5/4/11

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

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

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

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

JB

We ask that you take a moment to subscribe to Iron Mountain

3/23/11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JB

3/19/11

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

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

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

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

JB

3/14/11

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

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

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

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

JB

3/12/11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JB

3/10/11

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

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

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

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

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

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

JB

2/28/11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JB

2/26/11

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

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

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

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

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

JB

2/7/11

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

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

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

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

JB

1/27/11

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

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

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

Is this a realistic policy?

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

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

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

JB

12/29/10

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

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

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

JB

12/20/10

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

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

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

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

JB

12/12/10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JB

11/5/10

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

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

JB

9/8/10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JB

9/6/10

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

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

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

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

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

JB

8/21/10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JB

7/28/10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JB

3/16/10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JB

2/7/10

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

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

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

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

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

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

JB

2/1/10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JB

1/25/10

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

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

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

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

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

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

JB

1/18/10

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

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

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

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

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

JB

11/20/09

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JB

11/18/09

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

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

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

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

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

JB