Breaking News

Departments

Roundup: Media's Take

This is where we excerpt articles from the media that take a historical approach to events in the news.

Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Robert Spencer: The Last Day of the World

Source: frontpagemag.com (5-31-06)

[Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of five books, seven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). He is also an Adjunct Fellow with the Free Congress Foundation.] As the E.U., U.N. and U.S. contrive to fund the Palestinian Authority despite declarations that they would never aid Hamas; as the Russians rush to aid Iran’s nuclear ambitions; and as America is ever more riven by furious disagreement over the prosecution of the terror war, a historical analogy is useful to put things in perspective.

On Tuesday, May 29, 1453, the armies of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II entered Constantinople, breaking through the defenses of a vastly outnumbered and indomitably courageous Byzantine force. Historian Steven Runciman notes what happened next: the Muslim soldiers "slew everyone that they met in the streets, men, women, and children without discrimination. The blood ran in rivers down the steep streets from the heights of Petra toward the Golden Horn. But soon the lust for slaughter was assuaged. The soldiers realized that captives and precious objects would bring them greater profit." (The Fall of Constantinople 1453, Cambridge University Press, 1965, p. 145.)

It has come to be known as Black Tuesday, the Last Day of the World.

Some jihadists "made for the the small but splendid churches by the walls, Saint George by the Charisian Gate, Saint John in Petra, and the lovely church of the monastery of the Holy Saviour in Chora, to strip them of their stores of plate and their vestments and everything else that could be torn from them. In the Chora they left the mosaics and frescoes, but they destroyed the icon of the Mother of God, the Hodigitria, the holiest picture in all Byzantium, painted, so men said, by Saint Luke himself. It had been taken there from its own church beside the Palace at the beginning of the siege, that its beneficient presence might be at hand to inspire the defenders on the walls. It was taken from its setting and hacked into four pieces." (P. 146.)

The jihadists also entered the Hagia Sophia, which for nearly a thousand years had been the grandest church in Christendom. The faithful had gathered within its hallowed walls to pray during the city’s last agony. The Muslims, according to Runciman, halted the celebration of Orthros (morning prayer); the priests, according to legend, took the sacred vessels and disappeared into the cathedral’s eastern wall, through which they shall return to complete the divine service one day. Muslim men then killed the elderly and weak and led the rest off into slavery.

Once the Muslims had throughly subdued Constantinople, they set out to Islamize it. According to the Muslim chronicler Hoca Sa’deddin, tutor of the sixteenth-century Sultans Murad III and Mehmed III, "churches which were within the city were emptied of their vile idols and cleansed from the filthy and idolatrous impurities and by the defacement of their images and the erection of Islamic prayer niches and pulpits many monasteries and chapels became the envy of the gardens of Paradise."

Tuesday has been regarded as unlucky by superstitious Greeks ever since.

Why did this happen?

It had been a long time coming. The once-great Empire had been by the time of this last siege of Constantinople reduced to little more than the city itself. But a few chief causes can be isolated:

1. Realpolitik. Short-sighted Byzantine Emperors such as John VI Cantacuzenes made ill-advised alliances with the Ottomans; in 1347 he invited them into Europe to aid them in a dynastic dispute, and they haven't left yet.

2. Disunity. The Western European powers were themselves disunited and preoccupied with their own affairs. Compounding that was the fact that they couldn't rally much support for a bailout of the Byzantines without an ecclesiastical unity that, when it was affected on paper by the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Emperor, was rejected by the people of the Empire. The force the West finally sent was too small, and it was annihilated by the Muslims at Varna in Bulgaria in 1444. Far too many Westerners didn't see the peril of Constantinople as their peril, and far too many Easterners subscribed to the Byzantine official Lukas Notaras' quip: "Better the turban of the Sultan than the tiara of the Pope."

Yes, well, Notaras found out otherwise when the Sultan took a liking to the official's teenage boys ("like pearls," Qur'an 52:24) and had them beheaded before his eyes when Notaras refused to give his blessing to the Sultan's taking them for his pleasure. The Pope, for all his enormities, was not likely to have done that.

Meanwhile, the world has forgotten what happened on Black Tuesday, and so many other days like it from India to Spain, and persists in the fantasy that Islam does not contain an imperialist impulse and that Muslims can be admitted without limit into Western countries without any attempt to determine how many would like ultimately to subjugate and Islamize their new countries, the way their forefathers did to Constantinople so long ago.

And today we see the same ill-informed games of realpolitik, pragmatic alliances made with those who would conquer and subjugate us, and the same disunity and finger-pointing at each other instead of unity in the face of this threat to our common survival. It is the same sentiment Pastor Niemöller bewailed in his famous poem -- may we be spared from discovering when they come for us that there is no one left to speak for us, for they have all already been taken.

It is fitting that Black Tuesday coincided this year with Memorial Day. For only a strong defense -- not just military, but cultural and spiritual, a civilizational defense -- will conquer the forces of jihad and keep there from being many more Black Tuesdays, many more Last Days of the World. May we mount that defense, and speedily.

Posted on Wednesday, May 31, 2006 at 6:45 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Morton Mintz: The conspiracy that ordained our dependence on cars

Source: Nation (5-31-06)

High gas prices and our "addiction" to foreign oil, as President Bush has called it, have roots in a nearly forgotten criminal conspiracy. It was this conspiracy that ordained our extreme dependence on cars and trucks and the inevitable and all-but-irreversible results, including filthy air, congestion, long commutes and accelerated global warming.

In 1949, three of our largest corporations--General Motors, Standard Oil of California (SoCal, now Chevron) and Firestone Tire and Rubber (now Japan's Bridgestone)--were convicted of having conspired for more than a decade to replace highly efficient urban electric transit systems with bus lines. The bus lines' operators contracted never to buy new equipment "using any fuel or means of propulsion other than" petroleum. GM, SoCal and Firestone were fined $5,000 each, the maximum the antitrust laws then allowed. GM's treasurer, also convicted, was fined $1.

GM's $5,001 punishment somehow failed to deter it from continuing for six years to acquire electric-powered rail and bus properties and convert them to gasoline and diesel. The conspiracy-to-monopolize convictions, upheld on appeal, never received attention commensurate with their impact. In 1974, however, they did become a subject of Senate Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee hearings on the broad topic of auto industry reform.

Strikingly, the subcommittee chairman, Philip Hart, was the senior senator from Michigan, where the auto industry was dominant and where GM was the dominant corporation. An assistant subcommittee counsel, Bradford Snell, had researched the conspiracy for American Ground Transport, a study financed by the Stern Fund. GM, he testified, had led the destruction of more than 100 electric-rail transit systems in forty-five cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore and St. Louis.

The instruments of destruction were principally National City Lines (NCL) and other holding companies formed by GM, a manufacturer of gas and diesel buses; SoCal and Phillips Petroleum, providers of gasoline and diesel fuels; and Firestone, provider of bus tires. To finance the conversion of electric transit systems in sixteen states to gas or diesel buses, GM, SoCal, Firestone and Phillips (also convicted) gave NCL $9 million by 1950, Snell told the hearing. The conversion was virtually complete by the mid-1950s. In Los Angeles, Snell testified, GM and SoCal created NCL affiliates that bought up and scrapped rail lines, including those used by Pacific Electric, the world's largest electric railway operation. Its 3,000 trains had carried 80 million passengers through fifty-six Southern California incorporated communities annually. "Motorization drastically altered the way of life in Southern California," Snell wrote in a section of the study later endorsed by Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley. "Today," he continued,

Los Angeles is an ecological wasteland. The palm trees are dying from petrochemical smog; the orange groves have been paved over by 300 miles of freeways; the air is a septic tank into which 4 million cars, half of them built by General Motors, pump 13,000 tons of pollutants daily.... As early as 1963, the city was already seeking ways of raising $500 million to rebuild a rail system "to supersede its present inadequate network of bus lines".... A decade later, the estimated cost of constructing a 116-mile rail system, less than one-sixth the size of the earlier Pacific Electric, had escalated to more than $6 billion.

"In every city and suburb, our rail and bus services are either dead or dying," Snell testified. "At the same time, American travelers returning from Europe, for example, say there is a 'bus gap.' Even in Moscow, they say, the buses and subways look better than anything made in the United States. Travelers back from Japan tell the same story. Having ridden the 150-mile-per-hour bullet trains, they ask, 'Whatever happened to America's railroads?' " What happened was that with the end of steam, railroads everywhere electrified. Everywhere but here, that is: GM, the railroads' biggest single customer, forced them to switch to much less efficient diesel locomotives.

In a sixty-seven-page reply to these and other Snell charges, GM said it "did not generate the winds of change which doomed the streetcar systems" but did, "through its buses, help to alleviate the disruption left in their wake." Recalling the 1930s, GM said: "Times were hard and public transportation systems were collapsing.... GM was able to help with technology, with enterprise, and in some cases, with capital.... The buses it sold helped give mass transportation a new lease on life, which lasted into the postwar years." After reviewing the trial record, the senior judge of the US Court of Appeals in Washington, George MacKinnon, dismissed GM's defense. The convictions of GM, SoCal and Firestone resulted from "their concerted effort to replace electric streetcars with buses in numerous large and small cities," he told the Legal Times in 1990.

Resurrecting the story of the illegal behavior that distorted our transportation system will do nothing to lower gas prices. But it is instructive. It warns of a Congress that instead of overseeing corporate power is overseen by it. It illuminates the hypocrisy of tough-on-crime politicians and pundits who remain silent about corporate crime that harms people and the environment and even kills. And it shines a light on the inspiring legacy of a lawmaker whose name graces a Senate office building but whose brand of moral courage has too seldom been visible on Capitol Hill in the three decades since his death.

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 Wednesday, May 31, 2006 at 6:26 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Lee Siegel: How Oprah Changed the World

Source: New Republic (5-26-06)

[Lee Siegel is a senior editor at The New Republic.]

... In 1986, human nature in America started to change. That year, "The Oprah Winfrey Show," based in Chicago, became nationally syndicated, and the country entered the beginning stages of a quiet cultural revolution. It took awhile for the transformation to take hold, but, four years later, the effects were unmistakable. Do you really think George H.W. Bush, who presided over the spectacularly successful Gulf war, lost to Bill Clinton in 1992 because of a sagging economy? It was Oprah, stupid. It was Oprah behind Clinton in 1992 and also in 1996; and it was Oprah behind George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, electoral shenanigans notwithstanding.

It's safe to say that, with her parade of afflicted guests, Oprah helped along the perception of Clinton's childhood wounds as evidence of authentic character. With her emphasis on imperfect self-presentation as proof of genuine intention--she has appeared on the air in her bathrobe, without makeup--she also helped create an atmosphere that turned Al Gore, and then John Kerry, into fabricated con men who were too handsome (Kerry had his lanky Jimmy Stewart allure), articulate, and privileged to be trusted or true. Bush, on the other hand, was so inarticulate, awkward, and funny-looking that, when you thought of his own super-privileged background, you felt that at least he had something going for him. And all that unconcealed imperfection made him real--or at least electable.

It's ironic that O, Oprah's glossy monthly magazine, relies on the same formulas as potent arbiters of perfect appearance like Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and Self. Like its founder and editorial director, O is on the very front line in the American struggle between tyrannical appearances and the ordinary, imperfect, mortal person. Not just the suffering, injured person, but the unbeautiful person. In our society, not measuring up to resplendent appearances can cause a deep psychic wound. Every sphere of life has its heroic moments, and, in the War of Ordinary People Against Ideal Images, this exchange between Oprah and Julia Roberts is the equivalent of that solitary figure confronting the tank in Tiananmen Square:


Oprah: Does the pretty thing ever get to ya? ... I'm wondering, I was having this discussion with my girlfriend the other day. I said, "It's a really great thing we were never, like, pretty women, because now we don't have to worry about losing that."


Julia: You can't really complain about being in a movie called Pretty Woman when you're the woman.

It's hardly a coincidence that Roberts has been one of Oprah's select circle of favorite guests. Her full mouth and large, lustrous eyes contrast with and echo Oprah's own features. Just 33 years ago, when a 19-year-old Oprah got her start in television, anchoring the news for a local Nashville station, society would not have been ready to acknowledge such a comparison. You can only talk about it now because Oprah has become so rich and famous--she attracts tens of millions viewers around the world, and her net worth is said to be about 1.4 billion dollars. But the way she orchestrates and manipulates appearances on her show is one of the sources of her success.

It is not hard to imagine that, for many middle-class black women in her audience, Oprah's dig at Roberts--"the pretty thing" fades, which is a tragedy when all you have is the pretty thing--is an affirmation of sorts. At that moment, the white movie star (the yuppies' very goddess) is diminished by the black host's humor, irresistible self-deprecation, and earthy wisdom--qualities that black women in her audience might identity with and that, in Oprah's inspiring case, helped her bypass the white standard of beauty on her sure-footed path toward power and riches. After all, Roberts is Oprah's guest, not the other way around. Oprah is the one asking the questions, and with all the self-assurance and astuteness of someone who knows the answers. With Roberts, Oprah's sharp tongue not only spoke a humble truth to powerful appearance; it repossessed, as it were, the black sensuality that collagen stole and gave to the white world. ...

Like Oprah herself, Winfreyism has an equally fraught countermotion. The reverse side of a democracy based on exchangeable feelings is the creation of a kingdom of mere sensations, in which no experience has a higher--or different--value than any other experience. We weep and empathize with the self-destructive mother, we weep and empathize with Sidney Poitier, we weep and empathize with the young woman dying of anorexia, we weep and empathize with Teri Hatcher, we weep and empathize with the girl with the disfigured face, we weep and empathize with the grateful recipients of Oprah's gift of a new car to every member of one lucky audience, we weep and empathize with the woman burned beyond recognition by her vicious husband. In the end, like the melting vision of tearing eyes, the situations blur into each other without distinction. They are all relative to your own experience of watching them. The fungibility of feeling is really a reduction of all experience to the effect it has on your own quality of feeling.

In fact, Oprah's universal empathy has an infinite flexibility. When critics complained that she focused too much on stories of physical and emotional horror, Oprah quickly responded, in the early '90s, by mocking that very format. Publicly vowing to start diversifying her show, she immediately incorporated lighter fare more frequently. Several months after Jonathan Franzen dissed her Book Club, an incident that gave rise to a heated debate over its true function and value, Oprah disbanded it. (It has returned, but in a more peripheral and occasional way.) The Frey incident sent her spinning in appeasement yet again.

One of Oprah's most powerful visual metaphors is how she utterly transforms her appearance--her hairstyle, mode of dress, type of jewelry, even her manner of speaking--from day to day. It is her clever, dramatic embodiment of the possibility of personal change and growth. But ability to change is also a capacity for accommodation. It hints at a personality that will "stretch" itself in any rewarding direction, unconstrained by truthfulness or consistency. Unconstrained by the constraint of character, you might say.

The name Oprah gave to her production company--her business--is Harpo Productions, which is "Oprah" spelled backward. That is exactly right. Winfreyism is the expression of an immensely reassuring and inspiring message that has, without doubt, helped millions of people carry on with their lives. And it is also an empty, cynical, icily selfish outlook on life that undercuts its own positive energy at every turn. On her way to Auschwitz, sitting in her hotel room in Krakow, thinking about the masses of people who were murdered in the death camp, Oprah wrote in O, "I have never felt more human." Her empathy and moral growth seem to require human sacrifice. Yet watching Oprah does fill you with hope. It also plunges you into despair. She has become something like America itself.



Posted on Wednesday, May 31, 2006 at 6:22 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Max Boot: Send in the mercenaries (Darfur)

Source: LAT (5-31-06)

SO THE UNITED STATES has brokered a cease-fire among the warring factions in Darfur, and the U.N. Security Council has authorized the deployment of a peacekeeping force. To anyone blissfully unfamiliar with history, this sounds like a decisive step that will finally end the violence that has left at least 200,000 dead and 2 million homeless.

Alas, this is not the first cease-fire agreement in Darfur. An accord was reached in 2004 and was immediately violated. There is no reason to think that the current treaty will fare any better, especially because one of the main Darfur rebel groups has refused to sign it.

Pieces of paper, no matter how promising, require power in order to be enforced. The question is: Who will provide that power in Darfur? The African Union force deployed in 2004 has proven woefully inadequate. Its 7,000 soldiers lack the numbers, training and equipment to patrol an undeveloped region the size of France. They don't even have a mandate to stop ethnic cleansing; they are only supposed to monitor the situation.

If you listen to the bloviators at Turtle Bay, salvation will come from the deployment of a larger corps of blue helmets. If only. What is there in the history of United Nations peacekeepers that gives anyone any confidence that they can stop a determined adversary?

The odds are much greater that U.N. representatives will instead be taken as hostages by bloodthirsty thugs, as happened in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995 and in Sierra Leone five years later. Or that, rather than protecting the people, the peacekeepers will prey on them — as allegedly has happened in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and Congo, all places where blue helmets have been accused of a horrifying litany of sexual abuses, including pedophilia, rape and prostitution.

Even if these worst-case scenarios don't come to pass, the U.N. is likely to prove ineffectual in the face of determined opposition. Look at what is happening in East Timor, where, after seven years of U.N. stewardship, the capital has been paralyzed by fighting among armed gangs. The situation is even worse in Haiti, where a Brazilian-led U.N. force has done little to stem growing chaos. It is worse still in Somalia — the most lawless country on Earth — where a U.N. deployment failed in the early 1990s.

And to think that some self-described realists had the temerity to suggest that everything would have worked out in Iraq if only the lead role had been turned over to the U.N.! East Timor and Haiti are much smaller and more isolated, but the U.N. hasn't worked its multilateral magic in either place.

My point here isn't to indulge in U.N.-bashing for its own sake but simply to suggest that we should temper our expectations for the peacekeeping force that is due to arrive in Darfur in six to nine months' time. The drawn-out timetable itself suggests how ineffectual the U.N. is. Even under the best of circumstances, the janjaweed militia will enjoy another half-year of rapine without serious interference.

If the so-called civilization nations of the world were serious about ending what the U.S. government has described as genocide, they would not fob off the job on the U.N. They would send their own troops. But of course they're not serious. At least not that serious.

But perhaps there is a way to stop the killing even without sending an American or European army. Send a private army. A number of commercial security firms such as Blackwater USA are willing, for the right price, to send their own forces, made up in large part of veterans of Western militaries, to stop the genocide.

We know from experience that such private units would be far more effective than any U.N. peacekeepers. In the 1990s, the South African firm Executive Outcomes and the British firm Sandline made quick work of rebel movements in Angola and Sierra Leone. Critics complain that these mercenaries offered only a temporary respite from the violence, but that was all they were hired to do. Presumably longer-term contracts could create longer-term security, and at a fraction of the cost of a U.N. mission.

Yet this solution is deemed unacceptable by the moral giants who run the United Nations. They claim that it is objectionable to employ — sniff — mercenaries. More objectionable, it seems, than passing empty resolutions, sending ineffectual peacekeeping forces and letting genocide continue.

Posted on Wednesday, May 31, 2006 at 5:36 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Masaru Honda: Japan's Struggle to Think for Itself in National Strategy

Source: Japan Focus (5-28-06)

[Honda Masaru is an Asahi Shimbun Senior Staff Writer.]

Talk of Japan's "National strategy" has often been avoided in this country since the end of World War II, largely because of Japan's infamous past mistakes.

Japan is a regional Asian power and is the second-largest economy in the world.

Its actions cause ripples on a global scale whether it likes it or not.

And when powerful nations err in their strategies or fail to clarify them, their neighbors get worried.
The Asahi Shimbun interviewed 40 experts about Japan's national strategy, or lack thereof, over the past six decades. From academics to policy-makers, a summation of their views is offered below.

***

Independence

Most of the experts The Asahi Shimbun spoke with said that in their opinion, from the end of the Cold War to the present, Japan has not had a national strategy.

However, opinion regarding the period between Japan's independence and the early 1970s is divided.
The difference seems to depend on whether the so-called Yoshida doctrine of 1951 to 1972, a path established by former Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru, should be considered an actual national strategy per se.

The period extends from the end of Japan's occupation by the Allied Forces to the time that Okinawa wa s handed back to Japan from U.S. control.

Nakanishi Hiroshi, professor of international politics at Kyoto University, is of the opinion that Japan's postwar course, as set by Yoshida, was indeed "a national strategy of sorts."

In Nakanishi's opinion, three elements--moving on from the aftermath of being a defeated nation, cooperating with the United States and Britain, and economic recovery--overlapped and merged into a single strategy.

"In terms of diplomacy, in particular, in Japan's effort to become a normal nation and shed the status of a defeated nation, Yoshida likely judged that the quick and easy way to do so was to gain the help of the United States," Nakanishi said.

"This path was further shaped by his successors, such as prime ministers Ikeda Hayato and Sato Eisaku, and took root among the public in the 1960s."

This view is shared by many Foreign Ministry officials. Kuriyama Takakazu, former ambassador to the United States, thinks the Yoshida doctrine fostered peace in the nation and helped its postwar recovery.

"It formed the basis of its development later, and therefore, this national strategy proved to be a great success," said Kuriyama.

Former Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, on the other hand, is critical of Yoshida's path.
"That was a policy of conforming to the United States," Nakasone said.

"In essence, the priority was on economic recovery, and there was no room for independently establishing a strategy."

Nakasone says that Yoshida's course lacked a vision of postwar nation-building regarding issues like the Constitution, education and defense.

"It lacked the notion of national initiative," he said.

He also argues Japan should have worked jointly with the United States to form a global strategy, even while under the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty arrangement, by expressing its recommendations to Washington.

Similar criticism can also be heard from many defense specialists.

"The wealthy United States engulfed Japan with the bilateral security treaty system," said one senior Defense Agency official who has spent time in the United States studying national strategy. "It dragged Japan into the American market, and as much as possible accepted Japan's selfishness so that Japan could be maintained as a front for fighting communism.

"Japan was so content with the arrangement that it forgot the reality of being extraordinarily dependent on it."

These contrasting views are two sides of the same coin. The consensus seems to be that the Yoshida doctrine chose prosperity for Japan at the cost of its autonomy. Judging the value of that path depends on whether one focuses on its advantages or drawbacks.

Cold War

The diplomacy of former Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke revolved around three principles: centering Japan's diplomacy on the United Nations, cooperating with the free world, and maintaining Japan's position in Asia.

Subsequent administrations seemed to maintain those principles, at least on the surface. The reality, though, is that the Japan-U.S. relationship has formed the bedrock of Japanese foreign policy.

Although there have been efforts to devise an Asian policy that was independent, such as the Fukuda doctrine in the late 1970s, they were always within the limits of what Washington's Cold War policies would tolerate.

"Having principles saves contemplation and time," said one top-level Foreign Ministry official.

"If we have an established principle, then we won't have to doubt it each time we debate something.
"In my case, I never doubt the principle that the development of the Japan-U.S. alliance is in Japan's interests. My rationalization is to concentrate efforts on managing that alliance."

The official's comments suggest that for someone involved in diplomacy at the working level there is no room to be constantly rethinking basic strategies.

Indeed, managing the bilateral alliance has become a complicated task.

Although the United States accounted for half the world's GDP in the 1950s, that figure fell to around 30 percent in the 1980s. Japan's GDP, on the other hand, rose to fully half of the United States'. This change became the major cause of trade friction between the two nations, and the reason Washington began calling on Tokyo to take a bigger role in the alliance.

Some in the United States began complaining that Yoshida's path amounted to nothing more than mercantilism.

Nevertheless, Tokyo did not conduct a fundamental review of Japanese diplomatic policy, opting for stopgap measures instead, all the while repeating the mantra at home that "Japan-U.S. relations have never been better."

Then in 1989, the Cold War ended.

One high-level former Foreign Ministry official, someone who was at the very core of the ministry, admitted on condition of anonymity that both politicians and the ministry itself have lacked the proper mindset for strategy.

"Under the Cold War system, we didn't have to think about strategy regarding the general course we should aim for and what we should do to get there," the official said.

"With the collapse of the system, we became all the more conscious that we have to think for ourselves."

Politicians and ministry officials were so accustomed to not having to think that after the Cold War ended they were at a total loss as to what to rely on or how to go about thinking for themselves, the official said.

It is a situation, the official acknowledges, that continues to this day.

In the post-Cold War period

Japan now faces the immense task of helping to build and maintain the global order in the new age. We can no longer merely look after the nation's interests in the existing order.

Dispatching the Self-Defense Forces to participate in U.N. peacekeeping operations was part of that direction. Another was Tokyo's proposal to reform the U.N. Security Council.

Of vital importance, however, is whether Japan has a comprehensive strategy to back such policy decisions.

In their May 2003 summit, Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro and U.S. President George W. Bush agreed the Japan-U.S. alliance should play a key role in world affairs. The first result of that agreement was Tokyo's dispatch of SDF troops to Iraq.

But Koizumi's explanations of that move did not appear to have been based on a comprehensive strategy.

"The Japan-U.S. alliance shifted from protecting Japan to the two nations jointly shouldering responsibility for the international community," said Kazuo Ogura, Japan Foundation president.
"However, the global order Japan envisions may not be the same as the international order the United States is trying to build. Is it? Japan now faces that big question," said Ogura, who previously held the posts of Japanese ambassador to South Korea and France.

In February 2005, Tokyo and Washington set up common strategic goals within the process of the U.S. military's global transformation, including issues concerning China and Taiwan. Japan a few months earlier had revised the nation's long-term basic defense plan.

The revamped Japanese policy included strengthening the Japan-U.S. security alliance while improving security in the international arena so that Japan would not face any threats.

The latter is a new addition to the defense policy, and it requires the expansion of SDF operations. A senior Defense Agency official called the plan "a defense strategy." Clearly describing the nation's national strategy in this way was necessary to ensure civilian control over the SDF. However, because the government has yet to formulate and communicate clear national or diplomatic strategies, the defense strategy triggered concerns among Japan's Asian neighbors. These countries wonder what Japan is up to.

At this juncture, Japan must compile a comprehensive national strategy that reflects the country's views on how to build and maintain international order, taking into consideration the opinions of both the United States and Asia.

That will be the first step toward rebuilding Japan's diplomacy that appears to have recently lost direction in waves of nationalism and populism.

The experts interviewed by The Asahi Shimbun expressed similar views concerning the critical situation facing Japan's diplomacy and security.

Lack of a unified strategy

Coming up with a national strategy involves deciding which of the many national interests should take priority. The policies formed by the prime minister and his top advisers must be included in this process. Yet, they have not been. And that has led to confusion about priorities.

"Economics and diplomacy must work hand in hand. But there have been no moves to integrate their actions," Sakakibara Eisuke, a former vice finance minister for international affairs, recalled of his days in that powerful role.

"The Finance Ministry presided over international monetary diplomacy without consulting the Foreign Ministry, which mainly oversaw diplomacy over security issues. I think the former Ministry of International Trade and Industry also worked independently to settle trade issues with other nations," he said. "There was no mechanism in the Japanese government to integrate all that, nor did politicians even try to."

Now a professor at Waseda University, Sakakibara said the situation has not changed.

Even at the Foreign Ministry, it seems little effort is made among officials to set priorities for diplomatic policies.

"The Foreign Ministry deftly uses prime ministers and foreign ministers in different ways, to its own advantage," said a senior government official.

A diplomatic policy issue may be initially handled by a division chief, then passed up to the bureau director before reaching the administrative vice minister. Some issues then go to the foreign minister, while other more important issues go to the prime minister. It is a rigid vertical structure that leaves little room for debate among policymakers.

"There is hardly any discussion among officials on what options are available before a particular decision is made," the former government official said.

In 1986, the government set up the Security Council of Japan to handle national security decisions. Chaired by the prime minister, the council included Cabinet ministers in charge of foreign affairs, finance, trade and economy and defense, among others. It was set up to fortify the function of the Cabinet in setting national defense policies.

Yet, Morimoto Satoshi, a former senior Foreign Ministry official involved in security policies who is now a professor of security issues at Tokyo's Takushoku University, cast doubt on the council's independence.

He said that every ministers' statement in the Security Council was decided at meetings among senior officials of related ministries and agencies more than one day before the council. He said the council meetings of Cabinet members were merely rubber-stamp "ceremonies."

"Bureaucracy takes the lead. The council meetings have little substance. Ministries divide up the power according to their policy territories," Morimoto said. "The system makes it impossible to form a (unified) national strategy."

An advisory panel to the prime minister on diplomacy, headed by former diplomat Yukio Okamoto, in 2002 advised a security council be set up within the Cabinet. However, the prime minister appears to have so far ignored that report.

This article appeared in The IHT/Asahi Shimbun on May 4, 2006.

Posted on Tuesday, May 30, 2006 at 9:58 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Alberto J. Mora: An Affront To American Values

Source: Wa Po (5-27-06)

[The writer, who retired as Navy general counsel last year, wrote a memo to Pentagon officials two years before the Abu Ghraib scandal that warned against circumventing international agreements on torture and detainee treatment. Remarks made by Alberto J. Mora, former U.S. Navy General Counsel, on accepting the 2006 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award, May 22, 2006.]

Caroline and Senator Kennedy, Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, Chairman Murtha, family, colleagues, and friends. 

Today, the Foundation accords me a great honor. The value and significance I give to the Profile in Courage Award is amplified both because it carries President Kennedy’s name and because it recognizes courage – that rarest of virtues that was, as Robert Kennedy told us, the one the President admired most. I thank you most humbly and gratefully for this award.

Today, we all remember President Kennedy and his life’s meaning. We remember his humor and contagious smile, his elegance, and the grace of his bearing and language. We remember his courage as a naval officer in combat at sea, his courage in public office, and his courage in the face of the pain and physical infirmities that accompanied much of his life. We remember his ideals, and his uncompromising defense of our liberties and national values. 

And, today, we feel the heat of a small eternal flame burning on an Arlington hillside. Today, just as when first lit more than forty years ago, that testament of fire eloquently expresses both our Nation’s continuing sense of loss and – equally – our celebration of a life of exuberance, excellence, achievement, and service that is of lasting consequence and meaning for our future.

The Foundation recognizes me for certain actions that are generously, too generously, classified as “courageous.” These actions were in response to policies adopted by our Nation that permitted the infliction of cruelty upon captive human beings. Please allow me to say a few words about courage – and cruelty.

For over four years I had the privilege of serving as Navy General Counsel, where I worked with men and women who embody real courage. They were easy to spot because they wore the uniform of the Navy or Marines or of the other services. By now, most have served in the battlefields of the Middle East. Many have been there more than once and many bear the scars of combat. Despite the name of the award you give me today, I want you to know I have difficulty applying the same word of distinction to my actions. When I hear the word “courage,” I think of them.

All of us understand physical courage. Few of us here may be veterans of combat, but all of us are veterans of the schoolyard. And each of us remembers moments – even if only from childhood – when our knees were knocking because this type of courage was demanded of us. We know what it takes to summon physical courage, so we honor our men and women in uniform because their courage, routinely, is put to the ultimate test. Yet what I never understood until I started working with our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines is that their service to their country requires far more than physical courage. They have other types of courage that are less visible to those of us who have never worn the uniform.

A large painting hangs on the wall above the marble staircase leading to the Secretary of Defense’s office in the Pentagon. It depicts an Air Force officer and his family in church, kneeling at the altar. Soft light flows from a stained glass window behind them. Devoutly kneeling beside the officer are his wife and their young son and daughter. They are all praying, heads bowed, their faces partially hidden. 

During my first days at the Pentagon, I found the painting to be almost incomprehensible. Why should this painting, from the hundreds that hang in that building, be given such prominence? As a work of art it is not particularly distinguished. Its surface theme of military faith seemed to me to be of lesser importance, and certainly less heroic, than many of the other topics captured in the large body of art collected during our military history. 

There is, however, a plaque below and along the length of the painting that provides meaning and transforms it into something moving and eloquent. The plaque, which had at first escaped my attention, bears the inscription from the Bible – Isaiah, chapter 6, verse 8 – in which God asks the question: “Whom shall I send. And who will go for us?”, and to which Isaiah answers: “Here I am. Send me!” The coupling of this biblical passage to the scene of the military family at prayer changed my entire understanding of the painting. It also changed my comprehension of the courage demanded every day of our men and women in uniform and of their families. From that painting, two lessons will stay with me, always. 

First, it taught me that our soldiers’ courage is tested outside of military actions. Their courage, the painting taught me, is not first called for in battle. It is first demonstrated when a person decides to become a soldier, when he or she stands up, answers the Nation’s call, and says, “Here I am. Send me.” Courage is also demonstrated in the moment depicted in the painting – the departure. This is that moment in every soldier’s life when he or she, departing for duty or combat, says goodbye to the family; when they say goodbye; and when the soldier breaks the family’s embrace and turns to go. These moments occur and have occurred countless times since the first days of our Nation. We know it took place in the histories of the Kennedy and Murtha families, as it did, no doubt, in the lives of others in this room. At that moment, all the family members know they may never see each other again. Yet the soldier still turns, and leaves. “Here I am. Send me.” And the spouse and the son and the daughter – or perhaps it is the father and mother – let the soldier go. After the screen door slams and the sound of the footsteps fade, the family then endures the separation, and the loneliness, and the fears. They, too, say, “Here I am. Send me.”

This is courage.

The second lesson I drew from this painting comes from the bowed head of the Air Force officer. Many in the military services are devout; for them, their faith is an important and sustaining part of their lives in the military. Many others find less importance in religion or no importance at all. This is equally respected. But devout or not, every soldier, sailor, airman, or Marine pledges his or her allegiance to our Constitution and to the values protected by this document. The officer’s bowed head reminds us that American military power, indeed, any use of force by our Nation, should always be subordinated to our laws and values. Without such subordination, our power is purposeless and unconstrained, and may become illegitimate.

In response to the 3,000 murders on September 11, our Nation went to war. In Afghanistan, our targets were the Al Qaeda perpetrators and the Taliban regime that aided and abetted them. In Iraq, the target was an unstable tyrant who had a history of using chemical weapons and who could be trusted to cheat on and retreat from his international commitments. I supported both engagements as Navy General Counsel. I support them still as a private citizen. I regard each as a prudent and even necessary use of force. The terrorist threat, and the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction in reckless hands, can never be underestimated: I subscribe to Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England’s view that the only reason Al Qaeda killed 3,000 individuals was because they couldn’t kill three million. These threats dictated an aggressive response, and President Bush and our Nation responded accordingly.

And yet, there have been times in our Nation’s history when, in our quest for security, our fear momentarily overcomes our judgment and our power slips the discipline of the law and our national values. 

One such moment occurred in 1942 following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In what will always be regarded as an act of national shame, military authorities rounded up 120,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry and incarcerated them on the presumption of disloyalty. These citizens were stripped of their rights and held in detention camps for the duration of the war. Many lost businesses and property. When we recall this event – and it is relevant to our current situation – we also recall with shame the Supreme Court’s abdication of its judicial responsibilities in the notorious Korematsu decision, where it endorsed the legality of the patently unconstitutional detention.

Korematsu reminds us that when threats and fear converge, our laws and principles can become fragile. They are fragile today. In the summer of 2002 – sixty years after Korematsu and only four years ago – at Guantanamo and elsewhere, U.S. authorities held in detention individuals thought to have information on other impending attacks against the United States. Unless this information was obtained, it was believed, more Americans – perhaps many more – would die. In this context, our government issued legal and policy documents providing, in effect, that for some detainees labeled as “unlawful combatants,” interrogation methods constituting cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment could be applied under the President’s constitutional commander-in-chief authorities. Although there is continuing debate as to the details of how, when, and why, we know such cruel treatment was applied at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and other locations. We know the treatment may have reached the level of torture in some instances. And there are still questions as to whether these policies were related, if at all, to the deaths of several dozen detainees in custody.

It is astonishing to me, still, that I should be here today addressing the issue of American cruelty – or that anyone would ever have to. Our forefathers, who permanently defined our civic values, drafted our Constitution inspired by the belief that law could not create, but only recognize, certain inalienable rights granted by God – to every person, not just citizens, and not just here, but everywhere. Those rights form a shield that protects core human dignity. Because this is so, the Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel punishment. The constitutional jurisprudence of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments outlaws cruel treatment that shocks the conscience. The Nuremberg Trials – that triumph of American justice and statesmanship that launched the modern era of human rights and international criminal law – treated prisoner abuse as an indictable crime. The Geneva Conventions forbid the application of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment to all captives, as do all of the major human rights treaties adopted and ratified by our country during the last century. There should have been no doubt or ambiguity about the standard of conduct that our laws require of us. And even if laws have jurisdictional limits, there could have been no doubt about what our values forbade.

Despite this, there was abuse. Not all were mistreated, but some were. For those mistreated, history will ultimately judge what the precise quantum of abuse inflicted was – whether it was torture or some lesser cruelty – and whether it resulted from official commission, omission, or whether it occurred despite every reasonable effort to prevent the abuse. Whatever the ultimate historical judgment, it is established fact that documents justifying and authorizing the abusive treatment of detainees during interrogation were approved and distributed. These authorizations rested on the three beliefs: that no law prohibited the application of cruelty; that no law should be adopted that would do so; and that our government could choose to apply the cruelty – or not – as a matter of policy depending on the dictates of perceived military necessity. Some officials may also have believed that, if this abuse were disclosed or discovered, virtually no one would care. The resulting, inescapable truth is that – no matter how circumscribed these policies were, or how short their duration, or how few the victims – for as long as these policies were in effect our government had adopted what only can be labeled as a policy of cruelty.

The fact that we adopted this policy demonstrates that this war has tested more than our Nation’s ability to defend ourselves. It has tested our response to our fears, and the measure of our courage. It has tested our commitment to our most fundamental values and our constitutional principles. It has tested the depth of our commitment to those certain truths that our forefathers held to be self-evident. It has tested our understanding of what the terms “justice,” “the law,” “the rule of law,” and “human rights” are. It has tested our vision of what the relationship should be between the individual and the government. And, no less important, this war has tested our definition of human dignity. In this war, we have come to a crossroads – much as we did in the events that led to Korematsu: Will we continue to regard the protection and promotion of human dignity as the essence of our National character and purpose, or will we bargain away human and national dignity in return for an additional possible measure of physical security?

We need to be clear. Cruelty disfigures our national character. It is incompatible with our constitutional order, with our laws, and with our most prized values. Cruelty can be as effective as torture in destroying human dignity, and there is no moral distinction between one and the other. To adopt and apply a policy of cruelty anywhere within this world is to say that our forefathers were wrong about their belief in the rights of man, because there is no more fundamental right than to be safe from cruel and inhumane treatment. Where cruelty exists, law does not.

Why should we still care about these issues? The Abu Ghraib abuses have been exposed; Justice Department memoranda justifying cruelty and even torture have been ridiculed and rescinded; the authorizations for the application of extreme interrogation techniques have been withdrawn; and, perhaps most critically, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which prohibits cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, has been enacted, thanks to the courage and leadership of Sen. John McCain, a former Profile in Courage award recipient. 

We should care because the issues raised by a policy of cruelty are too fundamental to be left unaddressed, unanswered, or ambiguous. We should care because a tolerance of cruelty will corrode our values and our rights and degrade the world in which we live. It will corrupt our heritage, cheapen the valor of the soldiers upon whose past and present sacrifices our freedoms depend, and debase the legacy we will leave to our sons and daughters. We should care because it is intolerable to us that anyone should believe for a second that our Nation is tolerant of cruelty. And we should care because each of us knows that this issue has not gone away.

The years ahead will continue to test our national security. We again will be tempted to violate our values in the mistaken belief that we will be made more secure by doing so. When that test comes again – and it certainly will – we must muster the courage to defend our principles more firmly. We will have to be prepared – as President Kennedy said in his inaugural speech of his own, “new generation” of Americans – to be, also, a generation “unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”

It would be inappropriate for me to conclude without acknowledging those former colleagues whose work contributed to all I did at the Department of the Navy and, in some cases, to the very acts you recognize this morning. I am indebted to Secretary England for his superb leadership and superb leadership team; to my colleagues at the Navy Office of General Counsel, personified by Bill Molzahn, Art Hildebrant, and Peter Murphy; to the Navy Judge Advocate General Corps, which was led on my watch by RADMs Don Guter, Mike Lohr, and Jim McPherson; to the Judge Advocate Division of the Marine Corps and its commander, BG Kevin Sandkuhler; and to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, led by Dave Brant. Each of them – and many others – has my gratitude and admiration. They deserve the thanks of all for their service, and for what they have done to protect our Nation and the values upon which it stands.

Once more, I thank you –– for this award; for your many courtesies to me, my wife Susan, and my son Alex; and for allowing me to discuss with you why courage, in a time of cruelty, matters more than ever.

Posted on Tuesday, May 30, 2006 at 9:24 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, May 25, 2006

George F. Will: Where Republicans Went Wrong

Source: Newsweek (5-14-06)

... Twelve years after the high-water mark of postwar conservatism, this is the Republican rallying cry: Democrats would be even worse than we are! Even worse about spending, about government intrusiveness, etc.

The Republicans' implosion began in March 2005 with their Terri Schiavo derangement, the attempt to intrude federal courts into a state's jurisdiction and a family's tragedy. Fourteen months later, after Katrina, Harriet Miers and the "Bridge to Nowhere," Republicans completed their immolation by briefly borrowing an idea from the epitome of failure, the Carter presidency. They flirted with the idea of a $100 rebate to almost everyone—even people without cars—as balm for the sting of annoying gasoline prices. Remember President Carter's 1977 idea to stimulate the economy with a $50 rebate? Actually, the $100 idea was even more risible: 100 of today's dollars are equal to 30 dollars in 1977.

Five days after the 2004 election, Karl Rove, appearing on "Meet the Press," was feeling his oats. He noted that George W. Bush was the first president since FDR to win a second term while increasing his party's strength in both the House and Senate, and the first president since 1988 to receive a majority of the popular vote—and a higher percentage of that vote than any Democratic president since 1964. Asked about having said that his goal was to create a permanent Republican majority, Rove replied:

"There are no permanent majorities in American politics. They last for about 20 or 30 or 40 or, in the case of the Roosevelt coalition, 50 or 60 years and then they disappear. But would I like to see the Republican Party be the dominant party for whatever time history gives it the chance to be? You bet."

But "history" neither giveth nor taketh away. What has taken away the Republicans' brio are Republicans' choices that have confused their voters—choices about Iraq and spending. Republicans stand convicted of not meaning what they say about limited government, and Democrats are suspected of not saying what they mean to do if put in charge of Congress. The most notable Democratic vow concerning how they would use power was last week's promise, emanating from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, that they would not impeach the president....

Posted on Thursday, May 25, 2006 at 10:38 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Jarrett Murphy: Three decades after the drama of '68, will Harlem make room for Columbia?

Source: Village Voice (5-25-06)

Chances are that walking down 131st Street 30 years from now, you will not miss Pedro y José Auto Body, nor, on 130th, mourn the absence of Boiler Repair Maintenance Company. It is unlikely that you ever planned to live in a walk-up like 3289 Broadway or enjoy a "100% brushless car wash" three blocks away. And even if you have patronized the nearby paint store, pharmacy, architect, personal trainer, building-supply store, moving companies, construction firms, U-Haul yard, drug treatment facility, Gérard Duré's salon, or any of the storage facilities, gas stations, or Pentecostal churches in the area, you'll probably learn to live without. You may even appreciate the sprucing up of the tired-looking factory buildings and an end to the stench that rises from the Twelfth Avenue sidewalk after a delivery of meat or poultry to a wholesaler there.

What's more, you could end up working or studying in what will take their place in Manhattanville: nearly 7 million square feet of offices, research space, and housing for Columbia University. With scant wiggle room at its main Morningside Heights campus or uptown medical center, Columbia wants to move onto 18 acres roughly north of 125th Street and just east of Twelfth Avenue. To do it, the state's oldest college is asking the city for a special rezoning, scooping up parcels of land, and preparing to ask the state to invoke eminent domain if necessary.

Needless to say, not everyone in the area is thrilled with the idea. Residents, business owners, and some Columbia students have banded together to oppose the plan. The local community board is pushing an alternative development scheme. Civil liberties lawyer Norman Siegel has signed on to resist eminent domain. A sign on a door in the area reads, "Dear Columbia: Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself."

In the constant evolution of New York neighborhoods, this sort of fight isn't anything new. And for Columbia especially, this is not a first. Thirty-eight years ago, the university's bid to expand into Morningside Park—coupled with outrage over the school's military contracts—touched off days off unrest on campus in which students occupied five buildings and, in some cases, clashed violently with cops. After the bloodshed, that expansion plan died. Columbia has pursued projects in the years since, but none were as ambitious as the vision for Manhattanville.

Some opponents of the plan claim the resistance to the new proposal is the stiffest Columbia has faced since the student uprising. Folks caught in the middle think the university is applying lessons learned. "Columbia sees shadows of 1968," says Steve Stollman, a local businessman who says he's been offered a very attractive relocation deal. "They have to be very careful how they treat people when it's conspicuous like this."

But the parallel only goes so far. Last time the battle was over race and war. Now, the debate is about what makes a 21st-century city tick. ...

Posted on Thursday, May 25, 2006 at 10:10 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Edwin Meese: An Amnesty by Any Other Name ...

Source: NYT (5-24-06)

IN the debate over immigration, "amnesty" has become something of a dirty word. Some opponents of the immigration bill being debated in the Senate assert that it would grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants. Supporters claim it would do no such thing. Instead, they say, it lays out a road map by which illegal aliens can earn citizenship.

Perhaps I can shed some light. Two decades ago, while serving as attorney general under President Ronald Reagan, I was in the thick of things as Congress debated the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. The situation today bears uncanny similarities to what we went through then.

In the mid-80's, many members of Congress — pushed by the Democratic majority in the House and the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy — advocated amnesty for long-settled illegal immigrants. President Reagan considered it reasonable to adjust the status of what was then a relatively small population, and I supported his decision.

In exchange for allowing aliens to stay, he decided, border security and enforcement of immigration laws would be greatly strengthened — in particular, through sanctions against employers who hired illegal immigrants. If jobs were the attraction for illegal immigrants, then cutting off that option was crucial.

Beyond this, most illegal immigrants who could establish that they had resided in America continuously for five years would be granted temporary resident status, which could be upgraded to permanent residency after 18 months and, after another five years, to citizenship.

Note that this path to citizenship was not automatic. Indeed, the legislation stipulated several conditions: immigrants had to pay application fees, learn to speak English, understand American civics, pass a medical exam and register for military selective service. Those with convictions for a felony or three misdemeanors were ineligible. Sound familiar? These are pretty much the same provisions included in the new Senate proposal and cited by its supporters as proof that they have eschewed amnesty in favor of earned citizenship.

The difference is that President Reagan called this what it was: amnesty. Indeed, look up the term "amnesty" in Black's Law Dictionary, and you'll find it says, "the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act provided amnesty for undocumented aliens already in the country." ...

Will history repeat itself? I hope not. In the post-9/11 world, secure borders are vital. We have new tools — like biometric technology for identification, and cameras, sensors and satellites to monitor the border — that make enforcement and verification less onerous. And we can learn from the failed policies of the past.

President Bush and Congress would do better to start with securing the border and strengthening enforcement of existing immigration laws. We might also try improving on Ronald Reagan's idea of a pilot program for genuinely temporary workers. ...



Posted on Wednesday, May 24, 2006 at 8:02 PM | Comments (0) | Top

James L. Payne: Does Nation-Building Work?

Source: Independent Review, v. X, n. 4, Spring 2006 (5-24-06)

[James L. Payne is an independent writer who resides in Sandpoint, Idaho.]

In plunging into war, hope generally triumphs over experience. The past—the quiet statistical tabulation of what happened when such plunges were taken before—tends to be ignored in the heat of angry oratory and the thump of military boots. At the outset, it is easy to believe that force will be successful in upholding virtue and that history has no relevance.

Lately, this confidence in the force of arms has centered on nation building—that is, on invading and occupying a land afflicted by dictatorship or civil war and turning it into a democracy. This objective has been a major theme of the U.S. government’s recent actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the policy is not likely to be limited to those countries. The U.S. government now enjoys a military preeminence in the world, and the temptation to deploy its armed forces to repair or transform other regimes is likely to prove attractive again in the future.

Moreover, the idea of invading countries to “fix” them has recently gained considerable support in the academic and foreign-policy community. Among the first to advocate the assertive use of U.S. military forces around the world were William Kristol and Robert Kagan. In a 1996 article in Foreign Affairs, they urged the United States to adopt a posture of “benevolent global hegemony.” This means “actively promoting American principles of governance abroad—democracy, free markets, respect for liberty” (27). To John Quincy Adams’s advice that America should not go “abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” they mockingly replied, “But why not?” (31). In their endorsement for foreign-policy activism, Kagan and Kristol have been joined by a number of policy wonks, journalists, and academics, a group that has come to be known as “neoconservatives.”

In their enthusiasm for nation building by force of arms, neither the theorists nor the practitioners have examined the historical experience with this kind of policy. They are aware that a historical record exists, but they do not take it seriously. In a speech two weeks before the invasion of Iraq, President George W. Bush pointed to other interventions that had been successful:

America has made and kept this kind of commitment before—in the peace that followed a world war. After defeating enemies, we did not leave behind occupying armies, we left constitutions and parliaments. We established an atmosphere of safety, in which responsible, reform-minded local leaders could build lasting institutions of freedom. In societies that once bred fascism and militarism, liberty found a permanent home. There was a time when many said that the cultures of Japan and Germany were incapable of sustaining democratic values. Well, they were wrong. (Bush 2003)

Although this reference to Germany and Japan demonstrates an interest in the past, it is disappointingly selective. Yes, Germany and Japan would seem to be success stories for the idea that a U.S. army of occupation can leave behind an enduring democracy. But these cases are not the only pertinent ones. U.S. military forces have gone into troubled countries dozens of times through the years, but without the same results. They went into Cuba three times and tried to set up a democracy—in 1898, again in 1906, and again in 1917. Each time, after the troops left, civil war and dictatorship followed, and what has apparently found a “permanent home” in Cuba is not liberty but Fidel Castro’s dictatorship.

Kristol and Kagan are equally selective in their use of the historical record. In the Foreign Affairs article in which they advocate a muscular foreign policy, they approvingly cite the case of Haiti, where, they observe, “the United States completed the withdrawal of 15,000 soldiers after restoring a semblance of democratic government” (1996, 21). Again, the method of historical comparison is used carelessly. If Kristol and Kagan wish to claim that the U.S. military invasions succeed in establishing democracy, they are obliged to review all the cases of intervention. A disinterested analyst does not point to one case that appears to support the policy and ignore the cases that do not support it. In fact, even the Haiti case contradicts their thesis. Haiti appeared to represent a success story only during the brief period in 1996, when Kristol and Kagan were writing their article. Shortly afterward, it sank back into violent anarchy, the condition in which it remains today.

In pondering the policy of nation building, then, we need an overall picture of how such efforts turn out. Before government leaders roll the dice of war, invading a country in the hope of establishing a democracy, they ought to know what their odds are. The first step is to compile a list of cases. I focus here on the strongest, military version of nation building, illustrated by the case of Iraq: the use of ground troops to support a deliberate effort to establish a democracy. I leave aside many cases of lesser military involvements, such as episodes in which the United States sent only military aid or military advisors, funded rebel movements, or used only air power or sea power. If these lesser interventions fail, one can always say that the democratic power did not make a serious effort. The insertion of ground troops, however, manifests a high level of seriousness. It generally gives the occupier sweeping powers, including the ability to replace government officials, to establish political bodies such as legislatures, and to hold elections. My definition of nation building also requires that the invading country make “a deliberate effort to establish a democracy.” Thus, I leave aside purely peacekeeping missions, punitive missions, and countries with U.S. military bases, but with no significant U.S. role in local politics....

Nation-Building Military Occupations by the United States and Great Britain, 1850–2000

U. S. Occupations

Successes

Austria 1945–55
Dominican Republic 1965–67
Grenada 1983–85
Italy 1943–45
Japan 1945–52
Panama 1989–95
Philippines 1898–1946
West Germany 1945–52

Failures

Cuba 1898–1902
Cuba 1906–1909
Cuba 1917–22
Dominican Republic 1911–24
Haiti 1915–34
Haiti 1994–96
Honduras 1924
Lebanon 1958
Lebanon 1982–84
Mexico 1914–17
Nicaragua 1909–10
Nicaragua 1912–25
Nicaragua 1926–33
Panama 1903–33
Somalia 1992–94
South Korea 1945–61

British Occupations

Successes

Botswana 1886–1966
Fiji 1874–1970
Malaysia 1909–57
Maldives 1887–1976
Solomon Islands 1893–1978
Tonga 1900–1970

Failures

Brunei 1888–1984
Burma (Myanmar) 1885–1948
Cyprus 1914–60
Egypt 1882–1922
Ghana 1886–1957
Iraq 1917–32
Iraq 1941–47
Jordan 1921–56
Kenya 1894–1963
Lesotho 1884–1966
Malawi (Nyasaland) 1891–1964
Nigeria 1861–1960
Palestine 1917–48
Sierra Leone 1885–1961
South Yemen (Aden) 1934–67
Sudan 1899–1956
Swaziland 1903–1968
Tanzania 1920–63
Uganda 1894–1962
Zambia (N. Rhodesia) 1891–1964
Zimbabwe (S. Rhodesia) 1888–1980

Posted on Wednesday, May 24, 2006 at 7:17 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Rosemarie Jackowski: From Galileo to Churchill (Ward Churchill, that is)

Source: dissidentvoice.org (5-22-06)

[Rosemarie Jackowski is an advocacy journalist living in Vermont. She is currently waiting for the State Supreme Court to render its decision on the Appeal of her conviction. She was arrested for participating in a peaceful protest of the war. She can be reached at: dissent@sover.net.]

This is not the first time in history that mob rule has taken the place of intelligent reflection. The earth is flat; the sun revolves around the earth; 9/11 occurred because they hate us for our freedoms. Those who disagree will be charged with Heresy! A modern day Inquisition might be in our future.

History tells us that we are due for a Trial. It has been more than 300 years since the Salem Witch Trials and more than 80 years since the Scopes Trial.

Ward Churchill is under attack. Will he receive justice through a judicial process? No one knows. Has he ever made an error in any of his writings? I would assume so. A few years ago I planned to sponsor (as part of my activism) a contest. The purpose of the contest would be to get as many people as possible to read Howard Zinn's A Peoples History of the United States. A monetary prize would be awarded to anyone who found a significant error of fact in the book. I had a brief conversation with Zinn about my idea one day when he was speaking at a college near Albany, NY. I asked him what he thought about the contest. I will never forget his answer. He said, "Of course there might be a mistake in the book." The point is this: even the most highly respected authors and historians might not achieve absolute infallibility. Ancient history is hazy. Any author should be judged by the whole of his work. It would be helpful to also judge the Press by the same standard. The accuracy of all history textbooks that are currently in use in our schools should also be re-evaluated.

Will Churchill's detractors take a good look at the vast body of his writings or will the critics continue to hone in on one emotionally charged word or phrase? There are now questions about Churchill's explanation of how Native Americans became infected with smallpox. Every word, sentence, and punctuation mark that Churchill has ever used is up for scrutiny. That might be a good thing. Any fair examination of the works of Churchill will necessitate an equally grueling examination of the history of USA actions and policies from 1492 to the present day.

A thorough examination of the arguments that Churchill puts forward could enlighten many. So far, it seems that the main thrust of his writings is far more accurate than the sanitized view of history which is normally taught in most schools. Many in the US are still unaware of the government policy as expressed by Madeline Albright. While being interviewed by Leslie Stahl, Albright stated that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children was worth it. Churchill is not alone in condemning a policy that results in the deaths of so many.

The most heated criticism of Churchill is the result of his statement which basically said that 9/11 was Blowback. Those who embrace Churchill's work believe that he has been unfairly attacked on this issue. The view that government policies have consequences did not originate with WC. When the word "Blowback" was first used, Churchill had not yet published any writings. It was 1954. He was 7 years old.

"Blowback" is a term introduced by the CIA because it was generally accepted that US foreign policy would eventually result in blowback. At that time the CIA was concerned about the effects of USA involvement in the overthrow of Mossadeq in Iran.

In 2000, before the tragedy of 9/11, Chalmers Johnson published his book tilted Blowback. Blowback won an American Book Award in 2001. Most who follow US foreign policy knew that the American people would pay a price. The only surprise about 9/11 was the where and when. The "why" was well known and documented years before but ignored by the media. Churchill's explanation of the "why" has offended and shocked only those who were not paying attention.

David Lane, Churchill's attorney, might use the Galileo concept if there is a Trial. It seems very appropriate. All eyes will be on the Inquisition in Denver.

Posted on Tuesday, May 23, 2006 at 7:21 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, May 22, 2006

James Ottavio Castagnera: Immigrant Floods Are Recurrent

[Mr. Castagnera, a Philadelphia journalist and attorney, is the Associate Provost at Rider University and author of the weekly newspaper column “Attorney at Large.”]

The nation’s first “immigrant crisis” of the new century, like a pimple on the body politic, is coming to a head. The president appeared on TV last week to try to pull the two houses of Congress together on the issue, while --- just incidentally --- pumping up his own sagging popularity balloon. Mr. Bush painted a picture of National Guardsmen patrolling our southern borders, while ICE operatives presumably raid domestic workplaces. Meanwhile, Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, calling the last federal effort to control immigration a farce, offered an amendment requiring the Director of Homeland Security to certify border security before any amnesty program for current illegals could kick in.

Senator Sessions is perfectly right that the last major federal legislative initiative, exactly 20 years ago, legalized large numbers of illegals while failing to achieve enforcement measures to stem the flow. The 1986 enforcement fiasco, like the current “crisis,” was nothing new. A century ago, another Republican president, no less a light than Teddy Roosevelt, struggled with much the same problems.

In the early years of the 20 th century, a “Yellow Tide” (aka the “Yellow Peril”) was flowing primarily out of Japan, often via Hawaii. In 1907 anti-immigrant riots erupted in San Francisco. TR wrote to a Japanese official, “Nothing during my presidency has given me more concern than these troubles.” Americans placed much of the blame on the Niponese government for making exit from Japan a relatively easy process. Some war talk even ensued. More substantially, but no more successfully, the Congress enacted an Immigration Act. Like the 1986 statute, the 1907 legislation had little impact upon the influx of coolly labor on the West Coast.

In 1908, as Roosevelt sent the White Fleet into the Pacific on its famous around-the-world cruise, Secretary of State Elihu Root used this “big stick” to bully Japan into honoring a so-called “gentlemen’s agreement” to cut off coolly migration at its source. Root warned Ambassador Aoki that, unless there came “a very speedy change in the course of immigration,” the 16 th Congress was sure to pass a Japanese-exclusion act. The show of naval strength plus the threat of adverse legislation prodded the Nipon government to take action. The illegal influx decreased, though it never ceased entirely.

Then, as now, the lines were drawn between those who benefited from illegal immigration and those who felt threatened. As President Roosevelt was trying to promote legislation allowing for the naturalization of illegal Japanese living on the West Coast, the San Francisco Board of Education issued an order segregating Japanese school children. As labor unions in the “City by the Bay” agitated to repatriate the illegals, TR reminded the city’s citizens that they had happily accepted $100,000 in earthquake relief from Japan in ’06, and chided the unions that they were against the coolies “because of their efficiency as workers.” Indeed, the coolies were helping corporate America to build the West.

Today, too, as some 75% of ordinary Americans polled show little sympathy for the current crop of illegal aliens, these spiritual descendants of California’s 1906 coolies work for employers who are happy to have them. For instance, in an April cover story, Time Magazine found that 70 % of workers deboning chickens in an Arkansas plant were illegal immigrants. A recent NPR report focused on a New York employment service specializing in placing illegal aliens in bottom-feeder positions such as washing dishes for about $250 a week.

In 1886, the year the U.S. dedicated the Statue of Liberty, a Seattle mob put about half of that city’s 350 Chinese residents on a ship and sent them to San Francisco. Shipping “home” the millions of illegal immigrants living in the U.S. today is a practical impossibility, as well as a humanitarian’s nightmare. In fact, the same Time poll that discovered a lack of empathy for illegal immigrants also revealed that 78% of those queried favor citizenship opportunities for illegals already in the states, who hold jobs, speak English and pay taxes.

This time around, too, some slivers of organized labor are actually advocating for illegal immigrants. The Service Employees International Union, which recently separated itself from the AFL-CIO, leads a maverick coalition that actively organizes the bottom rung of our national workforce.

These last couple of data points suggest that perhaps things, while despairingly the same in so many respects, may differ from a century ago on at least some important points. If so, we may hope that this time around the result of the current national debate will be a balanced, effective immigration policy that secures the borders while also securing the civil rights and liberties of all who are already within our borders.

Posted on Monday, May 22, 2006 at 9:40 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Daniel Patrick Welch: Americans' unforgivable attitude toward immigration

Source: http://danielpwelch.com (5-22-06)

[Writer, singer, linguist and activist Daniel Patrick Welch lives and writes in Salem, Massachusetts, with his wife, Julia Nambalirwa-Lugudde. Together they run The Greenhouse School (http://www.greenhouseschool.org).]

Those who wish to read US history undistorted, rather than use its mythology for their own ends, are already hip to the never-ending plight of immigrants to "America"'s shores. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

Lazarus' famous poem, like its namesake, winds up rising from the dead, or rather, being tediously exhumed by those who wish to resurrect the self-serving image of America's open-armed embrace of those less fortunate. Notwithstanding the hostile receptions that each wave encountered, their only desire was to share in our unearned bounty and work their way toward a piece of the elite pie that is American wealth. Shame on them! How dare they do what our own ancestors did 20, 50, 100, 150 years ago!

But the very topic itself is a deliberate digression, a topic-changing distraction from the true business of the people—any people—facing the enormous issues we face. Unending imperial wars? Gays are getting married! Impending destruction of the ecosphere? Iran is enriching uranium! Those in power in the US are rife with corruption, greed and lies from top to bottom? Mexicans are taking our jobs!

(Im)Migration is as old as evolution itself. Yes, the dreaded E-word. Sorry, right wing lunatics, no safe haven here. It is the nature of multicelled organisms, from the first fish who flopped onto land in search of better feeding, breeding, or investment opportunities, to seek the better life.

George Bush, plumbing the Nixonian depths of unpopularity, would love to incite the racist backlash that propelled Nixon to power before his own criminality forced the American people to rethink their own horrific mistake. It seems gay marriage has not resulted in the implosion of Massachusetts society, much to the chagrin of the Church and its far-right allies. So immigration comes, right on schedule, as the wedge to separate god-fearing, law-abiding white people from their own common sense.

But it has always been the most difficult task of out-and-out racists to finesse their own lurid ideology so as to be palatable to some amorphous "majority" who will dutifully keep them in power. Even Bull Connor didn’t openly embrace the Klan. Every generation of white people in America has its own semantic trick, a sort of racist rabbit-in-the-hat to disguise its morally reprehensible agenda. Genocide? Noooooo. Manifest Destiny! Racism? Nooooo. States’ rights! Racism? Noooooo. Typhoid! Public health and safety! Etc.

And now, the new mantra is legality, or taxes, whatever floats your boat. In some uncharacteristic glint of rationality, Bush wants to seem "fair." The millions of undocumented workers should not be rounded up and sent "back where they came from" (whew!); instead, they should pay some meaningful penalty for daring to pick fruit for fifty cents an hour, back taxes on all the earnings their agribusiness bosses condescended to actually pay them, and learn English. Sounds fair to me! But really, shouldn’t we all examine our own complicity in this affair? I'm not one to point fingers without proof, so I'll confine the fateful lightning of my terrible swift sword to those whom we know to be guilty. Hands up, all who have, say, eaten or purchased fruit in the past six months! Aha! Pay your meaningful penalty and join the line on the left. Anyone get their lawn mowed? Aha! Pay your penance and join the guilty. As for the agribusiness owners of transnational corporations—-well, the simple notion of proportionality might impose incarceration, public caning or humiliation. Sorry, the law’s the law. And if some upper-level management crony of any of these multinationals is more fluent in, say, Dutch than English? Well, suffice it to say that DHS swat teams are available at a moment's notice. Along with a few Berlitz books. Hey, we're not Barbarians!

And speaking of the law, let's engage the new states' rights argument. The great thing about white people, and westerners in general, is that they can be cowed by simple (-minded) references to "The Law," even when they themselves are descendents of the centuries-old abuse of this very same principle. You’re illegal! Follow the LAW! Bark the pit-bulls of the right wing assault on immigration rights. But what is the law, exactly? I remember following the ever-shifting law of immigration when I myself got married (to an immigrant-gasp!). If we got married before date X, Y would happen. If we waited until date Z, AA would happen. Ugh.

This quintessentially racist backlash is running up against more powerful north-south and east-west divides, much to horror of Karl Rove and the corporate oligarchy that would continue to control America. From my own personal perspective, my mother's Irish grandparents were considered white only because of what a German-American friend jokingly calls a "clerical error." Until the end of the Civil War, the pastiest white people on earth, “the pale and blotchy race," in the words of a famous poet, were legally considered non-white. When emancipation threatened to make several southern states "majority non-white," The Law miraculously changed to suit the situation.

In the same way, law has served the interests of imperialism and oligarchy throughout history. I am fond of telling my students that the only reason I speak English is that the powers that invaded the country of my ancestors made it "illegal" for the indigenous people to speak their own Irish language. Presto! Official English is born.

On the recent Dia Sin Inmigrantes, our school participated by erecting signs on our roof saying "We are all immigrants" in English and Spanish. Aside from a total lack of press coverage, we were treated to the invasion of a certain self-appointed corrections specialist, who wandered into the school to tell us that we should change our signs to reflect "legal" immigrants. Oh really? My mother’s grandparents weren’t "legal" as far as my research reveals. And how, exactly, do families separate the "good" from the "bad" immigrants within our own ranks? Contrary to popular myth, the overwhelming majority of "illegal" immigrants did not sneak across the Mexican border. In most cases, they are people who came to study or work, with legitimate visas. Maybe they fell in love and had children (disgusting!) or ran out of money for school. So they stayed, and got jobs under the table, jobs that fuel much of the economy on which we all rely. God forbid they should be treated like human beings.

But speaking of the Mexican border, let's deal with this up front. I had a recent discussion with my own staff, most of whom are immigrants who have "made it," in the sense that they have now gained citizenship and bought houses, etc. Perhaps feeling guilty about their own success, they play Devil's Advocate: "Pero Daniel," they tell me. "I didn’t come here in a banana crate. I came legal. What if someone sneaked into your house at night, without your permission, and started to live there? Wouldn’t that be a crime?" I'm not sure if they are serious, so I take them at their word. "The United States is not a house," I counter. Let's change the analogy. What if, say, instead of a house, you were on a banana plantation, and all those outside the walls were dying of hunger? Wouldn’t you feel differently about someone who dug under the wall and stole a few bananas?"”

My staff, my colleagues, my friends, my fellow Americans, were silent. As devout Catholics, they could not resist the argument, so I (perhaps unfairly) hone in for the kill. Even as new Americans aware as few others of the realities beyond their borders, they are skittish. Did they realize, I ask, that half of the humans on the planet subsist on less than a dollar a day? That two thirds subsist on less than two dollars a day? My Dominican colleague, a devout Catholic herself raised on a coffee farm back home, was incredulous. Yes, I said. Who are "WE?" Is this all something we 'deserve?' The US population consumes almost half the natural resources of the world, yet we represent about 6% of the global population. Is this something we can sustain?

We--who now reside within borders defined by a series of genocidal wars and wield wealth and power gained through enslavement and expropriation—we now feel empowered to close the doors behind us. Ha! Sucks to be you! Get your own country!

Since we had recently been flooded, I used a readily available analogy: the dam. It seemed perfectly logical to me, absent racist claptrap about how white people are more productive, that the threatened dams in the region supplied the perfect metaphor. Given the disparity that exists, might the correct analogy be that the flood engineers are dealing with at this very moment? If the level on one side of the dam is too high, then something must be done to prevent the dam from bursting: If you don't want to eliminate the dam itself, the unequal pressure from both sides forces certain decisions: sluiceways might lower the pressure for the time being; shoring up the infrastructure might keep the water at bay for now. But the pressure is unrelenting—-come hell or high water-—whether we are prepared or not.

Elephants, donkeys, and other animals may not survive the flood. Ostriches bury their heads in the sand, willfully oblivious of what is to come. Democrats and Republicans alike would be wise to choose a different mascot.

Posted on Monday, May 22, 2006 at 9:29 PM | Comments (0) | Top

James S. Robbins: Democrats should promise not to abuse the impeachment power

Source: National Review Online (5-22-06)

[James S. Robbins author of Last in Their Class: Custer, Picket and the Goats of West Point. Robbins is also an NRO contributor.]

Imagine, if you will, a Republican president late in his second term, with low popular approval ratings and a recently elected Democratic Congress with its blood up. The Democrats’ are on a payback mission for the Republican-led impeachment of the current president’s Democratic predecessor. One pro-impeachment editorial goes on at length about the incumbent’s shortcomings:

"This man [has] no more fitness for the chief magistracy than any one of the fifty men you can see on the street any day of the week…. His cabinets have been composed of obscure men utterly incapable of rendering the assistance his own lack of intelligence makes necessary.…He has made the statesman everywhere subservient to the solider. He has made the national capital into a military camp. He has assumed the functions of a dictator and acts accordingly. At the end of his first term he was so wanting in modesty as to ask for a second, although the country was disgusted with his tyranny and selfishness."

This is the kind of thing one could find today in any Angry Left journal. But in this case the year was 1876, and the President was Ulysses S. Grant.

The impeachment issue has gained recent attention because of the possibility that the Democrats will take control of the House in the fall. Rep. John Conyers, who would likely become head of the House Judiciary Committee should the Democrats prevail, has already introduced H.R. 635, “creating a select committee to investigate the Administration's intent to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment.” The resolution has 36 co-sponsors. He has also introduced H.R. 636 and 637, which would censure the president and vice president for lying about the justification for war in Iraq.

Naturally, Republicans have responded by making the possibility of impeachment in the new House a fall election issue. The Democrats, not wanting to allow Republicans to shape perceptions during the campaign, have stated that impeachment is not high on their list of priorities. Prospective Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi stated somewhat clumsily, “I don't see us going to a place of impeachment." Conyers himself had an op-ed in the Washington Post saying there was no rush to remove Bush.

Can we believe them? This is why Grant’s second term is so interesting. The Republican party had been in firm control of Congress in the years following the Civil War. It made sense—Lincoln’s party had led the fight, and the southern, largely Democratic states had not yet emerged from Reconstruction. However, in the 1874 congressional race—the midterm race in Grant’s second term—the situation changed dramatically. Between the 43rd and 44th Congresses, the Democrats gained 94 seats, and the GOP lost 96. The Democrats went from a 111-seat deficit to a 79-seat majority. Within two weeks of this victory, the Democratic-leaning New York Herald was speculating on the probability of Grant’s removal. Democrats frequently invoked Andrew Johnson’s impeachment six years earlier, insisting that Johnson had done nothing that would rise to that level. A familiar refrain.

The Democrats proceeded quickly to make life difficult for Grant. The subpoena power was used liberally, and hearings became a constant on the Washington scene. Crédit Mobilier, the Whiskey Ring, Black Friday, the Sanborn Contracts, the Navy Contracts, Emma Silver Mine—these were the buzzwords of the day. Perhaps the highest profile take-down was Secretary of War William W, Belknap who was impeached on bribery charges in the summer of 1876. By then Belknap had already resigned his post, but the Democrats were determined to impeach him (it being an election year) and went ahead with it anyway. The Senate failed to convict Belknap, but he was a ruined man and the hearings and trial implicated others in the Grant administration, not always fairly.

The Democrats went after Grant at the very end, during the lame-duck period following the disputed 1876 election. Grant had made a public statement backing Republican Rutherford B. Hayes against the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, which they charged was interference in the process. They proposed articles of impeachment, and called for removing half of Grant’s Cabinet for good measure. Ironically, Grant was saved when southern Democrats failed to support the move, and Tilden himself let it be known that he opposed the scheme.

If power in the House shifts this fall it will not swing as far as it did in 1874. The Republican margin of control is slim, and a Democratic House would likewise have a slender hold. But authorization for an impeachment inquiry (the first step in the process) only requires a majority vote, and even if President Bush is not formally impeached, the inquiry itself would be a brutal process. Rep. Conyers has suggested a select committee meet before the process begins to conduct a further investigation. His promise of “no rush” to impeachment leads one to believe he seeks to stretch the process out for as long as possible. And President Bush would not be the only subject of this type of investigation. If the Grant precedent is any indication, any high-ranking members of the administration would be fair game.

The greatest difference of course is that while many public officials in Grant’s day were in fact guilty of crimes like bribery and embezzlement, today’s Democrats seek to criminalize what are essentially policy differences, particularly over conduct of the war on terrorism....

Posted on Monday, May 22, 2006 at 7:41 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, May 19, 2006

John Dean: How Does President Bush Compare with Other Wartime Presidents With Respect to Free Speech Issues?

Source: findlaw.com (5-19-06)

Lately, the Bush Administration has been talking of using the Espionage Act of 1917 to prosecute the New York Times and the Washington Post. Yet these veteran newspapers' "crimes" consist merely of publishing Pulitzer-Prize-winning articles on the CIA's secret prisons, and the NSA's secret surveillance programs.

Not even Nixon sank so low. He might have initiated criminal prosecutions against the Times for printing the Pentagon Papers, yet did not.

And in other respects, the Bush Administration makes Nixon look like a piker when it comes to free speech, as well as other civil liberties issues: Its electronic surveillance of American citizens has been done in utter defiance of the law.

Does the "war on terror" justify the Administration's incursions on civil liberties? Putting this Administration's actions in historical perspective suggests the answer is a resounding no.

Drawing on Professor Geoffrey Stone's Work on Wartime Presidents

Opportunistic president have, from our founding, exploited public fears during wartime for their political advantage. Yet other presidents have recognized the dangers to civil liberties in time of war.

In 2004, University of Chicago law professor (and former dean) Geoffrey Stone published his timely and telling study Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1789 to the War on Terror. Stone's work traced the general pattern of repressive action undertaken against civil liberties by the United States government in six periods of American history, so-called "perilous times."

Professor Stone called attention to widely recognized and acknowledged mistakes of the past because he could see that the emerging pattern in the current war against terror was ignoring history. The so-called Patriot Act, for example, was the first sign that America was about to repeat its "long and unfortunate history of overreacting to the dangers of wartime." Stone, obviously, was hopeful that history would not repeat itself.

It turned out, however, that the Patriot Act was the proverbial tip of the iceberg. History, of course, never repeats itself exactly. But what does occur is that patterns of behavior are repeated.

In his 800-page work, Professor's Stone addressed President John Adams's use of the Sedition Act of 1789; Abraham Lincoln's command during the Civil War; Woodrow Wilson's suppression of dissent relating to World War One; Franklin Roosevelt's forcible internment of 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent; the Cold War loyalty hysteria of Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee; and Nixon's suppression of anti-war criticism and protests.

Stone's work strongly suggests that history's mistakes are only being repeated now, in different guises....

It's true that Bush and Cheney did not call for the arrest of Howard Dean in 2004, as Woodrow Wilson did with Eugene Debs during World War One - an analogy Stone offers to suggest some progress is being made. But as more and more comes out about what they have done, it is clear that they plan to outdo all their predecessors when it comes to dramatic infringements of civil liberties in the name of wartime necessity. Stone may have been premature in believing progress has been made. The facts suggest otherwise.

Rather than suspend habeas corpus, Bush and Cheney declare people "enemy combatants" and keep them out of the jurisdiction of federal courts. No one knows how many Arab Americans (or Middle Easterners) have been rounded up, but rather than create internment camps, they are deporting them, sending them to secret prisons, or turning them over to countries where civil liberties do not exist, in a process delicately known as "diplomatic rendition" but better described as "torture by proxy." .

More generally, Bush and Cheney have surely topped all their predecessors in their unbridled support for and use of torture. They have outdone all their predecessors, too, in their high-tech, relentless fear-mongering. In their claim of strengthening the presidency, they have shown they are cowards hiding behind the great power of the offices they hold, the prerogatives of which they are determined to abuse.

Professor Stone quotes Justice Louis Brandeis, who wrote "Those who won our independence … knew that … fear breeds repression and that courage is the secret of liberty." There is no such courage in the Bush and Cheney presidency.





Posted on Friday, May 19, 2006 at 1:17 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Patrick J. Buchanan: Can We Win An Insurgents’ War?

Source: American Conservative (5-22-06)

The U.S. Army is not going to be defeated in Iraq, said one U.S. general, and he added pointedly: If we lose this war, we will lose it here in the United States. Correct.
The only war America ever “lost” was lost in the United States.

When Nixon pulled U.S. forces out of Vietnam in early 1973, the Viet Cong had been crushed, the North Vietnamese defeated, every provincial capital was in Saigon’s hands.

Yet we lost Vietnam in 1975, when Hanoi, rearmed by Moscow, invaded with a dozen divisions, while Saigon, cut off by Congress, was forced to fight what General Giap called “a poor man’s war.”
Books have been written about why we did what we did in 1974 and 1975. The truth is the United States walked away from South Vietnam when our enemy was flat on his back. As Nixon was bedeviled by Watergate, a Democratic Congress to whom power had passed decided South Vietnam was no longer worth saving.

In Iraq, we have fought three years and the cost in war dead is not 5 percent of the 58,000 we lost in Vietnam. Yet America’s will to see this war through seems less than it was in Vietnam in November 1968.

When Nixon told the nation North Vietnam could not defeat the United States—“only Americans can do that”—and he called on the “Great Silent Majority” to stand with him for “peace with honor,” the country did—through three more years of war and 30,000 more dead.

But the America of 2006 would never accept three more years of 10,000 more dead every year for success in Iraq. Long before, the nation would force the administration to pull out. And this raises a relevant question. Are we the people and nation we used to be?

For if one compares the sacrifices of previous wars with the present cost in blood and treasure of Iraq, the disparities are startling.
The war against Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, and Hirohito’s Japan cost 400,000 U.S. dead in four years. At its height, a third of the GDP was allocated for the war. At its end, 12 million Americans were under arms.
In Korea, we lost 33,000 in three years. During the Eisenhower era, we spent 9 percent of GDP on defense and maintained a draft. Reagan kept defense spending at 6 percent of GDP and broke the Soviet Empire.

Today, we spend 4 percent on defense, 1 percent on Iraq, our casualties are a tiny fraction of what we took in World War II, Korea, or Vietnam. Yet America wants out and the enemy knows it. What does this tell us?
We are a changed people and nation from who and what we were in 1960. And we live in a changed world. ...

Posted on Wednesday, May 17, 2006 at 11:27 PM | Comments (1) | Top

WSJ Editorial: Reagan on Immigration

Source: WSJ (5-15-06)

One myth currently popular on the political right is that the immigration debate pits populist conservatives in the Ronald Reagan mold against Big Business "elites" who've hijacked the Republican Party. It's closer to the truth to say that what's really being hijacked here is the Gipper's reputation.

One of the Reagan Presidency's symbolic highlights was the July 3, 1986, celebration of a refurbished Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, the gateway for immigrants a century ago. (Readers can find Reagan's entire speech that evening at www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches.) To Reagan, the conservative optimist, immigration was a vital part of his vision of this country as "a shining city upon a Hill," in the John Winthrop phrase he quoted so often. It was proof that America remained a land of opportunity, a nation built on the idea of liberty rather than on the "blood and soil" conservatism of Old Europe.

This view was apparent in Reagan's public statements well before he became President. In one of his radio addresses, in November 1977, he wondered about what he called "the illegal alien fuss. Are great numbers of our unemployed really victims of the illegal alien invasion, or are those illegal tourists actually doing work our own people won't do? One thing is certain in this hungry world: No regulation or law should be allowed if it results in crops rotting in the fields for lack of harvesters." As a Californian, Reagan understood the role of immigrant labor in agriculture.

In 1980, according to the book "Reagan: His Life in Letters" (page 511), the then-Presidential candidate wrote to one supporter that "I believe we must resolve the problem at our southern border with full regard to the problems and needs of Mexico. I have suggested legalizing the entry of Mexican labor into this country on much the same basis you proposed, although I have not put it into the sense of restoring the bracero program." The bracero program was a guest-worker program similar to the one now being proposed by President Bush. It was killed in the mid-1960s, largely due to opposition from unions.

During the same campaign, circa December 1979, the Gipper responded to criticism from conservative columnist Holmes Alexander with the following: "Please believe me when I tell you the idea of a North American accord has been mine for many, many years. I have seen presidents, both Democrat and Republican, approach our neighbors with pre-concocted plans in which their only input is to vote 'yes.'

"Some months before I declared, I asked for a meeting and crossed the border to meet with the president of Mexico. I did not go with a plan. I went, as I said in my announcement address, to ask him his ideas -- how we could make the border something other than a locale for a nine-foot fence." So much for those conservatives who think the Gipper would have endorsed a 2,000-mile Tom Tancredo-Pat Buchanan wall.

It's true that in November 1986 Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which included more money for border police and employer sanctions. The Gipper was a practical politician who bowed that year to one of the periodic anti-immigration uprisings from the GOP's nativist wing. But even as he signed that bill, he also insisted on a provision for legalizing immigrants already in the U.S. -- that is, he supported "amnesty."...

Posted on Wednesday, May 17, 2006 at 12:35 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Max Boot: Forget privacy, we need to spy more

Source: LAT (5-17-06)

PRETTY MUCH everyone agrees that our human-spy capacity is missing in action. The chances that a CIA agent will be in the same cave as Osama bin Laden when the next 9/11 is being plotted are vanishingly small. The chances that our porous border security or transportation security will stop the next gang of Islamist cutthroats aren't much better. It's simply impossible to protect every inviting target in a continent-sized nation of almost 300 million people.

When it comes to the war on terror, the biggest advantage we have comes from our electronic wizardry. The National Security Agency has its share of problems, but it has long been the best in the business at intercepting and deciphering enemy communications. Until now. If civil liberties agitators, grandstanding politicians and self-righteous newspaper editorialists have their way, we will have to give up our most potent line of defense because of largely hypothetical concerns about privacy violations.

Assorted critics, taking a break from castigating the Bush administration for doing too little to protect the homeland, are now castigating it for doing too much. How dare the NSA receive without benefit of a court order telephone logs from AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon? Even though the records were anonymous and did not include the contents of any calls (Verizon and BellSouth have now denied offering any information at all), hyperventilating worrywarts fret that fascism has descended.

Qwest is supposed to be the hero of this drama for having, in USA Today's words, "the integrity to resist government pressure." That is not a compliment often paid to a company that has been accused of massive fraud and whose former chief executive is charged with 42 counts of insider trading. Maybe Qwest should celebrate by launching an advertising campaign touting itself as the preferred telecom provider of Al Qaeda.

All this concern with privacy would be touching if it weren't so selective. With a few keystrokes, Google will display anything posted by or about you. A few more keystrokes can in all probability uncover the date of your birth, your address and telephone number and every place you have lived, along with satellite photos of the houses and how much you paid for them, any court actions you have been involved in and much, much more.

It is only a little more work to obtain your full credit history and Social Security number. Or details of your shopping, traveling and Web-browsing habits. Such information is routinely gathered and sold by myriad marketing outfits. So it's OK to violate your privacy to sell you something — but not to protect you from being blown up.


HOW FAR DO the civil-liberties absolutists want to take their logic? Will troops in Afghanistan and Iraq soon have to read Miranda warnings to captured suspects and apply for a court's permission before searching a terrorist safe house? Or do such niceties stop at our borders, thereby giving Al Qaeda and its ilk the freedom to operate unhindered only in the U.S.?

Much of this silliness can be traced to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which for the first time made judges the overseers of our spymasters. This was an understandable reaction to such abuses as the FBI's wiretapping of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But FISA is a luxury we can no longer afford. Were it not for FISA's high standard of "probable cause," the FBI could have examined Zacarias Moussaoui's laptop in August 2001 and perhaps saved 3,000 lives. The Patriot Act scaled back some FISA provisions, such as the "wall" between intelligence and law enforcement agents, but enough remain intact to raise unnecessary questions about the legality of some much-needed homeland security measures.

This archaic law should be euthanized. Replace it with legislation that gives the president permission to order any surveillance deemed necessary, subject to only one proviso: If it is later determined that an intelligence-gathering operation was not ordered for legitimate national security objectives — if, for instance, it was designed to gather dirt on political opponents — then the culprits would be punished with lengthy prison sentences. Given that our intelligence bureaucracy leaks like a sinking ship, it is a safe bet that any hanky-panky would become front-page news faster than you can say "Pulitzer Prize."

So far there has been no suggestion that the NSA has done anything with disreputable motives. The administration has nothing to be ashamed of. The only scandal here is that some people favor unilateral disarmament in our struggle against the suicide bombers.

Posted on Wednesday, May 17, 2006 at 11:54 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Laurence H. Tribe: Bush Stomps on Fourth Amendment

Source: Boston Globe (5-16-06)

[Laurence H. Tribe is a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor.]

The escalating controversy over the National Security Agency's data mining program illustrates yet again how the Bush administration's intrusions on personal privacy based on a post-9/11 mantra of ''national security" directly threaten one of the enduring sources of that security: the Fourth Amendment ''right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."

The Supreme Court held in 1967 that electronic eavesdropping is a ''search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, recognizing that our system of free expression precludes treating each use of a telephone as an invitation to Big Brother to listen in. By 2001, the court had come to see how new technology could arm the government with information previously obtainable only through old-fashioned spying and could thereby convert mere observation -- for example, the heat patterns on a house's exterior walls -- to a ''search" requiring a warrant. To read the Constitution otherwise, the court reasoned, would leave us ''at the mercy of advancing technology" and erode the ''privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted." This decision, emphasizing the privacy existing when the Bill of Rights was originally ratified in 1791, was no liberal holdover in conservative times. Its author was Justice Antonin Scalia. Justice Clarence Thomas joined the majority. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the dissent. This issue should not divide liberals from conservatives, Democrats from Republicans.

These two decisions greatly undermine the aberrant 1979 ruling on which defenders of the NSA program rely, in which a bare Supreme Court majority said it doubted that people have any ''expectation of privacy in the numbers they dial," since they ''must 'convey' [such] numbers to the telephone company," which in turn can share them with others for purposes like ''detecting fraud and preventing violations of law." Unconvincing then, those words surely ring hollow today, now that information technology has made feasible the NSA program whose cover was blown last week. That program profiles virtually every American's phone conversations, giving government instant access to detailed knowledge of the numbers, and thus indirectly the identities, of whomever we phone; when and for how long; and what other calls the person phoned has made or received. As Justice Stewart recognized in 1979, a list of all numbers called ''easily could reveal . . . the most intimate details of a person's life."

The Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unconstrained snooping by Big Brother -- made bigger by an onrush of information-trolling technology that few foresaw in 1979 -- is bipartisan. It is a guarantee that cannot tolerate the pretense that numbers called from a private phone, unlike the conversations themselves, are without ''content." That pretense is impossible to maintain now that the technology deployed by NSA enables the agency to build a web with those numbers that can ensnare individuals -- all individuals -- just as comprehensively and intimately as all-out eavesdropping.

Even if one trusts the president's promise not to connect all the dots to the degree the technology permits, the act of collecting all those dots in a form that permits their complete connection at his whim is a ''search." And doing it to all Americans, not just those chatting with Al Qaeda, and with no publicly reviewable safeguards to prevent abuse, is an ''unreasonable search" if those Fourth Amendment words have any meaning at all. ...

Posted on Wednesday, May 17, 2006 at 1:26 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, May 15, 2006

Michael Parenti: The Hidden Politics of Deficit Spending

[Michael Parenti's recent books include Superpatriotism (City Lights), The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), and most recently, The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press). For more information visit: www.michaelparenti.org.]

When government expends more than it collects in revenues, this is known as deficit spending. To meet its yearly deficits, it borrows from wealthy individuals and financial institutions in the United States and abroad.

The accumulation of these yearly deficits constitutes the national debt.

Conservative leaders who sing hymns to “fiscal responsibility” have been among the wildest deficit spenders. The Reagan administration in eight years (1981-88) tripled the national debt from $908 billion to $2.7 trillion. In the next four years, Bush Sr.’s administration brought the debt to $4.5 trillion.

The Clinton administration (1993-2000) slowed the rate of debt accumulation, and even produced a substantial budget surplus in its last three years, projecting a huge surplus that supposedly would retire most of the debt within a decade.

But the Bush Jr. administration reversed that trend with massive tax cuts and record deficit spending, increasing the national debt from $5.8 trillion to almost $9 trillion in less than six years. The debt should stand close to $10 trillion by the time Bush leaves the White House in January 2009.

In 1993, the federal government’s yearly payouts on the national debt came to $210 billion. By 2006, payments had climbed to about $430 billion. Several things explain the national debt:

First, the billions of dollars in tax cuts to wealthy individuals and corporations represent lost revenue that is made up increasingly by borrowing. The government borrows furiously from the big moneyed interests it should be taxing.

Second, there is the budget busting impact of military spending, also the added operational costs of actual wars. Thus in 2003-2006, Bush Jr. was spending $10 billion a month on his war in Iraq in addition to the standard military budget that had climbed to over $420 billion for fiscal 2006.

Third, the growing national debt itself contributes to debt accumulation. As the debt increases, so does the interest that needs to be paid out. Every year, a higher portion of debt payment has been for interest alone, with less for retirement of the principle, the debt itself. By 1990, over 80 percent of all government borrowing went to pay for interest on money previously borrowed. Thus, the debt becomes its own self-feeding force. The interest paid on the federal debt each year is the second largest item in the discretionary budget (after military spending).

Fourth, it follows that huge deficits are a way of privatizing the federal budget itself. The bigger the debt, the larger the portion of each tax dollar that is channeled out of the public sector and into the private coffers of the very rich.

Fifth, the greater the debt, the more excuse do rightwing rulers have to defund human services. So we hear that with such a big deficit there just isn’t enough money for such frills as hospital care, housing and education.

To borrow money, the government sells treasury bonds. These bonds are promissory notes that are repaid in full after a period of years. Who gets the hundreds of billions in yearly interest on these bonds? Mostly the individuals, investment firms, banks, and foreign investors with money enough to buy them. Who pays the interest (and the principle)? Mostly ordinary U.S. taxpayers.

Interest payments on the federal debt constitute an upward redistribution of wealth from those who work to those who live off personal wealth.

It is a hidden form of private taxation. As Karl Marx wrote almost 150 years ago: “The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into collective possessions of modern peoples--is their national debt.”

The debt serves the capitalist class well. Instead of capitalists investing their accumulated wealth in new production that would glut the market and remain unsold, they invest in U.S. Treasury notes. Lending money to the government becomes a relatively risk-free but profitable investment.

Predictions of large budget surpluses also overlook the additional but hidden deficits that exist. First, there is the “off-budget” deficit, an accounting gimmick that allows the government to borrow additional billions outside the regular budget. A nominally “private” corporation is set up by the government to borrow money in its own name.

For instance, monies to subsidize agricultural loans are raised by the Farm Credit System, a network of off-budget banks, instead of being provided by the Agriculture Department through the regular budget. Congress also created an off-budget agency known as the Financing Corporation to borrow the hundreds of billions needed for the savings-and-loan bailout, instead of using the Treasury Department. These sums are taken out of the general revenue, compliments of the U.S. taxpayer.

Another hidden deficit is in trade. As we consume more than we produce and import and borrow from abroad more than is exported, the U.S. debt to foreign creditors increases. Interest payments on these hundreds of billions borrowed from abroad have to be met by U.S. taxpayers.

Social Security also is used to disguise the real deficit. The Social Security payroll deduction--a regressive tax--soared during the Reagan years, and today produces a yearly surplus of over $120 billion. By 1991, 38 percent of U.S. taxpayers were paying more in Social Security tax than in federal income tax. Many Americans willingly accept these payroll deductions because they think the monies are being saved for their retirement. On paper, the Social Security surplus fund was about $1.8 trillion by early 2006.

But all those funds have been used to offset deficits in the regular budget, paying for White House limousines, wars, FBI agents, corporate subsidies, interest on the debt, and other items in the federal budget. Since the surpluses are not invested, but are expended on behalf of other purposes within the federal budget, some politicians maintain that the Trust Fund is "empty" or has already been spent. Bush himself says nothing about the existence (or nonexistence) of the $1.8 trillion.

U.S. political leaders have assiduously ignored the surest remedies for reducing the astronomical national debt:
(a) sharply reduce individual and corporate tax credits, deductions, and shelters,
(b) cut back on the huge subsidies to big business and agribusiness that do little to create jobs and much to fatten the coffers of the very rich,
(c) reintroduce a progressive income tax that would bring in hundreds of billions more in revenues, and
(d) greatly reduce the bloated military budget and redirect spending toward more productive and socially useful sectors of the economy.

To summarize: In almost every enterprise, government has provided business with opportunities for private gain at public expense. Government nurtures private capital accumulation through a process of subsidies, supports, and deficit spending and an increasingly inequitable tax system.

>From ranchers to resort owners, from brokers to bankers, from auto makers to missile makers, there prevails a welfare for the rich of such magnitude as to make us marvel at the corporate leaders’ audacity in preaching the virtues of self-reliance whenever lesser forms of public assistance threaten to reach hands other than their own.

Posted on Monday, May 15, 2006 at 8:13 PM | Comments (0) | Top

James Ottavio Castagnera: The Rich Remain Richer

Source: Lehighton Times-News (5-20-06)

Last week the Congress passed a new tax bill. The law was enacted along largely partisan lines with Democrats denouncing the measure as yet another GOP-generated windfall for the rich. The statute, which President Bush says he anxious to sign, extends reduced rates on capital gains and dividends for another couple of years. Appropriately, the act, passed by the House on May 10 th and the Senate a day later, is entitled the Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act. Net cost to the country’s coffers is pegged at $70 billion.

One website, calling itself “The Rational Radical,” rants that “the top 1% own 38.1% of the wealth in the country, the next 4% own 21.3%, and the next 5% own 11.5%. That is to say, the top 10% of the country owns 70.9% of this nation!”

This is nothing new.

According to author Kevin Phillips, who published Wealth and Democracy in 2002, the percentages of wealth held by the richest one percent of Americans between 1841 and 1860 were:

  • Philadelphia – 50%
  • Milwaukee – 44%
  • New Orleans – 43%
  • New York – 40 %
  • Baltimore – 39 %
  • St. Louis – 38 %
  • Boston – 37 %

Fast-forward to 1890 and the rest of the country has caught up with Philadelphia with fully half the nation’s wealth held by the top one percent of American families.

In those halcyon days of Robber Barons, federal controls that came in mostly during the Great Depression era of the 1930s, weren’t even on the Congressional agenda. The late, great economist Robert Heilbroner in his classic The Worldly Philosophers describes a typical stock swindle of the second half of the nineteenth century. “A head-spinning example,” writes Professor Heilbroner, “was the purchase of the Anaconda Copper Company by Henry Rogers and William Rockefeller without the expenditure of a single dollar of their own.” Here’s how it went:

  • Rogers and Rocky gave a $39 million check to the seller of the Anaconda properties on condition it remain untouched in a bank account for a specified period of time.
  • R & R next set up a paper organization they named the Amalgamated Copper Company, using their own clerks a dummy directors, and then had Amalgamated buy Anaconda for $75 million in Amalgamated stock… conveniently printed for this very purpose.
  • R & R next borrowed $39 million from the same bank where their check for a like amount had been deposited, using the $75 mil in Amalgamated stock as their collateral.
  • Next they sold the Amalgamated stock on the open market, raising $75 million in cash.
  • With this windfall they retired their $39 mil loan and pocketed $36 million as their personal profit on the deal.

Whew! If this echoes down the decades, reminding you, let’s say, of Enron… well, at least lots of Enron execs have been brought to justice. A multiplicity of class actions also are recovering at least a little of the billions out of which investors, employees and retirees were bilked.

Even Bill Gates, America’s wealthiest individual with assets surpassing those of some small nations, was forced to face up to a personal deposition in an anti-trust action a few years ago. In this regard, his experience mirrored that of John D. Rockefeller, who stood at the top of the American wealth pyramid a century earlier than Mr. Gates, and saw his Standard Oil broken up into seven separate corporations under the Sherman Anti-Trust Law. Like Mr. Gates, Mr. Rockefeller emerged from the legal ordeal as rich, or even richer, than ever.

Rockefeller’s PR response to attacks on his empire also prefigured those of Bill and Melinda Gates: he gave away big chunks of change to favorite charitable causes. One such cause was the University of Chicago, where a student jingle ran:

John D. Rockefeller,

Wonderful man is he.

Gives all his spare change

To the U. of C.

Proving yet again that the more things change, the more they remain the same, someone has posted “The Bill Gates Song,” appropriately enough on the Internet:

Netscape roasting on an open fire,
Apple begging on its knees,
Photo popping up on Time magazine,
Yes, Bill Gates dreams of days like these!
Everybody knows he's never fully satisfied,
Throws himself behind each task,
World dominion is his company's goal.
Well, hey, is that so much to ask?
He knows the world is in his sway,
We'll buy whatever software he might toss our way,
We'll surf his Internet, watch his TV,
He'll take us anywhere we ask him--for a fee.

[http://www.poppyfields.net/filks/00037.html]

Posted on Monday, May 15, 2006 at 7:05 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, May 12, 2006

Daniel Henninger: The CIA's leakers lack the Cold Warriors' sense of purpose

Source: WSJ (5-12-06)

... We used to live in simpler times. From 1950 to 1991, America's enemy took the form of a country with hundreds of ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads aimed at the U.S. mainland, and a global espionage force called the KGB with a single address, Moscow. This was the Cold War, and in those days the U.S. intelligence community had a common worldview. That ideology was laid out in the now-famous National Security Council document 68, delivered in April 1950 to President Harry Truman. The Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb the previous August.
NSC-68's first page--"Background of the Current Crisis"--describes a Soviet Union that is "animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world." NSC-68's chapter headings were not about mere policy but the basics, describing "The Fundamental Purpose of the United States" and "The Underlying Conflict in the Realm of Ideas and Values Between the U.S. Purpose and the Kremlin Design."

Who could disagree? Well, many did--ceaselessly outside the government, mostly in academic centers and policy journals. It was a lively, titanic debate. But not inside the government, or at least nothing that compares to what has been leaking out about the war on terror. The most serious bureaucratic disputes within the government's Cold War intelligence agencies involved disagreements over arms-reduction proposals in the SALT talks and the like. But there was no serious disagreement with the ideology or threat described in NSC-68.

Occasionally some in the West's intelligence services who couldn't abide this ideology (or decided to cash out) simply defected; they went over to the other side. In the mid-1970s the anti-Vietnam Democratic left of the Senate Church Committee hearings popularized the notion that the CIA was itself a kind of evil empire. Still, containing Soviet communism remained the animating idea inside the national security bureaucracies until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

Today we have neither institutional discipline nor a shared ideology. The foundational U.S. document in the war on terror is the June 2002 Bush Doctrine, a response to September 11. But here the threat itself is debated endlessly. Islamic terror has no address. Obviously swaths of the national security bureaucracy--the Pillars, Wilsons and McCarthys--not only don't buy into the Bush Doctrine but feel obliged to take their disagreements with it outside the government. Since Vietnam, a war as in Iraq is no longer a national commitment but a policy matter. ...

Posted on Friday, May 12, 2006 at 9:08 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, May 11, 2006

Thomas Powers: Spy vs. Spy

Source: NYT (5-10-06)

THE resignation of Porter Goss after 18 months of trying to run the Central Intelligence Agency and the nomination of Gen. Michael Hayden to take his place make unmistakable something that actually occurred a year ago: the C.I.A., as it existed for 50 years, is gone.

Once the premier American intelligence organization, the agency has now been demoted to a combination action arm and support service for the rapidly growing Office of the Director of National Intelligence, headed by John Negroponte.

The C.I.A. used to coordinate, write and sign all "finished national intelligence" — no longer. The C.I.A.'s director used to lead the meetings of the heads of the numerous organizations that make up the "intelligence community" — no longer. The C.I.A. used to have final say on many aspects of intelligence "tasking" — no longer. Last to go was the role that made the agency pre-eminent, responsibility for briefing the president. Now that job belongs to Mr. Negroponte, with his $1 billion budget and staff of 1,500.

What finally humbled and gutted the C.I.A. after decades of Washington bureaucratic infighting was a loss of support where it counted most: the refusal of the Bush White House to accept responsibility for the two great "intelligence failures" that prompted Congress to reorganize our services.

The first failure laid at the feet of the agency was the inability to prevent the surprise attacks of 9/11. In fact, the C.I.A. (and others) warned the White House often during the first eight months of 2001 that an attack was coming and where it was coming from, but the Bush administration did nothing. For reasons of broad national psychology, the White House's failure to stir itself was simultaneously overlooked and forgiven by the public, while the C.I.A. (and others) got held to strict account for failing to predict the day and the hour.

The second failure was the claim — "with high confidence" — in a National Intelligence Estimate sent by the C.I.A. to Congress in October 2002 that Iraq was making vigorous progress on programs for weapons of mass destruction. But this finding was in effect dragged out of the agency by the White House and the Pentagon. Agency analysts working on the issue assumed that Saddam Hussein was up to something, but they knew their evidence was thin and ambiguous; many of their superiors knew about contrary evidence but suppressed it.

Everybody at the C.I.A. — from George Tenet, then the director, down — knew the agency could not tell United Nations weapons inspectors where to find anything over a period of months. The C.I.A. knew it didn't know what sort of weapons program Iraq really had, and absent White House pressure the analysts would have written an intelligence estimate reflecting their uncertainties. (It is worth noting that the Senate Intelligence Committee, despite a promise to do so, has been conspicuously reluctant to examine the source of the pressure for the drumbeat of alarming weapons intelligence, or how the White House made use of it.)

President Bush might have accepted responsibility for these two failures. He might have followed the example of President John F. Kennedy, who took the blame for the disastrous C.I.A. attempt to put a rebel army ashore in Cuba in 1961. Instead, the administration hid the existence of the pre-9/11 warnings for as long as possible and continued to insist for many months after the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein's illegal weapons might still turn up, and it has blocked any official investigation of its role in exaggerating the slender intelligence that existed.

Blaming the C.I.A. for these failures led to Porter Goss being sent to Langley....

Posted on Thursday, May 11, 2006 at 1:03 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Jonathan Alter: What President Bush and his new press secretary could learn from FDR

Source: MSNBC (5-9-06)

It’s not about the mike. As Tony Snow takes over as presidential press secretary, you’ll likely see a spate of stories about how Snow’s low-key charm is working to improve White House media operations. But the honeymoon will last only a couple of weeks at most. That’s not Snow’s fault: President Bush could have Oprah as his mouthpiece and it still wouldn’t change his coverage. The only way to do that is to take a leaf from the greatest communicator of all—Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Most White House press secretaries aren’t well-known. (Quick: Who was Bill Clinton’s last one?) But even the ones who become household names cannot make up for the shortcomings of the president. If Bush is genuinely interested in making a fresh start, he will have to overhaul his own relationship with reporters, not assume that Snow can do it for him. In fact, some of the best-liked press secretaries have the least to show for it. Just ask Marlin Fitzwater, whose colorful style and longstanding personal friendships with Washington reporters couldn’t help George H.W. Bush get re-elected in 1992, or Mike McCurry, whose reputation for intelligence and candor did nothing to offset the abuse heaped on Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal.

The only way for a president to transform the news media’s view of him is to provide more of the commodity they crave the most—access. For decades, smart presidents (and candidates) have understood that most reporters can be bought off cheap with a little face time. They won’t become pussycats—and some will go out of their way to prove their independence. But it is much harder to twist the knife into someone who has just called you by name in a small group and listened patiently to your long-winded question. This was one of the keys to John McCain’s early success in the 2000 Republican primaries.

The president who pioneered the personal touch with reporters was FDR. Consider Roosevelt’s first press conference, which took place on March 8, 1933, four days after he took office. His predecessors rarely met with reporters and usually required questions submitted in writing. “I am told that what I am about to do will become impossible, but I am going to try it,” Roosevelt announced to the group crowded into the Oval Office that day. Then he laid down strict guidelines: he would meet with reporters twice a week, but he could only be quoted directly with permission (usually granted) and no radio recording was allowed. This was the first of an astonishing 998 press conferences he held over 12 years....

Posted on Wednesday, May 10, 2006 at 9:03 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Max Boot: Stop coddling despots

Source: LAT (5-10-06)

DURING HIS first four years in office, President Bush made impressive strides toward achieving the improbable goal laid out in his second inaugural address — "ending tyranny in our world." American troops liberated 50 million people and midwived representative governments in Afghanistan and Iraq. The United States also provided important support to peaceful uprisings in Ukraine, Georgia, Lebanon and Kyrgyzstan.

The ripples of those revolutions reverberated throughout the greater Middle East, long the major breeding ground of anti-Western terrorism. At a minimum, tyrants felt compelled to pay lip service to American demands that they curtail support for terrorism and show greater respect for human rights. Syria's Bashar Assad pulled his occupation army out of Lebanon; Hosni Mubarak promised to hold genuine electoral contests in Egypt; the Saudi royal family deigned to hold elections for municipal councils.

In the last year, however, the global momentum for democratization has palpably slowed and in some places reversed course altogether. Vladimir V. Putin has crushed all competing centers of power in Russia. Belarus, the only other dictatorship left in Europe, held fraudulent elections that confirmed Alexander G. Lukashenko's death grip on power. The same thing happened in Kazakhstan, where president-for-life Nursultan A. Nazarbayev claimed to have won more than 90% of the vote. Next door in Uzbekistan, security forces gunned down hundreds of unarmed protesters in the city of Andijan and then tried to cover up the massacre.

The same worrisome trend is observable in the Middle East. The Iranian ayatollahs have stepped up their campaign of torturing, jailing and executing dissidents. The Assad regime has arrested more opposition figures at home and continues to intimidate anti-Syrian activists in Lebanon. And, most glaring of all, modern-day pharaoh Mubarak has imprisoned his leading liberal opponent and renewed the draconian "emergency law" that allows indefinite detention of anyone who challenges his rule.

What's going on? Well, no one — not even Bush — ever said that the course of liberty would be smooth and easy. Entrenched elites have an obvious incentive to resist giving up power, and they now feel free to do so because they think that Bush, a lame-duck president with approval ratings in the low 30s, is too feeble to resist.

The despots reckon, not without reason, that they can simply wait out the current occupant of the White House. They know that the odds of vigorous action from the United States are slim given how many U.S. troops are tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq. The continuing turmoil in Iraq and Hamas' takeover of the Palestinian Authority — signs of the supposed dangers of too much freedom — provide further pretexts for repression.

In his remaining 986 days in office, Bush has a choice: Either he can sit back and allow the resurgence of the dictators, or he can fight back with the considerable power still at his command. His recent decision to grant a coveted White House reception to Ilham Aliyev isn't a good sign because the president of oil-rich Azerbaijan blatantly rigged his nation's parliamentary elections just six months ago. If Bush wants to show that he is still serious about promoting "the expansion of freedom," he could begin by making an example of Egypt.

Mubarak is reputedly one of Washington's closest friends in the Arab world, yet he has been among the most brazen in defying Bush's demands for greater openness while force-feeding his 78 million subjects a steady diet of anti-American and anti-Semitic drivel. His vow to hold multiparty presidential elections produced a suspect ballot last fall in which he secured 88% of a feeble turnout. Afterward, he consigned his chief challenger, Ayman Nour, to five years' hard labor on trumped-up charges of forging signatures to qualify for the ballot. The subsequent parliamentary election was even more dubious; ruling party goons used violence and fraud to keep the Muslim Brotherhood, the main opposition group, from winning too many seats. Now Mubarak's minions are roughing up peaceful demonstrators who support brave judges in their demand for greater independence and less electoral fraud.

Why, oh why, is this repugnant regime still getting $2 billion a year in American subsidies? Take the money away from Mubarak and give it to democracy-promotion programs across the Middle East. That would be a shot heard 'round the world. Failing such a signal, the dictators will become bolder and more brazen in defying what Bush once called "the nonnegotiable demands of human dignity."

Posted on Wednesday, May 10, 2006 at 7:43 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, May 9, 2006

Andrew Kuchins: Russia's Back (Boo!)

Source: WSJ (5-9-06)

U.S. Vice President Richard Cheney made clear last week in Vilnius that he is not pleased with Russia's democratic backsliding, human-rights abuses and rough behavior in its neighborhood. And to hammer the point home Mr. Cheney then broke bread with the noted democrat, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazerbayev, who got a complete pass on his dubious record. Alert the media: We've identified double standards in U.S. foreign policy!

But the real story that Mr. Cheney and many in Washington and elsewhere have a hard time dealing with is that Russia is back in the game. Rapidly accumulating oil and gas wealth is fueling a new assertiveness in Russian foreign policy that has been missing for nearly 20 years. Whatever issue we look at in 2006 -- be it Iran, the Middle East peace process, gas supplies to Europe or accession to the World Trade Organization -- Russia is more confidently defending its interests as it perceives them far more than two years ago, or even six months ago.

Russia's previous two decades of geopolitical decline started with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and included the disbanding of the Warsaw Pact and, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union. But it is possible that 2005 may be viewed retrospectively as a historical turning point in Eurasia -- the end of Russia's decline. This recovery might be based on the shaky foundation of high oil prices, but it's real nonetheless.

The momentum of "color revolutions" has dissipated as at-risk countries and their great power supporters have mobilized to prevent further spread. While falsified elections in Kyrgyzstan resulted in regime change last spring, subsequent elections in Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Belarus have been effectively managed with incumbent presidents, ruling parties or elites holding on to power. Authoritarian ranks are drawing in tighter formation -- led by Moscow and Beijing -- with Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov, Belarus's Alexander Lukashenko and others to resist U.S.-led democratization.

The eviction of U.S. military forces in Uzbekistan and the subsequent signing of a security alliance between the Russian Federation and Uzbekistan last year also marks a turning point. If one chooses to look at the U.S.-Russian relationship in Eurasia as a zero-sum game, then what took place in Uzbekistan marked the first clear victory of Russian interests at America's expense. The durability of this particular victory remains to be seen, but as long as record-high energy prices fuel Russia's status both substantively and symbolically as an energy superpower this competition is likely to persist if not grow.

The Russians are aggressively playing their energy card to expand economic, commercial and political influence throughout Europe. They're playing hard on the inclinations of France and Germany to appease their great gas supplier to the east, and to cater to Russian interests at the expense of new European states, notably Poland and Ukraine. If oil and gas prices remain high in coming years or even grow, so grows the leverage of Russia in this region and the world. This is a simple but powerful formula and certainly one that Mr. Cheney understands.

The Russian recovery is truly impressive. According to Moscow-based investment bank Troika Dialog, in 1999 Russian GDP in nominal terms was less than $200 billion; in 2006 it'll be close to $1 trillion -- growing at a rate of more than 25% per year, though nominal dollar growth rates will of course taper downward as the ruble appreciates in value. Since Russia's wealth is based on strategic commodities -- first and foremost hydrocarbons -- rather than information technologies or consumer goods, Russia's weight as a strategic, geopolitical player will increase. It will be able to punch above its weight class to some degree. There are many questions about Russia's capacity to be a real "energy superpower," something still unprecedented and rather undefined, but we better take the notion seriously when we consider Russian interests.

Throughout the 20th century, and notably during the second half of the Cold War, the currency of power was military forces. Remember Stalin's famous question about how many divisions the Pope commands? After a 15-year retreat from power politics, the Russians are returning with a different instrument, oil and gas.....

Posted on Tuesday, May 9, 2006 at 8:51 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ruel Marc Gerecht: The mess at the CIA is hardly the fault of Porter Goss

Source: WSJ (5-9-06)

[Mr. Gerecht, a Middle Eastern specialist with the Central Intelligence Agency from 1985 to 1994, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.]

"In the last year-and-a-half, more than 300 years of experience has either been pushed out or walked out the door in frustration. This has left the agency in free-fall. I have visited these brave and committed women and men in nearly every corner of the globe, and urge the new director do so. They deserve maximum support and a clear vision of where their agency is headed."

Quite unintentionally, Democratic Representative Jane Harman's press release on the resignation of CIA Director Porter Goss is a decent guide to the debilitating problems afflicting the agency's clandestine service. Although the operations directorate has certainly been in free-fall, this condition has very little to do with Mr. Goss's tenure. The CIA is a dispirited organization. It should be: The end of the Cold War removed a sustaining sense of purpose and the broad indulgence of the agency's unenviable record of clandestine-intelligence collection, counterespionage and analytical forecasting.

* * *
The nature and exigencies of the Cold War (and the attendant literary fascination with cloak-and-dagger stories that usually bore little resemblance to the truth) successfully camouflaged much of the internal rot. Case officers love to deceive themselves and others about their work. Would you want to admit that the most important espionage achievement of the Cold War was to wait inside U.S. embassies and consulates for Soviet officials to walk in, volunteering their information and services? Or would you want to admit today that CIA officers who wait for Pakistani, Jordanian and Egyptian security officers to give them information are the "front-line" operatives in the war on terror?

Another myth is on the verge of being born. To wit: Porter Goss, the conservative ideologue, greatly politicized the CIA, and encouraged or forced several critically important senior officers to leave the agency, thus dispiriting the entire organization.

Implicit in Ms. Harman's commentary -- made more explicit elsewhere by her, by other Democrats in Congress, and by sympathetic members of the press -- is the assumption that the Bush administration is waging a vendetta against Langley's upper echelons for their hostility to the administration and their embarrassing leaks to the press, especially before the 2004 elections. The current version of this theme, best articulated by Howard Dean of the Democratic National Committee, posits a completely apolitical, professional CIA -- correctly analyzing Iraq (weapons of mass destruction excepted, of course) -- being pounded by a partisan, bellicose, mendacious Republican administration, punishing those who speak truth to power....



Posted on Tuesday, May 9, 2006 at 8:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tim Rowland: The main achievement of Klan rallies is to speed the demise of the Klan

Source: Herald Mail (5-7-06)

John Howard, superintendent of Antietam National Battlefield, probably felt that he had little choice but to allow the Ku Klux Klan to soil what many consider to be sacred ground. But he's too sharp a guy not to understand and at some level appreciate the myriad of ironies.


In granting the Klan's request for a rally at Antietam, Howard did the right thing, and not just because the Constitution says he had little choice. Free speech is a federal foundation so nowhere can this be more undeniable than on federal property.


But it goes well beyond that. There are two reasons for maintaining a public battlefield. It's a commemoration to those who sacrificed themselves for the benefit of the rest of us. And it's also an instrument of teaching.


Out of battles come lessons, not just in military tactics, but in culture and society. Battles say to us, society made a mistake and this is the price of that mistake - so let's remember, so as not to repeat.


Although they are too angry and politically tone deaf to know it, Klan members have actually done us a tremendous favor by choosing Antietam as the site for their little shindig.


Some have made the point that the Klan's appearance on this ground sullies the memories of those who fought and died there.


The reality is quite the opposite. The Klan's appearance accentuates the importance of the struggle. Lincoln may not have gone into the Civil War with the idea of freeing the slaves, but the South sure went into the war with the idea of keeping them. This "states rights" issue that honorable southern sympathizers - understandably wishing to associate their cause with glory instead of shame - use as the cause of the war is essentially correct.


And one of the chief rights the South wished to protect was - you guessed it.


The Klan, of course, misreads history too far in the opposite direction. It has co-opted the southern flag and would have you believe the war was fought in the name of racial purity. Truth be told, it wouldn't surprise me if it's the southern partisans who take greater offense at the Klan's arrival than those of the North.


But what the Klan does is remind us that these battles are still being waged, in hearts instead of on hillsides. ...

Posted on Tuesday, May 9, 2006 at 6:59 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, May 8, 2006

Myles Kantor: Frederick Douglass' Cuban Legacy

Source: frontpagemag.com (5-8-06)

[Myles Kantor is a columnist for FrontPageMagazine.com and editor-at-large for Pureplay Press, which publishes books about Cuban history and culture. His e-mail address is MylesColumn@aol.com.]

I recently corresponded with Professor James Colaiaco about his new book, Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July. I've often cited Douglass in my writings about Cuba in light of his moral relevance to Fidel Castro's subjugation of a black-majority country.

Frederick Douglass is chiefly remembered as an anti-slavery activist and orator, but he was also a journalist and founded newspapers such as The North Star. Accordingly, Douglass was a passionate advocate of free speech. As he said in "A Plea for Free Speech in Boston":

Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason of righteousness, temperance, and of a judgment to come in their presence.

He continued:

To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money...A man's right to speak does not depend upon where he was born or upon his color. The simple quality of manhood is the solid basis of the right—and there let it rest forever.

For acting in the tradition of Douglass, black Cuban journalist Jorge Olivera and his family have suffered severely. He wrote recently in an open letter to leaders of the United States, European Union, and Canada:

I was sentenced to 18 years imprisonment in April of 2003 for practicing journalism without the supervision of official censors. Sick, they placed me in a barely lit cell infested with insects. I had to drink contaminated water and the food was regularly served in a state of putrefaction. On December 6, 2004, after 20 months and 18 days of the cruelest treatment, the penal authorities conditionally freed me for reasons of health. Now they plan to return me to jail. They will not allow me or my family to go into exile. Immigration officials deny us an exit visa, a process that reflects on the country in which we live...Since February 21, I have been prohibited to go outside the limits of Havana without court authorization, nor to participate in any celebrations or public events.

Other persecuted black journalists include Angel Moya Acosta and Ivan Hernandez Carrillo.

In 1886, Spain's parliament abolished slavery in Cuba. In 2006, Castro and his mostly white nomenklatura have degraded Cuba back to the imperial era. This regime might not be able to maintain electricity or sanitary health care, but it can turn back time.

Posted on Monday, May 8, 2006 at 7:29 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Robert Spencer: Betrayal at Brandeis

Source: frontpagemag.com (5-8-06)

[Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of five books, seven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). He is also an Adjunct Fellow with the Free Congress Foundation.]

Brandeis University began in 1948, according to its mission statement, “under the sponsorship of the American Jewish community” in order to “embody its highest ethical and cultural values.” In this age of the ascendancy of the academic Left, it is in danger of becoming the polar opposite of those noble aspirations: a useful idiot of the global jihad. First there was the appointment of Khalil Shikaki a senior fellow at its Crown Center for Middle East Studies, and the flat refusal to consider the evidence linking Shikaki to Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Now comes an honorary doctorate to be awarded to playwright Tony Kushner on May 21.

Kushner thinks that “it would have been better if Israel never happened,” and that its founding was a “mistake.” He has echoed the most outrageous fantasies of Palestinian propagandists, denouncing Israel for “ethnic cleansing” and declaring: “The biggest supporters of Israel are the most repulsive members of the Jewish community and Israel itself has got this disgraceful record...Israel is a creation of the U.S., bought and paid for...There are lots of beautiful little orange groves and olive groves which the Palestinians had before the Jews were there, and some very attractive European-looking cities, too...” Kushner has decried “the deliberate destruction of Palestinian culture and a systematic attempt to destroy the identity of the Palestinian people” -- without, of course, mentioning that that national identity was invented in the 1960s in what turned about to be an extraordinarily successful ploy to adjust the paradigm of the Arab-Israeli conflict with the newly-minted Palestinians as the underdogs.



Meanwhile, Brandeis Goldfarb Library featured a propagandistic exhibition of children’s paintings called “Voices from Palestine,” including depictions of bloodied Palestinian children and a PLO flag in the shape of Israel, suggesting that all of Israel belongs by right to the Palestinians. Adverse publicity compelled the Library to close the exhibit Wednesday, after four days of a scheduled two-week run. Yet the day after the Library closed the exhibit, protestors came out at Brandeis; one carried a sign reading, “Shut Down the Israeli Apartheid Terror State/From the River to the Sea Palestine Will Be Free.” Another read: “END Repression of Palestanian [sic] Children” -- a particularly brutal irony in light of the culture of murderous hatred into which Palestinian children at the youngest ages are plunged by their parents.



These are the “highest ethical and cultural values” of the American Jewish community? Brandeis has clearly lost its way: it has come full circle from the robust and fervent Zionism of Justice Louis Brandeis. It has imbibed so deeply the Left’s iron dogma of relativist multiculturalism that it has become just another academic conduit for the propaganda and disinformation that dominate the discussion about Israel in today’s universities.



The bitter irony is that Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz and the others responsible for hiring Shikaki and honoring Kushner, as well as the protestors at the University last Thursday, no doubt believe that all this demonstrates their commitment to justice. Those at Brandeis who are responsible for all this probably deplore the Israeli “apartheid” state, but they never address (except to explain away) the relentless terror attacks on Israeli civilians by Palestinian mujahedin or the overall climate of terror that made the infamous “apartheid wall” necessary. They do not examine the root causes of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and so believe that it can by various concessions on the part of Israel. They, like so many others in Europe and America, labor under the delusion that they can win peace with the jihadists through concessions and negotiated settlements.



They don’t have any idea of what the new rulers of “Palestine,” the Islamic Resistance Movement or Hamas, make quite plain in the Charter of their movement: that the conflict between Muslim Arabs and Israel is not ultimately about “stolen land” or nationalistic yearnings. If it had been, the Palestinian Arabs would have accepted the state offered them by the UN partition plan of 1948. Instead, it is just one front of the global jihad effort to establish the hegemony of Islamic law not just over what is now the State of Israel, but over the entire world. Hamas, the Charter says, “will spare no effort to bring about justice and defeat injustice, in word and deed, in this place and everywhere it can reach and have influence therein.” In this context justice equals Islamic rule: Hamas states that “Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.”



The jihad ideology stipulates that Muslims must strive to establish the hegemony of the Islamic social order over the world, offering non-Muslims conversion to Islam, subjugation as inferiors -- dhimmis, or protected (or guilty) people -- under Islamic law, or war (cf. Qur’an 9:29; Sahih Muslim 4294, etc.). What the befuddled Leftists of Brandeis don’t seem to realize is that this imperative does not stem from outrages committed by the infidels, although such outrages, whether imagined or real, are used as pretexts to stir up support for the jihad at hand. If Israel dismantled the wall tomorrow and withdrew to the 1967 borders, the Palestinians would not be placated.



If Israel gives up part of Jerusalem, peace will not come. The Palestinian mujahedin and their allies will have fresh demands. And Jerusalem itself will become more dangerous and uncomfortable for free people who believe in the equality of rights of all people. If, as Kushner and the Brandeis protestors evidently hope, Israel eventually disappears before the jihad onslaught, the warriors of jihad will not be placated, and peace will not come to the earth. New pretexts will be found to stir up the faithful to fight on until Islamic law reigns supreme over the entire world.

That’s why Brandeis’ hiring of Shikaki, honoring of Kushner, and displaying of Palestinian war propaganda are all in service of victory not only for the Palestinians, but for the global jihad. Brandeis has betrayed the principles on which it was founded; it is also abetting those whose ultimate goals involve the imposition of a draconian system that would deny equality of rights to women and religious minorities, and would dismiss the cultural monuments and intellectual achievements of the Judeo-Christian West as jahiliyya -- so much ignorance and trash. In that respect, Brandeis officials have not only betrayed its Jewish and American identity, but even its status as a University.

No one who loves genuine freedom, and who respects Judeo-Christian values, should hesitate to call them on these betrayals.

Posted on Monday, May 8, 2006 at 7:27 PM | Comments (0) | Top

James Ottavio Castagnera: Oil Crises Are Recurring Phenomena

Source: Lehighton (PA) Times-News (5-13-06)

[Jim Castagnera is a Philadelphia attorney and author who writes a weekly newspaper column, “Attorney at Large."]

As the price at the pump flirts with three dollars, the doomsday crowd declares the end of the Oil Age. While, as a recent National Geographic cover-story proclaims, we Yanks may have just witnessed the end of cheap oil, a dearth of petroleum products is unlikely. A better bet is one more round in a recurring cycle of shortage scares, dating back to the late 19th century.

The birth of the U.S. oil industry can be reasonably be dated back to the 1850s in western Pennsylvania, where “rock oil” was skimmed off the water with rags, bottled, and sold as a medicine labeled “Seneca Oil.” After the Civil War, a genuine oil shortage --- of whale oil, that is --- opened the door for kerosene to enter the market as a major competitor. By 1859, some three dozen firms were distilling and marketing “coal oil.” The first “Oil Boom,” during and immediately after the war, drew Cleveland’s John D. Rockefeller into the refining business in a big way.

Rockefeller’s Standard Oil soon used its near-monopoly on refineries, plus a complex rebate system, to manipulate railroad rates and crush the competition. The Standard Oil Trust Agreement of 1882 created the nationwide, soon to be worldwide, “Octopus.” But, according to oil expert Daniel Yergin of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, “a sense of precariousness underlay Standard’s great globe-girdling system. There was the fear that the oil would run out.”

Ironically, neither a drying up of crude oil, nor even a somewhat-belated Justice Department anti-trust action, broke Standard’s iron grip on the industry. Discoveries of vast oil and gas deposits, dwarfing Pennsylvania’s reserves, in Texas, Oklahoma, and a little later in Arabia, Russia and South America, made Standard’s brief monopoly a practical impossibility. The mushrooming industry, its growth tracking the transportation revolution powered by the internal combustion engine, struggled to maintain profitability in the teeth of growing surpluses and cut-throat competition.

Nearly a century after Standard’s move toward monopoly status, OPEC --- the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries --- built upon the 1973 “Arab Oil Embargo” a cartel regime that drove the members’ oil earnings up from $23 billion in ’72 to $140 billion five years later.

Americans once again feared dry gas tanks. For instance, in January 1974 this writer wrote in Lakeland Boating Magazine, “The American boater is vitally interested in what’s happening in the desert sheikdoms of the Middle East, where the robed rulers of these oil-rich lands (yes, I liked alliteration even then) have closed the valves that fed U.S. markets.”

Again, as in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, monopolization led to higher prices, which inspired entrepreneurs to open up new lines of supply, this time most notably in the North Sea. By the mid-1980s, crude oil prices very nearly collapsed.

At this, the start of the 21st century, as at the beginning of the 20th, the talk has turned to the end of oil. Wishful-thinkers of green hues would welcome such a state of affairs. Working stiffs (such as yours-truly, who commutes 100 miles a day) would not. I prefer to believe CERA’s Yergin, when he reassures us that although “bouts of anxiety have recurred since as far back as the 1880s… global output has actually increased by 60 percent since the 1970s, the last time the world was supposedly running out of oil.”

Now, as ever, soaring prices and apparent shortages can best be blamed on corporate shenanigans and political instabilities… today in Venezuela, Nigeria, the former Soviet Union and, inevitably, the Middle East.

The time is ripe for the United States to ensure its energy security… or risk more, and more severe, disruptions. Needed is concerted action along diplomatic, military and industrial/technological lines --- a three-front campaign. The decisive factors are not reserves but resolves.

Posted on Monday, May 8, 2006 at 6:32 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, May 5, 2006

Robert Samuelson: Why gas prices are soaring—and why they haven't hurt the brisk U.S. economy. Yet.

Source: Newsweek (5-8-06)

The United States has the energy policy it deserves, although not the one that it needs. Having been told for years that their addiction to cheap gasoline was on a collision course with increasingly insecure supplies of foreign oil, Americans are horrified to discover that this is actually the case. And yet, for all the public outcry and political hysteria over high gasoline prices, they haven't yet significantly hurt the economy—and may not do so. Since 2003, the economy has grown about 3.6 percent annually. It's still advancing briskly. That may be the real news....

It's conventional wisdom that big oil-price increases usually trigger a recession—or at least a sharp slowdown. Why haven't they? One oft-cited reason is that the economy has become more energy-efficient. True. Compared with 1973, Americans use 57 percent less oil and natural gas per dollar of output; compared with 1990, the decline is 24 percent. Cars and trucks have gotten more efficient, though not much more so since 1990. New industries (software programming, health clubs) use less energy than the old (steelmaking, farming). But there's a larger reason: the conventional wisdom is wrong.

Big oil-price increases in the past (1973-74, 1979-80 and 1990-91) did not cause recessions, though recessions occurred at roughly the same time. The connection has been repeated so often that most people probably accept it as gospel. But much economic research has concluded it's a myth. These recessions resulted mainly from rising inflation—inflation that preceded higher oil prices—and the Federal Reserve's efforts to suppress it. Higher oil prices merely made matters slightly worse. In 1980, for example, consumer prices rose 12.5 percent; excluding energy prices, they increased 11.7 percent.

This may explain the economy's resilience. One hopeful sign: most companies aren't passing along higher energy costs in their own prices. ...


Posted on Friday, May 5, 2006 at 5:10 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Mark Bowden: Playing to the Home Crowd in Iran

Source: NYT (5-5-06)

[Mark Bowden, a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, is the author of "Guests of the Ayatollah" and "Black Hawk Down."]

JUST over a quarter-century ago, five Iranian college students hit upon the idea of seizing the American Embassy in Tehran and staging a sit-in. Among them were Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is now Iran's president, and Habibollah Bitaraf, the current energy minister. The takeover of the embassy did not play out exactly as its student planners envisioned — indeed, Mr. Ahmadinejad himself initially opposed the move — but as a symbolic step, it not only isolated Iran from the rest of the world, it also rallied millions of Iranians to the idea of a strictly Islamist future. The ensuing hostage crisis made a big splash internationally, but perhaps its most important and lasting consequence was local: it gave the mullahs the leverage to take full power.

It is an old political strategy: identify a foreign enemy, provoke a crisis and wrap yourself in the flag. Today's confrontation with Iran over nuclear research is an example of how, as the saying goes, history rhymes.

Hard as it may be for Americans to believe, in November 1979 Iran's theocratic future was hardly assured. There had been a revolution, of course, but many different forces had combined to overthrow Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The mosque network, which had sunk deep roots that had spread wide during years of political oppression, provided the popular muscle; it was the force that propelled millions into the streets. But despite fervent and widespread reverence for Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the new Iran could have taken any number of identities.

Among those who had cast out the shah were Communists, nationalists, socialists and others — many of whom envisioned at least some flavor of democracy. Some of these groups were highly organized and well-financed, especially Tudeh, Iran's Communist party. These groups had varying ideas about the new Iran, but were united in preferring a secular state.

Ayatollah Khomeini himself was of two minds on the subject: he did not immediately seize power on his triumphant return to Iran from Paris but retreated to the holy city of Qom, appointed a provisional government manned by the secular political leaders who had surrounded him in exile, and established a revolutionary council to write Iran's new constitution....

Ayatollah Khomeini, whose initial response to the takeover was to order that the students be chased off the grounds, reconsidered when he heard reports of its popularity. Overnight heroes, the student occupiers quickly produced "evidence" on Iranian TV to substantiate their claim that America had been planning a countercoup. ...

Today, as the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, presides over an increasingly restive, unhappy population, his pit bull, President Ahmadinejad, has picked a new fight with the United States of America. Even many Iranians who oppose the theocracy now favor joining the nuclear club; it adds to national prestige and arguably enhances Iran's security. In openly pursuing nuclear power and defying world opinion, the old revolutionaries are shoring up their stature at home by appealing to nationalism and to fears of foreign invasion or attack.

And why shouldn't they? It worked before.




Posted on Friday, May 5, 2006 at 5:05 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, May 4, 2006

Sidney Blumenthal: The secret passion of George W Bush

Source: OpenDemocracy.net (5-3-06)

The urgent dispatch of Karl Rove to the business of maintaining one-party rule in the mid-term elections in November 2006 is the Bush White House's belated startle reflex to its endangerment. Besieged by crises of his own making, plummeting to ever lower depths in the polls week after week, Bush has assigned his political general to muster dwindling forces for a heroic offensive to break out of the closing ring. If the Democrats gain control of the House of Representatives or Senate they will launch a thousand subpoenas to establish the oversight that has been abdicated by the Republican Congress.

In his acceptance speech before the Republican national convention in 2004, the "war president" spoke of "greatness" and "resolve" and repeatedly promised "a safer world" and "security", and compared himself "to a resolute president named Truman." Afterward, Bush declared he had had his "accountability moment"; further debate was unnecessary; the future was settled.

But Rove's elaborate design for Republican rule during the second term has collapsed under the strain of his grandiosity. In 2004, Rove galvanised "the base" (ironically, "al-Qaida" in Arabic) through ruthless divide-and-conquer and slash-and-burn tactics. But with Bush winning the election by a bare 50.73%, he failed to forge the unassailable Republican realignment that he sought.

Rove is an amateur historian whose goal was modelled on the apparently unlikely figure of President William McKinley. Bush's radicalism bears little resemblance to McKinley's stalwart conservatism except for his friendly orientation toward big business. Rove zeroed in on McKinley because his election in 1896 created a natural Republican presidential majority that was broken only by the party split of 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt ran as a Progressive and when Franklin D Roosevelt ushered in a Democratic realignment in 1932.

Rove and Bush had hoped to use the second term to force radical changes that would alter American government, society and politics. At last, they planned to undo the New Deal and return to the Republican Eden. But Rove's proposal for the privatisation of social security, among other schemes, was aborted without even a single congressional hearing.

The Republican cathedral of his dreams in ruins, Rove has now discharged formal control of moribund domestic policy to a protégé, Joel Kaplan (a former law clerk of supreme-court judge Antonin Scalia's), in a reshuffle of the White House senior staff that includes the rise of another Rove protégé, Josh Bolten, as chief of staff, replacing Andrew Card, a New England Bush family factotum left over from the term of the elder Bush who was not one of Rove's creations. As Bolten has explained privately, Rove remains at the apex of a new iron triangle, just as he stood at the peak of the Texas triangle of Karen Hughes, Joe Allbaugh and himself that managed George W Bush's 2000 campaign for president.

Rove's lieutenants have been promoted to hold the fort while he begins the epic defence of the embattled regime. His mission is to salvage the Republican majority in Congress from the blighted corruption of its leadership and rescue the Bush White House from the consequences of its own radical policies on everything from the endless Iraq war to skyrocketing gasoline prices. In 2004, Rove was still able to manage the Bush campaign on the momentum of fear from 11 September 2001. No longer perceived by the public as a rock of security, Bush's rigid leadership is seen as the source of turbulence. Security was his promise, but disorder has become his by-product.

So Rove must depend on the tricks of his trade – arousing fear of gays and other threats (Hollywood) to traditional family values, as he did in 2004; spinning national security to cast the Democrats as weak and unpatriotic, as he did in 2002; using well-financed front groups and his regular corps of political consultants to outsource smears and produce them as television and radio commercials, as he did to destroy John McCain in the Republican primaries of 2000 and John Kerry in 2004; and conducting whispering campaigns about the personal lives of those he seeks to annihilate, as he has done since his devastating rumour-mongering about then Texas Governor Ann Richards as a "lesbian" helped install his patron in the Lone Star Statehouse in 1994 as the springboard for the White House.

Rove must concentrate his mind with one gimlet eye fixed on special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who on 26 April summoned him back to testify before a federal grand jury. As Rove develops strategy for elections to come, he is a subject under investigation for dirty tricks past.

Rumsfeld and Cheney: the last days

The ferocious defence of Bush's radical presidency is being mounted on other fronts. In the face of the generals who commanded the troops in Iraq and demand the resignation of secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld for blind arrogance and unswerving incompetence, Bush has reaffirmed his support. In the two weeks up to 27 April, Rumsfeld appeared on fourteen rightwing radio talk shows, securing "the base" and giving full vent to his untethered personality.

On 18 April, Laura Ingraham interviewed him on her syndicated programme. The transcript as it appears on the official department of defence website records: "Ingraham: I saw Charles Krauthammer (the conservative pundit) a couple of nights ago saying there is absolutely no chance that you would step down. Is he right about that? Secretary Rumsfeld: He is a very smart man. [Laughter.]"

The administration's diehard supporters in the Senate, meanwhile, are fighting to prevent the armed services committee from calling the generals to testify. Frustrating congressional oversight is essential to preserving executive power. Checks and balances are the enemy of the Bush White House.

Vice-president Dick Cheney, a principal author and defender of this constitutional doctrine, maintains his ever-vigilant grip on the executive branch, even as he was caught napping during a meeting on 20 April with Chinese president, Hu Jintao. David Addington, his chief of staff, extending his discipline far into the national-security apparatus, never rests.

For Rumsfeld and Cheney the final days of the Bush administration are the endgame. They cannot expect positions in any future White House. Since the Nixon White House, when counsellor Rumsfeld and his deputy Cheney watched the self-destruction of the president, they have plotted to reach the point where they would impose the imperial presidency that Nixon was thwarted from doing. Both men held ambitions to become president themselves.

The Bush years have been their opportunity, their last one, to run a presidency. Through the agency of the son of one of their colleagues from the Ford White House, George HW Bush (whom President Ford considered but passed over for his vice-president and chief-of-staff, giving the latter job to Cheney), they have enabled their notion of executive power. But the fulfilment of their idea of presidential power is steadily draining the president of strength. Their thirty-year-long project on behalf of autocracy has merely produced monumental incompetence.

Yet Rumsfeld and Cheney do not really care. Bad public opinion polls do not concern them. Their ambition is near its end. They want to use their remaining time accumulating as much power in an unaccountable executive as possible.

An embattled president

Ironically, the more Bush tries to entrench his imperial presidency the weaker he becomes. Believing that his single-mindedness, stark convictions and bold indifference to criticism have been the secret of his success, he is confounded and baffled by the inability of his constant redoubling of effort to produce the same results as before. Why should the traits that pulled him up suddenly have a reverse magnetic effect of pulling him down? At his peak, he proudly declared, "In Texas, we don't do nuance." Now he reasserts himself as "the decider".

And yet he feels compelled to explain the nuances of his decisions. On 24 April, he appeared before the Orange County (California) Business Council to justify the origins of the Iraq war and his foreign policy in general. "I also wanted to let you know that it's before you commit troops that you must do everything you can to solve the problem diplomatically. And I can look you in the eye and tell you I feel I've tried to solve the problem diplomatically to the max", he said.

Just the day before, on CBS's 60 Minutes, Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief in Europe, disclosed that during the run-up to the Iraq war the Iraqi foreign minister, Naji Sabri, had been bribed to hand over military secrets. "We continued to validate him the whole way through", Drumheller said. His information was that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. But the White House dismissed the intelligence. "The policy was set", Drumheller said. "The war in Iraq was coming. And they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy."

Drumheller's account is consistent with the famous Downing Street memo, memorialising British prime minister Tony Blair's conference with his top national security and intelligence advisors on 23 July 2002. The memo stated: "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

In his Orange County speech, to illuminate his thinking, Bush summoned the authority of the "higher Father". "I base a lot of my foreign policy decisions on some things that I think are true. One, I believe there's an Almighty." This is one Bush doctrine that is inarguable. But Bush's profession of faith is precisely the message that incites Islamic terrorists in their jihad against the Christian crusader. For Bush, the culture war and the war on terror are one and the same. Understanding that the latter undermines the former, that his policy and politics are at cross-purposes, involves too much nuance.

The more beleaguered Bush becomes, the more he is flattered by his advisors with comparisons to great men of history whose foresight and courage were not always appreciated in their own times. Abraham Lincoln is one favourite. Another is Harry Truman, who established the framework of cold-war policy but left office during the Korean war deeply unpopular with poll ratings sunk in the 20%-30%-range. Lately, Bush sees himself in the reflected light of Winston Churchill, bravely standing against appeasers. "Never give in – never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in", Churchill said in 1941 as Britain stood alone against the Nazis. "Bush tells his out-of-town visitors to think of how history will judge his administration twenty years hence and not to worry about setbacks in Iraq", conservative columnist Arnaud de Borchgrave writes.

Of course, Bush does care about the outcome of the mid-term elections. He knows full well the catastrophe that his already wounded presidency would suffer if the Republicans were to lose one or the other chamber of Congress. Once again, he is depending upon Rove's skill. But insofar as his policies are concerned "the decider" has decided that public opinion doesn't really matter.

On 25 April, Bush reached the invisible but fateful mark of 1,000 days left in his term. It is a magical number associated with the 1,000 days of President Kennedy, the time taken as the title of Arthur Schlesinger Jr's memoir of that White House. Bush cannot run again and has no obvious successor who will hold his team together. On 22 March, he announced that he would leave to the next president the decision about continued US presence in Iraq. In the final days of his backward Camelot he will never, never, never change his basic policies, the source of his unravelling.

The greater the stress the more Bush denies its cause. In his end time he has risen above his policy and is transcending politics. In his life as president he has decided his scourging is his sanctification. Bush will be a martyr resurrected. The future will unfold properly for all the wisdom of his decisions, based on fervent faith, upheld by his holy devotion. Criticism and unpopularity only confirm to him his bravery and his critics' weakness. Being reviled is proof of his righteousness. Inevitably, decades hence, people will grasp his radiant truth and glory. Such is the passion of George W Bush.

Posted on Thursday, May 4, 2006 at 6:44 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Wednesday, May 3, 2006

Kevin Phillips: Theocons and Theocrats

Source: Nation (5-1-06)

Is theocracy in the United States (1) a legitimate fear, as some liberals argue; (2) a joke, given the nation's rising secular population and moral laxity; (3) a worrisome bias of major GOP constituencies and pressure groups; or (4) all of the above? The last, I would argue.

The characteristics are not inconsistent. No large nation--no leading world power--could ever resemble theocracies like John Calvin's Geneva, Puritan Massachusetts or early Mormon Utah. These were all small polities produced by unusual migrations of true believers.

As a great power, a large heterogeneous nation like the United States goes about as far in a theocratic direction as it can when it meets the unfortunate criteria on display in George W. Bush's Washington: an elected leader who believes himself in some way to be speaking for God; a ruling party that represents religious true believers and seeks to mobilize the nation's churches; the conviction of many rank-and-file Republicans that government should be guided by religion and religious leaders; and White House implementation of domestic and international political agendas that seem to be driven by religious motivations and biblical worldviews.

As several chapters in American Theocracy make clear, this kind of religious excess has been a problem--indeed, a repeating Achilles' heel--of leading powers from late-stage Rome (historian Gibbon thus explained Roman decline and fall) to the militant Catholicism of Habsburg Spain and most recently the evangelical and moral imperialist Britain that saw 1914 as something of an Armageddon against the German Kaiser's Antichrist and wound up in 1917-18 crusading in the Middle East to liberate Jerusalem. But although this facet of historical decline constitutes a major caution regarding the future of the United States, this essay will concentrate on the domestic political aspects--the theocratic tendencies in the GOP and the notable "religification" of American politics across a spectrum from life and death to science and medicine to climate change and biblical creationism.


The Growth of Theocratic Sentiment

The essential US conditions for a theocratic trend fell into place in the late 1980s and '90s with the growing mass of evangelical, fundamentalist and Pentecostal Christianity, expressed politically by the religious right; and the rise of the Republican Party as a powerful vehicle for religious policy-making and eventual erosion of the accepted degree of separation between church and state. This transformation was most vivid at the state level, where fifteen to twenty state Republican parties came under the control of the religious right, and party conventions in the South and West endorsed so-called "Christian nation" platforms. As yet nationally uncatalogued--a shortfall that cries out for a serious research project--these platforms set out in varying degrees the radical political theology of the Christian Reconstructionist movement, ranging from the Bible as the basis for domestic law to an emphasis on religious schools and women's subordination to men. The 2004 platform of the Texas Republican Party is a case in point.

So are the political careers of Pat Robertson and John Ashcroft, two presidential aspirants whose careers were milestones in the theocratization of the Republican Party. Robertson's 1988 presidential bid brought huge numbers of Pentecostals into the Republican Party. Missouri Senator Ashcroft, who explored a presidential race in 1997-98, got much of his funding from Robertson and other evangelicals. Picked as Attorney General by Bush after the 2000 election, Ashcroft was the choice of the religious right. Earlier in his career Ashcroft had decried the wall between church and state as "a wall of religious oppression," and his memoir describes each of his many electoral defeats as a crucifixion and every important political victory as a resurrection, and recounts scenes in which he had friends and family anoint him with oil in the manner "of the ancient kings of Israel."

But the national political emergence of Bush was equally relevant. "Born again" during the mid-1980s, he came up during the same period and in the same intense mode. As Newsweek noted in 2003, "As a subaltern in his father's 1988 campaign, George Bush the Younger assembled his career through contacts with ministers of the then emerging evangelical movement in political life. Now they form the core of the Republican Party, which controls all of the capital for the first time in a half century. Bible-believing Christians are Bush's strongest backers."

More telling still, in the years since 1988 dozens of reports have quoted Bush the Younger telling ministers, supporters and foreign officials that God wanted him to run for President and that God speaks through him. In mid-2004 one Pennsylvania newspaper reported his telling a local Amish audience, "I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job." Reports that he told Middle Eastern leaders that God told him to invade Iraq have been denied by the White House, but this is clearly the sort of language he uses from time to time.

Since Robertson's run for the White House in 1988 and the victory that same year by Bush the Elder, the Republican Party has clearly moved closer to this constituency--and the process was speeded by Bill Clinton, whose politics and personal conduct offended the churchgoing South, in particular, enabling George W. Bush to pose as the standard-bearer of moral restoration in 2000. This metamorphosis gained further momentum after September 11, 2001, when the younger Bush responded to the terrorist attacks by declaring the start of a war between good and evil, speaking in a relentlessly religious idiom that several biblical scholars have described as double-coding--only mildly religious on the surface, but beneath that full of allusions to biblical passages and Christian hymns. They, too, suggested that Bush cast himself as a prophet of sorts--one who spoke for God.

The upshot of this escalating religiosity on the part of the Republican national leadership has been an escalating and parallel religiosity on the part of the Republican rank and file. Those voting Republican for President since 1988 have become increasingly religious in motivation. After 9/11 pro-Bush preachers described Bush as God's chosen man while hinting that Saddam Hussein, whose Iraq was the biblical "New Babylon" of fundamentalist preacher Tim LaHaye's eerie Left Behind series, was the Antichrist or at least the forerunner of the Evil One. In 2004 a further wave of evangelical, fundamentalist and Pentecostal turnout helped to cement the Republican transformation, even as moderate mainline Protestants shuddered and turned in a small Democratic trend between 2000 and 2004.

As early as 1988, Ohio academician John Green, a specialist in religious political behavior, had commented on how the growing correlation between frequent church attendance and Republican presidential voting was starting to raise a US parallel to the religious parties of Europe, most notably the Christian Democrats in Germany and Italy. By 2000-04, this correlation was much stronger, and political journalists began to speak of the "religious gap" that was replacing the "gender gap." The less discussed but even more significant aspect of this upheaval lay in a second set of polls that showed the increasingly theocratic inclinations of the Republican electorate (see chart).

These sentiments did not spring from nowhere. A majority of Americans take the Bible literally in many dimensions, including subjects ranging from the creation and Noah's Ark to the Book of Revelation. Within the ranks of Republican voters, the ratios are lopsided. For example, in 1999 a national poll by Newsweek revealed that 40 percent of American Christians believed in Armageddon and virtually as many thought the Antichrist was already alive. Because such believers were most numerous in the Republican electorate, I would calculate that roughly 55 percent of Bush 2004 voters believed in Armageddon--and it could be higher.

Such voters are especially prone to theocratic views, and foreign policy is by no means immune. In 2004 a survey by the Pew Center found that 55 percent of white evangelical Protestants consider "following religious principles" to be a top priority for foreign policy. Only a quarter of Catholics and mainline Protestants agreed, but given the makeup of the Bush coalition, I would guess that about half its voters would favor that position. This explains both why so many of Bush's core supporters cheered the first-stage US involvement in Iraq--and why Bush bungled things in the Holy Land so badly.


The Bible, Theology and American Politics

This is a bit of a chicken-versus-egg situation. Have the issues that matter most to Americans become more theological because religion has become more of a political force--or has the growth of issues with a religious dimension spurred the increasing religious divisions? Probably some of each, but the list is frighteningly long.

First and foremost are the issues involving birth, life, death, sex, health, medicine, marriage and the role of the family--high-octane subject matter since the 1970s. These are areas where perceived immorality most excites stick-to-Scripture advocates and the religious right. Closely related is the commitment by the Bush White House and the religious right to reduce the current separation between church and state.

Topics such as natural resources, climate, global warming, resource depletion, environmental regulation and petroleum geology mark out a third important arena. Organizations such as the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty have enlisted a fair amount of conservative religious and corporate support for preparing what amounts to a pro-business, pro-development explanation of Christian stewardship. The institute's director, Roman Catholic Father Robert Sirico, contends that left-tilting environmentalism is idolatrous in its substitution of nature for God, giving the Christian environmental movement a "perhaps-unconscious pagan nature."

Then there is the subject matter of business, economics and wealth, in which the tendency of the Christian right is to oppose regulation and justify wealth and relative laissez-faire, tipping its hat to the upper-income and corporate portions of the Republican coalition. Christian Reconstructionists go even further, abandoning most economic regulation in order to prepare the moral framework for God's return.

The last arena of theological influence, almost as important as sex, birth and mortality, involves American foreign policy, bringing us to the connections among the "war on terror," the rapture, the end times, Armageddon and the thinly disguised US crusade against radical Islam. Since Islam and Christianity began fighting in the seventh century, the Holy Land has often brought disillusionment: after the Crusades (all nine of them); after the fall of Constantinople in 1453; and five centuries later for the British, in particular, after World War I. Unmindful Western nations may still be playing out the Crusader hand. In the months before George W. Bush sent US troops into Iraq, his inspirational reading each morning was a book of sermons by a Scottish preacher accompanying troops about to march on Jerusalem in 1917.

Controversies over life and death--often pivoting on precise definitions of each--can only continue to burgeon. The arguable rights of women (or parents) are being displaced by the rights of embryos or by the prerogative of sperm and egg to join, decisions rooted largely in theology, not science. Perhaps the preoccupation involves maximizing the potential soul count for the hereafter, in the manner of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century inquisitors who ordered that heretics must die even if they repented, yet pursued repentance to save their souls first.

The theology of death is cloudier and also riskier politically. Although Bush took a bold and ultimately unpopular stand in the Terri Schiavo case, bending over backward to insist on continuing her life support, blocking death is not the theological equivalent of enabling birth. The Bible abounds with the killing of those already born, both by God and by lawful authorities. Bush himself, as governor of Texas, sent hundreds of prisoners to the electric chair.

The next throbbing cluster of issues involves church-state relations. The nonradical theocon wing of the GOP demands a more conservative judiciary and an expanded role for religion in education, social services and the constraining of what they consider to be immoral behavior--abortion, homosexuality, pornography and contraception--but avoids spelling out any grand revolutionary mandate. The Christian Reconstructionist movement, by contrast, proclaims ambitions that range from replacing public schools with religious education to imposing biblical law and limiting the franchise to male Christians.

The federal judiciary is the arena in which the battles most critical to incipient theocrats will be fought out judge by judge, court by court. Signs of their anxiety to control the federal judiciary burst into view in an early 2005 meeting at which conservative evangelical leaders were addressed by Tom DeLay and Senate majority leader Bill Frist. The focus of the strategy session was how to strip funding or jurisdiction from federal courts, or even eliminate them. James Dobson of the Colorado-based Focus on the Family named one target: the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. "Very few people know this, that the Congress can simply disenfranchise a court," Dobson commented. "All they have to do is say the 9th Circuit doesn't exist anymore, and it's gone." A spokesman for Frist said he did not agree with the idea of defunding courts or shutting them down, but DeLay, who had once said, "We set up the courts. We can unset the courts," declined to comment.

Beyond the judiciary, pressure for theological correctness became overt in federal government relationships with the varieties of science--from climatology to geology, and even entomology--that can conflict with the Book of Genesis. For the growing number of elected officials who uphold Genesis, the Almighty, not carbon dioxide, brings about climate change. The consequences here go far beyond the evolution-doubting books being sold by the National Park Service or inconvenient information about climate change or caribou habitats in oil lands being deleted from government websites. In Texas, where the cotton industry is plagued by a moth in which an immunity to pesticides has evolved, a frustrated entomologist commented, "It's amazing that cotton growers are having to deal with these pests in the very states whose legislatures are so hostile to the theory of evolution. Because it is evolution they are struggling against in their fields every season." Meanwhile, the bigger message--depressingly reminiscent of our imperial predecessors--is that science in the United States is already in trouble. Irving Weissman, a stem-cell researcher, told the Boston Globe, "You are going to start picking up Nature and Science and all the great [research] journals, and you are going to read about how South Koreans and Chinese and Singaporeans are making advances that the rest of us can't even study."

Part of the explanation involves the religious right's larger view of economic matters and dismantling of government. In the radical Texas Republican platform adopted in 2004, the Lone Star GOP was not content to call for abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Department; it also demanded abolition of the Internal Revenue Service and elimination of the income tax, the inheritance tax, the gift tax, the capital-gains levy, the corporate income tax, the payroll tax and state and local property taxes.

Evangelicals, Southern Baptist Convention adherents and others oppose government social and economic programs because they interfere with a person's individual responsibility for his or her salvation. Others were diverted by rapture and end-times possibilities. "Overall, this kind of teaching has certainly stifled social consciousness among evangelicals," said Tim Weber, professor of church history at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary. "If Jesus may come at any minute, then long-term social reform or renewal are beside the point. It has a bad effect there."

These are divisive issues, and they divide both parties, but survey data suggest that they divide the Republicans somewhat more than the Democrats. True, liberals were front and center in trying to shrink the role of religion in the public square, and they have paid the price. However, the more important confrontation is now within the GOP, as the essential tensions shift from the unpopular derogation of religion so prevalent decades ago to the theologization and theocratic excesses of the conservative countertide.

Three prominent Republicans have staked out the boundaries. Former Republican Senator John Danforth of Missouri complained in 2005 that "the only explanation for legislators comparing cells in a petri dish to babies in a womb is the extension of religious doctrine into statutory law." Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee suggested that George W. Bush's "I carry the word of God" posture ought to be a 2004 election issue. And Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut regretted that "the Republican Party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy."

Unhappily, that's the direction in which it's been trending.

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 Wednesday, May 3, 2006 at 9:33 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Peter Beinart: The Rehabilitation of the Cold-War Liberal

Source: NYT Mag (4-30-06)

This fall, for the third time since 9/11, American voters will choose between Democrats and Republicans while knowing what only one party believes about national security. In 2002, Democratic candidates tried to change the subject, focusing on Social Security and health care instead. In 2004, John Kerry substituted biography for ideology, largely ignoring his own extensive foreign-policy record and stressing his service in Vietnam. In this year's Senate and House races, the party looks set to reprise Michael Dukakis's old theme: competence. Rather than tell Americans what their vision is, Democrats will assure them that they can execute it better than George W. Bush.

Democrats have no shortage of talented foreign-policy practitioners. Indeed, they have no shortage of worthwhile foreign-policy proposals. Even so, they cannot tell a coherent story about the post-9/11 world. And they cannot do so, in large part, because they have not found their usable past. Such stories, after all, are not born in focus groups; they are less invented than inherited. Before Democrats can conquer their ideological weakness, they must first conquer their ideological amnesia.

Consider George W. Bush's story: America represents good in an epic struggle against evil. Liberals, this story goes, try to undermine that moral clarity, reining in American power and sapping our faith in ourselves. But a visionary president will not be constrained, and he wields American might with relentless force, until the walls of oppression crumble and the darkest region on earth is set free.

If this sounds familiar, it should. It was Ronald Reagan's story as well. To a remarkable degree, the right's post-9/11 vision relies on a grand analogy: Bush is Reagan, Tony Blair is Margaret Thatcher, the "axis of evil" is the "evil empire," the truculent French are the truculent French. The most influential conservative foreign-policy essay of the 1990's, written by the Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment, was titled "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy." And since 9/11, most conservatives have seen Bush as Reaganesque. His adherence to a script conservatives know by heart helps explain their devotion, which held fast through the 2004 election, and has only recently begun to flag, as that script veers more and more disastrously from the real world.

Liberals don't have a script because they don't have a Reagan. Since Vietnam, they've produced two presidents: Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Carter's foreign policy is widely considered a failure. Clinton's foreign policy is not widely considered at all, because he governed at a time when foreign policy was for the most part peripheral to American politics. Ask liberals to describe a Carteresque foreign policy, and they tend to wince. Ask them to describe a Clintonesque one, and you'll most likely get a blank stare.

But before Vietnam, and the disappointment and confusion it spawned, liberals did have a clear story of their own. In the late 1940's and 1950's, intellectuals like Reinhold Niebuhr and policymakers like George F. Kennan described America's cold-war struggle differently from their conservative counterparts: as a struggle not merely for democracy but for economic opportunity as well, in the belief that the former required the latter to survive. Even more important, they described America itself differently. Americans may fight evil, they argued, but that does not make us inherently good. And paradoxically, that very recognition makes national greatness possible. Knowing that we, too, can be corrupted by power, we seek the constraints that empires refuse. And knowing that democracy is something we pursue rather than something we embody, we advance it not merely by exhorting others but by battling the evil in ourselves. The irony of American exceptionalism is that by acknowledging our common fallibility, we inspire the world....

Posted on Wednesday, May 3, 2006 at 7:33 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tom Bethell: Congress is to blame for the energy crisis

Source: Washimngton Times (5-2-06)

[Tom Bethell, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, is available to discuss how Congress is to blame for the current uproar over surging gas prices.]

For those with long memories, the uproar about the price of oil has deja vu written all over it. When I came to Washington, 30 years ago, the energy crisis topped the news. Oil prices were rising and (we were told) the "Arab oil embargo " was to blame.

Wrong. No matter how despotic, Arab rulers have always been happy to sell oil. Prices rose, but mainly kept place with U.S. inflation. The real problem was that a few years earlier the Nixon administration signed price controls into law. The supply of gas at the pump was not allowed to match demand. Nixon's successors reaped the consequences. President Carter wore a symbolic sweater, and soon there were gas lines.

I don't think Gerald Ford or Mr. Carter had much idea of what had gone wrong.

Easier to blame foreigners than the good intentions of politicians. When President Reagan was sworn in, the first thing he did was to abolish the price controls. Mr. Ford could have done it five years earlier.

Today, as gas exceeds $3 a gallon, the search is on for new villains. The oil companies are "price gouging." That's a familiar accusation, but it's discouraging that President Bush has joined in. Oil companies compete fiercely with each other, and their products are highly regulated. That has not stopped Mr. Bush from pulling what Tony Blankley calls a "full Schumer": demagoguing the issue by ordering the Justice Department to "open inquiries into possible cheating in the gasoline markets."

The president should redirect his fire - and the country's attention - to the real problem: Congress. For years, lawmakers have done the environmentalists' bidding. Repeatedly, they have voted for restrictions and regulations that curtail supply and so make oil and gasoline more expensive. The recent run-up in price gave Mr. Bush the perfect opportunity to pin the blame where it has long belonged: on members of Congress who fear environmentalists more than motorists.

A key obstruction is the ethanol mandate in last year's energy bill, forcing drivers to use 71/2 billion gallons of the oxygenate additive by 2012. Producers of an alternative additive called MTBE are pulling out because they have become a target of tort lawyers. The lawyers should be fought off immediately, but the Democrats (who depend on trial lawyers for campaign funds) will oppose that all the way....

Posted on Wednesday, May 3, 2006 at 7:28 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Max Boot: Filling tanks, funding dictators

Source: LAT (5-3-06)

FREE-MARKET purists are getting a lot of mileage out of scoffing at all the hysteria about rising oil prices. From a strictly economic point of view, they've got a point. Even with crude selling at more than $71 a barrel and gasoline at about $3 a gallon, the U.S. economy continues to expand. It grew at a healthy annualized rate of 4.8% in the first quarter, and there has been no sign of a slowdown since. Oil is a much smaller part of the economy than it was during the oil shocks of the 1970s, and retail prices are still half of what the more heavily taxed Europeans pay.

Eventually, if oil prices keep rising, it may put a damper on the economy, but the odds are, if history is a guide, that prices will soon plunge as demand decreases (people drive less) and supply increases (oil companies dig more wells). Libertarians fret that political meddling will only interfere with the beneficent work of the invisible hand.

If oil were a commodity like any other, the free-marketers would be right. But it's not. Most oil reserves are controlled by governments, many of which conspire through the OPEC cartel to manipulate the market. These governments aren't the kind that any sane person would want to see in control of such a vital asset. Their power can only be countered by action from our own government.

Of the top 14 oil exporters, only one is a well-established liberal democracy — Norway. Two others have recently made a transition to democracy — Mexico and Nigeria. Iraq is trying to follow in their footsteps. That's it. Every other major oil exporter is a dictatorship — and the run-up in oil prices has been a tremendous boon to them.

My associate at the Council on Foreign Relations, Ian Cornwall, calculates that if oil averages $71 a barrel this year, 10 autocracies stand to make about $500 billion more than in 2003, when oil was at $27. This windfall helps to squelch liberal forces and entrench noxious dictators in such oil producers as Russia (which stands to make $115 billion more this year than in 2003) and Venezuela ($36 billion). Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez can buy off their publics with generous subsidies and ignore Western pressure while sabotaging democratic developments from Central America to Central Asia.

The "dictatorship dividend" also subsidizes Sudan's ethnic cleansing (it stands to earn $4.7 billion more this year than in 2003), Iran's development of nuclear weapons ($45 billion) and Saudi Arabia's proselytization for Wahhabi fundamentalism ($149 billion). Even in such close American allies as Kuwait ($35 billion) and the United Arab Emirates ($36 billion), odds are that some of the extra lucre will find its way into the pockets of terrorists.

In short, although high oil prices may not be a cause for economic panic, they do represent a big strategic headache — and one that requires a serious governmental response. But what? Most of the "solutions" being debated in Washington, such as sending taxpayers a $100 rebate or imposing a windfall profits tax on oil companies, would do nothing to address the crux of the problem: How do we defund the dictators?

That is not an issue that the United States can solve by itself. Although we are No. 1 when it comes to oil demand, our use represents only 25% of the global total — and falling. The U.S. should try to forge a consensus among major consumers, including the second-biggest oil guzzler, China, on how to wean our transportation infrastructure away from gasoline, which would have the additional benefit of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

In the meantime, there are some unilateral steps we can take: Drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Ease restrictions on building new refineries and pipelines. Eliminate the 57-cent-a-gallon tariff on ethanol imports made from Brazilian sugar cane. Increase federal funding for research and rollout of fossil-fuel substitutes such as hydrogen, cellulosic ethanol (produced from grasses and agricultural waste) and plug-in electric engines.

The most important step would be to increase the federal gasoline tax, currently a paltry 18.4 cents a gallon. Congress should enact a sliding-scale tax that rises as oil prices fall and vice versa. That would shape demand, which would in turn shape prices. The goal would be to create a "floor" at, say, $50 a barrel, which would avert the kind of precipitous price collapse that in the past has eviscerated investment in alternative energy sources and kept low-cost oil producers such as the Saudis and Russians in the driver's seat.

The tragedy of American politics is that it's still not possible to take this small, sensible step, even as our worst enemies, from Tehran to Caracas, grow more rich and powerful at our expense.

Posted on Wednesday, May 3, 2006 at 6:53 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, May 2, 2006

William Kristol: Iran's Unacceptable Nukes

Source: Weekly Standard (4-24-06)

IN THE SPRING OF 1936--seventy years ago--Hitler's Germany occupied the Rhineland. France's Léon Blum denounced this as "unacceptable." But France did nothing. As did the British. And the United States.

In a talk last year, Christopher Caldwell quoted the great Raymond Aron's verdict: "To say that something is unacceptable was to say that one accepted it." Aron further remarked that Blum had in fact seemed proud of France's putting up no resistance. Indeed, Blum had said, "No one suggested using military force. That is a sign of humanity's moral progress." Aron remarked: "This moral progress meant the end of the French system of alliances, and almost certain war."

Today, it is President Bush who has said (repeatedly) that Iran's "development of a nuclear weapon is unacceptable, and a process which would enable Iran to develop a nuclear weapon is unacceptable." The "reason it's unacceptable," the president has explained, is that "Iran armed with a nuclear weapon poses a grave threat to the security of the world." The Iranians must "not have a nuclear weapon in which to blackmail and/or threaten the world."

Is the America of 2006 more willing to thwart the unacceptable than the France of 1936? So far, not evidently. According to the New York Times, "One of President Bush's most senior foreign policy advisers" recently told a group of academics, "The problem is that our policy has been all carrots and no sticks. And the Iranians know it."

That acknowledgment could be the prelude to a new policy in which sticks are
finally assembled and wielded. That policy would manifest a far greater sense of urgency about the diplomatic process, and about pursuing meaningful sanctions, whether through the U.N. or a coalition of the willing. That policy would mean supporting diplomacy with the credible threat of force--instead of rushing every few days publicly to reassure the Europeans (and the Iranians) not to worry, that we're on a diplomatic track now, and, for that matter, for the foreseeable future. It would also mean stepping up intelligence activities, covert operations, special operations, and the like.

And it would mean serious preparation for possible military action--including real and urgent operational planning for bombing strikes and for the consequences of such strikes....

Posted on Tuesday, May 2, 2006 at 8:18 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Jonathan Alter: What FDR Teaches Us

Source: Newsweek (5-1-06)

On one level, it's unfair to compare a sitting president to his predecessors, especially when he has more than two and a half years to go. And it's doubly unfair to compare George Walker Bush, currently experiencing some of the lowest approval ratings in the history of polling, to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who is on the list of even conservative historians as one of our best presidents. But juxtaposing the two men may shed some light on both Roosevelt's unusual gifts and Bush's current troubles. FDR's presidency can offer some useful lessons—for today's White House, and for anyone intrigued by the mysteries of leadership.

Before reaching office, bluebloods Roosevelt and Bush had a great deal in common, even sharing some ancestors. FDR went to Groton and Harvard; Bush to Andover and Yale. Their academic records and the assessment of friends suggest roughly equivalent IQs. Both grew up with tough mothers and bearing the name of a previous American president. Both had a clubby charm and enjoyed bestowing cutting nicknames on aides. Both were tagged by top pundits of the day with the exact same epithet—"lightweight." Both lost for higher office, suffered business setbacks and experienced a personal crisis before becoming governor of a major state.

But the crises left entirely different imprints on the political style and character of their presidencies. FDR, stricken with polio at age 39, spent much of the 1920s building a clinic for polio victims at Warm Springs, Georgia. There, "Old Doc Roosevelt," as he called himself, shed his snobbism and learned to connect with ordinary people, as Bush does naturally. FDR restored the hope of polio patients, though neither he nor they would ever walk again.

Two weeks after barely dodging assassination in Miami in February of 1933, Roosevelt took office and performed a similar conjuring act on a larger stage. With the banks closed and millions of Americans wiped out, FDR used his "first-class temperament" to treat the mental depression of Americans without curing their economic one. In the days following his "fear itself" Inaugural and first "Fireside Chat," the same citizens who had lined up the month before to withdraw their last savings from the bank (and stuff it under the mattress or tape it to their chests) lined up to redeposit patriotically. This astounding act of ebullient leadership marked the "defining moment" of modern American politics, when Roosevelt saved both capitalism and democracy within a few weeks and redefined the bargain—the "Deal"—the country struck with its own people.

In "The Defining Moment," my new book examining FDR's election and storied Hundred Days, I don't draw explicit comparisons with Bush. But they're hard to ignore. Also at age 40, Bush conquered his own, less debilitating disease, a battle with the bottle that left his wife Laura saying, "It's me or Jack Daniels." He emerged with a single-minded focus and discipline that took him far. But when discipline hardens into dogma, a president loses the suppleness to respond to problems. Bush's adherence to routine—a frequent attribute of those who have beaten substance abuse problems—may have slowed his adjustment to new circumstances.

By contrast, Roosevelt was so flexible that many Democrats tried to stop him from gaining the 1932 presidential nomination because they saw him as a straddler and flip-flopper on issues like the League of Nations and Prohibition. (Neither "wet" nor "dry," he was a "damp.") But by calling for "bold, persistent experimentation," he turned flexibility into a principle. When man met moment in 1933, FDR cut left and right at once, putting people to work and regulating Wall Street for the first time, but also resisting pressure to nationalize the banks and slashing federal spending by 30 percent, the deepest cuts ever.

Posted on Tuesday, May 2, 2006 at 8:11 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, May 1, 2006

Stan Winer: Abu Ghraib ... Tortured fragments of history (The view from South Africa)

[South African-based writer Stan Winer is author of the book Between the Lies: Rise of the media-military-industrial complex, (London: Southern Universities Press, 2004)]

In April 2004, the world was momentarily shocked by televised photographs from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison showing hooded Iraqis stripped naked, posed in contorted positions, and visibly suffering humiliating abuse while amused American soldiers stood by. Responsibility for these acts has largely been confined to the lower ranks and kept close to Abu Ghraib itself. Official statements attributed the practice to an unusual and temporary breakdown in "military discipline", thus diverting any suspicion that psychological torture as paraded before our eyes in the Abu Ghraib snapshots is the product of intelligence policies shaped in design and application over a long period of time.
The Abu Ghraib scandal did, however, open a floodgate of news and information leaks about the existence of a mini-gulag of prisons the CIA and US Army Intelligence had set up in Afghanistan, on aircraft carriers, in remote places like the Indian Ocean Island of Diego Garcia, and in the prisons of torture-friendly allies.(1) An official inquiry disclosed that the US Army specifically allowed CIA to house "Ghost Detainees" who were unidentified and unaccounted for in Abu Ghraib, thus encouraging violations of reporting and monitoring requirements under the Geneva Conventions.(2)

What the official inquiry studiously failed to disclose were the reasons why obsessive secrecy was deemed necessary in the first place. Protected by extreme secrecy, such facilities are placed outside the rule of law. They are not subject to review of the manner in which they are operated, the interrogation methods used, and the general conditions prevailing there. Representatives of the Red Cross are denied access to the facilities; nobody knows how many detainees are held there, who the detainees are or where they come from, nor would it be known which authority was responsible for the arrest and bringing them to the facility, who conducted the interrogations, or whether they were authorised to do so.

It is reasonable to assume that, once a prisoner of war is captured, the captor’s immediate short-term objective would be to obtain from the prisoner quick information for tactical operations such as strikes, counter-strikes or further arrests. The infliction of physical pain is probably the quickest method of obtaining information, the usefulness of which is usually short-lived due to the changing and changeable nature of battlefield conditions. So why any need for psychological torture, which is comparatively slower at producing results and seemingly more benign than physical methods?

The obsessive veil of secrecy surrounding such methods means that military personnel are themselves largely unaware of how their individual actions fit into the overall picture. Others know exactly what they are doing, but keep quiet because they also know that what they are doing is criminal. The Official Secrets Act also ensures that lips remain tightly sealed. Above all, a perceived need to protect "the national interest" combines with censorship to retain a wall of silence around the subject.

A notable exception occurred, however, several years ago during the long-running trial in South Africa of alleged war criminal Brigadier Wouter Basson, a South African Army chemical and biological warfare specialist. The trial provided a rare glimpse into the horrors that can and did evidently occur in circumstances of extreme secrecy and geographical isolation no less pervasive and extreme as those prevailing currently in America’s gulag of secret prisons. Evidence presented at Basson’s trial concerned, among other things, certain events taking place in the 1970s and 1980s at an airfield and forward military base named Fort Rev, situated in Ondangwa in Owamboland in the former South West Africa, (now Namibia).

Fort Rev was used by 5 Reconnaissance Regiment and the other Special Forces Regiments as an operational base for launching counter-insurgency operations into Angola and areas of Owamboland. Within the base was also a secret torture and interrogation centre where attempts, not always successful, were made to "turn" or "convert" captured guerrillas into "pseudo operators" for covert deception operations. Hence the name Fort Rev, meaning "reversal". Behavioural scientists have another phrase for it: transmarginal inhibition or TMI — a state of behavioral collapse induced by physical and emotional stress prior to inducing new patterns of actions and beliefs. Successful application of this technique, sometimes referred to pejoratively as "brain washing", requires psychological torturers to have total control of the environment. Existing mental programming can then be replaced with new patterns of thinking and behavior. The same results can be obtained in contemporary psychiatric treatment by electric shock treatments and even by purposely lowering a patient’s blood sugar level with insulin injections. (3)

The Namibian deception operations, under the tutelage of battle hardened former Rhodesian special forces operators, had to be kept secret at any cost. If the operations were successful, pseudo gangs consisting of turned guerrillas posing as genuine freedom fighters would be infiltrated back into the field of battle where they would capture insurgents. Some of the captured insurgents, so-called "high value targets", would be turned at Fort Rev, others being useful only as a source of information. But, having served that purpose they then presented a security risk due to the nature of at least some intelligence they themselves would have picked during the course of interrogation, as this could immediately compromise the secrecy of the entire pseudo operations programme. So they could not be processed through normal channels and imprisoned in a central holding facility.

The torturers and interrogators at Fort Rev got around this small problem by simply killing off survivors. "Redundant" prisoners were disposed of without trace after being drugged and their bodies dumped into the Atlantic Ocean from an aircraft. It is difficult to imagine a more horrible way of dying. The doomed prisoners, before being loaded onto an aircraft and dumped 100 miles out to sea, were first injected with powerful muscle relaxants which had the effect of paralysing the victim whilst leaving his mind fully conscious. An anaesthetic drug was also used, having the effect of causing hallucinations. (4)

In the absence of digital imaging technology of the kind evidenced at Abu Gharieb, one can only speculate about the extent to which similar methods were practised during France’s battle for Algiers in the 1950s, Britain’s suppression of independence movements in Kenya and Malaya in the 1960s, Argentina’s dirty war, Britain’s Northern Ireland conflict in the 1970 and 1980s, and countless other regional conflicts. But whatever happened then, and whatever the true activities currently taking place in America’s gulag of secret prisons, it is certainly the case that extreme secrecy provides an ideal environment for the application of psychological torture techniques aimed at brain-washing prisoners of war.

Yet there remains wide public ignorance and a studied avoidance of this unsettling subject. Few people have been able to fit together the fragments of history and grasp the larger picture. Others simply don’t want to know. The practice of psychological torture, never fully acknowledged, is thus allowed to persist inside the secret services as the product of intelligence strategies that have probably been standard practice for at least half-a-century or more. Abu Ghraib is but the tip of an iceberg.



NOTES & REFERENCES:

(1) For a list of US detention sites see http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/media/2004_alerts/0617.htm

(2) For many years the Israeli secret services took this one step further by actually operating a "ghost prison" for political detainees. Code-named Facility 1391, this secret prison intended for "special cases" operated in Israel for many years within the walls of a secret army base, distant from the eyes of the Press and the public, and without being declared a detention facility, as required by statute. See http://www.icj-sweden.org/Facility1391.pdf

(3) The technique was discovered by Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov (see bibliography below) who identified TMI in the early 1900’s. His work with animals opened the door to further investigations with humans. The ways to achieve conversion through TMI are many and varied, but the usual first step in brainwashing is to work on the emotions of an individual or group until they reach an abnormal level of anger, fear, excitement or nervous tension. The progressive result of this mental condition is to impair judgement and increase suggestibility. The more this condition can be maintained or intensified, the more it compounds, leading to total behavioural conversion.

(4) Wouter Basson trial records 19, 20 & 20a. The complete trial record is available at http://ccrweb.ccr.uct.ac.za/archive/cbw/cbw_index.html

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eysenck HJ The biological basis of personality, Springfield, IL: Thomas, (1967)

Pavlov, IP Lectures on Conditional Reflexes: The higher nervous activity (Behaviour) of animals, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1928

Sargant, W The Battle for the Mind, London: Wm Heinemann, 1957

Posted on Monday, May 1, 2006 at 10:24 PM | Comments (0) | Top

David Wise: Read the news, go to jail

Source: LAT (4-30-06)

Unencumbered by a 1st Amendment, Britain for almost 100 years has had an Official Secrets Act to prevent leaks to the media and to prosecute offenders, including journalists.

Some Bush administration officials and members of Congress are casting a longing eye at the British law. If only the United States had a similar law, their reasoning goes, the reporters who revealed CIA-run prisons in Eastern Europe and the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping of terrorism suspects would be prosecuted instead of receiving Pulitzer Prizes.

The Constitution remains a barrier to those who would restrict the flow of information to the media — and thus to the public. But administration policies are gradually chipping away at its protections. The nation is in danger of having an Official Secrets Act not through passage of a law — although that is still a possibility — but through incremental steps.

The evidence is mounting:

• Judith Miller, as a reporter for the New York Times, spent 85 days in jail after refusing to name a confidential source in the investigation by Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald into the leak of the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame. Miller and half a dozen other reporters have been questioned by the prosecutor....

Although the indictment of the two lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is replete with references to "classified information," the espionage laws, with one narrow exception, refer only to "information relating to the national defense." The spy laws were passed in 1917 during World War I. A 1951 presidential executive order created the current system of classifying documents.

There is no law specifically prohibiting leaks, so the government has used the espionage laws to try to combat the practice. President Clinton vetoed anti-leak legislation passed in 2000 that would have made it a crime for a government official to disclose classified information.

To criminalize leaks of government information simply because the information is marked "classified" is absurd on its face. In 2004, the most recent year for which figures are available, the government classified 15,294,087 documents. It is hardly likely that the government has that many real secrets to withhold from its citizens.

Unnecessarily classifying documents is a fact of life in Washington. Many bureaucrats know that unless they stamp a document "secret" or "top secret," their superiors may not even bother to read it. One government agency classified the fact that water does not flow uphill. During World War II, the Army labeled the bow and arrow as a secret, calling it a "silent flashless weapon."...


Posted on Monday, May 1, 2006 at 9:39 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Home Newsletter Submissions Advertising Donations Archives Internships About Us FAQs Contact Us All Articles

 

 

News

Roundup

HNN Blogs

Etc.

Recent Comments

Archives

November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
March 2009
February 2009
January 2009
December 2008
November 2008
October 2008
September 2008
August 2008
July 2008
June 2008
May 2008
April 2008
March 2008
February 2008
January 2008
December 2007
November 2007
October 2007
September 2007
August 2007
July 2007
June 2007
May 2007
April 2007
March 2007
February 2007
January 2007
December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006
June 2006
May 2006
April 2006
March 2006
February 2006
January 2006
December 2005
November 2005
October 2005
September 2005
August 2005
July 2005
June 2005
May 2005
April 2005
March 2005
February 2005
January 2005
December 2004
November 2004
October 2004
September 2004
August 2004
July 2004
June 2004
May 2004
April 2004
March 2004
February 2004
January 2004

RSS Feed (Summaries)
RSS Feed (Full Posts)

ASHP-CUNY Banner

Subscribe to HNN's newsletter.

HNN Donations--click here.

Subscribe to HNN's newsletter.

Just How Stupid Are We? By Rick Shenkman

Subscribe to HNN's newsletter.

Subscribe to HNN's newsletter.

Subscribe to HNN's newsletter.