Turkey's Byzantine Heritage

Writing before the Constitutional Court overturned the AKP candidate's election, Indian diplomat K Gajendra Singh noted the current Turkish presidential election crisis is about the struggle between Islamism vs. Secularism, in the context of Turkey's Byzantine heritage:

In spite of all AKP endeavours Abdullah Gul failed to get required 2/3rd votes in the first round . In fact the opposition Republican Peoples party ( RPP) which controls one third of the seats , refused to enter the Parliament , thus 'even the quorum was not established' .Later it filed with the Constitutional Court that in the absence of quorum of 367 ,the proceedings were illegal and be declared invalid. The Court is likely to decide before the next vote.

Ever since AKP stunned everyone including itself in November 2002 elections by winning over 360 seats , the Turkish Armed forces , a bastion of secularism have made no secret of its dislike for the former's policies. AKP has used the criteria for joining the Europe Union(EU) to reduce military's decision making role in the National Security Council, now an advisory body .

Apparently it was in a coordinated manouvre by the secular establishment that the Chief of General Staff (CGS) issued the statement that "It should not be forgotten that the Turkish armed forces is one of the sides in this debate and the absolute defender of secularism." It added, "when necessary, they will display its stance and attitudes very clearly. No one should doubt that."

Next day, in a show of confidence rarely seen in past civilian administrations, the AKP government rebuked the military said that it was "unthinkable" for the institution (military) to challenge its political leaders in a democracy. "It is out of the question to withdraw my candidacy," Gul insisted on 29 April. "The Constitutional Court will make the right decision."

"We must avoid polarization ... Turkish democracy has been wounded," said Erkan Mumcu, leader of the center-right ANAP party, referring to the army statement. Protests began with thousands at Ankara University against the government on 27 April. Then came the Istanbul show of strength.

The secular establishment and citizens suspect AKP of harbouring a secret Islamic agenda like National Salvation Front in 1992 in Algeria which had almost won but was banned .( US led West said nothing then) .AKP attempted to criminalise adultery, restrict alcohol sales and lift a ban on Islamic headscarves in public places. It even tried to intervene in the autonomy of the military which expels suspected Islamist officers each year.

It is feared that the strict separation of state and religion will be eroded and Islam will creep into all fields of life if Gul were elected. Control of Presidency will give AKP a free hand to implement Islamist policies.

A hard and determined Prime Minister Recep Erdogan with statements like "Minarets are our bayonets, domes are our helmets, mosques are our barracks, believers are our soldiers," for which he was convicted and jailed for 4 months ,make people nervous . Perhaps pre-poning general elections due in November , which AKP is likely to win but not with 2/3 rd massive majority , would be the best option. To cool tempers for now.

IMHO Western complaints about the role of the Turkish military as guardians of secularism are ill-considered. It is clear that the American military, and NATO, play a similar role in Western Europe to that of the Turkish military in Turkey. NATO has done so since the end of World War II--acting as guardians against a return to Fascism or the advance of Communism, overthrowing Communist governments when needed, and currently at war against Islamists in Afghanistan and Iraq. Since Turkey is a member of NATO, the EU would do better to unconditionally support the Turkish military's defense of secularism against the "democracy" supposedly represented by so-called "moderate Islamist parties"--a fraudulent political pose analagous in its relation to the central menace to the so-called "Eurocommunism" that disappeared immediately after the fall of the USSR from which it once claimed to be independent...

More coverage at Turkish Daily News.

May Day!

You can read Wikipedia's history of May Day, here:

International Workers' Day (a name used interchangeably with May Day) is a celebration of the social and economic achievements of the international labour movement. May Day commonly sees organized street demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of working people and their labour unions throughout Europe and most of the rest of the world — though, as noted below, in neither the United States nor Canada. More-radical groups such as communists and anarchists are also given to widespread street protest on this day as well.

May Day was originally the commemoration of the Haymarket protests in Chicago in 1886: in 1889, the first congress of the Second International, meeting in Paris for the centennial of the French Revolution and the Exposition Universelle (1889), following a proposal by Raymond Lavigne, called for international demonstrations on the 1890 anniversary of the Chicago protests. These were so successful that May Day was formally recognized as an annual event at the International's second congress in 1891. The May Day Riots of 1894 and May Day Riots of 1919 occurred subsequently.

In 1904, the International Socialist Conference meeting in Amsterdam called on "all Social-Democratic Party organizations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on May First for the legal establishment of the 8-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace." As the most effective way of demonstrating was by striking, the congress made it "mandatory upon the proletarian organizations of all countries to stop work on May 1, wherever it is possible without injury to the workers."

May Day has long been a focal point for demonstrations by various socialist, communist, and anarchist groups. In some circles, bonfires are lit in commemoration of the Haymarket martyrs, usually right as the first day of May begins [1].
Due to its status as a celebration of the efforts of workers and the socialist movement, May Day is an important official holiday in Communist countries such as the People's Republic of China, Cuba, and the former Soviet Union. May Day celebrations typically feature elaborate popular and military parades in these countries.

In countries other than the United States and Canada, resident working classes fought hard to make May Day an official holiday[citation needed], efforts which largely succeeded. For this reason, in most of the world today, May Day is marked by massive street rallies led by workers, their trade unions, anarchists and various socialist and communist parties.

Due to its importance in Communist countries, the First and Second Red Scare periods ended May Day as a mass holiday in the United States, which has celebrated Labor Day on the first Monday of September since 1880.

Is Bush Education Secretary Whoring for Coke?

Scott Jaschik reports in Inside Higher Ed that critics of Education Secretary Margaret Spellings efforts to re-design American higher education are pointing to her acceptance of gifts from the Coca-Cola Company:

Asked a series of questions about Coke’s role in the Atlanta meeting (including specific questions about how much money was involved and what it was paying for), the department’s press office responded by sending a copy of a portion of the U.S. Code that says: “The Secretary is authorized to accept, hold, administer, and utilize gifts, bequests and devises of property, both real and personal, and to accept donations of services, for the purpose of aiding or facilitating the work of the Department. Gifts, bequests, and devises of money and proceeds from sales of other property received as gifts, bequests, or devises shall be deposited in the Treasury and shall be available for disbursement upon the order of the Secretary.”

Pressed for details, Chad Colby said that he believed Coke was paying for food for the Atlanta meeting and that the department was paying other expenses. Arrangements for the other regional meetings would each be different, he said.

Critics — most of whom did not want to be quoted by name — said that they viewed the invitations noting Coke’s role as host as further evidence of a corporate tilt by the department. They noted that the invitations were not generally available to rank and file professors and that the Spellings Commission report had a strong business orientation, but has been criticized for ignoring the liberal arts.

“The emphasis in the department’s consultations seems to be primarily on colleges and universities as training grounds for corporate America, rather than as a place for students to explore a variety of perspectives and learn to think critically for themselves,” said John W. Curtis, director of research and public policy for the American Association of University Professors, via e-mail. “This was reflected in the inclusion of corporate representatives on the secretary’s commission while faculty were largely excluded. The fact that these follow-up ’summit’ meetings are by invitation only, and appear to have some level of corporate sponsorship, only strengthens this impression.”

Charles Miller, chair of the Spellings Commission, said that the arrangements for the regional meetings were set up to make it relatively easy for people to attend and that many businesses can be helpful in this area.

Miller suggested that some academics “seem to have a problem with the word corporation” and suggested that professors should welcome more business involvement. He said that most business leaders are strong supporters of higher education. “They pay the taxes, they are on the boards, they use the graduates, they know about foreign competition,” he said.

In this context, it makes sense to look for ways to involve business leaders, he said. “It’s wrong-headed to think that the only people who can talk about the academy are the people who are in it.”

More criticism of Spellings on SchoolsMatter, including a link to this brewing scandal over US Department of Education-funded reading programs:

Fueled by a growing list of such complaints, the House Education and Labor Committee is looking into whether the Bush administration steered contracts to its favorite vendors, shutting out Slavin and other competitors.

And the Education Department's inspector general has asked the Justice Department to examine allegations of mismanagement and conflicts of interest that are swirling around the $6 billion federal grant program known as Reading First, a centerpiece of the five-year-old No Child Left Behind law.

Inspector General John Higgins said his office began investigating Reading First in May 2005 after receiving complaints of favoritism. He told the Education and Labor Committee that the law calls for a balanced panel of experts to review grant applications but the department had created a panel that had professional ties to a specific reading program.

Democratic Rep. George Miller of California, the committee's chairman, said three people involved in the reviewing process benefited financially - either directly or indirectly - when the panel distributed grants.

At a committee hearing April 20, three review panel members acknowledged benefiting from the sale of an assessment product called the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Learning Skills. One of the panel members was a co-author of the product, and the company in which he owned a 50 percent share had received more than $1.3 million in royalty and other payments from the sale of DIBELS. Two other review panel members were co-authors of a reading intervention product that was packaged with DIBELS, and they each had received about $150,000 in royalty payments from sales of their product.

All three denied any conflict of interest, saying they didn't review grant proposals that involved their own products. They said their products were selling because of their popularity, not because of any pressure from Washington.

Bush Foreign Aid Chief Resigns in Call-Girl Scandal

From the Indianapolis Star::

WASHINGTON - Ex-State Department official and Indiana native Randall Tobias may be called to testify in the defense of the woman at the center of a Washington sex scandal, her attorney said Monday.

Montgomery Blair Sibley, an attorney for Deborah Jeane Palfrey who is accused of running a prostitution service, said Palfrey has the obligation and the right to compel witnesses like Tobias to testify on her behalf.

"When they are served with a subpoena to appear and testify under oath, we expect them to tell the truth," Sibley said. "And we expect them to show up because nobody is above the law in this country, as this case is rapidly pointing out."
Tobias resigned Friday from a top post in the State Department where he oversaw most U.S. foreign aid.

ABC News reported late Friday that Tobias said in a Thursday interview that he had used the Pamela Martin and Associates escort services for massages, but he said there had been "no sex." Palfrey ran the service and turned its telephone records over to ABC.

Here's a link to the White House biography for Ambassador Tobias. Tobias was ex-CEO of pharmaceutical manufacturer Eli Lilly. Interestingly as US aid czar, he had been responsible for US government HIV and sexually transmitted disease initiatives, among other things.

According to an AP report on Yahoo! News:

Tobias submitted his resignation a day after he was interviewed by ABC News for an upcoming program about an alleged prostitution service run by the so-called D.C. Madam.

ABC reported on its Web site late Friday that Tobias confirmed that he had called the Pamela Martin and Associates escort service to have women come to his condo and give him massages. More recently, Tobias told the network, he has been using a service with Central American women.

Tobias, 65, who is married, told ABC News there had been "no sex" during the women's visits to his condo. His name was on a list of clients given to ABC by Deborah Jeane Palfrey, who owns the escort service and has been charged with running a prostitution ring in the nation's capital.

U.S. officials would not confirm the information. A message left on Tobias' voice mail seeking comment was not returned.

Tobias held two titles: director of U.S. foreign assistance and administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development. His rank was equivalent to deputy secretary of state.

Your tax dollars at work...

Olga Sobolevskaya on Mstislav Rostropovich

From RIAN.ru:

Talent and conscience were his only guides in life. "Solzhenitsyn's suffering earned him the right to speak the truth," he declared in 1970 in an open letter to the press. By supporting the dissident writer, he expressed his own unshakeable credo: be truthful in everything, in art and in life.

He had followed that credo since his youth. In February 1952, Rostropovich performed Prokofiev's Symphony Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, with the pianist Sviatoslav Richter conducting, at the Grand Conservatory Hall. It was a daring act of civil defiance as memories were still fresh of the crackdown on "formalist" composers (including Shostakovich and Prokofiev), who were accused of sacrificing content for the sake of form. In any case, he was "forgiven," just like he would be 10 years later, in the early 60s, when he accompanied his wife's performance of "Satires," a vocal cycle composed by Shostakovich to the words of a "banned" poet, Sasha Cherny. These social send-ups were considered frivolous, but they fell short of being criminal, so the couple were allowed to go on tours, win prizes and put their creative ideas into practice. In 1968, Rostropovich was even able to realize his life-long dream by staging Tchaikovsky's opera "Eugene Onegin" at the Bolshoi with Vishnevskaya, his wife, singing the lead part, Tatyana Larina.

In the 1970s, after the Solzhenitsyn scandal, the authorities tried to cut off Rostropovich's oxygen. They didn't stand a chance. His freedom was personal and total. No ideology could crush it. And no ailment could stop him from creating.

Putin on Yeltsin

From Kremlin.ru:

PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN: Dear Naina Yosifovna,

Dear members of the Yeltsin family,

Dear friends,

We have just paid our last farewell to Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, a man of true Russian expanse and generosity of spirit. We have paid farewell to a man of resolute will and authentic determination.

I am certain that only such a leader, a leader raised and nurtured by all the energy of our great Russia, could arouse a country such as ours and lead it to such fundamental change.

He became President through the support of millions of our citizens, changed the face of power and broke down the thick wall between the public and the state. He was devoted to his people and served them with courage.

He knew how to and loved speaking with people frankly and openly. He never remained in the shadows or hid behind the backs of others. There were times when he consciously chose to take all the fire on himself, accepting personal responsibility for very tough but necessary decisions. He bravely took upon himself the most difficult role in creating the most important democratic institutions.

President Yeltsin understood that most important of all was the irreversibility of the changes that had taken place and steadfast resolution in pursuing his strategic course.

This kind of political style and instinct distinguishes national leaders who do not think only of the present moment but look far ahead into the future.

At a time when the old mechanisms of power had collapsed and Russia’s statehood was weakened, Boris Yeltsin made the difficult achievement of giving the country a new constitution. He put his health and even perhaps his life on the line during the election of 1996, and he emerged victorious.

Looking back at Boris Nikolayevich, one cannot but remember his openness and love of life. It is not by chance that his amazing ability to build relations of genuine friendship became a real foreign policy advantage for Russia.

Dear friends and colleagues,

It is the destiny of a rare few to have found their own freedom and been followed by millions, to have led their country to truly historical transformation and in so doing change the world itself.

Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was able to do this, not once retreating or bowing under the weight of his task, not once betraying the people’s choice and his own conscience.

He will always remain a shining symbol of change, a symbol of the fight against decrepit dogmas and prohibitions.

Figures of this dimension never leave us. They live on in people’s ideas and aspirations, in the achievements and successes of their Motherland.

No matter how difficult it was for him, and no matter how great the challenges facing our country, Boris Nikolayevich always believed in the renaissance and transformation of Russia. He respected the talent and strength of the Russian people and sincerely tried to do all he could to improve the lives of millions of Russians (and he always said this word in his own distinctive way, with that particular ‘Yeltsin intonation’).

This was his dream, his goal. And Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin will not just live on in our memories – we will work towards this goal.

May his memory live forever!

Leon Aron on Yeltsin's Legacy

From The American.com:

He was rife with authoritarian habits and urges—and bound by self-imposed and self-enforced constraints. He thirsted for power and was zealous to acquire and hold it. Yet both the mode of acquisition of that power (by two free elections) and at least some of the uses to which he put it—greatly weakening the state’s stranglehold over society and the economy, and Moscow’s over Russia—were utterly novel for that country.

The Russia that Yeltsin left behind reflected the contradictions of its founding father. It was a hybrid: a polity still semiauthoritarian, corrupt, and mistrusted by the society, but also one that was governable, in which the elites’ competition for power was arbitrated by popular vote, and in which most of the tools of authoritarian mobilization and coercion appeared to have been significantly dulled. Yeltsin’s legacy is a collection of necessary, although far from sufficient, conditions for a modern capitalist democracy: free elections; freedom of political opposition; demilitarization of state and society; decentralization of the traditionally unitary state; a largely privatized economy; and a still small and weak but increasingly assertive civil society, sustained by civil liberties, freedom of the press from government censorship, and an increasingly independent and assertive judiciary. The political organism that he forged is full of severe defects, both genetic and acquired, yet capable of development and of peacefully thwarting Communist restoration without succumbing to authoritarianism.

Perhaps most important of all, Yeltsin freed Russia from what the great English poet Robert Graves (in an entirely different context) called “the never changing circuit of its fate”—the history that after four centuries appeared to have become destiny: imperialism, militarism, and rigid centralization interrupted by episodes of horrifyingly brutal anarchy. He gave Russia a “peredyshka,” a time to catch its breath. The traditional attributes of the Russian state—authoritarianism, imperialism, militarism, xenophobia—are far from extinguished. Yet more and higher hedges have been erected against their recurrence under Yeltsin’s peredyshka than at any other time in Russian history.

Brutalized—the rulers and the ruled alike—by terror and lies, gnarled by fear and poverty, paralyzed by total dependence on the state, the Russians’ journey from subjects to a free people will be neither easy nor fast. Yet, like a convalescing invalid, Russia under Yeltsin began to hobble away from the prison hospital that the czars and commissars built, with its awful food, stern nurses, short visiting hours, and ugly uniforms.

She is not out of the hospital yard yet. But if she can no longer be stopped, Yeltsin’s name, next to Gorbachev’s, will be inscribed by History among those of the greatest liberators.

Giuliani Speaks on Hamas-US Relations

Hizzoner is for them in principle, on one condition: Hamas recognize Israel's right to exist and renounce terrorism.

Sounds good to me. Here's Susan Rosenbluh's report from New Jersey's Jewish Voice and Opinion (ht lgf):

Rudy Giuliani doesn’t care whether the Palestinian government is run by Hamas, which is recognized by the US as a terrorist organization, or Mahmoud Abbas, the chairman of Fatah who is regarded by the Bush administration as a moderate.

"Hamas or Abbas, it makes no difference. The ball is in their court, and we just have to show patience and not push any peace process until they do what they have to do," said Mr. Giuliani.

What they have to do, he said, is, at the very minimum, to recognize Israel’s right to exist and to renounce terrorism. Then, he said, Israel and the US should sit back and see if they mean it.

"They don’t just have to say the words. Anyone can say the words. They have to show that they are ending terrorism; they have to show that they are doing what they have to do to end terrorism. I’m a strong proponent of the philosophy that we can trust, but we have to verify," he said. "If all that happens, then it will lead naturally to a peace process, but we have to wait patiently until they are ready to make it happen. And no one should make any concessions to the Palestinians until they take those steps."

Will Bush Education Department Destroy US Higher Education?

Of all the disasters caused by Bush Administration policies, there is one that I have seen up-close and personal--an attempt to bring "outcomes-based education" to US Higher Education through the mechanism of accreditation bodies. The result, as any adjunct faculty member knows, is a morass of bureaucratic goals, objectives, rubrics, boilerplate padding of syllabi, and "training" that seems designed to dumb down higher education until it becomes as disabled as what goes on in the worst American K-12 public schools. I've actually seen the University of Phoenix and Stanley Kaplan test prep courses held up as models for what university courses should become...

Until now, I thought no one was acting to oppose the imposition of an iron cage of accreditation review, an additional layer of bureaucracy championed by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. But according to an article in Inside Higher Education, I'm not alone in thinking that the Bush Administration initiatives are bureaucratic madness:

The accreditation panel is by far the most controversial of the rule making committees, because unlike the others, there have been no recent changes in federal law regarding accreditation, and some college officials have questioned whether the department has the legal grounds to consider some of the changes it is considering — most of which were prompted by the work of the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education.

Over several months, the negotiators — a mix of college administrators, accrediting agency officials and others — have engaged in pointed and at times tense debates about a range of issues, most of which boil down to: how far the federal government should go in demanding that accreditors set minimum standards for the performance of the colleges they oversee, most notably on how much their students learn.

As the department’s various proposals have evolved over the weeks and months, they have become slightly less intrusive at each turn. Most recently, the department issued draft regulatory language — based, its officials repeated again and again, on a proposal that some of the “non-federal” negotiators had suggested — that would no longer require accrediting agencies to dictate to colleges the levels of performance they must achieve in student learning (for non-vocational programs, at least; for vocational programs, all accreditors would still be required to set such standards, which agencies that accredit for-profit career-related colleges already must).

But because the government would still require accrediting agencies to judge whether the standards that colleges set for themselves and their success in meeting those goals are sufficient — and because the accreditors would be doing so knowing that the Education Department can (through its process for recognizing accrediting agencies) punish any accreditor who doesn’t set the bar high enough to satisfy department officials — some members of the negotiating panel argued Tuesday that even the less-aggressive changes amount to federal control of accreditation, and ultimately of higher education.

“We are taking a system of quality review driven by cooperation and replacing it with a parent-child relationship,” where the parent (the accreditor) is “controlled by the federal government,” argued Judith S. Eaton, president of the Council on Higher Education Accreditation, which coordinates accreditation nationally and recognizes 60 accrediting agencies. “When the accreditor stipulates the level of the performance indicators and the performance expectations, the institution has lost the opportunity to set its own direction, and that’s where the problem is ... We should say yes to accountability and to the goals of accountability, but no to this way.”

I'd go even further and ask that university cooperation with this initiative be ended as soon as possible. In the interests of academic freedom and defending the one element of our educational system that is really a model for the world--higher education--I'd ask Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats to stop the Bush Administration's accreditation reform madness, before it completely destroys the liberal arts in American colleges and universities...

David Halberstam Killed By Journalism Student

According to the San Francsico Chronicle:

At the time of Monday morning's accident, Halberstam was being driven to an interview with Hall of Fame quarterback Y.A. Tittle.

The drivers of the two cars were injured, but not seriously. Halberstam was being driven by a graduate journalism student from the University of California at Berkeley, where he had visited over the weekend. The crash remained under investigation, and the Menlo Park police officer on duty early Tuesday said no further information was available.

Kommersant on the Death of Boris Yeltsin

At the president's residence, it seemed to me that the tragedy had occurred in those very rooms: everyone walked carefully, avoiding each other's eyes, and spoke in whispers, if they spoke at all. People mentioned that Boris Nikolayevich's heart had been bothering him for a week, and then he suddenly improved on Sunday. Just when everyone had breathed a sigh of relief, he suffered cardiac arrest. The doctors did everything they could: they managed to get his heart going again, but it soon stopped, this time forever. His allotted time was simply up. He was so worn out that he just had no chance. No chance, and there was nothing else that could be done.

Vladimir Putin decided to make an announcement about the death of Russia's first president. The text of the statement was his own, and he edited and corrected it several times. He considered the words to be so important for himself personally and for the country as a whole that he waited to write them down until he could gather his thoughts late yesterday evening.

Before then, he met with the president of Turkmenistan, whom he went out to meet in a dark suit and tie. Mr. Berdymukhammedov initially smiled at the Russian president, but as soon as he saw the expression on Mr. Putin's face, the smile slid from his lips. In my opinion, the Turkmen president did not immediately understand what was going on and labored for some time under the impression that Mr. Putin's condition was somehow his fault. The Russian president congratulated Mr. Berdymukhammedov unenthusiastically on his election to the post of president and declared that the relationship between Turkmenistan and Russia is going along "extremely well" and that "we have responded to your recent request to build another branch of the gas pipeline along the Caspian Sea." Then he clammed up.

"Thank you for your respect… We are grateful for your hospitality…" began the Turkmen president. "Our cooperation has historical, uh, roots… We will build our cooperation on, um, mutually beneficial terms…"

Obviously noticing that something was up, he let his voice trail off. It seemed that he was still uninformed about what had happened. When the journalists were leaving, Vladimir Putin quietly informed his colleague, "we suffered a great tragedy today."

The talks with the president of Turkmenistan were also very short, as was dinner with him.

At the same time, it was being decided what would be done with the president's address to the Federation Council, which was scheduled for April 25. When it became known that Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin's family might schedule the funeral for Thursday, April 26, the Kremlin determined to go forward with the speech on Wednesday as planned, with the additional of a few extra phrases that would have the hall on its feet.

But then it was announced that the funeral would be on Wednesday, and the president's speech was immediately rescheduled.

There was no real doubt where final goodbyes would be said to Russia's first president: the Church of Christ the Savior, in the portion of the church dedicated to events of exceptional importance in the life of the church and of the country. Boris Yeltsin will be laid to rest in Novodevichy Cemetery.

An hour after the Turkmen president left, Vladimir Putin said his first words of farewell to Boris Yeltsin. In a televised speech to the nation, he also designated April 25 a national day of mourning.

"We knew Boris Nikolayevich as a courageous and also warm-hearted, sincere man," said Mr. Putin. "This was a straightforward and brave national leader… Boris Yeltsin took full responsibility on himself for everything that he advocated and strove for. For what he tried to do and did – for the sake of the country, for the sake of millions of Russians. All of Russia's woes and hardships, people's difficulties and woes, he unceasingly channeled through himself… And today I express my sincerest and deepest sympathies to [Yeltsin's widow] Naina Iosifovna and to Boris Nikolayevich's friends and relatives. We grieve together with you. We will do everything in our power to ensure that the memory of Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, his noble designs, his words 'take care of Russia' always serve as our moral and political compass… The person who brought an entire era into being has gone. A new democratic Russia was born – a free nation open to the world. Thanks to the will and direct initiative of Boris Yeltsin, a new constitution was adopted that acclaimed human rights as the highest value. It gave the people the opportunity to freely express their thoughts, to freely choose the powers-that-be in the country…"

Vladimir Putin's words oblige him to do the same.

The Accomplices: A Review

It seems fitting to review Bernard Weinraub's The Accomplices around the time of Israel's 59th Independence Day. I saw Ian Morgan's impressive New Group production at The Acorn theatre on 42nd Street last Saturday. The actors were uniformly excellent, direction intelligent, sets and costumes true to the 1940s period. Weinraub's play is a serious work about an important subject, and even if were not as well-written as it is, one that merits sober consideration. It is not for everyone, just for sensitive and intelligent audiences who like old-fashioned plays that help them think as well as feel. In a word--highbrow.

It is necessary to note that The Accomplices is a work of metaphorical rather than literal truth. Don't look to the play for an account of what actually happened day-by-day. It is not a documentary--although reminiscent of work by Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, or the WPA Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspaper. Rather, it reflects a personal re-imagining of history in order to illuminate, explore, and challenge the complacency of an audience. The pacing is slow and deliberate, it takes concentration and attention to understand what is happening on stage--it is a difficult play, intended for intelligent audiences. If you don't get it, then it's not for you. But if you do, you will think about it for a while. It sticks.

The conflicts between characters are symbolic incarnations of forces, such as love, fear, bigotry, assimilation, political expediency, calculation, determination, well-intentioned caution, and regret, that loom bigger than the individuals on stage, bigger than the story itself. For example, Daniel Sauli's Peter Bergson and David Margulies' Rabbi Stephen Wise act not as individuals alone, but as archetypal figures, representing the New Hebrew--the Israeli--in conflict with the Diaspora Jew--in the person of the "Pope" of the American Reform movement.

Bergson, arrived from Palestine, sees America with the eyes of a foreigner, so does not understand Wise. Wise, likewise, does not understand Bergson. What they say to each other on stage, they did not say in real life. But through their actions, they illuminate a Father-Son conflict at the roots of tensions in the relationship between Israel and American Jewry. Zionist leaders like Rabbi Wise helped create the state of Israel. That young Israel pursued a truly independent national course inevitably led to a strained relationship. The conflict between Bergson and Wise is the conflict between the Diaspora and Israel.

This conflict is nested within other sets of dramatic conflicts--between "Our Crowd" members like Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. and "street Jews" like speechwriter Samuel Rosenman, between Hollywood representatives like Ben Hecht and Establishment pillars, between Eleanor and Franklin, between the Treasury Department and the State Department. between Congress and the President. It's not just a play about Peter Bergson--it's a play about human nature in times of crisis, as acted out in the American system of government.

In brilliantly acted scenes starring John DeVries as FDR and Robert Hogan as a very Princetonian Breckenridge Long, Weinraub illuminates FDR's Machiavellian genius in holding together a Democratic Party coalition that united Southern racists and union leaders alongside liberal Northerners. In the character of Breckenridge Long, the State Deparment functionary responsible for keeping immigrants out of the USA in the wake of the Depression. When Rosenman finally asks Long to let up and permit more refugees to enter the USA, Long tells Samuel Rosenman that they both work for the same man--FDR.

Even Bergson's relationship with his wife Betty is symbolic of a conflict between political commitment and personal growth--Betty is portrayed as a dancer more interested in Bergson as a man, than in his cause.

Which is to say that The Accomplices is complex and intricate, operating on a series of different levels that require a certain degree of sophistication. It is a subtle work--not The Lion King nor Angels in America.

I must admit a personal interest, in that the author credited my film with stimulating an interest in the subject, and credited me generously in his program notes. Weinraub has gone well beyond what I attempted, and taken his story in a different and interesting direction. In his dramatizations of character and action, he both intensifed and crystallized the underlying personal and philosophical dramas of the conflict in a way that my documentary could not.

And he does it very well. I attended the play with the man who paid for the production of my film, a professor of political science and editor of a journal of international relations--and he was more enthusiastic than I, saying that the depiction of the FDR-Breckenridge Long-Morgenthau relationship was exactlly how political scientists understand presidential decision-making. Perhaps it might be staged at next year's American Political Science Association convention?

In any case, The Accomplices runs in New York until May 5th. You can buy tickets online, here.

Sarkozy Next French President

That's the gist of today's post-election analysis in today's International Herald Tribune.

Leon Aron Remembers Boris Yeltsin, 76

In a statement released by the American Enterprise Institute:

Today, Boris Yeltsin, the first democratically elected leader in Russia's thousand-year history, died.

As AEI resident scholar Leon Aron explains in his book, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life, Yeltsin oversaw the transformation of the Russian political system from stark totalitarianism to free market-based democracy. He institutionalized the vital liberties that Gorbachev had granted only provisionally and often by default, including freedom of speech and free and multicandidate elections. His eight and a half years as president were by far the freest, most tolerant, and open period Russia had ever known.

The Russia that Yeltsin left behind reflected the contradictions of its founding father. It was a hybrid: a polity still semiauthoritarian, corrupt, and mistrusted by the society, but also one that was governable, in which the elites' competition for power was arbitrated by popular vote, and in which most of the tools of authoritarian mobilization and coercion appeared to have been significantly dulled.

Leon Aron, author of Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life, the definitive biography of Yeltsin, is available for comment. He can be contacted at laron@aei.org or through his assistant, Igor Khrestin, at 202.828.6025 or ikhrestin@aei.org.

For additional media inquiries, please contact Veronique Rodman at 202.862.4870 or vrodman@aei.org.

Blame De-Institutionalization for School Massacres

Dr. Jonathan Kellerman tells it like it is about the Virginia Tech massacre, in today's Wall Street Journal:

The basic premise of Community Psych--that severely mentally ill people could be depended on to show up for treatment voluntarily--never made sense to me. The core of the most common and debilitating psychosis, schizophrenia, is degradation of thought and reason. So the idea that people with fractured minds could and would make rational, often complex decisions about self-care seemed preposterous.

One day, I voiced that opinion in class, questioning if any mechanisms were being set in place to prevent a flood of schizophrenics from ending up on the streets, homeless, helpless, victims of crime and, in some cases, victimizers. The Community Psych professor--one of the liberationists--responded with a patronizing smile and a folksy account of the success of a program in rural Belgium or some such place, where humble working folk created a therapeutic milieu by volunteering to house psychotics in their humble homes and everything ended up peachy.

I didn't challenge what amounted to flimsy anecdotal data, but I did question its relevance to the plight of thousands of severely mentally disabled individuals set loose in vast urban centers. The professor's smile tightened and he changed the subject; and I resolved to get through this joke of a prerequisite and concentrate on becoming the best psychologist possible.

By the time I received my doctorate in 1974, the doors to many of the locked wards had been flung open and the much vaunted community mental health centers were being built--predominately in low-rent neighborhoods. A few years later, government funding for these allegedly humane treatment outposts had been cut, as yet more fiscal belt-tightening was inspired by findings that they didn't work.

Because crazy people rarely showed up for treatment voluntarily, and when they did, the treatment milieu consisted of queuing up interminably at Thorazine Kiosks.

William Easterly on Paul Wolfowitz

In today's Washington Post:

Pity Paul Wolfowitz: Every time he tries regime change, he triggers an insurrection.

The latest revolt was launched by World Bank staffers and Western aid leaders in response to the revelation that Wolfowitz -- who had made a crusade against corruption the hallmark of his bumpy tenure as president of the World Bank -- may have awarded his companion a $60,000 pay increase. A staff that had always hated working for the intellectual architect of the Iraq war was now quite literally shouting for his resignation, and Wolfowitz was left wandering the corridors of the bank looking for a Green Zone in which to hide.

The root cause of his debacle at the bank was pretty much the same as the reason for the fiasco in Iraq: intellectual hubris at the top that disdained the messy realities at the bottom. He imagined it would be as easy to clean up the pathologies of foreign aid as he had thought it would be to create democracy in the Middle East.

Was Virgnia Tech Gunman Taught to Hate?

James Lewis says Virginia Tech's curriculum is full of crazy ideas that may have set the stage for Cho Seung-Hui's violent rampage:

Yes, I know. Tens of thousands of ordinary college students are lonely, full of rage, lost and frustrated. A few percent are psychotically disturbed, and some of them can kill. Our big factory colleges are alienating. Take millions of adolescents, and at any time there are bound to be quite a few confused and seething souls walking loose. Just visit downtown in any American or European city, and you can see all the lost and disturbed living in their private hells. And no, that doesn't excuse executing thirty-two innocents.

Still, I wonder --- was Cho taught to hate? Whatever he learned in his classes --- did it enable him to rage at his host country, to hate the students he envied so murderously? Was he subtly encouraged to aggrandize himself by destroying others? Was his pathology enabled by the PC university? Or to ask the question differently --- was Cho ever taught to respect others, to admire the good things about his host country, and to discipline himself to build a positive life?

And that answer is readily available on the websites of Cho's English Department at Virginia Tech. This is a wonder world of PC weirdness. English studies at VT are a post-modern Disney World in which nihilism, moral and sexual boundary breaking, and fantasies of Marxist revolutionary violence are celebrated. They show up in a lot of faculty writing. Not by all the faculty, but probably by more than half...

...The question I have is: Are university faculty doing their jobs? At one time college teachers were understood to have a parental role. Take a look at the hiring and promotion criteria for English at VT, and you see what their current values are. Acting in loco parentis, with the care, protectiveness, and alertness for trouble among young people is the last thing on their minds. They are there to do "research," to act like fake revolutionaries, and to stir up young people to go out and revolt against society. Well, somebody just did.

I'm sorry but VT English doesn't look like a place that gives lost and angry adolescents the essential boundaries for civilized behavior. In fact, in this perversely disorienting PoMo world, the very words "civilized behavior" are ridiculed --- at least until somebody starts to shoot students, and then it's too late. A young culture-shocked adolescent can expect no firm guidance here. But we know that already.

John Loftus on the Muslim Brotherhood's Nazi Roots

Melanie Phillips' article on Saddam's WMD led me to Google "John Loftus", which led to this item he published on the history of the Muslim Brotherhood:

Let me give you an example. This year a friend of mine from the CIA, named Bob Baer wrote a very good book about Saudi Arabia and terrorism, it's called “Sleeping with the Devil.” I read the book and I got about a third of the way through and I stopped. Bob was writing how when he worked for the CIA how bad the files were.

He said, for example, the files for the Muslim Brotherhood were almost nothing. There were just a few newspaper clippings. I called Bob up and said, “Bob, that's wrong. The CIA has enormous files on the Muslim Brotherhood, volumes of them. I know because I read them a quarter of a century ago.” He said, “What do you mean?”

Here's how you can find all of the missing secrets about the Muslim Brotherhood -- and you can do this too. I said, “Bob, go to your computer and type in two words into the search part. Type the word “banna,” b-a-n-n-a. He said, “Yeah.” Type in “Nazi.” Bob typed the two words in, and out came (now tens of) thousands of articles from around the world. He read them and called me back and said, “Oh my God, what have we done?”

What I'm doing today is doing what I'm doing now: I'm educating a new generation in the CIA that the Muslim Brotherhood was a fascist organization that was hired by Western Intelligence that evolved over time into what we today know as al Qaeda.

Here's how the story began. In the 1920's there was a young Egyptian named al Banna. And al Banna formed this nationalist group called the Muslim Brotherhood. Al Bana was a devout admirer of Adolph Hitler and wrote to him frequently. So persistent was he in his admiration of the new Nazi Party that in the 1930's, al Bana and the Muslim Brotherhood became a secret arm of Nazi Intelligence.

The Arab Nazis had much in common with the new Nazi doctrines. They hated Jews; they hated democracy; and they hated the Western culture. It became the official policy of the Third Reich to secretly develop the Muslim Brotherhood as the fifth Parliament, an army inside Egypt.

When war broke out, the Muslim Brotherhood promised in writing that they would rise up and help General Rommell and make sure that no English or American soldier was left alive in Cairo or Alexandria.

The Muslim Brotherhood began to expand in scope and influence during World War II. They even had a Palestinian section headed by the grand Mufti of Jerusalem, one of the great bigots of all time. Here, too, was a man - - The grand Mufti of Jerusalem was the Muslim Brotherhood representative for Palestine. These were undoubtedly Arab Nazis. The Grand Mufti, for example, went to Germany during the war and helped recruit an international SS division of Arab Nazis. They based it in Croatia and called it the “Handjar” Muslim Division, but it was to become the core of Hitler's new army of Arab fascists that would conquer the Arab peninsula from then on to Africa -- grand dreams.

At the end of World War II, the Muslim Brotherhood was wanted for war crimes. Their German intelligence handlers were captured in Cairo. The whole net was rolled up by the British Secret Service. Then a horrible thing happened.

Instead of prosecuting the Nazis - - the Muslim Brotherhood - - the British government hired them. They brought all the fugitive Nazi war criminals of Arab and Muslim descent into Egypt, and for three years they were trained on a special mission. The British Secret Service wanted to use the fascists of the Muslim Brotherhood to strike down the infant state of Israel in 1948. Only a few people in the Mossad know this, but many of the members of the Arab Armies and terrorist groups that tried to strangle the infant State of Israel were the Arab Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Britain was not alone. The French Intelligence service cooperated by releasing the Grand Mufti and smuggling him to Egypt, so all of the Arab Nazis came together. So, from 1945 to 1948, the British Secret Service protected every Arab Nazi they could, but they failed to quash the State of Israel.

What the British did then, they sold the Arab Nazis to the predecessor of what became the CIA. It may sound stupid; it may sound evil, but it did happen. The idea was that we were going to use the Arab Nazis in the Middle East as a counterweight to the Arab communists. Just as the Soviet Union was funding Arab communists, we would fund the Arab Nazis to fight against. And lots of secret classes took place. We kept the Muslim Brotherhood on our payroll.

But the Egyptians became nervous. Nasser ordered all of the Muslim Brotherhood out of Egypt or be imprisoned, and we would execute them all. During the 1950's, the CIA evacuated the Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood to Saudi Arabia. Now when they arrived in Saudi Arabia, some of the leading lights of the Muslim Brotherhood like Azzam, became the teachers in the Madrasas, the religious schools. And there they combined the doctrines of Nazism with this weird Islamic cult, Wahhabiism.

Everyone thinks that Islam is this fanatical religion, but it is not. They think that Islam -- the Saudi version of Islam - -is typical, but it's not. The Wahhabi cult was condemned as a heresy more than 60 times by the Muslim nations. But when the Saudis got wealthy, they bought a lot of silence. This is a very harsh cult. The Wahhabiism was only practiced by two nations, the Taliban and Saudi Arabia. That's how extreme it is. It really has nothing to do with Islam. Islam is a very peaceful and tolerant religion. It has always had good relationships with the Jews for the first thousand years of its existence.

For the Saudis, there was a ruler in charge of Saudi Arabia, and they were the new home of the Muslim Brotherhood, and fascism and extremism were mingled in these schools. And there was a young student who paid attention - - and Azzam's student was named Osama Bin Ladin. Osama Bin Ladin was taught by the Nazis of the Muslim Brotherhood who had emigrated to Saudi Arabia.

In 1979 the CIA decided to take the Arab Nazis out of cold storage. The Russians had invaded Afghanistan, so we told the Saudis that we would fund them if they would bring all of the Arab Nazis together and ship them off to Afghanistan to fight the Russians. We had to rename them. We couldn't call them the Muslim Brotherhood because that was too sensitive a name. Its Nazi cast was too known. So we called them the Maktab al Khidimat il Mujahideen, the MAK.

And the CIA lied to Congress and said they didn't know who was on the payroll in Afghanistan, except the Saudis. But it was not true. A small section CIA knew perfectly well that we had once again hired the Arab Nazis and that we were using them to fight our secret wars.

Azzam and his assistant, Osama Bin Ladin, rose to some prominence from 1979 to '89, and they won the war. They drove the Russians out of Afghanistan. Our CIA said, “We won, let's go home!” and we left this army of Arab fascists in the field of Afghanistan.

Saudis didn't want to come back. Saudis started paying bribes to Osama Bin Ladin and his followers to stay out of Saudi Arabia. Now the MAK split in half. Azzam was mysteriously assassinated apparently by Osama Bin Ladin himself. The radical group -- the most radical of the merge of the Arab fascists and religious extremists -- Osama called that al Qaeda. But to this day there are branches of the Muslim Brotherhood all through al Qaeda.

Osama Bin Ladin's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, came from the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the results of a Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

There are many flavors and branches, but they are all Muslim Brotherhoods. There is one in Israel. The organization you know as “Hamas” is actually a secret chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood. When Israel assassinated Sheik Yassin, the Muslim Brotherhood published his obituary in a Cairo newspaper in Arabic and revealed that he was actually the secret leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza.

So the Muslim Brotherhood became this poison that spread throughout the Middle East and on 9/11, it began to spread around the world.

Where is Saddam's WMD?

Melanie Phillips claims that Saddam' Hussein's WMD was moved to Syria after discovery by Iraq Survey Group inspector Dave Gaubatz, due to American incompetence during the Iraq war--and that the CIA is involved in a CYA operation that requires denying that fact, while destroying relevant evidence:

‘The problem was that the ISG were concentrating their efforts in looking for WMD in northern Iraq and this was in the south’, says Mr Gaubatz. ‘They were just swept up by reports of WMD in so many different locations. But we told them if they didn’t excavate these sites, others would’.

That, he says, is precisely what happened. He subsequently learned from Iraqi, CIA and British intelligence that the WMD buried in the four sites were excavated by Iraqis and Syrians, with help from the Russians, and moved to Syria. The location in Syria of this material, he says, is also known to these intelligence agencies. The worst-case scenario has now come about. Saddam’s nuclear, biological and chemical material is in the hands of a rogue terrorist state — and one with close links to Iran.

When Mr Gaubatz returned to the US, he tried to bring all this to light. Two congressmen, Peter Hoekstra, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Curt Weldon, were keen to follow up his account. To his horror, however, when they tried to access his classified intelligence reports they were told that all 60 of them —which, in the routine way, he had sent in 2003 to the computer clearing-house at a US air base in Saudi Arabia —had mysteriously gone missing. These written reports had never even been seen by the ISG.

One theory is that they were inadvertently destroyed when the computer’s data base was accidentally erased in the subsequent US evacuation of the air base. Mr Gaubatz, however, suspects dirty work at the crossroads. It is unlikely, he says, that no copies were made of his intelligence. And he says that all attempts by Messrs Hoekstra and Weldon to extract information from the Defence Department and CIA have been relentlessly stonewalled.

In 2005, the CIA held a belated inquiry into the disappearance of this intelligence. Only then did its agents visit the sites — to report that they had indeed been looted.

Mr Gaubatz’s claims remain largely unpublicised. Last year, the New York Times dismissed him as one of a group of WMD diehard obsessives. The New York Sun produced a more balanced report, but after that the coverage died. According to Mr Gaubatz, the reason is a concerted effort by the US intelligence and political world to stifle such an explosive revelation of their own lethal incompetence.

After he and an Iraqi colleague spoke at last month’s Florida meeting of the Intelligence Summit, an annual conference of the intelligence world, they were interviewed for two hours by a US TV show — only for the interview to be junked after the FBI repeatedly rang Mr Gaubatz and his colleague to say they would stop the interview from being broadcast.

The problem the US authorities have is that they can’t dismiss Mr Gaubatz as a rogue agent — because they have repeatedly decorated him for his work in the field. In 2003, he received awards for his ‘courage and resolve in saving lives and being critical for information flow’. In 2001, he was decorated for being the ‘lead agent in a classified investigation, arguably the most sensitive counter-intelligence investigation currently in the entire Department of Defence’ and because his ‘reports were such high quality, many were published in the Air Force’s daily threat product for senior USAF leaders or re-transmitted at the national level to all security agencies in US government’.

The organiser of the Intelligence Summit, John Loftus — himself a formidably well-informed former attorney to the intelligence world —has now sent a memorandum to Congress asking it to investigate Mr Gaubatz’s claims. He has also hit a brick wall. The reason is not hard to grasp.

The Republicans won’t touch this because it would reveal the incompetence of the Bush administration in failing to neutralise the danger of Iraqi WMD . The Democrats won’t touch it because it would show President Bush was right to invade Iraq in the first place. It is an axis of embarrassment.

Mr Loftus goes further. Saddam’s nuclear research, scientists and equipment, he says, have all been relocated to Syria, where US satellite intelligence confirms that uranium centrifuges are now operating — in a country which is not supposed to have any nuclear programme. There is now a nuclear axis, he says, between Iran, Syria and North Korea — with Russia and China helping build an Islamic bomb against the west. And of course, with assistance from American negligence.

‘Apparently Saddam had the last laugh and donated his secret stockpile to benefit Iran’s nuclear weapons programme. With a little technical advice from Beijing, Syria is now enriching the uranium, Iran is making the missiles, North Korea is testing the warheads, and the White House is hiding its head in the sand.’

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France Awaits Election Returns

CNN coverage here.
Too close to call in advance, says Sky News:

A new opinion poll shows centre-right candidate Nicolas Sarkozy still leading with 29%, ahead of the Socialist Segolene Royal on 25%.

The BVA poll has the centrist candidate Francois Bayrou slipping to 15%.

But at least one-third of voters are still undecided ahead of Sunday's first round.

Writing in Slate, Christopher Hitchens predicts they will vote for Jean Le Pen:

Le Pen may still be proven wrong next weekend in his overconfident assertion that people will vote for the real thing rather than a surrogate. Sarkozy, and others, may draw his fangs by stealing his voters. But some of us can remember a time when—as someone once put it—if you heard people discussing La Revolution in a French cafe, you realized that they were talking not about the last one, but the next one. I don't think it is sufficiently appreciated that France has now become the most conservative major country in Europe, where different defenses of the status quo are at war only with different forms of nostalgia and even outright reaction.