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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.

David Kaiser: What a week

Source: David Kaiser Blog (9-29-08)

[My new book, The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, has now been published.]

One era died today, but the shape of the new one remains completely unknown. The House's failure to pass the bail-out signals the utter bankruptcy of our political system--a drama in which two generations have certainly acted entirely in character. Boomer Henry Paulsen, a former Wall Street titan, took charge of the situation--as Donald Rumsfeld had taken charge of foreign policy for George W. Bush after 9/11--and announced he needed total powers. The Silent Democratic leadership of the House of Representatives, led by Nancy Pelosi and my old friend Barney Frank, felt it essential to try to keep some cooperative spirit alive and give the Administration some version of what it wanted to avoid an economic class. But the Republican Boomers who dominated the House of Representatives from 1994 until last year, riding roughshod over all opposition in pursuit of their agenda, would not be stampeded. Lurking behind them were the American people, who probably have no idea what is in store for them--any more than northerners and southerners in late 1860 knew what the Civil War would be like--but who see no reason to reward irresponsibility and greed on Wall Street with $700 billion of their money. The plan failed, the market fell 600 points, and no one has the slightest idea what might happen next.

We shall probably never know, but in the long run the plan's failure might not be a bad thing. I strongly suspect Wall Street would have used the money to try to hang on to as much of their gains over the last 16 years as they could, without addressing many underlying problems. We were certain to have a major recession in any event, and the problem now is to find another engine--something very unlike subprime mortgages or new derivatives--to fuel a recovery. Hundreds of billions may well be needed, but they should in my judgment go into a new institution that can lend directly to the businesses and regular banks who need liquidity--and, perhaps, buy up and renegotiate some subprimes. Meanwhile, the recession may lead to a New Deal type of public works program to rebuild infrastructure, while greener power may play the role of TVA. All that, however, is at least a year away, and probably more, and the country will suffer economically for some time..

The old order is, for the moment, played out. Market idolatry has failed catastrophically but no new ideas have emerged to take its place. While Democrats (including Barack Obama) understand that Wall Street's days of running wild must come to an end, I don't think any of them have many ideas about restructuring our economy. That is both frightening and challenging. Many new politicians, economists, writers, and even journalists will make their names over the next ten years--largely by focusing on real events, rather than spin. That is the beauty, in every sense, of the crisis, the Fourth Turning, that the late Bill Strauss and Neil Howe first predicted 15 years ago. Their ideas have never won mainstream acceptance, but it is becoming more and more difficult to pooh-pooh them now--even though some posters here continue to try. The crisis is both death and rebirth, and thus a time to look forward more than back.

John McCain is in every sense quite an old face; Barack Obama is a new one. That alone has proven a big advantage this year, but Obama also has shown the kind of curious, flexible, clear-headed intelligence that we are going to need.

A colleague yesterday reminded me of another vote at another moment of national crisis, the extension (after only one year) of the draft in the late summer of 1941 that passed the House of Representatives by a single vote. I have suspected for a long time that that vote--like the Senate vote for war with Iraq in 1991--reflected political realities more than sincere opinions. A significant majority of the House knew the draft had to continue in 1941, but they also knew that it was unpopular, and the Democratic leadership (which predicted the outcome exactly) probably arranged things to allow the maximum possible number of popular "no" votes while doing what the country needed. That, for various reasons--including the weaknesses of the plan--was what the House leadership--and especially the Republican House leadership--could not do yesterday. That's an interesting sign of where we are.

I spent the weekend in New York, watching Act II of another drama in Shea Stadium with my son (a devoted Mets fan) on Saturday. On Sunday he returned and I had a few hours to kill. Scanning the movies, I discovered one dealing with the subject of one of my books: Virtual JFK: Vietnam if Kennedy had Lived. I had no idea what to expect, but as it turned out, the movie, narrated by political scientist James Blight, used archival footage and tapes to show JFK at his level-headed best, refusing again and again to lose his cool when reporters baited him with argumentative questions, and facing down the Joint Chiefs in October 1962 when they bluntly told him that war was his only alternative. The movie, which acknowledged no specific secondary sources, actually seemed to draw on American Tragedy while discussing the Laotian and Vietnamese crises of 1961, in which Kennedy twice rejected the near-unanimous recommendations of his advisers and refused to begin large-scale war in Southeast Asia then and there. I am very glad that it was made and I hope it gets some good television exposure. Few viewers, I think, could watch the film without being reminded of Barack Obama--and those of us over 60 can remember how Kennedy, too,was frequently criticized for being too cool, too unemotional, and too cautious during his Presidency. Those were in fact the qualities we needed then, and those we have now been lacking for so long. Obama looks like he can provide them.

Posted on Tuesday, September 30, 2008 at 9:29 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Nigel Jones: Austria, still hobbled by its history

Source: Times (UK) (9-30-08)

[Nigel Jones's Countdown to Valkyrie: The July Plot against Hitler is published in December by Frontline Books.]

Austria is special. Its tourist board will tell you that, as will the headlines on the infrequent occasions when the Alpine republic grabs global attention. One of those rare occasions happened this weekend: Austria's far-right parties scooped up 29 per cent of the votes between them in a general election, pushing them ahead of the conservative People's Party, and only just behind the Social Democrats.

The last time Austria was in the news was in April when Josef Fritzl was arrested for imprisoning his own daughter in a cellar and fathering her seven children. While it would be absurd to connect the horrifying Fritzl case directly to Austria's troubled politics, the fact that Fritzl blamed his behaviour on his harsh upbringing under the Third Reich shows that the country remains hobbled by its history in a way that is no longer true of neighbouring Germany. By and large the Germans have faced up to and faced down their Nazi past. The Austrians have not, hence why, unlike Germans, a third of them are willing to vote for xenophobic parties.

Until this decade, Austrian schools continued to teach that the country was “Hitler's first victim”, rather than his earliest collaborator. The 1938 newsreel films showing the delirious Viennese crowds welcoming Hitler back give the lie to that particular piece of special pleading. As well as Hitler, many of the worst Nazi war criminals - including two of those hanged at Nuremberg, the SS leader Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Arthur Seyss-Inquart, overlord of the occupied Netherlands - were Austrians; as was Otto Skorzeny, reputed leader of the postwar Odessa organisation of former SS men.

But the shadows of Austria's history go back further than the Third Reich. Anyone taking a trip around Vienna's ring-road will gaze at the grandiose palaces, opulent museums and opera houses, and realise that this was once the hub of an empire, a multinational kennel in which the Austrians were, however insecurely, top dogs.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed 90 years ago. In 1918 the emperor departed, his threadbare ethnic quilt of an empire ripped apart, and the Habsburgs became history. Austria was left as a rump republic, a landlocked little nation whose 8.3 million people still long for their past imperial grandeur. Many of them hoped to find it with Hitler, but when he failed them too in 1945 all they were left with was a kind of angry nostalgia, easily exploited by nationalist politicians.

Ironically, the modern Austrian political system, against which its people have voted so spectacularly, was born behind the wire of Hitler's concentration camps. It was there that detained Social Democrats and Catholic conservatives came together and agreed to sink the bitter differences that had caused civil war in 1934 and made Austria such easy prey for Hitler.

Every institution, every state-run enterprise, was neatly divided between the socialist “reds” and the conservative “blacks”. In the state broadcasting corporation ORF - where I worked as a radio journalist - each department had a “red” boss and a “black” deputy, or vice-versa. This system, known as Proporz (“Proportionality”), allowed often talent-free party hacks the pick of the best jobs, the best perks and even the best housing. Originally designed to end class war and division, it bred bitter resentment among the majority who were excluded from the cosy but corrupt arrangement.

Jörg Haider, at 58 now the ageing enfant terrible of the far Right, skilfully rode such resentment after he took over Austria's small liberal Freedom Party in the 1980s and transformed it into a successful populist movement. Despite his praise for Hitler's employment policies and his attendance at Waffen SS reunions, he is a modern politician. He swapped brown shirts and lederhosen for designer suits and blue jeans as he denounced the immigration that had “swamped” Austria since the collapse of Communism...

Posted on Tuesday, September 30, 2008 at 9:16 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Robert S. McElvaine: Their Party Crashed. Ours May Too.

Source: WaPo (9-28-08)

[Robert S. McElvaine, a professor of history at Millsaps College, is the author of "The Great Depression" and, most recently, "Grand Theft Jesus: The Highjacking of Religion in America."]

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes." Mark Twain was supposed to have said that, but even if he didn't, there's no denying that we're seeing proof of the adage in today's financial crisis.

Consider this statement: "The extraordinary rate of default on residential mortgages forced banks and life insurance companies to 'practically stop making mortgage loans. . . .' " Sounds like 2008, doesn't it? It is in fact a comment from Ben S. Bernanke, current chairman of the Federal Reserve board. But when he wrote those words in 1983, he was talking about the Great Depression.

We've been hearing a lot of comparisons to the Great Depression lately, because today's crisis rhymes with that one to an extraordinary degree. At the most basic level, the cause of the current crisis is simple: Economists, business leaders and policymakers have all been ignoring the lessons learned from that early 20th-century calamity.

I've written extensively about the Great Depression, and in my view, the collapse of the "un-real" estate market of recent years was as predictable as the collapse of the Great Bull Market of the late 1920s. Even though some politicians insist otherwise, the fundamentals of our economy are not strong, just as they weren't in 1929. And the principal reason is that, just as they were in the period leading up to the Great Depression, economic fundamentalists have been in charge.

It's one of the fascinating coincidences of history that Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" was published in 1776, the year of the United States's birth. America then was seen as an unspoiled paradise, a "New Eden" where humans could return to what they imagined was a "state of nature." There was talk of an "American Adam" who roamed freely in this land where the "natural economy" of the free market that Smith postulated could operate, well, freely.

Almost from the start, many Americans have operated on the assumption that this American Adam's surname was Smith, and have taken the market as their economic god. The great irony, though, is that a new type of economy was being born in Great Britain at the same time. And industrialism would remove men and women from a state of nature more completely than ever before.

By the 1920s, the industrial economy was mass-producing at a rapid rate, which meant that its survival required the rise of mass consumption. Trying to play by the rules of Adam Smith's pin factory at a time when Henry Ford's massive River Rouge complex was closer to the true nature of the economy was a prescription for disaster. Such huge economic actors don't behave according to the "natural" laws of the simple economy of Smith's day; under modern circumstances, a more visible hand is needed to guide the market onto a course that benefits all. Yet both economists and political leaders of the time maintained their faith in market-god fundamentalism.

The task facing business in the 1920s was replacing the work ethic with a consumption ethic. If the American people were to be made into insatiable consumers, traditional values would have to be undermined and reversed. The means of accomplishing this? Advertising. The Mad Men of the '20s made over the traditional wisdom of "Waste not, want not" into the essential message of the consumption economy: "Waste and want." Bruce Barton of Barton, Durstine & Osborn, for instance, famously portrayed Jesus as the ultimate advertiser and businessman in his 1925 bestseller, "The Man Nobody Knows."

But wanting isn't enough. If the masses are going to be able to buy what they've been persuaded to want, they have to receive a sufficient share of total income to do so. Yet the opposite happened in the '20s. President Calvin Coolidge and his Treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, drastically reduced taxes on the highest incomes. Meanwhile, anti-union policies produced less income for worker-consumers. The share of total national income going to the very richest grew enormously, peaking in 1928, just months before the economy began to contract in the summer of 1929. The top 10 percent of American earners then were getting 46 percent of total income.

Providing large tax cuts for the richest was precisely the wrong policy. To stimulate consumption, taxes should have been cut at lower income levels. Cutting taxes on higher incomes stimulated speculation instead. Sound familiar?...

Posted on Tuesday, September 30, 2008 at 1:37 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Correlli Barnett: We have learnt the wrong lessons from Munich

Source: Times (UK) (9-29-08)

[Correlli Barnett is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and author of The Collapse of British Power (Pan Books).]

Tomorrow is the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Munich Agreement with Hitler. The word “appeasement” has been a synonym for cowardly surrender to armed threat ever since.

The Agreement marked the denouement of the foreign policy that Neville Chamberlain had pursued with unshakeable self-belief since he became Prime Minister in 1937. To him appeasement meant bringing a stable peace to Europe by replacing the Versailles Treaty of 1919 (imposed by the victors on Germany) with a new settlement based on mutual consent. The memory of the Great War, in which his cousins were killed on the Western Front, inspired him with a profound detestation of force. In his own words, “War wins nothing, cures nothing, ends nothing...in war, there are no winners, only losers.”

When Chamberlain conceived his vision, Nazi Germany had reoccupied the demilitarised zone of the Rhineland in defiance of the Versailles Treaty and was openly rearming; Britain, too, had begun to rearm. It seemed that Europe was heading inexorably towards another Great War.

Here was motive enough for a man of peace such as Chamberlain. Yet there was something else: a deal with Hitler would also effectively solve Britain's problem of defending a global empire in the face of a triple threat - from Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and militarist Japan.

But Chamberlain, a decent, honourable English gentleman, did not perceive that by wooing Hitler he was yielding him the upper hand, an advantage Hitler was ruthlessly to exploit when the Czechoslovakian crisis blew up in 1938.

After Hitler had occupied Austria in March and united it with Germany, it was clear that Czechoslovakia, with its minority population of German-speakers in the Sudetenland, would be next. So Chamberlain convinced his Cabinet that Britain must persuade the Germans, French and Czechs that there should be an “amicable” and “orderly” settlement of the Sudeten question.

A day later, the Chiefs of Staff reported on the military implications of German aggression against Czechoslovakia. Totting up a gloomy military balance sheet, they concluded: “We are not yet ready for war.” But it was well known in London that the German military leadership believed the same of Germany. So a declaration by Britain and France that they would fight for Czechoslovakia's territorial integrity might have enabled the German generals to deter Hitler from risking a war.

All that summer Hitler and his Sudeten stooge, Konrad Henlein, stoked the crisis. When Henlein ranted at a rally in Berlin, “We are German national citizens”, even Chamberlain had to acknowledge that this was no longer a domestic dispute between the Sudetens and the Czech Government, but a question of the territorial integrity of Czechoslovakia.

Chamberlain's noble aspiration to appease Europe was now supplanted as a motive by simple fear of war. In crucial Cabinet debates, only Duff Cooper and Oliver Stanley showed fighting spirit. Referring to the doubts of the German generals about Germany's readiness for war, Stanley prophesied (rightly) that in a year or so Germany “would be in an immeasurably stronger position for fighting a long war”. So stand firm? Not at all. In Chamberlain's cringe-making words, it was “very very important not to exacerbate feeling in Berlin against us”.

In September the crisis deepened. Reservists were called up, violent riots broke out all over the Sudetenland, and Hitler declared to the Nuremberg rally on September 12 that “the Germans in Czechoslovakia are neither defenceless nor are they deserted”. Next day there was an armed rising in the Sudetenland, which the Czechs easily crushed, and Henlein fled to Germany.

It seemed inevitable that the German Army would soon invade. Both France and the Soviet Union were bound to Czechoslovakia by treaties of alliance. Britain could hardly leave France to its fate, so a general European conflict seemed desperately near. This prospect broke the fragile nerve of the French Government, which pleaded with Chamberlain that a German invasion must be averted at all costs. This was exactly what Chamberlain needed as the justification for what he called his Plan Z - a personal mission to Hitler “with a view to finding a peaceful solution”.

On September 15 he flew to Munich and the two leaders sat down for a three-hour discussion at Hitler's mountain retreat. It was as if a clergyman was joining a professional card-sharp in a poker game. Chamberlain was to report later that he believed that Hitler's objectives “were strictly limited”, and that he had favourably impressed the man. In fact, Hitler had sized him up as a sucker to be easily conned.

Hitler coupled the threat of imminent war with ever-increasing demands. Even a Czech agreement to cede the Sudetenland, wrung out of President Benes by a disgraceful Anglo-French ultimatum to agree or be abandoned, was no longer enough. Now the Sudetenland must be handed over to Germany by October 1 or the German Army would march.

The deeply split British Cabinet reluctantly agreed with the Prime Minister that there was no alternative but to give in. Only Duff Cooper resigned in protest.

On September 29, Chamberlain, Edouard Daladier, the French Prime Minister, Hitler and Mussolini met in Munich. Next day the now infamous Agreement handing over the Sudetenland and Czech frontier fortifications to Germany was signed. It left Czechoslovakia defenceless and decisively swung the balance of military strength in Europe away from the democracies.

From an upstairs window of 10 Downing Street, Chamberlain told a shamefully cheering crowd that he had brought back “peace with honour. I believe it is peace in our time.” It was the climactic scene in the tragedy of a deeply moral man corrupted by a cunning adversary - and by his own vanity.

The word “appeasement” haunts us to this day.It confuses our political leaders who believe that not to stand up to any aggressor anywhere at any time is to be an “appeaser”. This was the argument advanced in 1994 to justify intervening in the Yugoslav civil war. No appeasement of Slobodan Milosevic! Tony Blair said the same in 1999 to justify the Nato-led attack on Serbia in the cause of the Muslim Albanian inhabitants of the historic Serbian province of Kosovo. And recently, both David Miliband and David Cameron rushed to Tbilisi to promise that the West will stand by Georgia in its dispute with Russia. No appeasement of Putin and Medvedev!..

Posted on Monday, September 29, 2008 at 10:01 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Tom Engelhardt: The Pentagon Bailout Fraud

Source: TomDispatch.com (9-28-08)

[Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.]

Let's start with the money the Bush administration has already thrown at the war in Iraq. According to the June congressional testimony of William Beach, director of the Center for Data Analysis, the war has cost $646 billion so far. The new defense budget for 2009 tacks on another $68.6 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan in the coming year. However, military expert Bill Hartung of the New America Foundation puts a conservative estimate of the costs of a single week of the Iraq War at approximately $3.5 billion (or about $180 billion a year).

In other words, the war in Iraq will cost far more in the next year than the Iraq portion of that $68.6 billion Congress is about to pony up in the defense budget, and so will be funded, as has long been true, through supplemental war bills submitted by the Bush administration (and then whatever administration follows). In other words, sometime in 2009 the direct costs of the war the Bush administration once predicted would cost perhaps $50-60 billion in total will stand at more than $800 billion, or $100 billion above the cost (if all goes well, which it won't) of the bailout of the financial system now being proposed in Washington.

Estimates of the true long-term costs of the President's war of choice, including payments of health care and veterans benefits into the distant future, soar into the budgetary stratosphere. They range from the Congressional Budget Office's $1-2 trillion to an estimate by economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes of up to $4-5 trillion. So we're talking somewhere between one-and-a-half and seven bailouts-worth of taxpayer dollars flowing into the morass of disaster, corruption, and carnage in Iraq.

And here's another curious bit of information: Just the other day, the website ThinkProgress pointed out a strange glitch in Iraq planning. The Bush administration, deep into negotiations with the Iraqi government, evidently managed to wheedle an extra year's time for the prospective withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq; its negotiators pushed the date from 2010 -- the year suggested by both Barack Obama and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki -- to 2011. According to Maliki in an interview with an Iraqi TV station, this change came from the administration's concern over the "domestic situation" in the U.S. (that is, the needs of the McCain campaign).

"Actually," said Maliki, "the final date was really the end of 2010 and the period between the end of 2010 and the end of 2011 was for withdrawing the remaining troops from all of Iraq, but they asked for a change [in date] due to political circumstances related to the [U.S] domestic situation so it will not be said to the end of 2010 followed by one year for withdrawal but the end of 2011 as a final date." So we're talking about another perhaps $150-180 billion in 2011 -- or approximately the full suggested initial payout in the Washington bailout plan of at least one key Democrat. This gives the phrase "presidential politics" new meaning. Now, just imagine for a moment the situation we might be in if there had been no Iraq War. We could have bailed ourselves out many times over.

As Chalmers Johnson, author most recently of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, the final volume of his Blowback Trilogy, has pointed out for years, the Pentagon, the military-industrial complex, and America's wars are in the process of bankrupting us. How strange then that, as he indicates below, no one in the mainstream even blinks when a staggering new Pentagon budget sails through the House of Representatives and then, by voice vote, through the Senate just as negotiators in Washington are scrambling to find a similar sum to deal with a catastrophic financial meltdown; nor does anyone in the mainstream bother to make any connection between that budget and the funds we don't have available to use elsewhere, or between the looting of Iraq and the looting of our financial system (and, in both cases, of course, the looting of the American taxpayer).

Related Links

  • Chalmers Johnson: We Have the Money (If Only We Didn't Waste It on the Defense Budget)

    • Posted on Sunday, September 28, 2008 at 9:19 PM | Comments (5) | Top

    Jonathan Zimmerman: Sarah Palin and the Assault on Merit

    Source: Teachers College Record ID Number: 15383 (9-28-08)

    In the 1990s, the Chicago Bulls won six NBA championships. Their formula was simple: Michael Jordan plus a decent supporting cast equals victory. At the end of every game, the ball was in Jordan's hands. And the Bulls almost always came out on top.

    Were the Bulls being "elitist" by channeling their entire offense through Michael Jordan? Of course they were. Jordan was the best basketball player on earth, plain and simple. He had won the right to carry the Bulls, and--even more--the Bulls needed him to do it. Anything less would have weakened their chances.

    So there's nothing wrong with "elitism," per se, so long as it's based on merit. The problem arises when people become elites without earning it, by the luck of birth and wealth. Your station in life should reflect your skill and effort, not your inherited status.

    Unless, of course, you want to be our vice president.

    The nomination of Sarah Palin represents a direct and unprecedented assault on the American ideal of merit. Of course, Palin's handlers insist that she has the experience, talent, and ability to serve as the nation's second-in-command. Clearly, though, Palin was nominated because=2
    0of who she is---a hockey mom, a hunter, and so on---rather than what she has done.

    Would you select an accountant because his son plays hockey? Would you choose a doctor because she can kill a moose? I doubt it. But plenty of voters seem ready to make Sarah Palin their vice-president, simply because she seems to be like them.

    To be sure, Americans have always wanted their leaders to possess a common touch. Abraham Lincoln split rails, after all, and Theodore Roosevelt went all the way to Africa to shoot lions. Heck, even President Bush wears cowboy boots and clears brush.

    Most of this was political theater, of course, as Ivy-educated patricians like Roosevelt and Bush tried to affect a regular-guy demeanor. Americans have always suspected inherited wealth, and rightly so: it runs counter to the self-made ideal, whereby each of us rises or falls depending on individual ability, dedication, and persistence.

    That's why Thomas Jefferson hoped that America would develop a "natural aristocracy," a new generation of talent to lead the new nation. Otherwise, he warned, we would be governed by "an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth." Better to be ruled by the gifted few, Jefferson wrote, than by the fortunate rich.

    Since then, Americans have been arguing about which is which. How can you pick out the natural aristocrats among us? How many of them simply appear talented, because of their social a
    dvantages? And how many poorer folk have the ability to rise to the top, if only they get a little break?

    Writing in the midst of the Great Depression, Harvard president James B. Conant thought he found the answer: standardized testing. As Conant well realized, many Harvard students got into the college solely because of their wealth or last name. The trick was to devise examinations that would separate people with true merit from those who simply had privilege. And so the Standardized Achievement Test was born.

    We've had plenty of debate about that, too. What does this test really measure? How should it be weighed next to grades and other accomplishments? Does it discriminate against minorities?

    The last question raises the specter of affirmative action, which has polarized our country for the past forty years. If a given group has suffered prejudice, some Americans argued, it should receive a special advantage in college admissions, job hires, and so on. Nonsense, said the other side: no matter what happened in the past, your future in life should never rest on the color of your skin.

    But here's the larger point: in all of these debates, both sides embraced the idea of merit itself. The dispute lay in the measurement of ability, not in its significance. Nobody questioned whether skill matters, or whether society should recognize and reward it.

    Nobody, that is, until this election cycle. In the smiling
    face of Sarah Palin, we see something fresh and truly remarkable in American history: the anti-merit candidate.

    Some people have gamely tried to depict Palin as a kind of Jeffersonian natural aristocrat, a sharp diamond plucked out of the Alaskan rough. More commonly, though, they have embraced her for her lack of special talent, ability, or knowledge. There's nothing special about Sarah Palin, and that's precisely what is so new--and so special--about her.

    And that brings us back to "elitism," which Palin's defenders inevitably invoke whenever anyone questions her qualifications. The very charge shows how far we have strayed from the meritocratic ideal. It ignores the difference between deserved and undeserved elitism, suggesting that any claim to high status is somehow suspect. And it makes a mockery of our entire government, implying that anyone among us is good enough to lead it.

    In one of his best-known quips, the conservative icon William F. Buckley said he would rather be governed by the first 300 names in the Boston phonebook than by the faculty of Harvard University. In the end, though, Buckley didn't want either group in charge. He rejected the faculty's left-liberal politics, of course, but he also recoiled at the notion of any average Joe at the helm.

    He was, in short, an elitist. And so am I. In a time of economic turmoil at home and enormous peril overseas, we need extraordinary—not 0Aordinary--leaders. Woe to America if we fall victim to the seduction of Sarah Palin, who tricks us into thinking that Everyman---or Everywoman---is good enough for us all.

    Posted on Sunday, September 28, 2008 at 9:03 PM | Comments (6) | Top

    Ron Chernow: The Lost Tycoons

    Source: NYT (9-28-08)

    [Ron Chernow is the author of “The House of Morgan” and “Alexander Hamilton.”]

    With breathtaking speed, the world of large Wall Street investment banks has vanished. Fabled firms, some more than a century old, have been merged out of existence (Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch), gone bankrupt (Lehman Brothers), or sought asylum as commercial bank holding companies (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley). Why on earth did this happen?

    The death of Wall Street has been a long-running, slow-motion crisis, barely discernible to participants who had still booked huge profits in recent years. Beneath the razzle-dazzle of trading desks and the wizardry of esoteric finance lay the inescapable fact that these firms had shed their original reason for being: providing capital to American business.

    The dynastic power exercised by Wall Street tycoons in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was premised on scarce capital. Only a handful of European countries and their private bankers had surplus capital to finance overseas development. In this cash-poor world, J. Pierpont Morgan and other grandees exerted godlike powers over American railroads and manufacturers because they straddled the indispensable capital flows from Europe. With their top hats, thick cigars and gruff manners, these portly tycoons scarcely qualified as altruists. As Morgan liked to warn sentimental souls, “I am not in Wall Street for my health.” Yet he and his ilk rendered America an invaluable service by reassuring European investors that they would receive an adequate return on their investments, securing an uninterrupted flow of capital.

    To safeguard those returns, old-line investment bankers became all-powerful overlords of their exclusive clients. When they issued company shares, they retained a large block for themselves. Some clients chafed at these gilded shackles, while others gloried in their servitude. As the head of the New Haven railroad, a Morgan client, boasted to reporters, “I wear the Morgan collar, but I am proud of it. If Mr. Morgan were to order me tomorrow to China or Siberia in his interests, I would pack up and go.”

    In the sunless maze of Lower Manhattan, the old Wall Street houses were miniature temples of finance. Elite, all-male and lily-white, rife with snobbery and bigotry, they didn’t bother to hang a shingle outside, and the tacit message to pedestrians was clear: keep on walking. This reflected the banks’ patented formula of serving only the most creditworthy clients: industrialized nations, blue-chip corporations and wealthy individuals.

    In London, these small partnerships were called “issuing houses” because they issued stocks and bonds but didn’t trade or distribute them. In their risk-averse culture, J. P. Morgan and his breed considered the stock market a faintly vulgar place, better left to Jews and assorted ethnic groups outside the top ranks of investment houses. This bias would later give predominantly Jewish firms like Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs a marked competitive edge. Even in the 1920s, patrician Wall Street firms stayed somewhat aloof from the stock market mania.

    Securities laws during the New Deal, mandating fuller disclosure of corporate accounting, eroded the Wall Street moguls’ power. The new transparency reduced the need of many companies for a banker’s imprimatur to certify their soundness. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which forced full-service banks to choose between commercial and investment banking, further shrank the investment houses’ influence....

    Posted on Sunday, September 28, 2008 at 8:09 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Juan Cole: First McCain said he didn't see the meltdown coming, then he said he saw it

    Source: Informed Comment (Blog run by Juan Cole) (9-27-08)

    About that claim by McCain that he warned about the mortgage crisis:

    McCain: "But -- but let me -- let me point out, I also warned about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and warned about corporate greed and excess, and CEO pay, and all that. A lot of us saw this train wreck coming."

    In fact, he has already admitted that he did not see the financial meltdown coming.

    "But I don't really know of anybody,with the exception of a handful, who said, 'wait a minute, this thing is getting out of hand and is over-heating.' I'd like to be able to tell you I anticipated it, but I have to give you straight talk, I did not."

    Posted on Sunday, September 28, 2008 at 7:49 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Jonathan Zimmerman: Patriot rises to the call in crisis

    Source: Philadelphia Inquirer (9-26-08)

    [Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth.]

    "I'm directing my campaign . . . to delay Friday night's debate until we have taken action to address this crisis."- Sen. John McCain, Sept. 24

    "I think that it is going to be part of the president's job, to deal with more than one thing at once."- Sen. Barack Obama, Sept. 24

    My fellow Americans:

    In this time of dire economic peril, patriotic Americans need to put aside their partisan differences and join hands as one people. So I have decided to cancel my classes until our financial crisis is resolved.

    I do so with a heavy heart. My students prepare exhaustively before each class, often nodding off after they arrive. I know they would prefer to be sleeping in their own beds, or with each other. But they trudge into the lecture hall, week after week, to hear me drone on about Puritan New England or the Progressive Era.

    We could continue to meet, of course, right through midterms and the final exam. But that would divert us from the greatest task of all: to stabilize our financial markets, and to guarantee a prosperous future for our children and grandchildren.

    So I have also encouraged my students to go shopping, which will prop up our wobbly retail sector.

    They are patriots, too, especially when it comes to Abercrombie or Juicy Couture. I know they will rise to the challenge, just as my own teenage daughters have done.

    Meanwhile, I have also instructed my departmental secretary to "pencil me out" of any and all faculty meetings for the rest of the semester.

    Amid the greatest crisis since the Great Depression, we should not be debating trivial matters such as Xerox costs and office space. (Just so you know, though, I'd like a desk at a window.)

    Until the economy is on firm footing, finally, I will not write any tendentious or jargon-filled academic articles.

    I know that this decision will come as a shock to my editors at Gerund-ing, A Journal of Prose and Prospects (For Tenure), which has published everything I have sent to them over the last 20 years. But the time has come to put aside such rank careerism and to unite for the common cause.

    My enemies in the department will scoff, of course, insisting that we should be able to "deal with more than one thing at once." But let us remember, again, that we are university professors. We can't deal with one thing properly, let alone multiple things.

    And so, my fellow Americans, I am announcing a halt to politics-as-usual.

    Drastic times call for drastic measures, as the old saying goes. Many years from now, historians will gaze back at this moment and wonder what we were doing.

    And we'll have a clear answer: Nothing. Say it loud, my fellow Americans, and say it proud: NOTHING!

    A great country demands nothing less.

    Posted on Friday, September 26, 2008 at 10:01 AM | Comments (0) | Top

    William J. Astore: Hey, Government! How About Calling on Us?

    Source: TomDispatch.com (9-23-08)

    [William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School. He now teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology, and is the author of Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism (Potomac Press, 2005), among other works. He may be reached at wastore@pct.edu.]

    Lately, our news has focused on tropical depressions maturing into monster hurricanes that leave devastation in their wake -- and I'm not just talking about Gustav and Ike. Today, we face a perfect storm of financial devastation, notable for the enormity of the greed that generated it and the somnolent response of our government in helping Americans left devastated in its wake.

    As unemployment rates soar to their highest level in five years and home construction sinks to its lowest level in 17 years, all our federal government seems able to do is buy up to $700 billion in "distressed" mortgage-related assets, bail-out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (at a cost of roughly $200 billion) or "loan" $85 billion to liquidate insurance giant AIG. If you're Merrill Lynch, you get a hearing; if you're just plain Marilyn Lynch of Topeka, what you get is a recession, a looming depression, and a federal tax bill for the fat-cat bail-outs.

    But, amazingly enough, ordinary Americans generally don't want bail-outs, nor do they want handouts. What they normally want is honorable work, decent wages, and a government willing to wake up and help them contribute to a national restoration.

    How America Was Once Rebuilt

    Before surging ahead, however, let's look back. Seventy-five years ago, our country faced an even deeper depression. Millions of men had neither jobs, nor job prospects. Families were struggling to put food on the table. And President Franklin Delano Roosevelt acted. He created the Civilian Conservation Corps, soon widely known as the CCC.

    From 1933 to 1942, the CCC enrolled nearly 3.5 million men in roughly 4,500 camps across the country. It helped to build roads, build and repair bridges, clear brush and fight forest fires, create state parks and recreational areas, and otherwise develop and improve our nation's infrastructure -- work no less desperately needed today than it was back then. These young men -- women were not included -- willingly lived in primitive camps and barracks, sacrificing to support their families who were hurting back home.

    My father, who served in the CCC from 1935 to 1937, was among those young men. They earned $30 a month for their labor -- a dollar a day -- and he sent home $25 of that to support the family. For those modest wages, he and others like him gave liberally to our country in return. The stats are still impressive: 800 state parks developed; 125,000 miles of road built; more than two billion trees planted; 972 million fish stocked. The list goes on and on in jaw-dropping detail.

    Not only did the CCC improve our country physically, you might even say that experiencing it prepared a significant part of the "greatest generation" of World War II for greatness. After all, veterans of the CCC had already learned to work and sacrifice for something larger than themselves -- for, in fact, their families, their state, their country. As important as the G.I. Bill was to veterans returning from that war and to our country's economic boom in the 1950s, the CCC was certainly no less important in building character and instilling an ethic of teamwork, service, and sacrifice in a generation of American men.

    Today, we desperately need to tap a similar ethic of service to country. The parlous health of our communities, our rickety infrastructure, and our increasingly rickety country demands nothing less.

    Of course, I'm hardly alone in suggesting the importance of national service. Last year, in Time Magazine, for example, Richard Stengel called for a revival of national service and urged the formation of a "Green Corps," analogous to the CCC, and dedicated to the rejuvenation of our national infrastructure.

    To mark the seventh anniversary of 9/11, John McCain and Barack Obama recently spoke in glowing terms of national service at a forum hosted by Columbia University. Both men expressed support for increased governmental spending, with McCain promising that, as president, he would sign into law the Kennedy-Hatch "Serve America Act," which would, among other things, triple the size of the AmeriCorps. (Of course, McCain had just come from a Republican convention that had again and again mocked Obama's time as a "community organizer" and, even at Columbia, he expressed a preference for faith-based organizations and the private sector over service programs run by the government.) Obama has made national service a pillar of his campaign, promising to spend $3.5 billion annually to more than triple the size of AmeriCorps, while also doubling the size of the Peace Corps.

    It all sounds impressive. But is it? Compared to the roughly $900 billion being spent in FY2009 on national defense, homeland security, intelligence, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, $3.5 billion seems like chump change, not a major investment in national service or in Americans. When you consider the problems facing American workers and our country, both McCain and Obama are remarkable in their timidity. Now is surely not the time to tinker with the controls on a ship of state that's listing dangerously to starboard.

    Do I overstate? Here are just two data points. Last month our national unemployment rate rose to 6.1%, a five-year high. This year alone, we've shed more than 600,000 jobs in eight months. If you include the so-called marginally attached jobless, 11 million Americans are currently out of work, which adds up to a real unemployment rate of 7.1%. Now, that doesn't begin to compare to the unemployment rate during the Great Depression which, at times, exceeded 20%. In absolute terms, however, 11 million unemployed American workers represent an enormous waste of human potential.

    How can we get people off the jobless rolls, while offering them useful tasks that will help support families, while building character, community, and country?

    Here's where our federal government really should step in, just as it did in 1933. For we face an enormous national challenge today which goes largely unaddressed: shoring up our nation's crumbling infrastructure. The prestigious American Society of Civil Engineers did a survey of, and a report card on, the state of the American infrastructure. Our country's backbone earned a dismal "D," barely above a failing (and fatal) grade. The Society estimates that we need to invest $1.6 trillion in infrastructure maintenance and improvements over the next five years or face ever more collapsing bridges and bursting dams. It's a staggering sum, until you realize that we're already approaching a trillion dollars spent on the Iraq war alone.

    No less pressing than a trillion-dollar investment in our nation's physical health is a commensurate investment in the emotional and civic well-being of our country -- not just the drop-in-the-bucket amounts both Obama and McCain are talking about, but something commensurate with the task ahead of us. As our president dithers, even refusing to use the "R" word of recession, The Wall Street Journal quotes Mark Gertler, a New York University economist, simply stating this is "the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression."

    The best and fairest way to head off that crisis is not simply to spend untold scores of billions of taxpayer dollars rescuing (or even liquidating) recklessly speculative outfits that gave no thought to ordinary workers while they were living large. Rather, our government should invest scores of billions in empowering the ordinary American worker, particularly those who have suffered the most from the economic ravages of our financial hurricane.

    Just as in 1933, a call today to serve our country and strengthen its infrastructure would serve to reenergize a shared sense of commitment to America. Such service would touch millions of Americans in powerful ways that can't be fully predicted in advance, just as it touched my father as a young man.

    What "Ordinary" Americans Are Capable Of

    My father was a self-confessed "regular guy," and his CCC service was typical. He was a "woodsman-falling," a somewhat droll job title perhaps, but one that concealed considerable danger. In the fall of 1936, he fought the Bandon forest fire in Oregon, a huge conflagration that burned 100,000 acres and killed a dozen people. To corral and contain that fire, he and the other "fellows" in his company worked on the fire lines for five straight weeks. At one point, my father worked 22 hours straight, in part because the fire raged so fiercely and so close to him that he was too scared to sleep (as he admitted to me long after).

    My father was 19 when he fought that fire. Previously, he had been a newspaper boy and had after the tenth grade quit high school to support the family. Still, nothing marked him as a man who would risk his own life to save the lives of others, but his country gave him an opportunity to serve and prove himself, and he did.

    Before joining the CCC, my father had been a city boy, but in the Oregon woods he discovered a new world of great wonder. It enriched his life, just as his recollections of it enrich my own:

    "Thunder and lightning are very dangerous in the forest. Well, one stormy night a Forest Ranger smoke chaser got a call from the fire tower. They spotted a small night fire; getting the location the Ranger took me and another CCC boy to check it out. After walking about a mile in the woods we spotted the fire. It had burned a circle of fire at least 100 yards in diameter from the impact of the lightning bolt.

    "You never saw anything so beautiful. The trees were all lit in fire; the fire on the ground was lit up in hot coals. Also fiery embers were falling off the trees. Some of the trees were dried dead snags. It looked like the New York skyline lit up at night. The Ranger radioed back for a fire crew. Meanwhile the three of us started to contain the fire with a fire trail.

    "Later, we got caught in a thunderstorm in the mountains. We stretched a tarpaulin to protect ourselves from the downpours. You could see the storm clouds, with thunder and lightning flashing, approaching and passing over us. Then the torrents of rain. It would stop and clear with stars shining. And sure enough it must have repeated the sequence at least five times. What a night."

    Jump ahead to 2008 and picture a nineteen-year-old high school dropout. Do you see a self-centered slacker, someone too preoccupied exercising his thumbs on video games, or advertising himself on MySpace and Facebook, to do much of anything to help anyone other than himself?

    Sure, there are a few of these. Aren't there always? But many more young Americans already serve or volunteer in some capacity. Even our imaginary slacker may just need an opportunity -- and a little push -- to prove his mettle. We'll never know unless our leaders put our money where, at present, only their mouths are.

    Remaking National Service -- And Our Country

    Today, when most people think of national service, they think of military service. As a retired military officer, I'm hardly one to discount the importance of such service, but we need to extend the notion of service beyond the military, beyond national defense, to embrace all dimensions of civic life. Imagine if such service was as much the norm as in the 1930s, rather than the exception, and imagine if our government was no longer seen as the problem, but the progenitor of opportunity and solutions?

    Some will say it can no longer be done. Much like Rudy Giuliani, they'll poke fun at the whole idea of service, and paint the government as dangerously corrupt, or wasteful, or even as the enemy of the people -- perhaps because they're part of that same government.

    How sad. We don't need jaded "insiders" or callow "outsiders" in Washington; what we need are doers and dreamers. We need leaders with faith both in the people -- the common worker with uncommon spirit -- and the government to inspire and get things done.

    The unselfish idealism, work ethic, and public service of the CCC could be tapped again, if only our government remembers that our greatest national resource is not exhaustible commodities like oil or natural gas, but the inexhaustible spirit and generosity of the American worker.

    Posted on Thursday, September 25, 2008 at 11:44 PM | Comments (1) | Top

    Simon Schama: The victory of big ideas over small minds

    Source: Telegraph (UK) (9-25-08)

    [Simon Schama is author of The American Future: A History.]

    The night before John McCain announced that Sarah Palin was his choice for vice-president, Barack Obama said, in his acceptance speech at Denver, that people with nothing better to run on could always “make a big election about small things”. “It's worked before,” he added ruefully – and accurately.

    What Obama meant by “small things” was the politics of personality and character assassination that he believes have cheapened the democratic process. His high-minded view is that no matter how dire the crisis, the masters of the low road turn what should be a debate over the national future into what they cynically assume most Americans want: a likeability contest. Instead of grappling with the responsibilities and limits of American military power, or the fate of the free market, Small Politics specialises in imagined affinity: the creation of a public persona with whom Regular Folk can identify. Headache-inducing homework gets replaced by feelgood instinct; People magazine becomes the campaign journal of record, rather than The Washington Post. Goodbye Cheney; hiya Hockey Mom.

    When shrewdly calculated, as it certainly was with Sarah Palin, playing on our affinity with our leaders serves to domesticate their power. In any democracy, leadership is a negotiation between familiarity and authority. Voters crave the illusion that a president or prime minister is one of them and understands their daily trials; the production of soap-operatics, pregnancies, family dramas and romances satisfies that need. But they also want a sense that the leader is unlike the run-of-the-mill windbag in the pub; someone of swift, hard, quiet effectiveness; someone exceptional who, when the need arises, is deaf to the clamour of the crowd.

    The present crisis has only magnified the conflict between these competing demands. Since Main Street has its doubts (to put it mildly) about the $700 billion bail-out of Wall Street, the candidates must be seen as attentive to the anger. But apparently, they also feel they have to demonstrate executive leadership before either of them is anywhere near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

    Someone might like to take them aside and tell them that, actually, the United States already has a president – albeit one who seems to think, astonishingly, that it’s a good idea to collude in their grandstanding. There is nothing the two senators can do to right the market, other than be good senators. But John McCain in particular seems to confuse posturing with action, rather like a brigadier shouting at his troops amid the din of fire. He evidently thinks that the American people will believe the worthiness of debate is a sign of weak government. He has it exactly wrong. Explaining to the American people what has gone amiss and, much more importantly, what can be done to repair the disaster is precisely what the candidates should be doing.

    The real challenge facing McCain and Obama, Palin and Joe Biden as they prepare for the crucial television debates which, until McCain’s threatened withdrawal, were due to start tonight in Oxford, Mississippi, remains the same as before the crisis: how to be both accessible and authoritative.

    Of the four of them, it’s Obama who faces the trickiest test. For television, his body language is all wrong – he has the look of someone who never suffers fools gladly. Occasionally, the camera catches him literally with his nose in the air; eyes half-closed in pained disbelief, as though he’s shown up for Plato’s Symposium and instead found himself trapped in Big Brother.

    Condescension is political as well as media death. Doubtless he knows this; but worse than coming across as the professor he was at Chicago Law School, stuck with a particularly dim bunch of students, would be to graft on a veneer of phoney down-home ingratiation. Anyone who has seen Obama in less scripted moments, or who has read Dreams From My Father, a book so beautifully written you can scarcely credit that it is by a politician, knows that he has all it takes for popular appeal.

    But like Gordon Brown, Obama thinks that the meltdown of world finance is no moment for idle talk of moose hunting. Among the changes he wants is an alteration to the character of election campaigns themselves, replacing dross with substance, bringing the debates back to what he imagines the Founding Fathers had in mind: a contest over America’s governance.

    It’s all very worthy, but not without traces of disingenuousness or even sour grapes. The only clangingly fake moment in Obama's otherwise powerful and moving acceptance of the Democratic nomination was the claim that his candidacy was “not about me; it’s about you”. Yeah, right. Obama knows very well that an African-American embodying an appeal to national unity is, to put it mildly, a revolutionary event, and that the projection of his own charisma has been the story since his barn-burner of a speech at the Boston Democratic Convention four years ago.

    And for all his wish to make the election a dignified argument, Obama also knows that John Kerry’s philosophical loftiness, his refusal to get down and dirty with the Swift Boaters traducing his military record, cost him the election. Obama has responded more aggressively to the same character assassin, the slime-specialist writer Jerome Corsi, who is feeding the popular myth that Obama is (at least at heart) a Muslim, and that his election would be tantamount to planting a fifth column in the White House.

    But Obama recognises that when elections stay Small, the Republicans – the masters of take-down gossip, the fine-tuners of likeability – almost always win. Which is why Joe Biden might actually turn out to be just as inspired a choice as Sarah Palin for vice-presidential candidate. Like Palin, Biden is no pussycat; he too talks to Regular Folk in a way that immediately tells them he knows all about their world. Biden is the scrapper from Scranton, Pennsylvania; the kid cruelly nicknamed “Dash” at high school because of a crippling stammer, who somehow (an American story, this) turned himself into the man in the saloon bar who just happens to know more about Albania or Burma or Kazakhstan than you ever thought possible.

    In a normal year, the conventional wisdom that vice-presidential choices and debates make no difference would hold good. But this time, there is no one in the United States not conscious of the vulnerability, for different reasons, of the men at the top of the tickets. So the “readiness for the White House” question, not to mention the sense that for the past eight years America has actually been governed by the Cheney administration plus front man, means that the audience for the VP debate will be at least as big as for the main event.

    The great quandary in this tussle between Big and Small Politics turns out, in the end, to be John McCain’s – and it is largely of his own making. For as long as he has been running for high office, McCain has cast himself as the “maverick” Republican, willing to defy the party line for the sake of principle. To the disgust of the hardliners who dominated his party, McCain was willing to reach across the aisle on immigration and campaign finance reform – and not just to Democrats but to the most liberal among their ranks, such as Russell Feingold of Wisconsin and, horror of horrors, Ted Kennedy.

    McCain was even prepared to denounce extreme Evangelicals, of the kind that nursed Sarah Palin’s faith, as “agents of intolerance”. He paid for this temerity by losing badly to George W Bush in the South Carolina primary in the 2000 race for the Republican nomination and his candidacy never recovered.

    So this year, once the nomination was sewn up, McCain made a Faustian pact. He knew that he had inherited the all-powerful take-down machine, created by Ronald Reagan’s communications genius Roger Ailes (later the chief of Fox News) and perfected by Lee Atwater, who won the 1988 election for Bush Sr by demonising Michael Dukakis as soft on criminal psychopaths. Atwater begat Karl Rove, who begat Steve Schmidt, now McCain’s campaign strategist and almost certainly the genius who came up with Palin, betting that Small Politics would always beat High Debate. So McCain signed on for attack commercials that depicted Obama as some sort of crazed, America-hating pacifist-Leftist who evidently would not put “Country First”.

    And then, in the shape of the Wall Street hurricane, history happened. Whoops. Overnight, the pit bull in lipstick no longer seemed just the ticket. Obama’s poll ratings in battleground states climbed and McCain, thrashing around for yet another identity, began to sound like a combination of Lenin and the populist William Jennings Bryan, railing against the greed of the plutocracy. Still more weirdly, the man who had spent his life denouncing regulation and central government intervention now became its most impassioned champion, summoning his inner Teddy Roosevelt and casting himself as the rod across the backs of the rich and irresponsible. This, as bar-room philosophers like to say, doesn’t pass the smell test...

    Posted on Thursday, September 25, 2008 at 7:47 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Stanley I. Kutler: They Claim the Bailout Is Necessary, But Is It Constitutional?

    Source: TruthDig.com (9-25-08)

    [Stanley Kutler is the author of “The Wars of Watergate.” ]

    Our “conservative” ideologues have steadily advanced their free-market myths during the past 40 years, insisting on minimalist government. Now those voices are quiet as we see the fallout of their laissez-faire notions. But once they reinvigorate financial institutions by transferring their huge debts to the taxpayer, we can be certain they will return.

    Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative favorite, has posited “originalism” in his notions of judicial power. Anyone who believes in a “living Constitution,” he said, is an “idiot.” Well then, John Marshall, our first great chief justice, his colleagues and those folks firmly wedded to our history (real conservatives?) are idiots. Maybe even Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, whose bailout bill certainly is “broad construction” of the Constitution at its most extreme.

    Paulson and his bailout accomplices propose the nationalization (what else is it?) of Wall Street’s reckless debts, actions that dwarf the excesses of the Gilded Age and the 1920s. The government will assume the bad debts of our financial “industry,” a remedy that will restore “free markets” and “normalcy.” All is forgiven; unfortunately, all is also forgotten. It is an “investment,” Paulson said—without irony.

    The only alternative, we are told, is unthinkable. The only? That remains to be seen—alas, even offered. Sen. Richard C. Shelby, R-Ala., said that before signing off on the bill he wanted “to make sure we’ve exhausted the alternatives.” Pure congressional blather; Paulson never answered.

    John Marshall believed in the elasticity of congressional power to do things “necessary and proper” to carry out the legislative branch’s other powers. As such, he might have broadly approved a bailout. But whether he would have accepted this legislation and its blank check for power is dubious. Marshall would not concede that discretionary power meant “absolutely indispensable”; there were limits—the limits of the Constitution itself.

    The practitioners of something called the “unitary executive” have disdained (once again) any notions of checks and balances by other branches of government. Congress is there only for the formality of enacting assumed powers into law. Beyond that, the White House’s grasp for absolute power is breathtaking.

    The administration’s version of the bailout legislation provides for review in Section 8, but the Catch-22 is that there is no review. The secretary’s “decisions” are to be “non-reviewable, committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.” The non-reviewable provision, along with its other purposes, allows the secretary unfettered, unchecked authority to enter into contracts “without regard to any other provision of law regarding public contracts.” Now we know the meaning of audacious.

    Wall Street loves this bailout. It relieves major banks and investment houses of “their mountainous rotten assets,” as William Greider recently noted. Wall Street folks usually reject redressing environmental losses (polar bears be damned), but “what’s not to like if you are a financial titan threatened with extinction,” Greider added.

    “I share the outrage,” Secretary Paulson confessed. “There’s a lot of blame to go around.” Just don’t expect him to point any fingers.

    Wall Street will not trouble its collective consciousness with worry over the Constitution. But this bailout bill is virtually unprecedented in its assumptions and its reach for unchecked power. Even Franklin D. Roosevelt’s bold, sometimes hasty, emergency legislation of the Depression wasn’t this audacious.

    Certainly, if New Deal Congresses had discarded judicial or administrative review, judges in the mold of Marshall, covering the political spectrum, probably would have asserted such power as derived from the Constitution itself.

    It is, after all, a little late in the day to resurrect the idea that the Constitution did not explicitly provide for judicial review. The non-reviewable dictate of this legislation might be an interesting challenge for Scalia’s “originalism,” as well as his political biases. Oh well, the Bush administration’s draft allowed Congress to fill in the blanks, and it may call the bill whatever it wishes. The Richard Cheney Memorial Act sounds just about right.

    Posted on Thursday, September 25, 2008 at 7:14 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Alan Schroeder: John McCain’s Risky Maneuver

    Source: Columbia University Press Blog (9-25-08)

    [Alan Schroeder, author of Presidential Debates: Fifty Years of High-Risk TV.]

    The gambit by John McCain to postpone Friday night’s opening debate at Ole Miss entails considerable risk to the candidate. History shows that the public disapproves of presidential contenders who appear to be shirking a campaign exercise now regarded as obligatory.

    Since the dawn of televised presidential debates in 1960, candidates have regularly sought to avoid taking part, or to whittle down the number and length of matches. Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972 wanted nothing to do with TV debates, and in those election cycles no joint appearances took place. Jimmy Carter sat out a 1980 debate against opponents Ronald Reagan and John Anderson. Incumbents Reagan and Clinton, in 1984 and 1996 respectively, agreed to only two meetings with their challengers, as opposed to the traditional three.

    On occasion, scheduled debates have been canceled. George H.W. Bush declined to participate in the first two match-ups of 1988, causing both to collapse at the last minute. Four years later, Bush’s avoidance of the first scheduled debate sparked the “Chicken George” phenomenon, a classic illustration of the dangers of candidate ambivalence. At the debate site in East Lansing, Michigan, a costumed protester showed up in a poultry outfit, toting a sign that said “Chicken George is afraid to debate.” Soon an entire flock of pseudo-chickens began turning up at Bush campaign events around the country, so enraging the candidate that he got into an on-camera argument with one of them. Ultimately Bush was left with little choice but to debate.


    McCain’s threat differs in that it marks the first time a candidate has balked after signing a debate agreement with his opponents; all the previous incidents occurred before the campaigns had finalized their debate talks. Back on August 21, 2008, negotiators for McCain and Obama issued a joint statement outlining their commitment to a series of one vice presidential and three presidential debates on four specific dates. In that statement the campaigns could not resist patting themselves on the back for having reached such an uncharacteristically early resolution.

    So why would McCain tamper with a debate roster that he agreed to? If we take the Senator at his word, the call for postponement involves a purely altruistic motivation. Skeptics argue that McCain is attempting either to buy himself additional time to prepare or duck the event altogether. Some see a cynical plot to delay or even cancel the vice presidential debate, a theory fueled by Republican debate negotiator Lindsay Graham’s suggestion that McCain and Obama meet on October 2 in lieu of Palin and Biden.

    As the McCain camp knows, reconfiguring the debate calendar this late in the game is virtually impossible. Plans at Ole Miss have been underway for nearly a year, and the university has spent an estimated $5.5 million dollars preparing for its moment in the sun. The other host communities on the debate schedule have made similar commitments of money and community effort. And TV networks and media personnel must resolve mind-numbingly complex issues of logistics and technology before a debate can be staged and covered.

    Bold though it may be, McCain’s move could backfire politically by rendering the candidate hysterical and overly reactive—a case of Chicken Little, rather than Chicken George. Already Obama is receiving high marks for maintaining his cool under fire in the midst of the melodrama. And if McCain ends up going through with the debate as planned, Americans may well wonder why all the fuss was necessary.

    The ultimate risk for McCain is that he will be seen as trying to deny voters a campaign ritual to which they feel attached. As the Nielsen ratings demonstrate, election after election, Americans take their presidential debates very seriously. After the Super Bowl, presidential debates are typically the most highly watched television programs of the year.

    Imagine a scenario in which one team in the Super Bowl announces 48 hours beforehand that it may not show up for the game. A ploy of this sort would not be favorably received by the fans. Presidential debates are not entirely analogous, of course, but one wonders: is it ever wise to deprive citizens of a media spectacle they have been looking forward to?

    Posted on Thursday, September 25, 2008 at 7:08 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Allen C. Guelzo: Lincoln's lessons for today's culture wars

    Source: Christian Science Monitor (9-25-08)

    ... What lies behind the insistence on injecting morality into politics – and what lies behind the resistance to it – is a battle between two basic concepts of democracy itself: between democracy as process and democracy as purpose. This conflict is hardly an aberration of the 1990s or the Religious Right. It's a battle that was spectacularly played out 150 years ago in the great debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas.

    Then, as now, politicians preferred their problems to come with neutral, dollars-and-cents solutions. In 1858, slavery was legal in 15 states, and slaveholders were demanding slavery's legalization in the Western territories as well. These demands had paralyzed Congress and triggered bloodshed in the Kansas Territory.

    As the senior US senator from Illinois and chair of the Senate Committee on Territories, Douglas's solution was simply to let the people who lived there decide for themselves. He called this "popular sovereignty," and it bothered him not at all that some people (in this case, white settlers) had the authority to decide whether other people (in this case, black slaves) should be held in a lifetime of forced labor.

    "If Kansas wants a slave-State constitution she has a right to it," Douglas announced on the floor of the Senate. "I do not care whether it is voted down or voted up." Law, for Douglas, was mere traffic regulations: so long as the proper procedures were observed, what people thought was right or wrong was irrelevant.

    Abraham Lincoln believed as devoutly as Douglas in democracy. "The sacred right of self-government, rightly understood, no one appreciated more than [me]," Lincoln said before the debates. "But it has no just application" to the question of slavery.

    Enslaving another human being was a denial of one of the primary natural rights – the right to liberty – with which everyone, according to Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, had been "endowed by their Creator." For that reason, "there can be no moral right in connection with one man's making a slave of another" – and no moral right in allowing a majority of white people to vote black people into slavery.

    But questions about moral right were exactly what Douglas believed had to be avoided in American public life. Once morality became mixed up with politics, then people began looking for firearms....

    [Lincoln felt differently.]

    A democracy without a sense of the sacredness of ... rights was like a tornado, hollow at the core and purposeless in direction. "[T]he real issue," in the slavery controversy, Lincoln said, was "the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world," and anyone who ignored the "real issue" in the name of secularism and choice was eroding the moral capital on which democracy relies....

    Posted on Thursday, September 25, 2008 at 6:56 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Timothy Garton Ash: The time has come for a final report on the 43rd president of the US

    Source: Guardian (UK) (9-25-08)

    [Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist.]

    As the two men who would succeed him train like Olympic athletes for tomorrow's foreign policy debate, pause for a moment to complete your final report on the 43rd president of the United States. What would you say?

    I would sum up his two terms in four words: hubris followed by nemesis.

    Remember the mood music of eight years ago. The greatest power the world has ever seen. Rome on steroids. An international system said to be unipolar, and Washington's unabashed embrace of unilateralism. The US as "Prometheus unbound", according to the neoconservative commentator Charles Krauthammer. Wall Street investment bankers bestriding the financial globe as Pentagon generals did the military globe and Harvard professors the soft power one. Masters of the universe. Personifying that hubristic moment: George Walker Bush.

    And now: nemesis. The irony of the Bush years is that a man who came into office committed to both celebrating and reinforcing sovereign, unbridled national power has presided over the weakening of that power in all three dimensions: military, economic and soft. "I am not convinced we are winning it in Afghanistan," Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a congressional committee earlier this month. Many on the ground say that's an understatement. The massive, culpable distraction of Iraq, Bush's war of choice, leaves the US - and with it the rest of the west - on the verge of losing the war of necessity. Here, resurgent in Afghanistan and Pakistan, are the jihadist enemies who attacked the US on September 11 2001. By misusing military power, Bush has weakened it.

    Economically, the Bush presidency ends with a financial meltdown on a scale not seen for 70 years. The proud conservative deregulators (John McCain long among them) now oversee a partial nationalisation of the American economy that would make even a French socialist blush. A government bailout that will total close to a trillion dollars, plus the cumulative cost of the Iraq war, will push the national debt to more than $11 trillion. The flagships of Wall Street either go bust or have to be salvaged, with the help of government or foreign money. Most ordinary Americans feel poorer and less secure.

    The decline in soft power - the power to attract - is also dramatic. The Pew Global Attitudes Survey has recorded a precipitous worldwide fall in favourable views of the US since 2001. The map is chequered, of course, but the distaste extends beyond policies of the Bush administration to things such as "American ways of doing business", and "American ideas about democracy". Iraq has been central to this collapse of credibility and attractiveness. When Bush denounces Russia for invading a sovereign country (Georgia), as he did again at the UN on Tuesday, a cry of "humbug" goes up around the world. Now American-style free market capitalism is taking a further hit, while some of the alternative models are looking better.

    Last weekend, five former US secretaries of state - two Democrat, three Republican - gathered for a panel discussion on the future of foreign policy, televised by CNN. Asked by Christiane Amanpour what should be the biggest concern for the new president, Colin Powell replied: "To restore a sense of confidence in the United States of America." Madeleine Albright added that the world of 2009 would be full of issues "that can only be solved in cooperation with other countries". And, Republican and Democrat, they chorussed "close Guantánamo".

    Even George Bush now seems to concur with this criticism of George Bush - and I don't just mean speculation that the father is privately critical of the son. Eight years ago, president Bush the younger hardly seemed to know what the word "multilateral" meant. In the course of his farewell address to the UN general assembly this week, he used the word "multilateral" 10 times.

    Obviously not all this mess can be blamed on Bush: he's not responsible for the epochal rise of China, nor for jihadist terrorists' long-term hatred of the west.

    But a great deal of it can. At the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, you can still see the painted glass sign that president Harry Truman placed on his desk in the oval office: The Buck Stops Here. (On the back it says: I'm From Missouri.) The buck stops there. The contrast between the president from Missouri and the president from Texas is painful. Judgment, prudence, vision, patience, honesty - every quality that the 33rd president so signally possessed, as the US remade the world after 1945, has been signally lacking in the 43rd.

    Iraq, the US's greatest strategic blunder in at least 30 years, is Bush's fault. The buck stops there. And the more we learn about it, the clearer it becomes that it was pursued with a mixture of self-deception and lies. The reporter Ron Suskind has a new book out in which he recounts how, in the runup to war, British intelligence secured unique access to Saddam Hussein's head of intelligence, Tahir Jalil Habbush.

    Habbush told them what turned out subsequently to be the truth: that Saddam had ceased his programme of weapons of mass destruction, but would not admit it, because he was obsessed with keeping regional enemies such as Iran in a state of fear and uncertainty. That version was corroborated by Saddam's foreign minister, to whom French intelligence had originally secured access.

    The Bush-Cheney White House ignored both reports, preferring what turned out to be the fabrications of a German intelligence source codenamed Curveball. Curveball indeed. Some of Suskind's reporting has been questioned, but the basic story is not in doubt. The Bush-Cheney White House pressed ahead to war on a fraudulent prospectus, suppressing and distorting very important contrary evidence. As a senior member of the administration told Suskind: "We're an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality." Hubris has rarely been better expressed.

    Something similar happened with the vertiginous unreality of hyper-leveraged Wall Street investment banking over the past decade. The financiers' motto, too, could have been "We create our own reality". Again, nemesis follows hubris as the night the day. The White House was not directly responsible for what looks like wild financial irresponsibility, but it was responsible for not supervising and regulating it - something even John McCain is now at least implicity admitting. The buck stopped there.

    As for the decline in American soft power, that is something for which George Bush was directly to blame. His arrogance, his unilateralism, his insensitivity, his long-time denial of the need for urgent action on climate change: all fed directly into the plummeting credit of the US around the world. It would have been a different story with a different president.

    For years now, we have seen those who hate the US abusing and burning effigies of Bush. The truth is, the anti-Americans should be building gilded monuments to him. For no one has done more to serve the cause of anti-Americanism than GW Bush. It is we who like and admire the US who should, by rights, be burning effigies. But now, at last, we live in hope of a better America.

    Posted on Thursday, September 25, 2008 at 8:58 AM | Comments (0) | Top

    Eric Rauchway: Presidents CAN do two things at once

    Source: Edge of the American West (blog) (9-24-08)

    [Eric Rauchway is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and the author, most recently, of Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America and Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America. ]

    Today is September 24. On this day in 1864, Abraham Lincoln presided over a country at war with itself and a party split to its roots over the question of how to plan for the nation’s reconstruction—to such an extent that on this day, Lincoln reluctantly accepted the resignation of Montgomery Blair, his Postmaster General and a valued advisor, owing to disputes over plans for Reconstruction.

    Yet the campaign for the presidency was “now being prosecuted with the utmost vigor,” as one could read in the New York Times.

    On this day in 1932, with the nation mired in the Great Depression, you could read Will Rogers in the New York Times saying “This is a year that will bring out lots of votes, for the voter has nothing to do but vote; his 1932 employment consists entirely of voting.” Managing the economic crisis was assuredly a full time job.

    Yet Herbert Hoover prepared to give a large speech in Iowa and Franklin Roosevelt had just given what became a famous address to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco.

    On this day in 1944, the US prepared one of the most ambitious postwar occupations in history for Germany, while American forces in the Pacific prepared an assault on the Philippines on the way to Japan.

    Yet President Roosevelt had just officially launched his campaign for a fourth term, while Thomas Dewey took his turn speaking in San Francisco, challenging Roosevelt’s supremacy.

    All these examples suggest the contest for the presidency has been an indispensable part of American democracy, enduring even in the greatest of crises. But somehow, on this day in 2008, John McCain announced the suspension of his campaign for the presidency and asked for an extension in preparing for this week’s presidential debate.

    Posted on Wednesday, September 24, 2008 at 11:03 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Niall Ferguson: Rough Week, But America's Era Goes On

    Source: WaPo (9-21-08)

    [Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University. His latest book, "The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World," will be published in November.]

    ... We are living through the end of a phenomenon that Moritz Schularick of Berlin's Free University and I christened "Chimerica." In this view, the most important thing to understand about the world economy over the past 10 years has been the relationship between China and America. If you think of it as one economy called Chimerica, that relationship accounts for around 13 percent of the world's land surface, a quarter of its population, about a third of its gross domestic product and somewhere more than half of global economic growth in the past six years....

    With China decoupled from the United States -- relying less on exports to America, caring less about the yuan's peg to the dollar -- the end of Chimerica seems nigh. And with the end of Chimerica, the balance of global power is bound to shift. No longer so committed to the Sino-American friendship established back in 1972, China can explore other spheres of global influence, from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that groups together China, Russia and four Central Asian nations to China's own nascent empire in commodity-rich Africa.

    But commentators should always hesitate before they prophesy the decline and fall of the United States. America has come through disastrous financial crises before -- not just the Great Depression but also the Great Stagflation of the 1970s -- and emerged with its geopolitical position enhanced. Such crises, bad as they are at home, always have worse effects on America's rivals.

    The same is proving to be true today. According to the Morgan Stanley Capital International index, the U.S. stock market is down around 18 percent to date this year. The equivalent figure for China is 48 percent, and for Russia -- the worst affected of the world's emerging markets -- it is 55 percent. These figures are not very good advertisements for the more regulated, state-led economic models favored in Beijing and Moscow.

    Moreover, because investors continue to regard the U.S. government's debt as a "safe haven" in uncertain times, the latest phase of the financial crisis has seen the dollar rally, rather than sag further.

    Of course, this could yet prove to be the safe haven's last gasp, especially if U.S. authorities are unable to avert a fresh wave of bank failures in the days ahead. Nevertheless, the caveat is clear. The hubris of recent years has certainly been followed by a terrible financial nemesis. But it is much too early to conclude that the American century is over. Like so much else made in the United States, this nemesis is proving an all-too-successful export.

    Posted on Wednesday, September 24, 2008 at 9:01 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Daniel Pipes: Appease Iran?

    Source: Frontpagemag.com (9-23-08)

    [Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.]

    After Hitler, the policy of appeasing dictators – ridiculed by Winston Churchill as feeding a crocodile, hoping it will eat one last – appeared to be permanently discredited. Yet the policy has enjoyed some successes and remains a live temptation today in dealing with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

    Academics have long challenged the facile vilification of appeasement. Already in 1961, A.J.P. Taylor of Oxford justified Neville Chamberlain's efforts, while Christopher Layne of Texas A&M currently argues that Chamberlain "did the best that he could with the cards he was dealt." Daniel Treisman, a political scientist at UCLA, finds the common presumption against appeasement to be "far too strong," while his University of Florida colleague Ralph B.A. Dimuccio calls it "simplistic."

    In perhaps the most convincing treatment of the pro-appeasement thesis, Paul M. Kennedy, a British historian teaching at Yale University, established that appeasement has a long and credible history. In his 1976 article, "The Tradition of Appeasement in British Foreign Policy, 1865-1939," Kennedy defined appeasement as a method of settling quarrels "by admitting and satisfying grievances through rational negotiation and compromise," thereby avoiding the horrors of warfare. It is, he noted, an optimistic approach, presuming humans to be reasonable and peaceful.
    From the prime ministry of William Gladstone until its discrediting in the late 1930s, appeasement was, in Kennedy's description, a "perfectly respectable" term and even "a particularly British form of diplomacy" well suited to the country's character and circumstances. Kennedy found the policy had four quasi-permanent bases, all of which apply especially well to the United States today:

    Moral: After the Evangelical movement swept England in the early nineteenth century, British foreign policy contained a strong urge to settle disputes fairly and non-violently.
    Economic: As the world's leading trader, the United Kingdom had a vital national interest in avoiding disruptions to commerce, from which it would disproportionately suffer.
    Strategic: Britain's global empire meant it was over-extended (making it, in Joseph Chamberlain's term, a "weary titan"); accordingly, it had to choose its battles sparingly, making compromise an accepted and routine way of dealing with problems.
    Domestic: The extension of the franchise made public opinion a growing factor in decisionmaking, and the public did not care for wars, especially expensive ones.
    As a result, for over seven decades, London pursued, with rare exceptions, a foreign policy that was "pragmatic, conciliatory, and reasonable." Again and again, the authorities found that "the peaceful settlement of disputes was much more to Britain's advantage than recourse to war." In particular, appeasement steadily influenced British policy vis-à-vis the United States (in relation to, for example, the Panama Canal, Alaska's borders, Latin America as a U.S. sphere of influence) and Wilhelmine Germany (the "naval holiday" proposal, colonial concessions, restraint in relations with France).

    Kennedy judges the policy positively, as serviceably guiding the foreign relations of the world's most powerful state for decades and "encapsulating many of the finer aspects of the British political tradition." If not a brilliant success, appeasement permitted London to accommodate the expanding influence of its non-ideological rivals such as the United States and Imperial Germany, which generally could be counted on to accept concessions without becoming inflamed. It thus slowed the UK's gentle decline.

    Post-1917 and the Bolshevik Revolution, however, concessions failed to mollify the new kind of ideologically-driven enemy – Hitler in the 1930s, Brezhnev in the 1970s, Arafat and Kim Jong-Il in the 1990s, and now, Khamene'i and Ahmadinejad. These ideologues exploit concessions and deceitfully offer a quid pro quo that they do not intend to fulfill. Harboring aspirations to global hegemony, they cannot be appeased. Concessions to them truly amount to feeding the crocodile.

    However dysfunctional these days, appeasement abidingly appeals to the modern Western psyche, ineluctably arising when democratic states face aggressive ideological enemies. With reference to Iran, for example, George W. Bush may bravely have denounced "the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history," but Middle East Quarterly editor Michael Rubin rightly discerns in the realities of U.S. policy that "now Bush is appeasing Iran."

    Summing up, the policy of appeasement goes back a century and a half, enjoyed some success, and ever remains alive. But with ideological enemies it must consciously be resisted, lest the tragic lessons of the 1930s, 1970s, and 1990s be ignored. And repeated.

    Posted on Wednesday, September 24, 2008 at 12:19 AM | Comments (1) | Top

    Eric Rauchway: How big a bailout?

    Source: Edge of the American West (blog) (9-23-08)

    Laura Conaway at Planet Money asks, “So how big is $700 billion, anyway?” And Brad Setser tells her, it’s five percent of GDP; it’s “real money.”

    Good, but maybe we can do better: remember the terrible horrible no-good very bad New Deal, which was, like, socialist and all that? All federal non-defense spending during the New Deal was only a few percentage points of GDP bigger than just the bailout.

    And remember—that $700 billion isn’t total payout, it’s how big the balance can be at any time. Theoretically, the total bailout could be even bigger.

    UPDATED to add, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which was the Bank Bailer-Outer of the New Deal, had something like $2 billion to work with; $500 million appropriated and license to borrow $1.5 billion. $2 billion was about 3.5% of GDP in 1932.

    UPDATED AGAIN to add, per Jonathan’s question, that federal nondefense spending has for the past four years or so been around 16% of GDP.

    Posted on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 11:09 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Andreas Umland: Moscow’s Miscalculated Show of Strength

    Source: Turkish Daily News (9-22-08)

    [Dr Andreas Umland is editor of the book series "Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society" ( http://www.ibidem-verlag.de/spps.html ) and administrator of the web site "Russian Nationalism" (groups.yahoo.com/group/russian_nationalism/).]

    In Western comments, the Russian army’s invasion of Georgia is portrayed as a manifestation of revisionist expansionism. Kremlin-controlled mass media, in contrast, presents Russia’s intervention in the Southern Caucasus as a humanitarian action saving a national minority from “genocide” as well as the “lives and dignity” of Russian citizens abroad. After what the Russian army had done to Chechnya in the 1990s, Moscow’s noise on Georgia is hyperbolic and hypocritical.

    The Russian leadership helped also to provoke the Georgian attack and had been seemingly waiting or even preparing for it. Yet, the Russian interpretation of the August 2008 events is valid, to a certain extent, too. Had Russia not intervened, the number of dead, wounded and fleeing Ossetians may have been higher. Tiblisi’s behavior towards Ossetians under Georgia’s first President Zviad Gamzakhurdia, in the early 1990s, did not bode well for Saakashvili’s methods to solve this separatist issue.

    A third factor, however, was more - or even the most - relevant. With her demonstrative unilateralism in the Caucasus, Russia intended to signal to the United States that she is back. Her actions were meant as a response to and replication of American international behavior on the Balkans and Islamic world, after the end of the Cold War. Having regained economic and military power, Moscow, with her action, communicated to Washington: “In our ‘backyard’ (i.e. the former Soviet republics), we can do the same as you did in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan or Iraq. Perhaps, we are not on a pair with you in world politics. But, in our sphere of influence, we are again a Great Power, and will behave accordingly.”

    People in the West may not only doubt whether the pre-history, circumstances and effects of the US’s and Russia’s recent military interventions and foreign policies are easily comparable. Many Westerners might be surprised that they themselves are addressees of Russia’s recent overreaction, in the Caucasus. Yet, this is exactly the case.

    For several years now, Russia’s tightly controlled world news reporting and foreign affairs commenting have been dominated by shrill anti-Americanism. Whether on popular TV shows or in high-brow journals, Russia is presented as the negative other of the US – its major counterweight both politically and culturally, on the Euro-Asian continent. Russia appears as the last defender of an alternative “Eurasian” civilization marked by traditional beliefs, historical rootedness, high culture, and spiritual values. While anti-Americanism can be found in many countries, Russia symbolizes this common sentiment in its most consistent and significant form. Russian official discourse on current international affairs is fixated on open and hidden US influence abroad which is seen as standing behind almost everything that is happening in the world today. While there are many “good Europeans” sharing, at least partially, this view, there is also the “bad West” comprised of those countries that are, in fact, satellites of the “amerikantsy.”

    It was this obsession with the US’s role in contemporary history that led Russia’s leaders not only to interpret Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia in conspirological terms, i.e. to understand Saakashvili’s behavior as inspired by Washington. The Russian leaders’ inferiority complex with regard to US power, apparently, also resulted in inattention to possible effects that their sharp response to Tiblisi’s inapt actions would have on countries good relations to which are seen as being of importance to Russia, by much of her elite. Russia’s resolute show of strength was primarily intended for the American spectator, and did have the effect on US political and intellectual leaders that Moscow had been anticipating or even hoping for.

    Yet, in Europe and the former Soviet empire, it had considerable impact too. There, the repercussions took a form that has, probably, been less welcome to Russia’s elites. Not only was the reaction of the EU member states’ – whether West or East European – to Russia’s excessive use of force only marginally less biting than the US’s. And not only is Russia still waiting for, at least, rhetorical support from various South-East Asian countries that it regards as her partners. Depressingly, some of Russia’s politically and culturally closest allies in the post-Soviet sphere too reacted with suspicious ambivalence. Most remaining member countries of the Moscow-dominated Commonwealth of Independent States have kept silent until know, or, like Ukraine, do not come up with a unified position of its political elites. Interestingly, Kazakhstan – perhaps, Russia’s most important ally in Central Asia – did, so far, not speak up for the Russian position either. Even, Belarussian President Aleksandr Lukashenka had to be reminded of his obligations towards Moscow by the Russian Ambassador in Minsk, before he duly called the invasion of Georgia “wonderful.” Oddly, it was Nicaragua – a country of marginal relevance to Russia’s interests – that first followed Moscow in recognizing South Ossetia and Abkhazia as states. Russia now runs the risk that the relative unimportance, in both regional and international terms, of the countries who follow Russia in supporting diplomatically the two separatist republics will have the effect of illustrating the dubiousness of the issue rather than actually strengthen Moscow’s position, on the international scene.

    Like numerous times before, the Russian leadership appears as being a prisoner to its own propaganda. Moscow’s leaders, of course, know that most information on political matters spread by Russian media and officials is, at best, filtrated, and, at worst, falsified. Yet, they continue becoming hostages of the aggressive public discourse evolving out of this manipulated factual basis. The results remind of Russia’s inadequate reaction to the fall of Milosevic or the Orange Revolution, and her subsequent loss of influence in Serbia and Ukraine – nations historically close to the Russians. The conduct of Moscow’s leaders’ foreign policy falls victim to the archaic political order they have created in post-Soviet Russia, in the first place. What, so far, is saving the Russian leaders from manifest domestic embarrassment is that media reports on the obvious mishaps of Russian foreign policy are also manipulated. A plethora of marginal statements by non-Russians supporting Moscow’s behavior in the Caucasus is extensively documented on Russian TV while Europe’s stiff position and the former Soviet republics lack of support remains uncommented and under-reported, in Russian mass media. However, outside the Kremlin’s propagandistic bubble, Moscow looks increasingly isolated – a perception that, sooner or later, will also find its way into the Russian public.

    Posted on Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 10:18 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Julian Zelizer: The Debate Questions We Need to Hear

    Source: Huffington Post (Blog) (9-22-08)

    [Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is the co-editor of "Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s" (Harvard University Press) and is completing a book on the history of national security politics since World War II.]

    The debates are starting. As I recently wrote in Politico, given the close nature of this presidential race, the debates can easily end up having the same impact as the Ronald Reagan-Jimmy Carter debates in October 1980, when Reagan's stellar performance pushed him ahead in the polls.

    But one of the most frustrating aspects of the debates is how many questions won't be asked. During the final months of the campaign, reporters tend to focus on a handful of issues. While most of these are important (though certainly not all, as we saw with the "lipstick on a pig" controversy), the compressed time frame of television news and the scramble to be the first on the "hot" issue of the day inevitably results in too many issues being squeezed out of the picture.

    Focusing on some key questions that do not always get a lot of attention would allow voters to evaluate the candidates more accurately and would push the candidates to answer questions that are outside of their comfort zone.

    For the purposes of starting a conversation, let me throw out four issues we need to hear more about.

    Homeland Security: One of the most remarkable aspects of this campaign has been how little attention has been focused on homeland security. It seems almost inconceivable after 9/11 that presidential candidates are not asked to devote more of their time to this matter. When the attacks occurred in 2001, we learned how vulnerable the nation was to terrorism and how little the government had done to protect the populace. As a result of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, however, public attention was quickly diverted to foreign policy. The nation's initial debate over issues such as airport security, baggage screening, ports, "soft" terrorist targets, and more fell to the wayside.

    Obama and McCain should be pressed during the debates on this issue. They can be asked about what the administration has done well since 9/11 and where it has fallen short. Where are we most vulnerable? What is the proper balance between civil liberties and federal surveillance? Where should the government focus its budgetary and manpower resources in the next four years to make sure the nation is safer? Who should handle these operations, private contractors or civil servants?

    Presidential and Vice Presidential Power: The reporter Charlie Savage brilliantly recounted how the expansion of presidential power has been a central goal of the Bush administration, and not just on questions of national security. This was true before 9/11, but President Bush's ability to expand the reach of the office increased dramatically after the crisis. During the past eight years, we have seen how the president has flexed his muscle by using a wide variety of tools, such as signing statements that circumvent the legislative will and surveillance policies that directly ignore FISA regulations.

    The candidates, both legislators, have been silent about executive power and yet reporters have not even bothered to ask. This is one of the central issues of our time. The questioners at the debates should ask candidates to be clear on how they would continue to expand or seek to roll back executive power, how they view the recent historic Supreme Court cases like Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), what steps they might take to restore the strength of the legislative branch, what the balance of power should be between the branches of government, and what are the appropriate limits of presidential power.

    Additionally, we have also seen how the power of the vice presidency has increased, nearly exponentially. This is not a unique phenomenon to Richard Cheney, since the vice president has become more of a policymaker and political force since the 1970s beginning with Walter Mondale. But with Cheney's role in shaping national security and energy policy, he has greatly strengthened the institution.

    Yet too many of us don't actually know how the candidates would answer Governor Palin's now famous question: "What is it exactly that the VP does every day?" We have heard almost nothing about what role the office would play in either administration and what specific reforms might be undertaken to limit the influence of whoever holds this position.

    Making Post-Partisan Politics Real: Earlier in the campaign, there was a lot of talk from both
    candidates about the possibility of post-partisan politics. This campaign has shown how such promises vanish very quickly. In the long run, there is little reason to believe that we can move beyond partisanship and polarization because the current rancorous environment is caused by broad political forces rather than by any single politician or faction. The factors include the decline of centrists in Congress, the presidential nomination process, gerrymandered districts, the 24 hour instantaneous media, and the power of interest groups in the campaign process.

    While it will be almost impossible to eliminate all these factors, it would be helpful to hear from the candidates about what they specifically hope to do to promote bipartisan agreement and negotiation. Beyond talking with the other side, which rarely works, Obama and McCain should be asked to specify how they would deal with the different forces causing polarization and what concrete steps they would take to change the way Washington works. Campaign finance and lobbying reform, for instance, has been a relatively unexamined topic, despite the fact that both candidates are allegedly promising real change in Washington. Whereas both men had made bold statements about not relying on independent organizations to broadcast ads to help their campaigns, the promises seem hollow in recent weeks. But reform is not impossible. There have been moments, like the mid-1970s and mid-1990s, when government reform was front and center because there was a realization that changing the way Washington works was necessary in order to produce better political results.

    The Rest of the World: We have focused so much attention on Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel and Russia that we don't really know how the foreign policy of these two candidates compares in other countries and regions. Foreign policy experts have been pointing to very important changes taking place in Asia, for instance, where the economic power of China has grown and there have been many significant changes in U.S.-Japanese relations. The candidates have said nothing about the direction of U.S.-India relations and what role India might play as an ally in Southeast Asia. For all we know (though it is doubtful), the two candidates could share the same foreign policy strategies in these regions or their policies could be diametrically opposed. We simply don't know, because they haven't been asked.

    Frankly, a voter would not even know these parts of the world existed based on most of the questions that have been asked of candidates. The rest of the world will matter, and it can matter a great deal. Americans in the 1990s learned with Afghanistan what happens when we don't pressure candidates and policymakers to keep their eyes roving around the globe. How will they respond to the growing role of Chinese economic power and how will they create more pressure for human rights? During the presidential debates, we need to hear more from the candidates about how they see American relations outside the hot spots.

    These are just a handful of the issues that should be raised in the debates. But this is a historic time for America and the candidates should not be allowed to get away with just answering a small set of questions.

    Posted on Monday, September 22, 2008 at 2:18 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Mark Naison: The Future of The Nation Is in the Hands of Obama Campaign Volunteers- Thoughts After a Weekend of Watching Football

    Source: Special to HNN (9-22-08)

    After spending most of my weekend watching football, I am feeling very worried about the outcome of this presidential election. The millions of people who spend their weekends in football stadiums watching men- most of them black- bang into one another at full speed and scantily clad cheerleaders- most of them white- shimmy and shake, are going to be much more comfortable with John McCain and Sarah Pallin than they are with Barack Obama.

    You could easily see John McCain pacing the sidelines as a coach of a college team or hanging out in the owners box in a pro football stadium He would be completely at home in that setting. And Sarah Pallin would turn heads, whether in cheeleaders garb, or a designer dress, in any football stadium in America.

    While there is a big difference between a presidential election and a football game, in a media driven society, there is a tremendous temptation to portray the two with comparable imagery.

    McCain and Pallin are a publicists dream. They are the kind of people many Americans would like to be; flashy, courageous, glamorous, possessing a charisma that comes from immersion in activities that have been powerfully identified with the national character - hunting, fishing, flying planes, accumulating cars and boats and houses Plus they are white If this election were a pure popularity contest among white voters, they would win in a landslide

    However, this election is more than a popularity contest. The country is falling apart It is bogged down in failing wars, its economy is on the verge of collapse, its infrastructure is aging rapidly and its energy policy is completely unequipped to face the twin challenges of global warming and diminishing fossil fuels.

    Many Americans, even those who possess residual racist sentiments, sense this, and they are worried, but the candidate asking them to address those issues is someone who along with the his racial background, carries the burden of being cerebral. Where would Barack Obama be on "Any Given Sunday?" Certainly not on a football field! And can you imagine Michelle Obama jumping up and down in a cheerleaders outfit? I don't think so! The Obamas are insightful, eloquent, and able to speak knowledgeably about all the important issues our nation faces, but there is nothing comforting or familiar about them to the tens of millions of white Americans who follow football or NASCAR. For many white Americans, Barack Obama represents a cohort- Black Intellectuals- that they have had little contact with, and in some instances, didn't believe existed! Trusting him to lead the country is a stretch!

    This places a tremendous burden on the millions of us who believe that Barack Obama's election alone can save the nation from catastrophe. We not only have to go to swing states and talk to people door to door, we have to engage relatives, neighbors and co workers in conversations about the election, even those we are afraid to talk to about serious matters, even at the risk of making enemies.

    But in doing so, we have to be as calm and as patient as the candidate himself. We represent the future Barack Obama talks about, a future where the best minds of the nation are directed toward solving problems and helping those in need rather than getting rich. Those of us who are educated have to talk frankly about our own advantages and explain that those advantages mean little if the country's economy falls apart and large numbers of our fellow citizens are suffering And we have to talk about issues. We have to discuss problems in the country's economy, health care system, foreign policy, energy strategy and explain why we think Barack Obama's program offers the only hope of reversing the growing decline in the living standards of working class and middle class Amercans.

    It is this kind of grass roots effort that is the real strength of the Obama campaign, not only because it encourages an in depth discussion of issues, but because it exemplifies the kind of civic mindedness and idealism that the nation needs to revive a society undermined by years of publicly sanctioned individualism and greed. Winning this election requires hard work, sacrifice, compassion and ability to reach out to fellow citizens we were are not fully comfortable with, attributes we will need even more when this election is over. We, the millions of members of the Obama campaign team, are part of a movement to change the civic culture of an entire nation to one in which community building, mutual aid and strong and compassionate government are restored to honored place they had in the last economic crisis the nation faced - the Great Depression.

    Are we up for the challenge? Can we win people over through the strength of our own example. The stakes are very high

    Posted on Monday, September 22, 2008 at 10:27 AM | Comments (0) | Top

    E. Anthony Rotundo: Manliness and the presidential politics in 2008

    Source: http://fredericksburg.com (9-21-08)

    [E. Anthony Rotundo, author of "American Manhood," is working on a book about conservatism, masculinity, and American culture.]

    Gender has captured center stage in the 2008 presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton barely missed being the first woman to seize a major party nomination for president. Sarah Palin now stands a good chance of becoming our first woman vice president. And the media have dealt constantly with issues of women in the campaign process.
    Certainly, it's a great and welcome change to see women candidates and women's concerns at the heart of the political process. But to understand fully the role of gender in this (or any) year's campaign, we need to remember that there are two sexes. The media and political professionals tend to talk about "women voters" as if they were the opposite of "regular" voters. Men's centuries of political privilege have hidden the fact that men, like women, are a voting bloc and an interest group.

    Looking at the political landscape in this way, we see that each of the modern political parties has a certain gender hue. Since at least 1980, the Republicans have been more the party of men and the Democrats more the party of women. Political pundits first recognized a gender gap after the Reagan-Carter election of 1980. They assumed that the gap was about women (because it was about gender), and they began to talk about Reagan's "woman problem." In fact, the media's gender blinders obscured an important truth: Reagan won because he attracted men away from the Democratic Party. In deserting the Democrats, men transformed the political landscape. The gender gap has remained a fact of presidential politics through the last seven elections.

    Scholars have sifted through political issues to see which ones make the sexes vote differently. They find that it's not "women's issues"--on equal rights and abortion, men and women vote the same way. The biggest difference between men and women comes on issues of social welfare. Often (though less consistently), women and men also separate on issues involving the use of violence--military force, the death penalty, etc. The Republicans practice the politics of toughness and independence and attract more men than women; the Democrats practice the politics of compassion and community and have the opposite gender appeal.

    But presidential campaigns are about much more than issues. They are a form of public theater that offers competing personalities, story lines, symbols, and catch phrases. And here the parties diverge even more than they do on the issues. The Republicans practice presidential politics as a drama of toughness. They summon up the perilous world of action movies--a world of terrorists, criminals, and evil empires--and show that they'll protect the nation by getting tough on the forces of evil. They borrow catch phrases from action movies ("Make my day," "Read my lips"), they invent slogans with masculine overtones ("Drill, baby, drill"). They attack in bold and daring fashion (the Swift Boat ad), they draw masculine heroes into their cause (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris), and they show their candidates riding horses and clearing brush. The Republicans present themselves as manly men, and they pursue campaigning as a blood sport.

    POLITICAL THEATER

    The Democrats stage a very different drama. They present themselves as reasonable people working for the growth of equality and social justice, and for compassion at home and abroad. Their conventions are tableaux of American diversity and their candidates apply policy expertise to issues of fairness and equality. But the Democrats have trailed the Republicans badly at the art of political theater. This explains why the Democrats have lost five of the last seven presidential elections, even though polls have usually shown the public agreeing with Democrats on the issues.

    This could happen again in 2008. The Republicans are trying to cut into the Democrats' strength among women. John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin and the Republicans' newfound outrage about sexism are bold acts of political theater, and they are pursuing the audience for this new gender drama by advertising heavily on "Oprah," the Lifetime Channel, and other female venues....

    Posted on Sunday, September 21, 2008 at 8:17 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Ted Widmer: When a New President Inherits a Mess

    Source: WaPo (9-21-08)

    [Ted Widmer, a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, is the author of "Ark of the Liberties: America and the World."]

    After a nerve-rattling week in which the U.S. financial system was shaken to the core, here's a simple question: Why on Earth would anyone want to be president right now?

    ven in the best of times, it's a grueling job. But the problems of 2008 seem unusually intractable, and despite the fine talk one sometimes hears about reconciliation, the electorate will be divided no matter who wins in November. Even Bush's snarkiest critics would have had trouble predicting all the rough weather of the second term, from Hurricane Katrina to the smoldering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the bursting of the housing bubble, the financial meltdown and the Recession That Dare Not Speak Its Name. Would any sane person want to inherit this?

    Of course, even to pose that question assumes that candidates for the nation's highest office are normal reasoning creatures. Most of us would pause before spending millions of dollars to travel thousands of miles to eat hundreds of chicken dinners with people who snipe at our clothes, our hair cuts and our every public utterance. Losing is no fun, but is winning even worse? "Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm," Lyndon B. Johnson once said. "There's nothing to do but to stand there and take it."

    So what does it mean to inherit the presidency in an hour of crisis? Historically, it has usually meant a push to reverse the last fellow's policies. That holds true even in relatively tranquil times. In 2001, for instance, the incoming Bush team, which scorned its predecessors as ineffectual, weak and morally compromised, made a mantra of the term "ABC" ("Anything But Clinton"). Their contempt was so thorough that a satirical headline in a story about the inauguration in the Onion read, "Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over.' "

    Ironically, the outgoing Bush team may be in for similar treatment from the next crowd. With about 80 percent of the electorate saying that the country is on the wrong track, it doesn't take a brilliant tactician to suggest that a new direction would work well for either Barack Obama or John McCain. ("ABB" isn't terribly catchy; perhaps "ABBA," for "Anything But Bush Administration," might work better in the year of "Mamma Mia"?) As even McCain's campaign makes clear, anti-Bushism is likely to be the refrain of the early months of 2009, no matter who is elected.

    But how well does rejecting the policies of one's predecessor work? Here's the historian's answer: pretty well. A glance at other difficult presidential transitions shows that in nearly every case -- though not quite all of them -- the presidency that came after a troubled one succeeded, in both senses of the word. And it usually did so by taking a brisk 180-degree turn.

    The tradition of trampling on the last guy's policies is nearly as old as the presidency itself. It was hard for John Adams to improve upon George Washington, but it was easy for Thomas Jefferson's crowd to blast Adams. Abraham Lincoln started off under the worst conditions imaginable, but his majestic first inaugural address sent a clear message that James Buchanan's prevarications were a thing of the past. Grover Cleveland, the only president in history to succeed two different men, was able to declare a new beginning not once, but twice.

    After Lincoln's, no presidency began under darker clouds than Franklin D. Roosevelt's. The U.S. financial system was in vastly worse shape than it is even today, totalitarianism was looming abroad, and the New York Stock Exchange had actually shut down. But Roosevelt knew that Herbert Hoover had given him, in FDR's own words, "an easy act to follow." On that dark inaugural day in 1933, the new president was only five sentences into his maiden speech when the sonorous attack on "fear itself" came; nothing was the same after that. Roosevelt launched a sustained attack on Hoover's laissez-faire policies; there's a reason he called the New Deal new....

    Posted on Sunday, September 21, 2008 at 8:07 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Andrew Roberts: Churchill ... secret conversations reveal views on Stalin and Gandhi

    Source: Telegraph (UK) (9-19-08)

    [“Masters and Commanders” by Andrew Roberts will be published by Allen Lane.]

    It was a wet Friday afternoon last year, and I was about to take the train back to London when it happened. The Churchill Archives in Cambridge were preparing to close, and I had finished working on the files I’d requested for my research on my new book, about the grand strategy of the Second World War.

    I’d love to pretend it was archival genius, or undue diligence, that encouraged me to take down the catalogue for the papers of Lawrence Burgis, but to be honest it was sheer serendipity. That and curiosity, because the name meant nothing to me in an archive that is otherwise stuffed with the papers of the political and military giants of the twentieth century.

    The catalogue stated that Burgis had been an assistant to the deputy secretary to the War Cabinet between 1939 and 1945, a junior post that mainly consisted of taking notes at meetings, which were then drawn up for the cabinet minutes before being burnt in the grate of the War Cabinet offices in Whitehall. Because the staff at the Churchill Archives are super-efficient, I decided to order up a file that simply stated December 1941, to see if it had anything interesting to say about the attack on Pearl Harbour that month. At best I was expecting copies of the opaque, deliberately uninformative Cabinet minutes that for decades have been publicly available at the National Archives at Kew.

    When it arrived soon afterwards, the brown file tied up with string contained scores of yellow pages written in a crabby calligraphy, employing a shorthand code and hieroglyphic-like marks throughout. The stain of rusty paper-clips and general mustiness of the documents implied that historians had worked through these obscure papers of a minor civil servant since they were deposited at the archive on Burgis’s death in 1971.

    'WC: address entirely new sit: to wh: existed last week,’ I read under a large '10/XII’ on a page opened at random, 'disaster in Pac. Pearl Har taken by surprise – maltreated. J complete control Cape Town to Van.’ It was at that moment that I realised that Lawrence Burgis had broken the 1911 Official Secrets Act, and had kept his verbatim notes of Winston Churchill’s War Cabinet. '10/XII’ meant the Cabinet of Wednesday, 10 December 1941, when 'WC’ – ie Winston Churchill - reported the events of three days earlier at Pearl Harbour. He was telling his colleagues that they had to address an entirely new situation to that which existed last week, for what was at stake was nothing less than Japanese control of the whole area between Cape Town in South Africa and Vancouver in Canada.

    If Burgis had kept the verbatim report for December 1941, I wondered, had he also kept them for all the War Cabinets in which he had sat in as a note-taker? The catalogue seemed to suggest as much, so there could be thousands of such pages, detailing word-for-word what everyone, not just the Prime Minister, had said in Britain’s most senior decision-making body [+italics] throughout the Second World War. [-italics]

    Lawrence Burgis (pronounced 'Burgess’) was, according to the diarist James Lees-Milne, 'the last serious attachment of Lord Esher’s private life’ (although it was unreciprocated). When Esher and Burgis first met – it is not known how – Burgis was a seventeen-year-old schoolboy at Ing’s School, Worcester, and the fifty-seven-year-old Reginald, 2nd Viscount Esher, was a former courtier to Queen Victoria and perhaps the best socially connected man of Edwardian England.

    Burgis was 'alert, intelligent and eager to learn’, and it was down to Esher that he secured a place on the staff of the Cabinet Office before the end of the Great War. That he knew he was breaking the law in not destroying his notes is evident from his unpublished autobiography, also amongst his papers, in which he explicitly stated that he kept his actions secret.

    Burgis certainly had an eye for history. 'To sit at the Cabinet table at No 10 with Churchill in the chair was something worth living for,’ he wrote. 'Perhaps some would have paid a high price to occupy my seat, and I got paid for sitting in it!’ He was proud to have been the only person besides Churchill and Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts to have been present at the War Cabinet meetings of both world wars. He certainly hugely admired Churchill, and was certain that had the Germans invaded Britain in 1940, the prime minister 'would have mustered his Cabinet and died with them in the pill-box disguised as a WH Smith bookstall in Parliament Square’.

    Burgis’s verbatim reports tell us a great deal about the way the War Cabinet worked, about why Churchill could dominate it and about how the soldiers and politicians interacted as decisions were made upon which the lives of tens of thousands depended. Speaking openly because they never expected their annotated remarks to survive the Cabinet Office fireplace, ministers argued passionately - and on occasion vehemently - for their view of grand strategy to prevail. Now, sixty-five years later, we can finally know what they said word-for-word. Our appreciation of many key decisions of the Second World War now need to be reassessed...

    Posted on Saturday, September 20, 2008 at 9:43 AM | Comments (0) | Top

    Tristram Hunt: Groundhog capitalism

    Source: Guardian (UK) (9-20-08)

    [Tristram Hunt's Penguin biography of Engels is published early next year.]

    Had Marx and Engels lived to see the day! The counting houses of global finance in freefall, traders going to the wall, and now Washington seemingly intent on nationalising its entire banking sector. As stockmarkets crash around the world, what we are now witnessing is an old-fashioned, full-throttle crisis of capitalism, and no event was more inclined to lift the mood of communism's founding fathers.

    In the 1850s Friedrich Engels was in Manchester, earning his and Karl Marx's crust working for his father's cotton-thread business, Ermen & Engels. After the failure of the 1848 revolutions, both men had concluded that communism's best chance lay with an economic rupture brought about by capitalism's inherent instability. And from within the very apex of global finance - the mills, counting houses and Royal Exchange of Cottonopolis, as Manchester was known - Engels reported back on the prospects of just such a collapse. As the mid-Victorian economic boom appeared to stumble and a worldwide credit crunch loomed in ways not dissimilar to the current denouement, Engels could not contain his glee.

    "Speculation in railways is again reaching dazzling heights - since January 1 most shares have risen by 40%, and the worst ones more than any. "Ça promet!" he announced in 1851 of another stockmarket bubble similarly out of control. Capitalism's finale was just around the corner: the railway frenzy was unsustainable, the East India market looked sub-prime while the British cloth industry was being hit by a flood of cheap cotton.

    "If the crash in the market coincides with such a gigantic crop, things will be cheery indeed. Peter Ermen is already shitting his pants at the very thought of it, and the little tree-frog's a pretty good barometer," Engels wrote of his fearful business partner. Bankruptcies were picking up in London and Liverpool, overproduction was glutting the market, and Engels was adamant the crash would kick in by March 1852. It wasn't to be. Instead exports surged, wages rose, standards of living improved and the mid-Victorian boom ground inexplicably, frustratingly, on.

    Four years later Engels's optimism returned as the markets faltered. "This time there'll be a dies irae such as has never been seen before: the whole of Europe's industry in ruins, all markets overstocked ... all the propertied classes in the soup, complete bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie, war and profligacy to the nth degree." And at last, he was right: overproduction in the textile markets and an unexpected hike in raw material costs led to a collapse of confidence in the cotton industry, then an HBOS-style run on the banks, and a spate of insolvencies. Like this week's collapsing stockmarkets, the 19th-century global economy shuddered as sugar, coffee, cotton and silk prices plummeted.

    "The American crash is superb and not yet over by a long chalk," Engels wrote in October 1857. "The repercussion in England would appear to have begun with the Liverpool Borough Bank. Tant mieux. That means that for the next three or four years, commerce will again be in a bad way. Nous avons maintenant de la chance." The conditions for revolution were ripe. With the capitalist mode of production in collapse, the working class would surely rise to the occasion. But two months into the crash the proletariat had still failed to realise its historic calling. "There are as yet few signs of revolution, for the long period of prosperity has been fearfully demoralising," Engels noted gloomily. And by the following spring, business had picked itself up again on the back of new markets in India and China.

    The final hope lay with the 1860s cotton famine. Then, as now, the crisis of capitalism was US driven, with the civil war leading to a blockade of the south by the north, curtailing cotton exports into Lancashire. Hundreds of thousands of workers were sacked. "You will readily understand that all the philistines are in a cold sweat," Engels reported in 1865 as the Liverpool docks emptied and 125,000 unemployed mill hands wandered the Manchester streets. "A lot of people in Scotland are finished as well, and one fine day it's bound to be the turn of the banks, and that'd be the end of the matter." But it was another false dawn, as the British working class stoically endured further immiseration. By which time Engels had pretty much given up on them. "The English proletariat's revolutionary energy has completely evaporated," he concluded.

    While few would expect any such militancy from laid-off bankers, what remains of the Marxist movement today is brimming with optimism that the financial crisis sounds the death knell of capitalism. With almost Alistair Darling-like doom, the International Committee of the Fourth International has declared that "the contradictions within the world capitalist economy are now reaching the point where the type of financial catastrophe and social and economic devastation experienced in the 1930s is not only possible, but is increasingly likely".

    I'm not so sure. The uncomfortable truth is that capitalism - assisted by a pliant state - has historically managed to extricate itself from similar crises and emerge ever more virulent. Marx died trying to explain away precisely such incongruities, while Engels chose a different route: building up a remarkable stockmarket portfolio while complaining about tax on his dividends. The final crisis has a little way to go.

    Posted on Saturday, September 20, 2008 at 9:32 AM | Comments (0) | Top

    Scott Lucas: The manufacture of fear? US politics both before and after 9-11

    Source: Newsletter of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, April 2008 Issue (4-1-08)

    "The chief costs of terrorism derive not from the damage inflicted by the terrorists, but what those attacked do to themselves and others in response. That is, the harm of terrorism mostly arises from the fear and from the often hasty, ill-considered, and overwrought reaction (or overreaction) it characteristically, and often calculatedly, inspires in its victims."―John Mueller1

    I would like to begin with two incidents, one from the perspective of the academic, one (with apologies in advance) from a much more personal standpoint. A few weeks ago my mother, who has been concerned for more than twenty years that I am cut off here in Britain from what is going on in the United States, forwarded a letter to me that has been widely circulated on the Internet:

    Are we fighting a war on terror or aren't we? Was it or was it not started by Islamic people who brought it to our shores on September 11, 2001?

    Were people from all over the world, mostly Americans, not brutally murdered that day, in downtown Manhattan, across the Potomac from our nation's capitol and in a field in Pennsylvania?

    Did nearly three thousand men, women and children die a horrible, burning or crushing death that day, or didn't they?

    And I'm supposed to care that a copy of the Koran was "desecrated" when an overworked American soldier kicked it or got it wet?

    Well, I don't. I don't care at all. I'll start caring when Osama bin Laden turns himself in and repents for incinerating all those innocent people on 9/11.

    I'll care about the Koran when the fanatics in the Middle East start caring about the Holy Bible, the mere possession of which is a crime in Saudi Arabia .

    I'll care when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi tells the world he is sorry for hacking off Nick Berg's head while Berg screamed through his gurgling slashed throat.

    I'll care when the cowardly so-called "insurgents" in Iraq come out and fight like men instead of disrespecting their own religion by hiding in mosques.

    I'll care when the mindless zealots who blow themselves up in search of nirvana care about the innocent children within range of their suicide bombs.

    I'll care when the American media stops pretending that their First Amendment liberties are somehow derived from international law instead of the United States Constitution's Bill of Rights. In the meantime, when I hear a story about a brave marine roughing up an Iraqi terrorist to obtain information, know this: I don't care.

    When I see a fuzzy photo of a pile of naked Iraqi prisoners who have been humiliated in what amounts to a college-hazing incident, rest assured that I don't care.

    When I see a wounded terrorist get shot in the head when he is told not to move because he might be booby-trapped, you can take it to the bank that I don't care.

    When I hear that a prisoner, who was issued a Koran and a prayer mat, and fed "special" food that is paid for by my tax dollars, is complaining that his holy book is being "mishandled," you can absolutely believe in your heart of hearts that I don't care.

    And oh, by the way, I've noticed that sometimes it's spelled "Koran" and other times "Quran." Well, Jimmy Crack Corn and—you guessed it—I don't care! ! ! ! !

    If you agree with this viewpoint, pass this on to all your e-mail friends.

    Sooner or later, it'll get to the people responsible for this ridiculous behavior!

    If you don't agree, then by all means hit the delete button.

    Should you choose the latter, then please don't complain when more atrocities committed by radical Muslims happen here in our great country.2

    Almost 60 years ago, when the foe of America was not radical Islamists but Communists, President Harry Truman hosted a meeting with Congressional representatives. The Truman administration, having been told by Britain that it could no longer provide aid to Greece or Turkey, faced a challenge: how could it persuade the American public and Congress to send hundreds of millions of dollars to those two Mediterranean countries? The advice to the Democratic president from Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican leader in the Senate, was blunt: make a speech to “scare the hell” out of the American people.3 Two weeks later, the president went before a joint session of Congress and issued what would become known as the Truman Doctrine: “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”4

    Of course, there are differences between the two cases. One is the action of “official” executive political networks, using the method of formal communication to justify policy; the other is that of private individuals taking advantage of the technological shift and acceleration brought by the Internet to disseminate an urgent message. In both cases, however, the purpose of the discussions is the “mobilisation of fear.” Notions of the “culture of fear” are far from new,5 but I think they can be applied effectively to the reconsideration of policymaking, specifically the making of U.S. foreign policy, in both historical and contemporary cases. I would put two general hypotheses:

    1. Scholarly study of U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War has been so focused on objective explanations of strategy, geopolitics, and, most important, “national security” that it has ignored the subjective construction and projection of that policy. Provocatively stated, the Soviet Union served not as much as an actual nightmare as a constructed nightmare to justify the projection of American power around the world.

    2. Contemporary U.S. foreign policy, like its 1950s predecessor, did not respond to fear with plans for “security”; rather, it has sought to channel and even stoke fear to bolster implementation of a predetermined policy. Specifically and provocatively stated, the Bush administration did not stage the tragedy of 11 September 2001, but within hours of the event it began to consider how to use a War on Terror to implement plans for regime change in Iraq....

    Posted on Friday, September 19, 2008 at 7:25 AM | Comments (0) | Top

    Manisha Sinha: Sarah Palin and the Betrayal of American Women

    Source: Huffington Post (Blog) (9-18-08)

    The emergence of Sarah Palin as the Vice Presidential Republican candidate is one of the biggest acts of betrayal against women in American history. In a transparent and cynical ploy to appeal to women's votes, John McCain has picked an anti-women's rights woman candidate. The worst part is that both his gutter tactics and playing "identity" politics of the obvious kind seems to be working. White women as a group have shifted from Obama to McCain. It is about time that the press, leading women in the country and Obama's supporters reveal the true record of the McCain-Palin ticket on women's issues.

    McCain's selection of a political light weight like Palin is not only politically opportunistic but reveals his extremely poor judgment in the first important decision taken by him as the Republican nominee for President. Clearly, he is the one who puts politics and winning the Presidency before his country, a lie that he projected on to his far more worthy opponent. Ms. Palin's gender and her ability to mouth one-liners do not excuse the personal and political scandals that have already marred her selection or her complete ignorance of most international and domestic issues. It is a slap on the face of most American women to have one of their worst rather than one of their best represent them at the highest levels of government.

    The place to begin in judging the McCain-Palin ticket is John McCain's views on women before his shameful and hypocritical reincarnation as the candidate for American women. All we know about McCain on women's issues is that he has opposed equal pay for equal work and the right to choose. He tells horrible "jokes" about rape, abandoned his first wife when she was physically incapacitated and publicly called Cindy McCain a word that rhymes with "punt." A man who disrespects his wives, first and second, cannot respect any woman. In an open and brazen attempt to appeal to women, one now finds McCain on "The View" and Rachel Ray's cooking show. His philandering days as a navy pilot and his improper relations with a female lobbyist lie forgotten. Whatever heroics McCain may have performed in Vietnam, he is no knight in shining armor. When it comes to women, he is downright dishonorable, personally and politically.

    Perhaps it is only natural that McCain would pick a woman like Sarah Palin, who has opposed every single woman's issue, as his Vice Presidential nominee. Palin is anti-choice but demands the right to privacy and choice for her family. The pregnancy of her underage daughter is a legitimate issue when she is against sex education in public schools and when the McCain-Palin ticket falsely accuses Senator Obama of promoting sex education for kindergartners! As Mayor, she forced victims of rape to pay for their state medical examination and is against abortion even in the case of rape or incest. She not only fails the test of feminism but of common human decency.

    Palin is probably the worst breed of conservative women since southern white slaveholding women defended slavery as a positive good and opposed the women's rights movement as heretical for allegedly overturning both God's and nature's plans for women. Her religious fundamentalism, often mistaken for spirituality, makes her the perfect historical heir to these women rather than Abraham Lincoln, whose legacy she had the temerity to evoke. Lincoln was a religious skeptic who came to believe that the Civil War was divine judgment on the nation for its sin of slavery. Does Palin believe that? As a proponent of Biblical literalism, she should probably defend slavery as an institution sanctioned by God. In fact, what better way to honor Lincoln's legacy on racial emancipation and black rights than inaugurate a gifted African American man as President on the bicentennial of his birth and repudiate the man who refused to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. and the long struggle for equal rights in this country.

    On nearly every issue, Palin's positions reveal both her inability and unwillingness to grasp basic facts and her unseemly pride in proclaiming her ignorance. She wants to ban books that don't follow her religious beliefs from town libraries, despite a USA Today report to the contrary, and wants "creationism" taught in our schools. The fact that she would want to ban any book is reminiscent of Nazi censorship and burning of books. She dismisses global warming as a myth not created by human activity and is unable to accept the theory of evolution. Her anti-intellectual and anti-scientific mentality reflects her college experience in no less than six different schools in the space of five years. She is actually a nice complement to McCain, who graduated near the bottom of the naval academy, and Bush, whose poor record as a student is well known. The ability to see Russia from Alaska is touted as her foreign policy expertise rather than her complete lack of knowledge about the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war. It is not the liberal intelligentsia that Republicans rail against but intelligence itself. Mockery and distortion (forgetting the Biblical injunctions against lying and "do unto others..."), is all that the gun toting and trigger happy McCain-Palin ticket have to offer against their infinitely more talented and intelligent opponent.

    In the most brazen instance of political plagiarism, McCain and Palin have been happily lifting Obama's words, ideas and slogans. Pretending to be a reformer, Palin is guilty of firing a state official for refusing to fire her former brother in law, revealing the worst kind of corruption and cronyism. Accepting per diem payments from the state treasury while she was at home, spinning lies about her opposition to the "bridge to nowhere," selling the Governor's jet on ebay and firing the Governor's cook will not make her a reformer. Moderates and independents should be aware that Palin is a right wing, fundamentalist Republican and her selection proves that the McCain-Palin ticket is neither independent nor maverick. Most American women ought to be smarter than this blatant attempt to make them vote for an anti-woman candidate simply because she is a woman.

    The Republicans will distract us to death with manufactured small issues like lipstick because they want to divert attention from their dismal eight year record of failure on every front. It is the height of irony to have the most sexist ticket in recent presidential history cry sexism. If American women want to continue the Republican record of economic disaster and international disrepute, they should vote McCain-Palin. They are wrong on Iraq, wrong on the economy, wrong on the environment and wrong on women's issues. If women want to vote for a ticket that will undo every gain made on women's rights in the past few decades they should vote McCain-Palin.

    It is also time for leading American women, progressive women, Democratic women and their supporters to speak out more forcefully against the McCain-Palin charade. (Sign the Women against Palin petition started recently.) As one who has been a long time admirer of the Clintons but a supporter of Obama this election cycle, I was disappointed that recently in Florida Hillary missed a golden opportunity to rally white women behind Obama by not taking on Palin explicitly. Her surrogates like the historian Sean Wilentz in a Time magazine article have been worse, repeating the canards and manufactured talking points of the McCain campaign. Hillary and her supporters need to do much more to address the stalking horse of Palin's candidacy. In fact all those feminists who strongly supported Hillary should now call Palin out. Otherwise, many women will vote for Palin believing they are advancing the cause of women in politics when precisely the opposite is true. American women have been betrayed and their leaders ought to take note.

    Posted on Thursday, September 18, 2008 at 7:46 PM | Comments (11) | Top

    Daniel Pipes: Must Counterinsurgency Wars Fail?

    Source: Washington Times (9-14-08)

    When it comes to a state fighting a nonstate enemy, there is a widespread impression the state is doomed to fail.

    In 1968, Robert F. Kennedy concluded that victory in Vietnam was "probably beyond our grasp," and called for a peaceful settlement. In 1983, the analyst Shahram Chubin wrote that the Soviets in Afghanistan were embroiled in an "unwinnable war." In 1992, U.S. officials shied away from involvement in Bosnia, fearing entanglement in a centuries-old conflict. In 2002, retired U.S. general Wesley Clark portrayed the American effort in Afghanistan as unwinnable. In 2004, President George W. Bush said of the war on terror, "I don't think you can win it." In 2007, the Winograd Commission deemed Israel's war against Hizbullah unwinnable.

    More than any other recent war, the allied forces' effort in Iraq was seen as a certain defeat, especially in the 2004-06 period. Former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger, former British minister Tony Benn, and former U.S. special envoy James Dobbins all called it unwinnable. The Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group Report echoed this view. Military analyst David Hackworth, among others, explicitly compared Iraq to Vietnam: "As with Vietnam, the Iraqi tar pit was oh-so-easy to sink into, but appears to be just as tough to exit."

    The list of "unwinnable wars" goes on and includes, for example, the counterinsurgencies in Sri Lanka and Nepal. "Underlying all these analyses," notes Yaakov Amidror, a retired Israeli major general, is the assumption "that counterinsurgency campaigns necessarily turn into protracted conflicts that will inevitably lose political support."

    Amidror, however, disagrees with this assessment. In a recent study published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Winning Counterinsurgency War: The Israeli Experience, he convincingly argues that states can beat non-state actors.

    This debate has the greatest significance, for if the pessimists are right, Western powers are doomed to lose every current and future conflict not involving conventional forces (meaning planes, ships, and tanks). The future would look bleak, with the prospect of successful insurgencies around the world and even within the West itself. One can only shudder at the prospect of an Israeli-style intifada in, say, the United States. Coincidentally, news came from Australia last week of an Islamist group calling for a "forest jihad" of massive fires in that country.

    Victory over insurgencies is possible, Amidror argues, but it does not come easily. Unlike the emphasis on size of forces and arsenals in traditional wars, he postulates four conditions of a mostly political nature required to defeat insurgencies. Two of them concern the state, where the national leadership must:

    • Understand and accept the political and public relations challenge involved in battling insurgents.
    • Appreciate the vital role of intelligence, invest in it, and require the military to use it effectively.

    Another two conditions concern counterterrorist operations, which must:

    • Isolate terrorists from the non-terrorist civilian population.
    • Control and isolate the territories where terrorists live and fight.

    If these guidelines are successfully followed, the result will not be a signing ceremony and a victory parade but something more subtle – what Amidror calls "sufficient victory" but I would call "sufficient control." By this, he means a result "that does not produce many years of tranquility, but rather achieves only a ‘repressed quiet,' requiring the investment of continuous effort to preserve it." As examples, Amidror offers the British achievement in Northern Ireland and the Spanish one vis-à-vis the Basques.

    After these conditions have been met, Amidror argues, begins "the difficult, complex, crushing, dull war, without flags and trumpets." That war entails "fitting together bits of intelligence information, drawing conclusions, putting into operation small forces under difficult conditions within a mixed populace of terrorists and innocent civilians in a densely-populated urban center or isolated village, and small tactical victories."

    Following these basic precepts does lead to success, and Western states over the past century have in fact enjoyed an impressive run of victories over insurgents. Twice U.S. forces defeated insurgents in the Philippines (1899-1902 and 1946-54), as did the British in Palestine (1936-39), Malaya (1952-57), and Oman (1964-75), the Israelis in the West Bank (Operation Defensive Shield, 2002), and most recently the U.S. surge in Iraq.

    Counterinsurgency wars are winnable, but they have their own imperatives, ones very distinct from those of conventional warfare.

    Posted on Thursday, September 18, 2008 at 7:43 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Julian Zelizer: '08 debates may resonate like Carter-Reagan

    Source: Politico (9-17-08)

    [Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. He is the co-editor of “Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s” (Harvard University Press) and is completing a book on the history of national security politics since World War II.]

    John McCain and Barack Obama will square off Sept. 26 in the first presidential debate. This televised event — and the two others that will follow in October — will potentially play a decisive role this year, allowing one of the candidates to break free from the deadlocked poll numbers that have defined the contest thus far.

    In close elections with significant numbers of undecided voters, debates can become true turning points. Consider the lone debate of the 1980 presidential contest between Republican Ronald Reagan and President Jimmy Carter, which proved essential to the outcome in November.

    Although we like to think of a Reagan Revolution in 1980, in reality, throughout September and early October, large numbers of voters were on the fence about which candidate to choose. While Carter was an unpopular president facing a stagnant economy and a hostage crisis in Iran, many voters feared that Reagan was too extreme and not very intelligent.

    Reagan and Carter had not debated before Oct. 28. The League of Women Voters had sponsored a debate on Sept. 21, but Carter had refused to join because third-party candidate John Anderson — a Republican congressman from Illinois whose appeal to independents posed a greater threat to Carter than to Reagan — had been allowed to participate.

    After the debate between Reagan and Anderson, the pressure for a Reagan-Carter matchup intensified in mid-October. The president — despite numerous advisers who told him he would lose support by allowing Reagan to appear more reasonable than Democrats had hoped and who feared the president’s skills were rusty, since he had not debated since 1976 — was confident that he would appear more experienced and knowledgeable than his opponent. Anderson’s support, moreover, had fallen below the 15 percent threshold required to participate.

    Reagan was bolstered by his great performance at the Alfred E. Smith Dinner on Oct. 16 and believed that he needed to debate the president to counter his new momentum.

    The buildup to the debate and its proximity to Election Day heightened the atmosphere surrounding the event. Carter adviser Hamilton Jordan recalled that “polls showed that people had quit making up their minds. It was as if the entire election had been put on hold, waiting for the debate.” Journalist Elizabeth Drew compared the debate to “the world heavyweight championship and the Super Bowl combined.”

    When debate night finally came, Carter demonstrated an impressive command of the details of public policy and the issues facing the nation. But Reagan offered a superb performance in front of the cameras.

    During one of the most dramatic moments, Carter was delivering a professorial statement about the problems in the health care system and accusing Reagan of having opposed the creation of Medicare in 1965. The president was trying to show his superior knowledge and dismiss Reagan as an extremist — the twin goals of the Democratic campaign.

    As Carter was speaking, the cameras panned to Reagan, who was visibly chuckling at the president. He looked like a major league hitter who just saw the pitch he was waiting for. Rather than offering a point-by-point rejoinder, Reagan mocked the president and followed up with a classic quip: “There you go again.”

    Carter made other mistakes. At one point, the president said that he had been talking to his 13-year-old daughter, Amy, about the most important issues of the day and she had said that she was most worried about nuclear war. Carter’s intention was to show how widespread the fear of nuclear catastrophe had become, with even children thinking about the issue, but the statement made Carter look like a president seeking counsel from his young daughter.

    In his closing statement, Reagan, with one line, devastated Carter by asking, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

    The rest was history. Most of the polls that came out showed that Reagan had performed much better than Carter. During the week that followed, the polls broke in Reagan’s favor. Undecided voters started to decide, and they didn’t like the president.

    The debate was certainly not the only factor at work. The Sunday before the election, a few days after the debate, Carter had gone on television to announce that there would probably not be a resolution to the hostage crisis before the election.

    But the debate was central, as Reagan came out of the event looking poised and having undermined Carter’s attempts to frame him. The results constituted a historic Electoral College landslide, with Reagan winning 489 electoral votes.

    There have been many other moments when televised debates were decisive. In 1960, John F. Kennedy came out of his debate with Richard Nixon looking like the more energetic and charismatic candidate. In 1976, President Gerald Ford’s terrible performance, when he suggested Eastern Europe was not under the control of the Soviet Union, compounded doubts about his intelligence and reminded conservatives of his loyalty to détente. In 2000, Al Gore’s sighs made him appear arrogant.

    Television debates are imperfect, to be sure. They can be shallow, they can focus on irrelevant questions and they often give more attention to the questioners than the candidates. But like them or not, they can have a huge effect on the outcome of the election, particularly in a race — such as the one we face today — where the polls show a dead heat.

    Posted on Thursday, September 18, 2008 at 7:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Jonathan Zimmerman: How Special are Your Needs?

    Source: Philadelphia City Paper (9-17-08)

    [Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth. He is the author of Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools (Harvard University Press).]

    Imagine two infant children, somewhere in America. One has a severe cognitive disability, while the other is born into extreme poverty.

    Which one deserves government assistance? In my mind, they both do. The disabled infant needs early speech therapy and a host of other services. But so does the poor child, who enters life with huge disadvantages in health, education and more.

    So why do so many Americans deem the first child more worthy of public support?

    Look no further than the Republican National Convention, and you'll see what I mean. "To the families of special-needs children all across this country, I have a message," declared vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, the proud mother of an infant with Down syndrome. "I pledge to you that if we are elected, you will have a friend and advocate in the White House."

    Television cameras panned to the adorable 4-month-old Trig Palin, while the crowd cheered. And we should all applaud Sarah Palin for bringing attention to the plight of disabled children, who often don't receive the services promised them under federal law.

    But here's the larger point: There is a law, and we're all bound by it. Since 1975, the federal government has required schools to provide disabled children a "free, appropriate public education" in the "least restrictive setting." And the law was signed by a Republican president, Gerald R. Ford.

    That's important, too. As the cheers for Trig Palin revealed, we now have a strong bipartisan consensus on a simple principle: Children with special needs deserve special help. Through no fault of their own, they begin life with a set challenges. So it's the duty of all of us — through our government — to lend them a hand.

    Somehow, though, poor kids don't elicit the same sympathy. Remember that 8.1 million children in our country still lack health insurance. But Republican lawmakers — including Sen. John McCain, Sarah Palin's running mate — blocked last year's reauthorization of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, which would halve the number of uninsured children by 2013.

    Think about it: The same people who cheered for Trig Palin — and for his mom's pledge — have blocked public health insurance for America's poorest kids. If you're born with a physical disability, the government is required to assist you. But if you're born into poverty, you're often on your own.

    Why? To many Americans, clearly, poor people are responsible for their own fate. But even if you grant this premise, how can you fault the children of the poor? Shall the sins of the parents simply be visited on the young? The more you blame their parents, indeed, the more poor kids would seem to merit help.

    That's the real issue here: Who gets help, and why? As usual, though, we're not talking about it. Instead, the Trig Palin saga has triggered yet another battle in America's perennial election-year fracas: the culture wars.

    So pro-lifers praise the Palins for electing to bring Trig into the world, while the pro-choice camp demands the same freedom for a mother who chooses an abortion. Across the political spectrum, meanwhile, women ask whether a mom with a Down syndrome baby can also find time to serve as our vice-president.

    Most recently, Trig Palin became a weapon in the war over stem-cell research. Democratic VP nominee Joe Biden blasted the GOP for its opposition to this research, which could provide therapies for disabled kids like Trig. Republicans fired back, condemning Biden for "launching an offensive debate over who cares more about special-needs children."

    That's a debate no side can win, of course, and it distracts us from the biggest question of all. Rather than asking Sarah Palin about abortion or stem cells, then, let's ask her about the larger role of government in the lives of children. Who should get help, and why? I'll be eager to hear her answer.

    Posted on Thursday, September 18, 2008 at 10:34 AM | Comments (1) | Top

    Tom Palaima: No Issues, No Interviews, No Scrutiny, No Democracy

    Source: Austin American-Statesman (9-18-08)

    [Tom Palaima, a professor of Classics and ancient history at the University of Texas at Austin, is a regular commentary contributor to the Austin American Statesman and writes regular reviews for the Times Higher Education and the Texas Observer. He has contributed a number of pieces to HNN.]

    After Sen. John McCain announced that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin would be his running mate, Republican presidential campaign manager Rick Davis told us what kind of campaign they would run: "This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates." And they are now running it right before our eyes.

    Palin and McCain will not discuss issues. Palin is off-limits to the press as she travels from heavily scripted rally to heavily scripted rally repeating a demagogic message of change that has no meaning in a democratic society without serious public scrutiny.

    The image of reporters shouting long-distance unanswered questions from airport tarmacs at her, even while our financial system and stock market get hit by Katrina-like forces, is, to me, a sacrilegious violation of a basic principle of our democracy. It is no change at all from the imperious secrecy of the Bush administration these last eight years.

    This is all the more troubling given that Palin's track record, in a state that has fewer people than Austin, Texas, of intense partisanship, appointments of unqualified cronies and vindictive firings of independent-minded public servants mirrors how our White House has operated since the year 2000.

    Davis wants us to trust his candidates when McCain mimics Herbert Hoover's assurances that the hemorrhaging economy is "fundamentally sound." The reality is that eight years of Republican laissez-faire policies have brought our economy to a perilous condition.

    On other issues, too, Americans are asked to trust McCain's and Palin's personalities and the unchallenged assertions they make. They declare that victory can be achieved in Iraq, without explaining what victory even is and with Palin, either dishonestly or ignorantly, still linking Iraq to 9/11.

    Shouldn't they be explaining to Americans why they think preemptive warfare (aka the Bush doctrine) and enhanced interrogative techniques are viable ways to secure our way of life? Shouldn't they explain how nearly $10 trillion dollars in national debt will go away by cutting taxes yet again for the wealthiest Americans? Don't they need to prove to us how off-shore drilling will solve the energy crisis?

    Beware when you hear talk about "composite views" and unspecified things that we individually should take away from candidates. Such words tell us it is okay to neglect the common good and the basic principles that made our country, until the last eight years, a world model of tolerance, personal freedom and respect for reason and law.

    This kind of talk invites us to give into prejudices about gay marriage or Roe vs. Wade or the teaching of creationism or pre-millennialist religious beliefs or the banning of sex education in schools or removing certain kinds of books from libraries or the biased liberal press.

    McCain and Palin are turning a critical election into a reality show. Nonetheless, here is my composite view of what I take away from the candidates.

    Where our future president is concerned, I am prejudiced toward educational achievement, intellectual abilities and democratic engagement with the issues.

    I admire Sen. Barack Obama, because, as the child of a single mother, he studied hard for years and became the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. His achievement contrasts with McCain graduating 894 out of 899 from the naval academy and Palin hiding the transcripts of her six years at four different regional colleges.

    I admire that Obama turned down lucrative jobs because he felt called to community organizing. I am biased towards his ability to devise solutions to complicated problems and explain them to critics and supporters. I want a president who has been involved in elite intellectual circles during his college and adult life, and has cared about human beings at the grass-roots, state and national levels.

    I admire Obama for continuing to address important issues, while being Swift-boated by Jerome Corsi, who Swift-boated John Kerry.

    I take away from such tactics and from the Republican personality-focused, take-no-questions campaign that Obama's ideas frighten those who do not like to think and who don't want us to think either.

    Posted on Thursday, September 18, 2008 at 10:31 AM | Comments (1) | Top

    Frederick W. Kagan: "No oil for blood"

    Source: Weekly Standard (9-17-08)

    [Frederick W. Kagan, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.]

    This morning, I had the honor of testifying before the House Budget Committee on the situation in Iraq. The discussion was polite and civilized, and was a reminder that even now it is possible for people who disagree about what to do in Iraq to argue without raised voices and disagreeable language (apart from the Code Pink women, yelling for those who think that shouting opponents down is preferable to arguing with them). Congressman Brian Baird once again demonstrated that it is possible even for those who bitterly opposed the war to recognize the importance of doing the right thing now--as well as the possibility of crossing the Republican-Democrat sectarian divide on this issue. One question came up repeatedly in the hearing that deserves more of an answer than it got, however: Why, after all the assistance we've given to Iraq over the past five years, was the first major Iraqi oil deal signed with China and not with an American or even a western company? The answer is, in part, because three Democratic senators intervened in Iraqi domestic politics earlier this year to prevent Iraq from signing short-term agreements with Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, Chevron, and BP.

    The Iraqi government was poised to sign no-bid contracts with those firms this summer to help make immediate and needed improvements in Iraq's oil infrastructure. The result would have been significant foreign investment in Iraq, an expansion of Iraqi government revenues, and an increase in the global supply of oil. One would have thought that leading Democratic senators who claim to be interested in finding other sources of funding to replace American dollars in Iraq, in helping Iraq spend its own money on its own people, and in lowering the price of gasoline for American citizens, would have been all for it. Instead, Senators Chuck Schumer, John Kerry, and Claire McCaskill wrote a letter to Secretary of State Rice asking her "to persuade the GOI [Government of Iraq] to refrain from signing contracts with multinational oil companies until a hydrocarbon law is in effect in Iraq." The Bush administration wisely refused to do so, but the resulting media hooraw in Iraq led to the cancellation of the contracts, and helps to explain why Iraq is doing oil deals instead with China.

    Senators Schumer, McCaskill, and Kerry claimed to be acting from the purest of motives: "It is our fear that this action by the Iraqi government could further deepen political tensions in Iraq and put our service members in even great danger." For that reason, presumably, Schumer went so far as to ask the senior vice president of Exxon "if his company would agree to wait until the GOI produced a fair, equitable, and transparent hydrocarbon revenue sharing law before it signed any long-term agreement with the GOI." Exxon naturally refused, but Schumer managed to get the deal killed anyway. But the ostensible premise of the senators' objections was false--Iraq may not have a hydrocarbons law, but the central government has been sharing oil revenues equitably and there is no reason at all to imagine that signing the deals would have generated increased violence (and this was certainly not the view of American civilian and military officials on the ground in Iraq at the time). It is certain that killing the deals has delayed the maturation of Iraq's oil industry without producing the desired hydrocarbons legislation.

    Nor is it entirely clear what the senators' motivations were. Their release (available along with their letter to Secretary Rice at the New York Observer quoted Senator McCaskill as follows: "'It's bad enough that we have no-bid contracts being awarded for work in Iraq. It's bad enough that the big oil companies continue to receive government handouts while they post record breaking profits. But now the most profitable companies in the universe--America's biggest oil companies--stand to reap the rewards of this no-bid contract on top of it all,' McCaskill said. 'It doesn't take a rocket scientist to connect these dots--big oil is running Washington and now they're running Baghdad. There is no reason under the sun not to halt these agreements until we get revenue sharing in place,' McCaskill said." So was this about what's best for Iraq and American interests there or about nailing "big oil" in an election year?

    Either way, like Barack Obama's asking the Iraqi foreign minister to hold off on a strategic framework agreement until after the American election, it was nothing but harmful to American interests and our prospects in Iraq.

    Posted on Thursday, September 18, 2008 at 9:45 AM | Comments (3) | Top

    Joseph Lane: Sex Ed for Kiddies? McCain’s Skewing of Voting Records

    Source: Britannica Blog (9-17-08)

    A great deal has been written about whether the recent ads by the McCain-Palin ticket are “factually accurate,” “highly misleading,” or “just plain lies.” Whoever thought we could have a “calm, respectful general election campaign” “without biased distortions of the other candidate’s record” (I mean you, John McCain!) must have been smoking something at the time.

    However, the now famous “sex education for kindergarteners” ad signals something more than just another tortured distortion of slender facts to win an election - it could point toward a crazy spiral that could backfire on John McCain much more than any fact-checker’s quibbles about whether this spot falsifies Obama’s action in question.

    Let me take a step back to discuss a seminar that I offered in Fall 2007. I taught a course on “U.S. Senators Running for President.” The issue, as I explained it repeatedly to the students, was to understand why forty-four senators ran unsuccessfully for president between 1960 and 2004 without any of them winning. Of course, in one sense, my timing could not be worse because we were standing on the cusp of the first race in our history between two sitting Senators. Unless Bob Barr or Ralph Nader makes a miracle run, a senator will win the presidency in 2008. However, even though we will elect a sitting senator this year, many of the points that we explored in that class still hold today, and that brings us back to the “sex ed” advertisement and the can of worms it may open.

    As a State Senator in Illinois, Barack Obama did vote for a “comprehensive sex education” bill that did include funding and guidance for “age appropriate” sex education for kids in kindergarten. The kindergarten and early elementary elements of that program were aimed at protecting children from sexual predators. Obama did not sponsor or write the bill and voted for the bill only in committee; he was urged to do so by the state PTA and other nonpartisan groups; the bill never came to a vote on the floor, did not pass, and did not become law. Nevertheless, the McCain ad claims that sex education for kindergarteners was Obama’s greatest education “accomplishment.”

    I don’t know who told McCain that this would be a great ad, but from my point of view, it may prove to be a great error.

    As my students looked at the nearly inevitable failure of senators running for presidents, they time and time again discovered how senators paid a high price for votes taken out of context. In the crazy legislative maneuverings of the world’s most complicated legislative body, senators are forced to take votes all the time on multiple versions of the same bill, cloture motions on bills they favor but that they know cannot pass (and voting against cloture one day lets you reopen the issue on another), motions to recommit bills to committees, and highly contrived, no chance to pass, politically motivated floor amendments. Even if you have not served in the Senate for long, you will quickly face lots of votes that are nearly impossible to explain to anyone who does not work in the U.S. Senate.

    So, after 26 years in the Senate, does John McCain really want to open the door to twisting votes out of context? If this becomes the pattern of the race and every committee vote, cloture vote, or amendment tree vote can be counted as one of your “accomplishments,” it will be possible to cite roll calls in which McCain voted against funding for troops in the field; against benefits for injured veterans; for deregulating Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns; for dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of earmarked spending projects; and for raising middle-class taxes.

    In a race between two senators, the greatest check on vote spinning like the John Kerry “I voted for the 87 billion before I voted against it” debacle was mutually assured destruction. With both candidates facing similar votes and similar legislative perils, they had good reason to play it straight. Each had a great deal to gain by sticking to critiques of only serious votes that tracked the candidates’ actual priorities and principles, and each had a great deal to lose if the race turned to cynical spinning of every vote “against” an amendment that was meant to advance the measure or votes in committee that were aimed at keeping negotiations rolling. If anything, McCain, who has served longer in the Senate and promises a higher standard of principled purity, the risk was greater.

    Now he has made it clear that a vote “for” anything makes it one of your accomplishments and a vote “against” anything means that you, perhaps single-handedly, killed the measure. If Obama decides that he is going to play this game, things may get very complex and interesting. The fact-checkers better get ready to unearth some very well-buried committee minutes, and voters better decide how they will deal with the discovery that both candidates were for everything before they were against it and against everything before they were for it. The losers will probably be the voters who will be barraged by “facts” that mean nothing stripped of context and that can only muddy the waters about the candidates’ real positions on real issues.

    Posted on Thursday, September 18, 2008 at 9:42 AM | Comments (0) | Top

    Harold James: History provides little comfort

    Source: Financial Times (9-16-08)

    [The writer is professor of history and international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University and Marie Curie professor of history at the European University Institute.]

    The drama of the past days – the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the rapid purchase of Merrill Lynch, the weakness of AIG, the threats to other institutions – all have no real historical precedent.

    It is impossible to find parallels for the extent of this week’s banking crisis since the Great Depression. But the implosions of the weekend do not even look like the American experience of depression, in which the country was swept by wave after wave of panic that wreaked widespread havoc by hitting small institutions exposed to local market conditions. Today’s crisis, by contrast, is right at the heart of the financial system, and threatens a complex pattern of credit guarantees and insurance backstops that were touted as making the financial system failsafe.

    Bankers, like everyone else, like to suck on a comfort blanket. In the middle of any episode of banking weakness or financial turmoil their oft-repeated claim is that they have learnt the right lessons from the Great Depression. It became an article of faith that a catastrophe of that magnitude could not occur again.

    In particular, in the 1930s, monetary policymaking was paralysed. Out of that story came a simple lesson that all policymakers have absorbed from Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s monumental Monetary History of the United States, and from its central chapter on the Great Contraction. The policy recommendation is simple: central banks have a responsibility to not allow a bank collapse to be followed by a deflationary monetary contraction.

    The US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England are currently doing much more than working out this lesson. They are providing massive amounts of liquidity and lending against an increasingly wide range of assets (now including equities). The central banks believe that they need to stop a chain reaction of financial sector collapses leading to a position when banks will no longer lend to anyone.

    This lesson on liquidity is not the same as that drawn by Friedman and Schwartz. It is more activist and much older. It stems from the British experience of 19th century banking crises and it reached its most powerful exposition in Walter Bagehot’s Lombard Street.

    Bagehot was the previous version of the bankers’ comfort blanket. The doctrine of liquidity provision depends on a clear separation of liquidity and solvency. Bagehot was completely lucid on this point: that the central bank’s responsibility lay in injecting temporary liquidity to deal with the problems of momentarily illiquid but not insolvent institutions. But if his doctrine was so effective as a remedy for crisis, why did the panics and collapses of the Great Depression occur?

    The problem is that the Great Depression was quite different from Bagehot’s panics, as are our current problems. In the middle of a panic that does not arise suddenly, but follows from a valuation problem (such as the subprime crisis), when markets are no longer effectively communicating price signals, it is impossible to know what solvency means. Indeed, one peculiarity of Lehman’s bankruptcy filing is the statement of assets and liabilities, in which assets are still listed as being greater than the liabilities....

    Posted on Thursday, September 18, 2008 at 9:09 AM | Comments (0) | Top

    Gabrielle M. Spiegel: History and the Torture Memos

    Source: The AHA's Perspectives on History (9-1-08)

    "Getting medieval," as those who saw the movie will remember, is the phrase employed by Ving Rhames in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction as he was preparing to torture with the aid of a pair of pliers and a blowtorch the hapless man writhing before him on the floor (the actual spoken words were: "I'm gonna get medieval on your …"). According to Carolyn Dinshaw, the phrase became so popular that in the spring of 1997 the mint company, Altoids, launched an advertising campaign that urged prospective consumers to "Get Medieval on Your Breath."1 Both instances conjure up prospects of great harm about to be propagated and, in the case of bad breath, a hoped-for annihilation.

    I was reminded of the phrase last spring, when I participated in a debate with Bruce Holsinger in the Center for 21st-Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Holsinger is professor of English and chair of the music department at the University of Virginia and the author of a fascinating little book entitled Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror.2 The topic in question was the use of medieval analogies in contemporary discourse, not least by a handful of neoconservatives, who have drawn upon an odd field of policy studies called "neomedievalism," first developed by British realist international relations scholars in the 1980s, and adapted by neocons after 9/11 for their own purposes. It was this latter incarnation of "neomedievalism" that proffered a cache of analogies about the "medieval" nature of contemporary non-state actors, including terrorists, which subsequently influenced the reasoning behind the legal judgments expressed by the authors of the torture memos as they set about demonizing the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and recommending the use of torture to a world that, in earlier "enlightened" days, had voluntarily abdicated its use. Although the actual number of analogies with the Middle Ages was limited, they were the sole historical comparisons to be deployed by the authors of the torture memos. In ways that were surprisingly literal, what these authors turned out to be recommending was, precisely, "getting medieval" in Tarantino's all too palpable sense.

    That both the torture memos and the "medievalizing" moves that helped to frame their thinking appeared to be a suitable subject for scholarly debate by practicing medievalists suggests that we are living at a moment when the temptations for such analogizing between the medieval and contemporary world seem to be spreading in current political language. Something about the post-9/11 world, both in public discourse and among medievalists themselves, is giving rise to ill-considered uses of the term "medieval," a phenomenon that raises the larger historiographical issue of the place of analogy in the logic of historical thought and the risks that indulgence in such analogizing, whether by the torture memo-writers or by medievalists themselves, entail.
    At the heart of the legal justifications for using torture against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan lay the notion that neither Afghanistan nor al Qaeda qualified as state actors, the former because it is a "failed state," the latter because it is merely, in the words of John Yoo, deputy assistant attorney general and framer of one of the longest memos (dated January 9, 2002) on the legal basis for torture, "a violent political movement or organization and not a nation-state. As a result, it is ineligible to be a signatory to any treaty"—not a "High Contracting Party," in Yoo's legalese—hence not party to or included within the scope of the Geneva Conventions regulating the treatment of prisoners of war in armed conflicts between signatory states. This view was fervently shared by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, who wrote a memo (dated February 7, 2002) to Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel, in response to the question of whether members of the Taliban militia qualified for POW status and thus protection under the Geneva Convention. Bybee concluded that the Taliban were not legally entitled to such status on the grounds that Afghanistan was a failed state because "the Taliban did not exercise full control over the territory and people and was not recognized by the international community, and was [therefore] not capable of fulfilling its international obligations."...

    Posted on Tuesday, September 16, 2008 at 10:59 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Frederick Kagan, Kimberly Kagan, Jack Keane: The Endgame in Iraq

    Source: American Enterprise Institute website (9-15-08)

    On September 16, General Raymond Odierno will succeed General David Petraeus as commander of U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. The surge strategy Petraeus and Odierno developed and executed in 2007 achieved its objectives: reducing violence in Iraq enough to allow political processes to restart, economic development to move forward, and reconciliation to begin. Violence has remained at historic lows even after the withdrawal of all surge forces and the handover of many areas to Iraqi control. Accordingly, President Bush has approved the withdrawal of 8,000 additional troops by February 2009.

    With Barack Obama's recent declaration that the surge in Iraq has succeeded, it should now be possible to move beyond that debate and squarely address the current situation in Iraq and the future. Reductions in violence permitting political change were the goal of the surge, but they are not the sole measure of success in Iraq.

    The United States seeks a free, stable, independent Iraq, with a legitimately elected representative government that can govern and defend its territory, is at peace with its neighbors, and is an ally of the United States in the war on terror. The Iraqi leadership has made important strides toward developing a new and inclusive political system that addresses the concerns of all Iraq's ethnic and sectarian groups. But it has also taken steps in the wrong direction. An understandable desire to seize on the reduction in violence to justify overly hasty force reductions and premature transfer of authority to Iraqis puts the hard-won gains of 2007 and 2008 at risk. Thus, the president's announcement of new troop withdrawals has come before we even know when Iraq's provincial elections will occur.

    Reducing our troop strength solely on the basis of trends in violence also misses the critical point that the mission of American forces in Iraq is shifting rapidly from counterinsurgency to peace enforcement. The counter-insurgency fight that characterized 2007 continues mainly in areas of northern Iraq. The ability of organized enemy groups, either Sunni or Shia, to conduct large-scale military or terrorist operations and to threaten the existence of the Iraqi government is gone for now. No area of Iraq today requires the massive, violent, and dangerous military operations that American and Iraqi forces had to conduct over the last 18 months in order to pacify various places or restore them to government control. Although enemy networks and organizations have survived and are regrouping, they will likely need considerable time to rebuild their capabilities to levels that pose more than a local challenge--and intelligent political, economic, military, and police efforts can prevent them from rebuilding at all....

    Posted on Monday, September 15, 2008 at 8:17 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    David Greenberg: How neocons made liberals wary of idealism

    Source: New Republic (9-24-08)

    n early November 1956, Soviet tanks swarmed into Hungary to crush an insurgency that had just thrown off Moscow's yoke. In the United States, where the presidential election was days away, the Democratic nominee was the professorial and sometimes equivocal Adlai Stevenson--the epitome of the peace-loving, arms control-pushing, diplomacy-advocating liberalism that Republicans loved to tar as squishy-soft. In Hungary's case, however, Stevenson didn't flinch.

    At a Cleveland campaign stop, having just learned of the news, the candidate forthrightly pledged America's solidarity with Hungary's revolutionaries, "a brave and determined and desperate people ... struggling against enormous odds to shake themselves loose from Russian imperialism." Stevenson chided the Eisenhower administration for its sham policy of "rolling back" communism, but he didn't let the U.S. campaign trail overshadow the European theater. "As a spokesman for the Democratic Party," he affirmed, "I am sure we want and pray that President Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles can make our influence and desire for right and justice felt once more, for we are Americans first and Democrats second."

    No one denounced Stevenson as a warmonger or a me-too Republican. His heartfelt support for the Hungarians was fully in line with mid-century liberalism. The New York Times, for one, began its editorial with a simple declarative sentence: "We accuse the Soviet Government of murder." For liberals, an instinctive revulsion toward the invasion joined naturally with a ready sympathy for a foreign people rallying for freedom under the American flag.

    There are important differences between today's crisis in Georgia and the crisis in Hungary. But one of the more salient is this: Where once liberals took the lead in decrying the subjugation of foreign peoples yearning for democracy, this time too many on our side of the aisle either lagged or lost their way. When Soviet tanks barreled into Georgia in early August on the absurd pretext of stopping "genocide," the first instinct of many liberals was either to lob verbal water balloons at President Bush and John McCain or to retreat behind a scrim of pox-on-both-their-houses pseudo-sophistication.

    For many, blaming the Republicans took precedence. Diminishing themselves, liberals tried to make sport of McCain's appropriation of Wikipedia boilerplate for a speech and make hay of his aide Randy Scheunemann's lobbying for the Georgian government. Or they went after Bush (or American policy in general) for "provoking" Russia by expanding NATO, supporting Kosovo's independence, and embracing Georgia's pro-Western premier, Mikheil Saakashvili. "[W]e should acknowledge that at least some of the blame lies, as it does so often, with our own hubris," Michael Hirsh wrote in Newsweek, faulting "Washington's active support of the Orange and Rose Revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia and its feckless encouragement of their Westernized, pro-NATO presidents." When the right language happened to come from McCain--who declared, "We are all Georgians now"--the general response among liberal pundits was to scoff. Writing on The Washington Post's website, Andres Martinez told the senator to speak for himself. "I am not a Georgian," he insisted, deriding the "over-the-top rhetoric about democracy and liberty" from McCain and Bush. Blogger Matt Yglesias, writing under the aegis of the Center for American Progress, called the statement "empty political sloganeering," "downright irresponsible," and "mawkish sentimentality."...

    Posted on Saturday, September 13, 2008 at 9:21 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Juan Cole: Palin on World Affairs ... Just not Ready for Prime Time

    Source: Informed Comment (Blog run by Juan Cole) (9-12-08)

    Sarah Palin revealed herself in the Charlie Gibson interview on ABC to be nervous,uninformed, green and generally not ready for prime time. The interview was full of stock phrases she was made to memorize, and which she repeated over and over again when stumped. She knows nothing about how Iran is run, or about Pakistan, or about al-Qaeda, and even is ignorant of the Bush doctrine of preemptive warfare. It was a shockingly bad performance.

    She had the hubris to suggest that her lack of knowledge and experience is a virtue. Why Americans, practical people, would fall for this line is beyond me. Would you want your car to be worked on by an inexperienced and ignorant mechanic? Would you want a plumber messing around with your pipes who did not know his way around wrenches?

    I'm tired of her trumpeting being from a small town as if that is qualification for high office. It isn't where you are from that matters. My parents are from Star Tannery, Va. and Winchester, Va., respectively, and I was born in Albuquerque, NM (not then a big city) and grew up mostly on army bases or in small places like Fuquay Springs, NC (near Ft. Bragg). These were not exactly Manhattan. We did not have a lot of money when I was growing up and I went to Northwestern on a scholarship. My background isn't so different from hers. But Palin futzed around at this campus and that, at one point switching from the University of Hawaii because the campus was on the rainy side of Oahu. How frivolous! She isn't well educated and doesn't appear to have thought it was important to become so. She has never shown any interest in the world at large, which she now wants to run. She is clearly ambitious, but nothing is more dangerous than ambition with no qualifications.

    The scariest thing in the was this exchange:

    'When Gibson said if under the NATO treaty, the United States would have to go to war if Russia again invaded Georgia,

    Palin responded: "Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help.

    "And we've got to keep an eye on Russia. For Russia to have exerted such pressure in terms of invading a smaller democratic country, unprovoked, is unacceptable," she told Gibson. '


    She went on later to talk about providing economic and other help and to back off seeming to threaten Russia with war.

    But look at the video below. It is the alacrity with which she says "perhaps so" that is so alarming. He asked her specifically about having to go to war with Russia over Georgia and she said, "perhaps so!" As though a war with a nuclear power was just the most natural and expected thing in the world. I think the San Francisco Chronicle entitled their article correctly.

    Help!

    As I count it, McCain Palin plans to keep us in Iraq for 100 years, to invade Pakistan, and to fight a war with Russia over Georgia, all at once. They won't just need a draft, they'll need gulags to pull that off!

    More excerpts from the ABC Palin interview :

    ' GIBSON: Let me turn to Iran. Do you consider a nuclear Iran to be an existential threat to Israel?

    PALIN: I believe that under the leadership of Ahmadinejad, nuclear weapons in the hands of his government are extremely dangerous to everyone on this globe, yes.

    GIBSON: So what should we do about a nuclear Iran?

    PALIN: We have got to make sure that these weapons of mass destruction, that nuclear weapons are not given to those hands of Ahmadinejad, not that he would use them, but that he would allow terrorists to be able to use them.So we have got to put the pressure on Iran.'


    Cole: Actually, Mahmud Ahmadinejad is not the commander in chief of the Iranian armed forces and is not in charge of national security or nuclear matters. Supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is. Moreover, Ahmadinejad cannot serve past 2013, and Iran cannot get nukes by then even if it was trying to do so, which the National Intelligence Estimate of December 2007 says it is not. If the reason to be afraid of the Iranian civilian nuclear energy research program is that Ahmadinejad is the president, she can relax. The idea that the Iranian government would give a nuclear bomb that could be traced back to Iran to a terrorist group is ridiculous, just another fear-mongering fantasy.

    'GIBSON: What if Israel decided it felt threatened and needed to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities?

    PALIN: Well, first, we are friends with Israel and I don't think that we should second guess the measures that Israel has to take to defend themselves and for their security.

    GIBSON: So if we wouldn't second guess it and they decided they needed to do it because Iran was an existential threat, we would cooperative or agree with that.

    PALIN: I don't think we can second guess what Israel has to do to secure its nation.

    GIBSON: So if it felt necessary, if it felt the need to defend itself by taking out Iranian nuclear facilities, that would be all right.

    PALIN: We cannot second guess the steps that Israel has to take to defend itself.'


    Cole: She doesn't seem to understand that our troops (including shortly, her son) are in striking distance from Iran and that a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran would have consequences for the United States. That is why Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff was sent to Israel by Bush to read them the riot act and instruct them that they are not to attack Iran. Palin's "anything goes" attitude to Israeli actions in the Middle East could get a lot of Americans killed.

    'GIBSON: We talk on the anniversary of 9/11. Why do you think those hijackers attacked? Why did they want to hurt us?

    PALIN: You know, there is a very small percentage of Islamic believers who are extreme and they are violent and they do not believe in American ideals, and they attacked us and now we are at a point here seven years later, on the anniversary, in this post-9/11 world, where we're able to commit to never again. They see that the only option for them is to become a suicide bomber, to get caught up in this evil, in this terror. They need to be provided the hope that all Americans have instilled in us, because we're a democratic, we are a free, and we are a free-thinking society.'


    Cole: Well at least she knows that the radicals in the Muslim world are a tiny group. But she gives no sign of understanding what is going on in the Muslim world, and just parrots a lot of slogans about evil and democratization.

    'GIBSON: Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?

    PALIN: In what respect, Charlie?

    GIBSON: The Bush -- well, what do you -- what do you interpret it to be?

    PALIN: His world view.

    GIBSON: No, the Bush doctrine, enunciated September 2002, before the Iraq war.

    PALIN: I believe that what President Bush has attempted to do is rid this world of Islamic extremism, terrorists who are hell bent on destroying our nation. There have been blunders along the way, though. There have been mistakes made. And with new leadership, and that's the beauty of American elections, of course, and democracy, is with new leadership comes opportunity to do things better.

    GIBSON: The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?

    PALIN: Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country. In fact, the president has the obligation, the duty to defend.'


    Unbelievable. She not only had no idea what the Bush doctrine was, she tried to BS her way through the question instead of being honest about not having heard of it. It is one thing to be ignorant about something, another not to be willing to admit it. The whole interview is painful for the narrow-minded and ill-informed view of the world it displays, but this is the nadir. And remember, McCain could have chosen Kay Bailey Hutchison if he wanted a woman on the ticket.

    I commented on the Bush doctrine as soon as W. enunciated it and warned how dangerous it was as an international precedent. I'm just a midwest college professor and I was following it. Shouldn't a political junkie know these things? I mean, are her horizons that narrow? If so, why should we want her a heartbeat away from the presidency? Haven't we already had 8 years of Crawford small town foreign policy? Has it been pretty?

    'GIBSON: Do we have the right to be making cross-border attacks into Pakistan from Afghanistan, with or without the approval of the Pakistani government?

    PALIN: Now, as for our right to invade, we're going to work with these countries, building new relationships, working with existing allies, but forging new, also, in order to, Charlie, get to a point in this world where war is not going to be a first option. In fact, war has got to be, a military strike, a last option.

    GIBSON: But, Governor, I'm asking you: We have the right, in your mind, to go across the border with or without the approval of the Pakistani government.

    PALIN: In order to stop Islamic extremists, those terrorists who would seek to destroy America and our allies, we must do whatever it takes and we must not blink, Charlie, in making those tough decisions of where we go and even who we target.

    GIBSON: And let me finish with this. I got lost in a blizzard of words there. Is that a yes? That you think we have the right to go across the border with or without the approval of the Pakistani government, to go after terrorists who are in the Waziristan area?

    PALIN: I believe that America has to exercise all options in order to stop the terrorists who are hell bent on destroying America and our allies. We have got to have all options out there on the table.'


    Sounds like she has the Obama position on this one, not the McCain position. Too bad, since this is one area where McCain's is the wiser.

    Part 1 of the Gibson interview:

    And Part 2:

    Posted on Friday, September 12, 2008 at 9:39 AM | Comments (5) | Top

    Jon Wiener: Sarah Palin and the Jews

    Source: Nation (9-8-08)

    [Mr. Wiener, a historian, is a contributing editor to the Nation.]

    Sarah Palin took the biblical Queen Esther as her role model when she became governor, according to her former pastor--a report that suggests her ties to Jewish history are stronger than you might have expected.

    When Palin took office as governor in 2006, according to the New York Times, she asked her former pastor in the Assembly of God church in Wasilla for "a biblical example of people who were great leaders and what was the secret of their leadership"--that's what Paul E. Riley, the pastor, told Kirk Johnson and Kim Severson of the Times. He recommended the Old Testament story of Esther, the beautiful Jewish queen who persuaded the Persian king to save the Jews from annihilation and instead let them kill their enemies. The story is celebrated by Jews annually in the Feast of Purim.

    The parallels are clear. Esther was selected queen in a beauty contest; Palin was runner-up in the Miss Alaska pageant.

    So Queen Esther apparently provided the role model for the former beauty queen who went to our own king and asked for earmarks for her people.

    The Palin/Queen Esther report has sparked a flood of commentary from fundamentalist Christian web sites. One reports that "Sarah Palin, like Esther, was an unlikely choice. Sarah Palin, like Esther, is bold and courageous in the face of fear. Sarah Palin, like Esther, proves you can be loyal and devoted to your family while having a high position. But perhaps, more than anything, . . . we are seeing someone right before our eyes who is capturing the hearts of the American people in a way that defies description" - just like the Bible says, "And Esther won the favor of everyone who saw her."

    Another says "Every once in a while a woman comes along who is made for the times. Sarah Palin is such a woman. . . . Another woman, Esther, was brought on the scene by God at just the right time. God's timing was perfect for he used Esther to save the Jews"--and now he is using Palin to save the Republicans.

    One problem with this view -that God sent Palin the way He sent Esther -- is that the Book of Esther never mentions God. It never says God sent Esther to save His people, or even that Esther's belief in God gave her the power to defeat her enemies. Somebody should point this out to the fundamentalists.

    If you follow the logic in the story - as another fundamentalist Christian website did - you find a "major, and creepily precise" parallel between the threats to Jews then and now. In Esther's day the threat came from Persia - and what country is the modern successor to Persia? Iran, of course -- "the same Iran that has vowed to wipe Israel off the map and is well on their way to acquiring the nuclear weaponry to do so . . . . And along comes tough, clear-eyed, plain-speaking Sarah Palin."

    The implications for Palin's Iran policy are clear. In the Bible, after the Jews are saved from annihilation, and after the first day of Jewish revenge against their enemies, the King tells Esther the Jews have killed 500 people, and asks what she wants to do next. Esther says she wants permission for a second day of killing - so the king grants the Jews the right "to destroy, to slay, and to cause to perish the entire host of every people and province that oppress them, small children and women, and to take their spoils for plunder."

    The Bible says the Jews then killed 75,000 more of their enemies. It doesn't say anything about Jewish casualties, which makes it seem like a one-sided slaughter. (This part usually doesn't get mentioned at the Purim carnival.)

    The cover of Newsweek this week is a photo of Palin with a shotgun. The Iranians should be worried - and so should the Americans.

    Reprinted with permission from the Nation. For subscription information call 1-800-333-8536. Portions of each week's Nation magazine can be accessed at http://www.thenation.com.

    Posted on Thursday, September 11, 2008 at 10:34 PM | Comments (1) | Top

    Andrew J. Bacevich: 9/11 Plus Seven

    Source: TomDispatch.com (9-9-08)

    [Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His bestselling new book is The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. You can read excerpts from it by clicking here, and here, or watch a video of him discussing the lessons of 9/11, seven years later, by clicking here.]

    The events of the past seven years have yielded a definitive judgment on the strategy that the Bush administration conceived in the wake of 9/11 to wage its so-called Global War on Terror. That strategy has failed, massively and irrevocably. To acknowledge that failure is to confront an urgent national priority: to scrap the Bush approach in favor of a new national security strategy that is realistic and sustainable -- a task that, alas, neither of the presidential candidates seems able to recognize or willing to take up.

    On September 30, 2001, President Bush received from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld a memorandum outlining U.S. objectives in the War on Terror. Drafted by Rumsfeld's chief strategist Douglas Feith, the memo declared expansively: "If the war does not significantly change the world's political map, the U.S. will not achieve its aim." That aim, as Feith explained in a subsequent missive to his boss, was to "transform the Middle East and the broader world of Islam generally."

    Rumsfeld and Feith were co-religionists: Along with other senior Bush administration officials, they worshipped in the Church of the Indispensable Nation, a small but intensely devout Washington-based sect formed in the immediate wake of the Cold War. Members of this church shared an exalted appreciation for the efficacy of American power, especially hard power. The strategy of transformation emerged as a direct expression of their faith.

    The members of this church were also united by an equally exalted estimation of their own abilities. Lucky the nation to be blessed with such savvy and sophisticated public servants in its hour of need!

    The goal of transforming the Islamic world was nothing if not bold. It implied far-reaching political, economic, social, and even cultural adjustments. At a press conference on September 18, 2001, Rumsfeld spoke bluntly of the need to "change the way that they live." Rumsfeld didn't specify who "they" were. He didn't have to. His listeners understood without being told: "They" were Muslims inhabiting a vast arc of territory that stretched from Morocco in the west all the way to the Moro territories of the Southern Philippines in the east.

    Yet boldly conceived action, if successfully executed, offered the prospect of solving a host of problems. Once pacified (or "liberated"), the Middle East would cease to breed or harbor anti-American terrorists. Post-9/11 fears about weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of evil-doers could abate. Local regimes, notorious for being venal, oppressive, and inept, might finally get serious about cleaning up their acts. Liberal values, including rights for women, would flourish. A part of the world perpetually dogged by violence would enjoy a measure of stability, with stability promising not so incidentally to facilitate exploitation of the region's oil reserves. There was even the possibility of enhancing the security of Israel. Like a powerful antibiotic, the Bush administration's strategy of transformation promised to clean out not simply a single infection but several; or to switch metaphors, a strategy of transformation meant running the table.

    When it came to implementation, the imperative of the moment was to think big. Just days after 9/11, Rumsfeld was charging his subordinates to devise a plan of action that had "three, four, five moves behind it." By December 2001, the Pentagon had persuaded itself that the first move -- into Afghanistan -- had met success. The Bush administration wasted little time in pocketing its ostensible victory. Attention quickly shifted to the second move, seen by insiders as holding the key to ultimate success: Iraq.

    Fix Iraq and moves three, four, and five promised to come easily. Writing in the Weekly Standard, William Kristol and Robert Kagan got it exactly right: "The president's vision will, in the coming months, either be launched successfully in Iraq, or it will die in Iraq."

    The point cannot be emphasized too strongly: Saddam Hussein's (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction and his (imaginary) ties to Al Qaeda never constituted the real reason for invading Iraq -- any more than the imperative of defending Russian "peacekeepers" in South Ossetia explains the Kremlin's decision to invade Georgia.

    Iraq merely offered a convenient place from which to launch a much larger and infinitely more ambitious project. "After Hussein is removed," enthused Hudson Institute analyst Max Singer, "there will be an earthquake through the region." Success in Iraq promised to endow the United States with hitherto unprecedented leverage. Once the United States had made an example of Saddam Hussein, as the influential neoconservative Richard Perle put it, dealing with other ne'er-do-wells would become simple: "We could deliver a short message, a two-word message: 'You're next.'" Faced with the prospect of sharing Saddam's fate, Syrians, Iranians, Sudanese, and other recalcitrant regimes would see submission as the wiser course -- so Perle and others believed.

    Members of the administration tried to imbue this strategic vision with a softer ideological gloss. "For 60 years," Condoleezza Rice explained to a group of students in Cairo, "my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East -- and we achieved neither." No more. "Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people." The world's Muslims needed to know that the motives behind the U.S. incursion into Iraq and its actions elsewhere in the region were (or had, at least, suddenly become) entirely benign. Who knows? Rice may even have believed the words she spoke.

    In either case -- whether the strategy of transformation aimed at dominion or democratization -- today, seven years after it was conceived, we can assess exactly what it has produced. The answer is clear: next to nothing, apart from squandering vast resources and exacerbating the slide toward debt and dependency that poses a greater strategic threat to the United States than Osama bin Laden ever did.

    In point of fact, hardly had the Pentagon commenced its second move, its invasion of Iraq, when the entire strategy began to unravel. In Iraq, President Bush's vision of regional transformation did die, much as Kagan and Kristol had feared. No amount of CPR credited to the so-called surge will revive it. Even if tomorrow Iraq were to achieve stability and become a responsible member of the international community, no sensible person could suggest that Operation Iraqi Freedom provides a model to apply elsewhere. Senator John McCain says that he'll keep U.S. combat troops in Iraq for as long as it takes. Yet even he does not propose "solving" any problems posed by Syria or Iran (much less Pakistan) by employing the methods that the Bush administration used to "solve" the problem posed by Iraq. The Bush Doctrine of preventive war may remain nominally on the books. But, as a practical matter, it is defunct.

    The United States will not change the world's political map in the ways top administration officials once dreamed of. There will be no earthquake that shakes up the Middle East -- unless the growing clout of Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas in recent years qualifies as that earthquake. Given the Pentagon's existing commitments, there will be no threats of "you're next" either -- at least none that will worry our adversaries, as the Russians have neatly demonstrated. Nor will there be a wave of democratic reform -- even Rice has ceased her prattling on that score. Islam will remain stubbornly resistant to change, except on terms of its own choosing. We will not change the way "they" live.

    In a book that he co-authored during the run-up to the invasion, Kristol confidently declared, "The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there." In fact, the Bush administration's strategy of transformation has ended. It has failed miserably. The sooner we face up to that failure, the sooner we can get about repairing the damage.

    Posted on Thursday, September 11, 2008 at 10:31 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Benny Morris: Cutting Through The Propaganda About The History Of Muslim Anti-Semitism

    Source: New Republic (9-10-08)

    Scholars in the West have begun to devote time and space to anti-Western jihadism and Muslim anti-Semitism--and a good thing, too, as these are very much on the contemporary international and Middle Eastern political and military agendas and, I fear, will grow in significance during the coming decades, as the Huntingtonian "clash of civilizations" widens. That such a "clash" is going on is all too apparent, from the riots in Nigerian streets, where hundreds died following the announcement of an impending beauty pageant on Nigerian soil, to the murder of an Italian priest in Turkey following the publication of the Muhammad cartoons in Denmark. Yet, Western liberals hesitate to tackle the subject of Muslim anti-Semitism, lest it seem anti-multicultural or provoke the hornet's nest of Allah's minions. Even the use of the word "jihad" has become taboo among appeasers of Islam--and even among some non-appeasers, such as George W. Bush, who, like other Western leaders, refuses to call the phenomenon by its precise name (and the name that its own practitioners use). People speak of "international terrorism" when they should be speaking of "international Muslim (or Islamist) terrorism."

    The compendium of anti-Semitic Muslim texts about Jews in Islamic Arab lands assembled by Andrew G. Bostom, a professor of medicine with a dark hobby, kicks off, unusually, with an explanation of the painting reproduced on the dust jacket. It is by Alfred Dehodencq, from 1860, and it portrays a group of Muslims, one of them brandishing a scimitar, handling roughly by her hair a kneeling dark-eyed damsel, her hands tied behind her back. The group, on a raised platform, is surrounded by an apparently enthusiastic mob. The scene is Fez, in Morocco, in 1834. The girl is named Sol Hachuel. She is seventeen years old, and she is about to be beheaded. She was accused of secretly adhering to her Jewish faith after converting to Islam--a charge tantamount to apostasy (still punishable by death in most Arab lands). Hachuel denied that she had ever converted. The governor of Tangier, Arbi Esudio, had accused her of "having provoked the anger of the Prophet." The Sultan agreed and pronounced the death sentence. She went bravely, reiterating her Jewishness and refusing to recant, with "Shema Yisrael," the Judaic profession of faith, on her lips.

    The case was certainly unusual--but it typified, in Bostom's view, the sorry lot of the Jews in the Muslim Arab world since the rise of Islam and its expansion around the Mediterranean basin in the seventh and eighth centuries. At the start of his book, Bostom provides a monographlength background survey of the "theological-juridical origins" of Islamic anti-Semitism, illustrating his points with a brief review of its "historical manifestations." At the level of principle, Muslim attitudes toward the Jews (and, less so, toward Christians) were--and are--informed by a basic ambivalence. Jews and Christians deserved, and received, a formal measure of respect as "People of the Book" and as the first to adopt monotheism; Islam had followed in their footsteps. But at the same time Jews and Christians were the "enemy," the rival religion and, in certain times and places, the political and military foe.

    It was this second attitude that dominated actual Arab practice during most of the fourteen centuries since the birth of Islam. In the lands stretching from Persia to Spain and Morocco, Jews (and Christians) were always second-class subjects, humiliated and discriminated against, often oppressed and persecuted, sometimes forcibly converted or slaughtered. There are almost no substantial Jewish or Christian minorities (the Copts of Egypt and the Christians/ animists of southern Sudan are exceptions) left in the Arab world today; and the few remaining Christians in Iraq and Palestine are rapidly fleeing westward. (Note the recent murder of the Arab owner of a Christian bookshop in Gaza.)

    The story peddled by latter-day Arab propagandists (and reinforced by some Jewish scholars, who tended in decades past, sometimes for apologetic reasons of their own, to highlight the medieval "Golden Age" of Islamic Spanish Jewry)--that the Jewish minorities in the Muslim Arab countries before the advent of Zionism enjoyed a pleasant fraternal existence among the majority populations--has often been trotted out for the benefit of ignorant Westerners, to illustrate Muslim Arab tolerance of minorities and, politically, to promote plans for a multi-ethnic, one-state solution for Israel/ Palestine. It also has taken hold among Western intellectuals. Thus as prominent a journalist as Lawrence Wright, in The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, writes that "until the end of World War II, there was little precedent in Islam for the anti-Semitism that was now warping the politics and society of the region. Jews had lived safely--although submissively--under Muslim rule for 1,200 years, enjoying full religious freedom," until Christian missionaries, Nazi propaganda, and the rise of Israel twisted their minds and propelled them toward anti-Semitism. Or consider Esther Webman, of Tel Aviv University's Dayan Center, who has written that "antisemitism did not exist in the traditional Islamic world.... Antisemitism is, in fact, a relatively new phenomenon in the Arab world." She attributed its rise to three factors: the nineteenth- and twentieth-century penetration of Western thought into that world; "the collapse of traditional political systems and of the loyalties" associated with modern nationalism; and, "most crucial, the development of the conflict [with Zionism] over the domination of Palestine."

    But this construct, in Bostom's view (and in my own), is wholly false. ...

    Posted on Thursday, September 11, 2008 at 9:47 PM | Comments (3) | Top

    Kathleen M. Dalton: A 'bully' Roosevelt fought for the little man

    Source: http://fredericksburg.com (9-11-08)

    [Kathleen M. Dalton is the author of "Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life" (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002).]

    Election years remind us that Americans vote for a president not knowing for sure what kind of person they are hiring to run the country. Even the vetting of long campaign seasons with their grueling questioning and debates about issues leaves us with questions unanswered.

    In the courtship phase, voters hear presidential hopefuls profess lofty goals, and we often know where the candidates stand on key issues, but once presidents are in office, voters' influence evaporates into polling data, and presidents exercise vast powers, especially in foreign policy, as they respond to unexpected crises. Once elected, presidents are not easily reined in by Congress or voters, nor are they bound by their campaign promises.

    Woodrow Wilson's 1916 supporters chanted, "He kept us out of war." In 1917, he led them into the war. FDR called for a balanced budget in the 1932 race and then turned to big deficit-spending to restart the economy during the Great Depression. In 1968, Richard Nixon piously talked law-and-order and praised traditional family values.

    Later, as a president who lied compulsively, he told his aides to burglarize, cheat, and bribe. Campaign promises have never been good guides to presidential performance. At best, campaigns can help us get to know where candidates stand on some issues and give us some sense of who they are as people.

    So how can voters measure the true caliber of a candidate? For starters, voters should distrust hype and pundits. Reporting the campaign as a cross between a horse race and a celebrity smack-down pulls voter attention away from issues and cheapens the process. Our past experiences with presidents who succeeded may illuminate how voters sometimes have looked deep into a candidate's heart and voted for the candidate who did not get good press. In 1948, for example, the media had pegged Thomas Dewey as the sure winner. But the voters trusted Truman. Similarly, in 1912, the New York Times called Bull Moose candidate Theodore Roosevelt a communist, and other newspapers spread rumors of his alleged drunkenness.

    Would any American voter cast a ballot for a drunk whom the Times called a communist? Voters showed their independence and listened to what Roosevelt said about the need for unemployment and health insurance, old-age pensions, and safe workplaces. When a would-be assassin shot TR in the chest and almost killed him, the candidate insisted on giving his scheduled public speech despite his wound; he talked to his audiences about his determination to fight to the death. Voters recalled his years of bold presidential leadership from 1901 to 1909.

    When the 1912 votes were counted, TR outpolled Republican incumbent William Howard Taft and ran the most successful third-party campaign ever. Democrat Woodrow Wilson went to the White House, but voters had not been cowed by rumors or mudslinging. TR had seen female activists as a rising political force and made an alliance with them. Later politicians copied him. TR remained an important political voice and possible contender for the presidency until his death. Pretty good for an accused communist!

    As the examples of Truman and TR show, the process of choosing a candidate is not always a story of voters led like sheep. Instead, voters work hard to find out who is the real deal. Voters want a campaign to reveal the true character of the candidate, to show us who has the stamina and wisdom for the job.

    What kind of candidate makes the best president? History provides abundant evidence that America's most successful presidents have been resilient spirits who fought for what the people needed....

    Posted on Thursday, September 11, 2008 at 8:55 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Victor Davis Hanson: What Was Feminism?

    Source: Real Clear Politics (9-11-08)

    [Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.]

    ... Women [who wanted liberation in the 1960s] in the workplace did not look for special favors. And they surely did not wish to deny innately feminine differences. Instead, they asked only that men should not establish arbitrary rules of the game that favored their male gender.

    Soon radical changes in American attitudes about birth control, abortion, dating, marriage and health care became, for some, part and parcel of women's liberation. But in its essence feminism still was about equality of opportunity, and so included women of all political and religious beliefs.

    That old definition of feminism is now dead. It has been replaced by a new creed that is far more restrictive -- as the controversy over Sarah Palin attests. Out of the recent media frenzy, four general truths emerged about the new feminism:

    First, there is a particular class and professional bent to the practitioners of feminism. Sarah Palin has as many kids as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, she has as much of a prior political record as the once-heralded Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, who was named to the Democratic ticket by Walter Mondale in 1984 -- and arguably has as much as, or more executive experience than, Barack Obama. Somehow all that got lost in the endless sneering stories about her blue-collar conservatism, small Alaskan town, five children, snowmobiling husband and Idaho college degree.

    Second, feminism now often equates to a condescending liberalism. Emancipated women who, like Palin, do not believe in abortion or are devout Christians are at best considered unsophisticated dupes. At worse, they are caricatured as conservative interlopers, piggybacking on the hard work of leftwing women whose progressive ideas alone have allowed the Palins of the world the choices that otherwise they would not now enjoy.

    Apparently these feminists believe that without the ideas of Gloria Steinem on abortion, a moose-hunting PTA mom would not have made governor. The Democrat's vice presidential candidate, Joe Biden, said Palin's election, given her politics, would be "a backward step for women."

    Third, hypocrisy abounds. Many female critics of Palin, in Washington and New York politics and media, found their careers enhanced through the political influence of their powerful fathers, their advantageous marriages to male power players and the inherited advantages of capital. The irony is that a Palin -- like a Barbara Jordan, Golda Meir or Margaret Thatcher -- made her own way without the help of money or influence.

    Fourth, most Americans still believe in the old feminism but not this new doctrinaire liberal brand. Consequently, a struggling John McCain suddenly has shot ahead of Obama in the polls. Apparently millions of Americans like Palin's underdog feminist saga and her can-do pluckiness. Many are offended by haughty liberal media elites sneering at someone that, politics aside, they should be praising -- for her substantial achievements, her inspirational personal story and her Obama-like charisma.

    This past week we were supposed to learn about a liberated Gov. Sarah Palin. Instead the media taught us more than we ever wanted to know about what they now call feminism.

    Posted on Thursday, September 11, 2008 at 6:19 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    A.N. Wilson: How Britain has given in to the religious fanatics intent on destroying our way of life

    Source: Daily Mail (UK) (9-9-08)

    [In his major new book, the historian A N Wilson examines how Britain has changed almost beyond recognition during the reign of the present Queen. Mass immigration and political correctness have turned Britain into a haven for Islamic fanatics. In this fourth extract, he says society is paying a terrible price for tolerating such extremists.]

    The growth of Islamism was first noted by the West with a mixture of indifference and incredulity. Had not the Islamic world always thrown up occasional figures such as the Mad Mahdi in Sudan, whose followers murdered General Gordon of Khartoum in 1885?

    Then they always faded away and the Muslim world resumed its peaceful, sleepy existence.

    That was the romantic idea. But ever since the West linked itself to dependence upon oil, and ever since large numbers of poor Muslims from the former Pakistan and elsewhere migrated here, it had not been a very realistic one. How unrealistic became clear on September 11, 2001, when Islamist suicide-murderers crashed hijacked planes into the Twin Towers.

    The world was suddenly conscious of a fanatical terrorist Islamist organisation, Al Qaeda, and Osama Bin Laden, its evil genius. This Saudi Arabian playboy had recast himself in the model of a prophet, and his long face - Jesus painted by El Greco - was soon to become one of the most famous of the age.

    The violence of Islamic fundamentalists had been visible as far back as the early Seventies when Auberon Waugh wrote an article in The Times that jestingly referred to the baggy trousers worn by Turkish men in the days of the Caliphate and how British soldiers used to call them 'Allah catchers'.

    In Rawalpindi an angry mob, many of whom, it is safe to guess, were not readers of The Times, stormed the British Council building and burned the library to the ground.

    Then there was the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, calls for the head (literally) of a Danish cartoonist who dared to depict the Prophet Mohammed in a drawing and, more recently, the threat of 40 lashes for a 54-year-old teacher from Liverpool after one of her pupils in the Sudan innocently named the class teddy bear 'Mohammed'.

    Western liberals have tended to respond in one of two ways. One is to suppose that there was some genuine grievance being suffered by the Islamists. Remove this and the mobs would fade away.


    Fatwa: Sir Salman Rushdie

    This school of thought usually had no difficulty in identifying the underlying 'causes' as U.S. foreign policy and the existence of the state of Israel.

    Other liberals take the view that it is pointless to apply the principles of 17th-century philosopher John Locke and sweet reason to people who stir up mobs and murder on such manifestly trumped-up charges.

    They point instead to the deplorable ideas being peddled by the Islamists - hatred of homosexuals, subjugation of women, violent anti-Judaism.

    And they ask by what right the Islamists attempt to impose their perverted values upon the West while milking Western democracies for benefits of all kinds.

    It is one thing to suppose the West represents the Great Satan, another to choose to reside within the Great Satan's jurisdiction, deriving free schooling and higher education, free or subsidised housing and employment while denouncing the countries that supply these benefits.

    What is striking is that much of the loudest and most violent Islamism comes not from those who live under sharia law and watch their shoplifting neighbours' hands being cut off and blasphemous schoolmarms being given the lash, but rather those who deliberately opted to live in the fag-end of Christian democracies....


    Posted on Thursday, September 11, 2008 at 5:29 PM | Comments (1) | Top

    Andrew Bacevich: The failure of Bush policy post-9/11

    Source: Salon.com (9-11-08)

    [Andrew Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at Boston University, retired from the U.S. Army with the rank of colonel.]

    The events of the past seven years have yielded a definitive judgment on the strategy that the Bush administration conceived in the wake of 9/11 to wage its so-called global war on terror. That strategy has failed, massively and irrevocably. To acknowledge that failure is to confront an urgent national priority: to scrap the Bush approach in favor of a new national security strategy that is realistic and sustainable -- a task that, alas, neither of the presidential candidates seems able to recognize or willing to take up.

    On Sept. 30, 2001, President Bush received from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld a memorandum outlining U.S. objectives in the war on terror. Drafted by Rumsfeld's chief strategist, Douglas Feith, the memo declared expansively: "If the war does not significantly change the world's political map, the U.S. will not achieve its aim." That aim, as Feith explained in a subsequent missive to his boss, was to "transform the Middle East and the broader world of Islam generally."

    Rumsfeld and Feith were co-religionists: Along with other senior Bush administration officials, they worshiped in the Church of the Indispensable Nation, a small but intensely devout Washington-based sect formed in the immediate wake of the Cold War. Members of this church shared an exalted appreciation for the efficacy of American power, especially hard power. The strategy of transformation emerged as a direct expression of their faith.

    The members of this church were also united by an equally exalted estimation of their own abilities. Lucky the nation to be blessed with such savvy and sophisticated public servants in its hour of need!

    The goal of transforming the Islamic world was nothing if not bold. It implied far-reaching political, economic, social and even cultural adjustments. At a press conference on Sept. 18, 2001, Rumsfeld spoke bluntly of the need to "change the way that they live." Rumsfeld didn't specify who "they" were. He didn't have to. His listeners understood without being told: "They" were Muslims inhabiting a vast arc of territory that stretched from Morocco in the west all the way to the Moro territories of the southern Philippines in the east.

    Yet boldly conceived action, if successfully executed, offered the prospect of solving a host of problems. Once pacified (or "liberated"), the Middle East would cease to breed or harbor anti-American terrorists. Post-9/11 fears about weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of evildoers could abate. Local regimes, notorious for being venal, oppressive and inept, might finally get serious about cleaning up their acts. Liberal values, including rights for women, would flourish. A part of the world perpetually dogged by violence would enjoy a measure of stability, with stability promising not so incidentally to facilitate exploitation of the region's oil reserves. There was even the possibility of enhancing the security of Israel. Like a powerful antibiotic, the Bush administration's strategy of transformation promised to clean out not simply a single infection but several; or to switch metaphors, a strategy of transformation meant running the table.

    When it came to implementation, the imperative of the moment was to think big. Just days after 9/11, Rumsfeld was charging his subordinates to devise a plan of action that had "three, four, five moves behind it." By December 2001, the Pentagon had persuaded itself that the first move -- into Afghanistan -- had met success. The Bush administration wasted little time in pocketing its ostensible victory. Attention quickly shifted to the second move, seen by insiders as holding the key to ultimate success: Iraq.

    Fix Iraq and moves three, four and five promised to come easily. Writing in the Weekly Standard, William Kristol and Robert Kagan got it exactly right: "The president's vision will, in the coming months, either be launched successfully in Iraq, or it will die in Iraq."

    The point cannot be emphasized too strongly: Saddam Hussein's (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction and his (imaginary) ties to al-Qaida never constituted the real reason for invading Iraq -- any more than the imperative of defending Russian "peacekeepers" in South Ossetia explains the Kremlin's decision to invade Georgia.

    Iraq merely offered a convenient place from which to launch a much larger and infinitely more ambitious project. "After Hussein is removed," enthused Hudson Institute analyst Max Singer, "there will be an earthquake through the region." Success in Iraq promised to endow the United States with hitherto unprecedented leverage. Once the United States had made an example of Saddam Hussein, as the influential neoconservative Richard Perle put it, dealing with other ne'er-do-wells would become simple: "We could deliver a short message, a two-word message: 'You're next.'" Faced with the prospect of sharing Saddam's fate, Syrians, Iranians, Sudanese and other recalcitrant regimes would see submission as the wiser course -- so Perle and others believed.

    Members of the administration tried to imbue this strategic vision with a softer ideological gloss. "For 60 years," Condoleezza Rice explained to a group of students in Cairo, Egypt, "my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East -- and we achieved neither." No more. "Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people." The world's Muslims needed to know that the motives behind the U.S. incursion into Iraq and its actions elsewhere in the region were (or had, at least, suddenly become) entirely benign. Who knows? Rice may even have believed the words she spoke.

    In either case -- whether the strategy of transformation aimed at dominion or democratization -- today, seven years after it was conceived, we can assess exactly what it has produced. The answer is clear: next to nothing, apart from squandering vast resources and exacerbating the slide toward debt and dependency that poses a greater strategic threat to the United States than Osama bin Laden ever did...

    Posted on Thursday, September 11, 2008 at 12:36 PM | Comments (2) | Top

    Juan Cole: Time to Declare the original al-Qaeda Defeated

    Source: Informed Comment (Blog run by Juan Cole) (9-11-08)

    [Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.]

    The original al-Qaeda is defeated.

    It is a dangerous thing for an analyst to say, because obviously radical Muslim extremists may at some point set off some more bombs and then everyone will point fingers and say how wrong I was.

    So let me be very clear that I do not mean that radical Muslim extremism has ceased to exist or that there will never be another bombing at their hands.

    I mean the original al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda as a historical, concrete movement centered on Usama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, with the mujahideen who fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s at their core. Al-Qaeda, the 55th Brigade of the Army of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan under the Taliban. That al-Qaeda. The 5,000 fighters and operatives or whatever number they amounted to.

    That original al-Qaeda has been defeated.

    Usamah Bin Laden has not released an original videotape since about four years ago. There was that disaster with the cgi black beard. There was the old footage spliced in by al-Sahab. But nothing new on videotape. I conclude that Bin Laden, if he is alive, is so injured or disfigured that his appearance on videotape would only discourage any followers he has left.

    Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's number two man, is alive and vigorous and oppressively talkative. But he has played wolf so many times with no follow-through that he cannot even get airtime on cable news anymore, except at Aljazeera, and even there they excerpt a few minutes from a long tape.

    Marc Sageman in his 'Understanding Terror Networks' estimates that there are less than a thousand Muslim terrorists who could and would do harm to the United States. That is, the original al-Qaeda was dangerous because it was an international terror organization dedicated to stalking the US and pulling the plug on its economy. It had one big success in that regard, by exploiting a small set of vulnerabilities in airline safety procedures. But after that, getting up a really significant operation has been beyond them so far.

    In the region, Usamah Bin Laden wanted to overthrow the royal family of Saudi Arabia, and install an al-Qaeda-led, Taliban-like 'emirate' in that country. He wanted to expel US troops from Prince Sultan Air Base, which he considered a form of American military occupation of Saudi Arabia and thus of two of the holiest cities in Islam, Mecca and Medina.

    Ayman al-Zawahiri wanted to overthrow the Egyptian government. His Egyptian Islamic Jihad was building cells and capacity for a violent attack on the Egyptian president, just as constituent elements of al-Qaeda had assassinated Anwar El Sadat in 1981.

    But the Saudi government has not been overthrown. The US troops are out of Saudi Arabia, so talk has died down about the occupation of the two holy cities, which never made much ssnse to begin with (there were few or no foreign troops in Hijaz, the west coast along the Red Sea, where Mecca and Medina are located). The Saudi royal family is flush with tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues. It may fall to a popular revolution as with Iran, in the future, but any such instability is unlikely to be led by al-Qaeda. Only 10% of Saudis now say they think well of that organization, and they are the ones who do not think it carried out September 11.

    Ayman al-Zawahiri's organization, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, has been devastated inside Egypt. Most of its cadres were killed or imprisoned. It had had an alliance,since 1980 or so, with the Gama'a al-Islamiyyah of the blind sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman. The leadership of the Gama'a has broken with the sheikh, and many of the leaders have renounced violence as a political path. They have written and published 20 or so 'recantations' that interpret the Qur'an as commanding peaceful activitsm and denouncing violence.

    That is, one of the major unexpected outcomes of Sept. 11 has been to turn one of the major Egyptian fundamentalist organizations into a peace movement.

    Everywhere you look, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad is weaker or has dwindled into insignificance.

    So if the original al-Qaeda has been defeated, what are the prospects of violent Muslim radicalism?

    Terrorist groups are active in four major contexts among Muslims:

    1) There are tiny one-off cells (a group of seven acquaintances, e.g., unconnected to any larger organization) among some Muslim communities of Western Europe. They have no real political prospects or import, although they can be briefly disruptive. They are expressions of discontent by a handful of obsessive personalities with Western foreign policy toward the Muslim world. There are also small one-off cells in some Muslim countries, such as Morocco, but so far they are not politically important. These cells are nurtured by the internet and might have dissipated in its absence.

    2) There are larger organizations or networks in some Middle Eastern countries that deploy terrorist tactics for political purposes. The radical Muslim movement of Algeria is an example. Al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia made a push 2003-2006 but was largely repressed.

    3) In small territories under what is locally perceived as direct foreign military occupation, organized national liberation movements have sometimes deployed Muslim radicalism as an ideology of resistance and resorted to terrorist tactics, as with Hamas in Gaza, and the Kashmiri and Chechen jihadi groups. They are leant greater significance and popular support by the national liberation project, but they are operating among relatively small populations (Gaza is 1.5 million) and are taking much larger occupiers, so that they can be crushed or marginalized over time.

    One implication of Sageman's work is that these groups centered on national liberation seldom pose a terrorist threat to the United States. Hamas, for instance, pledged no attack on the US. Sageman found no Kashmiris among the international terrorist groups-- they are focused on their domestic project of liberation.

    4) Virtually in a class by themselves are the Islamic State of Iraq in the Sunni Arab areas of Iraq, and the Taliban, whether the Tehrik-i Taliban in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan or the neo-Taliban of southern Afghanistan. The Islamic State of Iraq and similar organizations are called by Washington 'al-Qaeda in Iraq or AQI-- but the groups themselves generally do not call themselves this since the killing of Abu Musab Zarqawi. They have been attrited in Iraq by Shiite death squads, by American military operations and special death squads, and by the opposition of tribal and other local political forces, such as the 1920 Revolution Brigades, which allied from summer 2006 with the US. They operated on a much bigger scale than the groups in 3) and had the potential to control big swathes of territory before their defeat. The radical Sunnis' strategy in Iraq, of targetting Shiites and provoking an ethnic civil war, doomed them, since it left them a small minority toward which the majority was deeply hostile. They were forestalled by their own tactics from taking up the mantle of Iraqi nationalism, and so remained terrorist groups without larger political import.

    While the Taliban are broadly unpopular in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, they do have some claim on sentiments of sub-nationalism among the Pushtun ethnic group and so have managed to become political movements and not just terrorist groups (though they continue to deploy terrorism as one tool for accomplishing their political goals). The neo-Taliban in Afghanistan seem to be near to taking Ghazni, which is not so far from the capital, Kabul.

    Although the US is worried about the Arab volunteers who take refuge among the resurgent Taliban, they are a tiny element and cannot easily launch international terrorist operations from FATA. NATO is making a significant error if it does not recognize that the neo-Taliban is more than just a small international terrorist organization. Rather, it has elements of a national liberation organization (in northwest Pakistan it is the lentil-eating Punjabis who are coded as the 'foreign' occupiers).

    While counter-terrorism activities can be usefully pursued in these three areas, it is clear that the local perception of foreign occupation is part of the problem, and a long-term occupation is likely to exacerbate the violence rather than reduce it.

    Here is some support for that thesis. Aljazeera English reports on the Afghan reaction to Bush's announcement that he will send more US troops to Afghanistan. Those interviewed are convinced it won't matter or that it will make the security situation worse, and insist that more Afghan troops are the answer.



    It seems clear to me that a combination of sticks and carrots in dealing with the tribes plus strengthening the capacity and efficiency of the local military forces is the only path likely to succeed in the long run here. In any case the Taliban themselves do not pose the threat of international terrorism, though they may give safe harbor to individuals from abroad that do. The focus should be on tracking down and circumscribing the activities of those individuals. Convincing the Pushtun population generally to put up with 70,000 US and NATO troops and with air strikes that kill civilian villagers is a fool's errand.

    As for the relative decline of Sunni radicalism in Iraq, it comes in part from a political failure. That al-Qaeda's inability to develop a pan-Islamic discourse and strategy helped doom it is clear from the remarks by Ayman al-Zawahiri released earlier this week regarding Iran.

    'Do you have any advice or any words to refute the argument of the theoreticians who claim that 9/11 was an internal action carried out by the Israeli Government?

    Al-Zawahiri: My answer: It is enough to reply to this suspicion by saying that it is not based on any evidence. The first side that released this suspicion was Al-Manar Television, which is affiliated with the Lebanese Hizballah. It claimed that it cited a certain website. The objective behind this lie is clear. The objective is to deny that the Sunnis have heroes who harm America as no one has harmed it throughout its history. This lie was then circulated by the Iranian news media and they continued to repeat it until today for the same objective. Perhaps, they guided Al-Manar Television to begin these lies. Iran's objective is clear. It is to cover its collusion with America in invading the homelands of Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    I gave examples of this collusion in my recent interview with Al-Sahab under the title "reading in the events." This lie was then repeated by some of the psychologically defeated ones in our Islamic world, whose minds, which were distorted by Western exaggeration, refuse to believe that some Muslims can cause this harm to America. These poor minds have thus far not been able to understand why America is defeated in Afghanistan and Iraq in front of the simple mujahidin, and, in fact, why America has failed to arrest Mulla Mohammad Omar and Shaykh Usama Bin Ladin, may God watch over them, after more than six years of fierce war, during which it used all means of technology, which caused us a headache about its legendary capabilities. Fur thermore, why the power of the mujahidin is growing against it day by day despite this world war that is being launched against them?'

    No more eloquent testament to the defeat of the original al-Qaeda could be found than the pitiful inability of Zawahiri to name any genuine accomplishments in recent times save the ability of the top leadership to elude capture!

    The Bush administration over-reacted to September 11, misunderstanding it as the action of a traditional state rather than of a small asymmetrical terrorist group. Its occupation of Iraq lengthened al-Qaeda's shelf life. But poor strategy by the Sunni radicals themselvesf brought the full wrath of Iran, the Iraqi Shiites, Jordanian intelligence, and the United States military down on their heads.

    "Al-Qaeda in Iraq" is not a reason for the US to extend its occupation of that country, but is rather an epiphenomenon created by the occupation and the political mistakes it made.

    My hypothesis is that the relatively high incidence of terrorism in the Muslim world in recent times is associated with two major factors. One is the final tying up of the loose ends of the 19th and early 20th century legacy of Western colonialism in the region (Algeria, Palestine, Ksahmir and Chechnya all have that context). The other is the large scale movement from rural, peasant life to an alienating urban environment. The transition from agrarian to urban society has been attended with great violence and disruptions in other culture regions as well-- consider Germany in the first halfof the twentieth century, or Russia, or China. When the contradictions of the colonial legacy are resolved, and when the urban and demographic transitions are sufficiently advanced, the incidence of terrorism in the region will likely decline. There may be further violence, but it will be rooted in future crises such as the impending water shortage and very high fuel and food prices.

    For now, our war is over. Time to come home, and train and fund locals to do the clean-up work.

    Posted on Thursday, September 11, 2008 at 9:17 AM | Comments (1) | Top

    Joseph Lane: McCain’s Closing of the “Enthusiasm Gap” (Thanks to Palin)

    Source: Britannica Blog (9-10-08)

    [Joseph Lane is the Hawthorne Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Emory & Henry.]

    “The Enthusiasm Gap” has become a pundit’s watchword in this campaign as two highly motivated camps of Democrats, each thrilled with their standard-bearer, each pouring out to the polls in unexpected numbers expanded the Democrats’ edge in voter identification to 10 points, the highest it has been since Watergate. On the other hand, John McCain struggled to galvanize his own party, and even though it was not widely discussed, continued to lose as much as 25% of the Republican primary vote in states that went to the polls long after his nomination was assured. Fulminators of unrest on the Right spoke of third party candidacies, Christian voter boycotts, and disappointment in the turn that the party had taken.

    But all that has changed.

    This morning the campaign announced that it planned to keep the McCain-Palin ticket campaigning together, foregoing the normal practice of splitting up to cover more ground. The campaign has all but admitted that they need to keep McCain close to Palin because it is Palin who is bringing out the adoring crowds, Palin who is attracting all the standing ovations, and Palin who is energizing volunteers to join the organization. Governor Sarah Palin, it appears, closed the “Enthusiasm Gap” for good and delivered Senator McCain a real chance at winning the general election. A scant two weeks ago McCain was decrying the idea that “celebrity” should drive presidential elections; now he has a celebrity, and he is going to play it up for all he can get from it.

    Now the “Enthusiasm Gap” that we have to explain is the one within the Republican ticket. What does this surge of enthusiasm for Sarah Palin, enthusiasm that John McCain could never tap into alone, tell us about the Republican party? Was Bill Clinton wrong when he claimed that “The Republicans fall in line, but Democrats have to fall in love [with a presidential candidate]”? Are we seeing that Republicans are just as interested in swooning over the new kid in town as the Democrats?

    Perhaps, but I think we are seeing something more: In the last several cycles, the Republican party has exhibited a split personality. On the one hand, its biggest trump card, fallback position, and basic raison d’etre has been its commitment to national security in an age of terror. It has beaten Democrats to the median voter by convincing “Security Moms” that its candidates are simply more committed to doing “whatever it takes” to ensure America’s security and that line of argument was advanced repeatedly in the Republican National Convention. As Rudy (who else?!) put it - those Democrats never mention September 11! If they won’t talk about that awful day or utter the words “Islamic terrorism,” they must not be up to the job of “keeping America safe.”

    However, if you think that this commitment to a proactive, offensive posture in foreign and anti-terrorism policy is the reason for voting Republican, then John McCain was always the obvious choice. None of the other Republican candidates (sorry, Rudy!) had a longer or more vociferous record in pursuing this policy. Furthermore, McCain plausibly offered the benefits of being for the offensive against terror without the drawbacks of what he has repeatedly called the “mismanagement” of that offensive. Although his record on this score is not as great as he lets on (In 2003, he insisted that Iraq could be transformed by fewer than 100,000 troops and in only a year or two), he was as good as it gets.

    And still the Republicans did not love him. Now, it appears, they do love Sarah Palin whose credentials on fighting terrorism and managing an offensive foreign policy are nonexistent. She has no record on these matters and the vain attempts to manufacture some by referring to her leadership of the Alaska National Guard (to which she has issued no orders) or her state’s proximity to Russia (which she has never visited) only draw more attention to how thin her record is. And yet, the most conservative Political Scientist whom I know, a man who is generally a staunch institutionalist, told me, “The best thing that could happen for the Republicans would be if McCain could just make it through a couple of years, show her the ropes, and get her up to the level of competence, and then he could pass away so that she could lead us into 2012 as President.” Apparently some of his fellows would go even farther, and they are openly wishing that it was a Palin-McCain ticket rather than the other way around. Surely Cheney has demonstrated that you can educate and guide a novice president from the second chair!

    What all this means.

    Ultimately, I think we can draw only one conclusion: Many of the Republicans in the base of the party never cared that much about the national security argument in the first place. It was not really what motivated them at all. The cultural arguments about abortion, obscenity in library books, the role of [Christian] religion in defining America, etc. These issues on which Sarah Palin is clearly right with the Right were the issues right from the start. The security issue is at best their second most earnest concern and at worst a card played to win over voters who are not sufficiently clear-minded about or galvanized by the morality issues. Watching the Republican base forget all of the best reasons to elect McCain in their eager desire to place Sarah Palin one heartbeat from the presidency leaves us with the serious doubts about just what they think about John McCain even now.

    There is one other possibility that might be gleaned from the combination of the enthusiasm for Palin and the character of the shrillest, fringe, internet conspiracy attacks on Obama. Maybe, at least for some, the security issues and the cultural issues are actually the exact same issue. They can only conceive of and commit to a “war” between some Islamic terrorists and (mostly) Christian America if they see it as a war between Islam (as a religion) and Christianity (as their religion). In this context, Obama’s father’s religion really does indicate that he may be on the other side, and Sarah Palin’s comment before her old church that her son Track, headed for military deployment in Iraq, will be “on a task from God,” and that they should “pray that there is a plan, and that plan is God’s plan,” takes on such salience. Those who conceive of this “war” as a holy crusade must wonder, for all his military credentials and pro-offensive rhetoric, whether a man as secular as John McCain is a good choice to lead a religious crusade as a woman with no background save the right biblical principles. Do we want a faith-based foreign policy? Maybe the security moms will think twice about that one.

    Posted on Wednesday, September 10, 2008 at 5:38 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Juan Cole: What's the difference between Palin and Muslim fundamentalists? Lipstick

    Source: Salon (9-9-08)

    [Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.]

    John McCain announced that he was running for president to confront the "transcendent challenge" of the 21st century, "radical Islamic extremism," contrasting it with "stability, tolerance and democracy." But the values of his handpicked running mate, Sarah Palin, more resemble those of Muslim fundamentalists than they do those of the Founding Fathers. On censorship, the teaching of creationism in schools, reproductive rights, attributing government policy to God's will and climate change, Palin agrees with Hamas and Saudi Arabia rather than supporting tolerance and democratic precepts. What is the difference between Palin and a Muslim fundamentalist? Lipstick.

    McCain pledged to work for peace based on "the transformative ideals on which we were founded." Tolerance and democracy require freedom of speech and the press, but while mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Palin inquired of the local librarian how to go about banning books that some of her constituents thought contained inappropriate language. She tried to fire the librarian for defying her. Book banning is common to fundamentalisms around the world, and the mind-set Palin displayed did not differ from that of the Hamas minister of education in the Palestinian government who banned a book of Palestinian folk tales for its sexually explicit language. In contrast, Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it."

    Palin argued when running for governor that creationism should be taught in public schools, at taxpayers' expense, alongside real science. Antipathy to Darwin for providing an alternative to the creation stories of the Bible and the Quran has also become a feature of Muslim fundamentalism. Saudi Arabia prohibits the study, even in universities, of evolution, Freud and Marx. Malaysia has banned a translation of "The Origin of the Species." Likewise, fundamentalists in Turkey have pressured the government to teach creationism in the public schools. McCain has praised Turkey as an anchor of democracy in the region, but Turkey's secular traditions are under severe pressure from fundamentalists in that country. McCain does them no favors by choosing a running mate who wishes to destroy the First Amendment's establishment clause, which forbids the state to give official support to any particular theology. Turkish religious activists would thereby be enabled to cite an American precedent for their own quest to put religion back at the center of Ankara's public and foreign policies....

    The GOP vice-presidential pick holds that abortion should be illegal, even in cases of rape, incest or severe birth defects, making an exception only if the life of the mother is in danger. She calls abortion an "atrocity" and pledges to reshape the judiciary to fight it. Ironically, Palin's views on the matter are to the right of those in the Muslim country of Tunisia, which allows abortion in the first trimester for a wide range of reasons. Classical Muslim jurisprudents differed among one another on the issue of abortion, but many permitted it before the "quickening" of the fetus, i.e. until the end of the fourth month. Contemporary Muslim fundamentalists, however, generally oppose abortion.

    Palin's stance is even stricter than that of the Parliament of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In 2005, the legislature in Tehran attempted to amend the country's antiabortion statute to permit an abortion up to four months in case of a birth defect. The conservative clerical Guardianship Council, which functions as a sort of theocratic senate, however, rejected the change. Iran's law on abortion is therefore virtually identical to the one that Palin would like to see imposed on American women, and the rationale in both cases is the same, a literalist religious impulse that resists any compromise with the realities of biology and of women's lives. Saudi Arabia's restrictive law on abortion likewise disallows it in the case or rape or incest, or of fetal impairment, which is also Gov. Palin's position....


    Posted on Tuesday, September 9, 2008 at 3:25 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Jonathan Zimmerman: A focus on diversity is keeping us apart

    Source: Philadelphia Inquirer (9-7-08)

    [Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth. He is the author of "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century" (Harvard University Press). E-mail him at jlzimm@aol.com.]

    Several years ago, during a class on the history of race in America, I asked a group of students whether white parents should be encouraged to adopt African American children.

    Most of the students were white, and most of them said no. "Black and white culture are too different," one student explained. "The kids would feel out of place."

    I thought of this remark as I watched Barack Obama accept the Democratic nomination for president. In a luminous speech, dazzling with inspiration and intelligence, Obama called upon citizens to "come together as one American family." For too many Americans, however, family ends where race begins.

    That's particularly ironic, given Obama's own biracial background. But it's predictable, too. The more that Americans "celebrate diversity," the less they seem to have in common. And that's very bad news for Barack Obama, who needs to persuade millions of white voters that we're all in this together.

    It's a tough sell. Invoking their own family metaphor, large numbers of whites still say they can't "relate" to Obama. Although it's tempting to ascribe that sentiment to simple racism, my students' remarks point to a more subtle culprit - the ideal of diversity itself.

    By underscoring our differences, it drives us apart.

    Consider the concept of racial "learning styles," which Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., proferred earlier this year. According to this theory, black students learn better in groups, not alone; they prefer to move about the classroom rather than sit at their desks; and they are more impulsive - and less cerebral - than other children.

    Wright's comments sparked an inferno of popular ridicule and a small political firestorm for Obama, who quickly distanced himself from his longtime minister. But the idea of racial learning styles remains accepted wisdom at institutions such as my own, where students often tell me that Asians, Hispanics and blacks acquire knowledge differently from white people.

    Or consider the continued resistance to white adoptions of black children. To the National Association of Black Social Workers, interracial adoption threatens nothing less than the "cultural genocide" of African Americans. "Black children in white homes are cut off from the healthy development of themselves as black people," the association says.

    We are family? I think not.

    Beneath all of this talk, of course, lies the fallacy of race itself. Although America is a richly diverse place, we're told, people belonging to any given race are the same - or should be. That's why you still hear whispers in the African American community about whether Obama is "really" black.

    He isn't. And you're not "really" white, or Hispanic, or Asian, or whatever it is you say you are. We're all mongrels. But the concept of race masks the diversity inside each group, even as it exaggerates the differences outside them.

    For most of U.S. history, of course, white people presumed that the country was theirs. The ideal of diversity arose to challenge white supremacy, reminding us that Americans come in many colors - and that all of them deserve equal rights and respect.

    Along the way, however, it also reinforced the same racial categories that had bedeviled us for so long. And that helps explain why so many white voters - and even a few black ones - see Obama as strange, exotic or alien. Not evil or threatening, necessarily. Just different. Unfamiliar. Or should I say un-familial?

    Don't get me wrong. There's still plenty of old-fashioned racism out there. When Obama faced off against Hillary Rodham Clinton here in Pennsylvania, one in six white voters told exit pollsters that race influenced their decision. Nationwide, 5 percent of white voters say they would never vote for a black candidate. The real number is probably higher.

    But the problem isn't just racism. It's race, and the doctrine of diversity. If we teach our children to celebrate racial differences, they'll never see themselves as a single national family. And they won't elect leaders like Obama, who reminds us about the common humanity that should unite us all.

    Posted on Sunday, September 7, 2008 at 3:27 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Mark Naison: The McCain Palin Ticket Appeals to a Powerful Strain of Anti-Intellectualism in American Society

    Source: Special to HNN (9-6-08)

    The McCain Palin ticket, if elected, would be a disaster for the country. Their propensity to invoke God's will as a justification for government policies, their contempt for science and intellect, their extraordinary lack of knowledge about the culture and history of the major nations of the world,, and their shameless defense of an oil centered energy policy that has produced economic and ecological disaster for the nation, poorly prepares them to lead a nation whose reputation has been damaged by an ill considered war and whose position in the global economy has been steadily weakening.

    However, the very things that make McCain and Palin feared in most of the world gives them an excellent chance of winning the presidency. Their proud anti-intellectualism, reflected in their personal histories as well as their rhetoric, touches a powerful chord with many working class and middle class Americans. There is a long tradition in this country of mistrusting people who have advanced academic training, which the McCain/Pallin ticket has used to great effect in holding Barack Obama up to ridicule. While some Americans might admire Barack Obama for working as a community organizer before attending Harvard Law School, and for teach law before running for public office, Republicans have used these features of Obama's biography to saw that he doesn't understand how "real folks" live.

    Is this strategy going to work? Unfortunately, it could. Pitting the election as a contest between a "Good Old Boy" and his "Good Old Girl" sidekick against a "Professor" and "Community Organizer" is going to play well in large portions of working class and middle class America. McCain and Pallin are recognizable figures,, people you'd run into on the ball field and or the local bar, while Barack Obama seems like a talented and exotic outsider who somehow married into your family or moved onto your block. McCain and Pallin are candidates of a party whose policies have brought hardship and pain to untold numbers of Americans, whose jobs and homes are in jeopardy, and who are saddle with personal debt. But they speak a language ordinary people can understand and they don't make them feel guilty about their pickups and SUV’s, their snowmobiles or their guns, their service in the military and their religious faith or their occasional trips to the bar or the strip club. By contrast, they don't really know Barack Obama, and mistrust his sophistication, his calm demeanor and, and his easy facility with complex policy questions a president must face.

    The discomfort, and the confusion, many working class and middle class Americans feel about intellectuals is something I experienced first hand during my fifteen years coaching sandlot baseball and Catholic Youth Organization basketball in Brooklyn in the 1980's and 1990's. The teams I coached,. though their home base was Park Slope, played many of their games in white working class neighborhoods like Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, Marine Park, Canarsie and Bergen Beach. The majority of the people I coached against were cops, firemen, construction workers, civil servants, and people who owned small businesses and I really enjoyed spending time with them. They were tough, generous, competitive and far less racist than most people would be led to expect. Though their neighborhoods were still overwhelmingly white, they were scrupulously fair to the Black and Latino kids who played on visiting teams, and tolerate d no racist language and behavior from their players or fans .I liked competing against their teams, working with them to set up games and tournaments, and occasionally going out with them for a meal or a drink. For many years, they had no idea what I did for a living. They saw a big, loud, intense, man prowling the sidelines, someone who pushed his teams hard and never backed down from a physical confrontation, and figured I was one of them, a cop, a sanitation worker, maybe a construction foreman.

    When they found out I was a college teacher, they were utterly astonished and extremely confused. It was as though they just found out I had come from outer space "A professor, that's insane" someone told one of my fellow coaches" I thought he was just another Brooklyn redneck,". At the Bergen Beach baseball complex, located in a tough Italian enclave near the Belt Parkway, my name was no longer Mark, it was " Professor.", That is how people began referring to me at games and at meetings. That's how they refer to me today if they run into me in a store or on the golf course. .Their teasing wasn't mean spirited, but it definitely had an edge. These tough, hard working white guys saw professors as people who looked down on folks like them and were quick to write them off. They had felt comfortable with me because of how I acted on and off the field ,but now they wondered whether I secretly held them in contempt. No one said,” wow it's great that a guy who grew up on the streets of Brooklyn went out and got a PhD." Although they never said so in so many words, it seemed as though they feared that the very act of getting a PhD meant that I thought I was better than them.

    After listening to the speeches at the Republican Convention, I am convinced that appealing to such fears and suspicions is at the core of the McCain Pallin strategy. None of this is new. From George Wallace, to Spiro Agnew to Rush Limbaugh, the right has used anti-intellectualism, especially directed at Professors, as one of its major rallying cries. But to do so at this historic moment, when the American economy is in deep disarray and so many of its foreign policy initiatives have come to grief, is particularly worrisome. Will working class and middle class Americans see through this desperate charade and vote for someone with the temperament, training and intellect to actually solve some of the nation's problems, or will they let their own fears and prejudices wed them to the status quo. Time will tell, but based on my own personal experience in white middle class and working class America, I am not hopeful.

    Posted on Saturday, September 6, 2008 at 7:33 PM | Comments (26) | Top

    Leonard Steinhorn: Pre-Palin, a VP pick judged on looks

    Source: Politico.com (9-6-08)

    An indignant Republican vice presidential candidate, troubled that the media focused a disproportionate amount of attention on her looks, pleaded with reporters to start covering the important news: “I’d rather talk about what I stand for than what I look like.” But even then, The Associated Press story reporting her plea prefaced the quote by saying that she “brushed her sandy blond hair with an impatient sweep of her hand.”

    Sexism in the media? Very possibly, yet it wasn’t a female candidate, like Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, who received this treatment. It was Dan Quayle, right after he was nominated by George H.W. Bush for the second spot on the 1988 GOP ticket.

    Looking back 20 years, the pundits, reporters and commentators were rather ruthless in describing the then-Indiana senator’s “handsome features and blow-dried hair,” his “movie-star good looks,” his resemblance to Robert Redford, his “youth and movie star looks,” his “golden good looks.” As a headline in the San Diego Union-Tribune put it, “Do Ya Think He’s Sexy?”

    To then-freshman GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona, Quayle’s looks mattered. “I can't believe a guy that handsome wouldn't have some impact,' McCain said back then. Asked if Quayle would help the Republican ticket gain more appeal with women voters, McCain replied: “He comes across very well on the tube.”

    To his defenders on Capitol Hill, Quayle had established himself as a credible and thoughtful authority on defense and national security policy. But every reference to his good looks made him seem like a superficial lightweight. It was hard, as one writer put it, for him to be “taken seriously.”

    No one cried sexism back then. But if anyone made these comments today when discussing Alaska Gov. Palin, the chattering class and expedient feminists in the GOP would be all over it.

    Quayle understood that his surprising nomination would generate intense public scrutiny. As he put it, for every vice presidential nominee, but especially for an unexpected nominee like himself, "there are 15,000 journalists who want to grab him by the ankles, turn him upside down and shake him until something bad comes out."

    So to those who decry the media’s similar treatment of Sarah Palin, to those who say it’s singularly sexist, it’s important to look back and see that the media did the very same thing to Dan Quayle.

    Yes, the questions about whether Palin should run for vice president given her family responsibilities might not be asked of a male candidate.

    But complaints that she has been trivialized by references to her appearance and looks may have less to do with her gender than with a media culture obsessed with celebrity, sex appeal and Hollywood star qualities — and these yardsticks apply to both women and men. Even news networks, which we trust to inform us, often place a higher priority on their reporters’ looks than their knowledge of culture and history.

    Ironically, once in office Quayle would presage another bit of media attention over Palin's candidacy when he attacked the fictional television character Murphy Brown for setting a bad example for young people by having a child out of wedlock.

    The Palin frenzy may seem more intense today than the Quayle frenzy did 20 years ago, but that may stem from the explosion of media outlets on cable and the Internet. But the impulse behind the frenzy remains the same. Superficialities capture media attention. Ideas don’t.

    Posted on Saturday, September 6, 2008 at 7:31 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Jeff Pasley: “Bragging War Heroes” Then and Now

    Source: Common-Place.org (9-5-08)

    Today there was an incendiary post by M.J. Rosenberg at TPM Cafe called “Bragging War Heroes.” The post got quite tough with the McCain campaign’s heavy reliance on their candidate’s POW experience, in the acceptance speech and before. Rosenberg made some claims about past war heroes and their comparatively modest political use of their military backgrounds that are devastating, if true (to paraphrase my old graduate adviser). I would be interested to know what other historians think:

    "You would never know it from the media coverage but John McCain is not one of America’s greatest war heroes. He is a former POW who survived, heroically. He deserves to be honored for that heroism.

    "But one thing distinguishes McCain from other war heroes, the kind whose heroism changes history rather than their life stories.

    "America’s two greatest war heroes were Ulysses Grant and Dwight Eisenhower. Grant saved the union. And Ike saved civilization.

    "And neither one ever bragged about their experience. (Can you imagine Ike smacking down Adlai Stevenson by saying that while Adlai ran a nice medium-sized state, he was the Supreme Allied Commander who ran D-Day, defeated Hitler, and liberated Europe?).

    "Impossible. Like Grant, Eisenhower did not brag.

    "Actually, modesty about military accomplishments is typical of war heroes and not just here. In Israel, it is unheard of for great military leaders to brag about their service.

    "Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak was the most decorated soldier in Israel’s history (he was a commando who, among other amazing feats, dressed as a woman — with a handful of soldiers — invaded a terrorist stronghold in Beirut, killed the terrorists, and then fled to a waiting dinghy and headed home). Yitzhak Rabin led the IDF in its Six Day War victory. Ariel Sharon saved Israel from destruction in 1973 when he snuck up behind the Egyptian army and encircled them in the Sinai.

    "None of these guys talked about it. McCain does. Continuously. His lack of modesty — about something war heroes tend to be modest about — does not become him."

    Now it might well be true that Grant and Eisenhower were this reticent about using their military careers, but if so their modesty stands apart from a long pre-existing tradition. Perhaps President-Generals Washington, Jackson, Harrison, and Taylor did not personally make speeches about their war experiences, as far as I am aware, but the people who campaigned for them had no such compunctions, to say nothing of their lower-ranking successors Frank Pierce and Teddy Roosevelt. In the middle of the 19th century, bragging about war heroism was practically the default strategy of American presidential politics. There were campaign biographies galore, but probably more important were my true love (historical evidence division), the campaign songs....

    Posted on Friday, September 5, 2008 at 7:53 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Victor Davis Hanson: Want Real Change? Quit Nominating Lawyers

    Source: Real Clear Politics (9-4-08)

    [Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.]

    The 2008 presidential campaign is supposed to be a referendum on "change" -- who brings it and who doesn't.

    Real change, however, hasn't yet proven to mean new politics.

    The "hope and change" Barack Obama sounds like a traditional Northern liberal who always wants to raise taxes on the upper classes and businesses, expand government services and provide more state assistance to the middle class and poor.

    "Maverick" John McCain talks like a conventional Western or Southern conservative in favor of spending cuts, across-the-board lower taxes and smaller government.

    This year the media seem to think change means race and sex -- whether Barack Obama's background of mixed racial ancestry or the gender of Democratic primary candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

    It's certainly true that either the next president or next vice president will not be a white male. But does that mean de facto that the country will be run any differently?

    There is, however, one area where we might have seen real change. The Democrats could have not nominated another lawyer. This may partly explain why former military officer John McCain and working-mom Sarah Palin are polling near even with Obama and his running mate, Joe Biden, in a year that otherwise favors the Democrats.

    A snowmobiling, fishing and hunting mom of five who was trained as a journalist seems like a breath of fresh air -- and accentuates the nontraditional background of former naval officer John McCain. If the Republicans win, it may well be that, like George Bush and Dick Cheney, or Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, they weren't members of the legal culture.

    On the Democratic side, Barack Obama got out of Harvard Law School, worked for a firm, offered his legal expertise as a community organizer and went into politics. Joe Biden graduated from law school and almost immediately ran for office.

    In the Democratic primary, winner Obama, runner-up Hillary Clinton and third-place finisher John Edwards were all lawyers. In 2004, both Democratic nominees, John Kerry and Edwards, were lawyers. Al Gore, who ran in 2000, left law school without a degree and went into politics. His running mate, Joe Lieberman, was a Yale-trained lawyer. Mike Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, was a Harvard-trained lawyer and ran with lawyer Lloyd Bentsen.

    In fact, every Democratic presidential nominee for president and vice president in the last seven elections -- except Gore who dropped out of law school to run for Congress -- has been a lawyer....

    In the past, law school has not necessarily been considered ideal presidential training. Harry Truman was audacious perhaps because he had tried and failed as a haberdasher. Dwight Eisenhower learned about leadership from his years as a general. George H.W. Bush was a businessman and Ronald Reagan an actor. Even unpopular presidents like Jimmy Carter (farmer) and George W. Bush (businessman) brought different perspectives to the job.

    Change for Democrats this year was not a new strain of liberal politics or a different race or gender. Instead, they needed to have run candidates who talked, thought and acted differently from their usual run-of-the-mill sorts.

    And that meant someone other than the same old, same old legal eagles who appear glib -- but so often manage to lose in November.

    Posted on Friday, September 5, 2008 at 3:29 PM | Comments (1) | Top

    Tessa Morris-Suzuki: Comparative Perspectives on Nationality in the Prewar Japanese Empire

    Source: Japan Focus (This excerpt is from a long article entitled: "Migrants, Subjects, Citizens: Comparative Perspectives on Nationality in the Prewar Japanese Empire." Click here for pictures. (8-28-08)

    [Tessa Morris-Suzuki is Professor of Japanese History, Convenor of the Division of Pacific and Asian History in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, and a Japan Focus associate. Her book Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan's Cold War has just been published at Rowman & Littlefield.]

    Former Prime Minister Mori Yoshiro seems an unlikely champion of a multicultural Japan. His brief term of office is, after all, perhaps best remembered for the furore he evoked by a speech in which he described Japan as a “Divine Nation headed by the Emperor”. This echo of prewar nationalism stirred fears at home and abroad that senior Japanese politicians still subscribed to Shinto myths of a unique and racially superior Japan. Yet Mori today is an active participant in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s “Diet Members’ League for Promoting Exchanges of Foreign Human Resources” (Gaikoku Jinzai Kōryū Suishin Giin Renmei), an awkwardly-named body whose mission is to promote mass immigration by making Japan a magnet for skilled workers from around the world. (Akashi and Ogawa 2008, 69)

    Mori’s capacity to combine nostalgia for wartime nationalism with enthusiasm for boosting the number of foreigners in Japan is, however, perhaps not so odd after all. The inspiration for the activities of the Diet Members’ League is a fear that a low birth rate and declining population will irrevocably damage Japan’s power and prestige. For this reason, its members have given a friendly reception to the views of Sakanaka Hidenori, former head of Japan’s Immigration Bureau, who advocates an expansion in the size of Japan’s foreigner population to 10 million, or even maybe 20 million (ten times the current size) by the middle of this century, thus creating a “Big Japan” with enhanced global power and prestige. (Sakanaka 2005; Akashi and Ogawa 2008)

    Public statements by the Diet Members’ League are part of an intensifying debate in Japan about immigration and the place of foreigners in Japanese society. Against a background of impending population decline and global competition for skilled labour, the conventional battlelines of the migration debate are being redrawn. Now some conservative politicians are looking seriously at the need to revise social policies, and even to reform Japan’s nationality law, in order to adapt to an age of higher migration. Meanwhile, leading members of the opposition Democratic Party have been debating a proposal to give local voting rights to foreign permanent residents: a proposal which Sakanaka firmly excludes from his vision of Big Japan, and which LDP politician Hirasawa Katsue describes as “the first step towards the loss of Japanese identity and the dissolution of the heart of the nation state”. (Nishi Nihon Shimbun, 18 April 2008). Such political crosscurrents highlight a complex relationship between nationalism and internationalism, between belief in a “unique Japan” and in “coexistence [kyōsei] with foreigners”, and between nostalgia for the past and visions for the future.

    Colonial Origins

    These controversies surrounding migration and nationality are deeply embedded in Japan’s colonial history, just as current debates on multiculturalism and citizenship in Britain and France are deeply embedded in the history of the British and French Empires. The prewar past has a bearing on the present for several reasons. First, the policies pursued by Japanese governments in the first half of the twentieth century helped to determine the nature of the foreign presence in Japan today. Many Koreans in Japan are descendents of migrants from the colonial era. Many members of Japan’s Brazilian and Peruvian communities, which together numbered over 370,000 in 2006, are descendents of those who emigrated in the first half of the twentieth century, often under schemes supported by the Japanese state as a means of strengthening their nation’s social cohesion and international influence. (Immigration Bureau 2007, 18-19)

    Second, the ideas that resurface in present-day debates have a lineage that goes back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The legal framework of Japanese nationality was first set in place at a time when the creation of the Japanese colonial empire was just beginning, and this framework was further refined and developed as the empire grew. The boundaries of nationality, subjecthood and citizenship were therefore dynamic and contested. They were also riven with paradoxes, many of which arose from a central contradiction: the need for the Empire to unite its diverse subjects into a single loyal body while simultaneously seeking to divide rulers and ruled into a hierarchy of groups with separate sets of rights. As the Japanese empire expanded during the Asia Pacific War, colonial subjects in Korea and Taiwan were encouraged to see themselves as part of the inner circles of a multiethnic Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere [Dai Tō-A Kyōeiken], in which increasingly complex layers of rights and duties distinguished peoples of the metropolitan core, the formal colonies, quasi-colonies like Manchukuo and occupied areas. Identity, subjecthood, legal nationality and voting rights did not necessarily go together, and seldom coalesced into a single national heart....

    Posted on Thursday, September 4, 2008 at 8:54 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Tom Engelhardt: How the U.S. Garrisons the Planet and Doesn't Even Notice

    Source: TomDispatch.com (9-4-08)

    [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 American Age of Denial. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site, has just been published. Focusing on what the mainstream media hasn't covered, it is an alternative history of the mad Bush years.]

    Here it is, as simply as I can put it: In the course of any year, there must be relatively few countries on this planet on which U.S. soldiers do not set foot, whether with guns blazing, humanitarian aid in hand, or just for a friendly visit. In startling numbers of countries, our soldiers not only arrive, but stay interminably, if not indefinitely. Sometimes they live on military bases built to the tune of billions of dollars that amount to sizeable American towns (with accompanying amenities), sometimes on stripped down forward operating bases that may not even have showers. When those troops don't stay, often American equipment does -- carefully stored for further use at tiny "cooperative security locations," known informally as "lily pads" (from which U.S. troops, like so many frogs, could assumedly leap quickly into a region in crisis).

    At the height of the Roman Empire, the Romans had an estimated 37 major military bases scattered around their dominions. At the height of the British Empire, the British had 36 of them planetwide. Depending on just who you listen to and how you count, we have hundreds of bases. According to Pentagon records, in fact, there are 761 active military "sites" abroad.

    The fact is: We garrison the planet north to south, east to west, and even on the seven seas, thanks to our various fleets and our massive aircraft carriers which, with 5,000-6,000 personnel aboard -- that is, the population of an American town -- are functionally floating bases.

    And here's the other half of that simple truth: We don't care to know about it. We, the American people, aided and abetted by our politicians, the Pentagon, and the mainstream media, are knee-deep in base denial.

    Now, that's the gist of it. If, like most Americans, that's more than you care to know, stop here.

    Where the Sun Never Sets

    Let's face it, we're on an imperial bender and it's been a long, long night. Even now, in the wee hours, the Pentagon continues its massive expansion of recent years; we spend militarily as if there were no tomorrow; we're still building bases as if the world were our oyster; and we're still in denial. Someone should phone the imperial equivalent of Alcoholics Anonymous.

    But let's start in a sunnier time, less than two decades ago, when it seemed that there would be many tomorrows, all painted red, white, and blue. Remember the 1990s when the U.S. was hailed -- or perhaps more accurately, Washington hailed itself -- not just as the planet's "sole superpower" or even its unique "hyperpower," but as its "global policeman," the only cop on the block? As it happened, our leaders took that label seriously and our central police headquarters, that famed five-sided building in Washington D.C, promptly began dropping police stations -- aka military bases -- in or near the oil heartlands of the planet (Kosovo, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait) after successful wars in the former Yugoslavia and the Persian Gulf.

    As those bases multiplied, it seemed that we were embarking on a new, post-Soviet version of "containment." With the USSR gone, however, what we were containing grew a lot vaguer and, before 9/11, no one spoke its name. Nonetheless, it was, in essence, Muslims who happened to live on so many of the key oil lands of the planet.

    Yes, for a while we also kept intact our old bases from our triumphant mega-war against Japan and Germany, and then the stalemated "police action" in South Korea (1950-1953) -- vast structures which added up to something like an all-military American version of the old British Raj. According to the Pentagon, we still have a total of 124 bases in Japan, up to 38 on the small island of Okinawa, and 87 in South Korea. (Of course, there were setbacks. The giant bases we built in South Vietnam were lost in 1975, and we were peaceably ejected from our major bases in the Philippines in 1992.)

    But imagine the hubris involved in the idea of being "global policeman" or "sheriff" and marching into a Dodge City that was nothing less than Planet Earth itself. Naturally, with a whole passel of bad guys out there, a global "swamp" to be "drained," as key Bush administration officials loved to describe it post-9/11, we armed ourselves to kill, not stun. And the police stations… Well, they were often something to behold -- and they still are.

    Let's start with the basics: Almost 70 years after World War II, the sun is still incapable of setting on the American "empire of bases" -- in Chalmers Johnson's phrase -- which at this moment stretches from Australia to Italy, Japan to Qatar, Iraq to Colombia, Greenland to the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, Rumania to Okinawa. And new bases of various kinds are going up all the time (always with rumors of more to come). For instance, an American missile system is slated to go into Poland and a radar system into Israel. That will mean Americans stationed in both countries and, undoubtedly, modest bases of one sort or another to go with them. (The Israeli one -- "the first American base on Israeli territory" -- reports Aluf Benn of Haaretz, will be in the Negev desert.)

    There are 194 countries on the planet (more or less), and officially 39 of them have American "facilities," large and/or small. But those are only the bases the Pentagon officially acknowledges. Others simply aren't counted, either because, as in the case of Jordan, a country finds it politically preferable not to acknowledge such bases; because, as in the case of Pakistan, the American military shares bases that are officially Pakistani; or because bases in war zones, no matter how elaborate, somehow don't count. In other words, that 39 figure doesn't even include Iraq or Afghanistan. By 2005, according to the Washington Post, there were 106 American bases in Iraq, ranging from tiny outposts to mega-bases like Balad Air Base and the ill-named Camp Victory that house tens of thousands of troops, private contractors, Defense Department civilians, have bus routes, traffic lights, PXes, big name fast-food restaurants, and so on.

    Some of these bases are, in effect, "American towns" on foreign soil. In Afghanistan, Bagram Air Base, previously used by the Soviets in their occupation of the country, is the largest and best known. There are, however, many more, large and small, including Kandahar Air Base, located in what was once the unofficial capital of the Taliban, which even has a full-scale hockey rink (evidently for its Canadian contingent of troops).

    You would think that all of this would be genuine news, that the establishment of new bases would regularly generate significant news stories, that books by the score would pour out on America's version of imperial control. But here's the strange thing: We garrison the globe in ways that really are -- not to put too fine a point on it -- unprecedented, and yet, if you happen to live in the United States, you basically wouldn't know it; or, thought about another way, you wouldn't have to know it.

    In Washington, our garrisoning of the world is so taken for granted that no one seems to blink when billions go into a new base in some exotic, embattled, war-torn land. There's no discussion, no debate at all. News about bases abroad, and Pentagon basing strategy, is, at best, inside-the-fold stuff, meant for policy wonks and news jockeys. There may be no subject more taken for granted in Washington, less seriously attended to, or more deserving of coverage.

    Missing Bases

    Americans have, of course, always prided themselves on exporting "democracy," not empire. So empire-talk hasn't generally been an American staple and, perhaps for that reason, all those bases prove an awkward subject to bring up or focus too closely on. When it came to empire-talk in general, there was a brief period after 9/11 when the neoconservatives, in full-throated triumph, began to compare us to Rome and Britain at their imperial height (though we were believed to be incomparably, uniquely more powerful). It was, in the phrase of the time, a "unipolar moment." Even liberal war hawks started talking about taking up "the burden" of empire or, in the phrase of Michael Ignatieff, now a Canadian politician but, in that period, still at Harvard and considered a significant American intellectual, "empire lite."

    On the whole, however, those in Washington and in the media haven't considered it germane to remind Americans of just exactly how we have attempted to "police" and control the world these last years. I've had two modest encounters with base denial myself:

    In the spring of 2004, a journalism student I was working with emailed me a clip, dated October 20, 2003 -- less than seven months after American troops entered Baghdad -- from a prestigious engineering magazine. It quoted Lt. Col. David Holt, the Army engineer "tasked with facilities development" in Iraq, speaking proudly of the several billion dollars ("the numbers are staggering") that had already been sunk into base construction in that country. Well, I was staggered anyway. American journalists, however, hardly noticed, even though significant sums were already pouring into a series of mega-bases that were clearly meant to be permanent fixtures on the Iraqi landscape. (The Bush administration carefully avoided using the word "permanent" in any context whatsoever, and these bases were first dubbed "enduring camps.")

    Within two years, according to the Washington Post (in a piece that, typically, appeared on page A27 of the paper), the U.S. had those 106 bases in Iraq at a cost that, while unknown, must have been staggering indeed. Just stop for a moment and consider that number: 106. It boggles the mind, but not, it seems, American newspaper or TV journalism.

    TomDispatch.com has covered this subject regularly ever since, in part because these massive "facts on the ground," these modern Ziggurats, were clearly evidence of the Bush administration's long-term plans and intentions in that country. Not surprisingly, this year, U.S. negotiators finally offered the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki its terms for a so-called status of forces agreement, evidently initially demanding the right to occupy into the distant future 58 of the bases it has built.

    It has always been obvious -- to me, at least -- that any discussion of Iraq policy in this country, of timelines or "time horizons," drawdowns or withdrawals, made little sense if those giant facts on the ground weren't taken into account. And yet you have to search the U.S. press carefully to find any reporting on the subject, nor have bases played any real role in debates in Washington or the nation over Iraq policy.

    I could go further: I can think of two intrepid American journalists, Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post and Guy Raz of NPR, who actually visited a single U.S. mega-base, Balad Air Base, which reputedly has a level of air traffic similar to Chicago's O'Hare International or London's Heathrow, and offered substantial reports on it. But, as far as I know, they, like the cheese of children's song, stand alone. I doubt that in the last five years Americans tuning in to their television news have ever been able to see a single report from Iraq that gave a view of what the bases we have built there look like or cost. Although reporters visit them often enough and, for instance, have regularly offered reports from Camp Victory in Baghdad on what's going on in the rest of Iraq, the cameras never pan away from the reporters to show us the gigantic base itself.

    More than five years after ground was broken for the first major American base in Iraq, this is, it seems to me, a remarkable record of media denial. American bases in Afghanistan have generally experienced a similar fate.

    My second encounter with base denial came in my other life. When not running TomDispatch.com, I'm a book editor; to be more specific, I'm Chalmers Johnson's editor. I worked on the prophetic Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, which was published back in 2000 to a singular lack of attention -- until, of course, the attacks of 9/11, after which it became a bestseller, adding both "blowback" and the phrase "unintended consequences" to the American lexicon.

    By the time The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, the second volume in his Blowback Trilogy, came out in 2004, reviewers, critics, and commentators were all paying attention. The heart of that book focused on how the U.S. garrisons the planet, laying out Pentagon basing policies and discussing specific bases in remarkable detail. This represented serious research and breakthrough work, and the book indeed received much attention here, including major, generally positive reviews. Startlingly, however, not a single mainstream review, no matter how positive, paid any attention, or even really acknowledged, his chapters on the bases, or bothered to discuss the U.S. as a global garrison state. Only three years later did a major reviewer pay the subject serious attention. When Jonathan Freedland reviewed Nemesis, the final book in the Trilogy, in the New York Review of Books, he noticed the obvious and, in a discussion of U.S. basing policy, wrote, for instance:

    "Johnson is in deadly earnest when he draws a parallel with Rome. He swats aside the conventional objection that, in contrast with both Romans and Britons, Americans have never constructed colonies abroad. Oh, but they have, he says; it's just that Americans are blind to them. America is an 'empire of bases,' he writes, with a network of vast, hardened military encampments across the earth, each one a match for any Roman or Raj outpost."

    Not surprisingly, Freedland is not an American journalist, but a British one who works for the Guardian.

    In the U.S., military bases really only matter, and so make headlines, when the Pentagon attempts to close some of the vast numbers of them scattered across this country. Then, the fear of lost jobs and lost income in local communities leads to headlines and hubbub.

    Of course, millions of Americans know about our bases abroad firsthand. In this sense, they may be the least well kept secrets on the planet. American troops, private contractors, and Defense Department civilian employees all have spent extended periods of time on at least one U.S. base abroad. And yet no one seems to notice the near news blackout on our global bases or consider it the least bit strange.

    The Foreshortened American Century

    In a nutshell, occupying the planet, base by base, normally simply isn't news. Americans may pay no attention and yet, of course, they do pay. It turns out to be a staggeringly expensive process for U.S. taxpayers. Writing of a major 2004 Pentagon global base overhaul (largely aimed at relocating many of them closer to the oil heartlands of the planet), Mike Mechanic of Mother Jones magazine online points out the following: "An expert panel convened by Congress to assess the overseas basing realignment put the cost at $20 billion, counting indirect expenses overlooked by the Pentagon, which had initially budgeted one-fifth that amount."

    And that's only the most obvious way Americans pay. It's hard for us even to begin to grasp just how military (and punitive) is the face that the U.S. has presented to the world, especially during George W. Bush's two terms in office. (Increasingly, that same face is also presented to Americans. For instance, as Paul Krugman indicated recently, the civilian Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] has been so thoroughly wrecked these last years that significant planning for the response to Hurricane Gustav fell on the shoulders of the military's Bush-created U.S. Northern Command.)

    In purely practical terms, though, Americans are unlikely to be able to shoulder forever the massive global role the Pentagon and successive administrations have laid out for us. Sooner or later, cutbacks will come and the sun will slowly begin to set on our base-world abroad.

    In the Cold War era, there were, of course, two "superpowers," the lesser of which disappeared in 1991 after a lifespan of 74 years. Looking at what seemed to be a power vacuum across the Bering Straits, the leaders of the other power prematurely declared themselves triumphant in what had been an epic struggle for global hegemony. It now seems that, rather than victory, the second superpower was just heading for the exit far more slowly.

    As of now, "the American Century," birthed by Time/Life publisher Henry Luce in 1941, has lasted but 67 years. Today, you have to be in full-scale denial not to know that the twenty-first century -- whether it proves to be the Century of Multipolarity, the Century of China, the Century of Energy, or the Century of Chaos -- will not be an American one. The unipolar moment is already so over and, sooner or later, those mega-bases and lily pads alike will wash up on the shores of history, evidence of a remarkable fantasy of a global Pax Americana.

    Not that you're likely to hear much about this in the run-up to November 4th in the U.S. Here, fantasy reigns in both parties where a relatively upbeat view of our globally dominant future is a given, and will remain so, no matter who enters the White House in January 2009. After all, who's going to run for president not on the idea that "it's morning again in America," but on the recognition that it's the wee small hours of the morning, the bender is ending, and the hangover… Well, it's going to be a doozy.

    Better take some B vitamins and get a little sleep. The world's probably not going to look so great by the dawn's early light.

    [Note on Sources: It's rare indeed that the U.S. empire of bases gets anything like the attention it deserves, so, when it does, praise is in order. Mother Jones online has just launched a major project to map out and analyze U.S. bases worldwide. It includes a superb new piece on bases by Chalmers Johnson, "America's Unwelcome Advances" and a number of other top-notch pieces, including one on "How to Stay in Iraq for 1,000 Years" by TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan (the second part of whose Pentagon expansion series will be posted at this site soon). Check out the package of pieces at MJ by clicking here. Perhaps most significant, the magazine has produced an impressive online interactive map of U.S. bases worldwide. Check it out by clicking here. But when you zoom in on an individual country, do note that the first base figures you'll see are the Pentagon's and so possibly not complete. You need to read the MJ texts below each map to get a fuller picture. As will be obvious, if you click on the links in this post, I made good use of MJ's efforts, for which I offer many thanks.]

    Posted on Thursday, September 4, 2008 at 8:13 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Jeff Pasley: Veeps don't matter

    Source: Common-Place.org (8-31-08)

    ... I would lose my political historian’s license if I did not emphasize just how little vice-presidential picks matter, electorally speaking. Voters vote for president, the top, nation-embodying office, and always have, even back in 1796 when only local electors were actually running.

    Now, the fact that the Veep might have to assume the main office, we should take seriously. [Something McCain, apparently, does not take seriously.] The Whigs wished they could have had a do-over on that John Tyler pick, and the Radical Republicans nearly succeeded in doing Andrew Johnson over. Yet electorally, and barring presidential death, it has almost never been a big thing. Lyndon Johnson and John Nance Garner brought some Texas-style political muscle to their respective tickets, yeee-haawww, but Texas was still a Democratic state back then.

    The example that seems to hang over the veep-stakes in recent times has been Missouri’s own Tom Eagleton from 1972. While the Democrats’ craven handling of that episode certainly did not help McGovern in November, the idea that a 49-state, 23-point pulping like 1972 could truly hinge on a momentary running mate snafu is the kind of thing that only a pundit could actually believe. Let’s just say there were some larger forces at work.

    In most other presidential elections, even objectively disastrous picks have just not mattered. Dan Quayle, anyone? Take Dukakis running mate Lloyd Bentsen’s celebrated pantsing of Dan Quayle in 1988.
    It became “one of the most famous moments in US political history” (per the YouTube caption) and entered the permanent cultural lexicon, all the way to getting referenced in children’s Christmas specials. Yet it hardly saved the Dukakis-Bentsen ticket, or even made any difference at all as far as I can tell. Perhaps a non-Quayle would have helped Bush père a bit more in 1992, but I am really just saying that to be nice.

    1992 may only be the second-best example of why running mates don’t matter very much. The best one is probably 1836. Martin Van Buren’s controversial veep pick was Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky, a national hero in some circles for allegedly killing Tecumseh and fighting to keep the post offices open on Sunday. Suffice it to say that Johnson turned out to have some serious negatives. In a country where only white men could vote, and where questioning racism in any way drew vilification and mob violence, Johnson was exposed as having lived openly with an African-American woman named Julia Chinn and the couple’s two mixed-race daughters, whom Johnson educated and married off to white men. The Whig press, really still just proto-Whig at this point, heavily publicized Johnson’s private life and clucked that such race-mixing was the inevitable result of Democratic slumming and demagoguery. The U.S. would be seen as a “national of mulattoes” if Van Buren and Johnson were elected, one newspaper warned. A racist political cartoon was published depicting the Johnson family at home. [For an excellent article on the incident, see Thomas Brown, "The Miscegenation of Richard Mentor Johnson As an Issue in the National Election Campaign of 1835-1836," Civil War History 39 (1993): 5-30.]

    Old Kinderhook’s problematic image down south was not improved by the controversy, but he won the election anyway, carrying Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Virginia, and other states not known for their open-mindedness on racial matters. Looking at the map, Johnson’s unorthodox living arrangements may have hurt Van Buren as much with northern bluenoses, also usually racists, as it did with southerners. At any rate, Van Buren was hardly doomed even by such a catastrophic pick as Johnson.
    ...

    Posted on Thursday, September 4, 2008 at 8:09 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    Jonathan Zimmerman: Poverty, Not Sex Ed, Key Factor in Teen Pregnancy

    Source: San Francisco Chronicle (9-4-08)

    [Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century" (Harvard University Press).]

    One side thinks adolescents should receive more "comprehensive" information about sex, including contraception. The others side favors a more didactic approach, with a simpler message: "abstinence only."

    Sound familiar?

    Brace yourself for yet another round in America's perennial teen-pregnancy wars. On Monday, GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin confirmed that her 17-year-old daughter Bristol is five months pregnant. Faster than you could say "condoms," liberals and conservatives lined up in predictable battle formations. To the liberal camp, of course, the news about Bristol Palin simply confirmed the need for comprehensive sex education in the schools. On the right, meanwhile, Palin's pregnancy spurred new calls for abstinence-only instruction.

    They're both wrong.

    Let's start with conservatives, and their stubborn demand for abstinence-only education. Last year, an exhaustive five-year study confirmed that kids receiving this instruction are no more likely to delay sexual intercourse than their peers.

    But the abstinence-only sex education program still draws $175 million in federal money and untold sums from states and localities. As governor of Alaska, indeed, Sarah Palin supported abstinence-only education and denounced "explicit sex-ed programs" in the schools.

    Yet we still don't have any evidence that these explicit programs work, either. As University of Pennsylvania sociologist Frank Furstenberg confirmed last year, in an exhaustive review of the literature, efforts to prove the effectiveness of comprehensive sex education are "generally unimpressive, to say the least."

    We know that these programs can enhance students' knowledge about risky sex behaviors and change their attitudes toward these same behaviors. But can sex education actually influence what kids do? As best we can tell, it can't.

    There's only one point on which both sides seem to agree: Teen pregnancy is a big problem. They differ on their solutions, of course, but everyone seems to believe that pregnancy hurts the life chances of teenage moms and their children.

    Again, the data suggest otherwise. As Furstenberg has shown, bearing a child as a teenager doesn't hurt a woman's prospects for education, job advancement or marriage. Ditto for her kids, who don't suffer any measurable consequences from having a teenage mother.

    Instead, they suffer for a much more basic reason: They're poor. About two-thirds of teenage mothers live at or below the poverty line at the time they give birth. The less income and opportunity that you have, the more likely you are to become a teenage parent.

    So Americans have it exactly backward. Teen pregnancy doesn't deprive our kids of life chances; instead, kids who lack those chances are the ones who get pregnant. Why? Nobody knows for sure. But it seems that young women who have a sense of power and confidence in their lives are more likely to use contraception. Impoverished girls often lack that confidence, so they don't take measures to protect themselves. They are also less likely to have abortions, which are often too expensive or heavily tabooed in poor communities.

    And so the war rages, largely untethered by facts. For in the end, this struggle isn't really about facts at all. It's about rival views of sex itself. Left-leaning Americans view sex as a normal part of human development, so they want to give adolescents the information that will help them make responsible decisions about it. But social conservatives think sex should be reserved for one population alone: married people. Everyone else should abstain, especially if they're teenagers.

    That helps explain why Sarah Palin - in revealing Bristol's pregnancy - also announced that her daughter will marry Levi Johnston, the 18-year-old father of Bristol's unborn baby. To drive the point home, Johnston has joined the Palins at the GOP convention. It's a family affair, and now he's a part of it.

    The decision won immediate acclaim from conservatives, who regard unwedded childbearing as the greatest plague on the land. And there's a significant body of research showing that children raised by two parents do better than those in single-parent homes.

    But we also know that so-called "shotgun" marriages - that is, unions forged in response to a pregnancy - are heavily prone to divorce. That's one reason why divorce rates are so much higher in so-called red states, where young people are more likely to marry after conceiving a child.

    All things being equal, of course, it's still best for our teenagers - and for their offspring - to delay parenthood. But all things are not equal, and that's the whole point here. The hype over teen pregnancy diverts us from the truly serious problem in American society, which is the growing poverty of teenagers themselves. Last year, for example, UNICEF ranked the United States second to last among 21 developed Western nations in child health, safety and material well-being. Changing the teen pregnancy rate won't change any of that.

    So don't feel sorry for Bristol Palin or her unborn child, who will probably turn out OK. So did Ann Dunham, who bore a son when she was just 18. You've probably heard of him: Barack Obama. He seems to have done pretty well, too.

    Instead, think about the teen parents who lack the social and material advantages that you do. Remember that in most cases they're parents because they're poor, and not the other way around. The more we fight about teen pregnancy, the less we'll focus upon teen poverty. And that's bad news for all of us.

    Posted on Thursday, September 4, 2008 at 5:21 PM | Comments (3) | Top

    Julian Zelizer: Palin McCain’s Dan Quayle?

    Source: Washington Independent (9-3-08)

    [Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. He is the co-editor of “Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s” (Harvard University Press) and is completing a book on the history of national security politics since World War II.]

    Democrats have been relishing every minute since Sen. John McCain announced that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin would be his vice presidential running mate. The attacks have been fast and furious. Palin lacks experience; she has ties to the far right; she has scandals lurking in her personal background. Palin, Democrats say, is McCain’s Dan Quayle.

    This is among the most stinging comparisons in contemporary politics — bringing back memories of the running mate of Vice President George H.W. Bush in 1988. One Republican at the Democratic National Convention in Denver last week, surprised by the pick, predicted, “Democrats will have a field day typecasting her as Quayle in a pantsuit.”

    The comparison has some merit. It is easy to look back at the media coverage of Quayle in August of 1988 and to find language that closely resembles today’s talk about Palin.

    But the Democrats are forgetting the important point: Quayle was on the winning ticket. The candidate with the far more seasoned running mate, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis with Texas Sen. Lloyd Bensten, was trounced that year.

    When Bush picked Quayle, he wanted to shake up the race by bringing a charismatic conservative and younger face onto the ticket. Bush chose Quayle over more established finalists like Sens. Robert Dole, Pete Domenici, Alan Simpson or Rep. Jack Kemp and former Transportation Sec. Elizabeth Dole. Bush knew that conservative activists did not trust him, perceiving him to be part of the “white shoe” Northeastern Republican establishment, far more comfortable with compromise and bipartisanship than the younger renegades of the Reagan Revolution.

    Quayle seemed the perfect antidote. He was part of the up-and-coming cohort of congressional Republicans who maintained close ties to the conservative movement. Quayle made a name for himself in 1988 by attacking President Ronald Reagan for holding arms negotiations with the Soviet Union and betraying the conservative cause.

    “Perestroika is nothing more than refined Stalinism,” Quayle said, talking about the reforms then underway in the Soviet Union. Conservatives were initially excited about the choice. The right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly said that Quayle brought “youth, attractiveness, conservative image . . . all the elements of a great and winning ticket.”

    But things quickly started to go wrong. One problem was the sharp contrast of the team’s age and appearance. Bush made Quayle look too young for the job. Democrats played on this, attacking Quayle’s inexperience.Dukakis, after all, had selected Bentsen, an experienced elder statesman.

    There were also revelations about Quayle’s connections to Paula Parkinson, a stunning female lobbyist at the center of a 1980 scandal, who had revealed that she had used heavy-handed techniques to sway legislators. Parkinson, who later posed nude in Playboy, was the focus of a Justice Dept. investigation into whether politicians had traded favors for sex.

    The investigation did not turn up evidence of wrongdoing. But it was discovered that Quayle was one of the representatives who attended a golf trip with Parkinson in Florida. Quayle insisted that he had done nothing wrong and had gone to “play golf.”

    The senator looked ever more like a deer in the headlights as he faced questions about how he got a spot in the National Guard as a result of his privileged upbringing.

    Republicans were frustrated at their convention, just days after the announcement, when all the media attention in New Orleans was on Quayle rather than the Republican message. GOP strategist Ed Rollins lamented that the carefully planned out convention “got stomped on” by the Quayle selection.

    Quayle also made mistakes after the convention. The most infamous occurred at a photo-op at a school in Trenton, N.J., where Quayle mistakenly corrected a student who had spelled potato correctly. He said the young boy had left an “e” off the end.

    During the vice presidential debate, Quayle compared himself to John F. Kennedy, responding to a question about whether his lack of experience mattered. Obviously prepared for this, Bentsen jumped on the comparison, and said “I served with Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Bentsen was widely regarded as the winner that night.

    Democrats did not stop. One of their favorite sayings was “Quayle: Just a heartbeat away.”

    But the Bush team came back. Even as Democrats attacked Quayle and his candidacy deteriorated, the GOP strategist Lee Atwater and his team kept their guns focused on Dukakis. They painted him as weak on defense, in favor of high taxes and out of touch with mainstream values as a “card-carrying member of the ACLU.”

    In the end, this was what mattered most to voters. The strategy worked. The Republicans trounced the Democrats. Bush won 53.4 percent of the popular vote and a whopping 426 electoral votes—all with Quayle on the ticket.

    There have been other races where controversial picks did not sidetrack a presidential candidacy. During the 1952 presidential campaign, for example, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s pick, Sen. Richard M. Nixon, came under fire from press revelations that he maintained a secret slush fund filled by California supporters. The story broke just days after Eisenhower had announced his selection.

    Eisenhower was prepared to drop Nixon, but the senator went on television. Nixon made a speech, arguing that he and his wife, Pat, were common Americans without wealth, and he mocked the accusations against him. He said, most notably, that he would not return a cocker spaniel, Checkers, that a supporter had given his two little daughters. He spoke of his wife’s “respectable Republican cloth coat” and asked supporters to write directly to the Republican National Committee to show their backing. The polls were in Nixon’s favor — and the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket sailed to victory.

    In the past few days, Democrats have been focusing on one aspect of the 1988 campaign—Quayle’s many problems —while forgetting the overall story: Bush and Quayle won.

    Democrats could certainly point to the weaknesses and dangers in the Palin selection, but they should be cautious. If they allow Palin to distract them from their main target — McCain and his support for the unpopular economic and military policies of President George W. Bush — they might just find themselves like Dukakis and Bensten in 1988, on the losing end.

    Posted on Wednesday, September 3, 2008 at 9:54 PM | Comments (4) | Top

    Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Beijing Games call to mind our 1893 fair

    Source: Chicago Tribune (9-2-08)

    [Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a professor of history at the University of California at Irvine. He is the author of "China's Brave New World—And Other Tales for Global Times." ]

    There is an obvious relevance to Chicago's future in the three-ring circus (make that five-ring) that just concluded in China. Beijing's Olympic venues, opening ceremony and the like will provide points of comparison not just for London in 2012 but also for the Games that Chicago hopes to host four years later.

    But there's also a part of Chicago's past worth revisiting while the Beijing Games are fresh in our minds: the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893.

    There are, of course, critical differences between the Chicago exposition and the Beijing Games.

    But dive into Erik Larson's book "The Devil in the White City" or dip into the Chicago Historical Society's "Grand Illusions: Chicago's World's Fair of 1893," and many interesting parallels emerge.

    Start with the flash: The brightly lit "White City" of 1893, like the opening ceremony of 08/08/08, set a new standard for over-the-top displays using state-of-the-art technologies.

    Many 1890s reports about Chicago read eerily like recent articles on Beijing. Europeans once viewed America with the same mix of fascination and skepticism that Americans now hold for China. In Europe's eyes, the United States was an upstart land where shoddy goods were made and copyrights ignored. But there was an undeniable energy.

    The lingering question as the World's Fair neared was whether the United States could pull off a first-class international event with a hallowed lineage. After all, it was the Universal Exposition of 1889 in Paris for which Eiffel built his famous tower....

    Posted on Tuesday, September 2, 2008 at 9:08 PM | Comments (0) | Top

    John J. McKay: Palin gets her history wrong (If English was good enough for Jesus it's good enough for me)

    Source: http://johnmckay.blogspot.com (9-1-08)

    When Sarah Palin was running for governor in 2006, Eagle Forum, the anti-abortion group run by Phyllis Schlafly, sent a questionnaire to the candidates. Most of her answers were those desired by the group. She would allow abortion only to save the life of the mother (that is, opposed it even for rape and incest). Thought parents should be able to pull their kids out of any school classes that used books or taught information they disagreed with. Favored abstinence-only sex education ,school vouchers, and guns. Opposed hate-crime laws, legalized gambling, benefits for same-sex spouses, and gay marriage. But one answer stands out for its sheer silliness.

    Q: Are you offended by the phrase "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not?

    A: Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I’ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.

    Let's take this one from the top. None of the founding fathers ever said the pledge. It was written long after they were all dead. The first version was written by the Christian Socialist Francis Bellamy (the brother of utopian novelist Edward Bellamy) in 1892. The words were tinkered with a few times during his lifetime, but never included "Under God." Those were added in 1954 by an act of Congress at the request of the Catholic fraternal organization, the Knights of Columbus. The KC wanted the change to get more God into our public life to highlight the difference between the US and the godless Soviet Union.

    This is not a bit of historical trivia. The story of the evolution of the pledge has been told in the press countless times over the last half dozen years while various court cases have kept the pledge, and issues of religion in public schools, in the public eye. Anyone who is well informed on current events or politics--like the governor of a state--should have a passing familiarity with this story.

    Posted on Monday, September 1, 2008 at 7:36 PM | Comments (13) | Top

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    Just How Stupid Are We? By Rick Shenkman

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