The foreigners are comin' to git us! ("Libertarian" version)

Far-right Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul

I see I'm not the only one writing this weekend about "libertarian" kookiness. Steve Benen at TPM tells us about one instance in which Ron Paul puts his nuttiness in print 10/06/07. It seems that Congressman Paul sent out a fundraising letter, presented in longhand script (?!), that evidently isn't targeted at the save-the-whales, stop-global-warming crowd. His pitch included the following:

I don't need to tell you that our American way of life is under attack. We see it all around us -- every day -- and it is up to us to save it.

The world's elites are busy forming a North American Union. If they are successful, as they were in forming the European Union, the good 'ol USA will only be a memory. We can't let that happen.

The UN also wants to confiscate our firearms and impose a global tax. The UN elites want to control the world's oceans with the Law of the Sea Treaty. And they want to use our military to police the world. (my emphasis)

As Dave Neiwert has helpfully explained for us, the "North American Union" is the latest way that the nativist right thinks the Men In Black Helicopters as conniving against good all-American white folks. (Glenn Beck and the black helicopters 07/01/07; The return of the 'New World Order' 07/27/07; The swiftboating of American journalism 09/08/07;

Benen observes:

Listening to the [Republican Presidential] debates, Paul often comes across as the most sensible guy on the stage, especially when it comes to Iraq and the Patriot Act. And then we're reminded, in print, that when it comes to a paranoid vision of the world, Paul really is out there on the political periphery.

Tags: authoritarianism, dave neiwert, republican party, ron paul, steve benen

"Libertarianism" at the airport

Herbert Hoover: he was against the "fascist" New Deal and Roozevelt socialism, too

Continuing my grumbling about "libertarianism" from Friday, there's a good example of how dingy "libertarian" dogma can be at Antiwar Radio (on Antiwar.com). Dated 10/05/07, it's an audio interview by Scott Horton with Becky Akers, who the site describes as follows:

Becky Akers discusses the case of Carol Anne Gotbaum who was killed while being detained by cops at the Phoenix airport, how the government’s control over TSA [Transportation Safety Administration] and countless other entities results in waste and mismanagement, the benefits of free-market security and America’s descent into despotism.

It also identifies her as a regular contributor to the neo-Confederate site LewRockwell.com.

Both interviewers who are currently featured at Antiwar Radio, Charles Goyette and Scott Horton, seem to assume that we already live in a "police state" in the US. Akers is on board with that concept. Now, I'm not familiar with the details of the Carol Anne Gotbaum case, where a woman died after being taken custody by police at the Phoenix airport. But I'm not sure from the interview how familiar Akers is with it either. She mainly uses it to rant about the evils of government.

It's a good example of how "libertarians" come up with surprising arguments which are often unfamiliar to those who are not immersed in Ayn Rand when we first hear them.

Akers complains that the government has anything to do with airport security. And even that the government owns airports. In her utopia, private businesses would own airports and they, working together with the airlines, would provide security. And that security, being sprinkled with the magic of the Private Sector, would be far better than what the TSA currently provides. Because the airlines and the private airports would know their customers wanted security, so they would provide it.

But wait, you may be saying, isn't that what happened prior to 9/11? Those airlines used to provide security. And being responsive in the free market to their customers' complaints about the annoyance of the security checks, they tried to minimize the checks. Being subject to the competitive pressures of the free markets, they tried to keep ticket prices for major routes down. And being under the sovereign authority of their stock holders in the free market, they were under tremendous pressure to show rising profits each year and each quarter, which means they needed to cut costs wherever they could.

The result of this lovely free-market process? Inadequate security equipment, inadequate procedures, and very low-paid security personnel, many of whom were in jobs with more than 100% turnover in a year. This also meant that the personnel were often inexperienced, poorly trained, not terribly motivated and often not very friendly. So how is it going to help things if we go back to that system?

Oh, silly you. You obviously don't understand the, uh, depths of libertarian dogma. Because, you see, the airlines are government, too! True, they're technically private companies. But they get subsidies from the federal government! That means they're all just another set of socialistic institutions crushing out our liberty in the police state. (Hey, the hardcore libertarians actually do talk this way.)

In Aker's utopian free-market Eden, the airlines, the airports and all the security people will be privately owned. (A bit of a slip there; I guess it is the security services which will be privately owned, not the security people: but with libertarians, you can't be sure.) They will all be free of government safety and security regulations, they won't have to worry about all those pesky financial reporting standards or about lawsuits from irate customers, and of course they won't have hassle with any of those dang unions!

And what if these companies foolishly cut corners to squeeze out a bit of extra profit or just skim the company funds? Well, you don't need to worry, because we'll all be able to carry the weapons of our choice onto the airplanes with us. Akers was really irritated that people coming into the airports are "disarmed". Shoot, once we can bring our Glocks and Uzis and double-barrelled shotguns onto the plane with us, we won't have to worry about no terrorists. Somebody starts talkin' Arabic or some funny language like that, or if you hear somebody say something that sounds like "Allah", or some dark-skinned guy stands up and looks like he's up to something, the passengers can just gun him down right away. Who needs these socialistic government-paid police?

Akers griped that when she goes to the airport now, she feels helpless because "I don't have my gun, I don't have my knife". This, she says, is destroying civility and even civilization itself.

You get the drift. You can listen to the interview if you want to hear Akers explain how somebody named Leviathan has a giant conspiracy going through the TSA to make middle-class and wealthy white folks think like poor black people. Or something like that. It starts around minute 16. Mr. Leviathan's ultimate goal, she says, is to have police stationed in all our neighborhoods to make us go through scanners before we enter our houses. Scott Horton reminded her that there would be eyeball scans, too. And he gets in his usual plug for the crackpot rightwinger Ron Paul.

Now, this is the sort of thing that you can only take seriously if you grew up doing something like spending your every waking hour by the pool at the country club. If fans of this kind of stuff are antiwar, it's probably because they think war threatens to raise taxes on rich people and risks subjecting nice white youngsters to a military draft. No true AynRandian individualist would want to compromise his soul by having to spend a couple of years in a collectivist institution like the Army. And this idea that the wealthy should have to pay taxes or do anything else to support their country, why that's just another version of fascocommunistislamistdefeatocratism!
Sure, libertarians when you catch them running loose like on that radio interview will say things that don't sound like your standard stodgy Republican, such grouching about the cops or whining about intrusions on privacy.

But, in practice, to the extent that libertarians have any noticeable impact on American politics, it tends to be through advocacy of their free-market, no-regulations-on-business ideas, like through the "libertarian" think-tank, the Cato Institute. As of this writing, the following items are featured on their Web site's homepage:

"The Antitrust Religion", which looks to be a polemic against gubment regulation of business

"Cato Scholar Testifies on Reforming Health Care in Wisconsin" (hint: he's not demanding a broad new government program to plug gaps in health insurance)

"Bush Vetoes SCHIP Expansion", praising Bush's veto of the dangerous socialistic program to provide health care for more children, with links to several articles explaining why such dreadful threats to American liberty have to be blocked

"Supreme Court Begins New Term", bitching about how That Man Roosevelt turned the Supreme Court into stark raving socialists, or something to that effect

Less prominent items on the front page include an article about "what FDR had in common with the other charismatic collectivists of the 1930s". Follow the link and you can read about the "surprising similarities between the programs of Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler". Well, Stalin, too, but it's a review of a book that focuses on the other three.

This is not unusual. While the Antiwar.com site usually presents the antiwar and civil-libertarian side of libertarianism, that's not the main focus of the small libertarian movement. Theoretically, libertarians generally may be concerned with such things. But their main influence is to promote Republican-friendly, "pro-business", anti-regulation, anti-union causes. Their political and philosophical affinities, and those of some of their biggest bankrollers, are much closer to the Republicans than to the Democrats.

In the end, so is their narrowly-nationalistic, isolationist foreign policy perspective. They mostly share the unilateralist outlook of Dick Cheney and George Bush. They just don't approve of their current wars.

Tags: antiwar.com, becky akers, isolationism, libertarianism, republican party, scott horton

You want me to read what?

Antiwar.com 10/05/07 promotes the article War With Iran? Who Decides? from a John Birch Society journal

I know the various sayings: politics makes strange bedfellows, the enemy of my enemy is my friend and yadda, yadda.

But the John Birch Society is a crackpot group of rightwing promoters of hate and bigotry.

So I wasn't thrilled to see at Antiwar.com an article highlighted from a Bircher journal, The New American. The "About" Web page for that journal explains:

In addition to political topics, The New American also publishes articles about economics (from a free-enterprise perspective of course!), culture, and history. It is published by American Opinion Publishing, a wholly owned subsidiary of The John Birch Society.

I've posted before about how Antiwar.com is a "libertarian" site with philosophical affinities to the neo-Confederate LewRockwell.com crew.

I've cited articles on numerous occasions from Antiwar.com, and I expect to continue to do so. The same page that featured the Bircher article link also links to a number of current news articles on war-related matters and to articles by Norman Solomon, Ted Rall and Tom Engelhardt, none of whom are close to the Birchers' worldview. The Antiwar Radio feature there has some very impressive guests, including Juan Cole, Wesley Clark, Chalmers Johnson, Gareth Porter, Ray McGovern, Andrew Bacevich and others who are not associated with some crackpot far-right ideology.

So I encourage people to use Antiwar.com for the resources it provides, as I will continue to do.

But front-paging the John Birch Society? This makes me really wish that there was a comparable site run by real liberals or Greens or Catholic antiwar activists that was providing this service. Because Antiwar.com is also a site where articles by rightwingers from LewRockwell.com and now the Birchers are presented favorably to new audiences and have an additional route to mainstreaming their far-right ideas.

Antiwar Radio also features the occasional "libertarian" guest, like the following:

William Norman Grigg, publisher of TheRightSource, and author of the blog Pro-Libertate, discusses America’s descent into an authoritarian fascist state, our current system’s similarity to the way things are in China and Cuba (executions, slave labor, new prisons in waiting, etc.), the Prison-Industrial-Complex, the economics of the corporate warfare/police state, its origins in the Civil and Indian wars, the solution of laissez faire, the militarization of domestic police, the American civic religion of force that makes it all possible and the push for a North American Union. (my emphasis)

The "North American Union" is a popular bugaboo right now for the black-helicopter nativist crowd.

Far-right Congressman Ron Paul is a real favorite at Antiwar.com. Scott Horton at Antiwar Radio can't seem to do an interview with anyone lately without making a plug or two for "Dr. Ron Paul" and his wise thoughts. As Dave Neiwert has pointed out, Ron Paul has been notable over the years for his role in helping to mainstream themes from the far-right gutter to the "respectable" bosom of the Republican Party. Despite his being one of the few overtly antiwar Republicans in Congress, I've always been very suspicious of Paul's Presidential candidacy and even of his antiwar position. One of the reasons he gives for opposing the Iraq War is that he says it was authorized by and is being fought on behalf of the United Nations, a perennial bogeyman of the far right. (That anti-UN sentiment is very much mainstream Republicanism now.)

But the UN did not authorize the invasion of Iraq. In a weird, mirror-image kind of way, he's defending the false claims of Bush and Tony Blair in 2003 that their invasion of Iraq was in defense of UN resolutions.

The Bircher article that Antiwar.com front-paged is also lavish with the Ron Paul quotations. Not surprising: the Birchers like his crackpot economic ideas, too.

I know, "it takes all kinds," and all that. Some isolationist and "libertarian" types do sometimes have decent analyses of some aspect of the Iraq War or US foreign policy. But rightwing isolationism, whether it's the Old Right brand or the paleo-conservative or the neo-Confederate or the clean-shaven-lets-legalize-dope libertarian variety, is based on the same kind of nationalism and nativism that Dick Cheney's unilateralism is. No one should kid themselves about where that perspective leads, even if it agrees with the liberal/left position on the Iraq War or some other particular issue.

Politics make strange bedfellows, true. But that doesn't mean we have to let them take the covers.

And you may want to look twice and three times at articles from Antiwar.com by authors you don't immediately recognize when they talk about anything to do with Israel or Jews. The Birchers don't much like them either.

Tags: antiwar.com, antiwar movement, isolationism, john birch society, ron paul, scott horton

Wartime support and dissent

This is a Hungarian antiwar poster from the First World War that I especially like

Looking back into Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) for an earlier post reminded me of one of the books he cites, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1916; revised second edition 1919) by Wilfred Trotter, an English surgeon who was also the brother-in-law of Ernest Jones, one of Freud's closest collaborators. Freud said of Trotter's book "thoughtful" though "my only regret is that it does not entirely escape the antipathies that were set loose by the recent great war."

Freud was engaging far more in scholarly restraint there than in the blunt speaking for which Germans and Austrians are so well known, as Freud himself often was. Even in the second edition, Trotter argued that the events of the war had confirmed his earlier hypothesis:

... that in the German people the reactions in which the herd instinct was manifesting itself were in accordance with the type to be seen in the predaceous social animals rather than the type which seems to be characteristic of modern Western civilization.

This judgment had more to do with British chauvinism and popular stereotypes of Germans in the Anglo-Saxon world than they did with observation of facts.

Like all generalizations about nations or national groups, it's very easy even for careful researchers to let their analysis get way out in front of the facts. According to Trotter, the Great War showed that the "morale of the German people was of a special kind, and essentially dependent for the remarkable vigour it then showed upon the possibility of continued successful aggression." He proceeds to illustrate this judgment by the decision of the German General Staff to adapt a strategy of aggressive counterattack in 1918.

This is where "morale" gets tricky. Germany had only the bare outlines of democratic government at the beginning of that war, though there was a strong, vital tradition of democratic dissent and advocacy for democracy. And whether conservatives like to remember it so or not, the chief advocate of democratic government in Germany was the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

But by 1918, Germany was essentially run by a military junta under Generals Paul von Hindenburg (who as president in 1933 would appoint Adolf Hitler Chancellor) and Erich Ludendorff. Making generalizations about national morale based on the military decisions of a military government is a huge conceptual leap. Even more problematic is his observation, in which his uses "moral" as we would use "morale", that the "completeness of the moral collapse which accompanied [Germany's] beating seems to have been found remarkable and astonishing by very many."

Complete collapse of morale? Between the stupidity of Kaiser Bill (Wilhelm II), the boneheaded generals leading their army to defeat and the overwhelming force Germany confronted after American entry into the war, its hard to see how "moral collapse" can be blamed as the main cause for the German surrender. The democratic revolution of 1918 led by the SPD was certainly helped by anger over the war, as was the more radical Bolshevik Revolution in Russia the previous year. But it was scarcely exclusively a sign of "moral collapse".

Although to the extent that the Western Allies saw it that way, that might help explain why the Allies didn't have better sense than to force a humiliating peace onto the newly-democratic German government. But I'm not going to go into the many faults of the Peace of Versailles here.

The point I wanted to make is that morale has to be examined more carefully than just assuming that because the government at the time got away with doing something that it necessarily reflected popular enthusiasm for the actions. Fast-forwarding to our own time and place, the Iraq War lost majority public support at least two years ago and that majority opposition has been expressed now in majority votes in both houses of Congress. But the war goes on. So far as I'm aware, the Army in Iraq hasn't collapsed. Morale, in other words, is much more complicated than people deciding, "I like this policy."

There was certainly an outburst of popular support at the beginning of the war. Traditional German history-writing has assumed that there was a strong, general feeling of solidarity and optimism than may have even in some ways contributed to the strengthening of democratic aspirations.

For all its limitations, though, Trotter's book still has some valuable observations. In the following passage he talks about the way in which "the apprehended danger of the given war", by which he means in our current terms the degree to which one believes the war is vital to the national interest, has a decisive effect on the degree of public cohesion behind the war effort:

The apprehended danger of the given war is the measure of the completeness with which occurs such a solution of minor groups into the national body. The extent of such solution and the consequently increased homogeneity it effects in the nation will determine the extent to which national feeling develops, the degree to which it approaches unanimity, and consequently the vigour with which the war is defended and conducted.

What he observed, though, was also that even those in the minority opinion are affected by the intensity of the war: "Thus we may say that in a country at war every citizen is exposed to the extremely powerful stimulation of herd instinct characteristic of that state."

In the cases Trotter is discussing, those in the minority opinion were presumed to be those who opposed their own country's military action. (In the case of the Iraq War in the US, it is now the minority that supports the war policy.)

But whoever is in the minority or the majority, a certain anthropological/instinctual impulse works mightily on both:

Surrounded as it necessarily will be by an atmosphere of hostility, its character [the minority's] as a herd becomes hardened and invigorated, and it can endow its members with all the gifts of moral vigour and resistiveness [sic] a herd can give. ... In the individual who follows in feeling the general body of his fellow, and in him who belongs to a dissentient [sic] minority, the reactions peculiar to the gregarious animal will be energetically manifested. Of such reactions, that which interests us particularly at the moment is the moulding of opinion in accordance with instinctive pressure, and we arrive at the conclusion that our citizen of the majority is no more - if no less - liable to the distortion of opinion than our citizen of the minority. Whence we conclude that in a country at war all opinion is necessarily more or less subject to prejudice, and that this liability to bias is a herd mechanism, and owes its vigour to that potent instinct.

This gets to a broader issue, but it's worth mentioning in this regard that ideological conservatives in the US, especially the Christian Right, promote the feeling of themselves as an isolated and persecuted minority, even while insisting that they represent the good judgment of the majority.

Trotter notes that "is is common knowledge that in the present state of society opinion in a given country is always divided as to the justice of an actual war." Let's be optimistic and take this as a sign that reason and revulsion at the results of war do play a role in the public's attitudes toward war.

But, as important as the concept of the just war has been in putting some kind of limits on the extremes of war, Trotter's observation is also grimly true:

If pro-national and anti-national opinion, if belief and doubt in the justice of a given war, vary in relation to a single predominantly important psychological factor - the apprehended danger to the nation of the war in question - it is obvious that the ostensible and proclaimed grounds upon which such opinion is founded are less decisive than is commonly supposed. Finding, as we do, that the way in which a people responds to the outbreak of war depends certainly in the main and probably altogether on a condition not necessarily dependent on the causes of the war, it is obvious that the moral justifications which are usually regarded as so important in determining the people's response are in fact comparatively insignificant. This conclusion agrees with the observed fact that no nation at war ever lacks the conviction that its cause is just. In the war of 1914-1918 each of the belligerents was animated by a passion of certainty that its participation was unavoidable and its purpose good and noble; each side defended its cause with arguments perfectly convincing and unanswerable to itself and wholly without effect on the enemy. Such passion, such certitude, such impenetrability were obviously products of something other than reason, and do not in themselves and directly give us any information as to the objective realities of the distribution of justice between the two sides. The sense of rectitude is in fact and manifestly a product of mere belligerency, and one which a nation at war may confidently expect to possess, no matter how nefarious its objects may ultimately appear to be in the eyes of general justice. (my emphasis)

As we've learned again these last few years, a sense of certainty and self-righteousness can also lead to creating a state of belligerency.

But that observation just quoted has to be balanced against the reality of dissent that Trotter describes with historical examples:

A war regarded as not dangerous [i.e., a war in which the threat is not perceived as substantial enough to justify war] produces a less complete solution in the common body, a less[er] degree of homogeneity, and allows anti-national opinion that is, doubt of the justice of the war and opposition to the national policy, to develop on a large scale. These phenomena have been clearly visible in the history of recent wars. The South African War of 1899-1902 [aka, the Boer War] was not apprehended as dangerous in this country [Britain], and in consequence though pro-national opinion prevailed among the majority, anti-national opinion was current in a large and respectable minority. The war of 1914-1918 [the First World War], regarded from the first as of the greatest gravity, gave to pro-national opinion an enormous preponderance, and restricted anti-national opinion within very narrow limits. The Russo-Japanese War [of 1905] provided an excellent double illustration of these mechanisms. On the Russian side regarded as not dangerous, it left national opinion greatly divided, and made the conduct of the war confused and languid; on the Japanese side apprehended as highly dangerous, it produced an enormous preponderance of pro-national opinion, and made conduct of the war correspondingly vigorous.

Some of Trotter's usages sound odd in today's terms, e.g., "apprehended danger" of a war to mean perceived national interest in the war; "anti-national" to mean antiwar. But if you can get past the awkward wording, he has some decent observations.

This provides at least a note of optimism for our warlike species. This phenomenon shows that despite our inevitable inclination to revert to primitive us-against-them instincts in war, there is room for reason and reality-based thinking to overcome an irrational commitment to a war. Trotter writes, "The essential factor in stimulation of herd instinct by war is not the actual danger of a given war, but the apprehended danger of it." (my emphasis)

Tags: deutschland, erster weltkrieg, germany, hindenburg, ludendorff, wilfred trotter, wilhelm ii

Pseudo-archeology and the Bible

Eric Cline, a scholar of Semitic languages who takes scientific research seriously, warns in Raiders of the faux ark Boston Globe 09/30/07 about archeological scams relating to Biblical events and claims:

We are living in a time of exciting discoveries in biblical archeology. We are also living in a time of widespread biblical fraud, dubious science, and crackpot theorizing. Some of the highest-profile discoveries of the past several years are shadowed by accusations of forgery, such as the James Ossuary, which may or may not be the burial box of Jesus' brother, as well as other supposed Bible-era findings such as the Jehoash Tablet and a small ivory pomegranate said to be from the time of Solomon. Every year "scientific" expeditions embark to look for Noah's Ark, raising untold amounts of money from gullible believers who eagerly listen to tales spun by sincere amateurs or rapacious con men; it is not always easy to tell the two apart.

The tools of modern archeology, from magnetometers to precise excavation methods, offer a growing opportunity to illuminate some of the intriguing mysteries surrounding the Bible, one of the foundations of western civilization. Yet the amateurs are taking in the public's money to support ventures that offer little chance of furthering the cause of knowledge. With their grand claims, and all the ensuing attention, they divert the public's attention from the scientific study of the Holy Land - and bring confusion, and even discredit, to biblical archeology.

I should note that Hershel Shanks, head of the Biblical Archaeological Society (BAS) has been one of the leading scholars who have argued for the authenticity of the James burial box. (I found Cline's article by following a link at the BAS Web site.)

Cline argues that professional archaeologists need to become more aggressive in countering crackpot claims in the field.

Tags: eric cline, biblical archaeology

The state of American democracy

Fr. Charles Coughlin, the Rush Limbaugh of the 1930s

I watched and heard at least a couple of hours of the Congressional hearings Tuesday with Erik Prince, the Republican/Christian fundamentalist head of the Blackwater mercenary firm. Between Prince the Christianist acting surly and all but sneering his contempt for the Democrats on the Committee and several of the Committee Republicans bitching about MoveOn.org and whining that the Democrats support The Enemy and who criticizing Blackwater mercenaries was equivalent to blaspheming our Saviour-General Petraeus, we got a good glimpse at the thuggish side of today's authoritarian Republicans.

It gave extra resonance to some very recent blog posts, like Angry, hateful liberal bloggers by Glenn Greenwald Salon 10/02/07, Oprah the Nazi by Dave Neiwert Orcinus blog 10/02/07 and Stealing Fascism by Sara Robinson, Orcinus blog 10/01/07, all of which talk about manifestations of fanaticism that are becoming more and more "mainstream" in today's Republican Party. I'm surprised that none of the Democrats called out one or two of the Republicans on the Committee on their cracks, especially one of them who went on at some length about how the Democrats are supporting the Other Side.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's attempt to put the Republicans on the spot over Rush Limbaugh's trashy comment about soldiers who are critical of the Cheney-Bush war policies being "phony soldiers" didn't work out so well, it seems. As of Tim Grieve's post MoveOn, Limbaugh and how the game is played this morning, "Not a single Republican has signed Harry Reid's letter condemning Rush Limbaugh."

This new fad of having Congress pronounce official judgment on the propriety of statements by partisans in the course of normal political debate highlights one of the problems of democratic parties confronting a part that is becoming increasingly authoritarian, as today's Republican Party is. As disciplined as the often are, especially on supporting Cheney's foreign policies, the Republicans aren't quite a totally Leader-driven Party yet. As Ezra Klein points out in Immigration Issues: After Failure The American Prospect 09/24/07, the recent immigration reform bill was defeated by Republicans despite the President's support of the bill: "The legislation activated a large anti-immigrant bloc, whose primal scream, amplified into a Senate-shaking roar by conservative talk radio, doomed the bill". The aspirants to head the Party are carefully aligning themselves with their white nativist base on the issue, however.

Congressional declarations of what should be considered acceptable political speech is disturbing on a couple of levels. For one thing, it's embarrassing that one of the oldest democratically-elected legislative bodies in the world is reduced to such silly gestures. It's also an implied threat of legislative action, even though the resolution against MoveOn had no legal force.

Here the goals of the two parties are not mirror images of each other. On some issues, that's the case. On the Cheney-Bush torture policy, for instance, the Republicans with rare exceptions support it, while the Democrats oppose it. That's a difficult issue to craft a compromise over. Are they going to agree to only carry out mock executions by simulated drowning on Tuesdays and Fridays?

But in terms of regulating political speech, the goal of Republican authoritarians is to suppress pro-Democratic speech. Not (so far) by explicit bans but by stigma and quasi-legal means such as "free speech zones". As the late Molly Ivins put it, I thought the whole United States was a free speech zone. Also, it looks like the word "provocateur" is now a current part of our political vocabulary again. Anyone familiar with the Nixon administration's measures to suppress dissent could have guessed that some of this was going on. Cheney, after all, has sought to recreate the police-state features of the Nixon administration and take them much further. But this is the first concrete reference I recall coming across about the actual use of provocateurs against legal, peaceful protesters (though I obviously haven't been paying close enough attention), from The Mean Streets of the Homeland Security State-let by Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse, TomDispatch.com 09/30/07. Turse writes:

In 2005, the Times' Dwyer revealed that at public gatherings since the time of the RNC, police officers had not only "conducted covert surveillance… of people protesting the Iraq war, bicycle riders taking part in mass rallies and even mourners at a street vigil for a cyclist killed in an accident," but had acted as agent provocateurs. At the RNC, there were multiple incidents in which undercover agents influenced events or riled up crowds. In one case, a "sham arrest" of "a man secretly working with the police led to a bruising confrontation between officers in riot gear and bystanders."

The Democrats, on the other hand, stand (I hope!) for a genuinely "liberal" notion of free speech.

That's why I have a lot of sympathy for Jane Hamsher's comment when she writes:

Rush [Limbaugh] may be [a] drug gobbling bloviator with a giant 4-F pustule on his butt, but his comments were well in line with what is considered free speech in this country, and that actually isn't any of the Senate’s business.

On the other hand, she says in the same post:

I really don’t know which is more exasperating — that our Senators think it is their job to tell people at large how they should exercise their right to free speech, or that they fire back at Limbaugh in such a weak and meaningless way. I suppose they have to do something or we will be treated to and endless parade of Cornyn bills where the Village Elders tell us all how displeased they are at our “uncivilized” rhetoric via fiat, and the failure of Republicans to sign on after voting to condemn MoveOn will serve up some campaign fodder. Would that their gesture was something more effective than watching them stomp their feet and shout “I know you are, but what am I?”

As long as Democrats are willing to sit at a Congressional hearing and listen to Republican blowhards call them traitors and claim they hate American soldiers and not at least respond that they are a bunch of lying sleazebags to say something like that, they aren't going to be able to respond to any of these attacks in a fully adequate way.

There is an attitude problem on the Democrats' part. And a big part of that problem is that they still find it hard to accept that today's Republican Party is an increasingly authoritarian institution that doesn't intend to play by either the formal or informal rules of democracy any more than they have to.

Wesley Clark's campaign to Dump Rush off Armed Forces Radio does make a lot of sense. Limbaugh not only trashes on-duty soldiers who don't agree with him. He regularly promotes bigotry directed not only against minorities and immigrants but against The Liberals. Not to mention that his relationship to factual accuracy is inconsistent, to put it nicely. Having a hate preacher like Limbaugh on Armed Forces Radio provides a kind of official endorsement he should not enjoy. Digby states the case for this move succinctly in Killing the King 10/02/07.

But this kind of dilemma will pop up more and more. And it is a real dilemma. When an authoritarian party dedicated to suppressing dissent against its policies is facing off against a party dedicated to a liberal democratic position on political speech, the pro-democracy party doesn't have the option of simply directing the same suppression tactics against the authoritarian party.

Complicating all this is the projection dynamic, in which affluent Republican white guys manage to define themselves as victims targeted by The Liberals to be suppressed. It seems bizarre for most people to imagine that Christians are being persecuted for their religion in the United States. But for white fundamentalists, that has been a standard assumption for years if not decades. Republican fundis are convinced that The Liberals and The Hollywood Crowd (i.e., "The Jews") are actively persecuting them in the United States. It's part of the craziness that comes with authoritarian fanaticism.

I've posted about this phenomenon several times in connection with the anti-Semitic "war on Christmas" nonsense that the FOXists have taken to promoting every year during the holiday season:

Whining by the "defenders" of Christmas 12/28/04
The (Christmas) war fraud 11/24/05
The fine old conflict over Christmas 12/08/05
Analyzing the phony "war on Christmas" 12/15/05
More on the bah-humbug war against the (nonexistent) "war on Christmas" 12/23/05

And as Digby points out, our Beltway press and pundits are heavily invested in not recognizing the evolution of the Republican Party and the American party system more generally (Village Parties 10/02/07):

... this fetish for bipartisanship is a [Washington Beltway] Village construct. They all live together. They want everyone to get along, like back in the good old days when Tip and Bob would fight it out on the floor and then head out and get shitfaced with Wilbur Mills and John Tower. In those days the parties were not aligned ideologically and there was great political utility in having an open line of communication.

We are in a different time, in which the parties have realigned along some old traditional lines. We are also dealing with the fact that one party was hijacked by a radical political movement that sought to take the country back to a 19th century economic system, an 18th century social system and a 1st century Imperial system. Many Americans disagree with that plan and are trying to bring the nation back to the present.

Tags: anti-semitism, authoritarianism, bipartisanship, establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press, republican party, rush limbaugh, war on christmas

The War: Episode 7

Artwork by Auschwitz survivor Halina Olomucka

It's finally over. America has saved the world again for the 1000th time. Earl Burke got to "cop a feel" on Market Street in San Francisco on V-J Day. Katherine Phillips down in Mobile got to celebrate the atomic bomb as "the greatest thing they ever came up with." And we got to hear Norah Jones sing that dreadful "America, I gave my best to you" song one last time. I ain't buying the soundtrack.

Episode 7 didn't change the pattern established in the first six. Despite a good moment here and there, the personal connection we were supposed to make with these people according to Ken Burns' pre-screening hype was pretty much blocked by the chopped-up nature of the interview presentations. We rarely got enough continuous time with any of them to get any sense of their personalities.

And the war narrative itself was weak. There was lots of combat footage for people who are too lazy to channel-flip to the History Channel. But there was pitifully little political context for any of it. And there were points where the historical narrative was so bad as to be really misleading.

In the end, Burns wound up with the worst of both worlds: individual testimonies that the audience finds it hard to connect with as individuals (unless you count knowing that Katherine P. would pronounce "war" as "wauh" every time) and an historical narrative that was often painfully weak.

Episode 7 opens with one interviewee offering his pop psychology view that "there'll always be wars". We get a very conventional treatment of the death of Franklin Roosevelt. The only thing that struck me as notably positive about the historical narrative was that they did manage to mention the Soviet declaration of war against Japan along with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It would have been too much to expect an explanation that during the Cold War, the US account tended to make the atomic bombs the magic weapons that ended the war, while the Soviet account make the A-bombs almost insignificant in comparison to the threat posed by the Red Army.

The discussion of the Holocaust was as painfully superficial as most of the historical commentary. Here the America-centric focus of the documentary was glaring. The sequence gives an impression that is hard to believe wasn't an intentional sleight-of-hand. It's certainly true that seeing the sad state of inmates in the various detention camps in Germany and Austria had a strong effect on the Americans that liberated them, including giving many a new sense of how important the war was.

But this segment is introduced by historian Paul Fussell, one of the regular interview subject, referring to the effects the "death camps" had on people. It's understandable that people thing of concentration camps where people were killed as "death camps". But it can easily be confusing. There were six camps designated by the Germans as "extermination camps" (Vernichtungslager), all in Poland: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. See also the article Extermination Camps from the Yad Vashem Web site. (Sometimes Majdanek is not counted as a Vernichtungslager.)

There was enormous death and suffering in other camps. And a large part of the killings in the Holocaust took place outside of camps, including mass shootings in the east by the Einsatzgruppen and Ordnungspolizei units. But those six camps were the locations used specifically for the systmatic, industrially-organized killing of Jews and others targeted for mass murder. None of the six were liberated by the American troops. Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were part of "Operation Reinhart" in 1942-3 and had all ceased operation by the end of 1943. The Soviet Red Army liberated Majdanek in July, 1944, and Chelmno and Auschwitz in January, 1945.

This is another case where the information in The War was not wrong. But it surely left viewers not familiar already with more details the impression that Americans liberated the extermination camps, which is not the case. But it's clear that what the Americans did see, at Bergen-Belsen for instance, was dramatic and horrible (from a contemporary Czechoslovakian army newspaper, Ein tschechoslowakisches Armeeblatt berichtete im April 1945 aus dem KZ Shoa.de):

Angloamerikanische Armeen, die derzeit siegreich Deutschland durchqueren, haben auch eine ganze Reihe deutscher Konzentrationslager befreit. In diesen sahen die englischen und amerikanischen Soldaten erstmalig mit eigenen Augen, wie schrecklich Deutschen mit ihren Gefangenen umgingen. Im Lager Belsen waren 21.000 Männer, 18.000 Frauen und 500 Kinder. Es gab kein Trinkwasser, eine Ernährung war nicht möglich. Als die Amerikaner und Engländer ins Lager drangen, fanden sie dort Gefangene in einem so furchtbaren Zustand vor, dass diese sich kaum bewegen konnten. Von 40.000 Gefangenen waren 20.000 in so schlechtem gesundheitlichen Zustand, dass sie umgehend in Krankenhäuser verlegt werden mussten. Ein amerikanischer Korrespondent berichtet, dass in diesem Lager täglich viele Menschen an Hunger starben. Niemand begrub die Leichen. Amerikanische Soldaten sahen in einem Lagerbezirk aufeinandergehäufte tote Frauen, die alle völlig nackt waren. Der Haufen war 60 Meter lang und erreichte Tischhöhe. In Gruben und Gräben lagen viele weitere Leichen.

[Anglo-American armies which at the time were victoriously crossing Germany also liberated a number of German concentration camps. In these, the English and American soldiers saw for the first time with their own eyes how horrible German had treated their prisoners. In the Belsen camp there were 21,000 men, 18,000 women and 500 children. There was no drinking water, nourishment was not possible. When the Americans and English entered the camp, they found prisoners there in such a terrible condition that they could hardly move. Of 40,000 prisoners, 20,000 were in such a bad state of health that they had to be placed in hospitals immediately. An American correspondent reported that in this camp, many people died of hunger daily. No one buried the bodies. American soldiers saw in a section of the camp dead women tossed into a pile, all of them completely naked. The pile was 60 meters long and table-high. There were many more bodies in ditches and trenches.]

At least The War managed to give some sense of this event. But historical clarity was sacrificed to dramatic footage.

This series shows a big pitfall of "people's history". In trying to use the memories of "ordinary people" to tell the story of a world war, Burns winds up using their personal descriptions like experts of somce kind would be used in most documentaries. Now, I'm not one to promote the cult of Experts. A well-informed journalist or amateur historian may give as good or better an account of some events as a professional historian.

But it's one thing to hear Maurice Bell of Mobile describe seeing a kamikaze attack on his own shiop. But was the best guy to to give a background description of what the kamikazes were and what matoivated them? Bell tells us that the kamikaze pilots believed they would get a special place in Heaven for dying this way. Sound familiar?

But was religious martyrdom the sense of the kamikaze pilots of what they were doing? Leaving aside the questio of whether the concept of Heaven in the Abrahamic religions has a meaningful parallel in Buddhism or Shitoism, the religions of most Japanese at the time, here's what Robert Pape writes about the kamikazes in Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (2005) that the Japanese military adopted kamikaze attacks as a measure of desperation. They were initiated by Vice Admiral Takijiro Onishi as a way to slow down the American land invasion. And he writes:

Kamikaze pilots were also motivated by the belief that their sacrifice would bnable Japan to avoid occupation by the United States. These individuals, who were generally graduates of special training programs for pilots of universities, often kept extensive diaries, many of which have been published. Special attack pilots volunteered for their missions. Although social pressure may have contributed to why individuals willingly stepped forward, the common explanation they give for why such missions were important was that suicide attack was the only way to stave off American occupation. Shortly before his death, one pilot wrote in his diary: "We must fight to the end so that the Japanese can create a new era by the Japanese ourselves. We cannot succumb to the 'red hair and blue eyes.'" (my emphasis)

He also quotes Lt. Gen. Torashiro Kawabe, in a postwar description given to the US Strategic Bombing Survey on "the motivation of individual kamikaze pilots" that Pape says is in agreement with "contemporaneous accounts":

We believed that our spiritual convictions and moral strength could balance your material and scientific advantages. We did not consider our attack to be "suicide." The pilot did not start out on his mission with the intention of committing suicide [i.e., of immolating himself in a spirit of despair]. He looked upon himself as a human bomb which would destroy a certain part of the enemy fleet ... [and] died happy in the conviction that his death was a step towards the final victory. (my emphasis)

In other words, from Pape's brief account it appears that the perceived military necessity of the attacks was the central motivation according to which the kamikaze pilots were willing to saccrifice themselves in that way, not some promise of a special place in Heaven. But the latter is the impression with which the viewers of The War will be left.

The bottom line for me on the series: Burns' series provided some interesting moments. But on the whole, it was a real disappointment, offering largely conventional war stories and sub-par commentary on the major events of the war itself. Worst of all, the series will be very easy for most viewers to place into a familiar, comfortable, nostalgic framework, adding little to our understanding or perspective on the actual historical events.

Tags: holocaust, ken burns, paul fussell, robert pape, second world war, shoah, the war documentary

Andrew Bacevich on our Saviour-General Petraeus

Andrew Bacevich gives his take on Saviour-General David Petraeus, that divine presence whom it would be blashphemy to criticize in any way (at least according the the Republican Party line of the day) in Sycophant Savior The American Conservative 10/08/07 issue (accessed 10/02/07).

Bacevich opens with a pragmatic account of the organizational politics that senior military leaders have to practice:

George Washington, U.S. Grant, and Dwight D. Eisenhower were all “political generals” in the very best sense of the term. Their claims to immortality rest not on their battlefield exploits - Washington actually won few battles, and Grant achieved his victories through brute force rather than finesse, while Ike hardly qualifies as a field commander at all - but on the skill they demonstrated in translating military power into political advantage. Each of these three genuinely great soldiers possessed a sophisticated appreciation for war’s political dimension.

I have my reservations about his comment on Grant's "brute force". Grant's great contribution was to recognize the central importance of destroying enemy forces as opposed to seizing territory. But that's not my focus in this post.

He contrasts that with Saviour-General Petraeus:

David Petraeus is a political general. Yet in presenting his recent assessment of the Iraq War and in describing the "way forward," Petraeus demonstrated that he is a political general of the worst kind - one who indulges in the politics of accommodation that is Washington’s bread and butter but has thereby deferred a far more urgent political imperative, namely, bringing our military policies into harmony with our political purposes.

Bacevich, who has been a genuine critic of the Iraq War from the start and who lost a son in that war earlier this year, argues that in his recent performance in Washington, "Petraeus issued everyone a pass" on doing their own jobs to make responsible decisions about the war.

Bacevich explains how Petraeus' announced plan to ramp down the number of US troops in Iraq is not consistent with his own highly questionable assessment of The Surge as having been a great success. Bacevich favorably cites the article Learning From Our Modern Wars: The Imperatives of Preparing for a Dangerous Future Military Review Sept-Oct 2007 by Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli for it discussion of what Bacevich calls "the contradiction between our military efforts in Iraq and our professed political purposes there to persist."

Bacevich focuses on how the Cheney-Bush administration's approach to the Iraq War exposes the fake nature of their "global war on terror (GWOT)".

In effect, he is allowing the president and the Congress to continue dodging the main issue, which comes down to this: if the civilian leadership wants to wage a global war on terror and if that war entails pacifying Iraq, then let’s get serious about providing what’s needed to complete the mission - starting with lots more soldiers. Rather than curtailing the ostensibly successful surge, Petraeus should broaden and deepen it. That means sending more troops to Iraq, not bringing them home. And that probably implies doubling or tripling the size of the United States Army on a crash basis.

If the civilian leadership is unwilling to provide what’s needed, then all of the talk about waging a global war on terror - talk heard not only from the president but from most of those jockeying to replace him - amounts to so much hot air. Critics who think the concept of the global war on terror is fundamentally flawed will see this as a positive development. Once we recognize the global war on terror for the fraudulent enterprise that it has become, then we can get serious about designing a strategy to address the threat that we actually face, which is not terrorism but violent Islamic radicalism. The antidote to Islamic radicalism, if there is one, won’t involve invading and occupying places like Iraq.

This defines Petraeus’s failure. Instead of obliging the president and the Congress to confront this fundamental contradiction—are we or are we not at war?—he chose instead to let them off the hook.

Bacevich concludes by offering his assessment of Saviour-General Petraus: "he has broken faith with the soldiers he commands and the Army to which he has devoted his life. He has failed his country. History will not judge him kindly."

Tags: andrew bacevich, iraq war, petraeus

Hersh's latest on expanding the Iraq War to Iran

Seymour Hersh reports on the Cheney-Bush administration's current war planning for Iran in Shifting Targets: The Administration's plan for Iran in the New Yorker issue dated 10/08/07 (accessed 09/30/07). He reports that Dick Cheney's current approach is no longer a massive bombing campaign on a wide variety of Iranian targets but the new emphasis is "on 'surgical' strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq." As Hersh notes, after years of agitation on the topic of Iran's nuclear program, Cheney's new approach means that what was previously "a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism".

Hersh explains the shift as follows:

The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.

Reality, in other words, has been strongly reasserting its claims on Middle East policy.

I find the comment about public opinion especially intriguing. We know that Cheney and Bush have contempt for the opinions of the American public on matters of war and peace, except when they agree with Cheney's plans. Hersh also reports a couple of paragraphs later in the article:

At a White House meeting with Cheney this summer, according to a former senior intelligence official, it was agreed that, if limited strikes on Iran were carried out, the Administration could fend off criticism by arguing that they were a defensive action to save soldiers in Iraq. If Democrats objected, the Administration could say, "Bill Clinton did the same thing; he conducted limited strikes in Afghanistan, the Sudan, and in Baghdad to protect American lives." The former intelligence official added, "There is a desperate effort by Cheney et al. to bring military action to Iran as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the politicians are saying, 'You can't do it, because every Republican is going to be defeated, and we’re only one fact from going over the cliff in Iraq.' But Cheney doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the President."

Even dictatorships have to take some account of public opinion. So I have no doubt that managing public perceptions is a major concern of Cheney and Bush. But I would be curious as to just how public opinion against war with Iran gets filtered to Cheney and Bush in a way that causes them to change their planned course of action significantly.

Despite the uncertainty on that point, I do think it's very significant that even though many war critics are rightly disgusted right now at the timidity of Congressional Democrats in asserting their Constitutional role in the matter of military attacks on Iran, the public opposition to the Iraq War is somehow having the effect of restraining even Cheney and Bush in some way in this matter.

But we shouldn't fall into the current Republican habit of imagining that such issues exist almost exclusively in the form of domestic American politics. Even though it might be politically less difficult at first to have a more limited attack, it isn't necessarily the militarily optimal approach. Don't get me wrong. I'm opposed to expanding the war to Iran.

But one of the risks is the Iranian retaliation. If the US overtly attacks Iranian territory, we have to assume Iran will counter-attack in some way. A more limited strike would presumably leave Iran with a much greater capability to retaliate, a retaliation likely to be directed against American soldiers in Iraq.

We also have to remember. This is Dick Cheney and George Bush running this show. Apart from all issues of justification for war, if they expand the war to Iran, they will screw it up. Hersh lays out some of the risks as follows:

He [a recently retired C.I.A. official] added, "The guys now running the Iranian program have limited direct experience with Iran. In the event of an attack, how will the Iranians react? They will react, and the Administration has not thought it all the way through."

That theme was echoed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national-security adviser, who said that he had heard discussions of the White House’s more limited bombing plans for Iran. Brzezinski said that Iran would likely react to an American attack "by intensifying the conflict in Iraq and also in Afghanistan, their neighbors, and that could draw in Pakistan. We will be stuck in a regional war for twenty years."...

A limited bombing attack of this sort "only makes sense if the intelligence is good," the [Pentagon] consultant [on counterterrorism] said. If the targets are not clearly defined, the bombing "will start as limited, but then there will be an 'escalation special.' Planners will say that we have to deal with Hezbollah here and Syria there. The goal will be to hit the cue ball one time and have all the balls go in the pocket. But add-ons are always there in strike planning."

The surgical-strike plan has been shared with some of America's allies, who have had mixed reactions to it. Israel's military and political leaders were alarmed, believing, the consultant said, that it didn’t sufficiently target Iran's nuclear facilities. The White House has been reassuring the Israeli government, the former senior official told me, that the more limited target list would still serve the goal of counter-proliferation by decapitating the leadership of the Revolutionary Guards, who are believed to have direct control over the nuclear-research program. "Our theory is that if we do the attacks as planned it will accomplish two things," the former senior official said. (my emphasis)

Any time the Cheney-Bush administration is going to do something major like this and the viability of the action "only makes sense if the intelligence is good", we have good reason to worry.

The Iraq WMD fraud certainly makes our allies more concerned about following the American lead, understandably so. Hersh reports that Gordon Brown's government in Britain is interested in continuing down the same road that the pathetic Tony Blair took by supporting the Cheney-Bush administration in attacking Iran. But even they are worried about the intelligence claims, according to Hersh:

The revised bombing plan "could work - if it's in response to an Iranian attack,” the retired four-star [American] general said. "The British may want to do it to get even, but the more reasonable people are saying, ‘Let’s do it if the Iranians stage a cross-border attack inside Iraq.’ It’s got to be ten dead American soldiers and four burned trucks.” There is, he added, "a widespread belief in London that Tony Blair’s government was sold a bill of goods by the White House in the buildup to the war against Iraq. So if somebody comes into Gordon Brown’s office and says, ‘We have this intelligence from America,’ Brown will ask, ‘Where did it come from? Have we verified it?’ The burden of proof is high." (my emphasis)

Hersh discusses an incident where British commandos seized a big shipment of weapons coming across the Iranian border into Afghanistan, though it wasn't clear whether it was officially sanctioned by the Iranian government:

Vincent Cannistraro, a retired C.I.A. officer who has worked closely with his counterparts in Britain, added to the story: “The Brits told me that they were afraid at first to tell us about the incident—in fear that Cheney would use it as a reason to attack Iran.” The intelligence subsequently was forwarded, he said.

The retired four-star general confirmed that British intelligence “was worried” about passing the information along. “The Brits don’t trust the Iranians,” the retired general said, “but they also don’t trust Bush and Cheney.” (my emphasis)

Not surprisingly, less submissive allies are even more skeptical of US intelligence claims from the Cheney-Bush administration:

The French government shares the Administration’s sense of urgency about Iran’s nuclear program, and believes that Iran will be able to produce a warhead within two years. France’s newly elected President, Nicolas Sarkozy, created a stir in late August when he warned that Iran could be attacked if it did not halt is nuclear program. Nonetheless, France has indicated to the White House that it has doubts about a limited strike, the former senior intelligence official told me. Many in the French government have concluded that the Bush Administration has exaggerated the extent of Iranian meddling inside Iraq; they believe, according to a European diplomat, that “the American problems in Iraq are due to their own mistakes, and now the Americans are trying to show some teeth. An American bombing will show only that the Bush Administration has its own agenda toward Iran.”

Another important point in Hersh's article is the indication of how strongly Dick Cheney intends to make sure that the expansion of the war into Iran happens:

“Cheney’s option is now for a fast in and out—for surgical strikes,” the former senior American intelligence official told me. The Joint Chiefs have turned to the Navy, he said, which had been chafing over its role in the Air Force-dominated air war in Iraq. “The Navy’s planes, ships, and cruise missiles are in place in the Gulf and operating daily. They’ve got everything they need—even AWACS are in place and the targets in Iran have been programmed. The Navy is flying FA-18 missions every day in the Gulf.” There are also plans to hit Iran’s anti-aircraft surface-to-air missile sites. “We’ve got to get a path in and a path out,” the former official said.

A Pentagon consultant on counterterrorism told me that, if the bombing campaign took place, it would be accompanied by a series of what he called “short, sharp incursions” by American Special Forces units into suspected Iranian training sites. He said, “Cheney is devoted to this, no question.” (my emphasis)

Another grim indicator in Hersh's report is this:

And two former senior officials of the C.I.A. told me that, by late summer, the agency had increased the size and the authority of the Iranian Operations Group. (A spokesman for the agency said, “The C.I.A. does not, as a rule, publicly discuss the relative size of its operational components.”)

“They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk,” one recently retired C.I.A. official said. “They’re dragging in a lot of analysts and ramping up everything. It’s just like the fall of 2002” - the months before the invasion of Iraq, when the Iraqi Operations Group became the most important in the agency.

It's also important to recognize how drastic would be the contradiction between attacking Iran and our current posture of supporting the pro-Iranian, Shi'a-dominated government of Iraq:

Iran has had a presence in Iraq for decades; the extent and the purpose of its current activities there are in dispute, however. During Saddam Hussein’s rule, when the Sunni-dominated Baath Party brutally oppressed the majority Shiites, Iran supported them. Many in the present Iraqi Shiite leadership, including prominent members of the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, spent years in exile in Iran; last week, at the Council on Foreign Relations, Maliki said, according to the Washington Post, that Iraq’s relations with the Iranians had “improved to the point that they are not interfering in our internal affairs.” Iran is so entrenched in Iraqi Shiite circles that any “proxy war” could be as much through the Iraqi state as against it. The crux of the Bush Administration’s strategic dilemma is that its decision to back a Shiite-led government after the fall of Saddam has empowered Iran, and made it impossible to exclude Iran from the Iraqi political scene. (my emphasis)

Peter Galbraith emphasizes the same point in Mission accomplished - for Iran Salon 09/24/07:

In short, George W. Bush had from the first facilitated the very event he warned would be a disastrous consequence of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq: the takeover of a large part of the country by an Iranian-backed militia. [He refers to the Badr Organization, the militia of SIIC, the lead party in the Iraqi government.]And while the president contrasts the promise of democracy in Iraq with the tyranny in Iran, there is now substantially more personal freedom in Iran than in southern Iraq.

Iran's role in Iraq is pervasive, but also subtle. When Iraq drafted its permanent constitution in 2005, the American ambassador energetically engaged in all parts of the process. But behind the scenes, the Iranian ambassador intervened to block provisions that Tehran did not like. As it happened, both the Americans and the Iranians wanted to strengthen Iraq's central government. While the Bush administration clung to the mirage of a single Iraqi people, Tehran worked to give its proxies, the pro-Iranian Iraqis it supported - by then established as the government of Iraq -- as much power as possible. (Thanks to Kurdish obstinacy, neither the United States nor Iran succeeded in its goal, but even now both the U.S. and Iran want to see the central government strengthened.)

Since 2005, Iraq's Shiite-led government has concluded numerous economic, political and military agreements with Iran. The most important would link the two countries' strategic oil reserves by building a pipeline from southern Iraq to Iran, while another commits Iran to providing extensive military assistance to the Iraqi government. According to a senior official in Iraq's Oil Ministry, smugglers divert at least 150,000 barrels of Iraq's daily oil exports through Iran, a figure that approaches 10 percent of Iraq's production. Iran has yet to provide the military support it promised to the Iraqi army. With the United States supplying 160,000 troops and hundreds of billions of dollars to support a pro-Iranian Iraqi government, Iran has no reason to invest its own resources.

Of all the unintended consequences of the Iraq war, Iran's strategic victory is the most far-reaching. (my emphasis)

An overt military attack on Iran would be a very, very bad idea.

Tags: bush, cheney, iran war, peter galbraith, seymour hersh

The War: Episode 6

Ruins in Dresden 1945 (Photo: Gerhard Gronefeld)

The historical bloopers were coming fast and furious in Episode 6. It was sort of like one of those games that people play on long drives to combat boredom (or at least did in the days before SUV DVD players): counting hawks or pickups or whatever. It was so much a matter of blatant mistakes as of a number of places where I found myself thinking, "Wha...?" Maybe "groaners" would be a better word that "bloopers".

In the opening segment, one of the interviewees from Connecticut, Joseph Vaghi, tells about talking to a German prisoner in his mid-20s who asked him where he was from. As they talked, the German knew geographical details of the area that surprised the American. As they were talking, I thought about how my father as a young man worked in Connecticut in the summers during the late 1930s tapping maple trees to collect syrup. He said that there were some Germans working there who had to go back to Germany at some point to enter the service. (All young German men were subject to the draft.) So I thought, oh, maybe this guy was working in Connecticut before the war.

Oh, no, the German told the American that he knew all that because he had been trained in a school for administrators of future American "territories". Say what?!?

Now, there is an awful lot about the Third Reich I don't know. And I would be curious if anyone has some more specific reference about such a thing. But I have read a fair amount about German policies toward administering conquered territories and also about their Fifth Column (espionage) efforts in the United States. And it just seems unlikely in the extreme that there was any program to train "administrators" for future American "territories".

This is where a little bit of analytical commentary would have been useful if they were going to use stories like that, because many viewers hearing that will assume it's a fact. I'm tempted to quote Rummy on "unknowns" here, but I would be astonished to find out that any such thing existed in any form. Hitler envisioned making America a subordinate power, at the least, in a future world run by the Axis. But he was far to fixated on conquering Russia and killing Jews in Europe to worry about designing territorial administrations for North America.

There are several possibilities for that tale, which I would list in order of descending probability as follows: the German soldier had actually been in Connecticut (the American said he spoke "accent-free" English); the German had been trained in intelligence operations for possible infiltration to the US; the American had mixed his memory of the conversation with reports about the "geopolitical" studies in Germany, featured in one of Frank Capra's wartime "Why We Fight" films; the German had studied geography in college; and, he was actually being trained as an "administrator" for conquered Connecticut.

Certainly this kind of obscure claim is something that requires further explanation than just to be tossed out there into the stream of war folklore.

Some other historical bits that bothered me in Episode 6:

The narration says that in late 1944, Americans were "growing weary" of the war. Exactly what does that mean? I posted back in July about polling data from the US during the war. In that post, I quoted Josh Marshall:

The key point is that many polls were taken during the war. And approval of the president's conduct of the war, understanding and belief in the goals of the war and other similar measurements all remained constant at very high levels or in some cases actually went up. One key data point you can see on the chart is the number of Americans will to make peace with Hitler - that is, an negotiated end to the war rather than the unconditional surrender which was a key allied war demand. The number was under 10% for most of 1942 and 1943. Then it briefly surged up to just over 20% in early 1944 (roughly the time of the invasion of Italy) before falling back down to about 15% for duration of the war in Europe. (my emphasis)

As I recall, the documentary's narration just said "1944" for when people were getting weary of the war. But the context and the comment by interviewee Katherine Phillips accompanying it definitely made it sound like late 1944. Did anyone bother to check this stuff before they broadcast it?

Ray Leopold, a Jewish medic fighting in Europe, heard a rumor that he took seriously that if the Germans captured an American and found out he was Jewish, he would be killed. That he heard such a rumor is entirely plausible. And Lord knows that the Germans, including the Wehrmacht, were willing to kill Jews. But I've never heard of any systematic practice of Germans executing American POW's because they were Jewish.

On the subject of prisoners-of-war more generally, this documentary like most war documentaries does a very superficial job on treating the subject. It's understandable, because in general it's just a much more dull subject than battles and the shooting war and the high politics. You can go in most any bookstore and find all sorts of books about the Second World War. Try looking for one dealing with POW issues in that war the next time you walk by the war section in a large bookstore.

This documentary mentioned the Malmedy massacre, in which German soldiers murdered several dozen American prisoners. This was a significant event and caused great resentment among Americans. I don't believe they mentioned that it was Waffen-SS troops that committed the massacre, but that one incident created an especially negative image of the Waffen-SS in the United States. Joe McCarthy, the notorious alcoholic demagogue from Wisconsin, made his first national stir in the Senate by expressing his passionate outrage over the fact that the US Army had prosecuted the Waffen-SS perpetrators who had massacred those American prisoners at Malmedy for war crimes. Yes, you read that right. He was outraged that the Army took action against them. McCarthy is still a hero to many Republican rightwingers. No wonder Rush Limbaugh in trashing our soldiers today with his "unpatriotic" insults, to quote the world Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid used in a Senate speech Monday. Old Joe would have related to that just fine.

But in general, both Germans and Americans did a reasonably good job of following the Geneva conventions with each others prisoners. The practice on both sides on the Eastern Front were radically different. Millions of prisoners died on the Soviet and German sides. Telford Taylor, who was a chief counsel for the US at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials wrote about that in his 1970 book Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy as an example of why international law on treatment of captives is so necessary:

It is only necessary to consider the rules on taking prisoners in the setting of the Second World War to realize the enormous saving of life for which they have been responsible. Millions of French, British, German and Italian soldiers captured in Western Europe and Africa were treated in general compliance with The Hague and Geneva requirements, and returned home at the end of the war. German and Russian prisoners taken on the eastern front did not fare nearly so well and died in captivity by the millions, but many survived. Today there is surely much to criticize about the handling of prisoners on both sides of the Vietnam war, but at least many of them are alive, and that is because the belligerents are reluctant to flout the laws of war too openly.

Given the Cheney-Bush administration's policy of treating the Geneva Conventions as toilet paper, a little more decent background on the treatment of prisoners in the Second World War would have been very appropriate and timely. But then Burns might not have had time for the anecdotes from the guy who was a newspaper delivery boy in Sacramento all during the war.

The one story about an officer ordering the murder of German prisoners was an intense one. The interviewee claimed to have have objected to the officer that this was an illegal act and indicated that a number of soldiers wouldn't participate in the shooting. Here again, some effort at verification or some background on this practice would have been helpful. Some such shootings no doubt occurred; I'm not sure what kind of formal actions were taken against Americans involved by the services. The narration also mentioned that some officers gave a "take no prisoners" order during the Battle of the Bulge. To quote Taylor again:

Perhaps the most important of all the laws of war is the rule that an enemy soldier who surrenders is to be spared further attack and, upon being taken prisoner, is to be conducted, as soon as possible, to safety in the rear of the capturing force. It is "especially forbidden" under the 1907 Hague Convention "to kill or wound an enemy who, having laid down his arms, or having no longer means of self-defence, has surrendered at discretion." It is equally forbidden "to declare that no quarter will be given." And under the 1949 Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, they "shall be evacuated, as soon as possible after their capture, to camps situated far enough from the combat zone for them to be out of danger." (my emphasis)

I realize that for today's Republicans, such considerations are "quaint" and even downright contemptible. But they still are law in the United States and the world. In the Second World War, the highest officials of the US government still respected those laws. After the war, German and Japanese officers who violated them were tried and convicted of war crimes, some of them sentenced to death as a result. But war crimes trials and all they involved don't lend themselves easily to homey stories about how much fun it was to be a paper delivery boy back in the good old days.

I've posted more than once on issues relating to air warfare. So I won't go into much detail here. But the reporting on the air war was superficial to the point of being bad. I've paid particular attention to the story of the Dresden bombing. I went to Dresden on my honeymoon trip, so I do have some fond memories of the place. But that's not why I've focused attention on the Dresden bombing. It's because the Dresden bombing plays a particular role in the Holocaust-denial narrative. For more on that angle, see my post The bombing of Dresden 02/07/05.

The documentary makes it sound like the bombing of Dresden was Stalin's idea. It's true that Soviet pressure for greater Allied pressure on Germany was part of the calculation. There is certainly a legitimate case to be made that bombing Dresden was a case of bad judgment. But the city was a legitimate military target under the theory of "strategic bombing" being used in Europe. Again, it's not that The War says something wrong. But on a topic with continuing strong symbolic resonance, it didn't help the viewers to understand much about it. I noticed that they used the conservative figure of 35,000 deaths for the Dresden bombing. That's the high range of the realistic estimate. (Thirty-five thousand deaths is horrible by any measure; but the Holocaust-deniers obsess over that number for reasons discussed more at the link above.)

One of the bits of contemporary documentation they mention called even more for explanation. The narration cited a pamphlet issued by the 5th Air Force that said of Japan that "the entire population is a legitimate target ... For us, there are no civilians." To put it mildly, that was not national policy. Again, there is a lot to criticize about the morality and the effectiveness of the strategic bombing in both Europe and Asia in that war. But it was not official American policy to deliberately kill civilian noncombatants. That needed more explanation, definitely.

Particularly given the iconic role the Second World War plays in American national mythology, the bombing issues needed to be treated in more depth. A lot of viewers will take away from that episode a "lesson" that goes something like this: "Americans deliberately killed large numbers of civilians in the Second World War and there's no problem with that. They should have overthrown their own dang governments and surrendered if they didn't want civilians slaughtered."

A couple of other moments in Episode 6 also grated on me a bit. A minor one was a typical good-ole-boy story about Gen. George Patton stopping in the middle of a bridge crossing the Rhine river and saying that he had always wanted to piss in the Rhine, and proceed to unzip and do so in front of his soldiers. Now, I know Patton committed far more consequential indiscretions. His friend and admirer, Gen. Omar Bradley, wrote that if Patton hadn't been killed in an auto accident, he would have wound up badly damaging his own reputation by his own lapses in judgment. But I do wonder exactly what the regulations were about generals exposing their ding-dongs in public in front of their officers and men at that time.

Finally, Katherine Phillips of Mobile tells a story about she and two of her friends going to the train station one evening with sandwiches, donuts and coffee for soldiers on the train. She told it as a funny story and a fond memory. But what she described was having been terrified. A bunch of Marines jumped off the train whooping and started toward them. She and one of her friends tossed their sandwiches and donuts away, ran into the canteen at the station, locked the door, and hid under the counter in fear. That's what she described, even though she was laughing at it. The third girl was surrounded by Marines who kissed her repeatedly and left dirty hand prints all over her coat. There was a weird disconnect between what she described and the upbeat affect she displayed in telling it.

Episode 6 presented some good moments showing the grim side of war. But the defects and gaping omissions are so significant that it makes it difficult to trust the narrative. Some of the historical commentary is just sloppy.

Tags: dresden, dresden bombing, ken burns, second world war, the war documentary, world war two

The War: Episode 5

Yes, we had allies during the Second World War

The fifth installment of Ken Burns' The War strikes me as the most interesting yet. That's partially because my expectations have been considerably lowered by the first four episodes.

But still, this episode provided more engaging stories of people in extreme situations of combat in the Pacific, in the Battle of the Bulge in Europe and the Weisheimer family in their continuing imprisonment in the Philippines. It also had the advantage of relying fairly heavily on contemporary documents, not just 60-year-old memories.

Yet the accounts of the course of the war doesn't get much beyond the conventional, with lots of the same kinds of battle footage we've all seen many times before. This episode also continued to convey the impression that Americans were virtually ignorant of the world outside North America before the war began for the United States. While there's a lot of truth in that perspective, it's also misleading. I hope to expand on this a bit in a later post.

The bias of the documentary toward the stories of those who were quite young during the war continues to have an effect. For one thing, people who were not yet voting age at the time of Pearl Harbor really did first learn about the world outside North America during the war itself. Part of the contemporary material this episode uses is Sascha Weimzheimer's diary from her time in prison, written while she was a child. One Sacramento interviewee who apparently wasn't old enough to join the service during the war at all talked about how he used to play war as a kid. We needed a Ken Burns documentary to tell us that little boys play war?

The larger historical account remains a cipher. We learn that Roosevelt spent Thanksgiving of 1944 at a hospital for children with polio in Warm Springs, Georgia. What Roosevelt was doing in relations with allies or postwar planning seems to be out of the scope of this documentary. Speaking of allies, we hear in this episode that we had to deal with some annoying British general. Also we see a map that shows the Soviets apparently creeping at a slow pace across Europe, unlike the triumphant Americans who are already at the borders of Germany. It's nice to know that allies played some minor role in helping America save the world.

Tags: ken burns, second world war, the war documentary, world war two