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.
SOURCE: TomDispatch (1-31-11)
[Nick Turse is a historian, essayist, investigative journalist, the associate editor of TomDispatch.com, and currently a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. His latest book is The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso Books). He is also the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives. You can follow him on Twitter @NickTurse, on Tumblr, and on Facebook. His website is NickTurse.com.]
In the future, the power of magnetism will be harnessed to make today’s high explosives seem feeble, “guided bullets” will put the current crop of snipers to shame, and new multi-purpose missiles will strike targets in a flash from high-flying drones. At least, that’s part of the Pentagon’s battlefield vision of tomorrow’s tomorrow.
Ordinarily, planning for the future is not a U.S. government forte. A mere glance at the national debt, now around $14 trillion and climbing, or two recent studies showing how China's green technology investments have outpaced U.S. efforts should drive home that fact. But one government agency is always forward-looking, the Department of Defense’s blue skies research branch, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Born in the wake of an American panic over the 1957Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite, DARPA set to work keeping the Pentagon ahead of potential adversaries on the technology front. It counts the Internet and the Global Positioning System among its triumphs, and psychic spying and a mechanical elephant designed for use in the jungles of Southeast Asia among its many failures. It also boasts a long legacy when it comes to creating and enhancing lethal technologies, including M-16 rifles, Predator drones, stealth fighters, Tomahawk cruise missiles, and B-52 bombers, which have been employed in conflicts across the globe.
Today, DARPA is carrying on that more than half-century-old tradition through a host of programs designed with war, death, and destruction in mind. Wielding a budget of about $3 billion a year and investing heavily in futuristic weaponry and other military technology, it is undoubtedly helping to fuel the arms races of 2020 and 2030. While the United States seems content to let China sprint ahead in green technology, a number of its future weapons appear to be designed with a country like China in mind.
All of its planning is, however, shrouded in remarkable secrecy. Make inquiries about any of the weapons systems it’s exploring and a barrage of excuses for telling you next tonothing pour forth -- a program is between managers, or classified, or only now in the process of awarding its contracts. DARPA spokespeople and project managers even prefer not to clarify or explain publicly available information. Still, it’s possible to offer a sketch of some of the future weaponry the Pentagon has in development, and in the process glimpse what messages it’s sending to other nations around the world.
Mayhem Without the “Y”
Even in military culture, where arcane, clunky, or sometimes witty acronyms are a dime a dozen, DARPA projects stand out. Sometimes it almost seems as if like the agency comes up with a particularly bad-ass name first and then creates a weapons system to suit. Take as an example the Magneto Hydrodynamic Explosive Munition or -- wait for it -- MAHEM.
This program, run out of DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, seeks to “demonstrate compressed magnetic flux generator (CMFG)-driven magneto hydrodynamically formed metal jets and self-forging penetrators (SFP) with significantly improved performance over explosively formed jets (EFJ) and fragments,” according to the agency’s website.
If you’re scratching your head about what that could mean, don’t ask DARPA. When I inquired about the basics of how the weapon would function, a simple lay definition for the folks paying for this wonder-weapon-to-be, spokesman Richard Spearman insisted that “sensitivities” prevented him from giving me any further information.
As near as can be told, though, you should imagine an anti-tank round with a powerful magnetic field. Upon impact, it will utilize magnetic force to ram a jet of molten metal into the target. Theoretically, this will pack more punch that today’s high-explosive-propelled projectiles and lead, according to DARPA, to “increased lethality precision.”
Hasta La Vista, Baby
In the 2003 science-fiction sequel Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, or T3, a metal monster from the future, a Terminatrix, is sent back to alter the present in order to ensure a future where machines rule the world and humans face extinction. Today, DARPA, the Air Force, and a couple defense industry heavyweights are seeking to change the future of munitions with a monster of their own -- “a high speed, long-range missile that can engage air, cruise missile, and air defense targets.” The name of the program? I kid you not: Triple Target Terminator (T3).
Designed to be fired by either manned aircraft or drones, the Triple Target Terminator seeks to “increase the number and variety of targets that could be destroyed on each sortie” by allowing an aircraft to engage in air-to-air combat or air-to-ground attack with the same armament. Just what future air force the U.S. military imagines itself attacking with this weapon is not the sort of thing you’ll find out from DARPA. Spokesperson Spearman told me that “sensitivities” again prevented him from explaining even the basics of the system or its future uses. “A good part of the program itself is classified,” he assured me.
Last fall, Defense Industry Dailyreported that Raytheon had received a $21.3 million contract for the Triple Target Terminator (T3) program. This was followed, a few weeks later, by the same sum being awarded to Boeing for work on the project. These contracts constitute an initial one-year attempt to design a missile that meets “program objectives” and will set the stage for future efforts.
In a prepared statement provided to TomDispatch late last year, DARPA declared: “Depending on successful phase completion, follow on efforts will continue in two more phases with multiple-technology risk reduction demonstrations, including live fire from tactical aircraft. The program is structured to last three years, culminating in test demonstrations in 2013.”
Anti-Ship Shape
Once upon a time, broadsides and boarding parties typified warfare on the high seas. In the future, the U.S. military has its sights set on something slightly more high tech. To that end, DARPA is now developing a Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) that seeks to provide “a dramatic leap ahead in U.S. surface warfare capability.”
Designed to evade advanced enemy countermeasures, this would-be smart weapon is supposed to permit “high probability target identification in dense shipping environments, and precision aimpoint targeting for maximum lethality.” DARPA isn’t talking about this program either. LRASM, Spearman told me in December, was “in the final throes of getting all its contracts awarded. Until that happens and we have an official announcement, I can't set up any media engagements on that one.”
By mid-January when I followed up, the final throes had yet to cease, but just days later DARPA awarded two contracts, totaling $218 million, to military-corporate powerhouse Lockheed Martin for work on two different LRASM missiles. “Lockheed Martin is proud to offer our technology for Navy solutions,” announced Lockheed’s tactical missile honcho Glenn Kuller. “These LRASM contracts will demonstrate two mature tactical missiles for new generation anti-surface warfare weapons capability; one low and stealthy, the other high and fast with moderate stealth.”
Bullet Ballet
It’s the farthest thing from a fair fight. A man peers through an advanced telescopic sight. He zeros in on his prey, a figure without a sporting chance who has no idea that he’s being targeted for death. The sniper, who has lugged his 30 pound, .50caliber rifle up a ridgeline in order to kill with a single shot, breathes slow and steady, focuses, waits, waits, and finally pulls the trigger. A breeze he never felt, somewhere in the 4,000 feet between him and his target, sends the round off course. The sniper doesn’t log another kill. The human target gets to live another day.
To the U.S. military, this is a terribly sad story, and so they’ve turned to DARPA to look for a happier ending -- in this case via the Extreme Accuracy Tactical Ordnance, or EXACTO program which aims to allow “the sniper to prosecute moving targets even in high wind conditions, such as those commonly found in Afghanistan.”
The plan is for DARPA scientists to develop “the first ever guided small caliber bullet.” If you’ve ever watched a heat-seeking missile follow a fighter jet in a lame 1980s action flick (or the smart bullet from the 1984 Tom Selleck sci-fi disaster Runaway), then you get the idea. DARPA is focused on creating a maneuverable bullet (controlled by a guidance system) that moves with the target, adjusting in flight to slam into a human head and turn it into a red mist -- thus writing an upbeat ending to tomorrow’s sniper stories.
When asked for further information in mid-December, Spearman told me that “the PM [project manager] for EXACTO is in the process of transitioning his replacement into DARPA, making neither of them available for interviews.” About a month later, the new project manager, he said, was still not up to speed and thus both officials remained unavailable for comment.
The New Blitz
As Nazi air power pounded London during World War II, England’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill sheltered in an underground bunker to stay alive. Today, the leaders of other nations have bigger, stronger bomb shelters than Churchill’s and the U.S. military wants the means to destroy them without generating the negative press that using nuclear weapons might incur.
To bust those bunkers, DARPA’s Strategically Hardened Facility Defeat program is investigating nuke-free, earth-penetrating munitions to counter the “threat posed by our adversaries' use of hard and deeply buried targets.” Specifically aimed at the “senior leaders, command and control functions, and weapons of mass destruction” employed by “‘rogue’ nations,” these powerful, high-impact weapons will be designed to tunnel deep into the earth before exploding.
Things That Don’t Go Boom in the Night
Not all DARPA projects are designed to kill people and destroy hard targets. Some are geared toward delivering men, materiel, and someday robots to do the job instead. Others are aimed at intrusive surveillance, cyber-war, or making silver-screen dreams come true.
One long-term focus of military futurists and DARPA scientists has been the “urban environment.” (Think: the billion or more poor and potentially rebellious people already living in the slum cities of our planet.) The Urban Ops Hopper program, for example, seeks to develop small robots or semi-autonomous land drones -- unmanned ground vehicles or UGVs in mil-speak -- that can “adapt to the urban environment in real-time and provide the delivery of small payloads to any point of the urban jungle while remaining lightweight [and] small to minimize the burden on the soldier.” And yes, they might even hop.
For many years, the Pentagon has dreamed of persistent surveillance of planetary hot spots, developing, for instance, drone technologies to serve as spies in the skies across the globe. In 2003, Noah Shachtman, writing for the Village Voice, profiled the military’s Combat Zones That See, or CTS program. The rationale for the effort was, he wrote, to “protect our troops in cities like Baghdad, where… fleeting attackers have been picking off American fighters in ones and twos.” However, he added, “[D]efense experts believe the surveillance effort has a second, more sinister, purpose: to keep entire cities under an omnipresent, unblinking eye.”
All these years later, Americans are still in Baghdad, still periodically under siege there, and still, in the case of DARPA, dreaming of snooping on whole cities. With an acronym that brings to mind over-priced polo shirts, preppies on tennis courts, and an angry little alligator, DARPA's Large Area Coverage Optical Search-while-Track and Engage, or LACOSTE program is dedicated to achieving the dream of CTS: imaging technology that will allow for “single sensor day/night persistent tactical surveillance of all moving vehicles in a large urban battlefield.” Think of it as placing an entire city in a panopticon where the jailor has true omniscience.
Through its Gravity Anomaly for Tunnel Exposure, or GATE, program, DARPA is also developing technologies that could someday allow drones, flying overhead, to “see”below the Earth’s surface and identify areas with underground tunnels. And just this month, DARPA kicked off a new program called Mind’s Eye “aimed at developing a visual intelligence capability for unmanned systems.”
Partnering with defense giant General Dynamics, Roomba vacuum cleaner manufacturer iRobot, and long-time Pentagon contractor Toyon Research Corporation, as well as scientists from military-academic powerhouses like Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California Berkeley, and the University of Southern California, the Pentagon is exploring the idea of creating robots with artificial intelligence that could roll ahead of infantry patrols, scan the scene, analyze it, and figure out what to do next. In other words, the quest to build a robotic point man will now join a long list of DARPA projects certain to inspire fears of a future straight out of the Terminator films.
In 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me, secret agent James Bond’s Lotus Esprit sports car morphed into a mini-submarine. Never one to let an old silver-screen dream go to waste, DARPA is now attempting to one-up 007. Through its Submersible Aircraft program, the agency seeks to “combine the speed and range of an airborne platform with the stealth of an underwater vehicle by developing a vessel that can both fly and submerge.” Revolutionary it may be as a machine, but the reasons for creating it remain thoroughly predictable: the “insertion and extraction of expeditionary forces at greater ranges.” In other words, it’s meant to facilitate deploying forces overseas, perhaps for the next Iraq or Afghan War.
DARPA and the New Arms Race
Recently, some military experts went into mild hysterics over the unveiling of China’s first stealth fighter plane and word that the Chinese military was developing a “carrier killer” missile. Never mind that the jet is not unlike the F-22, a relatively useless fighter in the U.S. arsenal, and is still years away from production; never mind that the man who garnered headlines for the aircraft-carrier story, Admiral Robert Willard, the alarmist chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, said intelligence indicated only"that the component parts of the anti-ship ballistic missile have been developed and tested.”
Still, advances like the proto-plane and not-yet-effective missile have made great hyperbolic copy for the military-corporate complex. Some pundits went so far as to suggest that U.S. military “weakness” in Asia was emboldening China.
From the Chinese point of view, it undoubtedly looks quite different. After all, the U.S. has all-but-encircled China with military bases, sites, and facilities -- more than 100 in Japan, around 85 in South Korea, even a few in Central Asia -- and has around 50,000 troops deployed to East Asia and the Pacific, and another 100,000 or more deployed in South Asia, as well as the largest Navy on the planet patrolling offshore waters.
As for the future, perhaps the Chinese don’t quite believe that DARPA’s Long Range Anti-Ship Missile is meant to take out Somali pirates, or that the Triple Target Terminator is geared to counter the al-Qaeda air corps (which mainly seems to consist of ill-constructed bomb-laced underwear and explosive printer cartridges on commercial aircraft), or that the U.S. military plans to deploy Magneto Hydrodynamic Explosive Munitions to fight off non-existentTaliban tanks.
Amid talk of a new arms race, the American people should know more about just what billions of their tax dollars are paying for and what message they’re sending to the world. With Beijing holding close to $1 trillion in U.S. debt, it’s unlikely that either country has actual military designs on the other. It’s far more likely that such DARPA projects (and pundit saber-rattling) will simply lead to needless expenditures on weapons designed for wars the U.S. won’t fight. In the end, if history is any guide, many of these weapons will become the overpriced means of killing lightly armed men, along with unarmed men, women, and children in one poverty-stricken country or another in the decades to come.
Unfortunately, Americans can’t begin to have an honest conversation about any of this until DARPA comes clean about exactly what billions of their tax dollars are being spent on -- and why. Only then can the taxpayers begin to consider what message their future weapons plans are sending to the world and whether the U.S. really should be spending increasingly scarce dollars on making MAHEM.
Posted on: Monday, January 31, 2011 - 20:48
SOURCE: Business Week (1-30-11)
The attacks on Wilson make mildly entertaining parlor polemics, and they serve the partisan purpose of those who would trace a line of descent from Wilson’s alleged fascism to the efforts of fellow Democrat Barack Obama to reform health care and otherwise expand the role of government.
But like most such attempts to transpose labels from one era to another, the tagging of Wilson as a fascist obscures far more than it reveals. And it’s not as though Wilson doesn’t have a lot to answer for already. As a child and a young man growing up in the South during and after the Civil War, he imbibed the racist attitudes of his time and place -- attitudes that inspired his decision to extend the Jim Crow system of segregation from private industry to the federal workforce.
To be sure, the idea wasn’t Wilson’s alone: The impetus came from white Southern Democrats whose support Wilson required to implement policies having nothing to do with race. But he could have resisted the demands for segregation, and he did not....
Posted on: Monday, January 31, 2011 - 16:34
SOURCE: Commentary (1-30-11)
The president of the United States makes $400,000 a year. He has government-provided housing, a personal chef, his own helicopter and airplane, not to mention the best personal protection in the universe. It is at times like this that he really earns all those nice perks. There is no task more difficult than managing a revolution in progress. Jimmy Carter got it wrong in Nicaragua, and Iran and went down as a failure. Ronald Reagan got it right in the Philippines and South Korea, which contributed to the overall success of his presidency.
So far, I haven’t seen much evidence that Obama is earning his salary with his response to the revolution in Egypt. On Friday, he delivered an ultra-cautious statement, telling the “Egyptian authorities to refrain from any violence against peaceful protesters” and saying that “the people of Egypt have rights,” including “the right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech and the ability to determine their own destiny.” But he stopped well short of telling Hosni Mubarak, who is clearly on his last legs, that it was time for him to go — a message that Ronald Reagan memorably delivered via his friend Senator Paul Laxalt to Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.
The New York Times explains Obama’s reticence by citing a “senior administration official” who said that “Mr. Obama warned that any overt effort by the United States to insert itself into easing Mr. Mubarak out, or easing a successor in, could backfire. ‘He said several times that the outcome has to be decided by the Egyptian people, and the U.S. cannot be in a position of dictating events.’”...
Posted on: Monday, January 31, 2011 - 15:39
SOURCE: Progressive Professor (Blog) (1-31-11)
[Feinman is professor of American History, Government and Politics, as well as a lecturer on modern American topics.]
President Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday will be celebrated this coming Sunday, and the government will be giving extra attention to the historical significance of the 40th President over the next year.
It is understandable that such recognition would be given, as Reagan, for good and for bad, was indeed a very significant President in the years from 1981-1989.
But, unfortunately, much misinformation is being spread as to the record of the Reagan Presidency, which is indeed much more complex and often contradictory than the supporters of Reagan want to believe!
The dispute between his two sons from different marriages–Michael and Ron, Jr.–are telling, as they see their dad in different ways, but historians already see the complexity of Reagan, that not everything conservatives, Republicans and even Tea Party people say about Reagan, is the true and complete story!
So in the midst of debate about the legacy of Ronald Reagan, the Young America’s Foundation, is sponsoring two days of festivities at the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara, California this Friday and Saturday, February 4 and 5.
That is all fine and good, but the decision of this organization to invite former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to give the keynote speech on February 4 is a true distortion of the whole concept of Ronald Reagan!
Her presence, with the thin, unaccomplished record she possesses in public life, and her constant display of lack of knowledge or insights on ANY topic, makes one wonder about the political motivations of the group. Do they REALLY believe that Sarah Palin is the true successor to the man they love and admire? Would Reagan look at Sarah Palin as his heir apparent?
To make Sarah Palin a star of this event this coming weekend is to trivialize Ronald Reagan and to embarrass anyone who has any knowledge about Reagan and the conservative movement in America, as it is clear “Sarah Palin ain’t no Ronald Reagan!”
It can also be said that Sarah Palin “ain’t no Barry Goldwater” and that she “ain’t no Robert Taft”, earlier icons of the conservative movement! One wonders if she even knows of their contributions to the Republican Party and conservatism in America!
Sarah Palin could not walk in the shoes of Reagan, Goldwater or Taft, or really anyone else of substance, and it is a shame that Reagan’s memory, for good and for bad of his record, is being sullied by the involvement of this woman who proves that one does not need qualifications or education or intelligence to be a public figure!
The Founding Fathers are crying loudly in mourning, and the author suspects, so is Ronald Reagan in the after life!
Posted on: Monday, January 31, 2011 - 13:16
SOURCE: Perspectives (AHA) (1-31-11)
Last month’s presidential column provoked many responses. These included both posts on the AHA web site and others on independent blogs, two of which sparked long discussions, as well as a number of emails from historians and others. I’m grateful to all for these thoughtful responses. Let’s talk.
Ann Little and Jeremy Young, the bloggers who responded at length, pointed out, in different ways, that my title was imprecise: “it is not history, but historians, who are under attack.” They’re absolutely right. Americans love history. Tens of thousands of them reenact battles, hundreds of thousands visit historical sites and exhibits, and a million a week on average watch the History Channel. Thousands of them buy the works of history that appear on best-seller lists. From Tea Partiers to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s readers debating the Civil War, they’re passionate about the past. What they don’t love, to the same extent, are professional historians.
Many believe that professional historians are no better than, or indeed worse than, amateurs (a traditional American view that often encompasses experts in other fields, from medicine to climate). Some find that professionals are too politically correct to see the past as it really was. Many, especially journalists, insist that professionals just can’t write.
The biggest problem, though, is rooted in the core of our practices. Professional historians, Little argues, “are, by nature, splitters rather than lumpers. We aren’t united by a methodology or single set of disciplinary practices, and our writing and teaching more often than not seeks not to impose order on a given topic but rather to provide nuance and complexity. This is intellectually satisfying, but it sure makes it difficult for us to explain to the general public what we do and why it’s important that professionally trained historians do it rather than Cokie Roberts or Glenn Beck.”...
Posted on: Monday, January 31, 2011 - 12:53
SOURCE: Slate (1-30-11)
President Barack Obama has a "Shah problem" in Egypt. Recent events in Egypt recall the street protests of 1978 in Tehran when President Jimmy Carter had to decide whether to remain loyal to the Pahlavi regime, a long-standing American-backed dictatorship—or whether the time had come to abandon the Shah and support a popular uprising demanding human rights and democracy. Carter tried to have it both ways, modulating his support for the Shah, calling for political liberalization, and warning the Shah against the use of state violence against unarmed protesters. Obama seems to be following the same script, and the results may well turn out to be equally fraught with unintended consequences.
The 30-year regime of Gen. Hosni Mubarak is finished. Last week's events show that Mubarak has lost even the veneer of legitimacy. As in Tehran in 1978, a consensus has emerged from the Egyptian street that this pharaoh must go. A broad coalition of liberal human rights activists, genuine social democrats, old Nasserites, and Muslim Brotherhood advocates are supporting the spontaneous but politically inchoate street uprisings across the country. It was a similar coalition of secular liberals and religiously inspired political activists that brought down the Shah in February 1979—and only months later did Ayatollah Khomeini and his Shi'ite clerics forge a theocratic dictatorship....
Posted on: Monday, January 31, 2011 - 12:23
SOURCE: Salon (1-30-11)
Nevertheless, my thoughts did turn to John C. Frémont, a fellow out of American history that in all likelihood you’ve never heard of (unless you happen to live in Fremont, California). Frémont was the first presidential nominee of the Republican Party -- yes, Sarah Palin’s Republican Party -- in 1856. Today he’s forgotten, but in the mid nineteenth century he was probably the most famous man in the nation, an explorer of the West and an army officer who was hailed as a great hero. In other words, Frémont, like Palin, was a celebrity as well as a politician.
But there the apparent similarity pretty much ends. Unlike Palin, Frémont did not emerge out of nowhere onto the national scene. From the late 1830s to the late 1840s, Frémont led or participated in several topographical and scientific expeditions that explored the vast unknown terrain (at least unknown to most whites, except fur trappers and other "mountain men") that lay between the Mississippi Valley and the Pacific Ocean. Like the more famous Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who had made their famous trek to the Pacific from 1804 to 1806, Frémont was a trailblazer, a man who in his own lifetime was credited with opening up the West for settlement. By the time he ran for president in 1856, he was known as "The Great Pathfinder." His earlier achievements as an explorer, as a soldier who helped to win California from Mexico, as a man of destiny who made a fortune in the California Gold Rush -- all these things turned him into not only a hero, but a popular celebrity. Like Palin, who is hard at work establishing her status as a celebrity, Frémont did not look to any previous political experience (he had none) to boost his campaign for the presidency. Instead, he let his fame, his celebrity, do that for him. At age 43, he would have been the nation’s youngest president up to that time if he had been elected....
Posted on: Monday, January 31, 2011 - 11:54
SOURCE: LA Times (1-28-11)
Three Davos summits on from the West's Great Crash, we begin to see where we are. This is not the total collapse of liberal democratic capitalism that some had feared at the dramatic World Economic Forum meeting here in early 2009, but nor is it the great reform of Western capitalism, then the devout hope of Davos.
Western capitalism survives, but limping, wounded and carrying a heavy load of debt, inequality, demography, neglected infrastructure, social discontent and unrealistic expectations.
Meanwhile, other variants of capitalism — Chinese, Indian, Russian, Brazilian — are surging ahead, exploiting the advantages of backwardness, and their economic dynamism is rapidly being translated into political power.
The result? Not a unipolar world, converging on a single model of liberal democratic capitalism, but a no-polar world, diverging toward many different national versions of often illiberal capitalism. Not a new world order but a new world disorder — fractured, overheated, pregnant with future conflicts....
Posted on: Monday, January 31, 2011 - 11:52
SOURCE: National Review (1-28-11)
Barack Obama 1.0 had a solid record of hard-left governance as an Illinois state representative and U.S. senator. He voted for partial-birth abortion, wanted all troops out of Iraq by March 2008, and proved himself the most partisan of the 100 members of the Senate, even to the left of the only Socialist senator, Bernie Sanders. He seemed unaware of or indifferent to the embarrassment of his long intimacy with the crackpot racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright and other Chicago radicals. Version 1.0 led to office, but not to the highest office.
Barack Obama 2.0 then ran a stealth campaign in 2008 — now moderate more than hard left and often at odds with his own record. At times he called for fiscal sobriety, a more balanced approach to energy production, intrusions into Pakistan if need be, and a beefed-up presence in Afghanistan. In surreal moments, Obama almost seemed more centrist than Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush. Thanks to brilliantly voiced hope-and-change banalities, a lackluster McCain opposition, subservient media, the September 2008 financial meltdown, collective anger at President Bush, and the novelty of the first serious African-American candidate, the American people did what they hadn’t done in a half-century: They elected a liberal Democrat who didn’t have a southern accent. Version 2.0 achieved its purpose of election to the presidency.
Barack Obama 3.0 then reverted to his leftist roots. We saw appointments like Van Jones and Anita Dunn. Federal bailouts followed for politically approved businesses and crony capitalists. The SEIU leadership made serial visits to the White House. More than $3 trillion in spread-the-wealth borrowing was added to the national debt. Obama engineered a federal takeover of health care, and rhetorically waged war on the affluent, who were supposed to pay new taxes as penance for their assorted sins....
Posted on: Monday, January 31, 2011 - 10:58
SOURCE: Al Jazeera (1-28-11)
It's incredible, really. The president of the United States can't bring himself to talk about democracy in the Middle East. He can dance around it, use euphemisms, throw out words like "freedom" and "tolerance" and "non-violent" and especially "reform," but he can't say the one word that really matters: democracy.
How did this happen? After all, in his famous 2009 Cairo speech to the Muslim world, Obama spoke the word loudly and clearly - at least once.
"The fourth issue that I will address is democracy," he declared, before explaining that while the United States won't impose its own system, it was committed to governments that "reflect the will of the people... I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn't steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. Those are not just American ideas, they are human rights, and that is why we will support them everywhere."...
In fact, newly released WikiLeaks cables show that from the moment it assumed power, the Obama administration specifically toned down public criticism of Mubarak. The US ambassador to Egypt advised secretary of state Hillary Clinton to avoid even the mention of former presidential candidate Ayman Nour, jailed and abused for years after running against Mubarak in part on America's encouragement.
Not surprisingly, when the protests began, Clinton declared that Egypt was "stable" and an important US ally, sending a strong signal that the US would not support the protesters if they tried to topple the regime. Indeed, Clinton has repeatedly described Mubarak as a family friend. Perhaps Ms Clinton should choose her friends more wisely....
Posted on: Friday, January 28, 2011 - 14:15
SOURCE: WaPo (1-27-11)
President Obama on Tuesday called for all college campuses "to open their doors to our military recruiters and the ROTC," saying that it is "time to move forward as one nation." Similar calls have been issued since the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," as many urge ROTC to return to the Ivy League and other leading universities to reconnect the armed forces with the upper tier of American society. But expanding ROTC into these institutions is the wrong approach....
And while some college leaders may want ROTC back, faculties are likely to be unenthusiastic. Given that the nation is fighting two unpopular wars, with the possibility of more in the future, the military will always be an outside, uncomfortable and largely isolated presence on college campuses. Nor will the Pentagon be eager to send uniformed personnel - who are in short supply - to costly locations where they will recruit and train what is likely to be a small yield of new officers.
Rather than expanding ROTC into elite institutions, it would be better to replace ROTC over time with a more efficient, more effective and less costly program to attract the best of America's youth to the services and perhaps to military careers....
Posted on: Friday, January 28, 2011 - 12:59
SOURCE: Progressive Professor (Blog) (1-25-11)
Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann is demonstrating her total ignorance of American history and the history of her Republican party, based on the text of her speech to be delivered tonight after President Obama’s State of the Union Address!
She says slavery was ended by the Founding Fathers, showing she is unaware of the role of her Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln, and the Civil War in ending slavery. She is, as always, demonstrating her total lack of knowledge of the American past and the American Constitution, joining many other Republicans, including Sarah Palin, in this regard!
But now, Pat Buchanan, former challenger for the Presidency against George HW Bush in 1992, and running for President as a third party party candidate in 2000, has also demonstrated his lack of knowledge, by asserting there were more slaves in the Union states that had slaves (Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri) than in any of the Confederate States that broke away from the Union! He also said incorrectly that George Washington freed his slaves after his wife died, but the reality is that his wife outlived him by over two years!
The ignorance and lack of knowledge of these and other Republican leaders is shocking and reprehensible!
The Founding Fathers (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin) and the statesmen of the pre Civil War era (Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Stephen Douglas, William Seward, Charles Sumner, Abraham Lincoln) would be shocked and mortified if they came back today and witnessed the TOTAL STUPIDITY AND IGNORANCE of many GOP leaders, and Republicans of the Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower era would also be ashamed of what their party has become: a party without legitimacy, ethics, character, and morality!
Posted on: Thursday, January 27, 2011 - 16:46
SOURCE: National Review (1-27-11)
American reality has been turned upside down in just 20 years.
Americans no longer count on their news to be filtered and shaped by the Associated Press or the New York Times. Nor do millions have it read to them in the evening by CBS, ABC, or NBC anchorpersons — not with the Internet, cable news, and talk radio. Matt Drudge’s website, The Drudge Report, reaches far more Americans than does CBS anchor Katie Couric.
The old notion that America’s most successful citizens are turned out by prestigious four-year universities — the more private and Ivy League, the better — overseen by disinterested professors is also nearing an end. Private for-profit trade schools and online colleges are certifying millions in particular skills.
Meanwhile, the high jobless rate among recent college graduates, who are burdened by thousands of dollars in student loans, is starting to resemble the Freddie Mac– and Fannie Mae–spawned financial bubble of 2008, in which millions of indebted and unemployed borrowers could not pay back exorbitant federally insured home loans. For parents to keep borrowing $200,000 to certify their children with high-prestige degrees that don’t necessarily lead to good jobs seems about as wise as buying a sprawling house that one can’t afford. James Cameron, Bill Gates, Sean Hannity, Tom Hanks, Steve Jobs, Rush Limbaugh, Tiger Woods, and Mark Zuckerberg have all made good livings without earning B.A.s....
In response to this topsy-turvy world, the traditional media, tenured professors, well-paid public employees, rigid ethnic and racial lobbies, unions, organized retirees, open-borders advocates, and entrenched politicians all are understandably claiming that we live in an uncivil age.
We well may, but we also are seeing the waning of an old established order. And the resulting furor suggests that the old beneficiaries are not going quietly into that good night.
Posted on: Thursday, January 27, 2011 - 11:43
SOURCE: Philadelphia Inquirer (1-27-11)
In his State of the Union Address this week, President Obama pledged to help American schools recruit and train 100,000 new science and math teachers over the next 10 years. But he left out the scientists and the mathematicians - as well as the economists, anthropologists, political scientists, and historians.
That's a big problem. Since the 1980s, scholars in the academic disciplines have largely ceded the matter of K-12 schooling to professors of education. If we're serious about improving our schools, we need to bring the disciplines back in.
As a professor with one foot in each camp - a disciplinary department and an education school - I'm acutely aware of the divide between them. People in the disciplines generally dismiss education, and education professors disdain the disciplines. It's mutual.
It's also destructive. Too many ed schools still believe the myth that you can teach students "methods" of education without rigorous attention to the disciplines they will be teaching. And most disciplinary scholars still think anyone who understands a subject can teach it.
They're both wrong. We've all had teachers who didn't know enough about a subject to teach it well. And we've had teachers who knew their material backward and forward, but couldn't communicate it to others.
So, besides helping schools hire new teachers in science, math, and engineering, as Obama promised to do Tuesday, he should also establish incentives for collaboration between education schools and the disciplines....
Posted on: Thursday, January 27, 2011 - 09:59
SOURCE: Al Jazeera (1-25-11)
The democracy protests that swept Tunisian President Zine el Abedine Ben Ali from power are going viral, but sadly President Obama and other Western leaders seem immune.
Indeed, it is quite likely that the president and his colleagues in Europe are as frightened of the potential explosion of people power across the Middle East and North Africa as are the sclerotic autocratic leaders of the region against whom the protests are being directed.
The question is, why?
Why would Obama, who worked so hard to reach out to the Muslim world with his famous 2009 speech in Cairo, be standing back quietly while young people across the region finally take their fate into their own hands and push for real democracy?
Shouldn't the president of the United States be out in front, supporting non-violent democratic change across the world's most volatile region?...
Tonight in his State of the Union address the world will learn whether President Obama has any of his once celebrated vision, courage and audacity left in him, or if he's been so thoroughly beaten down by the forces that actually run Washington that he can barely muster support for the young people around the Arab world who are increasingly saying "Kefaya", Enough!, to their governments, and the larger global system that has kept them in power for so long.
It's probably too much to ask the President to say "Kefaya" to the forces that have so circumscribed his once progressive vision.
Posted on: Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - 18:17
SOURCE: BBC History Magazine (1-17-11)
Since the New Year always brings with it a spate of interest in anniversaries, perhaps we can start 2011 with one likely to raise a scowl in the vast majority of readers. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the introduction of payment for Members of Parliament, seen at the time as a great reforming measure, but now one indelibly associated with the expenses scandal that has left the reputation of the Commons so badly tarnished.
Between then and now, of course, yawns a great cultural and social gulf. Payment was only introduced after the House of Lords had banned the trade unions from supporting Labour MPs, many of whom were far too poor to serve in parliament for nothing. And at the time, the Liberal chancellor, David Lloyd George, was adamant that payment was merely a means to better parliamentary representation, not a step towards professional politicians. “It is not a remuneration, it is not a recompense, it is not even a salary,” he insisted. “It is just an allowance.”
However, there is more to the story than meets the eye. Payment was not quite the novelty we now assume: between the 13th and 17th centuries, local authorities often paid their MPs a token wage, and Great Yarmouth even rewarded its representatives with fish. The poet Andrew Marvell, who served as MP for Hull, was one of the last to receive payment, and consequently felt obliged to write long letters to the city corporation on the major issues of the day. And although payment had largely died out by Walpole’s day, reformers of all kinds soon revived the idea. The Chartists, for example, argued in 1838 that MPs should be paid £500 a year, with their attendance records published after each parliament – though their scheme did not, it has to be said, run to moats and duck houses....
Posted on: Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - 16:58
SOURCE: Huffington Post (1-26-11)
Last night's State of the Union address boils down to one point: In a cutthroat world, America has lost its edge. We're dull, and the Chinese are sharp. They have faster computers and high-speed rail. Their students work harder and score higher on math and science tests. It's Sputnik all over again. The only way to defeat them is to out-compete them.
It seems President Obama concluded that we as Americans can only understand the rhetoric of competition (and the related rhetoric of consumption). Look closely at his speech, and you'll see no mention of conservation (whether of energy or any other natural resource). You'll see precious few references to cooperation. Instead, it's all about restoring America's greatness while at the same time keeping America safe from terrorists.
We can't solve future problems with the government of the past, Obama said. But I would argue that we can't meet future challenges with the rhetoric of the past. For Obama, America is still the exceptional country, the light on the hill, though we may shine less brilliantly today. His solution is not to rethink our belief in our greatness, but to rekindle our competitive fire: to rededicate ourselves to being Number One, irrespective of the cost to others.
In an era of globalization and of shrinking natural resources, Obama continues to think in terms of nations in relentless competition. And to compete successfully, we must struggle, produce, innovate, all in the name of greater economic power and military prowess.
We must, Obama exclaims, remain exceptional: Exceptional, that is, in our profligate consumption of the world's resources and our prodigious expenditures on weaponry.
And with a State of the Union like that, who needs a Republican rejoinder?
Posted on: Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - 16:28
SOURCE: Commentary (1-26-11)
Christopher Hitchens doesn’t like The King’s Speech. Not because of its cinematic qualities, which he appreciates, but because of its political ones. According to him, the movie is a “a gross falsification of history” because it shows Churchill as “generally in favor of a statesmanlike solution to the crisis of the abdication” and because it neglects to portray Edward VIII as “a firm admirer of the Third Reich” and George VI as an appeaser and anti-Churchill.
When I first read Hitchens’s piece, my mind flashed back to an article Hitchens contributed to the Atlantic in July/August 2002, an article that, as the subtitle puts it, “takes the Great Man down a peg or two.” It occasioned a characteristically understated and effective response from my adviser Paul Kennedy, who pointed out the “misinformation” that Hitchens appeared to be circulating. Not at all abashed, Hitchens continues to regret that “it seems we shall never reach a time when the Churchill cult is open for honest inspection.”
It’s curious that Hitchens both criticizes the “Churchill cult” for supporting the Great Man, and George VI for supposedly failing to do so. But Hitchens is shooting at several targets simultaneously: Churchill for being a monarchist, and the monarchy for existing. When coupled with his opposition to appeasement, the result is not always convincing....
Posted on: Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - 16:21
SOURCE: TomDispatch (1-25-11)
[Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History and the director of the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan. His latest book, Engaging the Muslim World, is just out in a revised paperback edition from Palgrave Macmillan. He runs the Informed Comment website.]
Here’s one obvious lesson of the Tunisian Revolution of 2011: paranoia about Muslim fundamentalist movements and terrorism is causing Washington to make bad choices that will ultimately harm American interests and standing abroad. State Department cable traffic from capitals throughout the Greater Middle East, made public thanks to WikiLeaks, shows that U.S. policy-makers have a detailed and profound picture of the depths of corruption and nepotism that prevail among some “allies” in the region.
The same cable traffic indicates that, in a cynical Great Power calculation, Washington continues to sacrifice the prospects of the region’s youth on the altar of “security.” It is now forgotten that America’s biggest foreign policy headache, the Islamic Republic of Iran, arose in response to American backing for Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, the despised Shah who destroyed the Iranian left and centrist political parties, paving the way for the ayatollahs’ takeover in 1979.
State Department cables published via WikiLeaks are remarkably revealing when it comes to the way Tunisian strongman Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and his extended family (including his wife Leila’s Trabelsi clan) fastened upon the Tunisian economy and sucked it dry. The riveting descriptions of U.S. diplomats make the presidential “family” sound like True Blood’s vampires overpowering Bontemps, Louisiana.
In July of 2009, for instance, the U.S. ambassador dined with Nesrine Ben Ali el-Materi and Sakher el-Materi, the president’s daughter and son-in-law, at their sumptuous mansion. Materi, who rose through nepotism to dominate Tunisia’s media, provided a 12-course dinner with Kiwi juice -- “not normally available here” -- and “ice cream and frozen yoghurt he had flown in from Saint Tropez,” all served by an enormous staff of well-paid servants. The ambassador remarked on the couple’s pet tiger, “Pasha,” which consumed “four chickens a day” at a time of extreme economic hardship for ordinary Tunisians.
Other cables detail the way the Ben Ali and Trabelsi clans engaged in a Tunisian version of insider trading, using their knowledge of the president’s upcoming economic decisions to scarf up real estate and companies they knew would suddenly spike in value. In 2006, the U.S. ambassador estimated that 50% of the economic elite of Tunisia was related by blood or marriage to the president, a degree of nepotism hard to match outside some of the Persian Gulf monarchies.
Despite full knowledge of the corruption and tyranny of the regime, the U.S. embassy concluded in July 2009: “Notwithstanding the frustrations of doing business here, we cannot write off Tunisia. We have too much at stake. We have an interest in preventing al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and other extremist groups from establishing a foothold here. We have an interest in keeping the Tunisian military professional and neutral.”
The notion that, if the U.S. hadn’t given the Tunisian government hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid over the past two and a half decades, while helping train its military and security forces, a shadowy fringe group calling itself “al-Qaeda in the Maghreb” might have established a “toehold” in the country was daft. Yet this became an all-weather, universal excuse for bad policy.
In this regard, Tunisia has been the norm when it comes to American policy in the Muslim world. The Bush administration's firm support for Ben Ali makes especially heinous the suggestion of some neoconservative pundits that George W. Bush's use of democratization rhetoric for neo-imperialist purposes somehow inspired the workers and internet activists of Tunisia (none of whom ever referenced the despised former US president). It would surely have been smarter for Washington to cut the Ben Ali regime off without a dime, at least militarily, and distance itself from his pack of jackals. The region is, of course, littered with dusty, creaking, now exceedingly nervous dictatorships in which government is theft. The U.S. receives no real benefits from its damaging association with them.
Here’s one obvious lesson of the Tunisian Revolution of 2011: paranoia about Muslim fundamentalist movements and terrorism is causing Washington to make bad choices that will ultimately harm American interests and standing abroad. State Department cable traffic from capitals throughout the Greater Middle East, made public thanks to WikiLeaks, shows that U.S. policy-makers have a detailed and profound picture of the depths of corruption and nepotism that prevail among some “allies” in the region.
The same cable traffic indicates that, in a cynical Great Power calculation, Washington continues to sacrifice the prospects of the region’s youth on the altar of “security.” It is now forgotten that America’s biggest foreign policy headache, the Islamic Republic of Iran, arose in response to American backing for Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, the despised Shah who destroyed the Iranian left and centrist political parties, paving the way for the ayatollahs’ takeover in 1979.
State Department cables published via WikiLeaks are remarkably revealing when it comes to the way Tunisian strongman Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and his extended family (including his wife Leila’s Trabelsi clan) fastened upon the Tunisian economy and sucked it dry. The riveting descriptions of U.S. diplomats make the presidential “family” sound like True Blood’s vampires overpowering Bontemps, Louisiana.
In July of 2009, for instance, the U.S. ambassador dined with Nesrine Ben Ali el-Materi and Sakher el-Materi, the president’s daughter and son-in-law, at their sumptuous mansion. Materi, who rose through nepotism to dominate Tunisia’s media, provided a 12-course dinner with Kiwi juice -- “not normally available here” -- and “ice cream and frozen yoghurt he had flown in from Saint Tropez,” all served by an enormous staff of well-paid servants. The ambassador remarked on the couple’s pet tiger, “Pasha,” which consumed “four chickens a day” at a time of extreme economic hardship for ordinary Tunisians.
Other cables detail the way the Ben Ali and Trabelsi clans engaged in a Tunisian version of insider trading, using their knowledge of the president’s upcoming economic decisions to scarf up real estate and companies they knew would suddenly spike in value. In 2006, the U.S. ambassador estimated that 50% of the economic elite of Tunisia was related by blood or marriage to the president, a degree of nepotism hard to match outside some of the Persian Gulf monarchies.
Despite full knowledge of the corruption and tyranny of the regime, the U.S. embassy concluded in July 2009: “Notwithstanding the frustrations of doing business here, we cannot write off Tunisia. We have too much at stake. We have an interest in preventing al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and other extremist groups from establishing a foothold here. We have an interest in keeping the Tunisian military professional and neutral.”
The notion that, if the U.S. hadn’t given the Tunisian government hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid over the past two and a half decades, while helping train its military and security forces, a shadowy fringe group calling itself “al-Qaeda in the Maghreb” might have established a “toehold” in the country was daft. Yet this became an all-weather, universal excuse for bad policy.
In this regard, Tunisia has been the norm when it comes to American policy in the Muslim world. The Bush administration's firm support for Ben Ali makes especially heinous the suggestion of some neoconservative pundits that George W. Bush's use of democratization rhetoric for neo-imperialist purposes somehow inspired the workers and internet activists of Tunisia (none of whom ever referenced the despised former US president). It would surely have been smarter for Washington to cut the Ben Ali regime off without a dime, at least militarily, and distance itself from his pack of jackals. The region is, of course, littered with dusty, creaking, now exceedingly nervous dictatorships in which government is theft. The U.S. receives no real benefits from its damaging association with them.
Posted on: Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - 15:40
SOURCE: WSJ (1-26-11)
As Communist Party General Secretary Hu Jintao visited Washington last week pledging friendship and cooperation, back in China the generals were having a field day bashing America. Popular media commentator Major General Peng Guangqian, for example, called the U.S. a "trouble maker in the Asia-Pacific." He alleged that "the U.S., fearing the loss of its hegemonic status, is speeding up its activities in Asia to impede China's development."
This split in attitudes toward the U.S. is especially significant because Mr. Hu is retiring next year. The future of China-U.S. relations will be determined by Xi Jinping, the man destined, barring a major upset, to become general secretary at the 18th Party Congress in October 2012. Mr. Xi will also likely take over as chairman of the Central Military Commission, putting him directly in charge of military policy.
And unlike his predecessor, Mr. Xi's primary power base is the defense establishment. He will likely give senior military officers an even bigger say in diplomatic and security policies. Mr. Xi, who has assertive views on the subject, is losing no time in bolstering his authority among the generals.
On the same day that the Hu-Obama summit was held, the PLA announced the appointment of General Liu Yuan as political commissar of the General Logistics Department. As the son of late President Liu Shaoqi, Gen. Liu is a member of the "princeling" faction, which Mr. Xi—as the son of Xi Zhongxun, a former vice-premier—leads. Mr. Liu previously held the much less sensitive post of political commissar of the Academy of Military Sciences....
Posted on: Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - 15:01
