Roundup: Media's Take
This is where we excerpt articles from the media that take a historical approach to events in the news.
Jeff Shesol: Obama Should Take Heed from FDR on the Supreme Court
Ann Woolner: Liz Cheney Would Call John Adams a Terrorists’ Pal
George F. Will: As a Progressive, Obama Hews to the Wilsonian Tradition
Davidson Loehr: Beck, Coulter and Limbaugh are Avatars of Julius Streicher
Alexander J. Motyl: Difficult Task Defining Bandera’s Historic Role
Mark E. Halperin: How Obama Is Making the Same Mistakes as Bush
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Jeff Shesol: Obama Should Take Heed from FDR on the Supreme Court
Source: NYT (3-13-10)
[Jeff Shesol is the author of the forthcoming “Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court.”]
IN his State of the Union address, when President Obama criticized the Supreme Court, Justice Samuel Alito shook his head, scowled and mouthed a two-word dissent: “Not true.” Chief Justice John Roberts, meanwhile, smiled serenely, apparently untroubled by the president’s attack.
Now we know what Chief Justice Roberts really thinks.
Last week, he fired back, describing the scene as “very troubling.” The chief justice painted a harrowing picture of “one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court — according to the requirements of protocol — has to sit there expressionless.”...
This sort of presidential push-and-shove with the judiciary is unlike any since the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt waged a very public battle with the court’s conservative majority over the fate of the New Deal — a fight that culminated in Roosevelt’s plan to enlarge and pack the court. The White House tends to welcome comparisons between Presidents Obama and Roosevelt. But in this case, it is an analogy to avoid. Roosevelt’s court fight makes clear just how much Mr. Obama stands to lose in any such protracted struggle....
In his 1937 State of the Union address, Roosevelt warned the court to toe the line, bringing Democrats to their feet in wild applause. (To his disappointment, all nine justices, in a break from precedent, boycotted the speech.) One month later, the president made his audacious proposal to increase the number of justices from 9 to 15, and to fill the new seats with liberals.
Roosevelt was not the first president to spar with the Supreme Court. A number of reform-minded presidents — Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt among them — had complained that the court was wrongheaded or reactionary. But none carried the fight as far as Franklin Roosevelt did, or paid as dearly for it. Congress defeated his proposal to expand the court. And though the court did reverse itself in 1937 — in the middle of the Senate debate on the president’s plan — Roosevelt had split the Democratic Party, reawakened the opposition and undermined his second-term agenda.
The Obama administration should keep this in mind as it escalates its war of words with the court. Even though most Americans agree with the president’s position on campaign spending by corporations, the political upside of attacking the court may be short-lived. It is one thing for a president to forcefully disagree with a decision. But to engage in a public back-and-forth with the chief justice is fraught with risk....
The court’s change in direction in 1937 endured because Roosevelt was ultimately able to replace nearly all the justices with his own appointees. If Justice John Paul Stevens retires at the end of this term, as many analysts expect, Mr. Obama will have the chance to make his second appointment. But even then, he will have to wait for an opportunity to shift the court’s balance of power. Patience, in the face of pressing national challenges, is hard. But change, as is now amply clear, does not come quickly.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Ralph Peters: Why our 'post-modern presidents' fail
Source: New York Post (3-13-10)
[Ralph Peters has been a Post Opinion columnist since 2002.]
Since the end of World War II, our country has had three great presidents: Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan.
Their politics varied, but these giants stand in sharp contrast to our last three presidents, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and now Barack Obama. The first two presided over gravely flawed presidencies; the third is on his way to outright failure.
What makes these two presidential trios so different? A recent visit to the Truman Museum and Library in Independence, Mo., made me ask what made those great presidents great.
The answer is character. The three greats were men of great character; the three recents, men of great ambition -- driven, in their different ways, by a fateful sense of entitlement.
And you don't build character by punching your ticket at today's Ivy-League universities, then dashing straight into politics.
The people I admire most in life aren't the golden boys (or girls), but those who've come up the hard way. Frankly, failure builds character -- in those who have the gumption to get back up on their feet and fight to succeed.
Until the Reagan years, it was still possible to become president without elite credentials. Harry Truman had only a high-school diploma. Reagan graduated from the sort of college today's Washington insiders mock. Eisenhower was a Military Academy grad -- back when West Point was still an engineering school.
Most important, each man tasted bitter disappointments along the way. Young Harry Truman had to return from Kansas City to work 16-hour days on his family's troubled farm. After combat service in the First World War, he co-owned a men's store -- only to face bankruptcy in the postwar recession. Barely averting that bankruptcy, he paid each debt he owed over the years.
Eisenhower thought his career was finished when he failed to get a combat command during World War I. His peers gained medals while he trained troops Stateside. Years later, he was little more than a football coach in uniform. But he never gave up -- and worked relentlessly at his profession.
Ronald Reagan knew what it felt like to be written off, to be regarded as a second-rater. Descending through B-movies to minor television jobs, he seemed finished. He wasn't. Reagan remade himself to serve the country he loved. And the world's better and safer for it.
Each of these men -- all from rural or small-town backgrounds -- knew hardship, failure and what it was like to sweat for a living. Not one of them would stand a chance of being elected president today...
Friday, March 12, 2010
Godfrey Hodgson: Barack Obama and America
Source: openDemocracy (3-12-10)
[Godfrey Hodgson was director of the Reuters' Foundation Programme at Oxford University, and before that the Observer's correspondent in the United States and foreign editor of the Independent.]
When Barack Obama was elected United States president in November 2008, he was instantly compared with Franklin D Roosevelt: a leader who would use the deep financial and economic crisis he had inherited to transform American politics. The moment seemed propitious to fuse his inspiring human qualities with the clever political calculation expressed by his chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel: "Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste. They are opportunities to do big things."
Even at the time, it seemed to me that a more relevant comparison was with Lyndon Baines Johnson. LBJ had assumed the presidency at a time of perceived national crisis after the assassination of John F Kennedy in November 1963. After eleven months in the White House, the former vice-president was re-elected by what is still the highest proportion of the popular vote in American history.
By spring 1965, violent confrontations over desegregation in the south coincided with Johnson’s first and fateful moves to escalate American involvement in Vietnam. Johnson’s presidency was set on a course that would eventual rob it of forward momentum. In March 1968, Johnson announced that he would not be a candidate for the presidency in that year’s election - an event that can be seen in retrospect as having opened the door to Richard Nixon and (two instances of ineffectual Democratic leadership excepted) forty years of Republican ascendancy.
In a concentrated period of decisiveleadership that lasted less than two years, Johnson passed two important acts of healthcare reform, Medicare (for the elderly) and Medicaid (for the poor); two historic civil-rights statutes (the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965); a groundbreaking series of environmental measures; and dozens of education bills, which together secured a substantial role for the federal government in elementary and secondary schools for the first time in American history.
This record, in light of Obama's current predicament and my earlier view that he might usefully be compared with LBJ, invites a closer look at the two presidencies and their contexts.
The verdict
Barack Obama’s extraordinary campaign offered the prospect of an ambitious portfolio of legislative proposals were he to reach the White House. He has now been in office for a little longer than half of that extraordinarily creative period of statesmanship under Lyndon Johnson. So far, his record in persuading Congress to accept them has been dismal. Now his Democratic Party faces the serious danger of comprehensive losses in the congressional elections in November 2010.
There are many ways to register the gap between promise and reality. Here are just three.
First, Obama pledged to restore the the United States’s reputation in the international arena by making it plain that the country opposed torture and supported fair trials, due process and the rule of law. The signal of this commitment was a promise to close the Guantánamo prison-camp within a year. But the camp remains open, the administration’s declared intention to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the alleged architect of the 9/11 atrocities) according to US laws is uncertain, and concern with morale in the CIA seems to trump human rights.
Second, Obama the campaigner voiced doubts over the war in Afghanistan. In practice his new strategy there increases the US’s military involvement and extends its range to Pakistan, albeit as part of a plan that envisages eventual withdrawal. In other areas of foreign policy, the president has been unable to effect a rapprochement with Iran and been treated with disdain by China at the Copenhagen climate-change summit (see “Barack Obama: imperial president, post-American world, 7 December 2009).
Third, Obama’s ambitious domestic projects included cutting America’s dependence on imported energy and intensifying efforts to limit greenhouse-gas emissions. His carbon-trading plan will not reduce total emissions and is unable even to offer guaranteed business opportunities.
The picture is more mixed over two major domestic policy priorities, but even here no outstanding success can be claimed. First, Obama did succeed in pushing through Congress a vast stimulus package that has restored the profitability of the financial-services sector, but does not insist that it perform its social function by lending to individuals and small businesses. Unemployment remains high and corrosive. Second, his healthcare-reform plans have become a shadow of his original proposals and even this is reliant for progress on a parliamentary device (“reconciliation”). Washington is now waiting to see whether that will work (see “The United States: democracy, with interests”, 14 August 2009).
The context
The conclusion is unavoidable. Barack Obama, for all his integrity and talent, genuine charm and rhetorical brilliance, has - so far - failed as a president. Perhaps the most clinching evidence for the claim is that this man who sincerely wanted to bring Americans together, to “reach across the aisle” to Republican opponents, and to find common ground in the centre, has overseen a situation where America’s partisan political divisions are more acerbic than ever.
Many would argue that this summary is exaggerated, and that Obama may yet redeem some of his election promises and achieve some of his proclaimed goals. I do not accept, however, that it is unfair: the verdict could be, and often is, stated in far more critical terms.
The point of a comparison with Lyndon Johnson’s record is not to denigrate Barack Obama, still less to airbrush Johnson’s warts. It is rather to hold up a lens to the ways in which American public life has changed, and for the worse, in the years of the conservative ascendancy...
Ann Woolner: Liz Cheney Would Call John Adams a Terrorists’ Pal
Source: Business Week (3-11-10)
[Ann Woolner is a columnist for Bloomberg News.]
Liz Cheney, meet John Adams. Perhaps you have heard of him.
A Founding Father of our nation, he became America’s first vice president and its second president.
But before all that, back when he was practicing law in Boston, Adams did precisely what you say should disqualify lawyers from representing his country.
He defended the enemy. Charged with murder for the Boston massacre of 1770, let’s call his clients the Redcoat Nine.
Adams advocated for them so well that he persuaded a jury to acquit seven of the nine, including the captain charged with ordering the deadly shooting of rioting revolutionaries.
And he was proud of it. Adams would later call the episode “one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country.”
If he had done the modern-day version of that and then taken a job at the Justice Department, Liz Cheney would complain. She would say that shows the president and attorney general aren’t serious about defeating the enemy.
That’s what she says about Attorney General Eric Holder because he hired lawyers who represented Guantanamo Bay detainees in cases against the U.S. government....
These lawyers, like Adams, are aiding and abetting the American legal system. It works best when opposing sides have lawyers dedicated to capably advocating for their clients, however unpopular....
Alexander Zaitchik: Where Did David Brooks Get the Bizarre Idea That the Tea Party Crowd Resembles '60s Movements?
Source: Alternet (3-11-10)
[Alexander Zaitchik is a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist and AlterNet contributing writer. His book, Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance, will be published by Wiley in June.]
There is a fresh interpretive fad in the young field of Tea Party Studies: The New Right of 2010 as the New Left of the 1960s.
According to this nascent meme, today’s conservative grassroots holds strong echoes of earlier radicalism on the left. The Tea Party movement that worships Sarah Palin and screams for Barack Obama’s birth certificate is, in this view, more than just the latest herpetic outbreak of Richard Hofstadter’s paranoid “pseudo-conservatism.” It is a reincarnation of the New Left and 1960s counterculture. The Tea Partiers, it is becoming fashionable to argue, are the heirs not just of the John Birch Society and the young Barry Goldwater, but also of Students for a Democratic Society and the young Abbie Hoffman.
If this analogy smells suspect, it’s for good reason. Yet it appears to be gaining traction, especially among a certain breed of moderate with confused understandings of Tea Party conservatism, the New Left, and '60s counterculture. In late February, Michael Lind wrote a Salon piece in which he claimed, "The tea partiers are the hippies of our time…In Glenn Beck, the countercultural right has found its own Abbie Hoffman."
Although Hoffman was never a hippie (he called flower children "glassy eyed zombies" and passed through the civil rights and antiwar movements on his way to founding the Youth International Party in 1968), and Beck is neither exuberant nor radical (he is a sexually repressed Mormon businessman who exemplifies modern crackpot reaction), Lind’s strange comparison nonetheless found an admirer in David Brooks of the New York Times. Last Friday, March 4, Brooks expanded on Lind’s thesis in a column titled "The Wal-Mart Hippies." Echoing Lind, Brooks writes that, much like 1960s leftwing radicals, the Tea Partiers want "to take on The Man, return power to the people, upend the elites and lead a revolution." He called Lind's comparison of Beck to Hoffman “astute.”
"Obtuse" would be a better description, says Paul Krassner, a founding member of the Yippies and a friend of the late Abbie Hoffman. "Whereas the Yippies saw through the propaganda machine, the Teabaggers are soaked in it," explains Krassner. "We were active in a time of abundance, they are active in a time of economic catastrophe; so we fought villains and they fight scapegoats. Abbie Hoffman was a seeker of justice; Glenn Beck rationalizes injustice. Abbie was hysterically funny; he made people laugh and think simultaneously. Beck promulgates hysteria; he exploits the fear that he helps create. To link them as part of the same tradition is sixties bashing at worst and sloppy journalism at best.”
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Uri Dromi: Will Israel Join the March of Folly?
Source: International Herald Tribune (3-11-10)
[Uri Dromi was spokesman for the Rabin and Peres governments from 1992 to 1996.]
Barbara Tuchman, in her classic book “March of Folly,” examined four cases in history when governments acted contrary to their own best interests: the Trojans who let the Greeks bring the fatal horse into their midst; the papacy, which allowed and even brought about the Protestant secession; the British who lost America, and America, which lost the war in Vietnam.
When I heard that during Vice President Joseph Biden’s visit to Israel the government had approved the construction of 1,600 new homes in East Jerusalem, I was reminded of Tuchman’s book.
Beside the blunder of rubbing it in the face of your best friend and ally, there lies a much more substantial error: By expanding settlements instead of separating from the Palestinians while we still can, we Israelis are dooming ourselves to lose the Jewish and democratic state that has been won with so much sacrifice. In other words, we are immersed in our own march of folly. And we are doing it with our eyes open.
Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, should know. More than 20 years ago, when he was a general in uniform and I was the head of the Israeli Defense Forces’ publishing house, he urged me to translate military history books. “We need to learn from history,” he told me.
Knowing for sure that Mr. Barak had read “March of Folly,” I started wondering why he kept mute about the direction Israel is taking toward a binational state. At last, at a conference in Tel Aviv on Jan. 25, he spoke out: “The lack of a solution to the problem of border demarcation within the historic Land of Israel — and not an Iranian bomb — is the most serious threat to Israel’s future.”...
George F. Will: As a Progressive, Obama Hews to the Wilsonian Tradition
Source: WaPo (3-11-10)
[George F. Will writes a columnist for the Washington Post.]
There are legislative miles to go before the government will be emancipated from its health-care myopia, but it is not too soon for a summing-up. Whether all or nothing of the legislation becomes law, Barack Obama has refuted critics who call him a radical. He has shown himself to be a timid progressive....
In a scintillating book coming in June ("The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris"), Peter Beinart dissects the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson. Edward House, Wilson's closest adviser, wrote an awful but indicative novel, "Philip Dru: Administrator." With the nation in crisis, Dru seizes power, declares himself "Administrator of the Republic" and replaces Congress with a commission of five experts who decree reforms that selfish interests had prevented.
Wilson, once a professor of political science, said that the Princeton he led as its president was dedicated to unbiased expertise, and he thought government could be "reduced to science." Progressives are forever longing to replace the governance of people by the administration of things. Because they are entirely public-spirited, progressives volunteer to be the administrators, and to be as disinterested as the dickens....
Professor Obama, who will seek reelection on the 100th anniversary of Wilson's 1912 election, understands, which makes him melancholy. Speaking to Katie Couric on Feb. 7, Obama said:
"I would have loved nothing better than to simply come up with some very elegant, academically approved approach to health care, and didn't have any kinds of legislative fingerprints on it, and just go ahead and have that passed. But that's not how it works in our democracy. Unfortunately, what we end up having to do is to do a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people."...
Wilson was the first president to criticize the Founding Fathers. He faulted them for designing a government too susceptible to factions that impede disinterested experts from getting on with government undistracted. Like Princeton's former president, Obama's grievance is with the greatest Princetonian, the "father of the Constitution," James Madison, Class of 1771.
Davidson Loehr: Beck, Coulter and Limbaugh are Avatars of Julius Streicher
Source: Truthout (3-10-10)
[Davidson Loehr is a retired Unitarian minister, author of "America, Fascism & God: Sermons from a Heretical Preacher" (Chelsea Green, 2005).]
Making fun of demagogues like Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh has become a kind of parlor game, an escape valve to let out some of the frustration of impotent rage. This was brought home again when I read "Defying Hitler" by Sebastian Haffner. Writing between 1933 and 1939, he came of age during Hitler's rise to power. His observations are so searing it's still hard to believe that someone could see this clearly while the spirit of his times was morphing into a broad and deep spirit of evil. Once the Zeitgeist had changed, all kinds of murderous and insane actions became logical means toward transforming German culture into its Nazi metastasis.
"Avatars of Julius Streicher" doesn't sound quite sober - hardly anyone recognizes his name today, but Streicher's spirit is alive and well in Beck, Coulter and Limbaugh. Streicher was one of the 11 Nazis sentenced to hang by the Nuremberg Trials on October 16, 1946. Only ten were hanged because Hermann Goering committed suicide with some cyanide capsules the night before. Of the 11, Streicher was the only one who was not in the military, not in any significant position to command anything regarding the treatment and execution of millions of people who didn't fit the Nazi mold. But Streicher may have been the person most responsible for implanting the spirit of anti-Semitism that let Germans dehumanize and slaughter millions of people. Between 1923 and 1945, Streicher published "Der Stuermer" ("The Stormtrooper"), and spoke wherever he could to instill this deadly spirit into everyone he could reach. He especially liked to address schoolchildren, and would get them so conditioned that when he asked if they knew who the enemy of Germany was, they would shout, "The Jew! The Jew!" Streicher was hanged with the Nazi leaders for publishing this fact-free newspaper that did more than anything else to prepare the way for the Nazi death machines. A typical issue of "Der Stuermer" was described as "nothing but an incitement to the people of Germany who read it, an incitement to murder. It is filled with pictures of murder. It is an encouragement to all who read it to avenge themselves in the same way."
At his trial in Nuremberg, the prosecution said that while Streicher was not directly involved in the physical commission of these deadly crimes against humanity, "his crime is no less worse for that reason.... It was to the task of educating and poisoning the people with hate, and of producing murderers, that Streicher set himself. For 25 years, he continued unrelentingly the perversion of the people and youth of Germany. He went on and on as he saw the results of his work bearing fruit. In the early days, he was preaching persecution. As persecution took place, he preached extermination and annihilation and, as millions of Jews were exterminated and annihilated in the Ghettos of the East, he cried out for more and more.
"The crime of Streicher is that he made these crimes possible, which they would never have been had it not been for him and for those like him. In its extent Streicher's crime is probably greater and more far-reaching than that of any of the other defendants. The misery which they caused ceased with their capture. The effects of this man's crime, of the poison that he has put into the minds of millions of young boys and girls goes on, for he concentrated upon the youth and childhood of Germany. He leaves behind him a legacy of almost a whole people poisoned with hate, sadism, and murder, and perverted by him. That people will remain a problem and perhaps a menace to the rest of civilization for generations to come."
Peter Beinart: Obama Gets His Mojo Back
Source: The Daily Beast (3-11-10)
[Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His new book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, will be published by HarperCollins in June.]
Amidst the speculation over whether David Axelrod hates Rahm Emanuel or Rahm Emanuel hates David Axelrod or Lawrence Summers hates them both, the punditocracy has glossed over something significant: Team Obama has had one hell of a month. In late January, health care reform was widely considered dead. Now it’s considered a better than even bet. It could all still end in tears, of course. But for the moment, Barack Obama has his mojo back. And he has it back for one basic reason: He’s given up the dream that he could transcend the partisan divide....
That dream has been central to Obama’s political career. The most famous line in his 2004 Democratic convention speech was “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.” He defeated Hillary Clinton in part because Democrats believed she would usher in four more years of partisan blood sport while he was someone Republicans did not hate. But this post-partisan dream, it turns out, rested on two fallacies. The first is that because average Americans want less polarized politics, politicians will listen. In truth, as political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson illustrated in their 2006 book, Off Center, the GOP now responds to a set of incentives that has little to do with the public’s desire for kumbaya. For roughly a decade, the Club for Growth has run primary challengers against Republican moderates, and party activists have threatened to deny those moderates committee chairmanships, and as a result, centrist congressional Republicans have either abandoned their centrism or abandoned Congress. In the 1980s, the Senate contained about a dozen blue-state Republican moderates. Today, there are two or three, which means there is no safety in numbers. So on health care, when Obama went looking for the GOP partners to help him usher in his post-polarized age, he found that they simply weren’t there.
The other fallacy was that the red-blue divide was all about the culture war. From E.J. Dionne’s Why Americans Hate Politics to Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? liberals have often argued that were it not for dastardly culture warriors like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove dividing the country over “symbolic” issues like god, guns, gays, Americans would come together on behalf of more government intervention in the economy. Team Obama seems to have been particularly enamored of the idea that since he is a post-baby boomer who neither imbibed at Woodstock nor cursed it, he could lead the country beyond the cultural fights of the 1960s.
To some degree, those fights are indeed fading. When was the last time you heard a pundit screaming about affirmative action or gun control or the death penalty or school prayer? But what the Obama Democrats forgot is that liberals and conservatives are also genuinely, profoundly divided over the role of government. That division, which dates back to the progressive era, is just as intense as the division over culture. The belief that liberals are closet socialists, which is to say, closet totalitarians, is not a fringe view on the right. It is what the conservative movement has always believed. The White House didn’t forcefully respond to these charges because they seem to have believed they were marginal; that particularly after the financial crisis, there was a mainstream, bipartisan consensus in favor of more government spending and regulation. They were wrong....
Health care reform may still fail, of course, and with unemployment at nearly ten percent, the Democrats will get shellacked this fall no matter what. But Barack Obama is coming to terms with American politics as it is, not as he might like it to be. Partisan street-fighter may not be the part he envisioned himself playing, but he’s starting to warm to the role.
Ariel Dorfman: Earthquate Exposes Chile's History
Source: LA Times (3-11-10)
[Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean American author, teaches at Duke University. Website: adorfman.duke.edu. Dr. Dorfman has granted permission to reprint his op-ed in full.]
Almost two weeks after the earthquake that devastated Chile, the country is still reeling from aftershocks. I speak to my sister-in-law in Santiago and she suddenly interrupts our conversation, telling me she has to hang up, está temblandoestá temblando, está temblando -- it's trembling, again and again.
And yet the greatest aftershock of all, what we call réplicas, may be political.
After all, less than 60 days ago, there was another earthquake in Chile, of a different kind, when a majority of my country's citizens elected right-wing billionaire Sebastian Pinera president. In doing so, they rejected the Concertación, the center-left coalition that had defeated the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet in 1990 and had registered significant social and economic gains during its 20-year tenure.
Pinera's win inevitably created doubts about the future. Was this a permanent realignment, or would the Concertación, whose outgoing president, Michelle Bachelet, was leaving office with an unprecedented 80% approval rate, be back in four years?
Would Pinera, who had opposed Pinochet, continue the human rights work of the post-Pinochet governments, or would he bow to conservative elements among his allies who are severely tainted by their association with torture and disappearances? Could Pinera keep his promise to continue the expansive social policies of the Concertación and simultaneously accentuate the neo-liberal economic model, even if it has not been able to solve the shameful differences between rich and poor that make Chile one of the least equitable countries in the world?
All of these questions have been scrambled by the seismic cataclysm that struck Chile and caused damage approaching $30 billion. The new president inherits a country with hundreds dead and many more traumatized and homeless, and will be judged according to how he carries out the urgent task of national reconstruction. A number of pitfalls await him.
The earthquake did not only split Chile's ground and swamp entire towns with a deadly tsunami. It also revealed fractures in Chile's social and moral fabric -- the slow tsunami of persistent poverty and the cosmetic quality of the vaunted modernization that the country has undergone over the last decades.
When the Bachelet government initially declared after the cataclysm that it did not require foreign assistance, one could read behind the reasonable need to first assess the disaster's magnitude a more subtle message: Don't confuse us with Haiti. We can stand on our own.
The earthquake's nightmare alerted Chileans to a different face in the mirror, forcing us to recognize that we live in a país de mentira, a country forged out of illusions. We thought we were so developed! To the point that, more than 20 years ago, Joaquín Lavín, now Pinera's education secretary, proclaimed in a famous essay titled "Adiós, América Latina" that we were on the verge of joining Australia and the First World and leaving behind miserable Latin America.
In this context, this disaster can be seen as a wake-up call to Chile: Hello, Latin America! Or perhaps a test staged by Mother Earth, a challenge to rediscover the deepest sources of our misplaced identity. If so, the new president might well look to Chile's history for models to imitate or avoid.
President Pedro Aguirre Cerda, for instance, responded to the 1939 seismic catastrophe that left 30,000 dead by enacting groundbreaking laws that brought social security, a public health system and important expenditures in education to an exploited populace, establishing the welfare state that has been so instrumental in Chile's development.
Or there is the sobering case of President Pedro Montt, who, just inaugurated, had to deal with the ruinous Valparaíso earthquake of 1906. The youth of the country rushed to rescue victims and discovered the real Chile, the festering Chile that had been hidden under the mirage of gentility, the Chile that Montt and many others of the privileged elite preferred to repress.
Upon their return to Santiago months later, the students interrupted the homage organized for them by the government, jeering the oligarchs in attendance and then walking out, according to historian Gabriel Salazar. They went on to form a student federation that has been, ever since, a symbol of rebellion against injustice.
I believe that those youngsters of 1906 are calling out from beyond death to their descendants, the students of 2010, who have again gathered clothes and food and are heading by the thousands for the most distressed areas to aid the victims. I believe that the young then and now are demanding and anticipating a different Chile, a Chile of equality and fairness for all, a Chile that is measured not by the profits the richest make but by the way it treats its most neglected and suffering citizens.
I can only hope it is a message that our new president will heed, opening his heart and his mind to the true story of our ravaged land.
Joe Conason: The New McCarthyism
Source: Rasmussen Reports (3-11-10)
[Joe Conason writes for the New York Observer.]
The national madness known as "McCarthyism" began 60 years ago in Wheeling, W.V., when Joseph R. McCarthy held up a scrap of paper that supposedly listed the names of 57 State Department officials he said were actually Communists and traitors.
Eventually, America learned that the Wisconsin Republican's famous list was a fabrication, that he was a liar and a demagogue as well as an alcoholic -- and that his authoritarian appeals to fear were worse than useless in defending our security. But by then, McCarthyism's self-serving and fundamentally unpatriotic promoters had inflicted grave damage on the body politic and international prestige of the United States.
Today, McCarthy's heirs are more slick and glib than he ever was, yet their fundamental methods are the same. When Elizabeth Cheney, William Kristol and their media friends slander Justice Department attorneys as the "al-Qaida 7" and malign the "Department of Jihad," they are engaging in the smear tactics that became synonymous with McCarthy....
Cheney and Kristol have charged that certain lawyers in the Justice Department represented alleged terrorists held at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp -- and that by so doing, those attorneys rendered themselves unfit for government service. "Whose values do they share?" asks an ominous advertisement aired by their front group, known as Keep America Safe. They mean to insinuate that the values of those Justice Department attorneys, President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are somehow closer to the jihadism of al-Qaida than to those shared by most Americans....
The career of McCarthy and the specter of McCarthyism ended only when a handful of decent Republicans -- notably including Prescott Bush, the grandfather of George W. Bush -- joined in a Senate resolution of censure against him and his tactics. Perhaps we have witnessed such a moment of truth this week, when 19 prominent Republican attorneys, including Kenneth Starr and several former Bush Justice and Defense Department appointees, denounced the Keep America Safe smears as shameful, unjust and destructive.
Conservatives can effectively discredit this disgraceful campaign -- and it is their responsibility to do so.
Daniel Henninger: Why Obama Is No LBJ
Source: WSJ (3-11-10)
[Daniel Henninger is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal.]
...Barack Obama as LBJ is a metaphor worth pondering if one wants to understand Mr. Obama's difficulties with [his health care] project, and his presidency. The more useful comparison, though, isn't to LBJ's tortured 1960s presidency but to the famed Senate Majority Leader who in 1957 got a civil rights act passed....
From that January until Aug. 2, Johnson engaged in a mind-boggling effort of legislative politics, a story told across hundreds of pages in Robert Caro's "Master of the Senate." Johnson had to overcome the threat of a killer filibuster by the Old South Democratic bloc—led by the brilliant Richard Russell of Georgia—and the animosity and suspicion of northern liberals. Passing the bill, which enhanced voting rights for black Americans, was a remarkable legislative achievement. No civil rights legislation had passed since 1875.
Many possible comparisons between that effort and now are evident, few favorable to now....
LBJ spent his relentless energies and skills over seven months mostly on finding the means to assemble difficult Senate alliances (securing a bloc of Western-state senators by promising them, in secret, long-sought federal dams). This Congress has used up its energies with fights over endless policy detail. The "filibuster-proof" Senate let them think the institution's internal politics didn't matter. It always matters....
Most relevant for this moment: The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was "incremental." LBJ decided he had to prove it possible to pass notable, if partial, civil-rights legislation—"break the virginity," is how he put it. This meant abandoning two big provisions in the bill, enraging some, but not all, of the Senate's liberals. In short, jam-breaking compromise, of which there's been little with ObamaCare. I'm guessing the one person in the White House who has read Caro's book is Rahm Emanuel, the incrementalist....
The idea that Obama should become LBJ, even in the glare of modern media, reveals how other-worldly our politics has become. Only a dilettante would believe a Barack Obama can walk in off the street and be LBJ. To read Caro's account of the hours, years, effort, savvy and muscle memory Lyndon Johnson built over a career to become "LBJ" is to know why Washington "doesn't work" anymore....
Robert Kaplan: Man Versus Afghanistan
Source: Atlantic (3-11-10)
[Robert Kaplan is an American journalist, currently a National Correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly.]
We were there to fight, to do PT, to eat, to sleep, then to fight again. There was no big-screen TV or other diversion in the barracks. It was a world of concrete, plywood, and gun oil, and it was absolutely intoxicating in its intensity and unlike anything that existed in the British military.” So recollected retired Lieutenant Colonel Richard Williams of the elite British Special Air Service, concerning the worst days in Iraq. In December 2006, Williams told me, there were more than 140 suicide bombings in Baghdad, a level of violence that he likened to the Nazi Blitz on London. In December 2007, there were five. “General McChrystal delivered that statistic,” a feat that not even the recent bombings in Baghdad can detract from. In Iraq, he went on, General Stanley A. McChrystal raised the “hard, nasty business” of counterterrorism—of “black ops”—to an industrial scale, with 10 nightly raids throughout the city, 300 a month, that McChrystal, now 55, regularly joined.
Williams did not discount the decisive Sunni Awakening, the surge of 20,000 extra troops into Iraq, or the deployment of troops outside the big Burger King bases and deep into the heart of hostile Iraqi neighborhoods. But he insisted that the work of the special operators commanded by McChrystal was also pivotal.
And, Williams added, there was never any question that they would succeed.
“Doubt,” T. E. Lawrence wrote in Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926), is “our modern crown of thorns.” The Special Operations forces that McChrystal led in Iraq were not so afflicted, despite a home front—especially a policy nomenklatura in Washington—that by 2006 had given up on the war. McChrystal, whom Williams called “the singularly most impressive military officer I ever served with,” has never submitted to fate. His oft-documented physical regimen—running eight miles a day, eating one meal a day, and sleeping four hours a night—itself expresses an unyielding, almost cultic determination.
Last December, in a spare, homely office in Kabul that felt like the business-class lounge of a bad airline, McChrystal recalled his Iraq experience for me: “I remember”—he pauses—“we had a meeting in Balad [an air base north of Baghdad] in the spring of 2006, where we asked ourselves, ‘Have we already lost, and are too stubborn to admit it?’ After all, the military is hard-wired to be optimistic, so there is a danger of not being realistic. Well, we decided that we hadn’t lost. By then we had [Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi in our sights. We could smell him. We also felt, in those dark days, that we could break and implode alQaeda. We in JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] had this sense of … mission, passion … I don’t know what you call it. The insurgents,” McChrystal went on, “had a real cause, and we had a counter-cause. We had a level of unit cohesion just like in The Centurions and The Praetorians,” 1960s novels by Jean Lartéguy about French paratroopers in Indochina and Algeria. “It was intense,” McChrystal said, scrunching his already deeply carved face. “We were hitting alQaeda in Iraq like Rocky Balboa hitting Apollo Creed in the gut.”
I asked whether the situation in Iraq in 2006 was bleaker than Afghanistan now.
“Look, this isn’t easy,” he sighed. “Afghanistan for years got worse and worse, and the coalition sometimes lagged behind the reality of the situation.” Because the country is so decentralized, he explained, it is extraordinarily complex, with a different tribal and sectarian reality in each district. But then he ticked off ways the war could be won. “The insurgency is only fundamentally effective in the Pashtun belt. The critical part of the population is where the water and the roads are. People near water are more important economically: along the Helmand and Kabul rivers. You secure these areas, and you take the oxygen out of the insurgency.” He continued, talking about developing a corps of Afghan-area experts within the United States military akin to the American “China hands” of the early and mid-20th century, and “British East India Company types” who went out for years and learned the local languages. His command sergeant major, Mike Hall of Avon Lake, Ohio, said that when McChrystal selected his team of generals and colonels to come with him to command the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan in June 2009, he more or less told them to “get out of the deployment mentality—that they would be in-country for 18 months, two and a half years, for the duration, however long it took to win.”
McChrystal believes that the “ideological piece” of alQaeda is “truly scary”: that a new brand of totalitarianism—alQaeda the franchise—is running amok and motivating small secretive groups around the world, and that victory in Afghanistan is necessary to deliver a “huge moral defeat” to it.
McChrystal’s resolve is part of a larger, deeper story. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has repeatedly employed its military, wisely and unwisely, as a weapon against fate and inevitability. In that capacity, the military has become the principal protagonist in an intellectual debate, raging since antiquity, that pits individual moral responsibility against determinism—the belief that historical, cultural, ethnic, economic, and other antecedent forces determine the future of men and nations. McChrystal, the commander of American and NATO troops in an Afghanistan that is tottering on the edge of chaos, is both the supreme and most recent symbol of that struggle...
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Alexander J. Motyl: Difficult Task Defining Bandera’s Historic Role
Source: Moscow Times (3-11-10)
[Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark.]
Former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko’s decision to confer the title of Hero of Ukraine on nationalist leader Stepan Bandera on Jan. 22 has unleashed a storm of outrage inside and outside Ukraine. Critics accuse Yushchenko of whitewashing a Nazi-era fascist and betraying the ideals of the Orange Revolution that brought him to power. Some hint darkly at a resurgence of fascism in Ukraine.
As always, the reality is more complicated. Just who was Bandera and what does he represent?
Bandera headed the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, a nationalist movement that emerged in 1929 and took root in the Ukrainian-inhabited lands of eastern Poland in the 1930s. Neither Bandera nor the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists was fascist, although both had fascist inclinations — particularly in 1940 and 1941. Fascists run or aspire to run existing nations. Nationalists, in contrast, aspire to create nations. Fascists are always authoritarians and chauvinists; nationalists can be liberals, democrats, Communists, authoritarians or fascists. Nationalists and fascists sometimes look alike, especially to conceptually challenged analysts, but their differences are greater than their similarities.
Like the Algerian nationalists in the National Liberation Front, the Palestinian nationalists in the Palestine Liberation Organization or the Jewish nationalists in the Irgun, the Ukrainian nationalists were unconditionally committed to national liberation and independent statehood. All four movements had hierarchical structures, authoritarian leanings and strong leaders and engaged in violence and terrorism against their perceived enemies. Bandera was the Ukrainian version of Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat, not Adolf Hitler....
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, all of the newly independent states began questioning the Soviet historical narrative and constructing their own histories. What Soviet historians had assiduously ignored or distorted became the object of research, discussion and debate. The term Russian chauvinists had used derogatorily — “Banderas”— became a term of praise, much in the way that blacks appropriated the “N-word.”
For many Russians, the quest for historical memory meant accepting Stalin and Stalinism as qualified goods. For non-Russians, the quest for historical memory became inextricably connected to the search for an anti-Soviet identity. The former Soviet republics have focused on the violent, forced conditions under which they were incorporated into the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, as well as the destruction they experienced under Lenin and Stalin, the repression and stagnation they experienced under Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev and the opportunity for freedom they seized under Mikhail Gorbachev....
Bandera became especially popular as the noble ideals of the 2004 Orange Revolution were progressively tarnished by the heroes of that revolution, Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. The more unpopular Yushchenko became, the more he promoted Bandera and the nationalists in the hope that some of their idealistic glow would rub off on him. Unfortunately, Yushchenko’s ill-considered conferral of Hero of Ukraine status on Bandera threw a wrench into a more or less even-tempered discussion of the nationalists and their legacy. Yushchenko’s critics — among them Putin and other top Russian officials who have indirectly rehabilitated Stalin — added fuel to the fire with their irresponsible accusations of fascism. At this point, a sensible discussion is almost impossible in the highly politicized atmosphere surrounding Bandera.
The objective, even-handed accounts of Ukrainian historians, who see Bandera in all his complexity, will eventually seep into the public realm, but only after Ukrainian identity is consolidated and Ukrainian fears of a neo-imperial Russia subside. Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych could promote this shift by unifying the country around a common identity and history, vigorously protecting Ukrainian interests vis-a-vis Moscow and eschewing Yushchenko’s proclivity for provocation. Europe could help by opening its doors to Ukraine, and Russia can assist by rejecting Stalinism. And we should not forget about Western historians in this equation, who can do their part by refraining from simple-minded analyses.
James Traub: America Isn't Very Good at Nation-Building
Source: Foreign Policy (3-8-10)
[James Traub is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and author of, most recently, The Freedom Agenda. His new column for ForeignPolicy.com runs weekly.]
The United States' first "civilian surge" took place in August 1901, when 500 teachers disembarked from the USS Thomas, a converted cattle ship, in Manila Bay -- "the men wearing straw boaters and blazers," according to journalist and historian Stanley Karnow, "the women in long skirts and large flowery hats. Like vacationers, they carried baseball bats, tennis rackets, musical instruments, cameras and binoculars." America's colonial enterprise was new: Only a few months had passed since the Army had subdued a fierce insurgency and commenced governing the Philippines. The Thomasites, as this proto-Peace Corps came to be known, had responded to an advertisement placed in newspapers across the United States.
The State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) no longer have to put ads in the papers to assemble a civilian force for the state-building effort now under way in Afghanistan, but it's remarkable how haphazard, and almost frantic, the system remains. "It's a numbers game," a USAID official told me, "a body game." Only a few of the 400-odd civilians USAID has hired so far have either language or technical skills; most are either eager youngsters or post-career officials from the military, State, or USAID. Jack Lew, the deputy secretary of state who is overseeing the process, says that "it's proved incredibly difficult to take on such an urgent challenge when you don't have a deep enough bench."
As an American, this is perplexing. Why do we not have a deep enough bench -- or any bench at all to speak of? We used to have one, even after we ceased to be a practicing colonial state. Tens of thousands of civilians -- most of them serving in the Army -- governed Germany and Japan in the aftermath of World War II and left behind effective democratic states. The "strategic hamlet" program in Vietnam -- the core of the effort to win "hearts and minds" -- involved more than 1,000 civilians, most from USAID. But after the Vietnam War, both the military and the political leadership recoiled from the idea of counterinsurgency and "small wars." The Powell Doctrine stipulated that the United States would fight big wars or none at all, thus effectively eclipsing the space between "war" and "peace" where in the past it had deployed a civilian force.
The Powell Doctrine became received wisdom at precisely the moment it was being superseded by events, for the end of the Cold War produced a set of "complex emergencies" in Somalia, Haiti, Kurdistan, and the Balkans that required a combination of force and large-scale civilian presence. In 1997, Bill Clinton's administration issued a presidential directive designed to systematize the civilian-military response to such emergencies. The reserve civilian force envisioned by the plan was never brought into being. And George W. Bush's administration arrived in office ideologically opposed to state-building; Bush's first national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, sneeringly declared, "We don't need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten."...
The searing experience of Iraq and Afghanistan has made many Americans doubt the U.S. capacity to do much good at all abroad. That skepticism is a necessary corrective to the airy fantasies of a few years ago, but it's also a new kind of hyperbole. The Thomasites, four-fifths of whom, by the way, had prior teaching experience and thus more or less knew what they were doing, not only established a national school system in the Philippines, but offered the most benevolent possible face to America's colonial enterprise. They didn't leave a working democracy in their wake, but that's not what we're asking of the "civilian surge" in Afghanistan either. We are hoping they will help tip the scales of Afghan public opinion toward the government rather than the Taliban. Even that might be too much to ask. But it would be a shame if we failed because we hadn't taken the responsibility seriously.
Mark E. Halperin: How Obama Is Making the Same Mistakes as Bush
Source: TIME (3-7-10)
[Mark E. Halperin is an American political analyst for Time magazine and Time.com.]
Who would have thought that one of Barack Obama's biggest missteps as President would be repeating some of the bad habits of George W. Bush? No single factor was more instrumental in Obama's 2008 victory than his pledge to completely reverse the nation's course once in the White House. Instead, over the past year, Obama has mimicked some of Bush's most egregious blunders, leading to much of the political predicament in which the present decider finds himself today.
This is not to say that Obama has maintained Bush's policies, although his Administration's continuity on issues ranging from Afghanistan to Wall Street has alienated the left. And he certainly hasn't done himself any favors by failing to inspire the general public to rally around his agenda. But Obama's stumbles atop the high wire of running the federal government have created perhaps the greatest danger to his presidency, and they are oddly reminiscent of the misguided practices that tripped up his predecessor.
Consider all the ways in which the current occupant of the Oval Office has — inadvertently or otherwise — repeated the errors of the recent past:
No Chief Economic Spokesperson. Quick: Name all three of Bush's Treasury Secretaries. Hard to do, isn't it? Like Bush, Obama has failed to install an economics commander in chief who can serve as the public face and the in-house honcho of the Administration's financial team. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, National Economic Council chief Larry Summers and Council of Economic Advisers chair Christina Romer all bring strengths to their positions, but none is especially effective at conveying either a consistent message or a sufficient urgency, and none stands out symbolically or practically as America's economics czar. It is not practical for the President himself to serve as the daily go-to guy on any one issue, and given the short- and long-term consequences of the financial and unemployment crises, Obama desperately needs a distinct leader to handle this vital job. Bush needed a Robert Rubin figure, and so does Obama.
Failure to Integrate Policy, Politics and Communication. By the end of Bush's two terms, even some of his supporters were disappointed (and, at times, horrified) by how much of the decisionmaking at the highest levels of government were more a result of political machinations than rigorous, substantive policymaking. From its earliest days, Obama's White House has failed to put in place the necessary procedures and personnel to move strong, serious ideas along the conveyor belt from the minds of wonky experts cloistered in the Old Executive Office Building chambers to the President's lips as he introduces new initiatives at dramatic public events.
Tying the Administration's Fate Too Closely to His Party's Congressional Leadership. Republican leaders in Congress effectively persuaded Bush in almost every year of his presidency to marry his fate to theirs — and all too frequently, to subordinate his vision of right and wrong to their short-term political demands. This problem was particularly pronounced in the area of spending, from a mammoth farm bill to an expensive entitlement in the form of a Medicare prescription-drug benefit to colossal business-as-usual earmark spending. Bush also tarnished his personal image by staying largely silent in the face of ethics flaps involving Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff and other scandal-plagued Republicans...
Darrell Issa: Obama ... The New Nixon?
Source: National Review (3-10-10)
[Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) is the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.]
Richard Nixon is back. Or so it seems from much recent press coverage and punditry.
In December, John Feffer of the Institute for Policy Studies argued in The Huffington Post that the current administration’s professed commitment to realism in international relations meant that Barack Obama is “shaping up to be a true heir of Richard Nixon.” Time’s Peter Beinart echoed that sentiment last month when he declared “Obama’s foreign policy, in fact, looks a lot like Richard Nixon’s.”
Months earlier, a Foreign Policy article entitled “Obama, the Great Wall, and Nixon’s Ghost” cast Obama’s 2009 visit to Beijing as a whimper alongside his predecessor’s historic 1972 mission. USA Today’s headline declared that “Obama follows in the footsteps of Richard Nixon.” And, when the president decided to host the leader of China’s regional rival at the administration’s first state dinner, pundits writing for The Daily Beast noted that “Richard Nixon must be turning in his grave.”
On the domestic front, President Obama has been called “the most environmentally attuned . . . in a generation.” But in recognition of the fact that it was Richard Nixon who established the Environmental Protection Agency and gave us Earth Day 40 years ago, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorialist Paul Steinberg has written, “Not since the Nixon administration have green concerns enjoyed such a high profile in the Oval Office.”
NPR political editor Ken Rudin has also declared “almost Nixonesque” the Obama administration’s efforts to delineate groups and individuals unsupportive of its policy preferences. Veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas, reacting to what she believed were the Obama White House’s efforts to influence the media, asserted last June that even “Nixon didn’t try to do that.” The list of comparisons goes on.
The prospect of Nixon’s shadow falling across his administration must surely unsettle Barack Obama. The legacy of Richard Nixon has suffered for decades whenever an instance of political dishonor required historic quantification. Every time the ubiquitous suffix “gate” is applied to political scandals both great and small — from Clinton-era Travelgate to today’s Climategate — we are forced to think in terms of Richard Nixon.
In the minds of the American people, the Nixon years were fraught with criminal conspiracies, dirty tricks, and Machiavellian political machinations. Yet there are some lessons that President Obama would do well to learn from Nixon, particularly when it comes to our nation’s approach to the global terrorist threat.
In his 1985 book No More Vietnams, President Nixon identified the political and diplomatic framework that made inevitable this nation’s engagement in the protracted, costly war in Indochina. Drawing on his personal experience as commander-in-chief and an indisputably vast understanding of geopolitical reality, the president wrote much that could be instructive to the Obama administration as it seeks to counter the menace of militant international terrorism...
Bret Stephens: Iraqis Embrace Democracy. Do We?
Source: WSJ (3-9-10)
[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.]
In 2002, a presidential election was held in Iraq. Saddam Hussein won it by a margin of 11,445,638 to zero. "Whether that's because they love their leader—as many people said they do—or for other reasons, was hard to tell," reported CBS News's Tom Fenton from Baghdad.
You can't say they aren't fair and balanced over at CBS.
Another election has now been held in Iraq, this time involving 19 million voters, 50,000 polling stations, 6,200 candidates, 325 parliamentary seats and 86 parties. In the run-up to the vote, the general view among Iraqis and foreign observers alike was that the outcome was "too close to call." Linger over the words: "Too close to call" has never before been part of the Arab political lexicon.
But democracy has finally arrived, first by force of American arms, next by dint of Iraqi will. It's a remarkable thing, not just in the context of the past seven years of U.S. involvement, or the eight decades of Iraq's sovereign existence, but in the much longer sweep of Arab civilization. Paleontologists have described similar moments in evolution, when some natural cataclysm permits a nimbler class of animals to take the place of the planet's former masters.
Just so in Iraq: the Cretaceous period of the T Rex and the pterosaur is at last drawing to a close. George W. Bush, in all his subtlety, was their mass-extinction event.
In the West it's a different story. Among the most remarkable trends of recent years has been the disenchantment with the very idea of democracy.
It's a trend that expresses itself in various ways: the admiration for authoritarian (typically Chinese) efficiencies; the sense that democracies are incapable of rising to the "challenges" of health care and global warming; the distaste for the tea parties in the U.S. But nowhere has it been more consistent than in the West's commentary about Iraq.
It began nearly on the day that Saddam's statue in central Baghdad was brought down by American soldiers as jubilant Iraqis looked on. "This war was not worth a child's finger," wrote the English novelist Julian Barnes in a Guardian op-ed. That was published fully a year before the insurgency got underway, when the argument could not be made—as it was later made—that democracy is all well and good but that order of any kind, even tyrannical order, is much to be preferred.
For the next seven years, the insurgents murdered coalition soldiers and Iraqi civilians with equal abandon, right up to the morning of the election. Yet somehow the killing sprees (grotesquely replete with the cutting off of children's fingers) were treated by the world's great opiners not as the acts of evil men to be confronted and stopped, but purely as a function of the American presence in Iraq.
In this strange moral calculus, all the blood that was shed—including American blood—was on America's hands. It was also, by implication, a stain on America's "experiment" of "imposing" democracy on so obviously unwilling a people.
In the midst of those bloodbaths, the U.S. ceded civilian control to Iraqi authorities, who then conducted four democratic elections. I still remember the incredulity among the war's opponents, bordering on open dismay, when the parliamentary elections five years ago proved an inspiring success.
But the critics could relax, at least for a few years: The killing in Iraq did not abate. Successive Iraqi prime ministers were treated with none of the deference Western diplomats would routinely accord the masters of Egypt or Vietnam or even Syria. The division of Iraq was a respectable topic of conversation.
And yet throughout all of this, Iraqis somehow held fast to their idea of a democratic country. How was that possible? How could they not behave according to type, as inveterate sectarians and anti-Americans? Didn't they perhaps miss the political clarity that dictatorship uniquely provides?..
Tom Hayden: Exit Strategies for Afghanistan and Iraq
Source: Nation (3-8-10)
[Tom Hayden, a former California state senator, is the author, most recently, of The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama (Paradigm).]
It's been a long winter for the peace movement. Waiting for Obama has proved fruitless. The Great Recession has strengthened Wall Street and diverted attention from the wars. The debate over healthcare still won't go away and has demoralized progressive advocates. Given a chance to exit from Afghanistan when the Karzai election proved to be stolen, President Obama escalated anyway, but also promised to "begin" exiting almost before an opposition could mobilize at home.
Representative Dennis Kucinich will step into the crosswinds this week and force the House of Representatives to wake up, pay attention, and vote up or down on the Afghanistan war. The Kucinich initiative at least will reveal where Congress stands. Whether it will energize the peace movement for upcoming March protests or beyond is unpredictable.
Kucinich, interviewed along with other members of Congress by The Nation last week, is introducing a so-called privileged resolution requiring the House to hold a three-hour debate this coming Wednesday, followed by a vote on the Afghanistan war. The vote is expected to authorize the war, but passage of Kucinich's initiative would require a withdrawal in thirty days. If the president rejected such a decision, the withdrawal would be delayed until the end of 2010, nine months from now.
"It's time to force a debate," Kucinich says. "It's not enough to slow-walk the end of the war." On Friday Kucinich had seventeen co-sponsors for his measure.
The Kucinich bill is based on the 1973 War Powers Act, passed during the upsurge of Congressional opposition to the unilateral war-making of the executive branch during the Richard Nixon era. The War Powers Act, strongly opposed by Bush-era officials including Dick Cheney and John Yoo, was based on Article I, Section 8, of the federal Constitution, which, according to James Madison, "expressly vested" the power to "declare" war in Congress.
According to Gary Wills's history in Bomb Power, the War Powers legislation actually diluted Congressional authority by making declaration of war a joint exercise with the White House. Nonetheless, the symbolic threat to presidential prerogative inflamed Cheney into describing it as a Congressional usurpation. Yoo, the author of the notorious torture memos in the Bush administration, went so far as to argue that "declare" in the eighteenth century meant simply to "recognize[d] a state of affairs."
The Kucinich measure seeks to remind Congress of the peak progressive moment when, in tandem with a vast antiwar movement in the streets, Richard Nixon was forced to resign and the Vietnam War was terminated. A decade later, Congress again would play a key role in the Iran/Contra hearings during the Reagan era.
But Wednesday's vote may be a measure of how much Congress has continued to surrender its war-making prerogative to the administration...
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Gary Scharrer: Does State Board Need a History Test?
Source: San Antonio Express-News (3-9-10)
[Gary Scharrer is a columnist for the San Antonio Express-News.]
This is what can happen when you ignore experts, don't fully know your history, and are responsible for approving textbooks for Texas schoolchildren, according to critics worried about the State Board of Education:
You might delete someone recognized by Ladies' Home Journal as one of the 100 Most Important Women of the 20th Century — citing her membership in a socialist organization.
You could ban a popular children's author from textbooks because his name is the same as a professor who wrote favorably about Marxism.
You might even vote to teach youngsters that U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy's 1950s crusade to smear suspected Communists was vindicated by later research on Soviet spying.
The State Board of Education will meet again this week before taking final action in May on new social studies curriculum standards that will influence history and government textbooks for 4.7 million public school students....
Geraldine “Tincy” Miller, R-Dallas, encouraged colleagues to yank Huerta because “she was a prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America Party” and, therefore, did not “exemplify good citizenship” like Helen Keller....
The board tentatively decided to add W.E.B. DuBois, who co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, to the reading list for elementary school students.
“I was just stunned that I never knew who this man was. He is a true, great American,” board member Don McLeroy, R-Bryan, told his colleagues....
Pat Hardy, R-Fort Worth, encouraged the board to pull Bill Martin Jr. out of the standards.
The board apparently confused the author of “Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See?” with a different Bill Martin who wrote about “Ethical Marxism.”
It's a process that relies only sporadically on expertise, said Keith Erekson, director of the University of Texas at El Paso Center for History Teaching & Learning.
“Experienced review committees, invited experts and the public provide their feedback early in the process before the State Board of Education closes the door in order to do what they want to do,” Erekson said. “That would be like hiring top-rate engineers to design a car only to rush it off the assembly line without inspecting the final accelerator pedal.”
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