by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
Finally, here we are at the end of this week of a hundred days. As everyone in the western world probably knows by now, this benchmark for assessing presidencies goes back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who arrived at the White House in the depths of the Great Depression.In his first hundred days, FDR came out swinging. He shut down the banks, threw the money lenders from the temple, cranked out so much legislation so fast he would shout to his secretary, Grace Tully, "Grace, take a law!" Will Rogers said Congress didn't pass bills anymore; it just waved as they went by.President Obama's been busy, but contrary to many of the pundits, he's no FDR. Our new president got his political education in the world of Chicago ward politics, and seems to have adopted a strategy from the machine of that city's longtime boss, the late Richard J. Daley, father of the current mayor there. "Don't make no waves," one of Daley's henchmen used to advise, "don't back no losers."Your opinion of Obama's first 100 days depends of course on your own vantage point. But we'd argue that as part of his bending over backwards to support the banks and avoid the losers, he has blundered mightily in his choice of economic advisers.Last week, at a hearing of the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP) monitoring the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner tried to correct AFL-CIO General Counsel Damon Silvers. "I've practiced law and you've been a banker," Silvers said. Never, Geithner replied, "I've only been in public service."We beg to differ. Read Jo Becker and Gretchen Morgenson's front-page profile of Secretary Geithner in Monday's New York Times, and you'll see how Robert Rubin protégé Geithner, during the five years he was running the New York Federal Reserve, fell under the spell of the big barons of banking to whom he would one day help shovel overly generous sums of money at taxpayer expense.During "an era of unbridled and ultimately disastrous risk-taking by the financial industry," the Times reported, "... He forged unusually close relationships with executives of Wall Street's giant financial institutions."His actions, as a regulator and later a bailout king, often aligned with the industry's interests and desires, according to interviews with financiers, regulators and analysts and a review of Federal Reserve records."Wined and dined at the Four Seasons, and in corporate dining rooms and fine homes by the very men whose greed and judgment helped bring on the Great Collapse, Geithner became so much a favorite of the Club that former Citigroup chairman Sandy Weill talked with him about becoming the bank's CEO.According to Becker and Morgenson, "Even as banks complain that the government has attached too many intrusive strings to its financial assistance, a range of critics -- lawmakers, economists and even former Federal Reserve colleagues -- say that the bailout Mr. Geithner has played such a central role in fashioning is overly generous to the financial industry at taxpayer expense."The two reporters write that Geithner "repeatedly missed or overlooked signs" that the financial system was self-destructing. "When he did spot trouble, analysts say, his responses were too measured, or too late."In choosing a man to manage the bailout of the banks who's so cozy with its players, and then installing as his White House economic adviser Larry Summers, who in the Clinton administration took a laissez-faire attitude toward the financial industry which would later enrich him, the president bought into the old fantasy that what's best for Wall Street is best for America.With these two as his financial gatekeepers, President Obama's now in the position of Louis XVI being advised by Marie Antoinette to have another piece of cake until that rumble in the streets has passed on by.In fact, other Wall Street insiders -- many of them big contributors to the Obama presidential campaign, and progressive in their concern for the public interest -- privately are expressing serious concerns that Geithner, Summers and their associates are leading the president and America's taxpayers down a path toward further economic disaster.This week, as Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin of Illinois unsuccessfully fought for a congressional amendment he said would have helped 1.7 million Americans save their homes from foreclosure, the senator told a radio station back home that, "The banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place."He could say the same of the White House.
Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Monday, April 6, 2009
Ominous Nuclear Weapons
by John Nichols
Barack Obama drew cheers from an estimated 30,000 Czechs as he declared Sunday that, "I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons."
Obama's restatement of his administration's commitment to negotiate a fresh arms reduction treaty with Russia was greeted with enthusiasm in Prague, as was his pledge to work to convince countries around the world to abandon nuclear weapons as a means of security and aggression.
"As the only nuclear power who have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act," explained Obama, in a speech broke, at least rhetorically, from the Bush administration's hardline stances with regard to nuclear issues. "We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can start it."
Unfortunately, the president put a damper on the celebration when he revealed a slow timeline. "This goal will not be reached quickly -- perhaps not in my lifetime," Obama explained. "It will take patience and persistence. But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change."
And the president pretty much ended the party with his announcement that that the United States would "go forward" with a central-European missile defense system that has sparked intense opposition in the Czech Republic and Poland.
Obama claimed that the system is designed to protect Europe from an attack by Iran. "As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with the missile system," the president claimed. "If the Iranian threat is eliminated, we will have a stronger basis for security, and the driving force for missile construction in Europe will be removed."
But that line did not go over particularly well in Prague, where polls suggest that roughly 70 percent of Czech citizens oppose the missile shield project, key components of which would be positioned in the republic.
The Czech parliament has refused to ratify and agreement for siting the missile shield radar tracking system outside Prague.
As Obama spoke, crowds of anti-shield protesters, clad in white hazardous-material protection suits, demonstrated nearby.
From the U.S. came a mixed review of the Obama speech by Kevin Martin, executive director of Peace Action, the peace and disarmament organization that traces its roots to the old Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy and the Nuclear Freeze movement of the 1980s.
"President Obama's Prague speech was important in terms of re-asserting U.S. leadership on nuclear disarmament issues. U.S. Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, negotiations on an arms reduction treaty with Russia, pursuit of a treaty to ban fissile materials and strengthened non-proliferation policies are all crucial to progress towards a nuclear-weapons free world," said Martin.
But, he added, "President Obama's statement that such a world might not be achieved in his lifetime is very disappointing. Obama can and should announce the initiation of negotiations on the global elimination of nuclear weapons. Similarly, his promotion of nuclear power, missile defense bases in Poland and the Czech Republic and his escalation of troops in Afghanistan are all moves in the wrong direction."
John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. A co-founder of the media reform organization Free Press, Nichols is is co-author with Robert W. McChesney of Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy - from The New Press. Nichols' latest book is The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism.
Barack Obama drew cheers from an estimated 30,000 Czechs as he declared Sunday that, "I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons."
Obama's restatement of his administration's commitment to negotiate a fresh arms reduction treaty with Russia was greeted with enthusiasm in Prague, as was his pledge to work to convince countries around the world to abandon nuclear weapons as a means of security and aggression.
"As the only nuclear power who have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act," explained Obama, in a speech broke, at least rhetorically, from the Bush administration's hardline stances with regard to nuclear issues. "We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can start it."
Unfortunately, the president put a damper on the celebration when he revealed a slow timeline. "This goal will not be reached quickly -- perhaps not in my lifetime," Obama explained. "It will take patience and persistence. But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change."
And the president pretty much ended the party with his announcement that that the United States would "go forward" with a central-European missile defense system that has sparked intense opposition in the Czech Republic and Poland.
Obama claimed that the system is designed to protect Europe from an attack by Iran. "As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with the missile system," the president claimed. "If the Iranian threat is eliminated, we will have a stronger basis for security, and the driving force for missile construction in Europe will be removed."
But that line did not go over particularly well in Prague, where polls suggest that roughly 70 percent of Czech citizens oppose the missile shield project, key components of which would be positioned in the republic.
The Czech parliament has refused to ratify and agreement for siting the missile shield radar tracking system outside Prague.
As Obama spoke, crowds of anti-shield protesters, clad in white hazardous-material protection suits, demonstrated nearby.
From the U.S. came a mixed review of the Obama speech by Kevin Martin, executive director of Peace Action, the peace and disarmament organization that traces its roots to the old Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy and the Nuclear Freeze movement of the 1980s.
"President Obama's Prague speech was important in terms of re-asserting U.S. leadership on nuclear disarmament issues. U.S. Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, negotiations on an arms reduction treaty with Russia, pursuit of a treaty to ban fissile materials and strengthened non-proliferation policies are all crucial to progress towards a nuclear-weapons free world," said Martin.
But, he added, "President Obama's statement that such a world might not be achieved in his lifetime is very disappointing. Obama can and should announce the initiation of negotiations on the global elimination of nuclear weapons. Similarly, his promotion of nuclear power, missile defense bases in Poland and the Czech Republic and his escalation of troops in Afghanistan are all moves in the wrong direction."
John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. A co-founder of the media reform organization Free Press, Nichols is is co-author with Robert W. McChesney of Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy - from The New Press. Nichols' latest book is The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Welcome to Vietman Mr. President!
by Ray McGovern
I was wrong. I had been saying that it would be naïve to take too seriously presidential candidate Barack Obama's rhetoric regarding the need to escalate the war in Afghanistan. I kept thinking to myself that when he got briefed on the history of Afghanistan and the oft proven ability of Afghan "militants" to drive out foreign invaders-from Alexander the Great, to the Persians, the Mongolians, Indians, British, Russians-he would be sure to understand why they call mountainous Afghanistan the "graveyard of empires."
And surely he would be fully briefed on the stupidity and deceit that left 58,000 U.S. troops-not to mention 2 to 3 million Vietnamese-dead in Vietnam. John Kennedy became president the year Obama was born. One cannot expect toddler-to-teenager Barack to remember much about the war in Vietnam, and it was probably too early for that searing, controversial experience to have found its way into the history texts as he was growing up.
Innocent of History, and Distracted
But he was certainly old enough to absorb the fecklessness and brutality of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. And his instincts at that time were good enough to see through the administration's duplicity. And, with him now in the White House, surely some of his advisers would be able to brief him on both Vietnam and Iraq, and prevent him from making similar mistakes-this time in Afghanistan. Or so I thought.
Deflecting an off-the-topic question at his March 24 press conference, Obama said, "I think that the last 64 days has been dominated by me trying to figure out how we're going to fix the economy ... right now the American people are judging me exactly the way I should be judged, and that is, are we taking the steps to improve liquidity in the financial markets, create jobs, get businesses to reopen, keep America safe?"
Okay, it is understandable that President Obama has been totally absorbed with the financial crisis. But surely, unlike predecessors supposedly unable to do two things at the same time, our resourceful new president certainly could find enough time to solicit advice from a wide circle, get a better grip on the huge stakes in Afghanistan, and arrive at sensible decisions. Or so I thought.
It proved to be a bit awkward Friday morning waiting for the president to appear.... a half-hour late for his own presentation. Was he for some reason reluctant? Perhaps he had a sense of being railroaded by his advisers. Perhaps he paused on learning that just a few hours earlier a soldier of the Afghan army shot dead two U.S. troops and wounded a third before killing himself, and that Taliban fighters had stormed an Afghan police post and killed ten police earlier that morning. Should he weave that somehow into his speech?
Or maybe it was learning of the Taliban ambush of a police convoy which wounded seven other policemen; or the suicide bomber in the Afghan border area of Pakistan who demolished a mosque packed with hundreds of worshippers attending Friday prayers, killing some 50 and injuring scores more, according to preliminary reports. Or, more simply, perhaps Obama's instincts told him he was about to do something he will regret. Maybe that's why he was embarrassingly late in coming to the podium.
Another March of Folly
One look at the national security advisers arrayed behind the president was enough to see wooden-headedness.
In her best-selling book, "The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam," historian Barbara Tuchman described this mindset: "Wooden-headedness assesses a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions, while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs ... acting according to the wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts."
Tuchman pointed to 16th Century Philip II of Spain as a kind of Nobel laureate of wooden-headedness. Comparisons can be invidious, but the thing about Philip was that he drained state revenues by failed adventures overseas, leading to Spain's decline.
It is wooden-headedness, in my view, that permeates the "comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan" that the president announced yesterday. Author Tuchman points succinctly to what flows from wooden-headedness:
"Once a policy has been adopted and implemented, all subsequent activity becomes an effort to justify it...Adjustment is painful. For the ruler it is easier, once he has entered the policy box, to stay inside. For the lesser official it is better not to make waves, not to press evidence that the chief will find painful to accept. Psychologists call the process of screening out discordant information ‘cognitive dissonance,' an academic disguise for ‘Don't confuse me with the facts.'"
It seems only right and fitting that Barbara Tuchman's daughter, Jessica Tuchman Mathews, president of the Carnegie Foundation, has shown herself to be inoculated against "cognitive dissonance." A January 2009 Carnegie report on Afghanistan concluded, "The only meaningful way to halt the insurgency's momentum is to start withdrawing troops. The presence of foreign troops is the most important element driving the resurgence of the Taliban."
In any case, Obama explained his decision on more robust military intervention in Afghanistan as a result of a "careful policy review" by military commanders and diplomats, the Afghani and Pakistani governments, NATO allies, and international organizations.
No Estimate? No Problem
Know why he did not mention a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) assessing the likely effects of this slow surge in troops and trainers? Because there is none. Guess why. The reason is the same one accounting for the lack of a completed NIE before the "surge" in troop strength in early 2007.
Apparently, Obama's advisers did not wish to take the risk that honest analysts-ones who had been around a while, and maybe even knew something of Vietnam and Iraq, as well as Afghanistan-might also be immune to "cognitive dissonance," and ask hard questions regarding the basis of the new strategy.
Indeed, they might reach the same judgment they did in the April 2006 NIE on global terrorism. The authors of that estimate had few cognitive problems and simply declared their judgment that invasions and occupations (in 2006 the target then was Iraq) do not make us safer but lead instead to an upsurge in terrorism.
The prevailing attitude this time fits the modus operandi of Gen. Petraeus ex Machina, who late last year took the lead by default with the following approach: We know best, and can run our own policy review, thank you very much. Which he did, without requesting the formal NIE that typically precedes and informs key policy decisions. It is highly regrettable that President Obama was deprived of the chance to benefit from a formal estimate. Recent NIEs have been relatively bereft of wooden-headedess. Obama might have made a more sensible decision on how to proceed in Afghanistan.
As one might imagine, NIEs can, and should, play a key role in such circumstances, with a premium on objectivity and courage in speaking truth to power. That is precisely why Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair appointed Chas Freeman to head the National Intelligence Council, the body that prepares NIEs-and why the Likud Lobby got him ousted.
Estimates on Vietnam
As one of the intelligence analysts watching Vietnam in the sixties and seventies, I worked on several of the NIEs produced before and during the war.
Sensitive ones bore this unclassified title: "Probable Reactions to Various Courses of Action With Respect to North Vietnam." Typical of the kinds of question the President and his advisers wanted addressed were: Can we seal off the Ho Chi Minh Trail by bombing? If the U.S. were to introduce X thousand additional troops into South Vietnam, will Hanoi quit? Okay, how about XX thousand?Our answers regularly earned us brickbats from the White House for not being "good team players." But in those days we labored under a strong ethos dictating that we give it to policymakers straight, without fear or favor. We had career protection for doing that.Our judgments (the unwelcome ones, anyway) were often pooh-poohed as negativism. Policymakers, of course, were in no way obliged to take them into account, and often didn't. The point is that they continued to be sought. Not even Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon would decide on a significant escalation without seeking our best estimate as to how U.S. adversaries would likely react to this or that escalatory step.
So, hats off, I suppose, to you, Gen. Petraeus and those who helped you elbow the substantive intelligence analysts off to the sidelines.
What might intelligence analysts have said on the key point of training the Afghan army and police? We will never know, but it is a safe bet those analysts who know something about Afghanistan...or about Vietnam would roll their eyes and wish Petraeus luck. As for Iraq, what remains to be seen is against whom the various sectarian factions target their weapons and put their training into practice.
In his Afghanistan policy speech on Friday, Obama mentioned training eleven times. To those of us with some gray in our hair, this was all too reminiscent of the prevailing rhetoric at the start of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. In February 1964, with John Kennedy dead and President Lyndon Johnson improvising on Vietnam, then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara prepared a major policy speech on defense, leaving out Vietnam, and sent it to the president to review. The Johnson tapes show the president finding fault:
LBJ: "I wonder if you shouldn't find two minutes to devote to Vietnam."
McN: "The problem is what to say about it."
LBJ: "I would say that we have a commitment to Vietnamese freedom ... Our purpose is to train the [South Vietnamese] people, and our training's going good."
But our training was not going good then. And specialists who know Afghanistan, its various tribes and demographics tell me that training is not likely to go good there either. Ditto for training in Pakistan.
Obama's alliterative rhetoric aside, it is going to be no easier to "disrupt, dismantle, and defeat" al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan with more combat forces and training than it was to defeat the Viet Cong with these same tools in Vietnam.
Obama seemed to be protesting a bit too much: "Going forward, we will not blindly stay the course." No sir. There will be "metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable!" Yes, sir! And he will enlist wide international support from countries like Iran, Russia, India, and China that, according to President Obama, "should have a stake in the security of the region." Right.
Long Time Passing
"The road ahead will be long," said Obama in conclusion. He has that right. The strategy adopted virtually guarantees that. That is why Gen. David McKiernan, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan publicly contradicted his boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, late last year when Gates, protesting the widespread pessimism on Afghanistan, started talking up the prospect of a "surge" of troops in Afghanistan.
McKiernan insisted publicly that no Iraqi-style "surge" of forces would end the conflict in Afghanistan. "The word I don't use for Afghanistan is ‘surge," McKiernan stated, adding that what is required is a "sustained commitment" that could last many years and would ultimately require a political, not military, solution.
McKiernan has that right. But his boss Mr. Gates did not seem to get it.
Late last year, as he maneuvered to stay on as defense secretary in the new administration, Gates hotly disputed the notion that things were getting out of control in Afghanistan.The argument that Gates used to support his professed optimism, however, made us veteran intelligence officers gag - at least those who remember the U.S. in Vietnam in the 1960s, the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and other failed counterinsurgencies.
"The Taliban holds no land in Afghanistan, and loses every time it comes into contact with coalition forces," Gates explained.
Our Secretary of Defense seemed to be insisting that U.S. troops have not lost one pitched battle with the Taliban or al-Qaeda. (Engagements like the one on July 13, 2008, in which "insurgents" attacked an outpost in Konar province, killing nine U.S. soldiers and wounding 15 others, apparently do not qualify as "contact.")
Gates ought to read up on Vietnam, for his words evoke a similarly benighted comment by U.S. Army Col. Harry Summers after that war had been lost.
In 1974, Summers was sent to Hanoi to try to resolve the status of Americans still listed as missing. To his North Vietnamese counterpart, Col. Tu, Summers made the mistake of bragging, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield."
Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."
The Military Brass
I don't fault the senior military....Cancel that, I DO fault them. They resemble all too closely the gutless general officers who never looked down at what was really happening in Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the time have been called, not without reason, "a sewer of deceit."
The current crew is in better odor. And one may be tempted to make excuses for them, noting for example that if admirals/generals are the hammer, small wonder that to them everything looks like a nail. No, that does not excuse them.
The ones standing in back of Obama yesterday have smarts enough to have said, NO; IT'S A BAD IDEA, Mr. President. That should not be too much to expect. Gallons of blood are likely to be poured unnecessarily in the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan-probably over the next decade or longer. But not their blood.
General officers seldom rise to the occasion. Exceptions are so few that they immediately spring to mind: French war hero General Philippe LeClerc, for example, was sent to Indochina right after WW-II with orders to report back on how many troops it would take to recapture Indochina. His report: "It would require 500,000 men; and even with 500,000 France could not win."
Equally relevant to Obama's fateful decision, Gen. Douglas MacArthur told another young president in April 1961: "Anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland of Asia should have his head examined." When JFK's top military advisers, critical of his reluctance, virtually called him a traitor-for pursuing a negotiated solution to the fighting in Laos, for example-Kennedy would tell them to convince Gen. MacArthur first, and then come back to him. (Alas, there seems to be no comparable Gen. MacArthur today.)
Kennedy recognized Vietnam as a potential quagmire, and was determined not to get sucked in-despite the misguided, ideologically-salted advice given him by Ivy League patricians like McGeorge Bundy. Kennedy's military adviser, Gen. Maxwell Taylor said later that MacArthur's statement made a "hell of an impression on the president."
MacArthur made another comment about the situation President Kennedy had inherited in Indochina. This one struck the young president so much that he dictated it into a memorandum of conversation: Kennedy quoted MacArthur as saying to him, "The chickens are coming home to roost from the Eisenhower years, and you live in the chicken coop."
Well, the chickens are coming home to roost after eight years of Cheney and Bush, but there is no sign that President Obama is listening to anyone capable of fresh thinking on Afghanistan. Obama has apparently decided to stay in the chicken coop. And that can be called, well, chicken.
Obama and Kennedy
Can't say I actually KNEW Jack Kennedy, but it was he who got so many of us down here to Washington to explore what we might do for our country. Kennedy resisted the kind of pressures to which President Obama has now succumbed. (There are even some, like Jim Douglass in his book "JFK and the Unspeakable," who conclude that this is what got President Kennedy killed.)
Mr. Obama, you need to find some advisers who are not still wet behind the ears and who are not brown noses-preferably some who have lived Vietnam and Iraq and have an established record of responsible, fact-based analysis. You would also do well to read Douglass' book, and to page through the "Pentagon Papers," instead of trying to emulate the Lincoln portrayed in "Team of Rivals." I, too, am a big fan of Doris Kearns Goodwin, but Daniel Ellsberg is an author far more relevant and nourishing for this point in time. Read his "Secrets," and recognize the signs of the times.
There is still time to put the brakes on this disastrous policy. One key lesson of Vietnam is that an army trained and supplied by foreign occupiers can almost always be readily outmatched and out-waited in a guerilla war, no matter how many billions of dollars are pumped in.
Professor Martin van Creveld of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the only non-American military historian on the U.S. Army's list of required reading for officers, has accused former president George W. Bush of "launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 BC sent his legions into Germany and lost them."
Please do not feel you have to compete with your predecessor for such laurels.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. In the Sixties he served as an infantry/intelligence officer and then became a CIA analyst for the next 27 years. He is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
I was wrong. I had been saying that it would be naïve to take too seriously presidential candidate Barack Obama's rhetoric regarding the need to escalate the war in Afghanistan. I kept thinking to myself that when he got briefed on the history of Afghanistan and the oft proven ability of Afghan "militants" to drive out foreign invaders-from Alexander the Great, to the Persians, the Mongolians, Indians, British, Russians-he would be sure to understand why they call mountainous Afghanistan the "graveyard of empires."
And surely he would be fully briefed on the stupidity and deceit that left 58,000 U.S. troops-not to mention 2 to 3 million Vietnamese-dead in Vietnam. John Kennedy became president the year Obama was born. One cannot expect toddler-to-teenager Barack to remember much about the war in Vietnam, and it was probably too early for that searing, controversial experience to have found its way into the history texts as he was growing up.
Innocent of History, and Distracted
But he was certainly old enough to absorb the fecklessness and brutality of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. And his instincts at that time were good enough to see through the administration's duplicity. And, with him now in the White House, surely some of his advisers would be able to brief him on both Vietnam and Iraq, and prevent him from making similar mistakes-this time in Afghanistan. Or so I thought.
Deflecting an off-the-topic question at his March 24 press conference, Obama said, "I think that the last 64 days has been dominated by me trying to figure out how we're going to fix the economy ... right now the American people are judging me exactly the way I should be judged, and that is, are we taking the steps to improve liquidity in the financial markets, create jobs, get businesses to reopen, keep America safe?"
Okay, it is understandable that President Obama has been totally absorbed with the financial crisis. But surely, unlike predecessors supposedly unable to do two things at the same time, our resourceful new president certainly could find enough time to solicit advice from a wide circle, get a better grip on the huge stakes in Afghanistan, and arrive at sensible decisions. Or so I thought.
It proved to be a bit awkward Friday morning waiting for the president to appear.... a half-hour late for his own presentation. Was he for some reason reluctant? Perhaps he had a sense of being railroaded by his advisers. Perhaps he paused on learning that just a few hours earlier a soldier of the Afghan army shot dead two U.S. troops and wounded a third before killing himself, and that Taliban fighters had stormed an Afghan police post and killed ten police earlier that morning. Should he weave that somehow into his speech?
Or maybe it was learning of the Taliban ambush of a police convoy which wounded seven other policemen; or the suicide bomber in the Afghan border area of Pakistan who demolished a mosque packed with hundreds of worshippers attending Friday prayers, killing some 50 and injuring scores more, according to preliminary reports. Or, more simply, perhaps Obama's instincts told him he was about to do something he will regret. Maybe that's why he was embarrassingly late in coming to the podium.
Another March of Folly
One look at the national security advisers arrayed behind the president was enough to see wooden-headedness.
In her best-selling book, "The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam," historian Barbara Tuchman described this mindset: "Wooden-headedness assesses a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions, while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs ... acting according to the wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts."
Tuchman pointed to 16th Century Philip II of Spain as a kind of Nobel laureate of wooden-headedness. Comparisons can be invidious, but the thing about Philip was that he drained state revenues by failed adventures overseas, leading to Spain's decline.
It is wooden-headedness, in my view, that permeates the "comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan" that the president announced yesterday. Author Tuchman points succinctly to what flows from wooden-headedness:
"Once a policy has been adopted and implemented, all subsequent activity becomes an effort to justify it...Adjustment is painful. For the ruler it is easier, once he has entered the policy box, to stay inside. For the lesser official it is better not to make waves, not to press evidence that the chief will find painful to accept. Psychologists call the process of screening out discordant information ‘cognitive dissonance,' an academic disguise for ‘Don't confuse me with the facts.'"
It seems only right and fitting that Barbara Tuchman's daughter, Jessica Tuchman Mathews, president of the Carnegie Foundation, has shown herself to be inoculated against "cognitive dissonance." A January 2009 Carnegie report on Afghanistan concluded, "The only meaningful way to halt the insurgency's momentum is to start withdrawing troops. The presence of foreign troops is the most important element driving the resurgence of the Taliban."
In any case, Obama explained his decision on more robust military intervention in Afghanistan as a result of a "careful policy review" by military commanders and diplomats, the Afghani and Pakistani governments, NATO allies, and international organizations.
No Estimate? No Problem
Know why he did not mention a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) assessing the likely effects of this slow surge in troops and trainers? Because there is none. Guess why. The reason is the same one accounting for the lack of a completed NIE before the "surge" in troop strength in early 2007.
Apparently, Obama's advisers did not wish to take the risk that honest analysts-ones who had been around a while, and maybe even knew something of Vietnam and Iraq, as well as Afghanistan-might also be immune to "cognitive dissonance," and ask hard questions regarding the basis of the new strategy.
Indeed, they might reach the same judgment they did in the April 2006 NIE on global terrorism. The authors of that estimate had few cognitive problems and simply declared their judgment that invasions and occupations (in 2006 the target then was Iraq) do not make us safer but lead instead to an upsurge in terrorism.
The prevailing attitude this time fits the modus operandi of Gen. Petraeus ex Machina, who late last year took the lead by default with the following approach: We know best, and can run our own policy review, thank you very much. Which he did, without requesting the formal NIE that typically precedes and informs key policy decisions. It is highly regrettable that President Obama was deprived of the chance to benefit from a formal estimate. Recent NIEs have been relatively bereft of wooden-headedess. Obama might have made a more sensible decision on how to proceed in Afghanistan.
As one might imagine, NIEs can, and should, play a key role in such circumstances, with a premium on objectivity and courage in speaking truth to power. That is precisely why Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair appointed Chas Freeman to head the National Intelligence Council, the body that prepares NIEs-and why the Likud Lobby got him ousted.
Estimates on Vietnam
As one of the intelligence analysts watching Vietnam in the sixties and seventies, I worked on several of the NIEs produced before and during the war.
Sensitive ones bore this unclassified title: "Probable Reactions to Various Courses of Action With Respect to North Vietnam." Typical of the kinds of question the President and his advisers wanted addressed were: Can we seal off the Ho Chi Minh Trail by bombing? If the U.S. were to introduce X thousand additional troops into South Vietnam, will Hanoi quit? Okay, how about XX thousand?Our answers regularly earned us brickbats from the White House for not being "good team players." But in those days we labored under a strong ethos dictating that we give it to policymakers straight, without fear or favor. We had career protection for doing that.Our judgments (the unwelcome ones, anyway) were often pooh-poohed as negativism. Policymakers, of course, were in no way obliged to take them into account, and often didn't. The point is that they continued to be sought. Not even Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon would decide on a significant escalation without seeking our best estimate as to how U.S. adversaries would likely react to this or that escalatory step.
So, hats off, I suppose, to you, Gen. Petraeus and those who helped you elbow the substantive intelligence analysts off to the sidelines.
What might intelligence analysts have said on the key point of training the Afghan army and police? We will never know, but it is a safe bet those analysts who know something about Afghanistan...or about Vietnam would roll their eyes and wish Petraeus luck. As for Iraq, what remains to be seen is against whom the various sectarian factions target their weapons and put their training into practice.
In his Afghanistan policy speech on Friday, Obama mentioned training eleven times. To those of us with some gray in our hair, this was all too reminiscent of the prevailing rhetoric at the start of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. In February 1964, with John Kennedy dead and President Lyndon Johnson improvising on Vietnam, then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara prepared a major policy speech on defense, leaving out Vietnam, and sent it to the president to review. The Johnson tapes show the president finding fault:
LBJ: "I wonder if you shouldn't find two minutes to devote to Vietnam."
McN: "The problem is what to say about it."
LBJ: "I would say that we have a commitment to Vietnamese freedom ... Our purpose is to train the [South Vietnamese] people, and our training's going good."
But our training was not going good then. And specialists who know Afghanistan, its various tribes and demographics tell me that training is not likely to go good there either. Ditto for training in Pakistan.
Obama's alliterative rhetoric aside, it is going to be no easier to "disrupt, dismantle, and defeat" al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan with more combat forces and training than it was to defeat the Viet Cong with these same tools in Vietnam.
Obama seemed to be protesting a bit too much: "Going forward, we will not blindly stay the course." No sir. There will be "metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable!" Yes, sir! And he will enlist wide international support from countries like Iran, Russia, India, and China that, according to President Obama, "should have a stake in the security of the region." Right.
Long Time Passing
"The road ahead will be long," said Obama in conclusion. He has that right. The strategy adopted virtually guarantees that. That is why Gen. David McKiernan, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan publicly contradicted his boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, late last year when Gates, protesting the widespread pessimism on Afghanistan, started talking up the prospect of a "surge" of troops in Afghanistan.
McKiernan insisted publicly that no Iraqi-style "surge" of forces would end the conflict in Afghanistan. "The word I don't use for Afghanistan is ‘surge," McKiernan stated, adding that what is required is a "sustained commitment" that could last many years and would ultimately require a political, not military, solution.
McKiernan has that right. But his boss Mr. Gates did not seem to get it.
Late last year, as he maneuvered to stay on as defense secretary in the new administration, Gates hotly disputed the notion that things were getting out of control in Afghanistan.The argument that Gates used to support his professed optimism, however, made us veteran intelligence officers gag - at least those who remember the U.S. in Vietnam in the 1960s, the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and other failed counterinsurgencies.
"The Taliban holds no land in Afghanistan, and loses every time it comes into contact with coalition forces," Gates explained.
Our Secretary of Defense seemed to be insisting that U.S. troops have not lost one pitched battle with the Taliban or al-Qaeda. (Engagements like the one on July 13, 2008, in which "insurgents" attacked an outpost in Konar province, killing nine U.S. soldiers and wounding 15 others, apparently do not qualify as "contact.")
Gates ought to read up on Vietnam, for his words evoke a similarly benighted comment by U.S. Army Col. Harry Summers after that war had been lost.
In 1974, Summers was sent to Hanoi to try to resolve the status of Americans still listed as missing. To his North Vietnamese counterpart, Col. Tu, Summers made the mistake of bragging, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield."
Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."
The Military Brass
I don't fault the senior military....Cancel that, I DO fault them. They resemble all too closely the gutless general officers who never looked down at what was really happening in Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the time have been called, not without reason, "a sewer of deceit."
The current crew is in better odor. And one may be tempted to make excuses for them, noting for example that if admirals/generals are the hammer, small wonder that to them everything looks like a nail. No, that does not excuse them.
The ones standing in back of Obama yesterday have smarts enough to have said, NO; IT'S A BAD IDEA, Mr. President. That should not be too much to expect. Gallons of blood are likely to be poured unnecessarily in the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan-probably over the next decade or longer. But not their blood.
General officers seldom rise to the occasion. Exceptions are so few that they immediately spring to mind: French war hero General Philippe LeClerc, for example, was sent to Indochina right after WW-II with orders to report back on how many troops it would take to recapture Indochina. His report: "It would require 500,000 men; and even with 500,000 France could not win."
Equally relevant to Obama's fateful decision, Gen. Douglas MacArthur told another young president in April 1961: "Anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland of Asia should have his head examined." When JFK's top military advisers, critical of his reluctance, virtually called him a traitor-for pursuing a negotiated solution to the fighting in Laos, for example-Kennedy would tell them to convince Gen. MacArthur first, and then come back to him. (Alas, there seems to be no comparable Gen. MacArthur today.)
Kennedy recognized Vietnam as a potential quagmire, and was determined not to get sucked in-despite the misguided, ideologically-salted advice given him by Ivy League patricians like McGeorge Bundy. Kennedy's military adviser, Gen. Maxwell Taylor said later that MacArthur's statement made a "hell of an impression on the president."
MacArthur made another comment about the situation President Kennedy had inherited in Indochina. This one struck the young president so much that he dictated it into a memorandum of conversation: Kennedy quoted MacArthur as saying to him, "The chickens are coming home to roost from the Eisenhower years, and you live in the chicken coop."
Well, the chickens are coming home to roost after eight years of Cheney and Bush, but there is no sign that President Obama is listening to anyone capable of fresh thinking on Afghanistan. Obama has apparently decided to stay in the chicken coop. And that can be called, well, chicken.
Obama and Kennedy
Can't say I actually KNEW Jack Kennedy, but it was he who got so many of us down here to Washington to explore what we might do for our country. Kennedy resisted the kind of pressures to which President Obama has now succumbed. (There are even some, like Jim Douglass in his book "JFK and the Unspeakable," who conclude that this is what got President Kennedy killed.)
Mr. Obama, you need to find some advisers who are not still wet behind the ears and who are not brown noses-preferably some who have lived Vietnam and Iraq and have an established record of responsible, fact-based analysis. You would also do well to read Douglass' book, and to page through the "Pentagon Papers," instead of trying to emulate the Lincoln portrayed in "Team of Rivals." I, too, am a big fan of Doris Kearns Goodwin, but Daniel Ellsberg is an author far more relevant and nourishing for this point in time. Read his "Secrets," and recognize the signs of the times.
There is still time to put the brakes on this disastrous policy. One key lesson of Vietnam is that an army trained and supplied by foreign occupiers can almost always be readily outmatched and out-waited in a guerilla war, no matter how many billions of dollars are pumped in.
Professor Martin van Creveld of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the only non-American military historian on the U.S. Army's list of required reading for officers, has accused former president George W. Bush of "launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 BC sent his legions into Germany and lost them."
Please do not feel you have to compete with your predecessor for such laurels.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. In the Sixties he served as an infantry/intelligence officer and then became a CIA analyst for the next 27 years. He is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Monday, March 23, 2009
America In Need of a Moral Bailout
by Chris Hedges
In decaying societies, politics become theater. The elite, who have hollowed out the democratic system to serve the corporate state, rule through image and presentation. They express indignation at AIG bonuses and empathy with a working class they have spent the last few decades disenfranchising, and make promises to desperate families that they know will never be fulfilled. Once the spotlights go on they read their lines with appropriate emotion. Once the lights go off, they make sure Goldman Sachs and a host of other large corporations have the hundreds of billions of dollars in losses they incurred playing casino capitalism repaid with taxpayer money.
We live in an age of moral nihilism. We have trashed our universities, turning them into vocational factories that produce corporate drones and chase after defense-related grants and funding. The humanities, the discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions, have withered. Our press, which should promote such intellectual and moral questioning, confuses bread and circus with news and refuses to give a voice to critics who challenge not this bonus payment or that bailout but the pernicious superstructure of the corporate state itself. We kneel before a cult of the self, elaborately constructed by the architects of our consumer society, which dismisses compassion, sacrifice for the less fortunate, and honesty. The methods used to attain what we want, we are told by reality television programs, business schools and self-help gurus, are irrelevant. Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification. The capacity for manipulation is what is most highly prized. And our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic collapse.
Wow, that is a powerful piece of writing! What do you think of that?
Friday, March 20, 2009
Book Review in "American Prospect"
Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life by Adam Gopnik, Alfred A. Knopf, 211 pages, $24.95
The 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth is upon us, and the flood of Lincoln books has begun to crest. At least a dozen Lincoln books were released on Presidents' Day weekend. Meanwhile, the Obama camp has played heavily on Lincoln parallels since the campaign began. Conservative columnists chide that if Obama were really to act Lincoln's part, he would reach at once toward a bipartisan political center.
In fact, aside from the extraordinary arc that took them to the White House, most of the parallels between Lincoln and Obama are misleading. Lincoln worked hard to cajole the border states to stay within the Union, but he was no compromiser in 1860. As secession fever consumed the Deep South in the months before his inauguration, and others struggled to forge a grand compromise that would hold the Union together, Lincoln quashed any retreat from the Republican Party's platform principles. The famous "we are not enemies, but friends" paragraph that closed his Inaugural Address was inserted at the suggestion of William Seward, who thought Lincoln's original text too argumentative. Lincoln preferred to let a terrible war come, if it should, than to compromise on the perpetuity of the Union or the principle that the territories must be preserved from slavery.
Adam Gopnik's Angels and Ages springs from the coincidence that Lincoln was born on the same day as that other giant figure of the century, Charles Darwin. The year of John Brown's raid on the Harpers Ferry arsenal, the year in which Lincoln began his bid for the presidential nomination, was the year in which On The Origin of Species was published. Around these intertwined lives, Gopnik has constructed an elegant, widely ranging book of essays, many of which began as pieces in The New Yorker. Gopnik does not write with his eye directly on the political present, but Angels and Ages tells us more than he might have realized about the timidity of democratic liberalism after three decades of Republican political domination.
What Lincoln and Darwin had most in common, Gopnik argues, was a style of persuasion. Despite the enormous gulf between Lincoln's childhood and Darwin's comfortably sheltered one, they were both avid readers and deeply serious writers. Lincoln's métier was the law case, the close, reasoned argument that, until one gets to Seward's part, framed Lincoln's first Inaugural and the studious inelegance of the Emancipation Proclamation. Darwin's style was that of natural observation: the mountains of precisely observed detail through which he built the argument for species change through natural selection. Revolutionary in their impact, they both consciously eschewed the grand oratorical style. Lincoln's quotable passages are deeply memorable, but there are not nearly as many of them as one might imagine. Darwin famously put his most radical ideas in the most cautious language.
"They were nearsighted visionaries," Gopnik writes. "They particularized in everything." They preferred to write with small words than with overblown ones, to reason rather than to orate, to show the cosmos "in a tea bag" rather than, like Walt Whitman, yawp about it from the rooftops. In doing this, he argues, they invented a new language for liberal democracy: a new "liberal eloquence." To come on that language, on the heels of John Brown's mad, revolutionary rhetoric, is to find yourself at "a true fault line in modern consciousness."
The new style went hand in hand, Gopnik argues, with affection for bourgeois virtues. Both men were devotees of domestic life. Though they had thought as much as any two persons in the mid-19th century about the massive presence of death, that did not prevent either from grieving, with almost unhinging agony, over the deaths of their children. Neither man found comfort in the conventional religious solace of the day. Darwin had dethroned God from any directing hand in creation; Lincoln, who began as a religious skeptic, found his way back by his second Inaugural to a God whose intentions could not be fathomed. They were moderns, Gopnik argues, who could no longer conceive of life vertically and hierarchically but only along the particular-filled horizontals of time.
In all this, Gopnik writes, they helped invent liberal democracy's true language: modest, down to earth, scientific, proceduralistic. "Tininess is the point," he writes of Darwin, just as legal technicality is Lincoln's point. He urges us to find the power in the long, tedious opening section of Lincoln's Cooper Institute address in which he traced out every recorded vote of every one of the Constitution's signers on the question of slavery in the territories. He would have us recognize The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms with Observations on their Habits as the truest of Darwin's books.
John Brown -- the man of utopian visions and transcendentalist admirers -- haunts Gopnik's imagination in these passages, but it's hard not to think that George W. Bush and Jerry Falwell do, too. A sense of science as endangered by armies assembled in blind faith; an uneasiness with higher-law doctrines of preemptive war and legitimate torture; a skepticism about crusading rhetoric of every sort: all this saturates the mood of Angels and Ages and helps drive it back toward the small and precise. Where the big words and grand aspirations have been misappropriated so often, what else is democratic liberalism to do but regroup on the plain of precision, science, and competence?
In truth, Lincoln and Darwin were as caught up in big ideas as any of their contemporaries were. Lincoln's belief in the perpetuity of the Union cannot be unhitched from the powerful tides of romantic nationalism that swept through the 19th century. His belief that the Declaration of Independence had enshrined an anti-slavery premise in the nation's very founding was as much a product of higher-law faith as was the Southern slaveholders' conviction that secession remained a legitimate option because of the declaration's insistence on government by consent.
Darwin, for his part, could not but breathe the assumptions of progress that saturated mid-19th-century England. Racism of any form "had no place either in Darwin's life or in Darwin's logic," Gopnik writes; nor did Social Darwinism. But that is not so. For all Darwin's generosity of mind and his extended rebuttal to the thesis that the races of mankind were the result of distinct and separate creations, Darwin had no qualms about differentiating between savage and civilized races, or in assuming, like most of his Euro-American contemporaries, that in the course of progress the civilized would eventually exterminate the savage. He worried about the dis-eugenic consequences of his age's charitable sentiments even as he recognized the progression in moral power. He did not go nearly as far as Lincoln did when pressed on the point by Stephen Douglas in defending white supremacy, but neither did Darwin write off the skull-measuring experiments of the notorious racist, Samuel Morton. To wring out of either man their absorption in 19th-century liberal democracy's big moral ideals of nation, liberty, and progress (however flawed and partial) is to sketch only a cautious shadow.
Gopnik writes with an elegant sense for the past. His pursuit of the conflicting accounts of Edwin Stanton's words at Lincoln's death (from which the "angels" in his title derives) is an example of the historical method at its best. But he is pre-Darwinian in his historical sensibilities. He thinks something essential had turned by the time Lincoln's and Darwin's life ended, that the obvious truths of 1809, when they were born, had been swept away. The modern condition had arrived and with it (though it would take time for people to catch up to the fact), the language it needed.
Yet if history gives us only a continuous tangle of ways of thinking about the world, then finding the language for liberal democracy is not so simple. To mobilize an immensely diverse and anxious people at liberalism's current moment will take a vocabulary of civic aspirations as big, as justice-infused, and as morally charged as any of the words in the conservative word bank. One of the most striking things about Obama has been the way he has managed to combine (though not without tension) a technocratic ambition for decent, competent government with a liberal aspiration for a new civic and moral culture. Gopnik makes a thoughtful case for a language of smallness. But it would be a tragedy if, at this juncture, Lincoln were to come down only to this.
The 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth is upon us, and the flood of Lincoln books has begun to crest. At least a dozen Lincoln books were released on Presidents' Day weekend. Meanwhile, the Obama camp has played heavily on Lincoln parallels since the campaign began. Conservative columnists chide that if Obama were really to act Lincoln's part, he would reach at once toward a bipartisan political center.
In fact, aside from the extraordinary arc that took them to the White House, most of the parallels between Lincoln and Obama are misleading. Lincoln worked hard to cajole the border states to stay within the Union, but he was no compromiser in 1860. As secession fever consumed the Deep South in the months before his inauguration, and others struggled to forge a grand compromise that would hold the Union together, Lincoln quashed any retreat from the Republican Party's platform principles. The famous "we are not enemies, but friends" paragraph that closed his Inaugural Address was inserted at the suggestion of William Seward, who thought Lincoln's original text too argumentative. Lincoln preferred to let a terrible war come, if it should, than to compromise on the perpetuity of the Union or the principle that the territories must be preserved from slavery.
Adam Gopnik's Angels and Ages springs from the coincidence that Lincoln was born on the same day as that other giant figure of the century, Charles Darwin. The year of John Brown's raid on the Harpers Ferry arsenal, the year in which Lincoln began his bid for the presidential nomination, was the year in which On The Origin of Species was published. Around these intertwined lives, Gopnik has constructed an elegant, widely ranging book of essays, many of which began as pieces in The New Yorker. Gopnik does not write with his eye directly on the political present, but Angels and Ages tells us more than he might have realized about the timidity of democratic liberalism after three decades of Republican political domination.
What Lincoln and Darwin had most in common, Gopnik argues, was a style of persuasion. Despite the enormous gulf between Lincoln's childhood and Darwin's comfortably sheltered one, they were both avid readers and deeply serious writers. Lincoln's métier was the law case, the close, reasoned argument that, until one gets to Seward's part, framed Lincoln's first Inaugural and the studious inelegance of the Emancipation Proclamation. Darwin's style was that of natural observation: the mountains of precisely observed detail through which he built the argument for species change through natural selection. Revolutionary in their impact, they both consciously eschewed the grand oratorical style. Lincoln's quotable passages are deeply memorable, but there are not nearly as many of them as one might imagine. Darwin famously put his most radical ideas in the most cautious language.
"They were nearsighted visionaries," Gopnik writes. "They particularized in everything." They preferred to write with small words than with overblown ones, to reason rather than to orate, to show the cosmos "in a tea bag" rather than, like Walt Whitman, yawp about it from the rooftops. In doing this, he argues, they invented a new language for liberal democracy: a new "liberal eloquence." To come on that language, on the heels of John Brown's mad, revolutionary rhetoric, is to find yourself at "a true fault line in modern consciousness."
The new style went hand in hand, Gopnik argues, with affection for bourgeois virtues. Both men were devotees of domestic life. Though they had thought as much as any two persons in the mid-19th century about the massive presence of death, that did not prevent either from grieving, with almost unhinging agony, over the deaths of their children. Neither man found comfort in the conventional religious solace of the day. Darwin had dethroned God from any directing hand in creation; Lincoln, who began as a religious skeptic, found his way back by his second Inaugural to a God whose intentions could not be fathomed. They were moderns, Gopnik argues, who could no longer conceive of life vertically and hierarchically but only along the particular-filled horizontals of time.
In all this, Gopnik writes, they helped invent liberal democracy's true language: modest, down to earth, scientific, proceduralistic. "Tininess is the point," he writes of Darwin, just as legal technicality is Lincoln's point. He urges us to find the power in the long, tedious opening section of Lincoln's Cooper Institute address in which he traced out every recorded vote of every one of the Constitution's signers on the question of slavery in the territories. He would have us recognize The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms with Observations on their Habits as the truest of Darwin's books.
John Brown -- the man of utopian visions and transcendentalist admirers -- haunts Gopnik's imagination in these passages, but it's hard not to think that George W. Bush and Jerry Falwell do, too. A sense of science as endangered by armies assembled in blind faith; an uneasiness with higher-law doctrines of preemptive war and legitimate torture; a skepticism about crusading rhetoric of every sort: all this saturates the mood of Angels and Ages and helps drive it back toward the small and precise. Where the big words and grand aspirations have been misappropriated so often, what else is democratic liberalism to do but regroup on the plain of precision, science, and competence?
In truth, Lincoln and Darwin were as caught up in big ideas as any of their contemporaries were. Lincoln's belief in the perpetuity of the Union cannot be unhitched from the powerful tides of romantic nationalism that swept through the 19th century. His belief that the Declaration of Independence had enshrined an anti-slavery premise in the nation's very founding was as much a product of higher-law faith as was the Southern slaveholders' conviction that secession remained a legitimate option because of the declaration's insistence on government by consent.
Darwin, for his part, could not but breathe the assumptions of progress that saturated mid-19th-century England. Racism of any form "had no place either in Darwin's life or in Darwin's logic," Gopnik writes; nor did Social Darwinism. But that is not so. For all Darwin's generosity of mind and his extended rebuttal to the thesis that the races of mankind were the result of distinct and separate creations, Darwin had no qualms about differentiating between savage and civilized races, or in assuming, like most of his Euro-American contemporaries, that in the course of progress the civilized would eventually exterminate the savage. He worried about the dis-eugenic consequences of his age's charitable sentiments even as he recognized the progression in moral power. He did not go nearly as far as Lincoln did when pressed on the point by Stephen Douglas in defending white supremacy, but neither did Darwin write off the skull-measuring experiments of the notorious racist, Samuel Morton. To wring out of either man their absorption in 19th-century liberal democracy's big moral ideals of nation, liberty, and progress (however flawed and partial) is to sketch only a cautious shadow.
Gopnik writes with an elegant sense for the past. His pursuit of the conflicting accounts of Edwin Stanton's words at Lincoln's death (from which the "angels" in his title derives) is an example of the historical method at its best. But he is pre-Darwinian in his historical sensibilities. He thinks something essential had turned by the time Lincoln's and Darwin's life ended, that the obvious truths of 1809, when they were born, had been swept away. The modern condition had arrived and with it (though it would take time for people to catch up to the fact), the language it needed.
Yet if history gives us only a continuous tangle of ways of thinking about the world, then finding the language for liberal democracy is not so simple. To mobilize an immensely diverse and anxious people at liberalism's current moment will take a vocabulary of civic aspirations as big, as justice-infused, and as morally charged as any of the words in the conservative word bank. One of the most striking things about Obama has been the way he has managed to combine (though not without tension) a technocratic ambition for decent, competent government with a liberal aspiration for a new civic and moral culture. Gopnik makes a thoughtful case for a language of smallness. But it would be a tragedy if, at this juncture, Lincoln were to come down only to this.
Friday, March 13, 2009
China--The Next Big Enemy?
by Justin Raimondo
Those Chinese sailors who "harassed" a U.S. military vessel lingering perilously close to a Chinese base on Hainan Island, in the South China Sea, reportedly stripped down to their underwear when our sailors turned water hoses on them. Maybe the shower facilities on Chinese fishing vessels – it was fishing trawlers, not military gunboats, that met the Americans on China's doorstep – are insufficient, or maybe the Chinese were mooning us. I'm inclined to think the latter. In any case, Sunday's incident ratchets up tensions with China – which have been roiled in recent weeks, not only by a series of similar incidents, but also on account of issues broader than China's claims to virtually the whole of the South China Sea.
To begin with, the U.S. claims that the USNS Impeccable was manned by civilians and was just going about its undefined business when, suddenly, those big bad Chinese started "harassing" us – the bullies! But wait. Take a look at the Impeccable:
This baby is 5,368 tons, and over 281 ft. long: it is a surveillance ship, designed to track enemy submarines. China's contingent of nuclear-powered subs are reportedly based at Yulin, on Hainan. And while the U.S. government maintains that the crew is "civilian," half its crew are military personnel.
Now look at the Chinese vessels that were supposedly "harassing" this rather intimidating U.S. warship:
As John Stossel would put it: Give me a break! These are the ships that supposedly "aggressively maneuvered" around the Impeccable – as the Pentagon put it – "in an apparent coordinated effort to harass the U.S. ocean surveillance ship while it was conducting routine operations in international waters"? Behind the whiny rationale, however, lurks a damning admission: Yes, the U.S. routinely spies on the Chinese, and fully expects to get away with it. After all, for centuries foreigners have been lurking on the Chinese coastline, establishing colonies and warily poking and prodding the Chinese, with mostly limited responses – until now.
The Chinese, some analysts aver, are "testing" the Obama administration to see how much they can get away with. They are sending a "signal," we are told, which ought to have been clear enough after the 2001 incident, in which a U.S. surveillance plane was forced to land on Hainan after a collision with a Chinese fighter jet. The fallen Chinese pilot, one Wang Wei, is today a national hero, symbol of a resurgent Chinese nationalism that has little to do with who sits in the Oval Office. In the self-referential parlance of Washington, however, it's all about a "test" for President Obama.
Imagine if Chinese military vessels appeared 75 miles off the coast of, say, southern California, for the quite obvious purpose of tracking our submarine defenses and conducting surveillance of our San Diego naval base. It would be bombs away, pronto, and no questions asked. However, the Chinese penumbra of sovereignty is apparently more restricted.
Beijing claims U.S. actions violate the UN Law of the Sea, a treaty to which they are signatory and the U.S. is not. However, in contesting this assertion – which came up in the aftermath of the last Hainan incident – U.S. officials routinely note that the UN law, while granting China sovereignty over its "exclusive economic zone," would have been violated only if the Impeccable was on a commercial expedition, and yet the clear concern on the part of the Chinese is that this was a military mission.
We have our Monroe Doctrine, which was specifically aimed at the crowned heads of Europe, who, in our nation's youth, posed a threat on our very borders. (This same doctrine, ironically, was later tweaked and twisted into a rationale for our own imperial ambitions in South and Central America, as well as Mexico.) Other nations, however, are not entitled to a Monroe Doctrine of their own: China, Russia, and Iran have no corresponding prerogative to their own spheres of influence, as granted by geography, tradition, and the military necessities of a credible defense. It is a consistent application of the Bushian doctrine of preemption: to assert a "right" that is neither a matter of settled international law nor the subject of a treaty, and is clearly provocative in the extreme. What are we doing in China's backyard?
For decades, the Taiwan lobby has bought and manipulated U.S. politicians and succeeded in passing legislation that requires the U.S. to provide for Taiwan's security needs, including going to war in case its disputed sovereignty is violated. A huge arms sale under the Bush administration was orchestrated as a result of this unique legislation, which is a monument to the power of foreign lobbyists in the Imperial City.
Hey, wait a minute, aren't we're supposed to be in a new era here, with the ascension of Obama I to the imperial throne? One would think that such Bushian orthodoxies as the Wolfowitz doctrine – which assumes U.S. military supremacy on every continent – would be thrown in the dustbin of history. This is apparently not the case: the U.S. continues to assert its imperial prerogatives as if nothing has changed, as indeed it has not.
The administration has made a big show of abjuring torture and repudiating the legal doctrines that underpin it, but that's just an ordinary sense of decency, the least we might expect from the savior of our national honor. Now what about repudiating the military doctrines that were the foundations of George W. Bush's crazed foreign policy? Let's give the doctrine of military preemption – you know, the whole rationale for our disastrous Iraqi adventure – the heave-ho. The real change that's needed when it comes to the conduct of our government in relation to the rest of the world would be the abandonment of our legendary arrogance, which presumes our leading role on the world stage.
Bush and his neocon supporters gloried in what Charles Krauthammer exultantly deemed "the unipolar moment," but that moment has clearly passed. Indeed, it may have passed even as Krauthammer announced it. The Washington-based analysts are all atwitter about what prompted the Chinese to move on this front – even as U.S.-Chinese negotiations have been deemed a success and a visit to Washington by China's foreign minister is planned.
Yet the Chinese, even more than we, are well aware that America's moment may be passing. The biggest holders of U.S. debt are Chinese state-owned companies. No wonder they're resentful of our spy ship trawling their coastline: after all, they paid for it. What ought to be worrying the Obama administration is that the interest they're getting on their loan may not be enough to cover their national pride deficit. We may have the mightiest military in the world, but if the Chinese stop buying our debt, then the whole structure of the American warfare-welfare state will come tumbling down with astonishing rapidity.
There is plenty of anti-Chinese political sentiment in this country, and it's a constituency that is bipartisan. Among the Democrats, you have organized labor, which is instinctively Sinophobic in this country and always has been, as the history of the oppression of Chinese coolies in California amply demonstrates. The protectionist unions are in a lather about the fact that Chinese workers produce cheaper and better products that American consumers want to buy. In tandem with international do-gooders of every sort, the anti-China popular front also consists of Republicans of the sort who will welcome any fresh enemy, as long as it means more subsidies for the military-industrial-congressional complex. Throw in the wacko cultists of Falun Gong, and what you have is the reincarnation of the old, bipartisan anti-Communist alliance of yesteryear, which brought us wars in Korea and Vietnam – and may yet succeed in provoking a third war on the Asian landmass, one just as futile and unwinnable as its predecessors.
The formulation of American foreign policy is all about domestic political pressures. It is the domain of lobbyists and de facto foreign agents, most of them unregistered, who work with targeted American constituencies to further various commercial and foreign interests. A rational foreign policy, i.e., one that serves authentic American interests, is virtually impossible in these circumstances.
Those Chinese sailors who "harassed" a U.S. military vessel lingering perilously close to a Chinese base on Hainan Island, in the South China Sea, reportedly stripped down to their underwear when our sailors turned water hoses on them. Maybe the shower facilities on Chinese fishing vessels – it was fishing trawlers, not military gunboats, that met the Americans on China's doorstep – are insufficient, or maybe the Chinese were mooning us. I'm inclined to think the latter. In any case, Sunday's incident ratchets up tensions with China – which have been roiled in recent weeks, not only by a series of similar incidents, but also on account of issues broader than China's claims to virtually the whole of the South China Sea.
To begin with, the U.S. claims that the USNS Impeccable was manned by civilians and was just going about its undefined business when, suddenly, those big bad Chinese started "harassing" us – the bullies! But wait. Take a look at the Impeccable:
This baby is 5,368 tons, and over 281 ft. long: it is a surveillance ship, designed to track enemy submarines. China's contingent of nuclear-powered subs are reportedly based at Yulin, on Hainan. And while the U.S. government maintains that the crew is "civilian," half its crew are military personnel.
Now look at the Chinese vessels that were supposedly "harassing" this rather intimidating U.S. warship:
As John Stossel would put it: Give me a break! These are the ships that supposedly "aggressively maneuvered" around the Impeccable – as the Pentagon put it – "in an apparent coordinated effort to harass the U.S. ocean surveillance ship while it was conducting routine operations in international waters"? Behind the whiny rationale, however, lurks a damning admission: Yes, the U.S. routinely spies on the Chinese, and fully expects to get away with it. After all, for centuries foreigners have been lurking on the Chinese coastline, establishing colonies and warily poking and prodding the Chinese, with mostly limited responses – until now.
The Chinese, some analysts aver, are "testing" the Obama administration to see how much they can get away with. They are sending a "signal," we are told, which ought to have been clear enough after the 2001 incident, in which a U.S. surveillance plane was forced to land on Hainan after a collision with a Chinese fighter jet. The fallen Chinese pilot, one Wang Wei, is today a national hero, symbol of a resurgent Chinese nationalism that has little to do with who sits in the Oval Office. In the self-referential parlance of Washington, however, it's all about a "test" for President Obama.
Imagine if Chinese military vessels appeared 75 miles off the coast of, say, southern California, for the quite obvious purpose of tracking our submarine defenses and conducting surveillance of our San Diego naval base. It would be bombs away, pronto, and no questions asked. However, the Chinese penumbra of sovereignty is apparently more restricted.
Beijing claims U.S. actions violate the UN Law of the Sea, a treaty to which they are signatory and the U.S. is not. However, in contesting this assertion – which came up in the aftermath of the last Hainan incident – U.S. officials routinely note that the UN law, while granting China sovereignty over its "exclusive economic zone," would have been violated only if the Impeccable was on a commercial expedition, and yet the clear concern on the part of the Chinese is that this was a military mission.
We have our Monroe Doctrine, which was specifically aimed at the crowned heads of Europe, who, in our nation's youth, posed a threat on our very borders. (This same doctrine, ironically, was later tweaked and twisted into a rationale for our own imperial ambitions in South and Central America, as well as Mexico.) Other nations, however, are not entitled to a Monroe Doctrine of their own: China, Russia, and Iran have no corresponding prerogative to their own spheres of influence, as granted by geography, tradition, and the military necessities of a credible defense. It is a consistent application of the Bushian doctrine of preemption: to assert a "right" that is neither a matter of settled international law nor the subject of a treaty, and is clearly provocative in the extreme. What are we doing in China's backyard?
For decades, the Taiwan lobby has bought and manipulated U.S. politicians and succeeded in passing legislation that requires the U.S. to provide for Taiwan's security needs, including going to war in case its disputed sovereignty is violated. A huge arms sale under the Bush administration was orchestrated as a result of this unique legislation, which is a monument to the power of foreign lobbyists in the Imperial City.
Hey, wait a minute, aren't we're supposed to be in a new era here, with the ascension of Obama I to the imperial throne? One would think that such Bushian orthodoxies as the Wolfowitz doctrine – which assumes U.S. military supremacy on every continent – would be thrown in the dustbin of history. This is apparently not the case: the U.S. continues to assert its imperial prerogatives as if nothing has changed, as indeed it has not.
The administration has made a big show of abjuring torture and repudiating the legal doctrines that underpin it, but that's just an ordinary sense of decency, the least we might expect from the savior of our national honor. Now what about repudiating the military doctrines that were the foundations of George W. Bush's crazed foreign policy? Let's give the doctrine of military preemption – you know, the whole rationale for our disastrous Iraqi adventure – the heave-ho. The real change that's needed when it comes to the conduct of our government in relation to the rest of the world would be the abandonment of our legendary arrogance, which presumes our leading role on the world stage.
Bush and his neocon supporters gloried in what Charles Krauthammer exultantly deemed "the unipolar moment," but that moment has clearly passed. Indeed, it may have passed even as Krauthammer announced it. The Washington-based analysts are all atwitter about what prompted the Chinese to move on this front – even as U.S.-Chinese negotiations have been deemed a success and a visit to Washington by China's foreign minister is planned.
Yet the Chinese, even more than we, are well aware that America's moment may be passing. The biggest holders of U.S. debt are Chinese state-owned companies. No wonder they're resentful of our spy ship trawling their coastline: after all, they paid for it. What ought to be worrying the Obama administration is that the interest they're getting on their loan may not be enough to cover their national pride deficit. We may have the mightiest military in the world, but if the Chinese stop buying our debt, then the whole structure of the American warfare-welfare state will come tumbling down with astonishing rapidity.
There is plenty of anti-Chinese political sentiment in this country, and it's a constituency that is bipartisan. Among the Democrats, you have organized labor, which is instinctively Sinophobic in this country and always has been, as the history of the oppression of Chinese coolies in California amply demonstrates. The protectionist unions are in a lather about the fact that Chinese workers produce cheaper and better products that American consumers want to buy. In tandem with international do-gooders of every sort, the anti-China popular front also consists of Republicans of the sort who will welcome any fresh enemy, as long as it means more subsidies for the military-industrial-congressional complex. Throw in the wacko cultists of Falun Gong, and what you have is the reincarnation of the old, bipartisan anti-Communist alliance of yesteryear, which brought us wars in Korea and Vietnam – and may yet succeed in provoking a third war on the Asian landmass, one just as futile and unwinnable as its predecessors.
The formulation of American foreign policy is all about domestic political pressures. It is the domain of lobbyists and de facto foreign agents, most of them unregistered, who work with targeted American constituencies to further various commercial and foreign interests. A rational foreign policy, i.e., one that serves authentic American interests, is virtually impossible in these circumstances.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
The Inflection is Near??
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
FENGHUA, China — Chen Hsien, an employee of Fenghua Ningbo Plastic Works Ltd., a plastics factory that manufactures lightweight household items for Western markets, expressed his disbelief Monday over the “sheer amount of [garbage] Americans will buy. Often, when we’re assigned a new order for, say, ‘salad shooters,’ I will say to myself, ‘There’s no way that anyone will ever buy these.’ ... One month later, we will receive an order for the same product, but three times the quantity. How can anyone have a need for such useless [garbage]? I hear that Americans can buy anything they want, and I believe it, judging from the things I’ve made for them,” Chen said. “And I also hear that, when they no longer want an item, they simply throw it away. So wasteful and contemptible.”
Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”
We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese ...
We can’t do this anymore.
“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children,” said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows.
“You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior,” added Romm. “But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate ...’ Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy.”
Over a billion people today suffer from water scarcity; deforestation in the tropics destroys an area the size of Greece every year — more than 25 million acres; more than half of the world’s fisheries are over-fished or fished at their limit.
“Just as a few lonely economists warned us we were living beyond our financial means and overdrawing our financial assets, scientists are warning us that we’re living beyond our ecological means and overdrawing our natural assets,” argues Glenn Prickett, senior vice president at Conservation International. But, he cautioned, as environmentalists have pointed out: “Mother Nature doesn’t do bailouts.”
One of those who has been warning me of this for a long time is Paul Gilding, the Australian environmental business expert. He has a name for this moment — when both Mother Nature and Father Greed have hit the wall at once — “The Great Disruption.”
“We are taking a system operating past its capacity and driving it faster and harder,” he wrote me. “No matter how wonderful the system is, the laws of physics and biology still apply.” We must have growth, but we must grow in a different way. For starters, economies need to transition to the concept of net-zero, whereby buildings, cars, factories and homes are designed not only to generate as much energy as they use but to be infinitely recyclable in as many parts as possible. Let’s grow by creating flows rather than plundering more stocks.
Gilding says he’s actually an optimist. So am I. People are already using this economic slowdown to retool and reorient economies. Germany, Britain, China and the U.S. have all used stimulus bills to make huge new investments in clean power. South Korea’s new national paradigm for development is called: “Low carbon, green growth.” Who knew? People are realizing we need more than incremental changes — and we’re seeing the first stirrings of growth in smarter, more efficient, more responsible ways.
In the meantime, says Gilding, take notes: “When we look back, 2008 will be a momentous year in human history. Our children and grandchildren will ask us, ‘What was it like? What were you doing when it started to fall apart? What did you think? What did you do?’ ” Often in the middle of something momentous, we can’t see its significance. But for me there is no doubt: 2008 will be the marker — the year when ‘The Great Disruption’ began.
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