Washington Times: Republican House Speaker Must Go

The editors, whom I assume include Newt Gingrich's former press secretary Tony Blankley, suggest Henry Hyde replace Hastert, in order to show that Republicans can deal with the Mark Foley page-boy scandal:

The facts of the disgrace of Mark Foley, who was a Republican member of the House from a Florida district until he resigned last week, constitute a disgrace for every Republican member of Congress. Red flags emerged in late 2005, perhaps even earlier, in suggestive and wholly inappropriate e-mail messages to underage congressional pages. His aberrant, predatory -- and possibly criminal -- behavior was an open secret among the pages who were his prey. The evidence was strong enough long enough ago that the speaker should have relieved Mr. Foley of his committee responsibilities contingent on a full investigation to learn what had taken place, whether any laws had been violated and what action, up to and including prosecution, were warranted by the facts. This never happened.

Rep. John Shimkus of Illinois, the Republican chairman of the House Page Board, said he learned about the Foley e-mail messages "in late 2005." Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, the leader of the Republican majority, said he was informed of the e-mail messages earlier this year. On Friday, Mr. Hastert dissembled, to put it charitably, before conceding that he, too, learned about the e-mail messages sometime earlier this year. Late yesterday afternoon, Mr. Hastert insisted that he learned of the most flagrant instant-message exchange from 2003 only last Friday, when it was reported by ABC News. This is irrelevant. The original e-mail messages were warning enough that a predator -- and, incredibly, the co-chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children -- could be prowling the halls of Congress. The matter wasn't pursued aggressively. It was barely pursued at all. Moreover, all available evidence suggests that the Republican leadership did not share anything related to this matter with any Democrat.

Now the scandal must unfold on the front pages of the newspapers and on the television screens, as transcripts of lewd messages emerge and doubts are rightly raised about the forthrightness of the Republican stewards of the 109th Congress. Some Democrats are attempting to make this "a Republican scandal," and they shouldn't; Democrats have contributed more than their share of characters in the tawdry history of congressional sexual scandals. Sexual predators come in all shapes, sizes and partisan hues, in institutions within and without government. When predators are found they must be dealt with, forcefully and swiftly. This time the offender is a Republican, and Republicans can't simply "get ahead" of the scandal by competing to make the most noise in calls for a full investigation. The time for that is long past.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert must do the only right thing, and resign his speakership at once. Either he was grossly negligent for not taking the red flags fully into account and ordering a swift investigation, for not even remembering the order of events leading up to last week's revelations -- or he deliberately looked the other way in hopes that a brewing scandal would simply blow away. He gave phony answers Friday to the old and ever-relevant questions of what did he know and when did he know it? Mr. Hastert has forfeited the confidence of the public and his party, and he cannot preside over the necessary coming investigation, an investigation that must examine his own inept performance.

A special, one-day congressional session should elect a successor. We nominate Rep. Henry Hyde, also of Illinois, the chairman of the House International Relations Committee whose approaching retirement ensures that he has no dog in this fight. He has a long and principled career, and is respected on both sides of the aisle. Mr. Hyde would preside over the remaining three months of the 109th Congress in a manner best suited for a full and exhaustive investigation until a new speaker for the 110th Congress is elected in January, who can assume responsibility for the investigation.

Wikipedia on Yom Kippur

Yom Kippur (Hebrew:יום כיפור yom kippūr) is the Jewish holiday of the Day of Atonement. It falls on the tenth day of the Hebrew month of Tishri. The Bible calls the day Yom Hakippurim (Hebrew, "Day of the Atonements"). It is one of the Yamim Noraim (Hebrew, "Days of Awe"). The day is commemorated with a 25-hour fast and intensive prayer. It is the most holy day of the Jewish year.

Detroit Fresco

Someone I know and I just returned from giving a talk at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and have to wonder if Detroit may be on its way back from the brink. First, arriving in McNamara terminal at the Detroit Airport is a pleasant surprise. The last time I came was about a decade ago, and the airport wasn't a lot of fun. Today, it certainly is. Completed in 2002, McNamara is a beautiful building--almost one mile long, reminiscent of an assembly line in a way--but with moving walkways, fountains, lots of glass, and an interior railway system that whooshes back and forth constantly. Of course there's double-barrelled Starbucks. And signs in Japanese and Chinese. Planes to Europe and the Orient. There's a Westin hotel in case you need to spend the night. The photo doesn't do it justice. You really have to walk through to see how very nice, and to use Kwame Anthony Appiah's term, cosmopolitan it is. Someone I know and I've been to the famous Dubai Airport. Detroit's is better. It was designed by SmithGroup, Detroit's 150-year old architecture and engineering firm that once employed Minoru Yamasaki, architect of New York's World Trade Center. before that, the firm worked with Eero Saarinen on projects for General Motors.

Then it was off to visit the Detroit Intstitute of the Arts, located in the near-downtown "cultural district." Quite a number of museums cluster by Wayne State University, the renowned Scarab Club, Science Center, African-American museum, the Historical Society, and the Public Library. Sort of an Acropolis. In this collection, the art institute is clearly the Parthenon. Detroit Museum director Graham Beal was very much in evidence. His plummy English-accented voice narrated the audio tour for Annie Liebowitz's photography show; he was in the galleries telling visiting guests decorative candelabra seized by Stalin and sold in the 30s; and he could be found in the marble lined undeground cafeteria at the only table covered with white linen and full table settings, entertaining what looked like a bunch of donors. The museum is undergoing what looks like a massive renovation and expansion, so the "best of" the art has been gathered together on the first floor of the old building while construction work is underway. It was well-displayed, with all sorts of goodies from all over the world side-by-side: Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Henry Ossaway Tanner, Greek, Chinese, Persian, Indian, you name it, they had it. And they weren't the same pictures that you see all the time, either. For example, "Ellen's Isle" Robert S. Duncanson, "The Blue Gown" by Frederick Carl Freseke, "Bank of the Oise at Anvers" by Vincent Van Gogh, and "The Jewish Cemetery" by Jacob van Ruysdael. So one could enjoy Robert Hughes' "shock of the new" for older pictures, too.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the museum is the "Rivera Court," a gigantic room completely filled with the Detroit Industry Frescoes by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Unlike its notorious counterpart at Rockefeller Center, this one still stands--pehaps because it includes a likeness of Henry Ford in the way European paintings have an image of the donor. It's really a very interesting work, full of symbolism. It's all based on the Ford River Rouge auto plant--and shows the connection between nature and industry. Soviet doctrine idealized "Fordsism" during the period Rivera painted these murals, so there was no ideological problem for a Marxist to glorify the Ford Motor company's main auto factory. It's of historical, cultural, spiritual, and political interest. You are meant to worship the industrial age in this chapel of the museum. And, in a way, you can't help but do so. My only quibble with the Detroit Institute of the Arts remodelling scheme is that the new white marble facing on the wings doesn't match the limestone on the old buildings. Plus, the marble has the same sort of thick dark grain and very shiny finish that I saw in Moscow and Tashkent--perhaps a little too Sovietsky style...of course, so are Rivera's murals.

Across the street from the art museum is the Detroit Historical Society museum. And womeone I know and myself just happened to be there on the day of a "grand re-opening" celebration. There were balloons, a cocktail party (we had to leave before that got rolling), and all sorts of happy events. Admission was free, and the place was packed. I had no idea that Detroit had so much history. Of course, the town was initially French, as the name suggests, a big trading post even in the 17th Century, for the fur trade. Cadillac was a Frenchman, and they have a big painting of Cadillac at the court of the French king making a presentation. Detroit rapidly industrialized--before it became the automobile capital of the USA, it was a leader in manufcture of carriages and railway cars. The ice cream soda was invented in Detroit, too. Motown, of course. And even the 3-color traffic light. Naturally, they have the first horseless carriage manufactured in Detroit on display--as well as the "Body Drop" section of the Cadillac assembly line. It was a little bit like the 1964 world's fair. There was even a section where visitors could sit in the seats of sports cars like the Porsch Boxter. Lots of car trivia, brands of yesteryear--Packard, DeSoto, Nash, the Scarab--UAW history.Someone I know liked the exhibition of historical dresses on display on the 2nd floor...behind the assembly line. Plus a section devoted to the architecture of Albert Kahn, apparently the man who built Detroit. You hear a lot about Chicago architecture, but Detroit seems to have something to boast about, too. Definitely worth a visit.

Next door was the grand and inspiring Detroit Public Library, one of the Carnegie Libraries, and a nice complement to the other edifices on the street. It's too bad we didn't have time to see the other museums, something to come back for.

In Ann Arbor, everything seemed to be booming, and built on a gigantic scale. The University Hospital spread over an entire hilltop. Pfizer had a huge research facility, modern buildings covering 177 acres. Pfizer bought Warner-Lambert which bought Parke-Davis--a company featured in the Detroit Historical Society--a pioneer local industry.

The University of Michigan was huge, too. The buildings seemed a little stark. But the people were friendly. The Michigan League building where our conference took place was really ship-shape. The waxed floors gleamed, the wood looked polished. Everything worked. And the college town was neat. We had a fantastic Indian meal at the Shalimar restaurant.Then we walked to the original Borders Bookshop which started the national chain (located across the street from the present store). Inside was a novelist Edward P. Jones signing copies of The Known World and All Aunt Hagar's Children. He told one fan, who had seen him on Oprah, who had asked him how long it took him to write a book, that it took him five years to think about it, and a year-and-a-half to write it. You couldn't get more literary.

You can buy Jones' books from Amazon.com here:
The University of Michigan is alma mater to Google founder Larry Page. Word around town seemed to be that Google is about to build a new research facilty, to employ 1500 computer scientists working on new projects. Will that turn Ann Arbor into Silicon Valley East?

Fouad Ajami on Iraq Intelligence

Today's Wall Street Journal has an interesting op-ed about problems with American intelligence reports on Iraq:

But this brutal drawn-out struggle between American power and the furies of the Arab-Islamic world was never a Western war. Our enemies were full of cunning and expert at dissimulation, hunkering down when needed. No one in the coffeehouses of the Arab world (let alone in the safe houses of the terrorists) would be led astray by that distinction between "secular" and "religious" movements emphasized by the Senate Intelligence Committee. They live in a world where the enemies of order move with remarkable ease from outward religious piety to the most secular of appearances. It is no mystery to them that Saddam, once the most secular of despots, fell back on religious symbols after the first Gulf War, added Allahu Akbar (God is great) to Iraq's flag, and launched a mosque-building campaign whose remnants--half-finished mosques all over Baghdad--now stand mute.

No Iraqi agents had to slip into hotel rooms in Prague for meetings with jihadists to plot against America. The plot sprang out of the deep structure of Arab opinion. We waged a war against Saddam in 1991 and then spared him. We established a presence in the Arabian Peninsula to monitor him, only to help radicalize a population with religious phobias about the "infidel" presence on Arabian soil. The most devout and the most religiously lapsed of the Arabs alike could see the feebleness of America's response to a decade of subversion and terror waged by Arab plotters and bankrolled by Arab financiers. The American desire to launch out of Iraq a broader campaign of deterrence against the radical forces of the region may not have been successful in every way, but the effort was driven by a shrewd reading that, after Kabul, the war had to be taken deep into the Arab world itself.

Kwame Anthony Appiah on Cosmopolitanism

Not too long ago, driving in my car, I heard a soothing British voice that sounded much like Tony Blair's on WAMU's Kojo Nnamdi call-in show. The speaker turned out to be Kwame Anthony Appiah, Laurence S. Rockefeller professor of philosophy at Princeton University, author of Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Stangers Thanks to Google and Wikipedia, I later found out that Professor Appiah is the grandson of Sir Stafford Cripps, Britain's ambassador to the Soviet Union. His defense of cosmopolitanism as an alternative to religious fundamentalism was nice to hear on NPR. You can listen to the Kojo Nnamdi interview by clicking here. You can buy a copy of the book from Amazon.com by clicking here:Here's a link to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's definition of Cosmopolitaism.

Dmitri Simes on Clinton and Al Qaeda

From The National Interest:

As I have written in The National Interest, then Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin proposed U.S.-Russian cooperation against the Taliban and al Qaeda in 1999. Frustrated with Moscow’s opposition to the NATO attack on Yugoslavia earlier that year—and, more generally, increasingly concerned by Russia’s newly assertive foreign policy—the Clinton Administration dismissed Mr. Putin’s overtures out of fear that cooperation with the Kremlin would legitimize Russia’s own presence in Central Asia. So, even after the al Qaeda bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, the Clinton team’s focus was on containing Russia, not on working with Moscow against al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Even the 2000 al Qaeda bombing of the U.S.S. Cole did not persuade Mr. Clinton or his advisors that working with Russia in defeating the common threat was more important than curbing Russian influence in Central Asia. By that time, Russia was explicitly suggesting using its links to the Northern Alliance in order to defeat the Taliban. Later, President Putin acknowledged in an interview with Barbara Walters that he did not “know whether it would have been possible to prevent these strikes on the United States by the terrorists,” but added that “at that time, we certainly were counting on more active cooperation in combating international terrorism.” Both U.S. and Russian sources confirm that Russian approaches to the United States on joint counter-terrorism action in Afghanistan were largely ignored by the Clinton Administration.

Cooperation with China was also a casualty of the U.S.-led attack against Yugoslavia. Milosevic led the last self-proclaimed socialist regime in Europe and the Chinese leadership could not be expected to approve an attack on Yugoslavia any more than the United States would have been expected to endorse a Chinese attack on some democratic state, even one that had committed human rights violations in the course of a civil war. The accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade did not help either, since Beijing took the view that even if it was accidental, it occurred during a bombing campaign that was both bad policy and, because it had not been approved by the United Nations Security Council, in violation of international law. China was another key player in central and south Asia and had considerable influence over Afghanistan’s neighbor Pakistan.

If Russia and China were in America’s corner in 1999 and 2000, the U.S. could have taken action against the Taliban and either driven them from power or at least severed their links to al Qaeda. This would have made the September 11 attacks much more difficult to organize.

Declassified National Intelligence Estimate Key Findings

Here, in PDF format(ht LGF). An excerpt:

We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere.

• The Iraq conflict has become the “cause celebre” for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.

Michelle Malkin analyzes the significance of this document on her blog:

Putting aside how the outdated portions still refers to Zarqawi in the present tense, the big thing that strikes me about the key judgements is that they reflect a dhimmi, historically ignorant view of jihad more suited for the moonbat Left than our premier intelligence agencies.

Here's Andrew McCarthy's analysis from National Review Online:

Osama bin Laden claimed in 1998 that President Clinton’s policy was a “continuing aggression against the Iraqi people”; a “devastation” that continued the “horrific massacres” of the 1991 Gulf War. For the world’s leading jihadist, Clinton’s purported “eagerness to destroy Iraq” was the “best proof” of America’s intentions toward the Islamic world. None of it was true, of course, but that didn’t stop him from saying it.

Now, did the Clinton Iraq policy endanger the United States by providing bin Laden with a valuable tool for recruitment and incitement? I suppose if I were a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, I’d have to say it did. After all, adopting what passes for this line of reasoning, the 1998 fatwa was followed by the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing well over 200 people. The following year, plots against Los Angeles International Airport and the U.S.S. The Sullivans were thwarted by sheer luck. In October 2000, the U.S.S. Cole was attacked, resulting in the murders of 17 American sailors. And in the run-up to the 9/11 atrocities, Bush did not change Clinton’s Iraq policy; he continued it.

If we’re to be honest, however, it would be preposterous to claim that anything President Clinton did — in Iraq or anyplace else — “caused” jihadist terrorism. Just as it is inane to argue now that our current Iraq policy is the “cause.”

Whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, jihadism is attractive to tens of millions of people in what is called the Muslim world. Out of a total population of about 1.3 billion, that may not be a very high percentage (although I daresay it is higher than we like to think). But it is the ideology that attracts recruits. Grievances are just rhetoric. If the bin Ladens did not have Iraq, or the Palestinians, or Lebanon, or Pope Benedict, or cartoons, or flushed Korans, or Dutch movies, or the Crusades, they’d figure out something else to beat the drums over. Or they’d make something up — there being lots of license to improvise when one purports to be executing Allah’s will.

It is bad enough when the Muslim charlatans opportunistically use American policies they don’t like for militant propaganda purposes. It is reprehensible when American politicians do it.

President Clinton's Uzbekistan Connection

Former President Clinton's mention of the centrality of Uzbekistan to his plans in fighting Osama Bin Laden leapt from this trasncript of his Fox News interview with Chris Wallace:

CLINTON: No, no. I authorized the CIA to get groups together to try to kill him.

The CIA, which was run by George Tenet, that President Bush gave the Medal of Freedom to, he said, He did a good job setting up all these counterterrorism things.

The country never had a comprehensive anti-terror operation until I came there.

Now, if you want to criticize me for one thing, you can criticize me for this: After the Cole, I had battle plans drawn to go into Afghanistan, overthrow the Taliban, and launch a full-scale attack search for bin Laden.

But we needed basing rights in Uzbekistan, which we got after 9/11.

The CIA and the FBI refused to certify that bin Laden was responsible while I was there. They refused to certify. So that meant I would’ve had to send a few hundred Special Forces in in helicopters and refuel at night.

Even the 9/11 Commission didn’t do that. Now, the 9/11 Commission was a political document, too. All I’m asking is, anybody who wants to say I didn’t do enough, you read Richard Clarke’s book.

WALLACE: Do you think you did enough, sir?

CLINTON: No, because I didn’t get him.

WALLACE: Right.

CLINTON: But at least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some, including all the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try. They did not try. I tried.

So I tried and failed. When I failed, I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country, Dick Clarke, who got demoted.

So you did Fox’s bidding on this show. You did your nice little conservative hit job on me.

I'm interested to learn more--why the CIA wouldn't certify Bin Laden as a terrorist mastermind, why Uzbekistan wouldn't give the US basing rights, and so forth. Inquiring minds want to know. I'd say that based on my students views, Bill Clinton was very popular in Uzbekistan. And Hillary Clinton's photo was on display in an honored place in the foyer of the main auditorium at the Unviersity of World Economy and Diplomacy in Tashkent. (I saw Madeleine Albright's photo at the Keljak Ilmi Business School)...

Cat Massage Video from You Tube

Someone I know sent me this very funny cat massage video from You Tube...

Michelle Malkin on the Associated (with terrorists) Press

It seems like Michelle Malkin has uncovered a scandal involving terrorists associated with the Associated Press's photographer Bilal Hussein. She's upset that the Washington Post seems to be in full coverup mode, publishing AP president Tom Curley's op-ed defense of the AP--but not the story itself:

Let me repeat: According to the US military, Hussein was captured by American troops in a Ramadi apartment with an alleged al Qaeda leader and a weapons cache, and tested positive for explosives.

More Curley if you can stand it:

U.S. journalists are severely limited in their ability to move safely, make themselves understood and develop sources in such areas. AP has learned to overcome those limitations, using techniques honed over decades of covering sectarian confrontation and bloodshed in the Middle East.

"Techniques" such as turning a blind eye to widespread concern about the use of local stringers overseas? Or perhaps finely honed news-suppression techniques like those perfected by CNN during the Saddam regime?

Speaking of Eason Jordan's CNN, is Curley trying to pull an Eason in this incendiary paragraph:

Both official and unofficial parties on every side of a conflict try to discredit or silence news they don't like. That is certainly the case in Iraq, where journalists are routinely harassed, defamed, beaten and kidnapped. At last count, 80 had been killed.

Yes, you read that right. He is absolutely suggesting that our troops are retaliating against journalists whose work they don't like. Read the whole piece again and look at the context.

And his organization calls my reporting "incendiary?"

***

Will anyone at the Washington Post clue its readers into the real controversy over AP and Bilal Hussein? Anyone?

Robert Hughes on Journalistic Ethics

Time Magazine's legendary art critic tells how he got his job:

First, however, I had my trial run in Manhattan. AT Baker proved to be a bluff, weatherbeaten salt with an office on the 24th floor. Its perforated sound-tile ceiling bristled, porcupine-like, with red and green pencils, which he was in the habit of throwing upward to see if they would stick. They looked like something from the last Venice Biennale.

He sat me down and produced a packet of colour transparencies of the work of someone I had never heard of, a decorative artist named Felix Kelly. Baker pointed out with emphasis and regret that Kelly was a particular friend of Clare Boothe Luce, the widow of Henry Luce, Time’s founder.

Kelly was having a show in San Francisco. I would not, Baker added, be expected to fly over to see it. I could work from the transparencies, which were excellent. Mrs Luce would read my copy closely and with interest.

Felix Kelly turned out to be a stage designer whose speciality was pretty-as-a-picture late-surrealist perspectives — late Dali and eau-de-cologne — punctuated with stranded boats, Roman ruins and tottering, picturesque New Orleans–style tenements, embellished with much wrought-iron lace. I turned in 120 lines of falsely enthusiastic copy — unsigned, of course, in the Time style.

Those were the days. Mrs Luce was gratified and sent a note to Henry Grunwald urging that this new candidate be hired forthwith. And I was, at what seemed to me to be the munificent salary of $20,000 a year, plus expenses.

The Girl in Black (1956)

Watched this Michael Cacoyannis drama last night. It is depressing, yet starkly brilliant. The cast was unknown to me, but probably well-known to Greeks. A sensitive Audrey Hepburn-like Ellie Lambeti played Marina, the "girl in black". Dimitris Horn was a darkly handsome, Pavlos. And George Foundas a creepy Christos, villian of the piece. The acting was striking, at times the faces looked like masks in a Greek tragedy. It is about a clash of civilizations, Greek style, when two cosmpolitan Athenians arrive on a small Greek island for a week's vacation. The island is completely backwards and medieval in its mentality. Gangs of youths prey on the villagers, enforcing a strict code of morality in a violent way. However, our two Athenians are unaware of the world of darkness they have entered. It is so sunny on the island--they have come to swim and have fun, after all. So, they rent rooms in the dilapidated mansion of a Greek widow and her two children--brought there by a dockside tout, who has diverted them from the more sterile tourist hotel. The two Athenian holiday makers are a study contrasts themselves--the bald one is a hardworking architect, who sketches by the waterfront. The good-looking one is a playboy who lives with his mother. I won't give away the plot, except to say it involves the two Athenians clashing with each other--and the remaining Athenian clashing with the entire town, except the title's girl in black. For all the talk about honor killings in Islam these days, the film shows that rural Greece was just as repressive, religious, and opposed to cosmopolitanism in 1956 as anywhere today. The tragic death of innocents that concludes the film has a symbolic message about the future of Greece, it would seem. Luckily, Greece seems to have made the transition to modernity. Which gives one hope that half a century from now, perhaps the violence accompanying the clash of civilzation we see these days will becomeas much of a bad dream as Cacoyannis's story of an Athenian "vacation from hell."

Robert Hughes' Confessions

The Australian has run the best article so far on Robert Hughes' Agustinian-sounding memoir, Things I Didn't Know:

Five years later, the rest of New York continues to wallow in pained debate about how the victims of the attacks should be memorialised and what kind of buildings should be erected next to the void at ground zero. Not Hughes, though.

He is happy that what he calls that "great ugly scaleless box of a thing" no longer disfigures the New York skyline.

He never liked the twin towers, and he likes even less the endless "dickering" over 9/11 monuments and memorials. "Can you imagine how little would have happened to London after the Blitz if the same obsessive concentration on loss and sacrifice were placed upon every building that the Luftwaffe flattened?" Hughes asks.

He concedes that the initial shock of the towers' collapse was "deeply discombobulating". The post-9/11 view from his window was like "looking into a familiar face with a piece bashed out by some maniac with a baseball bat, which of course was the case". "But do I miss it aesthetically? Obviously not."

This was fighting talk from a New York resident on the day most of the city was weepily observing the fifth anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on the US. Yet Hughes has made a career out of the unflinching honesty of his opinions, as several prominent British artists know to their cost. As the vastly influential art critic for Time magazine for more than 30 years, Hughes was never much impressed with Brit Art celebrities such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, and he is not about to change his mind now he is ageing and injured.

UPDATE: Someone I know found this link to an excerpt in the Times of London, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2320105.html
Full disclosure: I have met Hughes, around the time he wrote about my work on the NEA and PBS issues rather critically, so I can't say he's exactly a friend--but he's a very good writer. I assigned his American Visions to my students in the American Culture course that I taught in Moscow. So I imagine this book is pretty interesting, too...You can buy a copy from Amazon by clicking here:

Blair Helps Shell

Tony Blair is lobbying Vladimir Putin to leave British-Dutch Shell Oil alone, in what is turning into an ugly business dispute over Sakhalin island wells:

Last week Russia's Ministry of Natural Resources suspended environmental permits allowing Shell and its partners - Mitsui and Mitsubishi of Japan - to operate the project, which is 80 per cent complete, and which has already secured contracts for a large proportion of the gas it is expected to produce. Sakhalin-2 has reserves totalling 4.5 billion barrels.

Downing Street, along with the Foreign Office and the Department of Trade and Industry, have made it clear they are not satisfied with the Russian government's explanation for the suspension.

Happy Ramadan!

According to Wikipedia, the month-long fast of Ramadan begins September 24th in Saudi Arabia and a day later elsewhere, ending October 23rd. It's not easy to fast for a month. When I taught in Uzbekistan, you could see the students who fasted were quieter and less energetic during class. Nights were noisier, as people ate. The Eid feast ending the fast was a big deal--the Indonesian Embassy slaughtered a bull, ordinary people slaughtered sheep.

Muslims believe that during Ramadan, the revelation of the Qur'an to Prophet Muhammad began. The entire month is spent fasting from dawn to dusk. Fasting during this month is often thought to figuratively burn away all sins. Furthermore, the Prophet Muhammad told his followers that the gates of Heaven would be open all the month and the gates of Hell would be closed. The first day of the next month is spent in great celebrations and rejoicings and is observed as the ‘Festival of Breaking Fast’ or `Eid ul-Fitr.

Melanie Phillips: Britain Must Do More

After Home Secretary John Reid's speech:

Whether this tentative throwing down of the cultural gauntlet in the face of creeping Islamisation does mark a more general shift away from the Whitehall strategy of appeasing extremism that has obtained until now remains to be seen. There is still a huge distance for the government to travel before it emerges from its state of collective denial. What is urgently needed, for example, is much more robust action against the fanatics doing the brainwashing. It is beyond belief that individuals are still able to parade on the streets of Britain calling for the murder of the Pope, or inciting hatred and murder against Jews or – in the words of the shiny new law on the statute book — glorifying terrorism. But despite such persistently high levels of paralysis within the establishment, there are now also signs in various quarters of a growing movement towards reality.

Tony Blair: L'Shanah Tovah!

From the British Prime Minister's Rosh Hashonah column in the Jerusalem Post:

As the latest report on anti-Semitism illustrates, the Jewish people have too often in history been victims of hatred. But they have also rightly inspired respect and admiration. We must not forget that the Jewish community - the oldest minority faith community in Britain - serves as an example of how identity through faith can be combined with the deep loyalty to the British nation.

As one of the children from the Naima Primary School wrote in the booklet presented to me at the thanksgiving service at Bevis Marks Synagogue in June, "Am I Jewish or English? This keeps me in confusion / I'm both, you see, that's my final conclusion / Judaism is my religion; I make it so, clearly / I adore England, I love it so dearly."

We shall continue to value our Jewish community and ensure that its members feel safe and security in Britain and know that they are an integral part of British society. We shall persist in the fight against anti-Semitism and racism, and our police will continue to work together with communities to ensure their safety and security.

The Jewish New Year is always an opportunity for renewal and new beginnings. My particular hope this year is that we can re-energize the peace process in the Middle East. But I would also like to say thank you to the Jewish community in Britain, which for the last three-and-a-half centuries has contributed enormously to Britain. I salute all they do for their community and country, their courage and endurance, their contribution and commitment to Britain, and Israel.

The Future of US Foreign Aid

Last night, on the PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Paul Solman hosted an interesting debate between economists William Easterly and Jeffrey Sachs. I'd say that Easterly won hands down. Sachs came across a lot like a used-car salesman, even had a blow-dry haircut and fancy suit. There's no transcript on the PBS website--unfortunately. But there is a link to RealAudio and mp3 versions, so you can hear the discussion for yourselves.

Shawn W Crispin on Thailand's Coup

It's monarchic networks, stupid! As Shawn W Crispin explains in his article on events in Bangkok for The Asia Times Online:

The mainstream media have widely misinterpreted the potent but peaceful protests as being galvanized by the Thaksin family's controversial US$1.9 billion tax-free sale of its 49% holdings in the Shin Corporation to Singapore's Temasek Holdings. To the contrary, the protests, which were later co-opted by various special-interest groups aligned against the government, were first galvanized and primarily sustained by the explosive claims first made by firebrand media mogul Sondhi Limthongkul that Thaksin was on particular occasions disloyal to the throne.

Democratic-minded Thais have since loyally donned royal-yellow shirts to demonstrate their support for the King, months after the elaborate June celebrations that marked the 60-year anniversary of his accession to the throne. Thaksin, who had stepped down as prime minister in April hours after a closed-door meeting with Bhumibol, surprised many when he resumed his caretaker role the following month to plan and preside over the high-profile royal celebrations.

The ARC's statement on Tuesday accusing Thaksin of lese majeste has brought the long-brewing tensions between the prime minister and monarch into the open. A groundbreaking academic paper that has recently made the rounds among Thailand's intelligentsia, written by Thailand expert Duncan McCargo, argues that Bhumibol had over the years maintained his authority over elected politicians through so-called "monarchic networks" of loyal royalists strategically positioned inside the bureaucracy, including the highest echelons of the military.

Monarchic networks

Although the paper remains controversial, what is apparent is that Thaksin did move to sideline a number of top government officials, which in effect diluted the palace's influence inside the bureaucracy and, as one palace source believes, aimed to consolidate his power in anticipation of the post-Bhumibol era.

For example, when Thaksin ordered in 2001 the sidelining of Kasem Watanachai and Palakorn Suwannarat, two well-known royalist bureaucratic officials, the King within hours appointed both of them to his Privy Council.

In 2002, two reporters for the Far Eastern Economic Review, including this correspondent, were threatened by Thaksin's government with lese majeste charges and deportation for a report signaling tensions between his government and the palace. More significant, the premier regularly wrangled with the Privy Council over annual military reshuffles in which Thaksin bid to promote his loyalists to pivotal positions in the top brass.

In 2003, he controversially promoted his relatively unknown cousin, General Chaisit Shinawatra, to the post of army commander - the country's most powerful military position - while elevating many other of his allies.

Tuesday's coup significantly came against the backdrop of another hotly contested scheduled military reshuffle in which Thaksin had controversially vied to elevate a clutch of his pre-Cadet Class 10 loyalists to the pivotal 1st Army Division. That reshuffle list reportedly brought Thaksin into conflict with senior members of the top brass and the Privy Council, and his refusal to back down from the proposed personnel changes appears to have been a major factor behind the coup.

According to sources familiar with the matter, Thaksin had attempted to elevate Major-General Prin Suwanthat to commander of the 1st Army Division, which crucially is charged with overseeing security in Bangkok. Thaksin also reportedly pushed to promote Prin's ally, Major-General Daopong Ratanasuwan, to take over the 1st Infantry. With assistant army commander Pornchai Kranlert in place, the reshuffle, if accomplished, would have given Thaksin an unbroken chain of command over crack troops responsible for Bangkok's security.

Notably, without his allies in the top posts, Thaksin's order from New York to impose a "severe state of emergency" and remove Sonthi from his position as army commander went unheeded.

Meanwhile, the military has promised to return power to the people as soon as possible, and judging by past royally orchestrated extra-constitutional interventions, it will honor that vow.

Thaksin's ouster will pave the way for important democratic reforms, which under the military's and monarchy's watch will broadly aim to dilute the power of the executive branch, limit the power of large political parties, and strengthen the independent checking and balancing institutions that Thaksin stands accused of undermining.

With the likely legal dissolution of Thaksin's powerful Thai Rak Thai political party, the nation now seems set to return to the wobbly coalition politics composed of several competitive middle-sized parties that characterized Thai democratic politics throughout the 1990s after the last coup in 1991 and the restoration of civilian rule after the bloody street protests of 1992.

More significant, perhaps, Thaksin's departure from the political scene will allow the Privy Council and the palace to plan without worries for a dynastic transition that maintains the centrality of the monarchy in Thai society. Thai democratic history shows that the country often takes one step backward to take two steps ahead, and Tuesday's royally backed coup is consistent with that tradition.

BTW, here's a link to Prof. Duncan McCargo's website (though I can't find his paper on monarchic networks listed).

Martin Kramer on Islamic Fascism

Martin Kramer argues that Islamism is a form of clerical fascism:

Any student of my generation first would have encountered the comparison in the work of the late Manfred Halpern, who spent nearly forty years as a politics professor at Princeton. Halpern grew up with fascism: born in Germany in 1924, he and his parents fled the Nazis in 1937 for America. He joined the war against the Nazis as a battalion scout in the 28th Infantry Division, and saw action in Battle of the Bulge and elsewhere. After Germany's surrender, he worked in U.S. Counterintelligence, tracking down former Nazis. In 1948 he joined the State Department, where he worked on the Middle East, and in 1958 he came to Princeton, where he did the same.

In 1963, Princeton published his Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa. For years, this book was the basic text in the field, and included the only academic treatment of Islamism, which no one much cared about at the time. Halpern labeled it "neo-Islamic totalitarianism," and this is how he described it:

The neo-Islamic totalitarian movements are essentially fascist movements. They concentrate on mobilizing passion and violence to enlarge the power of their charismatic leader and the solidarity of the movement. They view material progress primarily as a means for accumulating strength for political expansion, and entirely deny individual and social freedom. They champion the values and emotions of a heroic past, but repress all free critical analysis of either past roots or present problems.

Halpern continued:

Like fascism, neo-Islamic totalitarianism represents the institutionalization of struggle, tension, and violence. Unable to solve the basic public issues of modern life—intellectual and technological progress, the reconciliation of freedom and security, and peaceful relations among rival sovereignties—the movement is forced by its own logic and dynamics to pursue its vision through nihilistic terror, cunning, and passion. An efficient state administration is seen only as an additional powerful tool for controlling the community. The locus of power and the focus of devotion rest in the movement itself. Like fascist movements elsewhere, the movement is so organized as to make neo-Islamic totalitarianism the whole life of its members.

At the time, Halpern was a central figure in Middle Eastern studies, and his book—reprinted six times—appeared in every syllabus for the next fifteen years. His critical analysis of Islamism very much cut against the grain, at a time when Cold War strategists ardently wooed Islamists as allies against communism. In the 1970s, he walked away from the field, and his reputation within it slipped. But his rigorous treatment of Islamism stands up well, and his comparison of it with fascism was a serious proposition, made by someone who had seen fascism up close.

The comparison of Islamism with fascism also made sense to the late Maxime Rodinson, the preeminent French scholar of Islam, who pioneered the application of sociological method to the Middle East. As a French Jew born in 1915, Rodinson also learned about fascism from direct experience. He moved to Syria in 1940, but the Vichy regime deported his parents to Auschwitz, where they perished. Rodinson was a man of the left—in his early years, militantly so—but he took his thinking from no one.

In 1978, during Iran's revolution, enthusiasm for Islamism began to spread among his colleagues on the French left, who romanticized it as the vibrant, new anti-West. The French philosopher Michel Foucault become famously enamored of Ayatollah Khomeini. Rodinson decided to set things straight, in a long front-page article in Le Monde, targeted at those who "come fresh to the problem in an idealistic frame of mind." Rodinson admitted that trends in Islamic movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood were "hard to ascertain."

But the dominant trend is a certain type of archaic fascism (type de fascisme archaïque). By this I mean a wish to establish an authoritarian and totalitarian state whose political police would brutally enforce the moral and social order. It would at the same time impose conformity to religious tradition as interpreted in the most conservative light.

By "archaic," Rodinson referred to the religious component of the ideology, largely absent from European fascism.

I'm not sure whether Rodinson ever repeated this precise phrase, but putting it once on the front page of Le Monde was enough. He had accused his colleagues on the left of celebrating a form of fascism, from his perch at the pinnacle of Islamic scholarship. This especially rigorous critic of Eurocentric distortions of Islam didn't shy from the comparison of Islamism with fascism, at a moment as politically charged as the present one.

In 1984, Said Amir Arjomand, a prominent Iranian-American sociologist at SUNY-Stony Brook, picked up the comparison and ran with it. With a nod to Halpern, Arjomand pointed to "some striking sociological similarities between the contemporary Islamic movements and the European fascism and the American radical right.... It is above all the strength of the monistic impulse and the pronounced political moralism of the Islamic traditionalist and fundamentalist movements which makes them akin to fascism and the radical right alike."

In 1986, he took took the comparison even further, in an influential article for the journal World Politics entitled "Iran's Islamic Revolution in Comparative Perspective." Arjomand entertained a number of comparisons, but in the end settled on fascism as the best of them. Islamism (he called it "revolutionary traditionalism") and fascism "share a number of essential features," including "an identical transposition of the theme of exploitation" and a "distinct constitutive core."

Like fascism, the Islamic revolutionary movement has offered a new synthesis of the political creeds it has violently attacked. And, like the fascists, the Islamic militants are against democracy because they consider liberal democracy a foreign model that provides avenues for free expression of alien influences and ideas. (Also like the fascists, however, the Islamic militants would not necessarily accept the label of "antidemocratic.")

Arjomand's conclusion: "The emergence of an Islamic revolutionary ideology has been in the cards since the fascist era." (For much more of the comparison, go here. Arjomand later repeated the argument almost verbatim in his 1989 book The Turban for the Crown, Oxford.)