Government has been a job-creator (even if the GOP may not know it)

"No taxes on job-creators" (meaning owners of small and large businesses and anyone making over a certain amount of money, say a quarter-million a year) has been a mantra of some Republican participants in the debt/deficit debate. In view of that, the following may be of interest inasmuch as it shows that government, supposedly the root of all evil, has been a major job-creator.

Between 1990 and 2008, the number of employed workers in the United States grew from about 122 million to about 149 million. Of the roughly 27 million jobs created during that period, 98 percent were in the so-called nontradable sector of the economy, the sector that produces goods and services that must be consumed domestically. The largest employers in the U.S. nontradable sector were the government (with 22 million jobs in 2008) and the health-care industry (with 16 million jobs in 2008). Together, the two industries created ten million new jobs between 1990 and 2008, or just under 40 percent of total additions.

-- Michael Spence, "The Impact of Globalization on Income and Employment," Foreign Affairs, July/August 2011, p.30 (emphasis added).

Goin' to the chapel

Here (paragraphs 8 to 10).

[added later] A constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget is insanity. There are times when a balanced budget is desirable and other times when it isn't. One learns this on the second day (maybe the third) of any basic economics course.

Silliness on stilts: Friedman's "McDonald's theory"

Maybe the heat has gotten to them: a prominent IR prof/blogger (Drezner) and a prominent writer/blogger (Mead) have a go-round about a so-called "theory" promulgated by a prominent ... well, whatever Friedman is (careful, no bad words allowed). Drezner is basically right, but I don't know why he's wasting his time on this in the first place. He suggests that a kernel can be salvaged from the Friedman "theory" because two countries with McDonald's, although they can go to war (see his examples), may be less likely to do so. He then proceeds to admit that this proposition, even if true, is not useful because the presence of McDonald's is an "intervening variable." He nonetheless urges some student to write a thesis testing the 'war-is-less-likely-between-countries-with-McDonald's' proposition.

However, 'traditional' interstate war (country A fighting country B, without the complicating presence of any internal armed conflict) is so rare these days that the proposed test is, IMO, of minimal interest. Friedman's "theory" is not a theory and Drezner's weaker version of it is a waste of time, virtually by his own admission. I blame John Sides for drawing my attention to Drezner's post: it's all the fault of someone who doesn't even study international relations. Figures.

The U.S. left and Obama

It's no secret that large numbers of progressives or left-liberals (or whatever label one prefers) are unhappy with Pres. Obama's performance. Although there are some grounds for that unhappiness, I think part of its source may be the high expectations generated by the 2008 campaign. But presidents, especially in recent years (and with the possible exception of G.W. Bush), never behave in office exactly the way their campaigning suggests that they might; they move to the center, for lack of a better phrase, and when the center itself has shifted, or is perceived to have shifted, that will produce disappointments (e.g., in Obama's case, the insufficiently large stimulus package, compromise on Bush tax cut extensions, certain questionable foreign policy decisions, etc.). The disappointments, however, should not obscure the real, if measured, achievements of the Obama admin (e.g., health care reform, saving the domestic auto industry, fulfillment of pledge to end U.S. combat ops in Iraq, two pretty good Supreme Court appointments, etc.). Obama has not changed the underlying structure of the U.S.'s 'winner-take-all' politics (Hacker/Pierson's phrase), but changes to this kind of entrenched system are difficult, to say the least.

Disenchantment with Obama on the left can produce some unhinged judgments, as in this comment from a recent CT thread:

Obama should just do an LBJ. He won’t, of course, but that’s because he’s not as honorable as LBJ.

That is absurd. LBJ decided not to run for re-election in 1968 in the face of widespread discontent among Democrats and others, confirmed by Eugene McCarthy's strong showing in the New Hampshire primary, about his Vietnam policy. LBJ began an escalation of the Vietnam war under deceitful pretenses (the Tonkin Gulf resolution) and persisted in a policy that was misguided and morally dubious (to say the least). One can parcel out blame among his advisors and adduce all kinds of sophisticated and probably correct explanations about why LBJ's Vietnam policymaking took the course that it did, but ultimately it was a failed policy for which LBJ, as president, could not escape responsibility. Obama has made no mistakes of anything like a comparable magnitude. LBJ was in many respects a tragic figure; indeed, Eric Goldman wrote a book called The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson. No serious person will ever write a book called The Tragedy of Barack Obama. The comparison is groundless.

Historical footnote: On March 25, 1968, roughly a week before he announced he would not seek re-election, LBJ was advised by the so-called Wise Men (elders of the foreign policy establishment including Acheson, Lovett, McCloy) to change tack and start de-escalating (and negotiating). For ultra-hawk Walt Rostow, Johnson's national security advisor, this represented the 'death' of the U.S. foreign policy establishment (see D. Milne, America's Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War [2008], p.222). It was more like the establishment finally coming to its senses.

How changes in British welfare and housing policy are changing London

A bit off the usual track for this blog, but I saved this WaPo article last month and thought it might be worth linking to. Striking to an American is how actively the British government, until the recent austerity measures, subsidized rents etc. to ensure a level of socioeconomic diversity in central London neighborhoods. I think it's fair to say that a comparably far-ranging policy in the U.S. would be out of the question, regardless of the state of the economy.

Malefactors of great wealth

John Quiggin at CT:

What the US needs at this point is someone willing to advocate a return to the economic institutions that made America great – 90 per cent top marginal tax rates, strong trade unions, weak banks and imprisonment for malefactors of great wealth.

I associate the phrase "malefactors of great wealth" with FDR, but it was first used by TR.

Famine in Somalia

A discussion of the situation, including obstacles facing aid delivery.

Terror attacks in Norway

Update: The suspect in custody is described as a right-wing Christian fundamentalist opposed to multiculturalism, etc. Thus, this apparently had nothing to do with Norway's involvement in Libya and Afghanistan.

Someone quoted in this piece about the attacks in Norway says they will "change everything." Hyperbole, but understandable in the immediate aftermath of shocking events.

Targeting young people attending a summer political conference is especially despicable. The linked article says the death toll on the island is now 80. I would guess it's quite unlikely that a single assailant could have caused so many casualties; however, the article doesn't speculate on that. Whether Norway's participation both in the NATO operation in Libya and in ISAF (Afghanistan) was part of the motive for the attacks remains to be determined.

Too clever by half (?)

A list of recent columns by Slate's William Saletan (whom I never read, mainly because I don't read Slate very often) includes one about the Obama admin's position on congressional authorization for the Libya operation.

The column is called "Koh is my God pilot." That would be Harold Koh, chief legal advisor in the State Dept. (And just in case your brain has retired for the evening, the title is a riff on those bumper stickers one used to see now and then announcing "God is my co-pilot." Personally I prefer the bumper stickers that say "My airedale [or fill in other desired breed of dog] is smarter than your honors student." But I digress.)

If you find any of this offensive, don't blame me; I'm just the messenger.

P.s. Haven't actually read the column yet.

Head of Kashmiri American Foundation charged

Note (added 7/20): NYT and WaPo today refer to the group as the Kashmiri American Council, not Foundation.

Intuition and a glance at Wikipedia suggest that the Foreign Agents Registration Act is perhaps not one of the more consistently applied and enforced of U.S. laws. At any rate, quite hard on the heels of talks in Washington, which were said to have gone well, between the acting director of the CIA and the director-general of the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence agency, comes news that the FBI has arrested the executive director of the Kashmiri American Foundation on charges of being an unregistered agent of the Pakistan government. Not to get too speculative (what is this, a blog?) but it looks like maybe the CIA and the FBI and the Justice Dept. aren't communicating as well as they might, in view of the timing. Pure speculation on my part. (Some may see this as retaliation for the Pakistanis having detained several people involved in the vaccination campaign in Abbottabad [see previous post on that] or for the earlier arrest of CIA contractor Raymond Davis. Who knows?)

'Drifting' U.S.-India nuclear deal

The expected benefits of the U.S.-India nuclear deal, signed a few years ago, have so far not materialized, for reasons examined in this piece. Nicholas Burns is quoted in the article as saying the fault lies on India's side, and that seems to be accurate, inasmuch as the liability law passed by the Indian parliament deters U.S. companies from selling reactors, etc. The Japanese nuclear disaster following the tsunami has also made India understandably more wary of nuclear power.

Commenting on the linked WaPo article, a reader writes: "another bush/cheney [sic] debacle." Not really. As I wrote at the time, the U.S.-India nuclear deal was one of the very few Bush foreign policy moves that was defensible. And it may yet turn out to pay some dividends, assuming the current obstacles can be removed. (Sec. of State Clinton is now in India for talks.)

Documents of the Arab left

Kal at The Moor Next Door (which I visited recently for the first time in a long time) has started a series of translations of statements, communiques and so on from Arab left-wing parties, especially in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, and Mauritania. The first post in the series, consisting of three statements from the Tunisian Communist Workers Party (PCOT), is here. A main point of the series seems to be to counteract the impression in some quarters that Islamist parties monopolize the organized political space in Tunisia, Egypt, etc.

The post is careful to note it is not endorsing the views of PCOT, which is described as a Marxist-Leninist party with Hoxhaist (as in the former leader of Albania) and Stalinist tendencies, strongly opposed to normalization of relations with Israel. One hopes the full series will include statements from, e.g., social democratic (or democratic socialist) parties as well.

Food, water, and conflict

A post by Daniel Little with numerous links.

Why have I said practically nothing about the debt/deficit negotiations?

Mainly because I find the whole spectacle depressing.

Some Many things sound better in French

I was in the library the other day and saw a Paris Match cover that said, with reference to Peter Falk: il a fait d'un flic modeste une star mondiale [rough trans.: he made a modest cop into a world star]. See? The French sounds better.

Speaking of French: a review in NYTBkRev of Marc Fumaroli's When the World Spoke French.

The other Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch is in the news right now, but a friend tipped me off that today is the birthday of someone who contributed a lot more to the world: the late Iris Murdoch. (See today's installment of The Writer's Almanac.)

The first Murdoch novel I read, more than 20 years ago, was The Accidental Man (1971), one of her few novels with a clearly political context. The plot centers on a young American in Britain who opposes the Vietnam war and struggles with whether he is evading his responsibility by accepting an Oxford job and marrying an English girl (the appropriate word here, given her age) rather than returning to the U.S. to face the draft (and the possibility of prison).

Not Murdoch's strongest book by any means, something about The Accidental Man appealed to me and I went on the kind of binge that I've rarely done with any other author. By the time I was through I'd read a large number of her many novels (though I haven't read all of them -- she turned out almost one a year from 1954 through the mid '90s). Although critical and popular opinion seems to favor the books from her early and middle phases, e.g. The Black Prince or The Sea,The Sea (both of which won awards, the latter the Booker Prize), my favorites are three long, rambling ones she wrote in the '80s: The Good Apprentice, The Book and the Brotherhood, and The Message to the Planet (though I'm probably not quite as high on Message as the other two). These three have rather intricate plots and multiple characters, but nothing feels confused, and there are many pitch-perfect passages. For example, there's a moment in Good Apprentice when one of the main characters revisits, as a middle-aged man, the school where he was a star teenage athlete and student -- a kind of typical novelistic moment that in the hands of many writers, even good ones, would be banal and hackneyed and handled with a sledgehammer. Murdoch navigates it like Roger Federer hitting a cross-court forehand: everything is just right.

I've read some of her non-fiction, including the very rambling (probably by design) Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, and I also have Peter Conradi's biography, which someone gave me. Both Murdoch's life and her books remain somewhat controversial, and her novels are definitely not to everyone's taste. She probably wrote too many, and the weakest ones are not very good; the best ones, however, are, in my opinion, pretty great.

I don't return to Murdoch again and again, re-reading the novels every few years, but then I don't really do that with any authors. It's somehow enough to know that they're all on the shelf, within easy reach.

Can't walk away?

Correction (added 7-28): The amount in the Kerry-Lugar bill is $7.5 billion, not $750 billion.

"The U.S.-Pak[istan] relationship is vexing, complex, and dangerous, but nobody can just walk away from it," Prof. Joshua Goldstein writes. Hard to disagree with this as a general statement. However, as I've had occasion to mention before (echoing Lawrence Wright), there is a case -- not an airtight one, perhaps, but a serious case -- to be made for reducing the current level of U.S. military aid to Pakistan, given that at least some of it is being diverted into non-military purposes and/or used in ways that do not help the U.S. Despite the enactment of the Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill, which gives Pakistan $750 $7.5 billion in U.S. non-military aid over five years (most of which I believe has not yet been spent partly due to disputes about oversight and conditions with Pakistan's government), the relationship continues to be dominated by military and intelligence issues. And continuing to support the Pakistani military with very large amounts of aid may not be the most sensible thing for the U.S. to be doing.

The CIA and (alleged) fake vaccinations

Via DPTrombly:

In the latest incident in the rapid deterioration of the US-Pakistani relationship, the ISI have picked up a Pakistani doctor that it claims, and the Guardian reports, was involved in a horrifying breach of medical ethics. According to the Guardian’s sources, the CIA recruited this doctor to conduct a fake vaccination drive in Abbottabad, hoping to corroborate bin Laden’s sister’s DNA with residents of the mysterious compound where US operators would later terminate the al Qaeda head. Chris Albon is dead on about the disastrous medical and public health implications of this story, which will seriously endanger health workers even if the story was a complete fabrication.

Trombly says he agrees with Albon but, on the other hand, also says this is what one should expect when a clandestine agency is tasked with eliminating a most-wanted enemy. However, I suspect Albon's point is that there are some lines that even a clandestine agency carrying out an important mission should not cross. Clearly the CIA wanted to be as sure as it could be that OBL was living in that compound. The question -- or a question -- thus is whether the fake vaccination campaign, assuming it occurred, was essential or whether the required near-certainty was obtainable by other, less ethically troubling means (e.g., surveillance, tracking the courier who left and returned to the compound periodically, etc.). The CIA is licensed to do a lot of dubious things, but a good baseline rule is that torture shouldn't be one of them and neither should this.

Pakistan update: blustering about the border regions

Lead graph of Karin Brulliard's piece today in WaPo:

Karachi, Pakistan — Pakistan’s defense minister has said that the country might withdraw thousands of troops from its volatile border areas in response to a suspension of U.S. military aid, a move that would undermine Washington’s interests in a region that is home to al-Qaeda and a stew of other Islamist militant groups.

A bit of editorializing here, no? Whether the threatened move would "undermine Washington's interests" depends on exactly what the thousands of Pakistani soldiers are currently doing there. Recently it was reported that there have been cross-border clashes involving unspecified Afghan insurgents attacking into Pakistan and the Pakistan army responding with artillery fire that has allegedly killed Afghan civilians. A reduction of the Pakistani military presence in the border regions might not necessarily be an entirely bad thing if it leads to some reduction in Pakistan-Afghanistan tension. OTOH there might be a downside if the Pakistani military is actually carrying out effective counterinsurgency operations in the border regions. They are not in any case in N. Waziristan, where several militant groups continue to be based.

The WaPo article goes on to note that drone strikes in the border regions have been continuing, another source of some U.S.-Pakistan tension. Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann, writing in the current Foreign Affairs, contend that control of the drone program in these areas should be switched from the CIA to the U.S. military, a proposal which may have something to recommend it. However, the very non-transparency of the drone program which Bergen and Tiedemann criticize may be one reason the Pakistan government has tacitly supported it. On balance, though, they are probably right that more transparency would mean more support for the drones among the civilian population in these areas and a corresponding reduction of anti-U.S. sentiment.

Meeting of Minds

From Marjorie Garber, "Historical Correctness: The Use and Abuse of History for Literature," in A Manifesto for Literary Studies (2003), p.52 (footnotes omitted):

A memorable instance of this once-popular genre [i.e., dialogues of the dead] was offered by comedian Steve Allen's television show Meeting of Minds, which ran for four years on the American Public Broadcasting System. On one occasion Aristotle, Sun Yat-Sen, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning debated; on another a lively argument developed among Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Aquinas, Cleopatra, and Thomas Paine; a third panel featured Florence Nightingale, Plato, Voltaire, and Martin Luther; a fourth, Attila the Hun, Emily Dickinson, Galileo, and Charles Darwin. (Steve Allen to Galileo: "You know, it's most interesting. You sir, Miss Dickinson, and Dr. Darwin all had difficulty with domineering fathers." Attila: "My father, too, was no bargain." Or Karl Marx to Marie Antoinette, from a panel discussion with Ulysses S. Grant, Marie Antoinette, Thomas More, and Marx: "Did it ever enter your mind, Your Majesty, that...empty rituals and customs would in time destroy the people's respect for the monarchy?" Marie: "Nonsense, Dr. Marx, the people adored the rituals and customs!" Thomas More: "Yes, Dr. Marx,...rituals and manners aided the people to express their respect for royalty. I understand that in today's Marxist nations [sic] there is still room for pomp and circumstance.") These were not séances; actors played the parts. Allen's wife Jayne Meadows performed almost all the female roles.

I never saw Meeting of Minds. It's sounds mildly amusing, though I'm not sure where Steve Allen would have gotten the idea that Marx might think that rituals and customs destroyed respect for the monarchy of the ancien regime. His view of the French Revolution was a bit more insightful than that.

293 comments on Marx, several of them quite annoying

I'm neither an economist nor an expert on Marx (though I have read some Marx, mostly the parts that social scientists who are not economists have to read in the course of their schooling, including large chunks of Capital v.1 but not vols. 2 and 3). Nor do I really know anything about the controversies involving Sraffa's economics. So I didn't understand some of the 293 comments attached to John Quiggin's post on "Marxism without Revolution: Capital." But of the comments I did look at and understand or partly understand, several were quite annoying in tone, especially those by john c. halasz (he uses the lower case). Halasz's (or halasz's) contributions were mostly long, pompous lectures consisting largely of (1) assertions which he didn't bother to support, textually or otherwise, and (2) rehashes of standard Marxian points (do we really need to be told for the umpteenth time about the contradiction(s) between the relations of production and the forces of production?). Though much of his commenting was given over to the rather, imo, thankless and close-to-impossible task of defending Marx's labor theory of value (an effort in which he was joined by some other commenters), halasz did toward the end offer some critical remarks, e.g. that Marx could be faulted for not having "provide[d] an account of the state and the political domain...." Actually Marx does have an "account of the political domain" -- he may not treat it as (very) autonomous from economics, but that's a somewhat different point. Maybe halasz should start his own blog rather than lecturing so much at CT.

Bacevich on Wohlstetter

Cleaning up some papers, I was reminded recently that I happen to have a few worn-looking offprints of articles by Albert Wohlstetter, including his famous 1959 piece "The Delicate Balance of Terror" and a piece he wrote in 1960 for a series commissioned by Life on 'the national purpose'. (Explaining why I have these offprints would take me a bit too far afield; or, put more bluntly, I don't feel like doing it right now.)

Anyway, this prompts me to mention Andrew Bacevich's article in the May-June New Left Review, "Tailors to the Emperor," which is largely about Wohlstetter (with some attention also to Roberta Wohlstetter, who was best known for Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision). Bacevich's view of them is, not surprisingly, negative; however, after buying the article a while ago I proceeded only to skim it, so I can't really say specifically which parts I agree with and which I don't. So I'm neither endorsing the article nor criticizing it, simply mentioning it in the thought that one or two readers may possibly appreciate knowing about it.

P.s. Some other (possibly) interesting stuff in the May-June NLR. Check out the issue's t.o.c.

Pahk the cah and watch out for errant prepositions

Reader: There are so many serious, terrible things going on in the world; how can you write about nonsense?

Me: Oh give me a ******* break. It's the summer, at least where I am.

---------

Now that that's out of the way, a couple of random obs.:

1) I spent about 40 minutes or so this evening with a hard-copy edition of the NYT from July 1, which I happened to have bought. I don't sit down with a 'real' newspaper this way all that often, and it persuaded me of something I already believed: the experience of reading print newspapers is different, and in some ways much better, than reading them online. There's something about the print and about the pages and about not having to wait a second or two while your browser loads the particular article you want. There was quite a lot of interesting stuff in the July 1 Times, which unfortunately I don't really have time to go into, it being quite late.

2) However, I do have time to take a quick jab at GW law prof and popular blogger Jonathan Turley, who had a recent post about what he called "a Harvard study" on the impact of Fourth of July celebrations in childhood on adult political views. Turns out this is not in fact a "study released by Harvard" -- after all, universities don't release studies in their institutional capacities very often -- it's merely an academic paper (and apparently a somewhat odd one) co-authored by an assistant prof at the Kennedy School.

At the end of his post Turley opines that July 4th should be celebrated "even on [sic] Harvard Yard." Now, my impression is that no one does anything "on" that particular piece of real estate; even birds dropping their waste do it in Harvard Yard, not on it. Curious, I turned to Turley's very lengthy biography, scrolled to the end, and found that he received his undergraduate education at -- drum roll etc. -- the University of Chicago. Makes sense: they're too busy imbibing the Great Books there to worry about certain parochial and idiomatic uses of prepositions.

Dionne on the Declaration

"A reading of the Declaration of Independence makes clear that our forebears were not revolting against taxes as such — and most certainly not against government as such."

Whole column here.

Why are criminal gangs in Mexico killing Central Americans trying to get to the U.S.?

This sad story does not make clear why some migrants are being killed en masse by the Mexican mafias. It's one thing to kidnap would-be migrants and force them to run drugs; the mafias benefit from that. But what possible reason would the mafias have for killing them?

When the going gets tough...

...the Republicans trot out the hardly novel idea of a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. Even if one supports this, and I certainly do not, it can't be anything but a distraction from the current impasse, as opposed to a step toward resolving it.

Vague 'lessons' from the German model

Steven Rattner's For. Aff. piece "The Secrets of Germany's Success," subtitled "What Europe's Manufacturing Powerhouse Can Teach America," purports to draw lessons for the U.S. from the recent German experience. However, with one exception, the lessons are so general that they don't require an appeal to the German example. Distilled from the end of the essay, the lessons are:

1. Exploit the U.S.'s comparative advantage (e.g. in entertainment, technology, and finance)

2. Improve technical training

3. Encourage new industries (e.g. alternative energy)

4. Foster an export orientation

The only "lesson" that draws with more specificity on Germany is that the U.S. "should work to ameliorate" high unemployment along the lines of what Gerhard Schröder did in 2005 with the Agenda 2010 program whereby the government agreed to cover a portion of the salaries lost when workers' hours were reduced, thus allowing firms to keep workers on rather than fire them. In return, unions agreed to moderate wage increases. In the current U.S. budget climate the idea, though perhaps a good one, is probably not transplantable.

But the piece is informative even if the "lessons" are a bit disappointing.

See also a recent blogpost by Charles Lane at WaPo (link to be added later).

Money talks

George F. Will is passionate about the "right" of wealthy people to use their money to reinforce their privileged position in society. Of course, he doesn't put it quite that way. Applauding the five Supreme Court justices who just struck down Arizona's public financing statute, Will instead argues that money is speech and that any restrictions or burdens on such speech are unconstitutional. (Supreme Court precedent indicates that certain restrictions can be justified by an anti-corruption rationale but Will himself does not appear to agree with that, although he concedes it is the current state of the law.)

There's an old saying that money talks. Will and others who share his view take this literally and contend that writing a check is no different than getting up in a public meeting and moving one's vocal chords in such a way that intelligible words are produced and emitted. Writing a check, they believe, is no different than writing an article. It's all "speech." One might almost suspect Will secretly thinks that wealthy people are so inarticulate, so unable to make a case for the maintenance of their privilege by actually speaking, that depriving them of the ability to pour unlimited amounts of money into campaigns (if not through direct contributions to candidates, then through indirect third-party advertising) would sound the tocsin of a "U.S. Spring."

More on Obama's Afghanistan plan

This positive assessment by J. Goldstein of the president's Afghanistan speech contains much that I agree with, including the statement that the surge was not intended as a permanent occupation force and that the "one more fighting season" rationale for delaying withdrawal is unpersuasive. On the other hand, I'm not certain that the surge was the right way to go in the first place, although hindsight is 20-20 and at the time the surge was announced (Dec. '09) I was somewhat ambivalent about it.

I also would like to agree with the general "tide of war is receding" theme, and certainly there is some evidence to support it. I remain of the view that more U.S. troops should be brought home from overseas bases than the 65,000 which the linked post says have been withdrawn from Europe, Asia and Latin America in the last decade.

As the outgoing Sec. of Defense observed on the NewsHour several days ago, war is an abstraction for all but the minority of Americans who are serving in the military or who have close family or other ties to someone who is. Watching a film like 'Restrepo', which I mentioned earlier, is one way for those at a distance to reduce the sense of abstraction and get some feeling, however partial and attenuated, of what being on the ground in Afghanistan is like, at least from the standpoint of American soldiers. Although the sentiments expressed by the soldiers in the film are somewhat various, no one says they are sorry to leave when the tour is up.

Of course, withdrawing troops does not mean, as Obama made clear, simply abandoning any U.S. interest in or connection with the country. I think there's little prospect of that happening. Despite the numerous shortcomings of the Karzai regime, U.S. assistance in the form of money and civilian expertise (and probably intel support etc.) will continue to flow even as the troop levels are reduced. That's one of several reasons why Gideon Rose's piece in the NYT, harking back to Nixon and Kissinger's tortuous and (to be blunt) criminal process of extrication from Vietnam, is off the mark.

Noted

This piece about the NY Public Library's purchase of Timothy Leary's papers has some interest from the standpoint of cultural history. Also some neat quotes. For example:

After trying Leary’s magical pink pills Arthur Koestler told his host the next day that they were not for him: “I solved the secret of the universe last night, but this morning I forgot what it was.”

"A teaching moment for an entire generation"

The phrase is from this report on the Khmer Rouge trials and their effect on education in Cambodia.

What "singular role"?

Addendum/update (added Feb. 2012): This post at the blog U.S. Intellectual History points out that Winthrop's city-on-a-hill metaphor (mentioned below) and Reagan's "shining city on a hill" are both rooted in the same passage in the New Testament, Matt. 5:14-16: "Ye [i.e., Jesus's disciples] are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid."
----
I'm not going to offer much instant reaction to the president's Afghanistan speech, as I'm supposed to be on a break and there are plenty of other places where you can find instant reaction. However, I would like to take note of one sentence that occurred toward the end of the speech that strikes me as somewhat unfortunate: "Like generations before, we must embrace America's singular role in the course of human events."

Many people may take this simply as boilerplate, but that would only underline how deeply the virus of American exceptionalism has taken root in the body politic. My paperback dictionary, which I just checked, gives the first substantive definition for "singular" as "outstanding, exceptional." But it is not, I think, necessarily true that the notion of the U.S. as exceptional is something that has been embraced without question by overwhelming majorities of Americans for generations, as Obama's line implies. Nor is there, as far as I can recall, much of anything in the country's founding documents that suggests or supports an exceptionalist view. John Winthrop's 'city on a hill' speech, as revived by Ronald Reagan (who added the adjective "shining"), is probably the most obvious of the available precedents, but I don't think the framers of the Constitution were paying much attention to Winthrop, assuming the 'city on a hill' reference even means what Reagan supposed it to mean.

Pres. Obama is a relatively young president, served by, as far as I'm aware, very young speechwriters, and probably not surrounded on a daily basis by many people with a deep knowledge of history. Often this turns out not to matter much, but on other occasions it does.

It once seemed that every so often, at least until 9/11 and its sequelae, a group of scholars would get together and bring out a collection of essays under a title like America as an Ordinary Country. In fact that was the exact title of a collection edited by Richard Rosecrance and published in 1976; its subtitle was "U.S. foreign policy and the future." The argument or implication was presumably that the experience of Vietnam meant that the U.S. could finally shed an exceptionalism that had proved more of a burden than a benefit. I haven't read the book, but I suspect that today's policymakers could do worse than have their aides get a copy for them and spend a couple of hours with it.

P.s. (Afghanistan-related): I saw the documentary film 'Restrepo' recently (on DVD). Worth seeing.

Worth interrupting the break for...

...this piece on U.S. income inequality in WaPo today.

A brief excerpt:

In 1975, ...the top 0.1 percent of earners garnered about 2.5 percent of the nation’s income, including capital gains, according to data collected by University of California economist Emmanuel Saez. By 2008, that share had quadrupled and stood at 10.4 percent.

The phenomenon is even more pronounced at even higher levels of income. The share of the income commanded by the top 0.01 percent rose from 0.85 percent to 5.03 percent over that period. For the 15,000 families in that group, average income now stands at $27 million [per family per year, presumably].

Break

I'll be taking a break from posting for a while.

The Pentagon Papers 40 years on

Sanford Ungar and Michael Beschloss brought back the memories on the NewsHour tonight in a quite interesting discussion (which I heard on the radio as my TV is not working). Beschloss mentioned in passing that in 1961, ten years before Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the NYT, that paper had acceded to the Kennedy admin's request not to publish material it had acquired about the prospective Bay of Pigs operation. Apparently Kennedy later said, after the Bay of Pigs turned out badly for the U.S., that he wished the NYT had published it.

What really strikes me is the realization that only one short decade separates the Bay of Pigs from the Pentagon Papers. That was one heck of an eventful ten years. I'm not old enough to have many reliable first-hand memories of the U.S. in 1961 (and was only living here briefly then anyway, between my family's overseas domiciles), but I have a sense of what the early '60s were like from photos, movies, some things I've read, etc. The early '70s, of which I definitely do have memories, seem a long way away from the early '60s, which is, partly, a testament to how much happened in between and to how much 'the 60s' changed the tone (for lack of a better word) of American life and politics.

Goldstein on Sudan

A good review of the situation in Sudan which concludes that the independence of South Sudan will occur as scheduled in July and that, despite recent fighting around Abyei, full-scale civil war will not resume. Omitted (probably because not directly relevant to the current situation) is the fact that Omar al-Bashir remains under indictment by the International Criminal Court for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in connection with his government's actions in Darfur. The chief prosecutor of the ICC said a few years ago that the entire Sudanese state apparatus was complicit in the crimes.

Pity the poor unprotected U.S. defense budget

Jennifer Rubin, who writes a conservative blog at the Wash. Post -- apparently having Charles Krauthammer and George Will on the op-ed page isn't enough -- is worried that the defense budget will be cut too much as a result of the current budget negotiations. According to Rubin:

1) the primary duty of the federal government (higher than high-speed rail and a new health-care entitlement plan) is national defense; 2) defense spending is not driving the debt (it is skyrocketing domestic spending that has worsened our fiscal position); and 3) unless we want to cede our position as the sole superpower we can’t shatter the military that guarantees the West’s security and defends freedom around the planet.

Re point 2: of course, the one trillion plus spent on the Iraq misadventure has nothing to do with the deficit. Re point 3: we can't "shatter" the military, so let's continue ordering weapons systems that are outdated holdovers from the Cold War and funding layers of bureaucracy that have little real connection to military capability. After all, we can't "cede our position as the sole superpower."

I don't think I've seen someone refer to the U.S. as the "sole superpower" for quite a while. Krauthammer's "unipolar moment" has come and gone. And American policymakers themselves are realizing, as Gates's recent speech on NATO suggests, that trying to cling to the chimerical status of "sole superpower" is a recipe for, among other things, eventual bankruptcy.

Noted

Looking for a long novel to read this summer? This might be it.

'Demonstrative compellence' is a bust (again)

Back in Jan. '09 I blogged about an article that discussed the notion of 'demonstrative compellence' (as the author termed it) in connection with the G.W. Bush policy toward Iraq. The argument in a nutshell was that the invasion of Iraq was meant to signal to Iran and N. Korea that if they didn't straighten up and fly right they might be next. The strategy was, in essence, a complete failure, at least with respect to its intended targets. Iran continued its less-than-transparent nuclear program and N. Korea showed, on occasion, some apparent willingness to negotiate but basically continued on its path toward acquiring nuclear weapons.

Why bring this up now? Because some might think, not unreasonably, that one motive for the NATO intervention in Libya was to send a signal to possible emulators of Gaddafi that they had better not contemplate atrocities. The trouble is that the signal, if one was intended, has had little effect: the Assad regime in Syria has killed lots of protesters (though recent events in Syria, with some soldiers perhaps having mutinied and killed other members of the security forces -- it's still not entirely clear what happened -- point to the possibility of a split in the armed forces); the Saleh regime in Yemen killed lots of civilians before Saleh's departure; and the Bahraini regime used violence against protesters before (and after) calling in Saudi troops to shore itself up.

The case for the NATO intervention in Libya thus has to be made mostly on humanitarian grounds and in terms of Libya alone, it would seem, since from the standpoint of demonstrative compellence it's been a washout.

DSK in another context

Looking through Harold James's 2006 book The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire (having taken it out of the library, I was trying to decide whether to actually read it), I ran across a reference to Dominique Strauss-Kahn in a discussion of European identity (pp.132-34):

...Europe can probably most easily be defined by what its makers think it is not. It is not empire and it is not America....

A need to compensate for American mistakes or to resist American policies has in practice often been behind the momentum to create new European institutions. The European Monetary System in 1979 was in large part a response to the mismanagement and weakness of the U.S. dollar in the late 1970s. These were initiatives of policy-making elites frustrated by American high-handedness or incompetence; but the European response ran largely along technocratic lines.

It is only relatively recently that commentators have thought that they observed a more deeply embedded transcontinental assertion of a new identity. European civil society was mobilized by resistance to the 2003 Iraq war. One analysis, initially set out by a former French finance minister, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, spoke of the mass demonstrations against the Iraq war across Europe on Saturday, February 15, 2003, as the sign of the new civic consciousness. "A new nation was born in the street. And that new nation was the European nation."

James's cite is: D. Strauss-Kahn, "Une nation est née," Le Monde, Feb. 26, 2004 [I assume that should be 2003]

James goes on to observe that "[b]y 2005, President Chirac was appealing for a 'yes' vote in the French referendum on the European constitution on the grounds that it offered a defense against America, and that the 'Anglo-Saxons' were trying to frustrate a new Europe." (p.134) But the French and the Dutch defeated the constitution in the 2005 referendums.

The EU then went back to the drawing board and came up with something called the Treaty of Lisbon. Among other things it created a post called High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, popularly if not accurately referred to as the EU Foreign Minister. I'll end this little potted excursion into contemporary history with a question that Herman Cain might ask (assuming that he's heard of the EU Foreign Minister): How's that working out?

An original prescription

Lead-in to Wash.Post story:

"In what advisers billed as a major address, [Pawlenty] calls for tax cuts and smaller government."

Oh yeah.

Especially more tax cuts for the very highest brackets. Definitely. Why should we settle in the U.S. for having the most unequal distribution of income and wealth since the late 1920s? Why shouldn't we aim to have the most unequal distribution in U.S. history? Why shouldn't we try to duplicate the distribution of, say, Honduras in the 1950s? After all, there's no point in doing something unless you do it well.

Iraq note

The most recent wave of violence in Iraq strengthens the case for sticking to the timetable and withdrawing all U.S. soldiers from Iraq by the end of this calendar year. It might be tempting to think that keeping a U.S. military presence in the country in an 'advisory' capacity after Dec. 2011 would have a pacifying effect, but it's more likely to have the opposite. It's somewhat hard to imagine, in any case, Maliki making the explicit request that would be required, given the political realities he's facing.

Does American conservatism have an authenticity problem?

Mitt Romney, a multimillionaire (or is it billionaire?) and former head of Bain Capital, has pledged to make job creation the laser-like focus of his attention should he be elected President. Call me cynical or something, but I find it hard to persuade myself that Romney cares all that deeply about how many of his fellow Americans are employed or unemployed. (This is not a feeling I have exclusively about Romney or other Republican politicians, incidentally, but I will focus on Republicans here.)

My skepticism about the genuineness of Romney's concern for the plight of the unemployed and underemployed may be an instance of what has been called Romney's authenticity problem -- although this phrase, admittedly, has been used more with specific reference to his stance on health care reform. It may also, however, point to a larger issue: an authenticity problem of American conservatism in general.

One could argue that this problem, if it does indeed exist, is more a consequence of historical accidents than of the personal failings of American conservatives as individuals. Conservatism in the U.S. has labored under handicaps compared to the conservatisms of Britain or continental Europe. These handicaps may not have been so evident in recent decades, as the Right everywhere has converged on a mantra of neoliberal worship of 'the market,' but they nonetheless continue to operate, or so one might contend.

Put briefly, American conservatism, unlike (say) British conservatism, cannot appeal to the virtues of hierarchy and expect such an appeal to be heard in the same way that it would be heard in a society with a medieval past. On one level, this is just the well-worn Hartzian argument about American exceptionalism stemming from the absence of feudalism. But it's more than that. As Samuel Huntington wrote more than forty years ago (Political Order in Changing Societies, 1968, p.133):

In America,...[c]onservatism has seldom flourished because it has lacked social institutions to conserve. Society is changing and modern, while government, which the conservative views with suspicion, has been relatively unchanging and antique. With a few exceptions, such as a handful of colleges and churches, the oldest institutions in American society are governmental institutions. The absence of established social institutions, in turn, has made it unnecessary for American liberals to espouse the centralization of power as did European liberals.

From an historical perspective, Huntington's statement that American conservatism "has lacked social institutions to conserve" contains a rather glaring omission: namely, slavery (and, subsequently, Jim Crow). And I have no doubt that historians could come up with an entire list of social institutions that American conservatives have been interested in conserving. Nonetheless, Huntington's observation remains suggestive.

One might add that, where they have focused on defending social institutions, U.S. conservatives have not tended to be hugely successful. For instance, the defense of conventional marriage and the conventional family is a matter of intense concern to a part of the electorate, but it's a minority. Rather, when American conservatives have succeeded electorally in the fairly recent past, it has been as putative defenders of the common man and woman against the alleged depredations of "big government," even though the American welfare state has always been underdeveloped in comparative terms. Hence Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator, vowed that he would "get government off the backs" of ordinary, hard-working voters. Romney is trying to tap into this Reaganesque vein. But Romney is no Reagan and with Romney, moreover, the inauthenticity of one candidate is arguably compounded by the authenticity problem of an ideology.

I'm not sure that any of the foregoing helps to explain the less-than-overwhelmingly-impressive field of Republican presidential candidates. (Although Jon Huntsman, for one, has sort of an interesting biography.) There is probably a more mundane explanation for the lackluster field, namely, a reluctance to run against an incumbent president, even in economic hard times.

But even if this mundane explanation is correct, it may be worth thinking about a more basic problem facing any conservative movement in a mass democracy: how to generate popular enthusiasm for an essentially negative ideology. Thanks to Wikipedia's very long article "Conservatism in the United States" which I skimmed through just now, I was reminded of William F. Buckley's statement that conservatives "stand athwart history, yelling Stop". Yelling 'stop' is not a slogan that will win elections. Thus conservatives in the U.S. have transformed it into other slogans: no big government, no socialism, no government-run health care, no tax increases, etcetera. Whether these slogans can still rev up the conservative faithful in the required numbers -- as they did not manage to do in 2008 -- is an open question as the 2012 presidential campaign season begins.

An interesting life

I don't think I'd heard of Hans Keilson before reading this.

Coates on Fitzhugh

Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose blog at The Atlantic I probably should get more in the habit of looking at from time to time, has been writing a series of posts reflecting on his reading of George Fitzhugh, one of the antebellum South's intellectual defenders of slavery, to whom I had occasion to refer here. In this post Coates quotes from Fitzhugh's Cannibals All and proceeds to observe, among other things, that Fitzhugh "almost has no regard of labor as an individual value." As I mentioned in "The Dignity of Labor", this is precisely one of the ways in which mid-19th-century Northerners answered Fitzhugh's critique of nascent industrial capitalism. But although Fitzhugh is, of course, defending an indefensible system, Coates finds some passages to admire, for instance here. I personally don't find these particular excerpts quite as riveting, but these things are subjective.

(P.s. Coates is also on to Moby Dick; see Holbo here.)

McConnell v. Dionne (guess who's right)

Answering reporters' questions about the budget negotiations the other day on the Hill, Sen. McConnell said "the problem is not that we're taxed too little, it's that we [i.e., the government] spend too much." (Source: C-Span radio)

However, as E.J. Dionne (without mentioning McConnell) observes: "Americans pay less in taxes than the citizens of other rich countries — and currently pay the smallest share of their incomes for taxes since 1958."

Read the whole thing, as they say.

A Medal of Honor recipient remembered

Here.

The case for cutting U.S. military aid to Pakistan (with a postscript on the Pakistan 2020 report)

Lawrence Wright, in the May 16 New Yorker, advocates reducing U.S. support for Pakistan's military and intelligence service. (Phil Arena earlier drew attention to this piece at his blog.) I'm inclined to agree with Wright's prescription if not with all the reasoning. It seems likely that a lot of the aid is being diverted into non-military investments or used in ways that have nothing to do with the intended purposes. Wright notes that the Pakistani government is not doing much to expand its tax base (fewer than 2 million people pay taxes, he says, in a country of 180 million people) beyond appointing eunuchs as tax collectors in Karachi. The Pakistani military remains over-focused on India, which, as Wright observes, is not the main current threat to the state.

However, some of the presumed benefits that Wright connects with cutting military aid may prove difficult to realize. He mentions reducing U.S. tariffs for Pakistani textiles as a way of helping the civilian sector (and Pakistan's economy generally). But as a January 2011 article in The Seattle Times (which appears to have been picked up from Wash. Post) notes:

The [U.S.] House last year passed a narrowly focused bill designed to promote export industries in Afghanistan and [in] specific zones primarily in Pakistan's northwestern border region, but a corresponding bill has been stalled in the Senate. Separately, the U.S. textile industry has made clear it would strongly oppose any legislation that is more ambitious than the bill being considered, saying it would put American jobs at risk.

(See also Joshua Partlow and Haq Nawaz Khan, "As Violence Hurts Business, Pakistanis Debate U.S. Help; Restrictions Make Textile-Export Bill Useless, Some Say," Washington Post, July 28, 2009.)

Wright also suggests that a reduction in U.S. aid to Pakistan's military could give the U.S. leverage with India on the Kashmir issue, leading perhaps to a referendum that would result in Kashmir's independence. I wouldn't bet on that (I mean the leverage part). Nonetheless, Wright's piece does make a pretty strong case for cutting U.S. aid to Pakistan's army and the ISI (the intelligence service). (See also Aqil Shah, "Getting the Military Out of Pakistani Politics," Foreign Affairs, May/June 2011.)

P.s. Wright's piece is relatively brief and thus does not address issues that must lurk in the background of any discussion of U.S.-Pakistan relations, such as the persistently oligarchical character of key aspects of Pakistani society (i.e., the power of a small number of wealthy families) and the disastrous condition of the Pakistani state education system (which I have blogged about before), just to mention two.

P.p.s. The Asia Society has recently released a report, Pakistan 2020; according to part of a roll-out session for the report that I caught on C-Span radio several days ago, it addresses some of these more basic issues. The Asia Society's press release on the report is here.

P.p.p.s. The Economist chimes in.

From Magna Carta to the Arab Spring in under a half-hour

Pres. Obama's speech in Westminster Hall contained the soaring rhetoric one would have expected, and reading the text one can imagine it in delivery and even be moved at one or two points. There were at least a couple of things that jumped out: in one passage he equates "free enterprise" with "the market" (wrongly, I think); and the Roosevelt-Churchill chord is struck perhaps a bit too loudly at the end (don't Obama's speechwriters know about Churchill's view of the Empire? If Churchill had had his way, the British army, which Obama's grandfather, as the Pres. remarked, served as a cook in Kenya, would still be in Kenya). Still, it's hard to avoid Churchill-FDR in this context, and his speechwriters did manage to find a reasonably appropriate Churchill quotation -- something about 'the chirping bird of freedom' -- to end with.

The stuff about the U.S. and U.K. still being indispensable for leadership in the world etc. etc. is entirely predictable; what else could he say? This is not totally wrong, but even if it were he would still have had to say it. You can't get up in Westminster Hall and say "our power and influence are declining, let's decline gracefully, thank you very much." Well, I suppose you could, but you'd have to have really skilled speechwriters to make it go down.

Pictures of tornado damage

Here [hat tip: C. Bertram at CT].
Be sure to scroll down to #23, which is a striking image of storm clouds.

And not-so-quiet flow the platitudes

Kissinger's just-published book on China (which is not on my reading list, for several reasons) is probably (I'm guessing) a mixture of banalities, occasional insights, and reminiscence. When Niall Ferguson, who knows a lot about some things but China I don't think is one of them, writes about a book of this sort the result is almost guaranteed to be embarrassing, and sure enough, according to K. Winecoff, it is.

Israel-Palestine: is there a way forward?

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is back in the news cycle in the U.S., thanks to Obama's mention of the 1967 lines in his speech and his subsequent meeting with Netanyahu. As Stephen Hadley emphasized on the NewsHour Friday, Obama actually called for negotiated adjustments to the 1967 lines via land swaps, and if he had mentioned the land swaps first, his reference in the speech might not have been interpreted as such a big deal. Speaking later on the same program, David Brooks said that drawing "magic lines on a map" (I believe he used that phrase) would not solve a conflict whose roots are found in competing narratives, competing historical wounds, and so forth.

Brooks's remarks prompt a thought which I'm sure is not original (how many thoughts are?) but which I'm going to throw out anyway. Perhaps it has been a mistake to think in terms of 'solving' or 'resolving' the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; perhaps it would be better to think in terms of moving the conflict into a new phase, one that is less unjust, more stable, and more manageable. In this context the establishment of a Palestinian state with agreed-upon borders (or even 90 or 95 percent agreed-upon), and a Palestinian state which both recognizes Israel and is recognized by Israel, would be a major accomplishment, even if the issues of refugees and the status of Jerusalem remain unresolved.

Contrary to what many people seem to suppose, it is really not necessary to resolve all the outstanding issues, or even every last single territorial issue, in order to arrive at a mutually agreed-upon two-state arrangement. India and China still have disagreements about certain aspects of their border; so, I believe, do Greece and Macedonia; so do Thailand and Cambodia. Although the Thai-Cambodia border dispute recently has sparked some shooting and fatalities, most border disputes do not entail much or any violence. Many of them just simmer for years, causing some irritation in diplomatic relations and some inconvenience for those who live in or near the disputed areas, but not much else. There is no reason why Israel and a new Palestinian state have to agree on 100 percent of their border. Particularly difficult areas that can't be taken care of by land swaps can be labeled 'in dispute' and some kind of temporary jurisdictional arrangement can be put in place. Just as India and China disagree about five percent (or whatever the figure is) of their border, so Israel and the new Palestinian state could agree to disagree about five percent of their border. An understanding that there is nothing especially strange about such an outcome, coupled with a shift in thinking from 'resolving' the conflict to moving it into a new and less conflictual phase, might help in any event to restart a 'peace process' that appears to be very stalled at the moment.

P.s. As Jon Western argues, the "strategic time-frame" in the region is not on Israel's side, which should, one would think, be an impetus to re-starting negotiations.

Diehl's unwise prophecy

Jackson Diehl's column in today's Wash. Post ("Abbas's formula for war," p. A19, print edition) is nothing short of bizarre. It's hard to know where to begin with this farrago of weirdness. Diehl appears to think that Abbas's commitment to seek "a U.N. General Assembly vote on Palestinian statehood in September" is almost tantamount to a declaration of war. Diehl fastens on Abbas's statement in a recent NYT op-ed that a UN statehood vote would mean "Palestine would be negotiating from the position of one United Nations member whose territory is militarily occupied by another." Let's slowly read the first four words: Palestine. would. be. negotiating. Does that sound like a declaration of war? I didn't think so.

It gets worse. Diehl indicts the U.S. and its European allies for indulging "the soft bigotry of wishful thinking about Arab strongmen" by believing in Abbas's words rather than looking at his deeds. He implicitly compares those deeds to the actions of Syria's Bashar al-Assad. The latter has been shooting his own people in demonstrations around the country. Has Abbas been doing anything comparable? I didn't think so.

Abbas, Diehl concludes, "is trying to transform the Arab Spring into a mass movement against Israel," which "could trigger not just another intifada but another Middle East war." This has the inflammatory ring of a potentially self-fulfilling prophecy. What about the stalemated status quo, with a 'peace process' going nowhere? Doesn't that present dangers? Isn't there a chance that a UN General Assembly vote to admit Palestine, although mostly symbolic, might shake things up in a constructive way? Is it sensible to let the current situation, in which no serious talks are taking place, continue indefinitely?

Abbas's prime minister, Salam Fayyad, has succeeded, as Diehl himself semi-acknowledges, in creating the conditions for statehood on the West Bank. Last September a World Bank report concluded that "if the PA maintains its current performance in institution-building and delivery of public services, it is well positioned for the establishment of a state at any point in the near future" (quoted in Robert M. Danin, "A Third Way to Palestine," Foreign Affairs, Jan./Feb. 2011, p.102). Diehl writes that the recent Fatah-Hamas reconciliation agreement "probably will obligate" Abbas to fire Fayyad. Probably will obligate? What does that mean? Diehl doesn't bother to explain. He's too busy excoriating Obama for his alleged pressure on Netanyahu.

This column is, arguably, worse than bizarre. It's irresponsible.

Barnett on humanitarianism

Michael Barnett discusses his book Empire of Humanity (Cornell U.P., 2011) in a talk recorded in early April. I listened to the first 28 minutes or so. He argues, among other things, that humanitarian movements and organizations ('humanitarianisms') are creatures of the historical contexts in which they developed, that they have always interacted with states and 'done politics,' and that the perception among aid workers of a sharp divide between the Cold War and post-Cold War periods is historically false. The first two of these points seem incontestable; the third might be more controversial. I'll leave that to those who know more about this than I do.

Vaccines funding

I'm on the email list of One, which is urging members to 'call the White House' to ask the Pres. to commit $450 million over the next 3 years to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations at a donors conference in London next month. More info here.

Grammar grumpiness

Things have come to a pretty pass when not even the BBC is capable of matching a singular subject with a singular verb:

South Africans are going to vote in local elections after one of the most bitterly fought campaigns in years.

The delivery of basic services like water, housing and jobs have [sic!] been among the issues dominating campaigning.

Sorry. This is one of my pet peeves.

Schooled

This morning I e-mailed a friend who follows French politics: "What does it say about the French Socialist Party that an IMF chief has been its leading presidential prospect?" whereupon he replied, inter alia, that it's been a long time since the SP, "in France or anywhere else," is where one went looking for the "true left" (however defined). Allowing some leeway for a bit of hyperbole, I think that's true. Still, as I mentioned in my reply to his reply, there is something symbolic about the IMF, inasmuch as it stands for many as the institutional embodiment of neoliberalism. I should add that I know virtually nothing (that mantra again) about Strauss-Kahn's career.

Have we learned?

It would take too long to explain, but certain technical/computer problems (which I hope to solve in the reasonably near future) are requiring me to squat on the floor while writing this -- so it will be fairly brief (or at least briefer than it would otherwise be).

Many of us face the problem of too much to read -- too many books, magazines, journals, newspapers, blogs. We make choices and we take shortcuts. I can sometimes get a reasonably good idea about a book via a twenty-minute or half-hour's browsing of it in a bookstore. I did that this evening with Adam Hochschild's To End All Wars. Being familiar with his King Leopold's Ghost, I knew he was a very good writer, so my interest here was not so much savoring the prose as figuring out what he is doing. The answer is that this is a book mainly about the British experience in World War I, but with particular attention paid to the war's opponents (including, e.g., some COs who physically suffered for their convictions) as well as a more conventional cast of dramatis personae. There are some very familiar stories here (e.g., that of Rudyard Kipling and his son) but no doubt also some less familiar ones.

I was struck by the way the publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has chosen to pitch the book on the inside front jacket flap. The last line of the jacket description is something like "will we ever learn from the past?"

Some would argue that we already have. It is virtually impossible to imagine a replay of the First World War, in which large armies from the most supposedly 'advanced' countries in the world slaughtered each other in numbers mounting up to the millions while competing, at least on the Western Front, over tiny bits of territory. The last sustained armed conflict involving a direct clash between great powers was World War II (true, U.S. and Chinese troops fought in Korea, but the active fighting occurred over a relatively limited period). Some political scientists (most notably John Mueller) have made a fairly convincing case that the chances of another major great-power war are extremely remote -- not because nuclear weapons would come into play and make it short but because most countries no longer think in such terms, i.e., major war is no longer an option on the conscious menu of policy-makers. This thesis is controversial and it's not too hard to find some evidence that cuts the other way, especially if one looks, for example, at Pentagon planning documents, at the size of some defense budgets (especially but not only that of the U.S.), or at the amount of money that India, for instance, is planning to spend on weapons over the next decade.

Still, whatever one thinks of the obsolescence-of-major-war thesis, it seems to me too pessimistic to suggest that the attitudes that propelled Europe into its collective suicidal madness of 1914-1918 are anywhere near as strong today as they were a hundred years ago. Militarism and hyper-nationalism are certainly not extinct (and their strength varies in different parts of the world), but in general they do not have anything like the hold over mass publics and elites that they did in the early and middle years of the last century. The notion advanced by the historian David Bell that the "war on terror" represents a kind of apocalyptic thinking about war that dates from the Napoleonic era may have an appearance of plausibility, but I am more inclined to see discontinuities and some learning -- for lack of a better word -- in the history of the last 200 years.

P.s. Hitchens reviews To End All Wars in the NYT Book Review.

OBL and McVeigh

I put up a post with this title but it disappeared when Blogger went down, and now I don't feel like recreating it. I refer anyone interested to the comment thread attached to the Crooked Timber post "Justice Like a Hawk". (The link for CT is at the sidebar.)

Scotland forever

The Scottish National Party (SNP) has scored gains in local elections and looks set to win a majority in the Scottish parliament. According to the linked article: "The SNP's leader, Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond, promised to push for a referendum on Scottish independence during the next four years."

With the caveat that I know nothing about this (it's becoming a mantra here), I suspect that Scottish independence looked more plausible when the EU was in better shape than it is right now. Who needed Britain when an independent Scotland could get the benefits of economic integration and a common currency as an EU member? But the EU at the moment may not appear to be as strong a reed to lean on as it once did. Plus, seceding from the UK would mean no more good seats at royal weddings. Though I guess an independent Scotland could join the Commonwealth? Somehow I don't think that's in the SNP platform.

Scale back the drones

The death of OBL offers an opportunity to change some U.S. approaches in Pakistan and Afghanistan, starting with a reduction in drone strikes.

From the Democratic Individuality blog:

According to neocon foundations, the drones kill 5 civilians for every “Taliban." The Pakistan government says the number is 600 innocents for every “Taliban.” But even the neocon figure is bad enough....
Perhaps it is no wonder that starving crowds in Pakistan chant “death to Obama” or that Obama’s ratings in the Arab world, according to the Pew foundation (cited by Andrew Sullivan last week), are near the same dismal level as George Bush’s. The need for a redirection of policy could not be more glaring.

My problem with patriotic display; or, What I saw at the Kennedy Center last night

For whatever reason, I've never been very comfortable with overt manifestations of patriotism. I did not display the flag after 9/11 (or before it). I don't especially like the post-9/11 practice of singing 'God Bless America' at the 7th-inning stretch of baseball games; isn't the national anthem before the game enough? Nor can I look too kindly on the college students who congregated in front of the White House chanting 'USA' after the killing of bin Laden, though I recognize that they probably represented a fairly small fraction of their peers and I agree with DPT on the need for some humility about one's own reactions in this respect.

This issue presented itself in another guise for me last night, when I attended the 40th annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and delivered this year by Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard University and Lincoln Professor of History. Her lecture, "Telling War Stories: Reflections of a Civil War Historian," was thoughtful and quite interesting, if not exactly what I'd expected. What I want to focus on just now, however, is what preceded it. The U.S. Marine Band, "The President's Own," played for about 25 minutes, with Civil War images flashing on a screen above it, as people filed into the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, which was the venue. Then a Joint Color Guard presented the colors, which involves uniformed representatives of each of the military services presenting their flags in a stylized ritual, to the accompaniment of flourishes from the Marine Band, and with two rifle-wielding soldiers (were they Marines? I'm not sure) on either side of the flag-bearers. Then right after the Presentation of Colors (or was it right before? I can't remember) there was the national anthem. The Marine Band of course is a very tight ensemble (if you've never heard the Marine Band, you don't know how tight "tight" can be), and their renditions (including the Marine Corps hymn "From the Halls of Montezuma") were quite stirring. After all this, the audience was no doubt feeling something (patriotic or perhaps just 'stirred') by the time Congressman John Lewis walked to the podium to read a poem by Walt Whitman, "Dirge for Two Veterans," which was the last program item before the lecture itself.

But -- of course there was a "but" coming, you knew that -- was the military pomp and circumstance appropriate? Although war was the central theme of Faust's lecture, this was not a lecture about military history. Rather, she talked, among other things, about the connections between war and literature and war and memory, about the simultaneous attraction and repulsion that war has exercised over humans for millennia -- all in line with the fact that this was the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, not the Jefferson Lecture in Military Science.

Now, I don't know whether the Marine Band and the Presentation of the Colors are standard fare at the Jefferson Lectures, since, although I was aware of the Lecture's distinguished history, this was the first one I'd attended. (It would be easy enough to find out, no doubt, but bloggers don't do research. P.s. I'm joking.) But standard fare or not, I found it -- the Presentation of the Colors and so on -- a little peculiar in this context. (Be it noted in passing that in introducing Faust, Jim Leach, chairman of the NEH, mentioned the return of ROTC to Harvard.)

Was this feeling of oddness just me, was it just my own -- perhaps irrational -- problem with patriotic display? Perhaps. And yet, I thought I overheard a snatch of conversation a couple of aisles in front of me in which someone seemed to have asked his or her companion what all this was about, and the reply came back, "It's Washington." No, this answer won't do. It doesn't explain it. The Jefferson Lecture I would say hovers somewhere in between 'official Washington' and 'cultural Washington' -- it's a lecture delivered annually by a prominent scholar or person of letters intended for the general public -- and in neither official nor cultural Washington, at least to the best of my admittedly limited knowledge, is it mandatory to have the sort of preliminaries that were laid on here. OK, I've babbled on long enough and this post is not going to come to any neat conclusion. Perhaps someone who actually knows something about the Jefferson Lectures will leave a comment explaining that I'm an ignorant fool. But I couldn't resist taking advantage of the serendipitous confluence of the debate over the reaction to OBL's demise and my attendance at this event to indulge in the grand blogospheric tradition of dubious navel-gazing.

Fatah-Hamas rapprochement

In a post of a month ago (April 3, to be precise), I speculated about whether the prospect of a UN vote on Palestinian membership might lead to a reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas. It appears that such a reconciliation has now occurred, but more as a result of Egypt's having taken a new, more active role as broker or mediator between the two. This is one result of Mubarak's departure. Israel is making all kinds of noises, trying to get Mahmoud Abbas to back out of the Fatah-Hamas deal. He isn't going to, obviously, and anyway it's not at all clear that he should. Instead, perhaps Netanyahu should try silence for a while, rather than bluster. You never know what that might lead to.
Update: The deal has now been signed.

The OBL news

I've now read some of the NYT coverage. Interesting that it took U.S. intelligence, after determining the real name of Bin Laden's courier, two years to determine the general region in which he was working. I am rather amazed that OBL was living, with some of his family, in a big compound 35 miles from Islamabad (with no phone or Internet connection -- surely they should have put in a phone line to avoid suspicion), rather than in a remote hideout in the border regions. I guess this was on the maxim of 'hide in plain sight'. It seems reasonable to assume that someone(s) in the Pakistani military and/or government apparatus knew he was there, but for the moment this must remain an assumption.

P.s. Will this event change or further complicate the already somewhat strained relations between the U.S. and Pakistan? K. Winecoff thinks not and I agree with that, for reasons I will have to put off explaining till later.

Update (added 5/7): There has been much discussion over the last few days about the fact that OBL did not have his AK-47 and pistol in his hands when he was shot; according to the NYT the weapons were "in arm's reach" but not in his hands. So he was unarmed. Perhaps he was expecting to be taken alive; it's hard to come up with another explanation. Some think this makes the action an extrajudicial execution and that he should have been captured and put on trial. I can see arguments on both sides but cannot get too exercised about this particular action in this particular case. (I do deprecate the celebratory reaction of some, which I think was unseemly and does nothing to enhance the U.S. image in the world.) Militating against capture-and-trial in this case was, among other things, the difficulty the U.S. has had in determining how and where to try Khalid Sheik Mohammad; the problems involved in trying OBL would have been even stickier. However, I think this should be treated as a special case; in general I'm not in favor of the killing of unarmed individuals, no matter what their crimes. More to say, but I'm tired and will leave it at that for now.

The dignity of labor

The 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, which occurred last month, has occasioned much reflection about the war’s legacy. While many of the specific antebellum debates about slavery may seem somewhat remote, the persistence of race and racial inequality as issues in American life means that the collective ear is still primed, from time to time, to pick up certain echoes of those debates. Many other echoes, however, have grown very faint; for instance, few non-historians today recall the antebellum controversy over ‘free labor’ versus slavery.

Some southern apologists for slavery argued, among other things, that free labor in the North amounted to ‘wage slavery’ and that northern factory workers and hired hands were actually worse off than African-American slaves in the South. In this respect these defenders of slavery, notably George Fitzhugh, "seemed to speak in Marxist accents," as Dennis Wrong notes.[1] But other defenders of slavery evinced a very un-Marxist contempt for manual labor in general. James McPherson draws attention to some revealing quotations (italics in original):

"The great evil of Northern free society," insisted a South Carolina journal, "is that it is burdened with a servile class of mechanics and laborers, unfit for self-government, yet clothed with the attributes and powers of citizens." A Georgia newspaper was even more emphatic in its distaste. "Free Society! We sicken at the name. What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists?... The prevailing class one meets with [in the North] is that of mechanics struggling to be genteel, and small farmers who do their own drudgery, and yet are hardly fit for association with a Southern gentleman’s body servant." [2]

Abraham Lincoln and the new Republican Party of the time responded with a vigorous defense of free labor. However, as Eric Foner observes, Lincoln saw wage labor as a stepping stone that young men would take en route to becoming independent artisans, shopkeepers or entrepreneurs, rather than as a permanent feature of the American economy, though it was already becoming that in many cities in the mid-19th century, a process that would intensify after the Civil War.[3] The notion that work has an inherent dignity and overarching societal purpose–that, as William Seward said, "the free-labor system…brings into the highest possible activity all the physical, moral and social energies of the whole State"[4] – fit most comfortably with the world of Lincoln’s youth and young adulthood. It was more difficult to reconcile that notion with the working conditions and standardized production methods of mass manufacturing.

What of the dignity-of-labor ideal in ‘post-industrial’ societies? In an economy dominated by services in which a relatively small proportion of the population is engaged in direct production of tangible goods, it is still possible to speak of people taking pride in their work, irrespective of its nature, even irrespective of whether it is remunerated. But the ideal of the dignity of labor has slipped out of public discussion. Competitiveness is the lodestar of contemporary political-economic discussion in the U.S., along with debt and deficits. Attention is paid to the high unemployment rate, but as much for electoral considerations as any others. An attack by a right-wing governor on the right to collective bargaining sent thousands of people into the streets in Wisconsin, but that action was framed (quite understandably) as a defense of rights rather than primarily as a defense of the dignity of labor. And all sides use the discourse of rights. Thus laws restricting the prerogatives of unions are called right-to-work laws, and states where they are in force are known as right-to-work states -- as if the primary motive of such laws were to guarantee rights rather than to weaken unions. Ultimately, the meaning of 'rights' is determined by political struggles. As Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis put it: "Elements of a political lexicon – such as the discourse of rights – do not…have essential meanings…. Making history is often a matter of making language. But discourses are more often borrowed or stolen than created de novo. Faced with a restricted political vocabulary, political actors appropriate and transform tools that even hostile forces have labored to develop." [5]

Once slavery ceased to exist in the U.S., free labor had no polar antithesis to give it luster by comparison, and it tended to become, at best, just a fact rather than something to be widely celebrated. Critics of wage labor as exploitation could pursue their critique, secure in the knowledge that the surface similarities of their position to that of a George Fitzhugh probably would no longer be flung in their faces. This liberation, so to speak, of the critics of industrial capitalism arguably counts as one of the Civil War’s less-noticed consequences.

P.s. I had intended this post to have a broader, less U.S.-centric focus, but that proved beyond my capacities at the moment.

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Notes

1. Dennis H. Wrong, The Problem of Order (1994), p.32.
2. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (1988), p.197.
3. Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial (2010), pp.115-16.
4. Quoted in McPherson, p.198.
5. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Democracy and Capitalism (1986), pp.161-62.
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See also two books by Jonathan A. Glickstein: American Exceptionalism, American Anxiety: Wages, Competition, and Degraded Labor in the Antebellum United States (2002) and Concepts of Free Labor in Antebellum America (1991).