Mark Steyn: Too Big To Win

Steyn on America
WEDNESDAY, 15 JUNE 2011
Why can’t America win wars? It’s been two-thirds of a century since we saw (as President Obama vividly put it) “Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur.” And, if that’s not quite how you remember it, forget the formal guest list, forget the long-form surrender certificate, and try to think of “winning” in a more basic sense.

The United States is currently fighting, to one degree or another, three wars. Iraq — the quagmire, the “bad” war, the invasion that launched a thousand Western anti-war demonstrations and official inquiries and anti-Bush plays and movies — is going least badly. For now. And making allowances for the fact that the principal geostrategic legacy of our genteel protectorate is that an avowed American enemy, Iran, was able vastly to increase its influence over the country on our dime.

Afghanistan? The “good war” is now “America’s longest war.” Our forces have been there longer than the Red Army was. The “hearts and minds” strategy is going so well that American troops are now being killed by the Afghans who know us best. Does being murdered by the soldiers and policemen you’ve spent years training even count as a “combat” death? Perhaps that’s why the U.S. media disdain to cover these killings: In April, at a meeting between Afghan border police and their U.S. trainers, an Afghan cop killed two American soldiers. Oh, well, wild country, once you get up near that Turkmen border. A few weeks later, back in Kabul, an Afghan military pilot killed eight American soldiers and a civilian contractor. On May 13, a NATO “mentoring team” sat down to lunch with Afghan police in Helmand when one of their protégés opened fire and killed two of them. “The actions of this individual do not reflect the overall actions of our Afghan partners,” said Maj. Gen. James B. Laster of the U.S. Marine Corps. “We remain committed to our partners and to our mission here.”

Libya? The good news is that we’ve vastly reduced the time it takes us to get quagmired. I believe the Libyan campaign is already in The Guinness Book of World Records as the fastest quagmire on record. In an inspired move, we’ve chosen to back the one Arab liberation movement incapable of knocking off the local strongman even when you lend them every NATO air force. But not to worry: President Obama, cooed an administration official to The New Yorker, is “leading from behind.” Indeed. What could be more impeccably multilateral than a coalition pantomime horse composed entirely of rear ends? Apparently it would be “illegal” to target Colonel Qaddafi, so our strategic objective is to kill him by accident. So far we’ve killed a son and a couple of grandkids. Maybe by the time you read this we’ll have added a maiden aunt or two to the trophy room. It’s not precisely clear why offing the old pock-skinned transvestite should be a priority of the U.S. right now, but let’s hope it happens soon, because otherwise there’ll be no way of telling when this “war” is “ended.”

According to partisan taste, one can blame the trio of current morasses on Bush or Obama, but in the bigger picture they’re part of a pattern of behavior that predates either man, stretching back through non-victories great and small — Somalia, Gulf War One, Vietnam, Korea. On the more conclusive side of the ledger, we have . . . well, lemme see: Grenada, 1983. And, given that that was a bit of post-colonial housekeeping Britain should have taken care of but declined to, one could argue that even that lone bright spot supports a broader narrative of Western enfeeblement. At any rate, America’s only unambiguous military triumph since 1945 is a small Caribbean island with Queen Elizabeth II as head of state. For 43 percent of global military expenditure, that’s not much bang for the buck.

Inconclusive interventionism has consequences. Korea led to Norks with nukes. The downed helicopters in the Iranian desert led to mullahs with nukes. Gulf War One led to Gulf War Two. Somalia led to 9/11. Vietnam led to everything, in the sense that its trauma penetrated so deep into the American psyche that it corroded the ability to think clearly about war as a tool of national purpose.

For half a century, the Cold War provided a kind of cover. At the dawn of the so-called American era, Washington chose to downplay U.S. hegemony and instead created and funded transnational institutions in which the non-imperial superpower was so self-deprecating it artificially inflated everybody else’s status in a kind of geopolitical affirmative-action program. In the military sphere, this meant NATO. If the rap against the U.N. Security Council is that it’s the World War II victory parade preserved in aspic, NATO is the rubble of post-war Europe preserved as a situation room. In 1950, America had a unique dominance of the “free world” and it could afford to be generous, so it was: We had more money than we knew what to do with, so we absolved our allies of paying for their own defense.

But 1950 ended. The Continental economies recovered, Europe got wealthy, and so did Japan and later the Asian tigers. And in Washington nobody noticed: We continued to pay, garrisoning not remote colonies but some of the richest nations in history. Thanks to American defense welfare, NATO is a military alliance made up of allies that no longer have militaries. In the Cold War, that had a kind of logic: Europe was the designated battlefield, so, whether or not they had any tanks, they had, very literally, skin in the game. But the Cold War ended and NATO lingered on, evolving into a global Super Friends made up of folks who aren’t Super and don’t like each other terribly much. At the beginning of the Afghan campaign, Washington invested huge amounts of diplomatic effort trying to rouse its allies into the merest gestures of war-making: The 2004 NATO summit was hailed as a landmark success after the alliance’s 26 members agreed to commit an extra 600 troops and three helicopters. That averages out at 23.08 troops per country, plus almost a ninth of a helicopter apiece. Half a decade of quagmire later, Washington was investing even larger amounts of diplomatic effort failing to rouse its allies into the most perfunctory gestures of non-combat pantywaist transnationalism: We know that, under ever more refined rules of engagement, certain allies won’t go out at night, or in snow, or in provinces where there’s fighting going on, so, by the 2010 NATO confab, Robert Gates was reduced to complaining that the allies’ promised 450 “trainers” for the Afghan National Army had failed to materialize. Supposedly 46 nations are contributing to the allied effort in Afghanistan, so that would work out at ten “trainers” per country. Imagine if the energy expended in these ridiculous (and in some cases profoundly damaging) transnational fig leaves had been directed into more quaintly conventional channels — like, say, identifying America’s national interest and pursuing it.

The Cold War casts other shadows. In Korea, the U.S. forbore even to cut its enemy’s Chinese supply lines. You can’t win that way. But in the nuclear age, all-out war — war with real nations, with serious militaries — was too terrible to contemplate, so even in proxy squabbles in Third World backwaters the overriding concern was to tamp things down, even at the price of victory. And, by the time the Cold War ended, such thinking had become ingrained. A U.S.–Soviet nuclear standoff of mutual deterrence decayed into a unipolar world of U.S. auto-deterrence. Were it not for the brave passengers of Flight 93 and the vagaries of the Oval Office social calendar, the fourth plane on 9/11 might have succeeded in hitting the White House, decapitating the regime, leaving a smoking ruin in the heart of the capital and delivering the republic unto a Robert C. Byrd administration or some other whimsy of presidential succession. Yet, in allowing his toxic backwater to be used as the launch pad for the deadliest foreign assault on the U.S. mainland in two centuries, Mullah Omar either discounted the possibility of total devastating destruction against his country, or didn’t care.

If it was the former, he was surely right. After the battle of Omdurman, Hilaire Belloc offered a pithy summation of technological advantage:

Whatever happens
We have got
The Maxim gun
And they have not.

But suppose they know you’ll never use the Maxim gun? At a certain level, credible deterrence depends on a credible enemy. The Soviet Union disintegrated, but the surviving superpower’s instinct to de-escalate intensified: In Kirkuk as in Kandahar, every Lilliputian warlord quickly grasped that you could provoke the infidel Gulliver with relative impunity. Mutually Assured Destruction had curdled into Massively Applied Desultoriness.

Here I part company somewhat from my National Review colleagues who are concerned about inevitable cuts to the defense budget. Clearly, if one nation is responsible for near half the world’s military budget, a lot of others aren’t pulling their weight. The Pentagon outspends the Chinese, British, French, Russian, Japanese, German, Saudi, Indian, Italian, South Korean, Brazilian, Canadian, Australian, Spanish, Turkish, and Israeli militaries combined. So why doesn’t it feel like that?

Well, for exactly that reason: If you outspend every serious rival combined, you’re obviously something other than the soldiery of a conventional nation state. But what exactly? In the Nineties, the French liked to complain that “globalization” was a euphemism for “Americanization.” But one can just as easily invert the formulation: “Americanization” is a euphemism for “globalization,” in which the geopolitical sugar daddy is so busy picking up the tab for the global order he loses all sense of national interest. Just as Hollywood now makes films for the world, so the Pentagon now makes war for the world. Readers will be wearily familiar with the tendency of long-established pop-culture icons to go all transnational on us: Only the other week Superman took to the podium of the U.N. to renounce his U.S. citizenship on the grounds that “truth, justice, and the American way” no longer does it for him. My favorite in recent years was the attempted reinvention of good ol’ G.I. Joe as a Brussels-based multilateral acronym — the Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity. I believe they’re running the Libyan operation.

An army has to wage war on behalf of something real. For better or worse, “king and country” is real, and so, mostly for worse, are the tribal loyalties of Africa’s blood-drenched civil wars. But it’s hardly surprising that it’s difficult to win wars waged on behalf of something so chimerical as “the international community.” If you’re making war on behalf of an illusory concept, is it even possible to have war aims? What’s ours? “[We] are in Afghanistan to help the Afghan people,” General Petraeus said in April. Somewhere generations of old-school imperialists are roaring their heads off, not least at the concept of “the Afghan people.” But when you’re the expeditionary force of the parliament of man, what else is there?

War is hell, but global “mentoring” is purgatory. In that respect, the belated dispatch of Osama bin Laden may be less strategically relevant than the near-simultaneous exposé by 60 Minutes of Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea. This is the bestselling book the Pentagon gives to Afghan-bound officers, and whose celebrity author has met with our most senior commanders on multiple occasions. And it’s a crock. Nevertheless, it’s effected a profound cultural transformation — if only on us. “It’s remarkable,” an Indian diplomat chuckled to me a while back. “In Afghanistan, the Americans now drink more tea than the British. And they don’t even like it.” In 2009, remember, the Pentagon accounted for 43 percent of the planet’s military expenditures. At this rate, by 2012 they’ll account for 43 percent of the planet’s tea consumption.

Nation building in Afghanistan is the ne plus ultra of a fool’s errand. But even if one were so disposed, effective “nation building” is done in the national interest of the builder. The British rebuilt India in their own image, with a Westminster parliament, common law, and an English education system. In whose image are we building Afghanistan? Eight months after Petraeus announced his latest folly, the Afghan Local Police initiative, Oxfam reported that the newly formed ALP was a hotbed of torture and pederasty. Almost every Afghan institution is, of course. But for most of human history they’ve managed to practice both enthusiasms without international subvention. The U.S. taxpayer accepts wearily the burden of subsidy for Nevada’s cowboy poets and San Francisco’s mime companies, but, even by those generous standards of cultural preservation, it’s hard to see why he should be facilitating the traditional predilections of Pashtun men with an eye for the “dancing boys of Kandahar.”

Which brings us back to those Three Cups of Tea. So the Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity is building schoolhouses in Afghanistan. Big deal. The problem, in Kandahar as in Kansas, is not the buildings but what’s being taught inside them — and we’ve no stomach for getting into that. So what’s the point of building better infrastructure for Afghanistan’s wretched tribal culture? What’s our interest in state-of-the-art backwardness?

Transnational do-gooding is political correctness on tour. It takes the relativist assumptions of the multiculti varsity and applies them geopolitically: The white man’s burden meets liberal guilt. No wealthy developed nation should have a national interest, because a national interest is a selfish interest. Afghanistan started out selfishly — a daringly original military campaign, brilliantly executed, to remove your enemies from power and kill as many of the bad guys as possible. Then America sobered up and gradually brought a freakish exception into compliance with the rule. In Libya as in Kosovo, war is legitimate only if you have no conceivable national interest in whatever conflict you’re fighting. The fact that you have no stake in it justifies your getting into it. The principal rationale is that there’s no rationale, and who could object to that? Applied globally, political correctness obliges us to forswear sovereignty. And, once you do that, then, as Country Joe and the Fish famously enquired, it’s one-two-three, what are we fighting for?

When you’re responsible for half the planet’s military spending, and 80 percent of its military R&D, certain things can be said with confidence: No one is going to get into a nuclear war with the United States, or a large-scale tank battle, or even a dogfight. You’re the Microsoft, the Standard Oil of conventional warfare: Were they interested in competing in this field, second-tier military powers would probably have filed an antitrust suit with the Department of Justice by now. When you’re the only guy in town with a tennis racket, don’t be surprised if no one wants to join you on center court — or that provocateurs look for other fields on which to play. In the early stages of this century’s wars, IEDs were detonated by cell phones and even garage-door openers. So the Pentagon jammed them. The enemy downgraded to more primitive detonators: You can’t jam string. Last year, it was reported that the Taliban had developed metal-free IEDs, which made them all but undetectable: Instead of two hacksaw blades and artillery shells, they began using graphite blades and ammonium nitrate. If you’ve got uniformed infantrymen and tanks and battleships and jet fighters, you’re too weak to take on the hyperpower. But, if you’ve got illiterate goatherds with string and hacksaws and fertilizer, you can tie him down for a decade. An IED is an “improvised” explosive device. Can we still improvise? Or does the planet’s most lavishly funded military assume it has the luxury of declining to adapt to the world it’s living in?

In the spring of 2003, on the deserted highway between the Jordanian border and the town of Rutba, I came across my first burnt-out Iraqi tank — a charred wreck shoved over to the shoulder. I parked, walked around it, and pondered the fate of the men inside. It seemed somehow pathetic that, facing invasion by the United States, these Iraqi conscripts had even bothered to climb in and point the thing to wherever they were heading when death rained down from the stars, or Diego Garcia, or Missouri. Yet even then I remembered the words of the great strategist of armored warfare, Basil Liddell Hart: “The destruction of the enemy’s armed forces is but a means — and not necessarily an inevitable or infallible one — to the attainment of the real objective.” The object of war, wrote Liddell Hart, is not to destroy the enemy’s tanks but to destroy his will.

Instead, America has fallen for the Thomas Friedman thesis, promulgated by the New York Times’ great thinker in January 2002: “For all the talk about the vaunted Afghan fighters, this was a war between the Jetsons and the Flintstones — and the Jetsons won and the Flintstones know it.”

But they didn’t. They didn’t know they were beaten. Because they weren’t. Because we hadn’t destroyed their will — as we did to the Germans and Japanese two-thirds of a century ago, and as we surely would not do if we were fighting World War II today. That’s not an argument for nuking or carpet bombing, so much as for cool clear-sightedness. Asked how he would react if the British army invaded Germany, Bismarck said he would dispatch the local police force to arrest them: a clever Teuton sneer at the modest size of Her Britannic Majesty’s forces. But that’s the point: The British accomplished much with little; at the height of empire, an insignificant number of Anglo-Celts controlled the entire Indian subcontinent. A confident culture can dominate far larger numbers of people, as England did for much of modern history. By contrast, in an era of Massively Applied Desultoriness, we spend a fortune going to war with one hand tied behind our back. The Forty-Three Percent Global Operating Industrial Military Complex isn’t too big to fail, but it is perhaps too big to win — as our enemies understand.

So on we stagger, with Cold War institutions, transnational sensibilities, politically correct solicitousness, fraudulent preening pseudo–nation building, expensive gizmos, little will, and no war aims . . . but real American lives. “These Colors Don’t Run,” says the T-shirt. But, bereft of national purpose, they bleed away to a grey blur on a distant horizon. Sixty-six years after V-J Day, the American way of war needs top-to-toe reinvention.

(from National Review)

DOCUMENT OF THE WEEK: US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Report on Afghan Aid Scandal

It's longer than the press coverage indicates, so here's a link to the PDF document: EVALUATING U.S. FOREIGN ASSISTANCE TO AFGHANISTAN. Read it and weep.

Bottom-line: USAID projects undermine the Afghan government. Quote:

...our resources can inadvertently raise local tensions, cause infighting among local groups, and exacerbate rent-seeking behavior among corrupt actors.

UPDATE: USAID has issued a pathetic response, here:

Corruption and A3: Corruption is of course a real concern for both on budget and off budget assistance. I launched the Accountable Assistance for Afghanistan (A3) initiative in the fall of 2010 to help ensure that the Agency is taking the necessary steps to limit the likelihood of assistance directly or inadvertently supporting malign groups or being diverted from their development purpose by extortion or corruption. As a result, USAID is implementing safeguards in four areas, two of which strengthen our pre-award processes and two that strengthen our post-award implementation.

A number of changes have been made that significantly improve contractor oversight. First, USAIDIAfghanistan now includes a subcontractor clause in new awards that permits USAID to restrict the number of subcontract tiers, requires the prime contractor to perform a certain percentage of the work, and prohibits subcontract "brokering" or "flipping", which is when a subcontractor passes the work to someone else and increases the risk for corruption.
Second, we are increasing our financial controls through a joint program with the USAID Inspector General to audit all locally incurred costs of program-funded implementing partners. Audits will be performed by internationally-accredited regionally based audit firms and checked by the Inspector General. Third, USAIDIAfghanistan is also increasing its Project Oversight through the establishment of On-Site Monitors (OSMs) in USAID field offices for project monitoring. Each USAID project will be assigned an OSM that will provide real time data to contract staff in Kabul on project performance and accountability.

Kabul Bank: USAID takes oversight of its awards seriously - at all levels. With regard to the well-documented crisis at Kabul Bank, USAID has terminated this part of the Deloitte contract in Afghanistan to ensure that our technical assistance is as effective as possible in light of changed and difficult conditions. Nevertheless, we do not believe that Deloitte, or USAID could have stopped the massive fraud that occurred at Kabul Bank. Deloitte, with USAID funds supported the Afghan Central Bank by providing trainers and experts to build the capacity of its Bank Supervision Unit. Oversight of the Afghan financial sector is conducted by Afghan authorities, and actual bank supervision is a sovereign function of the Afghan government. The fraud committed by Kabul Bank officers was a criminal act, deliberately concealed by major shareholders and senior bank management. While there was private speculation about possible financial difficulties at Kabul Bank based in part on the crash of the Dubai real estate market, all donors were essentially caught by surprise at the Kabul Bank collapse. Kabul Bank's shareholder/officers alleged frauds and self-dealing caused these massive losses and hid them from Central Bank examiners through fake documentation and obfuscating accounting techniques to hide this from the Central Bank and other authorities. The initial outline of this fraud and revelation of the unprecedented level of loss did not occur until the Chairman of the Board of Kabul Bank began talking with Central Bank Authorities in the summer of 201O.

Terrorism and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee by Carlos J. Bringuier

My Cuban-American documentary filmmaker friend, Agustin Blazquez, recently sent this interesting article to share with readers:

Terror, from the Fair Play for Cuba Committee to al-Qaeda

Around February 1960 a group composed of left wing sympathizers, convicted felons and useful idiots got together to organize a Committee showing to the American people that Fidel Castro was a democratic peaceful leader, not a Communist; that his revolution will not bring Communism to Cuba but liberty and economical progress to the Cuban people.

The person who started the movement was Alan Sagner who at the time was living in the Livingston area in NJ; Mr. Sagner contacted CBS newsman Robert Taber in order to initiate the Committee.

For the idiots it was a romantic idea to come out to help the new Robin Hood (Fidel Castro) as portrayed in the New York Times, CBS and the rest of the already infiltrated liberal press.
Joining Sagner and Taber were Waldo Frank, Truman Capote, another CBS newsman Richard Gibson, Carleton Beals and Robert F. Williams among others.

The apparent purpose of the FPCC was to bring out the truth about the peaceful and democratic Revolution directed a Fidel Castro. Important names were in the Committee even two respected CBS newsmen.

What Alan Sagner, Robert Taber and the others didn't mention was that the Committee was formed with $3,500 furnished by Raul Roa, Jr., son of the Cuban Ambassador to the United Nations as testified by Dr. Charles A. Santos-Buch, MD to a Subcommittee of the US Congress on January 10, 1961.

Immediately the FPCC started branches in different cities of the US to raise money to help spread the truth about the peaceful Castro's Revolution. The FPCC started to infiltrate University Campuses and move ahead with their main objective: Destroy the US through Terrorism.

One of their most active chapters was located in Tampa, Florida. One of the Universities that they infiltrated was the University of South Florida also in Tampa.
The FPCC started organizing public demonstrations in several cities reaching sometimes thousands of demonstrators at certain places.

At the end of 1962, two of the members of the FPCC, by the last names of Suero and García got together with Roberto Santiesteban (an acquaintance of mine at Law School in Havana University) who at that moment was the chief aide to Carlos Lechuga, Cuba's United Nation Ambassador with a bizarre plan more criminal than the one carried on by al-Qaeda and Usama bin-Laden on September 11, 2001.

What those 2 members of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was going to do was to massacre the people of New York during the Thanksgiving weekend of 1962. Their target was Macy's, Gimbel's, Manhattan Grand Central Station, the Statue of Liberty, Bloomingdale's. They were going to use 500 kilos of TNT the day after Thanksgiving and the death total would have surpassed the one at the two towers in 9-11.

Luckily John Edgar Hoover was alert and they were apprehended, the explosives confiscated and incarcerated. The Castro regime obtained the release of my acquaintance Roberto Santiesteban in a political exchange of prisoners.

Later on on November 22, 1963, another member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, Lee Harvey Oswald carried on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy following orders of Dictator Fidel Castro.

What most people don't know is that Robert Taber, a CBS newsman at the time had spent month with Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra and he also spent sometime with the forces of Raúl Castro. His defenders claim that he was an honest newsman doing his job for CBS. What I have never seen published is the criminal record of Robert Taber, first Secretary of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and reporter of the Castro's newspaper "Revolución".

In the hearings of a Subcommittee of the Congress of the US I found:

"Taber, American citizen previously employed as writer by Columbia Broadcasting System, played leading role in organization during early 1960 of Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) pro-Castro propaganda front which has attracted support of substantial elements among U.S. liberals and which has also been infiltrated by Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party and by Communist Party (CP) U.S.A. In public testimony before Senate Internal Security Subcommittee SISS Dr. Charles Santos-Buch has admitted that he and Taber accepted $3,500 in cash to pay the cost of FPCC advertisement from a Cuban official in the United States, Raul Roa, Jr.

Taber left the United States in January 1961 and ha has been residing in Cuba since that time. It appears he is trying to avoid probability he would be subpoenaed to appear before SISS if he returns to this country, specially since SISS may contemplate perjury proceedings against him. In this regard, Taber testified before SISS in May 1960 at which time he denied any knowledge of Cuban Government support for FPCC.

Taber was arrested by State highway patrol in Findlay, Ohio, June 21, 1939, and pleaded guilty to armed robbery charges, auto larceny, and kidnapping. On September 27, 1939 he was sentenced to various prison terms ranging up to 30 years on various counts involved and he was subsequently paroled November 2, 1942, remaining on parole until November 22, 1949.

This is part of the history of the "distinguish" newsman from CBS Robert Taber. The one who contacted him to form the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, Alan Sanger received a great distinction from a fellow traveler named Bill Clinton who as President of the United States appointed him to direct the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in charge of funding programming for National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting System receiving billions of dollars from US taxpayers.

Dictator Fidel Castro has to be a happy man.

Decades after Fidel Castro and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee showed to our enemies what could be done and how to do it, Usama bin-Laden and al-Qaeda follow the path opened by Dictator Castro.

They started organizing new Fair Plays for the Arab terrorists. They followed exactly Fidel groundwork.

They created among others:

1) The Holy Land Foundation (HLF)
2) Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)
3) Islamic Committee for Palestine (ICP)
4) Islamic Concern Project
5) World and Islamic Studies Enterprises (WISE)
6) Islamic Association for Palestine

A few days after 9/11, George W. Bush signed a executive order designating a number of charities as front groups for terrorism.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad most active cell was located in Tampa, Florida.

Islamic Committee for Palestine most active cell was located in Tampa, Florida.

The World and Islam Studies Enterprises most active cell was located in Tampa, Florida.

And we have to remember that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee had his most active cell in Tampa, Florida.

Dictator Fidel Castro showed Usama bin-Laden how to conduct terrorism against the United States. Usama bin-Laden is dead, Dictator Fidel Castro remains living in Cuba protected by those he wants to destroy.

June 4, 2011
Dr. Carlos J. Bringuier

Fill In the Blanks by Jerry Weinberger - City Journal

Fill In the Blanks by Jerry Weinberger - City Journal

For the past decade or so, the dominant trend in education reform has been the rigorous use of standardized tests to measure student performance. I’m neither an economist nor a statistician, so I make no claim to know whether the elaborate systems of evaluation made fashionable first by President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and now by Race to the Top, President Obama’s education-grant competition, can be made to work. The recent discovery that New York’s math and reading scores were inflated by dumbed-down standards of proficiency, something now common under NCLB, gives good reason to be skeptical. But even if such a system could work, the real question would remain: Are the test-taking skills that it measures worth all that much?

The Dog that Didn't Bark in the Night...

I've been thinking lately that the real story is that the establishment "news" media no longer seems to have much interest in news. Even the Wall Street Journal has been disappointingly devoid of either reportage or intelligent criticism, obsessed as its sadistic editors appear to be with publishing articles about torture--or lifestyle accessories. Informed debate seems to have been relegated to the last century, at least for the "chattering classes."

Take foreign policy. A reporting vacuum.

What's going on with the "Arab Spring?" Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, etc. How's it going, folks? Obama's policy working out OK? What about all those billions in aid we're promising--why? How's that going to help the US economy? Please explain.

Moving east, we have the Arab-Israeli dispute. That settled yet? Is the US going to force a Palestinian state on Israel on September 1st? How come this is scheduled for a vote, anyhow? Anyone think this might be a bad idea?

Move east a little farther--Iran v the Gulf States. Looking peachy? Or is there some trouble afoot? If so, why? Who's behind it? Oh, and why are we paying up to $5.00/gallon for gas at the pump? Isn't that hurting the "recovery?"

Speaking of the "recovery," why isn't the unemployment rate dropping? Why are President Obama's advisors "surprised?" Shouldn't he want to hire some advisors who can give proper advice?

Back to the map...further east we have Iraq--any news from there? And beyond that, Iran; ditto. And further east still, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the famous AfPak. How's it going? What's the forecast? More "surprises" in store?

BTW, if we were truly angry or surprised that Pakistan had been sheltering bin Laden, why are we mending fences instead of cutting relations? Please, explain, someone. Funny that no one in the media seems to be the slightest bit curious about what on its face is an irrational--or dishonest--policy here.

Let's not forget Russia, the biggest Eastern country, threatening the US over Syrian protests. What's that about? My onetime acquaintance Michael McFaul, a well-known academic/NGO/think-tank "democracy specialist" has been picked for Russian ambassador. Does that mean anything? I think it does, and not anything good. But what do I know? I'd like to read some intelligent critiques...but so far have seen nothing, not even on twitter.

Likewise, our relations with China seem opaque, to say the least. What's going on? What happened with the standoff over North Korea sinking that South Korean ship? Did we back down? Did they? Is China helping or hurting us?

The Japanese earthquake and nuclear meltdown have been tragic, but I haven't seen much discussion of the fact that TEPCO (rhymes with PEPCO) had General Electric reactors. What does that mean for US business in Asia? If we had bombed Japan again, would it have been worse?

And what is going on in Africa? Lots of civil strife, apparently, but over what? Is it oil? Is it a Muslim-Christian clash of civilizations? Is it the rise of China?

Likewise, no news from Latin America. What happened to that Mexican drug war? Is it over? Who won? And what is going on in Cuba? Or with Hugo Chavez? Or Brazil, Argentina, Chile? Inquiring minds want to know...

Finally, back in the good ol' USA. Is Sarah Palin running for President, or not? And if she runs, will she win? And if she wins, would it be as much a victory for women as the ascent of Jill Abramson to the top job at the New York Times?

If not, why not?

Maybe some newspaper or magazine will have some answers to some of these questions, someday. In the meantime, to try and follow what's going on in the world, I'll continue to look for news on the Drudge Report...

Document of the Week: Transforming Classification of Secret US Government Documents

Here's a link to a blog about declassification of secret US government documents: Transforming Classification. It's published by the Public Interest Declassification Board

Writings of General Dempsey

President Obama's pick for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, has a paper trail. Here's a link to my limegreenbook's critique, and some lingering unanswered questions:

Obviously, GEN Dempsey and his staff are executing a very thorough strategic communications plan!

The articles contain much food for thought. Here’s some that comes to mind:

1. How goes the “Army-wide dialogue about our emerging concepts”? What have learned from it so far? Has it prompted any changes? Is the dialogue being summed up anywhere? (Although TRADOC has a blog with posts for many of these articles, the relatively low number of comments suggests that the Army-wide dialogue isn’t occurring there!)

2. Have these concepts already been validated? If not, how are they being validated? Are we plunging ahead with implementing these concepts before validating them?

3.[Note to self: Find and read the ALDS, the Profession of Arms white paper, and the ATC.]

4. What will it cost to replicate “the complexity of the operational environment in the classroom and at home station”? Can we afford it?

5. What are the implications of moving “away from a platform-centric learning model to one that is centered more on learning through facilitation and collaboration”? For example, what changes will be needed to TRADOC Reg 350-70 Systems Approach to Training?

6. For companies that support the Army in doctrine development, training support, etc., what can they do now to better prepare for the changes that will occur as a result of these concepts and initiatives?

Happy Memorial Day!

Here's an online history of our national holiday, proclaimed by General Logan in 1868.

Was Iran Behind 9/11?

This lawsuit--Havlish et al. v. Osama bin Laden, Iran, et al.--says it was...

In Praise of the NHS, by Charles Crawford

My Next Life: Ode to Boy

My Next Life: Ode to Boy: "It's my son's 12th birthday tomorrow. Last year I started a tradition to write him a poem for his birthday as a way to celebrate the person..."

Union Protection Made Dominique Strauss-Kahn Case Possible

From The Guardian::

Imagine the situation of the hotel worker had she not been protected by a union contract. She is a young immigrant mother who needs this job to support her family. According to reports, she likely did not know Strauss-Kahn's identity at the time she reported the assault, but she undoubtedly understood that the person staying in the $3,000-a-night suite was a wealthy and important person. In these circumstances, how likely would it be that she would make an issue of a sexual assault to her supervisors?

Housekeepers are generally among the lowest-paid workers at hotels, often earning little more than the minimum wage. It is a high turnover job, meaning that any individual housekeeper is likely to be viewed as easily replaceable by the management. If this housekeeper did not enjoy the protection of a union contract, is it likely that she would have counted on her supervisors taking her side against an important guest at the hotel? Would she have been prepared to risk her job to pursue the case?

We can never know how this particular woman would have responded otherwise – as, fortunately, she did have the protection of a union. However, it is likely that many similar assaults go unreported because the victims do not feel they can risk their jobs to pursue the case. They simply have to accept sexual harassment and even sexual assault as "part of the job".

There is a special irony to this situation given Dominique Strauss-Kahn's prior position. The IMF, along with other pillars of the economic establishment, has long pushed for reducing the rights of workers at their workplace. Specifically, they have pushed countries around the world to adopt measures that weaken the power of unions. The IMF has also urged western European countries to eliminate or weaken laws that prevent employers from firing workers at will. These laws, along with unions, are seen as "labour market rigidities" that prevent labour markets from operating efficiently.

In the dream world of the economists' textbook policies, all employers would have the ability to fire employees at will. There would be no protective legislation and no unions to get in the way. In that economist's dream world, then, powerful executives could be fairly certain that they would have licence to molest hotel workers with impunity.

Eliyho Matz on Fathers and Sons in Israeli-American Relations

Two Fathers, Two Sons and Two Presidents
By Eliyho Matz

[This article is dedicated to the memory of Michael Bergson Fichman Matz, godson of Peter H. Bergson.]

“Only trees have roots.”
George Steiner

The current May 2011 American/Israeli political crisis has been building up for the past 63 years, and maybe a few years longer if we consider FDR, the WWII President, as a component in this political-diplomatic entanglement and equation. In his May 20, 2011, speech at the State Department in Washington, President Barack Obama, tried politely to tell the people of Middle East region that the current changes in the region are recognized by America, at the same time mentioning to the Israeli nation that it will have to make some changes, too, that is, to move back to the pre-1967 borders, as part of a general political arrangement with the Palestinians.

The immediate response of the Israeli nation, led by its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been one of dismay. For we see that the Israeli nation of 2011, with its Prime Minister, are tragically trying to redefine the Israeli Zionist Jewish story by asking the Palestinians to recognize the Israeli nation as the national home of the Jewish people, as well as one that is Jewish and democratic. This new self-definition put forth by the Israeli Prime Minister makes no political sense, because, first, Israel has no constitution, and second, has never been the nation of all Jews. (Where are most of the Jews today? – definitely not in Israel.) What Israel is, is definitely the nation of the Israelis, and it should remain so and define itself as such. All Biblical and Talmudic arguments about the ancient Israelites, Hebrews, (etc.) are nonsensical in relation to the political reality of the nation today. The current Israeli population is represented by a mishmash of groups, and those who are Jewish became Jews during the last 2000 years. Even if there are some few Jews who claim an ancestry dating back to the Davidic Biblical period,* one has to be careful not to fall into this argument of Jewish ancestral antiquity when justifying the existence of the modern Israeli nation.

The Israeli nation established in 1948 as result of Political Zionism claimed sovereignty as an Israeli nation, and that was how the world (UN) saw it. Thus the decree that ended the British Mandate and the path of non-Jewish sovereignty signified the of the path of Political Zionism and started a new phase in the history of the Israeli nation and world Jewry. MAAZEL TOV!

The people who had led the Israelis to become a new sovereign nation were a) the chalutzim, or pioneers, who settled in Turkish-British Palestine; and b) the Palestinian and Stateless political activists in the United States during WWII. The story of the chalutzim is represented by Ben Gurion. The story of the political Palestinian and Stateless Jews in the US is represented by the Bergson Boys, also known as the Bergson Group. The Bergson Group included a core of the Irgun Tzvai Leumi (an illegal Palestinian underground terrorist organization active during the British Mandate), among whom was Yitshaq Ben-Ami (as mentioned above, the father of J-Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami). From 1940-1948, this group worked tirelessly to try to save the remnant of European Jewry, and to prepare the groundwork for an Israeli (Hebrew) republic. Without their work the United States, it is my firm belief that the Israeli nation would not have come about; it was their intense lobbying and organizational skills that prepared the groundwork for a new Israeli state.

The main group of Ben Gurion Zionists, as well as Benzion Netanyahu, one of the leaders of the New Zionist organization in the US (a Jabotinsky Zionist faction) and the father of the current Israeli Prime Minister, did not in fact seriously try to save Jews, but rather they were preoccupied with arguments over the future meaning of Zionism. Ben Gurion, who was the person who ultimately proclaimed the Declaration of Israeli Independence, did not really understand the inner meaning of that Declaration, which becomes obvious when one reads its text. Its irreconcilable contradictions remain unresolved till today. Of course the Israeli document represented an attempt to copy the American Declaration of Independence, but its authors lacked the depth of the Americans’ intellect and serious intent.

Mr. Benzion Natanyahu, who was among the leaders of America’s New Zionists, failed to do almost anything during the Holocaust to save Jews. Rather, he spent his precious time [researching and] writing the history of Abravanel.** Benzion Netanyahu also spent quite a bit of time criticizing the political work and the rescue attempts by the Bergson Group and actually published quite a few articles criticizing them.***

Thus we have sort of an interesting story here: the Bergson Boys, who agitated against the FDR administration and tried by political action to save European Jews, were attacked by every American Jewish organization (the FBI files on the Bergson Group during the years of WWII are filled with intriguing information given by informants of all the American Jewish organizations).

It was only because of the Group’s leadership, especially that of Peter Bergson but including others of the group, among them Yitshaq Ben Ami, that FDR eventually succumbed to the political pressure the Group exacted and created the War Refugee Board in 1944, whose purported intention was solely to save Jews, despite the fact that Jews were not mentioned in the Board’s name (another political trick of FDR). But the Bergson Group also had to bow to necessity: so that the American Jewish organizations would relinquish some of their pressure against them, Yitshak Ben-Ami was compelled to join the US military as a Bergson “kapurah yingel” (sacrifice). Ben Ami did so, survived the War, and following his discharge until 1948 dealt with some very important issues that helped secure the creation of the Israeli nation.

The success the Bergson Group had in America is a complex story, one that most American Jews know hardly anything about, and most American Jewish organizations would like to forget. But it is important to retell that it was the Bergson Group who convinced the American people that the struggle of the Palestinian Jews was like the American experience of independence. Their claim “It’s 1776 in Palestine” became their slogan, and it worked. Netanyahu senior missed the opportunity and never understood the meaning of the new Israeli sovereign nation (even though he came from the United States and settled in Jerusalem), always maintaining the belief that Israel should be the “Promised Land” for all Jews, not the UN recognized Israeli sovereign state.

So we have the stories of the fathers, Netanyahu and Ben-Ami. Now, what about the children? Working as a researcher and advisor to his father while he wrote his book, I met Jeremy when he was just in high school, and, if I remember, young Jeremy Ben-Ami was interested in politics since childhood and thus ended up in juxtaposition to where his father was. Jeremy is concerned with Jews, American Jewish behavior, and the future of the Israeli nation. But he lacks the spark of political understanding that his father had relating to what sort of a future the Middle East region has. In many ways, his J-Street organization reflects a total misunderstanding and the confusion characteristic of many American Jews, because it does not perceive the depth of the Palestinian Israeli conflict. It is the same with Benjamin Netanyahu. I guess he never stopped listening to his father’s nonsense about the “Jewish nation,” and he forgets that he only represents the Israeli sovereign nation, that has no constitution and no political direction other than for messianic dreams.

Finally, we move to the two Presidents. President Obama inherited the good qualities of FDR and maybe as great a crisis as FDR, and he is trying to solve some of America’s problems despite the Republican intransigence. Moreover, let us face reality here: Obama knows as well as FDR did the importance of the Middle East and its Saudi oil. Of course, Saudi oil is and has always been the secret agenda that no one openly discusses. It should be remembered that Harry Truman, who also understood the reality of the Middle East complexity including the importance of Saudi oil, hesitated before finally recognizing the new Israeli nation. So to help solve the Middle East problems today Obama will be assigning the Israelis a job: to get out of the Palestinian-conquered areas and return to the pre-1967 borders. It is a responsible American request.

However, that in itself will not solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. What will help to bring us closer to a solution is Peter Bergson’s political idea that the Middle East must consider uniting as a Middle Eastern Block, a political and economic block that will benefit the region and will produce more of a working solution to the region. Israel with its technological know-how, America with its political and military might, Saudi Arabia with its money, Turkey with its experienced democratic system (not perfect, but functional), can all help. That is what our President, Mr. Obama, should work on to achieve, and thus this new Middle Eastern political block will reflect a real new era in the Middle East.

Post-script: My father, who is a descendant of Khazars, comes from the town of Ostra (Ostrug) established more than one thousand years ago by Khazars who later converted to Judaism. Today this town is geographically located in the Western Ukraine. He escaped from Ostra, where most of his family was massacred by the Nazis. Eventually in 1943 he joined the Russian military might and ended his war service as a decorated soldier in Berlin only after its surrender. He then went to the Russian Far East and picked up my mother, and eventually he helped to organize the Exodus 1947 journey to Palestine.

************************

* For example, Yitshaq Ben-Ami in his book Years of Wrath, Days of Glory: Memoirs for the Irgun (New York: Robert Speller & Sons, 1982). Yitshaq was the father of Jeremy Ben-Ami, a founder of J-Street, the Jewish lobby group that advocates the return of Israel to its pre-1967 borders.

** B. Netanyahu: Don Isaac Abravanel: Statesman and Philosopher (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1968).

*** For example, see “The Fiasco of the Hebrew Committee” by B. Netanyahu [Zionews, July 1944]

Washington Post Outs the Arts Club of Washington

In this article by David Montgomery:

For reasons that defy logic, economics and social fashion, the little red brick house and its denizens endure here, on one of Washington’s least lovely downtown office blocks, like a bloom in a crack of the concrete canyon where I Street merges with Pennsylvania Avenue NW.

The green wood door is topped with an antique fan of leaded glass and adorned with a brass knocker worn smooth from use. Knock, and be admitted.

A throng of maybe 100 is sipping wine and nibbling chicken liver pate and skewered sea scallops. Most are dressed in black tie or evening gowns. Some of the dinner jackets are adorned with medals, indicating that the wearer is a military man. Many are spiced with colorful vests or adventurous cummerbunds, suggesting a free spirit. One of the freest spirits is art professor Edward “Eddie” Purcell III, who has cast aside all thought of a tux in favor of a full-length red silk 1950s vintage Chinese smoking robe.

Almost anything goes at the Arts Club of Washington, whose clubhouse is the quarters where James Monroe lived for a few months as president, in 1817, while the White House was being rebuilt following the British barbecue of 1814.

“The thing about the Arts Club, either you get it or you don’t,” says Robert Sacheli, club program chairman. “We have a lot of eccentric people here. We’re very proud of that. We encourage eccentricity.”

The bohemian side of the Social Register started calling this house home in 1916. Some of the same upper-crusty social folkways continue to be pursued, along with an artistic mission that seems equal parts anachronistic and vital. At a time when arts funding is being cut everywhere else, and private galleries are closing or moving to other parts of town, the Arts Club’s nearly $1 million annual budget is stable. The money goes to arts-related programming, historic preservation and club activities. The club hosts monthly openings for four artists in its four exhibit spaces, presents weekly free music concerts and sponsors scholarships and literary prizes. The public is welcome six days a week.

It must be the only club in this still-clubby town that is for members only — and for everybody else. This paradox is the beginning of a long list of reasons why the Arts Club makes no sense — and therefore why it survives. It is at once whimsically un-Washington and profoundly old Washington.

What Netanyahu Should Tell US Congress

A friend of mine, a professional negotiator, suggested this approach for a Netanyahu "miracle" speech in Washington:

The Israeli Prime Minister should announce the he is willing to negotiate with the Palestinian Prime Minister for an independent Palestinian state, at once, without any preconditions for either side. Everything would be on the table--for the Israelis as well as the Palestinians. He would be willing to stay on in Washington, to go to Camp David, to move talks to Jerusalem, wherever Abbas wants. He would stay as long as it took to reach an agreement--just as at Camp David. President Obama could mediate, or not, as he saw fit.

Can we make peace? "Yes, we can!"

If the Palestinians responded to the offer with intransigence, that would be their decision, not Israel's.

In my opinion, Israel could then unilaterally declare borders prior to the September 1st recognition of the state of Palestine by the UN.

If there were to be a border war after that--well, even the US fought a border clash with Britain in 1812...it would not pose an existential struggle for either side.

Eliyho Matz on the Future of Israeli-Eskimo Co-Operation

A Warm Israeli Nation Welcomes Cool Eskimo People
Special News Release
by Feature Contributor Eliyho Matz


The first wave of converted Jewish Zionist Inupiaq (pronounced In-you-pack) Eskimos have immigrated to Israel. They were converted to Judaism by native Alaskan Reform rabbi Kerach ben Mayim. The Jewish Agency assisted in their transfer, supplying high-cooled jet airplanes that were developed by Israeli/American new age technologies. The Israeli government named the operation “Igloo Wings” recalling previous such missions carried out at the birth of the Israeli state, when Yemenite Jews were brought from Yemen on operation “Magic Carpet,” Moroccan Jews on operation “Flying Atlas,” and Iraqi Jews on operation “Baghdadi Nights.” The Reform Jewish Inupiaq Eskimo congregation, “Mogen Dovid North Star White Ice Cubes,” which is located in the Arctic Circle, was established in 2005. The congregation has in its vicinity a natural hot water hole that is shared with the polar bears and is used alternatively as a mikveh (ritual bath).

This wave of conversion started a number of years ago after an Israeli couple, tarmilaim travelers, visiting the Arctic area were attacked by a polar bear in a tragedy that resulted in the death of the husband, Avi. Avi was buried in a large ice cube at the Arctic Circle. Eventually his wife, Sarit, married a local Inupiaq who converted to Judaism. Mr. Sly Seal started studying Jewish ethics and religious studies via the internet using his Apple ipod, and he has been developing a wide range of contacts via Twitter and Facebook. According to Sly, the Jewish network Sh’makolenu has been helpful, too. Sarit has been developing her own innovative network called e-yenta.com.

Intrigued by Mr. Seal’s enthusiastic conversion, other Inupiaq couples joined in the Eskimo Judaization process, and that is how the congregation developed. As a result of intense lobbying by an Israeli shaliach (representative) sent from Jerusalem by the Jewish Agency, a number of converted residents of the Inupiaq community responded to the strong Zionist appeal and decided to move to Israel and make Aliyah.

However, some technical details had been overlooked. One of the main issues for the Israeli government was how to handle the conversion process of the Eskimos. The leader of the Jewish Agency, Mr. Nathan S., who himself had spent a number of years in the Siberian permafrost region, promised a swift resolution. He consulted with the great Rabbi Bear of Alaska, as well as Chief Rabbi White Tiger of Siberia. Because of their type of ethnicity and the lifestyle involved, the Israeli government agreed to adjust its absorption policies and practices to accommodate the Eskimos.

These Jewish Eskimos who arrived on the first wave were housed in a large abandoned ice factory. The inner space of the ice factory was altered to accommodate six igloos and a synagogue made entirely of ice, maintaining an icy cool atmosphere year round. A debate which emerged among the Jewish Agency chiefs concerning whether to use this place as a tourist attraction or leave it just as an absorption center did not result in any immediate conclusions. Other cultural issues that were raised as a result of this Arctic/Zionist transaction have yet to be resolved. The settlement of these new Jewish Zionists amidst the ongoing Middle East regional hostilities has led to additional verbal criticisms of the new Israeli/Eskimo policy. But meanwhile, a consensus has been reached by the Eskimo/Zionist leaders in their belief that their arrival in Israel would help toward the cooling of militancy in the region, as well as in the temperament of its inhabitants. The Israeli Navy Seals immediately jumped into the fray and, appreciating the special skills of these newcomers, have taken on a mission to adopt and train them. The Seals will begin teaching the Eskimos how to fish and dive in the deep cool waters of the Mediterranean Sea, as well as in the warm waters of the Red Sea. (Plans are also in the works to introduce them to the shallow salty waters of the Dead Sea.) The Navy Seals, as well as other elite Israeli forces, will provide first-hand training to the new Jewish Zionist Eskimos in order for them to grasp the new challenges of their life in the Middle East. In return, the Seals also expect to benefit from their unique lifestyle experiences, including seal hunting in the Arctic, as well as other cold weather activities.

A few cultural problems that popped up with the arrival of the Eskimos still will have to be resolved. For example, Israeli ice cream is called Eskimo, and ices are called Artik. The Jewish Eskimos are working out some sort of deal with the Israeli government which, in a special session of the Knesset honoring the Eskimos, passed a decree (the constitutional process would have taken too long) that from now on both these items, Eskimo and Artik, would have to be renamed in order not to insult the Zionist Jewish Eskimos. This issue aside, these new immigrants were warmly welcomed by all Israeli citizens, including by the Chassids who loaned them their beaver hats for Shabbos services. Other Israeli Zionists have contributed Israeli clothing and other schmatas imported from China to help enable this new group of Jewish Zionist settlers to adapt quickly to this dynamic society and region.

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All rights reserved, including movie rights, by the Frozen News Agency, eliyho_matz@yahoo.com.

Robert Spencer on Nakba Attacks Against Israel

From FrontPage.com:

“The leaders of these violent demonstrations,” explained Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, “their struggle is not over the 1967 borders but over the very existence of Israel, which they describe as a catastrophe that must be resolved. It is important that we look with open eyes at the reality and be aware of whom we are dealing with and what we are dealing with.”

Indeed. And what they are dealing with is precisely what has been obscured, ignored, and denied, by Western governments and the mainstream media, for decades now. The Obama administration is just the latest U.S. administration to assume that Israel’s enemies can be negotiated with and placated with some agreement. The fact that every such compromise has failed never shakes this core belief, or leads policy analysts to realize that Israel is dealing with an unappeasable jihadist enemy.

No state has ever successfully reached a negotiated settlement with a jihadist enemy who avows a religious obligation to destroy it. So why is Israel constantly expected to be the first? Barack Obama and virtually everyone else in power in America and Europe assume that the violent demonstrators who breached Israel’s borders on Sunday will ultimately be pacified once a Palestinian state is set up. Yet as Hamas is now merging with the “moderates” of Fatah with whom Obama and others have been dealing, it is useful to recall that the Hamas Charter of August 1988 declares that “nothing is loftier or deeper in nationalism than waging Jihad against the enemy and confronting him when he sets foot on the land of the Muslims.” When will this Jihad end? The Hamas Charter quotes Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood: “Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors.”

R. Tripp Evans on Grant Wood

From the Marfield Prize National Award for Arts Writing lecture about his new biography of the American artist, at the Arts Club of Washington:

The National Award for Arts Writing, the Marfield Prize, is given annually by the Arts Club of Washington to recognize excellence in writing about the arts for a broad audience. A monetary prize ($10,000 for the current year) is given to the author of a book published in the previous year about visual, performing, media, or literary arts. Intended to help increase access to the arts, the Award celebrates prose that is lucid, luminous, clear, and inspiring, and creates a strong connection with arts and artists.

It is awarded to one book published in America during the previous year, and judged by distinguished writers of fiction and poetry. It is one of the country’s largest literary prizes given to a single author and is the only one of its kind in the country.

Inaugurated in 2006, the $10,000 prize is paid through an endowment established by long-time Arts Club member Jeannie S. Marfield in honor of Florence Berryman and Helen Wharton.

2010 Winner

R. Tripp Evans, Grant Wood: A Life (Alfred A. Knopf)

The Arts Club of Washington has named R. Tripp Evans the recipient of the fifth annual National Award for Arts Writing for his biography Grant Wood: A Life. (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).

Mr. Evans is a professor of art history at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. Grant Wood: A Life examines the ways in which collective national identity emerges from the unstable ground of myth. In this case, the myth is that of a presumably all-American, homespun artist whose life and art, most famously the painting “American Gothic”, have become stubborn icons for traditional small-town American values. Evans explores the contradiction between Wood’s folksy public image as “America’s Painter” and the realities of his European training, sophisticated use of art-historical sources, complex family relationships and closeted homosexuality.

Finalists
Yunte Huang, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History (W. W. Norton & Company)

Jamie MacVicar, The Advance Man (Bear Manor Media)

Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot GRRRL Revolution (Harper Perennial)

Judges
Michael Martone, professor of English and director, Creative Writing Program, University of Alabama; E. Ethelbert Miller, poet; Katherine Neville, novelist

Submitting Books for Consideration
To be eligible for the next award cycle, books must be written in English and originally published in the United States in 2011. Only non-fiction books by single, living authors will be considered. Anthologies, works of poetry and fiction, and books for children are not eligible. Manuscripts, monographs, and self-published books are also outside the scope of this award. Books may be memoirs, criticism, biographies, or histories, on the subject of any artistic discipline: visual (including painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, crafts, architecture), performing (including theater, music, and dance), literary (including poetry, fiction, storytelling, and playwriting), and media (including film and video, computer-generated arts, and new forms).

Publishers, agents, or authors may submit books for consideration. There is no fee to enter. Three copies of a book, plus the required entry form, should be submitted between July 1 and our deadline of October 1, 2011. Galleys are acceptable for books scheduled to be published in the final two months of the year. Please do not include promotional materials. All submitted material becomes the property of the Arts Club and will not be returned. Entry forms will be available for download here later this spring.

You can buy the book from Amazon.com here:

Bin Laden Photos -- The FOIA Process Begins

Bin Laden Photos -- The FOIA Process Begins

Bin Laden Photo Update: 5/11/11

Bin Laden Photo Update: 5/11/11 -- from FOIABlog.