22 DEC 23

Overview of the Human World

This map, "World 2000 BCE," arrived via Facebook from the Historical Maps folks, I copied it, and joined the group. Hunting and gathering (yellow) was the predominant socioeconomic form of human organization 4023 years ago. Simple farming (green) was also underway, while nomadic pastoralism (violet) covered more land area but very much less densely. Complex farming societies / chiefdoms and trade (orange) had evolved in what we now call Europe and the Near East and in China. There were four (or 5) "state societies" one along the Nile River, and two extending from Mesopotamia, one on the Korean peninsula, and one on the west coast of South America (blue) had established themselves. (click on the map to get this map full screen [on top of Iron Mountain] which you can enlarge and better read the labels.)

The map of 2000 years Before the Common Era (BCE) was how humans had organized themselves about 7500 years after the latest cycle of the "Ice Ages," which were a cyclic phenomenon extending back 2.4 million years. The most recent or "Last Glacial Period" lasted about 100,000 years. Homo sapiens sapiens emerged about 160,000 years ago, so modern humans evolved from previous homo stock during the previous Glacial Period or during the next warmer interglacial period. The fortunes of humanity and its evolution were tied to the prosperous and the problematic times of the Ice Ages.

I think this map tells us that everything we have become in the last 4023 years is both spectacular and humbling. We are now planning to inhabit Mars, yet we are still warring among our tribes and nations. We have not yet plumbed the extent of our own minds, but we are about to create artificial ones, which we will probably deny that they are sapient or have civil rights. There are other reasons to be proud and humbly contrite at the same time. We are able to read the thoughts of our generations back to Egyptian tombs of 4000 BCE and send our thoughts forward to our great grandchildren. Yet we are guided by our emotional hindbrains in matters of the survival of individual civilizations.

There are many coherent understandings among all humans; the cell phone basically proves this point. Music does. Dance. Sport as a substitute for bloody competition. Science is one of those processes that occasionally spawns revolutionary technology. There is a pace of advance that requires sagacity and temperance. We are learning the problems of pace anew with each new techology. There are things about us here in the 2000's that seem axiomatic, but which already we know we must reassess and find ways to improve.

For me, life is a quest for understanding and drawing a coherent picture of what the universe is ... and maybe our part in it. That path is ever open, yet tomorrow I must test my skills on The 405. I hope to be back writing next week. Happy Holidays to All!

JB

Global Affairs

30 SEPT 23

The EU and NATO

Carl Bildt is the former Prime Minister and former Minister for Foreign Affairs of the historically important nation of Sweden. On September 28, 2023 Foreign Affairs Newletters published his essay "The Promise and Peril of EU Expansion." This is very important essay from a perspective that Americans should come to understand and with a sense of the gravity of the situation that depends upon the US being stable and reliable.

Before you read the essay it is important to understand what is meant by the expression "the Balkans." For my generation and probably yours, the term referred, with intended vagueness, to an unknown number peoples in the area of Europe north of Greece and south of Poland. The Balkan Mountains are 90% within the nation of Bulgaria, and therefore the name is completely irrelevant to the area in question. Although the geographer who applied the term to the much larger area was German, for Americans we can look to the British (who call Livorno "Leghorn" and Mumbai "Bombay," among other rhetorical-geographic atrocities) for this two hundred years of belittling pun-laden wordage. "Balk" means to resist and to be unwilling to, for instance, accept an idea. For the English, Balkans means a backward place. Carl Bildt uses the term "Balkans" less perjoratively, but he uses it needlessly.

Much of the area was once part of the Ottoman Empire and therefore Islamic, and accordingly "mysterious" and usually reliably hostile. It is time to open up the area to fresh ideas about the nations and societies that are there in Southcentral (due south of Poland), given that Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, 23% of Russia, Georgia (Gruzia), Armenia and 20% of Azerbaijan make up the nations of Easterm Europe, north to south, respectively.

If you were to ask Google for a political map of the Balkans, the responses will not agree. My understanding of this problem is that the name "Balkans" has been basically misunderstood for centuries by everyone all the time. Some add Hungary (EU&NATO) to this group of nations. I do not, despite the "strongman" leadership of Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Romania (EU&NATO), may once have qualified politcally, but is (aside from rumors of vampires in the north) becoming a modern nation after years of dealing with Russia's leaders and her own. Moldova is "Balkan" only in the sense of being virtually unknown to westerners and thought probably corrupt. Bulgaria (EU&NATO) once inside the Iron Curtain is now becoming a modern nation. Croatia (EU&NATO) is faring well as a democracy. Greece (EU) and 3% of Turkey (both NATO) are by no means Balkan states. So, what is left are the nations Bosnia & Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Albania, and (North) Macedonia. So, for the 21st century and following the area is "Southcentral Europe."

The single historical factor shared by the small nations of Southcentral Europe is cultural trauma in terms of religion and ancient tribal matters. They are (and have had to be) each fiercely independent and governed without very much attention to democratic principles or systems. They are poor, not very industrialized, traditional cultures, and they seem on the whole to like it that way, at least instead of the alternatives of falling into orbit around richer and more modernized states, including those with more modern forms of corruption.

With all of that in mind the other thing to remember while reading Bildt's essay is that the EU is not NATO, nor vice versa. The EU has two nuclear powers: France and the UK. NATO has three: US, UK, France. If there is a universal and steadfast goal of both EU and NATO it would be a peaceful de-nuclear-weaponed Russia.

Bildt's essay on the near future of Europe/EU is enlightening and a very easy read. Enjoy.

JB

Global Affairs

15 July 23

The Bastille

The storming of the Bastille took place on July 14th, 1789. It was, in terms of its immediate consequences, a relatively minor event, proving almost nothing. It did prove to those in Paris who were involved that They were now a Force, one that Louis XVI and the nobility and church must contend.

At this point in French history the nation was segmented into "estates": 1st Estate, the clergy, 2nd Estate, the nobility, and the 3rd Estate, the commoners, which was overwhelmingly the most diverse, owing mostly to the rise of mercantile capitalism in the midst of a late "pre"-industrial economy, and sharply divided between rural and urban. The ragged evolution of the French Revolution, 1789-1815, was in part due to the ragged diversity of the 3rd Estate and key characters like Robespierre and Napoleon.

The point of this story is that one must not misunderstand the Force of events and to whom the import of the event means now or in the aftermath the most. The evolution of American society and its government as seen from Paris in 2021 is probably different from that seen in Washington, D.C. or Dubuque, IA or Los Angeles. The French may see President Biden as much weaker or more vulnerable than he really is. Accordingly, they may see former President Trump as stronger than he really is. Certainly his American followers, his Base, think so.

"Foreign Affairs" is a concept that is becoming increasingly quaint. The internet and other parts of mass communications almost trivialize red borderlines on political maps. More to the point, a globalized economy in which nations participate, within the structure of their own body of law, has Force that transcends national law, and also national government. Yet, to govern ourselves (and them themselves) we need the "scale" of our nations as efficient and tangible as possible.

Clearly, human beings can see well beyond the limits of these structures, and in the press of contemporary events seek the most effective forms to employ. In the US (and elsewhere), the inefficiency of our Constitutional system (designed to counter the worst of human nature) is understood as weakness. Strangely, in America those who most fear the strength of central government, now seek dictatorship. Ah, and that is what happen in France, too!

The most important "foreign affair" today is global climate change caused by human use of coal, petroleum, and other energy sources that produce greenhouse gasses, which are now up in the atmosphere slowly, but more and more rapidly choking our planet to death. Yesterday, the sharks and sea bass and corals and sardines off the Florida Keys encountered sea water at 98.2 F! If the marine environment becomes unlivable, the consequences will grow legs and come up on land as famine and fiery holocaust.

This month on Planet Earth human beings are getting their most vivid picture yet of how feckless their structures and systems are in the face of extinction.

JB

Foreign Affairs / Globalism

1 June 22

O Canada!
~450 words

One of my first cousins emigrated to Canada many years ago. He had decided to go to college there, liked it a lot, and just stayed, got married, had kids, became a professor, dean, and retired. His first off-spring is a devoted skier and, unfortunately, pulled a Sonny Bono a couple years ago, but is back on the slopes after major mending. His other off-spring is an attorney now. That is almost the extent of my connection to Canada, except for a marvelous trip many years ago to Vancouver and Victoria and Butchart Gardens, and before that a trip up out of NY across the Thousand Islands Bridge over the Niagara and then to Montreal and Quebec, which I had visited during college on the USS Randolph (CVS-15) as a "foreign" port for midshipmen. I genuinely like everything I have seen of Canada and Canadians, Francophone and Anglo. I almost forgot, I was in a wedding party in Toronto in 1962.

The trucker imbroglio this winter is over, PM Trudeau is still popular among many of us here to his south. Global warming, once thought to favor countries like Canada, might not be the boon once imagined. The biggest problem for Canada right now is the United States, not that it does not have domestic issues that seem intractible. The US is convulsing after trying to metabolize Donald J. Trump. He persists as a wad—a bolus— caught halfway down, refusing to succumb to the complete aliamentary process despite being a natural by all other signs and scents. He popped the cork from a djinni's bottle of political poison that had been brewing south of the "49th Parallel" for centuries, and now the fumes are seeping into the ken of Canadians.

It seems that the politics in the US poses a real and immediate national security threat to Canada., while Americans slumber through their chances to head off disaster, believing—as usual—that our ship will right itself. It will not. The fascist White Supremacist, never-socialists (even those on AFDC or farm price supports), 2nd Amentment perverting, grievance-based, sect-rousing Republicans are busy taking over the engine room of our ship and want next to take back the helm. Canada sees this and is very scared, even if many of us seem not to be.

I am factoring Canada into my main project these days. I have asked for courageous and (liberal, progressives) concerned people to contribute content or comment to the project. I am as worried as Canadians about the next two plus years, and believe that being prepared with a new concept about how to organize and conduct ourselves will be very helpful as the chaos descends upon us destroying trust and hope.

JB

(Foreign Affairs, The Project)

10/7/21

On September 15th the Biden administration made public a new strategic alliance with Australia and the UK. A central part of the alliance was the US agreement to provide nuclear submarines to the Australians. The French protested because they were in the "midst" of negotiating the sale of diesel-electric submarines to the Aussies, a project of considerable value to the French economy and the French military industrial base.

Here is a link to the New York Times version of an article by a pair of expert voices on international affairs, Adam Mount, PhD, and Van Jackson, PhD, both scholars and, it seems, also public intellectuals / pundits from serious academic backgrounds.
"Biden, You Should Be Aware That Your Submarine Deal Has Costs."

According to the NYTimes version, "Mr. Mount is a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, focused on U.S. nuclear strategy. Mr. Jackson, a former Pentagon official, is an expert on Asian security and U.S. foreign policy." This article is also published at several other websites by one or both of the authors, such as The Federation of American Scientists and several news outlets, like NBCNews.com.

Here, immediately below and in a slightly larger font, is the introductory first paragraph of the article, which caught my attention almost instantly because of the slightly and overtly discourteous address to President Joseph Biden as simply "Biden" in the title. The title is, itself, a subterfuge for a broader purpose, one which is given a treatment they believe will appeal to the older, more seasoned, but less intellectually agile members of their "crowd." That discourtesy to Biden was just the beginning. And for the record, truthfully, I have read much better and much worse articles in this genre. This one nicely illuminates part of our contemporary foreign policy Greek chorus (Google—a group of 'performers' who are usually unrelated to the central action of a story, but comment on the central action to provide the audience with a what might be called a third dimension of the story.)

"For more than a decade, Washington has struggled to prioritize what it calls great power competition with China—a contest for military and political dominance. President Biden has been working hard to make the pivot to Asia that his two predecessors never quite managed."

Forgive me, if I seem picky about this, but introductory paragraphs are designed to catch the eye of followers and potential recruits, or to annoy the people about whom the writers have scant respect. So—whatever—I have to deal with a few of the authors' key words and expressions, just as if these terms really are deliberate hooks to catch the imagination of people they both believe to be massively mistaken about international statecraft ... which I believe also to a greater or lesser extent. I believe I have in that regard the advantage of five years as a naval officer some time ago.

Just for a starter to give you an idea of my way of doing things, the word DECADE seems innocent enough, but is it? No, it is deliberately an indefinite time. First, it is a key to the authors' point of view, which is to say "not ground level" but perhaps not as high as 30,000 feet in the sky, either. They could have told us that the current situation has something to do with the emergence of China or of Xi Jinping, himself, as General Secretary of the CCP in 2012 or President of the PRC in 2013. I suspect the latter, but I think the inspecificity is excessive rather than just deliberately foggy. Perhaps they think calling a spade a spade would compromise something they will say later on. I don't know for sure, but surely Xi will know all about this AUKUS thing by now. The authors believe AUKUS is a(nother) reversion to tried and basically flawed first principles. Yet, it is fairly obvious that it is also much more and much less than that. Stay tuned.

We are all used to the collapsing of bureaucracies and administrations into collective terms like "the White House," "the Pentagon," "the Vatican," and so forth. We are inured to it. Our authors use the term WASHINGTON and pronoun a short bit later IT (not they). Of course we all know that there's more than one entity in DC involved here. In fact, though, in every office competing interests vie for attention. Most are muffled, some re-emerge, some are leaked to the media when and where they will do the most harm, and so forth. So, to my point, the metonymy reifying the city over its parts perpetuates a false impression of agreement among the parts, and in DC that would be rare indeed. Why do this? It tends to shut some of the parts up.

They use the term STRUGGLE in their opener. It could be called a struggle, but debate (and discussion) are more the modus operandi with individuals feeling the heat as their arguments are successful or fail to impress. I will admit that life in lots of organizations takes on a kill or be killed flavor, but after a couple of losses one learns that the idea is not actual death, but living on, perhaps, to discuss another day. Maybe these two voices feel their position is being given short shrift, so they are seeking an "underdog" flavor to their essay. I believe their fundamental point is more like a "large and complicated and unfashionable new dog" on the block, and as such may be facing the inevitable dominance routines.

PRIORITIZE is another commonly used word. As used here it suggests that the authors believe statements about Great Power Competition can be ranked as correct, less correct, and wrong, and as a given that there must be winner, as if Washington can only juggle one ball at a time. There can be ties and even bundles of good ideas. I will write about "multiple working hypotheses" fairly soon. Suffice it to say, the best policy taken will have back doors and sometimes multiple front doors to avoid getting trapped in, say, a "domino theory" or "containment." The authors need to pound out the deep background to their position more thoroughly, so that their understanding of the new foreign policy is not bogged down at every turn by explaining the psychology of PTSD among veterans and layed-off workers. The three parties to the alliance are not nearby neighbors to one another, but more deeply—to the great chagrin of the authors—the new pact smacks of Bismarck, Tallyrand, Kissinger, and every other person whose fundamental belief is that inevitably nations will resort to war to achieve the goals of some few or a slender majority of their constituents.

At the theoretical heart of the author's endeavor is the expression CONTEST FOR MILITARY AND POLITICAL DOMINANCE, used to define what they believe is the gut essence of the recently popular terminology: "great power competition (GPC)," supposedly a refined school of thought in international relations. First, I think it is salutary that these authors left out the ECONOMIC and the FINANCIAL/MONTETARY domains. There are four different domains of thought relevant to this situation where, remember, the US has been dominant in all four in the region since, yes, the Spanish American War and across the entire world since WWII. Leaving these two+ domains out, is crucially wrong. It must be said that GPC is meant to detach policy toward great powers from the more run of the mill policies via-a-vis not-great powers, acknowledging that one shoe does not fit France and Italy and Turkey equally, especially since one has nukes.

In the east-Asian / western-Pacific region, logistics and sheer proprinquity now strongly favor China, but their ability to take advantage of these in any of the four domains is, of course, problematic and always uncertain. So, the AUKUS defense pact is both regional and obviously global. President Obama had to give up the Trans-Pacific (Trade) Partnership (Agreement) for the lack of domestic agreement (see WASHINGTON and IT, above). The idea is not dead, you should know, but the loss of the airbase and naval base in the Philippines, caused by the cataclysmic eruption of Mt. Pinatubo and ensuing inept policy and diplomacy, was extremely serious and had to be responsibly accounted for and replacement achieved. That, military bases, is the regional strategic part of the alliance and the essence of this move by President Biden (and his closer advisors). Yes, military bases are hammers seeking nails, but for now they are necessary, given current asymmetries of policy around the world and especially in east Asia.

The notion of PIVOT emerged with the Spanish-American War, but has been more salient since the US found itself involved in a two ocean war in 1941. The concept is that old and recognizes that there may have been some in the military and in the relevant administrations who could not easily hold two ideas in their heads at the same time. The authors are misusing the term, but are acknowledging publicly that Biden has achieved at least part of the replacement of lost Philippine assets issue, but it—PIVOT— misleads the public into thinking Asia dropped off Washington's agendas after the Vietnam War. In a wound-licking sense, yes, but clearly the TransPacTradeAgreement, years in the attempt, was all about Asia, and, oh yes, the Seventh Fleet has been out there at considerable expense all the while. So this so-called "pivoting" comment recalls the walk and chew gum analogy, as if our interest in NATO is somehow less because of AUKUS. Not so. At the granularity of individuals in various DC departments and offices, there is always a flux of expertise and focus.

There is so much more to criticize about this article, but we need to arrive with the current evidence at the realization that some people, including the authors, believe the American public will only understand US foreign policy in terms and concepts that they were taught many decades ago in our high schools. In general the authors have the right idea that we must be much smarter in foreign affairs than we were in the 20th century. Foreign policy cannot remain hostage to the former division of labor in Washington. The most important US foreign policy in the 20th century, it should be remembered, was the Marshall Plan, and if you look at it carefully you will see all four of the domains of thought and activity brought together about as well as any large project since, well, since Ghengis Khan decided to conquer the EurAsian land mass!

My meta-analysis of the article and the fact that the NYTimes published it is this: the article is not (yet) a seminal work that will guide US foreign policy, but it does raise issues that will surely deserve treatment later on. The Times Editorial Board probably understands this very well.

JB

(War and Peace, Foreign Affairs)

Post Scripts: (1) For those who would appreciate a fictional, but bluntly realistic, background to the AUKUS saga, I recommend the Netflix series "Pine Gap"

(2) In Quora Paul Hannah writes that "Australia’s current submarine fleet consists of these boats. This is a Collins Class submarine. It was built in Adelaide. It is quite a good submarine, if you don’t mind all the things that go wrong on it, the cost blowing your budget and our limited construction capability.

"For a submarine to be any good, it needs all of its functions to work well. It needs to sense what is around, be able to attack threats but above all it needs to be quiet.

"The first two eventually came good with the Collins, but the third never did. Diesels are noisy machines and if your enemy can hear your sub, it can kill it.

"Buying nuclear powered subs from people who make lots of them solves all these problems. Plus it makes you very good friends with a couple of the big players in the game and in the defence realm, having very good friends is a very useful thing."

5/4/11

The Assad family rules Syria. Syria is, like most of the middle eastern countries a pastiche of various ethnicities and religious sects, dominated by Sunni Muslims, but ruled by Shiites. Syria has been the haven for literally hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who fled their own country over the past eight years. Syria abutts Turkey on the north, Iraq on the east, and Lebanon and Jordon and the Golan Heights now occupied by Israel on the south. Syria very well may be the keystone state in the region from the point of view of centrality, although Israel itself may claim that role politically, the proverbial burr under the Arab saddle.

It is widely assumed that the Shiite Assads are colluding with the Shiite Iranians to keep the Palestinian problem festering. Moreover, it assumed and probably documented that the arms arriving in Gaza and the Palestinian territories originate in or are transshipped through Syria. So, it is quite easy to understand that Israel and the United States have, on the face of it, no great love or respect for Syria, and quite the opposite. Funds for Fatah, Hamas and for Hezbollah come from Syria, presumed to have been "laundered" there from Iran. It is reported today by CNN that Fatah and Hamas have reached an accord that promises to put Israel into an unpleasant bargaining position, with Egypt now clearly leaning out of its former Mubarak-induced neutrality toward a unified stance on the key issues of Palestine.

To put it mildly, the expected disruption of the status quo by the so-called Arab Spring movements, including that in Syria, is a cat well out of the bag. Given that, this article from the Washington Post, a paper that usually represents the interests of the American military-industrial complex and the AIPAC, suggesting regional stability is at stake, is all the more perplexing. The Post cannot really want to continue this multiply duplicitous dance with the Assads, knows that the game being played by Israel is all but foreclosed, and that an opportunity has been given to the U.S. to correct its foreign policy all across the Arab world, so why this article?

Newspapers like the Post and the Times are not just for their subscribers. The editors collude with government officials to "leak" and to actually leak facts and points of view for foreign consumption. Could this Syria article be such a piece of that kind of stagecraft, designed to head-fake Assad? We are never sure, and that is why this role of viewpoint provider is so difficult to pin down. It is unlike this newspaper to run from an arms sale or a "police action." In today's edition the editors of the Post all but call for the assassination of Gaddafi in Libya, which may also be stagecraft, but clearly will find resonance across the planet. I think that the Post article is meant to be the weakest possible concession to the vivid fact that removal of Assad will cause some upheaval and destabilize the region for a while. But, consider the possibilities: defunding and no longer arming the three thorns in Israel's side would be a good outcome, if some other force moved Israel to understand the pivotal situation for what it is.

JB

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3/23/11

We have been there before. Things are not much improved over the two hundred years since we visited the Barbary Coast. Thomas Friedman in the New York Times today, thinks he has if not the answer, then the more accurate description of things in Libya and other countries now experiencing their own outrage at being lost in one of the slow eddies of civilization without progress. Friedman is probably mostly right about the "Tribes with Flags" and probably should be taken as partly right, since none of these countries is completely one way or the other. None completely "tribal" and none completely modern.

I remarked to my good friend in NYC who pointed this article out to me (since I do not often read Friedman's column in my daily foraging for "newstrition,") that Friedman does not use the word "Islam" in his article, not even once. I double checked this just now to make sure. The concept "Islam" may be there, but Friedman does not attribute to the religion any causal relationship to the "division" between these two types of countries. I think this is a mistake. I think that Islam is essentially a patriarchal religion and that it is easily used to bolster a patriarchal situation such as you might find in tribal organizations. We know that Turkey has been fairly clear on this issue from the moment Mustafa Kemal Ataturk burst on the scene in the post-WWI era.

I think the big lesson for Americans from Friedman's article is that we need to be a lot clearer about our own assumptions, but not afraid to act on the behalf of human beings subjugated by tyrants like Hosni Mubarak or Muammar Qaddhafi.

This brings up a second thought, expressed by Maureen Dowd on the same page of the Times as Friedman's article. Maureen is transfixed in her own special way by the role of women in our government in the development of the policy that finally got us onto the right side of this situation, albeit late and unconscionably disorganized. Maureen exaggerates the point to make it, and I agree that the men sure looked like sissies in this situation, clearly multi-tasking more ideas than their brains could actually deal with, and ending up in a political paralysis that "for safety sake" may have cost us the good-will and moral position that this whole event is about.

Notwithstanding the moral imperative that propelled me and the ladies toward intervention, there remains the question of why Barack Obama did not see the route on this when the Tunisians of Friedman's "real country" category rose up and threw off their old chains? The situation developed sufficiently slowly that any good national security team should have been all over it and with options prepared.

I need to suggest that options probably were prepared, but that at the point where the positive and negative institutional valences of the Intelligence, State, and Defense were most apparent, the White House and the President sitting there did not metabolize the intelligence or the options into broad-scale national policy alternatives and present them to Congress, as Senators Webb and Lugar have rightly pointed out. The outcome of asking Congress would have put the American people into the catbird seat, and I am confident that the moral issue and the Real Politik of the Libyan situation would have been the backbone of our new foreign policy. But it was not. Obama has expressed his moral indignation, but he has not controlled the press on this point, and the reports of his hestitancy are at least as vivid as his "outrage."

I criticized President Obama a few days ago about this, and I feel just a strongly today that he is dangerously inept. Whether the problem is his own unwillingness to commit to a course of action or that his close advisors are buffaloed by the welter of information that comes their ways is still something of a mystery to me. In the end, though, he is responsible for taking his own counsel or theirs.

JB

3/19/11

I am sick of this President and his feckless indecision. While Muammar Qadaffi murders his own people this shade of a president sits and mulls over the politics of intervention. Are you nuts! The Libyan people have cried for help! If they were drowning would you ask the Germans if they wanted to get wet? What! You would?! Don't you have a thought of your own? Is Hillary Clinton president or you? Your leadership is wanting, Barack! You are pathetic!

There comes a time in the course of human events when a sea of troubles boils and the people boil. There is nothing pretty about it. You have a megalomanic monster in a place of power, a kleptocrat, a dictator, a person whose wilingness to do harm frightens most men and women and they shy away. This is not a person who was elected. This is a person without human feelings whose will to power exceeds by a thousandfold any remote chance of his understanding the meaning of his actions. He is human only in shape. He is a pathological criminal, and he must be removed ... ... obliterated!

You, Barack Obama, are unworthy of your office. Yes, the decision to intervene is difficult and there are points on either side about the consequences of American action against Qadaffi and his mercenary troops whose loyalty is to their blood money, and who will run at the site of American arms plowing through their evil ranks. Yes, Barack Obama, you failed this test, like so many before. You had months to figure this out before the Libyans had built up their courage. You failed to direct and preside.

It doesn't matter that Angela Merkel has a smart answer for the question. The question is a moral one, not a German one! The question is whether when asked for help by a vox populi, we will. You did not, and now we have to face Gadhafi over the graves of his people. You sicken me, Obama! You are useless and you too will be replaced!

JB

3/14/11

If you want to begin to understand the destruction that the tsunami wreaked, look at these before and after satellite pictures from the New York Times. Be sure to use the blue slider in the middle of the photographs to see what has been lost.

The latest word on nuclear power plants is very dire, with three reactors in the process of melting down their fuel rods. Pay particular attention to the reports on these reactors, because the Japanese and the U.S. governments will begin attempts to avert panic. This situation is out of control and ... well ... devil take the hindmost. Here is how the panic-stemming reportage begins:

So far, Japanese officials have said the melting of the nuclear cores in the two plants is assumed to be “partial,” and the amount of radioactivity measured outside the plants, though twice the level Japan considers safe, has been relatively modest. [WTF does "modest" mean?]

But Pentagon officials reported Sunday that helicopters flying 60 miles from the plant picked up small amounts of radioactive particulates — still being analyzed, but presumed to include cesium-137 and iodine-121 — suggesting widening environmental contamination.

JB

3/12/11

I don't know what to call today's little essay. I have just watched videos of the earthquake and tsunami and nuclear power plant disasters in Japan. This is a dire situation that will draw attention away from Libya and Wisconsin, both dire situations of their own. Wisconsin is more abstract than the civil war in Libya and the horrible destruction and peril in Japan. I imagine there are people in the United States who feel the NFL lockout and potential for no football in 2011-12 is pretty dire, too, but Wisconsin and NFL at their bases are both about how to be a democratic country, not just about greed!

In Wisconsin the GOP has declared war on democracy, Democrats, working people, all under the guise of their mistaken partisan view of how government and economy both work. The NFL situation is a study in exploitation of the work of others, of greed converging from all directions on a well-tended pot of gold, and also about the rule of law. I care that the law is followed, but the rest of it is pure rubbish.

Japan will survive this horror, and the world will pause to reconsider the efficacy of nuclear power generation on an unstable planet. We will add an iconic word to our vocabularies and place it next to Chernobyl in long list of epic horrors, but we do not know that word yet for there are five nuclear reactors in peril.

So, finally, I get to express my chagrin about President Obama and Libya. The Washington Post this winter Saturday says that Obama is not so sure we should get into the civil war in Libya. I can see that as Commander-in-Chief, already bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan with Pakistan threatening to topple given just the wrong combination of events, Obama would be reluctant to divert even more of our resources to "somebody else's" fight. The Post, channeling some archaic nostrum about bearing responsibility for a person whose life you save, includes this bit of editorial bulloney in their account

Neil Hicks, the international policy director for Human Rights First, said the Obama administration has been careful, as a result, not to directly encourage Libya's rebels.

"They've promised very little, so I think the rebels should count on very little from the United States," Hicks said.

But Hicks and others say it is important that Gaddafi be forced from power, although how to do so remains the challenge.

"If he stays, his potential to destabilize what has happened in Tunisia and Egypt is great, and he will continue to give support to rulers who are the worst of the worst," Hicks said. "But if the United States becomes deeply implicated in the process of overthrowing Gaddafi, then it also bears responsibility for what becomes of Libya in the aftermath." (emphasis added)

The decision to quote Mr. Hicks does not reflect the opinion of everyone I know, nor of the vast majority of Americans as I read the sentiment expressed in the rest of the media. Clearly, Obama holds this view, and has forgotten that the French aided the Americans in their fight against Britain for independence.

Where is that spirit these days! I do not recall the French interfering in the development of our new nation. Well, they did sell us the Louisiana Territory, I recall!

There is no excuse for expressing your indignation over the murderous activities of Moammar Qaddafi, Mr. Obama, and then retreating to the comfort of platitudes and cost-value analyses. We need to have a good record with all the peoples of north Africa and within Islam. Standing by while atrocities are committed by a megalomanic dictator is exactly the wrong posture. We need to get in an make sure that Qaddafi fulfills his recent statement .. to the last drop of his blood!

JB

3/10/11

The Libyans, I should say the New Libyans, are getting hit hard by the well-funded armed forces "loyal" to Moamar el-Qaddafi, the mafiose tribesman who has run this poor country into the ground over the past forty years. Some of the voices from Libya (and elsewhere) tell the United States to go to hell and stay away from the Libyan revolution. Other voices, also from Libya and elsewhere, tell us we have a moral responsibility to intervene, since we (and many others) supported Qaddafi at times in the past.

Personally, I think our moral position is very problematic. We have warped our foreign policy in the Islamic countries for their petroleum and for our client Israel. But, even above that, we have reflexively chosen the path of supporting stability over moral imperatives. We have stood by passively as thousands upon thousands of human beings were slaughtered in internecine fratricide. We have sold arms to everyone and, why the press is surprised by the result is no longer amusing. The press in the United States is dominated and fundamentally controlled by corporate interests and corporatist "ethos," which is to say that corporations of whatever stripe are considered to be a progressive evolutionary step beyond mere individual home sapiens sapiens. The press is silent as business operates beyond and against the moral fiber of the public from which they sprang.

It might be that the United States must heed the warnings of serious members of the New Libyan rebellion that the presence of American forces would be counter-productive. What exactly to do they mean by this, though? Is the American reputation so bad that Arabs and Berbers in Libya cannot forget the basic guilt of American toleration of Qaddafi? What about Libyan toleration of Qaddafi? Is there not a balance of guilt?

Are the New Libyans afraid America will come in and argue for cheap petroleum? Are New Libyans so weak as to succumb to these probable business pressures? Probably. Qaddafi has "hollowed out" most institutions and organizations in Libya that would have mounted a possible threat to his dictatorship. So, Libya now finds itself the inheritor of its own cowardice! All the more reason to assist and to get the fuck out of Libya as soon as they have a functioning government.

What we common Americans want is for Libyans to stop killing Libyans, by which we mean that we want Moamar Qaddafi to leave and never return. Killing him is against our law about assassination of foreign leaders, but ... we all want him gone!

I cannot think that having mobilized the West in support of New Libyans that the United States or France or the United Kingdom or Italy or Germany would countenance a Qaddafi victory in this struggle. Having said that as principle, how much killing are we going to passively watch before our principle becomes righteous? It is righteous now and dillydallying is immoral, since we already know what we must do. Let us do it ... now!

JB

2/28/11

What a title for an essay! The winners of Oscars should be happy with their achievements, but the Academy pendulum has swung too far in the "comfort" direction, away from controversy, and unfortunately away from blazing talent toward career achievement. "True Grit" was the best picture this past year by any standard or measure, and it is irrelevant that the Coen brothers won it hands down recently. They are at the top of their game. Let it be said out loud. And this too shall pass.

But this essay is about losers, the people of the Arab countries and of the "-stans." These are the losers of history and the measure of that is the kind of government and leadership they have. What they have is assertive and egotistical men with a paucity of imagination for realizing the humanity of their countrymen and countrywomen, for realizing their potential, for shedding the enormous burden of tradition, for seeing a way to bring their people out of humble circumstances into the modern world.

It should not be lost on Americans that Islam is different in different countries. In the Arab and "-stan" world Islam is abused as a religion and as a method of social control and personal redemption and solace. In other parts of the world Islam is not a hate and fear doctrine. This means that cultural dispositions in the Arab psyche are to blame. I will call it primitive tribalism. It is a method of social control, and mindlessly asserted to hold patriarchal leaders in power. It is antithetical to democracy. The cure for it is to prove the patriarchs, be they kings or dictators, to be wrong. Insane men like Qadhafi in Libya need no further explanation. They must be killed.

It should not be lost on Americans that our country has taken the low road with respect to the Arab countries and the -stans. Our foreign policy was formulated in an era when the Communist International run in Moscow was active among the wreckage nations of the old Ottoman Empire, destroyed along with Imperial Russia in the Great War. The low road has been to secure countries and entire regions against the horror of Soviet infiltration with Communistic ideas! It was obvious back in my youth that this policy would turn Americans away from their core values as democracy loving and nurturing people.

James Carroll tells the story, unfolding now across north Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, for Pakistan, the most dangerous country in the world, worse even than North Korea. Carroll notes the genesis of our ugly American policy toward these people, and we see a glimmer from his writing and our understanding of the Cold War, that fixing broken cultures is a lot of hard and frustrating work, so why not opt for the easier way, the stability way, the wrong way!

Carroll does not mention the subtext of the Cold War, the fight of capitalist business for hegemony in the world, nor therefore does he note the torque and bias of our "righteous cause" in the Cold War (after all Leninist/Stalinist Russia was a terrible place where millions died needlessly for a "bankrupt" ideology). The corporations made sure that Americans equated successful business with that anti-communist righteousness, and so how easily it became to see business interests as a goal of American foreign policy. All they wanted was stability. They did not care a whit about the progress of peoples left in the undertow of historical processes. And, so we come into the 21st century fully burdened ourselves with an impossibly ugly foreign policy that even a "heroic" figure like Barack Obama cannot undo in two years or six.

But, as Confucius say, "a journey of a thousand li begins with the first step." There is no better time than now to recognize that the Cold War is over and that Islam is not the enemy but rather the whip in malignant, dirty, self-serving hands of tribalist demagogues and dictators. We need to get on the side of people, not these tinpot governments!

JB

2/26/11

"From the halls of Montezuma ..." is the beginning of the Marine Corps hymn, but the interesting part (also unfinished business) is "to the shores of Tripoli." The spanking new American republic with its own merchant fleet building encountered the "Barbary Pirates" along the coast of Libya and carried out a little war against them. Like my colleague, I am more than a little annoyed that the American response to the Libyan cry for help does not receive the same response we gave to Israel in 1948—instant diplomatic recognition of the freedom-seeking rebels!

We are not alone. Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post yesterday wrote as good a call for intervention as yesterday seemed appropriate. Today, which was foreseeable, of course, the situation is resolving somewhat and become more desperate. Tripoli in the northwest is isolated, but seemingly more strongly defended by "loyalists" than the freedom-seeking Libyans can uproot and defeat.

There are now two Libyas and we should recognize the new one and give them the assistance they need to end the sway of the dictatorship they hate so much.

There is a code of conduct among nations that says outsiders should stay out of the internal fights within nations. That code is applied liberally to situations where the outsider is unprepared for intervention or is trying to persuade other nations that they have nothing to fear from the outsiders. On the other hand, when the outsider does not like the looks of the "rebels" the code allows the outsider to support the "dejure" government. Moreover, when the outside forces are truly vexed, they tend to invent reasons for intervention on one side or the other, as witnessed by our two wars against Iraq in this generation. So much for codes of conduct! They are bullshit and everyone knows it.

So, Obama, get out of the law library and into the cockpit! We have been looking for a time to remove Muammar Qaddhafi for decades. Do not blow this wonderful chance for America to get on the right side of history ... for a change!

JB

2/7/11

Euro-centric culture and the many similar cultures within Islam we have largely ignore them or misunderstood them. In an OpEd piece today in the New York Times I learned something on the fly that, as an historian, gives me pause. I say, "on the fly" because the very, very interesting piece by Reuel Mark Gerecht, a former CIA employee concentrating on the Middle East, is not at all about classical feudalism as experienced in Europe, but rather a different kind of evolutionary path, a cul de sac it turns out, that the Arab world, particularly, among all the other worlds of Islam, has gotten itself into and is trying to get out of now. Gerecht wonders aloud about why "Arabia" (taken broadly to include all places where Arabs have settled) turned out the way it did.

His title is "How Democracy Became Halal," the decisive idea in his article that gives motion and hope to the unique historical processes that are unfolding in Arab lands. It is exceedingly difficult to gauge the culture from the standpoint of our own because of the divergent paths we have taken, not only in terms of formal religion, but as Gerecht notes, in terms of how the social compact is seen differently between us. In the west the tradition of feudal liege and subject was underpinned by a sense of overarching responsibility and order, giving way in good time to the idea of a social contract and then to miniature contracts, soon abundant and ubiquitous and forming an idea of a rule of law.

In the Arab lands and not completely apart from the notions embedded in Islam the feudal idea of two way responsibility (and eventually the idea of contract and orderly rule) was taken up by and submerged by the idea of what is allowed by God as righteous. So in Arab lands, heir to tribal authorianism by virtue of the hard life they led in the deserts of north Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, Arabs developed a lesser sense of their individuality as civic entities, and their relations with other human beings were mediated by Sharia and other forms of Islamic law first, rather than independently of overarching orthodoxy.

It is an interesting and probably fertile ground for commentators on the Arab uprisings of 2011, because it illuminates one of the blind spots we in western civilization have about the Arab culture ... (and vice versa). The idea that "democracy" is now "halal" (permitted and to be prized) is huge because it is the path out of the cul de sac, and yet as Gerecht writes, it is not pretty, and I would add, it might not get pretty soon.

JB

1/27/11

The news and commentary are full of the actions taken by ordinary people in Tunisia and now in Egypt against their repressive regimes that have run their countries for decades. Also in the news are the pitiful expressions of the U.S. Department of State, or at least the commentary about completely expected comments by Secretary Hillary Clinton and others.

Let's be clear about this at long last. The United States recognizes many governments that it does not like, governments that are repressive, illegally installed, and a host of other reasons for disliking them. Nevertheless, the position of our country now and in the past is that a regime that is de facto in charge of a nation for an appreciable time as in China, Burma, North Korea, endless (and mindless) African states, Cuba, Venezuela, and Beloruss, are all ... whether they are de jure states or not ... a fact of life.

It is the policy of every signatory to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (notwithstanding) that we try to arrive at the most peaceful accommodation between unfriendly states as we can to insure that lives are not lost and wasted in endless conflict. It is in some sense a matter of economic priorities. Simply: we cannot remake the world to suit ourselves, and we must depend on the people of a country to stand up for themselves.

Is this a realistic policy?

Yes. It is realistic and sometimes so antithetical to the "ideal" policy we would prefer to follow that the chasm between the two yawns viciously at our pitiful attempts to be true to our moral aspirations. So, with the State of the Union Address being ripped apart by fools, with the media giving them attention they do not deserve, with the question of Executive leadership in our country very much on the table, we must watch as Arab countries try to grow up and throw off the vicious dictatorships that follow closely on the demise of millennia of tribal authority.

We need a diplomatic system that promotes our ideals. All we have now is one that promotes our business interests and hopes for stability among people we understand very poorly. Would it be hypocritical to recognize a Mubarak in Egypt and at the same time beam information to the people of Egypt about the "blessings of democracy" and the eternal vigilance it requires? Would it matter if all advanced nations had such a policy, whether they act in concert or not? You are damned right it would make a difference! And, it is something that a Barack Obama should have been constructing from Day One. That would be Change we can believe in.

You might be interested to read the thoughts of veteran journalist Robert Fisk on the rebellions in the Arab world. I think you can begin to see the consequences of a 19th century view of diplomacy in an electronically invigorated world.

JB

12/29/10

Today in the New York Times Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the Soviet Union, architect of "perestroika" (continuous change and evolution), and the single most important character in Russian life since Stalin ... but on the other side ... wrote about the necessity for nailing down a comprehensive agreement among the nations of the Earth to get rid of nuclear weapons. He cites the failure of the United States Senate to appreciate the awesome responsibility it has.

With the likes of Arizona's senators Kyl and McCain leading the knee-jerk machismo movement in the direction of deadlier and more plentiful nuclear weapons, the nations of the earth who have grudges against neighbors, who have the economic means to buy their way into the proliferation of these weapons, who have nothing of the political or moral safeguards against their use, who have no compunctions about nuclear blackmail, all have reason to believe that the United States fundamentally does not care. This because of a few senators with shopworn ideas of national security.

When you read the prognostications of what probably will befall the planet in the next year and the next decade, author after author mentions the Iranian bomb threat and the loose-canon of North Korea both being emulated by nations with eager dictators willing to sacrifice world peace for an extra helping of political gravy. The world quite possibly will back into proliferation because the United States was too stupid to see its leadership role for what it is. We are not admired for inventing nuclear arms ... we are envied and we frighten them. It is time, way past time, actually, to turn this page and get on with the business of removing all nuclear weapons from the planet.

JB

12/20/10

James Carroll, writing his usual Monday column in the Boston Globe today, takes on the subject of our animal irrationality rather than writing some homily about Christmas. Congratulations to him on that score. Perhaps the late revelations about predatory priests in Belgium, Ireland, and here in Boston (and all across the land) last week, just tipped the scales for him. But, he begins with interesting news about the Winter Solstice conjoining with a lunar eclipse and a full moon. If that won't get the lunatic fringe out for a howl, what will?

Carroll's point in this column is well taken. We are in our poorly prepared democracy subject to all manner of howlings from the fringe, the appeal of Glen Becks and Ann Coulters and Newt Gingriches playing on the hindbrains of a society that so little understands its own history that bald-faced lies about our country today pass unnoticed or, worse, pass as truths superior to the complicated facts of our existence. But, Carroll's subject is narrowly war and more precisely the Afghanistan involvement, which matches the arrogance of a rich nation with the dishonest depths of a poor one, corrupting everything in sight. The truth, Mr. Carroll, is that we are in Afghanistan to rout out the people who flew four commercial airplanes on 9/11 into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a pasture in Pennsylvania.

We all remember that purpose, what we do not think about is what Carroll reminds us: we have now thousands of reasons for revenge, not to mention that we have laid bare the seething animus of Pakistan and awakened within our center of fears the truth that Afghanistan is right next to Iran on the west. The chess players of the world understand why we are there.

And Carroll's thoughts persist through the gloom of the long, dark night of our national humiliation in this rugged, backward, place of common evils and political hopelessness. Karzai is corrupt, no doubt and no surprise, except that we are a main cause of his corruption, arrogantly instructing this egotist in the governance of a land and people who have no concept of the starting place of our values. And, perhaps, Carroll is telling us that neither do we.

JB

12/12/10

The word "nashi" in Russian means "ours." It is an omnibus sort of word that has many colloquial uses extending from the idea of "us" as a people (Great Russians) to "we" as a subset of Russians, that is, the presumptive majority people. In the sense it is described in an OpEd by Oleg Kashin in the Sunday New York Times it draws on the "possession" definition of "ours" and suggests that for those unlucky people not part of the group called Nashi, Russia is not theirs to meddle with, to argue about, to vote one way while majorities vote the other. Kashin knows intimately about Nashi and has suffered greatly for his trouble.

I read an article yesterday that I did not quote about about the Eisenhower "fairwell address" that contains the warning about the military-industrial complex. That article said that the twentieth century was almost completely involved in a struggle to the death between three contesting views on how nations should be organized and governed. The three are capitalist democracy, fascism, and communism. I say "are" because, if nothing else, what happened to Kashin (and the other Russian journalists) and to hundreds of others impedimenta to Putin's re-establishment of Stalinism in Russia proves the truth of that idea.

The problem we have with political choices, of course, is that we assign roles to nations such that Russia is seen as "the communist country" and Germany/Italy as the "the fascist countries" and the United Kingdom and the United States as "the capitalist democracies" AS IF these roles were not in jeopardy of shifting among the nations we focus upon. Clearly, Nashi is not far off the course taken by the Italian fascisti or the Brown Shirts in Germany. They are state-sponsored thugs.

But, let me take this idea a step further. If Russia can shed the ideological baggage of Marxian communism and is left with Leninism and Stalinism, what separates that from the thuggery of Nazi fascism? Quite a bit, of course, but the idea is still valid as a pry into the real meaning of political systems, and of course, the suggestion I have made here many times that corporatist government has overtaken popular democracy here and abroad fits right into the idea of there being a tri-polar constellation of political systems available to ANY nation.

Russia has a troubled past, and that means it has a troubled social, cultural, and political inheritance from that past. Many of us have said that the Russian intelligentsia is poorly equipped and positioned to educate the mass of people in Russia toward Enlightenment theories and forms of government. This does not mean that Russians will always be slaves to their overlords. It simply means that any democracy has to have native roots and the soil for growing them in Russia is infertile.

It is the Kashins and Politkovskayas of Russia who fertilize that barren ground with their blood and lives, and they cannot do it alone. Russia is vast and her people are too long suffering to see (much less pull on) their own bootstraps. The roles played in the west to keep popular democracy alive are played by a much larger group of advocates, and yet we see that secret elites are always created and active in the pursuit of goals antithetical to our democracy, even to our view of capitalism. Like Putin in Russia these people have a focused goal of stability and financial bounty for themselves.

As the "debate" over nuclear arms reduction treaties with Russia meander across the political landscape of contemporary Washington, I wonder if the people like Senator Kyl (R-AZ) have any idea what the consequences of teasing the Russian bear might be. It seems to me, always, that engagement is the better way to move ideas into Russia and to pry loose the Russian rictus grip on authoritarian rule.

JB

11/5/10

I have begun lecturing about the perils of coddling China. Today we learn that China is trying to blackmail European nations into a boycott of the Nobel Prize ceremonies and courtesies. They feel that Prize-winner Liu Xiaobo is a criminal for trying to get democratic reforms into the Chinese government, which is decidedly un-democratic and equally anti-democratic. One party rule in China is a dictatorship not of the proletariat, but of a self-selected clique of party stalwarts. There is competition within the Chinese Communist Party and the brighter members seem to have an advantage, but the Red Chinese Army packs a huge wallop in governance as well. It is a governmental structure unwilling to accommodate itself to the progress of the individual throughout the world.

I am sorry for harping on this issue, but 2005 was the time to stop buying Chinese goods. 2010 is not too late. Boycott China wherever you can. Look at labels and understand that buying things of Chinese manufacture is not in your or your children's long term interest. China must be taught a lesson. Hoisting themselves up economically on the backs and shoulders of millions of underpaid workers is not going to provide China with the social or political experience they are going to need to be part of the community of nations. Send them a message!

JB

9/8/10

It is September 8th, 2010. Hamas has claimed direct and jubilant responsibility for last week's murders of four Israeli civilians, the outrage designed specifically to interrupt or close the peace talks now a week old and so far unscuttled.

It is two plus days until Saturday, September 11th, where in Gainsville, FL, a fundamentalist Christian pastor has convinced his flock of fifty equally moronic sheep to burn some Korans to let the Infidel know that "we still outraged Christians" are gonna settle accounts with y'all A-rabs one way orn tuther.

But Bibi Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas are still talking, the stakes never being higher than they are right now. To give you some perspective on the situation Thomas Friedman, columnist in the New York Times, suggests that the King of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah, offer his plan to Netanyahu as a power-broking gesture. You have to read this column, because if you had any illusions about Israel being able to walk out of these talks with peace, security, and territory acquired since 1948, you had better consider the situation anew.

Let's take as a premise that Netanyahu, being the arch conservative that he is, the pacifier-in-chief of the war party in Israel, the last, best hope for only a minor civil war inside Israel as a result of these talks, ... let us suppose he understands that Abdullah's answer comes with security from all Arabs, if not the Persians in Iran, and that it is a last, best, and final offer, will Netanyahu take the bait and see if he can forge a real and lasting peace from it. (Long sentence, I know, but the situation requires holding several thoughts in mind simultaneously.) The next two thoughts are: 1) will Netanyahu be impeached, overthrown, assassinated by the war party inside Israel, and 2) will Hamas and Hezbollah, both funded by Iran, thumb their noses at Abdullah and commit more atrocities, just to make the point (in Tehran and elsewhere) that Israel cannot be recognized or tolerated by the dispossessed Palestinians themselves and all other Muslims who "feel their pain."

The answer, I think, to #1 question is that, owing to his solid credentials in Israel that Netanyahu could survive, but might choose to forge the agreement and then opt out of the way shortly after, that is, he would take his personal licks, but get the statecraft accomplished. In this respect, it is Netanyahu who holds the key and must have the personal courage to act.

The answer, I think, to #2 questions is that, as Friedman suggests, there will be "civil war" in Palestine, Gaza particularly, but that the stature of Abdullah (and I am sure Abdullah understands the jeopardy this puts his "standing") will calm the situation sufficiently that Netanyahu could "try out the security arrangement" with some sense of optimism.

After all, the expected "civil wars" inside each opposing force will take time (weeks and perhaps months), will involve some serious activity most of the internal of which can be swept under the carpet, but can be "managed" by nearby cajolery and appropriate activities and support from abroad. Having written that, I do not think that Hamas can be kept from violence, so Hamas will have to be reorganized under Addullah instead of under Ahmadinejad and the ayatollahs of Iran.

The more I write the more fantastic this begins to sound. Going back to the pre-Six Day War boundaries seems to me to be too much to ask Netanyahu to take back to the Knesset. But, with Abdullah acting as Arab guarantor and with nuclear warfare just a year off, something along these lines might be possible. And, you have to ask, what are the alternatives?

You also have to ask whether Abdullah is really that important, given that Wahabbist Islam is probably the most conservative and least tolerant form of Islam, suggesting that Israel gives the opposition too much in any bargain with Abdullah? But, is there an intermediate position that Abdullah can take that lessens the security guarantee, but provides room for the parties to negotiate relatively long term incremental steps toward fulfillment of the Abdullah plan?

Is it cynical to think that the Palestinians and Israelis can buy some peace with half-hearted acceptance of provisional steps, knowing they can walk away from the "settlement" at a moment's notice? In fact, what is it that will bind the parties to a settlement? Does Abdullah have that kind of standing? Does the United States? What keeps Texas in the Union, you might ask. Answer: Sober reflection about where their bread is buttered. Now you have a whole set of new questions! Where is Israel's bread buttered, if not by American Jewry?

Finally, what keeps Iran from committing the unpardonable, but nevertheless hard-to-prove act of sabotage? It seems to me that you have to get Russia and China into the final security guarantee, because I doubt Abdullah has any real power over the Shiites in Iran.

These essays will resume in one week, assuming that Virginia, traveling to a first time game in Los Angeles, beats the University of Southern California ranked 14th in the nation, but if not, probably not sooner. LOL

JB

9/6/10

Today is Labor Day. It is a marker on the calendar that nearly everyone recognizes as "the end of summer" or the "return to school" or EVEN "the recognition of the dignity and essential, fundamental, and socially worthy toil of men and women who work on the land, in factories and offices, in the armed forces." Labor Day is fun and slightly sad. It is a day of recuperation from labor and it is a time for reflecting on what progress has been made in personal and family goals.

James Carroll, columnist in the Boston Globe usually writes on Mondays, but the subject he chose to write on today is not a Labor Day theme. It is something both less universal, yet clearly more pressing and important to the welfare of our planet. Today he tackled the festering wounds at the heart of the Israel-Palestine confrontation. He takes a moment of your repose on Labor Day to emphasize that the labor of making peace is the more strenuous and disconcerting task we have. It is, in fact, the crucial event of this year, for the status quo in Israel is actually festering, and that means that it is changing for the worse. Within the manifold of this status quo is the distinct possibility that Israel (and her allies) will soon be confronted by hostile nuclear weapons. In other words, the status quo is not static ... and it is not stable.

Israel exists because there was a Holocaust—the Shoah. Were it not for Hitler's and the Nazi's crime of genocide against European Jews, modern day Israel would not exist. And, one has to add quickly, there would be very little trouble in the middle east ... just the normal dislocations and growing pains of Arab societies moving all to slowly into the modern epoch.

I think that Carroll's essay today is especially enlightening because it clearly shows the historical basis of the present day attitudes in the streets of Palestine and Israel ... and arrayed around the table in Washington. There is no party in this situation without fault, without cause, without moral certitude. It is a thicket into which Brer Rabbit would not want to be pitched. It is for most who try to wrap their minds around it the paradigmatic "intractable situation," one without hand holds or foreseeable solutions.

Yet, the truth is that we have no choice. We must do the work ... including the hard labor of the conscience and hard labor of the soul ... to avoid what clearly is the inevitable nuclear exchange that will bring world civilization to the brink and maybe beyond.

JB

8/21/10

There isn't a Muslim on this planet ... and very few Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, atheists, etc. ... who do not understand that the problems in the so-called Holy Land—the Levant—are "reflected" directly in American politics, with American Jews and Israel scripting the show. AIPAC, American Jewry, and Israelis have been playing the American political cello like Yoyo Ma, and now President Barack Hussein "One-Term" Obama is tearing up that script, that music, and trying to get a different tune playing to which both Israelis and Palestinians, and the outraged, aggrieved, and intolerant can all pretend to dance.

Charles M. Blow, regular columnist in the New York Times writes this Saturday morning that in droves Jews are shedding their long affiliation with the Democratic Party, all because they believe it is necessary to dance the same dance lest someone believe they have forgotten what must never be forgotten.

What Blow understands of American politics is not incorrect. His analysis is spot on. What is not expressed (and should have been) are the reasons for the significant departure from the old script and the old music. The reasons Obama believes there is an opportunity for progress toward a solution in Palestine and Jerusalem is that Israel is now governed by the most militant and least likely to compromise government ever. Netanyahu is bellicose and is supported by an aging generation of equally intransigent and (I might add for realism) fearful Israelis who see the balance turning against them. The balance is not held in New York's suburbs or on the Lower East Side or in the Fairfax District of L.A. or Beverly Hills or Chicago's Skokie enclave. It is held in Tehran, and everyone knows it.

Iran holds one end of the cello's bow and plays the other side of the tragic music of Palestine. But, we are not talking about Hamas or Hezbollah, both supplied with whatever they need to harass Israel and take murderous potshots at Israeli troops and Israeli civilians a rocket's trajectory across the border. We are talking about a music-ending nuclear attack on Israel by fanatics in Iran, tipped past the balance of reason into the final solutions for the Levant, total elimination of the Jews.

Charles Blow knows that Obama plays Netanyahu like Mao played Nixon (and vice versa). Sometimes you have to take the least promising player into your orchestra in the hopes that he will, being advanced toward the fatal edge already, be able to back down when he sees the abyss opening out from under. Blow also knows that this is the week that Russian engineers are installing low-grade fuel into nuclear reactors in Iran, symbolically (if nothing else) lending credence to notions and nightmares of the fearful and bellicose among American Jews and Israelis.

This story cannot be told without a description of the stage and the music being played. So far the music has been (ironically) Wagnerian and arguably provocative. The stage is surrounded by hecklers and, indeed, oppressed people who hear each note like a bullet whining through their homes.

Even more to the point, in counterpoint to the righteousness of the Israeli will to survive, there is a seductive "progressive" note of expansion into the lands they have brought by force of arms into their control.

The metaphor is exhausted and the cacophony of an intractable reality is proof of it. The time line is currently one year until Iran has a nuclear weapon. The "assuagement" of the Israeli government by the declaration of this new national intelligence estimate (we read about yesterday in the Times) now exists on a fuse the shortness of which is terrible to consider. Blow knows this, and Blow figures, as do most, that Obama will back down from his position and let Israel with the backing of American Jewry make the pre-emptory strike on Iranian nuclear installations.

There is no question whatsoever that that policy would result in all out war in the middle east spreading like a wild fire across the face of the planet.

JB

7/28/10

Let's see. Lend Lease was in full swing when I was born. Not quite two years later Pearl Harbor was attacked, so that was the first day of "actual" war for the United States that happened during my lifetime. Since the 2nd World War we have had Korea—which has never been resolved and threatens to boil over again—Vietnam, Panama, Granada, Dominican Republic, Serbia, Somalia, Iraq I and II, Afghanistan, and soon Yemen. All told, without getting too precise about it, about 85% of my lifetime has been seriously impacted by America's wars, including my own combat zone duty in the mid-1960s in Tonkin Gulf and around the Indochinese peninsula.

I wasn't sufficiently against going into Afghanistan after bin Ladin, like most Americans, and when Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Hussein Obama said that there was a strategic goal they believed could be met with some diligence and patience on our part, I did not protest loudly.

I still have the eerie feeling that without our forces in Afghanistan the terrorists of al Qaeda would be roasting marshmallows and all beef hotdogs at tailgate parties throughout that loosely defined country after each successful terrorist raid on western civilization. I lose my breath when in an older movie the twin towers of the World Trade Center appear. I am, just like almost everyone, sick to my stomach about what war and empire have done to our country: the distortions of our industrial sector, the numbness we all have about mass death visited by suicide bombers and stealth bombers. It is truly sickening.

So, when Wikileaks and then major newspapers leaked and published the classified background information that we all suspected but refused steadfastly to hold in the center of our imaginations, that "news" that we are being "handled" by a bunch of opium farmers and fourth world tin pot raskals, I scarcely blinked. I was once in the midst of all that "classified" stuff and knew full well that most of it—probably 70% was CYA information rather than real facts about our plans or "them."

Maureen Dowd in the NYT has her take on the "revelations" and President Obama has his. His statement, which I thought was a marvel of truthfulness and still adroit, was that there was almost nothing in the illegally exposed information that was not already part of the public debate. Really! Really?

If Wikileaks did us any service by making these background materials public it was that the U.S. (and to some extent NATO) governments are in a gigantic denial syndrome. What the documents reveal Doonsbury has been drawing for months, namely a cynical interface between cultures that have virtually nothing to say to one another, there being so few points of fundamental understanding and common culture and ethics. The military, including the sacked McChrystal, have been asked to do something that cannot be done without removing the shackles of western ethics from their arms. No, I am not sneaking up on the idea that we should nuke Afghanistan into oblivion. (I am not even sure we should do that to North Korea, say.) I am saying that attempting to wrench the various peoples who make up Islamic Afghanistan into a 21st century version of their religion and a modern view of civil polity is fundamentally an impossible task ... and everything in the pilfered documents shows the lengths to which civilians and military alike skirt that fundamental issue and pretend that under some (wildly improbable) circumstances the struggle can be won.

No. It cannot be won with states like Pakistan, failing to to keep pace intellectually, industrially, economically with India its bete noir necessary adversary, cynically playing our over extended forces for the fools they believe them to be. No, it cannot be won in any terms familiar to western ears, eyes, or hearts. No, it cannot be won except by descending to the level at which the public consciousness exists (in so far as it ever exists in Afghanistan) and playing the game on those terms ... which is against our hopes and dreams of wrenching these peoples from their medieval ways and into our none-too-savory methods of governing villages and towns and cities.

The President may be right that these matters were "on the table" in plain view before. Now, though, we have a more "candid" and less manipulated view, and we really need to take it to heart. July 2011 is not soon enough to begin making some moves on that chess board that will rock Pakistan's world. The Afghans will cave to the Taliban, of course, and we will have to violate their territorial integrity from time to time to chase down terrorists, but they should be given to understand that we no longer hold out ANY hope for bringing them into the modern world. They will have to do that for themselves. Meanwhile, since we are no longer trying to find an economy there, we will bomb the opium fields into kingdom come, knowing of course that they will grow it again. Meanwhile we will let Mr. Karzai know that his life is not worth another American dollar, so he might as well kiss up to the Taliban sooner than later ... so we have a bald excuse for dealing him out of the game.

Enough of war. Our "reluctant empire" no longer serves our people ... only our corporations ... so we must begin anew. In November we will.

JB

3/16/10

There is a debate (perhaps it is a discussion) going right now with Dr. Paul Krugman at one pole of the opinion about China and her government's monetary policies, the objectives of which are often said to be "obvious," but are not really necessarily clear.

The "discussion" includes the following recent publications by Dr. Krugman in the New York Times:

• "Taking on China"
• "Curveball
  
• and "Capital Export, Elasticity Pessimism, and the Renminbi (Wonkish)"

The 1904 Mackinder Thesis is not entirely irrelevant here. Although China historically within itself has practiced a version of a "heartland" strategy of east Asian imperial hegemony—the Middle Kingdom and the Five Peoples—the point goes deeper than the movement of national borders. It goes to the almost imponderable significance of population numbers and poverty. In a nutshell, the history of the Han in China has been (except for one maritime foray to the east coast of Africa) the history of an inward focused people, content (if not perforce compelled) to focus on what is certainly the world's largest population with all that implies and connotes.

Which brings us to the considerations that Krugman and most of his commenters leave out—the motivations of the Chinese Communist government, leaving aside for the moment the question of whether "communist/ism" is at all germane to the discussion. Why does China pursue a monetary policy that it does (see Krugman's description of it)? The answer is that China earnestly wishes to modernize and to bring its people up out of what Marx termed "the idiocy of rural life." The Chinese people want this, of course, in terms they can stomach, namely, with due respect to useful traditions and cultural values. The methodology is essentially transparent to the average Chinese citizen, but competitive pressures and advanced quality controls have an impact, as do Google and other forces that work against population control.

The lessons of the Maoist period are not lost on Chinese. The "great leap forward" was not successful. The "cultural revolution" created a backlash. The last twenty years of flirting with capitalism, on the other hand, have produced unparalleled wealth and brought wealth down to the level where a legitimate middle class now exists, not "compradores" and their retinues, but educated professionals and people with a stake in continued socio-economic progress. So, in general and overwhelmingly China can be seen as seeking a better life for its people.

Krugman sees beyond this and into Hari Seldon's book that China in doing what it wants for its own people becomes a force to be reckoned with internationally. There is no gainsaying this perception, except that China really has no significant experience beyond its own cultural bailiwick. Yes, there is Chinese nationalism which can be whipped up almost instantly by a cynical government, but all always it tends to focus inwardly.

Krugman and others are savvy. They know the cultural history and they know the typical responses of North Americans and Europeans to a rival. The essays and blogs Krugman has written recently may be seen, therefore, as a heads-up to the West that an economic rival is playing its necessary game to the detriment of western recovery from the Great Recession. I am not convinced China's motives are hostile, but I am convinced that the Chinese government knows it is pinching our nose and hard!

Krugman knows that incidents like this do not produce comity. We do not easily forget, in this case, that China did not help the rest of the world recover, despite the fact that the rest of the world has been the consumer that China absolutely required to get this bootstrapping operation moving. The ethical or moral imbalance is obvious when it is our nose being pinched. Not so much when it is theirs, perhaps. Krugman is to be commended and applauded for bringing this up.

JB

2/7/10

You will search high and low for news of Greece and her economic problems, her political problems, the precipice over which the Greeks stare in horror at this very moment. The press in the United States is oblivious. No, not oblivious, "managed."

Here is what is happening in a nutshell. Greece has piled up a national debt equal to that of Germany, but without the productive capacity to resolve that debt within the frame of financial obligations. The result is that Greece was poised on the brink of defaulting to its European neighbors, who, when they got wind of the immediacy of the situation began to act like market managers always do—irrationally. Immediately, Portugal, Spain, and Italy began to survey their own situations and their financial connections to Greece. All at once, the horrid truth emerges that these countries, too, are very fragile and closer to the brink than generally reported, even in Europe.

Here is a reasonably good set of articles from the Guardian in the UK about Greece and her problems.

My colleague in Montreal, whose access to information and whose keen eye sees the situation for what it is, reported these matters to me yesterday and I was appalled ... primarily at the domestic U.S. press's obliviousness and collusion with Wall Street to keep this "greatest financial crisis in Europe since the meltdown two years ago" out of the imaginations and thoughts of snowbound Americans. Thank you, "Justina!"

Yes, the Euro is in danger, and yes, the problem affects the almighty dollar as well. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is trying to get involved, but the folks in Brussels, Belgium, the seat of the EU leadership has asked IMF to play a smaller role than IMF wants. So, the international repercussions will extend outward like low waves in deep water, but treatening tsunami when reaching the shallower waters of individual nations.

As "Justina" says, keep an eye on the Greece situation. There may be portents for the future here that threaten contemporary politics far more than Sarah Palin and her teapot revolution talk down in the bowels of Tennessee.

JB

2/1/10

China is an ancient place, both more and less than a country or nation, in the sense of being more than a "birthplace." It is a "civilization" like Russia, human, eclectic, yet fundamentally unique. The Chinese themselves are not all the same, of course, the most important ethnicity is the Han, whose territorial history goes back to the dim recesses of written history. There are four other major groups: the Manchu, the Mongolians, the Tibetans, and a mixed assortment of Muslim peoples called the Hui, including Uighurs, Kazakhs, and several others. Ethologists believe there are about sixty distinct ethnicities within the borders of China currently. In this sense, China is ... and has been for millennia ... an empire.

If you have Chinese associates or friends, you will know what I mean when I say that there is a distinct element of the Chinese personality that is shared, if not completely universally, then very widely among the Han. It is tough to put your finger on it, but if I had to put a one-word "western" label on it, it would the word "pragmatic." Quickly I would add the idea of "coldly pragmatic," leaving myself room to move towards "warmth." I have experienced both the cold and the warm, but would say that just from my own experience that, like Texans, the Han Chinese have a lore about themselves, a mythos, a marrow feel that transcends humility, dwells in an impoverished sort of hubris, and manifests itself, often crudely, as a long-suffering-but-recently-relieved humiliation for which some kind of redress is "obviously" appropriate and forthcoming. This is all fumbling around with delicate concepts, of course, but my experience derives from both males and females, older and younger, super-ordinate, collegial, neighbor, lover, and teacher. These Chinese were important in my life.

Each of these people were evoked as I read in the Sunday edition of the Washington Post about the noticable shift in the public attitudes expressed by the leaders of the People's Republic of China. The article is at a minimum a very interesting public notice given by the Post in what appears to be a deteriorating discourse between China and the rest of the world, particularly the Atlantic world. Further along that line of thought, the feeling is definitely of a foreboding. Having written recently about the Google assertion of principles and having received an earful from one Chinese-American and from a presumably Euro Sinophile, I am a little chastened to bring this up, but I will.

China recently reiterated the Ripley homily of Chinese marching four abreast forever past any point you might care to mention. They are seemingly endless, and their display at the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremonies made that point with some beauty and some pomp and quite a bit of lugubrious overkill ... that sort of "okay, now we're on our feet get the f**k off our lawn" type of attitude. The endlessness of China's population is an illusion, of course, but it is within the Chinese civilization a dominant illusion, very likely to frame and mold the Chinese government's policies on many things internally and in foreign affairs.

Internally, the neo-capitalists in the Chinese government are beginning to understand the huge power of people numbers when attached to money. Politically, they have always understood that the population can ... and if necessary should/could/would ... sustain grievous losses that would devastate smaller nations ... as the loss of a generation of young men did to post-WWI France. So, you can add "stoic" to the "pragmatic."

Externally, China believes that the rest of the world understands China's immensity and is or should be cowed by it. This is a big, very big mistake on their part, over which they must get, the sooner the better.

I do not mean to suggest that China is not important in terrestrial affairs. Clearly any nation that large, with the obvious pride and industry and enterprise, is going to be consequent. And just as obviously the historical chip on their shoulder from the 19th c. depredations, the Opium Wars, the utter humiliations is something to take into consideration. But ... China is responsible for itself. A civilization twice or three times older than Europe has to recognize that China's woes are mostly of their own making. The Ch'ing (Manchu) Dynasty fell apart, sold out, and at no point was worthy of the task before it ... organizing and nurturing the better spirits of Chinese peoples.

And so, yes, we will get off your lawn, China, but we are not going to kiss your ring or pay you reparations or even apologize for events begun 200 years ago and long since forgotten by 95% of the remaining world's people. In other words: get over yourselves and join the community of nations as the proud, and resilient people you are. Get rid of the chip!

JB

1/25/10

The internet has been around since the 1970's, but certainly for most of us only since about 1990 when the WorldWideWeb quickly supplanted Gopher. I have been online since the last moments of Gopher and the first of the Web, and it has truly been a fantastic journey, a breathtaking revelation, and (even) an excellent lesson in human nature. If there is one point that the internet has made, it is that human beings are human. They have biological and personal urges and these express themselves quickly ... even on the internet.

Society through its various means of exerting controls over our appetites has been virtually (no pun intended) helpless as pornography and politics rapidly spread out across the cyberscape of the internet. Parents have been justifiably cautious (or horrified) about letting their children have unfettered access to the web because of the pornography ... and rightly so, for graphic displays of bestiality and subjugation of human beings for sexual purposes are all too available. But politics is a different matter. Politics is by definition public and argumentative and emotional, with emphasis on public and free.

I am incredibly proud of Google for standing up to the leaders of the People's Republic of China on this count. They have given a cold clear shot of courage and honor to our internet culture. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's unapologetic criticism of China is equally important, for it takes a baton and runs with it in areas that Sergei Brin and Larry Page cannot go. She rose in my estimation by hundreds of points, for coddling China has become an industry around the globe.

China is a giant, commercially, militarily, and politically. Its weight is felt wherever the Chinese government wants it felt. They are not altogether subtle about it either. The Chinese response to Clinton was predictable and clearly a very sore point within the ruling clique there. But, they are on the wrong side of history on this one. Confusing politics with pornography may seem like an apt analogy to people who cannot abide criticism, but as dirty as politics gets sometimes, it is not pornography and, instead, it is exactly the sort of thing that human beings need to understand.

China is not a communist country in any Marxian definition of the term. Their "flirtation" with capitalism to jump over the historic impediments to progress has long since become a way of life. China is a command economy with much of the means of production (or elements thereof) in government hands ... but not in the public trust or a commons! China is simply a dictatorship, a frightening and frightened dictatorship at the same time. It is no wonder that the leadership is afraid of criticism and variant political ideas. No dictatorship can long stand when freedom of speech and conscience are wide-spread.

Google and Clinton have made and then turned an important corner in the maturation of our global civilization. Both are to be commended, and as always is the case, every man and woman on the planet must see that they have an obligation to let China's people know that they are welcome into the community of humanity ... and that China's leaders are not.

JB

1/18/10

By now everyone with an eye for cybernews has read something about the Chinese attack on Google and Google's response. Several have noticed that Washington has made no comment, since the Chinese foray into American internet company core intellectual property comes at a time when we have delicate negotiations going with the Chinese government on a wide range of things, including Global Warming and monetary policy. But the issue goes far deeper than any quick list like that. China tries to pretend that there is a difference between hackers in China and the Chinese government all the while, however, maintaining control over everything that breathes in that country. You can have it one way or the other, but not both.

Meanwhile another evolutionary process is underway. While China slowly sheds the primitive agrarian communism of Mao, finding it convenient to steal what they can to catch up (and their window for catching up in this technological environment is closing inexorably), back in the U.S.A. Microsoft, The Giant, the gargantuan, showing significant signs of being related to the dinosaurs, is strapped to its own unhappy past and perhaps fatally. The fact is that Internet Explorer, still used by 65% of all internetizens for browsing the web, is a classic case of "ontology recapitulating philogeny," namely, that to ease the transitions between stages of evolution of their Windows operating system and their browser, Microsoft has chosen the path that incorporates into each stage mortal flaws from father to son. It seemed like a good and reasonable choice at the time, given that the physical environment of computing was also changing so rapidly, but the flaws accumulate like genetic drift, and today we have a rival exploiting those flaws to hopefully leapfrog into the present.

Joe Wilcox, a veteran reporter on these issues, says that you should at last dump MSIE at once. Read his article. It is not dense with jargon. The simple fact is that MSIE is like those "loose lips that sunk ships" during WWII. It is a constant menace to the rest of us. Yes, of course, we know you are not a target, but you who continue with MSIE are now providing aid and comfort by having a computer they can use to batter at the door. Put another way, are you absolutely positive that you have done everything reasonable to prevent your computer from being taken over by hostiles and being used to mount denial of service attacks on friendlies? Of course you are not. If the German government recommends to an entire nation that they get off MSIE, listen!

If you doubt that Google's experience was significant, do not doubt that Google's response will be. Denying China access to our hard-won expertise is part of a global struggle for supremacy. Right now, in the throes of the Great Recession, the U.S. position in the world financial and monetary sectors is as perilous as it ever has been among the current player nations. The stakes could not be higher. China has its masses, as it proudly and somewhat ominously displayed at the beginning of the Olympics; it believes in itself and in the social and industrial momentum it can create using capitalist tools for non-democratic ends.

In other words, this is a serious and important situation in which, for a change, you can make a difference. Download Google Chrome (I am currently using it) or Firefox 3.5 (with 3.6 coming soon) or Opera (the European favorite because it has a small footprint that fits aging home machines nicely). The hardest part of the transition from one browser to another is bookmarks and the newer, better, faster, browsers make even this easy. Do it!

JB

11/20/09

Lorelei Kelly wrote in Huffington Post Thursday about a strategy of "commitment" to Afghanistan. You should read this, because it is either the most laughable recent arrangement of words on screen or a very subtle and psychologically astute plea for immediate withdrawal from that festering sore of west Asia.

Lorelei states her opening premise that having a strategy that incorporates other than military options is good. Then she counts the ways that not having a military strategy are bad ...

The consequences of a complete withdrawal would leave a violent, chaotic hole in the middle of a tense neighborhood. The US would deal a potential death blow to the world's premier military alliance (NATO) and crackpot messiahs across the globe will claim credit. Troops need to be in the mix. Most Afghans want us there. They overwhelmingly dislike the Taliban. Girls attending school has risen to 44% since we've been present. Far more Afghans have access to basic health care. We need to start seeing these benchmarks as part of a broader set of objectives -- all thus far achieved with the help of American troops.

Afghanistan is not Iraq. Obama is not Bush. We are not the Soviets. And this is not Vietnam. Historical analogies must be very carefully considered.

I don't know why Lorelei thinks NATO would be dealt a death blow by a coordinated but rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan. Perhaps she thinks that European governments have themselves over a public relations barrel on that subject. First, there is no evidence that any NATO force, including ours, is so committed to military ops in Afghanistan that not being committed would ring the death knell of a willingness to remain in NATO for some future necessity ... which is what Afghanistan is not. Second, "crackpot messiahs" are everywhere, Alaska, Virginia Beach, west Asia, the Arabian peninsula, the horn of Africa, everywhere. What they say is their business. Certainly we cannot predicate U.S. national policy on the angst of crackpots taking pot shots at us!

Lorelei says that troops must be in the "mix," by which she means a multi-pronged presence, that is, a continuation of military ops while we undertake to build a modern nation out of miscellaneous 14th century TinkerToy ® pieces. The assumption that Afghanistan is culturally or intellectually or spiritually ready to join the 21st century is at best problematic and on average utopian and without foundation in discernible evidence.

Afghans want us there? Who says they do? The only female member of the Afghan legislature is here in the U.S. right now telling us quite the opposite. Polls taken by Europeans and U.S. agencies report the opposite as well. The U.S. presence provides only temporary security to Afghans paid for at the cost of mayhem when we move along to the next village and the warlords and Taliban seep in behind us. And, you did notice that a female says this, a person with the most to lose if the Taliban take over the country again. No, Afghans generally do not want us or the Russians or any other do-gooder forces there stirring up the cultural demons that have kept Afghanistan retarded all these centuries.

Yes, historical analogies should be considered carefully, but doing the same thing again and again hoping that eventually you will have success instead of repeated failure is insanity.

George Will, of all people, put it quite directly. If President Obama decides to augment the troops and continue military operations in Afghanistan, he will have opted for a second term of office with the price being hundreds of billions of dollars and innumerable American, allied, and Afghan lives. It is not worth it.

JB

11/18/09

Tuesday evening on MSNBC it was reported that New Zealand has the least corrupt government in the world and Somalia the most. With folks like Wm. Jefferson, now starting his thirteen years in prison and the former governor of Illinois headed that way by all accounts, the U.S. comes in 19th in the world. Afghanistan ranks (word choice deliberate) next to the worst. Afghanistan, remember, is the place where the Taliban represents order and discipline. If you also like Sharia law, 9th century politics, misogyny gone over the top, and the rule of blood, Afghanistan is the place for you.

The overwhelming question is whether Afghanistan is the place for us. The President will soon be making a decision on whether to believe his generals that the mere infusion of 40,000 troops will bring order and stability to this trouble land. NATO announced Tuesday that it will be supplying more troops to stand alongside the Americans, not tens of thousands of troops, mind you. Just drops in the bucket, different languages (often) to make coordination difficult, different ethos to make discipline difficult, different war aims ... because we really do not have any.

The problem with Afghanistan is that it really is not a country in the modern sense. It is more like a confederation of places and peoples whose broad understanding is that they can coexist and occasionally make a profit from opium or perform a "good work" in the eyes of Allah and basically live out their lives as a pre-modern society without too much interference because their country is bereft of natural resources, impossibly mountainous in places, hot, dry, formidable.

How President Obama is going to make a decision on this has been speculated to death. Clearly two items loom foremost in the imaginations of policy makers these days. Afghanistan under the Taliban will become a safe haven and even a spawning ground for international terrorist, like Osama bin Ladin, who very well may still be in Afghanistan in some cave near Tora Bora. The second item is neighboring Pakistan with its nuclear arsenal, with its weak central government, with traitors in every closet, with adventurers around every corner, with its own Taliban. Pakistan is enough to scare the hell out of anyone, not excluding President Obama.

But, even with the two clear problems posed in the region, Afghanistan itself is unlikely be tractible to outside influence, especially clumsy, civilian-killing military like ours and NATO's. Perhaps the most dismal situation is the corruption and the mind-set among Afghans that this is more or less normal. Read Chatterjee's essay and then ask yourself if you would choose to spend a couple thousand U.S. lives every five years for the next twenty to thirty years trying to create a modern Afghanistan. I think you will agree with me that we just do not have the military, civilian, or any other kind of resolve to do it. We should just get out.

11 April 22

"Globalization Is Over ..."
~900 words

David Brooks's latest opinion essy in the New York Times is a doozy. I came this close to not mentioning it at all. I think, though, that people who read my essays occasionally should know that this sort of well-meant but apocalyptic writing is also going on. "Globalization Is Over. The Global Culture Wars Have Begun."

It is a long essay and full of rational thinking and seasoned observations, but glaring omissions and the age old problem of "and it is all happening as I stand here witness to it all"-ism.

I knew that thumotic would appear again somewhere, and David does not disappoint, although he spells it "thymotic," (ignoring that the Y-shaped letter in Greek is upsilon, pronounced "oo" and properly transliterated as "u"). Again, it means "something related to passion(s)."

I can say and I am confident to say that "globalism" and "globalization" and the "internet" and "the world economy" and that the idea of "liberty" rooted inside the word "liberal," as in "western liberalism" are not over. It is helpful, I think, to notice that "globalization" did not begin sometime after WWII, but began at the end of the 15th century with the first "voyages of discovery" and followed by the establishment of extractive plundering of Mezo-American and Andean American indiginous civilizations, followed by sporadic, then massive colonization (augmented by massive slavery) in the New World, and commercial empires established by the Dutch, British, and to lesser degrees Portugal and Spain and France. And every bit of this had its own David Brookses wondering what was happening to the status quo.

Liberty in the US is sometimes confused by voices ringing-out democracy and ringing-in dictators and autocrats seeming to, perhaps really are, foretelling a doom we thought could never happen. I am absolutely sure that History is a dialectic process. Thesis evokes and then meets antithesis and produces (some with smoke, mirrors, or explosions, wars, death, pandemics, and furor) a synthesis. Easy to write, but not easy to live through. And, lest my tone be misconceived as "mocking," the times we are in are deadly serious and not to be taken for granted that your rear end will come through unscathed.

Anti-Americanism is easy to do. Everyone does it. The US is a big target, by population, the 3rd largest country in the world, the overwhelmingly richest—worth $700,000 per capita (although not distributed that way). Americans are nearly inured to their wealth and to anti-Americanism, so those are the first mistakes. Pay attention and compare anti-Americanism to the flows of US immigration. Believe both. Take India for example: Narendra Modi is a pragmatic PM of what will in a short few years be the most populous country in the world—with nothing like $700,000 per capita wealth. He does anti-Americanism when it suits him. So do all the rest, when it suits them, some more politely, some not. President Putin literally and honestly hates America. His whole miserable life was dedicated to the diminishment and destruction of the US, and he is, in addition, excruciatingly angry that his Russia cannot possibly catch up to the US standards of living.

So, the problem with 18th century US declarations of constitutional government encouraging the "rule of law" is that over the past six or so years we have discovered that the "rule of law" here works well only when certain very important "informal rules of civilized behavior"—manners, politeness, civility, honesty—are observed. And—guess what!—as the world globalizes we discover that the informal rules, the norms, in each of the civilizations the global economy touches really differ, sometimes substantially. That means what David Brooks is railing about is the implicit rejection of the American kind of constitutional democracy, predicated on informal rules like civility. It is like we failed to tell them that they need a stiff upper lip, thick skin, courtesy, and the ability to tell the truth in order to successfully implement a constitutional government. In fact it is very difficult to tell someone this to their face. Anyway, some of them think it too far to go, and vaguely or pointedly "colonial" to also specify the points of civility necessary to its operation. Some of those cultures are millennia older than the one in the US. Some are but decades old.

But wait! Even more embarrassingly, the so-called Great American Experiment in multi-cultural democracy is itself coming apart at the seams because those very same informal rules are not sufficiently explicit and definitive and unequivocal in a society where there once was an ethno-European majority social order that now no longer exists. Culture wars you hear about on television or read about in Brooks are epiphenomena of the struggle to re-equilibrate norms and to find a reasonable homeo-statis of informal rules. No Congress has found the courage to write down these informal rules or go beyond the concept of taking a solemn oath, the taking of which is now culturally irrelevant.

Personally, I think that North America and Europe can accomplish this reconstitution of integrity and model the process for the rest of the world, accepting the genuine humility necessary to being a model. Finally, nothing will ever be final.

JB

(Globalism)

30 March 22

Sovereignty and Wishful Thinking
~1400 words, including UN Charter bits

On Monday, March 28th, Ali Velshi on MSNBC originating from Lviv, Ukraine, asked Julia Ioffe, a principal at Puck (news service), a question about why President Putin of Russia thought he could invade Ukraine with the purpose of replacing the government with one more suited to his idea of a non-threatening neighbor state. Her straightforward answer was that from Putin's (and many others') point of view the US had been doing that in Afghanistan, Iraq, Chili, Iran, Panama, Dominican Republic for many, many years. She omitted saying anything about the occasional multi-lateralality of US-led actions, clearly the case in Iraq and Afghanistan, and she offered no consolation that the US, whether acting alone or in concert with other democracies, was doing a good thing for these countries. Her statement came in the very last seconds of Velshi's hour of news, so there was no discussion or elaboration of the subject. It does need both. (She may have been a little bit put off that her commentary was sought only at the very end of the show. I say this because she already has had a bad experience with another MSNBC news host.)

I went to the Charter to see if Sovereignty was defined and, if so, any conditions or limitations on it were recognized by the UN.

Article 1

“The Purposes of the United Nations are:

1. To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace;

2. To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;

3. To achieve international cooperation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and

4. To be a center for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.”

noun

supreme power or authority.
"how can we hope to wrest sovereignty away from the oligarchy and back to the people?"
Similar: jurisdiction, supremacy, dominion, power, ascendancy, suzerainty, tyranny, hegemony, domination, etc.

the authority of a state to govern itself or another state.
"national sovereignty"
Similar: autonomy, independence, self-government, self-rule, home rule, ..., self-determination, etc.

a self-governing state.

The reason I have gone to all this trouble over the word "sovereignty" is because of the statement made in my previous essay about what to do about Putin ... or why not, and, if we come to the totally reasonable conclusion that we can and must, under what semblance of international "law," or if that proves (as I am sure it must) to be an impossible thicket of medieval and modern notions about governing the lands and seas of the planet, under what kind of pretext?

I think it fairly quickly reduces to the sort of multi-lateralism that girded the consciences of those armies that were pitted against Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan, namely, the formal agreement that the situation was clearly intolerable here and now, and as a model for the future, anywhere on the planet.

Invading Russia itself to achieve regime change is probably not in President Zelenskiy's plans or President Biden's or anyones' in NATO. But, as a moral matter, one that not only seeps into our imaginations daily, but actually floods the post-Putin's War terrain of world affairs, the issue of a war criminal thug like Putin ruling the largest country on earth is only tolerable under the reasonable expectation that in a reasonably short time he and his henchmen will be overthrown. But not just overthrown, it is necessary that Russia finally, at long last, is put on a path toward functioning democracy.

Well, it is briefly tolerable, if one believes that when the Russian people find out what Putin has actually done, they will rise up against him and the henchmen around him. Those who fled Russia just before and during the first weeks of the war, those who refused to succumb to Putin's more encompassing and restrictive dictatorship as the war approached and was begun, are the tinder for the necessary revolution in Russia, but as you can see, timing is very important. The bulk of the population must have time to absorb the awful news of what Putin has done in their name under the cover of mammoth lies. The prospects for this may now be fair to good, but certainly not yet excellent. The most important thing is for NATO and, particularly, the nuclear nations within it, to not utter a sigh of relief when the war ends, but rather keep up the pressure on domestic and international audiences to hold Putin and the henchmen to account. This may be the hardest part for democracies.

This finally brings us to "wishful thinking." The term was used Tuesday by an NBC correspondent in Moscow, I believe, in the context of where the Russian people really are in their hearts and heads concerning Putin. The estimates range from 50% to 80% of Russians in Russia are supportive of Putin and his "special operation in Ukraine." I am trying to have no illusions about how fast this estimate will change to 20% to 25%, particularly in the likely circumstances of the Putin's Ukraine War not having a clear-cut end point, but rather endless niggling about borders in the Donbas and Luhansk regions in the east, and what size the Ukraine military should be. All of that is what the democracies must contend with as their domestic issues boil and cool and boil again. It will be international Cold War for quite a while, time measured in years, I fear. I think we might have the adequate attention spans finally.

JB

(Globalism)

5/4/11

Is Syria the Keystone State in the Middle East?

The Assad family rules Syria. Syria is, like most of the middle eastern countries a pastiche of various ethnicities and religious sects, dominated by Sunni Muslims, but ruled by Shiites. Syria has been the haven for literally hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who fled their own country over the past eight years. Syria abutts Turkey on the north, Iraq on the east, and Lebanon and Jordon and the Golan Heights now occupied by Israel on the south. Syria very well may be the keystone state in the region from the point of view of centrality, although Israel itself may claim that role politically, the proverbial burr under the Arab saddle.

It is widely assumed that the Shiite Assads are colluding with the Shiite Iranians to keep the Palestinian problem festering. Moreover, it assumed and probably documented that the arms arriving in Gaza and the Palestinian territories originate in or are transshipped through Syria. So, it is quite easy to understand that Israel and the United States have, on the face of it, no great love or respect for Syria, and quite the opposite. Funds for Fatah, Hamas and for Hezbollah come from Syria, presumed to have been "laundered" there from Iran. It is reported today by CNN that Fatah and Hamas have reached an accord that promises to put Israel into an unpleasant bargaining position, with Egypt now clearly leaning out of its former Mubarak-induced neutrality toward a unified stance on the key issues of Palestine.

To put it mildly, the expected disruption of the status quo by the so-called Arab Spring movements, including that in Syria, is a cat well out of the bag. Given that, this article from the Washington Post, a paper that usually represents the interests of the American military-industrial complex and the AIPAC, suggesting regional stability is at stake, is all the more perplexing. The Post cannot really want to continue this multiply duplicitous dance with the Assads, knows that the game being played by Israel is all but foreclosed, and that an opportunity has been given to the U.S. to correct its foreign policy all across the Arab world, so why this article?

Newspapers like the Post and the Times are not just for their subscribers. The editors collude with government officials to "leak" and to actually leak facts and points of view for foreign consumption. Could this Syria article be such a piece of that kind of stagecraft, designed to head-fake Assad? We are never sure, and that is why this role of viewpoint provider is so difficult to pin down. It is unlike this newspaper to run from an arms sale or a "police action." In today's edition the editors of the Post all but call for the assassination of Gaddafi in Libya, which may also be stagecraft, but clearly will find resonance across the planet. I think that the Post article is meant to be the weakest possible concession to the vivid fact that removal of Assad will cause some upheaval and destabilize the region for a while. But, consider the possibilities: defunding and no longer arming the three thorns in Israel's side would be a good outcome, if some other force moved Israel to understand the pivotal situation for what it is.

JB

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3/23/11

We have been there before. Things are not much improved over the two hundred years since we visited the Barbary Coast. Thomas Friedman in the New York Times today, thinks he has if not the answer, then the more accurate description of things in Libya and other countries now experiencing their own outrage at being lost in one of the slow eddies of civilization without progress. Friedman is probably mostly right about the "Tribes with Flags" and probably should be taken as partly right, since none of these countries is completely one way or the other. None completely "tribal" and none completely modern.

I remarked to my good friend in NYC who pointed this article out to me (since I do not often read Friedman's column in my daily foraging for "newstrition,") that Friedman does not use the word "Islam" in his article, not even once. I double checked this just now to make sure. The concept "Islam" may be there, but Friedman does not attribute to the religion any causal relationship to the "division" between these two types of countries. I think this is a mistake. I think that Islam is essentially a patriarchal religion and that it is easily used to bolster a patriarchal situation such as you might find in tribal organizations. We know that Turkey has been fairly clear on this issue from the moment Mustafa Kemal Ataturk burst on the scene in the post-WWI era.

I think the big lesson for Americans from Friedman's article is that we need to be a lot clearer about our own assumptions, but not afraid to act on the behalf of human beings subjugated by tyrants like Hosni Mubarak or Muammar Qaddhafi.

This brings up a second thought, expressed by Maureen Dowd on the same page of the Times as Friedman's article. Maureen is transfixed in her own special way by the role of women in our government in the development of the policy that finally got us onto the right side of this situation, albeit late and unconscionably disorganized. Maureen exaggerates the point to make it, and I agree that the men sure looked like sissies in this situation, clearly multi-tasking more ideas than their brains could actually deal with, and ending up in a political paralysis that "for safety sake" may have cost us the good-will and moral position that this whole event is about.

Notwithstanding the moral imperative that propelled me and the ladies toward intervention, there remains the question of why Barack Obama did not see the route on this when the Tunisians of Friedman's "real country" category rose up and threw off their old chains? The situation developed sufficiently slowly that any good national security team should have been all over it and with options prepared.

I need to suggest that options probably were prepared, but that at the point where the positive and negative institutional valences of the Intelligence, State, and Defense were most apparent, the White House and the President sitting there did not metabolize the intelligence or the options into broad-scale national policy alternatives and present them to Congress, as Senators Webb and Lugar have rightly pointed out. The outcome of asking Congress would have put the American people into the catbird seat, and I am confident that the moral issue and the Real Politik of the Libyan situation would have been the backbone of our new foreign policy. But it was not. Obama has expressed his moral indignation, but he has not controlled the press on this point, and the reports of his hestitancy are at least as vivid as his "outrage."

I criticized President Obama a few days ago about this, and I feel just a strongly today that he is dangerously inept. Whether the problem is his own unwillingness to commit to a course of action or that his close advisors are buffaloed by the welter of information that comes their ways is still something of a mystery to me. In the end, though, he is responsible for taking his own counsel or theirs.

JB

3/19/11

I am sick of this President and his feckless indecision. While Muammar Qadaffi murders his own people this shade of a president sits and mulls over the politics of intervention. Are you nuts! The Libyan people have cried for help! If they were drowning would you ask the Germans if they wanted to get wet? What! You would?! Don't you have a thought of your own? Is Hillary Clinton president or you? Your leadership is wanting, Barack! You are pathetic!

There comes a time in the course of human events when a sea of troubles boils and the people boil. There is nothing pretty about it. You have a megalomanic monster in a place of power, a kleptocrat, a dictator, a person whose wilingness to do harm frightens most men and women and they shy away. This is not a person who was elected. This is a person without human feelings whose will to power exceeds by a thousandfold any remote chance of his understanding the meaning of his actions. He is human only in shape. He is a pathological criminal, and he must be removed ... ... obliterated!

You, Barack Obama, are unworthy of your office. Yes, the decision to intervene is difficult and there are points on either side about the consequences of American action against Qadaffi and his mercenary troops whose loyalty is to their blood money, and who will run at the site of American arms plowing through their evil ranks. Yes, Barack Obama, you failed this test, like so many before. You had months to figure this out before the Libyans had built up their courage. You failed to direct and preside.

It doesn't matter that Angela Merkel has a smart answer for the question. The question is a moral one, not a German one! The question is whether when asked for help by a vox populi, we will. You did not, and now we have to face Gadhafi over the graves of his people. You sicken me, Obama! You are useless and you too will be replaced!

JB

3/14/11

If you want to begin to understand the destruction that the tsunami wreaked, look at these before and after satellite pictures from the New York Times. Be sure to use the blue slider in the middle of the photographs to see what has been lost.

The latest word on nuclear power plants is very dire, with three reactors in the process of melting down their fuel rods. Pay particular attention to the reports on these reactors, because the Japanese and the U.S. governments will begin attempts to avert panic. This situation is out of control and ... well ... devil take the hindmost. Here is how the panic-stemming reportage begins:

So far, Japanese officials have said the melting of the nuclear cores in the two plants is assumed to be “partial,” and the amount of radioactivity measured outside the plants, though twice the level Japan considers safe, has been relatively modest. [WTF does "modest" mean?]

But Pentagon officials reported Sunday that helicopters flying 60 miles from the plant picked up small amounts of radioactive particulates — still being analyzed, but presumed to include cesium-137 and iodine-121 — suggesting widening environmental contamination.

JB

3/12/11

I don't know what to call today's little essay. I have just watched videos of the earthquake and tsunami and nuclear power plant disasters in Japan. This is a dire situation that will draw attention away from Libya and Wisconsin, both dire situations of their own. Wisconsin is more abstract than the civil war in Libya and the horrible destruction and peril in Japan. I imagine there are people in the United States who feel the NFL lockout and potential for no football in 2011-12 is pretty dire, too, but Wisconsin and NFL at their bases are both about how to be a democratic country, not just about greed!

In Wisconsin the GOP has declared war on democracy, Democrats, working people, all under the guise of their mistaken partisan view of how government and economy both work. The NFL situation is a study in exploitation of the work of others, of greed converging from all directions on a well-tended pot of gold, and also about the rule of law. I care that the law is followed, but the rest of it is pure rubbish.

Japan will survive this horror, and the world will pause to reconsider the efficacy of nuclear power generation on an unstable planet. We will add an iconic word to our vocabularies and place it next to Chernobyl in long list of epic horrors, but we do not know that word yet for there are five nuclear reactors in peril.

So, finally, I get to express my chagrin about President Obama and Libya. The Washington Post this winter Saturday says that Obama is not so sure we should get into the civil war in Libya. I can see that as Commander-in-Chief, already bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan with Pakistan threatening to topple given just the wrong combination of events, Obama would be reluctant to divert even more of our resources to "somebody else's" fight. The Post, channeling some archaic nostrum about bearing responsibility for a person whose life you save, includes this bit of editorial bulloney in their account

Neil Hicks, the international policy director for Human Rights First, said the Obama administration has been careful, as a result, not to directly encourage Libya's rebels.

"They've promised very little, so I think the rebels should count on very little from the United States," Hicks said.

But Hicks and others say it is important that Gaddafi be forced from power, although how to do so remains the challenge.

"If he stays, his potential to destabilize what has happened in Tunisia and Egypt is great, and he will continue to give support to rulers who are the worst of the worst," Hicks said. "But if the United States becomes deeply implicated in the process of overthrowing Gaddafi, then it also bears responsibility for what becomes of Libya in the aftermath." (emphasis added)

The decision to quote Mr. Hicks does not reflect the opinion of everyone I know, nor of the vast majority of Americans as I read the sentiment expressed in the rest of the media. Clearly, Obama holds this view, and has forgotten that the French aided the Americans in their fight against Britain for independence.

Where is that spirit these days! I do not recall the French interfering in the development of our new nation. Well, they did sell us the Louisiana Territory, I recall!

There is no excuse for expressing your indignation over the murderous activities of Moammar Qaddafi, Mr. Obama, and then retreating to the comfort of platitudes and cost-value analyses. We need to have a good record with all the peoples of north Africa and within Islam. Standing by while atrocities are committed by a megalomanic dictator is exactly the wrong posture. We need to get in an make sure that Qaddafi fulfills his recent statement .. to the last drop of his blood!

JB

3/10/11

The Libyans, I should say the New Libyans, are getting hit hard by the well-funded armed forces "loyal" to Moamar el-Qaddafi, the mafiose tribesman who has run this poor country into the ground over the past forty years. Some of the voices from Libya (and elsewhere) tell the United States to go to hell and stay away from the Libyan revolution. Other voices, also from Libya and elsewhere, tell us we have a moral responsibility to intervene, since we (and many others) supported Qaddafi at times in the past.

Personally, I think our moral position is very problematic. We have warped our foreign policy in the Islamic countries for their petroleum and for our client Israel. But, even above that, we have reflexively chosen the path of supporting stability over moral imperatives. We have stood by passively as thousands upon thousands of human beings were slaughtered in internecine fratricide. We have sold arms to everyone and, why the press is surprised by the result is no longer amusing. The press in the United States is dominated and fundamentally controlled by corporate interests and corporatist "ethos," which is to say that corporations of whatever stripe are considered to be a progressive evolutionary step beyond mere individual home sapiens sapiens. The press is silent as business operates beyond and against the moral fiber of the public from which they sprang.

It might be that the United States must heed the warnings of serious members of the New Libyan rebellion that the presence of American forces would be counter-productive. What exactly to do they mean by this, though? Is the American reputation so bad that Arabs and Berbers in Libya cannot forget the basic guilt of American toleration of Qaddafi? What about Libyan toleration of Qaddafi? Is there not a balance of guilt?

Are the New Libyans afraid America will come in and argue for cheap petroleum? Are New Libyans so weak as to succumb to these probable business pressures? Probably. Qaddafi has "hollowed out" most institutions and organizations in Libya that would have mounted a possible threat to his dictatorship. So, Libya now finds itself the inheritor of its own cowardice! All the more reason to assist and to get the fuck out of Libya as soon as they have a functioning government.

What we common Americans want is for Libyans to stop killing Libyans, by which we mean that we want Moamar Qaddafi to leave and never return. Killing him is against our law about assassination of foreign leaders, but ... we all want him gone!

I cannot think that having mobilized the West in support of New Libyans that the United States or France or the United Kingdom or Italy or Germany would countenance a Qaddafi victory in this struggle. Having said that as principle, how much killing are we going to passively watch before our principle becomes righteous? It is righteous now and dillydallying is immoral, since we already know what we must do. Let us do it ... now!

JB

2/28/11

What a title for an essay! The winners of Oscars should be happy with their achievements, but the Academy pendulum has swung too far in the "comfort" direction, away from controversy, and unfortunately away from blazing talent toward career achievement. "True Grit" was the best picture this past year by any standard or measure, and it is irrelevant that the Coen brothers won it hands down recently. They are at the top of their game. Let it be said out loud. And this too shall pass.

But this essay is about losers, the people of the Arab countries and of the "-stans." These are the losers of history and the measure of that is the kind of government and leadership they have. What they have is assertive and egotistical men with a paucity of imagination for realizing the humanity of their countrymen and countrywomen, for realizing their potential, for shedding the enormous burden of tradition, for seeing a way to bring their people out of humble circumstances into the modern world.

It should not be lost on Americans that Islam is different in different countries. In the Arab and "-stan" world Islam is abused as a religion and as a method of social control and personal redemption and solace. In other parts of the world Islam is not a hate and fear doctrine. This means that cultural dispositions in the Arab psyche are to blame. I will call it primitive tribalism. It is a method of social control, and mindlessly asserted to hold patriarchal leaders in power. It is antithetical to democracy. The cure for it is to prove the patriarchs, be they kings or dictators, to be wrong. Insane men like Qadhafi in Libya need no further explanation. They must be killed.

It should not be lost on Americans that our country has taken the low road with respect to the Arab countries and the -stans. Our foreign policy was formulated in an era when the Communist International run in Moscow was active among the wreckage nations of the old Ottoman Empire, destroyed along with Imperial Russia in the Great War. The low road has been to secure countries and entire regions against the horror of Soviet infiltration with Communistic ideas! It was obvious back in my youth that this policy would turn Americans away from their core values as democracy loving and nurturing people.

James Carroll tells the story, unfolding now across north Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, for Pakistan, the most dangerous country in the world, worse even than North Korea. Carroll notes the genesis of our ugly American policy toward these people, and we see a glimmer from his writing and our understanding of the Cold War, that fixing broken cultures is a lot of hard and frustrating work, so why not opt for the easier way, the stability way, the wrong way!

Carroll does not mention the subtext of the Cold War, the fight of capitalist business for hegemony in the world, nor therefore does he note the torque and bias of our "righteous cause" in the Cold War (after all Leninist/Stalinist Russia was a terrible place where millions died needlessly for a "bankrupt" ideology). The corporations made sure that Americans equated successful business with that anti-communist righteousness, and so how easily it became to see business interests as a goal of American foreign policy. All they wanted was stability. They did not care a whit about the progress of peoples left in the undertow of historical processes. And, so we come into the 21st century fully burdened ourselves with an impossibly ugly foreign policy that even a "heroic" figure like Barack Obama cannot undo in two years or six.

But, as Confucius say, "a journey of a thousand li begins with the first step." There is no better time than now to recognize that the Cold War is over and that Islam is not the enemy but rather the whip in malignant, dirty, self-serving hands of tribalist demagogues and dictators. We need to get on the side of people, not these tinpot governments!

JB

2/26/11

"From the halls of Montezuma ..." is the beginning of the Marine Corps hymn, but the interesting part (also unfinished business) is "to the shores of Tripoli." The spanking new American republic with its own merchant fleet building encountered the "Barbary Pirates" along the coast of Libya and carried out a little war against them. Like my colleague, I am more than a little annoyed that the American response to the Libyan cry for help does not receive the same response we gave to Israel in 1948—instant diplomatic recognition of the freedom-seeking rebels!

We are not alone. Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post yesterday wrote as good a call for intervention as yesterday seemed appropriate. Today, which was foreseeable, of course, the situation is resolving somewhat and become more desperate. Tripoli in the northwest is isolated, but seemingly more strongly defended by "loyalists" than the freedom-seeking Libyans can uproot and defeat.

There are now two Libyas and we should recognize the new one and give them the assistance they need to end the sway of the dictatorship they hate so much.

There is a code of conduct among nations that says outsiders should stay out of the internal fights within nations. That code is applied liberally to situations where the outsider is unprepared for intervention or is trying to persuade other nations that they have nothing to fear from the outsiders. On the other hand, when the outsider does not like the looks of the "rebels" the code allows the outsider to support the "dejure" government. Moreover, when the outside forces are truly vexed, they tend to invent reasons for intervention on one side or the other, as witnessed by our two wars against Iraq in this generation. So much for codes of conduct! They are bullshit and everyone knows it.

So, Obama, get out of the law library and into the cockpit! We have been looking for a time to remove Muammar Qaddhafi for decades. Do not blow this wonderful chance for America to get on the right side of history ... for a change!

JB

2/7/11

Euro-centric culture and the many similar cultures within Islam we have largely ignore them or misunderstood them. In an OpEd piece today in the New York Times I learned something on the fly that, as an historian, gives me pause. I say, "on the fly" because the very, very interesting piece by Reuel Mark Gerecht, a former CIA employee concentrating on the Middle East, is not at all about classical feudalism as experienced in Europe, but rather a different kind of evolutionary path, a cul de sac it turns out, that the Arab world, particularly, among all the other worlds of Islam, has gotten itself into and is trying to get out of now. Gerecht wonders aloud about why "Arabia" (taken broadly to include all places where Arabs have settled) turned out the way it did.

His title is "How Democracy Became Halal," the decisive idea in his article that gives motion and hope to the unique historical processes that are unfolding in Arab lands. It is exceedingly difficult to gauge the culture from the standpoint of our own because of the divergent paths we have taken, not only in terms of formal religion, but as Gerecht notes, in terms of how the social compact is seen differently between us. In the west the tradition of feudal liege and subject was underpinned by a sense of overarching responsibility and order, giving way in good time to the idea of a social contract and then to miniature contracts, soon abundant and ubiquitous and forming an idea of a rule of law.

In the Arab lands and not completely apart from the notions embedded in Islam the feudal idea of two way responsibility (and eventually the idea of contract and orderly rule) was taken up by and submerged by the idea of what is allowed by God as righteous. So in Arab lands, heir to tribal authorianism by virtue of the hard life they led in the deserts of north Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, Arabs developed a lesser sense of their individuality as civic entities, and their relations with other human beings were mediated by Sharia and other forms of Islamic law first, rather than independently of overarching orthodoxy.

It is an interesting and probably fertile ground for commentators on the Arab uprisings of 2011, because it illuminates one of the blind spots we in western civilization have about the Arab culture ... (and vice versa). The idea that "democracy" is now "halal" (permitted and to be prized) is huge because it is the path out of the cul de sac, and yet as Gerecht writes, it is not pretty, and I would add, it might not get pretty soon.

JB

1/27/11

The news and commentary are full of the actions taken by ordinary people in Tunisia and now in Egypt against their repressive regimes that have run their countries for decades. Also in the news are the pitiful expressions of the U.S. Department of State, or at least the commentary about completely expected comments by Secretary Hillary Clinton and others.

Let's be clear about this at long last. The United States recognizes many governments that it does not like, governments that are repressive, illegally installed, and a host of other reasons for disliking them. Nevertheless, the position of our country now and in the past is that a regime that is de facto in charge of a nation for an appreciable time as in China, Burma, North Korea, endless (and mindless) African states, Cuba, Venezuela, and Beloruss, are all ... whether they are de jure states or not ... a fact of life.

It is the policy of every signatory to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (notwithstanding) that we try to arrive at the most peaceful accommodation between unfriendly states as we can to insure that lives are not lost and wasted in endless conflict. It is in some sense a matter of economic priorities. Simply: we cannot remake the world to suit ourselves, and we must depend on the people of a country to stand up for themselves.

Is this a realistic policy?

Yes. It is realistic and sometimes so antithetical to the "ideal" policy we would prefer to follow that the chasm between the two yawns viciously at our pitiful attempts to be true to our moral aspirations. So, with the State of the Union Address being ripped apart by fools, with the media giving them attention they do not deserve, with the question of Executive leadership in our country very much on the table, we must watch as Arab countries try to grow up and throw off the vicious dictatorships that follow closely on the demise of millennia of tribal authority.

We need a diplomatic system that promotes our ideals. All we have now is one that promotes our business interests and hopes for stability among people we understand very poorly. Would it be hypocritical to recognize a Mubarak in Egypt and at the same time beam information to the people of Egypt about the "blessings of democracy" and the eternal vigilance it requires? Would it matter if all advanced nations had such a policy, whether they act in concert or not? You are damned right it would make a difference! And, it is something that a Barack Obama should have been constructing from Day One. That would be Change we can believe in.

You might be interested to read the thoughts of veteran journalist Robert Fisk on the rebellions in the Arab world. I think you can begin to see the consequences of a 19th century view of diplomacy in an electronically invigorated world.

JB

12/29/10

Today in the New York Times Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the Soviet Union, architect of "perestroika" (continuous change and evolution), and the single most important character in Russian life since Stalin ... but on the other side ... wrote about the necessity for nailing down a comprehensive agreement among the nations of the Earth to get rid of nuclear weapons. He cites the failure of the United States Senate to appreciate the awesome responsibility it has.

With the likes of Arizona's senators Kyl and McCain leading the knee-jerk machismo movement in the direction of deadlier and more plentiful nuclear weapons, the nations of the earth who have grudges against neighbors, who have the economic means to buy their way into the proliferation of these weapons, who have nothing of the political or moral safeguards against their use, who have no compunctions about nuclear blackmail, all have reason to believe that the United States fundamentally does not care. This because of a few senators with shopworn ideas of national security.

When you read the prognostications of what probably will befall the planet in the next year and the next decade, author after author mentions the Iranian bomb threat and the loose-canon of North Korea both being emulated by nations with eager dictators willing to sacrifice world peace for an extra helping of political gravy. The world quite possibly will back into proliferation because the United States was too stupid to see its leadership role for what it is. We are not admired for inventing nuclear arms ... we are envied and we frighten them. It is time, way past time, actually, to turn this page and get on with the business of removing all nuclear weapons from the planet.

JB

12/20/10

James Carroll, writing his usual Monday column in the Boston Globe today, takes on the subject of our animal irrationality rather than writing some homily about Christmas. Congratulations to him on that score. Perhaps the late revelations about predatory priests in Belgium, Ireland, and here in Boston (and all across the land) last week, just tipped the scales for him. But, he begins with interesting news about the Winter Solstice conjoining with a lunar eclipse and a full moon. If that won't get the lunatic fringe out for a howl, what will?

Carroll's point in this column is well taken. We are in our poorly prepared democracy subject to all manner of howlings from the fringe, the appeal of Glen Becks and Ann Coulters and Newt Gingriches playing on the hindbrains of a society that so little understands its own history that bald-faced lies about our country today pass unnoticed or, worse, pass as truths superior to the complicated facts of our existence. But, Carroll's subject is narrowly war and more precisely the Afghanistan involvement, which matches the arrogance of a rich nation with the dishonest depths of a poor one, corrupting everything in sight. The truth, Mr. Carroll, is that we are in Afghanistan to rout out the people who flew four commercial airplanes on 9/11 into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a pasture in Pennsylvania.

We all remember that purpose, what we do not think about is what Carroll reminds us: we have now thousands of reasons for revenge, not to mention that we have laid bare the seething animus of Pakistan and awakened within our center of fears the truth that Afghanistan is right next to Iran on the west. The chess players of the world understand why we are there.

And Carroll's thoughts persist through the gloom of the long, dark night of our national humiliation in this rugged, backward, place of common evils and political hopelessness. Karzai is corrupt, no doubt and no surprise, except that we are a main cause of his corruption, arrogantly instructing this egotist in the governance of a land and people who have no concept of the starting place of our values. And, perhaps, Carroll is telling us that neither do we.

JB

12/12/10

The word "nashi" in Russian means "ours." It is an omnibus sort of word that has many colloquial uses extending from the idea of "us" as a people (Great Russians) to "we" as a subset of Russians, that is, the presumptive majority people. In the sense it is described in an OpEd by Oleg Kashin in the Sunday New York Times it draws on the "possession" definition of "ours" and suggests that for those unlucky people not part of the group called Nashi, Russia is not theirs to meddle with, to argue about, to vote one way while majorities vote the other. Kashin knows intimately about Nashi and has suffered greatly for his trouble.

I read an article yesterday that I did not quote about about the Eisenhower "fairwell address" that contains the warning about the military-industrial complex. That article said that the twentieth century was almost completely involved in a struggle to the death between three contesting views on how nations should be organized and governed. The three are capitalist democracy, fascism, and communism. I say "are" because, if nothing else, what happened to Kashin (and the other Russian journalists) and to hundreds of others impedimenta to Putin's re-establishment of Stalinism in Russia proves the truth of that idea.

The problem we have with political choices, of course, is that we assign roles to nations such that Russia is seen as "the communist country" and Germany/Italy as the "the fascist countries" and the United Kingdom and the United States as "the capitalist democracies" AS IF these roles were not in jeopardy of shifting among the nations we focus upon. Clearly, Nashi is not far off the course taken by the Italian fascisti or the Brown Shirts in Germany. They are state-sponsored thugs.

But, let me take this idea a step further. If Russia can shed the ideological baggage of Marxian communism and is left with Leninism and Stalinism, what separates that from the thuggery of Nazi fascism? Quite a bit, of course, but the idea is still valid as a pry into the real meaning of political systems, and of course, the suggestion I have made here many times that corporatist government has overtaken popular democracy here and abroad fits right into the idea of there being a tri-polar constellation of political systems available to ANY nation.

Russia has a troubled past, and that means it has a troubled social, cultural, and political inheritance from that past. Many of us have said that the Russian intelligentsia is poorly equipped and positioned to educate the mass of people in Russia toward Enlightenment theories and forms of government. This does not mean that Russians will always be slaves to their overlords. It simply means that any democracy has to have native roots and the soil for growing them in Russia is infertile.

It is the Kashins and Politkovskayas of Russia who fertilize that barren ground with their blood and lives, and they cannot do it alone. Russia is vast and her people are too long suffering to see (much less pull on) their own bootstraps. The roles played in the west to keep popular democracy alive are played by a much larger group of advocates, and yet we see that secret elites are always created and active in the pursuit of goals antithetical to our democracy, even to our view of capitalism. Like Putin in Russia these people have a focused goal of stability and financial bounty for themselves.

As the "debate" over nuclear arms reduction treaties with Russia meander across the political landscape of contemporary Washington, I wonder if the people like Senator Kyl (R-AZ) have any idea what the consequences of teasing the Russian bear might be. It seems to me, always, that engagement is the better way to move ideas into Russia and to pry loose the Russian rictus grip on authoritarian rule.

JB

11/5/10

I have begun lecturing about the perils of coddling China. Today we learn that China is trying to blackmail European nations into a boycott of the Nobel Prize ceremonies and courtesies. They feel that Prize-winner Liu Xiaobo is a criminal for trying to get democratic reforms into the Chinese government, which is decidedly un-democratic and equally anti-democratic. One party rule in China is a dictatorship not of the proletariat, but of a self-selected clique of party stalwarts. There is competition within the Chinese Communist Party and the brighter members seem to have an advantage, but the Red Chinese Army packs a huge wallop in governance as well. It is a governmental structure unwilling to accommodate itself to the progress of the individual throughout the world.

I am sorry for harping on this issue, but 2005 was the time to stop buying Chinese goods. 2010 is not too late. Boycott China wherever you can. Look at labels and understand that buying things of Chinese manufacture is not in your or your children's long term interest. China must be taught a lesson. Hoisting themselves up economically on the backs and shoulders of millions of underpaid workers is not going to provide China with the social or political experience they are going to need to be part of the community of nations. Send them a message!

JB

9/8/10

It is September 8th, 2010. Hamas has claimed direct and jubilant responsibility for last week's murders of four Israeli civilians, the outrage designed specifically to interrupt or close the peace talks now a week old and so far unscuttled.

It is two plus days until Saturday, September 11th, where in Gainsville, FL, a fundamentalist Christian pastor has convinced his flock of fifty equally moronic sheep to burn some Korans to let the Infidel know that "we still outraged Christians" are gonna settle accounts with y'all A-rabs one way orn tuther.

But Bibi Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas are still talking, the stakes never being higher than they are right now. To give you some perspective on the situation Thomas Friedman, columnist in the New York Times, suggests that the King of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah, offer his plan to Netanyahu as a power-broking gesture. You have to read this column, because if you had any illusions about Israel being able to walk out of these talks with peace, security, and territory acquired since 1948, you had better consider the situation anew.

Let's take as a premise that Netanyahu, being the arch conservative that he is, the pacifier-in-chief of the war party in Israel, the last, best hope for only a minor civil war inside Israel as a result of these talks, ... let us suppose he understands that Abdullah's answer comes with security from all Arabs, if not the Persians in Iran, and that it is a last, best, and final offer, will Netanyahu take the bait and see if he can forge a real and lasting peace from it. (Long sentence, I know, but the situation requires holding several thoughts in mind simultaneously.) The next two thoughts are: 1) will Netanyahu be impeached, overthrown, assassinated by the war party inside Israel, and 2) will Hamas and Hezbollah, both funded by Iran, thumb their noses at Abdullah and commit more atrocities, just to make the point (in Tehran and elsewhere) that Israel cannot be recognized or tolerated by the dispossessed Palestinians themselves and all other Muslims who "feel their pain."

The answer, I think, to #1 question is that, owing to his solid credentials in Israel that Netanyahu could survive, but might choose to forge the agreement and then opt out of the way shortly after, that is, he would take his personal licks, but get the statecraft accomplished. In this respect, it is Netanyahu who holds the key and must have the personal courage to act.

The answer, I think, to #2 questions is that, as Friedman suggests, there will be "civil war" in Palestine, Gaza particularly, but that the stature of Abdullah (and I am sure Abdullah understands the jeopardy this puts his "standing") will calm the situation sufficiently that Netanyahu could "try out the security arrangement" with some sense of optimism.

After all, the expected "civil wars" inside each opposing force will take time (weeks and perhaps months), will involve some serious activity most of the internal of which can be swept under the carpet, but can be "managed" by nearby cajolery and appropriate activities and support from abroad. Having written that, I do not think that Hamas can be kept from violence, so Hamas will have to be reorganized under Addullah instead of under Ahmadinejad and the ayatollahs of Iran.

The more I write the more fantastic this begins to sound. Going back to the pre-Six Day War boundaries seems to me to be too much to ask Netanyahu to take back to the Knesset. But, with Abdullah acting as Arab guarantor and with nuclear warfare just a year off, something along these lines might be possible. And, you have to ask, what are the alternatives?

You also have to ask whether Abdullah is really that important, given that Wahabbist Islam is probably the most conservative and least tolerant form of Islam, suggesting that Israel gives the opposition too much in any bargain with Abdullah? But, is there an intermediate position that Abdullah can take that lessens the security guarantee, but provides room for the parties to negotiate relatively long term incremental steps toward fulfillment of the Abdullah plan?

Is it cynical to think that the Palestinians and Israelis can buy some peace with half-hearted acceptance of provisional steps, knowing they can walk away from the "settlement" at a moment's notice? In fact, what is it that will bind the parties to a settlement? Does Abdullah have that kind of standing? Does the United States? What keeps Texas in the Union, you might ask. Answer: Sober reflection about where their bread is buttered. Now you have a whole set of new questions! Where is Israel's bread buttered, if not by American Jewry?

Finally, what keeps Iran from committing the unpardonable, but nevertheless hard-to-prove act of sabotage? It seems to me that you have to get Russia and China into the final security guarantee, because I doubt Abdullah has any real power over the Shiites in Iran.

These essays will resume in one week, assuming that Virginia, traveling to a first time game in Los Angeles, beats the University of Southern California ranked 14th in the nation, but if not, probably not sooner. LOL

JB

9/6/10

Today is Labor Day. It is a marker on the calendar that nearly everyone recognizes as "the end of summer" or the "return to school" or EVEN "the recognition of the dignity and essential, fundamental, and socially worthy toil of men and women who work on the land, in factories and offices, in the armed forces." Labor Day is fun and slightly sad. It is a day of recuperation from labor and it is a time for reflecting on what progress has been made in personal and family goals.

James Carroll, columnist in the Boston Globe usually writes on Mondays, but the subject he chose to write on today is not a Labor Day theme. It is something both less universal, yet clearly more pressing and important to the welfare of our planet. Today he tackled the festering wounds at the heart of the Israel-Palestine confrontation. He takes a moment of your repose on Labor Day to emphasize that the labor of making peace is the more strenuous and disconcerting task we have. It is, in fact, the crucial event of this year, for the status quo in Israel is actually festering, and that means that it is changing for the worse. Within the manifold of this status quo is the distinct possibility that Israel (and her allies) will soon be confronted by hostile nuclear weapons. In other words, the status quo is not static ... and it is not stable.

Israel exists because there was a Holocaust—the Shoah. Were it not for Hitler's and the Nazi's crime of genocide against European Jews, modern day Israel would not exist. And, one has to add quickly, there would be very little trouble in the middle east ... just the normal dislocations and growing pains of Arab societies moving all to slowly into the modern epoch.

I think that Carroll's essay today is especially enlightening because it clearly shows the historical basis of the present day attitudes in the streets of Palestine and Israel ... and arrayed around the table in Washington. There is no party in this situation without fault, without cause, without moral certitude. It is a thicket into which Brer Rabbit would not want to be pitched. It is for most who try to wrap their minds around it the paradigmatic "intractable situation," one without hand holds or foreseeable solutions.

Yet, the truth is that we have no choice. We must do the work ... including the hard labor of the conscience and hard labor of the soul ... to avoid what clearly is the inevitable nuclear exchange that will bring world civilization to the brink and maybe beyond.

JB

8/21/10

There isn't a Muslim on this planet ... and very few Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, atheists, etc. ... who do not understand that the problems in the so-called Holy Land—the Levant—are "reflected" directly in American politics, with American Jews and Israel scripting the show. AIPAC, American Jewry, and Israelis have been playing the American political cello like Yoyo Ma, and now President Barack Hussein "One-Term" Obama is tearing up that script, that music, and trying to get a different tune playing to which both Israelis and Palestinians, and the outraged, aggrieved, and intolerant can all pretend to dance.

Charles M. Blow, regular columnist in the New York Times writes this Saturday morning that in droves Jews are shedding their long affiliation with the Democratic Party, all because they believe it is necessary to dance the same dance lest someone believe they have forgotten what must never be forgotten.

What Blow understands of American politics is not incorrect. His analysis is spot on. What is not expressed (and should have been) are the reasons for the significant departure from the old script and the old music. The reasons Obama believes there is an opportunity for progress toward a solution in Palestine and Jerusalem is that Israel is now governed by the most militant and least likely to compromise government ever. Netanyahu is bellicose and is supported by an aging generation of equally intransigent and (I might add for realism) fearful Israelis who see the balance turning against them. The balance is not held in New York's suburbs or on the Lower East Side or in the Fairfax District of L.A. or Beverly Hills or Chicago's Skokie enclave. It is held in Tehran, and everyone knows it.

Iran holds one end of the cello's bow and plays the other side of the tragic music of Palestine. But, we are not talking about Hamas or Hezbollah, both supplied with whatever they need to harass Israel and take murderous potshots at Israeli troops and Israeli civilians a rocket's trajectory across the border. We are talking about a music-ending nuclear attack on Israel by fanatics in Iran, tipped past the balance of reason into the final solutions for the Levant, total elimination of the Jews.

Charles Blow knows that Obama plays Netanyahu like Mao played Nixon (and vice versa). Sometimes you have to take the least promising player into your orchestra in the hopes that he will, being advanced toward the fatal edge already, be able to back down when he sees the abyss opening out from under. Blow also knows that this is the week that Russian engineers are installing low-grade fuel into nuclear reactors in Iran, symbolically (if nothing else) lending credence to notions and nightmares of the fearful and bellicose among American Jews and Israelis.

This story cannot be told without a description of the stage and the music being played. So far the music has been (ironically) Wagnerian and arguably provocative. The stage is surrounded by hecklers and, indeed, oppressed people who hear each note like a bullet whining through their homes.

Even more to the point, in counterpoint to the righteousness of the Israeli will to survive, there is a seductive "progressive" note of expansion into the lands they have brought by force of arms into their control.

The metaphor is exhausted and the cacophony of an intractable reality is proof of it. The time line is currently one year until Iran has a nuclear weapon. The "assuagement" of the Israeli government by the declaration of this new national intelligence estimate (we read about yesterday in the Times) now exists on a fuse the shortness of which is terrible to consider. Blow knows this, and Blow figures, as do most, that Obama will back down from his position and let Israel with the backing of American Jewry make the pre-emptory strike on Iranian nuclear installations.

There is no question whatsoever that that policy would result in all out war in the middle east spreading like a wild fire across the face of the planet.

JB

7/28/10

Let's see. Lend Lease was in full swing when I was born. Not quite two years later Pearl Harbor was attacked, so that was the first day of "actual" war for the United States that happened during my lifetime. Since the 2nd World War we have had Korea—which has never been resolved and threatens to boil over again—Vietnam, Panama, Granada, Dominican Republic, Serbia, Somalia, Iraq I and II, Afghanistan, and soon Yemen. All told, without getting too precise about it, about 85% of my lifetime has been seriously impacted by America's wars, including my own combat zone duty in the mid-1960s in Tonkin Gulf and around the Indochinese peninsula.

I wasn't sufficiently against going into Afghanistan after bin Ladin, like most Americans, and when Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Hussein Obama said that there was a strategic goal they believed could be met with some diligence and patience on our part, I did not protest loudly.

I still have the eerie feeling that without our forces in Afghanistan the terrorists of al Qaeda would be roasting marshmallows and all beef hotdogs at tailgate parties throughout that loosely defined country after each successful terrorist raid on western civilization. I lose my breath when in an older movie the twin towers of the World Trade Center appear. I am, just like almost everyone, sick to my stomach about what war and empire have done to our country: the distortions of our industrial sector, the numbness we all have about mass death visited by suicide bombers and stealth bombers. It is truly sickening.

So, when Wikileaks and then major newspapers leaked and published the classified background information that we all suspected but refused steadfastly to hold in the center of our imaginations, that "news" that we are being "handled" by a bunch of opium farmers and fourth world tin pot raskals, I scarcely blinked. I was once in the midst of all that "classified" stuff and knew full well that most of it—probably 70% was CYA information rather than real facts about our plans or "them."

Maureen Dowd in the NYT has her take on the "revelations" and President Obama has his. His statement, which I thought was a marvel of truthfulness and still adroit, was that there was almost nothing in the illegally exposed information that was not already part of the public debate. Really! Really?

If Wikileaks did us any service by making these background materials public it was that the U.S. (and to some extent NATO) governments are in a gigantic denial syndrome. What the documents reveal Doonsbury has been drawing for months, namely a cynical interface between cultures that have virtually nothing to say to one another, there being so few points of fundamental understanding and common culture and ethics. The military, including the sacked McChrystal, have been asked to do something that cannot be done without removing the shackles of western ethics from their arms. No, I am not sneaking up on the idea that we should nuke Afghanistan into oblivion. (I am not even sure we should do that to North Korea, say.) I am saying that attempting to wrench the various peoples who make up Islamic Afghanistan into a 21st century version of their religion and a modern view of civil polity is fundamentally an impossible task ... and everything in the pilfered documents shows the lengths to which civilians and military alike skirt that fundamental issue and pretend that under some (wildly improbable) circumstances the struggle can be won.

No. It cannot be won with states like Pakistan, failing to to keep pace intellectually, industrially, economically with India its bete noir necessary adversary, cynically playing our over extended forces for the fools they believe them to be. No, it cannot be won in any terms familiar to western ears, eyes, or hearts. No, it cannot be won except by descending to the level at which the public consciousness exists (in so far as it ever exists in Afghanistan) and playing the game on those terms ... which is against our hopes and dreams of wrenching these peoples from their medieval ways and into our none-too-savory methods of governing villages and towns and cities.

The President may be right that these matters were "on the table" in plain view before. Now, though, we have a more "candid" and less manipulated view, and we really need to take it to heart. July 2011 is not soon enough to begin making some moves on that chess board that will rock Pakistan's world. The Afghans will cave to the Taliban, of course, and we will have to violate their territorial integrity from time to time to chase down terrorists, but they should be given to understand that we no longer hold out ANY hope for bringing them into the modern world. They will have to do that for themselves. Meanwhile, since we are no longer trying to find an economy there, we will bomb the opium fields into kingdom come, knowing of course that they will grow it again. Meanwhile we will let Mr. Karzai know that his life is not worth another American dollar, so he might as well kiss up to the Taliban sooner than later ... so we have a bald excuse for dealing him out of the game.

Enough of war. Our "reluctant empire" no longer serves our people ... only our corporations ... so we must begin anew. In November we will.

JB

3/16/10

There is a debate (perhaps it is a discussion) going right now with Dr. Paul Krugman at one pole of the opinion about China and her government's monetary policies, the objectives of which are often said to be "obvious," but are not really necessarily clear.

The "discussion" includes the following recent publications by Dr. Krugman in the New York Times:

• "Taking on China"
• "Curveball
  
• and "Capital Export, Elasticity Pessimism, and the Renminbi (Wonkish)"

The 1904 Mackinder Thesis is not entirely irrelevant here. Although China historically within itself has practiced a version of a "heartland" strategy of east Asian imperial hegemony—the Middle Kingdom and the Five Peoples—the point goes deeper than the movement of national borders. It goes to the almost imponderable significance of population numbers and poverty. In a nutshell, the history of the Han in China has been (except for one maritime foray to the east coast of Africa) the history of an inward focused people, content (if not perforce compelled) to focus on what is certainly the world's largest population with all that implies and connotes.

Which brings us to the considerations that Krugman and most of his commenters leave out—the motivations of the Chinese Communist government, leaving aside for the moment the question of whether "communist/ism" is at all germane to the discussion. Why does China pursue a monetary policy that it does (see Krugman's description of it)? The answer is that China earnestly wishes to modernize and to bring its people up out of what Marx termed "the idiocy of rural life." The Chinese people want this, of course, in terms they can stomach, namely, with due respect to useful traditions and cultural values. The methodology is essentially transparent to the average Chinese citizen, but competitive pressures and advanced quality controls have an impact, as do Google and other forces that work against population control.

The lessons of the Maoist period are not lost on Chinese. The "great leap forward" was not successful. The "cultural revolution" created a backlash. The last twenty years of flirting with capitalism, on the other hand, have produced unparalleled wealth and brought wealth down to the level where a legitimate middle class now exists, not "compradores" and their retinues, but educated professionals and people with a stake in continued socio-economic progress. So, in general and overwhelmingly China can be seen as seeking a better life for its people.

Krugman sees beyond this and into Hari Seldon's book that China in doing what it wants for its own people becomes a force to be reckoned with internationally. There is no gainsaying this perception, except that China really has no significant experience beyond its own cultural bailiwick. Yes, there is Chinese nationalism which can be whipped up almost instantly by a cynical government, but all always it tends to focus inwardly.

Krugman and others are savvy. They know the cultural history and they know the typical responses of North Americans and Europeans to a rival. The essays and blogs Krugman has written recently may be seen, therefore, as a heads-up to the West that an economic rival is playing its necessary game to the detriment of western recovery from the Great Recession. I am not convinced China's motives are hostile, but I am convinced that the Chinese government knows it is pinching our nose and hard!

Krugman knows that incidents like this do not produce comity. We do not easily forget, in this case, that China did not help the rest of the world recover, despite the fact that the rest of the world has been the consumer that China absolutely required to get this bootstrapping operation moving. The ethical or moral imbalance is obvious when it is our nose being pinched. Not so much when it is theirs, perhaps. Krugman is to be commended and applauded for bringing this up.

JB

2/7/10

You will search high and low for news of Greece and her economic problems, her political problems, the precipice over which the Greeks stare in horror at this very moment. The press in the United States is oblivious. No, not oblivious, "managed."

Here is what is happening in a nutshell. Greece has piled up a national debt equal to that of Germany, but without the productive capacity to resolve that debt within the frame of financial obligations. The result is that Greece was poised on the brink of defaulting to its European neighbors, who, when they got wind of the immediacy of the situation began to act like market managers always do—irrationally. Immediately, Portugal, Spain, and Italy began to survey their own situations and their financial connections to Greece. All at once, the horrid truth emerges that these countries, too, are very fragile and closer to the brink than generally reported, even in Europe.

Here is a reasonably good set of articles from the Guardian in the UK about Greece and her problems.

My colleague in Montreal, whose access to information and whose keen eye sees the situation for what it is, reported these matters to me yesterday and I was appalled ... primarily at the domestic U.S. press's obliviousness and collusion with Wall Street to keep this "greatest financial crisis in Europe since the meltdown two years ago" out of the imaginations and thoughts of snowbound Americans. Thank you, "Justina!"

Yes, the Euro is in danger, and yes, the problem affects the almighty dollar as well. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is trying to get involved, but the folks in Brussels, Belgium, the seat of the EU leadership has asked IMF to play a smaller role than IMF wants. So, the international repercussions will extend outward like low waves in deep water, but treatening tsunami when reaching the shallower waters of individual nations.

As "Justina" says, keep an eye on the Greece situation. There may be portents for the future here that threaten contemporary politics far more than Sarah Palin and her teapot revolution talk down in the bowels of Tennessee.

JB

2/1/10

China is an ancient place, both more and less than a country or nation, in the sense of being more than a "birthplace." It is a "civilization" like Russia, human, eclectic, yet fundamentally unique. The Chinese themselves are not all the same, of course, the most important ethnicity is the Han, whose territorial history goes back to the dim recesses of written history. There are four other major groups: the Manchu, the Mongolians, the Tibetans, and a mixed assortment of Muslim peoples called the Hui, including Uighurs, Kazakhs, and several others. Ethologists believe there are about sixty distinct ethnicities within the borders of China currently. In this sense, China is ... and has been for millennia ... an empire.

If you have Chinese associates or friends, you will know what I mean when I say that there is a distinct element of the Chinese personality that is shared, if not completely universally, then very widely among the Han. It is tough to put your finger on it, but if I had to put a one-word "western" label on it, it would the word "pragmatic." Quickly I would add the idea of "coldly pragmatic," leaving myself room to move towards "warmth." I have experienced both the cold and the warm, but would say that just from my own experience that, like Texans, the Han Chinese have a lore about themselves, a mythos, a marrow feel that transcends humility, dwells in an impoverished sort of hubris, and manifests itself, often crudely, as a long-suffering-but-recently-relieved humiliation for which some kind of redress is "obviously" appropriate and forthcoming. This is all fumbling around with delicate concepts, of course, but my experience derives from both males and females, older and younger, super-ordinate, collegial, neighbor, lover, and teacher. These Chinese were important in my life.

Each of these people were evoked as I read in the Sunday edition of the Washington Post about the noticable shift in the public attitudes expressed by the leaders of the People's Republic of China. The article is at a minimum a very interesting public notice given by the Post in what appears to be a deteriorating discourse between China and the rest of the world, particularly the Atlantic world. Further along that line of thought, the feeling is definitely of a foreboding. Having written recently about the Google assertion of principles and having received an earful from one Chinese-American and from a presumably Euro Sinophile, I am a little chastened to bring this up, but I will.

China recently reiterated the Ripley homily of Chinese marching four abreast forever past any point you might care to mention. They are seemingly endless, and their display at the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremonies made that point with some beauty and some pomp and quite a bit of lugubrious overkill ... that sort of "okay, now we're on our feet get the f**k off our lawn" type of attitude. The endlessness of China's population is an illusion, of course, but it is within the Chinese civilization a dominant illusion, very likely to frame and mold the Chinese government's policies on many things internally and in foreign affairs.

Internally, the neo-capitalists in the Chinese government are beginning to understand the huge power of people numbers when attached to money. Politically, they have always understood that the population can ... and if necessary should/could/would ... sustain grievous losses that would devastate smaller nations ... as the loss of a generation of young men did to post-WWI France. So, you can add "stoic" to the "pragmatic."

Externally, China believes that the rest of the world understands China's immensity and is or should be cowed by it. This is a big, very big mistake on their part, over which they must get, the sooner the better.

I do not mean to suggest that China is not important in terrestrial affairs. Clearly any nation that large, with the obvious pride and industry and enterprise, is going to be consequent. And just as obviously the historical chip on their shoulder from the 19th c. depredations, the Opium Wars, the utter humiliations is something to take into consideration. But ... China is responsible for itself. A civilization twice or three times older than Europe has to recognize that China's woes are mostly of their own making. The Ch'ing (Manchu) Dynasty fell apart, sold out, and at no point was worthy of the task before it ... organizing and nurturing the better spirits of Chinese peoples.

And so, yes, we will get off your lawn, China, but we are not going to kiss your ring or pay you reparations or even apologize for events begun 200 years ago and long since forgotten by 95% of the remaining world's people. In other words: get over yourselves and join the community of nations as the proud, and resilient people you are. Get rid of the chip!

JB

1/25/10

The internet has been around since the 1970's, but certainly for most of us only since about 1990 when the WorldWideWeb quickly supplanted Gopher. I have been online since the last moments of Gopher and the first of the Web, and it has truly been a fantastic journey, a breathtaking revelation, and (even) an excellent lesson in human nature. If there is one point that the internet has made, it is that human beings are human. They have biological and personal urges and these express themselves quickly ... even on the internet.

Society through its various means of exerting controls over our appetites has been virtually (no pun intended) helpless as pornography and politics rapidly spread out across the cyberscape of the internet. Parents have been justifiably cautious (or horrified) about letting their children have unfettered access to the web because of the pornography ... and rightly so, for graphic displays of bestiality and subjugation of human beings for sexual purposes are all too available. But politics is a different matter. Politics is by definition public and argumentative and emotional, with emphasis on public and free.

I am incredibly proud of Google for standing up to the leaders of the People's Republic of China on this count. They have given a cold clear shot of courage and honor to our internet culture. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's unapologetic criticism of China is equally important, for it takes a baton and runs with it in areas that Sergei Brin and Larry Page cannot go. She rose in my estimation by hundreds of points, for coddling China has become an industry around the globe.

China is a giant, commercially, militarily, and politically. Its weight is felt wherever the Chinese government wants it felt. They are not altogether subtle about it either. The Chinese response to Clinton was predictable and clearly a very sore point within the ruling clique there. But, they are on the wrong side of history on this one. Confusing politics with pornography may seem like an apt analogy to people who cannot abide criticism, but as dirty as politics gets sometimes, it is not pornography and, instead, it is exactly the sort of thing that human beings need to understand.

China is not a communist country in any Marxian definition of the term. Their "flirtation" with capitalism to jump over the historic impediments to progress has long since become a way of life. China is a command economy with much of the means of production (or elements thereof) in government hands ... but not in the public trust or a commons! China is simply a dictatorship, a frightening and frightened dictatorship at the same time. It is no wonder that the leadership is afraid of criticism and variant political ideas. No dictatorship can long stand when freedom of speech and conscience are wide-spread.

Google and Clinton have made and then turned an important corner in the maturation of our global civilization. Both are to be commended, and as always is the case, every man and woman on the planet must see that they have an obligation to let China's people know that they are welcome into the community of humanity ... and that China's leaders are not.

JB

1/18/10

By now everyone with an eye for cybernews has read something about the Chinese attack on Google and Google's response. Several have noticed that Washington has made no comment, since the Chinese foray into American internet company core intellectual property comes at a time when we have delicate negotiations going with the Chinese government on a wide range of things, including Global Warming and monetary policy. But the issue goes far deeper than any quick list like that. China tries to pretend that there is a difference between hackers in China and the Chinese government all the while, however, maintaining control over everything that breathes in that country. You can have it one way or the other, but not both.

Meanwhile another evolutionary process is underway. While China slowly sheds the primitive agrarian communism of Mao, finding it convenient to steal what they can to catch up (and their window for catching up in this technological environment is closing inexorably), back in the U.S.A. Microsoft, The Giant, the gargantuan, showing significant signs of being related to the dinosaurs, is strapped to its own unhappy past and perhaps fatally. The fact is that Internet Explorer, still used by 65% of all internetizens for browsing the web, is a classic case of "ontology recapitulating philogeny," namely, that to ease the transitions between stages of evolution of their Windows operating system and their browser, Microsoft has chosen the path that incorporates into each stage mortal flaws from father to son. It seemed like a good and reasonable choice at the time, given that the physical environment of computing was also changing so rapidly, but the flaws accumulate like genetic drift, and today we have a rival exploiting those flaws to hopefully leapfrog into the present.

Joe Wilcox, a veteran reporter on these issues, says that you should at last dump MSIE at once. Read his article. It is not dense with jargon. The simple fact is that MSIE is like those "loose lips that sunk ships" during WWII. It is a constant menace to the rest of us. Yes, of course, we know you are not a target, but you who continue with MSIE are now providing aid and comfort by having a computer they can use to batter at the door. Put another way, are you absolutely positive that you have done everything reasonable to prevent your computer from being taken over by hostiles and being used to mount denial of service attacks on friendlies? Of course you are not. If the German government recommends to an entire nation that they get off MSIE, listen!

If you doubt that Google's experience was significant, do not doubt that Google's response will be. Denying China access to our hard-won expertise is part of a global struggle for supremacy. Right now, in the throes of the Great Recession, the U.S. position in the world financial and monetary sectors is as perilous as it ever has been among the current player nations. The stakes could not be higher. China has its masses, as it proudly and somewhat ominously displayed at the beginning of the Olympics; it believes in itself and in the social and industrial momentum it can create using capitalist tools for non-democratic ends.

In other words, this is a serious and important situation in which, for a change, you can make a difference. Download Google Chrome (I am currently using it) or Firefox 3.5 (with 3.6 coming soon) or Opera (the European favorite because it has a small footprint that fits aging home machines nicely). The hardest part of the transition from one browser to another is bookmarks and the newer, better, faster, browsers make even this easy. Do it!

JB

11/20/09

Lorelei Kelly wrote in Huffington Post Thursday about a strategy of "commitment" to Afghanistan. You should read this, because it is either the most laughable recent arrangement of words on screen or a very subtle and psychologically astute plea for immediate withdrawal from that festering sore of west Asia.

Lorelei states her opening premise that having a strategy that incorporates other than military options is good. Then she counts the ways that not having a military strategy are bad ...

The consequences of a complete withdrawal would leave a violent, chaotic hole in the middle of a tense neighborhood. The US would deal a potential death blow to the world's premier military alliance (NATO) and crackpot messiahs across the globe will claim credit. Troops need to be in the mix. Most Afghans want us there. They overwhelmingly dislike the Taliban. Girls attending school has risen to 44% since we've been present. Far more Afghans have access to basic health care. We need to start seeing these benchmarks as part of a broader set of objectives -- all thus far achieved with the help of American troops.

Afghanistan is not Iraq. Obama is not Bush. We are not the Soviets. And this is not Vietnam. Historical analogies must be very carefully considered.

I don't know why Lorelei thinks NATO would be dealt a death blow by a coordinated but rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan. Perhaps she thinks that European governments have themselves over a public relations barrel on that subject. First, there is no evidence that any NATO force, including ours, is so committed to military ops in Afghanistan that not being committed would ring the death knell of a willingness to remain in NATO for some future necessity ... which is what Afghanistan is not. Second, "crackpot messiahs" are everywhere, Alaska, Virginia Beach, west Asia, the Arabian peninsula, the horn of Africa, everywhere. What they say is their business. Certainly we cannot predicate U.S. national policy on the angst of crackpots taking pot shots at us!

Lorelei says that troops must be in the "mix," by which she means a multi-pronged presence, that is, a continuation of military ops while we undertake to build a modern nation out of miscellaneous 14th century TinkerToy ® pieces. The assumption that Afghanistan is culturally or intellectually or spiritually ready to join the 21st century is at best problematic and on average utopian and without foundation in discernible evidence.

Afghans want us there? Who says they do? The only female member of the Afghan legislature is here in the U.S. right now telling us quite the opposite. Polls taken by Europeans and U.S. agencies report the opposite as well. The U.S. presence provides only temporary security to Afghans paid for at the cost of mayhem when we move along to the next village and the warlords and Taliban seep in behind us. And, you did notice that a female says this, a person with the most to lose if the Taliban take over the country again. No, Afghans generally do not want us or the Russians or any other do-gooder forces there stirring up the cultural demons that have kept Afghanistan retarded all these centuries.

Yes, historical analogies should be considered carefully, but doing the same thing again and again hoping that eventually you will have success instead of repeated failure is insanity.

George Will, of all people, put it quite directly. If President Obama decides to augment the troops and continue military operations in Afghanistan, he will have opted for a second term of office with the price being hundreds of billions of dollars and innumerable American, allied, and Afghan lives. It is not worth it.

JB

11/18/09

Tuesday evening on MSNBC it was reported that New Zealand has the least corrupt government in the world and Somalia the most. With folks like Wm. Jefferson, now starting his thirteen years in prison and the former governor of Illinois headed that way by all accounts, the U.S. comes in 19th in the world. Afghanistan ranks (word choice deliberate) next to the worst. Afghanistan, remember, is the place where the Taliban represents order and discipline. If you also like Sharia law, 9th century politics, misogyny gone over the top, and the rule of blood, Afghanistan is the place for you.

The overwhelming question is whether Afghanistan is the place for us. The President will soon be making a decision on whether to believe his generals that the mere infusion of 40,000 troops will bring order and stability to this trouble land. NATO announced Tuesday that it will be supplying more troops to stand alongside the Americans, not tens of thousands of troops, mind you. Just drops in the bucket, different languages (often) to make coordination difficult, different ethos to make discipline difficult, different war aims ... because we really do not have any.

The problem with Afghanistan is that it really is not a country in the modern sense. It is more like a confederation of places and peoples whose broad understanding is that they can coexist and occasionally make a profit from opium or perform a "good work" in the eyes of Allah and basically live out their lives as a pre-modern society without too much interference because their country is bereft of natural resources, impossibly mountainous in places, hot, dry, formidable.

How President Obama is going to make a decision on this has been speculated to death. Clearly two items loom foremost in the imaginations of policy makers these days. Afghanistan under the Taliban will become a safe haven and even a spawning ground for international terrorist, like Osama bin Ladin, who very well may still be in Afghanistan in some cave near Tora Bora. The second item is neighboring Pakistan with its nuclear arsenal, with its weak central government, with traitors in every closet, with adventurers around every corner, with its own Taliban. Pakistan is enough to scare the hell out of anyone, not excluding President Obama.

But, even with the two clear problems posed in the region, Afghanistan itself is unlikely be tractible to outside influence, especially clumsy, civilian-killing military like ours and NATO's. Perhaps the most dismal situation is the corruption and the mind-set among Afghans that this is more or less normal. Read Chatterjee's essay and then ask yourself if you would choose to spend a couple thousand U.S. lives every five years for the next twenty to thirty years trying to create a modern Afghanistan. I think you will agree with me that we just do not have the military, civilian, or any other kind of resolve to do it. We should just get out.

JB