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.
What a joy to begin a book as stimulating and, indeed, wise as George M. Marsden’s “Jonathan Edwards: A Life.” Edwards (1703-58) was a New England religious intellectual and revivalist who had a powerful effect on American religious development well into the 19th century. The book is just out from Yale University Press.
From my notes on the first 50 pages, which I read over the weekend (any quote marks indicate the words of the author, Marsden, a professor at Notre Dame):
Ongoing religious tensions and injustices were very much on the minds of Protestant dissenters in that era. Congregationalists and Presbyterians in Britain were denied political office and access to a university education. The Catholic son of deposed British king James II -- the pretender “James III” -- lived in France, and it wasn’t considered unlikely that an effort might be made to seat him on the English throne. Huguenot refugees in New York City, whom Edwards saw when he was a young pastor at a Presbyterian congregation there in the early 1720s, recounted the harsh treatment they or their ancestors had experienced in France.
“The world into which Edwards was born will make a lot more sense if we think of it as British rather than American. ... Edwards lived in a thoroughly pre-Revolutionary British province.”
“How does a religion that claims universal and exclusive truth fit into a pluralistic environment? ... Much of the ‘Enlightenment’ thought of that time was a direct reaction to the conflicting absolutist claims of the preceding era of deadly religious wars.”
“A precocious teenage intellectual ... Edwards was confronted with how hopelessly quaint, dated, and even laughable the provincial world of East Windsor [Connecticut] would look to British sophisticates.” Yet, Marsden notes, the Puritan heritage of New England gave the region a heritage of intellectual seriousness.
One challenge facing a biographer, Marsden notes, is how to include significant material in the subject’s life even though it doesn’t “contribute to dramatic narrative as well as others.” Marsden also notes that “to make sense of Edwards’ life, one must take seriously his religious outlook on his own terms.”
New England settlements in Edwards’ day tended to be armed camps, not picturesque, idyllic villages, in light of the threat from Indian attacks.
“Jonathan Edwards is sometimes criticized for having too dim a view of human nature, but it may be helpful to be reminded that his grandmother was an incorrigible profligate, his great-aunt committed infanticide, and his great-uncle was an ax-murderer.”
In any era of American history, a very large percent of the white population was unchurched. What surprised me from Marsden’s book was to learn that the Puritans denied many people access to baptism and communion, saying those sacraments should be made available only to the truly converted. This was a major point of debate among Puritan religious leaders in the early 18th century.
When Edwards lived in New York City for nine months during 1722-23, the town had between 7,000 and 9,000 inhabitants. A decade before his arrival there, “19 participants in a bloody slave insurrection had been brutally executed in retaliation for killing nine whites.” In that era, a slave market was occasionally held on Wall Street.
His stay in New York provided Edwards with his first occasion to meet Jews. One Jew who lived near him, Edwards wrote, “appeared to me the devoutest person that ever I saw in my life.”
Wagner also quotes The Hotline's Chuck Todd, who summed up the achievement thusly: "'It's an impressive total, and it should put him at the top or a very close second … This is incredibly important. This is what makes John Edwards a top-tier candidate in 2004 instead of a rookie candidate running to build a name for himself for 2008.'"
The State Department’s annual human rights report now includes a section on child soldiers. From one analysis of the report:
An estimated 300,000 children are currently fighting in conflicts around the world. Children as young as seven years old serve as cooks, spies, messengers, clerks, porters and often end up on the front lines of combat. The use of children as soldiers is clearly a violation of a child's human rights and a particularly malicious form of child labor. In that vein, the United States has begun reporting on the many countries' security and rebel forces that recruit under-18s into their ranks. The reports highlight 22 countries currently using child soldiers; among the worst violators are Sri Lanka, Uganda, Philippines, Burma and Colombia.
The report’s description of Iraq’s use of child soldiers:
During the year, the regime held 3-week training courses in weapons use, hand-to-hand fighting, rappelling from helicopters, and infantry tactics for children between 10 and 15 years of age. Camps for these “Saddam Cubs” operated throughout the country. Senior military officers who supervised the course noted that the children held up under the "physical and psychological strain" of training that lasted for as long as 14 hours each day. Sources in the opposition reported that the army found it difficult to recruit enough children to fill all of the vacancies in the program.
Families reportedly were threatened with the loss of their food ration cards if they refused to enroll their children in the course. The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq reported in October 1999 that authorities were denying food ration cards to families that failed to send their young sons to Saddam Cubs compulsory weapons-training camps. Similarly, authorities reportedly withheld school examination results to students unless they registered in the Fedayeen Saddam organization.
Paul R Duffy writes in regard to a recent post here about “pravda,” literal truth, and “istina,” transcendent truth:
Your correspondent was correct about “pravda” and “istina,” but I thought I might just add a few philological notes:
You hardly ever hear the word “istina.” The normal translation for “That's true” is “Eto pravda”; to say “Eto istina” would sound archaic, almost liturgical.
If you etymologize the words you'll see that “pravda” comes from the concept of “rightness.” “You're right” is “Ty prav.” Right hand, right
wing, etc., is all “pravyi.” “Pravo” means “law” or “a right.”
“Istina,” on the other hand, seems to mean “real,” the real truth. God’s truth, for example, is “istina.” I think it’s connected with some form of the verb “to be”; this is how things are, never mind what is correct.
The dismaying looting of invaluable archaeological treasures from the Baghdad museum reminds me of a point I’ve made here before about a curious intersection of war and cultural heritage. During World War II, Secretary of War Henry Stimson took Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital, off the target list for a U.S. atomic bomb attack because of the high value he placed on its cultural importance.
Someone pointed out recently the counterexample of how Allied forces, out of military necessity, had bombed the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino during World War II despite calls to save the historic structure.
On Friday, I posted, in response to a friend’s query, about how there was no overall surrender by the Confederate government at the end of the Civil War. Donald Sensing of One Hand Clapping, it turns out, had quite ably covered that topic a bit earlier, in a post that I had missed. Don wrote:
Are there parallels between the end of the Confederacy and the end of the regime in Iraq? In 1865 the Confederate armies fought valiantly, unlike the Iraqi army today, but in the end it was outmaneuvered, outfought and trapped. When Richmond fell, the CSA government became basically disbanded. Southern President Davis fled the capital hoping to set up a rump government elsewhere, but for all intents and purposes the CSA was rudderless.
Robert E. Lee commanded only the Army of Northern Virginia, not all the field armies of the CSA. His surrender to Grant at Appomattox did not end the war. Fighting continued elsewhere, notably in North Carolina, where CSA Gen. Joseph E. Johnston opposed Union Gen. William T. Sherman. Finally, Johnston did surrender. CSA forces elsewhere were in bad shape. Hood's Army of Tennessee had been destroyed as a fighting force in November and December 1864 at the Battles of Franklin and Nashville; its troops didn't so much surrender as drift away.
There was never any capitulation of the entire CSA as a political entity. It just disappeared, politically, and its military units gave up on their own to the nearest Union commander. ...
I took our two kids to a dance performance Sunday afternoon at the Rose Theatre, a terrific children’s theater downtown. On the way there, it dawned on me that there was some question about the time of the performance. The tickets said 4:30, but my wife and I had thought it was at 2, the normal Sunday afternoon performance time. So, the kids (soon-to-be-7-year-old daughter and soon-to-9-year-old son, with his baseball cap turned backward) and I went into the theater a bit before 2 to check.
As soon as we entered the lobby, it was clear that the 2 p.m. show wasn’t the one for us. The lobby was full, but there were no kids at all. Just a very large crowd of women. We got in line and I found out from a ticket taker that the show we wanted to see was indeed at 4:30.
What was the 2 p.m. show? “The Vagina Monologues.”
No wonder one of the women in the lobby gave me a very strange look when I showed up and got in line with two children.
A North Carolina friend (John Matthews) noted to me this week that there may never be a formal surrender in Iraq, just as there wasn’t one to end the Civil War:
Lee didn't surrender for the South; he only surrendered the A. of N. Vir.
True. Lee had no authority to surrender anything but his army.
Johnson didn't surrender for the South; he just surrendered the troops under his command.
Also true. Sherman & Johnston discussed an overall surrender and actually purported to sign one (this is the origin of the "Forty acres and a mule") but both governments quickly repudiated it, as they should have.
Kirby Smith in Texas keep fighting for weeks after Appomattox.
Yep. The battle of Fort Blakely for the approaches of Mobile happened a week after Appomattox, and it took Gen. Richard Taylor another week to surrender Confederate forces in Alabama and Mississippi. In Texas Gen Jo Shelby never surrendered, but buried his banners in the Rio Grande and went into Mexico.
Jeff Davis never surrendered.
No, he was captured, and no one asked him to surrender. ...
Did the federal government ever recognize any one person or persons as having the authority to surrender on behalf of the South? ...
I mean, using the kind of reasoning some media folks are applying to Iraq you could make a case that the Civil War is still going on.
Let the White House press corps know about this.
I asked another North Carolina friend, Fred Ray, a close student of the Civil War, about the surrender situation at the end of that conflict. His response:
The short of it is that the South never formally surrendered. Jeff Davis was captured, and of course the US never admitted the South had actually seceded anyway. Funny thing, though -- after all that bloodshed the US kicked the Southern sisters out of the Union in 1866 and made them apply for readmission.
The best book on the subject is Noah Andre Trudeau's “OUT OF THE STORM,” which deals with the last months of the war. The Confederate armies surrendered one at a time, from east to west, and Union troops occupied Southern cities. Davis and Lee specifically rejected a guerilla campaign.
The closest we came to a formal surrender was in Feb. 1865 when Alexander Stephens, the Confed VP, led a delegation to Hampton Roads to confer with Lincoln about a negotiated end to the war. Had he accepted it them you would have then seen a formal negotiation between the two gov'ts. However Abe told them that there were three non-negotiable conditions for peace -- 1) lay down your arms and disband your armies 2) end slavery and 3) rejoin the Union. The conference was a failure.
From a piece by John Fund in the Wall Street Journal:
Columnist Charles Krauthammer says the combination of overcoverage and negative news would have had profound effects in previous wars: "Good grief. If there had been TV cameras not just at Normandy, but after Normandy, giving live coverage of firefights at every French village on the Allies' march to Berlin, the operation would have been judged a strategic miscalculation, if not a disaster."
Television also both creates and demands a short attention span: “Every plot line is resolved in at most an hour,” says commentator Michael Medved. “If it's not, many people get anxious or impatient.” Viewers certainly must now deal with a virtual kaleidoscope of changing images. The New York Times noted that one of the biggest changes in television in the past 50 years has been in the average length of time the camera will focus on one image before changing. In 1950, the average TV shot lasted 90 seconds. Today it's five seconds.
This constant changing of images tends to exaggerate the importance of individual events. “Television is a personal medium,” says Rep. J.D. Hayworth of Arizona, who worked as a sportscaster for 15 years before his election to Congress. “It creates an intimacy and an immediacy that makes it easy to create a crisis out of nothing only to have that replaced by a new crisis.”
Pentagon planners openly admit that while they are generally happy with the way U.S. journalists are covering the war -- Peter Arnett and Geraldo Rivera being exceptions -- they were surprised by the all-pervasive influence that television has had. A new Los Angeles Times poll finds that 69 percent of respondents are getting most of their news on the Iraq war from television, while just 13 percent are relying on the Internet and an even smaller proportion on newspapers.
I passed along to Andrew Sullivan on Thursday the URL for and some excerpts from a MEMRI translation of articles by the editor of Asharq al-Awsat, a London-based Arabic newspaper. The editor blasts the Arabic press for pervasive bias. Andrew posted on the topic this morning.
Some quotes from the piece, including the material that Andrew excerpted; the bracketed material was provided by MEMRI:
I know that adopting an impartial stand in the [Arab] media world is akin to suicide, because there are many who push the media into extremes, and take “nationalistic” positions, and maintain that whoever thinks differently is committing treason against the [national] cause. [They maintain] that lying for the sake of the cause is moral and honorable. The Arab media [of today], in these hard times, is slowly turning into the 1967 media; at that time, radio announcers, analysts, and journalists exaggerated acts of courage and covered up defeats, which -- historically -- became a mockery.
The Arab media today, with its clear inclination towards exaggerations and false promises of victory, is feeding the public stories that have nothing to do with the real events in the field. Hence, it is replicating the old media, despite the fact that it is broadcasting in color and using electronic technologies ...
The Arab media intentionally censored the proposals of the Iraqi opposition, although it represents segments of the Iraqi people ... More importantly, they censored any reports that contradicted their [ideological] positions, such as the reports about Iraqi secret service units firing on Iraqis who were trying to escape. [Instead], the Arab media published stories reminiscent of the adventures of Sindibad, such as the story about the one farmer who downed an Apache helicopter with an old rifle. Some of the Arab media highlighted reports that the coalition forces used chemical weapons, a claim that even the Iraqi information minister did not make. Tens of stories were axed just because they contradicted what Baghdad was saying, or because their sources were American. ...
Many in the [Arab] media establishments [as well as] the personnel ... agreed to submit to Saddam's Information Ministry not out of conviction, but in order to ride the emotional tide that is sweeping the streets, and profit from it. I asked one of them why is it that his TV channel was taking a biased position. He answered that it was a contest, akin to a beauty contest, either you get the viewers or someone else will get them.
We turned our media into mouth-pieces for the Iraqi Information Ministry, and they do not let the readers and viewers see anything except a biased point of view. They consider any objective discussion treason, and any impartial reporting is forbidden.
Mamoun Fandy, an instructor at the National Defense University, is a columnist for the Asharq al-Awsat and an astute observer of contemporary Arab societies. He had an op-ed in the New York Times this week about coverage of events in Iraq by the Arabic press:
Comparisons are being made between the Iraqi minister of information, Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, and Ahmed Said, a radio broadcaster whose name was synonymous with Nasser's regime. In 1967 it was Mr. Said, speaking on Sawt Al-Arab radio, the state-run channel that broadcast to the Arab world, who told the Arabs that their guns were bringing down Israeli planes from the sky like flies. We heard echoes of those wishful fictions when Mr. Sahhaf insisted that the Americans were nowhere near Baghdad, that their arrival was all a lie on the part of the American news media. "The images are made in Hollywood," he claimed in a press conference. ...
But the anti-Americanism that does exist is not so different from that of the Europeans, with the exception of the fanatic few.
Indeed, despite a war raging in one of the most important Arab capitals, there have been no reports of actual violence against American soft targets in the Middle East. We have not heard about Americans being killed or injured in Casablanca or Amman. This is a significant sidebar to this war that has attracted little comment. Dire predictions notwithstanding, Arabs did not rise up to destroy American interests in the Middle East.
This is because many of them knew Saddam Hussein's record up close.
Huda Ammash, who oversaw the Saddam regime’s biological weapons program, exhibited thorough devotion to Saddam -- despite the fact that the murder of her father in the 1960s had allegedly been ordered by Saddam. MEMRI offers a translation of an article by a Ba’ath Party official published in London-based Saudi daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat:
Some consider her as a lioness ready to pounce on her prey; others call her a fox. The truth is she is both: she has the courage of a lioness and the slyness of a fox. She knows when to appear forcefully on stage ... and when to seize upon an opportunity.
She represents the most incongruity known in contemporary Iraqi politics: her father Saleh Mahdi Ammash, who in the late ’60s of the last century occupied the office of the Vice President and Minister of Defense ... was murdered by Saddam, but the daughter is obedient to the murderer of her father. ...
In reality, the shy and hesitant student did not pay much attention to the fate of her father, considering it a tax on the struggle for the high principles which she believed in. ...
Huda Ammash did not complain, like other comrades, about the heavy duties she shouldered. She continued, like hell’s fire, to seek more.
Anybody heard about that woman’s whereabouts of late? It would be reassuring if she could be placed in the custody of U.S. forces.
Americans who are apt to argue that U.S. foreign policy needs constant infusions of legitimacy from the approbation of European governments are also apt to deplore, in the domestic culture wars, Eurocentrism in academic curricula. Such Americans resist the cultural products of Europe's centuries of vitality but defer to the politics of Europe in its decadence.
Why? Perhaps because yesterday's European culture helped make America what it is, and today's European politics expresses resentment and distrust of what America is. Both sensibilities arise from the distaste of some Americans for America.
I quoted a listserv comment by Mark of ZenPundit the other day. He wrote, “The difference between an ideologue and an intellectual is that the former reads primarily those things that will confirm his prejudices and the latter reads that which challenges his beliefs. Eric Hoffer, Richard Hofstadter and George Orwell illustrated the epistemological divide between the two camps of those who know the truth and those seeking it objectively.”
Gary Jones noted to me in an e-mail: “This reminded me of the old Russian distinction between pravda -- transcendent truth, and istina -- factual truth. The Soviets leveraged this Russian habit of mental submission to revelation and the method was exported to supporters around the world, including Chomsky.”
The National Interest, a foreign policy journal, has a Web site that each week offers a set of commentaries. The package of articles this week includes an essay by me. I write about some Nebraska-related tangents to the Iraq issue, in a reportorial vein rather than an opinionizing one.
I talk, among other things, about how the leading peace group in Nebraska repeatedly pointed to Chuck Hagel’s cautionary statements prior to the start of the U.S. campaign to bolster its arguments against the war.
Check out Austin Bay's commentary this week. He's done two pieces: one on the "urban judo" being used by American forces in Iraq, and another on the postwar reconstruction challenges in that country.
Reaction at the recent meeting of the Organization of American Historians was decidedly critical of the Bush approach toward Iraq, a piece by the editor of History News Network says. (My thanks to my friend Fred Ray for letting me know about the article.)
Some highlights from the piece:
Most people seemed opposed to the war. Indeed, as Jules Tygiel observed at the Iraq session, OAH members seemed virtually unanimous in their opposition to the war. No one on the Iraq panel defended the war. No one in the audience did either when they had the chance to speak. It was striking and people noted it. The polls say that some 70 percent of the American people support the war. But here at the annual meeting of one of the country's two leading history associations no one seemed to. ...
At the Vietnam panel Robert Brigham of Vassar stuck to the topic listed in the OAH program. He was the only member of the panel who did; everyone else linked the discussion of Vietnam to the war in Iraq. Afterward he explained that he was always the kind of kid who followed instructions. He sounded almost apologetic. ...
Alan Brinkley at the Iraq panel noted his opposition to the war but asserted that at least the Bush administration's policy is coherent. The Left, he noted, does not have a coherent policy to deal with the world now that containment is obsolete as a result of the end of the Cold War. This claim aroused the audience. One member noted that coherence is not necessarily a positive quality. Hitler, after all, had a coherent policy. ...
Conservatives will say that radicals have taken over the OAH. But it's not true. If the radicals had had their druthers, the organization would have passed a strong antiwar resolution. But no such resolution was even formally proposed. Why not? The reason is telling. The radicals could not agree among themselves on the use of such a resolution. While some plainly believed it would be helpful and one European historian pleaded for one so that Europeans would know that American opinion in support of the war is not unanimous, others argued that it would be undemocratic for the small number of members who turn out for the annual business meeting to speak on behalf of the 8900 members of the organization about a subject of such great sensitivity and controversy.
The comments section at the bottom of the article are worth checking out, too.
There's nothing wrong with individual academicians expressing opposition to the war. What's disappointing from the OAH conference, though, if the article accurately portrays the event, is the automatic rejection of considerations beyond a narrow antiwar perspective.
The article depicts outgoing OAH President Ira Berlin in a less than flattering light concerning a speech he gave in tribute to several radical historians. The point may be well taken, but I still remain a huge fan of Berlin's. His examinations of slavery in early America are written not just with insight but with eloquence. I intend to write here sometime about some of the things I have learned from his work.
Second, he observes that the return from some U.S. service personnel may not be so pleasant, just as it wasn’t for previous generations of American troops:
It is still weeks, perhaps months away before our troops come home--but while we, the non-combatants are flushed with pride for what the armed services of the "coalition of the willing" have done, let's start to think about how we will we welcome them back. Yes, there will be victory parades and joyful homecomings. But at least some of the soldiers coming home are going to be emotionally quite injured by this.
From my conversations with combat veterans of World War II and Vietnam -- often while they were three sheets to the wind -- as well as my reading on this subject, it is very clear that many of the soldiers who have been killing the enemy are going to be very troubled by what they have done. ...
I've noticed that many of the World War II veterans that I know who were engaged in the killing part of duty -- a sniper, a Navy man firing white phosporous shells into caves on Iwo Jima, a frontline infantry grunt -- developed serious drinking problems. This should be no surprise.
From an e-mail from my friend Craig Brelsford, a Pennsylvania native now living in the Netherlands:
This morning, many papers here in Holland have the picture of the Marine kicking back with a smoke in Saddam's palace. I love it, but quietly. Some people I know are angry. I'm pretty sure they wanted the U.S. to lose. I was, however, surprised to find a Dutch man who said he prefers Fox to CNN because CNN is too pessimistic. So I watched Fox for the first time on his satellite. Overall, the U.S. pretty much has a friend in Holland. I can't say the same for the country just six miles away from me, Belgium, or for France, or even for Germany.
Craig has connections by marriage to China. He writes:
We watched the big statue of Saddam fall, and I said to [Craig’s wife], the difference between China and Iraq is that China never had that -- pointing to the TV and the people busting up the fallen statue with a sledgehammer. They never had that release. Can you imagine, Geitner, how good that must have felt?
In a few years, they'll be opening up a museum in Baghdad about the Saddam era. There will be tears that day, as well as joy that the story is being told. The Chinese government still won't allow a Cultural Revolution museum.
I find Chinese to be deeply cynical about their own government, governments in general, and to some extent truth itself. Why? Is it not that they have been denied a chance to watch justice rain swiftly down on evil men?
Now, the old generation is dying. The chance is slipping away.
God allows the sun to rise on the just and the unjust. Some dictatorships do survive. Some dictators die quiet deaths. How much more, then, do we relish such scenes as those we saw yesterday.
I mentioned at the Volokh Conspiracy last week about the ubiquity of child soldiers in many of the world’s conflicts. I later received this interesting e-mail:
For a little more background, the Optional Protocol was signed by the US late last year. There was a multi-year delay while the advocates of prohibiting child soldiers had to decide whether the US military or child soldiers was a worse problem. Eventually they decided on phrasing that would permit long standing US policies to continue.
The crux of the dispute was the wording of age limits and policies. An example is college ROTC programs. Limiting ROTC scholarship and participation to students over 18 would interfere with attracting the youngest quartile of college students. But the conflicts were finally resolved. Here is a good summary of the Senate hearing where the shift from being anti-US to being anti-child warrior was accepted.
I don’t know if anyone else has blogged this, but Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is reporting talk that the convoy of Russian diplomats and journalists that came under U.S. fire in Iraq as it headed to Syria may have been less than innocent in its actions:
Controversial military correspondent Vladislav Shurygin, who is believed to be the person writing about the Iraqi operation in many Russian web sites under the name of "Ramzai," said on 7 April that U.S. troops might have suspected that the ambassador's convoy was attempting to smuggle pieces of secret U.S. military equipment out of Iraq, TV-Tsentr reported. Shurygin said that among the Russian journalists working at U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in Qatar, there are rumors that Russian intelligence agents working out of the Baghdad embassy had intercepted and jammed U.S. military communications, much to the displeasure of U.S. military authorities. "U.S. intelligence officers have many questions for their counterparts at the Russian Embassy," Shurygin said.
Some Russian officials have criticized the Russian diplomats, saying that they had indicated they would leave via Iran, a shorter distance away than Syria, but changed their minds without informing the U.S. government.
I knew that China has blocked Taiwan on a variety of matters regarding the U.N., but I hadn't stopped to consider how such maneuvers could harm the Taiwanese in regard to their health care.
That problem is now illustrated in dismaying fashion by the the SARS situation.
The World Health Organization calls the spread of the disease a "worldwide health threat." Yet the WHO refuses to work the Taiwanese in addressing SARS -- even though an outbreak of the disease has been reported on Taiwan. China, where SARS was first reported, has of course blocked Taiwan's membership in the WHO.
Hence the dismaying situation where the U.N.'s leading health care organization is using bureaucratic double-speak to rationalize its refusal to work with the Taiwanese about SARS.
The United States, to its credit, is offering help.
According to its constitution, the goal of the WHO is "the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health." Many politicians in Taiwan have recently been pointing out that despite this lofty goal, the WHO has long disregarded the health of Taiwan's 23 million people due to political pressure from China. Editorials in local newspapers are slamming the world health body for consistently denying the island nation access to its medical resources in the fight against severe epidemics such as foot-and-mouth disease, dengue fever, enterovirus and, most recently, SARS.
On March 14, when the first three cases of SARS were reported in Taiwan, Taipei authorities immediately informed the WHO of the situation. WHO officials stationed in Beijing responded that the group was not able to provide direct assistance to Taiwan on the matter because, in their view, Taiwan is a province of China. ...
In spite of Taiwan's good will and efforts to share its health resources with other nations, the paper argued, it has been denied participation in many international rescue operations and medical activities due to the lack of WHO membership. It cited the example of the magnitude 7.4 earthquake that struck Turkey Aug. 17, 1999, after which Taiwan's experienced medical teams were not allowed to assist in rescue operations. The paper also made reference to the fact that Taiwan's family-planning program has twice been rated as the best in developing countries, and yet the nation still fails to be included in the World Fertility Survey, the Demographic Health Survey and other medical-data collection and analysis events under WHO auspices.
The U.N., it's true, does some fine humanitarian work. But the political cynicism and bureaucratic group-think demonstrated by the U.N. on the Taiwan matter seriously undercut the organization's claims to be guided solely by kind-heartedness and a progressive regard for basic humanity.
“So President Bush, forgive me if I've been too tough on you. But I must tell you, Mr. President, you are the greatest threat to American troops.”: So writes George McGovern in The Nation.
That specific claim seems way over the top. (Ask American troops if they agree with McGovern’s claim.) The rest of the piece, though, seemed tough but within the bounds of legitimate argument. Left-of-center folks can make some perfectly sensible arguments that the campaign is ill-considered.
Not that I’m convinced by some of the arguments advanced by liberal critics.
A key weakness in the liberal argument are relying too heavily on soft measures by multilateral entities such as the U.N. in dealing with hard cases such as Iraq.
Another is too idealistic a belief in the perfectibility of the human character. (Sweet reason can be effective in dealing with just about anyone. Really? Consider the through-the-looking-glass version of reality being peddled shamelessly this week by the Iraqi information minister. He sounds right out of the Stalinist regime -- or Mao’s during the Cultural Revolution.)
A third is the knee-jerk blanket opposition to military force as an instrument of policy. That can be an unrealistic approach in an age when weapons of mass destruction will be super-empowering terrorists and rogue states.
I’m cautiously supportive of the Iraq campaign because, on balance, it will likely carry the fight forward in a major way against the network of proliferation that connects terrorists, thug-states, cynical governments and opportunistic businesses.
But the ability of the United States to trigger some kind of democratic revolution in the Middle East seems wildly optimistic. And the grand talk, especially by Blair, about how the Iraq campaign is part of some vague 21st century humanitarian crusade to liberate oppressed peoples seems wildly ambitious and impractical.
A post here this morning mentioned fears among Canadian businessmen about U.S. economic retaliation over the Canadian government’s refusal to support the Bush administration on Iraq.
This afternoon, blogger xavier basora of Buscaraons pointed me toward a delightful Colby Cosh post that says a small high-tech company in a Manitoba town is the designer and manufacturer of the night-vision equipment used by NATO forces throughout Afghanistan. The U.S. military has also bought some of its goggles from the Canadian firm.
Colby Cosh, referring to Mark Wahoski, the company’s founder, highlights this part of an article on the company:
Canadian Photonics is proof you can set up business anywhere in today's Internet world. The company is not only away from a major urban centre, but outside Canada's photonics centre in Ottawa, where the federal government recently dropped $30 million to cluster the industry into a photonics park in conjunction with Carleton University. Wahoski, 41, wasn't even aware of the federal subsidy.
By the way: I have quite fond memories of a Colby Cosh post from last November in which he responded to my question, “Does Canada have rednecks?”
The Iraqi information minister’s shameless resort to peddling fantasy as truth gives a telling indication about what everyday life is like in authoritarian societies. In Saddam’s Iraq, such incessant disregard for the truth is the norm.
What a burden it must be to try to carry on a thoughtful, rational existence in a society where one’s rulers routinely remove the truth as a normal consideration of life. The pushing out of truth removes the oxygen vital to an honest intellectual life.
Iraq is only one of many dozens of countries, of course, where it has been easy for a people to lose the truth amid the demagoguery and brutalities of their rulers.
The horror of this is magnified by the fact that many in the Muslim-Arab world are so desperate to see the U.S. campaign fail that they actually put a measure of credence in the information minister’s claims. After all, the most popular TV event in Egypt last year was the mini-series based on the anti-Semitic conspiracy-theory absurdities of the “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
With the toppling of Saddam, can Iraq at last regain the truth? Many forces, from anxious Arab governments to Islamist fanatics to even some European critics, seem content for Iraq to remain an oxygen-free environment. How revealing.
By the way: I’ve spend most of my pre-work hours this morning revamping an article I’ve written for an online commentary site. Once the piece is up (probably this week), I’ll link to it. I’ve had very little time to put together blog posts this morning.
Hooray for Mark, of the blog ZenPundit. Here is his comment on Noam Chomsky from a listserv on Tuesday:
Professor Chomsky can be rebutted on factual grounds as Dr. ... has easily done but whether this matters to Chomsky's core audience is debatable. Outside of the field of linguistics Chomsky has become a figure much like the notorious David Irving; it is not impossible that Chomsky will bring forth new and important information but scholars tend to look skeptically until he is proven accurate. Recall Chomsky's most recent charge that the United States was planning a "silent genocide" in Afghanistan -- "imaginary genocide" might have been a better description.
It is difficult to take Professor Chomsky's comments on U.S. foreign policy seriously for methodological reasons. Historians by training do not argue by assembling only the evidence that supports their conclusions; use a different standard of evidentiary proof for sources that support their thesis than sources that refute it; or misuse citations by quoting selectively or out of context. These techniques may be fine for scoring debating points in a dorm room bull session or as partisan propaganda in a campaign but a historian who publishes in this manner will deservedly be ripped to shreds by critics. Noam Chomsky, to put it charitably, is not a historian.
However I'm dubious that this matters a whit to Chomsky's devoted followers. The difference between an ideologue and an intellectual is that the former reads primarily those things that will confirm his prejudices and the latter reads that which challenges his beliefs. Eric Hoffer, Richard Hofstadter and George Orwell illustrated the epistemological divide between the two camps of those who know the truth and those seeking it objectively. If Chomsky was not providing an articulate and attractive rationale for anti-Americanism, most of his audience would seek it elsewhere.
Secondly, the effects of irrationalist philosophy like postmodernism has made Chomsky's task as a polemicist far easier.
Mark was responding to a listserv post -- a pro-Chomsky post -- that stated, “It seems almost pointless as to whether all Chomsky's facts are in fact ‘correct’ (any number of "historian" texts can be easier scrutinized in today’s age of the web and Lexis Nexis), the underlying truth, and desire to speak such truth are resonant in Chomsky's work.”
A U.S. backlash may in the offing against Canadian companies (I can't get the link to work and I don't have time to fix it, so trust me):
Two-thirds of Canadian corporate leaders say their business is already being hurt by strains in Canada-U.S. relations, a new poll has found.
"The strength of opinion is that it's beginning to hurt Canadian business," said Conrad Winn, chief executive of COMPAS Inc., which conducted the poll for the National Post. "An overwhelming majority are saying that if we didn't pay a price for this today, we certainly will tomorrow."
Up to 87% of business leaders believe Americans are especially resentful of anti-U.S. comments made by senior Canadian politicians. About 65% say that strain is beginning to affect or has already hurt Canadian access to the giant U.S. market. ...
"I am terribly worried. There is definitely some damage that has been done," Thomas D'Aquino, head of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, which represents more than 100 of the country's most influential companies, said yesterday.
"The hard evidence that can translate into millions of lost or deferred contracts has yet to be seen."
This is nothing for Americans to celebrate. Retaliation against Canadian companies doesn’t serve a constructive purpose in a globalized economy in which the cross-border economic connections are so pronounced. Plus, Canadian companies shouldn’t be blamed for the statements and policy positions of that country’s political leaders.
It’s not really news, but here is a new piece about how Elie Wiesel unequivocally supports the U.S. action in Iraq:
"If some European countries put as much pressure on Saddam Hussein as on Bush, there would have been no war," he said.
"Saddam Hussein had to be disarmed [and] there were no other means."
And: "You can accuse me of being naive, but I think in all conscience that this war was necessary."
A recent post here (“The ‘country mouse’ revolution”) talked, among other things, about how the social elite in the American colonies strove greatly to emulate the wealth and social status of British aristocrats. The post also talked about how the hold that the American elite held on tenants tended to be far weaker than that seen in Britain due to the remarkable availability of land here.
The post generated an e-mail conversation between myself and xavier Basora of the blog Buscaraons. Systems of land tenure appear to be the key, he said. In a blog post (I couldn't get the permalink to work just now, unfortunately), xavier also touched on other tangents:
I suggested to Geitner that he take a map of any Latin city of the Americas and compare it with the typical Anglophone town. The first thing that leaps out of the map is how the Anglophone towns are spread out over a large area- agglomerative and non-nucleated as Claudio Véliz characterizes them. ...
I reflected how North American land use is quite complex because while there's the English land use system, there's also the French- Louisana- and Spanish- Florida and the California territory- land use systems. John Sayles reminded the interviewer that the concept of eminent domain, recognized in American federal law, the mining and water rights of the Southwest and a few other minor juridical institutions originate from Spanish colonial law.
Sayles concluded that in Texas, there's no such thing as a distinct Anglo, black, Hispanic or Indian culture, they're more blended, more nuanced than superficial observers note or appreciate. The same could be said of Canada's own complex land usage patterns.
The same day, I received some insightful e-mails from Mark, the blogger behind Zenpundit. He wrote:
Keep in mind that from a British perspective "colonies" meant Canada through the West Indies and the fabulously wealthy sugar plantations on the islands were owned by absentee landlords due to the lethality of the climate (90 % mortality -- three times the rate of the Chesapeake tidelands). Most of these landlords were the peers and their close cousins in the English gentry. On the mainland, the richest area was the rice growing area of the Carolinas -- again a lethal climate farmed on the task-labor form of slavery.
A good book to recommend for this era is “Tobacco and Slaves” by Allan Kulikoff. ...
the nature of American Yeomen farmers (not the same as British Yeomen) and their relation to the market is hotly contested (Stephen Hahn's study of upcountry Georgia yeomen is very good).
Basically scholars are weighing the Yeomen tendency toward acquisitiveness of property, tracking of debt in account books, economic and political independence and “profit” (increases in net wealth as measured in land and chattel goods in what is essentially a cash-poor economy) versus communal-cooperative practices such as “borrowing and neighboring,” access to the commons, fencing laws that enclosed crops not livestock (favored poor farmers -- these laws in Illinois lasted until the 1880's), headright (later homesteading) and the like. ...
I wrote Mark back that his point reminded me of a book I had read about small farmers in antebellum South Carolina. In the 1820s, if I recall correctly, the state Supreme Court upheld the idea of allowing communal hunting access to land that in fact was privately owned. By the 1840s, however, the court changed course, strongly embracing the sanctity of private property.
I mentioned at The Volokh Conspiracy last week that the works of writer/photographer Wright Morris (1910-1998) are on display in a special exhibit in Omaha. Here are two snippets of his writings from the exhibit:
We went east ... and had our first good look at the pueblo culture of the southwest ... Adobe walls and texture, patterns of light and shadow, the dominance of the past in all aspects of the present, the palpable sense of time as a presence, made me more fully aware of what I was seeking in the transient ruins of my own culture. I wanted evidence of man in the artifacts that revealed his passing.
And:
Against the crack of dawn ... the Grandmother watched the foolish chickens leave the hen house, then sail off, like paper bags, in a puff of wind. ... The Grandmother saw plainly that all visible things were made or unmade by invisible forces, impersonal, impartial and inexhaustible as the prevailing wind.
By the way: I would urge Nebraskans visiting here to consider going to the Wright Morris symposium set for April 10-12 in Lincoln. The speakers will include Susan Rosowski, the widely respected Cather scholar at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (and one of the most decent academicians I’ve ever met). The keynote speaker will be Joe Wydeven, a dean at Bellevue University and a glorious writer (as his article on Morris in Great Plains Quarterly last year demonstrated).
Is E.J. Dionne’s interpretation of the budget battle in the U.S. House correct? If so, it appears to mean that House Republicans have met a key strategic roadblock in trying to restrain federal spending. The roadblock: the hesitation within the GOP itself to cut federal spending beyond a certain level.
As Dionne describes a recent budget vote:
Over and over, Spratt insisted that DeLay was flat wrong about what the motion meant. But Republicans embraced DeLay's magic words and were free to vote for a proposal that repudiated their budget. Spratt's instruction passed 399 to 22. ...
Why did the shrewd DeLay rely on Humpty Dumpty's logic? Because Spratt was on the verge of winning, DeLay had to pretend that a defeat was a victory.
"They no longer had the votes to defeat our motion," said Thomas Kahn, the Democrats' staff director on the Budget Committee, "because the cuts we were striking were so unpopular."
Sure, Dionne’s column typically reflects the majority thinking of liberal Democrats in the House. The point is, though: Regardless of his ideological biases, is he correct in describing the dynamics governing budget decisions in the House?
The first item: My 8-year-old son and I made a great little discovery on Saturday afternoon. Not far to our east, in Elk Horn, Iowa, is an impressive museum I’d been unaware of: the Danish Immigrant Museum. Some people might think, “Yeah, probably just a little hole-in-the-wall place with little antiquarian trivialities.”
Not so.
It’s a beautifully conceived, spacious facility with a soaring wooden-beam ceiling and first-rate exhibit space on two floors. Throughout the building, the curatorial work, about the Danish immigrant experience in America, is thoughtful and in no way amateurish. The Upper Great Plains has long had a concentration of Americans of Danish extraction.
Great book selection too; maybe I should have bought that atlas of Viking history I looked at.
A highlight was a set of framed proclamations, some including Hebrew text, thanking the Danish people for protecting Jews from the Nazis during World War II.
When my son played with the Legos in the museum’s basement area. Two other children were also playing there; they spoke Danish to each other the whole time. They’re Danes; their mother is pursuing a graduate project at the University of Texas and drove up to see the museum and pursue some research projects, a docent told me.
The other item: Hooray for “Liberty’s Kids.” For those who don’t know, that’s a kids' cartoon show on PBS about young people during the American Revolution. The show focuses, I believe, on events in Massachusetts.
My son loves the show and is familiar with historical events and figures whom I didn’t become acquainted with until the eighth grade or later. Sometimes at night, when my son and I read together, we break away from the book and have a conversation about the American Revolution.
Just over a week ago, an copy of the Declaration of Independence arrived here for a short stay at Omaha's Durham Western Heritage Museum. At the same time, my newspaper printed a full-page reproduction of the Declaration. My wife passed along a copy to my son.
I happened to be 55 miles away in Lincoln for an academic conference. When I called home that night, my son was so pleased with his copy of the Declaration that he said he wanted to read me the first eight sentences.
Time seemed to pause as I held the phone receiver close and listened to that small voice reading carefully and seriously, “We hold these truths to be self-evident ...”
The fact is that no one knows what the challenges of 21st century warfare are going to be. But one thing is for very sure: there are a handful of potential military enemies of the United States for whom we must retain the ability to roll up whole countries. And that means heavy mechanized and armored divisions.
The lightning thrusts and agile trickery that some admirers of Donald Rumsfeld say he favors may have their (very) occasional uses, but only heavy armor and big artillery -- and yes, all the logistics that entails -- can do what we are doing now in Iraq and may wind up doing elsewhere.
There’s much more in the post (and, overall, at Don’s blog).
My post at The Volokh Conspiracy on the Waco matter prompted many e-mails on Friday. Most were well-argued (and civil). I excerpt below from three of the messages.
One point in regard to my own thinking: In the post, I mentioned the statutory rape tangent aspect not to indicate that the federal government had jurisdiction on that matter but to underscore that a collision between Koresh and law authorities was probably inevitable. Several folks who e-mailed me, however, said I'm mistaken on that score; they point out that Koresh had cooperated with local law enforcements previously.
One writer’s response:
"Converting" semi-automatic weapons to fully-automatic is hardly "common as spitting on the sidewalk." It's a serious felony unless the converter holds a special license. I believe (though I have no documentation) that someone at the Branch Davidian complex had a Federal Firearms license, though I could be wrong about that, and whether or not someone did hold a DEALER's license, I do not believe anyone held a MANUFACTURERS license. If they held ANY license, then the BATF had cause to perform an inspection WITHOUT a warrant. If they did not, then by dealing in firearms for profit they violated Federal firearms law, and the BATF was justified in getting a warrant.
It is the MANNER in which the BATF "raided" the facility that most of us object to. The evidence is that the BATF ran the operation as a publicity stunt in order to make themselves look good. A group of religious wackos was the perfect target. Until they shot back.
It's certainly possible that Koresh could have been arrested and charged with statutory rape, but A) that's outside of the BATF's purview, and B) evidence shows that Koresh could have been arrested AWAY from the Davidian compound on numerous occasions.
If concern over the treatment of the children was that important, why wasn't that charge on the original warrant?
No, in Congressional testimony it has been proven that the BATF has repeatedly violated the rights of citizens and operated as a "rogue agency" with little to no restraint. The original accusation of the BATF being manned by "jackbooted fascists" was made by Democratic Congressman John Dingell in testimony over HR 666 in 1995. Testimony concerning that bill detailed a number of similar, though less deadly, abuses by the BATF.
Kopel takes a strong position on the inadequacy of the search warrant and the lack of any significant evidence that would have justified it. And, contrary to your conclusion "it's doubtful he would have agreed to go peacefully", Koresh had in fact been previously arrested without incident, frequently left the compound where he could have been apprehended alone, and actually had invited the local BATF to inspect the compound.
As far as I can see, Stange mentions the issue of gun sales and auto conversions, not because there has been significant difference of opinion regarding them among after-the-fact reviewers of the case, but simply because allegations of illegal behavior in these respect were part of the original setup for the disaster. These allegations appear (to my reading, at least) to have been thoroughly discredited.
And a third:
There is some doubt about your closing comment that Koresh would probably have refused to go peacefully. He had on previous occasions gone to the police station to answer questions, and he routinely traveled into town alone.
We will never know whether he would have gone peacefully to the police station again if he had been asked because they chose not to ask. It is possible that the violence and deaths were inevitable. It is also clear that the authorities made no effort to attempt a lower risk approach.
My personal opinion is that this was a case of glory hounds run amok in an operation designed for maximum publicity. The safe simple approaches were rejected because they would not generate much publicity.
Waco, the New York Times editorial board, a U.S. war with Canada: Those are the topics I wrote about in my guest posts at The Volokh Conspiracy this morning. I have good stuff for other posts here, including observations folks have e-mailed me this week, but I'm out of time. To be continued.
“You say (race) can't be a factor at all. Is that it -- is that your position, that it cannot be one of many factors?” O'Connor asked attorney Kirk Kolbo.
When Kolbo answered yes, O'Connor replied that the constitutional argument wasn't so simple.
“You're speaking in absolutes and it isn't quite that,” she said. “I think we have given recognition to the use of race in a variety of settings.”
It isn’t surprising that she would take such a stand. O’Connor has repeatedly argued for a middle position in the consideration of race in political redistricting, for example, authoring one of the key rulings on the topic in the ’90s. Her instincts are generally toward incrementalist measures anyway.
By the way: The article I've linked to quotes from one Eugene Volokh. Turns out he used to clerk for O'Connor.
My post on Wednesday about “the ‘country mouse’ revolution” (on some aspects of the American Revolution) promoted an interesting message from Roger Sweeny.
He cited this part of my post: “This notion of being ‘far’ from the center of intellectual and cultural life was pervasive among colonial elites, Bailyn argues; that being said, he also argues that it was this very provincialism and marginality that contributed to their creativity. They were free to reject the ‘conventional wisdom’ of the London drawing rooms in favor of the lessons taught by their own experience.”
Roger observes:
I remember reading a similar argument by Milton Friedman years ago. He was lauding the creativity of the University of Chicago in it's first 60 years. Among the examples was what he knew best: that the economics department was well outside the mainstream from the mid-thirties through the mid-sixties. But many of the ideas that were developed in Chicago at that time then spread to become influential or even a new conventional wisdom. He said that the ideas would never have been developed if the UC had been in Boston or New York or Washington.
By the way: Speaking of the University of Chicago, the renowned religious scholar Martin Marty, long a fixture at the school, was most impressive in his presentation last week at a symposium I attended in Lincoln. As I've written several friends this week, he demonstrated a remarkable intellect as well as a fine sense of humanity.
My friend Craig Brelsford, a Pennsylvania native now living in the Netherlands, mentioned this in an e-mail this week:
My very nice friend down the street was talking about the war. I think we were at the part where the irregulars in Basra are firing on the civilians coming out to get food from the British. She said, "I just can't believe anyone could do that!"
I think there're a lot of people who can't believe the things human beings are capable of. And I think a lot of them are incapable of believing it because they believe in this liberal expectancy that you cite below [about the supposed perfectibility of the human spirit -- GS].
Romanticism refuted original sin and said the sin was in society. Anyone grounded in the Bible recoils from such a sympathetic, emotional view of man. I'll take my cue from Jesus: Out of the human heart come adulteries, murder, etc.
Craig also writes:
By the way, I live two miles away from the Margraten cemetery, where some 7,000 American fallen from WWII are buried. Immaculate site, beautifully landscaped, and the grass here in the Netherlands is a rich green year-round.
About 10 miles from here, just in Belgium, is Henri-Chapelle, also American, also WWII, and nearly as beautiful as Margraten.
From another e-mail message this week from the Democratic Leadership Council:
But one antiwar Democrat has refused to change his rhetoric at all, and is supplying a fascinating exhibition of the Left's "Vietnam Syndrome": the tendency to interpret any military conflict through the nostalgic lens of the political struggle against the war in Vietnam.
Like rock musicians, antiwar protesters tend to keep going back to the 1960s and early 1970s for role models and inspiration. But few are as fearlessly faithful to the Vietnam War era of protests as presidential candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), who made a speech on the first day of the war in Iraq that consciously echoed George McGovern's "Come Home America" acceptance speech at the 1972 Democratic Convention.
"Come home, America," said Kucinich to the National Newspaper Association on March 20. "Come home and establish a living wage. ... Come home and provide single payer, guaranteed health care for the 41 million Americans who suffer illness without relief. ... Come home and make non-violence an organizing principle within our society through the creation of a Department of Peace, America!"
The Kucinich campaign is sort of the Unclaimed Freight Outlet of Democratic politics, retailing every failed or outdated lefty idea with a fierce and touching passion.
But Kucinich also reflects a persistent if small faction in the party that helps reinforce Republican claims that Democrats simply cannot be trusted with military leadership or with vigorous defense of our national interests. These come-home-America liberals are in many respects still fighting against the Vietnam War, and tend to react to any prospective use of military force by hauling out the same old signs and slogans. ... If allowed to define the Democratic Party's approach to national security issues, they would undoubtedly drag the party back into the electoral hole it inhabited for much of the post-Vietnam era of the 1970s and 1980s.
Antiwar Democrats are entitled to their opinions. ... But antiwar Democrats do not have the right to claim, as Dean often does, that opposing the war is a matter of fidelity to Democratic tradition, or that antiwar Democrats represent "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party."
The truth is that there's an enduring tradition of Democratic support for the principled use of force that predated and survived the tragedy of the Vietnam War. It was built by Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy, who practiced and preached a muscular internationalism, often exercised over the protests of isolationist Republicans.
I took my daughter, who will very soon turn 7, to a performance of the Omaha Symphony over the weekend. The guest performers were the Flying Karamazov Brothers, who showed some remarkable ways in which music and juggling can be combined. A highlight was when they did a complex rhythm routine bouncing tennis balls on and under a big table with a simple tick-tock sound as accompaniment. They did beats in various 1-2 combinations by bouncing balls on top of the table -- but how to do triplets (1-2-3)? It turned out to be easy: Bounce a single ball under the table (hitting the floor, then the table, then the floor). They then proceeded to do multiply triplets by timing their throws just right. Fun.
The Web site Filthy Pikers can provide a needed humor break. If you visit there, you'll see a link to a piece by a good friend of mine, Tedi Trindle, whose humor columns I used to edit at another newspaper. Her new humor piece talks, among other things, about Jeane Dixon and the worldview of teen-age girls.
In his new column for UPI, Jim Bennett examines the nature of the Anglosphere, a concept he pioneered. Among his observations:
... I have never advocated cultural-linguistic determinism.
Rather, I have pointed out that cultural-linguistic affinities have a substantial predictive value regarding international alignments ...
Meanwhile, the premiers of Canada's three principal English-speaking provinces have all voiced their support for the war. ...
Some have questioned whether the Anglosphere needs to be anything more than an ad-hoc alliance, coordinated informally by heads of government. Issues such as the above suggest that more formal and permanent arrangements will be needed. Certainly, we can dispense with the endless self-promotional propaganda forums that characterize the European Union: We do not need an Anglosphere Commission issuing endless blather on Anglosphere unity. But there are some structural needs to be addressed.
The Anglosphere is a child of peaceful times, but has now emerged to public attention in time of war. It cannot be limited to a military alliance, useful as it is proving under these circumstances.
“The American founders were provincials -- living on the outer borderlands of an Atlantic civilization”: So writes the venerable Bernard Bailyn, scholar of colonial Aemrica and emeritus professor of history at Harvard, in a new collection of his essays, “To Begin the World Anew.”
As one reviewer noted:
This notion of being “far” from the center of intellectual and cultural life was pervasive among colonial elites, Bailyn argues; that being said, he also argues that it was this very provincialism and marginality that contributed to their creativity. They were free to reject the “conventional wisdom” of the London drawing rooms in favor of the lessons taught by their own experience.
Bailyn powerfully illustrates the profound social differences between colonial elites and members of the English aristocracy by reprinting a number of prints that underscore how relatively modest were Virginia or New England “mansions” in comparison with the great estates of the British aristocrats, who would never have imagined leaving the dense life of England for the far away colonies.
... The Virginia plantation owners ... were distinctly “country mice” when compared with the opulence and grandiosity present, say, in Blenheim Palace.
Indeed, as historian Gordon Wood has written, “the scale of everything was different in the colonies.” As he noted in his seminal study “The Radicalism of the American Revolution”:
When Charles Carroll of Maryland, one of the wealthiest planters in the South, was earning what the colonists regarded as the huge sum of 1,800 pounds a year, the Earl of Derby’s vast estates were bringing in an annual income of over 40,000 pounds. ... Major merchants in American cities were worth between 25,000 and 50,000 pounds; in contrast, their counterparts in England were worth between 200,000 and 800,000 pounds. ...
[John] Hancock’s two-storied house, like most gentry homes in America, had only eight rooms; the Sackville family’s palace, Knole in Kent, had 365. ... [Virginia plantation owner William] Byrd’s Westover was 65 feet in length, but this was scarcely a tenth of the size of the Marquess of Rockingham’s house, Wentworth Woodhouse, which was longer than two football fields.
The habits and ideals of the British aristocracy had enormous influence on their counterparts in the American elite. Both tended to share, during the colonial era, a common set of beliefs: that the virtue necessary to govern resided in a landed elite, that men of ambition should seek financial independence from the economic marketplace, that the consumption of luxuries was something to be restricted to the social elite, and that aristocrats should exercise patronage (thus establishing a social and financial network of dependence and hierarchy).
They believed, too, that the idleness of the wealthy was desperately to be achieved and maintained. Ben Franklin touted hard work in “Poor Richard’s Almanac,” but he quite happily retired at the age of 42 to become a gentleman of leisure. (While serving years later as an American diplomatic representative in Paris, however, Franklin drew the attention of the court by dressing modestly, in simple “American” clothes, without a powdered wig, as part of his diplomatic machinations.)
The economic power of the British aristocracy tended to be far more secure than that of the American elite. A key factor was the availability of land in America, which offered opportunities for tenants to break away from dependence on the colonial elite. As Wood writes, “America could not sustain the stable patterns of tenantry that lay at the heart of a traditional landed society, and thus that dependency that lay at the heart of monarchical society was undermined.”
Don Sensing has a well-done post about similarities between the banzai charges of Japanese troops against U.S. forces during World War II and the attacks on U.S. troops by Saddam's fedayeen:
Until the last year of the war, senior Japanese commanders insisted that the superior spiritual power of Japanese troops could and would overcome American firepower. They understood quite well that they, the Japanese, suffered from a serious deficiency of weapons power, compared to the Americans. ...
Finally, Japan's senior generals wised up and figured out that mere moral courage and superior spiritual power (meaning for them the superiority of Japanese culture) were not going to win the day. Just before the battle of Iwo Jima, Gen. Kuribayashi expressly forbade banzai charges and actually ordered that no Japanese soldier was to die before he had killed either 10 Americans or one tank. He drilled and emphasized fire discipline, self-restraint and command and control at all levels. The result: Iwo Jima's defenders inflicted upon the US Marines one-fourth of all the casualties the Marines suffered in the entire war ...
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.
