Anatol Lieven on Pakistan and on the Afghanistan War

I heard a presentation yesterday at UC-Berkeley by Anatol Lieven, a former journalist who covered Pakistan extensively who is now Professor of War Studies at King's College in London. He has spent time fairly recently in the Swat Valley in Pakistan, which has been the scene of conflict between the Pakistani Army and the Pakistani Taliban.

I asked him what he thought from his research was the current state of Bin Laden's original Al Qa'ida organization. His picture is that there's no much left of Bin Laden's group in the sense of a cohesive, command-and-control type organization. He said that while it would be a great morale booster for the West to kill or capture Bin Laden or his deputy Zawahiri, that it would not likely make much difference in terms of the actual terrorism threat for the United States.

He sees the terrorism threat from radical jihadists as being a loosely connected network of groups, some of which use the name "Al Qa'ida" (like Al Qa'ida in the Magreb) and may have had some direct connection to Bin Laden's group at some point, and others of which are radical Salafi jihadists with similar ideas but no direct connection to the original group. He said that some of the connections between such groups are like nodes in a computer network, with others are more diffuse like (he used a literally cosmic example) intergalactic gases clumping here and there.

But he also told an interesting story about a group of Baluch smugglers who got busted in Pakistan within the relatively recent past. This was a group who had worked closely with Bin Laden's Al Qa'ida smuggling Qa'ida fighters back and forth across the Afghan-Pakistan border. It emerged that they were smuggling a variety of international fighters into Afghanistan to work with the Afghan Taliban, including a group of Muslim doctors from Russia. (I believe he said Russia and not the former Soviet Union.) Lieven concludes from this that some remnant of Bin Laden's group is using that loose international network to act as personnel "headhunters" for the Afghan Taliban. But he stressed that this was not in the sense of a centralized organization with officals like a "station chief in Karachi" or whatever. But rather a dispersed network where word gets passed along that the Afghan Taliban is looking for certain kinds of specialists, like medical personnel and they arrange for them to be smuggled in.

His picture of the current relationship between the Pakistani army and intelligence with Pakistani jihadist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET) that concentrate on the Kashmir issue is that they have a basic deal. They refrain from attacks in Western countries, which is particularly good for Britain, because a lot of the Pakistani immigrants to Britain come from the Punjab region near Kashmir and a lot of them are very sympathetic to LET. And mostly they have to refrain from attacks on India at the moment, after the huge Mumbai incident, with the promise they'll get to hit India again in the future. But they pretty much have a green light to help the Afghan Taliban against NATO and the Karzai government. Including the occasional target with special connection to India.

He stressed how much Pakistanis see the Afghanistan War in the context of the India-Pakistan conflict, with the current Afghan government being seen as pro-Indian. This is something that seems to only occasionally peek into American commentary on the war, so far as I've noticed. And this is a big part of what makes US-Pakistani relationship chronically troubled.

Lieven mentioned that the Pakistani elite tend to have a very Western orientation in terms of speaking English and sending their kids to Western universities and also in terms of their conception of property, etc. But he also said that many Pakistani officials would like to dump the current unsatisfying alliance with the US altogether and become an even closer ally to China.

He told about one factor I hadn't heard at all before. He said that it was common among Pashtun families (I took it he meant mainly in Pakistan) to send one son from the family to serve with the Pakistani Army and another to serve with the Afghanistan Taliban. When one of the two groups comes around looking for the son on the other side, the family can say, oh, that son's a bum and drug addict and a loser, but our good, sensible son is on *your* side.

He also said that the US military's perception that a lot of Afghan Taliban flee "across the border" to Pakistan is mistaken. What often happens, and what happened a lot in 2001-2, was that they simply go home and bury their weapons and wait to see how the military tide turns.

Lieven said that in his conversations with American military officials, they don't have a clear idea of what winning would mean. But they are haunted by their perceptions of Vietnam, which represents a clear idea of what losing would mean, the image of the helicopter on the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon in 1975 being a dramatic example. This is an interesting observation, because to hear official Pentagon spokespeople tell it, our armed forces haven't lost a single battle since probably Custer's Last Stand. And, more specifically, there is a widespread assumption in the officer corps that US *won* the Vietnam War militarily but that our victorious generals were stabbed in the back by the weak-kneed politicians and gutless civilians back home. (Though obviously not all versions are expressed that crassly.)

Lieven also says in that connection that the Pentagon right now tends to view an exit view a general peace agreement with the Taliban as being a kind of unacceptable defeat. He thinks the reports we hear of negotiations with the Taliban represents what he says was a similar approach by the Soviets to make one-off deals with individual commanders. But he thinks the Pentagon is pretty dead set against any general agreement with the Afghan Taliban. He said we shouldn't underestimate the Pentagon's determination to fight on for years to avoid what they see as a humiliating defeat.

Which tells me that if it's left up to our generals, we'll never stop fighting in Afghanistan. That seems to have been the case in Iraq, too; McCain's promise in 2008 of 100 year's war in Iraq reflected something like that attitude. But in Iraq's case, the pro-Iranian government in Baghdad eventually insisted on a status-of-force agreement that pulls out remaining US combat troops this year. And I'm already seeing some reports that the Pentagon is trying to find a way around that.

Lieven also said that it's his sense that the Pentagon is very cautious about any idea of going into Pakistan in a ground war. Which he thinks is a very appropriate caution. He has the sense that sending US ground troops into Pakistan on a large scale would probably wreck the US position completely in the Muslim world. He thinks that the operatives that the US has on the ground there now are "hostages to fate," as the Raymond Davis case illustrated so dramatically this year.

Tags: al qaida, afghanistan war, anatol lieven, osama bin laden, pakistan

An unfortunate contrast on the budget negotiations

Unfortunate for the Democrats and the general public, that is.

Here's President Obama from Wednesday evening, sounding tired and resigned to being slapped around by the Republicans:



Here's Republican Congressman Mike Pence, in a Think Progress video they titled "Pence Lets The The Truth Slip On His Uncompromising Stance."



Conventional wisdom holds that Bill Clinton benefitted politically by the Republican House's insistence in 1995 on a government shutdown. In this case, the CW is probably correct.

But Obama and the Democrats can only benefit if they make the Republicans own their actions in shutting down the government. Clinton made the m onw the 1995 shutdown. But Obama can't do that displaying the kind of weakness and pointless pursuit of bipartisanship that he's doing now.

The Republicans are sneering at him for his weakness. Mississippi Governor and unannounced 2012 Presidential candidate Haley Barbour tweeted yesterday, "With a stacked deck, Dems failed to pass a 2010 budget. Now that GOP controls 1/2 of 1/3 of fed gov't, Obama wants to talk 'responsibility.'"

That's how the Republicans roll. They block action - in the last Congress with the help of Blue Dog corporate Dems - and then blame the Democrats for not taking the action they successfully blocked. Ole Haley tweet may be mostly swagger. But it's a glimpse at the Republicans' attitude. And they have a point. Having the Republicans swat the Democratic President around while he pleads meekly for bipartisan harmony hurts the Democrats.

Tags: barack obama, democratic party, mike pence, republican party

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011, April 7: Southern Agrarian Allen Tate

Allen Tate (1899-1979)

The sixth of the 12 essays in the 1930 book, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, was by Allen Tate, "Remarks on the Southern Religion." The book consisted of essays by 12 different Southern writers arguing in various ways for the virtues of Southern agricultural societies.

Following Lyle Lanier's entertaining but unconvincing philosophical praise of the the supposed rural virtues, poet Allen Tate takes up Southern religion. At the start, he wisely confesses the modesty of his qualifications to write on the subject. There follows quite a bit of discussion of the religious view of "a horse croppping the blue-grass on the lawn" and of the distinction between Western and Eastern attitude toward Christianity. None of it especially informative.

He eventually gets to Southern religion. He argues that historically the American South never quite got its religion right. One reason was that it was mostly Protestant, which was "a non-agrarian and trading religion", Tate says. Another was that "the South never created a fitting religion," which meant that "the social structure of the South began grievously to break down two generations after the Civil War." The reader is left to guess that somehow this breakdown has to do with the encroachment of Yankee industrialism. Though how that relates to deficient Southern Protestantism is quite unclear. Everything would have been different if most Southerners had been Catholic like Scarlett O'Hara?

Tate sees the great religious need for the South as the requirement to "take hold of Tradition." The religious tradition of the South, as Tate sees it, consists in being more concerned with images than with dogma or abstract thought:

It could entertain the biblial mythology alomg with the Greek, and it could add to thsese a lively mediaevalism from the novels of Sir Walter Scott. ... The old Southerners were highly critical of the kinds of work to be done. They planted no corn that they could not enjoy; they grew no cotton that did not directly contribute to the upkeep of a rich private life; and they knew no history for the sake of knowing it, but simply for the sake of contemplating it and seeing in it an image of themselves. And aware of the treachery of nature, as all agrarians are, they tended to like stories, very simple stories with a moral.

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

His fellow contributor John Gould Fletcher might wonder at this point if Tate might be saying that those bad Yankees were right to think that the general educational system of the antebellum South was deficient in comparison to its Northern counterparts. One finds it hard to resist the suspicion that Tate in that passage is looking for flowery ways of saying that Southerners had such limited education opportunities that they were inclined to spend way too much time thrilling to Walter Scott stories and mistaking them for reality. Antebellum Southerners found in Scott's romantic novels a glorified version of the honor codes which dominated the rural South and which contributed so greatly to their exaggerated fears of Northern critics of slavery and to their tendency toward belligerant reaction to perceived injuries to their "sacred honor." Mark Twain had something like this in mind when he said of Scott, "Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war." (Life on the Mississippi)

Somehow out of this muddle, Tate comes to the following conclusion, which somehow he considers a religious solution:

We are very near an answer to our question - How may the Southerner take hold of his Tradition?

The answer is, by violence.

For this answer is inevitable. ...

This method is political, active and, in the nature of the case, violent and revolutionary. Reaction is the most radical of programs; it aims at cutting away the overgrowth and getting back to the roots. A forward-looking radicalism is a contradiction; it aims at rearranging the foliage.

The Southerner is faced with the paradox: He must use an instrument, which is political, and so unrealistic and pretentious that he connot believe in it, to re-establish a private, self-contained, and essentially spirtual life. I say that he must do this; but that remains to be seen.

Tate doesn't specify what the targets of this (religious? nihilistic?) violence should be, though it's safe to assume by the Southerner he meant the white Southerner. Should the target be Yankees? Foreigners? His black neighbors in the South? His white neighbors? His wife and children? All of the above?

Mark Twain might have wondered if Allen Tate weren't suffering from a variety of the "Sir Walter disease."

Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, slavery, southern agrarians, us south

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011, April 6: Southern Agrarian Lyle Lanier

The fifth of the 12 essays in the 1930 book, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, was by Lyle Lanier, "A Critique of the Philosophy of Progress." The book consisted of essays by 12 different Southern writers arguing in various ways for the virtues of Southern agricultural societies.



Lyle Lanier (1903-1988)

 Lanier's essay is less burdened with Lost Cause dogma than most of the contributions to this volume. His essay is a readable account of the philosophical history of the idea of progress. He spends a lot of time on the philosophy of John Dewey and Dewey's criticisms of the conditions at the time of mass democracy and the industrial society. Although Lanier criticizes Dewey on such points as his faith in the flexibility of human behavior and the potential of general cooperation, he does treat Dewey's ideas with some apparent sympathy and therefore avoids the more overtly reactionary character of other contributors.

At least until the last couple of pages. What he proposes as a desirable solution to the Depression conditions of 1930 sounds more like Mussolini than Dewey. He proposes:

... to renounce the capitalistic industrial program. This does not mean that the industrial technology should be scrapped; on the contrary, further mechanization of industrial production should be encouraged, since this would mean that progressively fewer persons would be required for its processes. The production of commodities should be stabilized in each industry, and the large surplus of chronically unemployed should be induced by all possible means to return to agriculture. The objection may be made that already there is over-production of agricultural commodities; the answer is that agriculture is more than a process of "production." The millions of people who now hang on to the fringes of industry would find a place to live and food to eat; they would no longer fill the "flop" houses and the bread lines. They would not have to look forward to the demoralising prospect of the dole, even when made under the guise of "insurance." They would have a base on which to knit together the fragments of lives now broken on the wheel of what we are pleased to call civilization.[my emphasis]

This sounds like a giant system of sharecropping, forcing the urban unemployed to the countryside "by all possible means." How an already-ravaged agricultural market could be altered to accommodate such a change, Lanier does not discuss. His main concern is to avoid public assistance programs for the urban unemployed - out of concern for the damage it does to their characters, of course.

Lanier's vision appears to be a dystopian one based on some abstract notion of the superior virtues taught by the agricultural life:

The unsalutary psychological and social consequences of the diminution of the influence of agriculture upon the general patterns of American life have already been indicated. ... If there exists any effective social and political intelligence in the country it might profitably be mobilized for the conduction of a specific program for the rehabilitation of the agrarian economy and the "old individualism" associated with it. This program is not conceived in a spirit of pathological regression to the past, stimulated by repugnance toward contemporary conditions; it is the definition of a concrete social aim. The instrumentalities of intelligent political leadership, informed social science, and a definitive social philosophy could have no more important problem than that of trying to effect a synthesis, in some sense, of the unified manner of living inherent in the agrarian family and community with the energy and inventiveness which have been divered into industrialism.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, slavery, southern agrarians, us south

Obama's re-election campaign

Utopia won't be on the ballot in 2012. But I hope a primary challenge to Barack Obama will be.

I don't think it's likely that a primary challenge would succeed in unseating Obama as the Democratic nominee. But what it would do is give the Democratic base a way to register our objections to Obama's general approach, which in a more sane political environment would be called conservative. Obama is not going to morph into a 21st-century Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt. He's not that guy. He's too cautious in his style, too wedded to the worst features of the national security state and too eager to please Wall Street in his economic proposals.

But a serious primary challenge from a liberal/progressive candidate could scare him into taking a more progressive stand on economic issues like foreclosure relief, employment and consumer protection. It could discourage him from new military adventures or from further escalation in Afghanistan and Libya. And it would likely force him to back off from the most destructive of his neoliberal inclinations and unambiguously defend Social Security against the Republicans and the Pete Petersons of the world.

Here's the Obama campaing's lackluster opening video, which is apparently aimed at getting the grass roots supporters (aka, "the left" in Punditspeak) who he has been posturing against for months and months fired up about campaigning for him:



We live in a two-party environment in the United States. That means that people with serious ideas about politics, especially those outside what our Pod Pundits take to be the current mainstream, have to be able to walk and talk at the same time - in this context meaning that we have to recognize the differences between the two parties while keeping in mind the deficiencies of the one we prefer. Pointing out that Obama's austerity policies are damaging doesn't mean that we have to forget that John Boehner's austerity policies are even more destructive, or that crackpots like Michelle Bachman would cause far more harm than Obama's failings.

Joan Walsh opposes any primary challenge to Obama. I don't agree with her position on that. But she does have a good analysis of the reasons it could be problematic from a progressive Democratic viewpoint (Obama 2012: Let's talk next year Salon 04/04/2011):

I [also] oppose a primary challenge from the left because I believe it would keep progressives trapped in the fiction that presidential campaigns are the be all and end all of progressive politics. They're not, as Obama's election should have proven to everyone. MoveOn, Dean-turned-Democracy for America and much of the lefty blogosphere went all-in for Obama, lauding him as the true-blue progressive in the race, when he was not. They helped bring him the Democratic nomination he should have had to at least compete for among progressives. (Do people now understand that his praising Reagan and saying Social Security needed fixing might have been harbingers of the way he's led?) They dissipated energy that could have been spent in other ways; progressive groups have spent the last two years trying to figure out how to organize the base for truly progressive causes, rather than allegiance to a centrist Democratic president. Meanwhile, the stunning organizing achievements of Obama for America in 2008 -- building an email list of 13 million names, 4 million donors and 2 million active volunteers -- were never put behind a grass-roots effort to support Obama's agenda. We know from the New York Times that the Bill Daley White House shut down an effort by OFA to back the Wisconsin protests.

Joan is basing this observation on the experience of 2008. Obama encouraged liberal donors to focus their contributions through the official campaign rather than through independent liberal groups. This was widely understood as a savvy move because it was generally thought that the diffusion of campaign effort between the Kerry campaign in 2004 and independent liberal groups was a weakness because it made message management more difficult. The Obama campaign also organized a grassroots support group, an effort led by Marshal Gans. All of this looked promising in the short run from both a Democratic Party and progressive activist point of view.

She's got a good point. We need independent progressive organization advocating for labor and civil rights, for Social Security and Medicare, against war and neoliberal economics.

But we also need a Democratic Party that will fight for democracy and programs like Social Security that are vital to the American way of life. Governors like Jerry Brown are showing that such a thing is possible at the state level. It's got to become possible again at the national level.

Tags: 2012 election, barack+obama, jerry brown, joan walsh

Libya War: Leslie Gelb on the risks of escalation

Leslie Gelb, intimating that he's speaking for the generals or some substantial portion of them, a not totally implausible insinuation coming from an establishmentarian like him, writes in U.S. Military Not Happy Over Libya The Daily Beast 03/31/2011 about the military risks in the Libya War. The following warning is a sensible one:

Remember, underneath everything happening now are the two driving goals that President Obama set: to protect populations and to oust Colonel Gaddafi. In all likelihood, U.S. coalition partners cannot achieve these goals without U.S. jets resuming combat missions. Even with more U.S. air power, it probably won't be possible to stop Gaddafi without using some coalition ground forces. So, pressures to do more and more will continue to lurk. All the Pentagon can do, then, is to raise tough questions (Who are those rebels we're determined to help, could they be Muslim extremists?) to diffuse pressures on the U.S. military to do more.

... Next time, Obama should make himself count to one million before he sets absolutists goals like "Gaddafi must go," and "We must protect civilian lives." [my emphasis]

Tags: leslie gelb, libya war

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011, April 5: Southern Agrarian John Gould Fletcher

The fourth of the 12 essays in the 1930 book, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, was by John Gould Fletcher, "Education, Past and Present." The book consisted of essays by 12 different Southern writers arguing in various ways for the virtues of Southern agricultural societies.



John Gould Fletcher (1886-1950)

As we've seen in the previous posts on other essays in the book, these writers weren't especially interested in developing plausible suggestions for some kind of new approach to making the American South a prosperous society based primarily on agriculture. The "agrarian" notion for them was primarily an ideology to glorify what are sometimes politely called the "folkways" of the South. In the South of 1930, those "folkways" were Jim Crow segregation laws, white supremacy in social relations, a whites-only democracy that in practice was often corrupt to the bone, and a network of organized white groups like the Ku Klux Klan to maintain the existing order against challengers white or black.

Fletcher's essay is mainly a long gripe about the existence of public education in the South. His argument, which he justifies with his version of the history of public schools in the region, is that free public schools aren't especially desirable but the South probably can't get rid of them. And they do some good in the primary grades, anyway. But he prefers to see them oriented as much as possible to promoting education for an elite, i.e., for the children of relatively affluent families.

He's quite defensive on the historical issue of public schools in the antebellum South. The system of private academies for the children of the wealthy worked well enough, he argued, and the lower orders didn't much care about education anyway. But the South did have some limited public schools prior to the Civil War, he protests, and it was really mean of the Yankees then and in 1930 to say that education in the antebellum South was inferior to that in the rest of the country:

The South was not, as was charged by the North before and after the Civil War, indifferent to education. She siply preferred the older schemes of education which were best suited to her own rural populations, to such novel methods as [Horace] Mann's, which were non-sectarian, non-religious, urban and egalitarian in scope.

He finds odd a quote he cites from an unidentified national teachers' convention of 1865 in Pennsylvania that slave children were "by law, prohibited the advantages of an education." But it was a fact that in slave states it had been illegal to provide a formal education to a slave, child or adult. Teaching a slave to read was a serious crime.

Fletcher summarizes his general grievance against all this here public education stuff as follows:

The inferior, whether in life or in education, should exist only for the sake of the superior. We feed and clothe and exercise our bodies, for example, in order to be able to do something with our minds. We employ our minds in order to achieve character, to become the balanced personalities, the "superior men" of Confucius' text, the "gentlemen" of the old South. We achieve character, personality, gentlemanliness in order to make our lives an art and to bring our souls into relation with the whole scheme of things, which is the divine nature. But the present-day system of American popular education exactly reverses this process. It puts that which is superior- learning, intelligence, scholarship - at the disposal of the inferior. It says in effect that if the pupil acquires an education, he will be better able to feed and clothe his body later. It destroys the intellectual self-reliance of character, and the charm of balanced personality, in order to stuff the mind with unrelated facts. Its goal is industry rather than harmonious living, and self-aggrandisement rather than peace with God. That is the indictment against it, and that is what we of the South now have to face.

In other words, we are somehow depriving the children of workers and farmers the higher things in life by teaching them about the higher things of life to better enable them to earn money to enjoy the higher things of life. Presumably working in a factory all day or picking cotton from dawn to dusk will better enable children to attain "intellectual self-reliance of character," a "balanced personality" and "peace with God." Why did those Yankees have to oppress the South with this nonsense about educating children who aren't born to wealthy parents?

Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, slavery, southern agrarians, us south

Aljazeera English on the fight for Libya's oil

This 04/05/2011 Aljazeera English clip reports on the government forces in Libya attacking oil installations, something the NATO air war has not been able to prevent. This is a big deal, because much of the optimism for establishing a viable rebel government in eastern Libya has rested on the assumption that they, rather than the government in Tripoli, could get the bulk of the country's oil revenue.



Tags: libya war

Radiation isn't forever - but it's lasts a loo-oong time

This is a PBS Newshour report from 03/29/2011 on the current state of findings on short- and long-term effects of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, Revisiting Chernobyl: A Nuclear Disaster Site of Epic Proportions. At around 8:30, they talk about scientists' findings on the long-term effects of nuclear radiation in the vicinity of Chernobyl.



Tags: nuclear power

Walter Russell Mead sees a "Wilsonian" war in Libya

Walter Russell Mead has a decent post on the Libya War, The Shores of Tripoli: Our Latest Wilsonian War The American Interest 03/30/2011. But he continues his more-than-a-little-aggravating habit of describing neoconservative/militarist foreign policy positions as "Jacksonian." This comment from James Lindsay, Is Operation Odyssey Dawn Constitutional? Obama versus the Framers CFR.org 03/25/2011 provides some useful historical perspective:

In 1798, at the start of the so-called Quasi-War with France, John Adams called Congress into a special session "to consult and determine on such measures as in their wisdom shall be deemed meet for the safety and welfare of the United States." When Andrew Jackson, not known as a shrinking violet when it came to presidential power, wanted to force France to pay damage claims that dated back to the Napoleonic era, he did not order the U.S. military into action. He instead asked Congress to pass a law "authorizing reprisals upon French property." Congress said no, and Jackson let the issue drop. When the Chilean government refused to apologize in 1891 after a mob killed two American sailors, Benjamin Harrison asked Congress "to take such action as may be deemed appropriate." If you don't remember the U.S.-Chilean war of 1891, it’s because Congress never authorized hostilities and the crisis passed. [my emphasis]

That hardly justifies regarding warmongering and Presidential usurpation of Congressional war powers as "Jacksonian."

Leaving that fault aside, Mead has some good comments on the Libya War:

The Libyan adventure is a lot of things: a noble effort to protect innocent civilians from horrifying goons, an experiment in a new kind of indirect American leadership, a last desperate throw of the dice by a hyperactive French president whose people increasingly loathe him, an attempt by flustered Arab establishmentarians to get on the right side of popular fury, a demonstration of Britain’s enduring if tortured moralism, a slugging match in the sand, and a nailbiting distraction for a White House that has repeatedly failed to convince voters that it is 'focused like a laser' on the economy and has much more to lose if this goes bad than it has to win if things work.

But there is one thing it won’t be, even if it "works": the start of a new age of multilateral cooperation under the rule of law. The UN-blessed response to Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait failed to start the new age of peace, collective security and law; similarly the liberation of Libya is a fluke not a trend.

The US-French-British usage of the UN Resolutions on Libya is likely to make Russia and China less enthusiastic about endorsing any such actions in the future for the reasons he explains:

Russia and China were unhappy enough with the idea that the UN could authorize an attack on a member government to challenge its domestic policy that they abstained. Hardly a surprise — both governments can easily imagine circumstances under which they would have to get down and dirty with domestic malcontents, and should Russia need to kill some more Chechens or China spill some more blood in Tienanmien Square some day, they don’t want a bunch of interfering busybodies poking around. But Qaddafi is such an unattractive figure, his threats were so blood curdling, and, perhaps not least, the prospect that the western powers might overreach and expose themselves was so deliciously attractive that they decided to sit back and let the West give war a chance. [my emphasis]

In the Realist school of foreign policy theory, it is normal and effectively inevitable that lesser powers will seek to reduce the relative power of a "hegemon," which the US is in the Realist view under our post-Cold War foreign policy strategy of global dominance. You don't have to be an adherent of the Realist view to imagine that China and Russia both took into consideration when they abstained on the UN Security Council vote rather than exercised their veto power that in intervening in Libya the US, France and Britain would "overreach and expose themselves" and thereby weaken their relative power and influence in the world more quickly.

Although if China or Russia is looking to someday become a world hegemon in the way the US is today, they might want to think carefully how much of an advantage is really is to be fighting wars in multiple countries over "humanitarian" concerns, oil, "Al Qa'ida," terrorism and whatever our other official reasons are this week. The leaders in Russia and China probably think Qaddafi is a bad guy, too, in some way or other. But do they really want to take on the American role of leading the charge to take out such Bad Guys? It sounds like the foreign policy version of Tom Sawyer's friends thinking it would be grand fun to paint Tom's fence for him.

Mead also notes that the Arab League and the African Union may also take a closer look the next time the US, France and/or Britain ask them to provide diplomatic cover for a Western military intervention. As Mead puts it imagining their perspective, "Give the old imperialists an inch of legal standing and they'll take a mile of turf."

But then, the neocons and Cheney militarist don't care about diplomatic cover. To most of them, unilateralism is far better than a multinational coalition, much less the United Nations, which they generally regard with the same hatred as the Old Right isolationists at the John Birch Society and the Ludwig Von Mises Institute. As Mead notes, "Human Rights Watch can’t start wars on its own." And in the Libya War, neocons who want to validate wars against Iran and Syria are happy to cheer this one on, all the while pointing out the problems of limited engagement and preaching the virtues of robust regime change, i.e., using American troops just like in the grand Iraqi adventure.

Then there's the Cheney crowd's main concern:

On top of that is the oil question. While there are a lot of Americans who think war for oil is immoral, there are plenty more who think that oil, that necessary driver of our economy and the condition of our prosperity, is one of the few things worth fighting about — and a much better reason for war than helping to put one gang of thieves in while kicking another one out.

Tags: andrew jackson, libya war, old hickory, walter russell mead

California's political battle for democracy - including Jerry Brown's dog Sutter

Is that too melodramatic a way to put it? I don't think so.

Dante Atkins gives a good summary of the state of play on the $26 billion California budget deficit (give a take a billion or two, depending on how you count) in The California GOP's assault on democracy Daily Kos 04/03/2011.

Jerry Brown understands how silly our media can be. So he's managed to make his dog a political figure, which our press corps can actually relate to. The dog, Sutter Brown, even has his own brand-new You Tube channel, which he inaugurated by pitching for his human companion Jerry's proposal to let the public vote on whether to use tax revenue to cover half the deficit or take it all in cuts. (In California, we don't talk about pets and their owners, but about animal and human companions.)



Dante Atkins puts this in the context of the Republicans' wrecker strategy nationwide:

There may have been a red wave sweeping the country in 2010, but as GOP gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman's campaign manager Mike Murphy described it, California experienced a blue riptide. From governor all the way down to superintendent of public instruction, Democrats swept—usually in landslides, despite significant funding disadvantages at the top of the ticket, where billionaire Meg Whitman spent $150 million of her own money only to lose to Jerry Brown by 13 points. In the attorney general race, the only close statewide race, a younger, female, mixed-race district attorney of San Francisco named Kamala Harris defeated an older white male from Los Angeles County, Steve Cooley, who had easily won countywide election twice. Not only that, but Democrats held every single Congressional seat and even gained a seat in the State Assembly — earning as overwhelming a mandate as one could possibly imagine.

But that hasn't prevented Republicans from acting as if they own the state and ruling it as a small minority. While a recently approved measure reduced the threshold for passing a budget in California to a simple majority, it still requires a supermajority of two-thirds to raise any additional revenues, and Republicans have just enough seats in the Legislature to block any such proposal. Governor Brown already signed into law nearly $11 billion in deep budget cuts, but even that still left a hole of roughly $15 billion - a sum that Brown would like to see filled with revenue increases to complement the massive cuts he already signed into law.

But the GOP? They're having none of it. Instead of accepting the fact that Democrats in California have an overwhelming governing mandate, that Jerry Brown has already slashed the budget significantly, and that poll after poll has shown that voters favor a balanced budgetary approach that includes both cuts and tax increases, the Republican Party in California is holding democracy hostage in service to their anti-tax ideology. See, the revenue increases in question wouldn't just be implemented through a vote of the legislature; They would be put on the ballot for the voters of California to approve. But the GOP won't even let the people vote. Instead, the Republicans have, like hostage-takers, released a list of demands that Governor Brown must meet before they'll even allow the people their most basic of privileges under a democratic system of governance: to cast a ballot on whether to raise revenues or not. These demands are the usual Norquistian platform of gutting pensions, deregulation, and destruction of environmental protections. [my emphasis]

As the Sutter video indicates in a humorous way, Brown intends to make the Republicans own the results.

I continue to believe that Jerry is doing just what needs to be done to start getting California past the Republican scam: telling voters they can have lower taxes without any negative effects of their lives or services that they consider important; wrecking the functioning of the government and then pointing to the results as showing that gubment doesn't work and therefore we need less of it; and, relying on demagoguery, sleaze-slinging and fear-mongering and scarcely pretending to act in any kind of responsible way.

I don't want to see the $10 billion or so that Jerry wants to finance through a temporary tax extension be taken as cuts. But if it comes down to the choice between doing that and resorting to the kind of half-measures that has allowed California state government to stumble along for years and years with a constantly increasing proportion of debt to revenue that inflicts more and more long-term damage on the state's ability to function. States' debt situations are very different than that of the federal government, which is far away from having excessive debt.

Better for the state to take all or most of the $10 billion in cuts and move forward from there. Make the government after the cuts work well and start to rebuild from a more realistic basis. Jerry is being careful not to appear to be threatening the voters, although the Republicans and various pundits will accuse him of it anyway. But he's not making a threat, he's being more transparent about what he's doing than previous governors. And he's recognizing that California's system of initiative and referendum gives the state a quasi-plebiscitary form of government. And he's working within that to build a consensus among the public on the direction to go. He's making his preferences clear. And if the results of another $10 billion in cuts look more like what he's warning than like what the lying Republicans say, that will be important for everyone to see, as well.

In this prolonged economic slump, we need real Democratic economic policies from the Democratic President not Herbert Hoover ones, and now kowtowing to the Republican Wrecker Party. But President Obama has decided that the latter is what he's going to do. So progressive state Governors like Jerry Brown have to play the bad hand that the economy, the Republicans and Obama have dealt their states. So far, Jerry is on the most promising of an undesirable choice of paths in this situation.

Tags: california politics, jerry brown, republican party

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011, April 4: Southern Agrarian Frank Lawrence Owsley

Frank Owsley (1890-1956)

The third of the 12 essays in the 1930 book, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, was by Frank Lawrence Owsley, "The Irrespressible Conflict." The book consisted of essays by 12 different Southern writers arguing in various ways for the virtues of Southern agricultural societies.

Owsley's essay provides a raw, dishonest and openly racist view of the Lost Cause version of Reconstruction which was fundamental to Southern conservatism:

... after the military surrender at Appomatox there ensured a peace unique in history. There was no generosity. For ten years the South, alrelady ruined by the loss of nearly $2,000,000,000 invested in slaves, with its lands worthless, its cattle and stock gone, its houses burned, was turned over to the three millions of former slaves, some of whom could still remember the taste of human flesh and the bulk of them hardly three generations removed from cannibalism. These half-savage blacks were armed. Their passions were roused against their former masters by savage political leaders like Thaddeus Stevens, who advocated the confiscation of all Southern lands for the benefit of the negroes, and the extermination, if need be, of the Southern white population; and like Charles Sumner, whose cdhief regret hade been that his skin was not black. Not only were the blacks armed; they were upheld and incited by garrisons of Northern soldiers, by Freedman's Bureau officials, and by Northern ministers of the gospel, and at length they were given the ballot while their former masters were disarmed and, to a large extent, disfranchised. For ten years ex-slaves, led by carpetbaggers and scalawags, continued the pillages of war, combing the South for anything left by the invading armies, levying taxes, selling empires of plantations under the auction hammer, drogooning the Southern populartion, and visiting upon them the ultimate humiliations.

This is a telling of history worth of Glenn Beck. Picking out parts that weren't dishonest would be a real challenge. It is true that the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery without compensation to the owners was an expropriation of property without compensation and therfore liquidated large amounts of Southern planters' capital. Prior to the Civil War, the planters had the possibility of compensated emancipation of their slaves. But say that the slaveowners of the future Confederacy were uninterested in such a solution would be putting it extremely mildly.

Sad to say, some such version of Reconstruction eventually became the predominant historical view of the period, even in non-Southern universities. It is even reflected to a significant degree in John Kennedy's book, Profiles in Courage (1955). Because, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. once lamented, that was the version of history he had been taught in the Harvard history department.

Owsley's essay elaborates on the importance of having this Lost Cause pseudohistory taught, especially to Southerners. He expressed it in this maudlin way:

But a people cannot live under condemnation and upon the philosophy of their conquerors. Either they must ultimately come to scorn the condemnation and the philosophy of those who thrust these things upon them, or their soul should and will perish.

Evidently, for Owsley the "soul" of the white South depended on pretending that grand lie about the recent past was actually true. He contributes to that in his essay by elaborating his own pseudohistory of the American South and slavery.

And, in a point essential to the neo-Confederate/Lost Cause narrative, denying that slavery had anything to do with causing the Civil War. How bizarre that claim is gets an illustration as Owsley relates the coming of the Civil War and the various slavery-related controversies that were part of the process.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, slavery, southern agrarians, us south

The ghosts of wars past and not-yet-passed: Libya, Kosovo, Afghanistan

This report by Kim Sengupta, Rebels die as victims of their own disarray The Independent 04/03/2011 illustrates one of the limitations of air power in the Libya War:

The rebel fighters were celebrating "victory" in their usual wasteful way, loosing off round after round into the air, using up ammunition in short supply. But this time it was a suicidal mistake: seconds later their vehicles, and an ambulance parked near by, were destroyed in an attack arriving with shattering explosions.

Air strikes had been carried out by a pilot from the international coalition who then thought an anti-aircraft barrage was being directed at him. Fifteen people, including three members of medical staff, were killed instantly when the warplane, believed to be an A-10 Tankbuster, responded with its devastating firepower.

These were the second set of "collateral casualties" in two days: eight others died in another bombing aimed at a regime convoy passing through the village of Argobe, near Ajdabiya. It ignited ammunition, spraying shrapnel into nearby houses. Four of those killed were female, including three girls aged 12 to 16 from the same family; two others were teenage boys.

This 04/02/2011 report from Aljazeera English reports on the same two incidents:



Initially, the US-French-British approach in Libya sounded a lot like their approach in the Kosovo War. I've speculated that Juan Cole's enthusiasm for the intervention in Libya was largely based on an optimistic view of the Kosovo War. In a post of 04/01/2011, Defections, US Withdrawal Point to Political Solution in Libya Informed Comment, he seemed to confirm this:

US Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates clearly has a model in his mind somewhat like Serbia in 1999-2000. In spring 1999 Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic sent troops into Kosovo, which began committing a massacre. NATO intervened to roll that back. During that war, Milosevic was indicted at the International Criminal Court for war crimes.

Milosevic's attempt to tinker with the presidential election of October 1999 provoked massive street protests against him. His military informed him that they would not support him. By spring of 2001 he was arrested by his own people and that summer he was surrendered to the United Nations.

NATO's aerial bombing missions were what stopped the advance into Kosovo of Serbian troops. But it was the world community's relegation of Milosevic to pariah status that helped the Serbian elite turn against him.

There are two problems with this. It's an unrealistic view of the Kosovo War, and the Western strategy in the Libya War is starting to look more like Rummy's fanciful approach in Afghanistan.

What we saw in the Kosovo War of 1999 was that air power can inhibit the use of ground troops but didn't prevent it. Cole writes, "NATO's aerial bombing missions were what stopped the advance into Kosovo of Serbian troops." But in fact, Serbian troops intensified their ethnic cleansing of Albanian Kosovars after the bombing campaign began. William Arkin in "Operation Allied Force: 'The Most Precise Application of Air Power in History'," from Andrew Bacevich and Eliot Cohen, eds, War Over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age (2001) explains:

From the perspective of allied pilots, attacking forces in Kosovo translated into huntng down and hitting individual vehicles - with negligible effect on the progress of Operation Horsehoe [the ethnic cleansing campaign Serbia launched in March 1999 just before the NATO bombing began]. [US Defence] Secretary [William] Cohen would later claim that the attacks proceeded according to plan, creating the conditions that shifted the "balance of power" toward the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). NATO, he said after the war, had been "creating the possibility that the military efforts of the Kosovar Albanians, which were likely to grow in intensity as a result of Milosevic's atrocities in Kosovo, might be a more credible challenge to Serb armed forces." But that is patent nonsense. In claiming that its Phase 2 efforts [which started after the initial 48-hour Phase 1 bombing] constituted a serious effort to stop ethnic cleansing by killing its perpetrators, NATO (and by extension the Clinton administration) was being either stupid or disingenuous.

NATO initially hoped that Serbia would relent on the ethnic cleansing campaign after the Phase 1 bombing campaign of the first 48 hours had taken place. That didn't occur. NATO then had to extend the bombing into Serbia proper and strike urban targets. The air war began on March 25. Arkin relates:

Toward the end of May, with the support of American intelligence and Albanian artillery, the KLA mounted a counteroffensive. "The is the beginning of a new phase of aggression, the so-called land operation," Major General Vladimir Lazarevic, commander of the Yugoslav Pritina Corps, said. Regardless of the ferocious debate inside NATO about the need for a ground war, Belgrade saw threatening signs that suggested NATO preparations for just that contingency.

NATO shored up their international diplomatic support with the crucial backing of Russia, which had been Serbia's supporter. There was also increasing anger among the Serbian public toward Milosevic. The combination of these factors persuaded him to call off the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and leave the area, which was a part of the nation of Serbia, as a de facto NATO protectorate.

Milošević, like Muammar Qaddafi more recently, was indicted for war crimes and thus faced the prospect of criminal prosecution under UN auspices, it's highly questionable whether this makes the leaders more likely to capitulate in an immediate conflict, whatever its value may be in the larger scheme of things. Ousting Milošević was never a war aim of the Kosovo War. Had NATO had to send in ground troops, Milošević had to calculate that it might become the goal. Combined with the internal political pressure in Serbia, Milošević could and apparently did calculate that he was more likely to survive in power - and stay out of the hands of international prosecutors - if he capitulated to NATO on Kosovo.

Its now obvious that regime change is the goal of the US-French-British forces in Libya. More is on the line for Qaddafi and his close supporters in this war than there was for Milošević in the Kosovo War in 1999.

But we also now know that the CIA, the British MI6 and Western Special Forces are operating on the ground, giving military direction to rebel fighters and coordinating air strikes. This sounds far more like the approach that the Cheney-Bush Administration used under Rummy's direction in 2001 in the initial stage of the ongoing Afghanistan War. The idea was to use the CIA, Special Forces and air power to support the Northern Alliance forces to take power in Kabul.

That strategy worked in Afghanistan to put the Northern Alliance in power in Kabul. It didn't work so well in bringing maximum power to bear directly against Bin Laden's Al Qa'ida, although the damage done to Al Qa'ida seems to have been very substantial. In a grim irony, advocates of permanent war want to pretend that the bogeyman of Al Qa'ida is a greater threat to the United States than the nuclear-armed Soviet Union was, so even a decade later, it's hard to tell from the information in the public record just how far-reaching the damage to Al Qa'ida was in 2001-2.

But the "Afghanistan model" for the Libya War looks to me like an even grimmer prospect that the Kosovo War model. With bombing and no-fly zones, the external powers have the option to limit their involvement or to pull back, however complicated that might be in practice. It's not so easy to do when the US is so deeply involved in the Libya civil war as we've becoming in the last three weeks (and maybe earlier than that?).

Tags: afghanistan war, juan cole, kosovo war, libya war, william arkin

Continuity in white racism

I recently read extensively through secessionist-era speeches and sermons. Word for word, they echoed the racist diatribes that I heard growing up in the South - from invocations of African barbarism to blatant portrayals of rape and racial amalgamation. Secession died in 1865, but the ugly sentiments behind it persisted. My hope is that the 150th anniversary of the Civil War will spur reasoned discourse and an end to our forebears' destructive vision. I also hope that it will end denial by my fellow white Southerners. The next time you hear someone proclaim that secession was about state's rights, not slavery, ask what right it was that the seceding states were so anxious to protect. [my emphasis]

This is from the contribution of Gordon Rhea to the article A Civil Discourse Charleston Magazine April 2011 (scrool down). It's a reminder of the elements of direct continuity from the days of slavery and the white racism that developed to justify it and white racism of today. As Rhea points out, that means that Confederate imagery is very servicable to present-day white racist agendas:

The Confederate battle flag of my youth represented opposition to integration. Today, it decorates the armbands of skinheads and white supremacists here and abroad.

Confederate apologists protest that hate groups have hijacked their flag, that Confederate symbols represent a proud heritage, not a hateful ideology. But white supremacists did not appropriate the Confederate flag by accident. They were not drawn to it simply by its design. They embraced it because it represented a nation stridently and openly dedicated to its principles. In 1861, the Confederacy's vice president Alexander Stephens proclaimed: "The Confederacy's foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based on this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth." [my emphasis]

He also points to the sometimes hysterical fears that antebellum slaveowners embraced and encouraged, which was a huge part of the political dynamic that led to the Civil War:

Southern spokesmen described an apocalyptic vision of emancipation, race wars, and miscegenation: The collapse of white supremacy would be so cataclysmic that no self-respecting Southerner could fail to rally to the secessionist cause. Modern Confederate apologists contend that secession was about "states rights," not slavery. They should read the speeches and pronouncements of their forebears, who give lip service to "states' rights" only in the context of the rights of states to decide whether some of their inhabitants could own other humans.

Tags: american civil war, gordon rhea, racism, us civil war, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011, April 3: Southern Agrarian Donald Davidson

The second of the 12 essays in the 1930 book, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, was by Donald Davidson, "A Mirror for Artists." The book consisted of essays by 12 different Southern writers arguing in various ways for the virtues of Southern agricultural societies.



Donald Davidson (1893-1968)

The Southern Agrarian essayists gave a lot of attention to create the kind of romantic and nostalgic atmospherics about the South with which we are familiar from the Gone With the Wind film. But their purpose was cultural and political: they defend the post-Reconstruction system of segregation and white supremacy.

Davidson's essay drips with the atmospherics: The "old country homes, with their pillared porches." Quaint and charming "folk-arts." City dwellers who yearn "to retire to the farm and live like gentlemen." The "provincial artist" who "should be able to approximate a harmonious relation between artist and environment."

Besides such tourist-pamphlet stylings, Davidson is nominally making a case for the potential of the South to be a particular source of great art. But there is a definite political/ideological agenda here, too:

In the South today we have artists whose work reveals richness, repose, brilliance, continuity. The performance of James Branch Cabell has a consistency that might have been more flickering and unstable if it had originated in some less quiet region than Virginia. The novels of Ellen Glasgow have a strength that may come from long, slow prosecution by a mind far from nervous. Yet these and others have not gone untainted. Why does Mr. CAbell seem so much nearer to Paris than to Richmond, to Anatole France than to Lee and Jefferson? Why does Miss Glasgow, self-styled the "social historian" of Virginia, propagate ideas that would be more quickly approved by Oswald Garrison Villard [a well-known liberal and pacifist who wrote a sympathetic biography of Abolitionist leader John Brown] than by the descendants of first families? Why are DuBose Heward's and Paul Green's studies of negro life so palpably tinged with latter-day abolitionism? Why does T.S. Stribling write like a spiritual companion of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Clarence Darrow? [my emphasis]

Obviously, Davidson isn't just looking for art that celebrates magnolia trees and languid plantations. It needs to be free of the taint of un-Southern ideas like democracy, equal rights for African-Americans and a negative judgment against slavery.

The Agrarians liked to cast their arguments in a kind of aristocratic minded pseudo-populism. Which is the only way I can think of to describe Davidson's vague criticism of "the industrial devourer" of the modern Yankee economy and all the evils of democracy and unionism that might come with it. Hiding not very well behind a grand style, he calls for a kind of art with a heavy pro-segregation propaganda bent:

The artists should not forget that in these times he is called on to play the part both of a person and of an artist. Of the two, that of person is more immediately important. As an artist he will do best to flee the infection of our times, to stand for decentralization [regionalism] in the arts, to resist with every atom of his strength the false gospels of art as a luxury which can be sold in commercial quantities or which can be hallowed by segregation in discreet shrines. But he cannot wage this fight by remaining on his perch as artist. He must be a person first of all, even though for the time being he may become less of an artist. He must enter the common arena and become a citizen. Whether he choose, as citizen-person, to be a farmer or to run for Congress is a matter of individual choice: but in that general direction his duty lies.

Davidson has some kind of theory of history in which he frames these arguments. In his view, industrialism is the bogeyman of the previous two centuries, and it produced two undesirable antitoxins, socialism and Romanticism. His view clearly owes a lot to the thinking of the counter-revolutionary theorists who rejected the French Revolution of 1789 right from the start - a perspective which greatly influences the Christian Right in the US today. Davidson writes:

Eighteenth Century society, which pretended to classicism artistically and maintained a kind of feudalism politically, was with all its defects a fairly harmonious society in which the artist was not yet out of place, although he was already beginning to be. But in the middle of the eighteenth century, democracy and the industrial revolution got under way almost simultaneously. The rise of the middle classes to power, through commercial prosperity, prepared the way for the one; scientific discovery, backed by eighteenth century rationalism, prepared for the other, and society speedily fell into a disharmony, where it has remained. Political democracy, as Mr. [Harold] Laski has shown left social democracy unrealized. The way was clear for the materialistic reorganization of society that in effect brought a spiritual disorganization.

His citation of the left writer Harold Laski on the non-fulfillment of social democracy is a bit of smoke-blowing; socialism is not what Davidson was calling for in 1930, in either the social-democratic or Communist varieties.

I mentioned above the "romantic" atmospherics that Davidson and the Southern Agrarians used. But when Davidson attacks Romanticism, he's referring more the philosophic and artistic movement of Romanticism in the early nineteenth century. That tradition had a mystical side which could fit nicely with Davidson's idealization of the antebellum South. But Romanticism also gave rise to "natural philosophy" like that of Schelling, which gave a huge impetus to the empirical science of which the Southern Agrarians are so suspicious. Davidson writes:

Wordsworth's hope that the objects of science - such as, presumably, dynamos, atoms, skyscrapers, knitting-machines, and chemical reactions - might one day become materials of art, when they are as familiar as trees and rocks, seems as far from realization as ever.

And Romanticism encouraged in some cases (Lord Byron, for instance) an enthusiasm for democracy and democratic revolution which the Southern Agrarians could only regard as unwholesome. Davidson is cautious enough to say that "we should do wrong to blame democracy too much" for the problems he describes. It was democracy's alliance with industrialism that is problematic. Though it is by no means obvious in what ways Davidson in this essay would have us distinguish the two phenomena, historically intertwined as they are.

His solution is a classically reactionary one, which is to develop an agrarian civilization rather than an industrial one, following the supposedly inspiring vision provided by the antebellum South of slavery. The frivolity of the agrarian vision itself - as distinct from its use as a pro-segregation ideology - is shown by this ahistorical passage:

The manners of planter and countrymen did not require them to change their beliefs and temper in going from cornfield to drawing-room, from cotton rows to church or frolic. They were the same persons everywhere. There was also a fair balance of aristocratic and democratic elements. Plantation affected frontier; frontier affected plantation. The balance might be illustrated by pairing; it was no purely aristocratic or purely democratic South that produced Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, John C. Calhoun and Andrew Johnson, Poe and Simms. There was diversity within unity.

Which I suppose is a nice and inspiring picture. All it requires is that we ignore the elements of "diversity", i.e., slavery, which tore the United States apart in the Civil War and destroyed the lovely agrarian paradise of the antebellum South that Davidson presents to us. If we ignore the destructive and undemocratic and anti-democratic elements of it, the antebellum South can serve as providing "a fair balance of aristocratic and democratic elements." If we ignore the fatal economic and political dynamics of the slavery system on which the antebellum South was based, we could say with Davidson, "Its culture was sound and realistic in that it was not at war with its own economic foundations."

Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, slavery, southern agrarians, us south

Arms for Libyan rebels?

Laurence Lee reports for Aljazeera English on possible foreign arms deliveries and training for the Libyan rebels:



Tags: libya war

Does Benjamin Barber know the meaning of "full disclosure"? Does the Huffington Post?

Benjamin Barber is a respected political scientist who often has worthwhile things to say. But he incurred some embarrassment recently for reasons Benjamin Pauker explains:

As a longtime advisor to [Muammar Qaddafi's son] Saif al-Qaddafi, Benjamin Barber knows him just about as well as any Western intellectual. Barber -- president of the CivWorld think tank, distinguished senior fellow at the Demos think tank, and author of Strong Democracy and Jihad vs. McWorld -- was among a small group of democracy advocates and public intellectuals, including Joseph Nye, Anthony Giddens, Francis Fukuyama, and Robert Putnam, working under contract with the Monitor Group consulting firm to interact with Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi on issues of democracy and civil society and to help his son Saif implement democratic reforms and author a more representative constitution for Libya.

That's the introduction to an interview Pauker did with Barber, Understanding Libya's Michael Corleone 03/07/2011. Barber, to his credit, talks at length about his consultations with Qaddafi the Younger in that interview.

The following articles report on Monitor Group's work to rehab Muammar Qaddafi's image:

• Laura Rozen, Among Libya's lobbyists Politico 02/21/2011

• David Corn and Siddhartha Mahanta, From Libya With Love Mother Jones 03/03/2011. Joseph Nye Jr. of Harvard was another academic participating in the Monitor Group's program. Referring to an article Nye did on Libya for The New Republic, Corn and Mahanta observe, "So The New Republic published an article sympathetic to Qaddafi that had been written by a prominent American intellectual paid by a firm that was being compensated by Libya to burnish the dictator's image." He also talks about Barber's role with the project.

• Libya documents: 'A proposal for expanding the dialogue around the ideas of Muammar Gaddafi' Guardian 03/04/2011

• Jon Wiener, Professors Paid by Qaddafi: Providing 'Positive Public Relations' The Nation 03/05/2011, Includes quotes from Barber.

• Peter Overby, U.S. Firm Under Fire For Gadhafi Makeover Contract NPR 03/10/2011 (Barber is quoted in the radio spot and text.)

There has been some question as to whether Monitor Group properly disclosed its work on behalf of the Libyan government. However, there is no indication of which I'm aware that Barber or the other academics involved in consulting with the Libyan government did anything unethical in their own work sponsored by the Monitor Group. I have no reason to question Barber's benign version of his work that he presents int he interview with Pauker. And, as the articles linked above show, Barber has talked with multiple reporters about his role.

However, there's no mention of his affiliations with PR for Qaddafi's regime in this Huffington Post piece on, uh, Libya: The Dangerous Incoherence of American Policy in Libya 04/01/11. (To be fair to Barber, he did disclose at the start of a Huffington Post column of 02/22/2011, "I offer my views about Libya here not just as a democratic theorist and HuffPost regular, but as a member of the International Board of the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation until this morning, when I resigned." He and Huffington Post may have though that was sufficient disclosure.)

In the following statement, for instance, even someone inclined to agree with it will regard it with a more credible eye if they know that the author is someone who was recently paid to assist in a PR campaign on behalf of Qaddafi's government:

Take Libya, where a frenzied media join excited politicians to call for military intervention -- for boots on the ground -- not just to protect civilians but to achieve regime change and the deposing of big rat Gaddafi (even if civilians are put in danger). Yet not so long ago President Bush helped secure the top two American priorities here through a peaceful rapprochement: weapons of mass destruction were removed voluntarily (imagine if Gaddafi still had them!) and the U.S. secured a formidable ally against al Qaeda in North Africa . More al Qaeda operatives were captured in Libya than anywhere else in the region, and Gaddafi was high on al Qaeda's hit list.

The reference to weapons of mass destruction is about what this undated article updated at least in 2004 from GlobalSecurity.org, Libyan Nuclear Weapons, relates:

On 19 December 2003 Libya agreed to destroy all of its chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons. The surprise announcement followed nine months of secret talks between Libyan, American, and British officials. Libya agreed to abide by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and to allow for immediate inspections and monitoring.

Another illustration of how the flood of information we can get today requires informed critical judgment more than ever.

Tags: benjamin barber, libya, monitor group

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011, April 2: Southern Agrarian John Crowe Ransom

A famous document in Southern conservatism is the 1930 book, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition by "Twelve Southerners". It consisted of essays by 12 different Southern writers arguing in various ways for the virtues of Southern agricultural societies.

John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974)

John Crowe Ransom's contribution was called "Reconstructed but Unregenerate." As the title suggests, it's a highbrown pitch for Lost Cause militance. He writes of the "unreconstructed Southerer":

I wish that the whole force of my own generation in the South would get bewhind his principles and make them an ideal which the nation at large would have to reckon with. ...

His fierce devotion is to a lost cause - though it grieves me that his contemporaries are so sure it is lost. They [the Yankees] are so far from fearing him and his example that they even in the excess of confidence offere him a little honor, a little petting. As a Southerner I have observed this indulgence and I try to be grateful. Obviously it does not constitute a danger to the Republic; distinctly it is not treasonable. ...

The Southerner must know, and in fact he does very well know, that his atinque conservatism does not exert a great influence against the American progressivist doctrine. The Southern idea today is down, and the progressive or American idea is up. But the historian and the philosopher, who take views that are thought to be respectively longer and deeper than most, may very well reverse this order and find that the Southern idea rather than the American has in its favor the autority of example and the approval of theory. And some prophet may even find it possible to expect that it will yet rise again.

... The South is unique on this continent for having founded and defended a culture which was according to the European principles of culture; and the European principles had better look to the South if they are to be perpetuated in this country.

Much of this will sound familiar to viewers of FOX News today: the whiny-white-guy posturing; the defiant pose against the supposedly oppressive dominant majority; the attack on the whole idea of progress ("progressivist doctrine"); the religious atmospherics; the simultaneously pompous and defensive claim about Truth being on their side.

If we substitute "white" for "European", even that attitude is alive and thriving in American political culture today, although "Europe" has become a negative symbol to be set against "American exceptionalism"for our contemporary conservatives.

Ransom's essay continues with polemics against "such fine words as Progressive, Liberal, and Forward-looking," against materialism, against the notion of "Service" (?!?). Ransom's view is explicitly reactionary, as seen in his statement, "The gospel of Progress is a curious development, which does not reflect great credit on the supposed capacity of our species for formulating its own behavior."

Some of Ransom's arguments for living in harmony with nature have a superficial contemporary "green" ring to them. But it is only a superficial impression. His viewpoint rejects science in favorite of the morals, habits and economics of the slave-based aristocracy of the pre-Civil War South. Like the other Southern Agrarians, he holds it up as a civilized ideal for the present:

Slavery was a feature monstrous enough in theory, but, more often than not, humane in practice; and it is impossible to believe that its abolition alone could have effected any great revolution in society.

The fulness of life as it was lived in the ante-bellum South by the different social orders can be estimated today only by the application of some difficult sociological technique.

Or perhaps by application of a lively imagination. He continues directly:

It is my thesis that all were committed to a form of leisure, and that their labor itself was lesurely. The only Southerners who went abroad to Washington and elsewhere, and put themselves into the record, were those from the top of the pyramind. They held their own with their American contemporaries. They were not intellectualy as seasoned as good Europeans, but then the Southern culture had had no very long time to grow, as time is reckoned in these matters: it would have borned a better fruit eventually. They had a certain amount of learning, which was not as formidable as it might have been: but at least it was classical and humanstic learning, not highly scientific, and not wildly scattered about over a variety of special studies.

Yes, "labor itself was lesurely." Except, you know, for the people who actually labored. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were "not intellectualy as seasoned as good Europeans"? Please. Like I said, it takes a lively imagination to come up with this stuff. We can give Ransom that much.

When Ransom proceeds to slightly less grand depictions of society and history, he makes an argument against the industrialization of the South. Other than vague moral and sentimental posturing against the corrosive effect of industrialism, he doesn't offer any real concept of how a prosperous agrarian-based economy could function in the South. The context of 1930 is important. The Great Depression had just begun. The depression condition had hit the rural South years earlier. And it was so terribly properous to begin with. Ransom avoids specific racial terms. But his vision, such as it is, is to turn the real condition of poverty and increasing hopelessness of rural and small-town whites into a moral virtue to be defended by an increasingly aggressive conservative Southern block within the Democratic Party, which in those days was critically dependent on its conservative and segregationist Southern wing. Ransom calls it a "counter-revolution" against industrialism as represented by such advocates of the awful doctrine of Progress as President Herbert Hoover.

The condition of poor white he wants to preserve and turn into a badge of pride and a program of political resistance, he describes fairly vividly at one point. In it, he seems to contradict his earlier insistence of the virtues of the leisurely life:

The Southern tradition came to look rather pitable in its persistence when the twentieth century had arrived, for the establishment [by which he means the economy] was quite depreciated. Unregenerate Southerns were trying to live the good life on a shabby equipment, and they were grotesque in their effort to make an art out of living when they were not decently making the living. In the country districts great numbers of these broken-down Southerners are still to be seen in pached blue-jeans, sitting on ancestral fences, shotguns across their laps and hound-dogs at their feet, surveying their unkempt acres while they comment shrewdly on the ways of God. It is their defect that they have driven a too easy, an unmanly bargain with nature, and that their aestheticism is based on insufficient labor.

But there is somethihng heroice, and there may prove to be yet something very valuable to the Union, in their extreme attachment to a certain theory of life. They have kept up a faith which was on the point of perishing from this continent.

This is Ransom's highbrown way of saying that the rural economy sucks and the South ought to fight to keep it that way.

And in this passage, Ransom hides the meaning of "1875" - the overthrow of the democratic Reconstruction governments by force and violence perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist organizations - by eluding it into the greater industrialization of the North. Since segregation, white supemacy and substandard public services including education that went with them don't figure into Ransom's essay explicitly, the reader could be forgiven for not wondering if those realities might have had something to do with the greater relative economic development in the rest of the country, where white racism took less self-destructive and pathological forms. Ransom derides that economic development as the "progressive principle" that meant "boundless aggression against nature":

Of course it was only after the Civil War that the North and the South came to stand in polar opposition to each other.

One wonders if John Calhoun would have agreed with that assessment.

Immediately after Appomattox it was impossible for the South to resume even that give-and-take of ideas which had marked her ante-bellum relations with the North.

A "give-and-take of ideas" that did not in the two decades leading up the Civil War includes open debate over the institution of slavery in most of the South. But did include increasing demands from Southern representatives that any discussion of abolition also be suppressed in non-slave states.

She [the South] was offered such terms that acquiescence would have been abject.

That is, under Congressional Reconstruction, the Southern states were expected to hold honest elections in which black males would be free to vote and to observe the terms of the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution. Today we have Republicans conservatives still attacking the basic concept of the 14th amendment on American citizenship, ostensibly in the name of controlling illegal immigration.

She retired within her border in rage and held the minimum of commerce with the enemy.

The "enemy" presumably being their fellow American citizens who were not supportive of white resistance to democracy and the Constitution.

Persecution intensified her tradition, and made the South more solid and more Southern in the year 1875, or thereabouts, than ever before. When the oppression was left off, naturally her guard relaxed. But though the period of persecution had not been long, nevertheless the Southern tradition found itself then the less capable of uniting gracefully with the life of the Union; for that life in the meantime had been moving on in an opposite direction. The American progressive principle was like a ball rolling down the hill with an increasing momentum, and by 1890 or 1900 it was clear to any intelligent Southerner that it was a principle of boundless aggression agaianst nature which could hardly offer much to a society devoted to the arts of peace.

One can't help but notice than Ransom's seeming opposition to the "boundless aggression agaianst nature" wasn't understood by his readers as less about industrialism - the struggle against nature is also a part of agriculture, after all - than about race. The opposition to "race mixing" and "miscegenation" would have been easily understood by Southern whites in 1930 as "aggression agaianst nature" in the segregationist ideology.

In any case, he is obviously promoting a thoroughly dishonest and reactionary version of history in his essay. This is hardcore Lost Cause ideology, though there may be distinctive quirks to his particular take.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, slavery, southern agrarians, us south

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011, April 1: the Southern Agrarians

A famous document in Southern conservatism is the 1930 book, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition by "Twelve Southerners". It consisted of essays by 12 different Southern writers arguing in various ways for the virtues of Southern agricultural societies.

In a joint introduction written by John Crowe Ransom, the Agrarians provided "A Statement of Principles". They state that all 12 contributors agree on the following:

... all tend to support a Southern way of life against what may be called the American or prevailing way; and all as much as agree that the best terms in which to represent the distinction are contained in the phrase, Agrarian versus Industrial.

They state an opposition to applied science (technology), which sounds reactionary enough in itself:

Industrialism is the economic organization of the collective American society. It means the decision of society to invest its economic resources in the applied sciences. But the word science has acquired a certain sanctitude. It is out of order to quarrel with science in the abstract, or even with the applied sciences when their applications are made subject to criticism and intelligence. The capitalization of the applied sciences has now become extravagant and uncritical; it has enslaved our human energies to a degree now clearly felt to be burdensome. The apologists of industrialism do not like to meet this charge directly; so they often take refuge in saying that they are devoted simply to science! They are really devoted to the applied sciences and to practical production. Therefore it is necessary to employ a certain skepticism even at the expense of the Cult of Science, and to say, It is an Americanism, which looks innocent and disinterested, but really is not either. [my emphasis]

But they are not indulging in a critical analysis of the way technological priorities are shaped by dominant economic powers or related social assumptions. In fact, it's hard to avoid the suspicion that they are using their superficial criticism of technology as opposition to science itself. They are, after all, defending a conservative South that a few years before staged had its melodramatic confrontation with science in the Scopes Trial.

In a reflection of the kind of muddled thinking that we still see today among American reactionaries, the Agrarians declared that supporters of Northern "Industrialism" are "Sovietists." They write: "With respect to these last it must be insisted that the true Sovietists or Communists - if the term may be used here in the European sense - are the Industrialists themselves."

They declare, "Opposed to the industrial society is the agrarian, which does not stand in particular need of definition." This is a telling claim, that they don't need to define their ideal state of society, which they find partially realized in the American South of 1930. Because what they are actually defending is their version of the white South, a Southern way of life which they explicitly oppose to the American way of life, a set of white Southern values for which "Americanism" is an insult to be cast at defenders of Yankee "Industrialism." And they state their general values in a way that is disturbingly suggestive of Blut und Boden mythology:

An agrarian society is hardly one that has no use at all for industries, for professional vocations, for scholars and artists, and for the life of cities. Technically, perhaps, an agrarian society is one in which agriculture is the leading vocation, whether for wealth, for pleasure, or for prestige - a form of labor that is pursued with intelligence and leisure, and that becomes the model to which the other forms approach as well as they may. But an agrarian regime will be secured readily enough where the superfluous industries are not allowed to rise against it. The theory of agrarianism is that the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations, and that therefore it should have the economic preference and enlist the maximum number of workers. [my emphasis]

The Agrarians' statement of principles is a piece of whiny white Southern victimology, one which takes for granted the Jim Crow system of white supremacy and doesn't even pretend to see white racism and its institutions of the time as the least bit problematic.

In the following statements, it helps to clarify the tone if one understands that "the South" in this context means "the white South", and that the "American industrial ideal" also includes the Constitutional system of democracy which the Southern Jim Crow political system was violating in the most egregious ways:

Nobody now proposes for the South, or for any other community in this country, an independent political destiny. That idea is thought to have been finished in 1865. But how far shall the South surrender its moral, social, and economic nutonomy to the victorious principle of Union? That question remains open. The South is a minority section that has hitherto been jealous of its minority right to live its own kind of life.

This is a somewhat Orwellian instance of white whining. They are representing white Southerners as a minority among Americans, guarding their "own" Jim Crow segregation "kind of life" which involved the political and social subjugation of the African-American minority relative to whites.

The South scarcely hopes to determine the other sections, but it does propose to determine itself, within the utmost limits of legal action. Of late, however, there is the melancholy fact that the South itself has wavered a little and shown signs of wanting to join up behind the common or American industrial ideal. It is against that tendency that this book is written. ...

These principles do not intend to be very specific in proposing any practical measures. How may the little agrarian community resist the Chamber of Commerce of its county seat, which is always trying to import some foreign industry that cannot be assimilated to the life-pattern of the community? [my emphasis]

Foreign industry in this case would include industries from other parts of the United States, some of which white Southerners feared might demand adjustments to the racially segregated "life-pattern of the community", which included Jim Crow laws, lynch-law and a thoroughly neurotic set of social customs and manners governing relationships between whites and blacks.

Just what must the Southern leaders do to defend the traditional Southern life? How may the Southern and the Western agrarians unite for effective action? Should the agrarian forces try to capture the Democratic party, which historically is so closely affiliated with the defense of individualism, the small community, the state, the South? Or must the agrarians - even the Southern ones - abandon the Democratic party to its fate and try a new one? ...

For, in conclusion, this much is clear: If a community, or a section, or a race, or an age, is groaning under industrialism, and well aware that it is an evil dispensation, it must find the way to throw it off. To think that this cannot be done is pusillanimous. And if the whole community, section, race, or age thinks it cannot be done, then it has simply lost its political genius and doomed itself to impotence. [my emphasis]

This was the attitude that led to Southern Governors standing in the schoolhouse doors to defy federal law to integrate Southern universities, a well-known symbol of the segregationists bitter fight against having the American Constitution and the American way of life prevail in the Jim Crow South.

The Southern Agrarians presented a highbrow, intellectual brand of reactionary ideology whose purpose was focused on preserving the segregation system in the South and the various economic and social restrictions on white workers that were very much a part of it.

In these posts over the next several days, I'll be looking at each of these essays individually.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, john crowe ransom, southern agrarians, us south