Andre Gunder Frank on Uncle Sam and his shrinking dollar
By Pepe Escobar with photographs by Kevin Nortz
Full Version: The Book Corner, Volume II
Andre Gunder Frank on Uncle Sam and his shrinking dollar
By Pepe Escobar with photographs by Kevin Nortz
The Coming
Trade War
By Henry C K Liu
A series
by Henry C K Liu
Sinoroving
Pepe Escobar in China
Money, Power
and
Modern Art
A series by Henry C K Liu
How Hezbollah defeated Israel
By
Mark Perry and
Alastair Crooke
(Oct '06)
Mark Perry and
Alastair Crooke
talk to the 'terrorists'
(Mar '06)
China: The
Impossible
Revolution
By
Francesco Sisci
Syed Saleem Shahzad reports on the Afghan war from the Taliban side
(Dec '06)
cmSetProduction(); cmCreatePageviewTag( "Article:Robert D. Kaplan:Rereading Vietnam:200708u:Free:print", "foreign/article/200708u/kaplan-vietnam" );Rereading Vietnam
The Vietnam analogy looms ever larger in the debate over Iraq, but the U.S. military has memories of that conflict that the public doesn't. .....
In 1943, at the age of 18, George Everette "Bud" Day of Sioux City, Iowa, enlisted in the Marines. He served in the Pacific during World War II, and later became a fighter pilot. He flew the F-84F Thunderstreak during the Korean War and the F-100F Super Sabre in Vietnam. Bud Day, a legendary "full-blooded jet-jock" as one recent account dubbed him, would see service in all three wars as a sanctified whole: For him the concept of the "long war" was something he had built his life around in the middle decades of the 20th century. As an Air Force major, he was the first commander of the squadron of fast FACs (forward air controllers), who loitered daily for hours over North Vietnamese airspace, seeking out targets for other fighter bombers. With the most dangerous air mission in the Vietnam War, Day and the other fast FACs were known as "Misty warriors." Misty was the radio call sign that Day himself had chosen for the squadron, inspired by his favorite Johnny Mathis song. The Mistys were "an aggressive bunch of bastards who pressed the fight; they got down in the weeds" and "trolled for trouble," writes Robert Coram in a recently published book about Bud Day, American Patriot. On August 26, 1967, Bud Day's luck ran out. He was shot down over North Vietnam.
The Military Code of Conduct "required that escape take priority over personal fears and concerns," Day writes in his own memoir, Duty Honor Country, published in 1989 by American Hero Press, Fort Walton Beach, Florida. Not ranked on Amazon, it is among the most amazing personal stories of any war. His eardrums ruptured, his face crusted with blood from beatings, one arm broken and both knees badly injured from the ejection, Bud Day was hung by the feet "like a side of butchered beef for many hours" by his captors after he refused to answer their questions. A week into his captivity he escaped. He then hiked 12 days alone in the jungle back to South Vietnam, eating frogs, nauseous from pain, only to be recaptured.
With all of his limbs now broken or shot up, he spent the next six years in captivity, undergoing mock executions, hung again repeatedly by his feet, often not permitted to urinate, beaten senseless in scenes "out of the Mongol Hordes" with whips that made his testicles like charred meat. When prison guards burst in on him and other POWs during a clandestine Christian service, Day stared into their muzzles and sang "The Star-Spangled Banner."
A recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, Day took the greatest pride in never revealing information to his captors about the Misty program. "If I were to divulge our secrets and tactics, it was highly likely that many of my fine, young, loyal pilots would die as a result..."
I met Bud Day in September 2005 at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station where Navy flyers had lined up to buy his book, for which he had to take payments in cash. I thought it demeaning that he had to sell his book this way. It says something about the blind spots of a Manhattan-based publishing industry that Day had to go to what is essentially a vanity press. The publication of Coram's book is, therefore, a welcome event.
The relative obscurity of Day's autobiography and other books like it about Vietnam constitutes a lesser-known aspect of our civilian-military divide. The books to which I refer should be part of our recollection of Vietnam, but they generally aren't. They aren't so much stories that soldiers tell civilians as those that soldiers tell each other. Of course, there are exceptions: most famously James Webb's Fields of Fire (1978), a book that overlaps with this category and which, in fact, did become a bestseller. But there is a range of books of lesser literary merit, yet of equal historical worth, that either have small readerships or readerships consisting overwhelmingly of military personnel, active duty and retired. The authors of these lesser-known books include marines and Green Berets (Army Special Forces) who were involved in counterinsurgency operations. Their writing reveals a second divide—that between professional warriors and conventional, citizen soldiers—which is but another facet of the warrior's alienation from the civilian world. To explore this second divide, I must also bring into the discussion a French writer and a British soldier, whose legacies include not only Indochina, but Algeria and pre-World War II Palestine—scenes, too, of messy, irregular warfare. Thus, my notion of another Vietnam library goes beyond the subject at hand.
Reading habits are influenced by the people you meet. If I hadn't had the opportunity to embed with professional warriors, I would never have heard of some of these books. For example, I learned a great deal about Bud Day and Duty Honor Country from Air Force Captain Jeremiah Parvin of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, a young A-10 Warthog pilot with a "Misty" patch on his arm. The A-10 is essentially a flying Gatling gun. Its pilots hover low to the ground and loiter over the battlefield at great risk. Even as they disdain the rest of the Air Force, marines and Green Berets consider A-10 pilots true warriors. A-10 pilots feel the same bond toward combat infantry. It is a trait of professional warriors that they feel closer to those in other armed services who take similar risks than toward men and women in their own service who don't. Being in the military is not enough for these men: To earn their respect, you had to have joined in order to fight—not to better your career, or your station in life.
Capt. Parvin was serving in South Korea when I met him. He hoped soon to be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. He told me all about the Misty FACs in Vietnam. He showed me a coin that he always carried in his pocket, commemorating the Mistys, with Bud Day's name inscribed on it. It was a tradition in his squadron that the youngest and oldest members always carried the coin on their person. Whenever there is a reunion of Misty warriors from Vietnam, held usually in the Florida Panhandle—where Day now lives—the pilots of Parvin's A-10 squadron, two generations removed, send a representative.
Bud Day's memoir is riveting. But it is also a raw manuscript in need of an editor. His tirades against the likes of Lyndon Johnson and the "ding-bat traitor" Jane Fonda get tiresome. To be sure, Day's address to the Navy flyers the morning I met him was laced with colorful profanities. But it was his very rage and aggression against communism, against the Democratic Party of the era, against those whom he considered weak soldiers in America's own ranks, against many things, that allowed him to survive more than half a decade of sustained torture.
Among the persons he dedicates his book to is "President Richard M. Nixon," for ordering "Linebacker I and Linebacker II," the 1972 bombings of North Vietnam (the latter known as the Christmas Bombings), and for giving the go-ahead to the Son Tay Raiders: Green Berets out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, who in November 1970 stormed the Son Tay prison west of Hanoi, where POWs were believed to have been held.
Because the prisoners had been moved from Son Tay nearly four months earlier, the raid was harshly criticized by major newspapers and some Democratic senators, notably William Fulbright, who questioned the "real purpose" of the mission, beyond freeing the prisoners. A New York Times editorial said the raid was "likely to widen the home-front credibility gap." Yet as Day recounts, the raid—along with the bombing campaigns that followed—constituted enormous morale boosts for the prisoners and led to improved treatment for them. Today among Green Berets, the Son Tay Raiders are looked upon as though mythical heroes from a bygone age.
What Bud Day and other POWs specifically admired about Nixon was his willingness to strike back in a way that Johnson hadn't. Johnson's bombing halt in 1968 was seen as a betrayal by POWs, and caused disappointment and anger even throughout the U.S. military. Remember that these POWs were often combat pilots—professional warriors and volunteers that is, not citizen soldiers who were drafted. Professional warriors are not fatalists. In their minds, there is no such thing as defeat so long as they are still fighting, even from prison. That belief is why true soldiers have an affinity for seemingly lost causes.
In December 1967, a prisoner was dumped in Day's cell on the outskirts of Hanoi, known as the Plantation. This prisoner's legs were atrophied and he weighed under 100 pounds. Day helped scrub his face and nurse him back from the brink of death. The fellow American was Navy Lieutenant Commander John Sidney McCain III of the Panama Canal Zone. As his health improved, McCain's rants against his captors were sometimes as ferocious as Day's. The North Vietnamese tried and failed, through torture, to get McCain to accept a release for their own propaganda purposes: The lieutenant commander was the son of Admiral John McCain Jr., the commander of all American forces in the Pacific. "Character," writes the younger McCain, quoting the 19th century evangelist Dwight Moody, "is what you are in the dark," when nobody's looking and you silently make decisions about how you will act the next day.
In early 1973, during a visit to Hanoi, North Vietnamese officials told Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that they would be willing to free McCain into his custody. Kissinger refused, aware that there were prisoners held longer than McCain, ahead of him in the line for release. McCain suffered awhile longer in confinement, then, once freed, thanked Kissinger for "preserving my honor." The two have been good friends since. McCain blurbs with gusto Bud Day's memoir. The senator writes: "I recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the dimensions of human greatness."
The term "professional warrior" is explicitly used by Navy Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale of Abingdon, Illinois, to describe himself, in A Vietnam Experience: Ten Years of Reflection (Hoover Institution Press, 1984). I learned in depth about Vice Admiral Stockdale's writings in this and a second book, Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot (Hoover, 1995) from midshipmen at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, where I teach. One "mid" told me that the moral lessons Stockdale provides helped inspire him to go to the academy.
Stockdale himself is a symbol of a civilian-military divide. The very way you recall him upon hearing his name shows on what side of the divide you fall. Most civilians remember Stockdale as H. Ross Perot's seemingly dazed vice presidential candidate, who, in the 1992 debate with Al Gore and Dan Quayle asked aloud, "Who am I? Why am I here?" and later requested that a question be repeated, since he had not turned on his hearing aid. In fact, Stockdale, a life-long student of philosophy, had meant his questions to be rhetorical, a restatement of the most ancient and essential of questions. Because of television's ability to ruin people's lives by catching them in an embarrassing moment in time, too few are aware that Stockdale's vice presidential bid was insignificant compared with almost everything else he did.
Those on the other side of the divide remember him as among the most selfless and self-reflecting heroes the armed services have ever produced. In September 1965, then-Navy Commander Stockdale (the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel) was forced to eject from his A-4 Skyraider over North Vietnam. He spent the next seven years in prison, undergoing the usual barbaric treatment that the North Vietnamese communists meted out to Americans who did not provide information. Told that he was going to be shown to foreign journalists, Stockdale, a Medal of Honor winner, slashed his scalp with a razor and beat himself in the face with a wooden stool, to prevent being used for propaganda purposes. "When George McGovern said he would go to Hanoi on his knees, we prisoners ... were humiliated," Stockdale writes. "We did not go anywhere on our knees, least of all home ... Most of us would be there now rather than knuckle under," he writes in 1984.
Unlike in World War II, when the Japanese and Germans considered POWs to be liabilities and a drain on resources, the North Vietnamese considered captured American pilots as prime political assets. For POWs, not allowing themselves to be used as such meant being able to withstand years of torture. Rather than victims, men like Day, McCain, and Stockdale, once incarcerated, continued to see themselves as warriors, fighting on the most difficult of fronts.
Moral philosophy, in particular the Stoics, helped Stockdale survive. As he puts it, after he ejected from his plane, "I left my world of technology and entered the world of Epictetus." Epictetus was a Greek-born philosopher in first-century Rome, whose Stoic beliefs arose from his brutal treatment as a slave. Stockdale explains, "Stoics belittle physical harm, but this is not braggadocio. They are speaking of it in comparison to the devastating agony of shame they fancied good men generating when they knew in their hearts that they had failed to do their duty ... " When Stockdale writes about Epictetus, Socrates, Homer, Cervantes, Calvin, and other writers and philosophers, their work achieves a soaring reality because he relates them to his own, extraordinary experiences as a prisoner in one of the 20th century's most barbaric penal programs. Stockdale reminds us about something that much scholarship, with its obsession for textual subtleties, obscures: The real purpose of reading the classics is to develop courage and leadership.
Stockdale explains—drawing on Napoleon, Clausewitz, and other military strategists—that "the word moral" bears an "unmistakably manly, heroic connotation." (Virtue or virtu in Machiavelli's Italian derives ultimately from vir, Latin for "man.") He says that while we think of immorality in terms of categories like sexual abandon and fiscal irresponsibility, such vices, as serious as they may seem to civilians, are not in the same category as failure of nerve (his italics) in war. For a professional warrior, "doing your duty" is not to be confused with "following orders." The latter implies routine and mechanistic repetition; the former an act of potentially painful and devastating consequences, in which serving a larger good may mean something worse than death even.
The implications of "doing your duty" are spelled out further in Bury Us Upside Down: The Misty Pilots and the Secret Battle for the Ho Chi Minh Trail (Ballantine, 2006) by Rick Newman, a journalist at U.S. News & World Report, and Don Shepperd, a former Misty. They write that in November 1967, in order to rescue Captain Lance Sijan of Milwaukee, a smoke screen of cluster bombs was dropped near North Vietnamese anti-aircraft guns, so that the guns could be taken out by low-flying F-4 Phantoms, throwing enemy air defenses into enough chaos to allow a helicopter to pick up the downed pilot. The operation failed. Captain Sijan, injured worse than Bud Day during ejection, evaded the North Vietnamese for six weeks. After he was captured, he escaped again, then was recaptured, and died of torture and pneumonia. He was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously.
This occurred while the pilots were operating under extremely restrictive ROEs (rules of engagement). Stockdale describes bombing runs over Hanoi in which each plane had to follow the other in exactly the same path, with almost no unscheduled maneuvering permitted—significantly increasing the chance of a plane being shot down, in order to reduce the chances of errant bombs hitting civilians. He and other pilots rage over how restrictive rather than wanton were the so-called Christmas bombings (which, incidentally, were called off on Christmas Day). Few other air campaigns in history were fought under such limited ROEs, and yet achieved such an immediate and desired political impact: the return of the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table, the release of the POWs, and the end of America's military involvement in the war. The equivalent would have been if the pinprick bombings ordered by President Bill Clinton on Iraq in 1998 had led to a regime change in Baghdad; or a change of heart by Saddam Hussein that opened the country unambiguously to United Nations weapons inspections.
Bury Us Upside Down documents the lives of men who, like Bud Day, served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam—a fact that inspires envy among professional warriors I know. "If I had the choice I would have been born before the Great Depression," Army Special Forces Master Sergeant Mark Lopez of Yuba City, California, told me recently. "That way I could have enlisted at 18 and fought in World War II and Korea, and still be young enough to have seen action in Vietnam."
Yet my favorite story in Bury Us Upside Down is about a different sort of serviceman: Air Force flight surgeon Dean Echenberg of San Francisco—a former hippy who helped start a free clinic in Haight-Ashbury, did drugs, went to the great rock concerts, and then volunteered for service in Vietnam, more-or-less out of sheer adventure. He ended up with the Mistys, billeted among men whom Bud Day had trained. If anyone lived the American Experience of the 1960s in its totality, it was Echenberg. One day in 1968, his medical unit was near Phu Cat, just as it was attacked by Viet Cong. "The dispensary quickly filled with blood and body parts," write the authors. "Parents and family members staggered around in a daze, desperate for their children to be saved." Echenberg worked almost the entire night with a pretty American nurse. Near dawn, emotionally overwrought, the two laid down to rest near the end of the runway on the American base, and "made love in the grass while artillery boomed in the distance."
"Echenberg struggled to understand how anybody could be so savage as to murder children." The authors continue:
All of them had volunteered to go to "the village," a job they knew would likely get them killed. Their reason? As the commanding sergeant tells the author: "you have a sense of independence down here. There's no ... paperwork. You're always in contact with the Viet Cong. You know you have a job to do. You go out at night and you do it." And so, these marines left their base camp, with its "canvas cots, solid bunkers ... ice cream and endless guard rosters, and went to live with some Vietnamese ... "
In West's story there is no sense of defeat and doom and perversion like in classic Hollywood movies about Vietnam; no beautiful, ingeniously constructed, and introspective narration about soldiers and their vulnerabilities, beset with moral complexities, as in a work like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried (1990), a favorite of high school and college literature courses. West has not written a better book than O'Brien, himself a twice-wounded veteran of the war. But he has written a very different, equally worthy kind that, outside of the members of the military who have regularly recommended it to me over the years, is still relatively little known.
The Village is a story of interminable, deadly, monotonous life-and-death nighttime patrols, dryly and technically narrated, as though extracted from the pages of a hundred, strung-together after-action briefs. To wit: "He had fired twenty bullets in one excited burst, yet missed because he had used a magazine which contained no tracers. Unable to see his fire, he had failed to lead properly when the scout ducked around the corner of the house." The book is as absent of style as it is of negativity. Like any good field manual, it has no time for that. As I said, warriors are not fatalists. The Village deals with what works in a counterinsurgency struggle and what doesn't. It is a story meant for war colleges that the public, too, desperately needs to know. For the redeeming side of the Vietnam War it reflects was not an aberration.
The Marines of Bing West's story constituted a CAP (Combined Action Platoon), which moved into Binh Nghia in early 1966, a village terrorized by the Viet Cong, and over 18 bloody months pacified it, taking unabashed pride in their work. "Many of the marines," West writes, "let months go by without writing a letter or reading a newspaper. The radius of their world was two miles." The following passage helps explain why many Vietnam veterans I meet in the course of my reporting have not altogether negative memories of that war.
The Village demonstrates that the military has memories that the public doesn't. To many who grew up in the 1960s, Vietnam was a cause. But to those who fought it Vietnam was foremost a war, in all its gray shades: with its tactical successes and tactical failures, with its Marine CAPS and Green Beret infiltrations that worked, and its Big Army ones that didn't; with its Army generals who succeeded like Creighton Abrams, and its Army generals who failed like William Westmoreland; with its moments of glory like Hue, and its moments of disgrace like My Lai; and, above all, with its heroes, like the Son Tay Raiders and the Misty forward air controllers.
In 2002, Bing West returned to Binh Nghia. In a new epilogue he writes:
The cheap and slightly out-of-focus jacket design suggests a term-paper quality manuscript that will be a chore to read. Yet as combat writing goes, Across the Fence is pure grain alcohol. It is not replete with rich, unforgettable descriptions, but rather a work of dry realism that makes no attempt at profundity, and is thus unburdened by doubt—the warrior's great strength. There is bitching about physical discomfort, but no complaints about the purpose of the war. So little emotion is there that the author allows himself only a brief and passing broadside against Johnson's ceasefire and what he considers the antagonism of the media.
John Stryker Meyer and the men in his unit, as he writes, "were triple volunteers." They had volunteered for Army parachute jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia; then for Army Special Forces training at Fort Bragg; and finally to serve in the Command and Control element of MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command Vietnam—Studies and Observation Group). This was a joint unit engaged in classified, unconventional warfare in Laos and Cambodia: places known respectively as the "Prairie Fire" and "Daniel Boone" AOs (areas of operations), or just plain "Indian Country" in Meyer's own words. The book's title is military lingo for across the border from Vietnam, where "the North Vietnamese Army," as the author writes, "had moved soldiers, supplies, rockets, guns, and propagandists south into the eastern provinces" of these so-called "neutral" countries, whose territories were an integral part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail Complex.
Across the Fence was published only in 2003. Meyer had "signed a government document in 1968 pledging never to write or talk publicly about SOG for 20 years." After that, he explains, "anti-Vietnam" sentiment "made it difficult to find a publisher who would buy the concept of a Vietnam book that dealt with real people striving against unbelievable odds in a politically handicapped war." Encouraged by his writing teachers at Trenton State College, Meyer eventually produced a battlefield diary of daily forays into Laos and Cambodia in 1968 and 1969.
Arriving at a SOG base in Vietnam, the author was shown into a barracks, where on "one double bunk, sweaty and naked, was a couple heavily involved in the rapture of the moment." Nearby, he "found an SF [Special Forces] trooper showering, while a naked Vietnamese woman squatted in the water, washing herself." Seeing that he was an FNG (fucking new guy), a sergeant explained to him that the prostitutes were given weekly health check-ups and what the prices were. These were men away from home for many months: A significant percentage of them were soon to die. Meyer himself was momentarily to enter an existence where life was "a matter of inches":
Every time Meyer crossed the border it was with South Vietnamese "indigs" (indigenous troops) integrated into his unit. He writes about their exploits and personalities in as much detail as he does about the Americans. He identifies with them, and with the enemy whose skill he admires, more than he does with elements of the home front.
Thanksgiving is just another day "across the fence," this time in Cambodia, once again surrounded by North Vietnamese troops, once again saved by the Air Force and the five-second fuses on the claymore mines. "The gods of recon had smiled on ST [spike team] Idaho one more time," he concludes near midnight of that fourth Thursday in November 1968.
There is little sense here that the war was lost. While historians cite 1968 as a turning point because of the home front's reaction to the Tet offensive, the My Lai massacre, and the protests at the Democratic party convention in Chicago, on the ground in Vietnam, 1968 marked a different trend: William Westmoreland was replaced by Creighton Abrams, population security rather than enemy body counts became the measure of merit, "clear and hold" territory replaced the dictum of "search and destroy," and building up the South Vietnamese Army became the top priority. "There came a time when the war was won," even if the "fighting wasn't over," writes Lewis Sorley, a West Point graduate and career Army officer, in A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam (1999). By the end of 1972, Sorley goes on, one could travel almost anywhere in South Vietnam in relative security, even as American ground forces were almost gone. Retirees I know in the armed forces affirm how much more benign an environment South Vietnam was during this period than the Iraq of today. Still, as one veteran told me: Everyone has different memories of Vietnam, depending upon where they served, and what time they were there.
Sorley's book was reviewed prominently by the major liberal newspapers and foreign policy journals. They gave it generally respectful write-ups, a sign of a reassessment of Vietnam based less on ideology than on paying more attention to the second half of a war: a period to which, as Sorley notes, Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History (1983) devotes only 103 out of 670 pages, and Neil Sheehan's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Bright Shining Lie (1988) devotes 65 out of 790 pages. Sorley told me he isn't sure what would have happened had Congress not cut off aid to South Vietnam at about the time the ground situation was at its most hopeful. He felt that a respectable case might be made that it would have survived. His book has seen a rise in sales among military officers eager to know how the ground situation in Iraq might be improved to the level it had been in Vietnam, thanks to Gen. Abrams's change of strategy.
A similar thesis emerges in The Battle of An Loc (2005) by retired Army Lt. Col. James H. Willbanks, who describes a 60-day siege in mid-1972, in which heavily outnumbered South Vietnamese troops and their American advisors (including himself) rebuffed several North Vietnamese divisions. This gave Nixon the fig leaf he needed for a final withdrawal. Optimism then might not have been warranted, but it wasn't altogether blind. Lt. Col. Willbanks said he wrote his book, published by Indiana University Press, for the same reason Sorley did: to give more attention to the second half of the war.
Another book that those in the combat arms community pressed me to read is Once A Warrior King: Memories of an Officer in Vietnam (1985) by David Donovan (a pseudonym). This is the story of a young Army civil affairs officer in a remote part of South Vietnam near Cambodia, which, as he too documents, was used as major staging post for the North Vietnamese Army. Herein is a series of feverish accounts of horrific firefights that alternate with the struggle to establish schools, maternity clinics, and agricultural projects. It is as though the author were writing about today's Iraq: a corruption- and faction-plagued central government that exists officially, but has little reality outside of the capital; a regular U.S. Army that he despises, confined too often to big bases and which the locals hate; and small units like his with life-and-death control over civilians. "Terribly frustrated," he realizes that his own countrymen "would never understand about all the small but very important things that were needed ... " Take soap: just plain old bars of soap, he informs us, would do more to win over the villagers in his district than guns and bullets. He ends his Vietnam saga thus: "I do not believe it was an immoral war at all, rather a decent cause gone terribly wrong."
You cannot approach Vietnam and Iraq, or the subject of counterinsurgency in general, without reference to Jean Larteguy, a French novelist and war correspondent, who, in a very different way than Stockdale, is an example in his own person of the civilian-military divide. Larteguy inhabits the very soul of the modern Western warrior, alienating some civilian readers in the process. Stockdale quotes him. Sorley told me that several editions of Laretguy's The Centurions (1960) have passed through his hands in the course of a professional lifetime dominated by Vietnam. Alistair Horne, the renowned historian of the Algerian War, uses Larteguy for epigrams in A Savage War of Peace (1977). Some months back, Gen. David Petreaus—now commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq - pulled The Centurions off a shelf at his home in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and gave me a disquisition about the small unit leadership principles exemplified by one of the characters. For half a decade now, Green Berets have been recommending Larteguy's The Centurions and The Praetorians (1961) to me: books about French paratroopers in Vietnam and Algeria in the 1950s.
Almost half-a-century ago, this Frenchman was obsessed about a home-front that had no context for a hot, irregular war; about a professional warrior class alienated from its civilians compatriots as much as from its own conventional infantry battalions; about the need to engage in both combat and civil affairs in a new form of warfare to follow an age of what he called victory parades and "cinema-heroics"; about an enemy with complete freedom of action, allowed "to do what we didn't dare;" and about the danger of creating a "sect" of singularly brave iron men, whose ideals were so exalted that beyond the battlefield they had a tendency to become woolly-headed. Larteguy dedicates his book to the memory of centurions who died so that Rome might survive, but he notes in his conclusion that it was these same centurions who destroyed Rome.
Born in 1920, Jean Larteguy—a pseudonym; his real name was Jean Osty—fought with the Free French and afterwards became a journalist. Because of his military experience and resistance ties, he had nearly unrivaled access to French paratroopers who fought at Diem Bien Phu and in the Battle of Algiers. His empathy for these men, some of whom were torturers, made him especially loathed by the Parisian Left, even though he broke with the paratroopers themselves, out of opposition to their political goals which he labeled "neofascism."
Larteguy eventually found his military ideal in Israel, where he became revered by paratroopers who translated The Centurions into Hebrew to read at their training centers. He called these Jewish soldiers "the most remarkable of all of war's servants, superior even to the Viet, who at the same time detests war the most ... " By the mid-1970s, though, he became disillusioned with the Israel Defense Forces. He said it had ceased to be "a manageable grouping of commandos" and was becoming a "cumbersome machine" too dependent on American-style technology—as if foreseeing some of the problems with the 2006 Lebanon campaign.
Recently I walked into the office of the chief of staff of Army Special Forces in South Korea, Col. David Maxwell of Springfield, Massachusetts, and noticed a plaque with Larteguy's famous "two armies" quote. (The translation is by Xan Fielding, a British Special Operations officer, who, in addition to rendering Larteguy's classics into English, was a close friend of the British travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, to whom Fermor addresses his introduction in his own classic, A Time of Gifts (1977.) In The Centurions, one of Larteguy's paratroopers declares:
Rather than a roughneck, Col. Maxwell epitomizes the soft, indirect approach to unconventional war that is in contrast to "direct action." The message that Maxwell and other warriors have always taken away from Larteguy's famous quote—rooted in his Vietnam experience—is that the mission is everything, and conventional militaries, by virtue of being vast bureaucratic machines obsessed with rank and privilege, are insufficiently focused on the mission: regardless of whether it's direct action or humanitarian affairs. (One of the complaints of the Misty forward air controllers was that their own Air Force bureaucracy was a constant hindrance, more interested in procedure than results. The same complaint has occasionally been made against the regular Army in Iraq by marines and Green Berets.)
The conventional officer would reply that the warrior's field of sight is so narrow that he can't see anything beyond the mission. "They're dangerous," one of Larteguy's protagonists says of the paratroopers, "because they go to any lengths ... beyond the conventional notion of good and evil." For if the warrior's actions contradict his faith, his doubts are easily overcome by belief in the larger cause. Larteguy writes of one soldier: "He had placed the whole of his life under the sign of Christ who had preached peace, charity, brotherhood ... and at the same time he had arranged for the delayed-action bombs at the Cat-Bi airfield ... 'What of it? There's a war on and we can't allow Hanoi to be captured.'"
Vietnam, like Iraq, represented a war of frustrating half-measures, fought against an enemy that respected no limits. Bud Day, half-starved and broken-limbed, writes of seeing a long convoy of trucks heading out of Hanoi, safe because of our own self-imposed bombing restrictions. "I found it mind-boggling that the United States, the strongest nation in the world, would permit this flea on the buttocks of humanity to conduct a war this way." More than almost any writer I know, Larteguy communicates the intensity of such frustrations, which, in turn, create the psychological gulf that separate warriors like Bud Day from both a conscript army and a civilian home-front.
The best units, according to Larteguy, while officially built on high ideals, are, in fact, products of such deep bonds of brotherhood and familiarity that the world outside requires a dose of "cynicism" merely to stomach. As one Green Beret wrote me, "There are no more cynical soldiers on the planet than the SF [Special Forces] guys I work with, they snort at the platitudes we are expected to parrot, but," he went on, "you will not find anyone who gets the job done better in tough environments like Iraq." In fact, in extreme situations like Iraq, cynics may actually serve a purpose. In the regular Army there is a tendency to report up the command chain that the mission is succeeding, even if it isn't. Cynics won't buy that, and will say so bluntly.
Larteguy writes that the warrior looks down on the rest of the military as "the profession of the sluggard," men who "get up early to do nothing." Yet as one paratrooper notes in The Praetorians:
The estrangement of soldiers from their own citizenry is somewhat particular to counter-insurgencies, where there are no neat battle lines and thus no easy narrative for the people back home to follow. The frustrations in these wars are great precisely because they are not easily communicated. Larteguy writes: Imagine an environment where a whole garrison of 2,000 troops are "held in check" by a small "band of thugs and murderers." The enemy is able to "know everything: every movement of our troops, the departure times of our convoys ... Meanwhile we're rushing about the bare mountains, exhausting our men; we shall never be able to find anything."
Because the enemy is not limited by western notions of war, the temptation arises among a stymied soldiery to bend its own rules. Following an atrocity carried out by French paratroopers that calms a rural area of Algeria, one soldier rationalizes to another: "'Fear has changed sides, tongues have been loosened ... We obtained more in a day than in six months fighting, and more with twenty-seven dead than with several hundreds.'" The soldiers comfort themselves further with a quotation from a 14th century Catholic bishop: "When her existence is threatened, the Church is absolved of all moral commandments." It is the purest of them, according to Larteguy, who is most likely to commit torture.
Here we enter territory that is utterly unrelated to the individual Americans I've been writing about. It is important to make such distinctions. When Larteguy writes about bravery and alienation, he understands American warriors; when he writes about political insurrections and torture, some exceptions aside, he is talking about a particular caste of French paratroopers. Yet his discussion is relevant to America's past in Vietnam and present in Iraq. I don't mean My Lai and Abu Ghraib, both of which aided the enemy rather than ourselves, but the moral gray area that we increasingly inhabit concerning collateral civilian deaths.
In The Face of War: Reflections of Men and Combat (1976), Larteguy writes that contemporary wars are, in particular, made for the side that doesn't care about "the preservation of a good conscience." So he asks, "How do you explain that to save liberty, liberty must first be suppressed?" His answer can only be thus: "In that rests the weakness of democratic regimes, a weakness that is at the same time a credit to them, an honor."
What kind of soldier can make the most of such limitations? Larteguy found his answer in the elite Israeli units of the mid-20th century, that were, in turn, a product of Larteguy's own personal hero: Orde Wingate. Wingate is of paramount importance because of the way he confronted challenges similar to those faced by America in Vietnam, and again in Iraq.
Larteguy writes: "The Israeli army was born of ... that mad old genius" Orde Wingate and his "midnight battalions" of Jewish warriors that included the young Moshe Dayan and Yigael Allon. "The Israelis would say of this goim: 'If he hadn't died, he would be head of our army.'" Wingate was a Christian evangelical before the term was coined. The son of a minister in colonial India, he frequently quoted Scripture and read Hebrew. In 1936, Captain Wingate was dispatched to Palestine from Sudan. For religious reasons he developed an emotional sympathy for the Israelis, establishing himself as "the Lawrence of the Jews." He taught them "to fight in the dark with knives and grenades, to specialize in ambushes and hand-to-hand fighting."
Wingate headed to Ethiopia in 1941, leading Ethiopian irregulars in the struggle to defeat the Italians and put the Negus Negast ("King of Kings," Haile Selassie) back on the throne. From there it was on to Burma, where he consolidated his principles of irregular warfare with his famed "chindits," long-penetration jungle warriors, dropped by parachute behind Japanese lines.
He took the name from the legendary animal—half eagle and half lion—whose statue graces Indochinese pagodas. According to Larteguy, Wingate was openly obsessed with a dislike of conventional armies that "used parades to transform its young men into automatons." Instead, Wingate thought in terms of individuals, and believed that if he had the right young men, he could do more with ten of them than with 100 of the conventional kind.
Wingate would teach these select few "trickery." That is, how to be assassins, how to ambush, how to get accustomed to broken sleep rhythms and brackish water for drinking, how to win over the local tribes. Larteguy's famed two armies quote, with its reference to "tricks," was partly based on Wingate's vision, forged initially in Sudan and Palestine, and refined in the Horn of Africa and Indochina. It was in Vietnam where Larteguy first encountered the historical figure of Wingate, whose warrior ethos would ultimately merge with that of the Green Berets in the early part of the Vietnam War.
Uri Dan, a long-time Israeli journalist, a devotee of Larteguy, and an intimate of Ariel Sharon, told me that democracies of today, because of the existential threat they face from an enemy that knows no limits, "need centurions more than ever." He's right, but only up to a point. Take this story told to me by a Navy lieutenant at Annapolis who had commanded a SEAL team in Iraq:
Time after time, the lieutenant's combined American-Iraqi team would capture "bad guys with long rap sheets," who were undoubtedly terrorists. His unit would hand them over to higher authorities, but after a few weeks in prison they would be released and go back to killing civilians. "The Iraqis and my own men saw how broken the system was, and some felt it was easier just to kill these guys the moment we apprehended them. After all, it would have saved lives. But," he continued, "I told them, 'oh no. Here is where I have to draw the line.' It was important to have an officer in charge who had studied ethics." The enlisted chief petty officers of his SEAL team—reminiscent of some of Larteguy's centurions for all intents and purposes—were the finest men he had ever commanded. But they required supervision.
A frustrated warrior class, always kept in check by liberal-minded officers, is the sign of a healthy democracy.
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The Vietnam analogy looms ever larger in the debate over Iraq, but the U.S. military has memories of that conflict that the public doesn't. .....
In 1943, at the age of 18, George Everette "Bud" Day of Sioux City, Iowa, enlisted in the Marines. He served in the Pacific during World War II, and later became a fighter pilot. He flew the F-84F Thunderstreak during the Korean War and the F-100F Super Sabre in Vietnam. Bud Day, a legendary "full-blooded jet-jock" as one recent account dubbed him, would see service in all three wars as a sanctified whole: For him the concept of the "long war" was something he had built his life around in the middle decades of the 20th century. As an Air Force major, he was the first commander of the squadron of fast FACs (forward air controllers), who loitered daily for hours over North Vietnamese airspace, seeking out targets for other fighter bombers. With the most dangerous air mission in the Vietnam War, Day and the other fast FACs were known as "Misty warriors." Misty was the radio call sign that Day himself had chosen for the squadron, inspired by his favorite Johnny Mathis song. The Mistys were "an aggressive bunch of bastards who pressed the fight; they got down in the weeds" and "trolled for trouble," writes Robert Coram in a recently published book about Bud Day, American Patriot. On August 26, 1967, Bud Day's luck ran out. He was shot down over North Vietnam.
The Military Code of Conduct "required that escape take priority over personal fears and concerns," Day writes in his own memoir, Duty Honor Country, published in 1989 by American Hero Press, Fort Walton Beach, Florida. Not ranked on Amazon, it is among the most amazing personal stories of any war. His eardrums ruptured, his face crusted with blood from beatings, one arm broken and both knees badly injured from the ejection, Bud Day was hung by the feet "like a side of butchered beef for many hours" by his captors after he refused to answer their questions. A week into his captivity he escaped. He then hiked 12 days alone in the jungle back to South Vietnam, eating frogs, nauseous from pain, only to be recaptured.
With all of his limbs now broken or shot up, he spent the next six years in captivity, undergoing mock executions, hung again repeatedly by his feet, often not permitted to urinate, beaten senseless in scenes "out of the Mongol Hordes" with whips that made his testicles like charred meat. When prison guards burst in on him and other POWs during a clandestine Christian service, Day stared into their muzzles and sang "The Star-Spangled Banner."
A recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, Day took the greatest pride in never revealing information to his captors about the Misty program. "If I were to divulge our secrets and tactics, it was highly likely that many of my fine, young, loyal pilots would die as a result..."
I met Bud Day in September 2005 at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station where Navy flyers had lined up to buy his book, for which he had to take payments in cash. I thought it demeaning that he had to sell his book this way. It says something about the blind spots of a Manhattan-based publishing industry that Day had to go to what is essentially a vanity press. The publication of Coram's book is, therefore, a welcome event.
The relative obscurity of Day's autobiography and other books like it about Vietnam constitutes a lesser-known aspect of our civilian-military divide. The books to which I refer should be part of our recollection of Vietnam, but they generally aren't. They aren't so much stories that soldiers tell civilians as those that soldiers tell each other. Of course, there are exceptions: most famously James Webb's Fields of Fire (1978), a book that overlaps with this category and which, in fact, did become a bestseller. But there is a range of books of lesser literary merit, yet of equal historical worth, that either have small readerships or readerships consisting overwhelmingly of military personnel, active duty and retired. The authors of these lesser-known books include marines and Green Berets (Army Special Forces) who were involved in counterinsurgency operations. Their writing reveals a second divide—that between professional warriors and conventional, citizen soldiers—which is but another facet of the warrior's alienation from the civilian world. To explore this second divide, I must also bring into the discussion a French writer and a British soldier, whose legacies include not only Indochina, but Algeria and pre-World War II Palestine—scenes, too, of messy, irregular warfare. Thus, my notion of another Vietnam library goes beyond the subject at hand.
Reading habits are influenced by the people you meet. If I hadn't had the opportunity to embed with professional warriors, I would never have heard of some of these books. For example, I learned a great deal about Bud Day and Duty Honor Country from Air Force Captain Jeremiah Parvin of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, a young A-10 Warthog pilot with a "Misty" patch on his arm. The A-10 is essentially a flying Gatling gun. Its pilots hover low to the ground and loiter over the battlefield at great risk. Even as they disdain the rest of the Air Force, marines and Green Berets consider A-10 pilots true warriors. A-10 pilots feel the same bond toward combat infantry. It is a trait of professional warriors that they feel closer to those in other armed services who take similar risks than toward men and women in their own service who don't. Being in the military is not enough for these men: To earn their respect, you had to have joined in order to fight—not to better your career, or your station in life.
Capt. Parvin was serving in South Korea when I met him. He hoped soon to be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. He told me all about the Misty FACs in Vietnam. He showed me a coin that he always carried in his pocket, commemorating the Mistys, with Bud Day's name inscribed on it. It was a tradition in his squadron that the youngest and oldest members always carried the coin on their person. Whenever there is a reunion of Misty warriors from Vietnam, held usually in the Florida Panhandle—where Day now lives—the pilots of Parvin's A-10 squadron, two generations removed, send a representative.
Bud Day's memoir is riveting. But it is also a raw manuscript in need of an editor. His tirades against the likes of Lyndon Johnson and the "ding-bat traitor" Jane Fonda get tiresome. To be sure, Day's address to the Navy flyers the morning I met him was laced with colorful profanities. But it was his very rage and aggression against communism, against the Democratic Party of the era, against those whom he considered weak soldiers in America's own ranks, against many things, that allowed him to survive more than half a decade of sustained torture.
Among the persons he dedicates his book to is "President Richard M. Nixon," for ordering "Linebacker I and Linebacker II," the 1972 bombings of North Vietnam (the latter known as the Christmas Bombings), and for giving the go-ahead to the Son Tay Raiders: Green Berets out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, who in November 1970 stormed the Son Tay prison west of Hanoi, where POWs were believed to have been held.
Because the prisoners had been moved from Son Tay nearly four months earlier, the raid was harshly criticized by major newspapers and some Democratic senators, notably William Fulbright, who questioned the "real purpose" of the mission, beyond freeing the prisoners. A New York Times editorial said the raid was "likely to widen the home-front credibility gap." Yet as Day recounts, the raid—along with the bombing campaigns that followed—constituted enormous morale boosts for the prisoners and led to improved treatment for them. Today among Green Berets, the Son Tay Raiders are looked upon as though mythical heroes from a bygone age.
What Bud Day and other POWs specifically admired about Nixon was his willingness to strike back in a way that Johnson hadn't. Johnson's bombing halt in 1968 was seen as a betrayal by POWs, and caused disappointment and anger even throughout the U.S. military. Remember that these POWs were often combat pilots—professional warriors and volunteers that is, not citizen soldiers who were drafted. Professional warriors are not fatalists. In their minds, there is no such thing as defeat so long as they are still fighting, even from prison. That belief is why true soldiers have an affinity for seemingly lost causes.
In December 1967, a prisoner was dumped in Day's cell on the outskirts of Hanoi, known as the Plantation. This prisoner's legs were atrophied and he weighed under 100 pounds. Day helped scrub his face and nurse him back from the brink of death. The fellow American was Navy Lieutenant Commander John Sidney McCain III of the Panama Canal Zone. As his health improved, McCain's rants against his captors were sometimes as ferocious as Day's. The North Vietnamese tried and failed, through torture, to get McCain to accept a release for their own propaganda purposes: The lieutenant commander was the son of Admiral John McCain Jr., the commander of all American forces in the Pacific. "Character," writes the younger McCain, quoting the 19th century evangelist Dwight Moody, "is what you are in the dark," when nobody's looking and you silently make decisions about how you will act the next day.
In early 1973, during a visit to Hanoi, North Vietnamese officials told Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that they would be willing to free McCain into his custody. Kissinger refused, aware that there were prisoners held longer than McCain, ahead of him in the line for release. McCain suffered awhile longer in confinement, then, once freed, thanked Kissinger for "preserving my honor." The two have been good friends since. McCain blurbs with gusto Bud Day's memoir. The senator writes: "I recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the dimensions of human greatness."
The term "professional warrior" is explicitly used by Navy Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale of Abingdon, Illinois, to describe himself, in A Vietnam Experience: Ten Years of Reflection (Hoover Institution Press, 1984). I learned in depth about Vice Admiral Stockdale's writings in this and a second book, Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot (Hoover, 1995) from midshipmen at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, where I teach. One "mid" told me that the moral lessons Stockdale provides helped inspire him to go to the academy.
Stockdale himself is a symbol of a civilian-military divide. The very way you recall him upon hearing his name shows on what side of the divide you fall. Most civilians remember Stockdale as H. Ross Perot's seemingly dazed vice presidential candidate, who, in the 1992 debate with Al Gore and Dan Quayle asked aloud, "Who am I? Why am I here?" and later requested that a question be repeated, since he had not turned on his hearing aid. In fact, Stockdale, a life-long student of philosophy, had meant his questions to be rhetorical, a restatement of the most ancient and essential of questions. Because of television's ability to ruin people's lives by catching them in an embarrassing moment in time, too few are aware that Stockdale's vice presidential bid was insignificant compared with almost everything else he did.
Those on the other side of the divide remember him as among the most selfless and self-reflecting heroes the armed services have ever produced. In September 1965, then-Navy Commander Stockdale (the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel) was forced to eject from his A-4 Skyraider over North Vietnam. He spent the next seven years in prison, undergoing the usual barbaric treatment that the North Vietnamese communists meted out to Americans who did not provide information. Told that he was going to be shown to foreign journalists, Stockdale, a Medal of Honor winner, slashed his scalp with a razor and beat himself in the face with a wooden stool, to prevent being used for propaganda purposes. "When George McGovern said he would go to Hanoi on his knees, we prisoners ... were humiliated," Stockdale writes. "We did not go anywhere on our knees, least of all home ... Most of us would be there now rather than knuckle under," he writes in 1984.
Unlike in World War II, when the Japanese and Germans considered POWs to be liabilities and a drain on resources, the North Vietnamese considered captured American pilots as prime political assets. For POWs, not allowing themselves to be used as such meant being able to withstand years of torture. Rather than victims, men like Day, McCain, and Stockdale, once incarcerated, continued to see themselves as warriors, fighting on the most difficult of fronts.
Moral philosophy, in particular the Stoics, helped Stockdale survive. As he puts it, after he ejected from his plane, "I left my world of technology and entered the world of Epictetus." Epictetus was a Greek-born philosopher in first-century Rome, whose Stoic beliefs arose from his brutal treatment as a slave. Stockdale explains, "Stoics belittle physical harm, but this is not braggadocio. They are speaking of it in comparison to the devastating agony of shame they fancied good men generating when they knew in their hearts that they had failed to do their duty ... " When Stockdale writes about Epictetus, Socrates, Homer, Cervantes, Calvin, and other writers and philosophers, their work achieves a soaring reality because he relates them to his own, extraordinary experiences as a prisoner in one of the 20th century's most barbaric penal programs. Stockdale reminds us about something that much scholarship, with its obsession for textual subtleties, obscures: The real purpose of reading the classics is to develop courage and leadership.
Stockdale explains—drawing on Napoleon, Clausewitz, and other military strategists—that "the word moral" bears an "unmistakably manly, heroic connotation." (Virtue or virtu in Machiavelli's Italian derives ultimately from vir, Latin for "man.") He says that while we think of immorality in terms of categories like sexual abandon and fiscal irresponsibility, such vices, as serious as they may seem to civilians, are not in the same category as failure of nerve (his italics) in war. For a professional warrior, "doing your duty" is not to be confused with "following orders." The latter implies routine and mechanistic repetition; the former an act of potentially painful and devastating consequences, in which serving a larger good may mean something worse than death even.
The implications of "doing your duty" are spelled out further in Bury Us Upside Down: The Misty Pilots and the Secret Battle for the Ho Chi Minh Trail (Ballantine, 2006) by Rick Newman, a journalist at U.S. News & World Report, and Don Shepperd, a former Misty. They write that in November 1967, in order to rescue Captain Lance Sijan of Milwaukee, a smoke screen of cluster bombs was dropped near North Vietnamese anti-aircraft guns, so that the guns could be taken out by low-flying F-4 Phantoms, throwing enemy air defenses into enough chaos to allow a helicopter to pick up the downed pilot. The operation failed. Captain Sijan, injured worse than Bud Day during ejection, evaded the North Vietnamese for six weeks. After he was captured, he escaped again, then was recaptured, and died of torture and pneumonia. He was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously.
This occurred while the pilots were operating under extremely restrictive ROEs (rules of engagement). Stockdale describes bombing runs over Hanoi in which each plane had to follow the other in exactly the same path, with almost no unscheduled maneuvering permitted—significantly increasing the chance of a plane being shot down, in order to reduce the chances of errant bombs hitting civilians. He and other pilots rage over how restrictive rather than wanton were the so-called Christmas bombings (which, incidentally, were called off on Christmas Day). Few other air campaigns in history were fought under such limited ROEs, and yet achieved such an immediate and desired political impact: the return of the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table, the release of the POWs, and the end of America's military involvement in the war. The equivalent would have been if the pinprick bombings ordered by President Bill Clinton on Iraq in 1998 had led to a regime change in Baghdad; or a change of heart by Saddam Hussein that opened the country unambiguously to United Nations weapons inspections.
Bury Us Upside Down documents the lives of men who, like Bud Day, served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam—a fact that inspires envy among professional warriors I know. "If I had the choice I would have been born before the Great Depression," Army Special Forces Master Sergeant Mark Lopez of Yuba City, California, told me recently. "That way I could have enlisted at 18 and fought in World War II and Korea, and still be young enough to have seen action in Vietnam."
Yet my favorite story in Bury Us Upside Down is about a different sort of serviceman: Air Force flight surgeon Dean Echenberg of San Francisco—a former hippy who helped start a free clinic in Haight-Ashbury, did drugs, went to the great rock concerts, and then volunteered for service in Vietnam, more-or-less out of sheer adventure. He ended up with the Mistys, billeted among men whom Bud Day had trained. If anyone lived the American Experience of the 1960s in its totality, it was Echenberg. One day in 1968, his medical unit was near Phu Cat, just as it was attacked by Viet Cong. "The dispensary quickly filled with blood and body parts," write the authors. "Parents and family members staggered around in a daze, desperate for their children to be saved." Echenberg worked almost the entire night with a pretty American nurse. Near dawn, emotionally overwrought, the two laid down to rest near the end of the runway on the American base, and "made love in the grass while artillery boomed in the distance."
"Echenberg struggled to understand how anybody could be so savage as to murder children." The authors continue:
The young doctor had been ambivalent about the war when he first showed up in Vietnam. But he could no longer humor the anti-war protestors he knew. Yes, combat was inhumane, and atrocities happened on both sides, especially during the heat of battle. But he didn't see the communists as "freedom fighters" or "revolutionaries" like the crowd back in San Francisco. To him the communists were savages who terrorized civilians ...It was another young A-10 pilot, Air Force Captain Brandon Kelly of Cairo, Georgia, a forward air controller on the ground in Iraq, one of the most dangerous jobs there, who told me about Bury Us Upside Down, which was not reviewed prominently. Capt. Kelly told me that to fully understand what motivated people like him, I had to read this book. "Protests against the war spawned ideologies ... everything about Vietnam had to be rejected. The result was a shunning of this excellent book. Fashionable journals declined to review it," writes former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger in the preface to a reissue of Bing West's The Village (1972). While the battle in Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down (1999) lasted a day, and the one in Harold Moore's and Joe Galloway's We Were Soldiers Once...and Young (1992) lasted three days, The Village is about a Marine squad that fought in the same place for 495 days. Half of them died, seven out of 15.
All of them had volunteered to go to "the village," a job they knew would likely get them killed. Their reason? As the commanding sergeant tells the author: "you have a sense of independence down here. There's no ... paperwork. You're always in contact with the Viet Cong. You know you have a job to do. You go out at night and you do it." And so, these marines left their base camp, with its "canvas cots, solid bunkers ... ice cream and endless guard rosters, and went to live with some Vietnamese ... "
In West's story there is no sense of defeat and doom and perversion like in classic Hollywood movies about Vietnam; no beautiful, ingeniously constructed, and introspective narration about soldiers and their vulnerabilities, beset with moral complexities, as in a work like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried (1990), a favorite of high school and college literature courses. West has not written a better book than O'Brien, himself a twice-wounded veteran of the war. But he has written a very different, equally worthy kind that, outside of the members of the military who have regularly recommended it to me over the years, is still relatively little known.
The Village is a story of interminable, deadly, monotonous life-and-death nighttime patrols, dryly and technically narrated, as though extracted from the pages of a hundred, strung-together after-action briefs. To wit: "He had fired twenty bullets in one excited burst, yet missed because he had used a magazine which contained no tracers. Unable to see his fire, he had failed to lead properly when the scout ducked around the corner of the house." The book is as absent of style as it is of negativity. Like any good field manual, it has no time for that. As I said, warriors are not fatalists. The Village deals with what works in a counterinsurgency struggle and what doesn't. It is a story meant for war colleges that the public, too, desperately needs to know. For the redeeming side of the Vietnam War it reflects was not an aberration.
The Marines of Bing West's story constituted a CAP (Combined Action Platoon), which moved into Binh Nghia in early 1966, a village terrorized by the Viet Cong, and over 18 bloody months pacified it, taking unabashed pride in their work. "Many of the marines," West writes, "let months go by without writing a letter or reading a newspaper. The radius of their world was two miles." The following passage helps explain why many Vietnam veterans I meet in the course of my reporting have not altogether negative memories of that war.
The Americans liked the village. They liked the freedom to drink beer and wear oddball clothes and joke with girls. They liked having the respect of tough PFs [Popular Forces government militia] ... who could not bring themselves to challenge the Viet Cong alone. They were pleased that the villagers were impressed because they hunted the Viet Cong as the Viet Cong had for years hunted the PFs ... The Americans did not know what the villagers said of them ... but they observed that the children, who did hear their parents, did not run or avoid them ... The Marines had accepted too many invitations to too many meals in too many homes to believe they were not liked by many and tolerated by most. For perhaps the only time in the lives of those ... Americans, seven of whom had not graduated from high school, they were providing at the obvious risk of death a service of protection. This had won them open admiration ... within the Vietnamese village society in which they were working and where ultimately most of them would die.West, a former marine in Vietnam who made periodic visits to the platoon, ends his story thus: "In July of 1967, Binh Nghia was no longer the scene of nightly battles ... the enemy had accepted the persistence of the unit [the CAP], whereas his own determination to defend Binh Nghia had waned." That victory was won by marines who never accepted that "the village" was lost, even when the platoon was surrounded by 300 Viet Cong. The marines had done too many nighttime stake-outs, lying immovable for too many hours in filthy puddles, with rain pouring down as though out of a shower faucet, to simply retreat.
The Village demonstrates that the military has memories that the public doesn't. To many who grew up in the 1960s, Vietnam was a cause. But to those who fought it Vietnam was foremost a war, in all its gray shades: with its tactical successes and tactical failures, with its Marine CAPS and Green Beret infiltrations that worked, and its Big Army ones that didn't; with its Army generals who succeeded like Creighton Abrams, and its Army generals who failed like William Westmoreland; with its moments of glory like Hue, and its moments of disgrace like My Lai; and, above all, with its heroes, like the Son Tay Raiders and the Misty forward air controllers.
In 2002, Bing West returned to Binh Nghia. In a new epilogue he writes:
Once a year, the villagers gather to pray for good crops and no floods [by] ... a cement wall bearing a Vietnamese inscription to the Marines who built the well and the shrine in 1967 ... The Village remembers.Across the Fence: The Secret War in Vietnam (2003) by John Stryker Meyer is even more compact, technical, and intense than The Village. Like Bud Day's Duty Honor Country, it was published by a tiny press, in this case Real War Stories, Inc., and went unreviewed. It was recommended to me by a Green Beret sergeant major from rural Pennsylvania, Jack Hagen, whose friend had fought in the unit Meyer writes about. The book constitutes an intimate memory in its own right, another example of stories that warriors tell themselves.
The cheap and slightly out-of-focus jacket design suggests a term-paper quality manuscript that will be a chore to read. Yet as combat writing goes, Across the Fence is pure grain alcohol. It is not replete with rich, unforgettable descriptions, but rather a work of dry realism that makes no attempt at profundity, and is thus unburdened by doubt—the warrior's great strength. There is bitching about physical discomfort, but no complaints about the purpose of the war. So little emotion is there that the author allows himself only a brief and passing broadside against Johnson's ceasefire and what he considers the antagonism of the media.
John Stryker Meyer and the men in his unit, as he writes, "were triple volunteers." They had volunteered for Army parachute jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia; then for Army Special Forces training at Fort Bragg; and finally to serve in the Command and Control element of MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command Vietnam—Studies and Observation Group). This was a joint unit engaged in classified, unconventional warfare in Laos and Cambodia: places known respectively as the "Prairie Fire" and "Daniel Boone" AOs (areas of operations), or just plain "Indian Country" in Meyer's own words. The book's title is military lingo for across the border from Vietnam, where "the North Vietnamese Army," as the author writes, "had moved soldiers, supplies, rockets, guns, and propagandists south into the eastern provinces" of these so-called "neutral" countries, whose territories were an integral part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail Complex.
Across the Fence was published only in 2003. Meyer had "signed a government document in 1968 pledging never to write or talk publicly about SOG for 20 years." After that, he explains, "anti-Vietnam" sentiment "made it difficult to find a publisher who would buy the concept of a Vietnam book that dealt with real people striving against unbelievable odds in a politically handicapped war." Encouraged by his writing teachers at Trenton State College, Meyer eventually produced a battlefield diary of daily forays into Laos and Cambodia in 1968 and 1969.
Arriving at a SOG base in Vietnam, the author was shown into a barracks, where on "one double bunk, sweaty and naked, was a couple heavily involved in the rapture of the moment." Nearby, he "found an SF [Special Forces] trooper showering, while a naked Vietnamese woman squatted in the water, washing herself." Seeing that he was an FNG (fucking new guy), a sergeant explained to him that the prostitutes were given weekly health check-ups and what the prices were. These were men away from home for many months: A significant percentage of them were soon to die. Meyer himself was momentarily to enter an existence where life was "a matter of inches":
Three rounds slammed into the One-Zero's [recon team leader's] head, blowing off the right side of his face ... Nothing in the months of pulling garbage detail could prepare ST [spike team] Alabama for the grisly horror unfolding at that moment. The One-one [assistant recon leader] buried his face in the dirt and started praying. Black and the remaining ST Alabama ... returned fire. The Green Beret stood there, firing on single shot, picking off NVA [North Vietnamese Army] soldiers on top of the rise ... Both the NVA and ST Alabama tended to their wounded while the living combatants slammed loaded magazines into their hot weapons ...Enemy troops quickly reinforced the ambush site. It was always thus. As Meyer documents—through his own experiences, as well as through interviews he conducted for years afterwards to recreate the combat sequences—whenever SOG units crossed the border into Cambodia and Laos, they uncovered a beehive of North Vietnamese Army concentrations. The border truly meant nothing. The battlefield overlapped it. Meyer spends 18 pages describing a savage, day-long firefight in Laos that ends with many dead, as well as beer in the canteen for the survivors near midnight, before another insertion that meets another enemy troop concentration the next morning. From beginning to end, Across the Fence is a record of extreme heroism and technical competence that few who fought World War II surpassed.
Every time Meyer crossed the border it was with South Vietnamese "indigs" (indigenous troops) integrated into his unit. He writes about their exploits and personalities in as much detail as he does about the Americans. He identifies with them, and with the enemy whose skill he admires, more than he does with elements of the home front.
Thanksgiving is just another day "across the fence," this time in Cambodia, once again surrounded by North Vietnamese troops, once again saved by the Air Force and the five-second fuses on the claymore mines. "The gods of recon had smiled on ST [spike team] Idaho one more time," he concludes near midnight of that fourth Thursday in November 1968.
There is little sense here that the war was lost. While historians cite 1968 as a turning point because of the home front's reaction to the Tet offensive, the My Lai massacre, and the protests at the Democratic party convention in Chicago, on the ground in Vietnam, 1968 marked a different trend: William Westmoreland was replaced by Creighton Abrams, population security rather than enemy body counts became the measure of merit, "clear and hold" territory replaced the dictum of "search and destroy," and building up the South Vietnamese Army became the top priority. "There came a time when the war was won," even if the "fighting wasn't over," writes Lewis Sorley, a West Point graduate and career Army officer, in A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam (1999). By the end of 1972, Sorley goes on, one could travel almost anywhere in South Vietnam in relative security, even as American ground forces were almost gone. Retirees I know in the armed forces affirm how much more benign an environment South Vietnam was during this period than the Iraq of today. Still, as one veteran told me: Everyone has different memories of Vietnam, depending upon where they served, and what time they were there.
Sorley's book was reviewed prominently by the major liberal newspapers and foreign policy journals. They gave it generally respectful write-ups, a sign of a reassessment of Vietnam based less on ideology than on paying more attention to the second half of a war: a period to which, as Sorley notes, Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History (1983) devotes only 103 out of 670 pages, and Neil Sheehan's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Bright Shining Lie (1988) devotes 65 out of 790 pages. Sorley told me he isn't sure what would have happened had Congress not cut off aid to South Vietnam at about the time the ground situation was at its most hopeful. He felt that a respectable case might be made that it would have survived. His book has seen a rise in sales among military officers eager to know how the ground situation in Iraq might be improved to the level it had been in Vietnam, thanks to Gen. Abrams's change of strategy.
A similar thesis emerges in The Battle of An Loc (2005) by retired Army Lt. Col. James H. Willbanks, who describes a 60-day siege in mid-1972, in which heavily outnumbered South Vietnamese troops and their American advisors (including himself) rebuffed several North Vietnamese divisions. This gave Nixon the fig leaf he needed for a final withdrawal. Optimism then might not have been warranted, but it wasn't altogether blind. Lt. Col. Willbanks said he wrote his book, published by Indiana University Press, for the same reason Sorley did: to give more attention to the second half of the war.
Another book that those in the combat arms community pressed me to read is Once A Warrior King: Memories of an Officer in Vietnam (1985) by David Donovan (a pseudonym). This is the story of a young Army civil affairs officer in a remote part of South Vietnam near Cambodia, which, as he too documents, was used as major staging post for the North Vietnamese Army. Herein is a series of feverish accounts of horrific firefights that alternate with the struggle to establish schools, maternity clinics, and agricultural projects. It is as though the author were writing about today's Iraq: a corruption- and faction-plagued central government that exists officially, but has little reality outside of the capital; a regular U.S. Army that he despises, confined too often to big bases and which the locals hate; and small units like his with life-and-death control over civilians. "Terribly frustrated," he realizes that his own countrymen "would never understand about all the small but very important things that were needed ... " Take soap: just plain old bars of soap, he informs us, would do more to win over the villagers in his district than guns and bullets. He ends his Vietnam saga thus: "I do not believe it was an immoral war at all, rather a decent cause gone terribly wrong."
You cannot approach Vietnam and Iraq, or the subject of counterinsurgency in general, without reference to Jean Larteguy, a French novelist and war correspondent, who, in a very different way than Stockdale, is an example in his own person of the civilian-military divide. Larteguy inhabits the very soul of the modern Western warrior, alienating some civilian readers in the process. Stockdale quotes him. Sorley told me that several editions of Laretguy's The Centurions (1960) have passed through his hands in the course of a professional lifetime dominated by Vietnam. Alistair Horne, the renowned historian of the Algerian War, uses Larteguy for epigrams in A Savage War of Peace (1977). Some months back, Gen. David Petreaus—now commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq - pulled The Centurions off a shelf at his home in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and gave me a disquisition about the small unit leadership principles exemplified by one of the characters. For half a decade now, Green Berets have been recommending Larteguy's The Centurions and The Praetorians (1961) to me: books about French paratroopers in Vietnam and Algeria in the 1950s.
Almost half-a-century ago, this Frenchman was obsessed about a home-front that had no context for a hot, irregular war; about a professional warrior class alienated from its civilians compatriots as much as from its own conventional infantry battalions; about the need to engage in both combat and civil affairs in a new form of warfare to follow an age of what he called victory parades and "cinema-heroics"; about an enemy with complete freedom of action, allowed "to do what we didn't dare;" and about the danger of creating a "sect" of singularly brave iron men, whose ideals were so exalted that beyond the battlefield they had a tendency to become woolly-headed. Larteguy dedicates his book to the memory of centurions who died so that Rome might survive, but he notes in his conclusion that it was these same centurions who destroyed Rome.
Born in 1920, Jean Larteguy—a pseudonym; his real name was Jean Osty—fought with the Free French and afterwards became a journalist. Because of his military experience and resistance ties, he had nearly unrivaled access to French paratroopers who fought at Diem Bien Phu and in the Battle of Algiers. His empathy for these men, some of whom were torturers, made him especially loathed by the Parisian Left, even though he broke with the paratroopers themselves, out of opposition to their political goals which he labeled "neofascism."
Larteguy eventually found his military ideal in Israel, where he became revered by paratroopers who translated The Centurions into Hebrew to read at their training centers. He called these Jewish soldiers "the most remarkable of all of war's servants, superior even to the Viet, who at the same time detests war the most ... " By the mid-1970s, though, he became disillusioned with the Israel Defense Forces. He said it had ceased to be "a manageable grouping of commandos" and was becoming a "cumbersome machine" too dependent on American-style technology—as if foreseeing some of the problems with the 2006 Lebanon campaign.
Recently I walked into the office of the chief of staff of Army Special Forces in South Korea, Col. David Maxwell of Springfield, Massachusetts, and noticed a plaque with Larteguy's famous "two armies" quote. (The translation is by Xan Fielding, a British Special Operations officer, who, in addition to rendering Larteguy's classics into English, was a close friend of the British travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, to whom Fermor addresses his introduction in his own classic, A Time of Gifts (1977.) In The Centurions, one of Larteguy's paratroopers declares:
I'd like ... two armies: one for display, with lovely guns, tanks, little soldiers, fanfares, staffs, distinguished and doddering generals, and dear little regimental officers ... an army that would be shown for a modest fee on every fairground in the country.But the reply from another character in The Centurions to this declaration is swift, "you're heading for a lot of trouble." The exchange telescopes the philosophical dilemma about the measures that need to be taken against enemies who would erect a far worse world than you, but which, nevertheless, are impossible to carry out because of the "remorse" that afflicts soldiers when they violate their own notion of purity-of-arms, even in situations where such "tricks" might somehow be rationalized. They win the battle, but lose their souls.
The other would be the real one, composed entirely of young enthusiasts in camouflage battledress, who would not be put on display but from whom all sorts of tricks would be taught. That's the army in which I should like to fight.
Rather than a roughneck, Col. Maxwell epitomizes the soft, indirect approach to unconventional war that is in contrast to "direct action." The message that Maxwell and other warriors have always taken away from Larteguy's famous quote—rooted in his Vietnam experience—is that the mission is everything, and conventional militaries, by virtue of being vast bureaucratic machines obsessed with rank and privilege, are insufficiently focused on the mission: regardless of whether it's direct action or humanitarian affairs. (One of the complaints of the Misty forward air controllers was that their own Air Force bureaucracy was a constant hindrance, more interested in procedure than results. The same complaint has occasionally been made against the regular Army in Iraq by marines and Green Berets.)
The conventional officer would reply that the warrior's field of sight is so narrow that he can't see anything beyond the mission. "They're dangerous," one of Larteguy's protagonists says of the paratroopers, "because they go to any lengths ... beyond the conventional notion of good and evil." For if the warrior's actions contradict his faith, his doubts are easily overcome by belief in the larger cause. Larteguy writes of one soldier: "He had placed the whole of his life under the sign of Christ who had preached peace, charity, brotherhood ... and at the same time he had arranged for the delayed-action bombs at the Cat-Bi airfield ... 'What of it? There's a war on and we can't allow Hanoi to be captured.'"
Vietnam, like Iraq, represented a war of frustrating half-measures, fought against an enemy that respected no limits. Bud Day, half-starved and broken-limbed, writes of seeing a long convoy of trucks heading out of Hanoi, safe because of our own self-imposed bombing restrictions. "I found it mind-boggling that the United States, the strongest nation in the world, would permit this flea on the buttocks of humanity to conduct a war this way." More than almost any writer I know, Larteguy communicates the intensity of such frustrations, which, in turn, create the psychological gulf that separate warriors like Bud Day from both a conscript army and a civilian home-front.
The best units, according to Larteguy, while officially built on high ideals, are, in fact, products of such deep bonds of brotherhood and familiarity that the world outside requires a dose of "cynicism" merely to stomach. As one Green Beret wrote me, "There are no more cynical soldiers on the planet than the SF [Special Forces] guys I work with, they snort at the platitudes we are expected to parrot, but," he went on, "you will not find anyone who gets the job done better in tough environments like Iraq." In fact, in extreme situations like Iraq, cynics may actually serve a purpose. In the regular Army there is a tendency to report up the command chain that the mission is succeeding, even if it isn't. Cynics won't buy that, and will say so bluntly.
Larteguy writes that the warrior looks down on the rest of the military as "the profession of the sluggard," men who "get up early to do nothing." Yet as one paratrooper notes in The Praetorians:
In Algeria that type of officer died out. When we came in from operations we had to deal with the police, build sports grounds, attend classes. Regulations? They hadn't provided for anything, even if one tried to make an exegesis of them with the subtlety of a rabbi.Dirty, badly conceived wars in Vietnam and Algeria had begotten a radicalized French warrior class of non-commissioned officers, able to kill in the morning and build schools in the afternoon, which had a higher regard for its Moslem guerrilla adversaries than for regular officers in its own ranks. Such men would gladly advance toward a machine gun nest without looking back, and yet were "booed by the crowds" upon returning home: so that they saw the civilian society they were defending as "vile, corrupt, and degraded."
The estrangement of soldiers from their own citizenry is somewhat particular to counter-insurgencies, where there are no neat battle lines and thus no easy narrative for the people back home to follow. The frustrations in these wars are great precisely because they are not easily communicated. Larteguy writes: Imagine an environment where a whole garrison of 2,000 troops are "held in check" by a small "band of thugs and murderers." The enemy is able to "know everything: every movement of our troops, the departure times of our convoys ... Meanwhile we're rushing about the bare mountains, exhausting our men; we shall never be able to find anything."
Because the enemy is not limited by western notions of war, the temptation arises among a stymied soldiery to bend its own rules. Following an atrocity carried out by French paratroopers that calms a rural area of Algeria, one soldier rationalizes to another: "'Fear has changed sides, tongues have been loosened ... We obtained more in a day than in six months fighting, and more with twenty-seven dead than with several hundreds.'" The soldiers comfort themselves further with a quotation from a 14th century Catholic bishop: "When her existence is threatened, the Church is absolved of all moral commandments." It is the purest of them, according to Larteguy, who is most likely to commit torture.
Here we enter territory that is utterly unrelated to the individual Americans I've been writing about. It is important to make such distinctions. When Larteguy writes about bravery and alienation, he understands American warriors; when he writes about political insurrections and torture, some exceptions aside, he is talking about a particular caste of French paratroopers. Yet his discussion is relevant to America's past in Vietnam and present in Iraq. I don't mean My Lai and Abu Ghraib, both of which aided the enemy rather than ourselves, but the moral gray area that we increasingly inhabit concerning collateral civilian deaths.
In The Face of War: Reflections of Men and Combat (1976), Larteguy writes that contemporary wars are, in particular, made for the side that doesn't care about "the preservation of a good conscience." So he asks, "How do you explain that to save liberty, liberty must first be suppressed?" His answer can only be thus: "In that rests the weakness of democratic regimes, a weakness that is at the same time a credit to them, an honor."
What kind of soldier can make the most of such limitations? Larteguy found his answer in the elite Israeli units of the mid-20th century, that were, in turn, a product of Larteguy's own personal hero: Orde Wingate. Wingate is of paramount importance because of the way he confronted challenges similar to those faced by America in Vietnam, and again in Iraq.
Larteguy writes: "The Israeli army was born of ... that mad old genius" Orde Wingate and his "midnight battalions" of Jewish warriors that included the young Moshe Dayan and Yigael Allon. "The Israelis would say of this goim: 'If he hadn't died, he would be head of our army.'" Wingate was a Christian evangelical before the term was coined. The son of a minister in colonial India, he frequently quoted Scripture and read Hebrew. In 1936, Captain Wingate was dispatched to Palestine from Sudan. For religious reasons he developed an emotional sympathy for the Israelis, establishing himself as "the Lawrence of the Jews." He taught them "to fight in the dark with knives and grenades, to specialize in ambushes and hand-to-hand fighting."
Wingate headed to Ethiopia in 1941, leading Ethiopian irregulars in the struggle to defeat the Italians and put the Negus Negast ("King of Kings," Haile Selassie) back on the throne. From there it was on to Burma, where he consolidated his principles of irregular warfare with his famed "chindits," long-penetration jungle warriors, dropped by parachute behind Japanese lines.
He took the name from the legendary animal—half eagle and half lion—whose statue graces Indochinese pagodas. According to Larteguy, Wingate was openly obsessed with a dislike of conventional armies that "used parades to transform its young men into automatons." Instead, Wingate thought in terms of individuals, and believed that if he had the right young men, he could do more with ten of them than with 100 of the conventional kind.
Wingate would teach these select few "trickery." That is, how to be assassins, how to ambush, how to get accustomed to broken sleep rhythms and brackish water for drinking, how to win over the local tribes. Larteguy's famed two armies quote, with its reference to "tricks," was partly based on Wingate's vision, forged initially in Sudan and Palestine, and refined in the Horn of Africa and Indochina. It was in Vietnam where Larteguy first encountered the historical figure of Wingate, whose warrior ethos would ultimately merge with that of the Green Berets in the early part of the Vietnam War.
Uri Dan, a long-time Israeli journalist, a devotee of Larteguy, and an intimate of Ariel Sharon, told me that democracies of today, because of the existential threat they face from an enemy that knows no limits, "need centurions more than ever." He's right, but only up to a point. Take this story told to me by a Navy lieutenant at Annapolis who had commanded a SEAL team in Iraq:
Time after time, the lieutenant's combined American-Iraqi team would capture "bad guys with long rap sheets," who were undoubtedly terrorists. His unit would hand them over to higher authorities, but after a few weeks in prison they would be released and go back to killing civilians. "The Iraqis and my own men saw how broken the system was, and some felt it was easier just to kill these guys the moment we apprehended them. After all, it would have saved lives. But," he continued, "I told them, 'oh no. Here is where I have to draw the line.' It was important to have an officer in charge who had studied ethics." The enlisted chief petty officers of his SEAL team—reminiscent of some of Larteguy's centurions for all intents and purposes—were the finest men he had ever commanded. But they required supervision.
A frustrated warrior class, always kept in check by liberal-minded officers, is the sign of a healthy democracy.
The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200708u/kaplan-vietnam.
All material copyright The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Don’t earnestly insist you don’t want to throw women in jail. “Quindlen’s Prison Film” 08/27 7:00 AM
DAVID FRUM: How about some Foucault? “Poor Katie”
MYRNA BLYTH: It is hard to feel sorry for someone making $15 million a year, especially if you were on the other end of one of her self-absorbed tirades. “Poor Katie” 08/24 7:21 AM
SUSAN KONIG: The Nanny really knows how to raise children. “Can I Borrow Your Nanny?” 08/24 7:36 AM
DAVID FRUM: How about some Foucault? “Poor Katie”
MYRNA BLYTH: It is hard to feel sorry for someone making $15 million a year, especially if you were on the other end of one of her self-absorbed tirades. “Poor Katie” 08/24 7:21 AM
SUSAN KONIG: The Nanny really knows how to raise children. “Can I Borrow Your Nanny?” 08/24 7:36 AM
The Sack of Washington
The most ominous parallel between America 2007 and the crumbling Roman Empire is the outsourcing of public responsibilities to private contractors. An excerpt from Cullen Murphy's new book, Are We Rome?
The most ominous parallel between America 2007 and the crumbling Roman Empire is the outsourcing of public responsibilities to private contractors. An excerpt from Cullen Murphy's new book, Are We Rome?
The Lobby Strikes
Posted by Justin Raimondo on August 27, 2007
The publication of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, a book-length version of the now-famous essay by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, is—naturally!—an occasion for the Lobby to go into high gear, and the intimidation tactics are already well along. Mearsheimer and Walt were invited by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs to speak before the group, but the event was cancelled by the group’s president, Marshall Bouton, who gave out the party line that the two could not be permitted to speak without a “balancing” point of view by none other than Abe ”What Armenian Genocide?” Foxman. That’s the Lobby’s “argument”—that Mearsheimer and Walt’s thesis is so “toxic” that it cannot be allowed to stand alone, without a “corrective” offered by the Anti-Defamation League or some other outfit associated with the Thought Police.
This just goes to confirm the authors’ thesis, expressed in their London Review of Books piece:
“The Lobby pursues two broad strategies. First, it wields its significant influence in Washington, pressuring both Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the ‘smart’ choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing US support, because a candid discussion of US-Israeli relations might lead Americans to favour a different policy.”
Article URL: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/the_lobby_strikes/
Posted by Justin Raimondo on August 27, 2007
The publication of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, a book-length version of the now-famous essay by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, is—naturally!—an occasion for the Lobby to go into high gear, and the intimidation tactics are already well along. Mearsheimer and Walt were invited by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs to speak before the group, but the event was cancelled by the group’s president, Marshall Bouton, who gave out the party line that the two could not be permitted to speak without a “balancing” point of view by none other than Abe ”What Armenian Genocide?” Foxman. That’s the Lobby’s “argument”—that Mearsheimer and Walt’s thesis is so “toxic” that it cannot be allowed to stand alone, without a “corrective” offered by the Anti-Defamation League or some other outfit associated with the Thought Police.
This just goes to confirm the authors’ thesis, expressed in their London Review of Books piece:
“The Lobby pursues two broad strategies. First, it wields its significant influence in Washington, pressuring both Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the ‘smart’ choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing US support, because a candid discussion of US-Israeli relations might lead Americans to favour a different policy.”
Article URL: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/the_lobby_strikes/
"We Are Going To Hit Iran. Bigtime"
by Maccabee
Sat Sep 01, 2007 at 03:50:24 PM PDT
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/9/1/183018/1527
by Maccabee
Sat Sep 01, 2007 at 03:50:24 PM PDT
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/9/1/183018/1527
Below is a quite factual review of the Mearsheimer/Walt book in yesterday's Sunday Times in London. One senses that the book will receive more even treatment overseas than in the US.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article2348741.ece
From The Sunday Times
September 2, 2007
The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy
By John J Mearsheimer and Stephen M Walt
Reviewed by Max Hastings
Five years ago, Atlantic Monthly commissioned two academics, John Mearsheimer of Chicago University and Stephen Walt of Harvard, to write a significant article about the influence of the Israeli lobby on American foreign policy. When the piece was at last completed, the magazine declined to publish, deeming it too hot for delicate American palates. It eventually appeared in 2005, in the London Review of Books, provoking one of the most bitter media and academic rows of recent times. The authors were accused of antisemitism, and attacked with stunning venom by some prominent US commentators. Mearsheimer and Walt obviously like a fight, however, for they have now expanded their thesis into a book.
Its argument is readily summarised. The authors support Israel’s right to exist. But they are dismayed by America’s unconditional support for its governments’ policies, including vast sums of cash aid for which there is no plausible accounting process. They reject the view articulated as a mantra by all modern American presidents (and 2008 presidential candidates) that Israel and America share common values, and their national interests march hand in hand.
On the contrary, say the authors, America’s backing for Israel does grave damage to its own foreign-policy interests. And many Israeli government actions, including the expansion of West Bank settlements and the invasion of Lebanon, reflect repressive policies that do not deserve Washington’s endorsement: “While there is no question that the Jews were victims in Europe, they were often the victimisers, not the victims, in the Middle East, and their main victims were and continue to be the Palestinians.”
The authors argue that American policy towards Israel is decisively and
They quote the experience of a Senate candidate who was invited to visit AIPAC early in his campaign for “discussions”. Harry Lonsdale described what followed as “an experience I will never forget. It wasn’t enough that I was pro-Israel. I was given a list of vital topics and quizzed (read grilled) for my specific opinion on each. Actually, I was told what my opinion must be . . . Shortly after that . . . I was sent a list of American supporters of Israel . . . that I was free to call for campaign contributions. I called; they gave from Florida to Alaska”.
When congresswoman Betty McCollum, a liberal with a solid pro-Israel voting record, opposed the AIPAC-backed Palestinian AntiTerrorism Act, which was also opposed by the state department, an AIPAC lobbyist told McCollum’s chief-of-staff that her “support for terrorists will not be tolerated”. Former president Jimmy Carter incurred not merely criticism but vilification when he published a book entitled Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, likening Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians to that of the old white regime in South Africa towards its black majority.
Whatever view Europeans take of Israel, most find it difficult to comprehend the sheer ferocity of American sentiment. Ian Buruma wrote an article for The New York Times entitled How to Talk About Israel. He said how difficult it is to have an honest debate, and remarked that “even legitimate criticism of Israel, or of Zionism, is often quickly denounced as antiSemitism by various watchdogs”.
Such remarks brought down a storm on his head. The editor of The Jerusalem Post, also a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, published an open letter to Buruma that began: “Are you a Jew?” He argued that nonJews should discuss these issues only in terms acceptable to Jews.
The American media, claim the authors, even such mighty organs as The New York Times and The Washington Post, do less than justice to the Palestinians, much more than justice to the Israelis. Robert Bartley, a former editor of The Wall Street Journal, once said: “Shamir, Sharon, Bibi – whatever those guys want is pretty much fine by me.” There is no American counterpart to such notably Arabist British polemicists as Robert Fisk.
Mearsheimer and Walt’s book argues its points at such ponderous length that it makes pretty leaden reading. But it is extraordinary that, in a free society, the legitimacy of the expression of their opinions should be called into question. “We show,” say the authors, “that although Israel may have been an asset during the cold war it is increasingly a strategic liability now that the cold war is over. Backing Israel so strongly helps fuel America’s terrorism problem and makes it harder for the United States to address the other problems it faces in the Middle East.”
Americans ring-fence Israel from the normal sceptical proc-esses of democracy, while arguments for the Palestinians are often denounced as pernicious as well as antisemitic. All the 2008 presidential candidates, say Mearsheimer and Walt, know that their campaign would be dead in the water if they hinted that Israel would receive less than 100% backing if they win. They note that many Israelis are much bolder in attacking their own governments than any American politician would dare to be.
Part of the trouble is that AIPAC faces no significant opposition. Palestinians, and indeed all Arabs, command negligible sympathy in America, especially since 9/11. The authors think that the most helpful step towards diminishing the Israel lobby’s grip would be for election campaigns to be publicly financed, ending candidates’ dependence on private contributions: “AIPAC’s success is due in large part to its ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who do not.”
But the authors know reform will not happen. The Israel lobby is vastly strengthened by the support of America’s Christian Zionists, an important element of George W Bush’s constituency. Some may think these people are lunatics, but there are an awful lot of them. They are even more strident in their opposition to Arab rights in Palestine than the Israeli Likud party.
Mearsheimer and Walt conclude, weakly but inevitably, with a mere plea for more open debate in the US about Israel. “Because most Americans are only dimly aware of the crimes committed against the Palestinians,” they say, “they see their continued resistance as an irrational desire for vengeance. Or as evidence of unwarranted hatred of Jews akin to the antisemitism that was endemic in old Europe.
“Although we deplore the Palestinians’ reliance on terrorism and are well aware of their own contribution to prolonging the conflict, we believe their grievances are genuine and must be addressed. We also believe that most Americans would support a different approach . . . if they had a more accurate understanding of past events and present conditions.”
For Europeans, all this adds up to a bleak picture. Only America might be capable of inducing the government of Israel to moderate its behaviour, and it will not try. Washington gives Jerusalem a blank cheque, and all of us in some degree pay a price for Israel’s abuses of it.
After that remark, I shall be pleasantly surprised to escape an allegation from somebody that I belong in the same stable of antisemites as Walt and Mearsheimer. Yet otherwise intelligent Americans diminish themselves by hurling charges of antisemitism with such recklessness. There will be no peace in the Middle East until the United States faces its responsibilities there in a much more convincing fashion than it does today, partly for reasons given in this depressing book.
The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by John J Mearsheimer and Stephen M Walt
Allen Lane £25 pp496
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article2348741.ece
From The Sunday Times
September 2, 2007
The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy
By John J Mearsheimer and Stephen M Walt
Reviewed by Max Hastings
Five years ago, Atlantic Monthly commissioned two academics, John Mearsheimer of Chicago University and Stephen Walt of Harvard, to write a significant article about the influence of the Israeli lobby on American foreign policy. When the piece was at last completed, the magazine declined to publish, deeming it too hot for delicate American palates. It eventually appeared in 2005, in the London Review of Books, provoking one of the most bitter media and academic rows of recent times. The authors were accused of antisemitism, and attacked with stunning venom by some prominent US commentators. Mearsheimer and Walt obviously like a fight, however, for they have now expanded their thesis into a book.
Its argument is readily summarised. The authors support Israel’s right to exist. But they are dismayed by America’s unconditional support for its governments’ policies, including vast sums of cash aid for which there is no plausible accounting process. They reject the view articulated as a mantra by all modern American presidents (and 2008 presidential candidates) that Israel and America share common values, and their national interests march hand in hand.
On the contrary, say the authors, America’s backing for Israel does grave damage to its own foreign-policy interests. And many Israeli government actions, including the expansion of West Bank settlements and the invasion of Lebanon, reflect repressive policies that do not deserve Washington’s endorsement: “While there is no question that the Jews were victims in Europe, they were often the victimisers, not the victims, in the Middle East, and their main victims were and continue to be the Palestinians.”
The authors argue that American policy towards Israel is decisively and
They quote the experience of a Senate candidate who was invited to visit AIPAC early in his campaign for “discussions”. Harry Lonsdale described what followed as “an experience I will never forget. It wasn’t enough that I was pro-Israel. I was given a list of vital topics and quizzed (read grilled) for my specific opinion on each. Actually, I was told what my opinion must be . . . Shortly after that . . . I was sent a list of American supporters of Israel . . . that I was free to call for campaign contributions. I called; they gave from Florida to Alaska”.
When congresswoman Betty McCollum, a liberal with a solid pro-Israel voting record, opposed the AIPAC-backed Palestinian AntiTerrorism Act, which was also opposed by the state department, an AIPAC lobbyist told McCollum’s chief-of-staff that her “support for terrorists will not be tolerated”. Former president Jimmy Carter incurred not merely criticism but vilification when he published a book entitled Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, likening Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians to that of the old white regime in South Africa towards its black majority.
Whatever view Europeans take of Israel, most find it difficult to comprehend the sheer ferocity of American sentiment. Ian Buruma wrote an article for The New York Times entitled How to Talk About Israel. He said how difficult it is to have an honest debate, and remarked that “even legitimate criticism of Israel, or of Zionism, is often quickly denounced as antiSemitism by various watchdogs”.
Such remarks brought down a storm on his head. The editor of The Jerusalem Post, also a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, published an open letter to Buruma that began: “Are you a Jew?” He argued that nonJews should discuss these issues only in terms acceptable to Jews.
The American media, claim the authors, even such mighty organs as The New York Times and The Washington Post, do less than justice to the Palestinians, much more than justice to the Israelis. Robert Bartley, a former editor of The Wall Street Journal, once said: “Shamir, Sharon, Bibi – whatever those guys want is pretty much fine by me.” There is no American counterpart to such notably Arabist British polemicists as Robert Fisk.
Mearsheimer and Walt’s book argues its points at such ponderous length that it makes pretty leaden reading. But it is extraordinary that, in a free society, the legitimacy of the expression of their opinions should be called into question. “We show,” say the authors, “that although Israel may have been an asset during the cold war it is increasingly a strategic liability now that the cold war is over. Backing Israel so strongly helps fuel America’s terrorism problem and makes it harder for the United States to address the other problems it faces in the Middle East.”
Americans ring-fence Israel from the normal sceptical proc-esses of democracy, while arguments for the Palestinians are often denounced as pernicious as well as antisemitic. All the 2008 presidential candidates, say Mearsheimer and Walt, know that their campaign would be dead in the water if they hinted that Israel would receive less than 100% backing if they win. They note that many Israelis are much bolder in attacking their own governments than any American politician would dare to be.
Part of the trouble is that AIPAC faces no significant opposition. Palestinians, and indeed all Arabs, command negligible sympathy in America, especially since 9/11. The authors think that the most helpful step towards diminishing the Israel lobby’s grip would be for election campaigns to be publicly financed, ending candidates’ dependence on private contributions: “AIPAC’s success is due in large part to its ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who do not.”
But the authors know reform will not happen. The Israel lobby is vastly strengthened by the support of America’s Christian Zionists, an important element of George W Bush’s constituency. Some may think these people are lunatics, but there are an awful lot of them. They are even more strident in their opposition to Arab rights in Palestine than the Israeli Likud party.
Mearsheimer and Walt conclude, weakly but inevitably, with a mere plea for more open debate in the US about Israel. “Because most Americans are only dimly aware of the crimes committed against the Palestinians,” they say, “they see their continued resistance as an irrational desire for vengeance. Or as evidence of unwarranted hatred of Jews akin to the antisemitism that was endemic in old Europe.
“Although we deplore the Palestinians’ reliance on terrorism and are well aware of their own contribution to prolonging the conflict, we believe their grievances are genuine and must be addressed. We also believe that most Americans would support a different approach . . . if they had a more accurate understanding of past events and present conditions.”
For Europeans, all this adds up to a bleak picture. Only America might be capable of inducing the government of Israel to moderate its behaviour, and it will not try. Washington gives Jerusalem a blank cheque, and all of us in some degree pay a price for Israel’s abuses of it.
After that remark, I shall be pleasantly surprised to escape an allegation from somebody that I belong in the same stable of antisemites as Walt and Mearsheimer. Yet otherwise intelligent Americans diminish themselves by hurling charges of antisemitism with such recklessness. There will be no peace in the Middle East until the United States faces its responsibilities there in a much more convincing fashion than it does today, partly for reasons given in this depressing book.
The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by John J Mearsheimer and Stephen M Walt
Allen Lane £25 pp496
NEW YORK TIMES
9/6/07
A Prosecutorial Brief Against Israel and Its Supporters
WILLIAM GRIMES
THE ISRAEL LOBBY AND U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
By John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt
484 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.
"The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" arrives carrying heavy baggage. John J. Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, set off a furor last year by arguing, in an article that appeared in The London Review of Books, that uncritical American support for Israel, shaped by powerful lobbying organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, does grave harm to both American and Israeli interests.
A bitter debate has raged ever since, with accusations of anti-Semitism leveled by, among others, Alan M. Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor, and Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, one of the principal lobbying organizations taken to task by Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt.
"The Israel Lobby," an extended, more fully argued version of the London Review article, has done nothing to calm the waters. The authors have been barred from making appearances by at least one university and several cultural centers to discuss their subject, and continue to reap a whirlwind of criticism and abuse. If they were looking for a fight, they have found it.
Slowly, deliberately and dispassionately Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt lay out the case for a ruthlessly realistic Middle East policy that would make Israel nothing more than one of many countries in the region. On those occasions when Israel's interests coincide with America's, it should count on American support, but otherwise not. What Americans fail to understand, the authors argue, is that most of the time the two countries' interests are opposed.
The reason they do not realize this, Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt insist, can be explained quite simply: The Israel lobby makes sure of it. Working closely with members of Congress, public-policy organizations and journals of opinion, energetic, well-financed groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the American Jewish Committee, along with dozens of political-action committees, perpetuate the myth, as the authors see it, of Israel as an isolated, beleaguered state surrounded by enemies and in need of America's unstinting financial and military support.
This lobby is particularly adept at stifling debate before it begins, the authors argue. "Whether the issue is abortion, arms control, affirmative action, gay rights, the environment, trade policy, health care, immigration or welfare, there is almost always a lively debate on Capitol Hill," they write. "But where Israel is concerned, potential critics fall silent and there is hardly any debate at all."
There is nothing underhanded or devious about this, the authors say. Like the National Rifle Association or the AARP, the Israel lobby relies on the traditional political weapons available to any special-interest group in pressing its agenda. It just happens to be unusually skillful and effective.
"It is simply a powerful interest group, made up of both Jews and gentiles, whose acknowledged purpose is to press Israel's case within the United States and influence American foreign policy in ways that its members believe will benefit the Jewish state," they write.
The problem, Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt argue, is that Israel has become a strategic liability with the end of the cold war and a moral pariah in its dealings with the Palestinians and, most recently, the Lebanese. Uncritical American support for its closest Middle East ally has damaged American credibility in the Arab world, encouraged terrorism, stymied the search for a solution to the Palestinian problem, and in every way made America's international position weaker and more dangerous.
Coolly, not to say coldly, Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt mount a prosecutorial brief against Israel's foreign and domestic policies, and against the state of Israel itself. They describe a virtual rogue state, empowered by American wealth and might, that blocks peace at every turn, threatens its cowering neighbors with impunity, crushes the national aspirations of the Palestinians and, whenever the opportunity arises, bites the hand that feeds it.
Working tirelessly in the background is the Israel lobby, playing Iago to America's Othello, leading president after president down ever more dangerous paths. Without intense pressure from the Israel lobby, the authors argue, America would not have undertaken the war in Iraq.
Most American readers will bristle at the authors' characterization of Israel. This is to be expected, Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt argue, because of the completely false image of Israel and its history that has been manufactured by the Israel lobby. As a result, Americans completely misinterpret the Palestinian issue and fail to support a productive policy that would tilt away from Israel and toward the Palestinians.
The authors state, on several occasions, their belief that Israel has a moral and legal right to exist, but the effect of their book is to leave it dangling by a moral and strategic thread. In essence they call for the United States to cut Israel loose, to return more or less to American policy before the 1967 war, when the United States tried to occupy a middle ground between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Strangely, the authors do not itemize the fabulous benefits delivered by this approach in the 1950s and '60s.
It is a little odd that so chilly a book should generate such heat. Most of Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt's arguments are familiar ones, and it is hardly inflammatory to point out that the major Jewish organizations tend to take a much tougher line on, say, a two-state solution to the Palestinian problem, the Iraq war or settlements in the West Bank, than most American Jews favor. The writers stand on eminently defensible ground when they argue for a more constructive, creative American role in peace talks.
The general tone of hostility to Israel grates on the nerves, however, along with an unignorable impression that hardheaded political realism can be subject to its own peculiar fantasies. Israel is not simply one country among many, for example, just as Britain is not. Americans feel strong ties of history, religion, culture and, yes, sentiment, that the authors recognize, but only in an airy, abstract way.
They also seem to feel that, with Israel and its lobby pushed to the side, the desert will bloom with flowers. A peace deal with Syria would surely follow, with a resultant end to hostile activity by Hezbollah and Hamas. Next would come a Palestinian state, depriving Al Qaeda of its principal recruiting tool. (The authors wave away the idea that Islamic terrorism thrives for other reasons.) Well, yes, Iran does seem to be a problem, but the authors argue that no one should be particularly bothered by an Iran with nuclear weapons. And on and on.
"It is time," Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt write, "for the United States to treat Israel not as a special case but as a normal state, and to deal with it much as it deals with any other country." But it's not. And America won't. That's realism.
9/6/07
A Prosecutorial Brief Against Israel and Its Supporters
WILLIAM GRIMES
THE ISRAEL LOBBY AND U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
By John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt
484 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.
"The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" arrives carrying heavy baggage. John J. Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, set off a furor last year by arguing, in an article that appeared in The London Review of Books, that uncritical American support for Israel, shaped by powerful lobbying organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, does grave harm to both American and Israeli interests.
A bitter debate has raged ever since, with accusations of anti-Semitism leveled by, among others, Alan M. Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor, and Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, one of the principal lobbying organizations taken to task by Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt.
"The Israel Lobby," an extended, more fully argued version of the London Review article, has done nothing to calm the waters. The authors have been barred from making appearances by at least one university and several cultural centers to discuss their subject, and continue to reap a whirlwind of criticism and abuse. If they were looking for a fight, they have found it.
Slowly, deliberately and dispassionately Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt lay out the case for a ruthlessly realistic Middle East policy that would make Israel nothing more than one of many countries in the region. On those occasions when Israel's interests coincide with America's, it should count on American support, but otherwise not. What Americans fail to understand, the authors argue, is that most of the time the two countries' interests are opposed.
The reason they do not realize this, Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt insist, can be explained quite simply: The Israel lobby makes sure of it. Working closely with members of Congress, public-policy organizations and journals of opinion, energetic, well-financed groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the American Jewish Committee, along with dozens of political-action committees, perpetuate the myth, as the authors see it, of Israel as an isolated, beleaguered state surrounded by enemies and in need of America's unstinting financial and military support.
This lobby is particularly adept at stifling debate before it begins, the authors argue. "Whether the issue is abortion, arms control, affirmative action, gay rights, the environment, trade policy, health care, immigration or welfare, there is almost always a lively debate on Capitol Hill," they write. "But where Israel is concerned, potential critics fall silent and there is hardly any debate at all."
There is nothing underhanded or devious about this, the authors say. Like the National Rifle Association or the AARP, the Israel lobby relies on the traditional political weapons available to any special-interest group in pressing its agenda. It just happens to be unusually skillful and effective.
"It is simply a powerful interest group, made up of both Jews and gentiles, whose acknowledged purpose is to press Israel's case within the United States and influence American foreign policy in ways that its members believe will benefit the Jewish state," they write.
The problem, Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt argue, is that Israel has become a strategic liability with the end of the cold war and a moral pariah in its dealings with the Palestinians and, most recently, the Lebanese. Uncritical American support for its closest Middle East ally has damaged American credibility in the Arab world, encouraged terrorism, stymied the search for a solution to the Palestinian problem, and in every way made America's international position weaker and more dangerous.
Coolly, not to say coldly, Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt mount a prosecutorial brief against Israel's foreign and domestic policies, and against the state of Israel itself. They describe a virtual rogue state, empowered by American wealth and might, that blocks peace at every turn, threatens its cowering neighbors with impunity, crushes the national aspirations of the Palestinians and, whenever the opportunity arises, bites the hand that feeds it.
Working tirelessly in the background is the Israel lobby, playing Iago to America's Othello, leading president after president down ever more dangerous paths. Without intense pressure from the Israel lobby, the authors argue, America would not have undertaken the war in Iraq.
Most American readers will bristle at the authors' characterization of Israel. This is to be expected, Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt argue, because of the completely false image of Israel and its history that has been manufactured by the Israel lobby. As a result, Americans completely misinterpret the Palestinian issue and fail to support a productive policy that would tilt away from Israel and toward the Palestinians.
The authors state, on several occasions, their belief that Israel has a moral and legal right to exist, but the effect of their book is to leave it dangling by a moral and strategic thread. In essence they call for the United States to cut Israel loose, to return more or less to American policy before the 1967 war, when the United States tried to occupy a middle ground between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Strangely, the authors do not itemize the fabulous benefits delivered by this approach in the 1950s and '60s.
It is a little odd that so chilly a book should generate such heat. Most of Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt's arguments are familiar ones, and it is hardly inflammatory to point out that the major Jewish organizations tend to take a much tougher line on, say, a two-state solution to the Palestinian problem, the Iraq war or settlements in the West Bank, than most American Jews favor. The writers stand on eminently defensible ground when they argue for a more constructive, creative American role in peace talks.
The general tone of hostility to Israel grates on the nerves, however, along with an unignorable impression that hardheaded political realism can be subject to its own peculiar fantasies. Israel is not simply one country among many, for example, just as Britain is not. Americans feel strong ties of history, religion, culture and, yes, sentiment, that the authors recognize, but only in an airy, abstract way.
They also seem to feel that, with Israel and its lobby pushed to the side, the desert will bloom with flowers. A peace deal with Syria would surely follow, with a resultant end to hostile activity by Hezbollah and Hamas. Next would come a Palestinian state, depriving Al Qaeda of its principal recruiting tool. (The authors wave away the idea that Islamic terrorism thrives for other reasons.) Well, yes, Iran does seem to be a problem, but the authors argue that no one should be particularly bothered by an Iran with nuclear weapons. And on and on.
"It is time," Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt write, "for the United States to treat Israel not as a special case but as a normal state, and to deal with it much as it deals with any other country." But it's not. And America won't. That's realism.
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http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eBX...Io30G2B0IupC0EP
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BOOK REVIEW
No, it's the dog that wags the tail
The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by John J Mearsheimer and Stephen M Walt
This controversial book argues that client state Israel and its allies in the US are leading the US government to engage in policies that are manifestly against its interests - a classic case of the tail wagging the dog. Nothing could be further from the truth. The US has been using Israel to fulfill its policy objectives for decades, and will continue to do so. - Mark LeVine (Sep 7, '07)
No, it's the dog that wags the tail
The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by John J Mearsheimer and Stephen M Walt
This controversial book argues that client state Israel and its allies in the US are leading the US government to engage in policies that are manifestly against its interests - a classic case of the tail wagging the dog. Nothing could be further from the truth. The US has been using Israel to fulfill its policy objectives for decades, and will continue to do so. - Mark LeVine (Sep 7, '07)
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PolicyWatch #1258: U.S. Support for the Iranian Opposition Mehdi KhalajiAbandoning our Democratic Allies David Schenker , Boston GlobeThe Fragile Crescent Martin Kramer, New Republic OnlinePolicyWatch #1216: The History of U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East Michael Oren
Al Qaeda planning fresh attacks on US: CIA chief
Saturday, 08 September , 2007, 10:00
New York: CIA director Michael Hayden warned on Saturday that al Qaeda was plotting fresh attacks on the United States aimed at sowing death and destruction on a massive scale.
Also read: Osama urges Americans to convert to Islam
His comments came just days ahead of the sixth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks and as the US government said it was analysing a copy of the latest video message said to have been made by elusive al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.
"Our analysts assess with high confidence that al Qaeda's central leadership is planning high impact plots against the American homeland," Hayden told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
"Al Qaeda is focusing on targets that would produce mass casualties, dramatic destruction and significant economic aftershocks," he added.
The bin Laden video, first reported on Friday by US officials monitoring militant websites, would be the first such appearance by the militant leader since October 2004, when he threatened new attacks on the United States.
"I want to be as clear as I can about the threat we face," Hayden said, saying the Central Intelligence Agency would use "every inch we're given" by the US government to wage the "war on terror" and hunt down militants.
"We bear responsibility for standing watch on this threat," he said. "Our nation is in a state of armed conflict with al Qaeda and its affiliates. It's a conflict that is global in scope," he added.
"It's very hard to see this thing as anything less than war" criticizing the media for references such as a "so-called war on terror."
Saturday, 08 September , 2007, 10:00
New York: CIA director Michael Hayden warned on Saturday that al Qaeda was plotting fresh attacks on the United States aimed at sowing death and destruction on a massive scale.
Also read: Osama urges Americans to convert to Islam
His comments came just days ahead of the sixth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks and as the US government said it was analysing a copy of the latest video message said to have been made by elusive al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.
"Our analysts assess with high confidence that al Qaeda's central leadership is planning high impact plots against the American homeland," Hayden told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
"Al Qaeda is focusing on targets that would produce mass casualties, dramatic destruction and significant economic aftershocks," he added.
The bin Laden video, first reported on Friday by US officials monitoring militant websites, would be the first such appearance by the militant leader since October 2004, when he threatened new attacks on the United States.
"I want to be as clear as I can about the threat we face," Hayden said, saying the Central Intelligence Agency would use "every inch we're given" by the US government to wage the "war on terror" and hunt down militants.
"We bear responsibility for standing watch on this threat," he said. "Our nation is in a state of armed conflict with al Qaeda and its affiliates. It's a conflict that is global in scope," he added.
"It's very hard to see this thing as anything less than war" criticizing the media for references such as a "so-called war on terror."
http://www.stratofortress.org/current-oper...eapons_capacity
Weapons Carriage Capability of the B-52H
Having received numerous requests for "how many bombs can the B-52 carry?", we put together this list.
CONVENTIONAL
Bombs
MK82 (500 lb) - 51
MK84 (2000 lb) - 18
MK117 (750 lb) - 51
BDU-48 - 17
CBU
CBU-87 - 40
CBU-89 - 42
Laser Guided
GBU-10 - 8 to 10
GBU-12 - 10
GBU-28 - 4
Other Advanced
JDAM - 12 JSOW - 12 (in development) WCMD - 16
Missiles
Conventional Air Launched Cruise Missiles (CALCM) - 20
Harpoon (Anti-Ship Missile) - 8
AGM-142 (television guided missile) - 4 [Normal load is 3 with a controller, 4 can be carried with a "hand off to another aircraft with a controller pod installed.]
Mines
MK56 - 20
MK62 - 51
MK63 - 18
MK65 - 18
NUCLEAR
Advanced Cruise Missiles (ACM) - 12
Air Launched Cruise Missiles (ALCM) - 20
Bombs - 8
http://www.stratofortress.org/current-oper...eapons_capacity
The plane was carrying advanced cruise missiles from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., to Barksdale Air Force Base, La., on Aug. 30, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of a Defense Department policy not to confirm information on nuclear weapons.
http://www3.whdh.com/news/articles/national/BO61467/
Weapons Carriage Capability of the B-52H
Having received numerous requests for "how many bombs can the B-52 carry?", we put together this list.
CONVENTIONAL
Bombs
MK82 (500 lb) - 51
MK84 (2000 lb) - 18
MK117 (750 lb) - 51
BDU-48 - 17
CBU
CBU-87 - 40
CBU-89 - 42
Laser Guided
GBU-10 - 8 to 10
GBU-12 - 10
GBU-28 - 4
Other Advanced
JDAM - 12 JSOW - 12 (in development) WCMD - 16
Missiles
Conventional Air Launched Cruise Missiles (CALCM) - 20
Harpoon (Anti-Ship Missile) - 8
AGM-142 (television guided missile) - 4 [Normal load is 3 with a controller, 4 can be carried with a "hand off to another aircraft with a controller pod installed.]
Mines
MK56 - 20
MK62 - 51
MK63 - 18
MK65 - 18
NUCLEAR
Advanced Cruise Missiles (ACM) - 12
Air Launched Cruise Missiles (ALCM) - 20
Bombs - 8
http://www.stratofortress.org/current-oper...eapons_capacity
The plane was carrying advanced cruise missiles from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., to Barksdale Air Force Base, La., on Aug. 30, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of a Defense Department policy not to confirm information on nuclear weapons.
http://www3.whdh.com/news/articles/national/BO61467/
BOOKS-US: Outing the "Israel Lobby"
By Khody Akhavi
WASHINGTON, Sep 6 (IPS) - When John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt published their controversial essay "The Israel Lobby" in the London Review of Books in March 2006, their work elicited the kind of response of which most academics only dream.
But it was also attacked and condemned by critics for its provocative and pointed argument that a wide-ranging coalition that includes neoconservatives, Christian Zionists, academics, columnists and Washington lobby groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is responsible for shaping U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and suppressing the public debate in Washington.
Columnist Christopher Hitchens, himself no stranger to controversy, called the work "slightly but unmistakably fishy." The Anti-Defamation League called it "a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control." Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz said it was riddled with distortions, and questioned the motivations of Walt, who served at the time as academic dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and Mearsheimer, who teaches at University of Chicago, to produce a paper that "contributes so little to the existing scholarship while being so susceptible to misuse."
To be sure, the article would not have engendered such visceral reactions if not for the robust credentials of its authors. Overnight, two pillars of the academic establishment achieved notoriety for pushing into the open a subject that had long remained a taboo.
And the object of their critique, the "lobby" -- general parlance to describe those actors who actively promote a "pro-Israel" policy -- launched an aggressive campaign to discredit their work and injure their reputations. More than one year later, they are still standing, proving that, according to Michael Massing, "the wide attention their argument has received shows that, in this case, those efforts have not entirely succeeded."
Now, Mearsheimer and Walt have expanded their article into a 355-page book called "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In it, they argue much the same, that there exists neither a strategic nor a moral reason for the U.S. to diplomatically, military and unequivocally support Israel in the Middle East. As such, the U.S. should treat Israel as it does its other allies and conduct foreign policy that benefits U.S. interests.
And they accuse the "Israel lobby" as molding the political debate in a way that ultimately undermines the long-term security of the U.S. "While other interest groups -- including ethnic lobbies representing Cuban Americans, Irish Americans, Armenian Americans, and Indian Americans -- have managed to skew U.S. foreign policy in directions that they favoured, no ethnic lobby has diverted that policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest," they write.
To what extent is the lobby an agent of the Israeli government, as opposed to a network or "political coalition" of people who have their own ideas about what is best for Israel? Mearsheimer and Walt write that, "It is the specific political agenda that defines the lobby, not the religious or ethnic identity of those pushing it."
They also argue that the lobby acts on its own, and sometimes even against the express interests and policy of the Israeli government. That may be due, in large part, to the fact that the institutional leadership of the lobby is comprised of individuals and organisations whose views are more closely associated with those of the right-wing Likud party in Israel.
On this point, Mearsheimer and Walt's broadbrush term "the Israel lobby" is a bit misleading, as they themselves admit, because it does not account for the multiplicity of views within the "pro-Israel" political community. It should more accurately be called the "pro-Likud" lobby. Nonetheless, the two authors include moderate pro-Israel groups, of whom they clearly approve, such as Americans for Peace Now and Israel Policy Forum, under their overly general rubric of the "Israel lobby," and muddy the waters further.
Indeed, the borders of the lobby -- as defined by the authors -- are fuzzy, but Mearsheimer and Walt identify the group of academics, think-tanks, political action committees, neoconservatives and Christian Zionists who they believe form the core, and that tends to bolster their argument that the common denominator of all these groups is their ideological connection.
They include, in no particular order: AIPAC, John Hagee's Christians United for Israel, ADL, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organization, Zionist Organisation of America, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Bernard Lewis, Charles Krauthammer, Daniel Pipes and the Middle East Forum, the Israel Project, Elliot Abrams, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Center for Security Policy, William Kristol, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Congresspersons such as Eliot Engel of New York, and others.
Mearsheimer and Walt also detail the extent to which the lobby and its supporters have employed, in the words of Michael Massing, "bullying tactics" to silence Israel critics. Massing wrote the most substantive critique of the initial article in the New York Review of Books, writing that "despite its many flaws," the Walt-Mearsheimer essay had "performed a very useful service in forcing into the open a subject that has for too long remained taboo."
After publishing their article, the two authors themselves were accused of being anti-Semites, a charge they go to great lengths in their book to rebut. And they cite the response to former President Jimmy Carter's recent book, "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid" as an example of the phenomenon.
"Not only was Carter publicly accused of being an anti-Semite and a 'Jew hater,' he was even charged with being sympathetic to Nazis," they write. "Since the lobby seeks to keep the present relationship intact, and because in fact its strategic and moral arguments are so weak, it has little choice but to try to stifle or marginalise serious discussion."
One of the most extreme examples of this public intimidation was crafted -- in McCarthyist fashion -- by Pipes, who, in the aftermath of the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks, invited university students around the country to post comments and behaviour of their professors that were deemed hostile to Israel and the U.S. on his website, Campus Watch.
Yet for all the attention paid to how the aggregate influence of the "lobby" contributes negatively to U.S. policy, Mearsheimer and Walt do not focus extensively on the nuts and bolts of how the lobby actually works to translate its wishes into U.S. policy, and this would have strengthened their argument. Missing is a list of campaign contributions by lobby-affiliated individuals to certain candidates, or more first-hand investigation and interviews with key figures. Thus, even though the book is richly sourced, much of the information comes from second-hand sources such as newspapers and public statements, and so, feels second-hand.
The last, and best, part of the book focuses on how the lobby has helped to shape the public and Congressional debate on the Iraq, Syria, Iran, and last summer's Israel-Hezbollah war. While it is questionable the extent to which the lobby actively pushed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Mearsheimer and Walt successfully demonstrate that it has exerted significant influence on Congress, promoting and advocating economic sanctions bills that target Syria and Iran.
The political coalition of right-leaning groups that form Mearsheimer and Walt's "Israel lobby" do not pull the strings of Washington politicians as a puppeteer would a puppet. The lobby is not a monolithic entity, created out of some shadowy conspiracy, and the authors of this book, suffice it to say, are not anti-Semites. They are international relations specialists, part of the "realist" school of thought that emphasises national interest and security in determining policy.
"The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" adds some substance to an argument that has already been made. If readers were not convinced of the authors' views the first time around, it is doubtful they will find much to change their minds in this book. But Mearsheimer and Walt's argument has cracked the door to long overdue debate.
(END/2007)
By Khody Akhavi
WASHINGTON, Sep 6 (IPS) - When John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt published their controversial essay "The Israel Lobby" in the London Review of Books in March 2006, their work elicited the kind of response of which most academics only dream.
But it was also attacked and condemned by critics for its provocative and pointed argument that a wide-ranging coalition that includes neoconservatives, Christian Zionists, academics, columnists and Washington lobby groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is responsible for shaping U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and suppressing the public debate in Washington.
Columnist Christopher Hitchens, himself no stranger to controversy, called the work "slightly but unmistakably fishy." The Anti-Defamation League called it "a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control." Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz said it was riddled with distortions, and questioned the motivations of Walt, who served at the time as academic dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and Mearsheimer, who teaches at University of Chicago, to produce a paper that "contributes so little to the existing scholarship while being so susceptible to misuse."
To be sure, the article would not have engendered such visceral reactions if not for the robust credentials of its authors. Overnight, two pillars of the academic establishment achieved notoriety for pushing into the open a subject that had long remained a taboo.
And the object of their critique, the "lobby" -- general parlance to describe those actors who actively promote a "pro-Israel" policy -- launched an aggressive campaign to discredit their work and injure their reputations. More than one year later, they are still standing, proving that, according to Michael Massing, "the wide attention their argument has received shows that, in this case, those efforts have not entirely succeeded."
Now, Mearsheimer and Walt have expanded their article into a 355-page book called "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In it, they argue much the same, that there exists neither a strategic nor a moral reason for the U.S. to diplomatically, military and unequivocally support Israel in the Middle East. As such, the U.S. should treat Israel as it does its other allies and conduct foreign policy that benefits U.S. interests.
And they accuse the "Israel lobby" as molding the political debate in a way that ultimately undermines the long-term security of the U.S. "While other interest groups -- including ethnic lobbies representing Cuban Americans, Irish Americans, Armenian Americans, and Indian Americans -- have managed to skew U.S. foreign policy in directions that they favoured, no ethnic lobby has diverted that policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest," they write.
To what extent is the lobby an agent of the Israeli government, as opposed to a network or "political coalition" of people who have their own ideas about what is best for Israel? Mearsheimer and Walt write that, "It is the specific political agenda that defines the lobby, not the religious or ethnic identity of those pushing it."
They also argue that the lobby acts on its own, and sometimes even against the express interests and policy of the Israeli government. That may be due, in large part, to the fact that the institutional leadership of the lobby is comprised of individuals and organisations whose views are more closely associated with those of the right-wing Likud party in Israel.
On this point, Mearsheimer and Walt's broadbrush term "the Israel lobby" is a bit misleading, as they themselves admit, because it does not account for the multiplicity of views within the "pro-Israel" political community. It should more accurately be called the "pro-Likud" lobby. Nonetheless, the two authors include moderate pro-Israel groups, of whom they clearly approve, such as Americans for Peace Now and Israel Policy Forum, under their overly general rubric of the "Israel lobby," and muddy the waters further.
Indeed, the borders of the lobby -- as defined by the authors -- are fuzzy, but Mearsheimer and Walt identify the group of academics, think-tanks, political action committees, neoconservatives and Christian Zionists who they believe form the core, and that tends to bolster their argument that the common denominator of all these groups is their ideological connection.
They include, in no particular order: AIPAC, John Hagee's Christians United for Israel, ADL, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organization, Zionist Organisation of America, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Bernard Lewis, Charles Krauthammer, Daniel Pipes and the Middle East Forum, the Israel Project, Elliot Abrams, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Center for Security Policy, William Kristol, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Congresspersons such as Eliot Engel of New York, and others.
Mearsheimer and Walt also detail the extent to which the lobby and its supporters have employed, in the words of Michael Massing, "bullying tactics" to silence Israel critics. Massing wrote the most substantive critique of the initial article in the New York Review of Books, writing that "despite its many flaws," the Walt-Mearsheimer essay had "performed a very useful service in forcing into the open a subject that has for too long remained taboo."
After publishing their article, the two authors themselves were accused of being anti-Semites, a charge they go to great lengths in their book to rebut. And they cite the response to former President Jimmy Carter's recent book, "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid" as an example of the phenomenon.
"Not only was Carter publicly accused of being an anti-Semite and a 'Jew hater,' he was even charged with being sympathetic to Nazis," they write. "Since the lobby seeks to keep the present relationship intact, and because in fact its strategic and moral arguments are so weak, it has little choice but to try to stifle or marginalise serious discussion."
One of the most extreme examples of this public intimidation was crafted -- in McCarthyist fashion -- by Pipes, who, in the aftermath of the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks, invited university students around the country to post comments and behaviour of their professors that were deemed hostile to Israel and the U.S. on his website, Campus Watch.
Yet for all the attention paid to how the aggregate influence of the "lobby" contributes negatively to U.S. policy, Mearsheimer and Walt do not focus extensively on the nuts and bolts of how the lobby actually works to translate its wishes into U.S. policy, and this would have strengthened their argument. Missing is a list of campaign contributions by lobby-affiliated individuals to certain candidates, or more first-hand investigation and interviews with key figures. Thus, even though the book is richly sourced, much of the information comes from second-hand sources such as newspapers and public statements, and so, feels second-hand.
The last, and best, part of the book focuses on how the lobby has helped to shape the public and Congressional debate on the Iraq, Syria, Iran, and last summer's Israel-Hezbollah war. While it is questionable the extent to which the lobby actively pushed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Mearsheimer and Walt successfully demonstrate that it has exerted significant influence on Congress, promoting and advocating economic sanctions bills that target Syria and Iran.
The political coalition of right-leaning groups that form Mearsheimer and Walt's "Israel lobby" do not pull the strings of Washington politicians as a puppeteer would a puppet. The lobby is not a monolithic entity, created out of some shadowy conspiracy, and the authors of this book, suffice it to say, are not anti-Semites. They are international relations specialists, part of the "realist" school of thought that emphasises national interest and security in determining policy.
"The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" adds some substance to an argument that has already been made. If readers were not convinced of the authors' views the first time around, it is doubtful they will find much to change their minds in this book. But Mearsheimer and Walt's argument has cracked the door to long overdue debate.
(END/2007)
George Shultz on the Israel lobby, excerpted from his introduction to Abe Foxman's book The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control. His critique of the Walt/Mearsheimer and Carter books seems to have more to do with the books as he imagines them than as they actually are. U.S. News & World Report
Opinion
The 'Israel Lobby' Myth
By George P. Shultz
Posted September 9, 2007
Israel is a free, democratic, open, and relentlessly self-analytical place. To hear harsh criticism of Israel's policies and leaders, listen to the Israelis. So questioning Israel for its actions is legitimate, but lies are something else. Throughout human history, they have been used not only to vilify but to establish a basis for cruel and inhuman acts. The catalog of lies about Jews is long and astonishingly crude, matched only by the suffering that has followed their promulgation.
Defaming the Jews by disputing their rightful place among the peoples of the world has been a long-running, well-documented, and disgraceful series of episodes across history. Again and again a time has come when legitimate criticism slips across an invisible line into what might be called the "badlands," a place where those who should be regarded as worthy adversaries in debate are turned into scapegoats, targets, all-purpose objects of blame.
In America, we protect all speech, even the most hurtful lies. We allow a virtual free-for-all by which laws are adopted, enforced, and interpreted. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent yearly to influence this process; thousands of groups vie for influence. Among these are Jewish groups that have come under renewed criticism for being part of an all-powerful "Israel lobby," most notably in a book published this week by Profs. Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer.
Jewish groups are influential. They also largely agree that the United States should support Israel. But the notion that they have anything like a uniform agenda and that U.S. policy in Israel and the Middle East is the result of this influence is simply wrong.
One choice. Some critics seem overly impressed with the way of thinking that says to itself, "Since there is a huge Arab Islamic world out there with all the oil, and it is opposed to this tiny little Israel with no natural resources, then realistically the United States has to be on the Arab side and against Israel on every issue, and since this isn't the case, there must be some underhanded Jewish plot at work." This is a conspiracy theory, pure and simple.
Another tried and true method for damaging the well-being and security of the Jewish people and the State of Israel is a dangerously false analogy. Witness former President Jimmy Carter's book Palestine—Peace Not Apartheid. Here the association on the one hand is between Israel's existentially threatened position and the measures it has taken to protect its population from terrorist attacks, driven by an ideology bent on the complete eradication of the State of Israel, and, on the other, the racist oppression of South Africa's black population by the white Boer regime.
The tendency of mind that lies behind such repulsive analogies remains and is reinforced by the former president's views, spread across his book, which come down on the anti-Israel side of every case. These false analogies stir up and lend legitimacy to more widely based movements that take the same dangerous direction.
Anyone who thinks that Jewish groups constitute a homogeneous "lobby" ought to spend some time dealing with them. For example, my decision to open a dialogue with Yasser Arafat after he met certain conditions evoked a wide spectrum of responses from the government of Israel, its political parties, and American Jewish groups who weighed in on one side or the other. Other examples in which the United States rejected Israel's view of an issue, or the view of the American Jewish community, include the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia and President Reagan's decision to go to the cemetery at Bitburg, Germany.
The United States supports Israel not because of favoritism based on political pressure or influence but because the American people, and their leaders, say that supporting Israel is politically sound and morally just.
We are a great nation. Mostly, we make good decisions. We are not babes in the woods. We act in our own interests. And when we mistakenly conclude from time to time—as we will—that an action or policy is in America's interest, we must take responsibility for the mistake.
So, on every level, those who blame Israel and its Jewish supporters for U.S. policies they do not support are wrong. They are wrong because, to begin with, support for Israel is in our best interests. They are also wrong because Israel and its supporters have the right to try to influence U.S. policy. And they are wrong because the U.S. government is responsible for the policies it adopts, not any other state or any of the myriad lobbies and groups that battle daily—sometimes with lies—to win America's support.
George Shultz was secretary of state from 1982 to 1989. This is excerpted from his introduction to The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control by Abraham Foxman (Palgrave Macmillan).
Two New Myth-Busting Books
Posted by Paul Gottfried on September 12, 2007
I’ve just finished two books written by promising young scholars, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution" by Kevin A. C. Gutzman and "33 Questions about American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask" by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. Refreshingly, neither of the authors seems interested in sounding like the staff of the Republican National Committee. [Read More]
"Cowboy Republic"Review of Marjorie Cohn's most recent book- by William Fisher - 2007-09-12
Laura Ingraham Outsells Clinton and Rosie... Book Hits #1 at Barnes & Noble and Amazonby Human Events"Power to the People" off to a roaring start in sales
BOOK REVIEW
That '800-pound gorilla' ...
Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States by Trita Parsi
Nothing is as it seems in the Middle East, and author Parsi sheds light on the dark, back-door wheeling and dealing among supposed enemies - Israel, Iran and the US - going back decades. The book is a timely and important read for anybody who wants push back the essentialist arguments that suggest an impending clash of ideologies. (Sep 14, '07)
That '800-pound gorilla' ...
Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States by Trita Parsi
Nothing is as it seems in the Middle East, and author Parsi sheds light on the dark, back-door wheeling and dealing among supposed enemies - Israel, Iran and the US - going back decades. The book is a timely and important read for anybody who wants push back the essentialist arguments that suggest an impending clash of ideologies. (Sep 14, '07)
Petraeus out of step with US top brass
As the highly public face of President George W Bush's policy in Iraq, especially the "surge", General David Petraeus has done his boss proud in following the White House script. This spokesman's role, however, has created a deep rift between him and the nation's highest military leaders. Most notably, he is on a collision course with Admiral William Fallon, chief of Central Command, who has reportedly dismissed him as an "asskissing little chickenshit". - Gareth Porter (Sep 13, '07)
THE ROVING EYE
Behind the Anbar myth
One of the key arguments in General David Petraeus' presentation to the US Congress this week was the close collaboration between the occupation and Sunni tribal leaders in al-Anbar province. Nothing could be further from the truth: what success there is in Anbar is not due to the general's wily ways, but to an Iraqi sheikh. And even then, US occupation forces remain the main enemy. - Pepe Escobar (Sep 13, '07)
As the highly public face of President George W Bush's policy in Iraq, especially the "surge", General David Petraeus has done his boss proud in following the White House script. This spokesman's role, however, has created a deep rift between him and the nation's highest military leaders. Most notably, he is on a collision course with Admiral William Fallon, chief of Central Command, who has reportedly dismissed him as an "asskissing little chickenshit". - Gareth Porter (Sep 13, '07)
THE ROVING EYE
Behind the Anbar myth
One of the key arguments in General David Petraeus' presentation to the US Congress this week was the close collaboration between the occupation and Sunni tribal leaders in al-Anbar province. Nothing could be further from the truth: what success there is in Anbar is not due to the general's wily ways, but to an Iraqi sheikh. And even then, US occupation forces remain the main enemy. - Pepe Escobar (Sep 13, '07)
http://calitreview.com/2007/09/10/the-israel-lobby-and-us-foreign-policy-by-john-j-mearsheimer-and-stephen-m-walt/ ://http://calitreview.com/2007/09/10/t...tephen-m-walt/
James Abourezk pulls no punches as he reviews "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy" in the California Literary Review.
James Abourezk pulls no punches as he reviews "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy" in the California Literary Review.
From newly released book: "Censored 2008"
-----------------------------------------------------------------
#1 No Habeas Corpus for "Any" Person
#2 Bush Moves Toward Martial Law
#3 Africom: US Military Control of Africa`s Resources
#4 Frenzy of Increasingly Destructive Trade Agreements
#5 Human Traffic Builds US Embassy In Iraq
#6 Operation Falcon Raids
#7 Behind Blackwater
#8 KIA: The US Neoliberal Invasion of India
#9 Privatization of America`s Infrastructure
#10 Vulture Funds Threaten Poor Nation`s Debt Relief
***************************************
Link to rest/full details of all 25-
http://www.projectcensored.org/censored_2008/index.htm
-----------------------------------------------------------------
#1 No Habeas Corpus for "Any" Person
#2 Bush Moves Toward Martial Law
#3 Africom: US Military Control of Africa`s Resources
#4 Frenzy of Increasingly Destructive Trade Agreements
#5 Human Traffic Builds US Embassy In Iraq
#6 Operation Falcon Raids
#7 Behind Blackwater
#8 KIA: The US Neoliberal Invasion of India
#9 Privatization of America`s Infrastructure
#10 Vulture Funds Threaten Poor Nation`s Debt Relief
***************************************
Link to rest/full details of all 25-
http://www.projectcensored.org/censored_2008/index.htm
'The Age of Turbulence' by Alan Greenspan
By J. Bradford Delong
The oracle speaks on life, money and politics.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eBX...Io30G2B0IwVA0E8
By J. Bradford Delong
The oracle speaks on life, money and politics.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eBX...Io30G2B0IwVA0E8
Kolbert, Elizabeth. "The Lady Vanishes.(A Woman in Charge)(Book review). ." The New Yorker. 83.16 (June 11, 2007): 130. General Reference Center Gold. Gale. Montgomery County Public Library (MD). 17 Sept. 2007
<http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?...version=1.0>;.
Full Text:COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In August, 1995, Carolyn Huber, an aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton, was doing a little tidying up around the White House when, in the so-called book room, she noticed a sheaf of computer printouts lying on a table. Without looking at them too closely, Huber picked up the papers and shoved them, along with a stray coat hanger, into a box, which she then pushed underneath a table in her office. The printouts--and the coat hanger--sat there, undisturbed, for five months, until Huber finally got around to cleaning her office and discovered what a mess she had got into.
The printouts were old billing records from the Rose Law Firm. They detailed work that Hillary Clinton had performed in the nineteen-eighties for Madison Guaranty, a failing Arkansas savings and loan, and they had been subpoenaed back in 1994 as part of the Whitewater investigation. The records had been searched for but, investigators were told, were nowhere to be found. Huber realized that she needed to report the discovery of the documents right away. When she delivered the papers to the Clintons' lawyers, her hands were shaking.
As Carl Bernstein tells us in his new biography of Hillary, "A Woman in Charge" (Knopf; $27.95), the appearance of the billing records presented a challenge even to the First Lady's staunchest allies. The White House book room was off-limits to almost everyone except Huber, the Clintons, house guests, and Mrs. Clinton's grooming staff, and it was hard to imagine the First Lady's makeup assistant taking much interest in them. (When investigators examined the records later, they found Mrs. Clinton's fingerprints, literally, on them.) Hillary offered no explanation for what had happened--"I do not know how the billing records came to be found where they were found," she told reporters--but was nonetheless angry that so few in her party rallied to her defense. She questioned her aides, one of whom tried to explain the awkwardness of the situation.
"You know, we don't have answers for people," the aide said to her, according to Bernstein. "We can't tell them where these things were. We can't tell them why it took two years to find them." Clinton still didn't see the problem. "Yeah, but people should know that if I wanted to destroy these things I would have destroyed them," she said. "And they never would have been found."
There are two kinds of books about Clinton. The first tries to prove that she's really much worse than you think she is, the second that she's really no worse than you think she is. Bernstein has apparently mellowed since his Watergate days, and his book belongs squarely in the latter camp. Even as he chronicles one fabulous misstep after another, he describes the former First Lady as "well-intentioned" and "principled," motivated by deep religious faith and a passionate sense of caring. He characterizes the "so-called Whitewater matter" as "overblown almost from the moment the New York Times first wrote about it," and relates Clinton's various self-justifying comments--"If I wanted to destroy these things, I would have"--with no apparent irony.
Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta, Jr.,'s "Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton" (Little, Brown; $29.99) is the other kind of Clinton book. Van Natta is a Times reporter and Gerth a former Times reporter. Indeed, it was Gerth who broke the "so-called Whitewater matter," back in 1992, and then, more than any other journalist, kept the story alive. The tantalizing promise of "Her Way," which is appearing simultaneously with "A Woman in Charge," is that there is still a book's worth of dirt about Hillary out there. But, thanks in part to Gerth's earlier diligence, this is a promise that's tough to make good on. Take the hitherto untold story of Lee Telega, a Cornell University extension employee who worked in Clinton's Washington office for six months, guiding the new senator on agricultural policy. Gerth and Van Natta go to great lengths to prove that Clinton's office never filed the required paperwork for Telega. The result? Apparently, Senator Clinton is guilty of receiving unauthorized dairy-farming advice.
"A Woman in Charge" and "Her Way" join what is, by now, a veritable library of Clinton biographies, including Donnie Radcliffe's "Hillary Rodham Clinton: A First Lady for Our Time," Gail Sheehy's "Hillary's Choice," David Brock's "The Seduction of Hillary Rodham," and Edward Klein's "The Truth About Hillary." The pace of publication has quickened recently, so that the book lists this spring and summer include at least five new Clinton volumes--six if you count the paperback that accompanies "The Hillary Clinton Voodoo Kit: Stick It to Her, Before She Sticks It to You!"
Just about every biography--and this includes the two latest entries--begins with a description of Clinton's formative years: her middle-class childhood in Park Ridge, Illinois; her stint as a Goldwater Girl in high school; her arrival, in thick glasses and bell-bottoms, at Wellesley College. Most then rush through her years at Yale Law School, a romantic interlude whose unromantic climax is seventeen years in Arkansas. There follows a discussion of the 1992 campaign, Hillary's critical role in saving Bill from Gennifer Flowers, and the requisite reflection on the complex nature of their marriage. Sympathetic and unsympathetic biographers alike tend to tell Clinton's more recent history as a sequence of spectacular humiliations--first Gennifer, then health care, then Monica--followed by even more spectacular recoveries: an office in the West Wing, a seat in the United States Senate, a shot at the Presidency. Along the way, they offer some never before disclosed documents or factoids. As the end approaches, they try to come up with an account of what matters to Hillary and what doesn't--an explanation of who she truly is. Then, in the very last pages, they acknowledge that the effort probably hasn't quite succeeded and that the reader is still feeling at sea. As the historian Gil Troy observes in his 2006 biography, "Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady," the "literature regarding Hillary Rodham Clinton is vast but unsatisfying." Or, as Gerth and Van Natta put it at the close of their book, "So, who is the real Hillary?" So many pages, so little progress.
The repeated failure to get at the "real" Hillary can itself be variously interpreted. It can be taken as a reason to abandon the project or, alternatively, to rethink the question. On the face of it, one would be hard pressed to maintain that the public doesn't yet know enough of the relevant facts. By now, even those who have been only half paying attention possess more information--much of it intimate--about Hillary Clinton than they do about their neighbors, their co-workers, and, quite possibly, their parents. If many Americans, including many of Clinton's biographers, still feel that they don't know the real Hillary, then surely that must say something about who Hillary really is.
Consider the apparently simple but, it turns out, unanswerable question of her name. When she married Bill, at the age of twenty-seven, Clinton pointedly decided to remain Hillary Rodham. According to Bernstein, she had resolved to do this "as a young girl, even before the practice was encouraged by a nascent women's movement." He quotes Clinton telling a friend that the choice was a matter of principle: it affirmed that she would continue to be "a person in my own right." Seven years later, when Bill was in a tough campaign to regain the Arkansas governorship, Hillary changed her mind. Except, she insisted, it wasn't a change at all.
"I don't have to change my name," she declared. "I've been Mrs. Bill Clinton. I kept the professional name Hillary Rodham in my law practice, but now I'm going to be taking a leave of absence from the law firm to campaign full-time for Bill and I'll be Mrs. Bill Clinton." Hillary remained Mrs. Bill Clinton all the way up to the eve of her husband's Inauguration as President, at which point she suddenly began introducing herself as Hillary Rodham Clinton. This change, too, she insisted, wasn't one. "Hillary Rodham Clinton has been the First Lady's name all along, since 1982," her press secretary, Lisa Caputo, told the Times, in what was described as a tone of exasperation. "We're at a loss as to why people think this is something that we're just trying to change now." A few weeks ago, the Albany Times-Union reported that Clinton has now dropped "Rodham" from her Presidential-campaign literature, though it still appears on communications from her Senate office. Even the one apparent constant in this history--Hillary--turns out to be dodgy. During a 1995 trip to Nepal, Clinton said to reporters that she had been told that she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, the first climber to reach the top of Mt. Everest. This is why, she explained, her name has two "l"s. But, since Clinton was born in 1947 and Edmund Hillary, a New Zealander, was unknown outside his own country until his summit, in 1953, the account, as many noted, was implausible. (Questioned about the tale during the 2006 Senate campaign, a Clinton aide called it a "sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter.")
In a political culture like ours, where character supposedly is all, this sort of fuzziness is obviously a problem. And yet even here it's possible to look for an advantage. Clinton's Presidential campaign is explicitly premised on the idea that no one really knows her. The day before the formal announcement of her candidacy, on January 20th, Clinton told NPR's Steve Inskeep, "I may be the most famous person you know very little about." Two days after the announcement, she told NBC's Brian Williams, "I'm probably the most famous person you don't really know." The day after that, she told the "Today" show's Meredith Vieira, "I may be the most famous person you really don't know." Speaking to potential supporters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the following weekend, she said, "I may be the most famous woman you don't really know."
In the fifteen years since Hillary became First Lady, she has made news for almost everything she's done. (Her hair styles alone have probably generated more headlines than most congressmen.) Two episodes, however, stand out, because they were so consequential and, in different ways, so disastrous. "A Woman in Charge" is especially good on what's generally referred to as the health-care debacle; "Her Way" offers genuinely new insights into Clinton's vote on Iraq.
Bernstein makes several things clear about the health-care debacle, one of which is that it didn't have to happen. As he reports the story, the first critical misstep was Bill's. Many of the new President's advisers, including Lloyd Bentsen, the Treasury Secretary, and Donna Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, opposed the choice of Hillary to lead what was formally known as the President's Task Force on National Health Care Reform. They doubted her qualifications and advised the President to keep his distance. Shalala tells Bernstein that she warned the President, "You can't run a major policy like this out of the White House. You've got to have some insulation from it, in case it falls on its face." But he wouldn't--or couldn't--listen. As an anonymous deputy explains to Bernstein, it was a matter of politics in the most domestic sense. Hillary had "stood by him in the Gennifer Flowers mess. And he had to pay her back. This is what she wanted."
The next mistakes were Hillary's, and Bernstein documents them in rich detail. Clinton and the task force's staff coordinator, Ira Magaziner, assembled five hundred members for the group, then decided to organize them--if that's the right word--into thirty-four committees. Not surprisingly, work quickly fell behind schedule. The committees were required to meet under near-military conditions of secrecy: members were forbidden to photocopy documents under discussion or even bring pens and pencils to some sessions. Their meetings were closed to the press and, indeed, to all outsiders, an arrangement that was soon challenged--successfully--in court.
Clinton's biggest blunder, as Bernstein tells it, was to offend the very legislators whose support she needed most. At a retreat for Democratic senators in the spring of 1993, Clinton was asked whether it was realistic to pursue such an ambitious health-care program, given her husband's many other legislative initiatives. She responded that the Administration was prepared to "demonize" those who opposed the task force's recommendations.
"That was it for me in terms of Hillary Clinton," Senator Bill Bradley, of New Jersey, told Bernstein. "You don't tell members of the Senate you are going to demonize them. It was obviously so basic to who she is. The arrogance. The assumption that people with questions are enemies. The disdain. The hypocrisy."
When the task force finally finished its proposal, months after it had promised to do so, the bill was one thousand three hundred and twenty-four pages long and so complex that, Bernstein writes, "even Hillary's closest allies on the Hill could not fathom its contents." In the meantime, Clinton all but assured a poor reception for the bill by allowing it to be leaked to the Washington Post before formally briefing lawmakers. Still, there was hope for some kind of health-care reform. As the task force's plan was dying, key senators and congressmen of both parties proposed simpler alternatives. Had Clinton thrown her support behind any one of these, millions of Americans who lack health insurance might now be covered. But she refused.
"I find her to be among the most self-righteous people I've ever known in my life," Bob Boorstin, the task force's deputy for media relations, told Bernstein. "And it's her great flaw, it's what killed health care."
The Senate voted on the Iraq war resolution on October 11, 2002. On October 10th, Clinton delivered a speech on the Senate floor explaining her position. She called her vote "very difficult"--"This is probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make," she said--but she would "cast it with conviction," she added.
"The facts that have brought us to this fateful vote are not in doubt," she said. "Intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members." All these so-called facts, of course, turned out to be very much in doubt.
A great deal has been written about the intelligence gathered before the war and about the extent to which it was manipulated. It now seems clear that the White House presented to the public information that it knew, or at least should have known, to be false. But senators had access to information that the public never saw. Ten days before the vote authorizing the war, the Bush Administration delivered to Congress a classified, ninety-page report entitled "National Intelligence Estimate: Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction." The document, most of which to this day has not been released, detailed what was known and, just as important, what was not known about Saddam's capabilities. On the basis of the report and other information, Senator Bob Graham, of Florida, then the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, decided that evidence of W.M.D.s in Iraq was weak. He repeatedly urged his colleagues to read the full report and not to rely on the unclassified--and highly selective--summary that the Administration had made public. (Graham was one of the twenty-three senators who ultimately voted against the war.)
Did Clinton take the trouble to read the intelligence estimate before casting her vote? All the evidence that Gerth and Van Natta review indicates that she didn't. Clinton would have had to go to a secure room in the Capitol to get access to the document. Meanwhile, as Gerth and Van Natta point out, her aides could not have seen the intelligence estimate, because they lacked the necessary security clearances. Her spokesperson recently told the Washington Post that Clinton was briefed on the report "multiple times" by several members of the Administration.
No one, except perhaps Clinton, can know whether reading the intelligence estimate would have influenced her decision to authorize the war. Gerth and Van Natta argue, plausibly, that her vote was all but predetermined by her need to appear "tough" and by her husband's 1998 bombing campaign against suspected W.M.D. sites in Iraq. They also argue, plausibly, that her failure to consult the report undermines recent statements she has made. At a candidates' forum in February, Clinton declared, "My vote was a sincere vote based on the facts and assurances that I had at that time." Also in February, she said, "If I had known then what we know now, there would never have been a vote and I never would have voted to give the President the authority." At a campaign stop in New Hampshire the same month, she pointedly refused to label her vote a mistake, saying, "The mistakes were made by this President, who misled this country and this Congress." But can you really be misled by a report you've never read?
Neither Bernstein nor Gerth and Van Natta talked to Clinton directly for their books. (Bernstein reports that when he started work on his book, in 1999, both Hillary and Bill indicated that they would be happy to speak to him; later, they changed their minds, on the ground that they didn't want to favor one book over all the others.) As a result, "A Woman in Charge" and "Her Way" are forced to fall back on Clinton's largely ghostwritten, highly sanitized account of her life, "Living History," published in 2003. Then again, Hillary being Hillary, it's not clear how much the authors would have gained by spending time with her.
I covered Mrs. Clinton sporadically from the day she began her first campaign for the Senate, on Daniel Patrick Moynihan's farm, through her early years in office. In that period, I saw her in dozens of settings--working the state fairgrounds in Syracuse, nodding attentively during her "listening tour," chatting with aides in Washington, signing books in Westchester County, taking a call from her husband on her cell phone. I also interviewed her a few times. When the subject was policy, she was always smart and engaged; when the topic was personal, it was like talking to someone through several layers of Plexiglas. Of course, I was trying to get at the "real" Hillary. (In the interest of full disclosure, I never even came close.)
History is full of politicians who have sacrificed other people to their ambitions. A willingness to do so might even be called a precondition of power. Clinton is unusual in that she seems, above all, to have sacrificed herself. Whether you follow her around for months or just read a book about her, you can't help admiring her extraordinary discipline. When her husband was accused of creating a "slush fund" to manage his extramarital affairs, she organized a legal team to protect him--that's the kind of person she is. (Bernstein reports that, in 1990, the team interviewed five women, in one case with Hillary in the room, to obtain statements from them that they had never had sex with Bill.) In January, 2000, I accompanied Clinton on a campaign swing through western New York. The first morning began with what was expected to be a friendly radio interview. Instead, the host asked Clinton whether she had ever slept with Vince Foster. No matter what else she did or said that day, it was clear that this story was going to dominate the news cycle. Her press secretary looked as if he wanted to vomit. But Clinton managed to smile and shake hands through the next ten hours of campaign events, as if the whole incident had never happened.
As soon as Clinton indicated that she was going to run for President, it was inevitable that books like Bernstein's and Gerth and Van Natta's would appear. It was also inevitable that, whether or not anything truly new was revealed, other journalists would use these volumes as an excuse to trot out their own favorite Clinton stories--the billing records, the name changes, the absurd extravaganza on the Moynihan farm, and, oh, have I mentioned "I've always been a Yankees fan"? The Clinton camp's official response to the books has been dismissive. "Is it possible to quote someone yawning?" the Senator's press secretary, Philippe Reines, said to the Washington Post. Perhaps Clinton is, at this point, hardened enough to be bored by the efforts of Bernstein et al. Or perhaps she is pained by them. It would be interesting to know what she really feels, and it is possible to argue that such information is relevant to the electorate. How a chief executive regards his (or her) mistakes is, after all, a matter of importance. (See President George W. Bush.) But, as "A Woman in Charge" and "Her Way" make clear, this is precisely the sort of question about Hillary that cannot be answered.
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In August, 1995, Carolyn Huber, an aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton, was doing a little tidying up around the White House when, in the so-called book room, she noticed a sheaf of computer printouts lying on a table. Without looking at them too closely, Huber picked up the papers and shoved them, along with a stray coat hanger, into a box, which she then pushed underneath a table in her office. The printouts--and the coat hanger--sat there, undisturbed, for five months, until Huber finally got around to cleaning her office and discovered what a mess she had got into.
The printouts were old billing records from the Rose Law Firm. They detailed work that Hillary Clinton had performed in the nineteen-eighties for Madison Guaranty, a failing Arkansas savings and loan, and they had been subpoenaed back in 1994 as part of the Whitewater investigation. The records had been searched for but, investigators were told, were nowhere to be found. Huber realized that she needed to report the discovery of the documents right away. When she delivered the papers to the Clintons' lawyers, her hands were shaking.
As Carl Bernstein tells us in his new biography of Hillary, "A Woman in Charge" (Knopf; $27.95), the appearance of the billing records presented a challenge even to the First Lady's staunchest allies. The White House book room was off-limits to almost everyone except Huber, the Clintons, house guests, and Mrs. Clinton's grooming staff, and it was hard to imagine the First Lady's makeup assistant taking much interest in them. (When investigators examined the records later, they found Mrs. Clinton's fingerprints, literally, on them.) Hillary offered no explanation for what had happened--"I do not know how the billing records came to be found where they were found," she told reporters--but was nonetheless angry that so few in her party rallied to her defense. She questioned her aides, one of whom tried to explain the awkwardness of the situation.
"You know, we don't have answers for people," the aide said to her, according to Bernstein. "We can't tell them where these things were. We can't tell them why it took two years to find them." Clinton still didn't see the problem. "Yeah, but people should know that if I wanted to destroy these things I would have destroyed them," she said. "And they never would have been found."
There are two kinds of books about Clinton. The first tries to prove that she's really much worse than you think she is, the second that she's really no worse than you think she is. Bernstein has apparently mellowed since his Watergate days, and his book belongs squarely in the latter camp. Even as he chronicles one fabulous misstep after another, he describes the former First Lady as "well-intentioned" and "principled," motivated by deep religious faith and a passionate sense of caring. He characterizes the "so-called Whitewater matter" as "overblown almost from the moment the New York Times first wrote about it," and relates Clinton's various self-justifying comments--"If I wanted to destroy these things, I would have"--with no apparent irony.
Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta, Jr.,'s "Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton" (Little, Brown; $29.99) is the other kind of Clinton book. Van Natta is a Times reporter and Gerth a former Times reporter. Indeed, it was Gerth who broke the "so-called Whitewater matter," back in 1992, and then, more than any other journalist, kept the story alive. The tantalizing promise of "Her Way," which is appearing simultaneously with "A Woman in Charge," is that there is still a book's worth of dirt about Hillary out there. But, thanks in part to Gerth's earlier diligence, this is a promise that's tough to make good on. Take the hitherto untold story of Lee Telega, a Cornell University extension employee who worked in Clinton's Washington office for six months, guiding the new senator on agricultural policy. Gerth and Van Natta go to great lengths to prove that Clinton's office never filed the required paperwork for Telega. The result? Apparently, Senator Clinton is guilty of receiving unauthorized dairy-farming advice.
"A Woman in Charge" and "Her Way" join what is, by now, a veritable library of Clinton biographies, including Donnie Radcliffe's "Hillary Rodham Clinton: A First Lady for Our Time," Gail Sheehy's "Hillary's Choice," David Brock's "The Seduction of Hillary Rodham," and Edward Klein's "The Truth About Hillary." The pace of publication has quickened recently, so that the book lists this spring and summer include at least five new Clinton volumes--six if you count the paperback that accompanies "The Hillary Clinton Voodoo Kit: Stick It to Her, Before She Sticks It to You!"
Just about every biography--and this includes the two latest entries--begins with a description of Clinton's formative years: her middle-class childhood in Park Ridge, Illinois; her stint as a Goldwater Girl in high school; her arrival, in thick glasses and bell-bottoms, at Wellesley College. Most then rush through her years at Yale Law School, a romantic interlude whose unromantic climax is seventeen years in Arkansas. There follows a discussion of the 1992 campaign, Hillary's critical role in saving Bill from Gennifer Flowers, and the requisite reflection on the complex nature of their marriage. Sympathetic and unsympathetic biographers alike tend to tell Clinton's more recent history as a sequence of spectacular humiliations--first Gennifer, then health care, then Monica--followed by even more spectacular recoveries: an office in the West Wing, a seat in the United States Senate, a shot at the Presidency. Along the way, they offer some never before disclosed documents or factoids. As the end approaches, they try to come up with an account of what matters to Hillary and what doesn't--an explanation of who she truly is. Then, in the very last pages, they acknowledge that the effort probably hasn't quite succeeded and that the reader is still feeling at sea. As the historian Gil Troy observes in his 2006 biography, "Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady," the "literature regarding Hillary Rodham Clinton is vast but unsatisfying." Or, as Gerth and Van Natta put it at the close of their book, "So, who is the real Hillary?" So many pages, so little progress.
The repeated failure to get at the "real" Hillary can itself be variously interpreted. It can be taken as a reason to abandon the project or, alternatively, to rethink the question. On the face of it, one would be hard pressed to maintain that the public doesn't yet know enough of the relevant facts. By now, even those who have been only half paying attention possess more information--much of it intimate--about Hillary Clinton than they do about their neighbors, their co-workers, and, quite possibly, their parents. If many Americans, including many of Clinton's biographers, still feel that they don't know the real Hillary, then surely that must say something about who Hillary really is.
Consider the apparently simple but, it turns out, unanswerable question of her name. When she married Bill, at the age of twenty-seven, Clinton pointedly decided to remain Hillary Rodham. According to Bernstein, she had resolved to do this "as a young girl, even before the practice was encouraged by a nascent women's movement." He quotes Clinton telling a friend that the choice was a matter of principle: it affirmed that she would continue to be "a person in my own right." Seven years later, when Bill was in a tough campaign to regain the Arkansas governorship, Hillary changed her mind. Except, she insisted, it wasn't a change at all.
"I don't have to change my name," she declared. "I've been Mrs. Bill Clinton. I kept the professional name Hillary Rodham in my law practice, but now I'm going to be taking a leave of absence from the law firm to campaign full-time for Bill and I'll be Mrs. Bill Clinton." Hillary remained Mrs. Bill Clinton all the way up to the eve of her husband's Inauguration as President, at which point she suddenly began introducing herself as Hillary Rodham Clinton. This change, too, she insisted, wasn't one. "Hillary Rodham Clinton has been the First Lady's name all along, since 1982," her press secretary, Lisa Caputo, told the Times, in what was described as a tone of exasperation. "We're at a loss as to why people think this is something that we're just trying to change now." A few weeks ago, the Albany Times-Union reported that Clinton has now dropped "Rodham" from her Presidential-campaign literature, though it still appears on communications from her Senate office. Even the one apparent constant in this history--Hillary--turns out to be dodgy. During a 1995 trip to Nepal, Clinton said to reporters that she had been told that she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, the first climber to reach the top of Mt. Everest. This is why, she explained, her name has two "l"s. But, since Clinton was born in 1947 and Edmund Hillary, a New Zealander, was unknown outside his own country until his summit, in 1953, the account, as many noted, was implausible. (Questioned about the tale during the 2006 Senate campaign, a Clinton aide called it a "sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter.")
In a political culture like ours, where character supposedly is all, this sort of fuzziness is obviously a problem. And yet even here it's possible to look for an advantage. Clinton's Presidential campaign is explicitly premised on the idea that no one really knows her. The day before the formal announcement of her candidacy, on January 20th, Clinton told NPR's Steve Inskeep, "I may be the most famous person you know very little about." Two days after the announcement, she told NBC's Brian Williams, "I'm probably the most famous person you don't really know." The day after that, she told the "Today" show's Meredith Vieira, "I may be the most famous person you really don't know." Speaking to potential supporters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the following weekend, she said, "I may be the most famous woman you don't really know."
In the fifteen years since Hillary became First Lady, she has made news for almost everything she's done. (Her hair styles alone have probably generated more headlines than most congressmen.) Two episodes, however, stand out, because they were so consequential and, in different ways, so disastrous. "A Woman in Charge" is especially good on what's generally referred to as the health-care debacle; "Her Way" offers genuinely new insights into Clinton's vote on Iraq.
Bernstein makes several things clear about the health-care debacle, one of which is that it didn't have to happen. As he reports the story, the first critical misstep was Bill's. Many of the new President's advisers, including Lloyd Bentsen, the Treasury Secretary, and Donna Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, opposed the choice of Hillary to lead what was formally known as the President's Task Force on National Health Care Reform. They doubted her qualifications and advised the President to keep his distance. Shalala tells Bernstein that she warned the President, "You can't run a major policy like this out of the White House. You've got to have some insulation from it, in case it falls on its face." But he wouldn't--or couldn't--listen. As an anonymous deputy explains to Bernstein, it was a matter of politics in the most domestic sense. Hillary had "stood by him in the Gennifer Flowers mess. And he had to pay her back. This is what she wanted."
The next mistakes were Hillary's, and Bernstein documents them in rich detail. Clinton and the task force's staff coordinator, Ira Magaziner, assembled five hundred members for the group, then decided to organize them--if that's the right word--into thirty-four committees. Not surprisingly, work quickly fell behind schedule. The committees were required to meet under near-military conditions of secrecy: members were forbidden to photocopy documents under discussion or even bring pens and pencils to some sessions. Their meetings were closed to the press and, indeed, to all outsiders, an arrangement that was soon challenged--successfully--in court.
Clinton's biggest blunder, as Bernstein tells it, was to offend the very legislators whose support she needed most. At a retreat for Democratic senators in the spring of 1993, Clinton was asked whether it was realistic to pursue such an ambitious health-care program, given her husband's many other legislative initiatives. She responded that the Administration was prepared to "demonize" those who opposed the task force's recommendations.
"That was it for me in terms of Hillary Clinton," Senator Bill Bradley, of New Jersey, told Bernstein. "You don't tell members of the Senate you are going to demonize them. It was obviously so basic to who she is. The arrogance. The assumption that people with questions are enemies. The disdain. The hypocrisy."
When the task force finally finished its proposal, months after it had promised to do so, the bill was one thousand three hundred and twenty-four pages long and so complex that, Bernstein writes, "even Hillary's closest allies on the Hill could not fathom its contents." In the meantime, Clinton all but assured a poor reception for the bill by allowing it to be leaked to the Washington Post before formally briefing lawmakers. Still, there was hope for some kind of health-care reform. As the task force's plan was dying, key senators and congressmen of both parties proposed simpler alternatives. Had Clinton thrown her support behind any one of these, millions of Americans who lack health insurance might now be covered. But she refused.
"I find her to be among the most self-righteous people I've ever known in my life," Bob Boorstin, the task force's deputy for media relations, told Bernstein. "And it's her great flaw, it's what killed health care."
The Senate voted on the Iraq war resolution on October 11, 2002. On October 10th, Clinton delivered a speech on the Senate floor explaining her position. She called her vote "very difficult"--"This is probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make," she said--but she would "cast it with conviction," she added.
"The facts that have brought us to this fateful vote are not in doubt," she said. "Intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members." All these so-called facts, of course, turned out to be very much in doubt.
A great deal has been written about the intelligence gathered before the war and about the extent to which it was manipulated. It now seems clear that the White House presented to the public information that it knew, or at least should have known, to be false. But senators had access to information that the public never saw. Ten days before the vote authorizing the war, the Bush Administration delivered to Congress a classified, ninety-page report entitled "National Intelligence Estimate: Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction." The document, most of which to this day has not been released, detailed what was known and, just as important, what was not known about Saddam's capabilities. On the basis of the report and other information, Senator Bob Graham, of Florida, then the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, decided that evidence of W.M.D.s in Iraq was weak. He repeatedly urged his colleagues to read the full report and not to rely on the unclassified--and highly selective--summary that the Administration had made public. (Graham was one of the twenty-three senators who ultimately voted against the war.)
Did Clinton take the trouble to read the intelligence estimate before casting her vote? All the evidence that Gerth and Van Natta review indicates that she didn't. Clinton would have had to go to a secure room in the Capitol to get access to the document. Meanwhile, as Gerth and Van Natta point out, her aides could not have seen the intelligence estimate, because they lacked the necessary security clearances. Her spokesperson recently told the Washington Post that Clinton was briefed on the report "multiple times" by several members of the Administration.
No one, except perhaps Clinton, can know whether reading the intelligence estimate would have influenced her decision to authorize the war. Gerth and Van Natta argue, plausibly, that her vote was all but predetermined by her need to appear "tough" and by her husband's 1998 bombing campaign against suspected W.M.D. sites in Iraq. They also argue, plausibly, that her failure to consult the report undermines recent statements she has made. At a candidates' forum in February, Clinton declared, "My vote was a sincere vote based on the facts and assurances that I had at that time." Also in February, she said, "If I had known then what we know now, there would never have been a vote and I never would have voted to give the President the authority." At a campaign stop in New Hampshire the same month, she pointedly refused to label her vote a mistake, saying, "The mistakes were made by this President, who misled this country and this Congress." But can you really be misled by a report you've never read?
Neither Bernstein nor Gerth and Van Natta talked to Clinton directly for their books. (Bernstein reports that when he started work on his book, in 1999, both Hillary and Bill indicated that they would be happy to speak to him; later, they changed their minds, on the ground that they didn't want to favor one book over all the others.) As a result, "A Woman in Charge" and "Her Way" are forced to fall back on Clinton's largely ghostwritten, highly sanitized account of her life, "Living History," published in 2003. Then again, Hillary being Hillary, it's not clear how much the authors would have gained by spending time with her.
I covered Mrs. Clinton sporadically from the day she began her first campaign for the Senate, on Daniel Patrick Moynihan's farm, through her early years in office. In that period, I saw her in dozens of settings--working the state fairgrounds in Syracuse, nodding attentively during her "listening tour," chatting with aides in Washington, signing books in Westchester County, taking a call from her husband on her cell phone. I also interviewed her a few times. When the subject was policy, she was always smart and engaged; when the topic was personal, it was like talking to someone through several layers of Plexiglas. Of course, I was trying to get at the "real" Hillary. (In the interest of full disclosure, I never even came close.)
History is full of politicians who have sacrificed other people to their ambitions. A willingness to do so might even be called a precondition of power. Clinton is unusual in that she seems, above all, to have sacrificed herself. Whether you follow her around for months or just read a book about her, you can't help admiring her extraordinary discipline. When her husband was accused of creating a "slush fund" to manage his extramarital affairs, she organized a legal team to protect him--that's the kind of person she is. (Bernstein reports that, in 1990, the team interviewed five women, in one case with Hillary in the room, to obtain statements from them that they had never had sex with Bill.) In January, 2000, I accompanied Clinton on a campaign swing through western New York. The first morning began with what was expected to be a friendly radio interview. Instead, the host asked Clinton whether she had ever slept with Vince Foster. No matter what else she did or said that day, it was clear that this story was going to dominate the news cycle. Her press secretary looked as if he wanted to vomit. But Clinton managed to smile and shake hands through the next ten hours of campaign events, as if the whole incident had never happened.
As soon as Clinton indicated that she was going to run for President, it was inevitable that books like Bernstein's and Gerth and Van Natta's would appear. It was also inevitable that, whether or not anything truly new was revealed, other journalists would use these volumes as an excuse to trot out their own favorite Clinton stories--the billing records, the name changes, the absurd extravaganza on the Moynihan farm, and, oh, have I mentioned "I've always been a Yankees fan"? The Clinton camp's official response to the books has been dismissive. "Is it possible to quote someone yawning?" the Senator's press secretary, Philippe Reines, said to the Washington Post. Perhaps Clinton is, at this point, hardened enough to be bored by the efforts of Bernstein et al. Or perhaps she is pained by them. It would be interesting to know what she really feels, and it is possible to argue that such information is relevant to the electorate. How a chief executive regards his (or her) mistakes is, after all, a matter of importance. (See President George W. Bush.) But, as "A Woman in Charge" and "Her Way" make clear, this is precisely the sort of question about Hillary that cannot be answered.
Gale Document Number:A164764690
© 2007 Gale, a part of The Thomson Corporation. Thomson and Star Logo are trademarks and are registered trademarks used herein under license=
War without end
Best known for his tales of losers, thieves and addicts, Denis Johnson takes on the Vietnam War in his daring new novel, "Tree of Smoke"
By Laura Miller
Books
Best known for his tales of losers, thieves and addicts, Denis Johnson takes on the Vietnam War in his daring new novel, "Tree of Smoke"
By Laura Miller
Books
AP Photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais<h4 class="home_dig_blog_hed">‘Giving’ and Taking</h4> By Chris Hedges — Bill Clinton has written a new book about charity, a fitting subject for a president who betrayed the poor and led his party into the arms of corporate America.
Greenspan Is Critical Of Bush in Memoir
Former Fed Chairman Has Praise for Clinton By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 15, 2007; Page A01
Alan Greenspan, who served as Federal Reserve chairman for 18 years and was the leading Republican economist for the past three decades, levels unusually harsh criticism at President Bush and the Republican Party in his new book, arguing that Bush abandoned the central conservative principle of fiscal restraint.
While condemning Democrats, too, for rampant federal spending, he offers Bill Clinton an exemption. The former president emerges as the political hero of "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World," Greenspan's 531-page memoir, which is being published Monday.
Greenspan, who had an eight-year alliance with Clinton and Democratic Treasury secretaries in the 1990s, praises Clinton's mind and his tough anti-deficit policies, calling the former president's 1993 economic plan "an act of political courage."
But he expresses deep disappointment with Bush. "My biggest frustration remained the president's unwillingness to wield his veto against out-of-control spending," Greenspan writes. "Not exercising the veto power became a hallmark of the Bush presidency. . . . To my mind, Bush's collaborate-don't-confront approach was a major mistake."
Greenspan accuses the Republicans who presided over the party's majority in the House until last year of being too eager to tolerate excessive federal spending in exchange for political opportunity. The Republicans, he says, deserved to lose control of the Senate and House in last year's elections. "The Republicans in Congress lost their way," Greenspan writes. "They swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither."
He singles out J. Dennis Hastert, the Illinois Republican who was House speaker until January, and Tom DeLay, the Texan who was majority leader until he resigned after being indicted for violating campaign finance laws in his home state.
"House Speaker Hastert and House majority leader Tom DeLay seemed readily inclined to loosen the federal purse strings any time it might help add a few more seats to the Republican majority," he writes.
He adds three pages later: "I don't think the Democrats won. It was the Republicans who lost. The Democrats came to power in the Congress because they were the only party left standing."
Greenspan, 81, indirectly criticizes his friend and colleague from the Ford administration, Vice President Cheney. Former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill has quoted Cheney as once saying, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter."
Greenspan says, " 'Deficits don't matter,' to my chagrin became part of the Republicans' rhetoric."
He argues that "deficits must matter" and that uncontrolled government spending and borrowing can produce high inflation "and economic devastation."
When Bush and Cheney won the 2000 election, Greenspan writes, "I thought we had a golden opportunity to advance the ideals of effective, fiscally conservative government and free markets. . . . I was soon to see my old friends veer off to unexpected directions."
He says, "little value was placed on rigorous economic policy debate or the weighing of long-term consequences." The large, anticipated federal budget surpluses that were the basis for Bush's initial $1.35 trillion tax cut "were gone six to nine months after George W. Bush took office." So Bush's goals "were no longer entirely appropriate. He continued to pursue his presidential campaign promises nonetheless."
Greenspan was intensely criticized for endorsing a large tax cut in a congressional testimony during the first weeks of the Bush administration. He notes that he was recommending any tax cut, even a smaller one proposed by some Democrats. But he acknowledges that those who had warned him about the perception he was backing Bush's plan were right. "The tax-cut testimony proved to be politically explosive," he writes.
Yet, he adds: "While politics had not been my intent, I'd misjudged the emotions of the moment. . . . Yet I'd have given the same testimony if Al Gore had been president."
By the end of last year, Greenspan writes with some bitterness, Washington was "harboring a dysfunctional government. . . . Governance has become dangerously dysfunctional."
However, he calls Clinton a "risk taker" who had shown a "preference for dealing in facts," and presents Clinton and himself almost as soul mates. "Here was a fellow information hound. . . . We both read books and were curious and thoughtful about the world. . . . I never ceased to be surprised by his fascination with economic detail: the effect of Canadian lumber on housing prices and inflation. . . . He had an eye for the big picture too."
During Clinton's first weeks as president, Greenspan went to the Oval Office and explained the danger of not confronting the federal deficit. Unless the deficits were cut, there could be "a financial crisis," Greenspan told the president. "The hard truth was that Reagan had borrowed from Clinton, and Clinton was having to pay it back. I was impressed that he did not seem to be trying to fudge reality to the extent politicians ordinarily do. He was forcing himself to live in the real world."
Dealing with a budget surplus in his second term, Clinton proposed devoting the extra money to "save Social Security first." Greenspan writes, "I played no role in finding the answer, but I had to admire the one Clinton and his policymakers came up with."
Greenspan interviewed Clinton for the book and clearly admires him. "President Clinton's old-fashioned attitude toward debt might have had a more lasting effect on the nation's priorities. Instead, his influence was diluted by the uproar about Monica Lewinsky." When he first heard and read details of the Clinton-Lewinsky encounters, Greenspan writes, "I was incredulous. 'There is no way these stories could be correct,' I told my friends. 'No way.' " Later, when it was verified, Greenspan says, "I wondered how the president could take such a risk. It seemed so alien to the Bill Clinton I knew, and made me feel disappointed and sad."
Known for his restrained if not incomprehensible public statements over the past several decades, Greenspan's direct criticism of Bush and his economic policies comes as the economy is emerging as an issue in the 2008 presidential race. And the man Greenspan praises so highly for fiscal probity is married to the current front-runner for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.
The politically charged observations are scattered through the first half of the book, in which Greenspan offers a standard memoir covering his birth in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City in 1926 through his years as Fed chairman, from when he was appointed in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan to his retirement in 2006. His theme is the unequaled power of free-market capitalism; Greenspan calls himself a "libertarian Republican."
The second half offers a graduate education in global economics that is at times lucid and at times dense. Greenspan occasionally slips into his notoriously complicated Fedspeak, touring the world with detailed analysis of the global economy and the prospects in Japan, Britain, France, China, Russia, India and just about everywhere else.
He clearly considers China the big economic question of the future. "I have no doubt that the Communist Party of China can maintain an authoritarian, quasi-capitalist, relatively prosperous regime for a time. But without the political safety valve of the democratic process, I doubt the long-term success of such a regime," he writes.
"The Age of Turbulence" is likely to be mined word by word on Wall Street, where the Masters of the Universe will seek clues to how to make billions. Greenspan dives deep into his economic data, his experiences, his philosophy and meetings with world political and economic leaders.
He explains how an advanced economy hinges on property rights, the rule of law, a culture of trust, contracts, debt, reputation, self-interest and "creative destruction" -- the scrapping of old technologies and processes.
He argues, for example, that the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States -- from the steel, automobile and textile industries to computers and telecommunications -- "is a plus, not a minus, to the American standard of living." He maintains that immigration reform, "by opening up the United States to the world's very large and growing pool of skilled workers," will help reduce the inequality of incomes.
Without elaborating, he writes, "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."
Looking ahead to 2030, he predicts that the U.S. gross domestic product will be 75 percent larger than it is now. His most dire forecast is that if the Federal Reserve is prevented from constraining inflation, the 10-year Treasury note would be "flirting with a double-digit yield sometime before 2030, compared with under 5 percent in 2006."
Greenspan has nothing but praise for hedge funds, which he describes as "a vibrant trillion-dollar industry dominated by U.S. firms." He claims that hedge funds help eliminate inefficiency in the markets. "They are essentially free of government regulation, and I hope they will remain so." He scoffs at proposals to regulate them, declaring, "Why do we wish to inhibit the pollinating bees of Wall Street?"
For all his wonkish ways, Greenspan writes with delight about his marriage to journalist Andrea Mitchell and their travels, friends and mutual love of classical music. He knows how to enjoy a good Vivaldi cello concerto in Venice.
Though cautious about the coming decades, Greenspan ultimately shows a flash of hope at the end of his memoir. "Adaptation is in our nature," he writes, "a fact that leads me to be deeply optimistic about our future."
Former Fed Chairman Has Praise for Clinton By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 15, 2007; Page A01
Alan Greenspan, who served as Federal Reserve chairman for 18 years and was the leading Republican economist for the past three decades, levels unusually harsh criticism at President Bush and the Republican Party in his new book, arguing that Bush abandoned the central conservative principle of fiscal restraint.
While condemning Democrats, too, for rampant federal spending, he offers Bill Clinton an exemption. The former president emerges as the political hero of "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World," Greenspan's 531-page memoir, which is being published Monday.
Greenspan, who had an eight-year alliance with Clinton and Democratic Treasury secretaries in the 1990s, praises Clinton's mind and his tough anti-deficit policies, calling the former president's 1993 economic plan "an act of political courage."
But he expresses deep disappointment with Bush. "My biggest frustration remained the president's unwillingness to wield his veto against out-of-control spending," Greenspan writes. "Not exercising the veto power became a hallmark of the Bush presidency. . . . To my mind, Bush's collaborate-don't-confront approach was a major mistake."
Greenspan accuses the Republicans who presided over the party's majority in the House until last year of being too eager to tolerate excessive federal spending in exchange for political opportunity. The Republicans, he says, deserved to lose control of the Senate and House in last year's elections. "The Republicans in Congress lost their way," Greenspan writes. "They swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither."
He singles out J. Dennis Hastert, the Illinois Republican who was House speaker until January, and Tom DeLay, the Texan who was majority leader until he resigned after being indicted for violating campaign finance laws in his home state.
"House Speaker Hastert and House majority leader Tom DeLay seemed readily inclined to loosen the federal purse strings any time it might help add a few more seats to the Republican majority," he writes.
He adds three pages later: "I don't think the Democrats won. It was the Republicans who lost. The Democrats came to power in the Congress because they were the only party left standing."
Greenspan, 81, indirectly criticizes his friend and colleague from the Ford administration, Vice President Cheney. Former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill has quoted Cheney as once saying, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter."
Greenspan says, " 'Deficits don't matter,' to my chagrin became part of the Republicans' rhetoric."
He argues that "deficits must matter" and that uncontrolled government spending and borrowing can produce high inflation "and economic devastation."
When Bush and Cheney won the 2000 election, Greenspan writes, "I thought we had a golden opportunity to advance the ideals of effective, fiscally conservative government and free markets. . . . I was soon to see my old friends veer off to unexpected directions."
He says, "little value was placed on rigorous economic policy debate or the weighing of long-term consequences." The large, anticipated federal budget surpluses that were the basis for Bush's initial $1.35 trillion tax cut "were gone six to nine months after George W. Bush took office." So Bush's goals "were no longer entirely appropriate. He continued to pursue his presidential campaign promises nonetheless."
Greenspan was intensely criticized for endorsing a large tax cut in a congressional testimony during the first weeks of the Bush administration. He notes that he was recommending any tax cut, even a smaller one proposed by some Democrats. But he acknowledges that those who had warned him about the perception he was backing Bush's plan were right. "The tax-cut testimony proved to be politically explosive," he writes.
Yet, he adds: "While politics had not been my intent, I'd misjudged the emotions of the moment. . . . Yet I'd have given the same testimony if Al Gore had been president."
By the end of last year, Greenspan writes with some bitterness, Washington was "harboring a dysfunctional government. . . . Governance has become dangerously dysfunctional."
However, he calls Clinton a "risk taker" who had shown a "preference for dealing in facts," and presents Clinton and himself almost as soul mates. "Here was a fellow information hound. . . . We both read books and were curious and thoughtful about the world. . . . I never ceased to be surprised by his fascination with economic detail: the effect of Canadian lumber on housing prices and inflation. . . . He had an eye for the big picture too."
During Clinton's first weeks as president, Greenspan went to the Oval Office and explained the danger of not confronting the federal deficit. Unless the deficits were cut, there could be "a financial crisis," Greenspan told the president. "The hard truth was that Reagan had borrowed from Clinton, and Clinton was having to pay it back. I was impressed that he did not seem to be trying to fudge reality to the extent politicians ordinarily do. He was forcing himself to live in the real world."
Dealing with a budget surplus in his second term, Clinton proposed devoting the extra money to "save Social Security first." Greenspan writes, "I played no role in finding the answer, but I had to admire the one Clinton and his policymakers came up with."
Greenspan interviewed Clinton for the book and clearly admires him. "President Clinton's old-fashioned attitude toward debt might have had a more lasting effect on the nation's priorities. Instead, his influence was diluted by the uproar about Monica Lewinsky." When he first heard and read details of the Clinton-Lewinsky encounters, Greenspan writes, "I was incredulous. 'There is no way these stories could be correct,' I told my friends. 'No way.' " Later, when it was verified, Greenspan says, "I wondered how the president could take such a risk. It seemed so alien to the Bill Clinton I knew, and made me feel disappointed and sad."
Known for his restrained if not incomprehensible public statements over the past several decades, Greenspan's direct criticism of Bush and his economic policies comes as the economy is emerging as an issue in the 2008 presidential race. And the man Greenspan praises so highly for fiscal probity is married to the current front-runner for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.
The politically charged observations are scattered through the first half of the book, in which Greenspan offers a standard memoir covering his birth in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City in 1926 through his years as Fed chairman, from when he was appointed in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan to his retirement in 2006. His theme is the unequaled power of free-market capitalism; Greenspan calls himself a "libertarian Republican."
The second half offers a graduate education in global economics that is at times lucid and at times dense. Greenspan occasionally slips into his notoriously complicated Fedspeak, touring the world with detailed analysis of the global economy and the prospects in Japan, Britain, France, China, Russia, India and just about everywhere else.
He clearly considers China the big economic question of the future. "I have no doubt that the Communist Party of China can maintain an authoritarian, quasi-capitalist, relatively prosperous regime for a time. But without the political safety valve of the democratic process, I doubt the long-term success of such a regime," he writes.
"The Age of Turbulence" is likely to be mined word by word on Wall Street, where the Masters of the Universe will seek clues to how to make billions. Greenspan dives deep into his economic data, his experiences, his philosophy and meetings with world political and economic leaders.
He explains how an advanced economy hinges on property rights, the rule of law, a culture of trust, contracts, debt, reputation, self-interest and "creative destruction" -- the scrapping of old technologies and processes.
He argues, for example, that the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States -- from the steel, automobile and textile industries to computers and telecommunications -- "is a plus, not a minus, to the American standard of living." He maintains that immigration reform, "by opening up the United States to the world's very large and growing pool of skilled workers," will help reduce the inequality of incomes.
Without elaborating, he writes, "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."
Looking ahead to 2030, he predicts that the U.S. gross domestic product will be 75 percent larger than it is now. His most dire forecast is that if the Federal Reserve is prevented from constraining inflation, the 10-year Treasury note would be "flirting with a double-digit yield sometime before 2030, compared with under 5 percent in 2006."
Greenspan has nothing but praise for hedge funds, which he describes as "a vibrant trillion-dollar industry dominated by U.S. firms." He claims that hedge funds help eliminate inefficiency in the markets. "They are essentially free of government regulation, and I hope they will remain so." He scoffs at proposals to regulate them, declaring, "Why do we wish to inhibit the pollinating bees of Wall Street?"
For all his wonkish ways, Greenspan writes with delight about his marriage to journalist Andrea Mitchell and their travels, friends and mutual love of classical music. He knows how to enjoy a good Vivaldi cello concerto in Venice.
Though cautious about the coming decades, Greenspan ultimately shows a flash of hope at the end of his memoir. "Adaptation is in our nature," he writes, "a fact that leads me to be deeply optimistic about our future."
'The Nine' by Jeffrey Toobin
By David J. Garrow
An opinion-based look at the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eBY...Io30G2B0Iwlq0Ej
By David J. Garrow
An opinion-based look at the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eBY...Io30G2B0Iwlq0Ej
Bashing Bush with Greenspan
By Jonah Goldberg
The pedantic economist speaks plainly about his support for the Iraq war -- and
liberals misquote him.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eBY...Io30G2B0Iwlv0Eo
By Jonah Goldberg
The pedantic economist speaks plainly about his support for the Iraq war -- and
liberals misquote him.
http://email.latimes.com/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eBY...Io30G2B0Iwlv0Eo
Greenspan Delivers Mash Note to Billby Allan H. RyskindAlan Greenspan, the guru of all things economic, says he’s a libertarian, small-government Republican. But his new book, The Age of Turbulence, while jammed with interesting tidbits, sends out a far different political message.
'The Evangelical President': A Reviewby Greg CorombosWashington Examiner White House Correspondent Bill Sammon's intriguing book documenting the true faith of President George Bush
Hocus POTUS: A Fictional Account of the Search for WMDs in IraqOnnesha Roychoudhuri, AlterNet
War on Iraq: The new novel from a veteran journalist and former Marine, captures a truth about Iraq that you won't get from reading the daily news. Here's an interview with him and an excerpt.
Iraq Sets the Stage for Possible U.S. War with IranPeter Galbraith, The New York Review of Books and TomDispatch
War on Iraq: The contest of control over Iraq between the U.S. and Iran is the largest potential crucible of disaster for the planet between now and January 2009.
Why Does Norman Podhoretz Hate America?
by Michael Scheuer
World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism
Norman Podhoretz
Doubleday, 2007
240 pp.
Norman Podhoretz's new book, World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, is a hate-filled, anti-American book of the first order. Podhoretz hates every American who does not support the neoconservatives' views, the foreign policy they have devised, and the military and national security disasters to which they are leading America. Patrick Buchanan, Andrew J. Bacevich, Sir John Keegan, Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, and many others are all targets of Podhoretz. These men are variously characterized as anti-Semites, isolationists, recanters from the true creed, or simply as small men who fear the neoconservative utopia is about to arrive, discredit their views, and cost them their jobs or prestige. Podhoretz is particularly vicious toward Buchanan because he knows that Buchanan sees through the neoconservative fantasy with the most unrelenting acuity. Buchanan's frank voice and non-interventionism – not isolationism – are genuinely American characteristics, so Podhoretz must go all out to discredit Buchanan as an anti-Semite, lest Americans listen to Buchanan's advice not to get their children killed fighting other peoples' wars, be they wars for Israelis or Muslims or anyone else.
And who are the heroes of the story? Why, Podhoretz and the familiar roster of the only real Americans and Israel-firsters, of course: Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Charles Krauthammer, Douglas Feith, Victor Davis Hanson, John R. Bolton, Joseph Lieberman, Richard Perle, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Steve Emerson, Daniel Pipes, Michael Rubin, Michael Ledeen, Kenneth Adelman, Frank Gaffney, and a few others who have battled so long and hard to ensure that America fights an endless war against Muslims in Israel's defense. Podhoretz and his chums are the men responsible for the lethal mess America now faces in the Muslim world, and they have also done more than any other group – Hamas and Hezbollah included – to undermine Israel's long-term security. In short, the influence and arrogance of this gang has been an unmitigated and accelerating disaster for the two nations they claim to love most. I will leave it up to those who read the book to decide which country they obviously love best, but I bet you can guess before turning a page.
Podhoretz is big on pinning the Islamofascist label on our Islamist enemies. The phrase has nothing to do with reality, of course, as the Islamists are far from fascists, though they clearly are the most dangerous threat America now confronts. But Podhoretz does not care about understanding the enemy's real motivation and attributes in order to annihilate him as quickly as possible. By using the term Islamofascist he seeks only to block any debate on the neoconservative agenda by ensuring that its critics are identified as pro-fascist, therefore anti-American, therefore pro-Nazi, and therefore anti-Semitic. Other notable men have described this tactic as the Big Lie, and it is a neocon specialty and trademark.
And if this Big Lie is not enough for you, try another of Podhoretz's on for size. This one is so ahistorical and deliberately misleading that it is hard to even begin to comment on its mendacity. Podhoretz focuses on one of the terrorist Yasser Arafat's rants damning the United States as "the murderers of humanity," considering it divine revelation that Arafat did not mention Israel in the single paragraph quoted in the book. "The absence of even a word here about Israel," lectures Podhoretz to Americans he obviously sees as mindless cattle who will believe any lie thrown their way, "showed that if the Jewish state had never come into existence, the United States would still have stood as the embodiment of everything that most of these Arabs considered evil. Indeed, the hatred of Israel was in large part a surrogate for anti-Americanism, rather than the reverse." (91) How many major American military conflicts with Arabs can Podhoretz name that occurred prior to Israel's establishment?
Clearly, Podhoretz and his heroic band want the Islamist enemy to stay in the field so that the war he and the Israel-firsters wanted and now have will go on and on and on. Like the sickest and most addled of bloodletting Wilsonian interventionists, Podhoretz quotes the puerile position of George W. Bush that U.S. security depends on building mirror images of America abroad: "All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know that the United States will not ignore your oppression or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for liberty, we will stand with you." (182) And what is the endgame of standing with those who stand for liberty? Quoting President Bush again, Podhoretz says U.S. military forces must "drain the swamps" of the Islamofascist world and replace incumbent regimes with elected governments that will "fulfill the hopes 'of the Islamic nations [who] want and deserve the same freedoms and opportunities as people in every nation.'" (135) This effort, Podhoretz adds, is "marked by more than a touch of nobility." (212)
In Podhoretz's hateful prose we find the true crusader spirit bound up with the con-man's willingness to distort history for political advantage. Again using the rhetoric of George W. Bush, Podhoretz argues "that history had called America to action and that it was both 'our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom's fight.'" (215) Taken to its logical bottom line, this assertion means that American parents should be delighted to nobly spend the lives of their children so Iraqis and Afghans can vote and have parliaments. Implicit in this absurd argument is that somehow U.S. national security requires that other people – not all others, of course, only Muslims – vote, behave democratically, and become secular. This is truly analysis by assertion. Can anyone really imagine that American society is automatically safer because Mrs. Mohammed votes and wears mascara? Or, alternatively, that U.S. national security is threatened if the Pashtun tribal leaders of southeastern Afghanistan do not appoint precinct captains to get out the vote in parliamentary elections? Clearly, Podhoretz is running a con here, and the price will be paid not in cash but in the blood of American kids. Indeed, Podhoretz can only lecture the grieving parents of the young Americans who have already died in Iraq : "By any historical standard, our total losses were still, and would remain, amazingly low." (110)
History also gets in the way of Podhoretz's worldview, so we get another con. We are not, he argues, trying to impose democracy and neuter the religion of a 14-century-old Islamic civilization and 1.4 billion Muslims, but merely trying to repair a political order that was inappropriately arranged by the Western powers a hundred years ago. "But here again," Podhoretz argues,
"[T]he so-called realist [view of U.S. foreign policy that opposed the Iraq war] ignored the reality, which was that the Middle East of today was not thousands of years old, and was not created in the seventh century by Allah or the Prophet Mohammed. … Instead, the states in question had all been conjured into existence less than one hundred years ago out of the ruins of the defeated Ottoman Empire in World War I. Their boundaries had been drawn by the victorious British and French with a stroke of an often arbitrary pen, and their hapless peoples were handed over in due course to one tyrant after another." (144-145)
This is another absurd argument that again reduces to nonsense, to wit: The French and British tried to dictate the organization and political system of an ancient Islamic civilization and cocked it up, but we are much smarter – and implicitly purer – than they were, so we can build the perfect Muslim world. This smug attitude does capture in a nutshell, however, a good part of the basic un-Americanism of the neoconservatives; they are a foreign and, I think, malign influence in our body politic. America is a republic founded on the principles and insights derived from what Gertrude Himmelfarb has described in her brilliant work The Roads to Modernity as the American Enlightenment, fundamental to which is a profound belief in the utter imperfectability of man. Podhoretz and his all-knowing and stern-minded gang of neoconservative warmongers, on the other hand, are the heirs of the French Enlightenment's faith in man's perfectibility, the principles of which have brought the world the bloody horrors and mass murder conducted by the French revolutionaries, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and any number of others who attempted to create a perfect society. There is no sane reason to believe that neoconservative-led efforts to "perfect" Muslim society would yield less bloodshed, much less to imagine that it would increase security for the United States.
The other part of the fundamental un-Americanism of Podhoretz and his brothers lies in their use of the ideas and heroes of American history only if they further their "enlightened" foreign policy; all others they ignore or misrepresent. Picking and choosing from the words of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John Kennedy, Podhoretz tries to infer that fighting a "world war" against the Islamofascists is identical to fighting world wars against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and then the Soviet Union. This sounds good if you say it fast, but the selective use of our presidents' words by Podhoretz is just another of his inaccurate assertions.
Germany, Japan, and the USSR were modern industrial nation-states that posed direct, tangible, and sustainable military threats to the survival of the United States. The Islamofascist enemy is a specious conjuring of the neoconservatives that does not exist. The Islamist threat personified and led by Osama bin Laden is a direct, tangible, and enduring national-security threat to the United States, but it does not now amount to a world war, and it will not unless the neoconservatives continue to hold sway. We are fighting a war with the Islamists that is ours to lose, and at the moment we are successfully losing it because President Bush and 17 of the 19 individuals in the current crop of presidential candidates buy Podhoretz's lethal lie that the Islamists are "the latest mutation of the totalitarian threat to our civilization" and are, "like the Nazis and the Communists before them … dedicated to the destruction of the freedoms we cherish and for which Americans stand." (14-15) Actually, America's war with the bin Laden-led Islamists is fueled by the impact of U.S. and Western interventionist foreign policies in the Islamic world, not, as Podhoretz claims, by "our virtues as a free and prosperous country." (102) To the extent that America combines reduced interventionism with military action against genuine threats, we will defeat the Islamists. The increased interventionism of Podhoretz and his coterie will lead to endless war abroad and eventually between Muslim Americans and their countrymen at home – and America's defeat.
Podhoretz's final con comes at the expense of the late George Kennan. Podhoretz takes some of Kennan's words and twists them in a way that makes him seem like a supporter of the neoconservatives' endless overseas interventionism and war-for-perfection agenda. At the end of his book, Podhoretz quotes Kennan: "To avoid destruction the United States need only to measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation." (215) With this passage he leaves the reader to believe that Kennan would have supported the neoconservative crusade "to beat back the 'implacable challenge' of Islamofascism as the 'greatest generation' of World War II in taking on the Nazis and their fascist allies, and as its children and grandchildren ultimately managed to do in confronting the Soviet Union and its Communist empire in World War III." (217)
This is an intolerable and deliberately misleading attempt to make Kennan appear to be an arch-interventionist. Toward the end of his long life, Kennan wrote something of a valedictory essay for his fellow citizens in Foreign Affairs (March/April 1995), "On American Principles." In this essay Kennan praised John Quincy Adams's noninterventionist foreign policy as a principle appropriate to America, and, more important, described how it was admirably applicable to the chaos and confusion of the post-Cold War world. The dangers inherent in U.S. interventionism after the Cold War, Kennan wrote, are roughly similar to those
"that clearly underlay John Quincy Adams' response to similar problems so many years ago – his recognition that it is very difficult for one country to help another by intervening directly in its domestic affairs or in its conflicts with its neighbors. It is particularly difficult to do this without creating new and unwelcome embarrassments and burdens for the country endeavoring to help. The best way for a larger country to help smaller ones is surely by the power of example. Adams made this clear in the address cited above. One will recall his urging that the best response we could give to those appealing to us for support would be to give them what he called 'the benign sympathy of our example.' To go further, he warned, and try to give direct assistance would be to involve ourselves beyond the power of extrication 'in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assumed the colors and usurped the standards of freedom.' Who, today, looking at our involvements of recent years, could maintain that the fears these words expressed were any less applicable in our time than in his?"
Does this sound like the warmongering of the neoconservative interventionists? I think not. It rather sounds like the words of a man who knows his country's history and traditions and its peoples' character far better than the obtuse Podhoretz and crew. At one point in his book Podhoretz quotes W.H. Auden's description of the 1930s as "a low and dishonest decade." (188) There is no better overall description for Norman Podhoretz's World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism than "low and dishonest."
by Michael Scheuer
World War IV: The Long Struggle Against IslamofascismNorman Podhoretz
Doubleday, 2007
240 pp.
Norman Podhoretz's new book, World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, is a hate-filled, anti-American book of the first order. Podhoretz hates every American who does not support the neoconservatives' views, the foreign policy they have devised, and the military and national security disasters to which they are leading America. Patrick Buchanan, Andrew J. Bacevich, Sir John Keegan, Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, and many others are all targets of Podhoretz. These men are variously characterized as anti-Semites, isolationists, recanters from the true creed, or simply as small men who fear the neoconservative utopia is about to arrive, discredit their views, and cost them their jobs or prestige. Podhoretz is particularly vicious toward Buchanan because he knows that Buchanan sees through the neoconservative fantasy with the most unrelenting acuity. Buchanan's frank voice and non-interventionism – not isolationism – are genuinely American characteristics, so Podhoretz must go all out to discredit Buchanan as an anti-Semite, lest Americans listen to Buchanan's advice not to get their children killed fighting other peoples' wars, be they wars for Israelis or Muslims or anyone else.
And who are the heroes of the story? Why, Podhoretz and the familiar roster of the only real Americans and Israel-firsters, of course: Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Charles Krauthammer, Douglas Feith, Victor Davis Hanson, John R. Bolton, Joseph Lieberman, Richard Perle, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Steve Emerson, Daniel Pipes, Michael Rubin, Michael Ledeen, Kenneth Adelman, Frank Gaffney, and a few others who have battled so long and hard to ensure that America fights an endless war against Muslims in Israel's defense. Podhoretz and his chums are the men responsible for the lethal mess America now faces in the Muslim world, and they have also done more than any other group – Hamas and Hezbollah included – to undermine Israel's long-term security. In short, the influence and arrogance of this gang has been an unmitigated and accelerating disaster for the two nations they claim to love most. I will leave it up to those who read the book to decide which country they obviously love best, but I bet you can guess before turning a page.Podhoretz is big on pinning the Islamofascist label on our Islamist enemies. The phrase has nothing to do with reality, of course, as the Islamists are far from fascists, though they clearly are the most dangerous threat America now confronts. But Podhoretz does not care about understanding the enemy's real motivation and attributes in order to annihilate him as quickly as possible. By using the term Islamofascist he seeks only to block any debate on the neoconservative agenda by ensuring that its critics are identified as pro-fascist, therefore anti-American, therefore pro-Nazi, and therefore anti-Semitic. Other notable men have described this tactic as the Big Lie, and it is a neocon specialty and trademark.
And if this Big Lie is not enough for you, try another of Podhoretz's on for size. This one is so ahistorical and deliberately misleading that it is hard to even begin to comment on its mendacity. Podhoretz focuses on one of the terrorist Yasser Arafat's rants damning the United States as "the murderers of humanity," considering it divine revelation that Arafat did not mention Israel in the single paragraph quoted in the book. "The absence of even a word here about Israel," lectures Podhoretz to Americans he obviously sees as mindless cattle who will believe any lie thrown their way, "showed that if the Jewish state had never come into existence, the United States would still have stood as the embodiment of everything that most of these Arabs considered evil. Indeed, the hatred of Israel was in large part a surrogate for anti-Americanism, rather than the reverse." (91) How many major American military conflicts with Arabs can Podhoretz name that occurred prior to Israel's establishment?
Clearly, Podhoretz and his heroic band want the Islamist enemy to stay in the field so that the war he and the Israel-firsters wanted and now have will go on and on and on. Like the sickest and most addled of bloodletting Wilsonian interventionists, Podhoretz quotes the puerile position of George W. Bush that U.S. security depends on building mirror images of America abroad: "All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know that the United States will not ignore your oppression or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for liberty, we will stand with you." (182) And what is the endgame of standing with those who stand for liberty? Quoting President Bush again, Podhoretz says U.S. military forces must "drain the swamps" of the Islamofascist world and replace incumbent regimes with elected governments that will "fulfill the hopes 'of the Islamic nations [who] want and deserve the same freedoms and opportunities as people in every nation.'" (135) This effort, Podhoretz adds, is "marked by more than a touch of nobility." (212)
In Podhoretz's hateful prose we find the true crusader spirit bound up with the con-man's willingness to distort history for political advantage. Again using the rhetoric of George W. Bush, Podhoretz argues "that history had called America to action and that it was both 'our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom's fight.'" (215) Taken to its logical bottom line, this assertion means that American parents should be delighted to nobly spend the lives of their children so Iraqis and Afghans can vote and have parliaments. Implicit in this absurd argument is that somehow U.S. national security requires that other people – not all others, of course, only Muslims – vote, behave democratically, and become secular. This is truly analysis by assertion. Can anyone really imagine that American society is automatically safer because Mrs. Mohammed votes and wears mascara? Or, alternatively, that U.S. national security is threatened if the Pashtun tribal leaders of southeastern Afghanistan do not appoint precinct captains to get out the vote in parliamentary elections? Clearly, Podhoretz is running a con here, and the price will be paid not in cash but in the blood of American kids. Indeed, Podhoretz can only lecture the grieving parents of the young Americans who have already died in Iraq : "By any historical standard, our total losses were still, and would remain, amazingly low." (110)
History also gets in the way of Podhoretz's worldview, so we get another con. We are not, he argues, trying to impose democracy and neuter the religion of a 14-century-old Islamic civilization and 1.4 billion Muslims, but merely trying to repair a political order that was inappropriately arranged by the Western powers a hundred years ago. "But here again," Podhoretz argues,
"[T]he so-called realist [view of U.S. foreign policy that opposed the Iraq war] ignored the reality, which was that the Middle East of today was not thousands of years old, and was not created in the seventh century by Allah or the Prophet Mohammed. … Instead, the states in question had all been conjured into existence less than one hundred years ago out of the ruins of the defeated Ottoman Empire in World War I. Their boundaries had been drawn by the victorious British and French with a stroke of an often arbitrary pen, and their hapless peoples were handed over in due course to one tyrant after another." (144-145)
This is another absurd argument that again reduces to nonsense, to wit: The French and British tried to dictate the organization and political system of an ancient Islamic civilization and cocked it up, but we are much smarter – and implicitly purer – than they were, so we can build the perfect Muslim world. This smug attitude does capture in a nutshell, however, a good part of the basic un-Americanism of the neoconservatives; they are a foreign and, I think, malign influence in our body politic. America is a republic founded on the principles and insights derived from what Gertrude Himmelfarb has described in her brilliant work The Roads to Modernity as the American Enlightenment, fundamental to which is a profound belief in the utter imperfectability of man. Podhoretz and his all-knowing and stern-minded gang of neoconservative warmongers, on the other hand, are the heirs of the French Enlightenment's faith in man's perfectibility, the principles of which have brought the world the bloody horrors and mass murder conducted by the French revolutionaries, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and any number of others who attempted to create a perfect society. There is no sane reason to believe that neoconservative-led efforts to "perfect" Muslim society would yield less bloodshed, much less to imagine that it would increase security for the United States.
The other part of the fundamental un-Americanism of Podhoretz and his brothers lies in their use of the ideas and heroes of American history only if they further their "enlightened" foreign policy; all others they ignore or misrepresent. Picking and choosing from the words of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John Kennedy, Podhoretz tries to infer that fighting a "world war" against the Islamofascists is identical to fighting world wars against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and then the Soviet Union. This sounds good if you say it fast, but the selective use of our presidents' words by Podhoretz is just another of his inaccurate assertions.
Germany, Japan, and the USSR were modern industrial nation-states that posed direct, tangible, and sustainable military threats to the survival of the United States. The Islamofascist enemy is a specious conjuring of the neoconservatives that does not exist. The Islamist threat personified and led by Osama bin Laden is a direct, tangible, and enduring national-security threat to the United States, but it does not now amount to a world war, and it will not unless the neoconservatives continue to hold sway. We are fighting a war with the Islamists that is ours to lose, and at the moment we are successfully losing it because President Bush and 17 of the 19 individuals in the current crop of presidential candidates buy Podhoretz's lethal lie that the Islamists are "the latest mutation of the totalitarian threat to our civilization" and are, "like the Nazis and the Communists before them … dedicated to the destruction of the freedoms we cherish and for which Americans stand." (14-15) Actually, America's war with the bin Laden-led Islamists is fueled by the impact of U.S. and Western interventionist foreign policies in the Islamic world, not, as Podhoretz claims, by "our virtues as a free and prosperous country." (102) To the extent that America combines reduced interventionism with military action against genuine threats, we will defeat the Islamists. The increased interventionism of Podhoretz and his coterie will lead to endless war abroad and eventually between Muslim Americans and their countrymen at home – and America's defeat.
Podhoretz's final con comes at the expense of the late George Kennan. Podhoretz takes some of Kennan's words and twists them in a way that makes him seem like a supporter of the neoconservatives' endless overseas interventionism and war-for-perfection agenda. At the end of his book, Podhoretz quotes Kennan: "To avoid destruction the United States need only to measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation." (215) With this passage he leaves the reader to believe that Kennan would have supported the neoconservative crusade "to beat back the 'implacable challenge' of Islamofascism as the 'greatest generation' of World War II in taking on the Nazis and their fascist allies, and as its children and grandchildren ultimately managed to do in confronting the Soviet Union and its Communist empire in World War III." (217)
This is an intolerable and deliberately misleading attempt to make Kennan appear to be an arch-interventionist. Toward the end of his long life, Kennan wrote something of a valedictory essay for his fellow citizens in Foreign Affairs (March/April 1995), "On American Principles." In this essay Kennan praised John Quincy Adams's noninterventionist foreign policy as a principle appropriate to America, and, more important, described how it was admirably applicable to the chaos and confusion of the post-Cold War world. The dangers inherent in U.S. interventionism after the Cold War, Kennan wrote, are roughly similar to those
"that clearly underlay John Quincy Adams' response to similar problems so many years ago – his recognition that it is very difficult for one country to help another by intervening directly in its domestic affairs or in its conflicts with its neighbors. It is particularly difficult to do this without creating new and unwelcome embarrassments and burdens for the country endeavoring to help. The best way for a larger country to help smaller ones is surely by the power of example. Adams made this clear in the address cited above. One will recall his urging that the best response we could give to those appealing to us for support would be to give them what he called 'the benign sympathy of our example.' To go further, he warned, and try to give direct assistance would be to involve ourselves beyond the power of extrication 'in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assumed the colors and usurped the standards of freedom.' Who, today, looking at our involvements of recent years, could maintain that the fears these words expressed were any less applicable in our time than in his?"
Does this sound like the warmongering of the neoconservative interventionists? I think not. It rather sounds like the words of a man who knows his country's history and traditions and its peoples' character far better than the obtuse Podhoretz and crew. At one point in his book Podhoretz quotes W.H. Auden's description of the 1930s as "a low and dishonest decade." (188) There is no better overall description for Norman Podhoretz's World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism than "low and dishonest."
September 26, 2007 Greenspan's Oil Claim in Context
by Dilip Hiro and Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch Before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, discussion of Iraqi oil was largely taboo in the American mainstream, while the "No Blood for Oil" signs that dotted antiwar demonstrations were generally derisively dismissed as too simpleminded for serious debate. American officials rarely even mentioned the word "oil" in the same sentence with "Iraq." When President Bush referred to Iraqi oil, he spoke only of preserving that country's "patrimony" for its people, a sentiment he and Great Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair emphasized in a statement they issued that lacked either the words "oil" or "energy" just as Baghdad fell: "We reaffirm our commitment to protect Iraq's natural resources, as the patrimony of the people of Iraq, which should be used only for their benefit."
That May, not long after the president declared "major combat" at an end in Iraq, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz did point out the obvious – that Iraq was a country that "floats on a sea of oil." He also told a congressional panel: "The oil revenue of that country could bring between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the course of the next two or three years. We're dealing with a country that could really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."
But his relatively obscure comments, as well as his oil-based miscalculations, passed largely unnoticed in the mainstream. Had Iraq then produced a significant percentage of the globe's toys rather than possessing the planet's third largest oil reserves, the prewar media would undoubtedly have been chock-a-block full of worried discussions about our children and the coming video drought; on the other hand, that there might have been any significant connections between the motivations of top administration officials planning an invasion and global oil flows or the garrisoning of the oil heartlands of the planet was clearly a laughable thought. It didn't matter that our vice president, when the CEO of a major energy firm, had worried quite publicly about global energy supplies, that our president had failed in the oil business, and that our national security adviser had once had a Chevron double-hulled oil tanker, the Condoleezza Rice, named in her honor. Now, it turns out that, among the simpleminded was former Federal Reserve head Alan Greenspan.
Middle Eastern expert Dilip Hiro, whose newest book Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources, focuses on oil and blood as well as recent the geopolitics of Iraqi oil (pp. 137-148), considers Greenspan's recent oil statement in the context of the historical record. Tom
How the Bush Administration's Iraqi Oil Grab Went Awry
by Dilip Hiro
Here is the sentence in The Age of Turbulence, the 531-page memoir of former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan, that caused so much turbulence in Washington last week: "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." Honest and accurate, it had the resonance of the Bill Clinton's election campaign mantra, "It's the economy, stupid." But, finding himself the target of a White House attack – an administration spokesman labeled his comment, "Georgetown cocktail party analysis" – Greenspan backtracked under cover of verbose elaboration. None of this, however, made an iota of difference to the facts on the ground.
Here is a prosecutor's brief for the position that "the Iraq War is largely about oil":
The primary evidence indicating that the Bush administration coveted Iraqi oil from the start comes from two diverse but impeccably reliable sources: Paul O'Neill, the Treasury Secretary (2001-2003) under President George W. Bush; and Falah Al Jibury, a well-connected Iraqi-American oil consultant, who had acted as President Ronald Reagan's "back channel" to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein during the Iraq-Iran War of 1980-88. The secondary evidence is from the material that can be found in such publications as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
According to O'Neill's memoirs, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, written by journalist Ron Suskind and published in 2004, the top item on the agenda of the National Security Council's first meeting after Bush entered the Oval Office was Iraq. That was Jan. 30, 2001, more than seven months before the 9/11 attacks. The next National Security Council (NSC) meeting on Feb. 1 was devoted exclusively to Iraq.
Advocating "going after Saddam" during the Jan. 30 meeting, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, according to O'Neill, "Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with a regime that's aligned with U.S. interests. It would change everything in the region and beyond. It would demonstrate what U.S. policy is all about." He then discussed post-Saddam Iraq – the Kurds in the north, the oil fields, and the reconstruction of the country's economy. (Suskind, p. 85)
Among the relevant documents later sent to NSC members, including O'Neill, was one prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). It had already mapped Iraq's oil fields and exploration areas, and listed American corporations likely to be interested in participating in Iraq's petroleum industry.
Another DIA document in the package, entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," listed companies from 30 countries – France, Germany, Russia, and Britain, among others – their specialties and bidding histories. The attached maps pinpointed "super-giant oil field," "other oil field," and "earmarked for production sharing," and divided the basically undeveloped but oil-rich southwest of Iraq into nine blocks, indicating promising areas for future exploration. (Suskind, p. 96)
According to high-flying oil insider Falah Al Jibury, the Bush administration began making plans for Iraq's oil industry "within weeks" of Bush taking office in January 2001. In an interview with the BBC's Newsnight program, which aired on March 17, 2005, he referred to his participation in secret meetings in California, Washington, and the Middle East, where, among other things, he interviewed possible successors to Saddam Hussein.
By January 2003, a plan for Iraqi oil crafted by the State Department and oil majors emerged under the guidance of Amy Myers Jaffe of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. It recommended maintaining the state-owned Iraq National Oil Company, whose origins dated back to 1961 – but open it up to foreign investment after an initial period in which U.S.-approved Iraqi managers would supervise the rehabilitation of the war-damaged oil infrastructure. The existence of this group would come to light in a report by the Wall Street Journal on March 3, 2003.
Unknown to the architects of this scheme, according to the same BBC Newsnight report, the Pentagon's planners, apparently influenced by powerful neocons in and out of the administration, had devised their own super-secret plan. It involved the sale of all Iraqi oil fields to private companies with a view to increasing output well above the quota set by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) for Iraq in order to weaken, and then destroy, OPEC.
Secondary Evidence
On Oct. 11, 2002 the New York Times reported that the Pentagon already had plans to occupy and control Iraq's oilfields. The next day the Economist described how Americans in the know had dubbed the waterway demarcating the southern borders of Iraq and Iran "Klondike on the Shatt al-Arab," while Ahmed Chalabi, head of the U.S.-funded Iraqi National Congress and a neocon favorite, had already delivered this message: "American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil – if he gets to run the show."
On Oct. 30, Oil and Gas International revealed that the Bush administration wanted a working group of 12 to 20 people to (a) recommend ways to rehabilitate the Iraqi oil industry "in order to increase oil exports to partially pay for a possible U.S. military occupation government," (
consider Iraq's continued membership of OPEC, and © consider whether to honor contracts Saddam Hussein had granted to non-American oil companies.
By late October 2002, columnist Maureen Dowd of the New York Times would later reveal, Halliburton, the energy services company previously headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, had prepared a confidential 500-page document on how to handle Iraq's oil industry after an invasion and occupation of Iraq. This was, commented Dowd, "a plan [Halliburton] wrote several months before the invasion of Iraq, and before it got a no-bid contract to implement the plan (and overbill the U.S.)." She also pointed out that a Times' request for a copy of the plan evinced a distinct lack of response from the Pentagon.
In public, of course, the Bush administration built its case for an invasion of Iraq without referring to that country's oil or the fact that it had the third largest reserves of petroleum in the world. But what happened out of sight was another matter. At a secret NSC briefing for the president on February 24, 2003, entitled, "Planning for the Iraqi Petroleum Infrastructure," a State Department economist, Pamela Quanrud, told Bush that it would cost $7-8 billion to rebuild the oil infrastructure, if Saddam decided to blow up his country's oil wells, according to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in his 2004 book, Plan of Attack (pp. 322-323). Quanrud was evidently a member of the State Department group chaired by Amy Myers Jaffe.
When the Anglo-American troops invaded on March 20, 2003, they expected to see oil wells ablaze. Saddam Hussein proved them wrong. Being a staunch nationalist, he evidently did not want to go down in history as the man who damaged Iraq's most precious natural resource.
On entering Baghdad on April 9, the American troops stood by as looters burned and ransacked public buildings, including government ministries – except for the Oil Ministry, which they guarded diligently. Within the next few days, at a secret meeting in London, the Pentagon's scheme of the sale of all Iraqi oil fields got a go-ahead in principle.
The Bush administration's assertions that oil was not a prime reason for invading Iraq did not fool Iraqis though. A July 2003 poll of Baghdad residents – who represented a quarter of the Iraqi national population – by the London Spectator showed that while 23 percent believed the reason for the Anglo-American war on Iraq was "to liberate us from dictatorship," twice as many responded, "to get oil." (Cited in Dilip Hiro, Secrets and Lies: Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and After, p. 398.)
As Iraq's principal occupier, the Bush White House made no secret of its plans to quickly dismantle that country's strong public sector. When the first American proconsul, retired Gen. Jay Garner, focused on holding local elections rather than privatizing the country's economic structure, he was promptly sacked.
Hurdles to Oil Privatization Prove Impassable
Garner's successor, L. Paul Bremer III, found himself dealing with Philip Carroll – former chief executive officer of the American operations of (Anglo-Dutch) Royal Dutch Shell in Houston – appointed by Washington as the Iraqi oil industry's supreme boss. Carroll decided not to tinker with the industry's ownership and told Bremer so. "There was to be no privatization of Iraqi oil resources or facilities while I was involved," Carroll said in an interview with the BBC's Newsnight program on March 17, 2005.
This was, however, but a partial explanation for why Bremer excluded the oil industry when issuing Order 39 in September 2003 privatizing nearly 200 Iraqi public sector companies and opening them up to 100 percent foreign ownership. The Bush White House had also realized by then that denationalizing the oil industry would be a blatant violation of the Geneva Conventions which bar an occupying power from altering the fundamental structure of the occupied territory's economy.
There was, as well, the vexatious problem of sorting out the 30 major oil development contracts Saddam's regime had signed with companies based in Canada, China, France, India, Italy, Russia, Spain, and Vietnam. The key unresolved issue was whether these firms had signed contracts with the government of Saddam Hussein, which no longer existed, or with the Republic of Iraq which remained intact.
Perhaps more important was the stand taken by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the senior Shi'ite cleric in the country and a figure whom the occupying Americans were keen not to alienate. He made no secret of his disapproval of the wholesale privatization of Iraq's major companies. As for the minerals – oil being the most precious – Sistani declared that they belonged to the "community," meaning the state. As a religious decree issued by a grand ayatollah, his statement carried immense weight.
Even more effective was the violent reaction of the industry's employees to the rumors of privatization. In his Newsnight interview Jibury said, "We saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities and pipelines built on the premise that privatization is coming."
In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, much equipment was looted from pipelines, pumping stations, and other oil facilities. By August 2003, four months after American troops entered Baghdad, oil output had only inched up to 1.2 million barrels per day, about two-fifths of the pre-invasion level. The forecasts (or dreams) of American planners' that oil production would jump to 6 million barrels per day by 2010 and easily fund the occupation and reconstruction of the country, were now seen for what they were – part of the hype disseminated privately by American neocons to sell the idea of invading Iraq to the public.
With the insurgency taking off, attacks on oil pipelines and pumping stations averaged two a week during the second half of 2003. The pipeline connecting a major northern oil field near Kirkuk – with an export capacity of 550,000-700,000 barrels per day – to the Turkish port of Ceyhan became inoperative. Soon, the only oil being exported was from fields in the less disturbed, predominately Shi'ite south of Iraq.
In September 2003, President Bush approached Congress for $2.1 billion to safeguard and rehabilitate Iraq's oil facilities. The resulting Task Force Shield project undertook to protect 340 key installations and 4,000 miles (6,400 km) of oil pipeline. It was not until the spring of 2004 that output again reached the prewar average of 2.5 million barrels per day – and that did not hold. Soon enough, production fell again. Iraqi refineries were, by now, producing only two-fifths of the 24 million liters of gasoline needed by the country daily, and so there were often days-long lines at service stations.
Addressing the 26th Oil and Money conference in London on Sept. 21, 2005, Issam Chalabi, who had been an Iraqi oil minister in the late 1980s, referred to the crippling lack of security and the lack of clear laws to manage the industry, and doubted if Iraq could return to the 1979 peak of 3.5 million barrels per day before 2009, if then.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi government found itself dependent on oil revenues for 90 percent of its income, a record at a time when corruption in its ministries had become rampant. On Jan. 30, 2005, Stuart W. Bowen, the special inspector general appointed by the U.S. occupation authority, reported that almost $9 billion in Iraqi oil revenue, disbursed to the ministries, had gone missing. A subsequent congressional inspection team reported in May 2006 that Task Force Shield had failed to meet its goals due to "lack of clear management structure and poor accountability," and added that there were "indications of potential fraud" which were being reviewed by the inspector general.
The endorsement of the new Iraqi constitution by referendum in October 2005 finally killed the prospect of full-scale oil privatization. Article 109 of that document stated clearly that hydrocarbons were "national Iraqi property." That is, oil and gas would remain in the public sector.
In March 2006, three years after the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, the country's petroleum exports were 30-40 percent below pre-invasion levels.
Bush Pushes for Iraq's Flawed Draft Hydrocarbon Law
In February 2007, in line with the constitution, the draft hydrocarbon law the Iraqi government presented to parliament kept oil and gas in the state sector. It also stipulated recreating a single Iraqi National Oil Company that would be charged with doling out oil income to the provinces on a per-capita basis. The Bush administration latched onto that provision to hype the 43-article Iraqi bill as a key to reconciliation between Sunnis and Shi'ites – since the Sunni areas of Iraq lack hydrocarbons – and so included it (as did Congress) in its list of "benchmarks" the Iraqi government had to meet.
Overlooked by Washington was the way that particular article, after mentioning revenue-sharing, stated that a separate Federal Revenue Law would be necessary to settle the matter of distribution – the first draft of which was only published four months later in June.
Far more than revenue sharing and reconciliation, though, what really interested the Bush White House were the mouthwatering incentives for foreign firms to invest in Iraq's hydrocarbon industry contained in the draft law. They promised to provide ample opportunities to America's Oil Majors to reap handsome profits in an oil-rich Iraq whose vast western desert had yet to be explored fully for hydrocarbons. So Bush pressured the Iraqi government to get the necessary law passed before the parliament's vacation in August – to no avail.
The Bush administration's failure to achieve its short-term objectives does not detract from the overarching fact – established by the copious evidence marshaled in this article – that gaining privileged access to Iraqi oil for American companies was a primary objective of the Pentagon's invasion of Iraq.
Dilip Hiro is the author of Secrets and Lies: Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and After, as well as, most recently, Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources, both published by Nation Books.
Copyright 2007 Dilip Hiro
by Dilip Hiro and Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch Before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, discussion of Iraqi oil was largely taboo in the American mainstream, while the "No Blood for Oil" signs that dotted antiwar demonstrations were generally derisively dismissed as too simpleminded for serious debate. American officials rarely even mentioned the word "oil" in the same sentence with "Iraq." When President Bush referred to Iraqi oil, he spoke only of preserving that country's "patrimony" for its people, a sentiment he and Great Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair emphasized in a statement they issued that lacked either the words "oil" or "energy" just as Baghdad fell: "We reaffirm our commitment to protect Iraq's natural resources, as the patrimony of the people of Iraq, which should be used only for their benefit."
That May, not long after the president declared "major combat" at an end in Iraq, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz did point out the obvious – that Iraq was a country that "floats on a sea of oil." He also told a congressional panel: "The oil revenue of that country could bring between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the course of the next two or three years. We're dealing with a country that could really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."
But his relatively obscure comments, as well as his oil-based miscalculations, passed largely unnoticed in the mainstream. Had Iraq then produced a significant percentage of the globe's toys rather than possessing the planet's third largest oil reserves, the prewar media would undoubtedly have been chock-a-block full of worried discussions about our children and the coming video drought; on the other hand, that there might have been any significant connections between the motivations of top administration officials planning an invasion and global oil flows or the garrisoning of the oil heartlands of the planet was clearly a laughable thought. It didn't matter that our vice president, when the CEO of a major energy firm, had worried quite publicly about global energy supplies, that our president had failed in the oil business, and that our national security adviser had once had a Chevron double-hulled oil tanker, the Condoleezza Rice, named in her honor. Now, it turns out that, among the simpleminded was former Federal Reserve head Alan Greenspan.
Middle Eastern expert Dilip Hiro, whose newest book Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources, focuses on oil and blood as well as recent the geopolitics of Iraqi oil (pp. 137-148), considers Greenspan's recent oil statement in the context of the historical record. Tom
How the Bush Administration's Iraqi Oil Grab Went Awry
by Dilip Hiro
Here is the sentence in The Age of Turbulence, the 531-page memoir of former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan, that caused so much turbulence in Washington last week: "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." Honest and accurate, it had the resonance of the Bill Clinton's election campaign mantra, "It's the economy, stupid." But, finding himself the target of a White House attack – an administration spokesman labeled his comment, "Georgetown cocktail party analysis" – Greenspan backtracked under cover of verbose elaboration. None of this, however, made an iota of difference to the facts on the ground.
Here is a prosecutor's brief for the position that "the Iraq War is largely about oil":
The primary evidence indicating that the Bush administration coveted Iraqi oil from the start comes from two diverse but impeccably reliable sources: Paul O'Neill, the Treasury Secretary (2001-2003) under President George W. Bush; and Falah Al Jibury, a well-connected Iraqi-American oil consultant, who had acted as President Ronald Reagan's "back channel" to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein during the Iraq-Iran War of 1980-88. The secondary evidence is from the material that can be found in such publications as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
According to O'Neill's memoirs, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, written by journalist Ron Suskind and published in 2004, the top item on the agenda of the National Security Council's first meeting after Bush entered the Oval Office was Iraq. That was Jan. 30, 2001, more than seven months before the 9/11 attacks. The next National Security Council (NSC) meeting on Feb. 1 was devoted exclusively to Iraq.
Advocating "going after Saddam" during the Jan. 30 meeting, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, according to O'Neill, "Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with a regime that's aligned with U.S. interests. It would change everything in the region and beyond. It would demonstrate what U.S. policy is all about." He then discussed post-Saddam Iraq – the Kurds in the north, the oil fields, and the reconstruction of the country's economy. (Suskind, p. 85)
Among the relevant documents later sent to NSC members, including O'Neill, was one prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). It had already mapped Iraq's oil fields and exploration areas, and listed American corporations likely to be interested in participating in Iraq's petroleum industry.
Another DIA document in the package, entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," listed companies from 30 countries – France, Germany, Russia, and Britain, among others – their specialties and bidding histories. The attached maps pinpointed "super-giant oil field," "other oil field," and "earmarked for production sharing," and divided the basically undeveloped but oil-rich southwest of Iraq into nine blocks, indicating promising areas for future exploration. (Suskind, p. 96)
According to high-flying oil insider Falah Al Jibury, the Bush administration began making plans for Iraq's oil industry "within weeks" of Bush taking office in January 2001. In an interview with the BBC's Newsnight program, which aired on March 17, 2005, he referred to his participation in secret meetings in California, Washington, and the Middle East, where, among other things, he interviewed possible successors to Saddam Hussein.
By January 2003, a plan for Iraqi oil crafted by the State Department and oil majors emerged under the guidance of Amy Myers Jaffe of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. It recommended maintaining the state-owned Iraq National Oil Company, whose origins dated back to 1961 – but open it up to foreign investment after an initial period in which U.S.-approved Iraqi managers would supervise the rehabilitation of the war-damaged oil infrastructure. The existence of this group would come to light in a report by the Wall Street Journal on March 3, 2003.
Unknown to the architects of this scheme, according to the same BBC Newsnight report, the Pentagon's planners, apparently influenced by powerful neocons in and out of the administration, had devised their own super-secret plan. It involved the sale of all Iraqi oil fields to private companies with a view to increasing output well above the quota set by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) for Iraq in order to weaken, and then destroy, OPEC.
Secondary Evidence
On Oct. 11, 2002 the New York Times reported that the Pentagon already had plans to occupy and control Iraq's oilfields. The next day the Economist described how Americans in the know had dubbed the waterway demarcating the southern borders of Iraq and Iran "Klondike on the Shatt al-Arab," while Ahmed Chalabi, head of the U.S.-funded Iraqi National Congress and a neocon favorite, had already delivered this message: "American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil – if he gets to run the show."
On Oct. 30, Oil and Gas International revealed that the Bush administration wanted a working group of 12 to 20 people to (a) recommend ways to rehabilitate the Iraqi oil industry "in order to increase oil exports to partially pay for a possible U.S. military occupation government," (
consider Iraq's continued membership of OPEC, and © consider whether to honor contracts Saddam Hussein had granted to non-American oil companies. By late October 2002, columnist Maureen Dowd of the New York Times would later reveal, Halliburton, the energy services company previously headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, had prepared a confidential 500-page document on how to handle Iraq's oil industry after an invasion and occupation of Iraq. This was, commented Dowd, "a plan [Halliburton] wrote several months before the invasion of Iraq, and before it got a no-bid contract to implement the plan (and overbill the U.S.)." She also pointed out that a Times' request for a copy of the plan evinced a distinct lack of response from the Pentagon.
In public, of course, the Bush administration built its case for an invasion of Iraq without referring to that country's oil or the fact that it had the third largest reserves of petroleum in the world. But what happened out of sight was another matter. At a secret NSC briefing for the president on February 24, 2003, entitled, "Planning for the Iraqi Petroleum Infrastructure," a State Department economist, Pamela Quanrud, told Bush that it would cost $7-8 billion to rebuild the oil infrastructure, if Saddam decided to blow up his country's oil wells, according to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in his 2004 book, Plan of Attack (pp. 322-323). Quanrud was evidently a member of the State Department group chaired by Amy Myers Jaffe.
When the Anglo-American troops invaded on March 20, 2003, they expected to see oil wells ablaze. Saddam Hussein proved them wrong. Being a staunch nationalist, he evidently did not want to go down in history as the man who damaged Iraq's most precious natural resource.
On entering Baghdad on April 9, the American troops stood by as looters burned and ransacked public buildings, including government ministries – except for the Oil Ministry, which they guarded diligently. Within the next few days, at a secret meeting in London, the Pentagon's scheme of the sale of all Iraqi oil fields got a go-ahead in principle.
The Bush administration's assertions that oil was not a prime reason for invading Iraq did not fool Iraqis though. A July 2003 poll of Baghdad residents – who represented a quarter of the Iraqi national population – by the London Spectator showed that while 23 percent believed the reason for the Anglo-American war on Iraq was "to liberate us from dictatorship," twice as many responded, "to get oil." (Cited in Dilip Hiro, Secrets and Lies: Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and After, p. 398.)
As Iraq's principal occupier, the Bush White House made no secret of its plans to quickly dismantle that country's strong public sector. When the first American proconsul, retired Gen. Jay Garner, focused on holding local elections rather than privatizing the country's economic structure, he was promptly sacked.
Hurdles to Oil Privatization Prove Impassable
Garner's successor, L. Paul Bremer III, found himself dealing with Philip Carroll – former chief executive officer of the American operations of (Anglo-Dutch) Royal Dutch Shell in Houston – appointed by Washington as the Iraqi oil industry's supreme boss. Carroll decided not to tinker with the industry's ownership and told Bremer so. "There was to be no privatization of Iraqi oil resources or facilities while I was involved," Carroll said in an interview with the BBC's Newsnight program on March 17, 2005.
This was, however, but a partial explanation for why Bremer excluded the oil industry when issuing Order 39 in September 2003 privatizing nearly 200 Iraqi public sector companies and opening them up to 100 percent foreign ownership. The Bush White House had also realized by then that denationalizing the oil industry would be a blatant violation of the Geneva Conventions which bar an occupying power from altering the fundamental structure of the occupied territory's economy.
There was, as well, the vexatious problem of sorting out the 30 major oil development contracts Saddam's regime had signed with companies based in Canada, China, France, India, Italy, Russia, Spain, and Vietnam. The key unresolved issue was whether these firms had signed contracts with the government of Saddam Hussein, which no longer existed, or with the Republic of Iraq which remained intact.
Perhaps more important was the stand taken by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the senior Shi'ite cleric in the country and a figure whom the occupying Americans were keen not to alienate. He made no secret of his disapproval of the wholesale privatization of Iraq's major companies. As for the minerals – oil being the most precious – Sistani declared that they belonged to the "community," meaning the state. As a religious decree issued by a grand ayatollah, his statement carried immense weight.
Even more effective was the violent reaction of the industry's employees to the rumors of privatization. In his Newsnight interview Jibury said, "We saw an increase in the bombing of oil facilities and pipelines built on the premise that privatization is coming."
In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, much equipment was looted from pipelines, pumping stations, and other oil facilities. By August 2003, four months after American troops entered Baghdad, oil output had only inched up to 1.2 million barrels per day, about two-fifths of the pre-invasion level. The forecasts (or dreams) of American planners' that oil production would jump to 6 million barrels per day by 2010 and easily fund the occupation and reconstruction of the country, were now seen for what they were – part of the hype disseminated privately by American neocons to sell the idea of invading Iraq to the public.
With the insurgency taking off, attacks on oil pipelines and pumping stations averaged two a week during the second half of 2003. The pipeline connecting a major northern oil field near Kirkuk – with an export capacity of 550,000-700,000 barrels per day – to the Turkish port of Ceyhan became inoperative. Soon, the only oil being exported was from fields in the less disturbed, predominately Shi'ite south of Iraq.
In September 2003, President Bush approached Congress for $2.1 billion to safeguard and rehabilitate Iraq's oil facilities. The resulting Task Force Shield project undertook to protect 340 key installations and 4,000 miles (6,400 km) of oil pipeline. It was not until the spring of 2004 that output again reached the prewar average of 2.5 million barrels per day – and that did not hold. Soon enough, production fell again. Iraqi refineries were, by now, producing only two-fifths of the 24 million liters of gasoline needed by the country daily, and so there were often days-long lines at service stations.
Addressing the 26th Oil and Money conference in London on Sept. 21, 2005, Issam Chalabi, who had been an Iraqi oil minister in the late 1980s, referred to the crippling lack of security and the lack of clear laws to manage the industry, and doubted if Iraq could return to the 1979 peak of 3.5 million barrels per day before 2009, if then.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi government found itself dependent on oil revenues for 90 percent of its income, a record at a time when corruption in its ministries had become rampant. On Jan. 30, 2005, Stuart W. Bowen, the special inspector general appointed by the U.S. occupation authority, reported that almost $9 billion in Iraqi oil revenue, disbursed to the ministries, had gone missing. A subsequent congressional inspection team reported in May 2006 that Task Force Shield had failed to meet its goals due to "lack of clear management structure and poor accountability," and added that there were "indications of potential fraud" which were being reviewed by the inspector general.
The endorsement of the new Iraqi constitution by referendum in October 2005 finally killed the prospect of full-scale oil privatization. Article 109 of that document stated clearly that hydrocarbons were "national Iraqi property." That is, oil and gas would remain in the public sector.
In March 2006, three years after the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, the country's petroleum exports were 30-40 percent below pre-invasion levels.
Bush Pushes for Iraq's Flawed Draft Hydrocarbon Law
In February 2007, in line with the constitution, the draft hydrocarbon law the Iraqi government presented to parliament kept oil and gas in the state sector. It also stipulated recreating a single Iraqi National Oil Company that would be charged with doling out oil income to the provinces on a per-capita basis. The Bush administration latched onto that provision to hype the 43-article Iraqi bill as a key to reconciliation between Sunnis and Shi'ites – since the Sunni areas of Iraq lack hydrocarbons – and so included it (as did Congress) in its list of "benchmarks" the Iraqi government had to meet.
Overlooked by Washington was the way that particular article, after mentioning revenue-sharing, stated that a separate Federal Revenue Law would be necessary to settle the matter of distribution – the first draft of which was only published four months later in June.
Far more than revenue sharing and reconciliation, though, what really interested the Bush White House were the mouthwatering incentives for foreign firms to invest in Iraq's hydrocarbon industry contained in the draft law. They promised to provide ample opportunities to America's Oil Majors to reap handsome profits in an oil-rich Iraq whose vast western desert had yet to be explored fully for hydrocarbons. So Bush pressured the Iraqi government to get the necessary law passed before the parliament's vacation in August – to no avail.
The Bush administration's failure to achieve its short-term objectives does not detract from the overarching fact – established by the copious evidence marshaled in this article – that gaining privileged access to Iraqi oil for American companies was a primary objective of the Pentagon's invasion of Iraq.
Dilip Hiro is the author of Secrets and Lies: Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and After, as well as, most recently, Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources, both published by Nation Books.
Copyright 2007 Dilip Hiro
Iraq War: Love and Personal Loss [Photo Essay]
Nina Berman, AlterNet
War on Iraq: Andrew Lichtenstein's new book, Never Coming Home, shows the faces behind the Iraq War casualty statistics. This photo essay launches AlterNet's new multimedia series.
<h3 class="entry-header">Singer: Blackwater and Counter-Insurgency</h3> I've been following the controversy over Blackwater in Iraq the same as other people, and reading scathing commentaries by Arab pundits like Fahmy Howeydi, Naji Hussein, Faisal Jalloul, and others. But I don't pretend to know very much about the details of private security contractors. Luckily, I do know Peter Singer of Brookings, author of the excellent Corporate Warriors and someone with real perspective on the full scope of the problem. Singer has just published a timely and deeply interesting report called "Can't Win With Them, Can't Go To War Without Them" (warning: link is to PDF) which argues forcefully that "the use of private military contractors appears to have harmed rather than helped the counterinsurgency efforts of the U.S. mission in Iraq."
His argument applies specifically to Iraq, where he identifies a series of very specific ways in which the use of private contractors has undermined the counter-insurgency mission, and more generally to its pernicous role as an "enabler" of poor strategic decisions.
At the level of grand strategy, he warns that the availability of contractors "allows policymakers to dodge key decisions that carry political costs, thus leading to operational choices that might not reflect public interest." In other words, it allows the US to fight wars beyond the means of the all-volunteer army, thus allowing for a more aggressive foreign policy than an electorate might prefer. He details the many functions of these contractors, from logistical support to armed roles in the battlespace, and concludes bluntly that "the war in Iraq would not be possible without private military contractors." Where that could be used as testimony to their usefulness, Singer views it as an "addiction", a cheap fix which allows for poorly conceived military interventions beyond the real means of the United States.
More directly, he argues that the reliance on contractors undermines the very counter-insurgency doctrines on which the military's hopes currently rest. The availability of these contractors feeds a set of perverse incentives - their financial interest is to build huge bases, for instance, with elaborate (and expensive) logistics which alienate Iraqis and go against counterinsurgency best practices as outlined in Petraeus's manual. More significantly, perhaps, he shows in some detail how the contractors "inflamed popular opinion against the American mission through operational practices that ignore the fundamental lessons of counterinsurgency" and "participated in a series of abuses that have undermined efforts at winning 'hearts and minds' of the Iraqi people." He identifies a lengthy trail of contractor misconduct which did not begin a few weeks ago, pointing out that they are often "the most visible and most hated aspect of the American presence." A security contractor's job is, say, to get an official from point A to point B safely - not to win hearts and minds along the way. In a counterinsurgency which deeply depends on winning local support, this is a problem. As he quotes one Iraqi official, people just view the contractors as Americans. That they are above the law shines a glaring spotlight on the shortcomings of Iraq's alleged sovereignty, while also (and this is my interpretation of what Singer is saying) insulting the professional American military personnel who are operating under clear chains of command and codes of behavior.
There's a lot more there, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the background and wider implications of the current Blackwater controversy.
Posted on September 27, 2007 at 01:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
His argument applies specifically to Iraq, where he identifies a series of very specific ways in which the use of private contractors has undermined the counter-insurgency mission, and more generally to its pernicous role as an "enabler" of poor strategic decisions.
At the level of grand strategy, he warns that the availability of contractors "allows policymakers to dodge key decisions that carry political costs, thus leading to operational choices that might not reflect public interest." In other words, it allows the US to fight wars beyond the means of the all-volunteer army, thus allowing for a more aggressive foreign policy than an electorate might prefer. He details the many functions of these contractors, from logistical support to armed roles in the battlespace, and concludes bluntly that "the war in Iraq would not be possible without private military contractors." Where that could be used as testimony to their usefulness, Singer views it as an "addiction", a cheap fix which allows for poorly conceived military interventions beyond the real means of the United States.
More directly, he argues that the reliance on contractors undermines the very counter-insurgency doctrines on which the military's hopes currently rest. The availability of these contractors feeds a set of perverse incentives - their financial interest is to build huge bases, for instance, with elaborate (and expensive) logistics which alienate Iraqis and go against counterinsurgency best practices as outlined in Petraeus's manual. More significantly, perhaps, he shows in some detail how the contractors "inflamed popular opinion against the American mission through operational practices that ignore the fundamental lessons of counterinsurgency" and "participated in a series of abuses that have undermined efforts at winning 'hearts and minds' of the Iraqi people." He identifies a lengthy trail of contractor misconduct which did not begin a few weeks ago, pointing out that they are often "the most visible and most hated aspect of the American presence." A security contractor's job is, say, to get an official from point A to point B safely - not to win hearts and minds along the way. In a counterinsurgency which deeply depends on winning local support, this is a problem. As he quotes one Iraqi official, people just view the contractors as Americans. That they are above the law shines a glaring spotlight on the shortcomings of Iraq's alleged sovereignty, while also (and this is my interpretation of what Singer is saying) insulting the professional American military personnel who are operating under clear chains of command and codes of behavior.
There's a lot more there, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the background and wider implications of the current Blackwater controversy.
Posted on September 27, 2007 at 01:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Huffington Post blogger:
Trey Ellis
Clarence Thomas: Nobody Knows the Trouble He's Seen
Posted October 1, 2007 | 11:41 AM (EST)
Clarence Thomas, Clarence Thomas book, My Grandfather's Son,
You have to feel sorry for the judge. Like George Bush he has failed upwards until the poor guy is now hopelessly out of his league. Unlike our president, however, he doesn't have to pretend to understand the complexities of his job for just eight years and then retire to the back nine. Poor Clarence is stuck there for life. He seems caught in some sort of chilling Twilight Zone episode, cursed for what he wished for. His new memoir, "My Grandfather's Son,"is yet another sad chapter in his lifetime of self-hate.
Am I being too hard or condescending on what should be one of the wisest people in the nation? How else do you explain his terror of asking a single question from the bench? His excuse is that the other justices "talk too much."
It's called doing their job.
They arrive with questions that need to be answered, instead of dogma that needs to be adhered to. Justice Thomas is clearly that terrified kid in every class that knows that if he opens his mouth everyone will realize that he didn't understand today's lesson. Instead of being a beacon of pride for young black kids that, like him, might have been raised in poverty, he is an embarrassment.
His supporters point to his writings, but back in his chambers he is backed up by clerks who are some of our very smartest legal minds. Kato Kaelin could sign off on their briefs and sound like he knew what he was talking about.
George Bush the First's appointment of a black man who was patently unqualified to the highest bench is exactly what affirmative action is not supposed to be about. The point is to open up gatekeepers like elite law schools and medical schools. Once the students graduate, however, they, and every other job applicant has to rise to a certain standard. My sister is a heart surgeon. Nobody is going to let her cut somebody open just to fill a quota. She has to be excellent at what she does. The bar for a lifetime appointment to our highest bench should have been just as high.
My mom went to Yale law school a few years after Thomas, after having graduated Magna Cum Laude from Howard. She was a thirty-five-year-old black mother of two teenaged kids. She knew she was brilliant, the best of the best, and thrilled at debating the other students. She never once said, "Oh, I'm only here because they needed a brown body. I really belong at the DeVry College of Law."
And that's how she raised me. Old school. Yes, racism still exists, she would tell me. So a B+ might do for the white boys, but you have to be that much better. How pathetic is it that Clarence Thomas writes that he graduated from Yale Law School with his head hanging low, convinced that the world knew that his diploma came with an asterisk of inferiority? When my mom's friends graduated they burst out of law school ready to kick ass and take names.
The most odious part of Thomas's memoir is his continued insistence that his contentious confirmation hearings elevate him to the canon of tragic black heroes like Native Son's Bigger Thomas and To Kill a Mockingbird's Tom Robinson. As Jane Meyer and Jill Abramson clearly demonstrate in their book, Strange Justice, Anita Hill was only one of several and Thomas, now one of the twelve highest judges in our nation, lied repeatedly during his confirmation hearings. The bitterness that seems to be eating away at him and spews out of this book might stem from the fact that he was the head of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission while he was sexually harassing Anita Hill and he is now sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America because he lied his ass off in the United States Senate.
----------------------------------
Hoo-ha brother, Hoo-ha!
Trey Ellis
Clarence Thomas: Nobody Knows the Trouble He's Seen
Posted October 1, 2007 | 11:41 AM (EST)
Clarence Thomas, Clarence Thomas book, My Grandfather's Son,
You have to feel sorry for the judge. Like George Bush he has failed upwards until the poor guy is now hopelessly out of his league. Unlike our president, however, he doesn't have to pretend to understand the complexities of his job for just eight years and then retire to the back nine. Poor Clarence is stuck there for life. He seems caught in some sort of chilling Twilight Zone episode, cursed for what he wished for. His new memoir, "My Grandfather's Son,"is yet another sad chapter in his lifetime of self-hate.
Am I being too hard or condescending on what should be one of the wisest people in the nation? How else do you explain his terror of asking a single question from the bench? His excuse is that the other justices "talk too much."
It's called doing their job.
They arrive with questions that need to be answered, instead of dogma that needs to be adhered to. Justice Thomas is clearly that terrified kid in every class that knows that if he opens his mouth everyone will realize that he didn't understand today's lesson. Instead of being a beacon of pride for young black kids that, like him, might have been raised in poverty, he is an embarrassment.
His supporters point to his writings, but back in his chambers he is backed up by clerks who are some of our very smartest legal minds. Kato Kaelin could sign off on their briefs and sound like he knew what he was talking about.
George Bush the First's appointment of a black man who was patently unqualified to the highest bench is exactly what affirmative action is not supposed to be about. The point is to open up gatekeepers like elite law schools and medical schools. Once the students graduate, however, they, and every other job applicant has to rise to a certain standard. My sister is a heart surgeon. Nobody is going to let her cut somebody open just to fill a quota. She has to be excellent at what she does. The bar for a lifetime appointment to our highest bench should have been just as high.
My mom went to Yale law school a few years after Thomas, after having graduated Magna Cum Laude from Howard. She was a thirty-five-year-old black mother of two teenaged kids. She knew she was brilliant, the best of the best, and thrilled at debating the other students. She never once said, "Oh, I'm only here because they needed a brown body. I really belong at the DeVry College of Law."
And that's how she raised me. Old school. Yes, racism still exists, she would tell me. So a B+ might do for the white boys, but you have to be that much better. How pathetic is it that Clarence Thomas writes that he graduated from Yale Law School with his head hanging low, convinced that the world knew that his diploma came with an asterisk of inferiority? When my mom's friends graduated they burst out of law school ready to kick ass and take names.
The most odious part of Thomas's memoir is his continued insistence that his contentious confirmation hearings elevate him to the canon of tragic black heroes like Native Son's Bigger Thomas and To Kill a Mockingbird's Tom Robinson. As Jane Meyer and Jill Abramson clearly demonstrate in their book, Strange Justice, Anita Hill was only one of several and Thomas, now one of the twelve highest judges in our nation, lied repeatedly during his confirmation hearings. The bitterness that seems to be eating away at him and spews out of this book might stem from the fact that he was the head of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission while he was sexually harassing Anita Hill and he is now sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America because he lied his ass off in the United States Senate.
----------------------------------
Hoo-ha brother, Hoo-ha!
New Book Extols a Noninterventionist Foreign Policy
For more than a century U.S. foreign policy—whether conducted by Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives—has been based on the assumption that Americans’ interests are served best by intervening abroad to secure open markets for U.S. exports, fight potential enemies far from American shores, or engage in democratic nation building. Before the twentieth century, however, a foreign policy of nonintervention was widely considered more desirable, and Washington’s and Jefferson’s advice that the republic avoid foreign entanglements was largely heeded.
Opposing the Crusader State: Alternatives to Global Interventionism, edited by Robert Higgs and Carl P. Close (Senior Fellow and Academic Affairs Director, respectively, of the Independent Institute), examines the history of American noninterventionism and its relevance in today’s world. Arguing that interventionism is not an appropriate “default setting” for U.S. foreign policy, the book’s contributors clarify widespread misunderstandings about noninterventionism, question the wisdom of nation building, debate the validity of democratic-peace theory, and make the case for pursuing a peace strategy based on private-property rights and free trade.
“Readers will come away from this book with a richer understanding of the noninterventionist movements in U.S. history,” write Higgs and Close in the book’s introduction. “Most important, perhaps, they will have a firmer understanding of why many classical liberals embrace the strengthening of commercial ties between all countries as a means of avoiding war.”
Buy Opposing the Crusader State ($15.95)
Book highlights and synopsis
For more than a century U.S. foreign policy—whether conducted by Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives—has been based on the assumption that Americans’ interests are served best by intervening abroad to secure open markets for U.S. exports, fight potential enemies far from American shores, or engage in democratic nation building. Before the twentieth century, however, a foreign policy of nonintervention was widely considered more desirable, and Washington’s and Jefferson’s advice that the republic avoid foreign entanglements was largely heeded.
Opposing the Crusader State: Alternatives to Global Interventionism, edited by Robert Higgs and Carl P. Close (Senior Fellow and Academic Affairs Director, respectively, of the Independent Institute), examines the history of American noninterventionism and its relevance in today’s world. Arguing that interventionism is not an appropriate “default setting” for U.S. foreign policy, the book’s contributors clarify widespread misunderstandings about noninterventionism, question the wisdom of nation building, debate the validity of democratic-peace theory, and make the case for pursuing a peace strategy based on private-property rights and free trade.
“Readers will come away from this book with a richer understanding of the noninterventionist movements in U.S. history,” write Higgs and Close in the book’s introduction. “Most important, perhaps, they will have a firmer understanding of why many classical liberals embrace the strengthening of commercial ties between all countries as a means of avoiding war.”
Buy Opposing the Crusader State ($15.95)
Book highlights and synopsis
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