douglass carmichael: articles

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 00:35:26 GMT

I highly recommend the difficult series, the Reith lectures by the african witer Wole Soyinka on the nature of terror and its use by politicians.

The first transcript is at

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2004/lecture1.shtml

and from there you can click through to the others. I think there are five.

his bio at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2004/lecturer.shtml

Mon, 06 Dec 2004 01:49:25 GMT

The most important reading today has been the difficult article in The New Republic

www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20041213&s=beinart121304

AN ARGUMENT FOR A NEW LIBERALISM.

A Fighting Faith

by Peter Beinart

Post date: 12.02.04

Issue date: 12.13.04

Basically he argues that the democrats ("The Liberals") must embrace a new cold war mentality toward "Islamic Fundamentalism." He says it is the only way to win, and it requires confronting the soft side of the democratic party, and abandoning the social issues ( he does not name them but environment, economy, health...).

He does not see that the basic humanitarian side of the democrats is concerned that the it is the US fundamentalists that mirror the Islamic fundamentalists, and support the same kind of totalitarian government - in response to each other.

He seems to reduce the whole issue to winning. An alternative reading would be that he is trying to mobilize the democrats to be a war party. Why? protecting Israel might be one answer. It is not clear what other logic leads down this path, especially if the argument that it is the way to win fails. He wants to say that people Voted against Kerry because he was weak on Iraq, which equals weak on Terror. But the polls show that people are much more concerned about terror than the war in Iraq, and their concern about Iraq is that it is such a mess.

Therefore being concerned with terror is not the same as supporting the war. Kerry made attempts to separate the issues, but because he was ambivalent in his voting about Iraq, and talked at the end about More troops to fight harder to win, I think the evidence shows that many couldn't see a difference between Kerry and Bush, and that sometimes foolish consistency is smarter than flip-flopping. It may be that the popular perception of both candidates is close to the discernible truth.

But now to the article.

During World War II, only one major liberal organization, the Union for Democratic Action (UDA), had banned communists from its ranks.
Announcing the formation of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), the statement declared, "[B]ecause the interests of the United States are the interests of free men everywhere," America should support "democratic and freedom-loving peoples the world over." That meant unceasing opposition to communism, an ideology "hostile to the principles of freedom and democracy on which the Republic has grown great."

This is his set up. That being militant against Islamic fundamentalism is equivalent, and that he has no critique of the costs to US society of the way Bush has gong about it.

At the time, the ADA's was still a minority view among American liberals. Two of the most influential journals of liberal opinion, The New Republic and The Nation, both rejected militant anti-communism.
The American Civil Liberties Union (aclu) denounced communism, as did the naacp. By 1949, three years after Winston Churchill warned that an "iron curtain" had descended across Europe, Schlesinger could write in The Vital Center: "Mid-twentieth century liberalism, I believe, has thus been fundamentally reshaped ... by the exposure of the Soviet Union, and by the deepening of our knowledge of man. The consequence of this historical re-education has been an unconditional rejection of totalitarianism."

And he continues to equate anti totalitarian with being against Islamic fundamentalism and for the war in Iraq, not noting that Iraq was one of the most secular Arabic countries, itself opposed to fundamentalism (and conceivably holding it at bay more than the US or post Saddam government can do).

Today, three years after September 11 brought the United States face-to-face with a new totalitarian threat, liberalism has still not "been fundamentally reshaped" by the experience.

And here the equation is complete, and the idea that American liberalism needs to act cold war toward Islamic fundamentalism as if it were Soviet communism. The shift in scale makes Beinart Quixotic, spending all on very weak opponents, while strengthening them

On health care, gay rights, and the environment, there is a positive vision, articulated with passion. But there is little liberal passion to win the struggle against Al Qaeda--even though totalitarian Islam has killed thousands of Americans and aims to kill millions;

He reduces the humanitarian justice side of the democratic party as completely as do the Bush folks.

When liberals talk about America's new era, the discussion is largely negative--against the Iraq war, against restrictions on civil liberties, against America's worsening reputation in the world. In sharp contrast to the first years of the cold war, post-September 11 liberalism has produced leaders and institutions--most notably Michael Moore and MoveOn--that do not put the struggle against America's new totalitarian foe at the center of their hopes for a better world. As a result, the Democratic Party boasts a fairly hawkish foreign policy establishment and a cadre of politicians and strategists eager to look tough. But, below this small elite sits a Wallacite grassroots that views America's new struggle as a distraction, if not a mirage. Two elections, and two defeats, into the September 11 era, American liberalism still has not had its meeting at the Willard Hotel. And the hour is getting late.

Get rid of the softies is the message, make the democratic party the center of a new cold war.

The real change this year was on foreign policy. In 2000, only 12 percent of voters cited "world affairs" as their paramount issue; this year, 34 percent mentioned either Iraq or terrorism. (Combined, the two foreign policy categories dwarf moral values.) Voters who cited terrorism backed Bush even more strongly than those who cited moral values. And it was largely this new cohort--the same one that handed the GOP its Senate majority in 2002--that accounts for Bush's improvement over 2000. As Paul Freedman recently calculated in Slate, if you control for Bush's share of the vote four years ago, "a 10-point increase in the percentage of voters [in a given state] citing terrorism as the most important problem translates into a 3-point Bush gain. A 10-point increase in morality voters, on the other hand, has no effect."

This does not do a good job of sorting out the difference between the Iraq voting and the Terrorism voting, nor does it include the possibility of a much more strategic "win the hearts and minds" strategy and what it could accomplish, which was crippled by the negatives f the war (its stupidity, lying, meanness, ill-planning and Prisons scandals, to name a few). Nor does he in the article deal with the loss of esteem in all the countries of the world (according to poling such as done by Pew on worldwide country by country attitudes toward the US.

You get the idea. Here are further excerpts and a closing comment.

On national security, Kerry's nomination was a compromise between a party elite desperate to neutralize the terrorism issue and a liberal base unwilling to redefine itself for the post-September 11 world.
Like the other leading candidates in the race, he voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq. This not only pleased Kerry's consultants, who hoped to inoculate him against charges that he was soft on terrorism, but it satisfied his foreign policy advisers as well.
For top Kerry foreign policy advisers, such as Richard Holbrooke and Joseph Biden, Bosnia and Kosovo seemed like models for a new post-Vietnam liberalism that embraced U.S. power. And September 11 validated the transformation. Democratic foreign policy wonks not only supported the war in Afghanistan, they generally felt it didn't go far enough--urging a larger nato force capable of securing the entire country.
At the Democratic convention, Biden said that the "overwhelming obligation of the next president is clear"--to exercise "the full measure of our power" to defeat Islamist totalitarianism.
Three months before the Iowa caucuses, facing mass liberal defections to Dean, Kerry voted against Bush's $87 billion supplemental request for Iraq. With that vote, the Kerry compromise was born. To Kerry's foreign policy advisers, some of whom supported the supplemental funding, he remained a vehicle for an aggressive war on terrorism. And that may well have been Kerry's own intention. But, to the liberal voters who would choose the party's nominee, he became a more electable Dean.
That wasn't an accident. Had Kerry aggressively championed a national mobilization to win the war on terrorism, he wouldn't have been the Democratic nominee.
Kerry was a flawed candidate, but he was not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem was the party's liberal base, which would have refused to nominate anyone who proposed redefining the Democratic Party in the way the ADA did in 1947.
In 1950, the journal The New Leader divided American liberals into "hards" and "softs." The hards, epitomized by the ADA, believed anti-communism was the fundamental litmus test for a decent left. Non-communism was not enough; opposition to the totalitarian threat was the prerequisite for membership in American liberalism because communism was the defining moral challenge of the age.

Moore is a non-totalitarian, but, like Wallace, he is not an anti-totalitarian. And, when Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe and Tom Daschle flocked to the Washington premiere of Fahrenheit 9/11, and when Moore sat in Jimmy Carter's box at the Democratic convention, many Americans wondered whether the Democratic Party was anti-totalitarian either. [badly wrong minded]

By January 2002, MoveOn was collaborating with 9-11peace.org, a website founded by Eli Pariser, who would later become MoveOn's most visible spokesman. One early 9-11peace.org bulletin urged supporters to "[c]all world leaders and ask them to call off the bombing," and to "[f]ly the UN Flag as a symbol of global unity and support for international law." Others questioned the wisdom of increased funding for the CIA and the deployment of American troops to assist in anti-terrorist efforts in the Philippines. In October 2002, after 9-11peace.org was incorporated into MoveOn, an organization bulletin suggested that the United States should have "utilize[d] international law and judicial procedures, including due process" against bin Laden and that "it's possible that a tribunal could even have garnered cooperation from the Taliban."

Bush has not increased the size of the U.S. military since September 11--despite repeated calls from hawks in his own party--in part because, given his massive tax cuts, he simply cannot afford to. An anti-totalitarian liberalism would attack those tax cuts not merely as unfair and fiscally reckless, but, above all, as long-term threats to America's ability to wage war against fanatical Islam. Today, however, there is no liberal constituency for such an argument in a Democratic Party in which only 2 percent of delegates called "terrorism" their paramount issue and another 1 percent mentioned "defense."
or liberals to make such arguments effectively, they must first take back their movement from the softs.
As Mary Sperling McAuliffe notes in her book Crisis on the Left: Cold War Politics and American Liberals, 1947-1954, while some of the expelled affiliates were openly communist, others were expelled merely for refusing to declare themselves anti-communist, a sharp contrast from the Popular Front mentality that governed MoveOn's opposition to the Iraq war.
In 1969, Ronald Radosh could remark in his book, American Labor and United States Foreign Policy, on the "total absorption of American labor leaders in the ideology of Cold War liberalism."
That absorption mattered. It created a constituency, deep in the grassroots of the Democratic Party, for the marriage between social justice at home and aggressive anti-communism abroad. Today, however, the U.S. labor movement is largely disconnected from the war against totalitarian Islam, even though independent, liberal-minded unions are an important part of the battle against dictatorship and fanaticism in the Muslim world.

But, if elements within American labor threw themselves into the movement for reform in the Muslim world, they would create a base of support for Democrats who put winning the war on terrorism at the center of their campaigns.
Challenging the "doughface" feminists who opposed the Afghan war and those labor unionists with a knee-jerk suspicion of U.S. power might produce bitter internal conflict. And doing so is harder today because liberals don't have a sympathetic White House to enact liberal anti-totalitarianism policies. But, unless liberals stop glossing over fundamental differences in the name of unity, they never will.
But, despite these differences, Islamist totalitarianism--like Soviet totalitarianism before it--threatens the United States and the aspirations of millions across the world. And, as long as that threat remains, defeating it must be liberalism's north star. Methods for defeating totalitarian Islam are a legitimate topic of internal liberal debate. But the centrality of the effort is not. The recognition that liberals face an external enemy more grave, and more illiberal, than George W. Bush should be the litmus test of a decent left.

Today, the war on terrorism is partially obscured by the war in Iraq, which has made liberals cynical about the purposes of U.S. power. But, even if Iraq is Vietnam, it no more obviates the war on terrorism than Vietnam obviated the battle against communism.

Of all the things contemporary liberals can learn from their forbearers half a century ago, perhaps the most important is that national security can be a calling.
If the struggles for gay marriage and universal health care lay rightful claim to liberal idealism, so does the struggle to protect the United States by spreading freedom in the Muslim world. It, too, can provide the moral purpose for which a new generation of liberals yearn. As it did for the men and women who convened at the Willard Hotel.

We don't need a calling for the ambitious, we need a calling for truth and justice that appeals to the majority of mankind. The choice is not between being against totalitaruanism or leaving it alone, it is between getting it here in a worst kind of war there, vs working for justice and a liveable world.

Beinart's forced logic seems to argue that to win the next election (or to have won the last several) the Democrats ("Liberals") need to act like its a new cold war. I think most of us find that logic flawed. Multilateral justice and targeted police action would be much better, and leave us some room to deal with larger issues like environment, energy, spread of nuclear weapons.If so, what is his motive for going down this new cold war path? Why do we need to force terrorism (world wide a still small number of people and casualties compared to Bhopal, auto accidents...) to be the single issue to define the party?

How much of it is to keep the US on a path that protects Israel. Is there any other explanation?

Friedman in the NYT

<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/05/opinion/05friedman.html?oref=login&;hp>

Of all the irresponsible aspects of the 2005 budget bill that

the Republican-led Congress just passed, nothing could be more

irresponsible than the fact that funding for the National

Science Foundation was cut by nearly 2 percent, or $105

million.

On CBS news , there are other ways..

Millions of folded paper cranes fluttered down from warplanes in the skies over southern Thailand Sunday as the air force completed a mission of peace aimed at expressing the nation's hope for an end to separatist violence in the Muslim-dominated ...

Fri, 15 Oct 2004 07:24:24 GMT

The New New York Review of Books

Volume 51, Number 17 · November 4, 2004

The Election and America's Future
For what has been called "the most consequential election in decades," we have asked some of our contributors for their views.
With K. Anthony Appiah, Russell Baker, Ian Buruma, Mark Danner, Ronald Dworkin, Michael Ignatieff, Anthony Lewis, Norman Mailer, Edmund S. Morgan, Thomas Powers, Alan Ryan, Brian Urquhart, Steven Weinberg, and Garry Wills.

The View from the Heartland
By Joseph Lelyveld
Eau Claire, Wisconsin: These are battleground wards, of a battleground district, in a battleground state that's supposedly being scoured by canvassers in pursuit of the few remaining undecided voters. I've landed here, a week before the first presidential debate, on a less frenetic mission. I want to listen, one by one, to a cross-section of Wisconsin voters, hoping to discover what I can about how Iraq is registering, especially among Bush voters, not only as a campaign issue but as a portent of what the country may face in the years ahead.

The Truth About Muslims
By William Dalrymple
The tortuous and complex relationship of Western Christendom and the world of Islam has provoked a wide variety of responses from historians. Some take the view that "our civilization has grown" out of "the long sequence of interaction and fusion between Orient and Occident." Others have seen relations between Islam and Christianity as being basically adversarial, a long-drawn-out conflict between the two rival civilizations of East and West.

Dreams of Empire
By Tony Judt
Talk of "empire" makes Americans distinctly uneasy. This is odd. In its westward course the young republic was not embarrassed to suck virgin land and indigenous peoples into the embrace of Thomas Jefferson's "empire for liberty." Millions of American immigrants made and still make their first acquaintance with the US through New York, "the Empire State." From Monroe to Bush, American presidents have not hesitated to pronounce doctrines whose extraterritorial implications define imperial authority and presume it: there is nothing self-effacing about that decidedly imperious bird on the Presidential Seal. And yet, though the rest of the world is under no illusion, in the United States today there is a sort of wishful denial. We don't want an empire, we aren't an empire—or else if we are an empire, then it is one of a kind.

Tue, 21 Sep 2004 00:49:46 GMT

Steve Clemmons being serious about government secrecy.

see http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/ for today

Via FUGOP (see this excellent site), I received a valuable and thought-provoking report (released on September 14th) "Secrecy in the Bush Administration," prepared for Congressman Henry Waxman by the Special Investigations Division/Minority Staff of the House Committee on Government Reform. I have just spent the last hour and a half reading it, and the problem is worse than I thought.

This is a small selection from this excellent report that converges with my own frustrations trying to get important policy data from the government, current and historical:

Beginning in the 1960s, Congress enacted a series of landmark laws that promote "government in the sunshine." These include the Freedom of Information Act, the Presidential Records Act, and the Federal Advisory Committee Act. Each of these laws enables the public to view the internal workings of the executive branch. And each has been narrowed in scope and application under the Bush Administration.

Freedom of Information Act

The Freedom of Information Act is the primary law providing access to information held by the executive branch. Adopted in 1966, FOIA established the principle that the public should have broad access to government records. Under the Bush Administration, however, the statute's reach has been narrowed and agencies have resisted FOIA requests through procedural tactics and delay. The Administration
has:

Issued guidance reversing the presumption in favor of disclosure and instructing agencies to withhold a broad and undefined category of "sensitive" information;

Supported statutory and regulatory changes that preclude disclosure of a wide range of information, including information relating to the economic, health, and security infrastructure of the nation; and

Placed administrative obstacles in the way of organizations seeking to use FOIA to obtain federal records, such as denials of fee waivers and delays in agency responses.

Independent academic experts consulted for this report decried these trends. They stated that the Administration has "radically reduced the public right to know," that its policies "are not only sucking the spirit out of the FOIA, but shriveling its very heart," and that no Administration in modern times has "done more to conceal the
workings of government from the people."

Secrecy undermines the ecosystem of transparency that is vital for democracy's survival. When official secrecy dominates a political system, structural corruption thrives.

I have been giving a lot of thought to structural corruption in America -- and what the corruption of America's blue chip media organizations, political parties, religious institutions, and corporations means. I want to write an article soon that compares right-wing Republican kingpin and harrasser of moderate Republicans Tom DeLay to Japan's late kingmaker Shin Kanemaru.

RAND has sometimes placed self-interest above the public good, in my view, but Arnold Horelick was hitting exactly the right target, more than two decades ago.

In any case, read this report.

-- Steve Clemons

Wed, 01 Sep 2004 18:27:51 GMT

Interesting series of articles in the Washington Monthly on what would happen if Bush wins.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0409.bushforum.html

Mon, 23 Aug 2004 02:08:31 GMT

For some releif, try to imagine living in such a sesory world. Zen like..

Life without numbers in a unique Amazon tribe

Piraha apparently can't learn to count and have no distinct words for colours

By STEPHEN STRAUSS
Friday, August 20, 2004 - Page A3

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1+1=2. Mathematics doesn't get any more basic than this, but even 1+1 would stump the brightest minds among the Piraha tribe of the Amazon.

A study appearing today in the journal Science reports that the hunter-gatherers seem to be the only group of humans known to have no concept of numbering and counting.

Not only that, but adult Piraha apparently can't learn to count or understand the concept of numbers or numerals, even when they asked anthropologists to teach them and have been given basic math lessons for months at a time.

Their lack of enumeration skills is just one of the mental and cultural traits that has led scientists who have visited the 300 members of the tribe to describe the Piraha as "something from Mars."

Daniel Everett, an American linguistic anthropologist, has been studying and living with Piraha for 27 years.

Besides living a numberless life, he reports in a separate study prepared for publication, the Piraha are the only people known to have no distinct words for colours.

They have no written language, and no collective memory going back more than two generations. They don't sleep for more than two hours at a time during the night or day.

Even when food is available, they frequently starve themselves and their children, Prof. Everett reports.

They communicate almost as much by singing, whistling and humming as by normal speech.

Mon, 28 Jun 2004 21:53:08 GMT

The new NYRB

Volume 51, Number 12 · July 15, 2004

Making Torture Legal
By Anthony Lewis
Reading through the memoranda written by Bush administration lawyers on how prisoners of the "war on terror" can be treated is a strange experience. The memos read like the advice of a mob lawyer to a mafia don on how to skirt the law and stay out of prison. Avoiding prosecution is literally a theme of the memoranda. Americans who put physical pressure on captives can escape punishment if they can show that they did not have an "intent" to cause "severe physical or mental pain or suffering." And "a defendant could negate a showing of specific intent...by showing that he had acted in good faith that his conduct would not amount to the acts prohibited by the statute."

The Truth About the Drug Companies
By Marcia Angell
Every day Americans are subjected to a barrage of advertising by the pharmaceutical industry. Mixed in with the pitches for a particular drug—usually featuring beautiful people enjoying themselves in the great outdoors—is a more general message. Boiled down to its essentials, it is this: "Yes, prescription drugs are expensive, but that shows how valuable they are. Besides, our research and development costs are enormous, and we need to cover them somehow. As 'research-based' companies, we turn out a steady stream of innovative medicines that lengthen life, enhance its quality, and avert more expensive medical care. You are the beneficiaries of this ongoing achievement of the American free enterprise system, so be grateful, quit whining, and pay up." More prosaically, what the industry is saying is that you get what you pay for. Is any of this true?

Will Turkey Make It?
By Stephen Kinzer
Nine centuries after Pope Urban II sent the first Crusaders off to fight "the Turk," 321 years after the Ottoman army besieged Vienna, Turkey and Europe are approaching a historic encounter. In December, leaders of European Union countries will vote on whether to begin negotiations that would lead to Turkey's joining the EU. Every day it seems more likely that they will say yes.

Nailed!
By Daniel Mendelsohn
On Hatchet Jobs: Writings on Contemporary Fiction by Dale Peck.

The Lost Art of Eating
By Ingrid Rowland
On Feast: A History of Grand Eating by Roy Strong.

Street Arab
By John Updike
On Childe Hassam, American Impressionist, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, June 10-September 12, 2004.

Photo: Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, General John Abizaid, and Major General Geoffrey Miller preparing to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee about Iraqi prisoner abuse, Washington, D.C., May 19, 2004. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Fri, 25 Jun 2004 00:05:06 GMT

Foreign Affiars articles

A Global Power Shift in the Making
James F. Hoge, Jr.
Global power shifts happen rarely and are even less often peaceful. Washington must take heed: Asia is rising fast, with its growing economic power translating into political and military strength. The West must adapt -- or be left behind.
Read

Seeing the Forest
Eugene Linden, Thomas Lovejoy, and J. Daniel Phillips
Experience has shown that piecemeal efforts to protect tropical forests cannot do the job. Conservationists must rethink their approach, implementing conservation on a continental scale, and fast.
Read Preview

Strengthening African Leadership
Robert I. Rotberg
Poor leadership has been the depressing norm in Africa for decades. But as a bold new initiative by a group of past and present African leaders takes off, good governance may finally come to the continent.
Read Preview

Beyond Kyoto
John Browne
Global warming is real and needs to be addressed now. Rather than bash or mourn the defunct Kyoto Protocol, we should start taking the small steps to reduce carbon dioxide emissions today that can make a big difference down the road. The private sector already understands this, and its efforts will be crucial in improving fossil fuel efficiency and developing alternative sources of energy. To harness business potential, however, governments in the developed world must create incentives, improve scientific research, and forge international partnerships.
Read

The Myth Behind China's Miracle
George J. Gilboy
Washington need not worry about China's economic boom, much less respond with protectionism. Although China controls more of the world's exports than ever before, its high-return high-tech industries are dominated by foreign companies. And Chinese firms will not displace them any time soon: Beijing's one-party politics have bred a timid business culture that prevents domestic firms from developing key technologies and keeps them dependent on the West.
Read Preview

History and the Hyperpower
Eliot A. Cohen
Whether or not the United States today should be called an empire is a semantic game. The important point is that it resembles previous empires enough to make the search for lessons of history worthwhile. Overwhelming dominance has always invited hostility. U.S. leaders thus must learn the arts of imperial management and diplomacy, exercising power with a bland smile rather than boastful words.
Read Preview

A Republican Foreign Policy
Chuck Hagel
The war on terrorism must top the U.S. foreign policy agenda -- but it cannot be waged without also attending to the broader crisis in the developing world. Recognizing this, a Republican foreign policy should be guided by seven principles that seek to encourage stability, expand democracy, and strengthen key alliances. Above all, Washington must recognize that U.S. leadership depends as much on principle as it does on the exercise of power.
Read Preview

Saving Iraq From Its Oil
Nancy Birdsall and Arvind Subramanian
Of all the pressing questions facing Iraq today, perhaps the most important in the long run is what to do with the country's oil. Vast wealth from natural resources can often be a curse, not a blessing, corrupting a nation's political and economic institutions and impeding the growth of democracy. There is only one way for Iraq to resist the oil curse: by handing over the proceeds directly to the Iraqi people.
Read Preview

Containing Iraq: Sanctions Worked
George A. Lopez and David Cortright
The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has prompted much handwringing over the problems with prewar intelligence. Too little attention has been paid, however, to the flip slide of the picture: that the much-maligned UN-enforced sanctions regime actually worked. Contrary to what critics have said, we now know that containment helped destroy Saddam Hussein's war machine and his capacity to produce weapons.
Read Preview

Building Entrepreneurial Economies
Carl J. Schramm
The "Washington consensus" approach to development -- which urges other countries to emulate American capitalism -- misses one vital ingredient: the role that entrepreneurs play. Jump-starting growth in the developing world will require an understanding of the American entrepreneurial system, which involves four sectors of the economy.
Read Preview

China's Hidden Democratic Legacy
Orville Schell
China is finding it ever more difficult to straddle the divide between its anachronistic political system and its booming market economy. A reconsideration of the country's political future must come soon. Fortunately, China can find guidance in its own history: a previous generation of reformers who sought to balance the imperatives of modernity with the best aspects of Chinese tradition.
Read Preview

Berlin to Baghdad: The Pitfalls of Hiring Enemy Intelligence
Timothy Naftali
Washington wants to hire ex-Baathists to help rebuild Iraq. The CIA's experience using ex-Nazis to run West Germany's intelligence service should give it pause.
Read

First Principals
Walter Russell Mead
Ron Chernow's new biography examines Alexander Hamilton's role in the founding of the American republic and his contribution to its conflictual political culture.
Read

The Unsettled West
Joshua Kurlantzick
Three new books detail Xinjiang's long history of oppression. As they show, Beijing's rule there has always been harsh -- but never so bad as in the last few years.
Read

The Fire Last Time
Scott Snyder
Going Critical offers an insiders' view of the deal struck with North Korea in 1994 and a core lesson for the Bush administration: there's no substitute for negotiation.
Read

Warlords as Stakeholders
Kimberly Zisk Marten
Read

Abnormal Demographics
Mark Lawrence Schrad
Read

Understanding Saddam
John Mueller
Read

Previous Issue: May/June 2004

Fri, 04 Jun 2004 18:14:28 GMT

And in the curent issue of the NYRB

Unfit to Print?
By Michael Massing
On May 26, The New York Times published a lengthy editors' note belatedly acknowledging that the paper's pre-war coverage "was not as rigorous as it should have been." According to the note, accounts of Iraqi defectors were not analyzed with sufficient skepticism, and "articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display" while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question "were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all." The Times deserves credit for running a detailed mea culpa. Yet the note seems less than forthright.

The low key tone of the NYT apology makes it feel like their pre-war Iraq coverage was about something rather more trivial. thre is no sense of blood, or damaged US reputation.

Thu, 03 Jun 2004 00:21:55 GMT

A very good summary of the state of the new government. not yet definitive, because it can't be, but lays out the issues.

http://billmon.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1482

An see the Chalabi article in the New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040607fa_fact1

Fri, 21 May 2004 18:10:29 GMT

From yesterday's www.washingtonmonthly.com

FRENCH HEALTHCARE....The Economist provides a capsule summary of healthcare in France:

Its hospitals gleam. Waiting-lists are non-existent. Doctors still make home visits. Life expectancy is two years longer than average for the western world.

....For the patient, the French health system is still a joy. Same-day appointments can be made easily; if one doctor's advice displeases, you can consult another, a habit known as nomadisme médical. Individual hospital rooms are the norm. Specialists can be consulted without referral. And while the patient pays up front, almost all the money is reimbursed, either through the public insurance system or a top-up private policy.

For family doctors too, liberty prevails. They are self-employed, can set up a practice where they like, prescribe what they like, and are paid per consultation. As the health ministry's own diagnosis put it recently: “The French system offers more freedom than any other in the world.”

Thu, 20 May 2004 06:17:08 GMT

This kind of policy earns high marks in workability. The americans could have led with thsi kind of proposal, which is probably inevitable (unless things get really much worse), but again missed the opportunity for any kind of leadership.

http://www.hipakistan.com/en/detail.php?newsId=en65229&;F_catID=&f_type=source

UNITED NATIONS: Germany wants Iraq to set up a national security council to resolve disputes about military action between US-led forces, the Iraqi army and the new interim government, its diplomats said on Wednesday.

The proposal was part of an effort to resolve the most controversial section of a planned UN Security Council resolution on Iraq - the relationship between the Iraqi army and police and the US-led foreign troops.

Basically there is no disagreement in the council that Iraqi forces can say "no" to participation in an American military operation, but German envoys told reporters there should be a "mechanism" for them to do this.

The idea of some kind of coordinating body for security is shared by other Security Council members, said Pakistan's Ambassador Munir Akram, this month's council president.

"Part of the discussion is the possibility of a sort of consultative committee in which there would be representation of all sides... and that the actual security policy would be coordinated," he said.

Wed, 19 May 2004 19:07:27 GMT

A good article on Kerry's strategy. Get the center, don't offer too much that can be shot at.

http://www.bopnews.com/archives/000734.html#000734

Fri, 14 May 2004 18:55:44 GMT

The issue of race and migration is poised to be more active- and poisonous. Learning languages, enjoying travel, help. I know for myself, being fairly articulate in Spanish, it is much easier for me to feel at home through speaking Spanish with Mexicans in Mexico than to feel at ease with Mexicans in the US speaking Spanish. Here is an interesting article by Carlos Fuentes, on Huntington's ideas abut the place and future of Mexicans in the United States.

http://www.digitalnpq.org/archive/2004_spring/fuentes.html to see the whole

The Mexican as exploiter | Huntington’s new crusade is directed against Mexico and the Mexicans that live, work, and enrich life in the northern nation. As far as Huntington is concerned, Mexicans do not live—they invade; they do not work—they exploit; and, they do not enrich—they impoverish, since poverty is part a Mexican’s natural condition. All of this, when taking into account the number of Mexicans and Latin Americans in the United States, constitutes a cultural threat for that which Huntington dares to mention: the Anglo-American, Protestant, and Anglo speaking white race.

Are Mexicans invading the US? No, they are simply obeying the laws of the job market. There are job offers for Mexicans because there is a North American labor need. If some day, there were to exist full employment in Mexico, the US would have to find cheap labor from another country for the jobs whites, Saxons, and Protestants—naming them as does Huntington—do not want to fill, since they have either surpassed these levels of employment, or because they have grown old, due to the fact that the economy of the US has passed from the industrial period, to the post-industrial, technological, information age.

Do Mexicans exploit the US? According to Huntington, Mexicans constitute an unjust burden for the US economy: they receive more than they give back.

All of this is false. California earmarks a billion dollars a year to educate the children of immigrants. But if it were to do otherwise—listen up, Schwarzenegger—the state would lose $16 billion a year in federal aid to education. Similarly, Mexican migrant workers pay $29 billion a year more in taxes than the services they receive.

Thu, 13 May 2004 20:51:31 GMT

Another must read.. Friedman in the NYT shifts..

http://nytimes.com/2004/05/13/opinion/13FRIE.html

Why, in the face of the Abu Ghraib travesty, wouldn't the administration make some uniquely American gesture? Because these folks have no clue how to export hope. They would never think of saying, "Let's close this prison immediately and reopen it in a month as the Abu Ghraib Technical College for Computer Training — with all the equipment donated by Dell, H.P. and Microsoft." Why didn't the administration ever use 9/11 as a spur to launch a Manhattan project for energy independence and conservation, so we could break out of our addiction to crude oil, slowly disengage from this region and speak truth to fundamentalist regimes, such as Saudi Arabia? (Addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.) Because that might have required a gas tax or a confrontation with the administration's oil moneymen. Why did the administration always — rightly — bash Yasir Arafat, but never lift a finger or utter a word to stop Ariel Sharon's massive building of illegal settlements in the West Bank? Because while that might have earned America credibility in the Middle East, it might have cost the Bush campaign Jewish votes in Florida.

And, of course, why did the president praise Mr. Rumsfeld rather than fire him? Because Karl Rove says to hold the conservative base, you must always appear to be strong, decisive and loyal. It is more important that the president appear to be true to his team than that America appear to be true to its principles. (Here's the new Rummy Defense: "I am accountable. But the little guys were responsible. I was just giving orders.")

Add it all up, and you see how we got so off track in Iraq, why we are dancing alone in the world — and why our president, who has a strong moral vision, has no moral influence.

Mon, 10 May 2004 23:41:50 GMT

Worth reading for deeper background in diplomacy and policy.

H-Diplo Roundtables are now archived at

http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/

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Carolyn Eisenberg Hofstra University

At last an Assistant Professor, who is willing to think in bold, broad terms about core issues of international politics and the internal affairs of nation-states. One casualty of the still mounting pressure on young scholars to rush into print is that it discourageswide-canvass books and original speculation.

Jeremy Suri has broken this mold and written an original, challenging work of synthesis that brings together topics that are often treated in isolation. Power and Protest is a genuine work of international history. The accessibility of foreign archives, particularly those from the former Soviet bloc, has generated repeated calls for a new international history. In practice, however, few historians have been able to avoid an American-centered or Soviet-centered history. Suri has managed an overview that enables the reader to view international politics from multiple perspectives and to provide a broader context for understanding national decisions.

The author also links the study of high politics within nation-states to their social and intellectual history. Diplomatic historians have long recognized the importance of this sort of inquiry, but have had difficulty implementing it. With the same facility that he displays, moving back and forth between the capitals of the great powers, Suri examines the social movements inside these states and their impact onforeign policy.

click on link above to get the full review and discussion

Sat, 08 May 2004 20:50:53 GMT

New voices always welcome.

http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?pid=1415

For example, in 2000, Ecuadorian General Lucio Gutierrez was ordered to repress protests against government policy by tens of thousands of indigenous Ecuadorians. Instead, he set up kitchens to feed them, permitted them to occupy the Congress, and joined an indigenous leader in announcing a new government. He was jailed for this disobedience, kicked out of the army--and in 2002 he was elected president, the first time indigenous people had exercised such power anywhere in the hemisphere. Far from perfect, he still represents a crucial shift in power.

...

Another is that capitalism and state socialism do not define the range of possibilities, for the indigenous nations often represent significantly different ways of imagining and administrating social and economic systems as well as of connecting spirituality to politics. Indigenous people have been relegated again and again to history's graveyard; as the Zapatistas and other visionaries and insurrectionaries they have, instead, generated the birth of another future. "Another world is possible" has become a rallying cry, and in some ways this is their world, the other future drawn from another past recovered despite everything.

Wed, 05 May 2004 17:26:37 GMT

A lack of Bush leadership in Mideast media.. here is a very good longish article describing the attempts and the failures. It looks like this never had high profile. And my view is that in the non-conversational follow the chain administration, nothing has high profile.

http://www.techcentralstation.com/050304B.html

And this excellent description, also from counterpunch

Against an impressive amount of warnings, from a wide variety of sources, including the intelligence community, as to the complexity of the Iraqi situation and the high risks involved in letting loose, imprudently, the long-compressed popular dynamics in that country, the Bush administration chose to listen only to a very specific set of "experts": the Pentagon's friends among the Iraqi opposition in exile. The most symptomatic of them in my view is Kanan Makiya-a man who has much been quoted as part of a neocon cabal led by former "Trotskyites" that took the helm of U.S. foreign policy, according to a somewhat phantasmagoric view propagated by both liberal and conservative circles.

Wed, 28 Apr 2004 21:49:03 GMT

Must read article, recommended by several, on the background of Muqtada al-Sadr

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0427/p01s03-woiq.html

Fri, 16 Apr 2004 03:44:55 GMT

Into economics today. The following from The Reckoning newsletter.

THE GREAT DELUDER

By Kurt Richebächer

For us, Mr. Greenspan is the great deluder of the American public, flatly deceiving it about the economy's true situation and prospects. His speeches always convey the impression of extraordinary sophistication, but the reality is that elementary knowledge of macroeconomic aggregates or processes, such as saving or wealth creation, obviously eludes him. It keeps amazing us how little critical response he finds.

One reason for this generally silent complacency, we presume, is an overwhelming desire among economists not to upset the prevailing bullishness of public opinion. Bear in mind that Wall Street economists dominate economic discussion in the United States. Their main concern is the stock market.

But we also note a widespread lack of knowledge or interest in macroeconomic matters even of crucial importance. Nobody cares about savings, nobody cares about a credit expansion that has gone completely out of control and nobody seems to realize that the huge trade deficit has been the greatest profit-killer in the U.S. economy for years. Rather, it is hailed as an emblem of economic strength.

The other looming danger in addition to the trade deficit, is, of course, the immense risk it poses to the dollar and in its wake to the whole financial system, both having become heavily hooked on incessant, immense capital inflows. It seems to us that this horrendous danger, too, is in general not at all appreciated. Pointing to higher U.S. real GDP growth in America than in Europe and Japan, the bullish American consensus has been hailing Mr. Greenspan's aggressive monetary easing as a tremendous success. In our view, this comparison is heavily distorted by different calculations of inflation rates.

Looking at the economic aggregates that truly matter for people and the economy, like employment, incomes, and production, the U.S. economy over the past three years has performed most miserably among the industrial nations. What went wrong in the first place? Actually, it seems easier to first identify some factors that have plainly not been among its causes. It is the first economic downturn in postwar history that has not been precipitated by rising inflation and monetary tightening.

As aggregate domestic demand eventually outpaced aggregate domestic supply during past booms, inflation rates used to accelerate. The Fed then pulled the brakes, invariably culminating in recession. Monetary easing, starting about a year later, then promptly triggered the subsequent V-shaped upturn. Within just two years following the recession, the economic losses suffered during the recession were more than offset by very steep economic recoveries.

Periods of recession implicitly reflected the liquidation of the borrowing and spending excesses that had accumulated during the prior boom. In this way, businesses came out of recessions with strong balance sheets and great gains in efficiency.

The thing to see is that the borrowing and spending excesses that accumulate in the course of the boom essentially disrupt the economy's established pattern of demand, output, incomes, relative prices and profits. These distortions hamper economic growth directly over time, irrespective of the level of interest rates.

But manifestly, both the U.S. economy's and the stock market's sharp downturns in 2000 were not caused by tight money or credit. Nonfederal credit rocketed in the year's second quarter when the two began their plunge at an annual rate of $1,315 billion. The increase during the year as a whole was $1,148 billion, after $1,098 billion the year before. For comparison, during recession year 1991, the total nonfederal credit rose $188 billion, after $410

billion in 1990 and $632 billion in 1988.Assessing the U.S. economy's prospects, we must be clear about the extraordinary causes of the downturn that started in mid-2000. In our view, the consumer borrowing and spending binge since 1997 is the U.S. economy's decisive primary maladjustment, certainly the one that brought about the downturn in 2000. It was crucial in generating the variety of dislocations and imbalances that broke the economy's vigor - the collapse of personal saving, the surge of the trade gap, the slump in business investment, the profit carnage, and exploding consumer and business debt loads.

In response, the Fed almost immediately began an unprecedented campaign of monetary easing. According to the American consensus economists, this campaign's success over the last three years has been remarkable. As a result, according to the general mantra, the U.S. economy did not suffer an economic slump of the kind that followed the stock market's crash in 1929. In one of his congressional testimonies, Mr. Greenspan actually emphasized that "imbalances in the economy had not festered in the past years."

But have the economic and financial maladjustments that precipitated the economy's downturn in 2000 really been significantly remedied? To repeat the key point in this respect: Since this downturn was definitely not caused by tight money or credit, loose money alone cannot be the solution.

What Mr. Greenspan has succeeded in doing is cushioning the impact of the bursting stock market bubble on consumer spending, by rapid and drastic rate cuts that promptly fuelled a housing and bond bubble instead. The former created the soaring collateral values that facilitated sharply higher borrowing, while the latter served to slash borrowing costs.

For many observers, this was an ingenious new monetary policy. For sure, it prevented for the time being a sharper economic downturn. But it raises the last and most important question of all: Has Greenspan's policy created the conditions that are requisite to put the U.S. economy on the road of lasting recovery? The credit excesses of the late '90s bubble economy implicitly disrupted its underlying structures of demand, output, relative prices and profits in many ways. The thing to realize is that these bubble-related maladjustments depress the economy of their own accord, as happened in the

United States in 2000-01. In the same vein, restoring sustainable economic growth requires liquidation of the distortions that have accumulated in the economy and its financial system.

We see absolutely no evidence of this having happened. Instead, Mr. Greenspan has merely diverted these distortions, turning them into even greater maladjustments elsewhere in the economy.In the view of the bullish consensus, Mr. Greenspan has done a brilliant job in preventing a deeper and longer recession than might have been expected. This assessment, of course, ignores the protracted employment and income disaster. In our view, America's Great Deluder has done a miserable job: he has papered over existing maladjustments from the boom through even bigger, new bubbles and macroeconomic maladjustments, heralding much worse to come in the future. The structural damage to the economy has become far too big to lend itself to a mild correction. The next downturn will not be pleasant.

Regards, Kurt Richebächer for The Daily Reckoning

Thu, 15 Apr 2004 04:57:26 GMT

And Friedman in tomorrow's NYT can see some good where I haven't. But then it's complex and demanding to udnerstand.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/15/opinion/15FRIE.html

Consider an intriguing article on Tuesday in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz pointing out that Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority and Hamas, longtime rivals, had "made a great deal of progress" toward setting up a new administration to run Gaza after Israel's unilateral withdrawal. The article quoted Hamas leaders as saying that they were willing to participate in the administration of Gaza now that it is being "liberated" — for which Hamas claims credit — and not being turned over in the context of the Oslo peace accords

Thu, 15 Apr 2004 04:28:23 GMT

George Ball in Foreign Affairs, 1979

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19791201faessay8214/george-w-ball/the-coming-crisis-in-israeli-american-relations.html

A veteran of Middle East negotiations recently said to me: "Trying to help Israel find the way to peace is like pushing a bicycle out of the path of an approaching train while the boy riding it frantically back-pedals."

The metaphor reflects the dangers of the current situation but does not explain them. A major contributing cause is the excessively ingrown and convoluted relations between Israel and the United States. Over the last 30 years these relations have evolved to the point where Israel is more dependent on the United States than ever, and yet feels itself free to take hard-line positions at variance with American views without fear of anything worse than verbal admonition from Washington. The result is to encourage Israeli positions and actions that cannot be in the long-term interest of Israel itself, and to deprive the United States in practice of freedom of diplomatic action on issues that deeply affect its national interest.
The state of the relationship between the two countries has been uneasy for some years. It is now approaching a crisis state, and unless American-Israeli relations are radically redefined-either in a closer or looser direction-the search for an Arab-Israeli peace will be completely thwarted and the interests of both nations increasingly jeopardized.
How did we get into the present situation of "dependence without responsibility"? What can we learn from the past? And, above all, what is the American national interest in the present situation, and how can our support of Israel, and our relationship with Israel, be brought into line with that national interest?
II
To those familiar only with the period since 1967, it may come as a surprise that for nearly 20 years the relations between Israel and the United States were far from being as intricately intertwined as they have become since. Until 1956, America treated Israel not much differently from other friendly states. The rapid decision to recognize Israel in 1948, 11 minutes after Israel had proclaimed statehood, had been made by President Truman against the judgment of others in his government, and when, in Israel's first war, the Arabs promptly attacked the new state, the United States used United Nations machinery to bring about separate armistice agreements between Israel and the four belligerent Arab states, in 1949.
Four years later, Secretary of State Dulles directed the main thrust of his Middle East diplomacy at building a tier of defenses against the Soviet Union. To avoid prejudice to our larger Middle Eastern interests, he refused to provide arms to Israel. The guiding principle of our military assistance in the Middle East-expressed for a time in a tripartite agreement with Britain and France, signed in 1950-was to maintain an arms balance. We took no action to facilitate Israel's armament program until May 1956, when the State Department relinquished NATO priority over French military equipment to permit its diversion to Israel.
On October 29, 1956, Israel attacked Egypt in collaboration with the misbegotten Suez adventure of the French and British. Israeli forces swept across the Sinai Desert. Though ...

Tue, 13 Apr 2004 16:27:38 GMT

From the new New York Review of Books.

Volume 51, Number 7 · April 29, 2004

The Failure
By Thomas Powers
The challenge facing investigators now, and historians later, is to explain how the evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction collected by the CIA—wrong in almost every instance—was used by President Bush and his principal advisers to describe an urgent and growing danger which justified a preemptive war. Can the White House plausibly claim that its loud misreading of the evidence was not driven by a determination to go to war? Can the President plausibly claim that the war policy was not his, or that he did not know he and his spokesmen were exaggerating the dangers they cited? It is these questions which define the crisis confronting the CIA.

January 17, 2002: The Trouble with the CIA
Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda

In Search of Hezbollah
By Adam Shatz
Beirut used to be known as the Paris of the Middle East, and in the well-to-do Christian and Sunni quarters of the city, the capital of Lebanon still manages to cast a spell. The cafés are thick with smoke and conversation in Arabic, English, and French, techno music blares from clubs until four in the morning, and everywhere there are women in miniskirts. But "Haririgrad," as downtown Beirut is sometimes called, is hardly representative of the country. If you take a ten-minute drive to the city's southern suburbs, a series of dingy, overcrowded slums, you will see another country, where hejabs are more common than miniskirts, liquor is hard to find, and you're less likely to see posters of Prime Minister Hariri than of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the forty-four-year-old secretary-general of Hezbollah, the Party of God.

August 16, 1990: Beirut: The Hamra by Jean Said Makdisi

The Disintegration of Palestine
By Edward R.F. Sheehan
Nablus is a pleasing city, the most populous in the West Bank. A visitor is struck by the limestone dwellings on verdant mountainsides that surround the ancient town, first settled three millennia ago in the northern part of the West Bank. The city is now inhabited by nearly 200,000 Palestinians who are suffering badly from the Israeli occupation and the growing disintegration of their society.

Mon, 05 Apr 2004 20:00:29 GMT

important for empathy..

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0405/p09s02-coop.html

The focus on Jews and Israel reflects a wider belief among Arab Iraqis, Sunni and Shiite alike, that the US and Israeli occupations are twin Golems of a globalization that they can not resist or control, one that is causing the disintegration of the very fabric of their cultures and economies even as it offers prosperity and freedom to a fortunate few.

It may be hard for Americans to understand the occupation of Iraq in the context of globalization. But Iraq today is clearly the epicenter of that trend. Here, military force was used to seize control of the world's most important commodity - oil. And corporations allied with the occupying power literally scrounge the country for profits, privatizing everything from health care to prisons, while Iraqi engineers, contractors, doctors, and educators are shunted aside.

Like economic globalization in so many other countries of the developing world, this model in Iraq is an unmitigated disaster. My visits to hospitals, schools, think tanks, political party headquarters, art galleries, and refugee camps reveal conditions clearly as bad, and often worse, than on the eve of the US invasion. So outside the Kurdish north, there is almost universal antipathy for the occupation, for what Iraqis refer to derisively as the "Governed Council" (whose members are dismissed as paid employees of the occupiers), and for a draft constitution that analysts here feel has enough holes to ensure continued repression and corruption, however appealing the veneer of democracy.

Sun, 04 Apr 2004 18:04:06 GMT

This is just beautiful. Feynman was active at caltech when i was an undergrad, and he had a major influence on my life, hinting that science was a commited way of seeeing the world,for its intrinsic beauty, , not a career.

Which end is nearer to God, if I may use a religious metaphor, beauty and hope, or the fundamental laws? I think that the right way, of course, is to say that what we have to look at is the whole structural interconnection of the thing; and that all the sciences, and not just the sciences but all the efforts of intellectual kinds, are an endeavor to see the connections of the hierarchies, to connect beauty to history, to connect history to man's psychology, man's psychology to the working of the brain, the brain to the neural impulse, the neural impulse to the chemistry, and so forth, up and down, both ways. And today we cannot, and it is no use making believe that we can, draw carefully a line all the way from one end of this thing to the other, because we have only just begun to see that there is this relative hierarchy.
And I do not think either end is nearer to God. To stand at either end, and to walk off that end of the pier only, hoping that out in that direction is the complete understanding, is a mistake. And to stand with evil and beauty and hope, or to stand with the fundamental laws, hoping that way to get a deep understanding of the whole world, with that aspect alone, is a mistake. It is not sensible for the ones who specialize at the other end, to have such disregard for each other. (They don't actually, but people say they do.) The great mass of workers in between, connecting one step to another, are improving all the time our understanding of the world, both from working at the ends and working in the middle, and in that way we are gradually understanding this tremendous world of interconnecting hierarchies.

http://www.southerncrossreview.org/33/feynman.htm