History, U.S. regionalism, foreign policy, politics, life.
Geitner Simmons is an editorial writer with the Omaha World-Herald.
This weblog expresses his personal views only.
He is also
a Midwesterner, a Southerner, a husband, a father, a son. And always a student.
I learned much at the conference on Great Plains studies last week. The theme for this year’s three-day symposium was religion on the plains. A few items from my notes:
Greek Orthodox congregations in the United States tend to struggle with whether to use a liturgy that is all-Greek, all-English or a mixture. One presenter illustrated the challenge by singing a liturgy in English, then in Greek. No comparison -- the Greek was gorgeous, perfectly suited to the melody. The English version, merely so-so.
In 1999, the Montana Association of Jewish Communities published a cookbook. One of the recipes was for Crow Cut, a dish made from elk. As the cookbook explains:
This recipe is attributed to the early frontiersmen and is named for the Crow Indian tribe. Why is it being presented in a Montana Jewish cookbook? There were Jewish frontiersmen, there were Jewish traders, ranchers, farmers and merchants. Far away from traditional foods, far from ritual butchers, these hardy souls adapted food from local traditions. The elk is a kosher animal. If, after reading this recipe and the reader does not have elk available, substitute beef or lamb ...
The name of a Jewish cookbook published in 1964 in Dallas, Texas: “5,000 Years in the Kitchen.”
America’s historical experience, since the beginning of European settlement, goes back only a few centuries, a brief span when compared to the full breadth of European history: I’ve heard several people make that point over the years. But on the plains of North Dakota, a community of Benedictine monks there is connected to, and inspired by, a spiritual tradition that goes back more than 1,500 years.
The Benedictines’ rule, or principles for guidance, says that in deciding on an appropriate course of action, one should differentiate between what is essential and non-essential. (For the Benedictines, the essentials are shared prayer, work and community life.) That principle, in practice, has helped the Benedictines embrace adaptability -- a useful approach for those 19th century Benedictines who had left their centuries-old monastery in Europe to start a bare-bones monastery from scratch in the far different world of the Dakota plains.
I’d read about Methodist and Baptist circuit riders in the frontier days of the Carolinas. But the conference informed me about the circuit riders of the 19th century Great Plains. Some circuit riders covered 700 miles.
The original proposal for creating two states dubbed “Dakota” would have divided them east-west rather than north-south.
From an address by Martin Marty: He quoted one academic, who wrote, “Tell me your landscape and I will tell you who you are.” Which relates to a Willa Cather line, “The great fact was the land itself.” Marty quoted from a Kent Haruf novel in which someone complains about the unfairness of a situation: “Of course it’s not fair. There ain’t none of it that’s fair. Life isn’t. And all our thinking it should be don’t seem to make one simple damn.”
The Midwest has had a mania for creating small colleges. A 19th century booster of Ohio once bragged that while England had two universities and France one, Ohio had 37.
The dwindling of many rural communities on the plains is well-known. Less so, perhaps, is that there are many “ghost colleges” in the region. One now-defunct college on the high plains of Texas observed in its promotional literature that once there, students would find that “we have the entire prairie for an athletic field.”
That will have to do for now. I have to complete an article today for online publication, submitting it on Tuesday. So, I will spend my normal blog time tonight or early Tuesday morning finishing the article rather than blogging. I’ll link to the piece when and if it goes online at mid-week.
Not so reassuring reports from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty about the Shiites in southern Iraq:
IRAQI SHIA OPPOSITION LEADERS DESCRIBED AS IRANIAN 'APPARATCHIKS.'
Saddam Hussein has little to fear from senior Iraqi opposition figures because Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has
turned many of them into "Iranian government apparatchiks," Alireza Nurizadeh writes in the 24 March issue of Beirut's "The Daily Star." Iranian judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmud Hashemi-Shahrudi, for example, used to be a leading figure in SCIRI, and International Assembly of the Ahl al-Bayt Secretary-General Shaykh Muhammad Mahdi al-Asifi used to lead the pro-Iran faction of the Al-Da'wah al-Islamiyah (Islamic Call) party. SCIRI head Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim might soon be appointed to a similar post, according to "The Daily Star." "The yellowed Iranian birth certificates (issued by Iranian consulates in Karbala and other cities) of [the named individuals] bear witness to the fact that those Shi'a who dream of ruling Iraq are more Iranian than Iraqi," according to "The Daily Star." SCIRI's Abdul Aziz al-Hakim has been touted as a possible future Iraqi leader, but his close relationship with Tehran precludes the United States allowing such an occurrence, according to a commentary in the "Gilan-i Imruz" daily of Rasht on 10 February.
WARNING OF AN ANTI-U.S. SHIA UPRISING.
"Closely informed Lebanese and Iraqi Shi'a sources" said in the 23 March issue of Manama's "Akhbar al-Khalij" that Iraqi Shi'a refuse to take power by relying on the United States, which is why they have not staged an antigovernment uprising in southern Iraq. Iraqi Shi'a who are inclined toward Lebanese Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah are preparing for armed resistance against a U.S. occupation, according to the Bahraini publication. Other anonymous sources close to the Iraqi Muslim Brotherhood, according to "Akhbar al-Khalij," say that Sunni Islamists are prepared to join with the Shi'a in their resistance.
Maybe such reports are misleading or alarmist. But I still thought them worth passing along.
The Democratic Leadership Council had some interesting info this week about how many Iranian moderates are hopeful that the war in Iraq will lead to a shakeup in Iran.
Did you see what Scott Ritter is predicting about how the Iraq campaign will turn out? A weird fellow. Give him a few more years, and he'll be able to succeed Ramsey Clark as the West's top lunatic/apologist for anti-Western thug-regimes.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan demonstrated the good that can result when a vigorous intellect is applied to the questions of public policy. Moynihan was a rare and curious figure in that liberals as well as conservatives will have particular cause to lament his passing this week.
For me, Moynihan stands out as a true hero because of his work as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in the mid-1970s. He was stalwart and eloquent in standing up to Soviet machinations and reckless U.N. initiatives. It was a magnificent, inspiring achievement.
In his first campaign, in 1976, Moynihan's opponent was the incumbent, James Buckley, who playfully referred to "Professor Moynihan" from Harvard. Moynihan exclaimed with mock indignation, "The mudslinging has begun!"
Peace protesters made a bit of noise in North Carolina the other day outside a fund-raiser for John Edwards. It was part of the ongoing protests in the state's Triangle area (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill), and only one of several efforts by opponents of the war to indicate their displeasure at Edwards' stance. Pictures and comments from the protest are here (although the page was very slow to call up this morning).
From an e-mail this week from my friend Craig Brelsford, a Pittsburgh native now living in the Netherlands:
We get a French channel, TV5 (TAY VAY SANK). The reporting on the war is laughably, viciously biased. Day 5 into the war, and already it's a quagmire, a la Vietnam. A house bombed in Baghdad gets deep coverage, without anyone putting the accident into its proper context, that is, that the bombs are overall remarkably accurate. Deep divisions in America, with Michael Moore more or less representing the mood of the public. I was laughing at my TV yesterday, as though it was comedy. Then I realized they were serious, and I got angry.
I don't know what's going to happen. But I've been paying more attention to those stories, one of them about McCaffrey, saying we may not have sent enough guys in. I'm worried.
But seeing the dead soldiers on TV hardened my resolve. I think Iraq miscalculated there. They think we'll pull out the way we did in Somalia. I think we're going to see this thing through, despite Susan Sarandon and Mike Moore and TAY VAY SANK.
By the way: Some recent posts here have talked about the linguistic entanglements of the French and English languages. Craig writes:
Dutch also has hundreds if not thousands of French words in it, but it's funny, you can tell the infusion of French into Dutch came later because many of the French-Dutch words keep a more French sound. But in English, the infusion started earlier, with William, and the French-English words have less of a French sound. (Also, English experienced the Great Vowel Shift right before Shakespeare, and all words, even native English ones, underwent a marked change in pronunciation.)
U.S. leaders are mindful of the need to avoid damaging Iraq's archaeological sites and Shiite holy sites in Iraq. That brings to mind Henry Stimson's directive during World War II that U.S. forces avoid obliterating Kyoto, Japan's ancient capital.
That is the topic of a well-done post by CalPundit.
In another CalPundit post (this one from Monday), Kevin Drum gives voice to this thought:
Watching the Academy Awards I'm reminded of a question I have every year: why are the presenters so lame at reading their lines? I mean, these folks are professional actors, but they read their four or five line intros like fourth graders in a school play. Sometimes they can't even read the names of the nominees without stumbling.
What gives?
Yes, why is that? Kevin also asks some follow-up thoughts.
I leave at mid-day today for a three-day conference in Lincoln. It's an annual symposium about the Great Plains; the topic to be examined changes each year. This year, the topic is religion on the Plains. Attending the conference, sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Great Plains, has become a spring ritual for me. Here is a link to the symposium agenda. An address by Martin Marty kicks off the event tonight.
So, I will be away from blogging till sometime over the weekend.
A Thomas Friedman column this week made a crucial point:
Yes, we have changed. “What Chirac failed to understand was that between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the twin towers, a new world was created,” said Dominique Moisi, a French foreign policy expert. “In the past, the Americans needed us against the Soviets and would never go so far as to punish France for straying. But that changed after 9/11. You have been at war since then, and we have not, and we have not integrated that reality into our thinking (and what that means) in terms of America's willingness to go it alone. We have fewer common interests now and more divided emotions.”
In his latest column, UPI columnist Jim Bennett touches on a related point which I’ve focused on repeatedly here. He writes that over the past decade or so:
... the United Nations was envisioned as an effective organ of security, and the Security Council as body that would no longer be paralyzed by the vetoes of contending superpower rivals. An increasingly elaborate web of transnational law was promoted through treaties and the new institutions they established, which was moving for the first time to a transnational law of personal jurisdiction. International law was increasingly seen as something that bound individuals as well as states. A series of U.N. conferences on various topics would serve in place of elected legislatures, to establish by the consensus of the self-selected the new orthodoxy of thought, speech and behavior.
Sept. 11,2001, began the process of stripping away this illusion. It demonstrated that there was no such thing as an effective international civil society. Rather, it demonstrated that sufficiently large segments of the world's population held such dissimilar fundamental viewpoints on basic issues of life that peaceful coexistence and tolerance, without more forceful dissuasion of parties of concern than previously thought necessary, would not be possible.
This in no way means, however, that the governments and activists pushing for a Kumbaya international order are letting up in their efforts. On the contrary, they will argue that the current Iraq campaign provides further proof that efforts should be redoubled in trying to constrain U.S. power through new mechanisms of international law.
International support for such a cause is being strengthened by the fervently negative press coverage given the Iraq campaign by non-American media. The Wall Street Journal had an article on Tuesday about the press coverage.
An article by Rob Long in the current National Review argues that just as the French will spend half an hour to prepare an egg properly or refuse (in a real-life incident he describes) to serve the cheese and dessert courses together to save time, so their government will continue to insist that all the rules of the diplomatic process be followed scrupulously, regardless of whether the actions accomplish anything in the face of a major security threat.
“Ossified, rule-bound cultures simply do not take action,” Long writes, “because action leads to change, and change leads to dessert and cheese laying together on the table, all willy-nilly and higgledy-piggledly.”
He adds: “Why didn’t we know this? Don’t we all know someone, in our life or our business, obsessed with process and steps and organization flows? Someone who impedes progress and delays action, not necessarily out of malice, but out of some deeply held belief that it’s better, when confronted with a choice, not to make one?”
The point isn’t that diplomatic processes are necessarily a waste of time. In most instances, diplomacy is precisely the appropriate tool to accomplish important tasks. But as the Iraq situation indicates, in some instances a punctilious insistence on process accomplishes nothing. Worse, it ill serves one’s interests if not one’s security.
At the same time, another reality should be sinking in: The limitations seen on the U.S. military’s rules of engagement in Iraq, in order to minimize civilian casualties, will likely become the way of the future.
Modern sensibilities here and abroad encourage such a development. So do pressures from the Kumbaya activist culture. Intensive, around-the-clock media coverage also contributes to the trend.
A caller to the Canadian radio program "As It Happens" last night said she’s not surprised that Iraqis aren’t rising up to welcome American troops or that many of the Iraqi forces aren’t laying down their arms.
I’ll grant that the Shias in southern Iraq have reason to be wary of the United States, given how Saddam’s regime punished them savagely after their failed uprising, at the urging of George Bush Sr., in 1991.
Still, the woman reminded me much of the Lillian Gish character in the movie version of Graham Greene’s “The Comedians,” in which she played an American innocent who didn’t have a clue as the true savagery of Papa Doc’s Tonton Macoute.
Here is a report from The New York Times, for example, about the terroristic tactics used by Saddam’s Fedayeen: “A woman who waved to British forces on the outskirts of the city was later found hanged, an American officer said.”
That is why many in southern Iraq haven’t come forward to welcome U.S. troops.
“They are thugs, the tools of terror,” said Christopher Hellman, a senior analyst with the Henry L. Stimson Center, an independent public policy institute on international security in Washington, D.C. "They are similar to Hitler's S.A. (the brownshirts), a force meant to ensure loyalty to the leadership by whatever means, or Russian commissars whose job was to shoot their own soldiers if they retreated.” ...
“A lot of what they have been doing prior to the start of this war is spying on other Iraqi forces,” Byman added. “They torture. They rape. They inspire fear. If someone defects, they torture his family members and send the defector a videotape of it. That's routine.”
Congratulations, West Virginians. Your state is especially impressive in terms of the number of young people stepping up to volunteer for the U.S. Army this year. (Phooey. I just checked the link; registration is required. That wasn't the case when I first saw the story on Tuesday.)
A flap has erupted in the Massachusetts House over the wording of a proposed resolution that would express support not just for U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf but also for Bush’s leadership.
In Illinois, lawmakers are considering a proposal that would prohibit condominium and homeowners' associations from preventing people from flying the American flag on their property. The state Senate passed the measure on Monday.
That "High Noon" post certainly generated a lot of interest (although, as I subsequently found out, I was hardly the first to interpret the movie in connection to the Iraq situation). I quote from one final e-mail on the subject; the writer makes a sound point:
High Noon may have been a great movie, but it was certainly not representative of the way things were in the Old West. The idea that four gunmen could frighten a western town into inaction is pretty silly. Many of the town's men would have been veterans of the Civil War, not to mention battles with Indians; no doubt all would have been familiar (if not proficient) with firearms. The women, too. Four bad guys would have been outmanned and outgunned.
The Dalton Gang was wiped out by the good people of Coffeyville, Kansas, when the outlaws tried to rob both of the town's banks in one day. Likewise, the James-Younger Gang was shot to pieces by the folks in Northfield, Minnesota. In real life, Frank Miller would have been better served by staying on the train, but that would have made a lousy movie.
My friend Chris Scott, of the blog The Insecure Egoist, writes in regard to my post immediately below on Peter Arnett:
Not quite a year ago, Dateline: NBC ran a self-congratulatory reflectory 10 year anniversary. The whole episode was basically about how cool and vanguard-ish Dateline was for the stories it ran. Part of it was absolutely heinous. They spoke about the various individuals they had met who had changed their respective lives. Most of these individuals were facing uphill struggles of one sort or another: some were facing death in the face of uncurable diseases. Dateline had no follow up -- they were just talking about how cool they were for reporting them! Call me crazy, but that seems to me a callous disregard for these individuals' actual welfare and humanity. They were turned into trophies.
Indeed.
All media, print as well as broadcast, promote their coverage as part of their marketing. But such promotion shouldn't be done in an exploitive way.
Did anyone out there see that atrocious segment on NBC last night by Peter Arnett? He’s covering the war for MSNBC and for National Geographic Explorer.
Well, at least he’s supposed to be covering the war.
The overwrought segment last night showed Arnett's crew filming bombing footage from the balcony of a Baghdad hotel, but it didn’t present any actual reporting. It was merely a two-minute puff piece in which viewers were shown Arnett standing in his hotel room as the bombs fell, barking into a satellite phone about how spectacular everything was.
In his voiceover, Arnett talked about how brave his crew was and how smart they had been to chose that particular hotel room, because, he said, it turned out to offer the perfect location for shooting.
He sounded less like a journalist than like Robin Leach at his most insufferable.
Some big-time TV journalists are known for their self-indulgence, but the Arnett piece set a particular standard for egotistical extravagance.
The piece actually ended with Arnett mopping his brow and letting out a deep breath of (supposed) relief.
A strange weekend. I did my usual thing, devoting most of my time to the kids. I was able to follow the war news, but not in a sit-down-and-watch-for-hours way. I got as much news from radio as from TV. (It helps that there’s a CNN news station here on the AM radio dial.)
I’d intended to quote from a rang of blog material I’d seen at night over the weekend, but I’m just about out of time. Here is one item, part of a serviceman’s letter, from Meryl Yourish’s blog:
Last night it was beautiful over Iraq; dark and mostly clear. Just a few thin clouds caught the pale moonlight. The stars were spectacular. The night sky here is so dark, so free (normally) of man-made light, that you can see millions of stars, stars in such profusion that you can hardly pick out constellations because the spaces between the familiar stars are filled with tiny lights you never saw before.
The darkness and the peace were short-lived. As we flew north we saw the comet-tails of jet exhausts and the flash of missiles exploding. At our northernmost orbit, we saw large fires on the horizon. ...
And speaking of radios, the nets were full of the voices of American and British airmen speaking in measured tones, gathering intelligence, giving and receiving guidance to targets, passing battle damage assessments, and requesting tankers. ...
It set a new record for long sorties for my crew, but when the time came to turn back toward our home away from home, we found ourselves hoping our replacement would be delayed. We were the first of our kind to cross the border, and we wanted to be the last to return.
I’ll have to leave it at that for now.
By the way: The bad news is that Michael Moore was actually given an Oscar last night and then used the occasion to indulge in a rant against Bush and the U.S. action in Iraq. The good news (if the online account I read is accurate) is that there was a lot of audible booing.
‘It has put mission accomplishment ahead of force protection’
Perhaps Thomas Ricks, a Washington Post reporter with much experience covering military affairs, was too quick over the weekend with his critical conclusions about the U.S. war plan for Iraq. It’s unavoidable that some U.S. casualties would occur and some Americans would be captured. Still, Ricks isn't some knee-jerk critic of the military, and his points deserve attention:
Indeed, columns of M1 Abrams tanks and M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles ferrying thousands of troops continued their relentless drive toward the capital yesterday, pulling to within 100 miles of the city.
But that armored force is tethered to Kuwait by a largely unsecured supply line, which set up the conditions for the ambush near Nasiriyah yesterday in which 12 soldiers from an Army support unit were either killed or taken prisoner.
That attack "hopefully will be a wake-up call for everyone to realize that bypassed [Iraqi] units can live to fight another day," one Army officer commented yesterday. He said he continues to worry that the overall U.S. invasion force -- a third the size of that which ousted Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 -- is too small. ...
Another pillar of the U.S. approach is to minimize civilian casualties. In practical terms, that has meant the imposition of unusually restrictive rules of engagement on U.S. and British troops, who say they have been told not to shoot unless shot at. Iraqi units that are holding out in the south appeared to take advantage of those constraints.
U.S. casualties that were suffered in the process are bound to provoke criticism of the gamble that U.S. commanders are taking, predicted Peter Feaver, a Duke University expert in national security. "Certainly, you will have no trouble finding quotes from retired Army officers saying that the war plan has been too risky," he said. But, he added, in his own opinion "the really important thing about the plan is that ‘it has put mission accomplishment ahead of force protection."
A small, new French bakery in my neighborhood was in the news here lately. The owner, a native of France, has been catching flak from some Omahans merely because he is French.
I made it a point over the weekend to go by the bakery and buy a few things.
The owner isn’t political or, by any description, anti-American; he’s just trying to sell baked goods and make a living. The presence of his business strengthens and enlivens my neighborhood. He chose, after all, to live here in Omaha. And I’m quite happy he chose to locate his business in my neighborhood in particular.
His tomato-and-basil bread, incidentally, is a delight.
During the Gulf War in 1991, I wrote a column, at a newspaper in North Carolina, in which I voiced strong support for the U.S. military effort. An American woman I knew slightly at the time, a specialist in Arab studies with a master’s degree in that subject, wrote me a heated, condescending letter in which she disputed my arguments.
It was a long letter, but the only point of hers I remember is that she wrote that she read The New York Times daily. Implying, in other words, that she was far better-informed than I was.
As if readers of the Times should be of a single mind on a subject.
These days, her comment is downright quaint, given that the online readership of the Times now exceeds its print readership. And I doubt that readers of the paper are unanimous in their views on the Iraq question.
More thoughts from my friend Craig Brelsford, a Pennsylvania native now living in the Netherlands:
Reports say Iraqi soldiers are changing into civilian garb and blending into the local population, awaiting their chance to strike. A soldier who shucks his uniform and continues to fight is a war criminal. In battle, they should be given no quarter; once captured, they should be treated not as prisoners of war, but as the terrorists they are.
... I just looked at my U.S. passport and noticed most of the English writing is supplemented by a French translation. This is a vestige of the time when French was the world's diplomatic language. I'm wondering why a French translation needs to be there anymore.
And from another e-mail of his; it mentioned his recent trip to Nice, France:
Nice is warm nearly year round, palm trees grow tall as in Florida or southern California. Nice is one of the main cities of the famous south of France.
How far south is Nice?
How about 2 degrees latitude farther NORTH than Omaha!
After I posted comments from my friend Craig Brelsford about the linguistic connections between English and French, xavier Basora wrote to recommend the book “Honni mal y pense” by Henriette Walter, written in French. Writes xavier: “The book explains the close and intertangled relationship between French and English languages full of example followed by example.”
Though it is difficult enough to write well in one’s native tongue, an extraordinary group of authors has written enduring poetry and prose in a second, third, or even fourth language. Switching Languages is the first anthology in which translingual authors from throughout the world examine their experiences writing in more than one language or in a language other than their primary one. Driven by factors as varied as migration, imperialism, a quest for verisimilitude, and a desire to assert artistic autonomy, translingualism has a long and brilliant history.
By the way: After I posted an item about U.S. trade in cultural goods, xavier wrote me, “It's very true that the American book trade is very dynamic and exports all over the world. I know because I see the original language American book and the French translation side by side.”
He's a friend and colleague, but I would say that Jeff Koterba has come up with a classic editorial cartoon relating to the war. (It's the cartoon for 3-21.)
Maybe one more movie reference is relevant on the Iraq matter. Given the hall-of-mirrors uncertainty about which Saddam is real and which is a double, the 1980 Akira Kurosawa film “Kagemusha” (The Double) comes to mind:
Shot on one of the largest budgets in Japanese film history, Kagemusha (The Double) saw the return of Kurosawa to the samurai film and in epic style. The film takes place in 16th century Japan where a ferocious power struggle, a battle for the county's spiritual capital -- Kyoto, is raging between warlord Shingen Takeda (Tatsuya Nakadai) and two rival clans.
When Shingen is shot by a sniper during a lengthy siege, on his death bed he proclaims that his passing should be kept secret for no less than three years -- lest the Takeda clan be destroyed by their enemies. Begrudgingly his powerful generals agree, and Shingen's place is assumed by his kagemusha -- his double or “shadow warrior” -- a former thief (again wonderfully played by Nakadai) bearing an incredibly likeness to the lord.
And so this kagemusha takes on the unenviable task of full-time impersonator, repressing his own personality and assuming the mantle of impotent leader; successfully fooling Singen's family and friends, and playing his part in battle. Even more remarkably, the clan seems to flourish under his rule; morale improves, and the clan's unbeaten military record is maintained.
But slowly the pressure starts to tell as the kagemusha, a common man elevated far above his station and plagued with pity and self-doubt, longs for his old life and his long forgotten sense of self.
My friend Craig Brelsford, a Pennsylvania native now living in the Netherlands, has e-mailed me many observations this week on the Iraq matter. He and his wife just returned from a brief trip to France. (Craig is multilingual; I’m quite jealous.) Among the points he has raised:
Did you see Blair's speech? It confirmed to me something I learned in journalism about politicians. And that's this: It isn't all spin. There's true sincerity, true passion, true spirit, mingled with the lies and avarice and grasping for power. There are moments where it is clear that the politician is passionately using politics to accomplish the right thing; something he knows is true and right and is in a position to achieve.
I also liked Bush's speech. Grave, somber, firm, humane.
Any surprise that after both speeches, public support for the war, both in Britain and in America, began to grow?
One of my favorite thinkers, Irving Babbitt, pointed out that whereas human beings are tragically susceptible to falling for lies and double dealing (one need only look at the triumph of communism for an instance of that), they are also capable of sensing the truth and of responding powerfully to it.
Truth is an ancient word related to tree. Like trees, Bush and Blair have stood firm, their vision unclouded. Their speeches were full of the power of their convictions. ...
Our friend went to America for the first time two weeks ago. She spent eight days in New York. She loved New York. She also made me explain why the buildings were so warm. Here in Europe, you keep your heat around 64, and you wear a sweater in the house. Of course, in America, we don't do that. I refused to defend America's rather wasteful way. She pressed on, though, making it seem the Dutch are just more virtuous than the Americans, that they care more for the environment. That may be true, but I pointed out that national realities also shaped this supposed virtue. In Holland, there's no abundance of anything, except tulips and cows. They HAVE to conserve. (I often say the tight squeeze here is Holland's greatest curse and greatest blessing, because it turned them into the industrious people they are today.) Americans don't HAVE to conserve the way the Dutch do.
She didn't appreciate that. To her, Americans had a moral problem. They were a bunch of wastrels who care little for the earth.
Common sense tells her Americans are just people, people much like West Europeans. But ideology tells her Americans are villains who engage in predatory capitalism and fight people without the moral imprimatur of the UN and who gave up on Kyoto.
Europe remains one of the best places in the world to live. But as my link shows, it faces real problems. It is in a muddle over nationhood, it is getting older, immigrants are beating on the door, and they have given up on Christianity. ...
1. I like the French. Really. I think the French are an important people. They are creative, innovative, and they have given a lot to the world. However, they are not nearly as important, or creative, or innovative as they think they are. And though they have given much to the world, they also gave the world Napoleon and les collabo's of World War II.
2. I see some bloggers such as Andrew Sullivan are running some of the vilest stuff from the anti-Bush, anti-war people. I don't think it's necessary anymore to show how vile those people are. All they can offer now is talk. It is Bush who is offering action. And as Sullivan himself said some weeks ago, only one thing matters now, and that is how things go on the battlefield. ...
I've been thinking a lot about French rudeness. Perhaps these thoughts will help you:
1. For centuries, France was the leading country in Europe. French was the leading language. Educated people throughout Europe learned it. Ever read a Tolstoy novel? They're peppered with French words. Russian nobles often spoke better French than Russian.
French is still an important language, but English has supplanted it as a world language. So there's some resentment over France's lost glory.
2. The French language has a unique relationship with English. English has a double heritage: the ancient Germanic base and the Franco-Latin grafting, the result of William the Conqueror's invasion of England in 1066. William and the Normans spoke French. His conquest set up a funnel into which thousands of French words poured into English. So when a Frenchman looks at English, he sees "French" words being passed off as English words, and he thinks, English wouldn't be anything without us. No other language can look at English and say that.
This St. Petersburg Times article, linked to by Winds of Change, talks about the potential that governments and entities hostile to the United States would use satellites as a tool against the United States. (I've posted about the U.S. military's use of space-based assets.) From the article:
If there is a war with Iraq, at least a dozen nations will watch it unfold from space, including some countries that oppose U.S. policies in the Middle East.
That means a hostile government could share satellite intelligence about U.S. war strategy with Saddam Hussein.
Or Iraq itself, which has no satellites but does possess sophisticated intercept equipment, might just steal the data.
"It has happened before," said Bill Kennedy, a veteran satellite imaging specialist in Washington, D.C. "A Japanese university was caught hijacking data from (an American) Landsat satellite as it flew over Japan. You have to have a high level of technology and sophistication, but it can be done. It has been done." ...
Tim Brown, senior analyst with the nonprofit group GlobalSecurity.org in Alexandria, Va., thinks the opportunities for mischief are limited.
"You have to ask yourself the question, if Saddam Hussein had the best imagery available, what would that accomplish?" Brown said. "If they want to know what's going on at a U.S. air base, do they need satellite imagery to accomplish that, or is it information they can get from the ground? I think the danger of the imagery is overblown." ...
Under a law passed in 1992, the federal government can close off all data developed by American commercial satellites if the secretaries of state and defense decide that's necessary. They can limit access to the data only to protect international obligations, foreign policy and national security concerns.
The limitations are imposed by the secretary of commerce, whose department licenses the satellites.
So far, Brender said, there are no indications that this will happen in the event of war with Iraq.
"I think the administration finds it better to have the images in the public domain," he said. "They show our strength and resolve to the Iraqis and others who might need to see them."
Even if images from U.S. satellites were closed off, "it would be expensive and difficult," Zimmerman says. "There are too many eyes in the sky. We can't control them all."
Donald Sensing, a knowledgeable source on matters military as well as spiritual, is posting impressively about many aspects of the conflict.
Two topics: possible concerns that would arise a "slow war," and how a fumbling TV reporter who nonchalantly tried to put on a gas mask while reporting live from Kuwait would have been dead had it been an actual chemical attack. Don explains the proper procedure for donning a gas mask.
It’s funny how the script for “High Noon” can be interpreted in various ways. Anyone who followed the link I provided to the online review of the movie may have noticed that the script has been described by some as a hostile allusion to the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Hollywood blacklisting controversy. The screenwriter, Carl Foreman, wound up on the blacklist.
The links from Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds sent well over 6,000 visitors this way on Thursday. That pushed the number of visits here since the blog's inception past the 100,000 mark. That’s puny compared to the numbers for the big bloggers, but still a milestone for any blog. Thanks to all who have stopped by over the past nine months.
More: More recent "High Noon" blogging -- well-done blogging -- which predated my post and which I was unaware of till today: from John Rosenberg of Discriminations (John is a fine scholar of Southern history and a thoughtful e-mail correspondent of mine, incidentally), and from Alan Dale of The Kitchen Cabinet.
Still more: From today's inbox:
Another movie I would want others to see to understand the American take on things is "Big Country" with Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston, Jean Simmons. Won an Oscar in in '58. Supposedly Pres. Eisenhower was so moved he watched it 5 times. Short summary: A Boston Sea Captain goes to Texas to marry and though provoked does not fight just to fight; but does respond to real danger and peril. By example he demonstrates honor and courage. And by the end of the movie others understand and admire him for it. A truly wonderful movie.
I like to think the sea captain angle fits into the blog theory of Maritime powers vs. land powers.
Visitors arriving here from Andrew Sullivan's blog and InstaPundit might be interested in some recent posts here:
My critical take on Michael Lind's new book, which tries to smear George W. Bush by linking him to every unsavory aspect of Texas history Lind can think of.
Thomas Friedman invoked a Western-movie motif in his latest column:
President Bush is fond of cowboy imagery, so here's an image that comes to mind about our pending war with Iraq. In most cowboy movies the good guys round up a posse before they ride into town and take on the black hats.
We're doing just the opposite. We're riding into Baghdad pretty much alone and hoping to round up a posse after we get there. I hope we do, because it may be the only way we can get out with ourselves, and the town, in one piece.
But for this situation, isn’t the best (albeit imperfect) movie parallel “High Noon”?
In that 1952 film, the theme was Gary Cooper, unilateralist.
Cooper tried to round up support from the townspeople of Hadleyville, Wyo., to stand up to the gunslingers who were about to arrive and devastate the town. But no one would step forward to join him. He faced the danger alone.
Another theme: Time ran out, leading to an unavoidable showdown between the forces of good and evil.
This taut, tightly scripted, minimalist film tells the tale of a solitary, stoic, honor-bound marshal/hero, past his prime and already retired, who was left desolate and abandoned by the Hadleyville townspeople he had faithfully protected for many years. Due to the townspeople's cowardice, physical inability, self-interest and indecisiveness, he is refused help at every turn against a revenge-seeking killer and his gang.
Fearful but duty-bound, he eventually vanquishes the enemy, thereby sparing the civilized (democratic) town the encroachment of barbaristic frontier justice brought by the deadly four-man group of outlaws.
As I said, the parallel may be incomplete, but the necessary unilateralism of Cooper’s character, Kane the resolute marshal, does have resonances in the current foreign policy atmosphere.
At one point, Kane seeks support from the church. He interrupts the Sunday service and makes an appeal. The local minister wrings his hands. Members of the congregation resort to various rationalizations to weasel out of taking a firm stand.
One church member tries to persuade his brethren to support the marshal: “I tell ya, if we don’t do what’s right, we’re gonna have plenty more trouble. So there ain’t but one thing to do now, and you all know what it is.”
That is why this indulgence has to stop. Because it is dangerous. It is dangerous if such regimes disbelieve us. Dangerous if they think they can use our weakness, our hesitation, even the natural urges of our democracy towards peace, against us. Dangerous because one day they will mistake our innate revulsion against war for permanent incapacity; when in fact, pushed to the limit, we will act. But then when we act, after years of pretence, the action will have to be harder, bigger, more total in its impact.
Another Blair statement is also relevant: “If our plea is for America to work with others, to be good as well as powerful allies, will our retreat make them multilateralist? Or will it not rather be the biggest impulse to unilateralism there could ever be?”
It figures. It's all happened too sudden. People gotta talk themselves into law and order before they do anything about it. Maybe because down deep they don't care. They just don't care.
Kane also grows frustrated with the pacifism of his new wife, Amy, a converted Quaker. She tells him that her personal experience with violent death has left her determined to find a way beyond the resort to gunplay. She recounts the murder of two of her family members:
I've heard guns. My father and my brother were killed by guns. They were on the right side but that didn't help them any when the shooting started. My brother was nineteen. I watched him die. That's when I became a Quaker. I don't care who's right or who's wrong. There's got to be some better way for people to live.
During the Iraq controversy, Continentals have often pointed to the traumas of the world wars, saying that that historical experience deepened their moral sensibility and that the world must move beyond senseless carnage.
In the end, Kane faces the four outlaws alone, clearly outgunned. (Yes, an incomplete parallel.) A ferocious gunfight ensues. Amy, pulled by love and loyalty to her husband, appears on the scene and takes up a gun. She kills one of the outlaws. All the evildoers are slain.
In the final scene (which has no dialogue), Kane and Amy depart:
Without support from the people, Kane will no longer be their leader. Silently, without a backward glance or goodbye, he and Amy ride off into the distance from the community of weak, fickle onlookers in the saved, unremarkable town of Hadleyville ... The contemptible crowd that was unwilling to fight to preserve its law and order remains silent as the buckboard goes out of view, accompanied by the title song's famous melancholy ballad.
When evil needs to be dealt with, impractical moral pretensions and facile rationalizations for inaction are often no substitute for a sober resort to force.
Update: Phooey. James Woolsey, it turns out, raised the Europeans/"High Noon" parallel more than a year ago in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. A pretty good piece (titled "Where's the Posse?").
More: Some remarkable e-mail this afternoon from this post. My thanks to everyone who has written. From the inbox:
Message recieved by WashU law students yesterday: "In view of the international events taking place this week, the award winning Japanese film -- A Taxing Woman -- which as to be shown this week in the Harris Institute International Film Series will be postponed. In its place we will show as A Paradigm of American Justice, the classic film -- High Noon -- starring Gary Cooper (who won an Oscar for his role) and Grace Kelly. The film will be shown at 2 pm in the small courtroom."
I told an Algerian friend to view "High Noon" and some Bugs Bunny cartoons for an insight into the American psyche; at least red state types.
Don't forget that Lloyd Bridges in that movie is like France. He got along well with the Marshal and they were allies of old but because of wounded pride because the Marshal didn't think he was up to the job of substituting as Marshal he did all that he could to make sure Cooper had to go it alone, if at all. ... You know, now that I think of it, Bridges also thinks he has the loyalty of the Marshal's old flame (Europe) but she turns on him for not behaving like a man (new Europe).
Moscow is not very pleased at the prospect of acting in the role Washington has cast for it -- the role of a "junior regional policeman," working for a "miserly wage." The Moscow elite feels that Washington is using the Iraq situation to forcibly jam Russia into its geopolitical and economic plans, something that has been going on for the past year. ...
Yet, no senior member of the Bush Administration has been willing to utter in public even the very vague promise to "take into account" Russian interests in Iraq. This has disturbed the Russian establishment.
... in the eyes of the radical "state-patriots" (derzhavniki), Vladimir Putin appears to be continuing down the path of Gorbachev and Yeltsin. They "gave away" Germany, the Baltic States and God knows what else! Now the current president has given way before the West in terms of NATO expansion, and has reconciled himself to the American withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, the deployment of U.S. forces into Central Asia and the Caucasus ...
For the Kremlin it is becoming quite apparent that the close relationship with America (within the framework of the antiterrorist coalition) is no longer quite as profitable as it was a year ago. ...
All of these goals of American policy disturb Russia. Moscow, along with France, Germany and China, doesn't feel that that its own security is threatened by Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, nor does it consider the hypothetical threat that WMD might fall into the hands of terrorists from these sources as likely.
No, a greater threat to the Russian establishment is that if the United States is successful in democratizing the Middle East, this will lead to a democratic restructuring of Central Asia and the whole of the southern periphery of the post-Soviet space. And this challenges Russia's national interests. Such a development would not be in the interests of a large portion either of the Russian elite or of the post-Soviet elite in the other countries of the CIS connected to it. This is why it has sought to hinder democratization and the creation of open economies, since under such conditions it would not be competitive.
Moscow does not like the growing pressure of Washington on North Korea. The Kremlin is concerned that all of this is being done with a hidden agenda -- to strengthen the American military presence on the Korean peninsula and to lay the foundations for a regional ballistic missile defense system for the Asian-Pacific region as a means to counter a rising China and to counter its threats to Taiwan. Obviously, Beijing has sought solidarity with Moscow on a common position to prevent the realization of the American strategic plans.
There is also another factor working against any convergence of Moscow's goals with American policy: the fabric of economic relations binding Russia to Europe and even China is much tighter than that with America. ...
Moreover, in Russia -- as in Europe -- it is well remembered that after the conclusion of "Desert Storm" the most lucrative contacts in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia (for arms deliveries, telecommunications and a whole host of other projects) were awarded exclusively to American firms. The winner takes all!
Meanwhile, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports that the Duma has suspended consideration of the U.S.-Russian treaty to reduce strategic nuclear weapons (a treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate on Monday).
Bush, Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair, French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder have gone all-out to sway public opinion in their respective countries even as they are engaged in monumental diplomatic confrontation. ...
Koizumi, when asked by opposition party leaders what his stand on war would be without a new U.N. Security Council resolution, said his response would depend on "the climate of the moment.'' ... It is an anachronism to fail to inform the people and propose available options while instead offering nothing but the stand that the government has decided that what it does will be "the only thing in the national interest.''
Meanwhile, this article says the Japanese government has
finalized the outline of new legislation designed to allow the Self-Defense Forces to offer rear support for multinational forces stationed in Iraq after the end of an expected war in the country, sources said.
With a U.S.-led attack on Iraq imminent, the government apparently made the decision to play a role in the postwar reconstruction of the country. ...
As for the infrastructure assistance, SDF members would be involved in rebuilding airports, roads and other infrastructure damaged by attacks. Defense personnel would aid victims of the war by transporting food, clothing, medicines and other necessities, and by providing medical services for refugees who have returned to Iraq after the war, the sources said.
And this Japanese news report says “UNICEF would like the Japanese government to provide financial assistance for postwar Iraq if a war takes place and the Japanese people to support the government in doing so.”
I criticized UCLA history prof Perry Anderson in a post Tuesday, saying he appeared to be minimizing the hostility of Democrats toward the Bush policy on Iraq. Erik, who runs the well-done blog Bite the Wax Tadpole (check out his nifty euroblogs section, incidentally), sent a most cogent e-mail pointing out that I'd failed to grasp Anderson's point. He's sorted things out far better than I did:
He isn't suggesting that the differences between Democrats and Depublicans (or between the US and Europe) on Iraq today are slight. He's saying that the fundamental reason for the chasm is that many Democrats and Europeans are responding with automatic opposition to Bush, with the result that the gap is much wider now than it would be if Gore or Clinton were making precisely the same arguments.
I suspect he's right about many Democrats, and I'm dead certain he's right about European opinion. George Bush never had a chance with European public opinion. From the day he appeared on the radar of European opinion he was portrayed as a bloodthirsty idiot cowboy slave of the oil companies, who spent his time personally beheading death-row inmates and
smearing oil on endangered waterfowl. Yes, I exaggerate, but not as much as you might believe.
The fact that he came after Clinton, who most Europeans simply adored, only made the contrast stronger. When Bush was elected, the feeling of genuine loss amongst the politically aware was palpable (at least in Amsterdam).
Speaking of the DLC, its affiliated Progressive Policy Institute has released another interesting “Trade Fact of the Week.” This time, cultural exports. Good stuff:
High culture: America conducts $15 billion worth of annual merchandise trade in books, visual arts and musical instruments.
THE NUMBERS:
Value of U.S. book exports, 2002: $4.2 billion
Value of paintings imported from France, 2002: $1.4 billion ...
WHAT THEY MEAN:
Cultural goods -- books, artwork, musical instruments, sound recordings, antiques and so on -- account for about $15 billion in U.S. trade each year. This figure is lower than those for the most heavily traded products (autos, clothes, electronics, energy
and food range from $60 to $150 billion) but comparable to the annual values for steel or jewelry.
Few trade barriers exist for these products -- books, antiques, original artwork and music recordings are all duty-free ...
America's largest cultural merchandise export is books (most of all technical manuals and college texts), which bring in about $4 billion in exports per year. Canada buys nearly half of all America's exported books, with $1.8 billion in purchases last
year.
One of the largest single book export categories, however, is Bibles -- the United Kingdom, Africa, and Brazil all buy more than 5 million copies a year.
CDs, DVDs, and other recording media come in next, with about $3 billion in annual exports. Services exports, however (especially in cinema), are harder to measure but are probably at least as valuable as book and music exports combined.
In musical instruments and visual artwork, the United States is more a buyer than a seller. For imported paintings and statuary, France is the top source; for antiques, the United Kingdom ...
Perry Anderson, a history professor at UCLA, defends the Bush policy on Iraq, among much else, in a provocative essay in the London Review of Books. I don’t agree with several of his conclusions, but it’s a stimulating piece. Some excerpts:
An occupation of Iraq does pose a challenge, which we don't underestimate. But it is a reasonable wager. Arab hostility is overrated. ...
The Sunni centre of the country will certainly be trickier to manage, but the idea that stable regimes created or guided by foreign powers are impossible in the Middle East is absurd. Think of the long-term stability of the monarchy set up by the British in Jordan, or the very satisfactory little state they created in Kuwait. Indeed, think of our loyal friend Mubarak in Egypt, which has a much larger urban population than Iraq.
Everyone said Afghanistan was a graveyard for foreigners -- British, Russian and so on -- but we liberated it quickly enough, and now the UN is doing excellent work bringing it back to life. Why not Iraq?
Interesting, but he still seems to be skirting around the magnitude of the challenge as far as the nation-building task in Iraq.
First, hostility to the Republican regime in the White House. Cultural dislike of the Bush Presidency is widespread in Western Europe, where its rough affirmations of American primacy, and undiplomatic tendency to match word to deed, have become intensely resented by public opinion accustomed to a more decorous veil being drawn over the realities of relative power.
To see how important this ingredient in European anti-war sentiment must be, one need only look at the complaisance with which Clinton's successive aerial bombardments of Iraq were met. If a Gore or Lieberman administration were preparing a second Gulf War, the resistance would be a moiety of what it is now.
“Old Europe” would give a Gore administration a pass on an invasion of Iraq? Admittedly, the disdain for Bush among many Europeans is intense. But it’s hard to see how Europeans would accept a U.S. invasion even if a Democrat were in the White House.
But as substantial policy contrasts tend to dwindle in Western political systems, symbolic differences of style and image can easily acquire, in compensation, a hysterical rigidity.
The Kulturkampf between Democrats and Republicans within the United States is now being reproduced between the US and EU. Typically, in such disputes, the violence of partisan passions is in inverse proportion to the depth of real disagreements. But as in the conflicts between Blue and Green factions of the Byzantine hippodrome, minor affective preferences can have major political consequences. A Europe in mourning for Clinton -- see any editorial in the Guardian, Le Monde, La Repubblica, El Pais -- can unite in commination of Bush.
Is he saying, among other things, that the “depth of real disagreement” between Democrats and Republicans over Iraq is merely slight? If so, that seems way off-base. Many rank-and-file Democrats are expressing absolute exasperation with the administration as far as Iraq.
Terrorism, of the sort practised by al-Qaida, is not a serious threat to the status quo anywhere. The success of the spectacular attack of 11 September depended on surprise -- even by the fourth plane, it was impossible to repeat. Had al-Qaida ever been a strong organisation, it would have aimed its blows at client states of America in the Middle East, where the overthrow of a regime would make a political difference, rather than at America itself, where it could not leave so much as a strategic pinprick.
As Olivier Roy and Gilles Keppel, the two best authorities in the field of contemporary Islamism have argued, al-Qaida is the isolated remnant of a mass movement of Muslim fundamentalism, whose turn to terror is the symptom of a larger weakness and defeat -- an Islamic equivalent of the Red Army Faction or Red Brigades that emerged in Germany and Italy after the great student uprisings of the late 1960s faded away, and were easily quelled by the state.
The complete inability of al-Qaida to stage even a single attentat, while its base was being pounded to shreds and its leadership killed off in Afghanistan, speaks volumes about its weakness. In different ways, it suits both the Administration and the Democratic opposition to conjure up the spectre of a vast and deadly conspiracy, capable of striking at any moment, but this is a figment with little bearing one way or another on Iraq, which is neither connected to al-Qaida today, nor likely to give it much of a boost, if it falls tomorrow.
Again, fascinating points. His argument was bolstered by a Washington Post article, mentioned here on Monday, that talks about heartening gains in the fight against al-Qaida. Such progress is to be applauded. Still, the growing likelihood that weapons of mass destruction will come within the grasp of terrorists raises very serious concerns for this country for the long term.
There is much more of interest in Anderson’s essay. Certainly a piece worth reading and pondering.
The Council of State Governments investigated state suffrage laws, and their results show a poor substitute for the “universal suffrage” guaranteed by the Constitution. Citizens may be disqualified from voting for more than 50 reasons, and every state except Michigan has at least one provision for disqualification. Alabama has 25 and South Carolina 28. On the credit side, Illinois and Pennsylvania have only one each, and Vermont two. The average is about six. Convicted felons are barred in 40 states. Lesser crimes that are punished by disfranchisement range from betting on an election to wife beating. Treason, electoral bribery, bigamy, perjury, adultery, malfeasance in office, receiving stolen goods, and miscegenation are all reasons for losing the right to vote in at least one state. Five states bar Indians, and Rhode Island specifically bars Narragansett Indians. Insane persons, idiots, illiterates, incompetents, soldiers, sailors, and “immoral persons” are generally disfranchised. Disqualification of paupers, the infamous poll tax in eight states, and some amazing registration and residence requirements make the list almost complete. Add to this the terrorism which prevents Negroes and unpopular minorities from voting, and the wonder is that anyone is left to go to the polls.
The quote begins a chapter in which Keyssar provides many fascinating nuances. I highly recommend the book.
This analysis questions whether North Korea's long-range missile program actually poses that much of a threat. But it says North Korea poses another potential threat:
If one is concerned about near-term capabilities for missile delivery of lethal payloads to US territory, a more likely threat is short-range
missiles launched from ships, which uses simpler technology than long-range missiles and appears feasible for a country like North Korea.
Such forward-based threats have a number of advantages compared to using intercontinental missiles, since they use short-range missiles, are likely to have higher accuracy, and do not pin-point the country of origin. They could also not be engaged by the planned Ground-based Midcourse or Aegis-LEAP missile defenses, but would require large-scale deployment of short-range defenses around coastal cities.
I've meant to link to this earlier: This Robert Samuelson column does a fine job explaining the context behind the debate over derivatives. That sounds boring as hell, but as Samuelson explains, it's an important issue:
To the list of financial threats can now be added "derivatives" -- sophisticated securities that are used mostly by big investors (banks, insurance companies, corporations).
Just last week, legendary investor Warren Buffett denounced derivatives as "financial weapons of mass destruction" that could cause economic havoc. By contrast, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan says derivatives have improved economic stability. Who's right? This is an important debate, because derivatives have exploded and are implicated in two recent financial scandals -- Enron's bankruptcy and the near-bankruptcy in 1998 of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), a private investment fund. ...
Buffett doesn't deny derivatives' theoretical benefits. Indeed, he's not worried by standard futures contracts such as wheat (traded on exchanges, such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange). What frightens him is the possibility that newer derivatives (traded "over the counter'' -- between one customer and another) could trigger a panic.
Regular visitors here will know that a recent post here blasted a new book by think-tanker Michael Lind. I wrote: “Lind’s thesis is sloppy and cheap. A fifth-generation Texan, Lind dredges up all the negatives he can think of from Texas history ... and tries mightily to link them all to Bush. Bush comes from a Texas subculture, Lind argues, in which those unsavory old-time values are still revered to one degree or another. Such claims are overwrought and overly clever.”
Now, here is a review of a new book by a friend of mine, Friend 3, who, in an amazing coincidence -- well, just read the review:
While I'm an admirer of R. Friend 3's writings on theological issues, especially papal infallibility, I had a very different reaction to his latest book, "Teddy Toadies to Bay State Barbarities."
Three’s thesis is that Ted Kennedy's character has been shaped by Massachusetts's long, shameful involvement in some of the most disgraceful aspects of American history.
Three’s book is sloppy and cheap. He dredges up all the negatives he can think of from the Bay State's history, especially from the recent time of fierce opposition in Boston to meaningful school integration and earlier -- the trigger-happy resort to violence in the Indian wars, the embrace of slavery as a source of wealth for ship builders, merchants, and sailors who made it possible to bring slaves to America without reliance on Dutch or British slavers, the backward-looking focus on brutal labor practices common in the 19th century cotton and woolen mills, the demagoguery and thievery of old-time Irish political bosses (including Kennedy's grandfather who was Mayor of Boston) -- and tries mightily to link them all to Kennedy.
Three argues that Kennedy comes from a Massachusetts culture in which the results of those unsavory old-time horrors can still convey advantage to those whose families once directed and profited from them to one degree or another. Imagine that!
Three's claims are overwrought and overly clever. Yes indeed, Massachusetts's history overflows with the recurrent resort to mindless violence and exploitation of immigrants as a cheap source of labor for the enrichment of the Back Bay set and Harvard Yardies. And sure, Massachusetts's whaling fleets helped hunt many species of whales to near extinction while its fishing fleet helped bring the cod to the point where commercial cod fishing had to be suspended in the Atlantic; thereby causing a depression in Labrador and Newfoundland that continues to this day. And sure, Massachusetts's capital is the place where Boston's decaying, failing public schools are literally within the shadows of wealthy independent elementary and secondary schools as well as some of the wealthiest universities in the world, including its wealthiest, Harvard.
But why should any of these things matter when Massachusetts is such a great place for upper-middle class and wealthy liberals? Three refuses to even address the question.
Three's bitterness is such that he gives no credit to Kennedy and other Massachusetts liberals who have developed government programs for all the low-wage folks who serve them in their clubs, clean their kids ivied dorm rooms, and keep their Cape cottages sparkling.
Three should stick to theological matters about which he's infallible when speaking ex sofa.
By the way: Friend 3 writes me: “Why are all the people who liked Michael Lind's book now attacking mine? My book is every bit as thoughtful and fair as Lind's.” Sorry about that, 3.
When the new blog Zenpundit appeared on the scene recently, I recommended it, saying that I’d seen some well-informed listserv posts by Mark, the blogger who started Zenpundit.
Here is one of Mark’s most recent listserv posts, in a discussion about the U.S. as “hyperpower”:
"Hyperpower" was a term was coined circa 1996 by the French foreign minister and I think his term "hyperpuissance" was meant primarily in terms of magnitude of power rather than speed of acquistion. For several reasons, the best analogs to America's current power status relative to peer competitors is not Germany or even Great Britain but Ancient Rome or some of China's early dynasties after the warring states period.
First, the Hohenzollern German Empire was an industrial nucleus of a world dominating power but it lacked in several key strategic dimensions -- resources, space and geographic location. Germany, under the Kaiser or Hitler needed to secure a reliable breadbasket and fuel either from Transcaucasia or the Middle-East in order to dominate world affairs. Germany's neighbors, particularly Great Britain, realized that allowing Germany hegemony over the raw materials of the Eurasian landmass was a long term threat and moved to block such aspirations. Surrounded by enemies Germany's powerful military was disadvantaged by long wars and lack of strategic depth.
Secondly, Great Britain while a successful world-spanning empire had two misfortunes. First a small population relative to all the other great powers and secondly to rise in an era when the level of technology meant that vast distances in themselves posed insuperable strategic problems even for the most advanced of nations. It was simply beyond the capacity of Great Britain or other powers to wage war as effectively in remote locales as it was nearer to home. The British therefore became the masters of employing indigenous forces on a large scale backed by a small investment of modern Western firepower . It was an excellent tactic for dealing with the backward military forces of local rulers but fared less well against a determined opponent like the Zulus and poorly against Imperial Japan's modern armies. Great Britain's economic and cultural " soft power " were far greater than Germany's -- see Niall Ferguson's article in the current BBC History magazine -- but prior to the rise of globalized mass media British culture tended to penetrate other civilizations only amongst educated elites.
The United States by contrast demonstrated in Afghanistan that if it is "unbound" by anything it is the historical tyranny of distance. This is an underappreciated advantage but it is compounded by the fact that no other power has this a similar logistical capability with conventional forces. More significantly for the long run -- and this explains why anti-American sentiment is strongest among traditional elites of other nations -- our "soft power" penetrates into the broad mass of humanity culturally, economically and well-nigh unstoppably. Even when the local population also assumes an anti-American position politically, American values and consumer culture broadcast over airwaves, the internet and through commerce whets appetites and sows ideas disruptive to paternalistic social systems. Agitated populations, particularly among younger demographics tend to challenge traditional power arrangements.
This "soft power" effect of American culture in a globalized market is really only comparable to that of Rome's classical influence or Imperial China's Confucian dominion over tributary states and near neighbors like Japan. What is different about the United States is a greater willingness to adapt and Americanize elements of foreign cultures -- food, fashions, concepts -- and return them at a high rate of speed to the global market. Former powers of this stature, tended to stigmatize foreign mores and attempted to preserve their own culture. Even Christianity was a religion of slaves for several centuries prior to Constantine's conversion. I think we are witnessing something relatively new with America's current world position which is why academics are left grasping for ill-fitting terms like "empire."
Asked about winning in the South at the Commonwealth Club of California, Kerry said: "With respect to the South, I am going to campaign in the South. I am campaigning down there now. I have a presence in the South and I believe that somebody, like myself, who is fiscally responsible, who cares about education, who has been a prosecutor, and put people behind bars, some of them for the rest of their life, who has fought for this nation ...
"The last president from New England -- a senator -- President Kennedy won a bipartisan South. It was a different South then and I understand that. ... But let me say to you folks, and this is not an argument I am going to make across the country because I intend to campaign and talk to folks and think that we can win a number of states there, Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas and a number of others.
"But for better or worse, in the last campaign in 2000, Al Gore proved that you can get elected president of the United States without winning one Southern state -- if he had simply won New Hampshire or West Virginia or Ohio or Colorado or a number of other states. We are the leaders. Democrats have to stop looking at the small solution that the country is compartmentalized in that way. I think that the Gore campaign pulled out of Ohio, three weeks before the election and only lost Ohio by 3 percent.
"I think that people all over this country with common sense want a leadership that makes this country more secure, that addresses the challenges of the future, that puts people back to work, that is fiscally responsible and that doesn't always drive political wedges and look for the lowest common denominator in American politics."
(via a Wyeth Ruthven e-mail; Wyeth's blog is here)
A fine Max Sawicky post on the topic of Jews and neoconservatives (via Gary Farber's lively Amygdala, which addresses the topic here). Kevin Drum, of the consistently interesting CalPundit, sparked conversation on the topic by raising a set of questions here.
It wasn't that long ago that events in El Salvador were the source of enormous debate in this country. Now El Salvador draws little attention. In one sense, that's good, since it's a reflection of the ending of the civil war and the awful atrocities associated with it. Anyway, from an AP story:
The party of El Salvador's former leftist guerrillas claimed victory in more than 100 of 262 mayorships at stake in elections, and its leader said the results showed Salvadorans were hungry for change.
The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, also claimed to have increased its number of seats in congress in Sunday's vote, drawing even with their former conservative adversaries in the country's 1980-1992 civil war -- the ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance, ARENA. Salvadorans voted for 262 mayorships and 84 congressional seats.
FMLN leader Shafick Jorge Handal said the victory showed "the people's will for a change."
Just seeing a reference to the ARENA party reminds me of the old days when George Bush Sr., then vice president, went down to speak to Chamber of Commerce types in San Salvador and deliver the message that the Reagan administration wanted an end to the killings committed by death squads linked to ARENA.
My friend Craig Brelsford, a native of Pennsylvania now living in the Netherlands, sends along these thoughts:
I spent the past few days with my wife in Nice. I had lots of friendly conversations along the shore with Frenchmen. I find that being able to speak French (I speak fluently now, though with mistakes) neutralizes a lot of the anti-Americanism. I am not quite one of "them," but speaking the language lowers so many barriers. So the most I got was people who didn't care much for America -- but were interested in talking to this American who learned their language. Tres rare, un americain qui parle francais, they were saying. ...
So, sorry, I wasn't in the mood to boycott. [Craig’s wife] had a business trip to Nice, and I tagged along.
I paid close attention to the French media, newspapers and television. I find both extremely one-sided. Le Monde editorializes freely on its front page. I guess I respect them more than The New York Times, though, because they don't try to hide their bias behind some pretense of neutrality. They even run editorial cartoons on the front page. One I had to admit was funny. It showed Blair naked except for a fig leaf. An American is armed to the teeth and standing next to him -- you can imagine the exaggeration. The American is saying, "Well, if you can't go to war with us, Tony, we'll understand."
I watched a news show in which the host and a reporter were clearly making no effort to conceal their anti-war, anti-Bush, anti-Blair stance. The subject of the program was, "Is the house of Blair burning down?" They had the British ambassador to Paris on, Holmes I think his name was, and Holmes said something very cutting: As much as Blair is struggling, he said, at least the Brits are having a debate. ...
I hate to have to make this prediction, and I pray it doesn't come to pass, but if it does happen I want to be able to say I told you so: As war begins, or perhaps just before we go in, Saddam will use chemical or bio weapons on Kuwait, Israel, the Kurds, or the American forces. And the hardened anti-war people, including some high officials in some European governments, will blame America, even though such use will prove Saddam had no intention of disarming. But many of the more reasonable anti-war people will have a revolt of conscience and rally to our side.
I support this war but worry about the drain on the national treasury as we rebuild yet another nation. I think some money could be saved by pulling some of our people out of Europe and South Korea. Why do we need 70,000 servicemen in Germany anymore?
The Washington Post had two articles of note Sunday:
An extensive look at U.S. war plans for the Iraq campaign. According to the article, look for audacity: unprecedented use of special forces and an emphasis on speed (with major troop movement coming only a few days after the beginning of the intitial air attack).
This article gives an especially upbeat description of recent gains against al-Qaida:
Civil War vets as chief executive My friend Fred Ray, a well-informed student of the Civil War, writes in regard to my recent post about military officers who ran on national party tickets in the 19th century:
You sort of ignored US Grant, who initiated the CW veteran as politician. In fact we've only had two professional soldiers, Grant and Eisenhower, as presidents.
Both Rutherford B. Hayes and William McKinley were vets (trivia -- they served in the same regiment); Hayes was a major general (and a good one) who resigned in '64 to go into politics. Our ancestors [Fred is referring to his and my Confederate ancestors -- GS] fought both men in the Shenandoah and elsewhere.
Between 1865 and 1900 it was very difficult to get elected to anything if you were not a CW vet, north or south. ...
BTW, T.R. was the first of the post-CW presidents -- being too young to serve.
Here's a quick blurb on the subject:
... “Major McKinley” is the first complete account of the Civil War service of President William McKinley, the last of the Civil War veterans to reach the White House and the only one who served in the ranks. McKinley enlisted as a private in the 23rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry (later commanded by another future president, Rutherford B. Hayes) and was the regiment's commissary sergeant when his bravery at the Battle of Antietam led to a commission and an assignment to Hayes's military staff. He later served with four other generals and ended his military career as adjutant of a division and as a brevet major.
McKinley regarded the end of slavery as the significant outcome of the war and valued the contributions of the black soldiers in the Union army. After the war, as a young lawyer and congressman, he defended the rights of freedmen and continued to do so long after others had tired of the cause. He also reached out to former Confederate soldiers in an effort to help restore unity to a divided country, but this initiative eventually overshadowed and diminished his advocacy of civil rights.
Fred’s right that my account was skimpy about the post-Civil War years. My main interest was in the period of intense competition between the Democrats and Whigs from the 1830s to the early 1850s.
Somebody jumped down my throat late last week at my description of the Bush administration as "hard-right." My words, I was hotly told, sent a misleading implication that the administration's positions are outside the political mainstream. My characterization, I was told, indicated that, for all my pretensions, I was joining the media herd in endorsing the idea that Bush is on the hard-right fringe.
Here's what I wrote in my post: "Lind is fully entitled to challenge the hard-right policies of the Bush administration. But he only undermines his credibility when he tries to do so through misleading and poorly reasoned applications of Texas history."
From my e-mail reply:
You've been reading my posts for a long time now. You've seen many, many things I've written. You don't have to send me a knee-jerk avalanche reaction like that. I'm not Paul Krugman, and I don't deserve to be talked to that way. ...
You apparently interpreted my statement that the administration's policies can be subject to legitimate criticism to mean that I think those policies are far outside the mainstream -- no. If you make that interpretation, you assumed wrong.
I was indicating something far different: If liberals want to criticize Bush, fine. It's a very, very conservative administration. But stooping to petty and false arguments is out of bounds.
I chose the word "hard-right" simply as a statement of fact. I chose the word "hard-right" to mean that the policies of the current Bush administration are staunchly conservative -- no Dick Darmon/James Baker/George Bush Sr. pussyfooting.
And that's exactly how I intended it.
This country has a broad spectrum of accepted political opinion, a mainstream that encompasses the policies of the Bush administration as well as those of congressional Democrats (well, most of them). That's the last time -- I hope -- I'll need to waste energy to indicate that I acknowledge something so obvious.
On Friday, I criticized, in the post immediately below, the new Michael Lind book that tried to link George W. Bush to every loathsome part of Texas heritage that Lind can think of. I mentioned, for example, how Lind was transparent in the breathless way he tried to shock left-leaning readers with observations such as ... the Old West was violent, and ... Jim Crow was repulsive, and ... old-time good-old-boy Texas governors could be spectacular buffoons.
As if any of that were surprising.
In any case, it’s striking how feverishly Lind works to link Bush to all that tawdry history.
Here’s another example, concerning the gun culture. Lind writes, in an article for The Globalist:
The culture of the gun is the culture of Anglo-Scots in Texas. The grandfather of a friend of mine — a South Texas sheriff — used to check his tommy-gun (machine gun) with hat-check girls at restaurants in the 1930s.
My scoutmaster grew up on a ranch near the Mexican border where a loaded rifle resting at every door. The former State Comptroller of Texas threatened an acquaintance of mine with a pistol. My niece shot her first deer — at the tender age of six.
One can envision Lind at his keyboard, eager with anticipation at how his words will lead readers in Manhattan and LA and Seattle to just swoon at the sheer horror of it all.
Sure, jackasses in Texas and elsewhere have long done stupid things with guns to supposedly prove their manhood. But what Lind implies is that just as “the former State Comptroller of Texas threatened an acquaintance” of Lind with a pistol, so George W. Bush callously bullies other nations by flexing U.S. military might. Such a grossly tenuous claim -- reminiscent, in a mirror-image sort of way, of John Birch Society-style argumentation -- doesn’t really explain anything. It just, to borrow a phrase from Rosalyn Carter, makes certain people comfortable with their prejudices.
As for the 6-year-old shooting her first deer, that does strike me as quite young. But if Lind is arguing that Texas is unique in that regard, he seems to be stretching the truth. You don’t think that many hunting enthusiasts in Michigan, Maine and eastern Washington start teaching their children at quite tender ages about the use of guns and the techniques of hunting? And does that mean there is automatically something poisonous in their political subculture? No.
By the way: Thirty years ago, in junior high school, I was an avid hunter (of rabbits and squirrels). But I haven’t fired a shot since the '70s. I have fond memories of hunting, but they relate not to the firing of a shotgun but to my depth of enjoyment in being in the woods on a cool autumn afternoon. These days, I have no interest in firing a shot at any animal, but I have no quarrel with the hunters who do.
Virginia Postrel noted some online chatter claiming that George W. Bush isn’t a true Texan, due to his family’s Connecticut connection. I wrote her Thursday to point out that think-tank scholar Michael Lind has a new book out on Bush called "Made in Texas." He first set out the book’s thesis in a three-part set of essays in The Globalist; the book and essays are all linked to here. (Incidentally, this long post will be the only new item I have time to write today.)
Lind’s thesis is sloppy and cheap. A fifth-generation Texan, Lind dredges up all the negatives he can think of from Texas history, especially from the Jim Crow days and earlier -- the trigger-happy resort to violence, the embrace of segregationism, the backward-looking focus on extractive industry, the demagoguery of old-time country-boy (and country-gal) governors -- and tries mightily to link them all to Bush. Bush comes from a Texas subculture, Lind argues, in which those unsavory old-time values are still revered to one degree or another.
Such claims are overwrought and overly clever. Yes indeed, 19th century Texas history overflowed with the recurrent resort to mindless violence, and the Jim Crow injustices were wide-ranging and horrific. And sure, a legitimate case can be made that the focus on oil by many Texas magnates slowed the state's embrace of high-tech industry.
But much of Lind’s rhetoric comes across as shrill and hysterical. He is so hostile to Bush’s staunchly conservative policies (and, above all, to the religious right) that he stoops to questionable claims in trying to link Bush to various horrors and idiocies from Texas history. From his lead-off essay for The Globalist:
Although Mr. Bush's forebears are from the Northeastern United States, the landscape which has shaped him is that of Texas.
It's a culture that combines a violent Scots-Irish strain of Old Testament religiosity and a pre-industrial economy that strongly favors the commodity-driven capitalism of cotton and oil over high-tech manufacturing and scientific R&D.
This unique synthesis has long held back social and economic progress in Texas. And now, as the inspiration for the Bush Administration's disastrous Middle Eastern policy, this traditional Lone Star mentality threatens to undermine U.S. military and diplomatic leadership in the world. ...
In addition to its legalism, this Old Testament Protestant morality is also communal. Its single, seamless moral code is enforced by the community, employers, schools, the state and — until a few decades ago — by the lynch mob. Among clannish, tight-knit, old-fashioned Anglo-Celtic Southern Protestants, as among Orthodox Jews, there is little toleration for deviance from tribal norm.
The result has been intellectual and cultural sterility — and the persistence of pre-modern superstition.
Lind talks at length about yahoo country-boy Texas governors from the early 20th century -- as if Bush should be held accountable six decades later for their inanities.
Lind is especially opportunistic in regard to racial issues. He implies that there is no serious discontinuity between the way white Texans viewed racial issues in the Jim Crow period and the way they do so today. White Texans, in other words, are incapable of moral growth. New Yorkers, say, can move beyond Crown Heights, but by Lind’s description, contemporary Texans are forbidden from severing any connection to the cruelties and horrors of the Jim Crow era.
Historian Robert Dallek, who has written extensively on the Lyndon Johnson presidency, reviewed Lind's book in the New York Times in January. Dallek's analysis was disappointing. He's smart enough to recognize Lind's exaggerations, but he choose to skirt around most of them and comment gently on the rest. Here’s the closest he came to criticizing the book:
For all Lind's chilling reminders of just how much the Bush administration is a reflection of ultraconservative views, his portrait of the Bush presidency is overly stark and deterministic. It is too much a caricature and too little an account of other forces at work in the American economy and politics that have slowed and partly deterred Bush from excesses offensive to a majority of Americans. Indeed, what seems most striking about the Bush presidency so far is not only the extent to which he is a representative of reactionary influences in Texas, the South and other parts of the country but also how important moderate centrist influences remain in shaping national policies and actions.
Lind is especially hysterical in his overwrought claims about Christian conservatives. His eagerness for readers to recoil in horror is transparent. In a Globalist essay titled “Of Texas, Cowboys and Militant Zionists,” for instance, he writes:
The fierce religiosity of Anglo-Celtic Texans (see Part 1), like so much else, can be traced back to Ulster and Scotland — via Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia. The 18th century Scots who moved to the American colonies from Northern Ireland combined frontier brutality with simple and fervent Calvinism. Much as the Protestant Dutch Afrikaaners of South Africa did, these Protestant Scots-Irish Southerners compared themselves to the ancient Hebrews.
Lind is acting as if such an attitude have been unusual in Christian circles. But the early European settlers in what would become the United States were suffused with the notion that theirs would be a New Jerusalem on the Atlantic’s western shores. The writings of Cotton Mather overflow with the notion. Similarly, in 1778, a New Hampshire minister declared that the United States was “nearly to a parallel with Ancient Israel, than any other nation upon the globe.”
Along the same lines, historian Simon Schama talked at length in his 1987 book “An Embarrassment of Riches” (which examined the Dutch experience in its “Golden Era” following liberation from Spain) about how the Dutch regarded themselves as specially blessed by Divine Providence, through their impressive conquest of the sea and ultimate expulsion of the Spaniards.
Schama wrote: “Memories of epic inundations in the late Middle Ages, transmitted to succeeding generations as written and oral folklore -- fables, ballads and fairy tales -- conditioned the 16th century Dutch to regard themselves as ordained and blessed survivors of the deluge.”
Lind is fully entitled to challenge the hard-right policies of the Bush administration. But he only undermines his credibility when he tries to do so through misleading and poorly reasoned applications of Texas history.
By the way: The American Enterprise ran a set of articles in 2000 that provide a good counterpoint to Lind’s claims. The articles can be fairly criticized for being too effusive in praising Texas as the supposed capital of “right thinking” -- free enterprise, individual initiative, limited government and all that -- but they address some aspects of modern Texas culture that Lind conveniently ignores.
John Ellis has been named a Senior Fellow at The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. He will write two papers for the center. One will talk about the intersection of new technology and terror; the other, about media coverage of the war on terrorism. John says he is discontinuing his blog for the time being, and perhaps for good, to devote time to various pursuits.
U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, was one of the speakers at a "Rally for America" event in downtown Houston; the event was billed as nonpartisan, although most of the speakers were Republicans supporting the Bush policy. The crowd shouted down Lee when she tried to express her disagreement with the administration on Iraq. But that's similar to what the folks tried to do at that Canadian university last year when Netanyahu tried to speak, and I can remember American students trying to do the same thing to Jeanne Kirpatrick at several campuses in the '80s when she was the ambassador to the U.N. The proper response is rebut an argument, not to try to silence the person making it.
The United Nations is falling down on the job, the New Democrats say. From an e-mailing this week by the Democratic Leadership Council:
As much as we join other Democrats in criticizing the diplomatic bungling of the Bush Administration in dealing with past or potential allies before and during the Iraq crisis, we think it's now time for Democrats to focus on the United Nations' responsibility to enforce its own resolutions and authorize action to disarm Saddam Hussein. ...
There's already a backlash underway in U.S. public opinion against the previously lofty reputation of the United Nations. And if the United Nations begins to reflect the apparent belief of some in Europe that the United States, not Iraq or North Korea, represents the primary threat to world peace and stability, then domestic support for collective security through multilateral organizations will inevitably drop even further.
A good friend writes:
I've always been fascinated by Pitcain Island, where the Bounty mutineers settled down and started a colony that lives on today.
But apparently there's trouble in paradise. Turns out that when a girl turns 12 or so she's considered eligible, and there's not much to do on the island, y'know. Apparently that a lot of the men are committing sexual abuse, and according to the women it has always been that way. The British are getting ready to prosecute and some are saying it will totally destroy the island conmmunity (which has only 45 residents today, though hundreds of descendants live elsewhere and have ties to the island.
Rod Dreher has a fine NRO piece about how it's possible to disagree with the French government over Iraq and still appreciate the wonders of France. It's good to see a writer convey a sense of humanity -- connecting one's points to one's life experiences, from a religious inspiration at a French cathedral to noting the special meaning a Paris bridge has for one's parents -- while advancing an argument.
Wesley Clark sounded pretty eccentric in this Washington Post interview by fixating upfront on whether he comes “from a long line of rabbis.” (He raised the issue himself at the start of the interview, but then he couldn’t confirm things one way or the other.) At any rate, the talk about Clark’s possible presidential bid, at a time when some Democrats say they need to shore up their toughness on foreign policy, brings to mind how U.S. political parties in the 19th century often placed military officers on their national ticket as part of what one observer called a strategy of “gunpowder glory.”
I’ll give a look here to some of those candidates, focusing on the first half of the 19th century. The list isn’t intended as comprehensive. This is just a blog-excursion. (I’ve merely flipped through Paul F. Boller Jr.’s informative and entertaining “Presidential Campaigns.”)
George Washington had a military background, of course, but the “gunpowder glory” trend began in 1824 when Democrats nominated Andrew Jackson, hero of the Battle of New Orleans, near the end of James Monroe’s administration. Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky, one of four presidential nominees that year, heaped scorn on Jackson’s candidacy: “I cannot believe that killing 2,500 Englishmen at New Orleans qualifies for the various, difficult and complicated duties of the Chief Magistracy.”
Jackson won a plurality of the popular vote, but the election went to the House of Representatives, which selected John Quincy Adams in a much-derided decision. Jackson ran again in 1828, won, and served two terms.
In 1836, when Jackson’s second term was ending, the Whigs nominated three candidates (each with regional strength, in hopes of throwing the election into the House and uniting behind a single Whig candidate). One of the candidates was William Henry Harrison, who had done a mediocre job as a general during the War of 1812 and had led U.S. troops against Tecumseh at Tippecanoe in 1811. Democrats nominated Martin Van Buren for president and as his running mate selected Col. Richard Johnson of Kentucky, who was said to have killed Tecumseh in 1813, although that claim was challenged during the campaign.
Van Buren prevailed. Harrison proved the strongest contender among the Whigs, and in 1840 he won the presidential contest, becoming the first Whig to attain the chief executive position. In the 1840 race, Harrison was the first presidential contender to take the campaign stump, yet he deliberately avoided talking policy specifics, due in part to the fractured nature of the Whigs. “Let him say nothing -- promise nothing,” said Whig strategist Nicholas Biddle. Sen. Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri coolly noted that “availability was the only quality sought by the Whigs.”
The divisions within the Whig coalition were illustrated by how the nationalist Harrison was paired with running mate John Tyler, a fervent booster of states’ rights. When Harrison died in office, Tyler succeeded him and proceeded to alienate Whig members of Congress by reversing many of Harrison’s policy stances. In the 1844 presidential contest, Democratic James K. Polk prevailed.
Whigs made a comeback in 1848 with another successful “gunpowder glory” strategy. Their presidential nominee was Zachary Taylor, a Mexican War hero nicknamed “Old Rough and Ready.” Taylor’s military record was far more impressive than that of Harrison. Democrats countered by nominating free-soiler Lewis Cass, a general from the War of 1812 who had gone on to serve as territorial governor of Michigan. For vice president, Democrats named Gen. William O. Butler, who had also served during the War of 1812.
Cass had performed creditably as an officer, but Whigs made great sport of his record. Then-U.S. Rep. Abraham Lincoln did so, for example, in a much-quoted humorous speech on the floor of the House (as a previous post here has mentioned).
Cass later served as secretary of state under President James Buchanan and would resign the Cabinet in 1860 when Buchanan refused to reinforce Fort Sumter in Charleston, S.C.
Democrats in 1848 derided Whig nominee Taylor as a “military autocrat,” comparing him to Caesar, Cromwell and Napoleon. Some Whigs had not been enthusiastic, either. Daniel Webster deemed him an “illiterate frontier colonel” without the slightest understanding of national issues. Many Whigs, Webster said, would “not vote for a candidate brought forward only because of his successful fighting in this war against Mexico.”
Taylor won the election, but in a parallel with the Harrison-Tyler situation during the previous Whig administration, Taylor died while in office and was succeeded by a vice president, Millard Fillmore, who also reversed policy in key respects.
In 1852, the Whigs, who were becoming increasingly wobbly as a political force, turned once again to a general (this time, on the 53rd ballot). Their nominee was Winfield Scott, a hero of the Mexican War. Scott was easy to lampoon, however, given his egoism, primness and fondness of fancy uniforms. Democrats tagged him as “Fuss ‘n Feathers.”
The Democratic nominee, Franklin Pierce, had been a brigadier general during the Mexican War. Whigs heaped scorn on his military performance, but it was to no avail. Scott proved a weak candidate and Pierce won handily. Whig nominee Scott carried only four states.
Republicans, the new political force in the 1850s, didn’t pursue a “gunpowder glory” approach, although the party’s first presidential nominee, John Fremont, had allure as a celebrated explorer of the American West.
In 1864, Abraham Lincoln did face Gen. George McClellan, Lincoln’s former top commander, as the Democratic presidential nominee. (Radical Republicans had pushed Gen. Ulysses S. Grant for the GOP nomination that year, but he adamantly refused to consider their proposal.) The Democratic national platform that year, in contrast to the GOP’s, talked only about the war.
Other military-connected candidates in the 19th century included the Democrats’ 1880 presidential nominee, Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, a respected Union commander during the Civil War. Hancock did well as far as the popular vote, coming up short by less than 10,000 ballots out of 9 million cast. But he lost big in the Electoral College. The winner was Republican James A. Garfield, soon to be felled by an assassin’s bullet.
In 1884, the Republican vice presidential nominee was General John A. “Black Eagle” Logan, paired with presidential candidate James G. Blaine. But the Democratic ticket, headed by Grover Cleveland, would prevail.
By the way: Not long ago, an item at Best of the Web, quoting Charles Krauthammer, I believe, tallied the many times that Bill Clinton had used the word “I” in an interview about current public policy issues. When William Henry Harrison, in 1840, became the first presidential nominee to take to the campaign stump, one Democratic newspaper accused him of “garrulous egotism” for his repeated references to himself. In one speech, the paper counted 81 “I’s.”
Anglosphere vs. Hispanosphere; a Philippines counterfactual
I quoted the other day from e-mails to me from xavier Basora, of the blog Buscaraons, who argued against Anglospheric triumphalism (a triumphalism that I sometimes endorse). The constitutional traditions in the English-speaking do not provide the sole path toward the cultivation of democracy, xavier argues. Xavier has further written me that his arguments have been the source of debate at this online site. In addition, he says, he and Jim Bennett (who writes the “Anglosphere” for UPI) have had a productive e-mail discussion on the topic.
On one tangent, Jim Bennett speculated on a fascinating counterfactual possibility for the Philippines. Jim notes that xavier:
seems to think that the only options on the table for the Philippines were American conquest or continued Spanish rule, or maybe independence. At the time, many people thought that the alternative to American rule was most likely Germany's acquiring the islands from Spain by one means or another. Then instead of William Howard Taft's supervision of the pacification of the islands, we might have had Hermann Goering's father, fresh from his near-extermination of the Herero in Namibia.
Of course in 1914 the Japanese would have rolled them up along with the other German Pacific possessions, making the short leap from Taiwan, and incorporating them in the earlier version of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. I'm not sure the Filipinos would have found it any more pleasant in 1914 than they did in fact in 1941.
If Paul von Lettow-Worbeck had been posted to the Philippines instead of Tanganyika then, he might have led the Japanese on quite a merry chase, though. He was a brilliant guerilla tactician. It would make a great alternate-history story, with goose-stepping, pickelhaube-wearing Filipino troops fighting the Japanese in the back parts of Mindanao.
By the way: Donald Sensing has a good link about a contemporary dispute about the Spanish-American War, but I won’t give away what it’s about. It’s worth checking out.
And: Jim Bennett argues in his latest column that Bush should seek a declaration of war from Congress against Iraq.
Considering the use of tactical nukes against Vietnam in the ’60s
That was the topic of a 1966 report by a group of defense consultants. This op-ed, critical of the contemporary contemplation of the use of low-level nukes, describes the report:
The report grew out of an overheard remark. As the Vietnam War escalated in the spring of 1966, a high-ranking Pentagon official with access to President Johnson was heard by scientist Freeman Dyson to say, "It might be a good idea to toss in a nuke from time to time, just to keep the other side guessing."
Dyson and three other scientists -- Steven Weinberg, S. Courtenay Wright and Robert Gomer -- were so appalled by the remark that they undertook a systematic study of the utility of nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War. They were members of JASON, a group of elite scientific advisors to the Pentagon who spent two months each summer analyzing tough problems confronting the United States military. Other officials involved in the JASON study confirm that there was recurring talk around the Pentagon that spring and summer about using tactical nuclear weapons to block passes between North Vietnam and Laos, especially the Mu Gia Pass, a key part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail -- the Viet Cong's primary supply route headed south.
The 55-page study analyzed the effects of using tactical nuclear weapons against a variety of targets, most in North Vietnam, as well as the likely political effects of a nuclear campaign. ...
The report identified a number of targets against which, in principle, tactical nuclear weapons might be useful: bridges, airfields, missile sites, large troop concentrations, tunnel systems, Viet Cong bases in the South and urban-industrial targets such as ports and storage depots in the North.
The analysis of the scientists revealed numerous obstacles to the effective use of nuclear weapons. Often, it would be hard to find the targets. In many cases, there were more effective alternatives. In others, use of nuclear weapons would not substantially affect enemy operations. For example, the authors estimated that it would take 3,000 tactical nuclear weapons per year to interdict supply routes like the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Even then, damaged roads and trails could be relatively easily rerouted and cleared.
Most importantly, the study warned that a first use of nuclear weapons by the United States could lead China or the Soviet Union to provide Vietnamese fighters with tactical nuclear weapons. ...
The report, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, is available online here.
Ohio never ratified the 14th Amendment, and a handful of social conservatives in the Ohio legislature opposed a recent move to ratify it, notes Kevin Drum of Calpundit.
I’m reminded of how another Ohioan, abolitionist Joshua Giddings, proposed at the 1860 Republican national convention that the words “all men are created equal” be added to the party platform. The convention voted down his resolution. Giddings said he would have to leave the convention. A New York delegate renewed Giddings’ proposal, and this time it won approval.
Another poem from the anthology “Rural Voices,” about rural life in Nebraska; it’s by Steven P. Schneider and is titled “Chanukah Lights Tonight”:
Our annual prairie Chanukah party
latkes, kugel, cherry blintzes.
Friends arrive from nearby towns
and dance the twist to “Chanukah Lights Tonight”
spin like a dreidel to a Klezmer hit.
The candles flicker in the window.
Outside, ponderosa pines are tied in red bows.
If you squint,
the neighbors’ Christmas lights
look like the Omaha skyline.
The smell of oil is in the air.
We drift off to childhood
where we spent our gelt
on baseball cards and movies,
cream sodas and potato knishes.
No delis in our neighborhood.
Only the wind howling over the crushed corn stalks.
Inside, we try to sweep the darkness out,
waiting for the Messiah to knock
wanting to know if he can join the party.
Two items relating to public radio programs I heard over the weekend:
I caught only the last half of the program, but I was impressed by an interview with percussionist Evelyn Glennie on The Record Shelf. She is attempting to expand the classical music repertoire through the increased use of percussion instruments, including non-Western ones. Her flamboyant performance style reflects what she sees as a growing expectation by young people for musical performances, even ones involving classical music, to incorporate strong visual elements. She was articulate and insightful about the musical selections she and host Jim Svejda discussed. I was greatly surprised when I later discovered that she is profoundly deaf; deaf people can have difficulty in speaking precisely, but her speech was quite crisp.
"The Thistle and Shamrock,” which features Celtic music, featured a program (No. 1032) about compositions relating to Brian Boru, a 10th century Irish hero who defended Ireland against a Viking invasion. The Irish were victorious, but at great cost. Among the 10,000 said to have been killed in the Battle of Clontarf near Dublin in 1014 were Brian Boru’s son, Murrough, whom Brian Boru had intended as his heir as part of a vision to unite the Irish clans.
I'm not totally surprised that some Spanish might still harbour some grievances over the Spanish American war. However, by and large pretty much no one cares about that era and I wrote in the past at my blog about how the American intervention was the culmination point of aggressive American expansionism and had fatal consequences for Spain.
The Spanish defeat pretty much sealed the country's path towards its civil war due to fracosomania. I stated it crudely in my blog but that was the implicit sentiment that the Generacion 98 expressed. Yet on the positive side the defeat allowed the Catalans to push for greater autonomy culminating in the Mancommunitat of 1911 and again in 1930.
In any case, the Spanish American war was both regrettable and totally unnecessary. I'm of the opinion that had America not intervened, Spain would've taken the path to become a democratic regime much earlier thanks to the hard experiences learnt from the Cuban insurrection of 1868. There would've been no civil war and the Spanish authourities would've felt confident enough to decentralize Spain and allow the Catalans Basques to manage their affairs. ...
The Generacion del 98 -- the Spanish ones at least -- were deeply traumatized by the defeat and in my mind it hardened attitudes throughout the society. The centralists saw dangers in decentralizing power; the autonomists (i.e. the Catalans) held the opposite view as well as demanding more latitude to govern its own affairs; the military loathed the politician and felt the civil society had betrayed them. In sum, Spanish society was becoming more polarized and the ability to run a country via politics became progressively harder until 1936.
I suspect that what embittered the Generacion del 98 was the gratuity of American intervention. There wasn't an egregious causus belli and the Americans were far more cynical in their interference (the Platt Amendment of 1903) of Cuban affairs. Treating the island as America's casino and brothel dishonoured the Americans who died in that conflict and insulted the Cuban insurrectionists who desired independence to run their own affairs.
As for the Philippines, I'm unimpressed by America's legacy. The Americans treated the 4 centuries of Spanish rule as irrelevant and pretended that there was a cultural and political vacuum that required a 'correction'. I wonder if the Philippines would've been the basket case that it is if Spain had retained the island?
By the way: The terrific blog Ideofact (which I discovered through Eve Tushnet) has a post pointing to provocative observations at Buscaraon relating to the Magna Carta and political evolution.
This week I mentioned a study about the spending splurge by state governments in the 1990s. An additional factor contributing to the states' budget woes is Congress's continuing imposition of unfunded mandates.
But didn't that end in 1995 as part of passage of the Contract with America? Not at all.
Two new unfunded mandates -- well, actually partially funded mandates -- are Bush's 2001 education initiative as well as last year's big "election reform" law that requires the states to overhaul their election procedures and buy new voting equipment. When Congress approved the election measure last year, lawmakers heaped praise on themselves for promoting fairness and efficiency. But when it came time this year to actually appropriate the pledged federal contribution, guess what? Congress decided to approve only 70 percent of its original pledge. But the mandates on the states remain in full force.
Now is the hour for expert military analysis. With his new column, Austin Bay delivers:
Use of WMD by Saddam loyalists remains the biggest concern, not only to U.S. forces but Iraq's neighbors and the Iraqi people. WMD, however, are an existing threat that eliminating Saddam diminishes. Given the Iraqi people's hatred for Saddam, don't expect Baghdad to become Stalingrad.
If a city fight develops, several analysts suggest the U.S. attack on Panama City in 1989 is a better historical model. Weakly defended and isolated buildings ripe for precision strike characterized that scrap. Republican Guards in "web defenses," where key military positions are sited near hospitals, schools and religious sites, and are then linked by underground tunnels, are another concern. However, executing such a defense -- once surrounded -- requires deeply committed troops, and that's something Saddam knows he doesn't have.
Samuel Forry and Lorin Blodget: Who in the world were they?
They are two 19th century figures I’d never heard of until this week, but I came away quite impressed after reading about their achievement: They were pioneers in scientifically analyzing weather patterns in the United States.
That was an enormous contribution at a time when Americans were streaming westward in great numbers and trying to anticipate the weather conditions.
The groundbreaking climatological study by Forry appeared in 1842; the much-praised, comprehensive study by Blodget, in 1857.
Curiously, such analysis was initiated by the Surgeon General’s Office of the U.S. Army in order to understand the potential health concerns facing troops in Western outposts. (Yes, we’re just a bunch of imperialists, aren’t we?)
Blodget’s book, “Climatology of the United States,” drew on years of data collected by the Smithsonian Institution and through the years has garnered great praise, as indicated here (you have to scroll down):
Blodget at that time published maps whose isothermal lines, despite limitations obvious to us today, were surprisingly accurate. His annual temperature map, for example, showed the 60-degree isotherm essentially as modern maps do: coming across central New Mexico, the line was draped over the Llano Estacado and continued eastward to the mouth of Chesapeake Bay.
Blodget's precipitation maps can be criticized, too, but they accurately indicated relatively wet areas in the Northwest, in the Rockies and Appalachians, and along the Gulf Coast; significantly, they indicated a low in the Great Plains. Blodget in fact drew what we would call a 20-inch isohyet running very close to the 100th meridian; he even correctly indicated that in the northern plains this line connecting points of equal precipitation lies slightly east of that meridian but that in the southern plains it crosses over to the west of it. (His map, which spoke of the "Great Plains of the Interior," made special mention of the "Desert Plains" where we now recognize the High Plains. Contrary to famous assertions that this part of the country was uninhabitable by Europeans, Blodget wrote that these plains had "much capacity for cultivation.")
With all his pioneering knowledge, Blodget was keenly aware that there was much he did not understand. Things we take for granted, he advanced as tentative truths: that the atmosphere in the mid-latitudes has a generally westerly flow; ... that continentality induces a general decline in winter temperatures at inland locations. ...
Of other processes much studied today Blodget had little or no conception: air mass analysis was unknown to him; so were such things as winter-storm dynamics, the role of the Rocky Mountains in nurturing the formation of the low pressure systems that contain those storms, and the role of jet streams in guiding storm movement.
Could I have some ‘freedom toast’ over here, please?
There has been no universally accepted name for what Americans refer to as French toast. In this country, it’s also been called “nun's toast,” “Spanish toast” and “German toast.” I read this week that Americans switched from calling it “German toast” to “French toast” during World War I as part of the general anti-German linguistic acrobatics of the time; one online claim dated the change to World War II.
Maybe so, although this account (you have to scroll down to find the French toast entry) says the first printed reference to “French toast” appeared in this country in 1871 (but why -- to celebrate France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War?).
So, what do the French call it? “Lost bread.”
By the way: From what I read, The British call it (or at least used to call it) “Poor Knights of Windsor.” Does that mean that before 1917 they referred to it as “Poor Knights of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha”?
Hey, that’s a lot different from what Molly Ivins said
Sorry, but here’s one more Francophobic blogger post. (Hey, at least I had an idiosyncratic take on the silly “freedom fries” issue the other day.)
Molly Ivins gave a hooray last week when Reporters Without Borders, I believe it was, gave France a higher rating than the United States when it comes to press freedom.
But Marc Carnegie, a senior correspondent with Agence France-Presse, takes a different view:
In its latest issue, the respected French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur calls U.S. President George W. Bush a "little Presbyterian Caligula." The harsh rhetoric is not surprising; like elsewhere in French society, Bush-bashing is a popular pastime in the press. The astonishing thing is that what the magazine said is illegal.
Under France's antiquated press law, it is forbidden to insult the French president or foreign heads of state. The law has been on the books, with few changes, since 1881; it's the same one Emile Zola defied when he published J'accuse to defend Captain Dreyfus at the end of the 19th century. No one has been arrested for insulting the president here since the 1960s, when a parade spectator was briefly jailed after booing Charles de Gaulle. But the far-reaching code remains on the books, and its pernicious effect has extended well beyond France's borders.
In Africa as well as Central and Eastern Europe, the law has been used as a model for local press codes that have muzzled journalists and stifled dissent. Jacques Chirac's recent outburst at would-be EU members of the East, warning them like unruly children to "keep quiet" over Iraq, did more than just miss the point about the new freedoms behind the former Iron Curtain. It also underlined how ill at ease French officials can be to robust challenges. In a country where the state sector is bloated, and the president is also a political party boss, a fully unfettered press would be a useful bulwark against excessive power.
But journalism in France, as in other places on the Continent, remains a relatively velvet-glove occupation. Compared to the dogged investigations in U.S. papers or the tabloid bravado in Britain, the sensibility of French newspapers is largely genteel -- at least with regards to their own leaders, if not to Mr. Bush. Last week's publication of a book attacking Le Monde, one of France's most esteemed papers, shocked the chattering classes here and quickly drew vows of legal action. ...
The French law has also had an enormous impact on the nations of the former Soviet bloc, which after decades of repression have no tradition of a free and vibrant press. "Following the French model, virtually every new press law or draft press law in Central or Eastern Europe first proclaims press freedom and then provides for its restriction," the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe said back in 1994 ...
Even so, the press in the former Soviet bloc is flourishing -- and it wasted little time in castigating Mr. Chirac after he told the East to button its lip. "We can ask ourselves what France and Germany did in 50 years of communism for all the countries in the Eastern bloc," Romania's Expres fired off in an editorial. "The answer is simple: nothing. ... We have had enough failures with France and Germany."
What a pleasant surprise this article in City Journal was. I thought it would be a mildly stimulating review of Martin Scorcese’s “Gangs of New York.” Instead, it was a terrific look at the Irish experience in 19th century New York, and much more:
Gangs also features a screen-dominating performance by Daniel Day-Lewis, who boasts a wonderful New York accent throughout the movie, the kind you don’t hear in the city much anymore. The accent is anachronistic, however: New Yorkese didn’t reach its full development until the early twentieth century, four decades after the events the movie depicts. ...
Some of the country’s founders believed that Anglo-Saxon culture was basically identical with Western Civilization. Catholicism, in their view, was incompatible with democracy and religious freedom. As a delegate drafting the New York State Constitution, for example, John Jay successfully pushed for an amendment forbidding practitioners of religions with leaders located beyond American shores—like, say, the pope in Rome—from becoming U.S. citizens (the federal government eventually took over the responsibility of granting citizenship, rendering such state restrictions void). ...
It took a charismatic religious leader to lead the Irish—and the nation—out of this destructive circle. “Dagger” John Hughes, an Irish immigrant gardener who became the first Catholic archbishop of New York, makes only a silent cameo appearance in Gangs of New York, looking like a refugee from The Godfather; but in the real world, he catalyzed a remarkable cultural change that would liberate Gotham’s Irish from their self-destructive underclass behavior, so that within a generation they began flooding into the American mainstream (see "How Dagger John Saved New York‘s Irish,“ Spring 1997). It’s a shame that Scorsese didn’t find a bigger part in his film for this brilliant, complex, and extremely effective man. ...
Hughes was fortunate to have more than his own considerable talent to rely on in reforming the New York Irish. The Oxford movement in England had resulted in the conversion to the Catholic Church of a number of brilliant and talented individuals, most famously John Henry Cardinal Newman. In New York, the movement had an even greater influence, leading several highly educated Protestants to convert to Catholicism. Many of these high-profile converts ... offered to help the Irish; Hughes astutely availed himself of their services.
Hughes also developed close relationships with WASP politicians like William H. Seward, the Whig Governor of New York. Many WASPs shared Hughes’s vision of a pluralistic America and felt that a large numbers of immigrants would speed the economic development of the country. They understood that with the help of immigrants, the U.S. could become the greatest economic power the world has ever known, and its greatest democracy. Too bad that Scorsese treats all WASP politicians and philanthropists as naive buffoons, without recognizing the value of their efforts to uplift the newcomers, very much an American tradition.
Just goes to show you never know what you’ll stumble on when you go prowling online to find something interesting to read over lunch.
I’ve mentioned before that a University of Nebraska student named Chris Gustafson did an impressive job in putting together "Rural Voices," a 370-page book of poems, essays and reminiscences by more than 100 contributors talking about rural life in Nebraska. The quality of writing is impressive, and I learned much from the book. The sense of place in Nebraska’s farm county and ranchlands is quite powerful.
I know most of the visitors here are city dwellers, but I’m going to excerpt some material from the anthology from time to time.
For example: Suzanne Richards took up the ranch life in Nebraska’s remarkable Sand Hills in 1996. She raises this prospect: “You Might be a Rancher’s Wife If ... ” Among her 28 answers:
If his favorite radio channel is the weather station.
If he buys you insulated coveralls for your anniversary instead of lingerie and you are thrilled.
If he calls to check on the cows, but doesn’t ask how you are.
If his idea of quality time is tractor-driving lessons.
If your baby’s first word is “mooo.”
If your fridge looks like a veterinary pharmacy.
If you mow your lawn with a goat.
If, instead of foreplay at night, you check for ticks.
I've written several times at length here about the severe drought afflicting the American West. Gary Jones e-mails to point out an Economist article that includes the following:
Already about 40% of the world’s population has insufficient water for sanitation and hygiene, and 2.2m people die each year from diseases linked to inadequate sewerage or contaminated drinking water. Each day, about 2m tonnes of waste are dumped into the world’s rivers and lakes, the UN calculates. There is now about 12,000 cubic km of polluted water on the planet, equivalent to more than the contents of the world’s ten biggest river basins. If the rate of pollution keeps pace with population growth, this pool of contaminated water will grow to 18,000 cubic km by 2050, or nine years’ worth of worldwide irrigation needs, at current rates.
Though such worries are normally associated with poor countries, the report says that, of 122 countries ranked on the quality of their water and “their ability and commitment to improve the situation”, the world’s worst is prosperous Belgium, which gets lower marks than impoverished African, Asian and Middle Eastern countries. Combining affluence with effluence, Belgium fails to treat its waste water properly and has let its heavy industries pollute waterways. This is especially reckless given that, as the report notes, Belgium has relatively few sources of usable groundwater. By contrast, Britain, the first industrialised nation, whose factories used to spew vast quantities of toxic waste into its rivers, has cleaned up its act sufficiently to become the fourth-best water provider, beaten only by the environmentally conscious Finns, Canadians and New Zealanders.
Mike Shuster, high diplomacy correspondent for NRP, had a piece this morning that dutifully praised the work of the International Atomic Energy Agency (the U.N. agency charged with monitoring for nuclear nonproliferation violations) and its director general, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei. Actually, the piece was pretty good and included a relatively balanced take on the agency.
The piece had a big hole, however. The story mentioned ElBaradei's self-praise about how the IAEA uses advanced technologies and aggressive inspections that recalcitrant governments supposedly can't counter. Shuster's piece made no mention of a major failure on the IAEA's part: Its longstanding inability to detect and inhibit North Korea's covert program to develop weapons-grade nuclear materials in direct violation of a 1994 agreement with the United States.
For all its self-congratulation about its technological prowess and assertiveness, the IAEA actually has great difficulty in trying to track down the type of decentralized, less extensive infrastructure needed for a uranium-based system. That's not an encouraging observation, but it's the truth.
A second sore point: Shuster's piece talked about how the IAEA takes pride in emphasizing its solemn neutrality in dealing with individual governments. But what did ElBaradei do in his very next quote in the piece? He criticized U.S. nuclear policy, directly and forcefully.
A Pentagon briefing on Monday included fascinating, though sobering, material from about the military’s preparedness against chemical and biological attack. (I linked the other day to a new Cato Institute report that raised concerns about the level of preparedness.)
According to the Pentagon briefers, troops have been issued a new, lightweight protective suit (all suits, including older-model ones in inventory, have been inspected); supplies of vaccine for anthrax and smallpox are more than adequate; and the level of training has been strong. (The Cato report takes issue pointedly with the latter point.)
The military is not very comfortable with the quantity of botulinum vaccine currently available.
If Iraq does use chemical or biological agents, it might be more likely to do so at night, because the temperature would probably be more favorable for effective use of the agent, one of the briefers said.
Excerpts from the briefing:
When you look at biological warfare agents, there are three important things to look at. First, can they make it? Can they get what they need so that they can make a biological warfare agent? That's not extremely difficult science. ...
The next most difficult step is now you've got to be able to put it into a usable form. That's probably the most difficult step, because the difficulty with most biological warfare agents is, they're not very robust. They actually, under exposure of extremes of heat, light and cold, die, because -- think about it -- they're a living organism. ...
As a consequence, there are selective agents which do very well. Anthrax, which you've heard about for years, is one of those because it's very robust. Many of the others are not as robust. And so you prioritize, and you focus on those that you think potentially are the most usable.
The same applies to your chemical agents and just to translate those. Today in Washington, D.C., mustard agent would, in fact, be frozen. It freezes at roughly 56 to 58 degrees Fahrenheit. And it's not in a usable form. VX, because it's a liquid and it's meant for contact, in these particular environments is not going to off-gas much because of the cold that we have today here in Washington, D.C. And nerve agent GB or sarin that you've heard of will, in fact, stay fairly low tothe ground and not spread large distances because of the cold. ...
The one that most folks remember is the battle for Basra, which was a key battle in the Iraq-Iran War, where if he didn't take back Basra from the Iranians, he had lost his access to the sea. And that's probably the largest battle and the largest amount
of chemical agents that he used. But if you track through history, you find that he used it throughout the Iraq-Iran War. ...
I think the biggest thing that we need to look at is that during the Gulf War, he had the same capability that he has today, and he didn't use them then when he had the opportunity. Because of that, first, we need to be concerned, because he's used it in the past. But second, we need to understand fully that he probably has some grave reservations about using those chemical and biological agents. But we're going to be prepared. ...
We spent a lot of time studying issues like Kamisiyah [an Iraqi chemical depot blown up during the Gulf War, said by some to be a factor in Gulf War Syndrome] ... And as we look at the potential for conflict with Iraq again, knowing that they potentially have chemical and biological agents, and have them in storage, we've looked at the methodology that we will use to in fact first identify those sites, and then two, secure those sites to eventually destroy the chemical and biological agents that might be there.
There's a lot of technology that's been developed since the Gulf War. There are very specialized units, some of them in the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, some of them in Technical Escort Unit and my Chem-Bio Rapid Response Team. There are
organizations who have specialized capability that, of course, support our combatant commanders, and you can expect that they are there and they are in theater. ...
As any other country who looks at possible employment of chemical or biological agents, they look at aerial delivery, they look at missile delivery, and then they look at artillery delivery, basically a spectrum of capabilities. There's also the possibility that their special operations capability could, in fact, employ them also. But that would be against very selected targets and very small amounts because it's being carried in by humans rather than larger employment methods.
A new Cato report looks at the 1990s spending surge by state governments. The description of California’s situation was particularly striking :
California is probably in the poorest fiscal shape of any state. The budget gap for FY03 and FY04 combined is estimated to be $35 billion. The budget gap was caused by a remarkable run-up in state spending in the late 1990s under Gov. Gray Davis ... Spending nearly doubled between FY94 and FY01 from $39 billion to $78 billion.
... State government employment has expanded rapidly under Governor Davis as well. Employment, measured in full-time equivalents, jumped from 296,000 in FY2000 to 311,000 in FY01 and to 326,000 in FY02, even as a large budget gap was opening. ...
The biggest spenders in real per capita general fund spending, between fiscal 1990 and 2001: Montana (No. 1), Ohio, Illinois, Oregon, Nebraska (gulp), Kentucky, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Wyoming and New Mexico.
The report lists these as the worst jurisdictions for high taxes, in order: Alaska (No. 1), D.C., New York, Wyoming, Hawaii, Maine, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Mexico and Montana. Those listed as the best for low taxes: New Hampshire (No. 1), Tennessee, Florida, Alabama, Missouri, Texas, Indiana, Virginia, Nevada, Arkansas.
Low taxes shouldn’t be considered the be-all of state government, but at the same time, too many officials seem unmindful of the ramifications of a heavy tax burden and a lack of fiscal discipline.
An unexpected anti-American slogan: ‘Remember the Maine!’
Has bad have fellow Europeans been beating up on Spain’s prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, for supposing the Bush administration on the Iraq issue? The International Herald Tribune explains:
Guenther Grass, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, German Social Democratic Party member and a signer of a declaration backing Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's position of no war even with United Nations backing, accused Aznar in Madrid on Wednesday of returning Spain to "pre-democratic" circumstances (read the Franco era) and serving as "a vassal" to the United States. According to Grass, whose politics over the years included rejection of German reunification, "Europe says no to the United States."
In France, the line on Spain in key segments of the media has now approached that of Chirac's outburst last week against the East European countries that unanimously backed the United States' view of Iraq. Alain Duhamel, perhaps the country's most closely followed political commentator, called Aznar "Washington's messenger boy" (petit telegraphiste in French), an insult of rare resonance here, since it traditionally has been used to castigate someone doing the bidding of a menacing foreign power.
I was surprised to hear on NPR this morning that many Spaniards evidently are still nursing resentment toward the United States over the Spanish-American War. “Remember the Maine!” -- once a rallying cry for Gilded Age jingoists -- is now a mantra of 21st century Spanish pacifists, the NPR report said.
The IHT article also mentions the Spanish-American War along with other facets of anti-Americanism among some Spaniards:
Another part of it has to do with traditional Spanish anti-Americanism, which goes back to the Spanish-American War.
Like France, although without its blood-debt of two world wars to the United States, Spain's anti-Americanism brings together the anti-globalist, anti-capitalist, clericalist and anti-Semitic elements of the country's right- and left-wing extremes.
By the way: As long-time visitors to this site may remember, the Spanish-American War is a particular interest of mine. Last July 4 (on the 100-year anniversary of Teddy Roosevelt's official declaration of the war's end), I wrote about the conflict's long-term significance for U.S. foreign policy and military development, how the war led to regional reconciliation between the North and South and how black U.S. soldiers confronted Jim Crow horrors as they served in uniform.
Things haven’t been going so smoothly for the Japanese government, either, as it offers measured support for the U.S. position on Iraq.
The Nautilus Institute, which closely follows foreign policy developments in East Asia, paraphrases a Japan Times article as reporting that
the Japanese government has been deflecting a growing amount of criticism, even from within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), since it came out in clear support of adopting a new resolution against Iraq at the UN Security Council. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda, however, told a news conference that Japan's speech at the Security Council did not indicate support of an US-led military offensive against Iraq. "Adopting a new resolution means that the international community will speak in one voice," said a visibly irritated Fukuda when asked about criticism that has arisen within the LDP. "We are not saying we support a military strike." ...
Meanwhile, Shizuka Kamei, a former LDP policy chief, lashed out against the speech given by Ambassador to the UN Koichi Haraguchi, saying it gave premature support for the US position. ...
Other veteran LDP politicians, including Mitsuo Horiuchi, chairman of the party's Executive Council, also expressed concern over the speech. "Do we need to publicly say such a thing at this stage?"
Nautilus cites another Japan Times article which quoted a top LDP official as ruling out the possibility that Japan would shoulder “the financial cost of a possible US-led war against Iraq as it did in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.” Nautilus added: “The executive also said the US understands Japan's stance and will not ask for financial assistance."
Keep your eye on this brand-new blog: Zenpundit. The blogger, Mark, has been providing incisive comments for months at the H-DIPLO listserv, which focuses on diplomatic history (and, of late, on the Iraq question). I have no doubt that he will bring the same sharpness of mind to his blog contributions.
One Zenpundit post of interest: the use of nanotechnology by the U.S. military. He provides a link to this Army Web site.
My wife has a remarkable sensibility when it comes to animals. She realizes things about our pets' behavior and needs that I don't have a clue about. (We have three cats, plus a year-old English springer spaniel just introduced to our household over the weekend.)
Here's an example. My wife came to realize that one of our cats, a pleasantly content, low-key black-brown mystic-cat named Stretch, could understand what the names of our other two cats are -- and that if my wife asked her where "Arthur" or "Wissie" (our other two cats) were, Stretch would lead her to them, no matter what hidey-hole in our old Victorian house they were in.
That's come in handy in recent days, because some of the cats have been hiding for long periods of time in the wake of our lumbering, happy-go-lucky new dog, Poco, who's dying to get to know all the cats. Stretch, who's been uncharacterically unnerved herself by our new dog, has provided a useful retrieval service for her fellow felines.
By the way: Upcoming topics to be addressed here include chemical weapons preparedness; politics and generals; a historical parallel between the South and the West; prairie poetry; immigration patterns on the American frontier; and various tangents relating to the Louisiana Purchase, separate from the much-discussed Lewis and Clark angle.
The Pentagon released the transcript of a recent briefing by a “senior defense official” (the only I.D. given) about Iraq’s efforts to place military assets near civilian areas. The transcript is here; the slides shown at the briefing, here.
Some excerpts:
This shows another famous Desert Storm example that might be familiar to many of you. Iraq took advantage of an airstrike near a mosque to create an incident designed to discredit the coalition air campaign and provided supposed proof of an Iraqi claim that the coalition was deliberately damaging Muslim religious sites.
The Iraqis removed the dome of this mosque to simulate bomb damage and bulldozed some rubble to create the false impression that a coalition bomb had struck the mosque. If you look in the upper -- slightly right, that's the nearest actual bomb crater from the attacks that occurred near this facility, because there was a military unit close to this facility. The point of this disinformation effort was, again, to embarrass the coalition military and foment a storm of international protest. ...
More recently, from last year, Saddam has been removing ammunition supplies from existing depots and putting them in smaller bunkers right next to civilian neighborhoods. Here's a case from September of last year where they built field fortifications -- in this case, revetments and a bunker -- next to a school. [The link will take you to the slide.] ...
This is kind of an interesting example from October of last year. It's clear that the Iraqis built revetments for ammunition or military equipment next to one of Saddam's international food warehouses, a civilian facility that's used to distribute food provided from the international community for the Iraqi population. ...
Another picture from 1999 shows military heavy equipment transporters, or HETs, parked adjacent to a mosque. HETs are to transport tanks and other military vehicles.
The next slide demonstrates another method for shielding ammunition. This is a rather complex one. In this example, Saddam is trying to shield military ammunition by using a religious site. This mosque is situated right in the middle of a large ammunition depot. Again, you can see these are all revetments with bunker buildings in the middle of them for ammunition storage, and a mosque located in the middle of this field of ammunition bunkers. ...
Now, I would point out that armies around the world, including our own, have regular military bases on which are located religious structures. But I personally know of no examples where one could find a religious structure right in the middle of an ammunition storage depot of this type. ...
In this case from October of last year, anti-aircraft weapons have been placed on the roof of the Ministry of Media. These weapons represent a military threat to our forces. But the building is reportedly the home of the Iraqi media. Perhaps many foreign journalists also frequent this site. How should a military planner respond to this kind of threat? ...
America's foreign critics have two replies. First, friendship with the United States cannot require blind obedience to U.S. policies -- or to George W. Bush. Second, we're not anti-American, only antiwar. These arguments deserve some respect. But they would be more convincing if they seemed less expedient.
France and Russia insist on U.N. inspections. But in the 1990s, France and Russia weakened the economic sanctions designed to make inspections work. China and Russia urge multilateralism -- but when the United States asks for their help in dealing with North Korea's nuclear threat, it's absent. Germany's Gerhard Schroeder didn't have to resort to anti-Americanism to rescue his faltering election campaign. He and French President Jacques Chirac have not merely disagreed with U.S. policy; they have stoked anti-Americanism.
Many sophisticated objections to American power seem veils for a simplistic resentment of American power. This is not policy; it is peeve. It is peeve partly provoked by the Bush administration, whose gunslinger rhetoric has often been needlessly inflammatory. But it is still peeve uninformed by an appreciation of the possible collateral damage.
America's military and economic umbrella depends on a minimum of trust. By inciting anti-Americanism, our foreign critics risk the unintended consequences -- self-defeating for all -- of American resentment.
Historian C. Bradley Thompson recently attended the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. The complaints he voices about what he saw are familiar, but legitimate and important:
Of the roughly two hundred panels, there was virtually nothing on subjects such as the American Revolution, the Civil War, or America's involvement in the two World Wars. Instead, there were dozens of papers on subjects ranging from the banal to the bizarre and perverse.
Participants were subjected to scintillating presentations on topics such as "Meditations on a Coffee Pot: Visual Culture and Spanish America, 1520-1820," or "The Joys of Cooking: Ideologies of Housework in Early Modern England," or "Body, Body, Burning Bright: Cremation in Victorian America."
But without question the dominant theme of the conference was sex. Historians at America's best universities are obsessed with it. ...
By sanctifying the stories of oppressed and "marginalized" groups, historians subtly indoctrinate students with the idea that justice and rights are synonymous with one's group identity, be it one's race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation.
But what of America's founding ideals, such as the principle of inalienable individual rights? ...
Today, our children are being taught to be ashamed of America. By denigrating the principles and great deeds of America's past and dethroning its heroes, today's college professors are destroying in our youth the proper reverence for the ideals this nation stands for. And a nation that hates itself cannot last.
Not that Thompson’s arguments are on the mark in all cases. He laments that social history has displaced the traditional focus on political history. (Academic history, he writes, “seeks to elevate the history of ordinary men and women doing ordinary things at the expense of great men and women doing great things.”) As with much of what he writes, his point can be taken too far. A proper balance is needed. A sound history of the nation’s history should involve an understanding of the founders and constitutional development. But there’s nothing wrong with also learning about the course of labor history or the experience of minorities. It’s a matter of keeping things in sensible perspective.
The same applies to Thompson’s point that academic history portrays the course of U.S. history as a long string of oppressive acts -- “that the colonization of North America represents an act of genocide; that the Founding Fathers were racist, sexist, ‘classist,’ ‘homophobic,’ Euro-centric bigots; that the winning of the American West was an act of capitalist pillage; that the so-called ‘Robber Barons’ forced widows and orphans into the streets; that hidden in the closets of most white Americans is a robe and hood.”
“To help put over this slander,” he says, “historians dissolve American history into a chaotic hodge-podge of trivial stories about politically correct victim groups.”
Which trivial stories would those be? The experience of Southern blacks with discrimination and lynching during the Jim Crow era? The less-than-generous way in which Chinese Americans were long treated in the American West?
Again, it’s a matter of balance. In fact, to honestly acknowledge the depth of injustice once institutionalized unapologetically in America is to appreciate how far the nation has come toward realizing its most noble ideals.
By the way: The Thompson op-ed comes from the Ayn Rand Institute, whose op-ed material often exhibits the same lack of balance: Vividly expressed, important points will married with extreme sentiments on other aspects. This is underscored by the institute’s hysterical criticisms of religion.
Last fall, the institute issued a Thanksgiving op-ed, for example, that correctly praised the virtues of hard work and appreciation for individual initiative. “Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday, because this country was the first to create and to value material abundance,” Gary Hull wrote. “ It is America that has been the beacon for anyone wanting to escape from poverty and misery. It is America that generated the unprecedented flood of goods that washed away centuries of privation.”
That’s right. The American Revolution wasn’t only a landmark political event; it was similarly so in the economic and social realms. The colonial-era encumbrances on economic striving by non-aristocrats were tossed off, producing a remarkable burst of economic activity. The elitist belief that only the aristocratic set should be allowed to pursue materialistic enjoyments was abruptly junked. It was a new era, and materialism -- the pursuit of economic security and prosperity for average Americans -- was at the forefront of people’s thinking in the early republic.
But, the op-ed won’t leave well enough alone:
Many Americans make Thanksgiving into a religious festival. They agree with Lincoln, who, upon declaring Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, said that "we have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven." They ascribe our material abundance to God's efforts, not man's.
That view is a slap in the face of any person who has worked an honest day in his life. The appropriate values for this holiday are not faith and charity, but thought and production. The proper thanks for one's wealth goes not to some mystical deity but to oneself, if one has earned that wealth.
Please. Such a claim amounts to an egregious sidestepping of a central part of the holiday's origins. The Pilgrims' culture was saturated with religiosity. And their idea was to express thankfulness not merely as a general statement but to offer thanks to someone in particular: God.
If irreligious Americans in the 21st century want to approach Thanksgiving in a purely secular way, fine. But it’s just as acceptable for believers to continue to remember and appreciate the religious origins of Thanksgiving and its continuing spiritual meaning for millions of Americans.
Blogging may be a bit infrequent here for the time being. Sunday was D-Day here for our household, as in "Dog Day." A delightful year-old English springer spaniel has joined our household, mainly to be a companion here to a little boy who really needed one. (Little sister is also delighted.) The first day went well. But everyone is getting used to the changes, including those affecting morning and evening routines. Not as tumultuous as bringing home a baby, but in some ways roughly comparable.
