'In Flanders Fields'

An interesting post by Tim Kendall on his War Poetry blog. (Some other good stuff here too.)

Noted in passing

I used to subscribe to Dissent but I haven't in a long time. Glancing at its website just now, however, I spot several articles in the current issue that may be of interest to some readers, including one about Minnesota. They're all gated, i.e., to read them you have to shell out twenty bucks to subscribe. Just thought I'd mention it, fwiw.

R. Payne on one aspect of the Bush memoirs

Here.

P.s. And if you missed it, Stephen Walt's "Delusion Points" is a catalog of Bush's atrocious foreign policy mistakes. Except for the U.S.-India civil nuclear agreement, which I thought was sensible and one of the very few non-horrible Bush foreign policy moves, the rest of the Bush record is as bad as Walt says.

Filkins interview

Dexter Filkins interviewed on Fresh Air on Afghanistan (it's the Thursday show: Nov. 11).

The UK-France defense deal

Britain and France, in an agreement reached last week, decided to co-operate on nuclear warhead testing and to set up a joint 'expeditionary' (read: intervention) force, as well as to co-operate when it comes to aircraft carriers. Britain presently has two carriers, France has one, and they've agreed that at least one of these will be at sea at any given time. According to a summary at Spiegel Online: "Britain will install catapults on a new aircraft carrier under construction so that both French and British jets can operate from it. By the early 2020s the two nations aim to combine their carrier operations." This makes some sense, inasmuch as it must be damned expensive to keep one aircraft carrier, let alone more than one, buzzing around in circles in the Mediterranean or the Atlantic or wherever.

An IR scholar who happens to be a friend was saying, when this came up in a recent conversation at a slightly drunken (on my part at any rate) dinner, that the agreement to share aircraft carriers shows that Britain and France have now established a "joint identity" -- well, maybe he didn't say that precisely, but the word "identity" was definitely used. I'm a bit skeptical about this, partly because I'm not totally sure what it means (though I have a reasonably good idea) and partly because this agreement seems to be driven primarily by budgetary considerations. Some in Britain are apparently worried about whether the French carrier, if that were the one at sea, would deploy to the Falklands if that were required. Others dismiss this concern.

The nuclear agreement would "establish a centre in the UK to develop testing technology and another one in France to carry out the testing" (BBC), starting in 2014. This is being called revolutionary and unprecedented. But is it that surprising? It's not like either country is going to use its nuclear weapons against the other. Actually, the chances of their ever using their nuclear weapons at all are, mercifully, infinitesimal. The British and French nuclear arsenals are largely status symbols, signs that their possessors are great powers, and from a security standpoint it would probably make no difference if every British and French nuclear warhead were dismantled and destroyed tomorrow. Who, after all, are they deterring? They don't work against people like the 2005 London subway bombers. You can't threaten to drop a nuclear bomb on an individual's house, for example. That would be absurd and crazy. Nonetheless, we have to at least pretend that this whole deal is a noteworthy development. Otherwise IR types would have less to argue about at drunken dinners.

Finally!

Pres. Obama's endorsement of a permanent seat for India on the UN Security Council has a significance that goes well beyond the question of India's membership: it is an explicit, highly public announcement of U.S. recognition that the Security Council is in need of reform generally. I could be wrong, but my impression is that this is the clearest statement on the matter that a U.S. president has made. It was overdue. I guess one thing this shows is that eventually, after thousands of analysts and pundits write thousands of words about something (in this case, the need for Security Council reform), someone in the government may notice. (Yes, that last sentence is unfair. But not completely.)

P.s. More on this in a future post.

P.p.s. Erik Voeten, The Monkey Cage's man on these matters, offers his take here.

Timothy Egan on "how Obama saved capitalism and lost the midterms"

Can't resist linking to this before shutting off the computer for the night. I don't agree with every single statement in it but the last few paragraphs are spot on.

And btw, if you're wondering whether Citizens United affected the elections, the answer is a resounding yes, according to Norman Ornstein. Earlier today I heard him (at an AEI thing broadcast by CSpan radio) say it could have changed the outcome in as many as 20 House races.

No fixed ideology?

"I don’t think people carry around with them a fixed ideology. I think the majority of people, they’re going about their business, going about their lives. They just want to make sure that we’re making progress. And that’s going to be my top priority over the next couple of years."

-- President Obama, at today's press conference


The majority of Americans may not "carry around with them a fixed ideology," but they do carry around some powerful, if usually unarticulated, assumptions and beliefs. These stem from America's history and the mythical narratives and images that have become firm, one might even say fixed, elements of the national psyche. Without positing some historically-derived, widely shared political impulses ("ideas" would be perhaps too formal a word), it is hard to understand why so many Americans are susceptible (and have been susceptible for a long time) to rhetoric about "tax-and-spend liberals," "big government," "government interfering in our lives," "a government takeover of health care," etc. etc., when such rhetoric masks the facts that the U.S. taxes its citizens less than most other 'developed' countries and that its welfare provisions are less generous than those of most other 'developed' countries.

Why is the phrase "class warfare" such a toxic label in U.S. political discourse that it can be trotted out at a moment's notice to delegitimize attempts to address income and wealth inequality, which has grown to frightening and obscene levels in this country over the last 30 or so years? Why can struggling and economically hard-pressed voters be persuaded to vote for candidates who, far from proposing solutions to their problems, talk in the same breath about reining in spending and creating jobs (without bothering to explain how it is possible to do both simultaneously) and who spout slogans like "take back the government" without bothering to explain what that means? How was Ronald Reagan, a professional actor devoid of any notable grasp of issues, able to build an enormously successful career by uttering slogans like "let's get the government off our backs"? It's hard to answer these questions without positing a shared mythology holding that the genius of the American people lies in self-reliance, entrepreneurial initiative, and sheer determination to overcome all odds, and that this genius can only fully flourish and work its magic when the evil entity called "the government" located in that alien place called "Washington DC" removes its dead hand from individuals and corporations and allows them to mobilize the creative energies which, once unleashed, can assure that the U.S. remains, in the rather astoundingly hyperbolic albeit no doubt sincere words of several candidates in their victory speeches, "the greatest country ever known in the history of the world" [sic].

The worst result so far...

...is the (apparent) defeat of Russ Feingold. :(

Of course, there are other bad results, but this one I think is a particular loss for the Senate.

Documentary examines war's 'human terrain'

While looking for something else, I stumbled across an article about the new documentary Human Terrain (one of whose directors is James Der Derian, whose name will be known to some readers). Rather than quoting or taking the time to summarize, I'll just give the link: here.

Japan-India trade & nuclear energy deal

Here.

Is U.S. national security really at stake in Afghanistan? If not, we should get out

I was more-or-less inclined to give Pres. Obama the benefit of the doubt, at least for a while, when he announced the so-called Afghan surge in December of last year. He argued that the mission was vital to U.S. national security and that the commitment of 30,000 additional soldiers was designed to stop the Taliban's momentum and give the Afghan security forces the necessary time to increase their capacity.

In hindsight, perhaps I did not think hard enough about a couple of basic issues: (1) how closely is stopping the Taliban's momentum etc. linked, in a practical sense, to the goal of disrupting and defeating al-Qaeda?; and (2) if the answer to (1) is "not very closely," then why is the U.S. committing so many resources to fighting the Taliban in the first place? Put more simply: would it make it any real difference to U.S. national security if the Taliban re-took the essential levers of power (such as they are) in the country and re-established themselves as the government in Kabul? I am more and more inclined to think the answer is no it wouldn't, in which case it becomes more and more difficult to justify the current U.S./ISAF policy.

In a recent post on his blog, Stephen Walt writes:

As our numbers fall [i.e., when U.S. troops start to be drawn down, starting presumably some time in 2011], the Taliban will regroup, Pakistan will help rearm them covertly, and the struggle for power in Afghanistan will resume. Afghanistan's fate will once again be primarily in the hands of the Afghan people and the nearby neighbors who meddle there for their own reasons. I don't know who will win, but it actually won't matter very much for U.S. national security interests. [emphasis added]

If who wins doesn't matter very much for U.S. national security interests, then I, for one, will find it increasingly hard to watch on the NewsHour those photos and names of U.S. military personnel who have been killed. I'm willing to stipulate that the Taliban leadership is a nasty and repressive lot and that a victory for them would be bad (to put it mildly) for Afghan democrats (small "d") and for women, among others. But the sacrifice of American lives at the scale on which it is occurring can only be justified if American vital national security interests are at stake. If, as Walt suggests, the U.S. is eventually going to concoct a fig-leaf peace settlement and then persuade ourselves that we won (if, indeed, this is the best possible outcome given current conditions), it would probably be better to get out right now.

Historical analogies are easy to misuse, and I have been wary of analogies between Afghanistan and Vietnam. (After all, the misuse of historical analogies contributed to the U.S. getting into Vietnam in the first place.) However, it's worth recalling that whatever one thought of the 1973 Vietnam peace agreement, it was never in the cards that, once U.S. forces had left Vietnam, they would be re-introduced to prevent the 'fall' of Saigon. The Kissinger-Nixon strategy of pursuing "peace with honor" -- hugely costly in terms of Vietnamese and American lives, and costly too for the Cambodians and Laotians -- appears pointless (indeed, flatly immoral) in retrospect. Walt is worried that we have forgotten this piece of history (among others). I continue to be wary of historical analogies when they are mobilized for use in policy debates, but one can be wary of analogies and at the same time acknowledge that there is some wisdom in Santayana's dictum that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

Rhetorics of empire

The calendar tells me that today is United Nations Day: a fitting day for this post (for reasons that will become clear).

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In Cosmopolitanism (Norton pb., 2007), Kwame Anthony Appiah writes:

The independence movements of the post-1945 world that led to the end of Europe’s African and Asian empires were driven by the rhetoric that had guided the Allies’ own struggle against Germany and Japan: democracy, freedom, equality. This [i.e., the conflict between colonial powers and independence movements] wasn’t a conflict between values. It was a conflict of interests couched in terms of the same values. (p. 80)

According to this view, the colonizers and the colonized framed their positions in the same language: both sides argued that they were upholding liberal principles. If so, did the colonizers genuinely believe that they were acting on behalf of such principles? No doubt some of them did, but that issue is beyond the scope of this post. The above-quoted passage from Appiah does, however, raise questions about the relation of words to concepts. Someone’s use of a word such as “freedom” does not necessarily indicate a commitment to anything that most people would recognize as freedom. A slaveholder in the act of beating a slave does not become a promoter of freedom simply by uttering the words “I am doing this because I believe in freedom.”

Admittedly this example is an exaggeration. In the conflict between colonial powers and independence movements, rhetoric was used in somewhat, but only somewhat, more subtle ways. The career of Jan Smuts (1870-1950) is instructive in this connection. In No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton University Press, 2009), Mark Mazower devotes a lot of attention to Smuts, who was the leading South African politician of the first half of the twentieth century. Smuts viewed membership in the British Empire as a means to ensure the preservation and spread of white rule in southern Africa. During the first of his two terms as prime minister of South Africa (1919-1924), “the foundations of the future apartheid regime were being laid by eroding the last remnants of the native suffrage and introducing segregationist settlement restrictions.” (p. 51)

Smuts was also a believer in international organization. Among other things, he was a main drafter of the preamble to the UN Charter, which listed among the organization’s purposes the reaffirmation of “faith in fundamental human rights, …the dignity and worth of the human person, …the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small….” Mazower asks: “How could the new world body’s commitment to universal rights owe more than a little to the participation of a man whose segregationist policies back home paved the way for the apartheid state?” (No Enchanted Palace, p. 19) The answer – or at least an answer – is that for Smuts, and for some others involved in the UN’s founding, “fundamental human rights” did not in fact mean universal rights. Adhering to an “evolutionist paradigm of cosmic harmony under beneficent white guidance” (p. 57), Smuts saw “differential degrees of freedom and differential treatment of groups by the state [as] not merely reasonable but necessary for human progress.” (p. 64) As a young man, Smuts “had talked easily about the mission of ‘half a million whites’ to lift up ‘the vast dead weight of immemorial barbarism and animal savagery to the light and blessing of ordered civilisation,’” and he hoped the UN would be “a force for world order, under whose umbrella the British Empire – with South Africa as its principal dynamic agent on the continent – could continue to carry out its civilizing work.” (p. 65)

The UN Charter itself, as Mazower observes, did not specifically condemn colonialism, and few people of any prominence, except for W.E.B. Du Bois, objected to this omission at the time. Indeed an African journalist predicted that a new “scramble for coloured territories and spheres of influence” was in the offing, adding that “new life has been infused into predatory imperialism.” (quoted, p. 63)

However, the UN did not, as things turned out, conform to Smuts’s vision, nor did a new scramble for colonies occur. On the contrary, what Harold Macmillan called a wind of change (in his famous 1960 speech) was running strongly against the continuation of formal empire. This soon became evident within the UN itself. A complaint to the General Assembly about the treatment of Indians in South Africa, spearheaded by Nehru and first brought in 1946, presaged “the emergence in the General Assembly of an entirely new conception of world order – one premised on the breakup of empire rather than its continuation.” (Mazower, p. 185) The General Assembly’s December 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples called for quick independence for the remaining colonies, rejecting the argument that an alleged lack of readiness for self-government could justify delay.

The end of colonialism, an epochal change in world politics, represented an unusual case of a modern international institution becoming obsolete (cf. K.J. Holsti, Taming the Sovereigns: Institutional Change in International Politics [Cambridge U.P., 2004], p. 274). But although the institution became obsolete, the rhetoric associated with it has proven to be longer lived. Although virtually no one in authority extols, in Smutsian fashion, the superior wisdom of the “white race,” more nuanced versions of what Mazower calls imperial internationalism are still extant. In the context of the “war on terror,” references to “civilization” and “barbarism” have become common (see Mark Salter’s work on this); these words have overtones, whether intended or not, that cannot be fully grasped unless one remembers the once-widespread view that colonized peoples were “uncivilized.” The trope (to use a fashionable word) of civilization versus barbarism should not have been resurrected in recent years, no matter that the context is different. These words carry too many reminders of the old rhetorics of empire.

Note: For more on Smuts, see the sources listed in Mazower's notes. Also, Richard Toye's Churchill's Empire (Henry Holt, 2010) contains a couple of references to Smuts from a somewhat different perspective.

New estimates of malaria death rates in India

A study published in the Lancet suggests that roughly 200,000 deaths per year in India are due to malaria, a figure some 13 times higher than the World Health Organization estimates. As this BBC story notes, about 1.3 million deaths from infectious diseases, with acute fever as the main symptom, occur in rural parts of India each year, but the causes of these deaths are hard to determine, since most of them are not medically certified. The Lancet study used an interview technique called verbal autopsy. The WHO says the study's estimates are too high, but this story certainly raises questions about the numbers of those dying from this preventable disease. The study was jointly funded by NIH, the Canadian Institute of Health Research, and Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute.

Deranged

Via E.J. Dionne: Apparently not even The Weekly Standard likes Dinesh d'Souza's deranged new book The Roots of Obama's Rage.

Of goats, gibbons, and the election season

I caught an interview today on All Things Considered with Rand Paul's Democratic opponent in the Kentucky Senate race, Jack Conway. Robert Siegel pressed Conway on a "controversial" (Siegel's word) ad criticizing what Paul did in college. Something about joining a group that deprecated Christians, worshipped "false idols," etcetera.

Look, it would be a disaster if Rand Paul were elected to the Senate, and I guess you do what you have to do (within certain elastic limits) to try to ensure that doesn't happen. On the other hand, I honestly don't give a flying **** what Rand Paul did in college. If he had had sexual intercourse with a mountain goat while engaging in lewd acts with a gibbon, I would regard it as irrelevant to his fitness to be a U.S. Senator.

Gentlemen never sue

The name of Theodore Roosevelt (class of 1880 at Harvard) is invoked at the very beginning of the movie The Social Network. The actor playing Mark Zuckerberg confidently, if a tad bizarrely, informs his girlfriend that TR’s membership in the Porcellian Club is what ensured his eventual accession to the presidency of the U.S.

Theodore Roosevelt – who as a Harvard undergraduate spent on club fees and clothes in two years a sum of money that would have sustained the average American family of the time for six years* -- is in some ways (but only some) a fitting patron saint for this movie, whose themes of money and class would not have been foreign to him. However, the only character in the movie that TR would really have understood is the rower who is reluctant to sue Zuckerberg because that’s not what “gentlemen of Harvard” do. The rest of the movie -- including the computers, the drugs, the parties, and the sexual situations – would have been, it is pretty safe to say, either incomprehensible or shocking (or both) to TR. That’s not a criticism of The Social Network, of course, but it is an indication of how much certain aspects of the world have changed in the last 125 years.

As for the movie on its own terms: it’s entertaining – especially the scene in which the actor playing Larry Summers appears – but I would take most of it with a few grains of salt.

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*Kim Townsend, Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others (paperback ed., Harvard Univ. Press, 1998), p. 259. For TR's views on masculinity, race, etc., in historical context, see Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity (Vintage Bks., 2005), pp. 355ff.

Sacked for gridlock

In the months leading up to Yuri Luzhkov's sacking as mayor of Moscow, Russian state-run TV apparently had criticized him for gridlock on the roads and the destruction of historic buildings, among other things.

If U.S. mayors could be fired or otherwise removed for gridlock, Washington, D.C. would not have the same mayor for more than a few weeks at a time.

A ghost laid to rest?

Reporting for the NewsHour last night on the dramatic rescue of the miners in Chile, Jonathan Franklin said (I'm paraphrasing) that the ghost of General Pinochet had been left at the bottom of the mine shaft. Meaning, presumably, that many people outside the country thought first of the Pinochet era when they thought of Chile, but now the first thing to come to mind will be the rescue. I don't know whether any of that's right, but it was an interesting remark.

Preview

Coming in November later this month:

Rhetorics of empire