Tomes and Bones

Roland Dumas sur la Judéophobie et l'Islamophobie

2010-04-29T08:41:00.000-07:00

A la judéophobie a fait place l'islamophobie
envoyé par oumma. - L'actualité du moment en vidéo.

L'ancien Ministres des Affaires étrangères sous François Mitterrand s'exprime à propos des pseudo-affaires "islamiques" en France. Heureusement qu'on est toujours en "pays paisible" !

Alabama Republican for Governor to Save English Language

2010-04-28T08:10:00.000-07:00

I love the way the soft, comforting music discords with the "I will beat the shit out of Mexicans" stare/threat/subtext. Oh, and I am sure it will save lots of money. Right up there with (McCain ally) Carly Fiorina's infamous "demon sheep" ad.

Houria Bouteldja dans tous ses Etats(-Généraux)

2010-04-16T17:50:00.000-07:00

Al-har vs ilham Moussaïd (NPA) et Houria Bouteldja (PIR)
envoyé par Al_har. - L'actualité du moment en vidéo.

Une interview avec Houria Bouteldja sur les Etats-Généraux contre l'islamophobie et la négrophie, organisés par le Parti des Indigènes de la République. Oui, c'est ce groupe "radical", "communautariste" et "proto-terroriste" que Marianne aime tant vomir et Monsieur le ministre Brice Hortefeux a menacé de dissoudre. Il y a d'abord une courte interview avec Ilham Moussaïd, la candidate portant le hijab du N.P.A. qui avait tant suscité la controverse.

Bouteldja présente la raison pour le mouvement et souligne en particulier le lien avec la lutte des noirs. En effet, il s'agit de démontrer que comme la négrophobie (ou l'antisémitisme) que "l'islamophobie est un racisme". Notons l'importance des Afro-Américains dans les symboles des Indigènes : Muhammad Ali et Malcolm X (circonstanciellement musulmans) ont leur place à cotée de Yasser Arafat et le cheikh Yassin.

Je ne sais pas ce qu'adviendra de tout cela. Mais je sais qu'en effet que la Nation of Islam et le Black Power furent haïs et vomis à l'époque par tous les médias et intellectuels "respectables" aux Etats-Unis d'Amérique... tout comme les Indigènes le sont en France. Aujourd'hui, bien sûr, ce sont Muhammad Ali et Malcolm X et ceux qui ont levé leurs poings qui sont les saints et les martyres... et tout les gens dits respectables chantent leur louange !

Monsieur Lieberman se présente (ainsi que ses idées)

2010-04-14T10:43:00.000-07:00

Voici quelques phrases tirées d'une interview avec le Ministre des Affaires étrangères d'Israël, Avigdor Lieberman, relayée par le Courrier international. Très éclairant...

"Je crois dans le Grand Israël [Palestine biblique], mais je suis prêt à accepter une solution fondée sur deux Etats. [...] Je suis prêt à accepter la solution des deux Etats, mais pas celle qui donnerait un Etat et demi aux Palestiniens et un demi-Etat aux Juifs."

"Ça ne me plaît pas de voir le Triangle [un groupe de villes et villages arabes israéliens contigus à la Cisjordanie, au sud-est de Haïfa] sous souveraineté israélienne. Là-bas, il n’y a presque pas de Juifs et il ne sera pas difficile de faire passer ces Arabes israéliens sous souveraineté palestinienne. En contrepartie, les blocs d’implantations [colonies] de peuplement en Cisjordanie, comme le Goush Etzion [au sud-ouest de Jérusalem et Bethléem], passeront sous souveraineté israélienne."

"Notre objectif, c’est un Etat d’Israël ET juif, pas un Etat de tous ses citoyens ou d’autres contes de grands-mères."

"Les Etats-Unis exigent que nous gelions la construction dans la plupart des quartiers juifs de Jérusalem comme Gilo, Ramot, Pisgat Zeev et Talpiot-Est. C’est inacceptable. Toute concession israélienne supplémentaire est vaine. Tout ce sur quoi nous cédons est aussitôt oublié pour céder la place à de nouvelles revendications."

"Les députés arabes de la Knesset ? Voilà des gens dont la seule aspiration politique est de détruire Israël en tant qu’Etat juif et sioniste. Un député comme Ahmad Tibi ne reconnaît pas le caractère juif et sioniste d’Israël. Mais, comme il jouit de tous les droits conférés par un Etat démocratique, il participe au nom de l’Autorité palestinienne à des conférences contre l’Etat d’Israël. Il se présente lui-même comme un député “palestinien” et ne rate pas une occasion de nous calomnier." (Notons aussi le sondage fait il y a pas longtemps où 56% des Israéliens juifs de 15-18 ans se déclaraient contre le droit d'Israéliens arabes de siéger au Knesset. Via le Jerusalem Post.)

"Les Arabes israéliens ont trop de droits, et cela dans tous les domaines."

"Or le conflit du Moyen-Orient ne porte pas sur des territoires mais sur des valeurs. Il oppose l’islam extrémiste à l’Occident éclairé. Quiconque pense que la paix peut être pliée d’ici deux ans se trompe et trompe son monde."

Pas très diplomatique ce chef de la diplomatie israélienne ! On notera le millénarisme biblique (abandoné à contrecœur), l'amalgame de tout et n'importe quoi, et l'ethno-nationalisme décomplexé (même volkish). N'imaginons pas s'il s'agissait d'un Serbe ou d'un Boer...

Poutine est à genou... en Pologne

2010-04-08T13:26:00.000-07:00

Ca parait hors de son caractère, mais pendant une cérémonie comémorant le massacre de 22,000 officiers polonais par les Soviétiques en 1940, le Premier ministre russe Vladimir Poutine a pris l'initiative de s'agenouiller devant l'autel consacré aux défunts. Reprenant ainsi le role de Willy Brandt, le Chancelier allemand qui fit un geste similaire devant le Ghetto de Varsovie, Poutine nous donne un symbole très fort.

En effet, je pense que la réconciliation des peuples passe en partie par ces images. Pour prendre la paire franco-allemande comme exemple : pour atténuer mille souvenirs de rivalité (Jena, Napoléon à Berlin, Sedan (deux fois), Verdun, Hitler à Paris..) il a fallu en créer d'autres, notamment celles de de Gaulle et Adenauer s'embrassant, ainsi que Mitterrand et Kohl main dans la main à Verdun... Et si aujourd'hui les Japonais arrivent pas à s'entendre avec les Chinois - et même les Koréens ! - sur l'histoire, je pense que cette absence de symboles forts de pénitence et de réconciliation en est en parti la cause.

Lire notamment deux articles de la presse polonaise grace au Courrier international.

"...some sort of nerd empowerment program gone terribly wrong. "

2010-04-06T00:42:00.000-07:00

Josh Marshall's account of the RNC's Young Eagles Program (the one that spent contributor's money on a faux-lesbian bondage nightclub in Las Vegas).

The Jamaicans in Bristol

2010-04-02T10:27:00.001-07:00

Excellent documentary on the experience of Jamaican immigrants to Bristol. Talks about the first wave, breaking the color bar, relations with the police, riots, the global anticolonial struggle, a classic soundtrack by Philip Glass..

Courtesy of Crooked Timber.

The Return of the Metics

2010-03-27T00:30:00.000-07:00

According to George Will, those born in the U.S. should not necessarily have the rights of Americans. This he argues in an extremely legalistic and pedantic piece in the WaPo. He assiduously avoids any practical consideration as to having millions of people born and raised in the U.S. suddenly being non-citizens. One minute it's "assimilation," the next it's "eternal foreigner". He essentially arguing for expanding the status of metic to much larger part of the population.

Jeannette Bougrab, nouveau chef de la Halde, sur le sexisme/racisme/classisme

2010-03-23T13:01:00.000-07:00

Après que Gérard Longuet ait déclaré qu'il fallait nommer quelqu'un venant "du corps français traditionnel" à la tête de la Halde (Haute Autorité contre les discriminations et pour l'égalité, ouf) on a finalement opté pour Jeannette Bougrab. Elle est professeur de droit, fille de harkis et jeune de 36 ans. Dans cette interview avec le Figaro Madame elle aborde de nombreux sujets comme les statistiques ethniques, les quotas, la place des femmes au travail, le "classisme," etc. Les positions exprimées dans ces quatres petites minutes sont plutôt ordinaires, mais intelligemment défendues.

Et oui, elle est jolie aussi.

(Saudi) Journalist: Yemeni Capital Actually Pretty Calm

2010-03-23T11:16:00.000-07:00

Seulement en français, grâce au Courrier international.

Judge Bans Front National Poster

2010-03-14T07:34:00.000-07:00

Jean-Marie Le Pen of the Front National is running in what are in all likelihood his last elections: to be had of my home region, Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur (PACA), an FN stronghold.

As part of the campaign, the FN's youth wing began plastering the above poster in PACA and then all around. The League Against Racism and Antisemitism (LICRA) called for its banning and, two days ago, a judge ordered the FN to remove these posters or suffer a 500 euro fine for each day in delay (see article in Le Figaro).

The judge ordered this because:
"[T]his poster is not only by nature meant to provoke a feeling of rejection and animosity towards a group of people whose religious practices, women and nationality is aimed but, in addition, is aimed essentially at youth which is by nature more easily influenced."

The poster took example from a similar one from Switzerland. The symbolism includes France speared by minarets, a brown woman wearing a burqa, the Algerian flag covering France and the injuction "No to Islamism!". It appeals to three strains of French racism and Islamophobia, notably:

1) Algerian War Revanchism: The Algerian flag is also that of the Front de Libération National, the revolutionary organization that evicted France from Algeria. Le Pen is a veteran of the Algerian War and many of the FN's supporters are composed former French settlers in Algeria and partisans of French Algeria. This part of the base is driven by the same bitterness and stab-in-the-back theories that flourished in Germany after the First World War and the U.S. after the Vietnam War. In 1997, an FN regional councilor for PACA said "The Algerian War will be over when we have power."

2) Traditional Anti-Arab/Muslim Sentiment: The Algerian flag onto France also refers to the mass immigration from North Africa that began after the Second World War. It refers to q traditional hostility to non-Whites and non-Christians, similar sentiment appearing in most Western European countries around this time, and to a more explicit fear of an islamized Algerian France where the infertile White natives have been replaced by proliferating Arabs. This apocalyptic vision is one shared and also promoted by significant parts of the American neoconservative intelligentsia through the World War IV and Eurabia cottage industries.

3) New "War on Terror" Islamophobia: The explicit call of the poster is against Islamism. Here, it taps into relatively newer images of Muslims as religious fundamentalists and terrorists. The key events are the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Algerian Civil War between the military and the Islamist "Islamic Salvation Front" after the latter won elections in 1992, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks and following propagation of the ideology of the War on Terror. We have the image of France being Islamized, with terrorism and Sharia law being imposed. There are about 6 million Muslims in France. An internal government report estimated the number of women wearing burqas at 2,000. There is little history of Islamist terrorism in France, with the major exception of several bomb attacks in Paris in 1995 (related to then Algerian Civil War).

Glenn Beck Denounces Wilders and Le Pen, Sees Return of Fascism to Europe

2010-03-10T05:14:00.000-08:00

An initial report from Loonwatch had it that Glenn Beck had lumped far-right European politicians Geert Wilders and Jean-Marie Le Pen in the same "fascist" basket. Loonwatch emphasized how the right-wing Islamophobic intelligentsia in America then pounced on Beck to recant and apologize for suggesting Wilders was "fascist".

Beck's narrative presented "Left" and "Right" in Europe to be rising. he explained "Left" in Europe means Communism, "Right" means Fascism, and that these forces were now rising. In short, Europe is headed towards totalitarianism once again.

He noted, quite accurately, that in times of economic crisis, people tend to radicalize. As proof today, he cites the rise to prominence of Wilders in Holland and of Le Pen in France. He noted that though French President Nicolas Sarkozy had low approval ratings in the thirties, "this guy, far right, Le Pen, he's at 57%."

Holy shit! France is going to have the Fascist/Far Right/Vichyite Jean-Marie Le Pen as President?!

Did I hear that right?

Beck presented "this guy" with juxtaposed pictures of President Sarkozy and... Dominique de Villepin! Indeed, you can barely hear it, Beck says "vi-le-pen" not "le-pen'".

Dominque de Villepin, of course, is former President Jacques Chirac's protégé and a former Prime Minister, made most famous as Foreign Minister for his stirring antiwar speeches before the U.N. Security Council in the run up to the invasion of Iraq. He indeed has high approvals right now (like Chirac) and is considered a potential right-wing challenger to Sarkozy in 2012.

He is not Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the anti-Muslim, anti-immigration, neofascist party the Front National. Le Pen is reaching retirement age and has about a fifth of France voting consistently for him. He is currently campaigning in what will probably be his last election: to be head of the my home region in the South of France (despite it being his strongest base of support, it is very unlikely he will win outright).

We shouldn't be too hard on Beck. I get it, Villepin/Le Pen, they're both French and sound similar. A small slip-up, like a typo, due near-homophony of a foreign tongue. It is completely understandable, Beck's team can't be expected to know the politics of foreign countries perfectly... nothing but an honest mistake. An honest mistake that happens to once again promote hysteria by presenting an apocalyptic vision of the totalitarian Europe to come: no doubt these Americans will be asked to fight to save Europe again and no doubt the French will be ungrateful again too.

What a difficult and thankless thing it must be, to live in Glenn Beck's America.

"Unmistakably German"

2010-03-07T09:45:00.001-08:00

I've been going through military ads recently, including many that celebrate "the national mystique". Now, something not quite completely different, as this controversial ad by French car company Citroen.

Really, one has to consider this a minor work of art given its magnificent aesthetics. And all those semi-obscure cultural references to reactionary German excellence (the winter forest, Prusso-Bavarian setting, fair maidens on horseback or serving huge sausages and... fencing?!), clearly a cultured, creative and zealous marketing/media grad put a lot of thought and had a lot of a fun putting this together. Now, I'm sure the eagles and swords would like to refer to Prussia - and I lord knows I love the Prussian mystique - but it feels rather more sinister, doesn't it?

(All this besides why Citroen is doing an ad like this. Trying to steal the glory of BWM, Audi and Mercedes-Benz? To not say Volkswagen!)

Before the Magma Monster II

2010-02-19T14:22:00.000-08:00

Metaphorical dungeons-and-dragons-battles paired sword-lightning-transformations is evidently a running theme. This time inspired from Indiana Jones, apparently from 1998-1999.

Supprimer le singulier du mot identité

2010-02-19T12:49:00.000-08:00

Alors que la France est saisie d'hystérie par des fausses crises identitaire,un Belge écrit un article sympathique et très lucide sur la nécéssaire multiplicité des identités.

Before the Magma Monster

2010-02-16T22:30:00.000-08:00

U.S. Marines make people go 'poof' with Carmina Burana playing in the background? I didn't think such notions would have all that much appeal to young people in the age of Megaman and Ghouls n' Ghosts. Just goes to show you: it's all about gameplay.

Army Recruitment Vids

2010-02-11T01:07:00.000-08:00

Inspired by a crackin' post on Army recruitment commercials from around the world from Starbuck including retro 1980s American ads and some quality British ads. I decided to make my own.

First, an understated and sober French ad celebrating the national mystique. While the spot may give the soldier's career a certain abstract glory, I think it fails. The battles cited include Gergovia (!), where the Gauls succeeded in pushing back Caesar's legions. The relevance of the thing is somewhat undermined by the following battle at Alesia which the Gauls lost, paving the way for Roman administration, Latinization and the birth of the French language. Rather than Gergovia, it is Alesia which marks the starting point of French history, a military defeat (with a similar place for the Battle of Hastings in English history). They also list Austerlitz, a battle not for "peace" or "French security," but the moment France subjugated Europe... and another step in Napoleon's imperial excesses that would lead him to national disasters in wars with England, Spain and Russia. The concluding passage with "Afghanistan," instead of giving French participation in that war a noble air, seems rather to emphasize how very irrelevant that will seem in the long run.

A similar but much more effective ad calling for U.S. Army officers. It is quite amazing how much glory they pack into 1 minute: Washington crossing the Hudson, MacArthur in the Pacific, Teddy Roosevelt's charge, the liberation of Europe, the conquest of space... The whole thing linking these legends with contemporary issues through General Petraeus and his "good war" in Iraq, the advancement of women and minorities, and of course self-improvement and leadership (be the best you can be, etc).

"Citizen Soldiers," a National Guard ad that also taps into the national mystique. This time, however, with a hard rock band and lavish reenactments of the War of Independence and the Second World War. A reflection of different budgets? And, as if the nobility of past glorious wars seems too distant, the ad is spliced with contemporary soldiers saving American civilians in the aftermath of a (natural?) disaster. (Cue Haiti.) But more than more than just being humanitarians, the Army is libertarian: "We are free... because of the brave." A statement that may be true at certain specific points in history but is rather misleading given the role armies usually play.

The persistent glorification of war and the existence of a military-industrial complex are relatively recent phenomena in American history. Armies are by necessity as bureaucratic, hierarchical, and indeed despotic organizations as exist in the world. They are at odds with many American values including anti-State prejudice, "negative" liberty, individualism and so forth. A military has no use for these values. I find this ad ("At This Moment") a fascinating mesh combining the sublime, collectivist aesthetic of Soviet socialist realism with some values of American society (self-improvement, saving American families post-disaster). In the Soviet Union, military-bureaucratic values imbued the whole society, for understandable reasons.

Recruiters attempt to keep up with the times. Over the decades, changes have included a greater emphasis on minorities and women, use of pop culture (notably music), and a shift towards individualism (mottos tending to change from some variant of "Protect the Nation" to "You Be the Best"). This legendary, infamous and criminally bad "Marine Defeats Fire Monster" ad captures more of the Spirit of Age than anything I can imagine... Are kids who are going to sign up through appeals to World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings really going to be good with their rifles and tanks in some sand swept Iraqi city or the "tribal" villages of Afghanistan?

Of course, if slaying a poorly-rendered CGI Balrog wasn't enough to make you eyes bleed be sure to check these Japanese navy ads (one and two). An accurate reflection of a society?! Someone needs to do a Ph.D. thesis on this stuff.

The Best of Worlds (book review)

2010-02-04T03:32:00.000-08:00

The Post-American World (2008)
Fareed Zakaria

Caveat: The following book review is very long. It is probably a longer treatment than the work really deserves. However, I came to political consciousness at the same as I was reading the weekly columns of Fareed Zakaria and so I think I felt a certain need to deal with the subject once and for all. The review serves as a fairly thorough exploration of a very self-consciously "universal" version of the American ideology as adopted by a prominent liberal American intellectual of South Asian extraction.

You can also see Zakaria's lecture at LSE (scroll down to June 2009) on his book, which I attended. At the fifty-second minute I made a joke relevant given the earlier conspiratorial questions on Zakaria's attending Bilderberg conferences and nervously asked a question (which unfortunately he forgot to answer until I approached him later at the book signing). I hope the review does not seem too harsh, however, real criticism of someone's public life and work should not be shied away from when it is warranted.

***

It was reported during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign that Barack Obama was reading a book entitled The Post-American World. This might seem a less than promising sign for a future of Chief of State. Fareed Zakaria’s book, however, is not so much concerned with the end of America as the rise of the "Rest," that is, of the end of the Third World's underdevelopment and impotence. The meaning of this is not predetermined. We live in a time of particularly fractious identities. Whether it is wealthy Russian expats getting an education in elite Western universities or the descendants of poor West Indian immigrants in the streets Paris and London, questions of belonging, of which world to inhabit, of learning how to act in different social and national contexts, and of deciding what cultural values one will adopt (if any) are unavoidable. And while these "Third Culture Kids" form a small minority, they have a disproportionate impact on the world. They include both Obama with his celebrated (ad nauseum) background and Zakaria, an Indian immigrant and naturalized American. Thus, in reading and writing The Post-American World, each could ascribe whatever values they wished, from cheering the long overdue return to economic equality of the (darker-skinned) peoples of the South to fearing a development boding ill for the power and future of the West, and of the United States in particular.

In his book, Zakaria emerges as a kind of synthesis of two prophets of new order. He is Francis Fukuyama in signaling and praising the triumph of Western capitalism and liberal democratic ideals across the world. But there is also, counter-intuitively, Frantz Fanon in saluting the rise of the postcolonial South from wretched poverty and thereby ending 500 years of Western cultural, economic, political and military hegemony. The book is useful both for its own analysis and as an expression of a prominent Establishment commentator's thoughts. These assets are unfortunately obscured somewhat by the style of writing. There isn't exactly self-censorship but one has the distinct impression that Zakaria writes as he imagines his decidedly middlebrow audience of Newsweek readers would like him to. Numerous appallingly bad expressions, inaccuracies and metaphors (which a good editor really would have spotted) also detract from the text. His noted description of Burma as "tiny" (the country is the size of Texas) is only the tip of iceberg

Zakaria identifies "the rise of the Rest as the great story of our times." In a few paragraphs, he skillfully dismisses the neurotic obsession with Islamic terrorism and the imagined struggle with the "Islamofascist" tide. These are both rather annoying distractions. And indeed, it is the economic developments of the past forty years that have been revolutionary. Between 1870 and 1970, the economically and technologically advanced countries of the world remained concentrated in North America, Europe, Britain's White Dominions, and Japan. A few small, wealthy countries were added in the form of the postwar Asian Tiger economies while Argentina (once as rich as the U.S.) ingloriously fell back into the fold of the "underdevelopment". Today, most of the world's growth is outside the developed world and particularly strong in China. "The Rest" have hardly reached parity, and most of their new wealth is concentrated in an insecure minority of their populations, but their collective weight nonetheless has made them capable of negotiating with what used to be called "the North" on more equal terms. The G7's replacement by the G20 is the institutional manifestation of this shift.

World leaders at a G20 summit.

Zakaria sees the economic rise of the South as the ultimate logical consequence of the West's own rise that began five centuries ago. He offers a plausible theory of economic development in Asia being constantly crippled by "strong states". Societies were dominated by princes and warlords who were interested in building palaces and monuments to their own glory and would often seize the assets of those who got too wealthy. Zakaria writes that "Asian rulers largely fit the stereotypes of the Oriental tyrant." Indeed, "Most countries in Asia had powerful and centralized predatory states that extracted taxes from their subjects without providing much in return." He compares them to the Soviet Union, both equally obsessed with prestige projects like the Taj Mahal and space exploration. He also notes how the egalitarian poverty of peasant societies from Russia to China were often scornful of merchants, placing them at the bottom of the social ladder in terms of honor if not wealth. China's was a continent-country where the centralization of power was such that the Emperor could at a whim cut off the funding of the explorer Zheng He, who had traveled to much of the rest of Asia as a sort of prelude to Columbus. Zakaria's damning assessment: it was "the expression of a civilization's stagnation".

Into this static historical order came the West with its vast technological and economic power. By 1919, the Europeans and their descendants controlled 85% of the world's landmass and dominated China indirectly too. This spread European ideas (or at least political vocabulary): while the first generation of colonial subjects wanted the West's power, the second wanted also its ideal whether in the form of liberalism or Marxism. In particular, under the twin "hegemonies" of Great Britain and the United States, there spread limited and rational government, constitutionalism, free trade, capitalism and so forth. For Zakaria, it is the long-delayed embrace of Western (American) ideals by the Third World that has allowed it (finally) to begin to overcome Western superiority.

Zakaria is not entirely positive about the (neo)colonial experience. But besides the White supremacy, wars of pacification and occasional genocide, he sees this as on balance a laudable development. Still, only because the Western hegemony would end. All is not perfect in the world dominated by what Winston Churchill called "the English-speaking peoples". For example, Zakaria discusses one of the legacies of that world with an uncustomary (and welcome!) bite. World financial institutions continue to have the curious tradition of always appointing an American to the head of the World Bank and a European to the International Monetary Fund. Zakaria responds: "This 'tradition,' like the customs of an old segregated country club may be charming and amusing to insiders,but to outsiders it is outrageous and bigoted." Fanon could not have written with a more acid tongue! But this sort of comment is rare and Zakaria does not dwell on past injustices because "The natives," he writes, "have gotten good at capitalism."

Zakaria brings no real insight as to why capitalism began to succeed in the tropics where it had failed for 200 years. He is rather better as to the consequences. Modernization will change gender relations and threaten "the hierarchy of age, religion, tradition, and feudal order." Global civilization will no longer be the monopoly of European culture. Many new "regional CNNs" like Al Jazeera, TeleSUR, France 24, and Russia Today provide new lenses through which to see the world. American mass culture maintains its exceptional influence in the world but we also see the proliferation of film and music industries in India (Bollywood), Nigeria (Nollywood) and parts of the Arab world. There are a few shallow ruminations on what this means for the future (will culture become "modern" or Western"?) but Zakaria also moves to the meat: "The great shift taking place in the world might prove to be less about culture and more about power." And here, we have another Fanonian word, this time in a darkly prophetic mode as he talks of the leaders outside the West: "They have read the Goldman Sachs BRIC [Brazil, Russia, India, China] report. They know that the balance of power has shifted." So whereas the first wave of global civilization was under Europe's boot, this new one will emerge with a certain equality between peoples.

Zakaria deals in anecdote and generalization. He has almost nothing to say specifically about the futures of the Middle East, Latin America, Africa or the former Soviet Union. Europe and Japan are mentioned mainly to cite their terminal demographic decline. Zakaria is distinctly uninterested in the European Union, which is perhaps surprising given its economic weight (slightly greater than North America) in the economically-obsessed world he describes. Nor is he interested in dealing with it as an attempt at transnational governance complementary to globalization, a model for other regions, or indeed even something to be discredited. Zakaria limits himself to national portraits of India and China, which he clearly clearly sees as the two new emerging powers to be contended with. We have two chapters replete with facts, vignettes and stereotypes. While both are useful, neither is really satisfactory.

China's GDP.

China's chapter (entitled "The Challenger") is the better of the two. We find many useful facts and amusing asides. Whereas Zakaria has the (apocryphal?) quote of Napoleon Bonaparte that "when China wakes,she will shake the world," he also juxtaposes this with the mentality of the American missionaries and capitalists that penetrated China in the nineteenth century: "1 billion souls to save, 2 billion armpits to deodorize." Has there been a better expression of the Spirit of the Age? We are treated to a plethora of statistics on the Industrial Revolution in China since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping: 9% growth a year for three decades, 400 million people lifted out of poverty, a sevenfold increase in personal income. China's success, of course, doesn't square particularly well with the "spread of Western ideas/free markets" narrative, at least in its more extreme form. For while Deng's reforms did reintroduce a form of capitalism to China, it remains extremely statist. Besides the authoritarian polity, the economy remains protectionist (like the Asian Tigers before it) and monetary manipulation (an undervalued Yuan) is used to boost exports, while Zakaria notes that state-owned enterprises form half the economy. The author guards himself from making ill-advised predictions. He notes the growing environmental damage and increasing number of protests in China, but does not see democracy as an immediate necessary outcome. Despite the chapter title, he does not predict a U.S.-Chinese confrontation. Rather, the U.S. will remain militarily superior for decades. America and China remain inevitable bedfellows through a kind of economic M.A.D., one needs the market, the other the debt, this happy circumstance appearing indefinitely sustainable...

There is however also the inevitable absurd Zakarian phrase. Responding to a poll saying that 72% of Chinese believe one does not need to have belief in God to be moral, he says of this: "The point is not that [China] is immoral—in fact all hard evidence suggests quite the opposite—but rather that in [China] people [do not] believe in God. This might shock many in the West [...]." How earnest! I cannot comment on the "hard evidence" suggesting the Chinese are not more evil than other peoples. From Europe, however, not wholly godless but well-acquainted with concepts of "secular humanism," one can only wonder wonder what "West" he is talking about.

The chapter on India (imaginatively entitled "The Ally"), while also filled with useful tidbits, is actually a fairly dire failure. It often borders on total incoherence. I don't know if this is the written manifestation of the struggle between Zakaria's Muslim Indian background (which he scarcely mentions in his writings) and his adoption of American citizenship (with the zeal of the converted). The chapter is perhaps the most misleading, if not self-deceiving, in that he forces us (and himself) to see an unconvincingly strong natural kinship between the U.S. and India. He sometimes gives the impression the latter country is a really a sort of embryonic, Hindu America that by some accident found itself attached to Asia. He sees a U.S.-India "special relationship" emerging of the sort normally reserved for the United Kingdom and Israel. While this is not an implausible possibility, his evidence his weak. He bases his argument partly on the notion that democratic India is a society which has "asserted dominance over the state." This condition is the subject of Zakaria’s very first book (From Wealth to Power), which quite eloquently explained the rise of the U.S. in the nineteenth century in terms of having a weak state and strong society. (In contrast, again, to the "predatory," warring states of Europe of that time.) He sees Indian-Americans being a bridge between the two countries in a way which (more numerous) Chinese-Americans apparently cannot be. But then problems begin. "The country might have several Silicon Valleys, but it also has 3 Nigerias". It ranks 128th out of 177 in the Human Development Index. Female literacy stands at 48%. We are talking of "a country of rampant poverty, feudalism, and illiteracy." The Indian elite was self-consciously socialist from independence onwards, sporting a very "mixed" economy in every sense, and whose "many intellectuals and journalists [...] are well-schooled in the latest radical ideas - circa 1968, when they were in college."

Yet despite all this Zakaria finds the chutzpah to claim in a single, unqualified statement: "If Indians understand America, Americans understand India." Unfathomable. It seems too absurd to consider that an American society centered on consumption as an end in itself could "understand" a country where abject poverty is not only rampant but, in some cases, held up as a Gandhian ideal. It is not explained how Americans "understand" a country which at once has an extremely diverse population of over 1 billion inhabitants and receives scarce media coverage in America. Certainly American leaders did not "understand" Indians in the decades after independence, when New Delhi adhered to a strict anticolonial line on issues like Indochina and to Moscow-leaning neutrality in the Cold War. Indeed, as Republicans tar every opponent with the brush of "Socialism," and Liberals defensively deny they are guilty of such apostasy, can it really be said America can "understand" a country like India which not only has a proud Socialist tradition but indeed has several states (West Bengal, Kerala, Tripura) that still consistently elect Communist governments? Indeed, that Indian democracy is continental, multiconfessional, multilingual (17 languages, 22,000 dialects), featuring "multiple regional elections," not true national ones, suggests greater affinity for (and a vote of confidence in) embryonic pan-European democracy than what exists in the United States. Pace Zakaria, how could we not come to the conclusion that this great Indian-American consanguinity is no more than the imaginative projection of an enthusiastic immigrant's failure to come to terms with his own inevitably fractured identity?

Indian Communists in Kerala pay homage to Soviet socialist realism.

The final parts of the book are dedicated to what America's place in this new "globalized" world of economic equals should be. The discussion is informed first by the tired comparison with the British Empire. And here, Zakaria freely indulges in his penchant for silly phrases and inaccuracies. What does it mean to say that the failed British attempt to keep the Thirteen Colonies of North America over eight years, at a high cost in blood and treasure, was a "strategic masterstroke"? Can it be said of the 1899-1902 Boer War that it "broke of the back of [the British] empire," when that entity continued merrily along for another half-century? Indeed, what to make of the statement that "London played its weakening hand with impressive political skill" during the postwar years? While Britain's decolonization was not as traumatic an experience as that of France, one would have to forget that British "strategy" for managing its decline was more often than not to sloppily flee whatever area got too troublesome - India, Palestine, Greece - often leaving problems that remain with us today. And how can such "impressive political skill" be squared with the humiliation at the hands of the Americans at Suez in 1956?

Typical right-wing American literature (and the two that follow).

Nonetheless, Zakaria's substantive discussion of the future of American power is more insightful. The U.S. will continue its demographic growth through immigration and procreation. Although the Iraq War was the "apogée" of a kind of American power, the country will likely maintain a near monopoly on intercontinental military power for some time to come. America will remain the "indispensable nation," to use Madeleine Albright's phrase, for any question needing international concertation. The problem becomes one of encouraging America's better instincts. That the country not be tempted to use its power for selfish ends. He urges against empire, for an acceptance of rising powers, and recommends behavior like that of Franklin Roosevelt and George H.W. Bush. He cites the ineffectiveness of military force in the asymmetrical fight against terrorism ($1 trillion having been spent on military means and only $10 billion on civilian ones). Hozever, to a nation with military power, the imperial temptation is inevitable: "To a man who has a hammer, every problem looks like nails."

The answers are unclear. Zakaria says we need "(international) legitimacy" on issues from climate change to Darfur which leads to the problem of "how to get people to agree?" In all this hangs ever-heavily the question of the Iraq War. How can a just international system be established given the preponderance of American power, its ability to start wars in regions regardless of its inhabitants' feelings on the subject, and indeed drag numerous European governments along for the adventure despite the protests of their own citizens? He has no answer to this or to his own support for the Iraq War (like so many other "good Liberals," see Hoffmann vs. Zakaria and Tony Judt's "Bush's Useful Idiots"). He limits himself to a long, awkward footnote on his support of the invasion, with retrospective caveats on having a "larger force" and "international sanction". The recommendations and questions are not accompanied by anything on how a less imperial America and a more balanced world might be practically achieved. He does not suggest (say) that the inhabitants of regions affected by the U.S. should have a veto on the policies supposedly done in their name. Zakaria is reduced to pleading against the concept of eternal war in the name of total security: "We will never be able to prevent a small group of misfits from planning some terrible act of terror." He shows incomprehension towards "chest-thumping hysteria" and the fact that "[t]he strongest nation in the history of the world now sees itself as besieged by forces beyond its control." He advises, "the United States must make a much broader adjustment. It needs to stop conveying fear."

But this is only the beginning, for there are two Americas: the one Zakaria thought he joined and the one that exists. He is extremely critical of political realities in the U.S. which might as well be called "decadent". We have an "irresponsible national political culture" that is "proud to be despised abroad". The capital, "D.C., has become a bubble; smug and out of touch with the world outside." A venerable political system has been "captured by money, special interests, a sensationalist media, and ideological attack groups." At the same time, Zakaria waxes lyrical about America being "the first universal nation," on account of its acceptance and successful integration of huge numbers of immigrants from all corners of the world (indeed, an impressive feat). In contrast, he sees a defensive, selfish, narrow-minded America emerging. He writes of first moving to the U.S. as an 18-year old student: "America was a strikingly open and expansive country. Reagan embodied it." Yes Reagan, of all presidents, incarnated America's more broadminded and cosmopolitan side! There is something ridiculous in Zakaria's disappointed expectation that as America "globalized the world, it forgot to globalize itself." There is a strange, lame and almost pathetic quality to these observations and pleadings. The book concludes thus:

For America to thrive in this new and challenging era, for it to succeed amid the rise of the rest, it need fulfill only one test. It should be a place that is as inviting and exciting to the young student who enters the country today as it was for this awkward eighteen-year-old a generation ago.

Is one reading of a country, or a man who having married a girl under the intoxicating influence of love, rolls over some time later to discover that she was not without flaws and vices, not the picture of perfection he had imagined? Actually, the triumphs and idiosyncrasies of America are closely linked to it being an insular and indeed extremely parochial nation. But for Zakaria, evidently, "universal nations" speak English (and are wary of the creeping bilinguality from southern neighbors that might one day plague them like their northern neighbor), use only the Imperial System (alone, Zakaria notes, with Liberia and Myanmar), park their SUVs in pleasant suburbs (preferably in California), they don't know what's happening abroad (dramatized by this TED presentation), and "soccer" is certainly not the national pastime of predilection (but any number of sports with little appeal beyond North America can still have the qualitative "world" in the titles of their tournaments). In fact, the more the inhabitants of any country tout its "universality," the more they believe that their own little fraction of humanity is indeed the sum of human existence, the less they feel a need to interest themselves in the affairs and lives of those beyond their borders. Zakaria has forgotten that America is a really existing nation, which is to say a group of people, and not an idea that exists in the sublime abstractions of the mind.

A naturalization ceremony. Also see the 7-minute video Disney produced that U.S. customs shows at international airports.

Ultimately, the book never escapes its contradictions. The first between the "acultural," "universal" America of Zakaria's immigrant imagination (the one made up of lovely words like "democracy," "freedom" and "rule of law") and the America of really really existing human beings with their inevitable flaws, idiosyncrasies and particularities (Black, White, Southern, rural, working class, Establishment, hippie, Baptist...). The second tension, less personal and more conceptual, between Zakaria as a prophet of the triumph of the Third World (Fanon) and of the ideal of Western liberal capitalism (Fukuyama). His love for the ideal means he cannot bring himself to condemn the means for its propagation: centuries of European colonialism and hegemony in the Third World. There is a singular lack of engagement. Read Zakaria and one almost wonders if Indians should thank the British for conquering their land and, though leaving it in the same condition of abject poverty after 100 years of rule, at least in the meantime having taught them the good sense of speaking English (and the worship of melanin-deficiency). Was it beyond the imagination to suggest that the benefits of technical progress from West could (should) have been spread in the rest of the world without being subjugated by that civilization (indeed, following the Japanese example)? In the same vein, for all his talk of the universal interests of mankind, Zakaria has no answer to all the questions posed by the necessarily parochial and self-interested character of American power. His curious conception of national identification (parochial) leads him to total moral abdication (universal): "The Iraq War may be a tragedy or a noble endeavor, depending on your point of view." The latter may be a question of subjective experience but the former is not in doubt.

Not much remains after all this. For if the portraits are clichéd, the generalizations crude, and the critical engagement absent, what is the point of reading Fareed Zakaria? At the least, he has identified the most important development of our time and worked hard to discredit the false and pernicious narrative of the "Long War". In that sense he plays an important role in American political discourse. But he has come rather late. Asia has been "rising" for three decades. Its does only so much good to condemn the War on Terror after singing its praises all the way past the Rubicon. For this book at least, I do not think posterity will judge Zakaria to be much more than a Johnny-come-lately and the uncritical cheerleader of a era, someone who was incapable of asking the hard questions, let alone even beginning to answer them.

An Intellectual and the Boulder of Memory

2010-01-29T06:12:00.000-08:00

This article was also published in The Beaver under the title "The boulder of memory".

In 2008, British historian Tony Judt was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a motor neuron disease. Today, he is paralyzed from the neck down and cannot live without a wheezing breathing aid. ALS typically removes mobility but not sensation, a mixed blessing and a strange torture when on the verge of sleep one cannot reach for an itch (see Judt's moving thoughts on the subject in this short video with The Guardian). Last October, despite his paralysis Judt delivered an impassioned, two hour lecture defending welfare state. The sight, of this man under a blanket constantly pausing for air, to share the fruits of a life’s worth of reflection was at once pathetic and heroic. It inspired me to reread some of his works and try to draw out the essence of the man.

I do not want to say that Tony Judt is our greatest historian. He is not a thinker with a grand narrative or an overarching system, but is certainly a man with a method. Why care about history? For Judt, we cannot understand ourselves unless we remember where we came from. Today, we are intellectually lazy. It seems so easy now, as we recite the verses of freedom, democracy, mixed market economies and universalism; all laudable, no doubt, but it forces us to forget why often good, intelligent people became Communists or Fascists or so often chose war over peace. Why would Europeans cheer as they head towards the horrors of the trenches? Why would Russians wage war against themselves in the messianic hope and sheer terror of Communism? Why would Nazis attempt to annihilate and enslave entire races? Judt believes we have duty to remember some of this, to have the beginnings of understanding. To this end he set himself an aim of some ambition: to save the twentieth century – with all its marvels and terrors – from “the enormous condescension of posterity,” to paraphrase E.P Thompson. A man of the Left but unswervingly critical of its failings, he seems a more appropriate voice than most to redeem social democracy and the welfare state.

Though an obsessively European historian, Judt lives in the United States of America. There is something of that other great voice of reason, Stanley Hoffmann, in Judt’s choice to live, teach and write in North America. These are two men who have in part dedicated their lives to explaining Europe to Americans for whom the Old Continent is increasingly of purely touristic interest. This might have placed some constraints on Judt’s writing. He once bemoaned the “middle-brow political acceptability” of the “terribles simplificateurs” that are American public intellectuals. Indeed, one need only read a few of the cartoonish opinion pieces that grace the pages of America’s newspapers of record – those of Thomas Friedman or Charles Krauthammer for example – to understand what is meant and to shudder at what passes for “discourse”.

Yet, Judt never dumbed himself down or pandered to his audience. Many people have come under the withering criticism of his pen. The effect is devastating and memorable. The academic texts on the esoteric Marxism of Louis Althusser’s are “unreadable excursions into the Higher Drivel.” Judt writes of Tony Blair that “He conveys an air of deep belief, but no one knows in quite what.” But he is also not afraid to say things that might make him unpopular in his adopted country. He excoriated the American “Left” in a classic 2006 article on “the Strange Death of Liberal America”. In this work, Judt condemned the stunning array of liberal intellectuals who jumped onto the bandwagon of the War on Terror and the Iraq War, from opportunistic “converts” like Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman to even thoughtful writers like David Remnick and Michael Ignatieff. They were, for Judt, nothing more than “Bush’s useful idiots”.

But if Judt has railed against America’s “liberal armchair warriors”, his entire world view could be described as one of total opposition to the American Right – which has sometimes cost him. It is one thing to extol the virtues of the welfare state or to attack American Cold War triumphalism (notably the “naively self-congratulatory” accounts of the popular historian J.L. Gaddis). It is quite another to criticize Israel. Judt has written on the country’s “dark victory” in the 1967 Six Day War and of the criminal and stupid policy of sending more settlers to live in the West Bank. Characteristically, he was able to write harsher things in the liberal Israeli daily Ha’aretz than in the American media. Where criticism and praise for his work was “more measured” in Israel, in America it was often “hysterical”. Judt has gone so far as to advocate a one-state solution for Israel-Palestine, a position which, whatever its merits, is one that requires great courage to take in America. As a result of this he lost, among other things, his seat at The New Republic’s editorial board.

Still, even as Judt is an engaged intellectual – indeed, one with an agenda – this does not lead him to falsify or exaggerate or mislead. He would rather us merely understand what has occurred. How else can one interpret his magnum opus, Postwar? This brick-like 900-page tome is something of a chronological encyclopedia of European history since the Second World War. Judt could have written, as the title suggests, a triumphant story of how the Europeans came together after total war to achieve peace, prosperity and an embryonic union. Instead, there is no imposed narrative, no theme except the subject itself. The book suffers from this, sometimes seeming like a series of unrelated articles. But it also a sign of the author’s integrity that he cannot distort history in an artificial, preconceived narrative. In such a self-conscious bid to make himself the historian of Europe, he sought to give Europeans a history, a sense of the road they traveled from the abyss that were the years 1914 to 1945. Judt writes as an heir to those “chance survivors of the deluge” who were European intellectuals – among them Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus – who having lived through war, Nazism, collaboration and Communism, had no choice but to write of it. There is something autobiographical when Judt says of these writers that “they were constrained, like Camus’s Sisyphus, to push the boulder of memory and understanding up the thankless hill of public forgetting for the rest of their lives.”

Is the work of Sisyphus futile? One could be excused for having that impression. We need constant reminding that the welfare state was born of the misery of depression, that the desire for peace comes from the horrors of war. And need it be stressed that the paths of both Stalinism and Nazism passed through the industrialized death of the Great War? The work of remembrance never ends. Judt himself has not stopped working, despite the temptation of suicide. And now, even as he is subjected to the quiet torture of his bodily prison, even as this article approaches the tone of the obituary, I cannot help but hope for more words from this most admirable of intellectuals. The Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci produced his celebrated Prison Notebooks under the duress and censorship of Mussolini’s jails. The great theorist of postcolonial revolution Frantz Fanon penned the most eloquent lines of his Wretched of the Earth under the feverish pain of the leukemia that would soon kill him. The mind stays even as the body fails. If Tony Judt cannot heal, then let him produce a few lines more.

On American Interventions

2010-01-16T08:14:00.000-08:00

This piece was published in The Beaver under the decidedly more imaginative title "Dominance at the drop of presidents’ hats". A few might protest that there isn't nuance or balance in this piece. I can only plead that there is only so much one can do in 900 words, but one can list a few little-known, elementary facts and attempt to draw a truth from them.

The United States of America is the only country today with the ability to independently send large amounts of forces almost anywhere in the world. To those who face the prospect of American bombs and boys in their country, it can be hard to fathom why Washington might choose to intervene in their forlorn corner of the Earth, and not others.

The answer cannot usually be found in terms of “vital national interest”. The most hard-headed “realist” scholars – from Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan on Vietnam to Stephen Waltz and John Mearsheimer on Iraq – have tended to oppose America’s wars in the Third World. The countries of the South are underdeveloped, often fractious and unstable, typically lacking in industry and technology. So, when (as is frequently the case) our American presidents bring up Hitler and Stalin, World War and Cold War, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, we can only be somewhat dubious at the contrast.

American wars of intervention are overwhelmingly “optional”. Prior to waging war in Korea, General Douglas MacArthur had said the peninsula held little strategic value. The “fall” of South Vietnam to Communism could hardly mean that the Viet Cong guerrillas would now swim across the South China Sea to seize Malaysia or Indonesia (Lyndon Johnson once said they would be on the shores of Hawaii). Equally, in places like Rwanda, Bosnia or Kosovo, where “humanitarian intervention” is called upon or practiced, there is rarely a serious American national security interest. One could say the same with Iraq. There was no reason why Saddam Hussein with his little rump state would be more difficult to live with, even if he had nuclear weapons, than Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China.

American interventions occur because American leaders feel like it. But if the idea of war holds a certain mystique, Americans do not like wars. Or, at least, they do not like the cost in youth and taxes. So if American leaders feel like waging a war, it is usually because they think it will be an easy thing. Yet the “Wilsonian”, “universalist” and “liberal democratic” impulses of the American ideology place high standards. Suddenly they expect flowering Republics and economic miracles wherever American boots are, so many countries – whether composed of illiterate peasants or warring ethnicities – promise to become post-war Japans and West Germanies.

The record of past interventions, however, is not very encouraging. In Vietnam, “counter-insurgency” meant the pure and simple removal of the rural population. In Panama, the U.S. invasion of 1989 led to much chaos, looting and death. In Bosnia and Kosovo, huge amounts of international aid and ten and fifteen years of peace have not made Serb, Croat, Bosnian or Albanian any more likely to live in the same democracy. Their economies continue to be extremely weak, with over 40 per cent unemployment. All the disasters in Iraq – human, economic, ethnic, anarchic – were presaged in past interventions. Against this record, the invasion of Iraq can only be attributed to the Bush era national security clique’s inordinate sense of themselves and their power. That they in fact were gods in whose hands the Arabs were only so much malleable putty that they could reshape in their own image.

But we are not there today. We have a new, good, liberal president, one whom Europeans cannot accuse of pandering to religious bigots or of flaunting a crass American nationalism. Yet it is Barack Obama who is sending 30,000 men on a “quick-fix” mission to Afghanistan, as George W. Bush did in Iraq in 2007. Obama goes for political reasons above all. He campaigned relentlessly on this “good war,” largely to avoid the curse of Jimmy Carter. But more than that, it is difficult for any politician to concede defeat after so much effort, particularly in America.

Yet we can be reasonably certain, once the foreigners leave, that Afghanistan will again face “anarchy” and “warlords,” and no doubt a few of the latter will choose the moniker “Islamic” for good measure. The notion that the “Afghan National Army” will be tripled in size in half a decade and will be able to “secure the country” even as the U.S. and NATO are incapable of the task (and the attempt costs several times Afghanistan’s entire GDP every year) is manifestly absurd. Yet Obama must fight.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson chose to begin the movement that would lead to over 550,000 Americans in Vietnam, just so that the Republicans would not be able to accuse him of “losing” 20 million more Asians to Communism. The Vietnam War’s cost was great, wrecking Johnson’s half-fulfilled domestic programs, ruining an endeavor that might have given America a true welfare state. In purely economic terms, the Afghan War is likely to cost at least as much over the next few years as Obama’s vaunted project of universal health insurance. Of course, Johnson did not have the embarrassment of being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in his first year in office, only to use the occasion to expound on theories of just war. Those time-tested words return: the first time as a tragedy, the second as a farce.

The Suicide of a Ruling Class (book review)

2009-12-30T23:37:00.000-08:00

David Halberstam
The Best and the Brightest

History – remembrance of a past – has a strange way of shifting over time. Contemporary history is conceived in the minds of each in the uncertainties of the moment. Our ideas of events are shaped by our limited experience of them, our position in relation to them, the haphazard reports of media. A confused conception exists in the general consciousness. The work of historians destroys this confusion, replacing it not with what occurred, but with the system, the chronology, the morality tale that their years of reflection and writing have brought them to. We hope through this process of filtered and selective memory to be wiser for the triumphs and failures of our predecessors.

David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest is one of those classics that defines events that new generations were unable to experience themselves. It is huge, like all major works dealing with the Vietnam War it needs to be downright Homeric in its scale. It needs to be epic. Here, the Greek tragedy is provided its magnitude by the contrast between the promise and brilliance of a new generation of American leaders, sharply counterpoised with the disaster they caused in Vietnam. It is a vast, sprawling collection of anecdotes and sketches that attempt to show how these people brought up the catastrophe.

The promise is apparent from the beginning. There is the glamour of John F. Kennedy’s “Camelot”. There is a sense that this young, modern, industrial nation might no longer be dominated by the “old White Southerners from small towns” that ran Congress. After Kennedy’s death, the promise paradoxically becomes, if anything, greater. Lyndon Johnson leads the Democrats to a glorious, overwhelming victory in the 1964 campaign. A man who was once the master of the Senate as a legislator, would now pass the great acts to redeem America: desegregating the South, launching the Great Society and the War on Poverty, and putting down the bases for healthcare provision for the neediest and the old.

Though LBJ could never replace the Golden Boy that was JFK, he could console himself with the shining CVs of his cabinet. And indeed it was impressive. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara is a number cruncher who saved Ford Motor Company. He had once been a brilliant student of philosophy and even as Secretary maintained a voracious appetite for fact, so that even as others in government “frolicked, he plowed through the unabridged Toynbee.” General Maxwell Taylor is a politically savvy soldier-scholar and an apparent expert on limited wars and counter-insurgency. Averell Harriman is an old Kremlinologist who – a septuagenarian – can still be said to be ambitious. General William Westmoreland, the man to eventually command 500,000 men in Vietnam, has a brilliant record and could not have a profile more suited for the air of a general than if God himself had chiseled him from marble. We have detailed sketches of all of these men in all their talents, flaws, ambitions and failings. The question becomes: how did these Captains of Industry, Rhodes Scholars, Harvard Deans, Ivy Leaguers and West Pointers – the “best” products of the American ruling class – come to fail so completely?

This is not a book about Vietnam. As such, there will be some difficulty in understanding why U.S. policy failed there, why propping the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem did not succeed, why the Americans had to intervene. Diem is repeatedly and casually described as “feudal” but there is little on how he ruled. We get a sense that the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam, Free Vietnam) is unreal. That the Americans fell to their own illusions as to the solidity of their creation when the CIA established the Diem regime on the corpse of France's puppet "State of Vietnam" in the crucial years of 1954-55. But there is not the verve or color of Halberstam’s descriptions of the Americans. Equally, the war itself is not the subject of this book. And while strategic hamlets, napalm, defoliation and free fire zones are mentioned, Halberstam is concerned with the war's origins, and not its nature.

It is a book about the United States of America and why that nation unleashed all the marvelous terrors of modern, industrial civilization on a small, peripheral peasant country. A country so weak and so marginal, it is hard to conceive why one would fight there at all. It is a book about why the Liberals came to doom themselves and their dreams. And here we are treated to all the crimes of American liberalism and all the complicities with those of American conservatism. It begins early. It is Kennedy who campaigns on a non-existent “missile gap” with the Russians (McNamara proposes adding 950 missiles to the U.S. arsenal for domestic political reasons, not strategic necessity.) It is Kennedy who reappoints J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles to head the FBI and CIA. They would go on, respectively, to spy on domestic leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and JFK himself, and continue hair-brained secret interventions abroad. It is Kennedy who refuses to overturn the irrational policy of not recognizing the government of the most populous country in the world, an absurdity that would last for three decades. It is Robert F. Kennedy who is the most hawkish in the early years. It is Lyndon Johnson who goes to war in South Vietnam, apparently because he could not face the domestic political consequences of “Losing Vietnam” as Harry S. Truman had once “Lost China”.

It is a dour business to see this descent into the bloody abyss. The causes emerge from the text. And here, disaster has many fathers, many necessary causes. Perhaps the most serious is the Liberal tendency to overcompensate for appearing to not be sufficiently “anti-communist”. There were no experts on Asia left in the American government, no people with “real expertise at the operational level.” We have touching portraits of Foreign Service China experts like John Stewart Service and John Patton Davies who were purged in the McCarthy Era merely for predicting the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek. In the 1960s, Foreign Service officers would be more cautious before stepping out of line. We have the United States exporting fears of the Communist Soviet Union to the Third World, describing all Communist national movements as the “new colonialism of a Soviet communist empire”. As though there were no such thing as Titoism, that Russia was now capable of transcontinental domination, that Mao was not capable of independence. There is the preponderant power of the United States itself, deriving from its size, its technology, its economy. If one has power, one will after all be tempted to use it, and Halberstam is on to something when he identifies “the enemy” as “bigness, technology and the government itself.” There is American nationalism, the mythology of the Second World War, and movies with John Wayne. There is finally, and this is eternal and universal, “the escalatory logic of White Crosses.” As one commits one soldier one commits the whole prestige of the nation. As one soldiers dies in an endeavor, it becomes all the more difficult to abandon it, so much easier to sacrifice more soldiers.

It is then, a rather discouraging affair. Ostensibly, it is one that we should learn from. And here we can identify crude parallels. There was the faddism with “counter-insurgency” (now shortened to “COIN”). There were the usual knee-jerk hawkish journalists like Marguerite Higgins and Joe Alsop, always ready to attack the manhood of those who govern if they are not eager for death. There is the temptation by the governing class to mask the war, to hide its costs, to pretend it is not even occurring, lest the people turn against it once they realize the burden this will be for them in blood and taxes. And here, why should we not be pessimistic? That generation of Liberals killed liberalism in America. It has still not recovered. We might question what this means for our own time, as the new “Best and Brightest” with our own prodigal son prove so underwhelming, so banal, so typical of the American State.

Perhaps it is normal. Doves and Good Men do not tend to fare well. They become militarists or are destroyed. Mahatma Gandhi was murdered, as were Anwar Sadat and Jean Jaurès. Léon Blum was tried by Philippe Pétain for treason. The German Social Democrats voted for war credits in 1914. The American Democrats voted for war in 1964 and in 2002. The British "Left," of all things, joined them in the latter year. Nationalism is at fault, an inordinate sense of one’s importance, one’s perspective, one’s abilities in the world. And, make no mistake, the idea of America is infinitely greater than the United States of America could ever be – indeed – greater than anything that could exist on this Earth. So all our Good Men, our Liberals, our Democrats, our Socialists, our Doves govern and they sin. The power destroys and disfigures them, makes the rotten from the inside out. In their later years they might look in the mirror but they can scarcely recognize themselves. Dan Ellsberg had been in the U.S. government during the 1960s escalation but went on to oppose the war and leak the Pentagon Papers. He later bumped into an old acquaintance and was asked: “Are you the Dan Ellsberg I knew in College?” He replied, “I haven’t been for a long time, but I am again.”

A Good Man's Wars (book review)

2009-12-20T23:23:00.000-08:00

George Orwell
Homage to Catalonia

George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is the classic account of his experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Here Fascists, Revolutionaries, and a tantalizing Utopia all appear. But I was first struck by how the book fit neatly into the usually lighthearted genre of travel writing. Here Orwell, like so many Englishmen, writes of his trip to Spain – as he might be writing of France or Italy – as an escape to stuck up, dour old England. The country is loved, hated, romanticized, as we might expect. The Spaniards are disastrously disorganized – all actions (even vital) are always pushed to mañana – but they are good-hearted. The countryside and towns are splendid, though Orwell only had time to appreciate them after being discharged. He communicates in “Bad Spanish”. He meets Italians, Englishmen and Frenchmen who had also joined the militia (including their wicked accents). One could almost be reading the experiences of an Erasmus exchange student (centered in, of all places, Barcelona, the quintessential student/international Anglo-experience city). One is only brought back to that time by the occasional incongruity, the shocking statement from another world, as for instance when Orwell describes a young Italian militiaman’s face as having “both candour and ferocity in it; also the pathetic reverence that illiterate people have for their supposed superiors.”

Orwell is here because he is a radical revolutionary and is willing to die for it. Orwell had been a colonial policeman in Burma where he had seen the excesses and humiliations of British imperialism. He had gone to Eton with the offspring of the English ruling class but willingly went into poverty in the slums of London and Paris to see the conditions of the working class. Orwell hated it: the wretched poverty and brutal working conditions of the proletariat combined with that self-satisfied bourgeoisie that guarded its wealth and privileges behind a careful set of norms and prejudices. So Orwell loves Barcelona. He is enthralled with the Revolution. People say “Salud” instead of “Buenas Dias,” they call each other “Comrade” instead of “Don” or “Señor”. They no longer even tip in the restaurants as waiters are now the equals of patrons. He is unconcerned with the fact that all the churches have been wrecked (Orwell assures us, the Catholic Church in Spain “was a racket”). Things are run down, the war means deprivation, but Orwell satisfies himself with symbols: “Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving.” To Orwell there is no doubt: “I recognized it immediately as something worth fighting for. Also I believe that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers’ State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily come over to the worker’s side”.

So Orwell joins the militia and goes to the front. And here one would excuse him if he had become disillusioned. He does not embellish the fighting against Francisco Franco’s hated “Fascists”. Rather, we are constantly torn between war as so demanding on human beings as to reveal their nobler side, and war as at bottom a nasty, meaningless, if not outright boring thing. Orwell spent most of the serving in trenches, sometimes commanding thirty or so men. We meet a motley crew of Spaniards, teenagers and foreigners. They hardly have any weapons, any training or indeed basic equipment (like uniforms). The peasants curse both armies as crops are trampled and go unharvested. There us very little activity for weeks on end as the enemy mostly sticks to its side, the Republicans to theirs. Orwell seems more terrified of the bitter cold of spending a night in a trench in winter (or the occasional, necessary, bathing in a river) than of Fascist soldiers. He is as explicit as he can be about the unglamorous, downright unhygienic side of war. On the irrepressible ability of lice to spread at the front, he says:

I think pacifists might find it helpful to illustrate their pamphlets with enlarged photographs of lice. Glory of war, indeed! In war all soldiers are lousy, at least when it is warm enough. The men who fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae – everyone of them had lice crawling over his testicles.

Orwell does participate in a little fighting, including a diversionary offensive. It is mostly graceless, however, and brought to an end by his being wounded. Here too it is a meaningless, empty thing. Orwell is shot in the neck, out of nowhere, and crumples to the ground, convinced it was friendly fire. Obviously he survived the event but it was a close run thing, and he thought he had permanently lost his voice for a time.

Contrasting this is a sense – precisely because war is such a wretched thing – that to fight for a good cause is something noble too. It tugs at him. Orwell notes that wartime naturally turns even liberal regimes into despotic ones, he describes all the discomforts in detail, he warns against the dangers of Spanish hospitals where the nurses will steal your valuables… and yet the war is also a romantic thing. There is camaraderie in shared sacrifice. Orwell notes that whereas the Republican government’s factions of “Trotskyists,” Stalinists and Anarchists were at each others’ throats, at the front the vicious politicking of the cities was did not exist among these groups’ various militias. He even allows himself a little rhetorical flourish, once riding a train and seeing what “was like an allegorical picture of war; the trainload of fresh men gliding proudly up the line, the maimed men sliding slowly down, and all the while the guns on the open trucks making one’s heart leap as guns always do, and reviving that pernicious feeling, so difficult to get rid of, that war is glorious after all.” Even lousy, disheveled and maimed, the spirit of 1914 is not yet lost.

There is also, perhaps especially, the internal political war. Here it is of the constant, petty, and dangerous internecine fighting between the Republican government’s various leftwing factions. I cannot pretend to understand the intricacies of the P.O.U.M., C.N.T., F.A.I. and P.S.U.C. Here Orwell sees the decay of his Revolution as (paradoxically) the (Stalinist) Communists gradually take power, so bourgeois dress, norms and hierarchy return. There is almost a civil war within the civil war, as Communists and anti-Stalinists establish barricades in Barcelona, eyeing each other for days in case the tension should flare up into fighting in the streets.

We get a sense of the vicious sectarianism that is so characteristic of the hard left. Orwell spends a great deal of time correcting the “lies” that were spread in much of the Communist European press that described as “Fascist” those parties opposed to the Communist Party takeover in Catalonia. (We also learn something of his fringe status that he felt the need to rebuke what was a rather marginal movement in England.) This is Orwell’s education in totalitarianism. Many of the themes that would later find their way into 1984 are present. Onetime allies become eternal enemies as Communist thugs hurl the epithet “Trotskyist” at their rivals. Orwell’s own friends vanish one by one, held up incommunicado in Spanish prisons, where it seems inevitable they will die of neglect. The war against the Fascists, the real war, becomes a mere background to the internal struggle for supremacy. His Revolution is dying.

Orwell leaves Spain as his membership of a non-Stalinist militia makes him a public enemy. He returns to an England that must have seemed rather unreal. If one is not in the mines, slums or factories, it is not an unpleasant place. Things are secure, timely, predictable. English travelers to Spain write in the papers that things are going fine because they “do not really believe in the existence of anything outside the smart hotels.” Always the sense that safe life in wealthy, stable, English-speaking countries makes one rather aloof and unable to fully understand the experiences of others. While in Spain, he had the inability to “shake off” the British notion that the police could not arrest him so long as he had done nothing wrong. In England the milk bottles, the cricket matches, and Royal weddings are there as they seemingly always have. But such calm in contrast with the war and upheaval of Spain does not bring Orwell peace of mind: “sometimes I fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.”

Homage to Catalonia is Orwell’s love letter to a Revolution. We are reminded of Orwell’s radicalism. It is striking how he spends no time at all to addressing the arguments of the Right (by which we mean any capitalist). They are enemies and that is a given. He is solely concerned about the nature and debates of the revolutionary Left. It says something of his priorities even as the radicalism of his legacy is carefully excised from our consciousness. It reminds us to of the banality, the inadequacy of contemporary politics. Who among the Left today would be willing to brave life and limb for their ideals? Our imaginations are shut. We cannot conceive of a better society, of another form of human organization. We dare not even try. And this is perhaps Orwell’s goal above all. To make us understand that there was a moment, however brief, in which he saw a window into another world, that the foundations of this one are not so solid. And if there is another world, that good men must risk themselves if we are to attain it.

The War that Lingers

2009-10-04T18:21:00.000-07:00

As part of their “Veterans” mini-series, Al Jazeera English has an excellent, if brief, documentary on the Algerian War. The half-hour video provides a concise narrative of the war that pitted France and its 1-million European settlers in Algeria against the native Arabs and their revolutionary movement, the National Liberation Front (FLN). In addition, there are also interviews (as the title suggests) of those who participated in the war and how haunts their lives still.

The show is particularly good at conveying the complexities of a chaotic situation. This was not merely a war between European and Arab, but also, within both groups. On the one hand, thousands of Harkis, Algerian soldiers who fought on the side of the French, were brutally massacred at the end of the war by the revolutionaries, an action which the French government did nothing to prevent. On the other, the OAS (Secret Army Organization) was a group of hard core French officer and settlers who conspired against their own government when it looked like it was turning towards peace, committing numerous terrorist attacks and making several attempts on President Charles de Gaulle’s life.

It is a good introduction to the Algerian War through its lingering consequences. From the French soldier who still has nightmares from witnessing Algerian prisoners having their throats slit under French orders. To the descendents of Harkis in France where they were put into camps and marginalized by the French and feared reprisals from more recent immigrants from Algeria who still hated them as collaborators. In so doing, the horrors and the moral ambiguities of the war are ably drawn out.

The documentary does not need to draw explicit parallels for it to make us think on today’s controversies. It is still unclear today exactly who in the French government knew about the widespread and systematic use of torture by French forces in Algeria. In 2000, General Jacques Massu, a resister during the Second World War who commanded during the Battle of Algiers and remained to de Gaulle, said torture “was not necessary in time of war” and that they could have “very well gotten along without it.” Another General, Paul Aussaresses, caused controversy in 2000 when he began to make interviews and books defending the torture he himself said he had committed in Algeria. Here the director leaves us on a chilling note, letting the one-eyed nonagenarian Aussaresses sing (!)what he calls “my song,” one by Edith Piaf: “Non, rien de rien, non je ne regrette rien.” Sinister lullaby.

The Economist, Caldwell, and "Eurabia"

2009-09-27T09:20:00.000-07:00

Parts of this post were published as letters in The Economist, a response to their review of Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe. He held his opening lecture for his book at LSE ("Can Europe be the same with different people in it?"). I was able to attend and ask a question. (See here, search "Caldwell", includes video).

Caveat: Because I am generalizing about Muslims in the whole of Europe, I will not do justice to the fact that there is no one "Muslim community" within Europe, or even within individual European nations. Coming from various nations in sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Southeast Asia, there is a good deal less coherence to "Muslim Europeans" than the term might imply.

Books on Islam's coming takeover of Europe are a veritable cottage industry, of which I think Mark Steyn's puerile sensationalism tops the lot. Caldwell's most recent book, however, is perhaps the most dangerous because it purports to be the most “respectable” version of the “Eurabia thesis” to date. The thesis has many parts, the most prominent being that we will see an “Islamized” Europe because of allegedly relentless Muslim immigration and congenitally high birth rates. It is the nightmare of European anti-immigration parties concerned with those with darker hues walking their streets and the crass fantasy of neoconservatives that effeminate, flaccid, relativist Europe should pay the ultimate price for its Neville Chamberlainism. Let me say a few things.

It would have been good for The Economist to debunk some of the “unremitting pessimism” from Caldwell and others on Europe's “Islamization”. It is at odds with basic facts. In the United Kingdom, immigration from India, the West Indies and non-Muslim parts of Africa means a majority of ethnic minorities are not in fact Muslims at all. In Germany, half a century of “mass” immigration means just over 1 in 20 residents of that country are Muslims. France has the largest Muslim population in Europe with perhaps 6 million, of which Algeria has provided the largest number. According to the CIA and other sources, while France has a fertility rate of about 2 per woman, for Algeria the figure is only 1.8. Cultural essentialism reveals its bankruptcy yet again.

More broadly, It is a grave mistake to portray the problems of Muslims in Europe as chiefly attributable to “culture”. Obviously, the conservatism of some recent arrivals, especially from rural parts of the Third World (not just Muslims, mind you), can be at odds with the post-feminist values of Europe (themselves a relatively recent phenomenon: Swiss women could not vote until 1971, to rape one’s wife only became a crime in England in 1991). For most European Muslims, cultural conservatism is not the issue. Children are quickly socialized to the materialism, consumerism, values and sexual mores that characterize Western society today.

I do not claim that there is a seamless multicultural Utopia in Europe. However, a statement like “a surprising number of immigrants have proved ‘unmeltable’” could only be made by someone with a rather rosy and idealized view of the American “melting pot”. Immigrants to the U.S. have tended to form their own ethnic neighborhoods that can be extremely durable, if not permanent. De facto residential segregation and somewhat defensive identity politics among ethnic groups is the norm in most countries. Muslims in Europe have proven no different. It should not be surprising that these “new Europeans” should maintain their identities as Muslims (or, forth that matter, as Arabs or Turks) while also being British or French. These identities, incidentally, are partly based on the need for community organization and consciousness against the varying degrees of hostility towards Muslims that exist in Europe. The existence of such “hyphen identities” is hardly a sign of failure in itself, any more than is the existence of Hispanic Americans or Malaysian Chinese.

The issue is not so much culture as ethnicity or, to use a good French term, “communitarianism”. The Economist notes that Caldwell “echoes” the warnings of the anti-immigration British politician Enoch Powell’s “warnings all those years ago.” It would have been nice to actually quote those warnings. Powell’s famous 1968 Rivers of Blood speech spoke of a woman who “finds excreta pushed through her letterbox. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies.” The issue for Powell was not “culture” but race. His prejudice was aimed at the presence of Blacks and South Asians in and of themselves (whether Hindu, Christian or Muslim). At the beginnings of mass immigration in the 1950s, the image of the “native” of Africa or Asia was still roughly that of the poems of Rudyard Kipling or of Hergé’s Tin Tin in the Congo: a child and a savage, either comical or dangerous, to be educated and to be disciplined. It never occurred to Europeans that they might live in Europe, with their own lives, viewpoints and rights.

For this reason, it is absolutely ridiculous for The Economist to say that “[f]or the most part European countries have bent over backwards to accommodate the sensibilities of the newcomers.” Ever since Muslims were invited into Europe for economic reasons in the 1950s, they have been subject to hostility and discrimination by the host populations. One example was the Paris Massacre of 1961 where between 40 and 200 peaceful Algerian protesters were killed by French police. This event was officially denied until 1998. Obviously, the unflattering reality of anti-Muslim prejudice was rarely discussed. Moralistic Europeans preferred to think Americans and South Africans had a monopoly on race prejudice. The question of minorities in Europe today is dominated, not by religious practice, but by ethnicity, racism, marginalization, social dysfunction, poor relations with the police, and so forth. This is why relations with other marginalized minorities in Europe (such as non-Muslim Blacks, Gypsies and secular ethnic Albanians) are not noticeably better than with Muslims. The allegedly unchanging essence of “Islam” is about as relevant to the problems of Muslims in Europe today as Catholic theology is to the Northern Irish question.

The question is not whether young girls who choose to cover their hair are destroying Europe. The question is why second and third generation Muslim Europeans are expected to become uniquely good, well-adjusted citizens when they are left to fester in the marginalized, decaying and “containable” ghettos of many of Europe’s major cities. And here, the example of the U.S. is informative.

There is a long history of internal migration of African Americans to cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. The Americans crammed a brimming population into slums and ghettos, letting the problem fester for decades, until the vicious circles of social decay and state crackdown now seem inescapable. Since the 1980s, the American prison population has quadrupled, with a very large proportion of that expansion being driven by the imprisonment of Black men. The problem is nowhere near so bad in Europe, though the proportion of minorities has steadily grown. Social problems are tackled less by systematic incarceration (often for non-violent crimes) which turns petty crooks into hardened criminals and more by stronger welfare states that provide basic economic security for those at risk. There is cause for optimism.

Numbers: Past and Future Cost of the Afghan War

2009-09-20T10:12:00.000-07:00

Given all the talk about the coming escalation in Afghanistan, I thought I'd put some figures on past and potential future cost of the war.

These are the past levels U.S. troops in Afghanistan. President Obama increased it by 21,000 this year. Talk of further escalation suggests there will be anywhere between 20,000 and 45,000 extra soldiers sent in the coming year. Casualties have roughly shadowed troop levels.

These numbers include Europeans and Canadians fighting in Afghanistan. Until 2008, America's NATO allies contributed roughly half of all forces in the country. These numbers do not include military contractors employed by the Department of Defense, of which we know comparatively little. In Afghanistan, at over 68,000, they outnumber American forces 1.3 to 1. Over 76% are local Afghans, almost 15% are Americans, the remaining 10% being other nationalities. (See the Congressional Research Service's detailed report on the subject.) Like the number of uniformed U.S. military personnel, their number too has been increasing.

The financial burden of the Afghan War up to today has been about $189 billion for the U.S. The cost in treasure, like that in blood, has also run roughly parallel to troop levels.

Source: CRS

What conclusions can we draw? Though every death is a tragedy, the number of U.S. casualties in Afghanistan has not been crippling. Top U.S. officials pushing for escalation have said the renewed effort will take at least 5 years. We can assume the war will cost at least $350 billion without further escalation, and potentially over $500 billion depending on how many more soldiers are sent. To put these figures in perspective, Senator Baucus's healthcare bill has a value of $857 billion over 10 years. After escalation, the Afghan War is likely to cost about as much per year as some of the healthcare reform proposals.

The costs of the Afghan War will threaten the viability of Obama's domestic project. While the financial burden may become equal to the administration's signature domestic reform, there are also the less quantifiable political costs. Public opinion among NATO allies has largely turned against the war and the U.S. may find itself increasingly alone there despite Obama's seduction of Europe. More seriously, the American public is trailing Euro-Canadian opinion. Now, a growing majority of Americans claim they oppose the war (also see a detailed WaPo-NBC poll). Obama, who has repeatedly used calculated ambiguity and even a certain vacuity, will have to make a firm decision regarding an unenviable political dilemma. Obama campaigned on Afghanistan, largely, I believe, as a way of protecting him from baseless attacks from the Right that he would be "weak on defense". He is in a bind. In attempting to escape the fate of Jimmy Carter he may be embracing that of Lyndon Johnson.

NATO has New Supreme Allied Commander...

2009-09-11T19:19:00.000-07:00

...and he is French!

Air Force General Stéphane Abrial is now one of NATO's two Supreme Allied Commanders. Given France's long and difficult history with NATO and its gradual re-integration into the organization since the end of the Cold War (which Sarkozy more or less finished), there is no absence of symbolism in having the first non-American Supreme Commander of NATO be a Frenchman.

I have to say I don't entirely understand the new post. Technically, Abrial is Supreme Allied Commander Transformation (SACT), based in Norfolk, Virginia. He is replacing an American Marine General, James Mattis. The SACT is charged with adapting NATO to the future at a time when the Alliance's role is in doubt as European and American publics turn against the war in Afghanistan. More symbolism for you! This is the first time France has been at the head of a major alliance since Marshal Ferdinand Foch was Commander in Chief of the Western Front in the Great War (1918).

France's reintegration into the Alliance has been long overdue. During the Cold War, it would have been natural for France, as the most presitigious continental European state (divided Germany was marked "atomic battlefield"), to have a central role in the coalition against the Soviet Union. France's costly and doomed wars of decolonization in Southeast Asia and North Africa meant the country was partly absent during NATO's formative years. In the 1960s, Charle de Gaulle decided on a new strategy of semi-membership of NATO that hoped to make France escape nuclear annihilation in a potential U.S.-Soviet War (possibly started over some nonsense in Asia). Since the end of the Cold War, the Gaullist position has lost many of its merits. It is laudable that France looks to be becoming a fully fledged partner as the Alliance at it attempts to adapt to the needs of a rapidly changing world.

"Afghan Options"

2009-09-07T14:47:00.000-07:00

A really cool defense blog by an American helicopter pilot goes through some of the more recent Afghan debate. The options:
* Withdrawal (Will, Walt)
* Nation-building (Clinton, McChrystal)
* Minimalist approach, IE, status quo (Biden, Jim Jones)

I don't think number 3, by the way, can be repackaged to be different to what has been done for the past 8 years.

George Will Rediscovers Paleoconservatism

2009-09-03T12:35:00.000-07:00

George Will, digging in on his call to leave Afghanistan, now has the same prescription for Iraq.

He notes the comment of one WaPo journalist who claims the presence of U.S. soldiers "serves as a check on Iraqi military and political leaders' baser and more sectarian instincts." To this he responds:

After almost 6 1/2 years, and 4,327 American dead and 31,483 wounded, with a war spiraling downward in Afghanistan, it would be indefensible for the U.S. military -- overextended and in need of materiel repair and mental recuperation -- to loiter in Iraq to improve the instincts of corrupt elites. If there is a worse use of the U.S. military than "nation-building," it is adult supervision and behavior modification of other peoples' politicians.

Did the surge work? Will violence increase? Either way, Will wants the boys home: "If, in spite of contrary evidence, the U.S. surge permanently dampened sectarian violence, all U.S. forces can come home sooner than the end of 2011. If, however, the surge did not so succeed, U.S. forces must come home sooner." All roads lead to home it seems.

This isn't the typical conservative response, mind you. Most conservatives, both the base and the intellectuals, appear to support the Afghanistan escalation although their position on Iraq is less clear. Here is a breakdown of some of the conservatives who have written against Will on Afghanistan. Most are limited to putting on their best best Churchill and MacArthur impressions. Fred Kagan deals with some specifics although he puts a lot of faith in the Afghan National Army.

The best and worst criticism I think is from Peter Wehner. In "Will's Loss of Nerve" he both basically attacks Will's manhood and quite rightly points out that he is a total flip-flopper. In the past 8 years, one could scarcely have found a better proponent of war in the name of both freedom and security (America's and everyone else's).

Will's shift is characteristic of American Conservatism. It has always lurched violently from decade to decade from stubborn isolationism to fervent crusade and back. It is a schizophrenic tendency I find quite disturbing and, historically, disastrous. I suspect we will see many more conservatives disown "Wilsonian idealism" and "nation-building" to return to their 90s-era soft isolationism. Today, incidentally, I don't think that would be such a bad thing.

Escalation in Afghanistan: The Debate

2009-08-31T09:50:00.000-07:00

Two escalators (bottom), one WTFer, and one indecider.

9 pieces to understand what is going on:

1) WaPo breaks down the new polls: 1/2 of Americans believe the Afghan War is not worth it, 1/4 are for escalation (above the 21,000 earlier this year), 45% want to decrease troop levels. The administration is going against its (presumably safe) liberal base and has much, much more support from conservatives on this issue.

2) National security expert Anthony Cordesman explains why escalation is necessary in "How to Lose in Afghanistan". He says the US/NATO have been losing over the last 8 years because of insufficient resources. Victory is possible thanks to the vigorous new leadership of General Stanley McChrystal and Ambassador (General) Karl Eikenberry, the concentration of civil-military powers in those two without Washington "micro-managing", and, most of all, more money and soldiers. (McChrystal's predecessor, General David McKiernan, was fired in mysterious circumstances, an action unheard of since MacArthur.) Cordesman notes the debate within the U.S. foreign policy elite, saying that "strong elements in the White House, State Department and other agencies" are opposing the new move. The threat: "an enduring regional mess" and a sanctuary for Al Qaeda." He concludes rather cautiously: "We have a reasonable chance of victory if we properly outfit and empower our new team in Afghanistan".

3) Dexter Filkins at the NYT reports on McChrystal's assessment of the situation: "serious, but winnable." So long as he has the resources to do it. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and NATO Secretary General Anders Rasmussen don't emphasize American soldiers, but Afghan ones: "I would not exclude the possibility that we need more combat troops, but first and foremost I would say that we need to increase significantly the number of Afghan soldiers".

4) There are the dribs and drabs from McChrystal himself... The actions of the past few months - his new "protect the people, don't destroy the enemy" counter-insurgency (COIN) guide, the "new strategy", his appointment as a COIN expert, the emphasis on the Afghan army - appear to me an attempt to rehabilitate the Afghan War the way General Petraeus did the Iraq War. His much-awaited report to the President is secret, allowing Obama to do some very in-character temporizing..

5) The NYT on hundreds of reports of irregularities in the recent election and thousands of complaints, recorded by the Afghan electoral authorities. Hamed Karzai's main opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, alleges fraud and we get an introduction to Afghanistan's "tribal machine" politics.

6) The Guardian intelligently sums it all up, using an illustrative photo of McChrystal to impart a subliminal message (subtle, subtle!).

7) George Will (why not?) in "Time to Get Out of Afghanistan" points out that poppy grows, elections don't change a thing, the economy is minuscule (less than 3$/day per Afghan), counter-insurgency theory says many 100,000s of troops are needed (impossible), the government controls only 1/3 of the country, one shouldn't think we can magically remove what McChrystal called the "culture of poverty" there.. Really quite eloquent when he wants to be. He concludes that if there is reason for the Afghan War then "must there be nation-building invasions of Somalia, Yemen and other sovereignty vacuums?" Instead, he advocates special operations, infiltration and missiles to defend the U.S. from Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, not occupation.

8) Stephen Walt is a little smug that McChrystal and the hawks' assessment of the situation is as negative as he has been blogging for months.

9) William Pfaff opines on the substitution of victory.

Personally, I find it an eerie coincidence that these events are occurring just as I have done so much research on the Indochina War, and specifically, how it was perpetuated and escalated thanks to the promise of a "Vietnamese National Army". All situations are different and I don't claim to be an expert on Afghanistan, but I can't help but be troubled many similarities: a new general, a new strategy, a mobilization campaign, the uniting of civil and military authorities, escalation... all on the promise that our local allies will have their army expand geometrically at the snap of our fingers. The similarity of even the words used sends a chill down my spine.

If we go up the escalatory chain, it is without optimism that I hope the Americans' Afghan National Army will prove a better bet than the French's Vietnamese one.

The Abuse of Analogy (I): Postwar Germany and Japan

2009-08-30T22:54:00.000-07:00

There was a time when many said that the cultures of Japan and Germany were incapable of sustaining democratic values. Well, they were wrong. Some say the same of Iraq today. They are mistaken. The nation of Iraq -- with its proud heritage, abundant resources and skilled and educated people -- is fully capable of moving toward democracy and living in freedom.

Those words were spoken by President George W. Bush in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, February 26, 2003. Now this is a fine way to frame an issue and Donald Rumsfeld tried something similar later on. Instead of dealing with criticisms of how democracy and peace are actually pretty hard to achieve in practice in many parts of the world, it seeks to portray skeptics as believing that the "Arab mind" is congenitally allergic to liberty. Most critics of Bush's policies had no such inclinations, but let us deal seriously with the Japan/Germany analogy as it compares to our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There are too many differences between the Japanese/German postwar miracles (economic growth, democratization, "civilianization") and the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for the comparison to be of any use. I will mention the most important.

First, regarding the economy. It is not true that the economic successes of Germany and Japan were principally due to foreign aid. The Third World has received aid to the value of many many times over the Marshall Plan since World War 2, that hasn't stopped many countries under U.S. influence in Latin America (Chile, Columbia), the Middle East (Egypt) or East Asia (Philippines) from being dirt poor. The nation needs to be already be internally "predisposed" towards growth. Let us note that Germany and Japan had been the most modern nations of Europe and Asia respectively. (Which is not to say, that economic growth cannot be ruined by an outside power, as in East Germany.)

In contrast, Afghanistan has basically no formal economy and competes with D.R. Congo and Somalia for title of “world’s poorest nation”. It has got to the point where Allied war costs in Afghanistan (also here) are several times bigger than the entire Afghan economy (about $20 billion). The situation not quite as catastrophic in Iraq, it was a relatively modern country, although 30 years of foreign war, sanctions and civil war have certainly made their mark (and in particular, the flight of the Iraqi middle class from the country in the wake of the chaos caused by the American invasion).

Second, it is notable that Germany and Japan were ethnically homogeneous, unlike Afghanistan or Iraq. There is little to suggest that a persistent U.S. presence in Iraq will be able to undo the sectarian hatreds in that country. The situation in Iraq has been “remedied” in recent years by the fact that the country has largely ethnically cleansed itself into Shiite, Sunni and Kurd areas (the country has over 4.5 million refugees and internally displaced persons). There is no indication that problems of the enfranchisement of the Sunnis, the fair distribution of oil wealth, or the status of the disputed city Kirkuk (indeed the whole of Kurdistan!) are going to be permanently resolved whether Americans are there or not. (For comparison: the West has been in Bosnia and Kosovo for over 10 years now, there are still no real prospects for Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks and Kosovars to live willingly in common states.)

Third, most significant, is that these are completely reversed situations. In Japan and Germany, a conventional war was won against them, and the peace, stability and trade which followed victory allowed positive changes in German and Japanese society. In Afghanistan and Iraq, we are told that positive social change during the war will allow victory. Needless to say, such positive change is difficult to achieve period, even more so in wartime, especially in a guerrilla war involving lack of territorial control, civil war, refugees (often the most educated), and the sabotage of "nation-building" efforts by the insurgents (bombing of Iraqi police stations, infiltration of the national army...).

There may be good arguments for the possibility of "victory" (if we could define the term) in Iraq or Afghanistan, but the analogy of Germany and Japan is not one of them. Carts before horses, poppy farmers before Mitsubishi, double digit economic growth before one can go to market without fear of being car-bombed. This narrative is broke, if I paid taxes I'd want a refund.

For reference: comparison of US aid to Iraq/Germany/Japan.

Obama’s War: Escalation in Afghanistan

2009-08-29T07:35:00.000-07:00

We seem to be at a genuine crossroads in Afghanistan. As late as two months ago, National Security Adviser General Jim Jones said, after an additional 21,000 troops were sent earlier this year, that new troop requests would likely lead the president to have “a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment.” I don’t know if Obama has shouted “WTF!?” but General Stanley McChrystal, top commander in Afghanistan, is asking for just that.

There is a plan soon to be presented by General McChrystal for perhaps an extra 20,000 men, in addition to the 69,000 already committed are to be sent. Drawdown would theoretically begin in five years. What would be the purpose? In that time, the Afghan army would be tripled from 88,000 men to 250,000 and the Afghan police doubled from 82,000 to 160,000. A recent 7-page “counter-insurgency guide” by McChrystal has said that “The conflict will be won by persuading the civilian population, not by destroying the enemy.” And furthermore: “To protect the population is the mission. The ISAF will have won when the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan has the support of the population.” U.S. efforts, in addition to training policy and military, include the anti-opium drug war, anti-corruption campaigns, and prison reform. In short, what is suggested is a vast, ambitious and long-term project of nation-building.

This new effort is occurring just as criticism of the war has been mounting and a majority of Americans appears to oppose it (nevermind allied opinion in Europe or Canada). The selling campaign by Obama officials has been rather artless. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen said on Meet the Press that “we can develop governance, so then we can develop an economy and they can take over their own destiny.” Mullen then got a little flustered when David Gregory asked him if the American people had “signed up” to nation-building:

No, I'm--right now the American people signed up, I think, for support of getting at those who threaten us. And, and to the degree that, that the Afghan people's security and the ability to ensure that a safe haven doesn't recur in Afghanistan, there's focus on some degree of making sure security's OK, making sure governance moves in the right direction and developing an, an economy which will underpin their future.

Quite. Over at Foreign Policy, we have noted IR professor Stephen Walt questioning “the safe haven myth” in Afghanistan (see response, counter-response). We have Richard Haas, President of the Council of Foreign Relations, arguing in the New York Times that Afghanistan is a “war of choice”. He stops short of actually opposing the Obama escalation but he cites:

The risk of ending our military effort in Afghanistan is that Kabul could be overrun and the government might fall. The risk of the current approach (or even one that involves dispatching another 10,000 or 20,000 American soldiers, as the president appears likely to do) is that it might produce the same result in the end, but at a higher human, military and economic cost.

This “makes Afghanistan not just a war of choice but a tough choice.” He shies away from opposing the escalation outright. He limits himself to asking the administration, Congress and the American people to monitor the situation as closely as possible to see if we are “winning”. If things go badly, we should presumably drawdown our forces. Yet, Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s “South Asia Czar,” recently both denied the U.S. military commitment was “an open-ended event” and was unable to define “victory”. He resorted to a Supreme Court justice’s reputed saying on obscenity: “We’ll know it when we see it.”

In a sense, the effort to “measure” success as Haas advocates is futile. The metrics of counter-insurgency are not exactly scientific. They are open to outright obfuscation by those who, having invested so many men, so much money, and their own political credibility on the war, have trouble saying it is not going well. If we escalate now, we will be there, successful or not, for at least five years.

So there we have it. Counter-insurgency and nation-building in Afghanistan looks like it will be escalated and prolonged under Obama. This indeed will make Afghanistan “Obama’s War” and his credibility and legacy will be inextricably tied to its success. I can understand the political considerations. He campaigned on Afghanistan. In being strong in Afghanistan, he hopes this will immunize him from allegations of Carterite flaccidity if he is conciliatory with regard to Iraq or Iran.

A German soldier and Afghan woman in the bazaar of Taloquan.

But is it wise? If it fails the already high costs of war risk spilling over domestically, doing irreparable damage to Obama’s already shaky domestic agenda. We are asking soldiers to be part-time social workers, indeed social engineers, in a foreign country of which they know nothing. We have enough trouble managing our own societies, which we understand much better. We find prisons, drugs, corruption, fair elections to be sometimes be intractable problems at home. Now the administration are saying that, in five years, the Americans and NATO will fix all that in Afghanistan. They will, in 5 years, train twice as many forces as were created in the past 8. All that, and fight off the Taliban at the same time. It is not that a more limited approach or eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan would be without risks. It is that their narrative for victory is bunk and cannot justify committing ourselves even further to the Afghan adventure.

The Suez War

2009-08-27T13:43:00.000-07:00

I watched a three-party documentary, "Suez" (with a needless subtitle), on that 1956 crisis and the war that pitted Britain, France and Israel against the Gamal Nasser’s Egypt. I already knew a little about the events but the documentary struck me for three reasons.

The first was how boneheaded the entire plan was. Militarily, it was perfectly feasible for Britain and France to use an Israeli attack on Egypt as an excuse to seize the Suez Canal. But I have trouble fathoming the aim. Nasser had promised to compensate the stockholders of the Suez Canal Company and neither attempted nor threatened to stop trade through the canal. The French premised the operation on Nasser’s rhetorical support for the Arab uprising in Algeria (then controlled by France and the home of 1 million Europeans). However, material support in the form of weapons, munitions and funds was minute. The Algerian revolutionaries would often bitterly comment on this, noting that the Soviets were similarly stingy despite all the rhetoric about world-solidarity, with only Mao Zedong’s China (curiously enough) giving any substantial aid.

They did not seem then to have any real reason for a fight, or anything to gain. Even if all the Franco-British dreams came true, and Nasser were toppled internally following the defeat of the Egyptian Army around the Canal, they would be the proud owners of a military base at Suez, as they did in the early 1950s, which had to be abandoned in the first place because with 80,000 troops it was exorbitantly expensive. The real motive of the operation, it seems to me, was not material interest but the offense they had taken. Neither the British nor the French, still in the transition to postcolonial values, could stand by as an “uppity wog,” a “sale raton” insulted them and flaunted them publicly. They had to put him back in his place.

The second was the interviews of veterans of the operation and in particular those of British soldiers. The documentary is worth watching for that reason alone as these septegenarians describe, as though it was yesterday, the excitement and terror they lived through, the awe they felt in the presence of massed Anglo-French naval and air power, or the disgust at the death and destruction they witnessed. It had always seemed to me as a relatively ‘clean’ little war. But I was struck in particular by the testimony of two veterans who described the brutality of the paratrooper units they were part of. One explained:

I know the expression “take no prisoners”. We didn’t take prisoners. Paras don’t take prisoners. Didn’t then. Because you didn’t. You haven’t got the men. You haven’t got the men to guard them. You know there’s another problem. This is not an order it’s just a thing. You’re out to survive. You are a few hundred, very small few hundred, against potentially thousands. And something’s going to be in the way. It’s going to be a problem. Get rid of the problem.

Bitter Victory at Port Said.

And another veteran says:

I saw so many Egyptians that were essentially executed. For no particular reason. I’m pretty sure that if we’d just kicked their asses they would have run home. I felt sick I really did. I felt utterly sick. And on a couple of occasions I remonstrated and asked “why?” And I was told to fuck off and mind my own business.

I had assumed that atrocities by well-paid and well-trained professional Western soldiers occurred only really under duress. There might be intractable fighting for weeks or months against an insurgency and an inability to separate civilians and fighters. Then, with all the frustrations and hatreds this is likely to lead to, some soldiers might forgo the rules of war and let loose on unarmed civilians or captured soldiers. I didn’t think such things could occur as soon as they did in Suez: the very first days of a war.

The third was strange image of France and Britain as warrior nations, great powers in their own right, and pursuing their own ambitions, ready to fight wars to do so. Indeed, France had spent the last decade in a permanent state of warfare, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers, many of them elite forces, in pitiless and brutal fighting against intractable guerrillas and terrorists in Indochina and Algeria. As a result, one British paratrooper who was dropped near the Canal with French forces recalls that the ‘French with their great experience carried their weapons through their harnesses. We weren’t allowed to in case they got caught up in rigging lines or somebody else’s rigging lines.’ Another soldier recalls with enthusiasm his awe at seeing massed Anglo-French naval power:

I recognized that this was a serious enterprise when I went up one morning and I saw this vast armada, mainly of French battleships and aircraft carriers all around. And it was quite clear you know, that this was a second D-Day almost. We were definitely going to do it.

Another age...

This reads something from another age. 50 million British and 50 million Frenchmen were living with the illusions of another time, as though there were no superpowers, as though the great postcolonial nations like India, China and Egypt counted for nothing, as though they could keep the desperate masses of African and Asia under their formal domination in perpetuity. The whole adventure, of course, was brought to an end by the American President Dwight Eisenhower. Putting pressure on the British pound, the British government buckled and called for a ceasefire. The British learning that the Americans needed to be assuaged, the French that they needed to be kept at arm's length, the two nations finding symmetry in their shared impotence. And that is the world I am more familiar with.

Notes on Counter-Insurgency

2009-08-25T06:57:00.000-07:00

I've just more or less finished my dissertation. (Thank effing God!) Advanced countries fighting insurgencies in foreign lands often resort to the solution of training local allies to fight in their place under auspices of a "national army". My subject was the Vietnamese National Army, which was an attempt by the French to do just that in the second half of the Indochina War. After a lot of slogging, any general lessons I might draw from French and other experiences?

First, I am more and more convinced that the notion that indigenous soldiers could somehow replace you is nonsense. If a situation has gotten so bad, that the foreign power needs to send 150,000 or 500,000 men in there, and they are unable to achieve victory at acceptable cost then the insurgents will simply win. There is no chance you are going to be able in the last couple years of the conflict, in your part time, turn the native regime's soldiers (who are variably corrupt, unmotivated, incompetent etc.) into the equivalent of your modern and professional army. It is notable that France, the U.S. and the Soviet Union have all fought insurgencies and left armies they created in their place (Indochina, Vietnam, Afghanistan). In no case was the local regime able to survive more than a few years against the insurgents.

Second, you can supplement your forces with locals. In fact, you have to, they know the terrain, the people, they will be able to nullify what advantages those two things give the insurgents. It will only work if you have a substantial portion of the wartorn nation's public opinion on your side. The only two successful examples (I know of) of counterinsurgency with the largescale use of foreign troops since WW2: British Malaya and the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. In both cases, the rebels' power was based on an ethnic minority representing only about 1/5 of the country (Chinese in one case, Kikuyu in the other). These were still very difficult wars that required about a decade to win and led to substantial political concessions from the British (granting independence and losing control of both countries).

Third, it is virtually impossible to destroy an insurgency if they have a active anctuary. That is when there is a neighbor where the insurgents can rest, recoup, escape the counterinsurgents, and receive training and materiel. Many places have played such a role: China in the Indochina War (and indeed the Korean War), North Vietnam in the Vietnam War, Pakistan in the Afghan Wars.. This presents an impossible dilemma for the counterinsurgent, who despite his overwhelming military and technological superiority, is unable to locate and destroy the enemy and its sources of power. If it attempts to do so, it would need further escalation and general warefare in another country, which may be beyond available means or acceptable costs. In neither of the successful British cases was there an active sanctuary.

For what this means for today I can't completely say. It is somewhat comforting to know that much of the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan are based on ethnic minorities. At the same time, I find it very distressing for Afghanistan especially, where the Pashtuns are a relatively large minority and AfPak border problem has not been resolved. In the Iraqi case, the change in U.S. strategy and "self-ethnic-cleansing" have led to a somewhat more encouraging situation. I can't predict the future but, ultimately, most of these wars end by the foreign power being reconciled to fact that, really, the area that has cost so many many and required so much of their defense effort is basically marginal to their fundamental interests. Although Iraq may be an exception given its position at heart of a region with so much oil, may be a partial exception to this.

"Realist" Scholar's case against the Afghan War

2009-08-18T17:43:00.000-07:00

An argument one doesn't hear often.

Street Without Joy

2009-08-05T19:29:00.000-07:00

Street Without Joy is the compelling and thoughtful chronicle of the French Indochina War (1945-1954) by the celebrated French soldier turned U.S. scholar Bernard Fall. Fall went on numerous trips to Southeast Asia, often talking with and living alongside French and American soldiers. He was killed by a landmine while with accompanying U.S. forces in Vietnam in 1967.

The meat of the book is committed to various large-scale operations by French forces against the Viet-Minh Communists. Here, Fall's first hand experience shines through, with vivid, all-too-real descriptions of the crushing humidity, of the disgust at peeling off leeches or being struck with dysentery, of feet swollen after endless marches, of the murderous, confusing cacophony of fighting... It is mostly a depressing list of indecisive failures: Ninh-Binh, Hoa-Binh, Operation Lorraine, "Street Without Joy" and other operations, with their familiar pattern of tens of thousands of troops with tanks and heavy weapons getting bogged down in mountain, jungle and marsh, the enemy picking away at them and their supply lines if he was stronger, melting into the bush and the population if he is not.

Bernard Fall with U.S. troops in Vietnam.

Viet-Minh attacks were brutal. Frenchmen and their African and Indochinese allies faced artillery fire from an invisible enemy hidden in in the bush, having their faces and limbs blown off, being fried in their tanks, or, if only lightly injured, find their wounds festering for days in the tropical heat. If the V.M. flee, the French had the impossible task of searching villages for Communists and supply depots. The rebel soldiers would hide themselves among the mostly skinny, flat-chested Vietnamese peasant women: a prudish French officer was ordered by his superiors to finger them to find the men among them. At other times, there is no such discrimination. Fall laconically reports his flying beside French bombers as they loose their napalm: 'scratch one Lao village - and we don't even know whether the village was pro-Communist or not.' In a kind of war where the support of the people is critical, the means for tactical victory could spell strategic defeat.

Fall also describes the men and women of Indochina and the French forces in often picturesque detail. Commanders included glamorous and energetic personalities like Free French leader Marshal Jean de Lattre de Tassigny whose son died in Indochina during his command or General René Cogny who had fought in the Resistance and walked with a limp and a cane due to permanent injuries from Gestapo torture. "Ex-Nazi" German Foreign Legionnaires fought alongside French Army survivors of Dachau and Buchenwald... after months spent in the jungle or in a Viet-Minh P.O.W. camp these same soldiers might come home with skeletal bodies 'like Christ off the cross'. The women are numerous. In addition to the usual wives, nurses and female military personnel there is the curious institution (at odds with the book's title) of the ‘Mobile Field Brothels’ of North African prostitutes that accompanied some units. Given that the U.S. was giving substantial aid to the war effort, the brothels gave French P.R. officers some worry at the possibility of an American newspaper headlining that the U.S. was financing French fornication...

A path without joy...

In addition to the individual descriptions of battles and people, Fall wraps his chronicle with a preface and a conclusion that ruminate on the concept of ‘Revolutionary Warfare’, or political insurrection by Communist or Nationalist forces with the aim of subverting an established regime. He describes the experiences Great Britain, France and the United States in Malaya, Indochina and Algeria, to attempt to inform discussion of the escalating war in the Vietnam (the book was published in 1964).

We find here that past experience must inform the present. Fall elaborates concepts that were as valid then in Southeast Asia and North Africa as they are today in Afghanistan and Iraq including the necessity of winning over the population (the primacy of the political over the military) and the notion of a hostile 'active sanctuary' providing refuge, material aid, and sometimes soldiers to the insurgents. Fall's bibliography even lists as the best handbook to counter-insurgency to be a slim, little known volume by French Colonel David Galula, Counter-Insurgency: Theory and Practice. Little known, that is, until about three years ago, when new the top U.S. commander in Iraq David Petraeus began to promote its reading and teachings within the U.S. military and wrote the preface to the most recent edition.

Street Without Joy, for those who love war stories, have an interest in the wars of Southeast Asia, or are students of counter-insurgency.

De 1940

2009-08-04T21:26:00.000-07:00

En réponse à un post de Jean-Dominique Merchet et inspiré de l’article célébré de David Reynolds.

Parce que parfois, au risque de la prétention, je me laisse à une poésie impitoyable…

Je suis un Américain né en France. Je dois avouer que parler avec mes compatriotes des U.S.A. à propos de 1940 et la Bataille de France est une expérience souvent déprimante. Ils ne comprennent pas la réalité de cette 'étrange victoire' allemande très surprenante, le fait d'une défaite alliée (et non seulement française), le sacrifice de ces dizaines de milliers de Français morts pour un monde libre, les dilemmes inévitables d'une France occupée pour laquelle la défaite allemande n'est ni probable ni prévisible sauf dans un futur très lointain.

Pour la culture 'populaire' américaine, la défense française est une mauvaise blague. Pour beaucoup la France de 1940 n'est qu'un lâche effémine qui se rend à la première occasion et se transforme en pute prête à se donner au maître nazi.

J'avoue - tout en reconnaissant les excès gaullistes et franco-centriques - que ce genre de discours me rend furieux.

Oui, la France de 1940 est politiquement divisée, économiquement médiocre, et dotée d'une doctrine militaire archaïque. Mais après tout, qu'ont fait les Belges avec leur naïve neutralité, les Américains avec leur isolationnisme myope, et les Anglais avec leurs dix divisions terrestres, une force qui, malgré la puissance économique britannique et leur vaste empire, représentait la moitié de celle de la petite Belgique ? Ce ne fut pas les seules erreurs et la seule défaite de la France.

Il faut un révisionnisme massif pour défaire les mythes gaullistes, pétainistes, résistants, britanniques, américains et allemands. La France a fait – avec toutes les difficultés des situations internes et internationales – son devoir. Elle a mené les Alliés à infliger plus de 150,000 pertes aux Allemands – blessés, morts et disparus – avant de céder lors de cette campagne fulgurante face à la concentration de force mécanique et aérienne de l’ennemi. Ses armées furent entourées en Belgique, ses soldats furent capturés par millions, Churchill réussit à transformer fuite en victoire à Dunkerque, et le territoire français fut ouvert pour une occupation longue et rude.

La France avait échoué. Et, comme l’historien britannique David Reynolds le soutient, se fut un tournant - peut être le grand tournant - du 20ème siècle. Les conséquences furent immédiates et catastrophiques: neutralisation de la flotte et l’empire français, participation de l'Italie a la guerre, début de la marche sudiste du Japon dans l'Indochine, étalement dangereux de la flotte britannique, et, enfin, domination nazie du continent européen. Sans 1940, il est tout a fait concevable que la deuxième 'Grande Guerre' reste une guerre limitée, européenne, sans hégémonie maléfique et sans génocide.

L'événement aura pour conséquence les heures les plus sombres du 20ème siècle. La catastrophe fut d’autant plus tragique parce que évitable. Des hommes bons de part en part l’Europe et le monde avaient échoué dans leur devoir. Et cela, c’est important. Si l'on en rit, on n’a pas conscience de la tragédie et, en vérité, on se moque de la tyrannie nazie, de la Shoah, et des 50 millions de morts victimes de cette guerre aussi absurde que toute les autres… Et que la France fut la gardienne en Europe de cette fragile équilibre et cette précieuse liberté.

Une tragédie aussi, parce que la France elle-même fut corrompue par la défaite. Elle céda au réconfort d'un prestigieux despotisme et vit le triomphe des pires tendances de l'anti-sémitisme français. Il ne faut pas rire de 1940, ni oublier cette année noire, mais s'en souvenir et y réfléchir pour prendre conscience du véritable fardeau, cette grande et terrible responsabilité, que la France portait pour la paix et la liberté. Ce fardeau que tout homme libre et pensant doit porter toujours, aujourd'hui et partout, dans son esprit et dans son cœur.

Bridging Two Worlds

2009-07-28T12:20:00.000-07:00

An excellent piece in the Columbia Journalism Review by Matt Mabe, a U.S. officer with two tours of duty in Iraq who went on to Columbia for grad school. The choice can seem strange but for Mabe 'journalism, like the military, isn’t just a profession; it’s a lifestyle and an invaluable American institution from which we derive our most cherished freedoms.' It makes for some bittersweet reading as he describes the incomprehension and disrespect for one another between the military on one hand and media and university professionals on the other.

He seems to have, in a small way, reconciled these two clashing worlds and determined to serve as a link between. Pen and sword, it seems, can meet, although, if you read till the end, you'll see how the latter won out in Mabe's case. Well worth reading.

Neurology > Philosophy

2009-07-18T16:46:00.000-07:00

V.S. Ramachandran talks on Charlie Rose for half an hour. Watch it here.

Man vs. animals, the origins of empathy, cultural transmission vs. biological evolution (humans change/learn with each generation at lightning pace, evolution takes millions of years), the nature of consciousness (why does the color red look as it does?)... It seems no existential or philosophical question escapes Ramachandran's grasp.

And in the face of the armies of scientists today - with their case studies, experiments, brain scanners, drugs and the vast, growing body of knowledge they draw upon - it strikes me that philosophers never stood a chance.

Not that neurologists or other scientists have made all that much progress yet on the big questions, but when Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Descartes or as recent as Freud and Betrand Russell pondered the human mind and existence, they never seemed to get much further than little mind games. Shadows in a cave, a demon in my head, a barber who shaves everyone in the town except men who shave themselves ('does not compute!') and, last but not least, really it all boils down to 6 year-old you wanting to bang your mom...

I can't help but think it was about as futile as camp-lit tribesmen speculating on the nature of the spheres and dots of light scattered across their night sky.

Thirty-Four Years After South Vietnam...

2009-07-17T14:55:00.000-07:00

...'America's abandonment of the moon'!

It's the moon! The moon I tell you!

For all my sympathy for exotic scientific endeavours (see my previous posts on 'Prometheus'), I think we can be a good deal less shrill about these things. But you have to love ol' KH's raw inhumanity:

So what, you say [to the abandonment of the Space Shuttle program]? Don't we have problems here on Earth? Oh, please. Poverty and disease and social ills will always be with us. If we'd waited for them to be rectified before venturing out, we'd still be living in caves.

Well I might point out two things:
1) If people spent lots of money in the past on exploration by land and sea, it is because they expected some kind of return (typically in the form of trade, land or booty). There is no foreseeable reason for space to ever be profitable given current technology. That might change in the future. And I guarantee you, as soon as soon as space exploration were to appear as useful an enterprise as that of overland pioneers and oceanic expeditions were in the past, you would see it occur.

2) Actually socially problems can and have been resolved, and at an exponential rate too. In the 19th Century, the average European (inhabitant of the wealthiest continent in the world) could look forward to pauperism, typhus, dysentery, smallpox, illiteracy, infant mortality, rotten teeth and an infinity of other ills, long considered 'incurable'. Well, notwithstanding certain persisting social problems of an altogether lesser magnitude, these issues have basically been eliminated in the wealthier countries. Meanwhile, the 'emerging markets' are beating back their own problems at an historically unheard of rate. Dealing with our own problems is less than futile, it has been working. And I have no apology for being anthropocentric - if human life should have a goal it should be that human lives should be good - that strikes me as a self-evident truth.

And I say this even as I think space exploration, CERN and other sciency stuff are good things. Practically speaking, it is cheaper and more useful to this stuff with robots. A live astronaut brings nothing to the table except the burden of air, food, water, and the fuel and rockets for a return ticket.. That, and the propaganda value that it be the boots of this or that nation leaving treads on extraterrestrial soil. I don't actually think space exploration driven by prestige and international rivalry - Americans, Russians, Chinese or what have you - is necessarily as conducive to genuine scientific progress than pragmatic and, when possible, international projects. One is for the acquisition of new knowledge for human advancement, the other is a pissing match.

The New Demographics

2009-07-05T17:29:00.000-07:00

The World, 2050

A new study discussed in Le Monde argues that the peoples of the South will age much faster than the already comparably old peoples of the North. This would be primarily due to the spread of sanitary and health technologies at a far faster pace than that experienced in 19th Century Europe, the first region to undergo such a demographic shift. It claims that by 2050, while the world population will increase by a third, the number of over 65s will triple.

The article cites in particular the example of China in which infant mortality dropped from 200 per 1000 to 40 per 1000 over 1950-1990, and it took only 12 years (1974-1986) to halve birth rates. By way of comparison, it took France 150 years to achieve either feat. One might think China is an exception as it is developing rapidly and has a one child policy. But it is a trend occurring gradually across the world including the entire developed world, the post-Communist world and most of East/Southeast Asia.

To counter those inclined to cultural determinism, the CIA claims that several Muslim countries including Algeria, Tunisia and Iran have birth rates of 1.7-1.8, rather less than France's 1.98. Note that France probably (!) has the largest Muslim community in Europe, and it is largely of Algerian descent. It puts a rather awkward twist on the Eurabia thesis when the mother countries of the allegedly relentless hordes of Arab-Muslim immigrants begin having less children than Europeans..

Not all countries have reached the peak of their demographic transition however. Notwithstanding the above, South Asia (and in particular India), Africa and much of the Middle East will continue to grow massively, partly because of longer lifespans and sustained high birth rates. The population of Africa will probably triple in our lifetime. The Middle East, where in many countries people under 25 outnumber the rest, will in all likelihood for that among other reasons suffer from a degree of instability.

What does this mean? Who knows. Historically this is an absolutely unprecedented situation, a product of modern technical civilization. I am not however inclined to think it is an altogether bad thing. We don't need more human beings, especially at our current (and growing) rates of consumption. And we can only laud that the more technically and economically advanced countries of the world - that is those with the greatest latent destructive powers - should have more old people. Nations of pensioners have less money and less inclination to fight one another or revolutionary upheaval than nations teeming with frustrated, unemployed young men.

The study and in depth look at demographics, mostly in French, is available at the INED website. It includes a cool population pyramid predictor application a fascinating little faq which answers questions you've always pondered, like whether the French have most of their babies out of wedlock.

Building Armies during Guerrilla Wars

2009-06-29T14:06:00.001-07:00

History isn't really meant to be studied for direct relevance to contemporary issues. If you do, you risk reading into the past based on your conceptions of the present, or drawing a forced meaning out to influence a contemporary debate.

Nonetheless, my choice of study of my dissertation I have admit is not entirely innocent. I am looking at the training by the French of a Vietnamese National Army (1950-54) during the Indochina War. Time and place are always marked by differences - here they are too numerous to list - but I did choose the subject as a case study of a recurrent strategy of wars in the Third World. The explicit aim of fighting a war in a country with the end-goal and exit strategy being the creation of a sustainable government and training of indigenous forces to replace your own. This pattern has been repeated in the U.S.'s wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan (and the Soviets too) and Iraq.

Graduation: Class of 2008

So as I read Tom Ricks, I am uneasy:

Several times the Bush administration tried to transfer responsibility for security to Iraqi army and police forces, only to see them unable to handle the burden. Now, once again, the Americans are trying to get Iraqi security forces to take over, as most U.S. troops withdraw from Iraqi's cities. Will the Iraqis be able to keep the population relatively secure? To be honest, I don't know, and no one else does. It's a matter of faith. And the leap comes tomorrow.

General Ray Odierno assures us: 'I do believe they are ready.'

Having spent a good chunk of the last week combing through U.S. foreign policy documents and the personal papers of then French President Vincent Auriol, I admit I am even more wary of politicians and generals telling us anything about how good a job they're doing.

I think the act of fighting a war can impose a kind of doublethink. Whether or not the Iraqi Army and the war are going well, the effort itself if it has any chance to be successful requires a degree of cheerleading. And in your own mind, your rhetoric can prevent you from having a more clear-headed view of the situation.

Combat: Class of 1953

I can’t help think of those French generals in Indochina who promised – every year – that within two years they’d have enough Vietnamese troops to knock out the Communists. And this, despite the continuous problems in training competent officers, in draft dodging and desertion and the fact that every time they handed areas to ‘their’ Vietnamese, the results went from mixed to disastrous. And this kind of optimistic discourse existed in both public and private as French leaders in charge of the war 'over there' tried to sell it to the public and political elite at home. All the while, their rather more detached American colleagues filed consistently negative reports.

This example from 1952 is typical: as a Marshal of France assured his government that the extra Vietnamese troops could allow them to deal 'decisive blows to the [Communist] Viet Minh]' by 1953, American diplomats reported from their conversation with the top French commander that despite his optimism he 'did seem to gloss over one very important aspect of the matter – the fact that there is a lack of confidence by the French High Command in both the ability and the reliability of Vietnamese effectively to assure security.' And this kind of dissonance, between vaguely hopeful wishful thinking by French leaders and the wry commentary of Americans repeats itself all the way to Dien Bien Phu and the establishment of the dysfunctional state of South Vietnam.

What does all this mean? For now, I'll just note that to make an army out of nothing and fight a guerrilla war at the same time - depriving that army of accountability and limiting the period of training to few extremely costly years - is a task of extreme difficulty. I am not aware of any examples of this strategy having succeeded (as opposed to fully destroying an insurgency and then having many peaceful years to create a viable army). I'll no doubt have more to say once the paper is done.

Solar Plane

2009-06-28T03:43:00.000-07:00

I have recently wondered how cheap airlines like EasyJet and Ryan Air are going to keep costs down and be environmentally friendly when airplanes are going to need fuel for the foreseeable future. The new prototype plane by Solar Impulse tells me alternative energy isn't going to be of much help in that regard for a while: it has the wingspan of an airbus, the weight of a car, and a cockpit for one (1) passenger.

It is, however, pretty cool and will hopefully fly without any fuel at all and able to go around the world in 25 days. Dr Bertrand Piccard, who runs the project, will fly the finished plane in Spring 2010 and attempt to go around the Earth in 5 hops. It sounds like there are many risks: the flight has to match the simulations and the weather has to be decent, too much turbulence would wreck a plane which is also a 60 meter hang-glider.. It all feels very adventurous, pioneering and sci-fiesque. Cool interview with him on the BBC page.

Sterile and Marginal

2009-06-22T15:05:00.001-07:00

Is anyone else struck by how sterile the 'debate' over Obama's rhetorical support (or lack of thereof) for the Iranian protesters is? Does it really make that big a difference either way? Aren't the events in Iran basically internally driven? It seems to me this 'controversy' only has any traction if one assumes the U.S. president's words have omnipotent powers.

That the Republicans have seized upon this as an issue I think is the product of two things. The first rather base and cynical, which is their need for a political football. It is all very theatrical and opportunistic, but hey, that's part of the game. The second is a sincere belief that Ronald Reagan huffed and puffed and blew the Berlin Wall down. Hence we have precedent.

I wouldn't touch the long, complicated and sterile (there's that word again) debate about the merits of the 'Reagan Victory Thesis' with a ten-foot-poll. But I will say this: in the absence of something big - like armed conflict with the outside world - these revolutionary/reformist processes are in the immediate basically internal. After all, the 'tough' rhetoric had stopped before the Soviet Union was disintegrating. By May 1988, Ronald Reagan was in Moscow proclaiming that the U.S.S.R. was no longer an Evil Empire and when East Germans broke through the Iron Curtain, George H. W. Bush repeatedly made the point of not 'dancing on the Berlin Wall'.

Not that words are wholly without influence. But it does strike me as rather marginal in the current situation. If and when the crackdown comes we can start discussing more unequivocal condemnation and sanctions. (Not that they particularly work.) But at the end of the day, neither the U.S. nor the West generally is able or willing to put any hard material backing - military or otherwise - behind the protesters. As soon as we've established that, the debate is academic. Rhetoric may have done great deal to encourage dissent - say - in Hungary in 1956 or Iraq in 1991. But it seemed like nothing but false hypocrisy when the West watched impotently as guns were fired and blood ran in the streets.

Incidentally, George F. Will I think is the only prominent conservative to have not jumped onto the bandwagon.

Ivan Rioufol

2009-06-19T14:34:00.001-07:00

A fellow blog has made a cottage industry on commenting on the 'Rioufolliene' thought-of-the-day coming out of the op eds of the Figaro. It has everything: vicious attacks on Barack Hussein Obama (no one else has their middle name so relentlessly emphasised), invocations of Islamo-fascism and the Axis of Evil, assertions that the leaders of Iran desire something like nuclear suicide, lamenting of postcolonial 'guilt', and - yes - a narrative that includes Nicolas Sarkozy riding as knight in shining armour to the rhetorical rescue of democracy in Iran.

Read it, just to be reminded that no one has a monopoly on bad faith and the production of mean-spirited, reactionary garbage.

'Minarets of Menace'

2009-06-19T09:42:00.000-07:00

The Daily Show has been reading my mind..

An hour with McNamara (1996)

2009-06-18T19:00:00.000-07:00

And that [our gasoline consumption] is disgraceful. In the first place, our automotive fuel consumption per capita is roughly twice that of, say, Germany. And this is a problem. It's an environmental problem: we are putting more greenhouse gas emissions in the upper atmosphere that are going to lead to climate change. It's a financial problem: it costs us far more. It's a security problem, this fuel comes out of the Middle East and we are more dependent on a very volatile region. We are not buying anything for it. We are not buying greater comfort, more convenience, or greater mobility...

Now I come back to contemplation. I think it is the responsibility of a leader, an action-oriented individual in our society, whether public sector leader or private sector leader, to contemplate as well as to act and to think about his role in society. And I want to suggest that the role in society of a petroleum executive today, in addition to making profits for his company, ought to be to help society increase efficiency in the use of petroleum. I don't think they think of themselves that way. They should.

Honestly, how great is Robert S. McNamara? I highly recommend this hour-long interview of him on his upbringing, the Depression, business over academia, 'action vs. contemplation', liberalism, Vietnam, cars/gas/climate change.. And this was in 1996.. Forget the end of the Cold War, forget 9/11, the trends that dominate our world today have been in place since at the 1970s if not earlier.

I don't know if Errol Morris saw this interview prior to shooting his The Fog of War. McNamara covers a lot of the same ground, even using phrases identical to those in the documentary, but he also talks about different stuff, often in the specific context of Nineties. Well worth watching.

Reflections on the Revolution in Iran

2009-06-17T01:39:00.000-07:00

It was not so long ago that that Iran was made a member of the 'Axis of Evil' by George W. Bush. It was a crude, almost childish example of speech writing, awkwardly meshing a similarly cartoonish phrase Ronald Reagan used to describe the Soviet Union with a Hitlerite term that evokes the most terrible force, the darkest years the world has ever seen.

It did not square all that well with the actual members of the new 'Axis'. The governments of Iraq, Iran and North Korea had indeed varying degrees of 'evil' but it did seem profoundly misleading to compare their tin-pot dictatorships with Nazi Germany and the U.S.S.R. - two vast empires that had literally had the potential to destroy the United States and, perhaps, dominate the world. Never mind that the members of this supposed 'Axis' did not have particularly close relations and two of them - Iraq and Iran - had been at each others' throats for decades. Nonetheless, the totalitarian imagery was evocative, and served the administration's purpose of instilling a lurid and demonic, albeit somewhat blurry, image of the enemy into public opinion as the necessary prelude to all war and confrontation.

I can't help but be struck by the colossal number of spectacular images and video coming out of Iran right now (some here, TPM has lots) and how it will affect the country's image abroad. I think of the extent to which they both confirm and contradict preconceptions. Yes, there are big, intimidating rallies with foreign chants and banners with alien script. Yes, there are upturned cars and buses burn. Indeed, supporters of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad show off disturbing anti-American imagery and slogans. But much more striking is how normal the people of Iran must seem to those expecting a more terrorist-totalitarian-'Islamofascist' vibe. These people do not look like the submissive, deprived citizens of the Soviet Union or oppressively robotic North Koreans on parade. Nor do they for the most part look like the ghostly burqa-clad women that float around Kabul or the scraggly old crackpots in turbans that appear in Al Qaeda's periodic videos.

Instead, we witness a society that seems much like our own and yet enticingly exotic. Red-White-and-Green take the place of our own colors at the rallies. The ubiquitous green of everything - banners, shirts, faces, glasses - evoke not a frightening fundamentalism, but happy memories of Kiev. We see 40something males sporting their polos and paunches, marching in orderly fashion. There are long-haired young men in T-shirts and jeans that look like they were grabbed off some London campus. Pretty girls walk in their summer clothes - their modesty assured by a light scarf covering half their hair - sometimes with braids, sunglasses, make-up or even tank-tops.

And we see them all gallantly face off with troopers wielding batons and wearing black body armor.

Instead of 1979, this feels like 1989. It is as though watching East Germans rallying against Communism as we hold our breath to see if the Russian tanks are rolled out. We look with apprehension for a repeat of Tiananmen. But would that be possible in the age of Facebook, cameraphones and YouTube? These tools, so frivolous in their normal usage, would ensure that every household knows the face of violence and tyranny. These events hold the potential to stir change in both the United States and Iran. That when gazing at the other, there would not be the ugly, distorted reflections of the "Great Satan" and the "Axis of Evil", but two nations might see each other for the first time.

Depressing Poll

2009-06-13T19:06:00.000-07:00

"Do most Islamic nations want to have a positive and peaceful relationship with the United States?"

In my insomnia, I have decided to write on a piece of news that has been bugging me for a while. According to a Rasmussen poll, a whopping 32% of Americans believe the answer to the above question is 'yes'. I don't know how Americans understood the question, but I find it disturbing no matter which way they interpreted it.

OIC participants

Did they interpret 'nations' to mean governments of Muslim-majority countries? Do they have any idea that the vast majority of these governments are either American allies or have normal relations with the United States? Of the 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, pretty much only Syria and Iran could be construed to be outright 'enemies'.

Kenyans

Did they forget that Muslim nations form a vast and diverse group, of which Middle Easterners form a surprisingly small minority? That the biggest Muslim country is Indonesia? Or that there are more Muslims in Africa or South Asia than the Middle East? Around two thirds of Americans apparently believe that the Muslim World - from the Senegalese peasants outside Dakar, to the Malay businessmen in Kuala Lumpur and from the godless post-Communist bureaucrats in Almaty to the jubilant Kenyans celebrating 'Obama Day' in Mombasa - on the whole wants conflict with the United States.

And is it not still terribly unreasonable, if we assume most respondents were ignorant that there are indeed Muslim countries outside of 'Arabia', to believe most ordinary men on the street in most Middle Eastern countries want bad relations with the United States in principle? Do they expect Americans in Egypt or Syria to be spat at in the street? I think it is better to be predisposed to the notion that ordinary people - to the extent they think about the United States - are more offended by specific U.S. policies than America itself until proven otherwise. That would seem to me understandable enough given that - for better and for worse - the pronounced and overwhelming American power and influence in the region is used with systematic disregard for the sentiments of its inhabitants.

Or is it that Americans have become prejudiced towards an entire religion because they have been saturated with images of violence, extremism and anti-Americanism from a handful of countries and terrorist movements? For all the talk of Iran and Hezbollah, all the lurid images of terror attacks and hysterical demonstrations, you will find almost nothing on the 1.5 billion Muslims strewn across every continent - Imams and agnostics, Sub-Saharan Africans and southeast Europeans, illiterate peasants and urbane intellectuals, burqa-clad women and make-up ladden girls in headscarves - characterized more by their differences than anything else. You almost never get a sense that they are people as one finds people in all corners of the globe, with their own painful struggles and petty worries, with their occasional exciting adventures and banal daily lives, with all their qualities and all their flaws. The effort to educate the American people on this issue, it seems to me, has been mismanaged with criminal negligence. We would do better to read more Fred Halliday and Alaa Al-Aswani.

Vladimir Putin

2009-06-09T14:59:00.000-07:00

I do not know enough about Russia today to have a full assessment of Vladimir Putin. I am quite impressed by his political career. This man, hand-picked by the disgraced Boris Yeltsin to succeed him, went from obscure intelligence officer to an enormously popular and unchallenged master of a rising, confident Russia.

Image-building: Manly-Man, 1800s

I can't help but think of Napoleon Bonaparte (no doubt because I am reading about him). Both he and Putin faced the challenge of establishing a new regime atop the debris of a stillborn democracy. No small part of any political career is shaping perceptions of one's self: creating an image, taking credit for successes, dodging blame for disasters. A new biography of Bonaparte's rise emphasizes this aspect of him - publishing his own newspapers describing his military campaigns and victories, rushing home to France to explain when in the midst of disaster in Egypt or Russia - as the first modern spin-doctor.

Can it last?

As Bonaparte established his legitimacy on the prestige of his military victories in Italy against Austria, so Putin founded his regime on the successful and brutal prosecution of the war in Chechnya. He benefited from a spectacular recovery of the economy, in no small part due to the explosion of oil and gas prices. He took credit for ending the 'anarchy' that reigned under Mikhail Gorbachev and Yeltsin. He consolidated his power and that of the Russian state, manifesting itself in an arbitrary despotism, having journalists mysteriously murdered in grotesque ways and destroying the business empires of hated 'oligarchs'.

Image-building: Manly-Man, 2000s

Gorbachev and Yeltsin (rightly or wrongly) are sources of shame and embarrassment for most Russians. Gorbachev is perceived to have willfully sold out to the West and destroyed the great state. Yeltsin looked like an incompetent, drunk tool. Putin stood up to the United States and the West on Iraq and Kosovo. He ostentatiously reasserted Russia's influence in the 'near abroad' - the vast areas of the former Soviet Union home to many millions of ethnic Russians - engaging in coercive energy politics in Ukraine and invading parts of Georgia. He cultivates an image of virile power. So, we get photos of Putin bare-chested showing his manly musculature (beats Nicolas Sarkozy), as well as a book on being a black-belt judo master, and even a story of his saving people from a tiger. He successfully escaped blame for a number of bungled affairs from the sinking of the Kursk submarine to the Beslan school massacre.

I don't know what this will mean for Russia in the future. I would hope we see a kind of reconciliation between Russia and the rest of Europe. Can one dream of a Russia with a strong welfare state, a healthy population, a rich and diverse economy, liberal democratic politics, engaged - even integrated - in some way with European institutions? The Putin years seem to suggest something very different. The economic underpinnings of Russia today seem to me very narrow. A state characterized by a reliable flow of cash from energy coupled with an otherwise weak economy strikes me as a recipe for an unaccountable regime (a 'petro-state' in the jargon). However, the transition to Putin as Prime Minister, a very strange story, also suggests at least a kind of plebiscitary despotism.

If I am to indulge in the Bonapartist analogy once more, one vast difference between the two regimes is in their relationship to war and peace. General and First Consul Bonaparte of France become Emperor Napoleon I of the Grand empire. This was made through war. And it was the necessities of continuous war between France and its neighbors that led to the degeneration of the state into a purely military regime subjugating all of society and the continent for victory: it meant only conscription, taxation and the strangling of trade with England. The concentration of powers in Napoleon's hands became unlimited.

Shades

Putin has no more war. He rules a secure state. The vicious circle of war and dictatorship - what Doris Kearns Goodwin has called 'the iron ring of tyranny' - does not exist in Russia today. In the Soviet Union, the military-industrial complex and the bureaucratic state long justified its domination of society and the economy, and isolation from the world, in terms of the necessities of civil war, war with Germany, and the existential threat posed by American atomic superiority. The general peace of the world today means internationalist and democratic pressures in Russia face a good deal less obstacles than in the past.

Drawings for the first time with thicker graphite: detail tends to suffer and shading is rather more difficult but also allows for experimenting with spreading color with my fingers. Colors slightly enhanced. K.G.B. Fishing. Shades.

More Doodles

2009-06-01T11:58:00.000-07:00

A mix of images:

* Quick and dirties of Yeats of Irish Uprising fame (that line by his mouth is supposedly a scar) and Pierre Mendes-France.
* Quick attempts at shading of Ike (eh..) and Orwell (OK).
* Two more Fanons, quite good really, one from a different position and the other from another photo (not sure which side of his face his little cheek-scar really was). Conveying emotion is very difficult though, have neither quite the 'see beyond' stare of the original in the first, nor the scowl in the second. Points to who can say which part of the second drawing I redid a zillion times and am still not happy with.

Stuart Hall on Cosmopolitanism

2009-05-25T11:15:00.000-07:00

I have for a long time had a soft spot for British crypto-Marxist intellectuals. They have largely been politically ineffectual and even irrelevant. The height of their influence was on Michael Foot’s 1983 Labour campaign against Margaret Thatcher. His platform – nicknamed ‘the longest suicide note in history’ – included withdrawal from NATO and unilateral nuclear disarmament. It concluded the Labour Party going down in flames at the polls and the spectacular triumph of Thatcherism. The old British Left has never really recovered.

Michael Foot: author of 'the longest suicide note in history'.

Nonetheless, whether it is Eric Hobsbawm on the history of capitalism, Benedict Anderson on the emergence of nationalism or Fred Halliday on the ‘Second’ Cold War and the Middle East, British Leftist thinkers have had much insight. So it is with Stuart Hall, born in Jamaica, co-founder of the New Left Review, professor, sociologist and cultural critic. His books – whether on the media or unsatisfactory developments in British politics – appear under obscure and intimidating titles like Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices and Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. But he also has a more common touch, appearing on BBC radio and various documentaries to comment on issues of globalization and multiculturalism with his trademark affable manner and comforting, grandfatherly voice.

Insightful volumes.. (mind the historical materialism)

Pnina Werbner (sp?) of Keele University has an interesting interview of Hall on the subject of cosmopolitanism today. I find this of particular interest given my own background. Hall is asked: is cosmopolitanism possible? Is it emerging with the coming of globalization, the rise of Asia, multiculturalism and immigration?

Faux cosmopolitanism: the airport bar.

Hall answers very quickly in the negative, human beings continue to be dominated by parochial, ethnocentric concerns, not but by the interests and culture of the whole of humanity – trans-culturalism, world peace, human rights, environmentalism and so forth are for another day. He laughs referring to his friends who appear to think themselves ‘cosmopolitan’ because they travel around the world for business and pleasure – with all the airports looking the same, eating diverse cuisines, living ‘the global life’ – when all they are doing is inhabiting Western bubbles (colonies) spiced with a little exotica.

He notes that genuine cosmopolitanism will be impossible until there is a basic equality between all fractions of humanity – North, South, East, West – so that all participate in what he calls, ‘the swim of history.’ Until now world history has been the history of capitalism, its tribulations and the rise of a technical-industrial civilization in the North with vast endeavours of production and destruction. Which is to say that Latin Americans, West Indians, Africans and Asians – four fifths of humanity – have been objects of foreign histories for some two hundred years. Hall does not have much to say on the new capitalism since the 1970s, which saw major non-Western nations and elites rise spectacularly in wealth and power for the first type since Japan in the 1870s. Yet from Dubai through Hyderabad, to Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, the are coming to the table, as incarnated in the expansion of the rich man’s club at G7 to an unwieldy G20.

Eric Hobsbawm: A European cosmopolitan.

Hall also does not consider more limited definitions of cosmopolitanism that might be more regionally circumscribed, but still useful. I think of this particularly in the European context – with all our nations, classes and tribes – where there have been individuals with the cosmopolitanism of ‘Europe’, the openness of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I think of Eric Hobsbawm, a man never limited by national preoccupations, partly as he was born in 1917 in Alexandria to Jewish parents, raised in Vienna and Berlin speaking English, growing up to become a British historian. Or of Stanley Hoffmann – an Austrian immigrant raised in France and a naturalized American – who has spent much of his life explaining France to America and America to Europe. Or again, in a more limited way, of George F. Kennan who though first articulated the doctrine of containment in the ‘Long Telegram’, spent his entire life criticizing U.S. Cold War policies. It was said his influence was so limited, because he had learned to understand Russia better than he did his own country. I believe such individuals might have the formation and interests to transcend individuals nations – working for peace for the whole of Europe, including Russia and North America – something of no small value given the concentration of destructive potential that continent has held for much of its history.

But I digress, as Hall’s mains concerns regard the relationship between Europe and the world, not between Europeans. Hall criticizes much of the rather triumphalist, universalist talk about globalization, noting that instead of homogenizing the world, we are only seeing the mixing – we might say the friction – between heterogeneous groups, poor and rich, conservative and modern. He notes that immigration represents a kind of globalization from below, and that Third World peoples learn to live in and adapt to living in foreign countries, exploiting legal and illegal markets, adopting what he calls ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’.

Globalization from Below: African migrants reach the shores of Spain.

A key question for the future, is the place of the diasporas these movements of people produce. How do young individuals deal with their ‘lived reality’ – people imbued by consumerist, sexualized Western culture, who might have deeply conservative grandparents, who return ‘home’ to India or Jamaica and are considered foreign and confused, while have the prospect of living and dying in France or Britain, while largely being considered foreign if not menacing by your host nation.

What place in the world for you, how should you act, what should you attempt to be? Hall does not pretend to have the answers. Instead, diasporas are torn between an alien present and a an imagined past, a mythical origin, which in no longer exists (if it ever did). For against the essentialists who believe in unchanging and eternal tribe and religion, he posits that people must ‘see the extent to which who you are now… your culture is being made and remade by forces that are global.’ In regard to my own experiences in France, Britain and America, I can only agree with his saying that ‘every diaspora has its regrets. Although you can never go back to the past, you do have a sense of loss,’ of family, landscape and tradition. He adds, fatalistically, ‘this is the fate of modern peoples.’

Not a be-all-end-all: Independence Day, Ghana.

Hall’s own nostalgia is partly linked to his leaving the West Indies just as it was on the threshold of independence. He did not participate in the building of independent nation-states whether in Africa, Asia or his native Jamaica. There seems to be a little regret for a missed opportunity, but he nonetheless claims the he never ‘tied [him]self into to the notion of the nation, and nationhood, as the ultimate end of the political process.’ While important in the context of defeating colonialism, he does not consider nationalism an end in itself or the only means to the people’s betterment. And indeed, one is tempted to agree with him given the unfortunate history of so many postcolonial states, the long history of nationalist terror in the idea’s birthplace, Europe, and indeed the partial rejection of the concept by Europeans themselves in favour of a kind of technocratic continental government.

Hegel and Marx: No History but Europe.

This makes him something of a cosmopolitan, though he is keen to distance himself from the Enlightenment’s definition of it. He notes that Western science and discovery came to serve to legitimize Western domination of the world. Thinkers – as diverse as Locke, Hegel or Marx – agreed that the peoples of Africa and Asia lived without history, in unchanging, fixed civilizations when not completely without culture. He condemns the belief that ‘we are the enlightened ones and we are going to enlighten everybody else... everyone else are the childhood of mankind and only Western civilization really are the grownups.’ Indeed, as a corollary, he doesn’t ‘think we can march around the world and make people cosmopolitan [or democratic, or respect human rights].’

He does admit to being a child of the Enlightenment in that he ‘believe[s] in history and in progress, I am not religious, I believe in the rule of law, etc.’ He also loves the Enlightenment’s belief in the power of debate: ‘It required a big argument!’ But even here, on the subjects of North-South relations and multiculturalism, the liberalism issued of the Enlightenment is of marked poverty. It imagines a world of ‘free-floating atoms contracting with other free-floating atoms’ and ‘it has never understood difference.’

Stuart Hall

Then nation-state, liberalism and Western interventionism are of little use to us today… What are we do to? And what is Hall, as a deracinated Jamaican and a Leftist intellectual in England, to recommend? Hall seems to suggest muddling through, he concedes that he is ‘a cosmopolitan by default.’ He aspires to an ‘openness to the horizon to that which I’m not.’ While, ‘I don’t want to make a fetish of Otherness,’ he does claim a sympathy and kind of kinship with the Palestinians in particular. He says that ‘I know what it’s like to be colonized… They come from another tradition, another world, another religious universe, another language, another literature… They are not me but I am open in some ways to their existing in my global world.’ An openness to other lives – as our own experiences and identities transform and interpenetrate – may provide a partial answer. That and a kind of activism, Hall reminds us that democracy is ‘open, argumentative, quarrelsome society.’ He urges political activism to solve the problems of today: “It’s quarrels that gave the enfranchisement of women or that gave the majority of people the vote. It is struggles that democratised old aristocratic and capitalist societies.” He assures, as though advising and supporting his grandchildren on a difficult matter “It’s not an easy passage.”

P: Mitterrand

2009-05-22T09:04:00.000-07:00

Large and original.

Doodles

2009-05-19T09:10:00.001-07:00

And now, for something completely different..

I have doodled ever since I could hold a pencil, usually to mixed results, but it has only been relatively recently that I have tried to draw real-life people, and only in the past year or so that I've tried drawing from pictures. Favorite subjects include Francois Mitterrand, Mobutu Sese Seko and Frantz Fanon. I am usually charmed by those with a certain mystique..

I've drawn a few over the past year and I've decided to share. Unfortunately I don't have access to any decent image-editing software on this computer (libary, they have scanners though) so I haven't been able to crop or fix the contrast of most of these pictures. (Did you know paint doesn't have a "zoom out" function?!)

I've got Frantz Fanon and James Blake Miller (aka. The "Marloboro Marine") from sometime early last autumn. Each time using a thick pencil, a bit rough..

More recently (last week), I indulged in my novel minor obsession with Mikhail Gorbachev. I was so pleased with the result that I continued that day with LBJ and George F. Kennan. For these I used a thin pen-pencil, so I don't have much color depth. The last two were quick and dirty and it shows, their left eyes are slightly off. (Although, for Kennan, it may be that he just had the one big eyeball.)

And finally...

..more Fanon! I used the same model as the first drawing, but this is the first time I had all the proportions looking about right and, most importantly, got good-looking shading. I invite you to look at the big version (see the original).

The Lonely Military-Industrial Complex

2009-05-12T12:49:00.000-07:00

Inspired by and in response to Stephen Walt. He questions the reasons and need for the United States to spend as much on defense as the rest of the world combined.

The global imbalance in defense spending towards the U.S. is the product of several factors. The most important have been the demilitarization of other advanced economies and the strength within American society of the National Security state and the military-industrial complex. The resources the U.S. commits to defense, while a huge imbalance internationally, is not unusual by American standards since 1945.

Europe (and Japan): where have all the soldiers gone?

The tendencies towards demilitarization within the developed world (Western Europe, Japan) have long been underway. Obviously in Germany and Japan, post-World War pacifism and guilt have been important. In countries like France, the U.K., Belgium and the Netherlands, military power was undermined by its consistent failure to maintain long-term colonial domination in the 1950s and 1960s. The trend really became pronounced with the end of the Cold War, when the security of European states was fundamentally assured, and they could engage in a vast demilitarization. Now European and Japanese defence spending tends towards a near-negligible 1% of GDP, with the exceptions of Great Britain and France with their lingering Great Power aspirations. The fact that even if a major European country invested more substantially in their military, they would lack the ability to undertake autonomous action of any real interest anyway (not counting the odd British and French adventures in Africa..).

In what was once the place of the ‘other’ vast military-industrial complex, the former Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War was the critical factor. Russia no longer needs to invest (waste) so much of its national wealth into military forces to control Eastern Europe or participate in the nuclear arms race. Add to that that the Soviet/Russian economy collapsed in 1989-1991, and you understand why that country no longer factors into the equation.

China is still attempting to have a working aircraft carrier. This, the ex-Soviet Varyag, is currently undergoing repairs by the Chinese.

China is the only rising economy that might rival the U.S. eventually in terms of defense spending. I suspect they will have both the potential and the interest in the mid-term future, but we are not there yet.

Unheard of..

So the 'spending more than the rest of the world' factoid is somewhat misleading. It is not that the U.S. is all that militarized by most standards. This is not Wilhelmine Germany, interwar Europe, or even Ronald Reagan's America (about 6% of GDP to the military). It *is* high by today's global standards, mainly because other poles of military power - Western Europe, Japan, Russia - have demilitarized massively. The United States is the last country in the world today seriously interested in projecting substantial military might abroad.

..and normal.

I don't know if 4% of GDP is too high. Certainly, given the size of the U.S., its economy, its scientific successes, this has meant that there has been a rampant and sickening technophilia in the U.S. military. It has been evident since the Cold War, with officers and congressmen seeming to think all their security problems can be resolved by atomic bombs, Huey helicopters, smart bombs, stealth bombers and more 137.5 million-dollar fighter jets… In my opinion, one can trace a straight line in thinking between losing in Vietnam despite dropping more bombs on Southeast Asia than the whole of those exploded in WW2 with the idea that Rumsfeld's "military revolution" would mean Iraq would be a cakewalk.

U.S. military power means our leaders will, every so often, misuse it. Whether this is because of hubris or miscalculation is irrelevant. Assuming no general war, in 20 or 30 years, I am convinced there will be American boys fighting a losing war in some other godforsaken corner of Asia. This is part of what the Founding Fathers' feared. America was meant to be different from Europe, with its vicious circle of power-hungry princes and ravenous wars.

Civil War: an American exception

America has not succumbed to despotism, but it has embraced a very European tradition of permanent semi-war footing, and military adventurism. This was literally un-American before 1941 and has been normal since. (And, to counter the arguments of a Bob Kagan: there were obviously American wars in the 19th Century, even expansionist ones, but there was no peacetime conscription or vast military establishments as in Europe.) So we have this ironic symmetry: the U.S. was exceptional before the Second World War for being the only civilian power, it has been exceptional since the end of the Cold War for being the last military power.

I think we could benefit from an honest and open debate on the issue of American military power. If only so that, every four years, we do not have these ridiculous pissing matches between presidential candidates as who is willing to be ‘stronger-on-defence’ by throwing yet more money at it... without ever detailing which programs in particular make the United States more secure. Although, to be frank, I doubt the country is capable of such a discussion. The fact that so many in our media and political elite portrayed the new defense budget - representing a 4% increase - as a cut seems to confirm this. At least Bob Gates seems committed to reorienting in a more useful manner the necessary curse of organized violence.

More Walt

2009-05-10T15:16:00.000-07:00

Noted realist international relations professor and commentator Stephen Walt has was is really a very good blog. He's been very prominent in the poli sci community in the U.S. for a long time (structural realism, defensive realism, balance of threat.. zz..), but only came to worldwide and public prominence when he co-wrote an article (later book) with John J. "give everybody nukes!" Mearsheimer on the Israel Lobby and U.S. foreign policy. He produces a steady stream of posts on a vast array of topics on the world today, whether its on Israel-Palestine, pessimism on Afghanistan, nuclear Iran, films and so forth..

More recently, he has written two pieces that caught my interest. The first compares Obama to Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon, and hopes he will be like the latter in terms of foreign policy (detente and recognition of enemies, military withdrawal from quagmires..). I am somewhat jealous because I long had drafts for a Nixon-Obama analogy piece kicking around on my desktop, and Walt has largely articulated what I would have said. He also has a must-read 'Threatmonger's Handbook' describing all the tactics used over the years to justify a large, large number of unnecessary and often ill-advised wars.

Worth tracking.

"Punching" (response to Walt)

2009-05-01T11:11:00.000-07:00

This is a long response to Stephen Walt's post on states punching above and below their weight. His post raises questions about the nature of a nation's power, its international influence, and the relationship between the two.

For this kind of exercise to be useful, one would need to define and be rigorous about what one means by 'national power', 'international influence' and so forth. The ability to get in the headlines is not the same thing as being influential.

President de Gaulle: power without influence.

In that sense, Charles de Gaulle is a rather misleading example. He obviously got a lot of attention at the time (and since) for his eloquent and bombastic rhetoric, and innovative, sometimes shocking, foreign policy. Arguably he increased France's power by making her autonomous within NATO through military withdrawal and the nuclear deterrent. However his influence over other countries seems to have been fairly close to nil. His efforts to seduce Germany (away from the Americans), to push the Poles to rebellion, to form a rapport with the Russians and neither were the Europeans willing to accept French leadership of the EEC with the Fouchet Plan. (One can only really cite his influence negatively: in blocking the UK's accession to the EEC, in vetoing the EEC for a while.)

Let us speak of *influence*, not notoriety. That is, we are talking about a state's ability to coerce, persuade or shape another state/region according to its desires. Here we find most countries becoming unexceptional, if not peripheral, to one another. Even informal spheres of influence today are rather rare, and whatever power a typical nation such as a Spain, an Argentina or a Malaysia has today, seems rather abstract. But let us explore this exercise..

Some conditions for punching above:
* Be the best in your region: This allows you to be the quasi-formal leader of your region in international fora. This applies mainly to Brazil and South Africa.

* Be powerful relative to your region: A related, but separate concept. Israel is tiny, of course, but its economic, technological and military prowess (not to mention the opposite qualities of its neighbors) give it a kind of dominance over its neighbors. Other examples of this could include Cuba (it used to have troops in various parts of Africa) and (Apartheid) South Africa.

The European Union: pooled power.

* Pool/join power: The best example of that is the EU. While it is obviously true the institution is a political fractious and a non-entity in any crisis, it also represents a sharing of economic power. Each EU member is economically too small to be of any real influence internationally (with the very slightly partial exception of Germany). EU membership negotiations are done in common, they offer the possibility of structural funds, agricultural funds, trade, aid, investment, and access to the European market. Naturally, the EU's neighbors greatly desire all these things, and the EU's member negotiate collectively to place *conditions* on access to it, the most important being democracy, the rule of law, market economics and so forth. In so doing, the small-to-medium sized EU states, each in themselves of little significance, are collectively using their substantial economic power to literally reshape their neighbors in accordance with their interest (in essence, making them peaceful, prosperous, democratic trading states).

Some conditions for punching below:

Happy irrevelevance... (Switzerland)

* Having a weak military-industrial complex and foreign policy/national security elites. This is the case of civilianized 'trading states', Japan and Western Europe (partial exceptions of Britain/France) being the typical examples. With military spending at circa 1% of GDP, the ability to project military power is almost nil, making one impotent in crisis situations requiring it (1990-1 Gulf War, Yugoslav Wars, for example).

...miserable strength. (Soviet soldiers in Prague, 1968)

* Have a too strong (or foolishly used) military-industrial complex and foreign policy/national security elites. Military power today is a double edged sword, and I would argue, not that useful in most instances. Globalization and nuclear weapons have meant that fighting first world countries is both useless and suicidal. Demographic explosion and asymmetric weapons (IEDs, Kalashnikov etc.) have made 3rd world occupation mostly pointless. The typical example of this was the Soviet Union, having vast armed forces, a huge nuclear arsenal, an economy distorted by 15-20% of GDP sucked into defense. Meanwhile, this military power was either A) unused B) used to control an impoverished, expensive, embarrassing and strategically useless Eastern Europe, and the threat it posed precluded much Soviet cooperation with the only places that mattered in terms of trade, aid and technological development: North America, Western Europe and Japan.

Still, this is all very schematic. One would really need appropriate and rigorous definitions. 'National power' seems easy enough, tally up the numbers in terms of GDP, soldiers, nuclear weapons, tanks, trade and so forth. 'Influence' and 'international power' seem much more difficult. Power is often structural and not related to executive leadership (the democratic/capitalistic/pacifying influence of German trade on its neighbors for instance). Power is also often conditional on a (usually problematic) situation for it to be useful. Without Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, for instance, it is doubtful US military power would have seen any 'useful' action since the end of the Cold War. Finally, 'power' can't be judged as a simple number (nation X is 10x stronger than nation Y).

Power and Peril: military adventurism

Power is double edged, particularly military power. Germany's influence abroad is constrained by its low military tradition and aversion to intervention. But does vast military capabilities really make a nation internationally powerful? As always, it depends. Military power is useful in some instances, but it also has an intoxicating effect on elites, leading them to military adventures that are extremely costly to the nation in terms of blood and treasure, while not increasing the country's international influence, in fact, often the opposite. The examples are infinite: French Indochina, French Algeria, the U.S. in Vietnam and Iraq, the Soviets and Americans in Afghanistan to cite the most modern examples. As they say, when you have a hammer..

Officer Recruitment Up: Nihilism and Nine-Eleven

2009-04-18T04:15:00.001-07:00

Tom Ricks in "From Ivy League to olive drab" comments on the (apparent) rise of elite graduates opting for the military over politics, finance and business. He explains it with two points:

The negative trend is, I think, that a significant portion of students are finishing at our best universities feeling let down and unfulfilled by the experience. It just wasn't all it they'd expected it to be. There is too much drinking and dope-smoking and too little sense of commitment to anything larger than one's own ambitions and appetites. Ultimately, they tell me, they didn't feel challenged to be more than themselves, intellectually or morally.

The historical moment is that these young men are from the 9/11 generation. Most of them were 13 or 14 years old then that attack occurred -- that is, barely conscious of the larger world. Since then, for all their conscious lives, they have lived in a nation at war. So what I think fundamentally is going on is that they are deciding that al Qaeda's attack and its consequences are becoming the defining event of their lifetimes, and they want to be part of that.

My response:

I think you are probably sadly right on both counts. University life might as well be a course in nihilism. That is somewhat unfair. The failure of universities to instill values is a reflection of our society (and consumer societies more generally). We are driven by money, sex, cars, TV and any number of banal careers. When one is working, one doesn't have quite the time to think and ponder about this. When one is studying, a mix of contemplation and idleness, the ugly, materialistic nihilism of our society becomes unbearable.

I think the second point on the 9/11 generation is also probably true, and also quite sad. I think it is sad that Americans feel so insecure today, when they in fact have never been so secure since 1939 when the Nazi conquest of Europe made isolationism untenable. We are not a nation at war. The fact some people talk and think as though we are in an epic struggle speaks to the mediocrity of this generation. As though having two 'small wars', virtually cut off from the rest of the nation, were comparable to the struggles of WW2 or the threats of total annihilation of the Cold War.

I find it sad also because the biggest security threat to America today, a nuclear terrorist attack, is not in fact one where military force is all that useful (unless we plan on invading every single potential proliferator, clearly impossible). It is much more a job for meticulous FBI agents and Pashtun-speaking intelligence officers than aimless drones or gung-ho Marines.

The only good sign is that at least some young people want to do something that requires discipline and purpose. Not that that needs to be found in the military. I myself will be graduating with a Master's shortly and, as I don't think I have the character for the military, hope to work in State or Defense.

Michael Kinsley vs. Social Sciences (and U.S. Cuba Policy)

2009-04-17T04:56:00.000-07:00

Michael Kinsley is my favorite journalist and political commentator around. This is so not so much on the basis of his articles, which are usually good but not great. Nor is it because of his trailblazing founding and editing of the first (?) online magazine Slate, although that usually provides a lot of very diverse and interesting stuff.

No, I was charmed with Kinsley's numerous appearances on Charlie Rose in which he is, from Clinton to Obama, an unflappable voice of reason and skepticism. You see him duke it out over the years from his writing a book on the American people in the 1990s entitled Crybabies, his preaching the gospel of combing media and internet (when it wasn't so fashionable, whereas now it seems so obvious to us), and his wry commentary of the Bush years. And too, one sees him in an ostensibly losing (and for the longest time, secret) struggle with Parkinson's disease, to the point of significantly affecting his mannerism and speech, which he has not let negatively affect his life. He defected from Washington D.C. to continue his career in Seattle, Washington (substituting Microsoft and hiking for Crossfire and going to New York shows).

Kinsley doesn't go onto Charlie Rose often enough, so I do read his articles. And I really enjoyed this week's piece. It's a commentary on experiments in social sciences and policy towards Cuba. The barbs on economics and political science are ones I have thought myself:

Among the social sciences, economists are the snobs. Economics, with its numbers and graphs and curves, at least has the coloration and paraphernalia of a hard science. It's not just putting on sandals and trekking out to take notes on some tribe.

Political science, meanwhile, announces its defensiveness in its name. If it really were a science, it wouldn't need to say so quite as adamantly, would it? The difficulty with social science is that it's about people, who tend to be fickle. Political science is usually about people in large groups. Parties. Societies. Nations. If you want to test a proposition about, say, the relationship between democracy and free trade, you can't just set up a bunch of countries to experiment with. You have to take what you find, and there will always be some exception or complication to defeat your pretensions to science.

It then goes on to argue how we have valid experiments in foreign policy: we've tried every different thing under the sun to eliminate communist regimes. Some things seem to work, others don't, and while hardly original, Kinsley suggests the longevity of Cuban Communism suggests something about the effectiveness of our policies towards that country..

I hope to see more of Kinsley's mild-mannered acid wit in the future!

Battlestar Galactica

2009-04-08T13:18:00.000-07:00

I finally finished Season 4 of Battlestar Galactica today. Spoilers abound.

BSG has for the last four years been some exemplary, bold television. As a series it has its flaws: seemingly bipolar characters, sometimes aimless story arcs, the fact that half the fleet seems to be made up of reporters… And the finale was deeply dissatisfying in many ways – I don’t need to repeat what has been said all over the internet about the gaping plot holes and unbelievably garish, lazy mysticism. At the same time, it had two things that I loved about the series.

The first is the real genius of the show. Its good moments are extremely good, because they are truly compelling. The quality of the actors and naturalistic settings make the characters and situations feel very real. The events gone through are awe-inspiring and we experience them as our own: the confused end of civilization, the claustrophobia of being on the run in tin cans, the wonder at finding a friendly, superior vessel, the despair of finding an Earth of ashes… And that is only scratching the surface. The travails, joy, despair, horror, redemption, and triumphs of the characters are ours. You literally fear, cheer and weep for them. The finale featured a good number of moving scenes and fitting send offs that ran from the shocking through the hopeful to the bittersweet… I loved Season 4 for using a number of characters – Dualla, Gaeta, Athena, Helo – to their full potential and the finale too has priceless moments with Adama, Roslin, Caprica Six, Baltar.

"Bold television"

The second is the show as a format for debate. Themes have included democracy, civil rights, terrorism, war and all that. The main themes in the finale are ones proper to Science Fiction: the nature of artificial life and the dangers of technology. Both themes are extremely timely. Artificial life for the current research on genetically modified food, cloning and stem-cell research. The dangers of technology are always an issue in any human civilization, but especially industrial civilization.

Frankenstein's Monster: Early Cylon

This isn’t particularly new ground. The show’s premise – robots becoming human, usually running amok – is extremely common in Sci Fi. One could cite Blade Runner, Terminator, about half of Isaac Asimov’s cannon, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis… In fact, you can go all the way back to what is perhaps the first Science Fiction novel, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. What BSG did was to add to this venerable tradition for the first time on television in a compelling new setting, beautifully executed with stunning CGI and great actors. It has renovated the Promethean Myth, perhaps the most important and commonly addressed question of Sci Fi.

Prometheus: Greek myth...

The conquest of technology, the acquisition of previously forbidden knowledge, these themes go back as least as far as the myth of Prometheus. The Titan Prometheus gives man the ability to use fire. The Gods are angered by this theft. Prometheus is chained to a mountain in the Caucasus, doomed to have his liver devoured by an eagle every day. Man is given a box, unwittingly opened by Pandora, releasing all of the evils into the world. We learn to split atoms, to turn dead dinosaurs into propulsion, to produce everything en masse. In doing so, the world conforms to something approaching our will. Infant mortality drops, lights stay on at night, urban pauperism is reduced to a small minority, EasyJet and Skype destroy the meaning of distance. We do not grow up with rotten teeth to die in our early thirties of dysentery… But we can never predict the effects of Prometheus’s gifts. It was not so long ago that blowing up the Earth was not such a remote possibility. And even today our addiction to various creature comforts might lead to any number of disasters. Whenever we empower ourselves further through technology, turning the world progressively into an extension of ourselves, we must always be aware of the dangers as well as the opportunities.

Debate on the issue seems to split into uncomfortable polarization. On the one hand are those who protest at various summits, or feel empowered by smashing a McDonald’s, variably anti-globalization, anti-genetic modification, anti-nuclear, seemingly entirely emotional and unconstructive (or, in the case of opponents of stem-cell research, driven by reasons of faith). On the other are those, rather low-key these days but very powerful in the Nineties, advocating growth above all, as part of a risk-taking and social Darwinist philosophy, typically displaying an unhealthy technological fetishism. Really, these are two equally nihilist modes of thinking. Only Tom Friedman, cheerleader of the new globalized capitalism cum cheerleader of all things Green, seems to have reconciled the dilemma within himself, although not really satisfactorily.

...flawed metaphor

The Promethean ambition is one of the most important dilemmas facing humanity today. Science Fiction is the only genre really capable of grappling with it. It is no coincidence if the subtitle to Shelley’s classic is The Modern Prometheus. BSG has breathed new life into the debates on artificial life specifically and the Promethean dilemma more generally. These are debates we need. For the myth of Prometheus is in some ways an inadequate metaphor for industrial, scientific Man. It is not the gods who curse us for acquiring new knowledge and technology. We do that ourselves. It is our own political, social, psychological and, indeed, moral character which determines that. We choose whether we split the atom to power lightbulbs or destroy cities, whether we use our surgeons to remove cancers or adjust our noses, whether our factories produce bullets or tennis shoes… We decide.

Not that I would take the producer, Ron D. Moore’s philosophies at face value. The very final scene had an unbelievably heavy-handed Luddite message… (Not that I think a little Luddism is unhealthy.) BSG also provided a fascinating vision of a cyclical pattern to technological development. This pattern could be extended beyond robots that kill their masters (for instance: civilization > nuclear weapons > nuke to Stone Age > repeat). BSG leaves us with much food for thought.

What are we left with after four seasons of BSG? We have an inevitably flawed, beautiful series. We have a striking, compelling story that often soars to very great heights. We have the sublime score of Bear McCreary which I’m sure I will long to for a long time… and something else. It is not often entertainment makes you think. More than that it has made me want to write. But it is bittersweet to see it end, as Tim Kreider writes:

[W]atching it end still made me sort of maudlin and wistful, since we’ve lived with those characters for years now and we’ll never see them again. A TV show creates an artificial family group, it's serial and ritualistic, and it lasts over a sizable fraction of your lifespan, so it’s much better at evoking this feeling of time and finality than even long movies or books--even if that series is as silly and trivial as Cheers. (I still get all nostalgic for a certain era of my life and circle of friends whenever I see an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.) It makes you mournful for a whole phase of your life, even if it's only just ending and you didn't even notice it was a phase while you were in it--a sort of nostalgia for the ever-vanishing present. Also I had a big crush on Laura Roslyn.

And to conclude with smiles:
* Galactisimpsons
* Motivational posters.
* BGCast Season 3 Analysis, Parts i, ii

Science, the State and Unknown Unknowns

2009-03-16T17:46:00.000-07:00

Tom Friedman's latest article bandies out an idea we haven't heard in a while: fusion. In this week's article he ore that, there is the mandatory colorful half/joke half anecdote.

You’ll hear about someone who’s invented a process to convert coal into vegetable oil in his garage and someone else who has a duck in his basement that paddles a wheel, blows up a balloon, turns a turbine and creates enough electricity to power his doghouse.

I love how Tom writes the way he speaks..

This might not be the best way to open a column arguing that fusion researchers are not crackpots, but I am nonetheless inclined to agree with his sentiment. History is full of examples of hare-brained schemes succeeding, though often not at the initial mission they set out for. There is Christopher Columbus's successful lobbying of the Spanish monarchy for funds to go round the world to India. There is the Manhattan Project which led to a less bloody victory over Japan, made WW3 simultaneously less likely and unimaginably more destructive. The internet was created as an offshoot of the many billions spent in the Space Race and technological competition with the Soviet Union.

All these projects involved a supreme act of imagination to foresee their consequences. What European in 1491 could guess that a New World could be found, a world they would flock to in the millions to find better lives, and eventually return to the Old to save it on more than one occasion? Who until Einstein could imagine the human ability to end the world, an act which had previously only been conceived of in texts such as the Book of Revelation? In 1930, Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset expressed amazement that he could read in his newspaper about the ongoing expeditions to the North Pole and 'that icebergs passed drifting against the burning background of the Andalusian landscape.' How would he respond when today hundreds of millions (billions?) of people communicate with each other at a moment's notice, through text, Skype, video, music?

This is why Science Fiction is so important. It allows us to speculate on hypothetical situations, that may seem perfectly implausible to us today, but which have features that may well characterize the future. There are too many, as Donald Rumsfeld so eloquently put it, "unknown unknowns" for us to assume anything will remain constant is foolish. The whole of human history attests to that, and with emergence of science and industry, that has grown exponentially truer.

For all this, we need to keep an open mind and invest human and financial resources into projects like space exploration, stem-cell research (recently re-approved by Obama), the Joint European Torus and CERN are so important. It is not that by pumping billions we'll end up with a Mars colony or ditch fossil fuels in favor of cold fusion. The vast majority of these kinds of projects will in all likelihood amount to nothing. The advances some would make however, in knowledge and ability, would in fact be greater than our ability to imagine.

Obama/Brown: Phoning It In

2009-03-07T18:26:00.000-08:00

I initially sent this to WaPo a couple days ago as an op-ed application. They didn't accept it, but at least they got back to me, which from their auto-response seemed rare enough ("if you don't get a response in a week, you can assume we didn't publish it.."). Here it is:

Gordon Brown’s visit to Washington last week Tuesday has been nothing less than a media disaster for the embattled British Prime Minister. These things are usually relatively innocuous – President Obama’s meetings with Prime Ministers Stephen Harper and Taro Aso were unremarkable – but things have conspired to make the British press treat Brown’s visit as a continuation of a national joke at his expense.

Obama, it seems, snubbed Brown. He did not hold a grand press conference in the rose garden, that was canceled due to the snow, in what one British journalist has called Obama’s ‘diplomatic version of the coitus-declining headache hinting that the "special relationship" has already progressed, after that quick stop at "special partnership", to "special marriage".’

Did I mention? White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’s casually terming his country’s ties with the U.K. It has also brought on an onslaught of unflattering romance analogies. The BBC noted that 'Gordon Brown looked as nervous as someone on a first date in his meeting with the president.' Politico summed up the British press's attitude to the whole affair: 'He's just not that into you.' Brown's dignity has not been helped by the fact that after speaking with Obama on British sacrifices in Afghanistan and the dire need for a 'Global New Deal', the President's next meeting that afternoon was with the Boy Scouts of America.

It’s all mostly harmless meanness, though obviously chastening for Brown to have his big moment meeting with the First Black POTUS and addressing the U.S. Congress in the midst of a global crisis (an honor relatively few British PMs have) ruined by the jeering British commentariat. Was it really too much to hope for the painfully-dreary-eyed-looking Brown to bask in a little of Obama's reflected glory? A Nixon or a Chirac could always count on foreign leaders and crises to give them statesmanship points..

As though all this wasn't bad enough, it has recently come out that Brown gave the President a penholder made from the timber of the 19th Century anti-slavery gunship the Gannet. Nice! How did Obama return the favor? With a 25-DVD set of classic American movies including Star Wars and the Wizard of Oz. Now, if Obama really doesn't care for Brown to think of something not totally half-assed, don't they have, like, people in State whose job it is think of stuff like this?

However trivial these 'snubs', people have found signs that Obama's coldness is not merely towards Brown personally, but to Britain itself. Obama unceremoniously returned that hideous bust of Winston Churchill in the White House (put their by George Bush) to the British and replaced it with one of Abraham Lincoln. Obama’s grandfather, they say, was tortured by the British, no less.

Is the Anglo-American magic gone? The Daily Telegraph ominously warns as much. The Heritage Foundation warns of the dire consequences of undermining the Special Relationship (including heightened Euro-Franco-German influence in NATO). At the risk of aligning myself with the forces of evil, I agree that Obama, whatever his own feelings, is appearing a little too cavalier. It is not good diplomacy.

I have no inordinate respect for British foreign policy. It has an almost wholly destructive role in Europe and lacks any kind of international ambition beyond shadowing U.S. foreign policy. From a U.S. point of view, however, this is nothing to complain about. The fact is, militarily at least, the British are the only allies worth a damn in Europe. The French are unreliable due to their own ambitions. The other Europeans, whatever the merits, have decided that their national security is not contingent on them seriously investing in forces that can be projected overseas. In terms of manpower and equipment, British contributions to U.S. missions are greater than the whole of Continental Europe.

It is not clear to me why Britain so different in that way. The British public doesn't give two hoots about U.S. foreign policy. Frankly I think the reasons are really base. British and French leaders live on the illusion of touching History. French Presidents (used to?) get their kicks by contemplating the power of their Bomb (Eg: blowing up Mururoa). British Prime Ministers – Churchill, Thatcher, Blair – get misty-eyed when Americans raise their glasses to them. All rather queer. But it is not the President's role to question why, but to cultivate this sort thing. Obama is an international superstar in many countries, but that glory is fleeting, you don't keep friends by being inconsiderate.

America, the Middle East and 'Respect'

2009-03-06T14:23:00.000-08:00

In response to Charles Krauthammer's January 30th piece. I meant to send this to the Washington Post but at 500 words, it is way above their limit for letters-to-the-editor. I am thinking of sending it anyway or using it as the basis for my own Op Ed.

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I can’t say that I was impressed by Charles Krauthammer’s January 30th piece in which he claims that President Obama is ‘defensive’ and ‘apologetic’ on account of his saying to Muslims that ‘we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect’. Was this really the best example of Carteresque repentance and self-pity Krauthammer could find? More gravely, he presents an extremely selective and distorted picture of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

The Muslims of the region have plenty of reasons to feel ambivalent towards the U.S.A. Our policies have been chiefly determined by the needs for stable supplies of oil, a commodity of so much importance to the world economy, and the fact that Israel, which Americans have a strong sentimental attachment to, happens to be there. U.S. policy in the Middle East, whatever its merits, has always put these two priorities ahead of the will of the region’s inhabitants or, indeed, their well-being.

U.S. actions in the Middle East have repeatedly been conducted in flagrant disregard of the will of its inhabitants. One thinks of the Anglo-U.S. coup against the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, in 1953 or Franco-U.S. support for the military takeover of Algeria in 1992 following the electoral victories of the Islamic Salvation Front. (Can one void a democratic election in the name of democracy?) Muslims were appalled at the excessive use of force during the Gulf War (recall the ‘Highway of Death’), the no-fly-zones established over Iraq in disregard for its sovereignty, and the sanctions regime that killed thousands of Iraqis. And, needless to say, Muslims were overwhelmingly opposed to the invasion of Iraq.

On big issues affecting the Middle East as a whole – whether it is Iraq, the Palestinian Question or the role of religion in their own countries – the U.S. has no regard for the opinion of the region’s people. Who can blame Middle Eastern Muslims if they come to the conclusion that the U.S., or rather its government, does not respect them?

This is not to say that the U.S. has never helped Muslims or is driven by prejudice against Islam. One need only cite America’s noble opposition to the Anglo-French operation at Suez in 1956, support for Bosnian Muslims or America’s record of integrating Muslim immigrants more successfully than the Europeans. However, it remains no less true that the American Empire, so uniquely democratic and consensual in Western Europe and Northeast Asia, has a deeply troubling character in the Middle East. I frankly doubt Obama can change this state of affairs any time soon, but one can only praise his declared intention to move in a new direction.

Le rôle du militaire français

2009-03-03T14:10:00.001-08:00

In response to: "Le future de l'armée française ?" at La Plume et le Sabre.

Il faut bien admettre que le modèle britannique a ses avantages. Il suffit de se retourner sur les problèmes français lors de la Guerre du golfe: on envoi une force un tiers de la taille des britanniques, l'aviation se confond avec celle de l'Irak, les problèmes d'inter-opérabilité sont immense. Au final, la contribution française a un caractère strictement symbolique, chose que le président François Mitterrand a pleinement conscience, mais qui sert à poursuivre les illusions de sa diplomatie (« Notre siège à l'ONU à tout prix! »). Les britanniques ont réussi à créer, avec une armée mince et professionnelle, une capacité a projeté des forces considérables dans le monde. Ceci leur permet d’apporter un soutient non- négligeable aux américains, représentant un « boost » de 10-20%.

Reste à savoir quel est notre objectif. Le fait est que le militaire occidental joue un rôle de moins en moins utile dans le système international. Il se trouve que tous, Nord-américains, Européens ou Japonais, ne connaissent aujourd’hui aucune menace de nature existentielle. Or, les américains sont les seules à maintenir une puissance militaire capable de grandes opérations outre-mer. Cela leur est d’une utilité : dissuader les chinois dans le détroit du Taiwan, libéré le Koweït en combattant Saddam Hussein. Mais la taille de leur établissement militaire, la military-industrial complex, encourage aussi la poursuite d’aventures déconcertantes. Leur investissement massif leur mène vers un déséquilibre hyper-technologique qui ne sert pas a grand-chose dans leurs guerres actuelles. Les porte-avions nucléaires, les F-117 et les smart bombs sont impuissants face à l’insurrection…

Quand à la France, elle est trop petite pour que ses capacités militaires aient une influence décisive sur les événements. L’Europe de la défense est mort-née. La France, peut au plus aider ou s’abstenir de tel ou tel projet américain. Ceci est le modèle politique anglais. Cela leur donne une certaine influence sur les Etats-Unis, mais elle n’est sûrement pas décisive. La situation des autres européens est lamentable. Et on se demande pourquoi les américains s'en moque de l'Europe. C’est simple : comme alliées, nous ne valons rien.

Voila nos dilemmes. Le rôle de la défense se réduit chaque jour. La France seule est trop petite, l’Europe est inachevée, l’Amérique est impériale. Les militaires restent là, n’ayant même plus le spectre de la Guerre froide ni le mythe gaullien pour se réconforter. Ils ne leurs restent plus que de poursuivre leurs aventures méconnus dans quelque coin oubliée d’Afrique…

Yugoslav Subprimes

2009-02-06T08:24:00.000-08:00

I'm reading about the collapse of Yugoslavia. On one of the factors:

One could readily argue that the level of debt now reached [in Yugoslavia], of about $20 billion, had rendered fundamental reform impossible... For years, the large Bosnian agro-form "Agrokomerc" had operated thoughout Yugoslavia as well as abroad... With the gathering economic uncertainty, Agrokomerc's business dealings began to include financial speculation. This, in turn, led to losses; these were concelaed by uncovered promissory notes which were accepted as collateral for credits by various banks, including Lbjuljanksa Bank, along with some Bosnian banks. Finally, in 1987 this house of credit collapsed when several banks, including Ljubljanska Banka, could not or would not continue to underwrite Agrokomerc.
Viktor Meier, Yugoslavia: A History of its Demise (1999), p. 43

This scandal led to the fall of the existing communist leaders in Bosnia and anti-Muslim sentiment in the rest of Yugoslavia. It was not the sole or even primary factor in the collapse, but it is nonetheless very eery.

"This is a farewell kiss, you dog!"

2008-12-14T16:31:00.000-08:00

I am impressed with Dubya's dodging abilities.

Best Captions Ever

2008-11-21T08:39:00.001-08:00

You're Fired

2008-11-12T05:17:00.000-08:00

Ironic?

Two Hundred and Thirty Two Years Later

2008-11-06T05:47:00.000-08:00

AP writer tries to live up to moment, fails

2008-11-01T16:29:00.000-07:00

But if Obama wins, these scribes know that they'll be facing the toughest
assignment of their careers. They've all oversubscribed to the notion that
Obama's candidacy is momentous, without parallel, and earth-shattering, so they
can't file garden-variety pieces about the "winds of change" blowing through
Washington. They're convinced that not only the whole world will be reading but
that historians will be drawing on their words. Will what I write be worthy of
this moment in time? they're asking themselves. It's a perfect prescription for
performance anxiety.

From Slate, 4 days ago.

Obama isn't even elected yet, but here's what a certain Liz Sidoti had to say in an article entitled "A campaign for the ages, tilting to the Democrats":

Counting down to Election Day, Barack Obama appears within reach of becoming the
nation's first black president as the epic campaign draws to a close against a
backdrop of economic crisis and lingering war. John McCain, the battle-scarred
warrior, holds out hope for a Truman-beats-Dewey-style upset.

I can appreciate the demand for melodrama but "battle-scarred warrior"? It's not Conan we're talking about.. But what the **** are we to make of a statement like this:

An Obama victory would amount to a wholesale rejection of the status quo: voters
taking a chance on a relative newcomer to the national stage, a 47-year-old
first-term senator from Chicago, rather than stick with a seasoned veteran of
the party in power. With strengthened Democratic majorities in Congress, he'd
have to deal with the party's left flank while governing a country that's more
conservative than liberal.

Epic fail.

Florida Ballot Referenda

2008-10-20T16:00:00.000-07:00

My absentee ballot includes a few provisions on referenda for various constitutional amendments including one giving the State the right to regulate/prohibit property rights of non-citizens (incl. legal residents), one banning gay marriage, one removing for tax purposes the added value of renewable energy sources on property (IE, you won't pay more to the government if you install solar panels), and one to allow for funding of community colleges via a local property tax.

The marriage amendment is particularly cute for its bald-faced partisanship:

This amendment protects marriage as the legal union only one man and one woman as husband and wife and provides that no other legal union that is treated as marriage or the substantial equivalent thereof shall be valid or recognized.

'Define' would actually be neutral, no need to refer to the seething hordes of gays waiting to rampage through your daughter's wedding. It then concludes bizarrely:

The direct financial impact this amendment will have on state and local government revenues and expendtures cannot be determined, but is expected to be minor.

Floridian democracy...

I Met Tom Friedman Today

2008-10-14T15:26:00.000-07:00

I arrived in the lecture theater a half hour before the anointed time. The girl next to me is told she cannot save a seat for a friend. A young gentleman is (apologetically) seated next to her. Said friend eventually arrives, he moves to another spot. The reunited start chattering in Russian…

Tom Friedman is late. 18:31, 32, 36, 38, 42… Oh, bursting in through a side door is a short, portly man with a graying moustache. He looks a bit flustered carrying his coat. He climbs onto the platform and keeps looking up, and around him, swerving his head. He has a strange focused look as he discovers the projector, the screen which already has one of his PowerPoint slides on it, and visually explores his immediate physical space. I think, “He does seem a little ridiculous.”

The chairman gives a brief introduction, “…he needs no introduction. This is Tom Friedman, the most… I want to say the most well-known writer for the New York Times. But Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize yesterday.” The audience laughs and Friedman self-deprecatingly raises his eyebrows and opens his arms with his hands upwards, as though to say, “What can you do?” He is late, we skip some of the formalities.

Friedman begins. The lecture is about his book Hot, Flat and Crowded – do please buy as I will sign it later – and he wisely prefaces his lecture with a “This is a book about energy, but really, it is a book about America. It is an America-centric book.” Indeed his opening line, “America has lots its groove” didn’t seem to have much resonance with his cosmopolitan audience. But he warmed us to him quite quickly. He shows a recent Daimler advert in South Africa:

German engineering, Swiss Innovation, American Nothing

…with a bang: “That billboard really pisses me off!” The audience burst out laughing. And so began something I have never seen before: an emphatic, enthusiastic and pugnacious performance, part stump speech, part preach, part stand-up.

His arguments were couched in metaphor. Nay, he spoke in riddles worthy of a Himalayan guru or Delphic Oracle:
“We must be China for a day, but not two.”
“We are living in the age of Noah.”
“We must not be ‘Where birds don’t fly.’”
“We must go from red to green.”
They’re not actually nonsensical when put in context. In fact they got his various points across quite effectively.

“We must not be ‘Where birds don’t fly.’” - Tom Friedman

It was his typical routine, one he had just performed in 24 lectures at US universities and repeated everything you find in his interviews with Charlie Rose, his books and his columns. The performance, however, made him more likable and impressive I think than any of those other media. The metaphors were there ("America, it's like a rocket, with a leaky..") He got us laughing repeatedly too ("Withdrawal from Iraq: the biggest transfer of air conditioners in human history"). I don’t think sharing his gags verbatim in writing does him justice.

I raised my hand for questions, but sadly, with only 15 minutes, I did not get a chance to share my thoughts. I had prepared a question on whether he’d given any thought to the engineers failing to fix our environmental problems (I thought of 2001: A Space Odyssey and its (basically) EasyJet flights to the moon to get a sense of the unpredictability of innovation). You know, contingency plans, about possible state action, or changing our consumption habits or our mode of transportation perhaps…

2001: The future was a better place yesterday.

The session was over, we clapped. We began leaving the theater. Immediate discussion with my peers emphasized the role that other countries might play (usually their own, one friend, a Brazilian journalist, talked about ethanol, a German girl talked about the policies of that country). For Friedman, the US mattered above all else, although that is normal as that is the audience he has committed himself to preaching to. (…the point of the world is to change it…) I think everyone was impressed.

We lined up for his book signing. Hot, Flat and Crowded currently has a 20 pound price tag so I did not actually own one (I felt a bit illegitimate throughout). The setting was not conducive to chit chat but in the back of my mind I wondered whether I should bring up the question I had wanted to ask during the session. I thought better of it. I climbed onto the platform where he was sitting, and he shook my hand (his was very soft) and I said “Hi, my name is Craig. I love your interviews on the Charlie Rose Show.” He smiled, it looked kind, sincere, wishing to please, “I appreciate that, really.”

I wondered if that was the smile he always gave to the anonymous blur of individuals he encountered when signing 50 or 100 autographs. Really I had half-lied to him. In reality his fountain of metaphors on Charlie Rose infuriate me (regardless whether his specific point was valid.) At the same time, if liberal triumphalists like Friedman or Zacharia move me to answer them, it is that I love to ha… Not hate, truly the wrong word, but contradict them. Being contrarian with certain people is one of things I enjoy most.

He struck this pose, solemn consideration, when asked questions.

Thinking of my question, in some ways it raised an important point about putting all our eggs in one basket. In other ways, it missed his point. He had closed the session with a long quote that was supposed to be uplifting, by some inspirational American woman. He had a little catchphrase earlier which I thought was more effective:

Pessimists are often right. Optimists often accomplish things.

I can’t help but think this green stuff is a bit of a fad like the talk about Japan Inc. and Space Research (S.D.I., Eureka) in the 80s. I certainly don’t think it’s going to be anywhere as big as IT or that the engineers are going to fix all our problems. But Friedman isn’t engaging in dispassionate analysis. His words and thoughts aren’t dead, academic description of reality (“truth”). They are an impassioned attempt to rouse Americans to change (“action”). As he has performed in front of groups as diverse as politicians, to students, to oil men, he might even be effective. To be right is one thing, to persuade is of another order.

Two streets down..

2008-10-01T17:02:00.000-07:00

Prescient Irony

2008-09-30T00:56:00.000-07:00

This Tom Toles cartoon was done before the invasion fiasco..

Ortega on Fukuyama

2008-09-22T10:15:00.000-07:00

That faith in modern culture was a gloomy one. It meant that tomorrow was to be in all essentials similar to today, that progress consisted merely in advancing for all time to be, along a road identical to the one already under our feet. Such a road is rather like an elastic prison which stretches on without ever setting us free.

When in the early stages of the Empire some cultured provincial – Lucan or Seneca – arrived in Rome, and saw the magnificent imperial buildings, symbols of an enduring power, he felt his heart contract within him. Nothing new could now happen in the world. Rome was eternal. And if there is a melancholy of ruins which rises above them like exhaltations from stagnant waters, this sensitive provincial felt a melancholy no less heavy, though of opposite sign: the melancholy of buildings meant for posterity

Over against this emotional state, is it not clear that the feelings of our time are more like the noisy joy of children let loose from school?

- Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1932)

I remember Dad making a similar point to me when I was a child..

Newsweek letters

2008-09-16T17:15:00.000-07:00

Two more got published (!). One on McCain/conservatism's problems, the other on the liberal foreign policy tradition. I don't know why it takes them 6 weeks..

Rugged Invidualism

2008-09-11T21:25:00.000-07:00

Robinette

2008-08-23T08:26:00.000-07:00

Joe Biden's middle name is 'Robinette'. His Mom's maiden name, family has French roots. I won't attempt a pun.

And how did he make his hair grow back?

US military power

2008-07-30T01:15:00.000-07:00

My friend Ellen, a reader of John Keegan’s excellent military histories, pointed out to me that we simply don’t fight pitched battles anymore. The Russians really let us down when they just collapsed like a stack of towels piled too high instead of duking it out on Battlefield Europe like we were gearing up for for fifty years. Now we’ve got all these cool toys and no one to play with. We’ve got radar-invisible planes and our enemies don’t have radar. We’ve got bombs that can vaporize cities and our enemies live in caves. We’ve got the best-trained army on earth and our enemies have got girls blowing themselves up on buses. Sucks, man.

From The Pain.

Could He have tried a bit harder?

2008-07-28T14:15:00.001-07:00

In Faustian style, the dream is one of infinite achievement. There is an American hymn which praises God as "the greatest Achiever of all". (Glancing around the world He created, one wonders whether He couldn't have tried a bit harder.) Americans are encouraged to believe that you can crack it if only you put your mind to it: this takes too little account of the frailty of the flesh, but it also overlooks the human capacity for self-destruction - the fact that even the most robust of achievers may be secretly in love with failure.

- Terry Eagleton, in a review of America, America

At the risk of sounding like a modern-day Panglosse, if were on a Heavenly Earth, it would not be as pretty as things could be. Human determination in the face of adversity is far more beautiful than any snow-capped mountain or shimmering sea. One can be intelligent, successful, generous and handsome. Fine. If you were born with those qualities you hardly deserve any laurels. If you've been in the gutter, a wretch and a wreck, and risen, risen above the shit to a higher state... That struggle, in itself, is greater than the end state.

We are only as beautiful as we were wretched.

As to "the frailty of the flesh"... Human beings have their limits. To one's mind, other human beings can be reduced to statistics. An individual cannot live as a number however. He must live and act in the belief that he is free. Determinism, even if it is in some philosophical sense true, can subjectively only serve as an excuse for inaction. A reason to say, "I can do nothing, it is out of my hands."

There is no excuse for inaction. The fact is, and even ruthless pessimism can only support this thought, whatever you are trying to do you could be doing it better. The only question is knowing how to do it better. That only requires informing oneself, which we can all do: you can ask someone for advise, you can open a book, you can read a trade journal, you can phone an expert, you can try harder, try something different, experiment.

This doesn't mean buying into all that particularly American liberal bollocks about we all being self-made men, and we all bearing the horrific angst of personal responsibility for our failings and, almost as bad, the inane bourgeois belief that at bottom the inequalities and privilege in our society is due to the fact that that X is smarter/more industrious/better than Y. It is merely to say: something can, and must, always be done.

Why Foreign Reporting Sucks

2008-07-05T07:47:00.000-07:00

What stories the world press publishes! I read many of the dispatches sent from Luanda in those days. I admired the opulence of human fantasy. But I also understood my colleagues' predicament. The editor sends a reporter to a country that is fascinating the world. Such a journey costs a lot money. The world is waiting for a great story, a scoop, a sensational narrative written under a hail of bullets. The special correspondent flies out to Luanda. He is taken to the hotel. He gets a room, shaves, and changes his shirt. He is ready and goes out immediately to look for the fighting.
After several hours he announces that he's beating his head against a wall -
He can't do anything.
Angola betrays no interest in his presence. The telephone doesn't answer, or if it does it answers in Portuguese, a language he doesn't understand. [...]
Asked about the situation, [the government spokesman] Felix answers tersely: Confusão.
Confusão is a good word, a synthesis word, an everything word. In Angola it has its own specific sense and is literally untranslatable. To simplify things: Confusão means confusion, a mess, a state of anarchy and disorder. Confusão is a situation created by people, but in the course of creating it they lose control and direction, becoming victims of confusão themselves. [...]
How to explain this to people who have been in Luanda only a few hours? So once again, as if they hadn't heard Felix, they ask:
"What's the situation?"
And Felix answers:
"Haven't I told you already? Confusão."
They go away shaking their heads and shrugging their shoulders. And they are shaking their heads and shrugging their shoulders because Felix has sown Confusão among them.

- Ryszard Kapuscinsky, Another Day of Life

Terrorist Fist Jab Used in US Army Ads

2008-07-02T18:09:00.000-07:00

Watch the double-plus-wholesome intro video till the end.

"Bump, bro'."

Just saying.

Clark, Swiftboat, McCain

2008-07-01T13:01:00.000-07:00

I don't think I've ever been more embarassed, to not say ashamed, to be an American than after watching this video.

Charlie Rose's Happy People

2008-07-01T09:30:00.000-07:00

I find these interviews really heartening. Is there anything better, really, than working really really hard at doing what you love, loving what you do, with an infectious happiness?

Tim Russert.

Stephen Colbert. Very interesting stuff on his upbringing, personality (would read a book a day, but never do homework), aims with the Show and White House Press Conference Dinner.

Colin Powell (1990s, saving the children).

Colin Powell, 1997

2008-06-28T11:56:00.000-07:00

I find this interview soothing, makes me pensive. Try the first 15 minutes.

Book Review: Mitterrand's last breath of vanity

2008-06-28T07:13:00.000-07:00

Politics and literature were the passions of Mitterrand’s life. Though he had written many books, and as a world leader had much to write about, the 200 days he had left to live upon leaving office in 1995 were not enough to produce anything like Churchill, de Gaulle or even Bush I or Giscard d’Estaing. What we have is a little book, Of Germany, of France, which attempts to frame what is perhaps his most important legacy: Franco-German reconciliation and European integration.

At the heart of the book is his policy towards German reunification. Here he omits much and lies a little. His own reticence becomes sideshow to Gisard and Thatcher’s outright opposition to unification. He glosses over the rather serious crisis between Bonn and Paris in late 1989, essentially on the differing paces of German and European unifications, which led him to have a meeting with the German foreign minister in which he luridly described the resurrection of the “Europe of 1913”. He says that meeting Thatcher on the 20th of January, she drew a “portrait” of a German-dominated Europe. The record shows that that is precisely what he did.

"I should like to stress that the root of evil in Germany is Prussia."

So lies flow from Mitterrand’s mouth like the Rhine through Charlemagne’s legacy. The book remains useful and pleasant. He is lyrical. It is an ode to Mikhail Gorbachev. Was he a failure? “Yes, if we think in terms of power, no, if we think in terms of History. Because everything began in Moscow.” More so, the book is an ode to Prussia. Yes, the militaristic northern Kingdom that united that German nation and was destroyed by the allies after WW2. He laments the destiny of Prussia as a victim of Hitler’s war, he disagrees with Churchill’s judgment that “I should like to stress that the root of evil in Germany is Prussia.” Mitterrand says “He was mistaken, while knowing it. It would have been better to recognize that the destruction of Prussia struck the German nation on its head and by dividing Germany of the sort her neighbors achieved a long sought after goal.”

"The assassination must be attempted at all costs. Even if it should not succeed, an attempt to seize power in Berlin must be made. What matters now is no longer the practical purpose of the coup, but to prove to the world and for the records of history that the men of the resistance dared to take the decisive step."

Instead, he waxes lyrical about Prussia as an early constitutional state and Frederick the Great as an enlightened despot. He quotes a Prussian officer who was involved in the 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler, the day it failed and he was killed for it: “None of us can complain about our lot… the value of a man is measured by his capacity to sacrifice his life for his ideals. Never forget that you have been raised on Prussian soil… This carries a great obligation: to serve the truth, to accomplish one’s duty to the end. Never will we be able to separate the notion of liberty but from true prussianism…” Mitterrand’s requiem: “That was the soul of Prussia before Stalin suffocated it.” A mixture of fear of Germany and love of Prussia. It is all true but terribly anachronistic. Prussia had long since died, annihilated by Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianisms into a economically dysfunctional and socially traumatized caricature of the police state. Yet Mitterrand could still tell an East German leader in 1989 that he was convinced that “Prussia would reappear in her true dimension, one of the richest reservoirs of men and means of Germany and of Europe.”

In all this poetry we find revealing or shocking little phrases. Clearly showing what his preference would have been for the events of 1989-1990, he was “not insensitive” to Giscard’s argument for European federation as a prerequisite to German unity, but that “I had to deal with History as it was being made, not as it might be dreamed.” There’s also an astounding bitterness when he writes that German critics of his foreign policy are “probably the expression of a grudge for having paid heavily the price of Nazism and who did not forgive the vanquished of 1940 for being among the victors of 1945.” And while in interviews he constantly asserted that, because of ‘Europe’, he was not afraid of the 80 million inhabitants of united Germany, he still writes that unification was a “challenge” to France, the answer to which, among other things was “to encourage our demographic growth, already more promising than that of Germany.”

Ultimately, the work screams “Legacy!” It is a “last breath of vanity.” Mitterrand incarnated at one time or another almost everything: Catholic, agnostic, conservative, socialist, Vichyite, resister, parliamentarian, republican monarch… But he wants to be remembered for Europe above all. “But if Europe does not have an answer to everything, her entering center-stage, after three quarters of a century of subjugation, sometimes of humiliation, restored to our countries and first of all of those of the Community the chance to make History instead of suffering it… But if we call vanity my European will, I accept that.”

Threats to 'Europe': "imperial ambitions" and "the epic illusion of glory in solitude".

For Mitterrand “dreams of the predestination of Germany and France, that geography and their old rivalry choose to give the signal. I work towards it too. If they have kept in them the best of what I do not hesitate in calling their instinct of greatness, they will understand that it is a project worthy of them.” This project? Europe. A Europe threatened by the temptations France’s “epic illusion of glory in solitude” and Germany’s “imperial ambitions, those of the Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs.” Concluding darkly that “the great powers of the rest of the world will attempt to ruin the coming of a new order which is not theirs.” We can be optimistic, France's Gaullist adventure outside of NATO has been (over so slowly) coming to an end since the 1990s, Germany has remained (minus its policy towards the collapse of Yugoslavia) a model of the civilian state and member of the community of nations.

What we have here is more poetry than history. The book also includes one other chapter, foreign reactions to his election in 1981, and the editor says Mitterrand was working on including the Gulf and Yugoslav Wars. It is a shame he was not given enough life to give a whole account, really a self-portrait, of his years as president.

Book Review: Memories of Thatcher

2008-06-15T13:25:00.000-07:00

It is hard to remember how bad things seemed for the West in the 1970s. Western economies reeled from the Oil Shocks and stagflation. The communist world grew to include South Vietnam, Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopia. The Soviet Union began a campaign to intimidate Western Europeans through the installation of SS20 nuclear missiles capable of vaporizing every NATO base in Europe in a matter of minutes. In 1979, one might have been forgiven for being pessimistic about the West’s prospects. Nonetheless, that was the year Margaret Thatcher came to power, just in time to catch the coming neoliberal wave which would bring free market reform from Chile to China and destroy the Soviet Empire.

There is much more to Thatcher than that, however, as this book (Diplomacy and Disillusion at the Court of Margaret Thatcher) by the Hungarian-born specialist on Eastern Europe George R. Urban. An occasional informal adviser to Thatcher (the subtitle “An Insider’s Account” is somewhat an overstatement), Urban gives us his account of the Iron Lady. Initially he is enamored with her. Literally. Seduced, as many men strangely were, he found her “an attractive lady” who though in her fifties had “retained the movements, the legs and walk of a young woman.” He wrote some of her “Churchillian rhetoric” calling for the rollback of the state at home and the defeat of communism abroad. Upon meeting her for the first time, he was delighted that “this highly intelligent, well-informed and resolute lady would make mincemeat of the American leadership.” He adds “what a pleasure to see a person of ideas in charge of declining Britain!”

The book is a selection of Urban’s diary entries introduced with short passages that explain the time and context. The story is that his gradual disenchantment with Thatcher as someone systematically opposed to both ‘Europe’ and Germany. He records her saying as early as 1984 (!) that “there is no question that if the Germans were reunited they would, once again, dominate the whole of Europe.” Needless to say, this would pose some problems later.

In particular, Urban wants to set the record straight on the “Chequers Seminar” in March 1990 in which Thatcher invited a number of historians and experts to give her advice on Germany. It eventually was leaked in the press that the seminar’s participants, and Thatcher herself, had an extremely anti-German tone. Urban, with most other participants, pleaded that they had not been anti-German or conspiratorial, but that that had been the Prime Minister’s attitude. As her guests asked her to accept unification she would answer with statements like “Yes, yes, but you can’t trust them.” or “Ah well, but not when you are talking to Germans. They will always be the same.” In fact, she had reached her conclusion some days before, echoing Mitterrand’s 1913, she told him “we may be going back to the state of affairs preceding the First World War.”

“…it is possible that the real problems of the future will be quite new: for example Muslim fundamentalism in France and Britain…”

The debate central to Urban’s book is a little surreal from today’s vantage point. But a contemporary reader unfamiliar with both British domestic politics and end of Cold War foreign policy will, however, find many other things of interest. Telling things on the era. I don’t think Urban had 9/11 in mind when he wrote to Thatcher, downplaying Europe’s potential problems with German and Russia, that “it is possible that the real problems of the future – and of course there will be some – will be quite new: for example Muslim fundamentalism in France and Britain supported by Libya or Iran.” Who cannot see some vindication for Vladimir Putin when Urban told Thatcher, “half in jest” that in Yeltsin’s Russia “what the ‘dark masses’ need is the periodic application of the whip, as so many Russians have been telling us. The present chaos, too, is waiting to be sorted out by a strong man of one kind or another. […] Even today, many Russians will volunteer the opinion that only a Tsar-like figure can keep them in order.”

“The present chaos [in Russia] is waiting to be sorted out by a strong man of one kind or another.”

Urban is writing before Tony Blair coined the term ‘Cool Britannia’. His Britain, only 10 or 20 years ago, is a weird place. The infamous and legendary anti-immigration populist Enoch Powell writes that the idea of the Soviet Union being bent on world domination is a self-serving American lie that has “no basis in fact”. As though it were the 1950s, Urban notes that “it is English chic to show Spartan exterior if not downright poverty.” Whole pages of the book are made up of Urban or Thatcher’s lamentations of the state of English: Why did all Britain’s goods come from Germany or Japan? Why were the only stores open till late at night owned by Pakistanis? Why were the English so sloppy, lazy, easy-going and humble? It was quite embarrassing for a statesman’s nation to be thus: “Thatcher is in many respects too good for Britain… She is cut out to be the leader of a nation with the thrift and work ethic of Japan, Germany, Switzerland, Taiwan, perhaps even the US, where her vision, resolve and free-market enthusiasm would produce lasting results.”

This tension, not like unlike that between De Gaulle and France, between Thatcher the English patriot and her distinctively un-English qualities (Urban notes a few: “moderation, give-and-take, respect for minority views, the distrust of grand schemes and theories…”) is only one of the paradoxes of her character. She is far more complicated than what many people who praise her legacy today seem to think. Thatcher, who according to Mitterrand “becomes like an 8-year old girl when she is with Reagan,” was outraged when the US invaded Grenada, on the grounds that it violated “Commonwealth sovereignty”. Thatcher, the Cold Warrior, like George Bush went to Kiev to oppose Ukraine’s independence (No “vive le Quebec libre” here…), supporting the collapse of communism and the integrity of the USSR. Thatcher, the nationalist, justifies this with a critique of Wilson of which given the troubles we have had, even today in the former Yugoslavia and Iraq, I can only approve: “It is Woodrow Wilson, of course, who is ultimately responsible for the damaging myth of the single-nation state. Such states cannot work. Wilson got it all wrong. He is the one to be put in the dock of history.” Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, Thatcher, for 15 years leader of the Tories, eventually came to dislike the term “conservative”: “we are a party of innovation, of imagination, of liberty, of striking out in new directions, of renewed national pride and a novel sense of leadership. That’s not ‘conservative’, is it?!”

The paradoxes and complexities escape her image in the United States. Urban describes a lavish party hosted by the Heritage Foundation with her as guest of honor: “It was a black-tie occasion. Everybody who is anybody in Washington and beyond was there – some fourteen hundred of them… The queen couldn’t have done better, what with the country-club conservatives, corporate America and the military all gathered under one roof… America was conferring on MT the sort of honorary imperial presidency she had vainly sought at home… But here in Washington, seat of the only remaining superpower, with the symbols, and the reality, of the might of America so theatrically displayed, she could, for a brief hour or two, savor the rewards of history she felt were her due. She was praised by her hosts to the point of embarrassment. When the black ties stood up to toast her, it was like a regimental gathering drinking to the monarch.”

This kind of honor is not something that Thatcher could receive in Britain without some heckling: hated by a large part for the mass unemployment her policies caused, thrown overboard by her own Conservative Party for the poll tax’s unpopularity, disliked by the foreign policy establishment for her opposition to both German unification and European integration… In Britain, the aggressively neoliberal/libertarian/neoconservative (whatever you want to call it) streak is quite alien to the nation’s character. She has only found an enduring appeal to the Euroskeptics still fighting against ‘Brussels’.

Thatcher and Reagan, withering into history...

It is strange that of all foreign leaders, only British ones like Churchill and Thatcher ever have conservative cults dedicated to them in the US. Her hallowed place in the Pantheon of American conservatism, like Churchill’s, is a skewed one: she has been reduced merely to the proponent of limited government and the flamboyant Cold Warrior. She has been stripped of all the idiosyncrasies, contradictions and petty parochialisms that make up every political life and every human being. One wonders if she can truly take comfort as she basks in the glory of being etched into the memory of the Americans, for what they see in her is not her, but a vain reflection of themselves.

Rue Britannia

2008-06-15T10:43:00.000-07:00

"Rue Britannia is a daily cartoon featuring RueB, a new embodiment of today's Briton. See her perspective on events that are affecting the UK from home and abroad."

I've just discovered this neat little startup comic/blog call Rue Britannia featuring this scantily clad young lady as the modern day RueB. This pugnacious little strip looks like my surest way of keeping in touch with the various happenings and 'controversies' that barely make an echo beyond the Channel.. He also wants people to advertise it so maybe his readership will be about 3 people bigger!

"You're not listening. I'm telling you something important."

2008-06-09T23:52:00.000-07:00

LBJ calls a friend at 6AM:
"Listen," he began. "I've been reading Carl Sandburg's biography on Lincoln and no matter how great the book's supposed to be, I can't bring Lincoln to life. And if it's true for me, one President reading about another, then there's no chance the ordinary person in the future will ever remember me. No chance. I'd have been better off looking for immortality through my wife and children and their children in turn instead of seeking all that love and affection from the American people. They're just too fickle."
I tried at first to cajole him from his morose mood by teasing him that from this day forward I would promise to include a question on Lyndon Johnson on every final exam I gave at Harvard so that at least for the length of my teaching career, students at Harvard would never forget him. But he cut my banter short with an unusual abruptness. "You're not listening. I'm telling you something important. Get married. Have children. Spend time with them."

I came across remarkable passage in two very first pages of Doris Kearns' biography of LBJ. I had it lying around but never read it. I was too busy with Randall Woods' much bigger bio and then moved on. It has certainly whet my appetite for more..

Quote of the Mo: Mitt's Famous Last Words

2008-06-09T23:46:00.000-07:00

"Don't sit too close to me. I've become more radioactive than Mururoa."

...

OK, so he had another 100 days to go.

Letter to Newsweek: 'Reform'

2008-06-06T15:39:00.000-07:00

On"Une Annee Horrible" June 9, 2008.

Dear Sir,

I agree with Gordon and Vaisse that Sarkozy has had a rough year, but why must every article about France obsess about reform? It is the only word on people's lips! Thatcher's Britain needed 'reform' because its GDP was a whopping 20% smaller than France's. Today, France's GDP is 5% smaller than Britain's. Alas, not all nations have the fortune of North Sea Oil and an English-speaking financial capital. Nonetheless, France has one of the best healthcare systems in the world, French homeowners have not fallen victim to the voodoo-financing of banks and the French economy is not suffering from currency depreciation, recession or inflation. France does not need half as much reform as people say it does. Sarkozy will continue being "Chirac on caffeine", tinkering here and there, being basically unremarkable as French presidents have mostly been since the end of the Cold War.

Book Review: DG's The Edge of the Sword

2008-05-31T09:55:00.000-07:00

The Edge of Sword is now a classic French essay on military leadership. Charles de Gaulle’s thoughts on the nature of leadership are condensed into this little book (80 pages). De Gaulle meditates on such topics as military-civilian relations, ‘great men’ in history, past wars, prestige and, perhaps most important, the qualities of a great leader. He writes succinctly, poetically, full of wise and witty quips.

Written in the 1930s, one finds many telling comments on the era. De Gaulle shows what seems like a dangerous militarism in his glorification of (well) glory as he condemns “a thousand [post-WW1] paintings applying themselves to depict the ravages while hiding what is effective and glorious.” He criticizes the Cartesian tendency for abstraction in French military thought, instead praising then-Colonel Pétain for the victories he achieved in WW1 thanks to flexibility for the circumstances on the battlefield (IE, not systematically attacking the enemy as the doctrine of élan prescribed). He even complains, we are still in 1932, that “from Sydney to San Francisco” education, shops, accommodation and clothes are becoming more and more similar…

De Gaulle’s description of the leader is paradoxical. He both says “thought” is opposed by changing circumstances and uncertainty on the ground, so the leader must have solid instincts and good intuition, but “the man of war must be capable to consider intensely and at length the same objects without tiring.” All great men of action, he says, “possessed the ability to turn in on themselves.” At the same time, thoughtfulness must not turn into waffling or indecision, for De Gaulle says, citing no less than Alexander the Great, Galileo, and Columbus, that there are no great accomplishments with “base prudence and cowardly modesty”.

A wonderful paradox emerges from De Gaulle’s description of war and power, for he knows the horror of them, yet he has committed his life to them. On weapons he writes “shameful and magnificent, their history is that of mankind.” No doubt thinking of his own struggles with depression, he notes that the leader is a lonely man, and there is a choice between “happiness and power.” Ultimately, however, his choice is clear: “it is not a question of virtue, and angelic perfection does not lead to empire.”

Finally, I want to quote him at length, because the book ends with a bang. He says that “nothing great is done without great men, and they are what they are for having wanted it. Disraeli got used, from adolescence, to thinking like a prime minister. In the lectures of [French Field Marshal] Foch, then still obscure, one could see the generalissimo.” De Gaulle almost seems to be predicting a glorious destiny for himself: as a child in school he himself had written of a story featuring himself as “General de Gaulle” chasing the Germans out of France…

De Gaulle wrote this book at the age of 42. He was not yet “le General” and the (twice) savior of France, but only a mid-ranking officer in the French army, one who had so far had a very slow, unspectacular rise in the ranks. Yet he dreams. He tells us what ambition is. A definition contrasting with the advice a letting agent gave me, during one of Birmingham’s darker hours, that if I were ‘ambitious’ I might open a fast food restaurant… (How ugly.) Hear De Gaulle speak:

“But, may the ambitious of the first rank be haunted by such a zeal, - artists of effort and leaven of the dough, - who see in life no other reason than to make their mark on events and whom, from the riverbank which ordinary days fix them at, dream only of the heave of History! These ones, despite the turmoil and illusions of the century, should make no mistake: there is not in the military an illustrious career which has not served a great cause in politics, nor any Statesman’s great glory which was not lit by the brilliance of the nation’s defense.” The dullness and disappointment of everyday life, the hopes and ambitions for greatness and glory are all in the same breath. In short, De Gaulle is entre le néant et l’infini…

Rebranding...

2008-05-27T15:52:00.000-07:00

I've been having trouble deciding what this blog is really about. So, here we go... here's some other quotes I had in mind for the topics of books, commentary and history.

I want to squeeze in these quotes somehow:
"I cannot live without books." - Thomas Jefferson
"There are too many idiots in this world." - Frantz Fanon
"Man in a word has no nature, what he has is history." - Jose Ortega y Gasset

Other ones I considered below.

Books:
"If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it." Toni Morrison

“A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.” – Franz Kafka

Commentary:
“Oh, my body, always make of me, someone who questions.” – Frantz Fanon

“The point is not merely to understand the world, but to change it…” – Karl Marx

History quote:
'When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness'. - Alexis de Tocqueville

Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past - Sigmund Freud

'History is life; he who has not lived, or has lived only enough to write a doctoral dissertation, is too inexperienced with life to write good history'. - Louis Gottschalk

“He who does not remember... is condemned to repeat it…” - (too common) Santayana.

Quote of Mo': DG again

2008-05-26T15:52:00.000-07:00

I think this one was expressly made for my fascination with Fanon and Mobutu... well, Mobutu didn't really have a cause higher than his own ego, but still. Antoine Parmentier was a 18th century French agronomist and pharmacist whose achievements include popularizing the potato as a European staple.

"One can observe, indeed, that the leaders of men - politicians, prophets, soldiers - who obtained more than others, identified themselves with high-minded ideas and drew from them great movements. Followed in life by virtue of suggestions of greatness, rather than interest, their fame is later measured less by their utility than the vastness of their work. Whereas, sometimes, reason condemns them, sentiment glorifies them. Napoleon, in the rankings of great men, is always ahead of Parmentier. To the point that certain individuals who were only, essentially, pushed to revolt and excess, keep nonetheless in front of posterity like a dark glory when their crimes were comitted in the name of some higher aspiration." - De Gaulle, The Edge of the Sword

Letter to Newsweek: 'I do believe in national character'

2008-05-22T03:40:00.000-07:00

I was rather bemused to read in Denis McShane's article that "Berlin and Warsaw have not been able to agree on a common line on Russia for the past three centuries." Between 1795 and 1914, 'Warsaw' did not have a state to govern (Poland was ruled by Russia, Germany and Austria, with a brief partial independence under Napoleon) while between 1949 and 1989 both 'Berlin' and 'Warsaw' were ruled by pro-Soviet Communist parties.

Of course, I can appreciate the broader point, that certain nations by virtue of their history and geography are almost congenitally inclined towards a certain attitude towards the outside world (and in this case, regarding Russia). However, I think we can challenge this. Many observers thought German reunification would mean the return of great power politics in Europe. Margaret Thatcher said that "I do believe in national character... Germany is thus by its very nature a destabilizing rather than stabilizing force in Europe."

It has been almost two decades since German and European unifications, marking an unprecedented era of general peace (without the crises that marked earlier eras) in Europe. Clearly we are not slaves to our history.

Stopping the Infernal Machine (Book Review)

2008-05-21T14:54:00.000-07:00

There’s been a curious inversion of roles between the United States and Europe. While Europe was the scene of the greatest wars the world has ever seen, in 1939, the US military was smaller than that of the Netherlands. Today, Europe is sometimes as a sort of post-modern Kantian zone of peace, while the US spends more on its armed forces than the rest of the world combined. The US, to use Zakaria’s phrase, went “from wealth to power”, Europe has done the opposite.

James Sheehan’s Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? is an attempt to grapple with this issue. His thoughtful romp through Europe’s 20^th Century is refreshingly brief. Instead of being bogged down in detail, his is a concise and leisurely tour of the major changes in Europe’s character. He traces the origins of militarism and pacifism in early 20^th Century Europe and their relationship with the relentless logic of European ‘progress’, that is, the exponential growth of the means of destruction so that our wars were fought, in turn, with weapons that were democratic, industrial and (almost) atomic. Sheehan chronicles the ‘invisible revolution’ that occurred after WW2 under the American nuclear umbrella: European states found their militaries increasingly impotent (useless), under-funded, and even their very culture ‘civilianized’. With this happening in the West, the transformation of the East and the end of the Cold War seem almost an afterthought, despite the fact that “Nowhere in the world, [were] there so many soldiers, so much war material, and so many nuclear weapons concentrated in such a compressed area as in the 2 German states.”

The book is not a comprehensive description of developments in Europe. Nor is the work notable for the intensity of its analysis. This makes the book a very pleasant, easy read, neither a slog nor demanding intellectually. It is more a narrative made up of little known facts on the topic, like The Economist’s prediction in September 1914 of the “economic and financial impossibility” of continuing war for more than a few months or a Summer 1941 British report that only one third of bombs over Germany were within five miles of their target.

Best, however, are the pearls of wisdom Sheehan shares on war and peace, as relevant to today as ever. He describes the vicious circle, present in wars of occupation as much as any misplaced investment, that the need for victory demands sacrifice, which in turn makes victory all the more necessary. He describes the French WW1 commander General Joffre who “did everything to keep the offensive alive, exercising the kind of leadership which if successful seems brave and resolute, and if it fails, inflexible and wasteful.” This is what is at stake in the legacies of Truman, LBJ and Bush II. Noting how, although WW1 and WW2 had started over Serbia and Poland, no one cared about them by the end of the war, he explains with a quote from Raymond Aron: “The very situations that bring about a modern war are destroyed in its wake.” What does it matter, today, whether Saddam had WMDs? He also says how, perhaps with certain politicians in his sights, “Fatalism is often a mask for failure.”

Although Sheehan is clearly sympathetic to his subject, but he has no illusions and does not see how any common European defense or foreign policy could function in a crisis. He reserves a great role for the US in incubating the fledgling European zone of peace, arguing that peace made European unity possible, and not the other way around.

One might remain dissatisfied with the lack of any rigorous analysis, the uneven almost anecdotal description of events, or criticize the occasional resort to “great man” history on Sheehan’s part. Nonetheless, he has done a great service in clearly defining the nature of the great shift in Europe. To the question “How did Europe go from Y to X?” he has gone a long way to define exactly what we mean by the Europe of 1914 and the Europe of 2003.

Most disturbing for me were his notes on the Yugoslav Wars and his description of these people who had turned against their compatriots in war and genocide. We are used to blood and death in some part of Latin America, Africa or Asia, but it is different for Europeans to watch, in this nation sporting sunny Mediterranean coastal tourism, Yugoslavs slaughter each other even though they “look like us, wear jeans, trainers and carry their belongings in familiar plastic bags.” Some 19^th Century thinkers thought (with alarm!) that if Europeans knew 2 generations of peace then they would were forget how to wage war and the meaning of sacrifice. Yugoslavia means, it seems to me, that even as Europe has for now surpassed the relentless logic of her history, it only takes a crisis for a vicious circle, the infernal machine, to return.

Finally over?

2008-05-21T02:04:00.000-07:00

The Pain says:

Quote of Mo': DG on Character

2008-05-16T15:03:00.000-07:00

"Much better, he embrasses action with the pride of the master, because he engages himself with it, it is his; enjoying of the success as long as it is due to him and even as he does not profit from it, bearing all the weight of setbacks not without some bitter satisfaction. In short, a fighter who finds in himself his fervor and his points of support, a player who looks less for gain than success and pays his debts with his own money, the man of character confers to action its nobility; without him a slave's dreary task, thanks to him the hero's divine game."
De Gaulle, The Edge of the Sword (1932)

Ignorance on Appeasement

2008-05-16T01:53:00.000-07:00

I have a lot more respect for Chris Matthews now..

And a note: Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler in 1938 was wrong, but that shouldn't lead us to believe that it was stupid, or that the principles involved weren't complicated.

All he did was apply the legal/moral principle established by Woodrow Wilson of self-determination in the case of the Sudeten Germans of Czechoslovakia. If you believe self-determination is an inviolable natural right,that the right of a people to choose their own country is absolute, then you believe in Munich.

Letter to Newsweek: Diagnostic, Prescription

2008-05-13T14:50:00.000-07:00

Hey, I just realised, if I have more to say on a topic in a LTTD... Why not just send another letter? Under a pseudonym is fine... this one's under Craig Haston, clocking in at a mere 102 words:

Fareed Zakaria is absolutely right in stressing the revolutionary character of the economic growth in Asia, Africa and Latin America. For a hundred years, between 1870 and 1970, growth was limited to North America, Europe, Japan and few lucky, small East Asian tigers. What remains to see if the 'Rest's' growth, and the socio-political issues that are arising because of it, will follow the relatively smooth path of North America, or the unstable, violent and terrible experiences that occurred in Europe and Japan. Ensuring the former is the historic mission of American and European foreign policies.

Letter to Newsweek: My Radical Edge

2008-05-12T09:42:00.000-07:00

I really struggled to keep this to about 200 words. Here's a very slightly extended version of my response to Zakaria's self-publicizing cover story:

Dear Sir/Madam

You write that “the world will become enriched and ennobled” by globalization. While I do not dispute the former, is there any evidence which suggests that material progress means greater moral character?

Recall the rapid modernization of Japan and Germany in the 1800s: authoritarian nations with conservative, militaristic values acquired all the power of an industrial economy. We know the rest. Japan’s modernization was intimately related to its aggressive Empire-building in Asia. The Germans acquired the horrific distinction of being both the world's most educated nation and its greatest mass murderers.

In this light, we might find the breakneck modernizations of the Gulf and China to be alarming. It is more than just the irony of mosques beside mega-malls or a helping McDonald's and Mao. Is it any wonder that societies with almost medieval religious attitudes should use their oil-wealth to fund ultra-conservative mosques throughout the world? Is it not worrisome that China, with its insecure, angry nationalism, should experience simultaneously a vertiginous rise to power and monumental social change with all the instability that that entails?

Of course, these concerns may prove unjustified. These societies may well follow the Euro-Americo-Japanese pattern. They too may have money as their religion, epidemic obesity, thrivingly obscene porn industries and no higher ambition for the majority of their consumer-citizens than bigger cars, wider HD-TVs and snazzier gadgets… Noble indeed!