Crazy Bergson Boy
By: Eliyho Matz
In honor of Will Rogers, Jr., and other Gentiles who attempted to save Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
And a special thanks to Thomas Jefferson.
[In a future feature film about the Bergson Boys, there will be an opening scene in a classy New York City restaurant: On one side of the room will be seated Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein, Claude Levi-Strauss, Isaiah Berlin, Benzion Netanyahu and some other prominent Jewish personalities. Seated at the other side of the restaurant will be Will Rogers, Jr., Guy M. Gillette, Edwin Johnson, Andrew Somers, and some other Congressmen and Senators prominent in the 1940’s. The group of Jews will be overheard discussing their overall personal achievements during WWII in science, philosophy, etc. The Congressmen and Senators will be heard rehashing their frustrations concerning the pitfalls they encountered in their attempts to work together to save European Jews. Suddenly Peter Bergson appears, entering into the restaurant with Marlon Brando, Ben Hecht, Kurt Weill, and Stella Adler. The group of government gentlemen look up and obviously recognize and warmly greet Bergson and his entourage; the Jewish group displays only sketchy familiarity….Evidently, it’s all relative….]
As years go by, recognition given to the Bergson Group’s activities in the United States during WWII has become increasingly ambivalent. The leading character in this group is Hillel Kook, a.k.a. Peter Bergson, a Palestinian Jew growing up under British Mandate Palestine who left the religious life of the yeshivas in Jerusalem and became a founding member of the Irgun in Palestine. Established as one of the Irgun leaders, Bergson’s activities carried him to Europe and culminated in the United States, where he not only became a leading spokesman for European Jews during the Holocaust, but where he also played a leading role in the creation of the new Israeli nation.
Some episodes of Peter Bergson’s life have been highlighted by various historians and writers, whose writings have reflected perhaps amazement but more often confusion over his activities. It is not surprising that such reactions would appear, especially because most of the time those who admired him, or those who admonished him, all seem to have had at best only a partial perspective of who he was. I was fortunate to have worked closely with Peter Bergson during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s at his Institute of Mediterranean Affairs in New York City. As we worked together to organize his papers and chronicle his thoughts, he spoke extensively of his activities, associations, dreams and frustrations. Due to the upcoming conference at Yad Vashem scheduled for mid-July 2011, the theme of which is an examination of the activities of the Bergson Group during the Holocaust, I feel compelled to comment upon and clarify some issues concerning Bergson’s activities.
To begin with, that such an event is happening at Yad Vashem at all is, in itself, some sort of a miracle. Several years ago the Wyman Institute presented a petition asking Yad Vashem to mention and exhibit some of Peter Bergson’s activities during the Holocaust. Yad Vashem, the Israeli National Holocaust Memorial and its top leadership, refused to hear the plea [see my article “Not a Yad and Not a Shem”]. And now, a sudden shift. The main speaker of the Yad Vashem conference will be Dr. David Wyman, a leading American historian of the Holocaust era, and the historian who has connected the dots to illustrate and prove that the political pressure that the Bergson Boys brought to bear during 1943 in the United States led to the establishment of the US governmental agency, the War Refugee Board.
Dr. Wyman is the individual who introduced me to Peter Bergson. However, what is confusing to me is Wyman’s lack of interest, as displayed in his writings, to confront the “other” issues that the Bergson Group dealt with, such as those surrounding “nationhood” and the political consequences of the work they did. This reluctance on Wyman’s part was apparently due to his desire not to confront Jewish organizations about their passive and ineffective role in the Holocaust. The fact that Wyman has now finally picked up the challenge to explain the Bergson phenomenon is, to me, not indicative of his overall understanding of the larger implications of some of their work, nor is he confrontational enough to bring the Bergson Group to the center stage of Holocaust historical writing. The appearance of Wyman at the conference in Jerusalem is significant. But, as I mentioned before, Wyman refuses to confront the totality of the Bergson Group’s activities as they extended past 1944 to the creation of the Israeli nation and to Bergson’s membership in the first Israeli Parliament; thus, for example, he offers no analysis of the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation [this is not Hebrew National, the kosher hot dog manufacturer, whose founders probably meant it to be Jewish and Kosher, and not National].
The conference, if serious about doing any justice to the Bergson Group, is going to have to deal with the analysis of how the news of the Holocaust came to America. The arrival of the news of the Holocaust has been debated, explored and is in totality a mess. A few historians, like Walter Laqueur and Richard Breitman in their book Breaking the Silence [NY: Simon & Schuster, 1986], Richard Breitman and Alan M. Kraut in their article “Who Was the ‘Mysterious Messenger’?” [Commentary: October 1983], and David S. Wyman in his own interpretation [The Abandonment of the Jews] have all emphasized the role played by Dr. Gerhardt Riegner, the World Jewish Congress representative in Switzerland, in transmitting a German messenger’s news to America. I do not have the real answer as to the identity of the German sources. However, I did see a copy of an affidavit that Paul Guggenheim, a Swiss Jewish professor of law, presented to American authorities in Switzerland in 1942 which indicates that the information on the mass killing of European Jewry came initially from a German official of the German Foreign Office, and an official of the Ministry of War. This affidavit led me to believe that detailed information came to US representatives in Switzerland from various German informants; and at one time I wrote a short article, “The Mysterious Riegner,” to present this case. While he was still alive, Riegner refused to give the name of his German source, which leaves us with more confusion than we need.
The simple facts are thus: the United States, at the start of WWII, did not have good Intelligence services. FDR’s quick response to this Intelligence crisis led eventually to the establishment of the OSS and to the nomination of William (“Wild Bill”) Donovan as its Chief Operating Officer. The lack of American experience in international spying led the Americans to ask the British to help out. The British help was simultaneously a blessing and a curse; what is important to note is that some of the British Intelligence leadership were double agents and committed Communists, a situation that, not surprisingly, resulted in many disastrous consequences in Intelligence, and is especially where the Jewish Holocaust suffered severe casualties. Some of these consequent frustrations can be found expressed in the book Intrepid’s Last Chance by William Stevenson [NY: Villard Books, 1983]. According to Stevenson, it was two Polish nationals, Jan Nowak and Jan Karski, who both brought the news of the massacre of European Jewry to the West. “Jan Nowak went to the Public Record Office outside London long afterwards and was shocked to find that everything from Karski and himself with regards to the extermination of the Jews had been omitted” (p. 272). Looking carefully at Intelligence issues during WWII, one discovers that some elements of the German leadership had been very shaken by Hitler’s wartime activities. Based on facts understood today, I would speculate that these elements, once they discovered and fully understood the Holocaust massacres, comprehended quite well that this plan of the systematic murder of European Jewry would harm Germany in the future. Therefore, as I mentioned above, they were willing to bring the terrible news to the West, especially to the Americans. Switzerland was the ideal place for them to carry out their mission, and sure enough, a few German messengers did arrive there. The Germans who endangered themselves knew exactly what they were doing. Once the messages reached the West, it would have been proper for the Allied governments to react. But this did not happen; the reason? -- Intelligence, Communist and other elements preferred the War to continue as long as it would help the Soviets. The consequent damage done to the Americans as a result of their inability to grasp the import of the intelligence reports coming out of Germany was enormous, and of course no action was taken to save Jews. The German elements willing to endanger their lives to topple the Hitler regime later failed again in July 1944.
The news about the Holocaust became public in the United States at the end of 1942. This led to a great deal of anxiety and anger in the American Jewish community. Within two weeks, on December 8, 1942, at noontime, FDR met with the Jewish leadership in America in a meeting at the White House; this was, in fact, the only time during WWII that the President invited this group to meet with him. A document I uncovered, written by Adolf Held, the President of the Jewish Labor Committee, that I published in Midstream [August/September 1980] is probably the most devastating piece of information we have about FDR and the massacre of European Jewry. In it Held documents that by this early date, December 8, 1942, FDR and his administration are fully aware of the massacre, but that FDR has decided not to take any action in this regard, at least for awhile. Wyman cites this document in his book The Abandonment of the Jews, but he fails to mention in his footnotes that it took me a few years to find it, and that I actually published this Held piece in an article four years before his book appeared. This omission is not a matter of a footnote error.
Due to the commotion brought by the messages that appeared in the American newspapers in November 1942 and the news of the systematic mass killing of European Jewry, the Bergson Group immediately started shifting gears and moved from their project to establish a Jewish army, to a full-blown effort to convince the FDR administration to take action to save what was left of European Jewry. Their activities have been documented by a few historians, of whom the leading one is Dr. David Wyman, but he is not alone. Wyman is of the school that concluded that the Bergson Group’s political activities in the year 1943 led to the establishment of the War Refugee Board in January 1944. This being so, the Bergson Group’s interest in saving European Jews did not, however, begin only in 1942/1943, nor did it end in 1944; rather, Bergson was involved in attempts to save Jews from 1935-1948. The trauma of November 1942, did not change his tempo or his ultimate goal to establish a Hebrew Republic (Israeli Republic) with a written constitution à la Thomas Jefferson as a model. This is what most historians fail to recognize. Bergson was probably the most tuned-in individual to come out of Palestine; over more than thirteen years he single-handedly reacted and promoted schemes to save Jews: The Committee for a Jewish Army, the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, and the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation, were all established by Bergson and were meant to give the Jews during WWII a political identity denied to them by the Nazis. For the Nazis, for whom the “Jew” was worth only one thing, i.e., a ticket to Auschwitz, thus eliminated Jewish political identity altogether. So for Bergson, this Nazi scheme fomented the critical need to reestablish and inform the free world of a political status for European Jewry. Bergson believed that establishing a political status for Jews was a critical factor toward saving them. A Hebrew Republic in Palestine, in spite of the world’s unwillingness to accept this idea, was for him the formula for achieving this sought for political status. The current research on the Bergson Group’s activities is to-date very limited, but the totality of his activities is essential to grasp, not just what the Group did in 1943.
Another participant in this upcoming seminar at Yad Vashem will be Judith Baumel, whose book Between Ideology and Propaganda: The “Irgun” Delegation and the Origins of American-Jewish Right-Wing Militancy [Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1999; Hebrew] is totally confusing as well as misleading, analytically faulty, and absolutely ahistorical. Dr. Wyman will thus have to face her and her theoretical nonsense, and I hope that there will not be an academic explosion at this conference! Baumel does not accept Wyman’s conclusion that the political activity of the Bergson Group led to the creation of the War Refugee Board. It should be noted that she is not alone in this stance among Israeli and American historians. For example, Saul Friedlander, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939-1945 [NY: Harper Perennial, 2008], also does not believe that to be the case. But I believe that unprejudiced examination of the facts will support Wyman’s conclusion. Many years ago, while I was a student of Dr. Wyman, and afterwards, I tried to explain the issue to Joel Carmichael, the editor of Midstream magazine and the son of Louis Lipsky, a well known Zionist leader. As a result of this discussion, Carmichael published my article “Political Actions vs. Personal Relations” [April 1981], also concluding that it was not shtadlanut (Jewish begging) but rather the political action of the Bergson Group in 1943 that led the United States government to take some sort of a role in saving Jews. [In the Jewish prayerbook one repeats in the daily prayers “Thank G-d for not making me a woman.” I would like to pray “Thank G-d for not making me an academic….”]
The reasons for my writing this article are many. For me it is important to bring up and to highlight some of Bergson’s activities. For a number of years at the end of the 1970’s and into the early 1980’s I spent many hours with Peter Bergson as well as Samuel Merlin and Yitshaq Ben-Ami (the father of Jeremy Ben-Ami of J-Street). Throughout those years we shared lots of ideas and thought over many approaches as to how to reclaim their place in history, and make their ideas and messages clear and relevant to the next generation. One of the main issues that always came up in our conversations was the role of the non-Jews who helped the Bergson Group. It is sort of interesting: it was the non-Jewish politicians who took a moral stand and decided to help. For Bergson presented them with the powerful argument that if they did not take a moral stand, then they were like the Germans -- and they responded. So it is important for me to develop some thoughts on the subject of the non-Jewish participants in the Bergson Group’s activities. Here I would like to focus on one individual, an American Congressman, who was instrumental in helping to propel the Bergson Group’s response to the Holocaust in 1943. Will Rogers, Jr., was the son of the famous American humorist Will Rogers, whose ancestors were Cherokee Indians and once commented that “’my ancestors didn’t come over on the Mayflower – they met the boat’” [P.J. O’Brien, Will Rogers, Ambassador of Good Will Prince of Wit and Wisdom (Philadelphia: The John C. Winston Co., 1935; p. 24)]. Will Rogers, Jr., who came to Congress in 1942, should be considered an American hero in the tradition of Sitting Bull, or better still, Crazy Horse. He definitely inherited from his ancestors that spirit of freedom and stubbornness that helped the Bergson Group pursue its resolve to bring to the United States Congress via the House and the Senate a resolution to create an agency to save European Jews. FDR did so eventually in 1944 particularly as a result of the pressure of Congress. In honor of Will Rogers, Jr., and his ancestors, I suggest that we look at the project in the American West of the building of the huge monument to Crazy Horse. In the spirit of Will Rogers and his ancestors, American Jews and Israelis should take this example of the Americans and erect such a large monument to Peter Bergson in New York, or in Tel Aviv, or in both.
WWII was over, and Bergson found himself more and more involved in the pursuit of his lifetime dream to bring about the creation of a Hebrew Republic (as called today the Israeli nation) in Palestine. It took an enormous amount of political work as well as other grassroots and cultural work to bring about this goal, that his Group felt was worthy to achieve. I would like to backtrack here and explore something about the Bergson Group that is sometimes overlooked. In 1943 Bergson for the first time came to realize and tried to cement a few issues concerning Jews. First he tried to alert the American people to the facts of what was going on in Europe while America was at war and the Jews were being massacred. Toward this end, he staged a famous pageant “We Will Never Die,” written by the playwright Ben Hecht, in New York City as well as other cities around the US. Later on, between July 20-25, 1943, in New York City, Bergson arranged The Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe. That conference led Bergson to believe that in order to convince the American government that it should take immediate action to save Jews, he would have to move his activities to Capital Hill and personally to lobby in Congress to push FDR to do something. He was beginning to fear that the goal to create a state for Jews after the War was getting to be an impossibility, as the number of Jews was diminishing by the millions. To help secure Jewish (Hebrew, Israeli) sovereignty in Palestine, he dispatched Arie Ben Eliezar to Palestine to revive the Irgun by appointing Menachem Begin to assume its leadership there. It was only thereafter that Bergson realized the magnitude of his mistake in this appointment. Menachem Begin, later the Israeli Prime Minister, was one of the biggest disasters that happened in Bergson’s decision-making; Begin caused him agony for the rest of his life, not only for his role in the Altalena incident, but for other issues as well. We always used to kid around about Begin, seen in Israel as a demagogue, that his legacy would culminate in the famous argument in the Israeli Knesset between him and Sprinzak. [When Sprinzak commented on the Roman orator Cicero, he used the Hebrew pronunciation “Kikero.” Begin responded that the name should be pronounced “Tzitzero.” Sprinzak again repeated “Kikero,” and Begin finally deferred by saying, “All right Mr. Sprinkak!”] Begin was earlier involved in the Altalena incident, the ship that the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation purchased with the help of American funds, part of which were amassed from a play written by Ben Hecht titled “A Flag is Born” and starring the young actor Marlon Brando. According to Bergson, Begin’s behavior in this incident ruined his life. [I plan to publish a short article on this subject in the near future.] As for Begin’s achievement of peace with Egypt in the Camp David agreement, this milestone was mostly due to the involvement of Moshe Dayan.
In 1944, Bergson also proposed the importance of a government-in-exile embassy in Washington, DC., which he established in April 1944. He asserted that the main reason for this embassy would be to ensure that those Jews who had lost their political identity during the War and were thus stateless could claim to be part of a Hebrew (Israeli) nation, proof of which was their embassy in Washington. This for him was a critical symbol for the surviving remnant of European Jewry; the fact that Begin in Palestine and the American Jewish leadership did not grasp its significance did not detract from its purpose. During 1944 and toward the end of WWII, Bergson formulated a written proposal articulating his belief that a Hebrew Republic (Israeli Republic) with a written constitution (like the American one) could be established immediately after the War. The fact that an Israeli sovereign nation was established in 1948 was for Bergson a natural progression of events and one that he contributed a great deal to. However, in the end, with the creation of the Israeli nation there emerged realities that terribly bothered Bergson. First and foremost was the fact that the Israeli nation never wrote a constitution for the Israelis, thus depriving itself of becoming a modern nation. In 1948 he predicted the terrible ramifications that this omission would cause. The impact of this issue is more complex, as it became a constant source of agony for Bergson for the rest of his life.
To conclude, we wish the organizers of this conference good luck, even though we know for sure that the serious issues Bergson raised will not be discussed. But it is a beginning, and let us hope that something good will come out of it.
Monday, June 27, 2011
Eliyho Matz on the Legacy of Peter Bergson
Eliyho Matz sent this article for publication in anticipation of an upcoming July conference about Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook), to be held at Israel's Yad Vashem:
Friday, June 24, 2011
An Indian Diplomat's Analysis of US-Afghan Tensions
M.K. Bhadrakumar, from Asia Times Online:
The Americans may be misreading that the discord with Karzai boils down to his perceived "rentier" mentality, and that through IMF pressure and offers of money, he could be persuaded. Washington may be making a grave miscalculation about the Afghan sense of honor.
It overlooks that slowly, steadily, the US is losing its monopoly of conflict resolution in Afghanistan and Karzai can no longer be kept away from networking with regional powers. Karzai's defiant stance on Saturday comes soon after his return to Kabul from attending the summit meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Astana.
The SCO summit adopted a statement on Wednesday calling for an "independent, neutral" Afghanistan (read: free of foreign occupation). Nurusultan Nazarbayev, president of Kazakhstan, who hosted Karzai, put it on record, "It is possible that the SCO will assume responsibility for many issues in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of coalition forces in 2014."
Saturday also happened to be an extraordinary day with Iranian Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi arriving in Kabul - an unprecedented visit in the history of Afghan-Iranian relations - "to explore ways for the further expansion of ties between the two neighboring states". Vahidi's visit unmistakably represents a big snub to the Obama administration.
Vahidi waded straight into the post-2014 status of the US occupation of Afghanistan. He told Karzai, "Ensuring regional stability will be possible only by the collective efforts of regional countries and the withdrawal of foreign forces."
Meanwhile, Karzai has already initiated moves to hold a loya jirga (grand council) soon after Eid. As things stand, the likelihood of such a traditional tribal council approving permanent US/NATO military bases is remote. The Afghan people militate against foreign occupation of their country.
The American game plan was to muster enough support in the Afghan parliament for the strategic agreement. But a loya jirga is a different ball game altogether. In his remarks on Saturday, which were nationally telecast, Karzai said, "They [US-led NATO forces] are here for their own purposes, for their own goals, and they are using our soil for that." He is appealing to Afghan nationalism.
In sum, the Obama administration sees the conclusion of the strategic agreement with Karzai, direct US-Taliban talks and the drawdown of troops in July as inter-related vectors of a wholesome process where Washington will be in total command - ably assisted by London. Obama will find it a bitter pill to swallow to accept that Afghan laws will prevail over the conduct of his troops.
Karzai defiantly claims it is his prerogative to decide on the "surge" operations by NATO and US foreign forces. Karzai insists that reconciliation of the Taliban should be "Afghan-led" so that his leadership is not in jeopardy and he links the US long-term troop presence to preconditions so that the Americans will have to depend on him and learn to work under his leadership rather than vice versa.
He threatens to go to the Afghan people unless the US meets the preconditions. Karzai counts on a balancing role by the regional powers in the Afghan endgame. Interestingly, on Saturday, he slammed NATO's military intervention in Libya.
Mark Steyn on the Geert Wilders Case
From National Review Online:
Nevertheless, as in all these cases, the process is the punishment. The intent is to make it more and more difficult for apostates of the multiculti state to broaden the terms of political discourse. Very few Europeans would have had the stomach to go through what Wilders did — and the British Government’s refusal to permit a Dutch Member of Parliament to land at Heathrow testifies to how easily the craven squishes of the broader political culture fall into line.
And at the end the awkward fact remains: Geert Wilders lives under 24-hour armed guard because of explicit death threats made against him by the killer of Theo van Gogh and by other Muslims. Yet he’s the one who gets puts on trial.
That’s the Netherlands, 2011. Shameful.
Geert Wilders Defends Free Speech
In the Wall Street Journal Online:
Yesterday was a beautiful day for freedom of speech in the Netherlands. An Amsterdam court acquitted me of all charges of hate speech after a legal ordeal that lasted almost two years. The Dutch people learned that political debate has not been stifled in their country. They learned they are still allowed to speak critically about Islam, and that resistance against Islamization is not a crime.
I was brought to trial despite being an elected politician and the leader of the third-largest party in the Dutch parliament. I was not prosecuted for anything I did, but for what I said. My view on Islam is that it is not so much a religion as a totalitarian political ideology with religious elements. While there are many moderate Muslims, Islam's political ideology is radical and has global ambitions. I expressed these views in newspaper interviews, op-ed articles, and in my 2008 documentary, "Fitna."
I was dragged to court by leftist and Islamic organizations that were bent not only on silencing me but on stifling public debate. My accusers claimed that I deliberately "insulted" and "incited discrimination and hatred" against Muslims. The Dutch penal code states in its articles 137c and 137d that anyone who either "publicly, verbally or in writing or image, deliberately expresses himself in any way that incites hatred against a group of people" or "in any way that insults a group of people because of their race, their religion or belief, their hetero- or homosexual inclination or their physical, psychological or mental handicap, will be punished."
I was dragged to court for statements that I made as a politician and which were meant to stimulate public debate in a country where public debate has stagnated for decades. Dutch political parties see themselves as guardians of a sterile status quo. I want our problems to be discussed. I believe that politicians have a public trust to further debates about important issues. I firmly believe that every public debate holds the prospect of enlightenment.
My views represent those of a growing number of Dutch voters, who have flocked to the Party for Freedom, or PVV. The PVV is the fastest-growing party in the country, expanding from one seat in the 150-seat House of Representatives in 2004, to nine seats in 2006 and 24 seats in 2010. My party's views, however, are so uncommon in the Netherlands that they are considered blasphemous by powerful elites who fear and resent discussion.
That's why I was taken to court, even though the public prosecutor saw no reason to prosecute me. "Freedom of expression fulfills an essential role in public debate in a democratic society," the prosecutors repeatedly said during my trial. "That comments are hurtful and offensive for a large number of Muslims does not mean that they are punishable."
The Netherlands is one of the few countries in the world where a court can force the public prosecutor to prosecute someone. In January 2009, three judges of the Amsterdam Appeals Court ordered my prosecution in a politically motivated verdict that focused on the content of the case. They implied that I was guilty. The case was subsequently referred to the Amsterdam Court of First Instance.
The judges who acquitted me yesterday already had a peremptory ruling from the appeals court on their desk. They decided, however, to follow the arguments of the public prosecutor, who during the trial had once again reiterated his position and had asked for a full acquittal.
Though I am obviously relieved by yesterday's decision, my thoughts go to people such as Danish journalist Lars Hedegaard, Austrian human rights activist Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff and others who have recently been convicted for criticizing Islam. They have not been as fortunate. In far too many Western countries, it is still impossible to have a debate about the nature of Islam.
The biggest threat to our democracies is not political debate, nor is it public dissent. As the American judge Learned Hand once said in a speech: "That community is already in the process of dissolution . . . where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists to win or lose." It has been a tenet in European and American thinking that men are only free when they respect each other's freedom. If the courts can no longer guarantee this, then surely a community is in the process of dissolution.
Legislation such as articles 137c and 137d of the Dutch Penal Code disgraces our democratic free societies. On the basis of such legislation, I was prevented from representing my million-and-a-half voters in parliament because I had to be in the courtroom for several days, sometimes up to three days per week, during the past year and a half. Such legislation should be abolished. It should be abolished in all Western countries where it exists—and replaced by First Amendment clauses.
Citizens should never allow themselves to be silenced. I have spoken, I speak and I shall continue to speak.
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
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)
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)
Thursday, June 09, 2011
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:
UPDATE: USAID has issued a pathetic response, here:
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.
Wednesday, June 08, 2011
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
Tuesday, June 07, 2011
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?
Thursday, June 02, 2011
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...
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
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
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?
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Happy Memorial Day!
Here's an online history of our national holiday, proclaimed by General Logan in 1868.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
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..."
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
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.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
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]
Saturday, May 21, 2011
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.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
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.
*****************************************
All rights reserved, including movie rights, by the Frozen News Agency, eliyho_matz@yahoo.com.
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.
*****************************************
All rights reserved, including movie rights, by the Frozen News Agency, eliyho_matz@yahoo.com.
Monday, May 16, 2011
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.”
Sunday, May 15, 2011
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.You can buy the book from Amazon.com here:
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.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Monday, May 09, 2011
Tom Tomorrow on Bush Torture & Bin Laden
I don't usually read Daily Kos, but this Tom Tomorrow comic made me smile: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/09/973635/-The-True-Story.
Friday, May 06, 2011
Greg Sheridan on bin Laden's Death & Aftermath
From Rupert Murdoch's The Australian, an interesting analysis, which I hope might reach readers of his Wall Street Journal. An excerpt:
A political miscalculation is easier to believe than the most miraculously perfect and clean special operations episode in the history of modern warfare.
Another interpretation has it that the Americans did tell the Pakistanis about the operation just after it began. It was too late then for them to tip off bin Laden, but it meant they could pull back their own soldiers and air force and prevent them reacting. That is also plausible.
There are a lot of other theories swirling around.
Indonesian terrorist Umar Patek, the Jemaah Islamiah commander who was integral to the Bali bombing which killed 202 people, including 88 Australians, was arrested in Pakistan a few months ago. He had been in Abbottabad. It is known he was in Pakistan to make contact with al-Qa'ida, which has helped JI in the past. According to some sources, Patek visited bin Laden at the compound in Abbottabad.
If so, it was Patek who led the Americans to bin Laden. But if Patek did visit bin Laden, how then is it that the world's most wanted terrorists didn't change his residence as soon as the Indonesian was arrested in January?
Did the ISI assure bin Laden of his safety and then betray him? Or was bin Laden in effect a prisoner in Abbottabad?
This is all very speculative. It is difficult to have confidence in any of the speculation, but nor is it easier to have faith in the detail of the official explanation, which has changed quite a lot in the various iterations.
If the Pakistanis did play a role in actively giving bin Laden to the Americans, it would make up for a lot of the grief they have caused Washington in recent years. It also makes it much easier for Barack Obama to pull the US out of Afghanistan sooner rather than later. And it occurs against a framework of US Defence Secretary Robert Gates leaving his job and General David Patraeus, the American commander in Afghanistan, being switched to head the Central Intelligence Agency.
Gates's replacement is Leon Panetta, the CIA director. The US intelligence community, as opposed to the military, has long been pessimistic about Afghanistan and inclined to leave there as soon as decently possible.
A Pakistani gift of bin Laden would assist this development and pay dividends for everybody, including the Pakistanis, who now believe the American involvement in Afghanistan is radicalising their society as well as limiting their strategic options in Afghanistan.
Invitation to an Art Exhibition in Memory of Polly Evans, May 26th, Washington, DC
At the Louise-Lisner-Dickson-Hurt Home. Open to the Public. Invitation here: http://www.lldhhome.org/artshow1.html
Thursday, May 05, 2011
Keith Koffler on the Banned bin Laden Photo
From White House Dossier:
I believe the Obama White House thinks the planet beyond Western Europe has our kind of rational, compassionate mindset. But the world has a very different mindset. If we took Bin Laden’s mangled corpse and strung it up on a flagpole at Ground Zero, half the population overseas would think this a perfectly reasonable approach.
But we can’t even release a photo.
In what way is the picture of the Terrorist King with his cerebellum dribbling out the side of his head going to inspire future Jihadists? Sure, there will be some angry ululating, but after that dies down, the message is clear: this is what the United States does to bad guys. Don’t be one.
It’s not spiking the football. How silly. It’s a lesson and a warning. Our enemies and their potential recruits understand that Bin Laden played a risky game, and lost. The photos would not shock them. Why shouldn’t America blow half his head off? That’s what they’d do to us.
Bin Laden is not a particularly sympathetic figure in the Arab world anymore. The photo would give sustenance to those seeking a better Arab world, a graphic message that the past is dead.
And then their are the conspiracies. The Arab street, and many other streets, think the sunrise is a conspiracy. We have left an indelible question mark in the minds of some around the world about whether we really got Bin Laden. The conflicting accounts we offered about the operation only accentuate the sense of a fictional story poorly told.
Gosh, some reasonable Americans took years to believe Elvis was dead. Jim Morrison of the Doors is still held by some to be in some shack in the south of France prying escargots out of their shells and laying down new rock music tracks.
Without the photo, Osama lives on. What better way to recruit the next generation of terrorists, gullible types who can be convinced that harems of willing virgins await their murderous self-immolation?
And what about us Americans. Don’t we have the right to see this? Don’t we have the right to see our worst enemy crushed by our brave protectors? Why, Mr. President, do you and some of the others in the elite ruling class grant yourselves permission to gain closure, while denying it to the rest of us?
Charles Crawford on the Death of Osama bin Laden
From CharlesCrawford.biz:
Most of the moral and legal burbling on whether it was right for the US special forces to shoot Bin Laden ("extrajudicial execution/killing" seems to be one the favourite phrases used) utterly misses the point.
Which is that the whole operation depended on brave beyond belief soldiers walking into a potential death-trap and hoping that Bin Laden was not only evil but also lazy and/or stupid.
Thus it must have been quite plausible that the whole shabby 'mansion' where Bin Laden lurked had been wired to explode in case of ultimate need, killing its inhabitants and their attackers alike.
Why did this not happen? Maybe Bin Laden was too cowardly to contemplate it, or too cocksure that his 'hiding in plain sight' plan was impenetrable?
Or maybe he wanted to do it but never got round to it, as getting sufficient TNT into the complex might have aroused suspicion?
Or maybe there were booby-traps in place but such was the skill of the SEALs that the AQ people got no chance to trigger them?
One way or the other, imagine the thoughts flashing through the minds of the yound US soldiers as they worked there way up through the dark chaotic building, driving forward to complete the mission from sheer discipline and courage, yet wondering whether when they threw open one final room the whole place would be vapourised - with them going too.
That final door is flung open. My God - there he is. Smirking in the corner with some woman. Maybe he has booby-trapped the room or has had time to put on a suicide belt.
This is no time for polite negotiation or reading Bin Laden his rights.
Bang. Bang.
End it. And hope to get out alive.
As it happens, we have one spectacular historical example of this explosive suicide involving massed Muslims, this time as the attacking troops.
It came 202 years ago to the month, on May 31 1809 on Čegar Hill, not far from Niš in central Serbia. Turkish forces closed in on Serbian 'insurgents' led by Stevan Sindjelic. Rather than surrender Sindjelic blew up his own gunpowder depot, obliterating himself and his own troops plus a goodly number of Turks.
To mark their costly victory and to warn off local Serbs from trying any more insurrections, the Turks built a tower of Serbian skulls in Niš and sent back Serbian scalps stuffed with cotton as tribute to the Sultan. Nice.
Parts of the tower are still there: The Tower of Skulls. I had a jolly dinner in Belgrade recently with one of Sindjelic's proud descendants.
So, Washington. Stop faffing about with these wimpy photographs and furtive so-called burials at sea.
Show your true respect for the finest Islamic warrior traditions. Get out a hack saw and the bricks and mortar - and start building.
President Obama's Remarks in NYC
Well, listen, the main reason I came here is because I heard the food is pretty good.
But to the Commissioner, to Mayor Giuliani -- who obviously performed heroic acts almost 10 years ago -- but most of all, to all of you, I wanted to just come up here to thank you.
This is a symbolic site of the extraordinary sacrifice that was made on that terrible day almost 10 years ago. Obviously we can't bring back your friends that were lost, and I know that each and every one of you not only grieve for them, but have also over the last 10 years dealt with their family, their children, trying to give them comfort, trying to give them support.
What happened on Sunday, because of the courage of our military and the outstanding work of our intelligence, sent a message around the world, but also sent a message here back home that when we say we will never forget, we mean what we say; that our commitment to making sure that justice is done is something that transcended politics, transcended party; it didn’t matter which administration was in, it didn’t matter who was in charge, we were going to make sure that the perpetrators of that horrible act -- that they received justice.
So it’s some comfort, I hope, to all of you to know that when those guys took those extraordinary risks going into Pakistan, that they were doing it in part because of the sacrifices that were made in the States. They were doing it in the name of your brothers that were lost.
And finally, let me just say that, although 9/11 obviously was a high water mark of courage for the New York Fire Department and a symbol of the sacrifice, you guys are making sacrifices every single day. It doesn’t get as much notoriety, it doesn’t get as much attention, but every time you run into a burning building, every time that you are saving lives, you're making a difference. And that's part of what makes this city great and that's part of what makes this country great.
So I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart and on behalf of the American people for the sacrifices that you make every single day. And I just want to let you know that you're always going to have a President and an administration who’s got your back the way you’ve got the backs of the people of New York over these last many years.
So God bless you. God bless the United States of America.
And with that, I'm going to try some of that food. All right? Appreciate you. Thank you.
Wednesday, May 04, 2011
Steve Clemons on the bin Laden Photo Ban
Many American intelligence officials began to think some years ago that he was dead already. A senior FBI agent once asked me, "you don't really believe he is still alive do you?"
If that is what high level Americans in the terror-tracking business thought, what does President Obama think that those through the Arab world will think.
Not releasing a photo of some sort furthers a bad trend of governments -- that the public doesn't have a right to know, that governments are better stewards of the truth and of basic information than the public. It is undemocratic and stiflingly paternalistic.
Wikileaks was a market reaction to the massive expansion of official secrecy not just in the US but elsewhere in the world.
President Obama's decision to hold back the bin Laden photo/s only aggravates this trend.
MosFilm Classics Go Online
On this MosFilm YouTube channel... (ht Robin Shapiro)
BTW, you can read the article I wrote about my tour of MosFilm, for this blog in 2005, here.
BTW, you can read the article I wrote about my tour of MosFilm, for this blog in 2005, here.
Tuesday, May 03, 2011
Four Questions Following the Death of Osama bin Laden
1. Who shot Osama bin Laden?
2. Why did Americans like Judy Woodruff, Diane Sawyer, and Leon Panetta wear black on television, following his death? (Panetta even wore a black tie on PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer).
3. How could bin Laden have been living in Abbottabad, Pakistan for six years without CIA knowledge or permission?
4. Why is the US government acting afraid, instead of victorious?
2. Why did Americans like Judy Woodruff, Diane Sawyer, and Leon Panetta wear black on television, following his death? (Panetta even wore a black tie on PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer).
3. How could bin Laden have been living in Abbottabad, Pakistan for six years without CIA knowledge or permission?
4. Why is the US government acting afraid, instead of victorious?
Fouad Ajami on the Death of Osama bin Laden
From his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Osama Bin Laden, Weak Horse:
When our remarkable soldiers gave him a choice, Osama bin Laden gave them a fight. Fittingly, he was not in a cave. He had grown up in the urban world of Jeddah, and he was struck down in a perfectly urban setting, a stone's throw from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, in odd proximity to a military academy, in a visible and large compound. He had outlived his time and use, and doubtless Pakistani intelligence was now willing to cast him adrift.
Thoughts on the Death of Osama bin Laden
1. President Obama deserves credit.
Without question, President Obama did the right thing. Two Presidents before Obama flinched when it came to Osama bin Laden. President Bill Clinton let him escape in the 1990s, while President George W. Bush let him escape in the 21st Century. It may have taken two years, but President Obama succeeded where the others failed. One may nitpick, or ask "What took so long?" Others may have found the Presidential announcement off-key.
However, any concerns about the circumstances should not take anything away from the fact that, for whatever reason, for whatever motive, President Obama succeeded where others before him had failed.
2. It is a real blow to Al Qaeda.
Those who maintain that this doesn't matter, or that bin Laden was not that important, don't understand the dynamics of revolutionary political movements. As bin Laden himself said, people bet on the strong horse against the weaker horse. Simply by staying alive for a decade with a price on his head, bin Laden defied the might and power and indeed legitimacy of the United States. Like Che Guevara, he came to symbolize anti-Americanism. He and his allies had blown up the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, downtown London, and sponsored attacks all over the world: Madrid, Bali, Algeria, Tunisia, Iraq, Israel, Russia, China, Turkey--thumbing his nose at everyone. This chutzpah alone gave Al Qaeda a following. With the killing of the Al Qaeda leader, America has finally shown the world that bin Laden didn't get away with it.
3. It is a tonic for the United States.
It makes concrete President Obama's campaign slogan, "Yes, we can!"
For almost decade, Americans have lived in fear: afraid to name the enemy's ideology; afraid to put terrorists on trial; afraid to fly; afraid to go into government buildings; afraid to close down Guantanamo, afraid even to think. The fear became contagious, creating a morale-sapping decade in which American commerce and industry--once the envy of the world--became a basket case. Likewise, government agencies ceased to function properly as scandals swirled from Hurricane Katrina, to the failure to prosecute Wall Street executives for fraud after the largest financial collapse in US history, to cheating scandals on standardized tests, to the failure to try and execute Major Nidal Hasan immediately after the Ft. Hood massacre--an open-and-shut case, if there ever was one.
Yes, the climate of fear resulted from a failure of leadership, institutionalized cowardice among political parties, business, and the citizenry. Now, the killing of bin Laden ought to permit American fear to be replaced by American confidence--and the rebuilding of shattered American institutions in the public, private, and non-profit sectors.
4. It is not a partisan issue.
This should go without saying. Bin Laden didn't attack Democrats or Republicans, he didn't attack Bush or Clinton--he attacked America. Likewise, all Americans were victims of the 9/11 attacks--not only families of those killed at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon or Flight 93. They suffered most directly, but the target was all of us.
5. It took much too long.
If this had happened in 2002, America could have celebrated. As it didn't, America can only be relieved. While cliches such as "better late than never" or Churchill's line that "Americans always do the right thing, after they have exhausted every alternative option" might seem apropos, they are not good enough.
With bin Laden finally dead, America must not flinch from rigorous self-examination, and an honest accounting for the mistakes of the past decade, in order to answer the question Bernard Lewis posed in another context: What Went Wrong?
To learn from our mistakes, first we must admit them.
Without question, President Obama did the right thing. Two Presidents before Obama flinched when it came to Osama bin Laden. President Bill Clinton let him escape in the 1990s, while President George W. Bush let him escape in the 21st Century. It may have taken two years, but President Obama succeeded where the others failed. One may nitpick, or ask "What took so long?" Others may have found the Presidential announcement off-key.
However, any concerns about the circumstances should not take anything away from the fact that, for whatever reason, for whatever motive, President Obama succeeded where others before him had failed.
2. It is a real blow to Al Qaeda.
Those who maintain that this doesn't matter, or that bin Laden was not that important, don't understand the dynamics of revolutionary political movements. As bin Laden himself said, people bet on the strong horse against the weaker horse. Simply by staying alive for a decade with a price on his head, bin Laden defied the might and power and indeed legitimacy of the United States. Like Che Guevara, he came to symbolize anti-Americanism. He and his allies had blown up the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, downtown London, and sponsored attacks all over the world: Madrid, Bali, Algeria, Tunisia, Iraq, Israel, Russia, China, Turkey--thumbing his nose at everyone. This chutzpah alone gave Al Qaeda a following. With the killing of the Al Qaeda leader, America has finally shown the world that bin Laden didn't get away with it.
3. It is a tonic for the United States.
It makes concrete President Obama's campaign slogan, "Yes, we can!"
For almost decade, Americans have lived in fear: afraid to name the enemy's ideology; afraid to put terrorists on trial; afraid to fly; afraid to go into government buildings; afraid to close down Guantanamo, afraid even to think. The fear became contagious, creating a morale-sapping decade in which American commerce and industry--once the envy of the world--became a basket case. Likewise, government agencies ceased to function properly as scandals swirled from Hurricane Katrina, to the failure to prosecute Wall Street executives for fraud after the largest financial collapse in US history, to cheating scandals on standardized tests, to the failure to try and execute Major Nidal Hasan immediately after the Ft. Hood massacre--an open-and-shut case, if there ever was one.
Yes, the climate of fear resulted from a failure of leadership, institutionalized cowardice among political parties, business, and the citizenry. Now, the killing of bin Laden ought to permit American fear to be replaced by American confidence--and the rebuilding of shattered American institutions in the public, private, and non-profit sectors.
4. It is not a partisan issue.
This should go without saying. Bin Laden didn't attack Democrats or Republicans, he didn't attack Bush or Clinton--he attacked America. Likewise, all Americans were victims of the 9/11 attacks--not only families of those killed at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon or Flight 93. They suffered most directly, but the target was all of us.
5. It took much too long.
If this had happened in 2002, America could have celebrated. As it didn't, America can only be relieved. While cliches such as "better late than never" or Churchill's line that "Americans always do the right thing, after they have exhausted every alternative option" might seem apropos, they are not good enough.
With bin Laden finally dead, America must not flinch from rigorous self-examination, and an honest accounting for the mistakes of the past decade, in order to answer the question Bernard Lewis posed in another context: What Went Wrong?
To learn from our mistakes, first we must admit them.
Monday, May 02, 2011
Chistopher Hitchens on the Death of Osama bin Laden
Glad that Hitch has lived to see it. From Slate:
If you tell me that you are staying in a rather nice walled compound in Abbottabad, I can tell you in return that you are the honored guest of a military establishment that annually consumes several billion dollars of American aid. It's the sheer blatancy of it that catches the breath.
There's perhaps some slight satisfaction to be gained from this smoking-gun proof of official Pakistani complicity with al-Qaida, but in general it only underlines the sense of anticlimax. After all, who did not know that the United States was lavishly feeding the same hands that fed Bin Laden? There's some minor triumph, also, in the confirmation that our old enemy was not a heroic guerrilla fighter but the pampered client of a corrupt and vicious oligarchy that runs a failed and rogue state.
Elsewhere in Slate, Daniel Byman analyzes the future of al-Qaida after Osama bin Laden, John Dickerson discusses the president's proactive role in the assassination, and William Saletan uncovers some holes in the raid narrative. Also, David Weigel describes the scene outside the White House following Obama's announcement, Anne Applebaum applauds America's use of human intelligence over expensive technologies, and Brian Palmer examines Bin Laden's burial at sea. For the most up-to-date-coverage, visit The Slatest. Slate's complete coverage is rounded up here.
But, again, we were aware of all this already. At least we won't have to put up with a smirking video when the 10th anniversary of his best-known atrocity comes around. Come to think of it, though, he hadn't issued any major communiqués on any subject lately (making me wonder, some time ago, if he hadn't actually died or been accidentally killed already), and the really hateful work of his group and his ideology was being carried out by a successor generation like his incomparably more ruthless clone in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. I find myself hoping that, like Zarqawi, Bin Laden had a few moments at the end to realize who it was who had found him and to wonder who the traitor had been. That would be something. Not much, but something.
In what people irritatingly call "iconic" terms, Bin Laden certainly had no rival. The strange, scrofulous quasi-nobility and bogus spirituality of his appearance was appallingly telegenic, and it will be highly interesting to see whether this charisma survives the alternative definition of revolution that has lately transfigured the Muslim world. The most tenaciously lasting impression of all, however, is that of his sheer irrationality. What had the man thought he was doing? Ten years ago, did he expect, let alone desire, to be in a walled compound in dear little Abbottabad?
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