. Like Adams, he fitted his ideals to the circumstances he confronted.
Perhaps the most famous distillation of Wilson’s thinking is to be found in his war address of April 2, 1917, when he said, “The world must be made safe for democracy.” That maxim, and the entire scheme of “Wilsonianism” that it is thought to represent, have often been derided as hopelessly idealistic. The realist George F. Kennan excoriated Wilson for “the colossal conceit of thinking that you could suddenly make international life over into what you believed to be your own image.”
That is a formidable criticism, but it is as misdirected at Wilson as it would have been at the Founders. Properly understood, Wilson’s simple declarative sentence—“The world must be made safe for democracy”—constituted a realistic as well as an idealistic lodestar for American foreign policy. It guided American diplomacy in the season of its greatest success, the half century following World War II. Wilson, maligned as a dewy-eyed idealist, should instead be celebrated as the original architect of America’s most realistic—and successful—foreign policies.
More clearly than his critics, Wilson recognized that the world now bristled with dangers that no single state could contain, even as it shimmered with prospects that could be seized only by states acting together—that it presented threats incubated by emerging technologies, and opportunities generated by the gathering momentum of the Industrial Revolution. Making such a world safe for democracy required more than the comforting counsels of isolation, and more than taking the inherited international order as a given and conducting the business of great-power diplomacy as usual. It required, rather, active engagement with other states to muzzle the dogs of war, suppress weapons of mass destruction, and improve both standards of living and international comity through economic liberalization. Most urgently, it required new institutions that would import into the international arena at least a modicum of the trust, habits of reciprocity, and rule of law that obtained in well-ordered national polities. These were ambitious goals, but they were also realizable, as time would tell.
At the heart of Wilson’s program lay the League of Nations. Yet for all the league’s apparent novelty, in Wilson’s view it honored a Westphalian objective: “affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.” The league is best understood not as a revolutionary menace to the Westphalian system, but as an evolutionary adaptation of venerable practices to modern circumstances. Respect for sovereignty was its essence. Only “fully self-governing”—that is, sovereign—states, dominions, or colonies were eligible for membership. Most actions required unanimous consent. Lacking an armed force, the league depended on its member states, especially the great powers, for enforcement of its provisions.
Nor did Wilson propose a wholesale cession of American sovereignty to the new body. He was offering a kind of grand bargain: the United States would abjure its historic isolationism and agree to play an engaged international role—but only if the rules of the international system were altered in accordance with American goals, putting the world on a pathway to more international cooperation and better international behavior.
The ironic result is well known. Wilsonianism was stillborn at the end of World War I, with consequences that spawned the Great Depression and the Second World War. But when the United States emerged from that latter struggle, the story was dramatically different. Understanding the singular blend of idealism and realism that crystallized in that pivotal moment is essential to comprehending the success of the international post–World War II order—and the danger of forgetting its relevance to the 21st century....
Jamie Glazov: Thank You, Glenn Beck, for Exposing Communism’s Evils
Source: PajamasMedia (2-8-10)
[Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Russian, U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He is the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev’s Soviet Union and is the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of The Hate America Left. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s Left Illusions. His new book is United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.]
The tortures included laying a man naked on a freezing cement floor, forcing his legs apart, and then an interrogator stepping on his testicles, applying increasing pressure until the confession surfaced. Imagine the consequences of no surfacing confession. Indeed, many people refused to confess to a crime they did not commit.
Daughters and sons were raped in front of their fathers and mothers — for the sake of extracting “confessions.”
These are just some of the delicacies that the Stalinist machinery inflicted on its citizenry in the hope of bringing socialism into earthly incarnation. Alexander Solzhenitsyn has shared much of this horror with us in his Gulag Archipelago — a work, mystifyingly enough, that I had never heard mentioned, except with a few exceptions, by one professor in a lecture or seminar in my entire eleven years studying Cold War history in academia. It was a work that I never saw, again with a few exceptions, on any academic syllabus — and many of my courses concerned Soviet history and American foreign policy toward the Soviet Union....
My family’s nightmarish experience in the Soviet Union was followed by a providential escape from totalitarian hell. We were among the lucky ones, the ones who got away. The United States gave us a safe and protected home — a home of unbelievable material well-being (in comparison to Soviet starvation) and human liberty. I will never forget the awe I felt experiencing my first taste of freedom, even as a young five-year-old boy who wasn’t completely sure what it was. My parents could now, for the first time, speak out without fear of brutal repercussions in defense of Soviet citizens who were being persecuted for their political and/or religious beliefs. For the first time, we lived without the dread to which I had been accustomed throughout my young life....
While my family agonized about the relatives and friends we had left behind, and as we kept the memory of their suffering alive in our hearts, our leftist acquaintances reprimanded us for our views, instructing us to see America — our personal liberator — as the most evil entity not only in the Cold War, but in all of human history. They wanted us to dedicate our lives — as they had done — to the victory of the West’s totalitarian adversaries....
But ooh la la — today we have a best friend in the West who has our back. We aren’t orphans anymore. There is a certain individual in this land, by the name of Glenn Beck, who has a television show on the Fox News Channel with a mass following; he is masterfully exposing this phenomenon that we experienced — and are still experiencing. He is telling the truth about the Soviet regime and about communism and he is beaming a light on leftists and liberals for their long romance, which continues till this day, with communist systems and the ideologies that brought them into place. Just recently, Beck’s program featured his profound documentary, The Revolutionary Holocaust, which powerfully illustrates the evil of communism and the leftist ideals that brought its horrors into existence. Beck’s documentary exposes the crimes against humanity perpetrated by mass murderers such as Che Guevara and Mao Zedong, who, till this day, enjoy great idolization in leftist milieus and, as we know, in the Obama White House itself.
I would like to take this moment to express my deepest and heartfelt gratitude to Glenn Beck....
Jonathan Tremblay: Howard Zinn and JD Salinger: The History of Passing Writers
Source: The End is Coming (Blog) (2-8-10)
[Jonathan Tremblay is a Historian and works as a Breaking News Editor for the History News Network]
In the past centuries, one profession and group of people are assuredly remembered more than the rest: writers. Mostly because their names are affixed to a piece of literature, poetry, music, history or fiction, it is a name that will live on as long as succeeding generations deem the works “classic”. That being said, what of the man? Surely a writer is embodied with his work but the recent passing of two literary greats has shown us that the writer himself becomes banal, unimportant even, as he completes his cycle on earth.
Penning The Catcher in the Rye in 1951, JD Salinger gave us Holden Caulfield as the very first troubled adolescent soul that spawned the Taxi Drivers, Rebels Without a Cause and much of the past decade in fiction. Both taught and banned in schools worldwide, the book was an instant classic and gave Salinger de facto immortality. The man behind the book however continued to exist for almost sixty years, living the life of an eccentric recluse that rarely spoke in public and almost never released another word he wrote. He died at the age of 91 as a forgotten man yet as an unforgettable author. We cared little for his life and, with the media frenzy over Afghanistan and Haiti showed little interest in his death.
On the very same day, Howard Zinn passed away at the age of 87. Publishing A People’s History of the United States in 1980, Zinn was a left-wing historian that has been called “visionary” by some and “socialist” by others. His ultimate work is still taught in the USA as a different and more populist take on their national history and around the world as a model of the unconventional retelling of history. Zinn continued to live in the public eye after the release of his work. In fact, he was touring talk shows and collaborating with Hollywood stars just last autumn working on another “people’s” History. Despite this continuous devotion to historical dissent and philosophical activism, Zinn passed without much rumbling on news services while historical circles still cry the death of a wonderful writer and/or brilliant adversary.
The imagination of both these men set them apart as some of the greatest lateral thinkers in recent history. Now dead, we are made to wonder if the lives of these writers were as important as their works, and indeed, as their legacies.
Well, only time can tell what, if and how we will remember Howard Zinn and JD Salinger. All we can do for now is to reminisce about the passing of other great writers and how their timely deaths were at times publicised and chagrined and at others trivial and wholly forgettable.
William Shakespeare was definitely notorious and celebrated in his time but the end of his lifelong career has been of little interest to anyone except his biographers. He wrote but a few collaborations in the last decade of his life and died, a shadow of a man, weakened by age. He left a wife and two daughters, both of whom never bore a son. Shakespeare the oeuvre lives on but Shakespeare the man and bloodline were no more by the mid 1600s.
George Orwell notoriously wrote Animal Farm and Nineteen-eighty-four. Beyond these visionary and incisive pieces of work, Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair) died in 1950 at the relatively young age of 46, crippled by health problems. Famed science fiction writers Isaac Asimov and L Ron Hubbard enjoyed a fair bit of fame before ending their writing careers and retreating to finish their lives in disease and substance abuse. It should be mentioned that Asimov died in 1992 of an HIV infection contracted during a blood transfusion, condemning his family to complete silence about his legacy (until some of the HIV/AIDS taboo was lifted) whereas Hubbard’s works have spawned the Church of Scientology and had made him over half a billion dollars in wealth by the time of his death in 1986.
Finally, there are the writers that left us legendary pieces of literature and accordingly suffered from tortured souls and twisted lives. Dostoyevsky dies penniless and in deep depression due to an intense gambling addiction as late 1800s Russia enjoyed the Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment. Mark Twain spiralled into depression as family and friends died around him and as he stubbornly continued to live despite a healthy life-long tobacco and alcohol intake. He finally left us in 1910 at the age of 75. More disturbed still were the writers that left us in their prime. The Hemingways, Plaths, Dickinsons and Woolfs that withered away, imprisoned in their own tortured psyche and whom finally took their own lives. They understood that the public had used them and no longer needed their services. We will continue to read The Old Man and the Sea and Mrs. Dalloway while being completely satisfied in our ignorance of the writer, the man, the woman, the being that may have given it all for us at the price of their own lives and importance as mortals.
David Silbey: The Philippine War is Not So Different from Afghanistan
Source: Fredericksburg.com (2-7-10)
[David Silbey is the author of "A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902" and associate professor of history at Alvernia University in Reading, Pa.]
The war in Afghanistan feels foreign to Americans: a far distant land, a confusing and alien culture, and combat against a shadowy enemy. That feeling is mistaken. America has spent much of its history fighting wars like the one in Afghanistan. So much so, in fact, that Afghanistan would be familiar to an American in 1900, and conventional wars such as World War II would seem strange....
Yet while [the Spanish-American War] is remembered, it was a war that occurred as a result that had longer-lasting repercussions. As part of the peace treaty with Spain, America bought the Philippine Islands in the Pacific for $20 million. We found ourselves embroiled in a war there against the Filipinos themselves, who resented being bought and sold....
The American forces fighting in the Philippines were experienced at the kind of war that they faced. The American Army had spent much of the last part of the 19th century fighting a series of small wars against the Native Americans in the continental west. Those small wars demanded the same kind of counterinsurgency skills that the Philippines did, and so American officers and soldiers found themselves in a familiar situation in the western Pacific. So too for Afghanistan: American forces there have a wealth of knowledge garnered in Iraq.
News of the Philippine War reached home almost as rapidly as does news from Afghanistan. It was an age of the telegraph and the mass-market newspaper. Both ensured that Americans were quickly informed of news from the islands. When Company C of the Ninth U.S. Infantry was ambushed and massacred at Balangiga on the island of Samar on Sept. 28, 1901, the news made the New York Times two days later, hardly slower than our same-day reporting on Afghanistan.
Both Afghanistan and the Philippines committed America to a new part of the world. Taking the Philippines made the United States a power in Asia for the first time, and shifted the focus of the western United States from the east to the Pacific waters. In Afghanistan's case, it has been a growing and probably long-term presence in Central Asia, mixed in with young nations like Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and Georgia, created in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, and jostling for position with such traditional regional powers as Pakistan and India....
...[T]he similarities between the Philippine-American War and the current conflict in Afghanistan should remind us of a time when the U.S. was more or less constantly at war in conflicts that never drew the all-encompassing attention of World War II. We may have returned to that era, one in which American forces are always involved in small wars around the globe.
The trickle of daily deaths--an IED here, a sniper there--will probably not grow to a roaring flood, but also may not really stop, a leaky faucet never quite repaired. American history has been dominated by war; so, too, may the American future be.
Ashley Cruseturner: Are the Two Major Parties Too Lost to Right this Ship?
Source: InsiderIowa.com (2-3-10)
[Ashley Cruseturner teaches American history at McLennan Community College in Waco, Texas. ]
Eerily like the Democratic Party of 1854, the Democratic Party of 2010 may be a presidential election victory away from an ignominious repudiation and a decades-long detour through the political wilderness. Like the 1850s, the thrilling and astonishingly decisive victory of a handsome dark horse, paradoxically, may mask the structural instability of the Democratic ascendancy. Under the sweet but delusional spell of sudden and unexpected congressional majorities and control of the White House, Democrats then and now misread their mandate and misjudged the durability of their dominance. Ironically, the recent meteoric elevation of party fortunes in 2006 and 2008, the euphoric triumph of Barack Obama, and perhaps even a hard-fought reelection win in 2012 by default, may well offer the Democratic Party of today one final and spectacular opportunity to definitively demonstrate the utter bankruptcy of modern liberalism.
In the same vein, the modern Republican Party runs the risk of misinterpreting the looming Democratic catastrophe as a GOP success. Democrats have struggled mightily to characterize the Republicans as the “party of no,” which, at least during this season of off-year canvasses and special elections, proved a compelling and winning strategy. More accurately, sensing the swelling public frustration, GOP leaders have merely opposed the Democratic overreach on sheer political instinct. Banking on continued economic stagnation, and expecting (justifiably it seems) an endless supply of Democratic maladroitness, hypocrisy, and arrogance, Republicans envision a dramatic midterm conquest commensurate with the Revolution of 1994....
Right now no one in the Republican Party is seriously addressing the tough issues that pose an existential threat to our survival as a nation: the trillions of dollars in debt we currently owe and the tens of trillions in unfunded liabilities looming in our future. The best the GOP can do is offer a promise to return to the status quo ante Pelosi: the pledge to stay on the road to disaster —but drive at a more moderate speed.
Is that really a winning message for 2010 and beyond?
During the 1850s, the two national parties proved utterly inadequate to the task of responding to, or even understanding, the impending crisis that threatened the Union. Our current state of affairs possesses a hauntingly familiar echo.
Victor Davis Hanson: Our Obama Saga
Source: PajamasMedia (2-5-10)
[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. This article originally appeared in two parts.]
I think our Obama’s collective story will some day be written something like this. The leftwing anointed vision of America got stalled with the failures of the Great Society, and the high tax, big government discontent of the 1970s and 1980s.
Abroad after Vietnam, the gospel that America was the problem sputtered out — with the fall of the Soviet Union, the rejoicing in Eastern Europe with the liberation from communism, the market reforms of China, and the general rise of a murderous radical Islam, coupled with the later 9/11 attacks.
In short, doctrinaire liberalism, now to be recast as progressivism, was in trouble. About all that could be hoped for in lieu of ideological governance were entrenched liberal congressional enclaves, which served traditional Democratic constituencies — and offered occasional opposition to conservative excess and corruption of the Abramoff sort.
Jimmy Carter was simply too inept, self-righteous, and inexperienced to retake Rome from the barbarians. A gifted Bill Clinton might have; but he was too savvy for subservience to an unpopular ideology, too enslaved instead to his multifarious appetites and too malleable and worried about Bill Clinton to be a principled avatar of hope and change.
So the media, academia, the unions, the foundations, and the elite on Wall Street kept waiting for the Great Stone Face to appear — the saintly deliverer who would at last have the requisite skill and pedigree to bring a benevolent liberal statism to the unwashed, who for so long in their ignorance and selfish, petty agendas had resisted what was good for them....
So Obama came in, quickly shed his thin centrist exoskeleton, and started in on the long promised bigger government agenda. In short order, we saw the absorption of some of the private sector, attempts at statist healthcare, and appointments that reflected an equality-of-result philosophy, mandated and enforced by a guardian class of Ivy-League technocrats, immune to the protocols they enforced on ignorant others, although, unlike Plato’s overseers, subject to no harsh regimen....
Obama knew little of Middle America and had little desire to learn. His idea of the nuances of the United States was gleaned from the university seminar and the federal payroll. Hyphenated racial-self-identity had always proved lucrative and was not to be abandoned. Postmodern indifference to the truth and facts ensured that much of what the President asserted, in reality, was not merely inaccurate but the exact opposite of what he claimed.
While Obama, the quick study, understood the role of deception, triangulation, and fudging in free-for-all politics, it was nevertheless difficult for him for long to disguise forty years of inculcation. So like a leaky faucet, the drops of an entrenched and rather scary philosophy now and then splashed upon us — Van Jones, Ron Bloom, and Anita Dunn echoed a prevailing ideological landscape.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China and the U.S.: Too Big to Fail
Source: Time.com (2-4-10)
[Wasserstrom is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, to be published in April by Oxford University Press]
Beijing has fervently denounced U.S. President Barack Obama's plan to sell more arms to Taiwan, and loudly demanded that he break his coming date with the Dalai Lama. Is this proof that China-U.S. relations have entered a radically new and deeply worrisome phase?
It's tempting to see it that way. There has been much talk of China ruling the world and the clash of civilizations this would prompt. Much has been made of the notion that Chinese leaders have been showing an unexpected cockiness vis-à-vis the U.S. of late, tightly controlling what Obama did when in China, refusing to follow American leads in Copenhagen and then lambasting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for criticizing Beijing in a Jan. 21 speech on Internet freedom. But it's a temptation worth resisting....
Just as all politics is local (to a degree), all diplomacy is domestic (to a large extent). China's dramatic growth may have increased its ability to be less deferential toward the U.S. But when officials loudly proclaim that foreign leaders should steer clear of the Dalai Lama, lash out against Clinton's "information imperialism" or stoke popular indignation about Taiwan, their motivation is largely a desire to play the nationalism card as effectively as possible at home, and it is as much a sign of insecurity as it is one of bravado....
A series of similar actions doesn't necessarily represent a coherent policy. Several instances of the Chinese government acting "tougher" could just be discrete events....
Whenever we think about how China's rise is sending shock waves through the international order, we should remember that this has happened before. From the 1890s to the 1910s, a continent-sized country was ascending. It claimed to hate imperialism yet wasn't above extending its control over territory. It had a tendency to go it alone, and made other powers nervous. That country was the U.S....
While Washington and Beijing seem very much at odds just now, we shouldn't let their current state blind us to how intertwined they have become, nor to parallels between America's rise at the start of the last century and China's at the start of this one. Whether they like it or realize it, their relationship is truly one thing too big to fail.
Judith Stein: 'Green' Jobs Go to China, Too
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer (2-4-10)
[Judith Stein is a professor of history at the City University of New York and the author of the forthcoming "Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies" (Yale University Press). She can be reached at judithstein@worldnet.att.net.]
The political tsunami in Massachusetts has concentrated the Democratic mind on the economy and employment. President Obama had thought he could turn his attention to health care while banking on the trinity of finance, retail, and housing for jobs and revenue. Massachusetts was proof that the old recipe is bankrupt.
Obama's State of the Union proposals to ease some of the anxieties of retirement, education, and child care will help at the margins, but they skirt the job question. And although his deficit reduction measures will do nothing to address long-term red ink, they will surely reduce employment in the short run.
Where are the jobs?
Democrats initially defended their poor jobs record with the refrain that employment is a lagging indicator. As unemployment continued to rise, they promised "green" jobs, which have the political benefit of marrying the desires of the working class with those of environmentally sensitive professionals.
Green jobs are surely needed. But green Democrats simply echo the Atari Democrats of the 1980s, who concluded that traditional manufacturing was disposable and high technology was the wave of the future. During this era, the young Barack Obama attempted - and failed - to find jobs for displaced steelworkers in Chicago.
China's approach
As it turned out, high-tech industries prospered or faltered on a nation's trade and industrial policy, just as autos and steel did. And the United States came up short in the new as well as the old industries. By 2004, China was exporting more information and communications technology than this country.
Whether a company was state-owned or private, domestic or foreign, the Chinese government offered a wide variety of financial incentives, subsidies, low-interest loans, manipulated currency - as well as its fabled low wages - to get results. China put green jobs in the same incubator, contrasting sharply with the American approach.
The U.S. government has invested millions in photovoltaics research, yet the country accounted for only 5.6 percent of global production in 2008, down from 30 percent in 1999. Despite the government's investment, the only leading American company in the field does its manufacturing abroad.
Chinese production in the sector during the same period grew from 1 percent to 32 percent of the global total. China has built the world's largest solar-panel manufacturing industry, requiring at least 80 percent of the equipment to be made in China.
East wind
The Chinese government also rigged the bids for large contracts to supply wind turbines by creating technical requirements that disqualified multinational companies. By contrast, when American stimulus funds subsidized a joint U.S.-China wind-power farm in West Texas, it turned out that Texas stood to get 30 permanent jobs to China's 3,000. After Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) protested, the Chinese agreed to build a wind-turbine factory in Texas.
That story had a happy ending, but Washington's default position was to award the contract without thinking about American jobs. This explains why the country's wind-power capacity increased in 2009, but its wind-power equipment manufacturing fell.
Meanwhile, the Chinese government offers huge subsidies to encourage green-technology manufacturers in the United States to move their production to China. And when manufacturing leaves, research and development operations follow. That's how China attracted battery and fuel-cell research formerly conducted in America.
For too long, outsourcing has been accepted policy in the United States. The government has sent a message that it does not care if jobs are created here or abroad.
The Obama administration needs to do more than simply throw money at research or offer tax credits. If it wants green jobs not simply to please environmentalists, but to provide work for Americans, it will have to make aid contingent upon domestic job creation. This means altering decades-old policies built on free trade, financial deregulation, and tax cuts.
Juan Cole: Was US-Iran Rivalry Driving the Exclusion of Candidates in Iraq?
Source: Informed Comment (2-3-10)
I am going to speculate a little today, but I am hoping it is informed speculation. I think an end-game drama is playing out in Iraq between the United States and Iran, and possibly among factions of Americans in Iraq, over the likely leader of the next Iraqi government. I am going to argue that the disqualification of 500 candidates, some of them prominent Sunni Arabs, was not a sectarian measure, but a strategic strike at a single candidate. Update: The ban on the 500 candidates has just been lifted.
Iraqi Vice president Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni Arab and member of the three-man presidential council, visited Washington for consultations with President Barack Obama on Tuesday...
I think the visit was to strategize with the US over how to counter the Shiite chess move, which was probably carried out in consultation with Iran, aimed at checkmating candidate for prime minister Ayad Allawi. Allawi is one of five or six plausible successors to current Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, assuming al-Maliki cannot muster the seats to allow him a second term. They also include Vice President Adil Abdul Mahdi of the Shiite Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, former prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari, who broke off from the Da'wa Party, perpetual gadfly and Neoconservative favorite, Ahmad Chalabi, and a couple of others. Of them all, only Allawi is anti-Iran. Of them all, only Chalabi might try to recognize Israel, though many suspect him of being a double agent for Iran....
Since the Iraqi constitution specifies that the single party or party-coalition that has the largest number of seats will be given the first shot at forming a government, al-Maliki could only get a second term if Da'wa does unprecedentedly well and outpolls almost all the other Shiite parties together. Worse for Shiite interests, you could imagine a situation where Da'wa gets 65 seats and the Iraqi National Alliance gets 70, but where some other coalition gets 73. It could be the Kurdistan Alliance, or the new cross-sectarian secular coalition of Ayad Allawi, to which Hashimi belongs. If Allawi's list got the 73 seats in this scenario, he would have the chance to try to form a government....
Allawi, an ex-Baathist of Shiite extraction, was a CIA asset in the 1990s in London, in charge of running the officers in the Iraqi military who defected from the Saddam Hussein regime, and of coordinating terrorist attacks in Baghdad and attempts to assassinate or overthrow Saddam Hussein. Allawi appears to be too much of an Arab nationalist to look with favor on reconciliation with Israel, and so he was disliked by the Neoconservatives in the US. But he was favored behind the scenes by the CIA, which managed to convince George W. Bush to appoint him interim prime minister in June, 2004, a post he held until he was defeated by the religious Shiite parties early the following year....
Julian Zelizer: Americans Want Government Reforms
Source: CNN (2-2-10)
Responding to President Obama's State of the Union comments about the "deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that "the American people don't care about process."
Yet Americans have indicated that they are quite unhappy with how their government is working. According to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, only 28 percent of those polled believe that the federal government is "working well," while seven out of 10 believe that the "unhealthy" government is in need of reform. Almost 93 percent said there was too much partisanship; 84 percent said special interests had excessive power....
During the 1960s and 1970s, liberal Democrats and Republicans concluded that much of their policy agenda would be impossible to achieve if the political process did not change. They perceived Vietnam and then Watergate as the outgrowth of deep flaws in how our government worked.
During the 1970s, they were able to pass a series of significant reforms, such as a campaign finance system that included public funds for presidential campaigns and contribution limits. Reforms opened up more of the political process through sunshine laws and retrenched the power of the senior committee chairmen in Congress who had usually done as they pleased, ignoring the will of the majority....
If President Obama, Democrats and Republicans are serious about building trust among citizens and creating a more productive political process, they should work together to do something about it. If Washington is serious about reforming the political process, three specific areas deserve immediate attention.
Filibuster reform: The 60-vote supermajority Senate has become dysfunctional. Both parties have expressed frustration with their inability to move legislation through the process. Both parties have used the filibuster as a normal tool of procedural warfare. Because of the rampant use of the filibuster since the 1960s, senators expect that 60 votes are now required on almost every piece of legislation....
Campaign finance reform: A recent Supreme Court decision eliminated many of the barriers to corporate donations and third-party advertising.
The power of private money in campaigns has been a huge political issue for over a century. Because politicians depend on interest group support to obtain funds for their campaigns, they constantly find themselves constrained when it comes to making policy. The influence of private money also diminishes public trust in government. Every story about another lobbyist like Jack Abramoff confirms their worst fears about corruption....
Congressional earmarks and tax breaks: Pork-barrel politics is as American as apple pie. But in recent decades, the system by which legislators pass appropriations targeted to key interests has become pervasive. Legislators are comfortable putting provisions that are tailor-made for lobbyists or particular interests into bills. These earmarks are not subject to hearings or oversight. The use of earmarks by Senate Democrats to close the health care legislation that passed last month made the public uneasy....
Although voters tend to be more interested in bread-and-butter issues, as well as questions about war and peace, there are a few exceptional moments when public anger about the political system becomes so intense that we enter into a period of substantive reform. We might be reaching one of those points, but in the end it will require the initiative of the president and congressional leaders to make sure that calls for reform are not just empty rhetoric.
Robert Zaretsky: Le Parti Thé
Source: NYT (2-3-10)
[Robert Zaretsky, a professor of French history at the University of Houston Honors College, is the author of “Albert Camus: Elements of a Life.”]
More than 100,000 angry citizens united in the nation’s capital to take their country back: back from the tax collector and the political and financial elites, back from bureaucrats and backroom wheelers and dealers and, more elusively and alarmingly, back from those who, well, were not like them....
...[T]his scene didn’t take place at the Tea Party demonstration in Washington last year. These protesters were gathered in France a half-century ago: Last week was the 55th anniversary of the mass demonstration in Paris of the Poujadist movement, a phenomenon that bears a close resemblance to our own Tea Party....
Ever since the nation’s liberation in 1945, a deep division had run down the middle of the French ideological spectrum: the Gaullists and Catholics on the one side, the Communists and their fellow travelers on the other. The political center had evaporated in the crucible of the cold war. The parliamentary system became ever more dysfunctional, lurching from one crisis to another as the competing parties accused one another of working against the interests of the man in the street.
The man (and woman) in the street had a different take. Neither the traditional right nor left seemed interested in his plight. Inflation dogged his heels and the influx of consumer and cultural goods from America breathed ever more warmly on his neck. Yet in the face of this widespread anxiety, the professional political class seemed indifferent. At this critical moment, Pierre Poujade leapt onto the national stage.
A stationer in Saint-Céré, a small town in southwestern France, Poujade mobilized his fellow shopkeepers against government tax inspectors in 1953. He found a ready audience: le petit commerçant was increasingly squeezed between the spread of chain stores and a heavy-handed state bureaucracy.
Poujade (who was, of course, the satisfied recipient of many state benefits, from retirement pensions to health insurance) channeled the swelling of popular resentment by creating the Union for the Defense of Shopkeepers and Artisans. By the end of the year, membership had rocketed, transforming the group from a provincial curiosity to a real and present danger to politics as usual.
Short and barrel-chested — he had once been a dockworker — Poujade had a booming voice that amplified the anxiety of his populist followers. France’s woes, he declared, were due to an urbane and urban professional class that had “lost all contact with the real world.” In his autobiography, titled “I’ve Chosen to Fight,” Poujade styled himself as a simple man of the people who had entered politics for selfless and patriotic reasons.
The real France, he insisted, was found not in Paris, but in small towns and on farms. It was certainly not found in the person of France’s most promising politician, Pierre Mendès-France, who as prime minister had acted on many of his campaign promises for meaningful economic and political change. For Poujade, the young and cerebral Mendès-France, a Sephardic Jew whose family had lived in France for several generations, was and would always be a foreigner....
...Their tactics, if not their platform — they did not, in fact, have one — worked. Poujade’s party won more than 10 percent of the votes, taking more than 50 seats in the National Assembly.
The election, though, proved to be Poujade’s swan song. He had demanded the nation’s ear, but once he and his fellow deputies had it, they had nothing substantive to say. Slogans and placards were poor preparation for governance, and the group’s rank and file soon either retreated from the political arena or joined the traditional right....
Historical parallelism is the duct tape of my profession: we apply it to the most disparate things. Sooner or later the tape frays, revealing unique fissures that require individual attention. Perhaps this is the case with the Poujadists and the Tea Partiers... In both instances, however, the despair and disconnect with politics seem similarly great and real, as does the common tendency to grasp for simple solutions to complex problems.
Tea Party activists might find it infuriating ever to be compared to the nation they consider the anti-America. But French observers of our country may be forgiven if they feel a certain déjà vu when they see a movement that brings nothing to the ballot box except anger.
Peter A. Coclanis: Haiti Needs to Be Built, Not Rebuilt
Source: WSJ (2-2-10)
[Mr. Coclanis is a professor of history and director of the Global Research Institute at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.]
In our haste to help Haiti, we need to resist the kind of sloppy thinking that can lead to false assumptions and overly optimistic plans. The recent call by International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn for a "Marshall Plan" for Haiti, which is now being echoed by many others, is a case in point...
The Marshall Plan, officially known as the European Recovery Plan, was a U.S. policy that spent tremendous sums of money rebuilding war-torn Europe between 1948 and 1952. Popularly identified with Secretary of State George C. Marshall, the plan was largely developed by talented State Department officials, such as George F. Kennan and William L. Clayton. It had several goals, including providing relief to the poor, promoting economic development, and preventing a communist upsurge in Western and Southern Europe.
The U.S. and other nations distributed more than $13 billion—equivalent to more than $97 billion in 2008 dollars—to 17 nations. Some of the countries that received aid were historically poor: Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Turkey, for example. Most, however, were already developed countries that were simply reeling from World War II—such as Austria, Denmark, France, Western Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
In many cases, factories, city centers and infrastructure were bombed out. In others, residents had fled ahead of the fighting or mobilized in response to the war. Heavy investment was required to restart the economies of these countries.
The Marshall Plan succeeded in helping to usher in the European "economic miracle" of the 1950s. But it did so, according to most historians, because the bulk of the aid went to developed nations that merely needed an economic jump start....
The situation in Haiti today is vastly different than that of postwar Europe and Japan. Haiti is an economically exhausted place, as it was on the eve of the Jan. 12 earthquake. Its economic problems are not akin to those facing Europe or Japan in 1948, and what is required to put Haiti on sound economic footing is much different....
Haiti is by far the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere... Realistically, building an economic base for Haiti will take generations.
Before the quake there were more than 10,000 nongovernmental organizations in Haiti feeding the poor, providing health services and much more. This fact alone should give the world pause. Haiti doesn't need to be rebuilt. It needs to be built from the ground up.
Bruce J. Schulman: House Should Pass Senate Health Care Bill
Source: Politico (1-31-10)
As the congressional leadership ponders the way forward on national health care reform, a sense of anti-climax overwhelms Washington and the nation. The stunning special election in Massachusetts and the president’s State of the Union, with its vague language, have only intensified the confusion....
The architects of the most important social legislation in U.S. history, the Social Security Act of 1935, felt the same ambivalence abut their handiwork — and the same letdown about the final product. But Social Security became the bulwark of American social policy — the foundation of the social safety net to this day.
It also proved a political boon for its creators, winning Democrats votes and elections for two generations. Health care reform, however attenuated and compromised, has similar potential....
Like the current health care overhaul, which aims to expand coverage, eliminate predatory insurance practices and restrain costs, Social Security appeared to its creators as the opportunity to address several issues at once. They aimed not just to relieve the suffering of the elderly — half of whom lived in bitter poverty and almost none of whom had pensions of any kind — but also to set up a system of unemployment compensation and get poor children off the streets.
In so doing, they aimed to help the needy, especially the elderly, and also to ease pressure on the job market by getting children and the elderly out of the labor force. This tactic, they said, might return the national economy to a sustainable level of employment.
“Cradle to the grave,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, the chairman of the committee he appointed to formulate and pass his program, “from the cradle to the grave,” Americans “ought to be in a social insurance system.”
Roosevelt wanted universal coverage, too. The program, he insisted, should reach beyond the employees of large industrial corporations. “Everybody ought to be on it,” FDR told Perkins, including “the farmer and his wife and family. I don’t see why not.”...
The most important political concession, and the biggest disappointment to reformers who saw Social Security as a tool to aid the impoverished, was the decision to pay for it entirely through “contributions” — a regressive payroll tax system. They gave up the idea of supplementing benefits with income tax revenues that would more aggressively redistribute income from the affluent to the struggling.
By the time the last compromise was made, Perkins expressed the disillusionment of many reformers. The thing,” she lamented, had been “chiseled down to a conservative pattern.”...
Passing the Senate bill might mean swallowing hard in the short-term, but if Americans enjoy new benefits and protection against catastrophic illness, the politics, history shows, could shift.
Even with the compromises present at its creation, FDR, Perkins remembered, considered Social Security “the cornerstone” of his legacy. President Barack Obama and the Congress might well remember that model.
Lawrence Wittner: Taxing the Rich
Source: Truthout (2-1-10)
[Dr. Wittner is professor of history at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is "Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement" (Stanford University Press).]
Decades ago, right wingers began championing cuts in income taxes for the rich and - when that lowered government revenue - turned around and claimed that government could no longer "afford" to maintain vital public services like education and health care. Unfortunately, in an effort to curry favor with the wealthy and their corporations, many state and national officeholders began to adopt the right wing's tax-cutting model. In New York State, the tax rate for top income earners was reduced from over 15 percent to less than half that amount. On the federal level, it plummeted from 91 percent (in the early 1960s) to 35 percent (today). As a result of such policies - and of rising expenditures on the military - there was a lot less government revenue left for public services, and they were slashed accordingly.
Of course, in these circumstances, there was plenty of money - in fact, more than ever before - in the pockets and vast bank accounts of the wealthy and their corporations. Furthermore, unlike most of the population, the wealthy generally didn't regret the decline of public schools, public hospitals, public law enforcement or public parks. After all, they sent their children to expensive private schools and colleges, utilized private health care, resided in secure, wealthy neighborhoods and vacationed in exclusive hotels and resorts. Why worry about the adequacy of the government's stamp program if the only time they experienced hunger was when the service was slow in their favorite French restaurant?
To help reverse the erosion of public services, unions and other social justice organizations have turned increasingly to a tax-the-rich approach. A good example of this occurred in Oregon on January 26 when voters passed two ballot measures that raised taxes on the wealthiest 3 percent of that state's residents and on the most lucrative businesses in the state.
These ballot measures were developed in the context of a severe state budgetary crisis, which left Oregon on the verge of freezing salaries for public employees, making deep cuts in spending on education and ending forest protection rules. Taking the offensive, public employee unions, community groups and progressive businesses developed a grassroots campaign to pass the two ballot measures, which were designed to safeguard $1 billion in public services while not raising taxes on the vast majority of the population or, for that matter, on 93 percent of small business owners. They pointed out that the rich had grown much richer thanks to conservative policies and that the state's minimum tax paid by most corporations stood at only $10 a year!
Daniel Pipes: How to Save the Obama Presidency: Bomb Iran
Source: National Review Online (2-2-10)
[Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.]
I do not customarily offer advice to a president whose election I opposed, whose goals I fear, and whose policies I work against. But here is an idea for Barack Obama to salvage his tottering administration by taking a step that protects the United States and its allies....
...Obama can give orders for the U.S. military to destroy the Iranian nuclear weapon capacity....
Circumstances are propitious. First, U.S. intelligence agencies have reversed their preposterous 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, the one that claimed with "high confidence" that Tehran had "halted its nuclear weapons program," No one (other than the Iranian rulers and their agents) denies that the regime is rushing headlong to build a large nuclear arsenal.
Second, if the apocalyptic-minded leaders in Tehran get the Bomb, they render the Middle East a yet more volatile and dangerous. They might deploy these weapons in the region, leading to massive death and destruction. Eventually, they could launch an electro-magnetic pulse attack on the United States, utterly devastating the country. By eliminating the Iranian nuclear threat, Obama protects the homeland and sends a message to American's friends and enemies.
Third, polling shows longstanding American backing for an attack on the Iranian nuclear infrastructure....
Not only does a strong majority – 57, 52, 58, 61, and 61 percent – already favor using force but after a strike Americans will presumably rally around the flag, jumping that number much higher....
Just as 9/11 caused voters to forget George W. Bush's meandering early months, a strike on Iranian facilities would dispatch Obama's feckless first year down the memory hole and transform the domestic political scene. It would sideline health care, prompt Republicans to work with Democrats, make netroots squeal, independents reconsider, and conservatives swoon.
Max Hastings: Lessons from Chilcot on the Atlantic Alliance
Source: Financial Times (UK) (1-31-10)
[The writer is an FT contributing editor.]
Tony Blair’s appearance on Friday before the Chilcot inquiry on the Iraq war conformed to expectations. It was an exercise in self-justification, indeed self-righteousness, at one with everything the former UK prime minister has said since 2003. It may be argued that no national leader can afford to apologise for mistakes of the highest importance. To do so would be to surrender to the vultures the carcass of his reputation.
I am among those sceptical about the merits of holding an Iraq inquest. Britain was the junior partner in a US adventure. No prominent American participants will testify, no Washington documentary evidence is available. The report of Sir John Chilcot and his colleagues will describe a train crash from the perspective of passengers. They can explain the process by which tickets were bought, the coach boarded. But the driver’s absence from the witness box seems an insurmountable impediment to reaching important conclusions.
Furthermore, the important realities have been plain for years. George W. Bush, former US president, and Mr Blair shared a moral and strategic enthusiasm for removing Saddam Hussein. They sincerely believed he possessed weapons of mass destruction. They took the risk of making these their casus belli because by no other means could they secure domestic political endorsements for military action. When the WMD case proved false and Iraq lapsed into bloody chaos, they were left naked before the court of public opinion and posterity.
The most important contribution of the Chilcot proceedings thus far is to emphasise how far British governance has become presidential rather than parliamentary. A host of witnesses – diplomats, civil servants, generals and ministers – have exposed their reservations about, even passionate objections to, the 2003 Iraq invasion. Britain went ahead anyway because one man, Mr Blair, was committed. Nobody was strong or brave enough to stop him. If all those who assert their opposition had declared it publicly at the time, or merely resigned in silence, Mr Blair could probably not have secured a parliamentary majority for war. But, with the exception of one middle-ranking Foreign Office lawyer and two leftwing ministers, the sceptics and dissenters voiced private misgivings then acquiesced.
It is an interesting question whether the Iraq experience means such Whitehall docility will be unforthcoming in a future international crisis. My own guess is that, once raw memories of this disaster fade, deference to the prime minister’s authority will remain the norm. A British national leader today possesses greater power over his own polity than does a US president over his.
Perhaps the most interesting and profitable field for investigation and speculation by Chilcot is that of Britain’s role in the Atlantic alliance. The memory is burnt on my brain of a moment in late 2002 when I heard one of the UK’s most prominent strategists express intense unhappiness about the Iraq commitment, then conclude with a sigh: “But if the Americans are determined to do this, we shall have to go with them.” His view was that Britain’s military linkage with the US was so fundamental to our foreign policy that we must fight willy-nilly. I believe this conviction, etched in the mindset of officials, diplomats and commanders since 1945, was the decisive influence on events.
Every British defence review and government strategy paper assumes we cannot take unilateral military action without US backing. Implicit is the fear that, should we flinch from supporting their cherished purposes, we shall forfeit theirs for our own. The inadequacy of European security policies, the refusal of EU partners to address defence in a credible fashion, reinforces such sentiment. If we are not with the Americans and they are not with us, goes the argument, we shall end up adrift in strategic limbo...
Tom Engelhardt: Seven Days in January
Source: TomDispatch (1-31-10)
[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.]
Sometimes it pays to read a news story to the last paragraph where a reporter can slip in that little gem for the news jockeys, or maybe just for the hell of it. You know, the irresistible bit that doesn’t fit comfortably into the larger news frame, but that can be packed away in the place most of your readers will never get near, where your editor is likely to give you a free pass.
So it was, undoubtedly, with New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, who accompanied Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as he stumbled through a challenge-filled, error-prone two-day trip to Pakistan. Gates must have felt a little like a punching bag by the time he boarded his plane for home having, as Juan Cole pointed out, managed to signal “that the U.S. is now increasingly tilting to India and wants to put it in charge of Afghanistan security; that Pakistan is isolated… and that Pakistani conspiracy theories about Blackwater were perfectly correct and he had admitted it. In baseball terms, Gates struck out.”
In any case, here are the last two paragraphs of Bumiller’s parting January 23rd piece on the trip:
Mr. Gates, who repeatedly told the Pakistanis that he regretted their country’s ‘trust deficit’ with the United States and that Americans had made a grave mistake in abandoning Pakistan after the Russians left Afghanistan, promised the military officers that the United States would do better.
His final message delivered, he relaxed on the 14-hour trip home by watching ‘Seven Days in May,’ the cold war-era film about an attempted military coup in the United States.”
Just in case you’ve forgotten, three major cautionary political films came out in the anxiety-ridden year of 1964, not so long after the Cuban Missile crisis -- of which only Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick’s classic vision of the end of the world, American-style, is much remembered today. (“I don’t say we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than ten to twenty million people killed.”)
All three concerned nuclear politics, “oops” moments, and Washington. The second was Fail Safe, in which a computerized nuclear response system too fast for human intervention malfunctions and fails to stop an erroneous nuclear attack on Moscow, forcing an American president to save the world by nuking New York City. It was basically Dr. Strangelove done straight (though it’s worth pointing out that Americans loved to stomp New York City in their fantasies long before 9/11).
Greg Grandin: Muscling Latin America
Source: The Nation (1-21-10)
[Greg Grandin is professor of history at New York University.]
In September Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, delivered on an electoral promise and refused to renew Washington's decade-old, rent-free lease on an air base outside the Pacific coast town of Manta, which for the past ten years has served as the Pentagon's main South American outpost. The eviction was a serious effort to fulfill the call of Ecuador's new Constitution to promote "universal disarmament" and oppose the "imposition" of military bases of "some states in the territory of others." It was also one of the most important victories for the global demilitarization movement, loosely organized around the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases, since protests forced the US Navy to withdraw from Vieques, Puerto Rico, in 2003. Correa, though, couldn't resist an easy joke. "We'll renew the lease," he quipped, "if the US lets us set up a base in Miami."...
Such challenges to US authority have led the Council on Foreign Relations to pronounce the Monroe Doctrine "obsolete." But that doctrine, which for nearly two centuries has been used to justify intervention from Patagonia to the Rio Grande, has not expired so much as slimmed down, with Barack Obama's administration disappointing potential regional allies by continuing to promote a volatile mix of militarism and free-trade orthodoxy in a corridor running from Mexico to Colombia.
The anchor of this condensed Monroe Doctrine is Plan Colombia. Heading into the eleventh year of what was planned to phase out after five, Washington's multibillion-dollar military aid package has failed to stem the flow of illegal narcotics into the United States. More Andean coca was synthesized into cocaine in 2008 than in 1998, and the drug's retail price is significantly lower today, adjusted for inflation, than it was a decade ago....
Seen in light of his escalation in Afghanistan, Obama's support for the Colombian base deal endorses the kind of elastic threat assessment that has turned the "long war" against radical Islam into a wide war where ultimate victory will be a world absent of crime--"counterinsurgen-
cies without end," as Andrew Bacevich recently put it.
Shortly after the fall of Baghdad, Washington tried to conscript all of Latin America in the fight. In October 2003 it pushed the Organization of American States to include corruption, undocumented migration, money laundering, natural and man-made disasters, AIDS, environmental degradation, poverty and computer hacking alongside terrorism and drugs as security threats. In 2004 an Army War College strategist proposed "exporting Plan Colombia" to all of Latin America, which Donald Rumsfeld tried to do later that year at a regional defense ministers meeting in Ecuador. He was rebuffed; countries like Chile and Brazil refuse to subordinate their militaries, as they did during the cold war, to US command.
So the United States retrenched, setting about to fight the wide war in a narrower place, creating a security corridor running from Colombia through Central America to Mexico. With a hodgepodge of treaties and projects, such as the International Law Enforcement Academy and the Merida Initiative, Obama is continuing the policies of his predecessors, spending millions to integrate the region's military, policy, intelligence and even, through Patriot Act-like legislation, judicial systems. This is best thought of as an effort to enlarge the radius of Plan Colombia to create a unified, supra-national counterinsurgent infrastructure. Since there is "fusion" among Latin American terrorists and criminals, goes a typical argument in a recent issue of the Pentagon's Joint Force Quarterly, "countering the threat will require fusion on our part."...
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- Stephen Kislock on Daniel Pipes: How to Save the Obama Presidency: Bomb Iran
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