Roundup: Historian's Take
This is where we place excerpts by historians writing about the news. On occasion this page also includes political scientists, economists, and law professors who write about history. We may from time to time even include English profs.
Tom Engelhardt, at tomdispatch.com (4-25-05):
[Mr. Engelhardt is the author of The End of Victory Culture and co-editor of History Wars, the Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past.]
Okay, okay, Iraq's not Vietnam. For one thing, just about no one there speaks Vietnamese. Oh, but here's a similarity, almost no Americans sent into Vietnam spoke Vietnamese (including diplomats); and almost no Americans sent into Iraq spoke Arabic (including diplomats). Oh, but here's a difference, the iconic photos of the horrors of the war in Vietnam were largely taken by a series of remarkable war photographers like Don McCullin, Eddie Adams, and Catherine Leroy (whose book Under Fire: Great Photographers and Writers in Vietnam is just out); on the other hand, the iconic photos of the Iraq War were not taken by our embedded photojournalists, but on digital cameras by a group of prison guards.
Obviously the two places/wars aren't the same and let's toss in another difference for good measure. The two wars occurred at different moments, allowing the crucial players in only one of them to refer to the other. So, while in the Vietnam era people spoke of the United States entering a"quagmire" (forget, for a moment, that the Vietnamese saw the matter rather differently), Americans after the invasion of Iraq worried about the"Q-word." And they weren't the only ones entering the pop-referentiality game. After all, as the journalist Christian Parenti wrote, the Iraqis jumped in as well -- as in the Baghdad Shiite slum of Sadr City:
"On one of the slum's main thoroughfares, al-Radhewi Street, are several walls marked with a message in English. Big block letters read Vietnam Street. Farther on, a wall bears a crudely painted mural depicting a modified version of an infamous Abu Ghraib torture photo. It is the prisoner in the hood and cloak standing on a box, arms outstretched, electrical wires dangling from his limbs. Next to him in the mural is the Statue of Liberty, but in place of her torch she holds the lever of an electrical switch connected to the wires. Below is scrawled: The Freedom Form George Bosh."
But now that we're deep in the mire, here's the strange thing: No one bothers to mention the"Q-word" at all. Evidently, there are no words to adequately describe where we are -- though that hasn't stopped various military commanders and Bush administration officials from trying.
In fact, the phrases that have been cropping up ever since the January 30th elections in Iraq --"progress,""tipping point,""turning the corner" -- rang strangely familiar. Admittedly, no general actually got up and claimed, as Westy Westmoreland did just months before the Tet Offensive of 1968, that he had seen The Light -- at that tunnel's end. In the brief double-period of euphoria after the November election in the U.S. and then the January one in Iraq, however, there was a distinct"uptick," even an up-rush of heavily qualified but exceedingly positive statements -- call it wishfulness, call it propaganda -- from military men in Iraq and at home, civilian Defense Department officials, and others in the Bush administration including the President himself (see quotes above). The insurgency had, it seemed, reached its zenith -- call it, in the mode of recent oil discussions,"peak insurgency" -- and was now"on the wane." It had begun the slow slide downhill toward oblivion in 2006 or 08 or 10 or… We had reached -- and here, let me introduce a phrase from Vietnam that somehow hasn't made it into the Iraq discussion yet (an obvious oversight by otherwise scrupulously repetitive people) --"the crossover point."
That term, used by the military in the Vietnam era, referred to the moment when"body counts" would show that we had killed more of the forces of our Vietnamese enemy than they could replace through recruitment in South Vietnam or infiltration from the North. Of course, here's a difference between the two war eras. As Donald Rumsfeld likes to say, we don't have (or at least often broadcast) the"metrics" for how we're doing in Iraq. In Vietnam, on the other hand, the statistics of triumph were omnipresent, regularly made public, and overwhelming. These were summed up in the military's Measurement of Progress system, monthly reports on everything from"strength trends of the opposing forces; efforts of friendly forces in sorties… enemy base areas neutralized… and the degree of government control of roads, population, etc."
There were figures on every form of destruction rained down on North Vietnam (sorties flown, tonnage dropped,"truck kills" and the like); while in the South, special effort went into the creation of numerical equivalents for death. Visiting Washington officials received son et lumière briefings in which death was quantified in elaborate charts and diagrams. General Westmoreland, for example, had his"attrition charts," multicolored bar graphs illustrating various"trends" in death and destruction; while, in the field, Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell had his codified kill ratios of"allied to enemy dead," ranging from 1-50 ("Highly skilled U.S. unit") to 1-10 ("Historical U.S. average"). Collated, sorted out, broken down, interpreted, and illustrated, such statistics -- a genuine numerology of death -- flowed tidally toward policy makers in Washington.
If the American statistics of slaughter had been accepted by both sides as the ruling logic of the Vietnam struggle, the United States should have won that war any day from the mid-1960s on. That they didn't and that the defeat in Vietnam, however sanitized and reformulated in American pop culture, remains so tenaciously in memory, especially among our military and political leaders, makes any comparison between Vietnam and Iraq a mobius-strip-style experience. After all, our leaders implicitly, in their actions if not their words, compare the two all the time.
If there are no (or few)"body counts" in this war and the"metrics" flowing back to Washington are not proudly broadcast to the public as signs of impending success, it's exactly because a supposed lesson of Vietnam was that our daily body-count announcements -- that is, the gap between war promises and war results -- was a significant factor in finally alienating public support for the war.
And yet, even without the"metrics" in constant sight, we can see the same basic pattern recurring -- as in recent glowing statements about insurgency downticks that were followed, as day is night, by reports on upticks in fighting in Iraq with, it should be added, a similar slow erosion of support for the war in the United States. As Juan Cole wrote recently at his Informed Comment website:"Bush and his agendas (social security privatization, the Iraq War) continue to slide in the polls. Americans turn out to want a timetable for withdrawal of US troops just as much as Iraq's Sunni Arabs do! (69 percent want a clear goal and don't think Bush has articulated one.)"
Okay, and here's another Vietnam/Iraq similarity: As was true with Vietnam, the Iraq War is being fought by the Bush administration on two fronts. In the post-Vietnam years, the war's supporters commonly claimed that the Vietnamese had fought a two-front war -- a war on the battlefield, which they had supposedly lost to the American military and a war for hearts and minds in the American homeland (as we would now call it), which they won because Americans lacked the will to take unending casualties. (And then, of course, there were all those pesky demonstrators, not to speak of the reporters who, myth had it, worked like so many demons to undermine the public will). In reality, the American government was engaged in a vigorous two-front war long before the Vietnamese were capable of weighing in. After all, Westmoreland made his infamous tunnel-and-light statements in November 1967 because Lyndon Johnson felt he needed reinforcements on the home front. He was already fighting a losing battle for the national opinion polls and so brought his general back to offer a little good news in front of the cameras.
Similarly, the Bush administration has, from the beginning, been fighting a complex two-front war (at home against both a pathetic Democratic opposition hardly willing to oppose him and what threatened to be, but hasn't become, a formidable antiwar movement). With its carefully embedded media in Iraq, its own propaganda outlets in the mainstream in the U.S., a cowed press, and much careful planning, the administration has certainly fought a better"post-war" in the United States than in Iraq, where disaster and failure have dogged American plans every step of the way. Each break or organized"turning point" has been used here to orchestrate a chorus of positive voices and good news about the war, regularly sidelining the bad news, often for significant periods of time. The January 30th elections were only the latest round of this. (Previous major ones: the pulling down of Saddam's statue, the killing of Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay, the capture of Saddam himself, and the turning over of"sovereignty" to the Iraqis.)
Unlike the Vietnamese, the insurgents haven't even attempted to open a"second front" in the United States. If anything, factions of them, via the omnipresent threat of kidnapping and murder, have helped embed the American media even further -- and, in videos, some parts of the fractured insurgency have offered, as with beheadings, evidence of barbarism around which no antiwar movement is likely to coalesce.
And yet… it's already clear that, as with the Johnson and Nixon administrations in the Vietnam era, the Bush administration is fighting a defensive"war" at home that it will not, in the long run, be able to win. It may be giving ground slowly, but giving it is, and years of debilitating fighting yet to come ensure that the war on the home front will end poorly for them.
So on the one hand, our leaders, military and civilian, have been ducking and twisting just not to be Vietnam-ish -- call it the attempt to learn from the Vietnam War experience. On the other hand, like so many addicts who never went into a recovery program, they just can't stop themselves, given some of the crude similarities between the two experiences. On so many subjects, all they have to do is open their mouths and out pops Vietnam. As for instance with their recent glowing descriptions of how successfully we're training"our" Vietnamese (…oops, I meant Iraqis), followed by generally unhappy results on the ground; or their awkward attempts to explain the willingness of enemy Iraqis (and associated or disassociated jihadis) to die for what they believe in, and the willingness of"our" Iraqis to run from what they don't believe in.
So much of this seems familiar; in part because it's in the nature of our world that, as Jonathan Schell has made so clear in his book The Unconquerable World, when a superpower invades a smaller country, tenacious resistance of one sort of another will result. National sovereignty, which has proved such a weak reed for so many countries and which has often enough brought little but the sovereignty of tyranny, is nonetheless prized beyond measure on the scale of what is of value, what is essential on this planet. And the results -- whether in Vietnam or in Iraq, whether the insurgents are backed by another superpower or by scattered bands of jihadis and weak states -- turn out to be not that different.
Withdrawing, Forever and a Day
On the difference side of the ledger when it comes to the two wars and two eras, consider U.S. military leadership. In Vietnam, the military was fighting in the context of the Cold War. The enemy was the Soviets (or perhaps the Chinese, or both); the Vietnamese were considered their cat's-paws. In a sense, they never existed; the fierce issue of nationalism (they had it, we didn't) was largely ignored; the degree to which a civil war was going on in Vietnam was ignored as well. In a sense, our military leadership, right to platoon level, was not well schooled in the war they were fighting. This is, I believe, no longer true.
Recently, I listened to a TV journalist, who fought in Vietnam and was embedded with the Marines in Iraq, comment that, in occupied Iraq, the people you wanted to talk to weren't the dopes staffing the CPA (headed by L. Paul Bremer), but the military guys; that they were the only ones who knew what was going down. The military leadership there had done its reading. They have, for instance, read William S. Lind on Fourth Generation Warfare -- that is, various kinds of insurgencies no longer controlled by states, or parties that could become future states; struggles in which a state military like ours faces "no single opponent." ("All over the world, state militaries are fighting non-state opponents, and almost always, the state is losing. State militaries were designed to fight other state militaries like themselves, and against non-state enemies most of their equipment, tactics and training are useless or counterproductive.") They are also well aware that such wars take, at best, years to win; and that superpower militaries are not especially well-suited to fight them.
I also listened to a Lt. Colonel, presently at the Hoover Institution, who, on becoming convinced after 9/11 that his command was going into Afghanistan promptly had 1,000 copies each of two books -- Lt. Col. Lester Grau's The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan and The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet Afghan War by Grau and Colonel A. Jalali -- airlifted to his forces and distributed widely. In the typical blunt way that soldiers can sometimes talk, he said that they had come in quite handy in the war to follow.
So you have a well-read, well-schooled, well-trained military that knows all too well how ill-suited it is to the struggle at hand in Iraq and, unlike in Vietnam, isn't begging the civilians in Washington for a little more time and some more troops to finish off the job. Unlike in Vietnam, my guess is that many of them want out and would, in fact, happily enough appropriate former Senator George Aiken's Vietnam-era suggestion to simply declare victory and -- in some phased manner -- go home.
In Vietnam, the military high command always wanted more. In Iraq, in a sense, they may want less than nothing at all. On the other hand, here's a similarity with Vietnam: As was true then, so now, in Washington (and in the field) there's a constant linguistic scramble to avoid the suggestion of defeat, which would mean thinking the unthinkable. If you were to return, for instance, to The Pentagon Papers of the Vietnam era, you would find document after document in which you can sense the chagrin, desperation, or despair that the war planners felt discussing (or often straining to avoid discussing) some version of defeat ("retreat,""humiliation" or, in that classic phrase of the time that did reenter Iraq-speak for a while and will certainly return," cutting and running").
For the first time in a while, however, we've gotten a fair amount of talk from American officials about"withdrawal." The President admittedly refuses to set a"timetable" for withdrawal, but one of his generals, Lance Smith, deputy commander of CentCom, which oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, lately suggested that American troops" could begin coming home in significant numbers if insurgent violence is low through general elections scheduled for the end of [2005]." Some American officials have recently spoken about getting American troop strength down from the present 140,000-150,000 range to perhaps 105,000 by early 2006 if all goes well. For instance, in an April 11th piece sprinkled with qualified but hopeful comments ("'They're slowly losing,' said Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, a senior aide to [Joint Chiefs Chairman] General Myers who commanded the Fourth Infantry Division in Iraq last year."), Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported that 105,000 figure from"senior military officials… by this time next year." His story began:
"Two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the American-led military campaign in Iraq is making enough progress in fighting insurgents and training Iraqi security forces to allow the Pentagon to plan for significant troop reductions by early next year, senior commanders and Pentagon officials say. Senior American officers are wary of declaring success too soon against an insurgency they say still has perhaps 12,000 to 20,000 hard-core fighters, plentiful financing and the ability to change tactics quickly to carry out deadly attacks. But there is a consensus emerging among these top officers and other senior defense officials about several positive developing trends, although each carries a cautionary note."
At other moments, other officials were reportedly suggesting -- as did Gen. Richard A. Cody, Army vice chief of staff, in mid-March -- that:
"Any permanent reduction in the number of U.S. troops in Iraq isn't likely until sometime between 2006 and 2008… For there to be any drawdown, Iraq security forces must continue to improve their ability to fight the insurgency themselves, [Cody] told reporters. The military is planning a staggered rotation of soldiers and large units that will be in Iraq between 2006 and early 2008, Cody said. That planning is expected to include the possibility of a significant reduction in U.S. forces. [Cody] said he could not be more specific in numbers or timeframe, nor did he say how a reduction would be achieved. Sending fewer or smaller units to Iraq is one possibility; shortening the time each unit spends in Iraq is another."
Meanwhile, in England, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, his prime minister now in an election fight, was also talking"withdrawal." According to Anton La Guardia of the British Telegram, Straw said that"British and American troops will be withdrawn steadily from Iraq starting next year and are likely to be completely out of the country within five years." Five years (and note that"likely")! Or in Straw's exact words,"over the next parliament British troops will be down to virtually nothing."
Virtually nothing... if all goes... likely... probably... Such statements, modest as they may be, referring as they do to dates that range from 2006 to 2010 or beyond, mentioning as they do only partial troop draw-downs, nonetheless never lack their qualifiers. Here's a phenomenon that should ring a few Vietnam bells: withdrawal as non-withdrawal. So should the increasingly anxious visits of high officials like Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Zoelick to Iraq looking for reassurance that our battered position there will not worsen.
Since we are only entering the"withdrawal" phase now, it's worth thinking about what kind of a model the Vietnam War offers policymakers on this score. In the Vietnam era, American officials, even presidents, talked endlessly, sometimes, as with Richard Nixon, incessantly about"withdrawal." And yet here was the odd thing, withdrawal never actually involved departure, merely all sorts of departure-like feints and maneuvers -- from bombing"pauses" that only led to fiercer bombing campaigns to negotiation offers never meant to be taken up to a"Vietnamization" plan in which American ground troops would be pulled out in favor of American-trained South Vietnamese forces as our air war was intensified. (Vietnamization -- like Iraqification today -- was a crucial part of Nixon's second-front campaign in the United States meant to disarm the antiwar movement, as to some extent it did. It was only in Vietnam that it failed.)
Each gesture of withdrawal allowed the war planners to fight a little longer; but if withdrawal did not withdraw the country from the war, the war's prosecution never brought it close to a victorious conclusion either. With every failed withdrawal gesture and every failed battle strategy, the sense of Vietnam as an American"nightmare" (a word from that moment that hasn't quite yet made it into ours) seemed to draw closer, and a feeling arose that the country had somehow been entrapped in Vietnam. (Think Q-word.)
This may be the strangest aspect of any reading of The Pentagon Papers, that secret history of the war commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara -- who, speaking of parallels, moved on to the World Bank presidency, just like undersecretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, once his usefulness in the Pentagon disappeared. No better documentation exists on the detailed nature of U.S. planning for upwardly ratcheted destruction in Indochina. Yet, among successive groups of planners one senses in the documents a growing feeling of inadvertence, helplessness, victimization, and self-pity.
Expect something similar from the Bush administration as things get worse. After all, though at least some significant part of our military leadership may want out, the civilians who took us in, don't. Since the civilians in the Pentagon and the rest of the administration think that even from hell there's no exit, they never planned to leave Iraq and I doubt they plan to depart now. As Donald Rumsfeld told assembled American troops during one of his surprise visits to Baghdad recently, "We don't have an exit strategy, we have a victory strategy." This, you might say, is a classic Vietnam-era formula for disaster.
Increasingly, observers from right-wing columnist Robert Novak to Juan Cole -- who believes that, speaking of Vietnam parallels, the Bush administration has put into effect its own"domino theory," creating something like a Shia crescent in the region -- sense that it's all in some fashion more or less over in Iraq. Assumedly withdrawal should be in the cards. But I wouldn't hold my breath on this one. We should watch for this administration's withdrawal maneuvers meant to hold off any exit from the country.
On the other hand -- to point to another difference between Vietnam and Iraq -- actual withdrawals are underway. If the Brits are taking the path of withdrawal maneuvers only, the Spanish, the Danes, the Thais, the Hondurans, the Hungarians, the Norwegians, the Portuguese, the New Zealanders, the Filipinos, and the Ukrainians have already left or are in the process of leaving, turning the" coalition of the willing" into the " coalition of the wilting." Just two weeks ago, the Polish government, grabbing desperately at the ending of the Security Council's mandate in Iraq, announced that their 1,700 troops would be out by year's end; and with the Berlusconi government suffering a serious setback in regional elections, the Italians now seem to be wavering as well.
We are ever more alone in Iraq; while, in Vietnam, our" coalition of the willing" -- some of whom were well-paid for their willingness -- hung on until very late in the game. The Republic of Korea's troops stayed to the bitter end, leaving only in 1973 (thanks to continuing infusions of money from the Nixon administration). Except for a small training contingent that left in 1973, the Australians pulled out in 1972, as did New Zealand and Thai forces. Only the Filipinos left relatively early -- in 1969. ...
This article first appeared on www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, a long time editor in publishing, the author of The End of Victory Culture, and a fellow of the Nation Institute.
Posted on: Friday, April 29, 2005 - 19:08
Nick Britten, in the London Daily Telegraph (4-22-05):
FOUR hundred years after the Gunpowder Plot, the broadcaster David Starkey warned yesterday that the lessons of terrorism had not been learnt and history was repeating itself.
Dr Starkey said Islamic fundamentalists had the same incentive and were acting in "precisely the same way" as those behind the conspiracy to blow up James I and spark a Catholic uprising.
The historian and constitutional expert said: "The parallels between the actions of the plotters and modern-day terrorists are terrifying and the motivation is the same -- that religion is the only important thing and that if the Government does not subscribe to the idea that your religion is absolute it must be removed. "Islamic terrorism has brought home the significance of the Gunpowder Plot: same ideals, same method of trying to make your point. "Look at what the plotters did. They put one ton of gunpowder in a room underneath the Houses of Parliament. Had it gone off, it would have killed the king, the chancellor, all the important bishops and judges. It was their Twin Towers and the effect would have been immense."
Dr Starkey, a Bye Fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, who presented the acclaimed television documentaries on Elizabeth I and Henry VIII, yesterday opened an exhibition at Coughton Court, near Alcester, Warwicks, to mark the Gunpowder Plot's 400th anniversary. "There was a great wave of anti-Catholicism after the plot was foiled but the only way I can see to rid ourselves of terrorism these days is to make every country as rich as Britain," he said. "There is nothing like economic prosperity to erode religious conviction. Just look at what's happened in Ireland, where religious fundamentalism has waned as the country has become richer." ...
Posted on: Friday, April 29, 2005 - 16:07
Martin Kramer, at his blog (4-29-05):
Last month, Columbia University announced with much fanfare that it would establish a chair of Israel studies. Four generous trustees threw in $3 million to make it happen—and to help extricate the university from its crisis. Michael Stanislawski, a professor of Jewish history, will conduct the search. The New York Sunreported today that the search committee has been formed. When the reporter read me the names, I burst out laughing.
The committee includes Ira Katznelson, chair of the ad hoc (a.k.a."whitewash") committee that investigated student grievances; Dan Miron, a long-suffering Hebrew lit professor in the Middle East department; and Karen Barkey, an authority on the Ottoman empire. So far, reasonable. But then add this to the mix: Rashid Khalidi, the ubiquitous Edward Said Professor; and lesser-known Lila Abu-Lughod, a Palestinian American anthropologist and signer and supporter of Columbia's divestment petition. Abu-Lughod, who's writing a book on the Palestinian experience in 1948, has just published a longing letter to the departed Professor Said."I sit here on the earthen terrace with the sunset warming the pharaonic temple across the field, wondering how to carry on your work. The first step, I know, is to keep talking about Palestine."
The inclusion of Khalidi and Abu-Lughod on the search committee is perverse. Edward Said used to complain that the Palestinians needed"permission to narrate" their story. At Columbia, the situation is reversed: Israel can't be narrated without the permission of the great Palestinian mandarins. They must be appeased, satisfied, propitiated.
And we know what price they will exact. The incumbent of the new chair must be someone who freely acknowledges Israel's sins, perhaps even its original sin. It must be someone at home in the self-excoriating world of post-Zionism. It must be someone willing to consider, in all seriousness, whether the"one-state solution" is the only one left—what is called in the code"Israel/Palestine." (Perhaps that should be the designation of the chair: Israel/Palestine studies.)
There will be plenty of willing and able candidates. Israeli universities are teeming with academics who fit the bill, and who've taken their oaths to Saint Edward. The search hasn't formally begun, but some hopefuls have already floated their names to friends at Columbia. Did you really believe that the great mafia on Morningside Heights would cede any of its home turf without a fight? (Didn't you see them rally to save Joseph Massad, the barking pup Edward left behind?) These people are militants, and they fight for every inch as though the world depended on it. I'm not going to guess how the battle for the Israel chair will end, but it will leave bloodstains on the upholstery, and it will perpetuate Columbia's crisis right through the next academic year.
The affair also raises the larger question of whether Israel studies are the answer to the problems at Columbia or anywhere. Last month, the Forward did a piece on the drive for Israel studies on campuses, quoting its various boosters. I was the sole dissenter."The answer to flawed Middle Eastern studies," I was quoted as saying,"isn't Israel studies, it's better Middle Eastern studies."
Without broader change, the malaise of Middle Eastern studies is bound to infect Israel studies. Last year I showed how Berkeley's Said-set took funds given by pro-Israel donors for visiting Israeli professors, and hijacked them to serve post-Zionist purposes. They did it by rigging the selection committee. ("Anyone with experience in academic administration," I wrote back then,"will tell you that most battles are won or lost by the selection of committee members." Memorize that sentence.) Here and there, it may be possible to protect an Israel studies position, by burying it deep in an isolated Jewish studies program. But who wants to go down there? That really is"fortress Israel," and it doesn't do anything to improve the lot of students with broader interests, who are left with holy rollers like Massad and Hamid Dabashi.
So I don't rejoice every time some heavily padded chair in Israel studies gets planted in the sand. I will rejoice when the entire public begins to understand that America (and not just Israel) deserves better. Low Library isn't home to the kind of courage it takes to change the big context. The U.S. Capitol just might be.
Back at Columbia, I do look forward to the adventures of Professor Stanislawski, admiral of the search committee, as he tries to steer his boat while members of the crew row furiously in different directions. Of course, he's busy giving assurances that only"academic qualities" will determine the outcome of the search. (He's a precedent-setter.) Speaking to the Columbia Spectator on who might fit the chair, he promised an international search, and added:"It could be an American, Israeli, Australian, Austrian, Swede, a Palestinian." I think he should be taken literally.
Then there are Bollinger's trustees, whose money pads the chair. Let's name them: David Stern, Mark Kingdon, Richard Witten, and Philip Milstein. However this ends up, the composition of the committee leaves them looking like cuckolds for the next year—and, possibly, forever. It's an open question whether their current plight is tragic or comic. Whenever guys in master-tailored suits get taken for a ride by the tweed jacket gang, you've gotta chuckle. I do. It's best to end where I ended my expose of Berkeley last year: In academe, as in real estate, buyer beware.
Posted on: Friday, April 29, 2005 - 12:57
Sean Wilentz, in a letter to the editor of the NYT (4-29-05):
To the Editor:
Bob Dole contends that the" current obstruction effort of the Democratic leadership" over judicial nominations is"extraordinary."
Yet between 1995, when the Republicans regained control of the Senate, and 2001, the Republican majority blocked 35 percent of President Bill Clinton's nominees to the federal appeals bench without giving them an up-or-down vote. Many did not even receive a hearing.
By contrast, President Bush has, since 2001, nominated 34 candidates to the federal circuit courts, 10 of whom the Democrats have blocked with filibusters - or just under 30 percent.
The Republicans' obstruction of Clinton nominees was much more"extraordinary" than anything since. That obstruction included calculated delays through the use of long-established Senate institutional privileges, including the notorious"blue slip" method favored by Senator Jesse Helms, in which senators can block a judicial nominee from their state.
It is surprising to see Senator Dole, who has spoken eloquently of his love for the Senate, abet the undermining of that institution's historical ability to act as a check and balance on the executive branch.
Posted on: Friday, April 29, 2005 - 12:36
Max Boot, in the LSAT (4-28-05):
Nomination battles are known for introducing new standards for officeholders. John Tower's failed bid to be Defense secretary in 1989 meant that public drunkenness was now a disqualification. The near-failure of Clarence Thomas' nomination to the Supreme Court in 1991 added sexual harassment to the list. The withdrawal of Zoe Baird's name for attorney general in 1993 made failure to pay nanny taxes a no-no. (I'm tempted to add that Robert Bork's rejection for the Supreme Court in 1987 ruled out nominees with scraggly facial hair.)
Now, John Bolton's nomination to be United Nations ambassador is in serious jeopardy, according to the senators who oppose him, because he's not nice enough.
But do we really want to add nastiness to the list of disqualifications? If we did, America's most effective diplomatists would have been kicked out of office. Dean Acheson, Henry Kissinger, Jeane Kirkpatrick, James Baker III and Richard Holbrooke, among others, were all tough customers. Those are exactly the qualities you need in dealing with the hard cases who rule much of the world. No milquetoast need apply for the post of U.N. ambassador, or any other demanding diplomatic job.
Bolton has been an effective diplomat and bureaucratic operator precisely because he has not tried to win any popularity contests. He has fought for his beliefs, and usually prevailed. In 1991, for instance, he helped push for repeal of the U.N.'s infamous "Zionism is racism" resolution. More recently, he has marshaled an impressive coalition behind the Proliferation Security Initiative designed to stop the spread of nukes. And he did it not by being polite but by being forceful and persuasive.
I don't see eye to eye with Bolton on everything. His animus toward the International Criminal Court — which led him to antagonize valuable allies because of his insistence that they sign treaties pledging never to refer U.S. soldiers for prosecutions — seems excessive to me. And he has never been known as a fan of nation-building or humanitarian interventions, which I believe are necessary in the post-9/11 world. But he seems like a good choice to help drain the U.N. cesspool of corrupt bureaucrats and self-serving tyrants, and nothing in his confirmation hearings has led me to think otherwise.
I'm not impressed by unverified allegations made by an anti-Bush partisan that, as a private citizen, Bolton pounded on her hotel room door in 1994. Same with claims that he yelled at a co-worker in the early 1980s. Even if true, so what?
More serious is the charge that he misused intelligence. But these accusations break down upon close examination. In both of the instances cited, which concern Bolton speeches about the dangers posed by Cuba and Syria, he did push initially for tougher language than the intelligence community was comfortable with. But when the CIA told him to tone down his remarks, he complied. His unwillingness to blindly accept initial CIA judgments should be applauded, not reviled, in light of numerous commission findings that our spooks are often clueless.
Bolton is also accused of intimidating analysts who disagreed with him. He purportedly threatened to fire Christian Westermann, a State Department analyst who disagreed about whether Cuba is developing weapons of mass destruction. What critics neglect to mention is that Westermann sent Bolton's draft speech for review to the CIA with a cover letter falsely claiming that State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research disagreed with its conclusions. In fact, no official determination had been made. Westermann was then said to have denied what he did. Westermann's own boss apologized to Bolton for his "entirely inappropriate" conduct. No wonder Bolton got steamed.
If you doubt that these are reasonable grounds for rejecting Bolton's nomination, you would be right. All the harrumphing about how Bolton is no Mr. Nice Guy is only a pretext. The real issue is that liberal Democrats, Republican squishes and their allies inside the State Department are mad at Bolton because he has been a committed champion of President Bush's "unilateralist" foreign policy. But as a "top Senate Democrat" told Time magazine: "We can't argue that this guy is unfit just because he's said mean things about the U.N. Don't forget, most Americans agree with him." So instead of debating the real issues, they're making his personality the issue. That's, umm, not very nice.
Posted on: Thursday, April 28, 2005 - 13:10
What steps should Western border agencies take to defend their homelands from harm by Islamists?
In the case of non-citizens, the answer is simple: Don't let Islamists in. Exclude not just potential terrorists but also anyone who supports the totalitarian goals of radical Islam. Just as civilized countries did not welcome fascists in the early 1940s (or communists a decade later), they need not welcome Islamists today.
But what about one's own citizens who cross the border? They could be leaving to fight for the Taliban or returning from a course on terrorism techniques. Or perhaps they studied with enemies of the West who incited them to sabotage or sedition. Clearly, the authorities should take steps to find out more about their activities, especially given the dangerous jihadi culture already in place in many Western countries, including Canada.
This question arose in late December 2004, after a three-day Islamist conference,"Reviving the Islamic Spirit," took place in Toronto. The event, boasting a host of high-profile Islamist speakers such as Bilal Philips, Zaid Shakir, Siraj Wahhaj, and Hamza Yusuf, alarmed the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), America's new border agency.
Spokeswoman Kristie Clemens explained that her agency had information on how events such as the one in Toronto"may be used by terrorist organizations to promote terrorist activities, which includes traveling and fund raising." Ms. Clemens later added that the CBP has" credible, ongoing information that these types of conferences have been used and are being used by terrorist organizations to not only transport fraudulent documents but to mask travel by terrorists." Terrorists imagine, she pointed out, that if they travel in a large group,"we're going to be less restrictive and try to expedite the processing."
Her explanation hints at why the CBP decided to detain nearly 40 Muslims, many of them American citizens, as they returned to the U.S. by car from the Toronto conference. The travelers report they spent long hours at the border near Buffalo, N.Y., and none too pleasantly. One woman said she was asked whether the wire in her underwire bra was a weapon. Another, seven months' pregnant, reported that border agents lifted her blouse to make sure she really was pregnant. A third traveler quotes himself asking a border guard,"If I refuse to give my fingerprints, what will you do?" to which he got a terse reply:"You can refuse, but you'll be here until you do."
When Daniel W. Sutherland, officer for civil rights and civil liberties at the Department of Homeland Security, the CBP's parent organization, spoke in Buffalo earlier this month, he discussed the December episode. On principle, however, he neither justified nor condemned CBP's procedures. Rather, he only acknowledged that CBP did an"after-action review" and refined a few points. Mr. Sutherland placed the detaining of citizens into a larger context ("There are multiple pieces to that puzzle") and spent most of his time emphasizing the need for his department and Muslim groups to work better together.
He was right to remain discreetly uninformative. America finds itself at war with radical Islam not just in Afghanistan but in Buffalo, Boston, Boca Raton, and Baltimore. Controlling the border flow, therefore, has paramount importance. As a law enforcement agency, the CBP in this and other cases (notably that of Tariq Ramadan) should not divulge its exact reasons for excluding foreigners or detaining citizens. To do otherwise would compromise national security.
Which in turn probably explains why, last week, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the American Civil Liberties Union – two organizations consistently hostile to American self-protection – goaded five of the detained travelers to sue the federal government on the grounds that they"were unlawfully detained, interrogated, fingerprinted, and photographed."
Two of the plaintiffs' demands have lasting implications: that the court declare the CBP had violated the travelers' rights and that it enjoin the CBP from"detaining, interrogating, fingerprinting, and photographing United States citizens who are Muslim because they are returning to the country after having attended religious conferences."
Were the plaintiffs to prevail in this case, attending religious conferences would instantly become the favored method for terrorists and other Islamists to cross the American border without hindrance. Such a malign implication means this lawsuit needs to be tossed out by the courts.
This article is reprinted with permission by Daniel Pipes. This article first appeared in the New York Sun.
Posted on: Wednesday, April 27, 2005 - 17:33
The protests against the No Child Left Behind legislation are growing. Anti-testing activists opposed it from the get-go, but now conservative states like Utah are complaining that the federal government should not trample on states' rights, and liberal states like Connecticut insist they will not test children every year from grades three through eight. And no surprise, the National Education Association has sued to overturn what it calls an unfunded federal mandate.
The critics of NCLB think that it was modeled on education reforms in Texas and that it sprang full-blown from the brow of President Bush. They think they can undermine NCLB if only they can expose shortcomings in Texas's schools. But NCLB is not going away because it is the product of many years of bipartisan demands for changes in the role of the federal government, especially in meeting its responsibilities to poor children.
The word "education" does not appear in the Constitution, and for many years the federal role in education was negligible. This changed forever in 1965, when Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, one of President Johnson's signature issues. Its main feature, Title I, sent federal dollars to school districts across the nation to raise the achievement of disadvantaged children. Fearful that districts would squander the money, Sen. Robert Kennedy inserted into the law a provision requiring districts to send test-score data to Washington to show that the new federal subsidy was making a difference for poor children. However, lacking any recognizable test of student performance, many districts ignored the requirement, and others produced mounds of non-comparable test scores. Over time, the success of the Title I legislation was measured by how much money it distributed, but its results were unknown.
In 1983, a federal report called "A Nation at Risk" warned that student achievement was mediocre at best and called for higher standards, better pay, and a stronger curriculum. In the flurry of activity that followed that report, a bipartisan group of reform-minded Southern governors -- including Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Bill Clinton of Arkansas, Jim Hunt of North Carolina, and Richard Riley of South Carolina -- insisted on higher education standards and agreed to a trial of the federally funded test called the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) in their states.
In 1988, recognizing the growing demand for higher standards and better tests, Congress created the National Assessment Governing Board to oversee the NAEP program of testing. In the years since, NAEP has become the gold standard in the testing industry. The next year, President George H.W. Bush invited the nation's governors to join him in a national summit to discuss ways to improve education. This summit produced six national education goals, which were negotiated largely between the Bush administration and Gov. Clinton of Arkansas on behalf of the National Governors Association.
To follow through on the new national goals (for the year 2000), the Bush administration launched its program, called America 2000, which called for voluntary national standards and a national test. Although the administration funded professional groups to set academic standards, the Democratic-controlled Congress never authorized any part of America 2000.
When Bill Clinton campaigned for president, he promised to create a system of national standards and tests. When he was elected president, his education program was known as Goals 2000, and like its predecessor, it recognized the need to press for higher student achievement. Passed by Congress in 1994, Goals 2000 provided funds for every state to write academic standards and develop tests. The same Democratic-controlled Congress reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which called on states to expect poor children to meet state standards. In his 1997 State of the Union address, President Clinton proposed the establishment of voluntary national tests in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math. The Department of Education spent $50 million to develop these tests, but the GOP-controlled Congress never authorized them.
In the 2000 campaign, both George Bush and Al Gore endorsed a federal role in promoting higher education standards and greater accountability....
Posted on: Monday, April 25, 2005 - 20:10
Daniel Pipes, at his website (4-25-05):
Does the Bush administration really believe, as its leadership has kept repeating since right after 9/11, that Islam is a"religion of peace" not connected to the problem of terrorism? Plenty of indications suggested that it knew better, but year after year the official line remained the same. From the outside, it seemed that officialdom was engaged in active self-delusion.
In fact, things were better than they seemed, as David E. Kaplan establishes in an important investigation in U.S. News & World Report, based on over 100 interviews and the review of a dozen internal documents. Earlier arguments over the nature of the enemy – terrorism vs. radical Islam – have been resolved: America's highest officials widely agree that the country's"greatest ideological foe is a highly politicized form of radical Islam and that Washington and its allies cannot afford to stand by" as it gains in strength. To fight this ideology, the U.S. government now promotes a non-radical interpretation of Islam.
In"Hearts, Minds, and Dollars: In an Unseen Front in the War on Terrorism, America is Spending Millions to Change the Very Face of Islam," dated today, Kaplan explains that Washington recognizes it has a security interest not just within the Muslim world but within Islam. Therefore, it must engage in shaping the very religion of Islam. Washington has focused on the root causes of terrorism – not poverty or U.S. foreign policy, but a compelling political ideology.
A key document in reaching this conclusion was the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, issued by the White House in February 2003, which served as the basis for the bolder, more detailed, Muslim World Outreach, completed in mid-2004 and now the authoritative guide. (A government discussion of this topic, dating from August 2004, is available online.) The U.S. government, being a secular and predominantly non-Muslim institution, faces many limitations in what is at base a religious dispute, so it turns to Muslim organizations that share its goals, including governments, foundations, and nonprofit groups.
The tactics for fighting radical Islam and promoting moderate Islam vary from one government department to another: it's covert operations at the CIA, psyops at the Pentagon, and public diplomacy at the State Department. Whatever the name and approach, the common element is to encourage the benign evolution of Islam. Toward this end, the U.S. government, Kaplan writes,"has embarked on a campaign of political warfare unmatched since the height of the Cold War." The goal is:
to influence not only Muslim societies but Islam itself…Although U.S. officials say they are wary of being drawn into a theological battle, many have concluded that America can no longer sit on the sidelines as radicals and moderates fight over the future of a politicized religion with over a billion followers. The result has been an extraordinary—and growing—effort to influence what officials describe as an Islamic reformation.
In at least two dozen countries, Kaplan writes:
Washington has quietly funded Islamic radio and TV shows, coursework in Muslim schools, Muslim think tanks, political workshops, or other programs that promote moderate Islam. Federal aid is going to restore mosques, save ancient Korans, even build Islamic schools…individual CIA stations overseas are making some gutsy and innovative moves. Among them: pouring money into neutralizing militant, anti-U.S. preachers and recruiters."If you found out that Mullah Omar is on one street corner doing this, you set up Mullah Bradley on the other street corner to counter it," explains one recently retired official. In more-serious cases, he says, recruiters would be captured and"interrogated." Intelligence operatives have set up bogus jihad websites and targeted the Arab news media.
In all, various agencies of the U.S. government are active in this Islamic activity in at least 24 countries. Projects include:
the restoration of historic mosques in Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkmenistan. In Kirgizstan, embassy funding helped restore a major Sufi shrine. In Uzbekistan, money has gone to preserve antique Islamic manuscripts, including 20 Korans, some dating to the 11th century. In Bangladesh, USAID is training mosque leaders on development issues. In Madagascar, the embassy even sponsored an intermosque sports tournament. Also being funded: Islamic media of all sorts, from book translations to radio and TV in at least a half-dozen nations.
Madrassahs, or Islamic schools, are a particular concern, for these train the next generation of jihadis and terrorists. Washington deploys several tactics to counter their influence:
Posted on: Monday, April 25, 2005 - 17:12
[The writer is professor emeritus of southern and civil rights history at the University of Virginia. ]
People calling themselves Christians are gathering once again for a crusade against what they consider to be the secular humanist subversion of Christian values. This time the object of their wrath is the judiciary. In the wake of the fanatical and fruitless assaults against the judicial system for letting Terri Schiavo die, the Family Research Council will convene tomorrow what it calls "Justice Sunday," a live simulcast to pit Christian values against "our out-of-control courts."
The burgeoning assault on the American judicial system by right-wing Christians is an integral part of their attack on "godless" secular humanism. According to them, secular humanists nurture a culture that promotes abortion; encourages gay marriage; prohibits prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance in permissive schools that indoctrinate students with Darwin's "theory" of evolution; preaches moral relativism; and generally threatens to subvert the Christian foundations of the republic.
What these self-avowed Christians do not acknowledge -- and what the American public seems little aware of -- is that the war they are waging is actually against other people calling themselves Christians. To simplify: Right-wing and fundamentalist Christians are really at war with left-wing and mainstream Christians. It is a battle over both the meaning and practice of Christianity as well as over the definition and destiny of the republic. Secular humanism is a bogeyman, a smoke screen obscuring the right-wing Christians' struggle for supremacy.
The assault on the judiciary is especially revealing. The vicious attacks on Judge George Greer, the Florida jurist who presided over the Schiavo case, reveal the bizarre nature of right-wing Christian fantasies. A regular recipient of hate mail and threats against his life that required him to walk to court with an armed marshal, Judge Greer is a lifelong Southern Baptist, a regular in church and a conservative Republican. None of those credentials protected him from the assaults of fellow Christians, including messages saying he would go straight to Hell. What he found "exasperating," he told a journalist, "is that my faith is based on forgiveness because that's what God did. . . . When I see people in my faith being extremely judgmental, it's very disconcerting."
Nearly all of the demonized judges are, in fact, practicing Christians, not secular humanists. Perhaps half of them are Republican appointees, and at least that many regard themselves as conservatives. In addition to Greer, most of the judges of the 11th Circuit who upheld his rulings, as well as most of the Supreme Court justices who declined to intervene, consider themselves Christian. And so it goes around the country, even including many, if not most, of the judges in the California-based 9th Circuit, the regular object of President Bush's ridicule. And, lest we forget, Charles Darwin himself was a serious Christian.
The history of a Christian church divided against itself is a long and bloody one. People calling themselves Christians have stood for war and peace, subjugation and brotherhood, communism and capitalism, privilege and equality, enslavement and liberty, imperialism and isolation.
That is one reason Thomas Jefferson insisted on religious liberty in the new republic. In his Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, he wrote that "millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity." ...
Posted on: Sunday, April 24, 2005 - 16:32
Journalists, George Bernard Shaw once said, "are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization." How odd, given the profession's un-equaled reputation for narcissism, that Shaw's observation holds true even when the collapsing "civilization" is their own.
Make no mistake: The Bush Administration and its ideological allies are employing every means available to undermine journalists' ability to exercise their First Amendment function to hold power accountable. In fact, the Administration recognizes no such constitutional role for the press. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card has insisted that the media "don't represent the public any more than other people do.... I don't believe you have a check-and-balance function."
Bush himself, on more than one occasion, has told reporters he does not read their work and prefers to live inside the information bubble blown by his loyal minions. Vice President Cheney feels free to kick the New York Times off his press plane, and John Ashcroft can refuse to speak with any print reporters during his Patriot-Act-a-palooza publicity tour, just to compliant local TV. As an unnamed Bush official told reporter Ron Suskind, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality--judiciously, as you will--we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." For those who didn't like it, another Bush adviser explained, "Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered two to one by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read the New York Times or Washington Post or the LA Times."
But the White House and its supporters are doing more than just talking trash--when they talk at all. They are taking aggressive action: preventing journalists from doing their job by withholding routine information; deliberately releasing deceptive information on a regular basis; bribing friendly journalists to report the news in a favorable context; producing their own "news reports" and distributing these free of charge to resource-starved broadcasters; creating and crediting their own political activists as "journalists" working for partisan operations masquerading as news organizations. In addition, an Administration-appointed special prosecutor, US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, is now threatening two journalists with jail for refusing to disclose the nature of conversations they had regarding stories they never wrote, opening up a new frontier of potential prosecution. All this has come in the wake of a decades-long effort by the right and its corporate allies to subvert journalists' ability to report fairly on power and its abuse by attaching the label "liberal bias" to even the most routine forms of information gathering and reportage (for a transparent example in today's papers, see under "DeLay, Tom"). Some of these tactics have been used by previous administrations too, but the Bush team and its supporters have invested in and deployed them to a degree that marks a categorical shift from the past.
Many of these lines of attack on the press might at first appear to have little in common. What does an increase in official secrecy have to do with payments to pundits, or the broadcast of official video news releases, or the presence of a right-wing charlatan in the White House press room pretending to be a reporter and serving up softball questions to the President in prime time? And how is any of this connected to the Administration's willingness to mislead the nation on everything from stem cells to Social Security?
The right wing's media "decertification" effort, as the journalism scholar and blogger Jay Rosen calls it, has its roots in forty years of conservative fury at the consistent condescension it experienced from the once-liberal elite media and the cosmopolitan establishment for whom its members have spoken. Fueled by this sense of outrage, the right launched a multifaceted effort to fight back with institutions of its own, including think tanks, advocacy organizations, media pressure groups, church groups, big-business lobbies and, eventually, its own television, talk-radio, cable and radio networks (to be augmented, later, by a vast array of Internet sites). Today this triumphant movement has captured not only much of the media and the public discourse on ideas but both the presidency and Congress (and soon, undoubtedly, the Supreme Court as well); it can wage its war on so many fronts simultaneously that it becomes nearly impossible to see that almost all these efforts are aimed at a single goal: the destruction of democratic accountability and the media's role in insuring it.
The Bush attack on the press has three primary components--Secrecy, Lies and Fake News. Consider these examples:
Secrecy
All Presidents try to keep secrets; it comes with the job description. Following 9/11, the need for secrecy increased significantly. Bush, however, has taken advantage of this new environment to shut down the natural flow of information between the governing and the governed in ways that have little or nothing to do with the terrorist threat. As Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity points out, "The country has seen a historic, regressive shift in public accountability. Open-records laws nationwide have been rolled back more than 300 times--all in the name of national security." Federation of American Scientists secrecy specialist Steven Aftergood adds, "Since President George W. Bush entered office, the pace of classification activity has increased by 75 percent.... His Information Security Oversight Office oversees the classification system and recorded a rise from 9 million classification actions in fiscal year 2001 to 16 million in fiscal year 2004."
Some of these efforts may be justified as prudent preparation in the face of genuine threats, but this is hard to credit, given the contempt the Administration has demonstrated for the public's right to information in non-security-related matters. Upon entering office, Bush attempted to shield his Texas gubernatorial records by shuttling them into his father's presidential library. That was followed by an executive fiat designed to hide his father's presidential records, as well as those of the Reagan/Bush Administration, by blocking the scheduled release of documents under the Presidential Records Act of 1978 and issuing a replacement presidential order that allowed not only Presidents but also their wives and children to keep their records secret. (The records had already been scrubbed for national security implications.)
In the aftermath of 9/11, Administration efforts to prevent accountability accelerated to warp speed. Attorney General Ashcroft reversed a Clinton Administration-issued policy governing FOIA requests that allowed documents to be withheld only when "foreseeable harm" would likely result, to one in which merely a "sound legal basis" could be found. And that was just the beginning. Even when documents were not withheld de jure, Administration officials often withheld them de facto. When People for the American Way sought documents on prisoners' cases being litigated in secret, the Justice Department required it to pay $373,000 in search fees before officials would even look. "It's become much, much harder to get responses to FOIA requests, and it's taking much, much longer," David Schulz, the attorney who helps the Associated Press with FOIA requests, explained to a reporter. "Agencies seem to view their role as coming up with techniques to keep information secret rather than the other way around. That's completely contrary to the goal of the act."
In addition, as Aftergood notes, "an even more aggressive form of government information control has gone unenumerated and often unrecognized in the Bush era, as government agencies have restricted access to unclassified information in libraries, archives, websites and official databases." These sources were once freely available but are now being withdrawn from view under the classification "sensitive but unclassified" or "for official use only." They include: the Pentagon telephone directory, the Los Alamos technical report library, historical records at the National Archives and the Energy Department intelligence budget, among many others. Even more alarming is the web of secrecy surrounding the operations of what has become the equivalent of a police state at Guantánamo Bay and other military prisons around the world, where the accused are routinely denied due process and traditional rules of evidence are deemed irrelevant. Exactly two members of Congress, both sworn to secrecy, are being briefed by the CIA on these programs. The rest of Congress, the media and the public are given no information to judge the legality, morality or effectiveness of these extralegal machinations, some of which have already resulted in officially sanctioned torture and possibly even murder.
Lies
The issue of "lies" has been the most consistently clouded by the Administration's supporters in the conservative media, who refuse to report facts when they conflict with White House spin. It's true, as I show in my book When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences, that many presidents have demonstrated an almost allergic reaction to accuracy. Still, the Bush Administration manages to set a new standard here as well, reducing reality to a series of inconvenient obstacles to be ignored in favor of ideological prejudices and political imperatives--and it has done so virtually across the entire executive branch. As Michael Kinsley noted way back in April 2002, "What's going on here is something like lying by reflex.... Bush II administration lies are often so laughably obvious that you wonder why they bother. Until you realize: They haven't bothered. If telling the truth was less bother, they'd try that too."
Rather than regurgitate that fruitless debate over the war--the deliberate untruths told by the Administration have been delineated ad nauseam--consider just two recent examples of its deception on matters relating to scientific and medical evidence:
§?Mercury emissions: When the EPA unveiled a rule to limit mercury emissions from power plants, Bush officials argued that anything more stringent than the EPA's proposed regulations would cost the industry far in excess of any conceivable benefit to public health. They hid the fact, however, that a Harvard study paid for by the EPA, co-written by an EPA scientist and peer-reviewed by two other EPA scientists, found exactly the opposite, estimating health benefits 100 times as great as the EPA did. Even more shocking, according to a GAO investigation, the EPA had failed to "quantify the human health benefits of decreased exposure to mercury, such as reduced incidence of developmental delays, learning disabilities, and neurological disorders."
§?Nuclear materials: The Los Angeles Times recently reported that government scientists apparently submitted phony data to demonstrate that a proposed nuclear waste dump in Nevada's Yucca Mountain would be safe. As with the EPA and mercury emissions, the Interior Department found unsatisfactory the results of a study from the Los Alamos National Laboratory concluding that rainwater moved through the mountain sufficiently quickly for radioactive isotopes to penetrate the ground in a few decades, so it just pretended it hadn't happened.
In these two emblematic cases, as it has done so many times before, the Administration simply issued its own pronouncements, ignored reality and went its merry way, damn the consequences both for the reality of its policies and for its own credibility. Those found guilty of deception did not mind the one-day story that would result demonstrating them to be liars any more than Vice President Cheney minded the fact that a videotape existed of him claiming on Meet the Press that the alleged Prague meeting between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official had been "pretty well confirmed" when he twice insisted, also on videotape, that he "never said that." And the political calculation turned out to be a good one. It was left to The Daily Show to run the two tapes of Cheney together. Reporters may have been angry at being lied to, but they returned the next day to swallow some more.
Fake News
The Bush Administration has invested untold millions in video "news releases" that disguise themselves as genuine news reports and are frequently broadcast by irresponsible local news programs. In three separate opinions in the past year, the Congressional Government Accountability Office held that government-made news segments may constitute improper "covert propaganda" even if their origin is made clear to television stations. Yet the Administration has rejected these rulings, fortified by a Justice Department opinion that insists that the reports are purely informational. Of course, the Administration's idea of "purely informational" is sufficiently elastic to stretch all the way from the White House to Ahmad Chalabi's house. As the New York Times reported, a "jubilant" Iraqi-American chanting "Thank you, Bush. Thank you, USA" is deemed to fall into this category, as is a report of "another success" in the Administration's "drive to strengthen aviation security" in which the "reporter" called the effort "one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history." A third segment, broadcast in January, described the Administration's commitment to opening markets for American farmers. The reports are clearly designed to simulate legitimate news programming. A now-infamous report narrated by PR flack Karen Ryan for the Department of Health and Human Services praising the benefits of the new Medicare bill imitated a real news report by having her sign off as "Karen Ryan, reporting" and by not identifying the story's source. The Clinton Administration made use of video "news releases" as well, but now the government's investment in them appears to have nearly doubled, as has its brazenness.
These phony news reports have much in common with stage-managed "public" presidential events that bar all potential dissenters and script virtually every utterance. In March, for instance, three people found themselves kicked out of a Bush Social Security event because of a bumper sticker on their car in the parking lot that read No More Blood for Oil. White House press secretary Scott McClellan said a volunteer asked the three to leave "out of concern they might try to disrupt the event," but, of course, no evidence of any potential disruption could be found save the "thought crime" of coming to the event with an antiwar bumper sticker on a car. This was not, recall, a Bush/Cheney '04 campaign event but a presidential forum to discuss the future of Social Security. (Previously citizens had been kept out of Bush events because of clothing deemed inappropriate or for reasons unexplained, as when most of a group of forty-two, barred from an event in Fargo, North Dakota, later discovered that what they had in common was membership on a Howard Dean meetup.com list.)
In addition to creating its own mediated version of reality, the Administration has also invested considerable resources in corrupting members of the media with cash payments, in what George Miller, ranking Democrat on the Committee on Education and the Workforce, has termed a "potentially criminal mismanagement of expensive contracts." These include hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments to right-wing pundits Armstrong Williams ($240,000), Maggie Gallagher ($21,000) and Michael McManus ($10,000), the conservative author of the syndicated column "Ethics & Religion," who, like Williams, was paid to help promote a marriage initiative. And yet the resulting scandal has benefited the Administration's war on the press by damaging journalism's public image and reinforcing the false belief that everyone in the media is somehow "on the take."
Undoubtedly the Administration's most bizarre effort to manipulate the media was its embrace of former gay prostitute James Guckert, aka Jeff Gannon, who showed up at the White House under a phony name and worked for a right-wing shell operation that acted less like a news organization than an arm of the Republican National Committee, publishing articles like "Kerry Could Become First Gay President." Gannon's ostensible employer, Talon News Service, employed an editor in chief, Bobby Eberle, who served as a delegate to the 1996, 1998 and 2000 Texas Republican Conventions and to the 2000 Republican National Convention and enjoyed many direct connections to Republican and right-wing organizations. Press secretary McClellan would often call on Gannon when he wanted to extricate himself from a particularly effective line of questioning. The words "Go ahead, Jeff," signaled that the press corps could be getting into an area that might embarrass the White House--or could be discovering a nugget of genuine news. Gannon's ploy might have continued indefinitely had the President not helped make him famous by calling on him at a January 26 news conference in order to be served up a softball that mocked Democrats for being "divorced from reality." Once exposed, Gannon resigned and Talon folded up shop like a rolled-up CIA cover-op. As James Pinkerton, an official in both the Reagan and Bush I White House, admitted on Fox News, getting the kind of clearance Gannon did in this security atmosphere must have required "an incredible amount of intervention from somebody high up in the White House," that it had to be "conscious" and that "some investigation should proceed, and they should find that out." As Frank Rich observed, "Given an all-Republican government, the only investigation possible will have to come from the press."
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this war against the media has been the fact that members of the media have largely behaved as if it is just business as usual. In fact, much of the success of the effort derives from the cooperation, both implicit and explicit, of the press. No one, after all, forces local TV stations to run official propaganda videos in lieu of their own programming, or without identifying them as such, and no one forces CNN Newsource, among others, to distribute them. And why did the curious mystery of "Gannon," despite its obvious newsworthiness--and sex appeal--receive so little critical coverage and virtually no outrage in the mainstream press? (Washington Post media critic and CNN talking head Howard Kurtz even went so far as to blame the scandal on "these liberal bloggers, [who] have started investigating his personal life in an effort to discredit him," and the National Press Club invited Gannon to be an honored guest on a panel on blogging and journalistic credibility.) Mike McCurry, White House press secretary under Bill Clinton, says he marvels at the willingness of the press corps to swallow the various humiliations offered them by Bush & Co. He told a recent gathering of Washington reporters and editors, "I used to think that if I ever tried to control the message as effectively as the current White House did, that I would have been run out of the White House press briefing room. But clearly I misjudged the temperament that exists."
The media's failure to resist this assault is perhaps understandable. Members of the profession are under siege from so many directions simultaneously they may feel they can hardly keep up with each incoming salvo. Not only is much of the traditional media controlled by multinational corporations that view their operations not as a public trust but as profit centers to be squeezed, but newspapers are facing an alarming decline in readership (and more than a few are admitting to having padded those numbers all along). Broadcast news has been steadily losing audience share for decades. In a vicious cycle, the results of such declines are more declines, as resources are cut to match reduced profits and pressure escalates from above to do more with less. Meanwhile, more and more "news" programs are succumbing to the tabloid temptation, and the lowering of quality has been ac-companied by a proliferation of factual errors, plagiarism and outright fiction proffered as reportage, further undermining public respect for the field. As Philip Meyer recently wrote in The Columbia Journalism Review, there is a sense that journalism itself "is being phased out. Our once noble calling is increasingly difficult to distinguish from things that look like journalism but are primarily advertising, press agentry, or entertainment." Throw in the nonstop ideological assault from the self-intoxicated section of the (mostly conservative) blogosphere, from (even more conservative) talk-radio and cable loudmouths like Limbaugh and O'Reilly, plus the fact that members of generations X and Y seem more likely to commit acts of terrorism than pick up a newspaper or watch a news broadcast, and it seems almost a luxury to worry about the Bush Administration's attack as well.
Another reason for the press's complacency is that many of these tactics are nothing new. Reporters have always engaged in a complex push-me/pull-you relationship with the President, alternately sucking up and pulling down as the political tides rose and fell. More than thirty years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed in Commentary that "in most essential encounters between the Presidency and the press, the advantage is with the former. The President has a near limitless capacity to 'make' news which must be reported.... The President also has considerable capacity to reward friends and punish enemies in the press corps.... Finally, a President who wishes can carry off formidable deceptions." What's unprecedented is the degree to which this Administration has employed these efforts to undermine the journalist's democratic function.
His formidable deceptions notwithstanding, George W. Bush has charmed many in the press personally, and his Administration, in the person of Karl Rove, has impressed them with its political perspicacity. Media insiders believe Bush/Rove to be a tougher political combination than most but have trouble believing they are seeking to effect a fundamental transformation in press-presidential relations. Media insiders appear to like Bush a great deal more than the public does and frequently overestimate his popularity (in fact, in early April, Bush's approval rating had fallen to the lowest level of any President since World War II at this point in his second term, according to the Gallup organization).
What's more, for journalists to admit they are being deceived, or even manipulated, contradicts their sense of self-importance as "players" in a perpetual game of good governance. To read ABC News's "The Note"--which has developed into a kind of Pravda for the "Gang of 500" who cover national politics every day--is to enter a world in which the President and his advisers are treated in a manner not unlike the way US Weekly treats "Brad and Jen." Its affectionate tone speaks, too, to Washington reporters' coziness with the subjects they're ostensibly covering, their sources. McCurry notes that unnamed sources are such a problem today in part because reporters are frequently more eager to grant anonymity than officials are to demand it. "I have had probably thousands of conversations with reporters in twenty-five years as a press secretary, and I'd say 80 percent of the time I am offered anonymity and background rather than asking for it. I rarely have to ask for it and don't ask for it because I prefer to keep on the record as often as I can."
While individual reporters and even news organizations are undoubtedly vulnerable to White House retaliation if they refuse to play ball--former White House officials spoke openly of their desire to punish CBS and Dan Rather--if these organizations were to unite on behalf of their constitutional charge and collective dignity, they would likely find a White House that knows when it's beaten. Alas, reporters, like Democrats and cats, are maddeningly hard to organize. When some recently tried to map out a collective response to the White House's secrecy obsession, it got few takers. Knight-Ridder reporter Ron Hutcheson, president of the White House Correspondents' Association, walked out of an anonymous briefing last term to be followed by exactly no one. Len Downie, executive editor of the Washington Post, has ruled out the possibility of participation in any such action. "We just don't believe in unified action," he explained in a note to former Post ombudsman Geneva Overholser, "and would find a discussion aimed at reaching agreement with others on 'practicable steps' or even agreement on when not to agree to various ground rules uncomfortable and unworkable."
The net result of this one-sided battle is the de jure destruction of the balance that has characterized the American political system since the modern, nonpartisan media began to emerge a century ago. And unless journalists find a way to fight back for the honor, dignity and, ultimately, effectiveness of their profession, the press's role in American democracy and society will continue to diminish accordingly, to the disadvantage of all our citizens. Bush adviser Karen Hughes has explained, "We don't see there being any penalty from the voters for ignoring the mainstream press." And there's been none to date. Speaking to Salon's Eric Boehlert, Ron Suskind outlined what he sees as the ultimate aim of the Administration upon which he has reported so effectively. "Republicans have a clear, agreed-upon plan how to diminish the mainstream press," he warns. "For them, essentially the way to handle the press is the same as how to handle the federal government; you starve the beast. When it's in a weakened and undernourished condition, then you're able to effect a variety of subtle partisan and political attacks."
"Two cheers for democracy," wrote E.M. Forster, "one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism." But the aim of the Bush offensive against the press is to do just the opposite; to insure, as far as possible, that only one voice is heard and that no criticism is sanctioned. The press may be the battleground, but the target is democracy itself.
Reprinted with permission from the Nation. For subscription information call 1-800-333-8536. Portions of each week's Nation magazine can be accessed at http://www.thenation.com.
Posted on: Friday, April 22, 2005 - 15:13
Cass R. Sunstein, in the LAT (4-15-05):
In the last half-century, conservative politicians have mounted three dramatically different attacks on the federal judiciary. The first attack, in which they emphasized the need for judicial restraint, was principled and coherent. The second, which called on judges to consider the original meaning of the Constitution, was more radical but still had honorable goals: to promote stability, neutrality and the rule of law. The third attack, however, is the most worrisome: a large-scale challenge to judicial independence, and we are now in the midst of it.
During the first of the three waves, beginning around 1955, conservatives attacked liberal activist judges for seizing on ambiguous constitutional provisions to strike down decisions of elected officials. The conservatives were concerned about Supreme Court rulings protecting accused criminals, above all Miranda vs. Arizona, which required police to inform suspects of their rights. The principals were Justices William O. Douglas, William J. Brennan Jr. and Earl Warren the liberal leaders of the Warren court. The attack on the Warren court helped fuel Gerald Ford's failed effort to impeach Douglas in 1970.
In this period, conservatives promoted judicial "restraint," calling on judges to hesitate before interpreting the Constitution to strike down reasonable judgments of the people's representatives.
President Nixon, for instance, sought to end the era of judicial "activism" by appointing judges who scaled back protection of criminal defendants and who rejected efforts to use the Constitution to protect the poor.
The second attack on the judiciary, which began in the early 1980s, no longer emphasized restraint. Instead it built on the approach to constitutional interpretation known as "originalism" the view that the Constitution means exactly what it meant when it was ratified. Some of these conservatives called for restoration of what they called "the lost Constitution."
Of course, defenders of the lost Constitution oppose new protections of criminal defendants. They have no sympathy for the right of privacy enunciated in Griswold vs. Connecticut and Roe vs. Wade. But many originalists are far more ambitious; they also believe, for instance, that Congress should not have more power over interstate commerce than it had in 1787. Unlike those who called for judicial restraint in the 1970s, these originalists are perfectly willing to use the Constitution to strike down decisions of elected officials if those decisions are inconsistent with the original meaning of the ratifiers.
On important occasions, this argument has found a receptive audience within the Rehnquist court, whose members have referred to the original understanding of the ratifiers in striking down the Violence Against Women Act and a key provision of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, among many other laws.
Originalism is a radical program, but it has one admirable feature: It is designed to promote both judicial independence from the political process and the rule of law, by ensuring what Justice Antonin Scalia, the most prominent originalist, calls a "rock-solid, unchanging Constitution." Scalia has deplored the fact that the "American people have been converted to belief in The Living Constitution, a 'morphing' document that means, from age to age, what it ought to mean."
But now we are witnessing a third wave of attack, in which originalism is receding, and in which many conservative politicians want judges to read the Constitution, and the law in general, as if it fits with the Republican Party platform.
Posted on: Wednesday, April 20, 2005 - 13:19
On April 7, 2005, in his New York Times op-ed piece, Thomas Friedman wrote:
' Until the recent elections in Iraq and among the Palestinians, the modern Arab world was largely immune to the winds of democracy that have blown everywhere else in the world. Why? That's a pretty important question. For years, though, it was avoided in both the East and the West.
In the West, it was avoided because a toxic political correctness infected the academic field of Middle Eastern studies -- to such a degree that anyone focusing on the absence of freedom in the Arab world ran the risk of being labeled an"Orientalist" or an"essentialist." '
I don't know Tom Friedman well. I once had dinner with him and Lee Bollinger, just after September 11, at the university president's house here at the University of Michigan, so I can say I've met him. I remember some of our conversation at that time. I argued, at a time when it seemed clear that the US would go to war with Afghanistan, that simply bombing the Taliban and al-Qaeda would not be enough. I said that the US had a responsibility to do nation-building in Afghanistan. Not only did we owe the country for helping devastate it by using it in as a proxy in our war with the Soviets, but if we did not help it out, it might well fall back into chaos and generate forces that might hit us again. Tom absolutely disagreed and, on free market grounds, argued that no attempt at government state building should ever be undertaken. I explained why I thought it was not only desirable but inevitable. He said,"Well, someone would have to show me how it could be done." I am glad to say that I clearly won this argument after the fact, and Tom seemed rather more enthusiastic about US nation-building a year later, when considering Iraq. Indeed, he now seems to want the US government to engage in vast social-engineering projects throughout the Middle East. Tom, I was just talking about Afghanistan. Even if I convinced you, I didn't mean you to go quite this far.
In the friendliest of ways, I would now like to address the two paragraphs above, in which Tom rather surprisingly lashed out at the field to which he himself belongs. (He has a master's degree in Middle East studies from St. Anthony's at Oxford University, and surely that training-- with some of the same people who trained or influenced the rest of us in the field-- is part of the secret of Tom's success as a journalist of the area).
He begins by wondering why the winds of democracy have not blown in"the Arab world" except recently"in Iraq and among Palestinians" (sic) (why not"and in Palestine"?). He says it is an important question that has been avoided by the academic Middle East studies field in the West, because that field was"infected" with a"political correctness" that made it impossible to speak of the problem of authoritarianism in the Middle East without risking being branded an"essentialist."
Now, there are at least four things wrong with these assertions.
First, it is not true that the recent elections in Palestine and Iraq were so unique. Lebanon had regular elections from 1943 until the civil war of the mid-1970s, which resumed in the 1990s. The Palestinians had what were widely regarded as relatively free and fair elections in 1996. And, important steps toward democratization were begun in Jordan in 1989, in Yemen after unification, in Morocco in 2002, and in Bahrain in 2002. Tom himself praised some of these developments at the time. These parliamentary elections were all flawed in important ways, and marred by continued aspects of authoritarianism, but they can't be dismissed as insignificant. And, the elections in Palestine and Iraq, both held under conditions of foreign military occupation with substantial portions of the electorate engaged in a boycott and poor security conditions, were also deeply flawed. (In Iraq, where the very names of the candidates were largely kept secret for fear they would be assassinated, the election was anonymous and therefore in some real sense not a democratic election at all, but a sort of national referendum on a set of party lists.)
So Tom's premises here are, well, downright weird, and contradict other things he has said in the past.
Then there is the inconvenient fact that political scientists such as Michael Hudson and others have in fact attempted to understand why the Arab world was an exception to the"third wave" of democratization. There is a fair literature on the subject by political scientists, of which Friedman seems, to my astonishment, completely unaware. Tom might enjoy reading Michael Hudson's"Obstacles to democratization in the Middle East," Contention, vol. 5, no. ii, pp. 81-105, 1995, which took up the subject he says has been absent, and did it ten years ago! Then there is Tim Niblock,"Democratization: a theoretical and practical debate," British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 25, no. ii, pp. 221-233, 1998. Or how about Fred Lawson's"Syria resists the end of history," Middle East and North Africa: governance, democratization, human rights. Ed. P.J.Magnarella. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999, pp. 67-82. Then there is Raymond Hinnebusch,"Liberalization without democratization in"post-populist" authoritarian states: evidence from Syria and Egypt," in Citizenship and the state in the Middle East: approaches and applications. Ed. N.A.Butenschon, Uri Davis, & M.Hassassian. Syracuse (USA): Syracuse University Press, 2000, pp. 123-145. Try Curtis Ryan and Jillian Schwedler's"Return to democratization or new hybrid regime? The 2003 elections in Jordan," Middle East Policy, vol. 11, no. ii, pp. 138-151, 2004. This is just a small sample of an enormous scholarly literature. Is it really true that Tom has departed so far from his earlier training that he can't even look articles up in Index Islamicus online, much less bother to read them?
Third, the way you would get accused of essentialism is to engage in it. This fancy word just means that you say things that depend on there being eternal essences of things. So, for instance, if you said,"Palestinians are now and always have been a violent, fanatical, and duplicitous race." -- that would be essentialism (also racism). You would be assuming that Palestinians have a shared and unvarying essence. If you said,"Arabs are incapable of democracy because their political instincts are always authoritarian"-- that would be essentialism. If you said that most Arab governments are authoritarian, and tried to explain why that was with reference to changing political, social or economic factors, then that would not be essentialist. It would be social science.
The fourth problem is that what Friedman has alleged about lack of critiques of authoritarianism in the region is completely untrue. I am going to be charitable and attribute his lapse of judgment to ignorance, or to listening to the wrong people and not reading enough in the field.
But I just did a few keyword searches in Lexis Nexis and on google, putting in the names of a few random major American scholars of Middle East studies. I tried to go back in time a bit, before the most recent controversies stemming from 9/11, so as to show that critiques have been being offered all along. I'll let readers judge if"political correctness" deterred the persons below, who are central to the field, from critiquing authoritarian governance in the Middle East. Most academics mainly write journal articles and books, rather than op-eds, and relatively few get quoted in the press. So if I could keyword search the books written by Middle East studies scholars, I could give many more examples. But even what is below is enough to show that Tom is dead wrong.
Michael Hudson, Political Science, Georgetown University, and a past president of the Middle East Studies Association, quoted in The Toronto Star May 12, 1994,"Killing an Arabic dream The civil war in Yemen is destroying the region's experiment in democracy and unity"
"Basically what you have in Yemen that's causing it to fall apart are two regimes that never really were able to shake off their exclusivist, dictatorial mentality even though unity was, and still is, something that on the popular level Yemenis wanted and still want," Michael Hudson, professor of international relations at Georgetown University in Washington, told The Star.
Along with thousands of other foreigners, including Canadian oil company workers, Hudson was evacuated from San'a just a few days ago."
Rashid Khalidi (a past president of the Middle East Studies Association and professor of history at Columbia University) et al., The New York Times, January 20, 1994, Thursday, Late Edition - Final
Human Rights Activist Disappears in Cairo
To the Editor:
Last Dec. 10, Mansour Kikhia, former Libyan Foreign Minister and twice Libya's United Nations representative, disappeared while in Cairo for the annual meeting of the Arab Organization of Human Rights, of which he was a founder and director. The evidence suggests he was abducted and is alive but detained in Libya.
Since he left his United Nations post in 1980, Mr. Kikhia, a distinguished jurist and human rights activist, has been a prominent member of the Libyan opposition. In 1984 he joined other well-known Arab opponents of despots and oligarchies to establish the human rights organization, placing himself on the front line of the battle for democracy and decent government in the Middle East.
Now his enemies have struck back at him in a lawless and cowardly fashion. We call on the Egyptian authorities -- from whose territory Mr. Kikhia disappeared -- to mount a vigorous investigation of this breach of human decency. We call on the Libyan Government to cooperate fully in the search for him.
As friends and colleagues of Mansour Kikhia, whose bravery and principles we have long admired, we urge Arabs, Americans with an interest in the Arab world and human rights organizations not to rest until he regains his freedom. Nothing could be worse than to let the governments concerned think he will be forgotten.
EDWARD W. SAID, CLOVIS MAKSOUD
RASHID KHALIDI, SAMIH FARSOUN"
New York, Jan. 12, 1994
Joel Beinin, Professor of History, Stanford, former president of the Middle East Studies Association, from his 2002 MESA Presidential Address:
' The holders of state power have always tried to impose an intellectual agenda compatible with their interests, as students of Middle East history know from the attempts of the `Abbasid Caliphs al-Ma’mun (813-33) and al-Mu`tasim (833-42) to impose the rationalist mu`tazili doctrine on their subjects. And there have always been those who have struggled against the imposition of doctrines associated with state power, as we know from the ardent resistance of Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855) to the mu`tazili doctrine. As some would have it, the victory of ibn Hanbal in this confrontation is part of"what went wrong" in Islamic societies. We could just as easily draw a different lesson: that when states attempt to impose an intellectual orthodoxy – even an"enlightened" one such as rationalism, secularism, modernization, Arab socialism, Marxism-Leninism, or neo-liberal economics and"freedom" – they inevitably generate a resistance, which may or may not itself be enlightened. And in combating that resistance they may very likely adopt cruel and authoritarian measures that will undermine the legitimacy of whatever"enlightened" ideas they espoused. The recent histories of Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Iran, and Turkey offer volumes of evidence for this proposition. '
Andrew J. Pierre and William B. Quandt,"The 'Contract' With Algeria; One Last Chance for the West to Help Stop the Civil War" The Washington Post, January 22, 1995, Sunday.
Quandt is a Vice Provost for International Affairs and professor of government at the University of Virginia, and long-time member of the Middle East Studies Association.
. . . leverage exists precisely because any Algerian regime will depend on solid relations with France and Europe, and to a lesser extent with the United States. Thus, a coordinated policy among all these external parties could help to strengthen the chance of Algerian democracy.
As the United States stakes out its position, several points are of particular importance:
A high-level American official should convey to Paris, the Algerian regime and opposition groups the United States' strong support for the end of violence through political dialogue between the military government and opposition forces. Algerians should be urged to begin a transitional process designed to create a legitimate government through free presidential and parliamentary elections. The Sant'Egidio document represents one step in this direction, and the regime's own commitment to early elections is another potentially positive element. One may doubt the sincerity of some in the opposition and some in the regime who have spoken of democratic processes, but each side should now put the other to the test by engaging in serious talks."
Lisa Anderson, Dean and Political Scientist, Columbia University and a past president of the Middle East Studies Association, in Jane Perlez,"A Middle East Choice: Peace or Democracy," The New York Times, November 28, 1999, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
(- on the rise of a new generation of Arab leaders:)
' One common thread runs through the process: the new leaders are likely to emerge for reasons of bloodline rather than merit, and it gives some analysts pause, no matter how pro-Western or pro-peace these leaders are.
"These people are not being chosen for competence in modern society but for loyalty and kinship," said Lisa Anderson, the dean of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University."There is not a layer of technocrats who appear to be poised to take the reins of power." '
That should be enough to show that Friedman's statement is not only wrong but bizarre. Let me just add two other documents. Although Edward Said was trained in literary criticism and mainly taught and wrote about literature, and was not trained as or employed as a Middle East studies academic, he is clearly one of Friedman's targets in the quote above, since he wrote against"Orientalism." But Said himself was a consistent and harsh critic of the lack of democracy in the Arab world.
Edward Said in The Guardian (London), January 12, 1991
"Because of this lopsided state of affairs militarism asumed far too privileged a place in the Arab world's moral economy. Much of it goes back to the sense of being unjustly treated, for which Palestine was not only a metaphor but a reality. But, I ask myself, was the only answer military force of one sort of another: huge armies, brassy slogans, bloody promises, and, alas, a massive series of concrete instances, starting with wars at the top and working down to such things as physical punishment and menacing gestures at the bottom? I speak superficially and even irresponsibly
here, since I cannot have all the facts at my command, and I perhaps have no right to be passing judgments such as these.
BUT I do not know a single Arab who would disagree with these impressions in private, or who would not readily agree that the monopoly on coercion given the state and its army and police have almost completely eliminated democracy in the Arab world, introduced immense hostility between rulers and ruled, placed a much higher value on conformity, opportunism, flattery and getting along than on risking new ideas, criticism or dissent.
Taken far enough this produces exterminism, a notion that if you don't get your way or something displeases you it is possible simply to blot it out. I do not doubt that that notion is behind Iraq's aggression against Kuwait. What sort of muddled and anachronistic idea of Bismarckian 'integration' is this, that wipes out an entire country and smashes its society with 'Arab unity' as its goal? The most disheartening thing is that so many people, many of them victims of exactly the same brutal logic, appear to have identified with Iraq and not Kuwait. Even if one grants that Kuwaitis were unpopular (does one have to be popular not to be exterminated?) and even if Iraq claims to champion Palestine in standing up to Israel and the US, surely the very idea that a nation should be obliterated along the way is a murderous proposition, unfit for a great civilisation like ours. It is a measure of the dreadful state of political culture in the Arab world today that such exterminism is current, maybe even prevalent."
Although Iran is not an Arab country, you never know what the unit of analysis is in American journalism. So here's something I wrote about Iran fully 15 years ago for a wide-circulation popular magazine.
Juan Cole writing in History Today, Mar., 1990:
"As measured by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Islamic Republic of
Iran has for the past decade achieved one of the worst human rights records of any country in the world. Of course, many of the government-sponsored summary arrests and executions carried out have targeted political groupings that posed an alternative to the clerical state. But the Khomeini regime has also persecuted communities that posed no particular threat to the Islamic Republic's stability, most prominently the Baha'is."
Posted on: Friday, April 15, 2005 - 22:26
How did this happen? How did a few renegade New York intellectuals associated with a few tiny publications who converted from liberalism to conservatism back in the late sixties and early seventies give birth to a movement that conquered the focal points of US political debate and convinced the Congress and the president to launch an ill-considered and deeply counterproductive war?
Influential intellectuals of both the Right and Left in Western Europe hold the rather oversimplified and unsophisticated view that the entire rightward drift of American liberalism during the sixties and seventies can be viewed as a result of the change in Israel's geopolitical status from the spirited socialist David of its early years to the pro-American empire, post-1967 military Goliath.
(The Six-Day war important to the birth of Neoconservatism, but so were other factors such as a lengthy New York city teachers' strike, and the blatantly anti-Semitic rhetoric of some of Black America's most vocal leadership.)
Neoconservative thinking originally grew out of Norman Podhoretz's editorships of Commentary (website), published by the American Jewish Committee, and, to a lesser degree, The Public Interest published by National Affairs.
While Neocon proponents like to argue that their political transformation reflected the views of a "liberal, mugged by reality," the movement's genesis was actually far more complex, deriving in part from the psychology of its founders -- Podhoretz had written previously of how scary he had always found Black people -- and a combination of New Left rhetoric, civil rights politics, and the changing geo-politics of Israel's position in the world vis-vis American power. All together the combination sent lifelong liberals into the arms of their former adversaries.
In any case all of these distinctions tend to miss the point. The conservative's ideological attack on 'liberal elite culture' in the early seventies arose from what they considered uncomfortable changes the country was undergoing. Like the vulgar Marxists a number of them had once been, the Right-Wingers saw an unspoken conspiracy ruling American political and cultural life in which everyone and everything was connected to everyone and everything else.
It was a kind of bargain-basement Hegelianism: The entire of American culture was moved as if guided by a single dialectical spirit. Harvard and Yale, feminism and taxes, school prayer and Soviet power, abortion and pornography, Communist revolution and gay rights: All of these social ills and more stemmed from the same source of political/cultural malaise, namely the post-Vietnam victory of the "New Class" and the "permissive" culture it had foisted upon the nation.
The New Class, according to Neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol, was made up of "scientists, teachers, and educational administrators, journalists and others." They had somehow manipulated Americans to believe that they were an evil people who rained death and destruction on Vietnam to feed their own sick compulsions.
As for Watergate, where the Liberal press had carried out a successful "coup d'etat" (in Norman Podhoretz's judgment) to please its own vanity, it succeeded only in increasing its own appetite.
In the aftermath of Vietnam and the Establishment's failure of will, the New Class radicals had swallowed the entire establishment -- the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, Harvard, and the like -- and annexed the Supreme Court. Among the most dangerous aspects of the tactics of these people, moreover, was the stealth with which they went about their ideological mission. While they spoke of social justice, what the New Class was really after was the Triumph of Socialism.
The ranks of the Neoconservatives were largely composed of former sectarian Marxists of mostly Jewish academic origin, who transferred their intellectual allegiance to capitalism and American military power but retained their obsession with theological disputation and political purity.
The impresario at the center of this attack was Irving Kristol, a onetime Trotskyist who had since become a passionate defender of capitalism. The job of the Neoconservative intellectual, Kristol once remarked, was "to explain to the American people why they are right and to the intellectuals why they are wrong."
Beginning with the early days of the Nixon administration this is just what they began to do. Spreading the Word was a costly proposition in America, however. There were think-tanks to be started, journals to be founded, scholarships to be offered, and university chairs to be endowed. Like Willie Sutton, Kristol had to go where the money was...i.e. corporate America.
The money tree did not bear immediate fruit. Historically, as Kristol observed, business wanted "intellectuals to go out and justify profits and explain to people why corporations make a lot of money." Kristol had a far more ambitious agenda in mind, but first he needed to convince the businessmen that they needed him.
In this effort he could not conceivably have cultivated a more valuable ally than Robert Bartley, the editorial-page editor of the Wall Street Journal. Both men were already fierce Cold Warriors, but Bartley, tutored by Kristol, soon enlisted in the New Class war as well.
The ideology of the New Class, according to Bartley, was fomenting "something that looks suspiciously like a concerted attack on business." In order to thrive and prosper in the upcoming battle for control of the American economy, businessmen and their allies needed to publish or perish. The Journal editorial pages soon became a hotbed of Neocon counterrevolution, with Kristol a regular contributor.
Once business began to pony up the kind of cash necessary to fight a media class war, the terms of Washington's insider debate began to change. With tens of millions of dollars solicited from conservative corporations, foundations, and zillionaire ideologues like Nelson and Bunker Hunt, Richard Mellon Scaife, Joseph Coors, and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the new Conservative Counter-Establishment (so-named by journalist Sidney Blumenthal) did a masterly job at aping the institutions of the Establishment's Washington and replacing them with its own....
Posted on: Friday, April 15, 2005 - 22:17
Neve Gordon, in the Baltimore Sun (4-11-05):
[Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University in Israel and is currently a visiting scholar at the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the editor of From the Margins of Globalization: Critical Perspectives on Human Rights and can be reached at nevegordon@gmail.com ]
ISRAEL IS THE key to understanding President Bush's strategy in Iraq. Not because it had any influence over the decision-making process leading to the Iraq war, but because the Bush administration has adopted the democratic occupation model that Israel introduced in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
After the eruption of the first Palestinian intifada in December 1987, Israel had to deploy a relatively large number of troops aided by tanks and armored vehicles to sustain the occupation - exactly as the United States is now doing in Iraq.
This transformed the Israeli occupation from an economically profitable enterprise into a financial liability, leading Israel to come up with the ingenious idea of outsourcing the responsibility for the population while continuing to control the natural resources - in this case, land and water.
After a series of negotiations, the Palestinian Authority was established - an entity that willingly took on the role of managing the daily lives of the inhabitants in the occupied territories while Israel maintained control of more than 80 percent of the land.
Within months, the civil institutions needed to administer populations in modern societies - chiefly education, health and welfare - were passed from Israel to the hands of the fledgling PA, which was also given some limited form of sovereignty. Thus, without renouncing its right to rule the West Bank and Gaza, Israel transferred responsibility for the residents to a subcontractor of sorts - the PA - and in this way dramatically reduced the cost of the occupation.
The elections that were held in the occupied territories in January 1996 were crucial for bestowing upon the PA a degree of legitimacy. To be sure, the PA did not end up executing all of Israel's wishes, and in many ways it became a recalcitrant entity. But this has little to do with Israel's initial objectives.
Israel's occupation is crucial for understanding Iraq for two essential reasons.
First, like Israel, the United States has made a distinction between the occupied inhabitants and their resources. The Bush administration's idea is to allow the Iraqis to manage themselves and in this way to cut the cost of the occupation while at the same time continuing to control the rich oil fields. The important question now is which U.S. corporations will profit most from the expected 200 percent increase in Iraqi oil production - from 2.1 million to 6 million barrels a day.
Second, whereas Israel was certainly not the first country to stage elections in an occupied context, it was the first power to reintroduce this practice in a post-colonial age so as to legitimize an ongoing occupation. The Bush administration found this strategy useful because it fits extremely well with the narrative about "spreading freedom" to the Middle East.
Since one cannot promote freedom and install a puppet government at the same time, Mr. Bush was adamant about holding elections. The crux of the matter is that the goal of these elections is not to transfer power and authority to the Iraqi people, but rather to legitimize ongoing U.S. control in the region.
Therefore, the current debate among liberals about whether the elections in Iraq followed the minimum procedures informing a fair democratic process is actually beside the point. Even if Jimmy Carter had approved the elections, the Iraqis would still have no say, for example, about the deployment of foreign troops in their country.
When all is said and done, the new democratic government in Iraq is being created to manage the local population so that the occupying power's economic elite can enjoy the spoils.
Posted on: Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - 20:12
My column last week,"Ariel Sharon's Folly," noted the likelihood that more than 8,000 Israelis living in Gaza will soon be removed by their own government, with force, if necessary. I called this step historically unprecedented and then challenged the reader to name"another democracy that has forcibly removed thousands its own citizens from their lawful homes."
Not surprisingly, readers took up the challenge, both by posting comments (such as here, here, here, and here) and sending me e-mails. Their responses fall into three main categories:
Eminent domain, a government prerogative properly used"to build roads, public works and the like" but often abused these days to encourage commercial projects. As a writer puts it,"American state and local governments, through a commonplace abuse of eminent domain, displace thousands of American citizens each year. Not exactly the same as Sharon's proposal, sure, but just as insidious for its creeping power over property rights." Three correspondents specifically refer to cases where their own families were evicted: the Tennessee Valley Authority which in 1933-35 forcibly evicted thousands of citizens to build the Norris Dam; Boston, in the 1960s, when hundreds of homes were seized to make way for a highway; and a Los Angeles project to build a shopping center. The case of the Navajos in the Joint Use Area with the Hopis in Arizona is also mentioned, as is the use of eminent domain in Australia.
Japanese internment in the United States during World War II:"The United States removed many American citizens of Japanese descent from their lawful homes and placed them in camps during World War II."
Cases of"ethnic cleansing," where a population perceived as foreign is thrown out of its homes and even out of the country. Examples include the American Indians, the victims of Nazism and apartheid South Africa, Germans after World War II, Muslims in India in 1947, and Russians in the Baltic States in 1991.
I don't see either any of these categories comparable to the case at hand. As one commentator says about eminent domain, it"applies to ALL citizens regardless of skin color, nationality or creed that live and own property in the area which is to be used for public development. … nothing of the sort is scheduled to happen [in Gaza]. Instead ONLY JEWISH residents are to be forcefully removed." Another reader concludes:"There is no conceptual equivalence whatever between what ‘eminent domain' means in terms of its core concepts of ‘development' and ‘benefit,' and what Sharon is planning." Precisely.
As for the Japanese internment, this involved the temporary relocation of citizens, not a permanent move nor the razing of their houses. Again, there is no comparison with what Sharon is doing.
Ethnic cleansing is hardly comparable to the Gaza situation, if only because the government and the evicted citizens are alike ethnically, and Israeli citizens are being returned to the heartland, not expelled.
Two other suggestions bear notice. General Charles de Gaulle,"elected under the slogan of Algerie française, immediately after his election began the withdrawal of French troops, thereby laying the basis for Algerian independence." This would count as a very close precedent had de Gaulle required French citizens in Algeria to leave, but he did not do that. In fact, the French government did not expect the exodus of nearly a million pieds noirs and Jews in just a few months in 1962:
The motto among the European and Jewish community was"Suitcase or coffin" ("La valise ou le cercueil"). The French government had not planned that such a massive number would leave, at the most it estimated that maybe 200,000 or 300,000 may chose to go to metropolitan France temporarily. Consequently, nothing was planned for their return, and many had to sleep in streets or abandoned farms on their arrival in metropolitan France.
De Gaulle let the French citizens in Algeria decide their own future, whether to stay or leave; this is a policy, incidentally, that I have recommended to the Israeli leadership for Israelis in Gaza.
The best analogy proposed was the razing of Africville, Nova Scotia. The authorities in 1965 bulldozed this, Canada's oldest and largest black settlement, to the ground, but it was done in the name of slum clearance, not relocation.
Reviewing these replies to my challenge confirms me in my view that what the Israeli authorities are about to do to their citizens in Gaza has no historical precedent.
Posted on: Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - 00:24
To the Editor:
"Intimidation at Columbia" conflates two different issues under the rubric of intimidation: charges that certain faculty members have behaved in an unprofessional manner toward students, and the ideas of those teaching Middle Eastern studies at Columbia.
Professors who do not treat students properly should be reprimanded. But for a student to encounter unfamiliar or even unpleasant ideas does not constitute intimidation.
Exposure to new ideas is the essence of education. Your call for the university to investigate "the quality and fairness of teaching" and "complaints about politicized courses" because students do not like the professors' ideas opens a Pandora's box that can never be closed.
Would you favor an investigation of every class on campus that deals with a controversial issue - for instance, whether I give enough class time to the pro-slavery argument, or whether economists present globalization in too flattering a light?
The autonomy of professors in designing and teaching their classes is the foundation of academic freedom.
Eric Foner
New York, April 7, 2005
The writer is a professor of history at Columbia University.
Posted on: Monday, April 11, 2005 - 22:19
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (4-11-05):
[Kai Bird is a biographer and contributing editor to The Nation. Martin J. Sherwin is a professor of history at Tufts University. Their book, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, has just been published by Alfred A. Knopf.]
Despite the menacing weather and bitter cold that chilled the Northeast on February 25, 1967, 600 friends and colleagues gathered in Princeton, N.J., to celebrate the life and mourn the death of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Some knew him as a gentle teacher and affectionately called him "Oppie." Others knew him as a great physicist, a man who in 1945 had become the "father" of the atomic bomb, a national hero, and an emblem of the scientist as public servant. And everyone remembered with deep bitterness how, just nine years later, the new Republican administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower had declared him a security risk -- making Oppenheimer the most prominent victim of America's anti-Communist crusade and an enduring symbol of the self-destructive tendencies that can seize a government too consumed by considerations of national security.
The last eulogy was given by George F. Kennan, veteran diplomat, the architect of America's postwar containment policy against the Soviet Union, and a longtime friend and colleague of Oppenheimer's at the Institute for Advanced Study. "In the dark days of the early 50s," Kennan said, "when troubles crowded in upon him from many sides, and when he found himself harassed by his position at the center of controversy, I drew his attention to the fact that he would be welcome in a hundred academic centers abroad and asked him whether he had not thought of taking residence outside this country. His answer," Kennan recalled, "given to me with tears in his eyes: 'Damn it, I happen to love this country.'"
On December 23, 1953, Oppenheimer's love for his country was severely tested. Summoned to the office of the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis L. Strauss, "the father of the atomic bomb" was given a letter that charged him with being a security risk. The 34 enumerated accusations ranged from the ridiculous -- in the late 1930s he had been a member of the Friends of the Chinese People -- to the pointedly political -- in 1949-50 he had opposed and therefore delayed a program to build the hydrogen bomb. As numerous books and articles have made clear, Oppenheimer's lack of enthusiasm for a hydrogen-bomb program was at the heart of the security-board hearing that he would endure for six weeks beginning on April 12, 51 years ago this week.
The letter of charges handed to Oppenheimer on that dark winter afternoon was the culmination of Strauss's carefully planned effort to eliminate Oppenheimer's influence from the fierce debate that had raged for five years over nuclear-weapons policy. Oppenheimer and Strauss had been on opposite sides of that debate from its inception, and, in the process, they had come to deeply dislike and distrust each other. Oppenheimer had emerged as the leading advocate of diplomatic initiatives to reign in the escalating arms race while keeping a limited nuclear arsenal sufficient for deterrence. Strauss, on the other hand, was a consistent advocate of a bigger and better nuclear arsenal that could overwhelm the Soviet Union and its satellites in a crisis. Since the inauguration of President Eisenhower in January 1953, it had become increasingly apparent that Oppenheimer was on the losing side. The meeting was about to confirm the full extent of Strauss's triumph.
Strauss's plan to silence Oppenheimer reflected a growing consensus among hardliners -- Democrats as well as Republicans -- that America's nuclear advantage was the foundation of the country's military policy and that opponents who argued otherwise posed a danger to the nation's security. Those who were convinced that a superior nuclear arsenal was the only effective antidote to the Soviet Union's large army chafed at Oppenheimer's condemnations of the Strategic Air Command's massive-retaliation strategy (he called it "genocidal") and at his calls for a public debate on issues related to war and peace in the nuclear age.
A Democrat who shared Strauss's view was a senator from Washington, Henry M. (Scoop) Jackson, recently elected in 1952. Representing the state that was home to both a major nuclear-weapons facility (Hanford) and the company that supplied America's bombers, "the Senator from Boeing" was not only a supporter of the Air Force's strategy; he was also to become -- along with the University of Chicago scholars Leo Strauss and Albert Wohlstetter -- one of the founding fathers of the neoconservative foreign policy that dominates the current Bush administration.
Indeed, there is a seamless connection between the early nuclear-weapons debate of the late 1940s -- most especially the debate in 1949-50 over whether to institute a crash program to build a hydrogen bomb -- and the Bush administration's insistence that American national security requires unilateral action -- even preventive wars. It is astonishing how clearly the issues raised in the sharp debate 55 years ago have been echoed by the men who took us to war in Iraq.
But that should not be surprising. Many of them, including Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and other proponents of the war worked for, or were tutored by, the late Senator Jackson. From Jackson those neoconservative acolytes drew the belief that nuclear weapons had tilted the diplomatic-military equation so heavily toward the military side that diplomacy could no longer be considered a strategy of first resort. Unilateral military action -- including preventive war if necessary -- was the only policy that could guarantee American security. It was a view that Oppenehimer publicly opposed.... [He also opposed the building of the Super, the hydrogen bomb.]
According to [Jackson's] biographer, Robert G. Kaufman,"He never forgot the experience of well-meaning but naïve scientists arguing against building the H-bomb." Richard Perle, who served as Jackson's top foreign-policy adviser between 1969 and 1979, told Kaufman,"His [Jackson's] enthusiasm for building missile defense, his skepticism about détente and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), all stemmed from his previous experiences and the lessons he drew from it: that had we listened to the scientists who had opposed the hydrogen bomb, Stalin would have emerged with a monopoly, and we would have been in deep trouble."
Like Jackson, Perle believes that the Soviet Union was deterred only by America's nuclear superiority, and that the ability to fight and win a nuclear war is as important today as it was during the cold war. Given the prospect of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of rogue states, failed states, or nonstate adversaries like al-Qaeda, it was a small step in logic for Perle and his colleagues to apply the unilateral Jackson-McMahon-Strauss logic of the hydrogen-bomb debate to the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein's arsenal.
Indeed, in the late 1990s Perle and Douglas J. Feith (another neoconservative intellectual who would become a high-ranking Pentagon official in the current Bush administration) signed a report urging Israel to focus on"removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq." Such an agenda, they argued, would"signal a clean break by abandoning a policy which assumed exhaustion and allowed strategic retreat by re-establishing the principle of pre-emption, rather than retaliation alone." Later, in November 2001, Perle said that Saddam Hussein"has weapons of mass destruction. The lesser risk is in pre-emption. We've got to stop wishing away the problem."
Oppenheimer had not sought to"wish away" either nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union, or any of the other serious issues he confronted as an adviser to the AEC and the armed forces. But he did believe that diplomatic initiatives and agreed-upon treaties were essential to an intelligent and viable national-security policy. Any effort to secure peace by force of arms alone was inherently unstable and particularly dangerous in the nuclear age. That is an argument that governments of the new Europe appear to have drawn in the 21st century from the history of war-ravaged"old Europe." It is an approach that Oppenheimer had advocated a half-century earlier, but one that a government narrowly focused on another approach succeeded in silencing.
Back in the autumn of 1945, Harry Truman said that the atomic bomb would be held by the United States as a"sacred trust" for the rest of the world, and"we shall not give our approval to any compromises with evil." In response, Oppenheimer said he disliked Truman's triumphalist tone:"If you approach the problem and say, 'We know what is right and we would like to use the atomic bomb to persuade you to agree with us,' then you are in a very weak position and you will not succeed ... you will find yourselves attempting by force of arms to prevent a disaster." And it was as likely as not, he implied, that those policies would give rise to the very disaster you had sought to prevent. That may very well turn out to be the story of our unilateral actions in Iraq. With respect to principles, at least, the debate over U.S. unilateral actions in Iraq is the hydrogen-bomb debate all over again.
Posted on: Monday, April 11, 2005 - 22:15
[Mr. Calabresi is the George C. Dix Professor of Constitutional Law, and Mr. Lindgren the Benjamin Mazur Research Professor, at Northwestern University.]
It has been almost 11 years since the last vacancy opened up on the Supreme Court. The current group of justices has served together for longer than any other group of nine justices in American history. What is more, the average tenure of justices has gotten a lot longer in the last 35 years. From 1789 until 1970, justices served an average of 14.9 years. Those who have stepped down since 1970, however, have served an average of 25.6 years. This means justices are now staying more than 10 years longer on average on the Supreme Court than they have done over the whole of American history.
The reason for this is not hard to find. Recently, the average age at time of appointment has been 53, which is the same as the average age of appointment over the rest of American history. The retirement age, however, has jumped from an average of 68 pre-1970 to 79 for justices retiring post-1970. Two of the current justices are in their 80s, two in their 70s, and four more between 65 and 69. Only one, Clarence Thomas, is younger than 65. The current Court is a gerontocracy -- like the leadership cadre of the Chinese Communist Party.
Indeed, David Garrow's scholarship has shown that decrepitude has been a problem with the last 10 justices to retire, those who left the bench from 1971-94. By some accounts, half of the last 10 retirees have been too feeble or mentally incompetent to participate fully in deliberating and deciding cases -- or even in some instances, to stay awake during the few mornings of oral arguments. While mental incompetence was rare in the first century on the Court, since 1898 it has become a regular occurrence for justices who serve more than 18 years; by one estimate about a third were mentally incompetent to serve before they finally retired.
With justices now staying 10 years longer than they have historically, vacancies are opening up a lot less often. Between 1789 and 1970 there was a vacancy on the Court once every 1.91 years. In the 34 years since the two appointments in 1971, there has been a vacancy on average only once every 3.75 years. The typical one-term president now gets to appoint only one instead of two justices, and with the recent 11-year drought of vacancies a two-term presidency could in theory go by without being able to make even a single Supreme Court appointment.
We think this is unacceptable. No powerful government institution in a modern democracy should go for 11 years without any democratic check on its membership. Nor should powerful officials hold office for an average of 25.6 years with some of them serving for 35 years or more. The rules allowing Supreme Court justices to do this are a relic of the 18th century and of pre-democratic times.
No other major country in the world allows the justices of its highest constitutional court to serve for life without a mandatory retirement age. England has a mandatory retirement age, and France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Austria all appoint their equivalents of our justices for a fixed term of years. In addition, none of the 50 states appoints its supreme court justices for life.
For these reasons, over the past few years we have been advocating a constitutional amendment that would limit the justices to an 18-year term with one seat opening up every two years. Tomorrow, a conference of scholars (most of whom are committed to this idea) will meet at Duke Law School to discuss various proposals for such an amendment. Our amendment would not apply to the currently sitting justices or to the current president and would go into effect when a new president takes office in 2009. In this respect, it would resemble the two-term limit on presidents that went into effect prospectively and which also restored a time-honored tradition of limited government service....
Posted on: Friday, April 8, 2005 - 14:28
The seemingly interminable 2004 presidential campaign is well behind us now, but I’m still not willing to let it go yet. I want to hear an apology from someone about the most egregious smear to emerge from the campaign. I’m not talking about the Swift Boat Veterans, or “flip-flopping,” or anything perpetrated by Michael Moore. What I mean is the decision to transform my old home state into an epithet.
I didn’t have the privilege of being born in Massachusetts, but I did grow up there, and I never thought I would hear one of our 13 original states used as an insult during a presidential debate (though it did take some punches during the 1988 Dukakis campaign). Yet there was President Bush, throughout his third go-round with Sen. John Kerry, telling us that “only a senator from Massachusetts” could believe this or that. The charge that Mr. Kerry was from Massachusetts was repeated again and again throughout the election, the implication being that simply hailing from such a bizarre, addled, liberal place ought to be enough to disqualify anyone from the Presidency.
Well, as George Washington Plunkitt once said, “Politics, it ain’t beanbag.” But I thought that if no one else is going to, I might write a few words myself in defense of Massachusetts.
I thought of pointing out that Massachusetts is not nearly as “liberal” as Mr. Bush would have it, either in the traditional meaning of that word or as the pejorative that assorted right-wingers have tried to make it. The state is currently working on its fourth straight Republican governor, and a Utah Mormon at that. It was also one of the first states to launch a tax revolt, back in the 1970s. Of course, a much earlier Massachusetts tax revolt produced results that even Karl Rove might appreciate.
I considered writing about that Revolutionary heritage. About how many of the fathers of our freedom came from Massachusetts: Samuel Adams and James Otis, and John Hancock and Paul Revere. Of how the first battles of our War for Independence were fought by those gun-toting yeoman farmers on Lexington Green and Concord Bridge, or of how Massachusetts was not only the cradle of liberty but the birthplace of Presidents from all parties: the Adamses, Kennedy, and our forty-first President, George H. W. Bush (paging Dr. Freud).
I thought of tracing my state’s ancient history of tolerance and open-mindedness. Of mentioning how Massachusetts was the first state to elect a black U.S. senator after Reconstruction, Edward Brooke—another Republican!—and how it was Massachusetts that raised the first black regiment in the Civil War, the gallant 54th, so magnificently commemorated by the famous Saint-Gaudens sculpture on the Boston Common.
To be sure, tolerance was not exactly at a premium in 2004, as voters in one state after another chose to preserve the sanctity of marriage. Massachusetts was much excoriated for not engaging in this curious intellectual exercise. But in fact, as a rash of studies after the election showed, the Bay State is a veritable paragon of “moral values”—with the lowest divorce rate, practically the lowest percentage of suicides, and the highest percentage of individuals with bachelor’s degrees in the country.
I even considered waxing rhapsodic about the sheer beauty of the place. The winding cobblestoned streets on Boston’s Beacon Hill, America’s original “shining city on a hill”; the beaches and cranberry bogs of Cape Cod; the rolling hills and fields of the west of the state. But who doesn’t think his home state is beautiful? And who really knows his whole state—even if it’s the size of Rhode Island....
I never like it when people call the South “redneck country,” or when news commentators flippantly refer to our great industrial heartland as “the rust belt.” I think if we really are to pull together as a nation, we need to restore at least a basic respect for how we all live and where we come from. An apology would be a good start, but I’m not holding my breath. As an old New Englander I know the worth of the place I come from and that its values and its character will endure long after the noise of another campaign has receded.
Posted on: Thursday, April 7, 2005 - 19:49
Jeffrey L. Pasley, at common-place.org (April 2005):
... Let us start with the basics. Until the middle of the twentieth century, becoming too old to work meant falling into dependence and poverty, and the onus for preventing this rested entirely on the family, the primary social, economic, and (in many ways) political institution of premodern times.
Most communities had poorhouses or some other form of poor relief, but these were reserved for unlucky persons who had no local relatives to care for them: widows, orphans, the disabled, and the mentally ill, in addition to the elderly. But town fathers were always concerned about keeping the poor rates low, so unattached people who might need care were often simply warned out and sent to go live or die someplace else. Benjamin Franklin sold Philadelphia’s first true institutional solution to this sort of suffering, the Hospital for the Sick Poor, as a way to save on the poor rates. David Hackett Fisher’s Growing Old in America (an early synthesis on the subject that still bears the Harvard Coop price tag from when I purchased it during grad school) provides examples of indigent old sleeping under piles of brush, foraging along the docks, and being left by the crew of a coasting vessel on an uninhabited island. Even if they did not meet quite such lonely fates, the unattached elderly, especially old women, often became social outcasts, the beggars and wise women and scary old crones who often provided needed community services but also inspired occasional spasms of community fear and disgust. It was witchcraft, baby.
Family responsibility for the elderly meant that adult children's lives were dominated by their parents’ needs in ways we cannot even imagine today. Any number of common social arrangements and legal doctrines revolved around the imperative to concentrate power and wealth, especially power over wealth, in the hands of older people, partly to make sure that they would be supported in their declining years. Multigenerational families lived close by each other if not actually in the same house, and the elders were not there to provide free babysitting and emotional support. They were patriarchs and matriarchs wielding the authority of age. Dear Old Dad controlled the family landholdings and held tight to the power this conferred over his children as long as he decently could, with quite lax standards of decency. An eldest son might have to delay his independence and work as Dad’s underling until his forties before he finally got control of the farm. Even then he could count on having to care for his parents as long as they lived, often as a contractual condition for the son’s getting title to the land. The contracts sometimes specified exactly what food and fuel the parents were to be furnished. Youngest daughters (like Emily Dickinson) might be denied the chance to get out of the house at all if their parents required care. Most children could count on the key decisions of their lives being made for them: whether to move west or to take on debt to acquire a larger plot of land; whether to be apprenticed to a trade, or bound out as a servant; whether to be married off to a convenient relative or neighbor, and so on. While the social historians I read sometimes waxed a little nostalgic about these traditional families, they also showed what a pressure cooker of tension they could be, to the point, some suggested, of pushing young Americans toward revolution. Fischer argued that the American Revolution wrought a "revolution in age relations" that delegitimated the superior status of elders, even if their economic power lingered for a while.
While it is not clear that anything radical changed in the material lives of elderly people after the Revolution, my impression is that the traditional system of home care either broke down or never worked very well. The demand for cash relief seems to have been quite high when an opportunity presented itself. Embarking on my own research on early American political history, I was at first shocked at the countless letters that came to government officials and political leaders from destitute veterans, widows, and others begging, wheedling, or demanding pensions, the settlement of claims against the government, minor appointments that might serve as pensions, and just plain money. The Revolutionary War veteran father of one of the newspaper editors I followed pestered the government to supplement his Virginia land bounty for decades, essentially for cost-of-living adjustments. This sort of piecemeal relief seems to have taken a sizable chunk of the government’s time in the early republic, and not a few politicians came to see the American people as a pack of beasts ravening after public assistance. When Congress considered a bill to allow disabled veterans to apply for pensions in 1803, Federalist Roger Griswold saw the deluge coming: "It opened a door for every one who had received the least wound . . . to enter a claim; . . . in every case where . . . the situation of the person was disagreeable, if he was not wealthy, his neighbors would feel for him, and would recommend him to the Government, in order to be freed from the trouble of providing for him themselves."
During the nineteenth century, demographic and economic trends combined to create a growing population of superfluous older people who commanded less respect than they used to and gradually lost both their former power and the family-based support system—such as it was—that went with it. Life expectancies rose while a greater and greater proportion of the population moved far from families and other relatives in search of wage-paying jobs in factories and offices. At the same time, the middle-class ideal of the nurturing nuclear family, focused on child rearing and mutual affection rather than economic production or the provision of social services, became more powerful, making extra members of the household, such as indigent parents, increasingly unwelcome. For the working class, there was no choice but to labor for as many years as physically possible, sometimes progressing through more menial but less taxing and less remunerative jobs, before spending the rest of their last years in penniless degradation.
By the later part of the nineteenth century, Fischer writes, old age became publicly identified as a social problem that needed to be solved. The perception was that a large surplus population of superannuated workers had developed, but no one quite knew what to do with them. Private pensions were beginning to appear in some industries, but never for the most vulnerable workers or in significant amounts. Other industrialized nations began establishing national old-age pension systems, while in the U.S. the pressure was relieved by the vast but temporary pension system for Civil War veterans and their immediate survivors. Reformers helped design some state programs, and Theodore Roosevelt, embarrassed that "even the Ottoman Turks" were getting ahead in the compassion race, pronounced the lack of provision for the elderly "a reproach to us as a nation." However, in general the Progressive Era made little impact on the problem.
It took a world-historical crisis and Franklin Roosevelt’s deft political hand to finally remove the blocks. The Great Depression threw more than half of the elderly into dependent poverty while only an estimated 5 percent of them had access to pensions. By the mid-1930s, the Civil War pension system that had once served some two-thirds of the elderly population was mostly gone.
Driven to the political edge, the elderly became a huge constituency for many of the radical movements and crackpot nostrums that roiled the country. This was most obvious in the case of Dr. Francis Townsend’s Old-Age Revolving Pension organization, which favored a $200-per-month government pension for every person over sixty. Townsend clubs sprouted up all over the country, and national conventions full of angry gray champions were held. Dr. Townsend himself was not a threatening figure, but his movement overlapped those of Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin, and other "radical aspirants to dictatorship" (as many critics saw them), and his followers joined many of the other groups in the failed Union Party challenge to FDR in 1936.
Social Security in its initial form was weak tea that hardly satisfied the acolytes of Townsend and Coughlin. It did not bring down these movements on its own, or even do much to alleviate poverty among the elderly in its early years, but it probably did help forestall more dire political upheavals. More important than its initial impact as a social reform was the ideological sea change Social Security signaled. It became the precedent and institutional basis for the federal government to finally take long-term responsibility for the fate of the nation’s most vulnerable citizens. FDR took one of the sticking points that had prevented a national pension system from being enacted in the past—the ideological opposition to permanent, universal poor relief—and turned it into an advantage. Call the retirement assistance "insurance," paid for with money from a worker’s paycheck, and it became a purchase rather than charity. Make it available to all workers, rich and poor alike, and the charges of socialism and class legislation that had doomed other retirement assistance proposals were easily turned aside....
Posted on: Thursday, April 7, 2005 - 18:23
