ReconsideRed - National Review

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August 30, 2010
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Contents
AUGUST 30, 2010
ON THE COVER
|
VOLUME LXII, NO. 16
|
w w w. n a t i o n a l r e v i e w. c o m
Page 43
The Greatly
Ghastly Rand
In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
looked out and showed us
the world of men as she sees
them. And she sees them
viciously. Jason Lee Steorts
Reihan Salam & Scott Winship on
American Competitiveness
. . . p. 26
BOOKS, ARTS
& MANNERS
COVER: MARK WILSON/GETTY
ARTICLES
16 COPS, AND ROBBERS
41
by Daniel Foster
The public requires protection from public-safety unions.
20 PRIME MINISTER CAMERON AT 100 DAYS
by John O’Sullivan
22 THE MANY MEANINGS OF ‘EUROPEANIZE’
by Duncan Currie
43
In the Tory–Lib Dem coalition, the junior partner is running the firm.
48
by Jay Nordlinger
49
by Reihan Salam & Scott Winship
New ‘citizen benefits’ could help restore American competitiveness.
51
by Lou Dolinar
by J. D. Johannes
SECTIONS
Afghans have noticed that we are not the Soviet Union.
35 ELEVENTH-HOUR COUNTERINSURGENCY
by Bing West
We must quickly prepare the Kabul government to win its own war.
37 FATAL CONCEIT
by Justin Logan & Christopher Preble
What’s wrong with nation building.
CITY DESK: CANCERLAND
Richard Brookhiser probes our
relationship with cancer.
The conventional wisdom was wrong, wrong, wrong.
32 THE ROAD TO CHARIKAR
ON THIN ICE
Mario Loyola reviews Skating on
Stilts: Why We Aren’t Stopping
Tomorrow’s Terrorism,
by Stewart A. Baker.
FEATURES
30 OUR REAL GULF DISASTER
PETRONOIA
Iain Murray reviews Oil: Money,
Politics, and Power in the 21st
Century, by Tom Bower.
What’s in a first name?
26 THE LEANER WELFARE STATE
THE GREATLY GHASTLY RAND
Jason Lee Steorts revisits Atlas
Shrugged, by Ayn Rand.
There are lessons to learn and not to learn from the Old Country.
24 ‘BARACK AND I’
A COMPLICATED REBEL
Ronald Radosh reviews Radical:
A Portrait of Saul Alinsky,
by Nicholas von Hoffman.
2
4
39
40
42
52
Letters to the Editor
The Week
The Bent Pin . . . . . . Florence King
The Long View . . . . . . . Rob Long
Poetry . . . . . . . . . Lawrence Dugan
Athwart . . . . . . . . . . . James Lileks
NATIONAL RevIeW (ISSN: 0028-0038) is published bi-weekly, except for the first issue in January, by NATIONAL RevIeW, Inc., at 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and
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letters--ready_QXP-1127940387.qxp 8/11/2010 1:36 PM Page 2
Letters
AUGUST 30 ISSUE; PRINTED AUGUST 12
EDITOR
Richard Lowry
Senior Editors
Richard Brookhiser / Jay Nordlinger
Ramesh Ponnuru / David Pryce-Jones
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Thomas L. Rhodes
Oppression Is Oppression
In the August 16 edition of NR, Claire Berlinski called for the banning of the
burqa in order to solve the problem of “gender apartheid and the subjugation and
abuse of women throughout the Muslim world.” How can removing a symptom
cure the disease?
Ivan M. Lang
Glendale, Wis.
As a sympathetic reader of your generally fine journal, it pains me to write in
complaint about Claire Berlinski’s argument in “Ban the Burqa.” She abandons
the core conservative principle of religious liberty in the name of a politically
expedient but ill-conceived reaction to a current political moment.
On what grounds does Berlinski say we should ban the burqa? Ostensibly,
because women who remain uncovered will become increasingly harassed by
Muslim men. But do we ban miniskirts because a few men might respond boorishly, and, even fewer, aggressively? No. And why? Because to do so is coercive
and reduces the liberty of the woman in question.
I thought conservatives were not only for religious liberty but against governmental social engineering. Apparently not at NAtIONAl RevIew.
Berlinski may assume that the burqa reduces the liberty of Muslim women,
but what of those who choose to wear it as an expression of their faith? She
broaches but eschews this very topic. If it is wrong for Muslim men to coerce
Muslim women, why is it fine for the government to do so?
Berlinski advances the wrong solution to an identified problem. If europe is
worried about the dominance of Muslim immigrants, its governments should
rethink their politically correct ideologies and start reducing the number of visas
to their countries. they can debate in the public sphere and try to show why secularism, Christianity, or some other belief system is better. But coercion by the
government is simply not the answer.
NAtIONAl RevIew should be resistant to governmental restrictions on religious expression. with a few twists of words and some backing by the leftists
who control our social-science departments, one could easily advocate governmental intervention in other practices or communities. Beware the law of unintended consequences.
Will Antonin
Via e-mail
ClAIRe BeRlINSkI ReplIeS: I thank Mr. lang and Mr. Antonin for contributing
to this discussion. to Mr. lang: I didn’t argue that banning the burqa would
solve the problem of gender apartheid in the Islamic world. to Mr. Antonin: I
did not write that it was “fine” for the government to coerce Muslim women. I
wrote that it was an outrage against religious freedom and religious expression.
I moreover said that it was discriminatory, persecutory, and incompatible with
the enlightenment traditions of the west. I fully appreciate your arguments and
find them compelling. But the arguments in favor of banning the thing seem to
me, on balance and from experience, more compelling still. there are no good
solutions to this problem. there are only less bad ones.
FOUNDER
William F. Buckley Jr.
2
|
Letters may be submitted by e-mail to [email protected].
AUGUST 30, 2010
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The Week
n Robert Gibbs complained about “the professional Left.”
These days the White House is looking more and more like the
amateur Left.
n President Obama says that the job of plugging BP’s Gulf oil
well is “just about over,” and the latest report from the administration claims that most of the oil not captured or washed
ashore is gone or diluted. Obama and his lower-downs have an
obvious interest in saying so. They may also be right. Ocean
microbes (especially prevalent in the warm Gulf) claim a lot of
the oil from spills. Some of the most volatile chemicals evaporate. Much of the rest is breaking down into simpler molecules. The estimates come with a load of caveats: They are
estimates, based on models and extrapolations; oil dispersed in
deep water may not break down as quickly as surface oil; even
the rosiest scenario leaves a malignant residue of 53 million
gallons that has or could come ashore—five times the Exxon
Valdez spill. The Gulf oil spill was a disaster. But the media,
with its yen for more and worse, may have made it seem even
greater than it was. So it truly was Obama’s Katrina.
ROMAN GENN
n On consecutive days, a district-court judge in Virginia
allowed a constitutional challenge to Obamacare’s individual mandate to proceed, and 71 percent of Missouri voters
approved a referendum banning the mandate’s enforcement. These two events may have little immediate consequence: Missouri cannot nullify a federal law, and the Virginia
judge merely declined to dismiss the case (though his statement made clear that it is anything but a frivolous exercise;
never before has the federal government forced Americans to
buy something). Constitutional issues aside, the mandate is a
bad idea; it will be especially burdensome to the low- and
moderate-wage households Democrats claim to be helping,
since they will have to accept one-size-fits-all coverage that is
more costly than what many of them are signed up for today.
While there are many things wrong with Obamacare, opponents are right to focus their initial attacks on the individual
mandate, since if it is nullified, by either a court ruling or a
political uprising, the rest of the edifice will become increasingly shaky—increasing Republicans’ chances of knocking it
down after the November elections.
n Responding to questions about Obamacare’s constitutionality at a town-hall meeting, Rep. Pete Stark (D., Calif.) casually replied: “I think that there are very few constitutional
limits that would prevent the federal government from rules
that could affect your private life. . . . The federal government,
yes, can do most anything in this country.” This sweeping
assertion brings to mind Madison’s words from Federalist 45:
“We have heard of the impious doctrine in the Old World, that
the people were made for kings, not kings for the people. Is the
same doctrine to be revived in the New . . . ?”
4
|
See page 10.
n No one can fault Judge Susan Bolton for a lack of imagination. She found that the Arizona immigration law is presumptively unconstitutional because the state might make too many
calls to the federal database that is supposed to, as a matter of
law, apprise states and localities of the legal status of suspect
individuals. (Never mind that in the unlikely event Arizona
overwhelms the system, the feds could just add a position or
two to the 153-person staff.) The law might delay the release
of an arrested legal immigrant while his status is being
checked. (Never mind that law enforcement routinely runs all
sorts of checks on arrestees, looking for everything from childsupport orders to outstanding warrants.) It might detain legal
immigrants from visa-waiver countries who lack proper documentation through no fault of their own. (Never mind that a
visitor from such a country has the duration of his stay stamped
into his passport.) The decision was a tissue of fanciful excuses
for validating the Obama administration’s refusal to enforce
the federal immigration laws. Arizona’s offense is not being in
on the joke.
n An internal memo leaked from U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services revealed that the agency was considering ways to enact “meaningful immigration reform absent
legislative action.” The memo proposed, for example, granting
“deferred action”—that is, an exemption from prosecution—to
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THE WEEK
the tens of thousands of illegal-immigrant high-school graduates who would qualify for citizenship under the DREAM Act
(which, by the way, has failed in Congress several times).
Meanwhile, the national union council that represents the
7,000 employees of the Office of Enforcement and Removal
Operations released a letter declaring a unanimous “vote of
no confidence” in the leadership of its parent agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Director John Morton and
Assistant Director Phyllis Coven have abandoned the
Agency’s core mission of enforcing United States Immigration
Laws and providing for public safety, and have instead directed
their attention to campaigning for programs and policies related to amnesty and the creation of a special detention system
for foreign nationals that exceeds the care and services provided to most United States citizens similarly incarcerated,”
the council wrote. Amnesty is doubly lawless when it is implemented before being passed.
n Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) stirred up an immigration
debate already roiling nicely, thanks to Arizona, with a proposal to amend the 14th Amendment, section 1 of which
declares: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States
Where Outfidels Are In
REG G UTFELD —editor, writer, blogger, TV host,
provocateur, showman, weasel wrangler, outlaw
(thrice convicted of aggravated mopery), future NR
Cruise speaker, and now small businessman—has come
up with a brilliant idea: open a gay bar.
Oh, not just any gay bar, but a Muslim-themed gay bar
catering to outfidels—if you know what I mean—across
the street from the Cordoba House, the infamous “Ground
Zero mosque” to be built near the scandalously still-empty
hole where the World Trade Center once stood. Here’s
Gutfeld:
G
You!
I wanna take you to a gay bar,
I wanna take you to a gay bar,
I wanna take you to a gay bar, gay bar, gay bar.
Let’s start a war, start a nuclear war,
At the gay bar, gay bar, gay bar.
Wow! (Shout out loud)
At the gay bar.
Oh, whoops. Those are the opening
lyrics to “Gay Bar,” by the band Electric
Six.
Here’s Gutfeld, explaining his aim to
“open the first gay bar that caters not
only to the West, but also Islamic gay
men. . . . This is not a joke. I’ve already spoken to a number of investors, who have pledged their support in this
bipartisan bid for understanding and tolerance.”
“As you know,” Gutfeld continues, “the Muslim faith
doesn’t look kindly upon homosexuality, which is why
I’m building this bar. It is an effort to break down barriers
and reduce deadly homophobia in the Islamic world.”
One floor will serve non-alcoholic drinks and it will operate round the clock, for those who still live in a burqa of
shame and need to come in off hours (closing time:
inshallah).
Now when it comes to social conservatism I’m no John
Ashcroft, but I’m not exactly Perez Hilton either. In other
6
|
words, I don’t normally celebrate gay disco openings or
closings.
But I like the idea for three reasons. First, it’s funny (and
funny is good). Second, it turns things back on the supposed Islamic champions of tolerance who are building the
mosque. Among politicized Islamic leaders, tolerance is
something they’re great at demanding and not so great at
demonstrating. The Saudi royal family spends billions
(that’s a guess) on exporting Islam around the globe and
immediately declares opposition to its efforts to be a form
of “Islamophobia” or general bigotry. But try to even talk
about Christianity in Saudi Arabia and you’ll find yourself
in jail—if you’re lucky. We need not belabor the point by
noting at any length that the Islamic world is less than
wholly receptive to synagogue construction.
Last, I admire tough-minded libertarianism. Too often,
libertarianism—or, as it’s called in lower
Manhattan, “social liberalism”—is really
a pathetic ideological mask, used by
people who want to hide their fear of
offending anyone. It can also be an
expression of civilizational low selfesteem—“Who are we to judge?” and all
that nonsense. It can also be a cop-out
to avoid critical thinking or an insidious
means of undermining cultural institutions. In short it’s not always bad, but it
often can be.
Tough-minded libertarians understand that freedom
isn’t merely—or even necessarily—a secular-governmental
product, but rather a cultural institution that needs to be
defended, even if that means offending people. Whatever
you may think of gay bars, they’re not going away in the
freedom-loving West. Pretty much everybody else in
American life has learned how to live-and-let-live with such
places, to one extent or another. If the folks behind
Cordoba House really want to build bridges with the West,
they’ll have to learn to do likewise, particularly on Fatwah
Tuesdays, when the first 72 virgins drink for free.
—JONAH GOLDBERG
AUGUST 30, 2010
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THE WEEK
. . . are citizens of the United States.” The 14th Amendment,
ratified in 1868, aimed to prevent the disfranchisement of
freed slaves; subsequent court rulings held that it applies to
the children of immigrants, whether legal or not. Defending
his proposed reform, Graham told NRO’s Daniel Foster,
“We’re not going to continue to have incentives for people to
break the law.” Yet we followed the policy of birthright citizenship all the years we had no immigration problem. Clearly
it is not the main cause of our current woes. Slack law
enforcement and unwise amnesties—the sort of policies
favored by such as Lindsey Graham—have caused the problem. Graham indeed envisions his amendment as an add-on to
an amnesty deal for the 12 to 14 million illegals already here.
Since amendments require the approval of two-thirds of
Congress and of three-quarters of the states, it is an add-on
that will never be added on—boob bait for bubbas. No sale,
Senator Graham.
TOM WILLIAMS/ROLL CALL/GETTY
n In 1856, Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina attacked
Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the floor of the
Senate with a cane and beat him to unconsciousness. In 2010,
Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota, the presiding officer, snorted
and mugged through a speech by Sen. Mitch McConnell of
Kentucky on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. “This is
not Saturday Night Live, Al,” said an angry McConnell. Later
Franken sent McConnell a written apology, which was accepted. You know what they say on the set of SNL—the first
time as tragedy, the second time as snorting and mugging.
n Congressman Mike
McMahon is a New York
City Democrat who represents all of Staten Island
and parts of Brooklyn. A
couple of Republicans are
competing for the honor of
running against him this
year—and one of them is
Michael Grimm. Grimm
has raised a fair amount
of money, which has the
McMahon campaign concerned. It compiled a list
headed—get this—“Grimm
Jewish Money Q2.” (The
last bit refers to the second
quarter of fundraising.) On
Michael Grimm
the list are more than 80
donors whom the McMahon campaign identifies as Jewish.
How do they know? Do the donors wear yellow stars? The
spokesman for the McMahon campaign, Jennifer Nelson,
explained that McMahon’s finance director is Jewish and
“knows a lot of people in that community.” Nelson released
“Grimm Jewish Money Q2” to the press. She commented,
“Where is Grimm’s money coming from? There is a lot of
Jewish money, a lot of money from people in Florida and
Manhattan, retirees.” The McMahon campaign, embarrassed,
fired Nelson for this comment, and for her release of the list.
Since when is “Jewish money” odd or sinful in New York City
politics?
8
|
n We’d like to congratulate Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) for getting so completely under the skin of Princeton professor Paul
Krugman, who recently used his New York Times column to
call Ryan a “charlatan” and his deficit-reduction plan a “fraud”
that had been “drenched in flimflam sauce.” Krugman did not
present any new criticisms of Ryan’s plan; he merely repeated
the claim that, according to one group of experts, the tax side
of it wouldn’t raise enough revenue to eliminate the deficit.
Ryan simply responded that experts oftentimes disagree when
estimating the effects of policy changes far into the future, and
that he would be amenable to tweaking his tax plan to keep
revenues at their historical average as a percentage of GDP—
this would be sufficient to balance the budget under his plan.
Krugman’s real problem with Ryan’s plan, of course, is that he
thinks Americans have historically paid too little in taxes, and
the budget should be balanced through tax hikes rather than
spending cuts. Many of us have made the opposite case, but
few have done it so effectively as to elicit such a hilariously
self-defeating response from such an influential proponent of
higher taxes.
n It has been a long climb-down for the Democrats on the
issue of new energy legislation. Last year, House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi was able to twist enough arms to get the House
to pass most of what the Democrats wanted: caps on carbon
emissions, renewable-energy mandates for utility companies,
and a grab-bag of subsidies for electric cars and solar-powered
houses—the works. But when the bill got to the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid discovered that it was too much of a
job-killer for the moderate wing of his caucus to stomach:
Gradually he gave up the carbon caps and the renewableenergy mandates until all he had left was the grab-bag of spending, and rising deficit concerns meant even that was no sure
thing. For a moment it looked as though the oil spill would give
the Democrats the momentum they needed to pass an energy
bill, but once again they overplayed their hand, by including provisions that would have killed jobs in Louisiana (Landrieu, D.)
and Alaska (Begich, D.). Chances that the Democrats will pass
a bill before November are dimming, but the economy will not
be safe until they have been completely extinguished.
n Fannie Mae and the Committee to Re-Inflate the Real Estate
Bubble continue their assault on the American economy and
on good sense: In the aftermath of a financial crisis caused by
the default of marginal mortgages, Fannie Mae, the Federal
Housing Administration, and state housing agencies have
teamed up to revive the nothing-down mortgage. Fannie has
agreed to buy mortgages from homebuyers who cannot even put
together the minuscule 3.5 percent down payment required of
most borrowers. Anybody who can scrape together a thousand
bucks and pass the credit check can now get a governmentbacked mortgage. Worse, these borrowers will not even be
required to purchase mortgage insurance, and they will automatically be enrolled for additional mortgage subsidies should
they become unemployed. The default rate for FHA-backed
mortgages is already 14 percent. If housing prices should
decline, even by less than 1 percent, practically all of these
$1,000-down buyers will be underwater, and therefore likely to
default. Fannie Mae’s twin brother, Freddie Mac, just went
begging to Congress for another $1.8 billion in bailout money,
AUGUST 30, 2010
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THE WEEK
arguing that it needs this—because housing prices are going to
fall. Fannie, meet Freddie.
n John Maynard Keynes famously wrote that any sort of
spending—even paying people to dig holes in the ground—
“will increase . . . the real national dividend of useful goods
and services.” But could he have imagined that giving coke to
monkeys, tracing the historic roots of dog domestication, or
sending scientists to the Indian Ocean to collect ants would be
considered good ways to stimulate America’s economy? All
these and more are on a long list of questionable projects that
were funded by last year’s $862 billion stimulus bill, and all
have ostensibly beneficial purposes: The first study, for example, is meant to find out how cocaine affects monkeys’ behavior (though since they already spend all their time chattering
excitedly, it’s not clear how anyone can tell). Unfortunately,
official estimates say the cocaine project created less than onehalf of a job, and the vaunted multiplier effect must be small,
as the monkeys are unlikely to buy anything with their grant
money except more cocaine. To be sure, it is easy to make
scholarly research sound silly, and studying coke-snorting
monkeys may be scientifically valuable. But only Barack
Obama, and possibly J. M. Keynes, would suggest that it
stimulates the economy.
JEFF MALET
n President Obama went to Michigan to drive a Chevy Volt,
General Motors’ new hybrid car. At $41,000, the Volt costs too
much. Washington will make it more attractive by offering a
$7,500 rebate. But that subsidy shifts the cost to the taxpayer,
who is already in for the substantial amount that General
Motors, courtesy of Uncle Sam, paid to develop the Volt. Since
the market, such as it is, for pricey green cars tends to be uppermiddle-class types, the commoners are being made to help
their betters. And there are already hybrid and all-electric
cars out there: the Toyota Prius, the Nissan Leaf. So the other
beneficiary of the Volt is the United Auto Workers, for which
General Motors acts as a front man. Politicians can make
things the public doesn’t want forever, if they have infinite
resources and infinite patience. But the deficit numbers
already tell us that resources are limited, and the polls suggest that voters, if not politicians, may soon have a patience
shortage.
n Rep. Maxine Waters (D.,
Calif.) is the latest House
Democrat to face ethics
charges. The ethics charges
against Charlie Rangel,
combined with the fact that
both Rangel and Waters are
black, have led some members of the Congressional
Black Caucus to complain
that this is about race. In
Waters’s case, it is, but not
in the way the CBC is in sinuating. Waters is charged
with improperly using her
office to benefit OneUnited,
a minority-owned bank—
10
|
“improperly” because one of the minorities who owned
OneUnited was Waters’s husband, and he held over $150,000
worth of stock in the bank when Waters intervened to arrange a
meeting between its president and the Treasury officials charged
with overseeing the federal bailout of the banking system.
OneUnited received a $12 million allocation from the Troubled
Asset Relief Program, despite being a poor candidate for a
bailout: The bank has so far missed all but one of its scheduled
dividend payments. Waters’s excuse, then, is that she is not a
crook, but was merely wasting taxpayer money on an expensive
boondoggle.
n President Obama has prescribed a surge for Afghanistan.
Like the surge in Iraq, this surge requires the trust and help of
the local population, who will be killed by extremists if their
support of the Coalition becomes known. Hugely complicating, if not defeating, our effort has been the release of tens
of thousands of classified documents by a group called
WikiLeaks: a group of people who fancy themselves righteous
whistleblowers. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has said
that his goal is to “end the war in Afghanistan.” The released
documents include the names and locations of many Afghans
who have aided the Coalition. The Taliban is studying these
documents closely, vowing death to informants. As a Taliban
spokesman said, “America is not a good protector of spies.”
There is now “a panic among many Afghans,” in the words of
one report. WikiLeaks has done grave damage to the American
interest, and grave damage to the Afghan people. The person
or persons who gave the classified material to WikiLeaks, of
course, have done the same. Whether or not WikiLeaks is
beyond our legal reach, the leakers presumably are not. The
U.S. government should find them and throw the heaviest
possible book at them.
n Al-Qaeda has a new chief of operations, according to the
FBI, and he knows the U.S. very well. Adnan Shukrijumah,
now 35 years old, came here as a child from his native
Saudi Arabia. He lived in Brooklyn, where his father was
imam of a mosque. Then the family moved to Florida, where
Shukrijumah took some college courses, and where his mother still lives. Shukrijumah left the U.S. early in 2001 and was
tagged by the FBI as a threat in 2003. Now thought to be in
the Afghanistan–Pakistan border badlands, Shukrijumah has
been decisively identified from old videos and photographs
by would-be New York subway bomber Najibullah Zazi, who
had met him at a training camp, and by 9/11 mastermind
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, his former boss. Shukrijumah’s
promotion comes with some risks to his health. Until recently he shared operational planning duties with two colleagues,
but both fell victim to U.S. drone attacks. Let’s hope for a
trifecta.
n The Taliban ambushed a team of aid workers hiking into the
roadless Parun Valley in northern Afghanistan. Seven men and
three women were murdered; two were doctors. Among the dead:
Tom Little, a 61-year-old American optometrist who had lived
in Afghanistan for 35 years and raised three daughters there;
Dr. Karen Woo, a 36-year-old British surgeon, engaged to be
married. They had planned to treat cataracts, and conduct dental
clinics. A Taliban spokesman said they had maps and a Bible,
AUGUST 30, 2010
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THE WEEK
and thus were spies and infidels. The Taliban are liars, as well as
cowards and murderers: The dead worked for the International
Assistance Mission, a Christian aid mission that has been in the
country for decades and does not proselytize. “Is it time to quit
now?” said Dirk Frans, the group’s director, meaning, No.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. And the
Taliban’s scripture? There is no God but Allah, and he says you
don’t need eyes or teeth.
n News Corp., Rupert Murdoch’s worldwide media empire,
is scaling back its operations in China for much the same reason that Google starting having second thoughts about the
Middle Kingdom: too much state interference. It is selling a
controlling interest in its television businesses to China Media
Capital, an investment fund run by the Chinese government.
Murdoch apparently has concluded that if Beijing is going to
act like a senior partner, he may as well make it one.
n Hip-hop singer Wyclef Jean is running for president of
Haiti, and has filed election papers. Haiti is Jean’s native
land, though he has lived in the U.S. since childhood. Since
2005, he has been principal of a charitable foundation helping Haitians, but the foundation has paid him large sums
of money and been sloppy about tax filings. Jean’s personal finances are also in disarray: He owes the IRS more
than $2 million, according to federal tax-lien documents.
According to a PBS report on the upcoming election, “The
winner will oversee spending of billions of dollars in international aid pouring into the country.” Whether Mr. Jean is
the right person for such a post must be left to the judgment
of Haitian voters, but surely some
measure of cynicism is justified.
Leftist movie actor Sean Penn,
who has been busy in Haitian
earthquake relief, has declared
himself “suspicious” of Jean’s
presidential bid, and mocked
the “vulgar entourage of vehicles” of the candidate’s first
campaign tour. As if the
wretched Haitians didn’t have
enough to cope with, now they
must endure dueling celebrity
egos.
WENN
n The Washington Post Company has unloaded the disintegrating Newsweek on Sidney Harman, an entrepreneur and
philanthropist, for $1. Newsweek is a money-hemorrhaging
mess that has lost more than half of its readers in recent years.
It may be that the philanthropist in Mr. Harman bought
Newsweek, but the entrepreneur in him must know that he
paid too much.
n In Indianapolis, police sergeant Matthew Grimes was asked
to give a presentation to a church audience. The pastor had
something up his sleeve: He would stage a fight between two
black men, to see how this white officer would respond. The
12
|
fight was staged: Grimes intervened, was thrown to the
ground, and drew his Taser gun. At that point, people said,
essentially, “Just kidding!” Grimes was injured during this
stunt, and was treated for back spasms at a hospital. We hope
everyone is happy. By the way, how do you test whether a
pastor has an ounce of sense in his head?
n Time was, an American kid could get a first lesson in capitalist enterprise by running a lemonade stand. A child may,
of course, still open a stand, but the lesson learned today will
more likely concern the moon-booted arrogance of regulationcrazed petty government officials. So it transpired for sevenyear-old Julie Murphy in Portland, Ore., who set up her stand
at a local art fair. County health inspectors asked to see her
restaurant license. When the lass could not produce one, they
threatened her with a $500 fine. Confronted by a reporter, the
state’s Food-Borne Illness Prevention Program Manager extruded the following: “When you go to a public event and set
up shop, you’re suddenly engaging in commerce. The fact that
you’re small-scale I don’t think is relevant.” Was the FBIPPM
ever a child? Or did he escape fully formed from one of the
more depressing novels of Charles Dickens?
n The 20th century was not kind to Thomas Molnar. Born in
Budapest, he was educated in a Hungarian town that had been
stripped from Hungary by the post–World War I settlement. As
a college student in Belgium he was interned by the Nazis in
Dachau (his crime: Catholic student activism). As the Forties
ended, he saw his native country go Communist. Then, 40
years of exile. Molnar anatomized the intellectual in the modern era, ever driven by the quest for novelty to undermine his
own accomplishments; he taught; he wrote for NATIONAL
RevIeW. In person he could be charming, but the sadness of
displacement always clung to him. The fall of Communism
allowed him to go home, to honors and last professorships.
Dead on the eve of his 89th birthday. R.I.P.
n John Callahan severed his spine in a drunken car accident at
the age of 21. A stubborn alcoholic, he did not go to AA for six
more years. Then, in his wheelchair, he became a cartoonist,
guiding a pen wedged into his right hand with the shoulder
motions of his left arm. He blasphemed the religious upbringing of his youth, but the blasphemies that stung were aimed at
the faux pieties of niceness. They were false counselors, and he
was Job. “Please help me,” says the Callahan bum’s sign, “I am
blind and black, but not musical.” His warmest fans were cripples and the ill. Dead at 59, from complications of quadriplegia. When life stinks, it stinks hard. You tell ’em. R.I.P.
THE MOSQUE CONTROVERSY
Wrong Man, Wrong Place
FeISAL ABDUL RAUF, the Islamic cleric associated
with the Ground Zero mosque project, is not quite what he
seems. And neither is the project.
Rauf presents himself as a moderate. There is reason for
doubt. “The issue of terrorism is a very complex question,” he
says. In other words: It’s complicated. And so is his relationship with Islamic extremists. He has published a book in
I
MAM
AUGUST 30, 2010
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FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/GETTY
cooperation with two affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood, an
openly terroristic organization. He refuses to acknowledge
that Hamas is a terrorist organization, and he minimizes
terrorist atrocities. He calls the United States an “accessory”
to 9/11.
And yet there was New York mayor Michael Bloomberg,
celebrating Rauf and what he stands for, and having the chutzpah to lecture critics of the mosque project about respecting
the prerogatives of the owners of the site. Now we know what
it takes to get Mike Bloomberg to discover property rights; at
least something good has come out of this mess. And that’s not
all: the Anti-Defamation League, which too often has acted
as the cat’s-paw of the Left, has taken a commendable stand
against the project.
this dispute has been presented as a question of whether an
Islamic center and mosque should be built in proximity to the
scene of the worst act of Islamic terrorism—and the worst act
of political violence—ever committed on U.S. soil. But at
least as germane to the dispute is the question of whether these
particular parties ought to be doing so. the fact that an apologist for terrorists and an associate of terrorist-allied organizations is proceeding with this provocation is indecent. We have
thousands of mosques in the United States, and who knows
how many Islamic cultural centers in New York City. We do
not need this one, in this place, built by these people. We’re all
stocked up on Hamas apologists, thanks very much.
Our frustration with this state of affairs is multiplied by the
fact that Ground Zero remains a gaping wound in the middle
of lower Manhattan, rather than having been rebuilt to match
the World trade Center’s former glory. If Mayor Bloomberg
is really so anxious to expedite the building of new projects in
the financial district, perhaps he’d like to help do something
about that, first.
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf
LAW
Judge Walker’s Phony Facts
was evident since last year that Judge Vaughn Walker, of
the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, was on a selfimposed mission to establish a federal constitutional right
to same-sex marriage, and thereby to overturn California’s
Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment passed by the people of the state in 2008. From his decision to have a “trial” of
the “facts” in the case rather than proceed straightaway to legal
arguments about the constitutional issues (a highly unusual
choice that surprised even the plaintiffs’ attorneys), to his
attempt to stage the trial as a nationally televised extravaganza
(thankfully brought to a halt by the Supreme Court), to his
unconcealed bias in favor of the plaintiffs in virtually every
aspect of the proceedings, Judge Walker had long been preparing us for a bald-faced usurpation of political power.
What Walker did not prepare us for, however, was the jawdropping experience of reading his sophomorically reasoned
opinion. Of the 135 pages of the opinion proper, only the last
27 contain anything resembling a legal argument; the rest is
divided between a summary of the trial proceedings and the
judge’s “findings of fact.” His determinations of law seem but
an afterthought—conclusory, almost casually thin, raising
more questions than they answer.
On what grounds does Judge Walker hold that the considered
moral judgment of the whole history of human civilization—
that only men and women are capable of marrying each other—
is nothing but a “private moral view” that provides no
conceivable “rational basis” for legislation? Who can extract an
answer from his muddled reasoning? Judge Walker’s wholesale
smearing of the majority of Californians as irrational bigots
blindly clinging to mere tradition suggests that he has run out
of arguments and has nothing left but his reflexes.
But the deeper game Judge Walker is playing unfolds in the
many pages of “fact finding” that make up the large middle of
his ruling. there, through highly prejudicial language that
bears little relation to any fact, the judge has smuggled in his
own moral beliefs—placing them in precisely the part of
his opinion that would normally be owed a large measure of
deference in the appellate courts, which are meant to accept the
lower court’s factual findings and rule only on questions of
law.
to take one example: It is hardly an incontrovertible fact that
“Proposition 8 places the force of law behind stigmas against
gays and lesbians.” But there it is in the opinion, as finding
No. 58. With “facts” like these, and appellate judges disinclined to question them, Judge Walker plainly hopes to propel
this case toward a victory for same-sex marriage, regardless of
how transparently weak his legal conclusions are.
But the judges who ultimately take up this appeal—the justices of the Supreme Court, not of the eccentric Ninth
Circuit—should not be buffaloed by Judge Walker’s invented
“facts.” Still less should they confirm the specious legal conclusions he has extracted from them.
I
t
EDITOR’S NOTE: The next issue of NATIONAL REVIEW
will appear in three weeks.
14
|
AUGUST 30, 2010
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Cops, and Robbers
The public requires protection from public-safety unions
BY DANIEL FOSTER
July, the Fraternal Order of Police
Lodge 103 in Bay City, Mich., used
funds from its dues-paying members
to erect a pair of billboards—one on
Saginaw and Columbus, another on Euclid near Fisher—designed to instill fear
in the 35,000 Michiganders the union’s
officers were sworn to protect.
The billboards warned that unlike Bay
City’s finest, city hall couldn’t prevent
residents from being “Beaten,” “Shot,”
“Stabbed,” or “Robbed,” and confronted
passers-by with an image of a masked
man pointing an automatic pistol at them.
City commissioners, facing a $1.66 million budget deficit, had asked the city’s
eight public-sector unions—which include two separate Teamsters locals—to
shed 10.8 percent in labor costs to avoid
job losses. Only the firemen met the July 1
deadline for the cuts, having struck a tentative deal at the eleventh hour. The other
seven were hit with layoffs—including the
police, who saw five officers pulled from
their force of 57, and who were given until
the end of August to ratify new contracts if
they didn’t want the reduction in force to
become permanent.
It’s a story that is playing itself out in
cities, counties, and states across the country. Hoboken, n.J., is planning to lay off
18 cops, eliminate top-brass positions, and
civilianize a number of non-patrol police
I
16
n
|
functions. Akron, Ohio, is eliminating holiday overtime pay for emergency-service
workers and reassigning a number of police to school districts, where costs can be
“shared.” East St. Louis, Ill., one of America’s most dangerous cities, is trying to
stave off police and fire reductions in
force with accounting tricks such as salary
deferrals. In perhaps the most dramatic example, the gang-ridden city of Oakland,
Calif., laid off 80 police officers—a full 10
percent of its force—in an effort to balance the city budget.
Everywhere, cash-strapped councils
and legislatures in the second year of postcrisis America are struggling to bring outlays in line with a shrunken and stagnant
revenue base after decades of metastasizing growth in public-sector labor costs.
And they are being forced to take a hard
look at their salary and pension obligations to police and firefighters—obligations that are both prime drivers of
structural deficits and as close a thing as
there is in local governance to a sacred
cow.
And the fuzz aren’t taking it lying
down. In Akron, Fraternal Order of Police
local president Paul Hlynsky has engaged
in a public war of words with mayor Don
Plusquellic, accusing him of lying and
negotiating in bad faith. In a move to rival
that of the Bay City police union, Oakland
police chief Anthony Batts responded to
the layoffs by ticking off a list of 44 situations to which his reduced force would no
longer be able to respond—and it wasn’t
just cats up trees and noise-ordinance violations. The list included felonies like burglary and grand theft, extortion and fraud.
Throughout these crises, the unions
have succeeded in casting the choice as
one between public safety and layoffs,
avoiding reductions in, or even talk of,
their extravagant compensation packages.
According to the Bureau of Economic
Analysis, in 2008, state and local governments spent $1.1 trillion on publicemployee compensation, a number that
accounts for fully one-half of their total
spending. State and local employees earn,
hour for hour, 34 percent more in wages
than do workers in the private sector, and
enjoy far more generous health-insurance,
sick-leave, and pension benefits.
The public/private disparity is especially stark when one focuses on publicsafety compensation in places such as
Oakland; police and firemen have accounted for about 75 percent of expenditures from the city’s general fund over the
last five years. Average total compensation for an officer in Oakland—a city in
which the median family earns $47,000—
is $162,000 per year.
As with most public-sector workers, a
major—and opaque—piece of emergencyservices compensation comes in the form
of lifelong pensions.
“Public-safety workers tend to receive
the most generous public-employee pensions,” says Josh Barro, a Manhattan
Institute fellow and expert on state and
local finance. “They are based on a significantly shorter career—it is not atypical to
see police and fire pensions based on 20
years of service—and they also tend to be
more generous as a percentage of salary.”
Other laws make the payouts even more
generous. In new York, for instance, a
“presumptive disability” law makes it
easy for firemen to secure lifetime, taxfree pensions at three-quarters pay; when
examining a fireman for the purpose of
determining whether he has a workrelated disability, a doctor is required to
start with the assumption that certain illnesses are job-related even if there is no
evidence that they are. A fireman from a
Bronx ladder company who develops a
lung disorder will qualify for disability
retirement even if it’s unclear whether he
developed his impairment from smoke
AUGUST 30, 2010
ROMAN GENN
3col_QXP-1127940387.qxp 8/10/2010 9:27 PM Page 16
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inhalation on the job, or from his twopack-a-day cigarette habit.
The “presumptive disability” bonanza
is sometimes exacerbated by abuse. In
July, the New York Post told the story of
John C. McLaughlin, a 55-year-old former
FDNY lieutenant who retired in 2001 with
an $86,000-a-year disability pension, after
it was determined that he was an asthmatic with diminished lung capacity. This
despite the fact that McLaughlin is an
accomplished triathlete who regularly
competes in long-distance races.
McLaughlin is hardly alone. An astonishing 80 percent of 2010 FDNY retirees
have qualified for disability benefits.
How did police and fire unions score
such a sweet deal? Part of it is institutional. Since public-safety unions can, by law,
virtually never strike, nearly all of them
take advantage of their right to force “interest arbitration,” wherein an ostensibly
neutral third party settles contract disputes
between labor and government. As such
handed union deals. . . . Then, as economic storm clouds gathered, he shifted gears
and cut spending—while still trying to
appease the unions.
Notoriously, one such deal guaranteed
almost $300 million in pension benefits
over 40 years to thousands of employees
based on salary increases they never received. The giveaway became known as
“Phantom COLAs,” for the cost-of-living
raises that were never paid. And even
when Montgomery’s teachers agreed to
give up cost-of-living raises last year,
about two-thirds of them continued to
receive step increases of up to 4 percent.
As a result of their different collectivebargaining policies, the two demographically similar jurisdictions have “parted
ways.” Montgomery County is “lurching
under the weight of irresponsible governance, unsustainable commitments and
political spinelessness,” while Fairfax,
“though facing tough choices[,] . . . has a
brighter future.”
policy, where the elite consensus—from
editorial boards to the Obama administration—is moving away from teacher heroworship and the fetishization of things like
class size (a preoccupation that happened
to pad the coffers of the unions) and
toward teacher accountability. But fiscal
crisis notwithstanding, this has yet to happen in public safety.
Instead, public-safety unions have been
able to buffalo the public into thinking that
keeping the peace requires breaking the
bank. What the public sees is scary billboards and lists of unenforceable statutes,
and not, for instance, the fact that the
Oakland Police Department backed out of
a job-saving deal that would have required
officers to make a mere 9 percent pension
contribution, because the city could guarantee only one year, and not three, without
further layoffs.
That police unions say they want to
avoid layoffs yet act so as to make them
necessary should leave little doubt that
Public-safety unions have been able to buffalo
the public into thinking that keeping the peace requires
breaking the bank.
arrangements became commonplace
through the 20th century, police and fire
unions began to see their compensation
rise faster than that of non-uniformed public employees. The availability of legally
binding arbitration meant that unions had
less incentive to deal directly with their
government employers, while elected officials facing angry voters could blame
expensive settlements on the imposition
of the arbitrators.
The effect of forced arbitration on the
fiscal health of local government is starkly illustrated in a recent comparative study
of Fairfax County, Va., and Montgomery
County, Md., undertaken in a refreshing
Washington Post staff editorial from May:
Virginia law denies public employees
collective bargaining rights; that’s helped
Fairfax resist budget-busting wage and
benefit demands. As revenue dipped
two years ago, Fairfax officials froze all
salaries for county government and
school employees with little ado. By contrast, Montgomery leaders were badly
equipped to cope with recession. County
Executive Isiah Leggett took office pro posing fat budgets and negotiating open18
|
But beyond institutions, political—and
even cultural—norms play a role in the
special status of police and fire compensation. For one thing, cops and firemen are
swing voters.
“Their unions are more powerful in the
sense that they are more politically heterodox,” says Barro. “Teachers’ unions are
nearly unanimous in their political support
for Democratic officeholders. Fire and
police unions split their loyalties more,
and are therefore in a better position to
extract support from politicians.”
“Republicans don’t view it as a waste of
time to try to make police unions happy,”
he adds.
And if public-safety workers are split in
their political allegiances, the elected class
is unified in its deference to men and
women in uniform, especially after a
decade whose defining acts of heroism
were performed by cops and firemen from
New York and New Jersey. Politicians are
loath to be seen as trying to nickel-anddime our heroes.
Legislators have been able to see the
sense through the sentimentality before,
most notably in the case of education
their priority is to preserve the privileges
of their vested senior members at the
expense of both the rookies who are usually first out the door and the communities
they serve.
In solving the immediate crisis posed by
the unions’ intransigence, state and local
governments facing structural deficits
must be allowed to lower labor costs without endangering public safety—by reducing compensation across the board instead
of laying off staff. In most jurisdictions,
governments can’t renegotiate the terms
of existing union contracts, even in fiscal
emergencies. This must change. Better
yet, states should follow the lead of Virginia and ban collective bargaining by
public employees.
We must take care that public-safety
workers are not allowed to hide behind the
badge. That they are our heroes does not
excuse them from taking part in the difficult choices that must be made to restore
solvency to state and local governments. If
the unions won’t let them, and the elected
class won’t make them, then the citizenry
must shame them. Somebody must watch
the watchmen.
AUGUST 30, 2010
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BY JOHN O’SULLIVAN
J
ust days before reaching its land-
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spending cuts had been leaked to the
media. One potential cut had aroused
particular interest: withdrawing universal free milk for children under five. A
similar proposal 40 years ago created
mayhem and gave its ministerial proposer, Margaret thatcher, then secretary
for education and science, her first hostile
sobriquet: “Milk snatcher.” Would a similar slur now be invented for a prime minister who has so assiduously distanced
himself from her?
undeterred, Willetts set about dutifully
explaining the presence of “free” milk on
the list of potential cuts needed to shrink a
fiscal deficit equal to about 12 percent of
GDP—when Cameron changed the policy.
In mid-interview the BBC interviewer told
him Downing street had just announced
that universal free milk was no longer on
the list of potential spending cuts.
Bold spending cuts are the “Excelsior”
on the banner of this government. they
are also the glue that holds it together.
they are the reason David Cameron
enjoys the admiration of American conservatives, including some who differ
strongly with him on social and foreign
policy. And they are the principal justification (others include radical conservative reforms in education and welfare) on
the tory right for embracing a long list of
policy concessions to their Lib Dem partners and, more broadly, to progressive
and establishment opinion.
20
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Large and small, these concessions
arrive almost daily. What follows is a
modest sample:
• Almost the first major decision made
by the government—and its first major
defeat—was its agreement to transfer regulatory powers over the financial-services
industry from Britain to the European
union. the powers include tough regulations on hedge funds, even though
these are concentrated overwhelmingly in
London. (Not coincidentally, the City of
London—i.e., the financial district—pays
approximately 12 percent of u.K. income
taxes.) Given the desire of France,
Germany, and the Eurocracy to subject
“Anglo-saxon” market liberalism to
government control, investors will increasingly prefer to place their money
elsewhere. this decision, which signals
the gradual decline of London as a world
financial center, was trumpeted by the
government as a victory because the Eu
regulatory body will be based in London.
(Interestingly, tim Geithner and the u.s.
treasury urged the Brits to resist these
regulations as best they could. this is a
very rare example of the u.s. government’s seeing a risk to American interests
in European integration.)
Other decisions to transfer powers from
London to Brussels have continued at
irregular intervals. these include:
• London’s “opting in” to the European
Investigation Order, which will allow
prosecutors from any Eu country to bug
the phone calls of British citizens, monitor
their bank accounts, and gain access to
their DNA if they suspect them of committing a crime in their countries, even if
the alleged offense is not a crime in the
u.K. Opting in was, incidentally, voluntary; Denmark opted out. And it seems to
contradict both the tories’ manifesto
promise to make no further transfers of
power to Brussels and their pledge to
restore civil liberties lost under Labour.
• Chancellor George Osborne’s budget
raised the capital-gains tax on higherincome taxpayers by ten percentage
points, to 28 percent. Measured tax in creases can be justified in the present budgetary climate, but the prime minister’s
justification rankled: “there is a very
big difference between the capital gains
that someone pays on, say, a second
home—which is not necessarily a splendid investment for the whole economy—there’s a difference between that
and actual investment in business assets.”
But people invest in second homes as nest
eggs rather than as residences. they are
saving for their old age, hoping to stay off
welfare. And they tend to be tory voters.
• unusually, Osborne has made clear that
the full cost of trident—Britain’s nuclear
deterrent—will have to be met from the
Ministry of Defence’s budget rather than
from national finances. the MOD budget
itself is likely to be cut by 10 percent at a
time when increases in the budgets for
health and overseas aid are “ring-fenced.”
Because trident’s cost is estimated at $30
billion over a five-year period, this means
draconian reductions elsewhere in the
defense budget. Among those signaled
through press leaks are: cutting 7,000 airmen and 295 aircraft from the Royal Air
Force (leaving it with fewer than 200 aircraft); reducing the navy by two submarines, three amphibious ships, and more
than 2,000 sailors; disbanding a 5,000strong army brigade (after Afghanistan);
transferring the Royal Marines from a
weakened navy to army control, and perhaps merging them with the special Air
service; and—in an especially symbolic
move—selling one of the Royal Navy’s
two new aircraft carriers to India. One
prominent figure will be disconcerted by
these defense reductions: hawkish defense
secretary Liam Fox, who has never been
a favorite with the Cameroons. But he is
putting up a good struggle launching guided leaks (see immediately above) and fighting hand to hand in the Whitehall trenches.
• Justice secretary Kenneth Clarke proposes to axe the prison-building program
and rely more on “non-custodial” sentencing in the community. this reverses
the previous Labour government’s plan to
build five more prisons, ignores pledges
in the tory manifesto supporting the
Labour policy, and glides smoothly over
the evidence from u.K. crime statistics
that “prison works.” But be of good cheer,
tories: It fulfills a pledge in the Liberal
Democrat manifesto.
• From 2016, it was announced by the
Housing Ministry, every new home is to
be powered by a green-energy plant to offset its environmental impact. If properties
do not reach a standard where their own
green-energy production offsets their
emissions, developers would be charged a
tariff of around $22,500 by the local council. this would go in part towards a “buyout fund” to finance the construction of
wind farms, solar panels, or geothermal
technologies in the local area, which
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would supply the new development with
green power. This would also add $22,500
to the cost of every new house. What that,
coupled with the tax hike on second-home
capital gains, would do to the housing
market does not inspire optimism.
• Above all, the Tories are committed
by their coalition agreement to pass legislation changing the electoral system from
U.S.-style “first past the post” to the
Alternative Vote. This system, in which
voters cast alternative votes that are
counted if their first choice falls out of
contention, would greatly benefit the Lib
Dems, making them the permanent governing “center party” in a multi-party
spectrum. But it would almost certainly
mean that the Tories would never again
win a governing majority—and that in the
next election they would lose seats from
their present minority. The same legislation also proposes a fixed five-year parliamentary term—with elections any
earlier requiring a 55 percent majority of
MPs—to make Cameron and Nick Clegg,
the Lib Dem leader and deputy prime
minister, feel secure from rebellion and
defections this time around.
Such proposals and the “progressive”
priorities they reveal are deeply unsettling
to non-Cameroon conservatives, though
they are offset to some degree by concessions exacted from the Lib Dems. Energy
Secretary Chris Huhne, a Lib Dem, has
recently had to explain—to the surprise of
all—how he has always seen a place for
nuclear power in national energy production. Some Lib Dems dislike the Tories’
school and welfare proposals (though others independently proposed similar ideas
before the election). But the balance of
concessions falls clearly in the direction
of the Lib Dems and the more excitably
dogmatic Cameroons.
The lesser justification for this bias is that
the Lib Dems are in greater need of such
concessions. Their precipitate fall in the
polls—one showed them down to 12 percent support, from 23 percent at the election—means they need help. So the Tories
must continue to yield to them, lest they
leave the coalition to preserve their seats.
But why should the Tories worry about the
Lib Dems’ losing seats if, as seems likely,
they would lose most of them to the Tories?
The answer to that lies in the greater
justification advanced by Cameron: The
coalition is necessary since it alone can
push through the spending cuts needed to
restore Britain’s budgetary and financial
22
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stability. A Week item in the last issue
of NATioNAL REViEW listed the economic exaggerations in that proposition.
Massive spending cuts were on the agenda of every political party because the
markets and the rating agencies were
demanding them. There is no alternative
to them. indeed, in March the Labour
government itself proposed cuts that, in
the words of its chancellor, Alastair
Darling, would be “deeper and tougher”
than those of Margaret Thatcher. What the
coalition has done is to add about 5 percentage points to Labour’s 20 percent
reduction over four years—a useful but
hardly decisive difference.
Now, however, a political weakness has
been added by the televised abandonment
of David Willetts: Will the cuts actually
materialize when the going gets tough? it
suddenly looks less certain.
Listen to Michael Brown, a former
Tory MP who is now a columnist for the
Independent and who knows the ways
of government: “Across Whitehall, this
week, under-secretaries and ministers of
state may now be less brave as they try to
second-guess Downing Street’s likely
reaction to any bold proposal they might
instruct officials to prepare. ‘Minister, i’m
not sure this will go down too well if No
10 gets to hear about this’ . . .”
if the cuts are gradually whittled down
by such nervousness, the Tory case for the
coalition will shrink with them. if, however, ministers press ahead with them,
they will face bitter struggles and deep
unpopularity. The political logic of this
second course for Tories is that they
should spend the next five years trudging
through the Slough of Despond to enter
an election fought on a new electoral system that will deny them a majority even if
they have somehow managed to become
popular. “Very brave of you, if i may say
so, prime minister,” as Sir Humphrey
Appleby used to say.
We should therefore assume that the
Cameroons at least have an escape hatch.
That could only be a permanent coalition
with the Lib Dems and the creation of a
new Center party, facilitated by the defection of either left-wing Lib Dems or rightwing Tories or, more probably, both.
After the election, NR advised the Tory
Right to establish an internal caucus within the Tory parliamentary party to protect
the long-term interests and traditions of
British conservatism. That still looks like
good advice.
The Many
Meanings of
‘Europeanize’
There are lessons to learn
and not to learn from the
Old Country
BY DUNCAN CURRIE
2008, with the rubble from Wall
Street’s collapse still smoldering,
pundits on both sides of the Atlantic
trumpeted the death of Americanstyle capitalism. in 2010, after the Greek
debt crisis, journalists and scholars have
been penning obituaries for European
social democracy. Meanwhile, Republicans continue to warn that President
obama’s agenda would “Europeanize”
the United States.
But what exactly does that mean?
Western Europe is hardly a monolith.
Taxes are low in ireland but high in
Norway, and labor markets are much
more flexible in Denmark than in
France. The region has innovation leaders (Switzerland, Sweden) and innovation laggards (italy, Spain). Though
allusions to “European health care” were
ubiquitous during the obamacare debate,
health regimes vary significantly from
country to country. All provide some type
of universal insurance coverage, but the
Swiss and Dutch systems are far more
market-oriented than those in Britain
and Scandinavia.
Across the pond, Washington has
severely distorted health-care costs and
incentives through tax subsidies (the
employer exclusion) and governmentrun programs (Medicare, Medicaid). The
public sector’s share of total U.S. health
spending is already hovering around
50 percent. America does not guarantee
universal coverage—yet—but it does not
have a genuine free-market system,
either. instead, it relies on a wildly inefficient third-party-payer scheme, which
has fueled rampant cost inflation. A 2008
McKinsey & Co. study found that “the
United States spends $650 billion more
on health care than might be expected
given the country’s wealth and the experience of comparable members of the
I
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AUGUST 30, 2010
Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD).”
This is not meant to disparage
Amer ican medicine—which remains
a wellspring of innovative drugs and
technologies—but rather to put the debate over “Europeanization” in context.
The U.S. economic model emerged from
unique historical, ethno-cultural, and
geographical circumstances. Yet in contemporary policy debates, transatlantic
differences are often exaggerated or misunderstood. Indeed, America’s vaunted
commitment to free markets and limited
government is less robust than is commonly believed.
That was true before Barack Obama
entered the White House. Even after one
controls for income inequality, a 2008
OECD study found, household taxes
are more progressive in the U.S. than
they are in any Western European country save Ireland. The World Bank and
PricewaterhouseCoopers reckon that,
nearly ten percentage points below the
weighted OECD average (excluding the
U.S.) in 1988 to more than eight points
above it in 2009. America is the lone
OECD member, Carroll adds, that taxes
its multinational corporations on their
foreign earnings from labor and services
rendered at a rate greater than 30 percent.
In general, those earnings are not subject
to U.S. taxation until they are repatriated.
The Obama administration wants to scrap
this policy, arguing (correctly) that it encourages U.S. multinationals to keep their
profits abroad. Yet Carroll emphasizes that,
given America’s steep corporate-tax rate,
the deferral rule “helps place U.S. com panies on a more level playing field
with their foreign competitors.” Most
OECD countries now have “territorial”
tax systems, meaning they don’t tax their
domestically based companies on their
earnings from labor and services rendered
abroad.
While U.S. corporate taxes are par-
Norway, 19.6 percent in Finland, 19.5
percent in Sweden, and 18.2 percent in
Denmark.
America’s corporate-tax regime has
skewed investment decisions, hindered
capital formation, and suppressed wages.
It has also contributed to excessive leveraging on Wall Street: A 2005 Con gressional Budget Office study found
that the effective tax rate on equityfinanced corporate capital income is 42.5
percentage points higher than that on
debt-financed corporate capital income.
In an era of increased capital mobility
that will demand increased financial prudence, the U.S. should seek to reduce
these distortions and bring its overall
statutory rate down to a much lower
level.
If that requires introducing a federal
value-added tax to recoup lost revenue,
the tradeoff is probably worth making. A
2008 OECD working paper concluded
that corporate taxes are “most harmful
America’s corporate-tax regime has hindered
capital formation, skewed investment decisions,
and suppressed wages.
through May 2009, the average total tax
rate on U.S. companies was 46.3 percent,
while the equivalent rates were 44.9 percent in Germany, 41.6 percent in Norway,
39.3 percent in the Netherlands, 35.9 percent in the United Kingdom, 29.7 percent
in Switzerland, 29.2 percent in Denmark,
and 26.5 percent in Ireland. According to
the most recent World Bank list of the
easiest places to pay business taxes, the
U.S. ranks 61st out of 183 economies,
behind France (59th), Sweden (42nd),
Holland (33rd), Switzerland (21st),
Norway (17th), the United Kingdom
(16th), Denmark (13th), and Ireland
(sixth).
Among all developing countries, only
Japan has a higher average statutory
corporate-tax rate than America. OECD
figures show that, by mid-2009, the U.S.
rate (including both federal and state
corporate taxes) was 39.1 percent. In
Western Europe, the corresponding rates
ranged from 34.4 percent in France, to
26.3 percent in Sweden, to 12.5 percent
in Ireland. As Tax Foundation economist
Robert Carroll has observed, America’s
combined corporate-tax rate went from
tially offset by assorted deductions, they
are still quite onerous. After accounting
for deductions and other tax breaks, University of Calgary economists Duanjie
Chen and Jack Mintz estimate that the
effective U.S. corporate-tax rate on new
capital investments in 2009 was 35 percent, the highest in the OECD. Even
when Chen and Mintz include the temporary “bonus depreciation” tax benefit
that expired at the end of last year, the
U.S. rate stood at 27.2 percent. By comparison, in high-tax Scandinavia, the
effective rates were 23.8 percent in
“I’m retiring from politics
to spend more time on my blog.”
for growth, followed by personal income
taxes, and then consumption taxes.”
Thus, a revenue-neutral, pro-growth tax
overhaul would “shift part of the revenue
base from income taxes to less distortive
taxes such as recurrent taxes on immovable property or consumption.” As
Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center
director Donald Marron puts it, “Not all
tax increases—or tax cuts—are created
equal.” Broadly speaking, the U.S. needs
to tax consumption more and corporate
income less; in that sense, it needs to
become more like Western Europe.
As for labor income, the fact that
Americans work longer hours than people in Germany and France—countries
with higher labor taxes—suggests that
the labor supply can be sensitive to marginal tax rates. Indeed, Nobel-laureate
economist Edward Prescott has determined that “virtually all the large differences between the U.S. labor supply and
those of Germany and France are due to
differences in tax systems.” Back in the
early 1970s, he notes, when labor-tax
rates in the three countries were more
comparable, Americans actually worked
23
fewer hours per person than did the
Germans and French. Prescott calculates
that if France lowered its effective tax
rate on labor income to the U.S. level,
“the welfare of the French people would
increase by 19 percent in terms of lifetime consumption equivalents. This is a
large number for a welfare gain.”
economist Richard Rogerson, a colleague of Prescott’s at Arizona State
University, is another proponent of the
idea that U.S.-european variations in
labor supply are primarily attributable to
variations in labor-income taxes. He cites
Holland as an instructive example. The
country’s average labor-tax rate climbed
fairly steadily through the 1970s and
reached its peak in 1983; since then, it
has fallen substantially. Meantime,
dutch work hours declined consistently
from the 1960s until the late 1980s, when
they began a persistent upward trajectory. Holland offers “very persuasive
evidence,” writes Rogerson, that labor
taxes are closely associated with hours
worked.
Given this association, it is no surprise
that expanding government can harm
economic output. Based on a detailed
analysis of the recent empirical literature,
Swedish economists Andreas Bergh and
Magnus Henrekson conclude that, above
a minimum threshold, government size in
rich countries is negatively correlated
with GdP growth. More specifically,
when tax revenues increase by ten percentage points (as a share of GdP), annual economic growth tends to shrink by
anywhere from half a percentage point to
one percentage point—a major drop.
Government spending represents a
heftier chunk of GdP in Scandinavia than
it does in America, although this gap has
been narrowing. To be sure, denmark
and Sweden are successful countries with
impressive levels of income mobility.
(norway’s vast oil wealth makes it sui
generis.) But Bergh and Henrekson stress
that government size is not the sole
determinant of economic prosperity.
Institutional quality, tax-system efficiency, and culture also play key roles. “The
United States is much more diverse than
Scandinavia in ethnicity, level of education, competencies, and social fractionalization,” they write. “Hence, to the extent
that a larger government blunts private
incentives for productive activity, the
behavioral effects are likely to be larger
in the United States.”
24
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For that matter, neither denmark nor
Sweden is as “socialist” as many people
imagine, thanks to significant liberali zation over the past three decades. denmark is virtually tied with America in the
2010 Index of economic Freedom (compiled by the Heritage Foundation and the
Wall Street Journal), and its labor markets are the most flexible in europe. After
being rocked by a financial meltdown
during the early 1990s, Sweden im plemented a series of market-friendly
structural changes, including bold pension reforms. The Index of economic
Freedom reports that both countries offer
greater business freedom, trade freedom,
monetary freedom, investment freedom,
financial freedom, and property-rights
protection, as well as lower levels of corruption, than does America, whose score
has gone down partly because of government bailouts and interventions, and the
lack of “transparency and accountability”
in those actions.
World economic Forum (WeF) data
tell a similar story. As part of its annual
executive opinion Survey, the WeF asks
global business leaders to grade their
country’s performance in a variety of
areas. In the 2009 survey, America ranks
far behind denmark and Sweden in the
following categories (among others):
“property rights” (denmark second,
Sweden fifth, America 30th); “public
trust of politicians” (denmark second,
Sweden sixth, America 43rd); “favoritism in decisions of government officials” (Sweden first, denmark third,
America 48th); “wastefulness of government spending” (denmark 14th, Sweden
17th, America 68th); “burden of government regulation” (Sweden 19th, denmark 27th, America 53rd); “transparency
of government policymaking” (Sweden
second, denmark fourth, America 31st);
and “regulation of securities exchanges”
(Sweden first, denmark seventh, Amer ica 47th).
In short, while the public sector consumes a larger slice of GdP in Scandi navia than it does in the U.S., the danish
and Swedish governments appear to
operate more efficiently than their Amer ican counterpart. As the U.S. seeks to
rejuvenate its economy while moving
toward fiscal consolidation and addressing future demographic challenges, there
are many lessons it can draw from
Western europe. But the virtue of big
government is not among them.
‘Barack and I’
What’s in a first name?
B Y J AY N O R D L I N G E R
BIden was goofy, sometimes
alarming, before he became vice
president, and he’s goofy, sometimes alarming, now. He has said
that he told obama he would be his running mate on two conditions: “I’m not
going to wear any funny hats, and I’m
not changing my brand.” By “brand,” he
apparently means “style” or “persona.”
And, true to his word, he’s not changing.
one curious thing about Biden is his
habit of referring to the president by his
first name—in public, I mean. or quasipublic. He did this at a democratic “issues
conference” in June; and he did it at a
fundraiser in July. The first time, he mentioned that “Barack and I sat in on” a particular meeting. The second time, he said,
“Barack and I are realists”—about the
economy, he meant. Let’s hope so.
I don’t know about you, but I have never
heard a vice president refer to a president
by his first name in public. dick Cheney
always spoke of George W. Bush as “the
president” or “President Bush.” Face to
face, I believe, he called him “sir.” In fact,
some reporters pointed this out, when
others were saying that Cheney, not
Bush, was actually in charge: the top dog.
I don’t believe Bush’s father ever referred
to “Ron” or “Ronnie.” And did nixon say
“Ike”? Unthinkable. did Garner, Wallace,
or Truman say “Franklin”? How about
“Frank”? Beyond unthinkable.
Someone once noted something about
Reagan’s White House staff. I don’t remember who it was, or I would credit him.
Talking together in private, they would
refer to Reagan as “the president.” They’d
do this at the mess, out at a ballgame,
wherever. And they would use an almost
reverential tone. This was highly unusual,
as political hands are a famously jaded,
hard-boiled bunch. The reverence came in
the first term; in the second, when Irancontra and other unpleasantness set in,
things were a little different.
More than once, I saw dave Powers,
JFK’s aide-de-camp, interviewed on television. Reminiscing about election night
1960, he’d say, “. . . and that was the last
time I called him Jack.” He also said, “I
J
oe
AUGUST 30, 2010
called him Jack for 14 years and Mr.
President for two years, ten months, and
two days.”
The business of names, of course, can
be a minefield. We have all stepped on a
mine or two, as we try to navigate our way.
To be safe, you might wait until someone
asks you to call him by his first name.
But even that can be tricky. For a while,
I addressed an acquaintance of mine—
about 70, the mother of a colleague—as
“Mrs. Jones” (let’s say). One day, she said
to me, with annoyance, “Why don’t you
call me Alice?” (again, let’s say). I myself
was a little annoyed, inwardly: Because
you didn’t ask me to, that’s why.
Should you go ahead and ask, without
waiting to be asked? Anthony Daniels has
made an interesting point, as he routinely
does. He notes that “May I call you by your
first name?” is not a neutral question. The
person being asked is sort of trapped. If he
says, “Actually, I would rather you called
me Mr. Smith,” he comes off as a total prig.
Similarly, “Do you mind if I smoke?” is not
a neutral question. If the other guy says, “In
fact, I do mind”—again, total prig.
Once upon a time in America, people
wanted to grow up real fast—to be considered adults. And that included “Mr.” and
other honorifics. Then, people wanted to
grow up real slow, if at all: and be teenagers into their grayness. You called someone “Mr. Brown,” and he might retort,
“‘Mr. Brown’ is my father! I’m Toby.” I
admit that I myself have always had a
problem with “Mr.”—some discomfort at
being called “Mr.” I was a summer-camp
counselor at the tender age of 18; the
rules were, the kids couldn’t call you by
your first name. I rebelled at “Mr. Nordlinger”—so the compromise was “Mr.
Jay,” which was quite strange.
Bill Buckley spoke and wrote brilliantly about this first-name business. No surprise there, right? In a 1975 column on the
subject, he lamented “the obsessive egalitarian familiarity which approaches a raid
on one’s privacy.” A couple decades later,
he said he hated it when he was in a doctor’s waiting room and a nurse would
call out, “William?” He was either “Bill”
or “Mr. Buckley” (although one college
classmate called him “Willie”).
When I first met him, I called him
“Mr. Buckley,” of course. He said, “Call
me Bill.” I mistered him once more—I
guess I just couldn’t help it. And he said
again, this time with vehemence, “Bill.”
And so it was, ever after. With some,
however, Bill would not persist: If they
could not bring themselves to call him
Bill, he let them alone. Mary Tyler Moore,
on her show, balked at calling her boss
“Lou.” To her, he had to be “Mr. Grant.”
Bill had a show too, of course—and we
might tell many stories about it. Here’s
one. Two of his guests one day were Jerry
Falwell and Harriet Pilpel, an abortionrights lawyer. Falwell was appearing by
video hookup; Pilpel was in the studio.
Beginning a point, Falwell said, “Now,
Harriet, I don’t know you . . . ,” and Bill
broke in, “Then why do you call her
Harriet?” In front of my television, I
winced hard for Falwell.
If names are a minefield at home, how
about abroad? There, the mines multiply a
hundredfold. And those mines include
pronouns, not just names. Vous or tu? Sie
or du? The formal you is not always the
safe you, you know: That, too, can give
offense (to those prepared to take offense,
which is many people).
For years, I stayed at the same hotel in
Salzburg, and knew the staff quite well. I
could not get them—even the guys—to
call me Jay. For a day or two, one of them
tried: I was “Jay” to him, and he was
“Klaus” to me. But I could see that it
caused him almost physical pain to say
my first name. So I let him off the hook—
we went back to “Herr Mertel” and “Herr
Nordlinger.” (I will not first-name while
others are “Herr”-ing.) The only one in the
joint who easily called me Jay was the
Indian-born head waiter.
I know a young German woman who
works for a big German institution, where
her boss is American-born. They work
in both languages: German and English.
When speaking in German, they are
“Frau” to each other; when speaking in
English, they call each other by their first
names. They make the switch unconsciously; it is perfectly natural to them.
Class, among other things, can rear
its head in the name business. When I
was a teenager, I went into a pharmacy in
Ypsilanti, Mich. A grandmotherly employee said to her manager—a man of about
40—“I’m going to go on break now, okay,
Mr. Conner?” He said, “Okay, Mabel.” I
burned. I was ready to join the Communist
party on the spot. Dignity comes into play
in this business. I know a man whose
grandfather, a pillar of the community,
went into a nursing home. He had always
been “Mr.,” but now, enfeebled and helpless, he was “Mike” (or whatever) to the
young women at the facility. This made
the grandson nearly homicidal.
How do you know how to address
people? What are the rules? I think you
go by feel, as so often in life. You go by
feel, judgment, sensitivity, stomach.
I don’t know what Biden says to Obama
face to face: I bet it’s “Barack,” and I think
that’s what Biden is signaling, in public.
But I would not refer to Obama by his first
name when out and about: when speaking
to the public. It feels wrong to me. It puts
a dissonance in my ear. Of course, we all
have different ears.
Is Biden being condescending? Obama
is a younger man than he, and Biden likes
to consider himself a sage. In the generalelection campaign of ’08, he said, “I’ve
forgotten more about foreign policy than
most of my colleagues know.” Yeah, sure,
Joe (speaking of first names). When he
says “Barack” in public, is he trying to
convey intimacy (as I’ve already suggested)? See how close I am to the president!
We’re a team, he and I. Incidentally, no
way he’ll dump me for ’12.
Then there is the awful question of
race—an inescapable question in America,
a question that taints everything. Shouldn’t
a vice president be especially careful not
even to appear to condescend—to condescend to our first black president? During
the ’08 primary season, when he himself
was running for president, Biden described
Obama as “the first mainstream African
American, who is articulate and bright and
clean and a nice-looking guy.” Al Sharpton
protested, “I take a bath every day.”
Um, what if a conservative Republican
leader repeatedly referred to the president
as “Barack” in public? Would everyone
think that was fine? The Senate minority
leader, Mitch McConnell, and the House
minority leader, John Boehner, both know
Obama—they served together in Congress, and they work together, sort of,
now. If they said “Barack,” would that be
hunky-dory? Or honky-dory? Remember
that some Democratic commentators even
found Scott Brown’s pickup truck, on the
campaign trail in Massachusetts, racist.
I have no doubt that Biden is innocent
in the “Barack” business—guilty only,
perhaps, of bragging about his closeness
to the president, and his own seniorstatesman status. And Biden can be expected to be goofy: He maintains his
“brand,” remember. But he might want
to rethink “Barack,” if he thought in the
first place.
25
The Leaner Welfare State
New ‘citizen benefits’ could help restore American competitiveness
workers fear the economic future? As
recently as the early 1990s, many academic and political
elites were convinced that the United States was doomed
to become a backwater, an economic also-ran. From
1973 to 1995, average labor productivity increased by 1.4 percent
a year, a marked decline from the 2.7 percent annual growth rate
that drove post-war prosperity from 1948 to 1972. Because
Germany, Japan, and a number of other industrial economies had
surpassed the United States in productivity growth over that period, it seemed likely that our country would slowly slip behind in
the economic league tables.
That’s not what happened. Between 1995 and 2000, productivity growth increased to 2.6 percent as heavy investments in information technology began to pay off. The American economy had,
by any objective standard, made an extraordinary comeback. The
recession that followed was short and shallow, but it offered a
S
HoUlD American
Mr. Salam is a policy adviser at Economics21 and blogs at The Agenda on
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE. Mr. Winship is a recent graduate of
Harvard’s social-policy doctoral program and analyzes economic trends at his blog,
The Empiricist Strikes Back.
26
|
glimpse of the wrenching change to come. From 2001 to 2003,
productivity growth reached a white-hot 3.6 percent. Yet the 2000s
were no one’s idea of an economic Golden Age. Even before the
Great Recession, the last decade had been characterized by a pervasive if ill-defined sense of economic unease. Many on the left
have exploited this unease, yoking to it an expansion of the existing welfare state that threatens to stifle growth and innovation.
Before we can offer an alternative, we have to understand the
source of our economic woes.
During the post-war era, the United States was without peer as
the ruined economies of Europe and East Asia struggled to recover
from the ravages of war. The years from 1973 to 1995 saw those
regions flourish, creating a market for U.S. goods and services as
well as competition for U.S. firms, most strikingly in the manufacturing sector. Now, as workers in China and India upgrade their
skills, the global economy is entering a new phase. Harvard economist Richard Freeman has warned of a global surplus of skilled
labor. “As the low-income countries catch up with the advanced
countries,” Freeman writes, “the pressure of low-wage competition from the new giants will battle with the growth of world productivity and the lower prices from goods produced in low-wage
AUGUST 30, 2010
ROMAN GENN
BY REIHAN SALAM & SCOTT WINSHIP
You deserve a factual look at . . .
The Deadly Threat of a Nuclear-Armed Iran
What can the world, what can the USA, what can Israel do about it?
Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has declared publicly – not once, but repeatedly – that Israel must be “wiped off the
map.” That effort, the destruction of Israel, seems to be the main goal of Iranian policy. When Iranian missiles are paraded
through the streets of Tehran, the destination “to Jerusalem” is clearly stenciled on them.
accomplished that in a daring and unprecedented raid. Iraq’s
What are the facts?
A d eath wis h for Israel. Ahmadinejad and the ayatollah who is
nuclear capability was eliminated in one stroke, never to rise up
again. Israel had done the world an enormous service. Had it not
the “supreme leader” have publicly mused that one or two
been for Israel’s decisive action, the Iraqi conquest of Kuwait
nuclear bombs would obliterate Israel, but that, though it would
and, without question, also of Saudi Arabia and its enormous oil
cause devastating damage and millions of casualties, Iran would
fields, and, for that matter, of Iran, could not have been
survive Israel’s retaliatory attack. Iran is a huge country, with
prevented. Saddam Hussein would have been the ruler of the
about 60 million inhabitants, so they are probably correct. And
world.
who can doubt that those religious fanatics would not hesitate to
The solution to the deadly threat that Iran poses to the world
allow the destruction of much of their country and to sacrifice
is obvious. Of course, diplomacy
a third or even one-half of their
population in order to eliminate “An attack on the Iranian nuclear installations and persuasion, threats and
promises, sticks and carrots –
the hated Jewish state. When our
country was entangled with the would fall under the heading of “anticipatory every possible means short of
Soviet Union in the bitter 40self-defense,” recognized and sanctioned by military action – should be used
until it becomes clear even to the
year long “cold war,” with both
international law and by common sense.”
most obdurate that nothing can
sides having sufficient nuclear
deviate Iran from its chosen path
weapons
to
destroy
the
of becoming a nuclear power and to dominate the Middle East.
opponent’s country and its people, things were kept in place by
There is reason to believe that the people of Iran, especially the
MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction. However “evil” the leaders
young people, oppose the oppressive and theocratic regime of
of the Soviet Union (the “Evil Empire”) may have been, there was
their country and are hostile to the mullahs who control
one great consolation and assurance: They were not crazy. But
everything. But the government has the tools of power firmly in
the Iranians and other Muslims are crazies, as we understand the
its hands. It controls the instruments of coercion – it can kill
concept. Because they take instructions directly from Allah, who
people and it controls the oil money. While it would be most
tells them to kill the Jews and other infidels, whatever the cost.
desirable and in the interest of the world to be able to foment an
Israel has no problem with Iran. They share no borders and
overthrow of the Iranian regime, that is an unrealistic and
have no territorial dispute. In fact, they face common Arab
unattainable prospect.
enemies and should be natural allies, as they indeed were under
Regrettably, there is only one solution to the terrible dilemma
the Shah. Iran’s death wish for Israel is based entirely on
confronting the world, the unacceptable danger of a nuclearreligious fanaticism. In contrast even to the intractable North
armed Iran. The terror, the destruction and the 60 million dead
Koreans, the determination of the Iranians is immutable. It
of World War II could have been prevented at several times
cannot be changed by persuasion, by diplomacy, by sanctions or
during the Nazi regime. But the Allied powers, under the
by threats.
leadership of Britain’s prime minister Neville Chamberlain,
Once Iran is in possession of nuclear weapons, it will not only
opted for appeasement and for “peace in our time.” We cannot
be a deadly danger to Israel, but to all of the Middle East and to
afford to make that same mistake again. The world must give
virtually all of Europe. The flow of oil from the Middle East, the
Iran an ultimatum: Desist immediately from the development of
lifeblood of the industrialized world, would be totally under its
nuclear weapons; if you do not, we shall destroy the facilities that
control and so would be the economies of all nations of the
produce them. There still is a window of opportunity to do that.
world, very much including the United States.
What is to be done? In 1981, then prime minister of Israel
That window may close very soon. But who would do the job?
The United States would be the obvious choice. But if the United
Menachem Begin, being aware of Iraq’s nuclear ambitions and
States were in accord, Israel could do it, just as it did the job in
looming realization of those ambitions, decided that its nuclear
1981 in destroying Iraq’s nuclear potential once and for all.
reactor at Osiraq had to be destroyed. The IAF (Israeli Air Force)
An attack on the Iranian nuclear installations would fall under the heading of “anticipatory self-defense,” recognized and sanctioned
by international law and by common sense. Nobody really knows for sure how far Iran is from reaching its goal — six months. six
years? The experts disagree. But if Iran is not stopped now, it may well be too late not very long from now.
This message has been published and paid for by
Facts and Logic About the Middle East
P.O. Box 590359 n San Francisco, CA 94159
Gerardo Joffe, President
FLAME is a tax-exempt, non-profit educational 501 (c)(3) organization. Its
purpose is the research and publication of the facts regarding developments
in the Middle East and exposing false propaganda that might harm the
interests of the United States and its allies in that area of the world. Your taxdeductible contributions are welcome. They enable us to pursue these goals
and to publish these messages in national newspapers and magazines. We
have virtually no overhead. Almost all of our revenue pays for our educational
work, for these clarifying messages, and for related direct mail.
To receive fr ee FLAME updates, visit our website: www.factsandlogic.org
109
countries to determine the well-being of workers in higher income
economies.” There is good reason to believe that growth in lowwage countries will prove overwhelmingly beneficial to U.S.
workers overall, not least by creating a wave of low-cost, innovative goods. Yet there is also no question that it will continue to
increase downward pressure on the wages of workers in tradable
economic sectors, from manufacturing and programming to legal
services and perhaps even education.
Another source of our economic discontent lies in the subtle difference between the two most recent productivity booms, which
economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Adam Saunders describe in their
book, Wired for Innovation. The 1990s boom can be directly traced
to IT investments, particularly in the retail sector, which had seen
sluggish productivity growth for decades. The productivity surge
from 2001 to 2003 was driven by investments in organizational
capital, a catch-all term for productivity-enhancing business
practices.
Many U.S. firms invested heavily in technology. But the most
successful firms—which Brynjolfsson and Saunders call “digital
organizations”—also embraced incentive systems and decentralized decision-making to allow their most talented, driven, and
well-trained workers to use new technologies effectively. To put it
simply, digital organizations reward workaholics and weed out
weak performers. Suffice it to say, the workers who flourish in
these firms are not replaceable cogs. Rather, they are valuable
assets, and they demand and receive generous compensation.
While digital organizations tend to be culturally egalitarian, they
are a major driver of wage dispersion. Google and Facebook, for
all their progressive bona fides, spend far more on top-flight engineers than on custodial staff, and they always will.
The rise of digital organizations is one reason productivity
growth has continued during the Great Recession. One of the most
striking facts about this downturn has been that employment has
declined far more than output. As jobs evaporated throughout
2009, productivity increased by 3.8 percent, the largest increase in
seven years. Comparatively few productive workers were let go,
and many of those who were worked in firms that simply discovered a way to do without them, in part by offshoring a range
of tasks.
As Dirk Pilat, an OECD economist, observed in 2004, these
developments “are part of a process of search and experimentation,
where some firms succeed and grow and others fail and disappear.”
Countries that allow this process of creative destruction have an
edge, Pilat suggests, in reaping the full benefits of technology
investment.
T
job losses we’ve seen over the last few years have
affected American workers unevenly. Those with some
college, 26 percent of the adult population, have an unemployment rate hovering around 8.3 percent. For the 30 percent with
only a high-school diploma, the unemployment rate is 10.1 percent. And for those without a high-school diploma, 13.4 percent of
the population, the unemployment rate is 13.8 percent.
Meanwhile, the 30 percent of adults over the age of 25 with a
college degree or more have fared well, with an unemployment
rate around 4.5 percent as of July. These are the workers who—a
handful of brilliant dropouts aside—staff the digital organizations
that are driving the economy forward. This is also the group that
tends to outsource household labor—by buying meals outside of
the home, day-care services, and much else—providing employ28
hE
|
ment opportunities for large numbers of less-skilled workers. For
better or for worse, all of us depend on the success of digital organizations. The value they create spreads throughout the wider
economy. America’s economic mission should thus be to attract,
retain, and develop talent, and to guarantee that the barriers to
grassroots entrepreneurship are as low and as few as possible.
Viewed through this lens, the Left’s effort to expand the existing
social contract, rooted in the industrial relations of the mid-20th
century, looks short-sighted at best. Citizens rely on employers and
the state to provide a range of benefits, which have come to include
comprehensive health insurance, pensions and retirement-savings
vehicles, and unemployment insurance. But this arrangement
creates a number of economic inefficiencies that the United States
can no longer afford.
For one, it prevents the personalization of benefits and restricts
the choice of providers. Employers approve only a limited number
of benefit providers, which in turn provide only a limited number
of plans. Governments, attempting to reduce inequality and promote solidarity, typically mandate baseline benefit levels and
restrict the ability of beneficiaries to tailor benefits to their liking or
to trade off greater risk for greater reward. This inclination also
requires governments to impose strict regulation on providers.
The liberal social contract also obscures the link between benefits and costs. When employers negotiate deals with insurance
providers and “pay” the premium, employees fail to connect
greater benefit use with lower take-home pay. And even if they did,
there would still be a free-rider problem: Why should I be costconscious if I’m going to have to pay for my coworkers’ profligacy
next year through higher premiums?
This moral hazard is worse with public benefits. In Social
Security and Medicare, population dynamics have allowed a large
base of workers to finance benefits for a relatively small number of
retirees, permitting the benefits to grow. But this arrangement
worked only while fertility was high and life expectancy low,
and the retirement of the baby boomers will reverse this alchemy.
The federal government can also pay for public benefits by selling
bonds to investors—up to a point. Because legislators try to
buy votes, the political dynamics push toward benefits of everincreasing generosity combined with low taxes—a toxic mix when
use of entitlements by beneficiaries is high. Debt levels eventually
explode and tax levels explode soon after, crippling firms and
driving away talent.
Even employer benefits have unintended consequences, as
demonstrated by the “job lock” workers stuck in poor-fitting positions experience because they are afraid they will lose their healthcare coverage. The system made great sense in earlier decades,
when lifetime employment was the expectation of employer and
employee alike and when few married women worked. Today,
however, employer benefits can impede the smooth functioning of
labor markets and thwart worker efforts to develop their skills in
new jobs and industries, undermining the central advantage of the
U.S. economy.
W
we need is a leaner, more flexible welfare state
founded on the principles of personalization and
choice, but one that protects those who hit a patch of
bad luck or whose marginal productivity lags behind the level
demanded by digital organizations. To that end, we favor a program of what we call “citizen benefits.” Americans would have
access to a range of benefits sponsored not by their employer, but
hAT
AUGUST 30, 2010
by a federal exchange. Just as workers today have employersponsored retirement plans and health-insurance policies, all citizens would have access to exchange-sponsored benefits.
But citizen benefits would be entirely voluntary—there
would be no mandates imposed on individuals or employers—
and employers could continue offering benefits to their workers
(but without receiving preferential tax treatment). There would
be subsidies to the disadvantaged, but they would be much
more transparent than they are under today’s arrangements.
And tradeoffs between greater pay, higher benefits, different
benefit mixes, and greater costs would be much more transparent than they are today, too. A federal safety net would continue to exist to catch those who fell through the cracks of the
citizen-benefit system.
To see how such a system would work, consider health insurance. To switch to a system of citizen benefits, two large tax
expenditures favoring employer-sponsored insurance—the
deductibility of insurance-related health expenses by employers
and the exclusion of employer-provided health benefits from
individual income taxation—would be repealed. The primary
effect of this change would be that many employers currently
providing health insurance would drop their coverage and instead
increase the pay of their workers. Workers could use the higher
take-home pay to purchase insurance.
Or not purchase it. The individual mandate imposed by
the Democrats’ recently passed health-care reform law, the
Affordable Care Act (ACA), would be repealed, and employers
would not be required to provide coverage or endure new taxes
to support citizen benefits, meaning the ACA’s play-or-pay
penalty for not covering workers would also be repealed. For
workers whose employers continued offering coverage, very
little would change under citizen benefits.
But for those whose employers dropped coverage, those who
never had employer coverage, and those who simply prefer an
alternative to their employer’s coverage, one or more public
insurance pools would be open to everyone. Private insurers
would offer different coverage options and benefit packages in
the pool and compete on price. Plans participating in the pool
would be subject to guaranteed-issue and renewal rules, and they
would be community-rated. Insurers could still offer coverage
outside the exchanges without facing these federal requirements,
meaning that ACA’s regulations would be repealed. A federal
reinsurance program would help offset insurers’ costs for the
most expensive subscribers they cover.
The federal government would subsidize, on a sliding scale,
the premiums of families earning less than 200 percent of the federal poverty line, rather than the 400 percent ceiling established
under the ACA. Subsidies would be fairly transparent in this
system—federal revenues would redistribute toward the poor
through premium support and toward the very sick through reinsurance and risk adjustment.
Ultimately, the system would not offer tax subsidies for health
insurance; but to allow health-care and insurance markets to
adjust, tax subsidies could be temporarily offered—with incentives for enrollment in (lower-cost) catastrophic-coverage plans.
It would also move us toward a system where insurance actually
functions as insurance, protecting enrollees from the risk of
unforeseen expensive services rather than paying for relatively
inexpensive and predictable costs. Finally, for the system to bring
down future federal deficits, it would ultimately have to replace
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29
Medicare and the services to seniors that that program provides—a change that would clearly need to happen gradually in
order to be politically viable.
retirement-savings benefits could be delivered in a similar
way. The federal government would sponsor IrA-style plans,
and existing IrAs and similar individual accounts would be
rolled into them. Individuals could contribute to these new plans
but would not be required to. Employers could match their
employees’ contributions but would not be required to. They
could also continue to sponsor their own retirement plans and
match employee contributions to them. The federal government
would provide its own match for contributions made by individuals in households earning under 200 percent of the poverty line.
All income-tax refunds would automatically be placed in an individual account unless the taxpayer specified otherwise. Also
by default, 3 percent of earnings would be transferred by his
employer from each employee’s paycheck to an individual
account, if the employee did not participate in an employersponsored plan or opt out of the default.
Social Security would continue to exist, but over time it would
shrink to become more of a safety-net pension program (while
retaining its other functions, such as providing disability benefits). As with health-insurance tax subsidies, in the long run the
goal would be to eliminate tax incentives for savings entirely, a
move that could be coupled with lower marginal tax rates, but
this, too, would require a transition period.
A third type of citizen benefit would be an income-loss insurance program that would replace the state/federal unemployment
program. It would do so by allowing holders of retirementsavings accounts to take qualified distributions from them in the
event of unemployment, divorce, death of a spouse, or short-term
disability. What is more, accountholders could borrow, up to
some limit, against future savings if existing savings are depleted. For periods of unemployment lasting longer than 16 weeks,
individual “re-employment accounts” would be given to those
still out of work, providing them with $5,000 to use for income
support, job training, or employment services. Holders of reemployment accounts could keep however much of the $5,000
was left upon finding a job. After 20 weeks of unemployment, a
traditional social-insurance program, similar to today’s government unemployment insurance, would provide an additional
safety net. This approach would give workers the flexibility they
need to seek training or to relocate to a more promising labor
market.
Everyone from policymakers to entrepreneurs to parents
wants to know about “the jobs of the future.” But just as no one
in 1800 could have predicted the extent to which the railroad
would reshape the American landscape, there is no way to know
exactly what the economy will look like in 2050 or even in 2015.
What we do know is that a dynamic market economy demands
openness and flexibility. Trade, offshoring, and the global sourcing of jobs are not just a quirk of history. As transaction costs
decline, successful firms focus on their distinctive internal capabilities while mobilizing the resources of other specialized
firms, wherever they are based. rather than fight this powerful
tendency, we need to embrace it. The citizen-benefits model
would build on American strengths. It has the potential to give
the united States the world’s most modern, flexible, and costeffective social contract, an essential competitive advantage in
a shrinking world.
30
|
OUR REAL
Gulf
Disaster
The conventional wisdom was
wrong, wrong, wrong
BY LOU DOLINAR
months after the Deepwater Horizon spill—which
President obama called the “worst environmental disaster America has ever faced”—the oil is disappearing,
and fisheries are returning to normal. It turns out that
this incident exposed some things that are seriously wrong in the
world of oil—and I don’t mean exploding wells. There was a
broad-based failure on the part of the media, the science establishment, and the federal bureaucracy. With the nation and its
leaders looking for facts, we got instead a massive plume of
apocalyptic mythology and threats of Armageddon. In the Gulf,
this misinformation has cost jobs, lowered property values, and
devastated tourism, and its effects on national policy could be
deep and far-reaching.
To get an idea of the scale of misinformation involved, consider how many of the most widely reported narratives about the
spill—ones that have woven their way into the national consciousness—have turned out to be dubious. Some examples:
East Coast beaches are threatened. Everyone got the wrong
idea about the magnitude of the spill from the very beginning.
Simply put, while terrible, it was never going to be as big as most
thought it would be. The spreading of this East Coast–beach
meme was a joint operation of NCAr, the National Center for
Atmospheric research, and the media. In June, NCAr produced
a slick computer-modeled animated video that showed a gigantic
part of the spill making its way around the southern tip of Florida
and up the East Coast. oil covered everything from the Gulf to the
Grand Banks. “BP oil slick could hit East Coast in weeks: government scientists,” dutifully reported the New York Daily News.
CBS News, MSNBC, and many other media outlets chimed in in
the same vein. The video was wildly popular on YouTube.
But then the government, in the form of a more senior bureaucracy, the National oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NoAA), disavowed the scenario.
In fact, according to Chuck Watson of Watson Technical
Consulting—a Savannah, Ga., firm specializing in computer
modeling of the effects of hurricanes, seismic events, geophysical hazards, and weapons of mass destruction—the simulation
was bogus from the very beginning, because it ignored important conditions in the Gulf. Furthermore, says Watson, the media
never took account of how diluted the oil would be once it hit the
Atlantic: The bulk of the theoretically massive spill the video
shows amounts to roughly a quart of oil per square mile. Watson
F
our
Mr. Dolinar is a retired columnist and reporter for Newsday. He is currently in
Mobile, Ala., working on a book about what really did happen in the Deepwater
Horizon spill.
AUGUST 30, 2010
The leak, pre-cap
Berman and Watson are contributors to The Oil Drum, a
group blog written by and for people in the energy business. The
website has been debunking many of the extreme scenarios surrounding the spill. Most of its contributors are proponents of
“peak oil” theories, and thus are skeptical of oil’s future and
eager to explore alternatives. The oil industry has come to a
sorry pass when its skeptics are its most credible defenders.
The Corexit threat. No aspect of the spill response has been
more controversial than the widespread use of Corexit, a family
of detergent-like compounds that break up oil, hence the name
“dispersant.” Once broken up, oil evaporates, and is also easily
eaten by bacteria. Dispersion turns thick, ugly slicks into
widely distributed droplets, minimizing damage to beaches and
sensitive wetlands. Massive application of dispersants is the
reason the spill disappeared so quickly; but it’s important not to
spray the dispersants directly on living things, like marshlands
or coral.
Corexit has faced a variety of criticisms. Some say it is
absolutely toxic, even more so when mixed with oil, and blame
it for illness, including cancer, among spill workers in Alaska
and elsewhere. They claim it’s been banned in Britain because
it’s poisonous. They also suggest that Corexit is more dangerous
and less effective than alternative dispersants, and has been used
because BP has a financial interest in the firm that makes it.
While this full-blown Corexit fear has been the province, for the
most part, of green blogs, a few such allegations have made their
way into mainstream publications like the New York Times, as
well as recent congressional hearings.
The reality is that enough of anything will kill you, but that the
amount of Corexit in the Gulf is highly diluted. As for the British
ban on Corexit, it was based not on toxicity, but on the product’s
slipperiness: Because the island nation is surrounded by a rocky,
ecologically sensitive coastal environment, its version of the
EPA makes sure all the small creatures that live there can cling
safely to their rocks. If oil or Corexit gets on a rock, the humble
limpet, the official guinea pig, loses its grip, so Corexit failed the
tests. It is approved for application to spills in open water.
Even the EPA, which tries to ban basically everything but
31
BP
claims flat-out that NOAA was “gold digging” for grants; there’s
probably more federal research money floating around the Gulf
than there is oil. “There is a feeding frenzy with people trying to
get funding for their specialty,” he says.
Giant plumes of oil. By mid-May, oil was still comparatively
scarce in the Gulf. Disappointed, the media began trying to
figure out where it had gone. Marine researchers were drafted
to provide the answer. Diluted oil was being found beneath
the surface; but how diluted, no one was sure, and there was
nothing vaguely resembling peer-reviewed literature.
Still, news reports implied or asserted that “enormous oil
plumes” were waiting, like submerged monsters, to rise and
attack unsuspecting beaches and wetlands. The New York Times
summed up the media consensus on May 15: “Scientists are
finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of
Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide,
and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that
the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially
worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.”
The article quoted Samantha Joye, a marine-sciences professor
at the University of Georgia, as saying that this oil was mixed
with water in the consistency of “thin salad dressing.”
According to the Washington Post, James H. Cowan Jr., a professor at Louisiana State University, reported “a plume of oil in
a section of the Gulf 75 miles northwest of the source of the leak.
Cowan said that his crew sent a remotely controlled submarine
into the water, and found it full of oily globules, from the size of
a thumbnail to the size of a golf ball.” The Post said that this
showed the oil might slip past containment booms and pollute
beaches and marshland.
But late in May, NOAA did a study that was far less alarming.
It found weak concentrations of oil in the area surrounding the
Deepwater Horizon site: 0.5 parts per million, maximum. The
median was a little over 0.2 parts per million. As with the “giant”
spill that threatened the East Coast, that’s barely above the
threshold of detection. And by late July and early August, BP, the
federal government, and some independent researchers were
saying they couldn’t find any plumes at all. “We’re finding
hydrocarbons around the well, but as we move away from the
well, they move to almost background traces in the water column,” said Adm. Thad Allen, the administration’s point man on
the spill. Some 75 percent of the oil released is gone—and that’s
based on new estimates that put the spill rate at the high end
of earlier projections.
As with the bogus doomsday model, industry experts say the
giant-plume threat was greatly overstated by scientists and further blown out of proportion by the media. According to Arthur
Berman, a respected petroleum expert at Labyrinth Consulting
Services in Sugar Land, Texas, the theory flunks basic physics.
“Oil is lighter than water and rises above it in all known situations on this planet. The idea of underwater plumes defies everything that we know about physical laws and has distressed me
from the outset about these unscientific reports.”
It also ignores the Gulf’s well-known ability to break down
oil. Berman points out that the Gulf has for millennia been a
warm, rich ecological gumbo of natural oil seeps, oil-eating bacteria, and marine life that subsists on the bacteria. His research,
he says, suggests that the spill represents at most four times as
much oil as seeps into the Gulf naturally in a year—in other
words, it is eminently digestible by the native ecosystem.
prune juice, has always approved of Corexit under tight supervision. The ePA weighed in with new findings at the beginning
of August: It said that Corexit was “similar” in toxicity to other
dispersants, and that there was no evil synergistic effect when
Corexit was combined with oil. To the extent we need to worry
about subtle, long-term environmental problems, the issue of
residual oil is 100 times more important than Corexit.
Senior scientist Judith McDowell of the Woods hole Oceanographic Institution, a marine biologist who recently returned
from the Gulf, says she isn’t entirely comfortable with the compound. But “given the situation in the Gulf,” she says, “given the
massive amounts of oil and the human-health consequences at
the well site, they had no choice.” She adds that dispersants
should not be used with all spills. “It’s a trade-off when one
wants to protect shoreline habitats, but you shouldn’t apply
dispersants in all situations.”
A
this misinformation comes at a serious cost. even if
the administration quickly rescinds its ban on offshore
drilling (cost: 50,000 jobs, more than $2 billion in lost
wages), as appeared likely in early August, the economic impact
of the spill and the paranoia surrounding it will be huge.
Potential visitors and customers are scared.
n The real-estate company CoreLogic, as quoted by Bloomberg, says property values could fall by about $3 billion over the
next few years along the Gulf, and as much as $56,000 for some
houses.
n A trade group, the U.S. Travel Association, said the tourism
industry in Florida alone could stand to lose up to $18.6 billion
over the next three years from the BP oil spill, even though the
well has been capped.
n There are dozens of anecdotal reports that no one is buying
Gulf seafood, even in areas unaffected by the spill. Gulf Coast
shrimpers and fishermen are in a tough spot: On one hand, as
more areas of the Gulf are declared safe, they presumably won’t
be able to collect compensation from BP or the government and
will have to get back to work; on the other, no one’s buying their
catch. Given the public fear of toxins in food, this problem could
last a long time.
n even if the drilling ban ends, regulatory uncertainty will
exact a huge cost from oil firms and their shareholders. Some
insider reports suggest that oil assets in the Gulf are already
being disposed of at fire-sale prices.
What’s especially unfortunate here is that all the misinformation connected to overreaction to the spill may have had a serious
influence on President Obama and his advisers—leading, for
example, to the Gulf drilling ban and an overly strict regulatory
approach. This is a tough sell for conservatives, many of whom
are looking for evil purposefulness, rather than delusion, in the
administration’s policies. But think of it this way. We have the
most liberal administration in history, and it is composed of people who lack the reflexive skepticism that conservatives apply to
the mainstream media and left-wing blogs. Spend enough time
following the reporting and blogging on Deepwater Horizon,
and you come to realize that the administration’s behavior in
the crisis likely wasn’t based on a cynical master plan; rather,
the administration was overwhelmed by sheer panic about the
magnitude of the potential disasters, outlined by its most loyal
supporters, that it thought it faced.
32
LL
|
The Road to
CHARIKAR
Afghans have noticed that we are not
the Soviet Union
BY J. D. JOHANNES
Bamiyan, Afghanistan
he Soviets wouldn’t come up here with less than a battalion,” says Tim Lynch, a retired Marine Corps officer driving us down the two-lane blacktop that crosses
the Shomali Plain, one of the largest and most fertile
agricultural regions in Afghanistan. Alexander the Great founded
the ancient city of Bagram on this plain, which opens up just north
of Kabul, widens through Parwan Province, and finally dead-ends
at the Salang and Panjshir rivers. Centuries later, Afghanistan’s
Communist government would choose the same locale for a major
air base, which today hosts the U.S.-led Coalition’s logistics-andtransshipment hub, Bagram Airfield. The Macedonians, the
Soviets, and now the Americans: All have found their way to the
Shomali Plain.
“This area is primarily Tajik,” Lynch says. “The Tajiks fought
the Soviets harder than the Pashtuns, but don’t seem to mind
Americans that much.” There are pockets of Pashtuns, but the
Tajik predominance makes the drive up the highway, through the
plain, and over the ragged road through the mountains to Bamiyan
relatively safe for three Americans and a hazara interpreter/fixer.
If a group of Soviet travelers had ventured up here in their day, the
mujahedeen would have killed them within an hour. Once in the
hazarajat area, Westerners can mostly roam around freely. The
greatest risk in Afghanistan, according to Lynch, is disease or illness. “The second-highest risk is car wreck,” he says, a fact you
might pick up from watching him drive in the traditional Afghan
style: like a maniac. “Way down on the list is the Taliban,” he says.
There are attacks on U.S. forces on the Shomali Plain and in the
surrounding valleys, but they pale in contrast to the Soviet experience. During the Soviet war in Afghanistan, there were nine
separate major expeditions into the Panjshir Valley. On the seventh campaign, 15,000 Soviet troops and 5,000 Communist
Afghan troops moved over the Shomali Plain in an attempt to
take the valley, and at one point an entire Soviet division and
Afghan corps were dedicated to clearing out mujahedeen here.
They failed. By way of comparison, the U.S.-led Operation
Anaconda, launched in March 2002 in Paktia Province, involved
1,700 helicopter-borne troops, 1,000 Afghan militiamen, and
several smaller special-operations units. The recent Operation
Moshtarak in helmand Province included a mix of about 4,000
Coalition ground-combat troops and 4,000 Afghan National
Army (ANA) troops, and is the only Coalition operation comparable in size to the various Soviet Panjshir expeditions.
‘T
Mr. Johannes is a documentary filmmaker and former Marine. He has traveled
through Iraq and Afghanistan, on his own and as an embedded reporter, since 2005.
AUGUST 30, 2010
For the Soviets and the mujahedeen, the Shomali Plain and the
Panjshir Valley were what Sun Tzu termed “desperate ground”—
terrain that must be defended or captured. It is certainly storied
ground: “Panjshir” in the Dari language means “five lions,” a
reference to the legend of five devout brothers who protected
the valley from intruders.
In the war against the Soviets, a new lion emerged—Ahmed
Shah Massoud. An ethnic Tajik and a sophisticated mujahedeen
commander, Massoud was educated at Afghanistan’s national
military academy and studied engineering at Kabul Polytechnic.
He trained his fighters in the use of advanced weapons and
developed a logistics pipeline from China. At the peak of his
power, he may have led as many as 50,000 fighters, and his wellhoned publicity machine ensured that he became known as the
“Lion of the Panjshir.” After the Soviets were forced out,
Massoud’s party dominated the short-lived mujahedeen government of Afghanistan. In 1994, Massoud and his army returned to
their home field in the Shomali and Panjshir, fighting the Taliban
to a draw until Massoud was assassinated by al-Qaeda shortly
before 9/11.
There is no current equivalent to Massoud in the Shomali and
Panjshir now. The Tajiks, with the exception of a few rent-afighters and day-labor Taliban, have no quarrel with the
Coalition. Many of Massoud’s lieutenants have taken up positions in the current Afghan National Army, working side by side
with U.S. forces.
One of them is Col. Zalmat Nbard, commander of the 1st
Battalion, 111th Division, southwest of Kabul. Nbard was an
effective enough fighter of Soviets that he was commissioned as
a colonel by the interim mujahedeen government. He commanded Tajik fighters during the civil war and fought the Taliban until
the U.S. invasion in 2001. He was trained in Massoud’s academies and rose through the ranks to become a commander. There
is little doubt that he has more combat experience than all his
NATO and U.S. advisers combined, and all agree that he is a
seasoned leader of Afghans. That Nbard is on the side of the
Coalition at all, rather than stirring up trouble in the neighborhood, is telling. The major fights in Afghanistan are in the south
and east, the Pashtun areas, not in the northern Tajik ones.
T
officers of the Afghan National Army fall into four
loose categories. There are former mujahedeen commanders like Nbard, former officers of the Communist regime
Nbard fought, a few retired Taliban, and young officers who have
no history in the 30 years of war since 1980. There is some tension between the Communist officers and mujahedeen veterans.
The Communists criticize the former mujahedeen for their failure
to follow doctrine. The mujahedeen slight the Communists as
unwilling to fight.
Nbard, who grew up fighting first the Soviets and then the
Taliban, is frustrated by the type of war he is being told to fight
now. U.S. advisers try to get him to follow ANA doctrine, which is
based on U.S. Army doctrine from the 1990s. His superiors at the
ministry of defense often are officers from the former Communist
regime, and they still fall back on Soviet tactics. His primary counterparts on the battlefield are Turks, whose government has issued
rules of engagement that make them incredibly risk-averse.
His frustration shows through during a planning session for a
routine patrol with two U.S. officers. They are in turn frustrated
He
that Nbard had not made any plans following the prescribed fiveparagraph order of the ANA, as well as by the fact that he does
not know how to read a map. Nbard is upset with the mission his
superiors have given him.
“It is a useless mission . . . it is a stupid mission . . . it is only good
for getting soldiers killed,” Nbard says. The mission is a “presence
patrol,” a drive through the Musahee district in the southwest of
Kabul Province. A presence patrol is often described by calloused
veterans as “driving around waiting to get blown up.” Nbard
knows firsthand the uselessness of these types of operations; he
spent years ambushing similar Soviet patrols in the 1980s.
In other words, the Coalition is using some of the same tactics
that so dismally failed the Soviets, while the Taliban employs those
that worked so well for the mujahedeen.
The former mujahedeen often chafe at the bureaucracy and
lethargy of the Afghan National Army and the Coalition. “Just give
me guns, trucks, ammo, and fuel, and I will defeat the Taliban!”
Maj. Shane Gries, a member of the Validation Transition Team,
cries in a pitch-perfect parody of Afghan bravado. “But it is not that
simple when you start putting NATO elements in the mix.” And so
Col. Zalmat Nbard, once a commander of mujahedeen and a loyal
deputy to the Lion of the Panjshir, today dutifully follows orders
and drives around waiting to get blown up.
But we’re not using all of the old Soviet tactics. For instance,
the destroy-and-search mission is out. That practice was exactly
what it sounds like: Aircraft would drop bombs on a village, then
helicopter gunships would strafe it. Afterward, Soviet soldiers
would search what was left of the smoldering village. Those freegunning operations brought proportional retribution: In one case,
an entire battalion of the Soviet 201st Motor Rifle Division was
destroyed on the road between Gardez and Khost.
In nine years, about 15,000 Soviet soldiers were killed in
Afghanistan. In roughly the same time, the Coalition has lost
1,993.
T
He failed tactics of the Soviets are on full display in Lester
Grau’s book The Bear Went Over the Mountain. Grau
culled reports on Soviet actions from the Frunze, a Soviet
general-staff college. The reports read like a chronicle of events
that could have happened in 2008 rather than 1988—the loop of
Afghan history repeating itself with better firepower. The companion book to The Bear Went Over the Mountain, one told from the
mujahedeen side, is Grau’s Afghan Guerrilla Warfare: In the
Words of the Mujahedeen Fighters, written with Ali Ahmad Jalali.
In both books, the Shomali Plain and the road between Kabul
and Charikar come up again and again. To take one example, the
attack on Mumtaz in 1988, detailed from the mujahedeen side, is
notable for the firepower they brought to bear on a brigade-size
garrison of government troops. “Mujahideen armaments included one Saqar, one BM12, one 122mm howitzer, six 82mm
mortars, eight 82mm recoilless rifles and approximately 40 RPG7s,” according to the mujahedeen who spoke to the authors. “We
also had some ZSU-23-2 anti-aircraft guns and some Stinger
anti-aircraft missiles.”
The Sarqar and BM 12 are multiple-rocket launchers with a
range of 8,000 meters. The howitzer and ZSU are so heavy that
they are usually towed behind a truck.
The plan at Mumtaz was to block the Charikar–Kabul road
from the north and south, then bombard the garrison with rockets and artillery for seven days before a 400-man ground assault
33
JAMIE FRANCIS
Swinging from a destroyed Soviet tank in the Panjshir Valley
force would move on it. The Communist government’s troops
held out for only a few hours before making a breakout for
Kabul, to the south.
By way of contrast, attacks by the Taliban on small U.S. outposts,
like Combat Outpost Keating and Wanat in the eastern mountains
near the Pakistan border, were fought with only mortars and RPGs.
The fighting at Keating and Wanat was fierce, but the Taliban does
not have nearly the firepower the mujahedeen employed. On the
Shomali Plain, the only comparable attack on U.S. forces was in
May 2010, when the Taliban mustered 30 fighters with rifles, RPGs,
and suicide vests to make a charge at Bagram Airfield.
What is most striking in Bear and the scholarly Soviet-military
writings about Afghanistan is what is missing: There is absolutely no evidence the Soviets seriously attempted population-centric
counterinsurgency to win the passive support of the population,
which is a key to understanding where the United States stands
in Afghanistan. The WikiLeaks documents show that the vast
majority of Coalition missions in Parwan are for meetings with
Afghan-government officials and assessments for development
projects. These discussions and assessments are textbook counterinsurgency.
Soviet counterinsurgency did have economic, social, and political lines of effort—brutal ones: The Soviets succeeded in destroying the rural agricultural economy by razing crops, clear-cutting
orchards in the Shomali Plain, and destroying irrigation systems.
Their political line of effort was to exploit tribal and party rivalries
among the mujahedeen. The social one was to create hundreds of
thousands of refugees fleeing to Pakistan while sending select
urban youths to be educated and indoctrinated in the Soviet Union.
There was a kind of logic to this version of counterinsurgency: If
the greatest advantage of the insurgent is to hide in plain sight
among the civilian population, then get rid of the civilians.
The Soviets put minimal effort into distinguishing civilians from
combatants, and the Taliban was just as brutal, if not more so. Its
campaign in the Shomali Plain was as medieval as its imposition
of sharia, and at times amounted to no more than a bloody
ethnic/sectarian cleansing, the murder of Uzbeks and hazaras by
the thousands. By contrast, Gen. Stanley McChrystal introduced
highly restrictive rules of engagement in 2009 to minimize civilian
casualties. The changes were controversial, accompanied by
many anecdotal accounts of how tying the hands of U.S. forces
was causing more of our troops to be killed or wounded in action.
34
|
Empirical evidence shows the restrictive ROE can protect
Coalition troops. A recent analysis by the National Bureau of
Economic Research found that “counterinsurgent-generated civilian casualties from a typical incident are responsible for six additional violent incidents in an average-sized district in the following
six weeks.” The tribal code of honor requires badal—blood
revenge—for the killing of a family or tribe member. If fewer
Afghans are accidentally harmed, then there are fewer instances
of the blood revenge being sought against Coalition troops.
T
hE Soviet force that arrived in Afghanistan was an artillery
army, with some tanks and mechanized infantry. Over the
course of the 1980s, the Soviet 40th Army morphed into an
air-assault and mechanized-maneuver force. The U.S. military of
the late 1990s was heavy and maneuver-based. It has since grown
into its counterinsurgency mission, but it still clings to too many
conventional habits. The American way of counterinsurgency, as
articulated in Field Manual 3-24, written in part by Gen. David
Petraeus, is the exact opposite of the Soviet approach. We don’t
destroy-and-search, we sit-and-talk, mostly with local tribal leaders. We have different ideas, and a different kind of army.
The Soviets in the 1980s to some degree had a less complicated fight than the one U.S. forces face now. During the Soviet occupation, the mujahedeen would actually come out and fight in the
open, at times, in an attempt to hold land and lines. It had standing military units; the Taliban, on the other hand, operates in cells.
And, as the study from the NBER shows, a significant portion of
the attacks on Coalition forces are driven by revenge rather than
by offensive strategy, meaning that the factors in play are more
cultural than strictly military.
Perhaps nothing sums up the difference better than what I saw
as I drove through the city of Charikar. It passed from Soviet to
mujahedeen hands in the 1980s, and the battle between the
Taliban and Massoud in the 1990s left it practically a ghost town,
pockmarked by bullets and shrapnel. Today, Charikar hums with
commerce, especially the downtown jewelry market, where gold
chains gleam through the clean plate-glass windows. Four civilians in an old Land Cruiser, packing only pistols, could stop for
diesel fuel on the outskirts of town without much worry. Which
means Charikar is safer than Tijuana or Juarez—that’s not saying
much, but it’s something.
AUGUST 30, 2010
Eleventh-Hour
Counterinsurgency
We must quickly prepare the Kabul
government to win its own war
BY BING WEST
T
HE Obama Surge began in July of 2009 with the entry of
a Marine brigade into southern Helmand Province. For
three years, a British brigade had struggled in Helmand,
meeting fierce resistance in every district. The surge
was meant to firmly establish Coalition control in this province
and elsewhere, with the goal of eventually handing the country
over to the Afghan army.
The surge has one more year to produce results, and then
Obama has promised to begin withdrawing our troops. So how is
the Helmand campaign going, and what does it portend about
other areas?
Having just returned from my third trip in a year to the province, I’d say that depends on how you assess success. In a sentence, the Marines are doing well, the Afghan army is tagging
along, and the people are standing on the sidelines.
Most of Helmand is a sand-and-dirt wasteland, though the
Helmand River runs 100 miles from the north to the southwest
through the center of the province, irrigating a “green zone”
about 20 miles in width. The main crop is opium poppies; this
one province produces close to half the world’s supply. The
Marine strategy was to seize and hold the river valley, then
pounce upon the Taliban and drug stronghold of Marja, located
near the center of the province.
This February’s assault on Marja by thousands of Afghan
soldiers and U.S. Marines, the war’s largest operation in eight
years, received intense press coverage. At first it was overhyped
as a success, because the fighting ended in a few weeks. Unfortunately, the new district governor failed to gain traction, and
the Taliban began a campaign of murder and intimidation that
continues today. Marja left a bad taste, since it showed that the
Taliban could adapt its tactics and string out the war.
In late July, I accompanied Lt. Col. Kyle Ellison, the commander of Marine Battalion 2-6, to remote Outpost Justice, deep in
Taliban-controlled territory in western Marja. Sgt. Christopher
Austin, 23, was in charge of a combined squad of eight Marines
and nine Afghan soldiers, with no interpreter. Austin carefully
pointed at a row of stout houses a hundred meters away.
“We get hit from there twice a day,” he said. “So watch it. They
ride up on motorcycles, pick up cached AKs [rifles], blaze away,
and drive off. We don’t bomb the houses.” The Taliban knows
our rules of engagement well.
On a bare hill behind the small settlement fluttered the flags of
a cemetery. “When we score a kill,” Austin said, “they take the
coffin up there in a parade of bikes. It looks like Hell’s Angels,
Mr. West, a former assistant secretary of defense and former combat Marine, is just
back from his eighth trip to Afghanistan.
but not a one of them carries a weapon. So they’re safe.” Austin
addressed his commander: “We want to ambush them tonight in
the vil’, sir.”
“How many?” Ellison asked.
“We’ve counted eleven to 20,” Austin said.
Ellison looked around. “You need four men to man posts,” he
said. “Plus four as a quick-reaction force. Set your ambush
tonight with eight, but don’t let them cut you off.”
A Pashtun interpreter in his second year in Helmand told me,
“The Taliban fear the saman dirian [Marines]. They say samandari have much enthusiasm. They like to fight.” Austin showed
that. The Marines excel at raw firefights. In Marja, they will
gradually exact a toll from the shoot-and-scoot bikers. As this
patient strategy of attrition continues, the trend points toward
Marine control across the populated districts of Helmand by
next summer.
Checking the Taliban momentum with American power,
though, is a midpoint, not a solution. After showing the Afghans
that we are in charge, we will need to get them ready to take
charge themselves—the army and the civilians. And some of our
efforts to win over the populace may be making this goal harder
to achieve.
Here’s an example. When Ellison left the outpost, he strode
along the dirt road. I suspected he was trolling, hoping the
Taliban would engage and lose a man or two, which is how
most direct-fire engagements end. He headed toward a mosque
where several men were loitering. The mullah hastened across
a poppy field to parley. Ellison listened to his complaints about
the shortage of work and a Taliban neighborhood gang that had
burned his motorcycle. Point out the Taliban compound, Ellison
said, and I’ll take care of that. The mullah refused. Okay, Ellison said, I’ll give you ten dollars a day to pull weeds out of the
canal and get the water to your crops. It’s not my canal, the
mullah replied; it belongs to the community. Give me ten men
to clean it.
This “give me” attitude is one of the ways in which we have
created a culture of entitlement rather than self-help. This mistake originates at the highest levels. According to Adm. Mike
Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, “the central mission in
Afghanistan right now is to protect the people, certainly, and that
would be inclusive of everybody. And that—in an insurgency and
a counterinsurgency, that’s really the center of gravity.”
That sort of gibberish has caused our current predicament.
Counterinsurgency is based upon a social contract: Our soldiers
bring money and honest government officials; in return, the
people cease passively and actively supporting the insurgents.
The Mullen approach misapplied counterinsurgency by giving
away $30 billion since the invasion without demanding selfsecurity in return.
We have been giving the villagers free goods for nine years.
Annually, the 31 Provincial Reconstruction Teams and District
Support Teams and our military spend $3 billion on projects that
are wildly popular. In fact, they are the only projects in many
districts. The one acronym most Afghans have memorized is
PRT.
In return, nothing has been asked of the communities that have
benefited. Indeed, until a few weeks ago, Karzai was opposed to
village self-defense for fear it would give rise to another set of
warlords. Because of all this, an attitude of entitlement and
dependency has taken root. Now, suddenly, we, the givers, are
35
asking the villagers to depend upon themselves and upon a government that depends upon us. That will be a hard sell. Until they
believe the Taliban are losing, most Pashtun villages will not
defend themselves or identify the secret Taliban who intimidate
them, and who are their cousins and neighbors.
Our battalions are spending too much time on nation building:
Every battalion gives a briefing that shows security as only one
of its four Lines of Operation, or LOOs. Security, they say, is no
more important than governance, economics, or the rule of law.
That military catechism is a fantasy, because the tribal response
to all these well-meant priorities has not been commensurate with
our efforts.
Nation building by LOOs was also part of our military doctrine
in Iraq, but it does not explain our success in that insurgency.
True, the Sunnis did eventually rebel against al-Qaeda and the
Islamist extremists, but they did not come over because of
improved governance; in fact, they loathed the Americaninstalled Shiite regime in Baghdad.
Instead, they decided to join the Americans because we were
the strongest tribe. I asked Abu Risha, who led the Sunni tribal
rebellion, why it took three years of blood and fighting before
the Sunnis came over. He said, “You Americans could not convince us; we had to convince ourselves.” When they joined up,
it was on the premise that the Americans would be staying. But
that is not the case in Afghanistan. The Taliban repeat President
Obama’s pledge that we are leaving soon, so the people stand
aside.
F
ROM Marja, I visited Operating Base Geronimo in nearby
Nawa district. When I was there last summer, the pace and
nature of the fighting was similar to what we are seeing
now in Marja. But Nawa has distinctly improved; it is good
enough to be considered a showcase. Nawa had an Afghan battalion commander who was willing to leave the wire, a new police
chief, a decent governor who had grown in self-confidence, an
assertive district council, and a bustling farmers’ market.
Lt. Col. George Nunez, the adviser to the local Afghan battalion, was optimistic. Having advised an Iraqi battalion during the
hard fighting in Anbar Province in 2006, he had a level eye.
“Before the summer of 2011,” he said, “we should turn Nawa
over to the Afghans. We’ll leave advisers. But most Marines
should be out of Nawa in a year.”
The Marine battalion commander, Lt. Col. Jeff Holt, was more
guarded but still optimistic. “We’ll place the Afghan forces in the
lead,” Holt said. “Beyond that, I can’t predict.”
I next flew to Garmsir district at the bottom of Helmand, where
Lt. Col. Ben Watson had deployed Battalion 3-1 in 50 outposts
across 350 square miles of farmland. Each outpost held an Amer ican and an Afghan squad. Watson had deployed the combined
units systematically, week after week, snapping up territory from
the Taliban like Pac-Man. Garmsir had improved at an unexpected rate. Watson was in the process of seizing the Safar Bazaar, the
gateway from Pakistan into southern Afghanistan. With the combat drawing to a close, Watson was fighting a political battle to
persuade the Afghan government to allow the local villagers to
raise a police force.
I left Helmand convinced that the Marines will basically clear
the province over the next year. I was less certain that our national
command in Washington has a clear-eyed view of what is possi36
|
ble in that timeframe. Benevolent counterinsurgency and billions
of dollars will not persuade the Pashtun tribes to turn meaningfully against the Taliban, particularly if they believe the Americans are leaving in a year. The people will not throw out the
Taliban; that is the job of the Afghan security forces. The priority mission for our forces should be to train those forces and instill
in them the confidence required to win.
Defeating an insurgency requires balancing three tasks: 1)
destroy the insurgent forces; 2) remove the insurgents’ appeal and
win over the people by building a nation with honest governance
and the rule of law; 3) train an indigenous force.
Regarding task 1, we cannot destroy the Taliban. They are too
elusive and have a vast sanctuary. It’s not enough for our Special
Operations Forces to hammer the Talib leaders, as they are certainly doing. The rural districts also have to be controlled by
Afghan forces, and that hasn’t happened yet.
Regarding task 2, we don’t have the time or resources to build
a nation when its top leaders are so feckless. Corruption is rife at
all levels, and their commitment to opposing the Taliban is shaky.
Admiral Mullen has said, “Afghanistan has to be stable enough,
has to have enough governance, has to create enough jobs, have
an economy that’s good enough so that the Taliban cannot return.” That certainly requires a vibrant nation. Yet President
Obama has scoffed, “Nobody thinks that Afghanistan is going
to be a model Jeffersonian democracy.”
Our battalions are trying to build a nation from these unpromising materials because senior officers from Mullen on
down have bought into an unproven theory of liberal counterinsurgency. “Soldiers and Marines,” according to the doctrinal field
manual entitled “Counterinsurgency,” “are expected to be nation
builders as well as warriors.” If the president has rejected nation
building, he must make that clear to his military commanders and
let them concentrate on fighting and training. If he hasn’t, he
must figure out a way to hold Afghanistan together as a nation
once the Americans are gone.
So task 3—training and instilling confidence in the Afghan
forces—should be the first priority at present. In my combinedaction platoon in Vietnam, it took 16 months before we could turn
over the village to the Popular Force platoon. Every day we
taught them on the job how to fight and how to have confidence
that they could kill the Viet Cong.
If we expect to cut loose the Afghan forces a year from now,
we have to get serious about preparing them now. This war will
turn on whether they show they can beat the Taliban, not on
American soldiers’ protecting the Pashtun tribes from their
Taliban cousins.
Our domestic political clock is approaching midnight. We need
to fix dates to tasks. Otherwise, we will be suddenly rushing the
transition without having properly prepared the Afghan units.
I know—we tried this approach in Vietnam. There the war
ended badly and millions were killed. So even as we turn the war
over to Afghan forces, we must keep some American combat
units, air power, logistics, and large advisory teams committed,
and the U.S. Congress must allocate aid every year for perhaps
another decade. This means over $60 billion in 2011. After that,
it would seem politically prudent to cut back in order to retain
congressional support. Still, we are facing more than $40 billion
in 2012, and a like amount for years after that. The surge is working, but surges are temporary by nature, and Afghanistan is a
long-term problem.
AUGUST 30, 2010
Fatal
Conceit
What’s wrong with nation building
BY JUSTIN LOGAN &
CHRISTOPHER PREBLE
mericans used to have a wise skepticism about
nation building. as recently as the 1990s, conservatives, especially, opposed the clinton administration’s social-engineering projects in Haiti, somalia,
and the Balkans: They doubted that the U.s. military should, or
could, become a tool for creating modern states where none
existed. after 9/11, however, as the U.s. military drifted into
nation-building operations in afghanistan and iraq, even previously skeptical observers found themselves endorsing the
expanded missions. Today, support for Barack Obama’s nationbuilding project in afghanistan is widespread, even among
conservatives.
Despite this new consensus, nation building remains expensive, unnecessary, and unwise. in a literal sense, nations,
unlike cars or computers, aren’t built: They develop organically. as charles Tilly observed in his 1990 book Coercion,
Capital, and European States, when the foundation of the
modern nation-state was laid in europe during the 16th and
17th centuries, it was a natural outgrowth of changes in military technology and resulted from the economic requirements
of fielding a national army. it was the farthest thing imaginable
from what goes today by the name of “nation building”—i.e.,
an external effort (usually by the United states) to create a
viable national government where one does not currently exist.
in general, such efforts have been undertaken amid political
violence, as in the case of the clinton administration’s
endeavors in the Balkans and today’s efforts in the mountains
and valleys of afghanistan.
many of today’s nation-building proponents are sol diers—but they resemble the military and political leaders of
the 17th century much less than they do the tweedy modernization theorists of the 1950s and 1960s. They advocate using the
U.s. military and civilian bureaucracies to help govern places
like afghanistan, in the hope that the result will be greater U.s.
national security. They favor a counterinsurgency effort that
includes distributing economic aid, establishing schools, organizing modern military and police forces, adjudicating political
disputes, uprooting corruption, and reforming judicial practices. as Gen. stanley mcchrystal promised before the recent
marja offensive: “We’ve got a government in a box, ready to
roll in.”
This is the kind of ambition the clinton foreign policy displayed in the 1990s, and it met with understandable scorn
A
Mr. Logan is associate director, and Mr. Preble is director, of foreign-policy studies
at the Cato Institute.
from conservative foreign-policy intellectuals. John Bolton
condemned clinton’s approach as reflecting an “instinct for
the capillaries”; John Hillen, a scholar at the Heritage Foundation, urged the administration to make clear that “superpowers don’t do windows.” Their objections could be boiled
down to two, both basically conservative: They believed that
the U.s. should focus on its own national interest, which did
not entail remaking other societies; and they viewed such projects as unlikely to succeed in any case, because particular
cultures and traditions generate institutions, not the other way
around.
What has changed about the first argument is that many
conservatives now wonder whether nation building may be
required for U.s. national security. On the second argument,
some analysts believe that the U.s. intervention in the
Balkans succeeded, and thus provides a template for future
operations.
To begin with the second argument, a brief look at the
Balkans suggests that the wariness some expressed at the time
was well-founded. in the nearly 15 years since the Dayton
accord was signed, Bosnia has been the site of the largest
state-building project on earth. On a per capita basis, the multinational project there has dwarfed even the post–World War ii
efforts in Germany and Japan. Tiny Kosovo received higher
per capita expenditure. Yet, as political scientists Patrice
mcmahon and Jon Western warned in Foreign Affairs last
year, Bosnia “now stands on the brink of collapse”—partly as
a consequence of persistent ethnic cleavages and the inherent
difficulty of state building. mcmahon and Western—who support additional efforts in Bosnia to prevent a collapse—warn
that Bosnia has gone from being “the poster child for international reconstruction efforts” to being a cautionary tale about
the limits of even very well-funded and focused efforts at state
building.
similarly, in surveying conditions in Bosnia and Kosovo,
Gordon Bardos of columbia University recently concluded
that “it is becoming increasingly difficult to argue that we have
the intellectual, political, or financial wherewithal to transform
the political cultures of other countries” at an acceptable cost.
if Bosnia and Kosovo—european countries less rugged than
afghanistan, and with, respectively, one-sixth and one-twelfth
of its population—represent the case for optimism in afghanistan, then the case for gloom is strong.
some might point to the U.s.-supported counterinsurgency
efforts in el salvador and colombia as models to be emulated
in afghanistan. However, in both cases, it was not large-scale,
U.s.-boots-on-the-ground state-building operations that succeeded, but violent, enemy-centric tactics accompanied by
american financial and logistical support to sitting governments. as Benjamin schwarz, who analyzed U.s. efforts in el
salvador for the Defense Department, has made clear, the two
strategically decisive events in the counterinsurgency there
were the cumulative effects of indiscriminate killing by death
squads supporting the government in the early 1980s, and the
collapse of the insurgency’s patron, the soviet Union. sim ilarly, in colombia, the game-changer was the government’s
focus on improving the army’s officer corps and deploying a
better-trained and better-armed army against the insurgents.
There is little parallel between this and the nation building
under way in afghanistan.
37
T
larger disconnect is on the question of whether
nation building is necessary for U.S. national security.
A decade ago, the mainstream consensus on the imprudence of nation building was reflected in the foreign-policy
views of George W. Bush. During the 2000 campaign, Bush
openly questioned the wisdom of such undertakings, and his
foreign-policy adviser, Condoleezza Rice, memorably de clared that the Bush administration wouldn’t have “the 82nd
Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten.”
But Bush and Rice, along with many others, changed their
minds in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. They succumbed to the
tempting liberal argument that illiberal politics was the “root
cause” of terrorism, and argued that using the U.S. military to
spread political reform would enhance American security. This
line of thinking yielded the two nation-building projects in Iraq
and Afghanistan. The mission in Iraq is scheduled to end next
year, but the country’s medium-term prospects remain very
much in doubt, and the U.S. has paid a high price in blood and
treasure to achieve even the shaky equilibrium that exists
today. In Afghanistan, despite the recent policy review and
after nearly nine years of fighting, there remains no clear
strategic end state in sight.
There was such an end state available in October 2001.
What was needed in Afghanistan was not counterinsurgency
and nation building, but a violent response to the terrorist
attacks. however, as the U.S. routed the Taliban in Afghanistan
and trained its sights on Iraq, it became clear that the problem
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had identified in Afghanistan—that there were no good targets—was true for the overall War on Terror. In December 2001, immediately after the
successful overthrow of the Taliban (a feat accomplished with
no more than a few hundred U.S. personnel on the ground),
Charles Krauthammer published an article titled “We Don’t
Peacekeep,” in which he argued that while U.S. military forces
“fight the wars[,] our friends should patrol the peace.” The
Bush White house apparently disagreed, defining U.S. objectives in Afghanistan and Iraq expansively to include the establishment of viable, modern democracies, growing economies,
and equitable judicial systems.
But what had changed? Why was it unwise for the Clinton
administration to seek to remake nations, but wise for the Bush
and, later, Obama administrations to seek to do the same? The
response comes that Washington has national-security interests in Central Asia, whereas there were no such security interests at stake in the missions of the 1990s. It is undeniable that
we have important interests in Afghanistan, but it is also true
that an ambitious state-building project there is unnecessary,
and unlikely to protect those interests at a justifiable cost. If the
Obama administration is to be believed, the al-Qaeda presence
in Afghanistan is fewer than 100 men, and its presence in the
Pakistani tribal areas “more than 300.” This is a threat we can
deal with in the same way we deal with the al-Qaeda threat
in Yemen, Somalia, or elsewhere: intelligence cooperation
(where available), special-operations forces, and drone strikes.
Consider the following counterfactual: If everything in
Afghanistan were the same today, except the U.S. did not
have a large military footprint there, would anyone propose
deploying 100,000 servicemen and -women to build the Afghans
a government? We should doubt whether the governmentbuilding project is likely to succeed. There is little precedent
38
he
|
for successful state building on this scale; and there are especially strong centrifugal forces in Afghanistan, including rampant illiteracy, the country’s position as a plaything of regional
powers (India and Pakistan), powerful identity politics, and a
xenophobic culture. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that
Afghanistan simply is not far enough along in the historical
processes that produced national states in the past.
T
he good news for Americans is that our security does
not hinge on the emergence of an Afghan state. The
U.S. retains the ability to prevent a Taliban takeover
without a large-scale, boots-on-the-ground presence in the
country. As for al-Qaeda, an extensive analysis by Columbia
University counterinsurgency expert Austin Long suggests
that fewer than 20,000 U.S. troops would be sufficient to deal
with its forces in Afghanistan.
That modest investment, aimed at an achievable goal, would
leave us room to reexamine some of the assumptions that have
been embedded in U.S. thinking over the past decade, beginning with George W. Bush’s expansive interpretation of
America’s aims in the “long war.” Sounding distinctly Wilsonian, Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union address
that “our calling, as a blessed country, is to make the world
better.” his Second Inaugural raised the stakes even higher,
setting an “ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” This
Progressive streak in Bush’s thought helps us understand
some of the continuity we see in his successor: President
Obama’s foreign-affairs rhetoric is less lofty than President
Bush’s, but the two are in basic agreement on America’s mission. Obama tells us that “extremely poor societies and weak
states provide optimal breeding grounds for disease, terrorism, and conflict.” he, too, wants to engage in nation building
to solve those problems, and argues that America must “invest in building capable, democratic states that can establish
healthy and educated communities, develop markets and
generate wealth.”
The problem with the nation-building impulse remains what
it was in the past: This project is rooted in deeply flawed ideas
about man’s ability to reshape society, and exhibits the very
type of “fatal conceit” that Friedrich von hayek scorned long
ago. It is incoherent to believe that the same government that
can produce neither jobs nor well-educated children at home
can build viable states in foreign lands with unfamiliar languages, customs, and cultures. To oppose such projects at
home while supporting them abroad defies the laws of economics and basic common sense.
It is a peculiar act of hubris to try to build a nation. After all,
as edmund Burke wrote, a nation is “not an idea only of local
extent, and individual momentary aggregation, but it is an idea
of continuity, which extends in time as well as in numbers, and
in space. And this is a choice not of one day, or one set of people, not a tumultuary or giddy choice; it is a deliberate election
of ages and generations.” echoing Burke, George Will argued
in 2006 that “when you hear the phrase ‘nation building,’
remember, it is as preposterous as the phrase ‘orchid building.’
Nations are not built from Tinker Toys and erector sets. They
are complicated, organic growths, just as orchids are. And
they are not built, either.”
Not in Afghanistan; not anywhere.
AUGUST 30, 2010
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The Bent Pin
BY FLORENCE KING
Heap o’ Nothin’
ACK when August was called the dog days,
columnists got a break. We were allowed, even
expected, to write about nothing much because
there was nothing much to write about. “Nothing
happens in August” was a given. If you pointed out that
World War I and Lizzie Borden both exploded in the first
week of August, you were reminded that exceptions prove
the rule; as for Hiroshima, that was just a coincidence.
The low-key, upbeat, dog-days vacation column thus
became a journalistic tradition. As with all traditions, there
are certain rigid rules. First, never depress your readers.
Strive for humor but steer clear of wit because while humor
goes for the jocular, wit goes for the jugular, and this particular twain must never, never meet anywhere within the
borders of the United States, however porous they may be.
Second, never predict anything, even an idyll. Frayed Americans relax when they hear that nothing is happening, but if
you remind them that nothing might not be happening you
will set them to waiting for the other shoe to drop. Third and
most important, wallow in sweet nostalgia until you sound
like a poster child for arrested development. Lemonade
stands, the old swimming hole, the toys your grandfather
whittled for you, the lamp you made by catching fireflies in
a jar—the whole family-values menu found in Edgar Guest’s
poem, which you must quote, that begins “It takes a heap o’
livin’ in a house to call it home.”
It takes a heap o’ heapin’ to make a heap, so let’s get
started.
I predict that banks will never pay interest on savings
again, and as soon as they get us resigned to that, they will
start charging us a fee to keep our money for us.
In all the turgid analyses of the “global financial crisis” to
which we are subjected, nobody ever mentions a critical
aspect of it: money as a figure of speech. “Penny wise and
pound foolish,” “a day late and a dollar short,” “don’t take
any wooden nickels”—the list is endless in every language
and there’s nothing global about it. People, miser and spendthrift alike, have an emotional connection to their money
that they don’t even realize until the figures-of-speech column turns up blank in their national ledgers. That the euro is
now the coin of the realm in 16 countries is a standing order
for psychological mayhem.
If the eternal complaint, “There’s nothing on TV,” seems
truer since the digital conversion, it is. Cable companies are
gradually taking the best shows, like Turner Classic Movies,
and moving them to digital without prior warning, nothing
but a fine-print footnote on the back of your cable bill. I predict that the History Channel will be the next vanishing act.
Even more traumatizing would be the loss of Animal Planet,
the only place left to find touching evidence of maternal
devotion. Soon we cable hold-outs will have nothing to
watch except Girls Gone Wild and steam mops.
B
Florence King can be reached at P.O. Box 7113, Fredericksburg, VA 22404.
They don’t call him “No Drama Obama” for nothing. He’s
even worse than we thought because he has committed the
ultimate American crime, worse than anything he has been
accused of so far: He has no sense of humor. You can tell just
by watching him at the mike that here is a person who knows
the words but not the tune. You see him standing like a greyhound in the slips, straining upon the start, but he can’t sense
where the start comes. Someone has over-coached him on
the subject of “timing.” He doesn’t really feel it, he just
knows that comedians are supposed to have something
called timing, so he puts on a little half-smile and waits for
it—you can almost hear him counting.
My ultimate prediction is based on the scientific certainty
of female intuition. I have a feeling that a lot is going to happen. I sense that something is gearing up, gathering speed,
starting to peek from behind the curtain. Lights keep going
off in my mind like fireflies in a jar, and I already have a
poem to go with it all: “Shine, Perishing Republic” by
Robinson Jeffers.
We are in the throes of rapid, obligatory cultural change,
and to see how bad that can get, imagine that the boy and girl
in The Blue Lagoon had lived to be rescued and brought
back to civilization. They would have fallen apart. Some tea
partiers have already reached that point, but most Americans
are still in the tics-and-twitches stage.
One such twitcher is Chris Matthews, whose finicky insistence on correct geographical pronunciations seems to have
reached the obsessive-compulsive level. Known for being a
Philadelphian, he spent much of Campaign ’08 taking care to
pronounce Missouri as “Missouruh” as the natives did, and
changing the long A in Nevada and Colorado from “ah” to
the local “eh.” As he was broadcasting from these places, I
figured he was taking care not to flaunt his eastern vowels
lest the natives think he was looking down on them and
making fun of their flat western accents.
A reasonable interpretation, yes? No, because he never
stopped; he’s still doing it on his show. He will interrupt himself to explain that this is the way to pronounce the place he’s
discussing, and he even corrects his guests, which can disrupt
their train of thought and distract the viewer. My stomach ties
in knots whenever he cranks up his Ob-Com MapQuest service. I wondered if he secretly wished he were from some big
tough state, but he doesn’t seem to have any masculinity
problems. I think his penchant for dialect lessons is his subconscious way of worrying about the debilitating effects of
Our Great Diversity.
Matthews is a liberal with conservative touches, and this
is one of them. He is aware that E Pluribus Unum is turning into Ex Uno Plures, but he does not cheer about it as
many on the left do. I suspect he believes that people have
a right to talk any way they please provided everybody
talks the same way, so he has turned his inner conflict into
an oblique little ’Enry ’Iggins game that serves him as a
safety valve.
39
longview_QXP-1127940387.qxp 8/10/2010 9:25 PM Page 40
The Long View
The “Grounder”
Congregation Newsletter from the
Ground Zero Mosque
What’s Going On at the
GZM This Week?
Prayer Rugs for the Needy
We’re collecting prayer rugs for the
needy. Please put all gently worn
prayer rugs in the bin right next to the
Stoning Wall. We’ll be distributing
them next Thursday, so please make
sure to put your donation in the bin
before then.
Newlyweds Social Group
Just got married? Confused about what
happens next? It’s hard to make a marriage work in 2010, and we’re here to
help. For guys, we talk in an open and
supportive environment about learning
your wife’s name, understanding her
limitations, and beating her with a bag
full of oranges. For the gals, it’s All
About Obedience. Tea and cakes are
served (separately) after the sessions.
It’s really a great way to meet other
newlyweds and to realize that Hey!
We’re not alone!
We meet every week in the Crimes
of Judaism Conference Room. To
sign up or for more info, just e-mail
[email protected].
Youth Group Picnic & Stoning!
Where: Ft. Tryon Park
When: This Saturday
What: The youth group has been
doing some amazing work this
year—we’ve raised a lot of money
for the new Teen Hangout Center in
40
|
the basement of the main hall—and
we’re celebrating with a picnic! And
a stoning!
What to Bring: Frisbees, a boom
box for listening to audio tapes of the
great imams, hot-dog buns, a great attitude!
What to Wear: Sweaters in case of
cold weather, heavier burqas. Gals:
Remember to bring the burqas with the
slightly larger eyeholes for Ultimate
Frisbee.
What You Can Do: Please consider
pitching in, either in the morning before the picnic to help set up tables
and chairs and the barbeque, or maybe
you can help gather smooth, tossable
stones from the nearby river bank, or
maybe there’s a special person in your
life who you feel needs to be stoned to
death (nominees due via e-mail by
Tuesday AT THE LATEST!!!!!!). The
key is to get involved!!! The Youth
Group is only as strong as YOU make
it!!! You get out of it what you put into
it!!!! Any ?? or thoughts, see us after
morning call to prayer or e-mail [email protected].
Recovery Programs at the GZM
Canceled due to eternal damnation.
Outreach Fellowship Meeting
This year, the Outreach Fellowship is
making it a major goal to reach out to
other local places of worship (that
aren’t befouled by Jews) in the neighborhood (except the Jewish parts).
We’re trying to recruit some outgoing,
not-overly-angry folks from the congregation to appear at local events,
town halls, etc. and remind folks that
we’re just ordinary, run-of-the-mill
everyday types. Neighbors and friends
and regular folks. All volunteers will
receive extensive media training on
how to stay on message, how to speak
to groups, and how to talk to an uncovered woman without throttling her
and calling her a whore. Please e-mail
[email protected] for
more information.
BY ROB LONG
Gay ’n’ Grounded
The gay Koran study group at the
Ground Zero Mosque has unfortunately disbanded due to the sudden death of
all of its members after they spontaneously burst into flames. We’re trying
to recruit another group. If you suspect
anyone of being a potential member of
this group, please let us know immediately.
Blood Drive Next Week!
Next week is the kickoff to our annual
Blood Drive, and we’re hoping that all
members of the congregation will do
their part to make this year’s Blood
Drive the Best Ever!!!!!
Please collect as much Jewish blood
as you can!!!!
Announcements:
Anyone who thinks he saw my wife
speaking freely to the UPS man—signing for a package, showing the top of
her right hand as she held the stylusthingy—PLEASE let me know immediately. Am trying to get Tuesday morning
off (my supervisor at work is a real pain)
to exact an honor killing. Thanks! See
Ramzi in the outreach office.
Have two tix to Lady Gaga concert,
willing to exchange for powdered
explosives. Please e-mail [email protected].
Trying to arrange a marriage for my
13-year-old daughter. She’s compliant and very quiet. Totally illiterate.
A great catch. Looking for husband
somewhere between 60 and 90 years
old. Dowry negotiable. Interested in
barter. Please e-mail me at [email protected]. Your photo
gets hers, although she’s entirely covered. Not into endless e-mailing. MUST
BE SERIOUS.
Have an announcement or group you’d like
us to know about? Just drop us a line at [email protected] and we’ll
be sure to include it in the next issue of The
Grounder! Remember: It’s your GZM!
AUGUST 30, 2010
books8-30_QXP-1127940387.qxp 8/10/2010 4:08 PM Page 41
Books, Arts & Manners
A
Complicated
Rebel
RONALD RADOSH
Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky,
by Nicholas von Hoffman
(Nation Books, 237 pp., $26.95)
N
h offmaN ’ s
short, breezy, and informative sketch of saul alin sky—and of the decade he
spent with him working as a community organizer—offers us a very different
take on the legendary activist than the
narrative we are accustomed to. This is
especially the case for those conservatives who consider alinsky close to the
devil. alinsky made the comparison
himself, invoking lucifer, along with
Thomas Paine and Rabbi hillel, in the
epigraphs to his classic, bestselling 1971
guide, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic
Primer for Realistic Radicals. as alinsky
put it, clearly facetiously, lucifer was
“the very first radical . . . who rebelled
against the establishment,” and who was
so effective “that he . . . won his own
kingdom.” But the reality of alinsky and
his work was significantly different
from what this tongue-in-cheek selfpresentation—and, a fortiori, today’s
conservative attacks on alinsky—would
icholas voN
Mr. Radosh, an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute
and a blogger for PajamasMedia.com, is the author of
Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left,
the New Left, and the Leftover Left.
have us believe. he was not a radical
believer in Big Government, and he probably would have had serious problems
with Barack obama’s agenda.
alinsky became famous by organizing
ethnic workers in the old chicago stockyards from 1939 to the end of the 1950s,
where he created the Back of the Yards
Neighborhood council as the vehicle to
organize them. Because of his work, von
hoffman notes, “what had been an area
of ramshackle, near-slum housing tilting
this way and that had been rebuilt into a
model working-class community of neat
bungalow homes.”
candidly, von hoffman adds that
alinsky did not challenge the neighborhood’s pattern of segregation, which
had “become an impregnable fortification of whites-only exclusionism.” Back
in 1919, these same workers played a part
in the famous 1919 chicago-area race
riots, in which 500 people, most of them
black, were wounded and 38 killed.
alinsky did manage to obtain permission
for blacks to have unmolested passage
through the Back of the Yards as they
were on their way to other places—which
seems little by today’s standards, but, as
von hoffman notes, was a major accomplishment then.
as for the Neighborhood council’s
funding, it came not from government
largesse, but from—of all things—the
illegal-gambling activities of alinsky’s
partner, Joe meegan. This spoke to alinsky’s longstanding friendly relations
with gangsters, thugs, and the organizedcrime syndicates. That source of funding
meant that any pressure from government to end racial exclusion would come
to naught. moreover, alinsky’s belief that
the people had to determine their own
destiny meant, for him, that if the people
wanted an all-white community, they
should not be challenged on the matter.
although he wanted integration, and
hoped that he could select and induce a
few middle-class black families to buy
homes in the Back of the Yards neighborhood and then convince whites to accept
them, his partner meegan nixed the idea.
“Even public discussion of a Negro family,” von hoffman writes, “would have
the same effect as news that the bubonic
plague was loose.” Even fair-minded
whites in the area believed that blacks’
moving in meant “slumification, crime,
bad schools, and punishing drops in realestate values,” and hence the simple idea
of an interracial neighborhood “would
destroy the community and the council.”
alinsky’s code of loyalty to the Back of
the Yards council came before his personal opposition to segregation. (as von
hoffman rationalizes it, “the leaders
behind the whites-only policy were his
friends.”) The people pursued a policy he
abhorred; and he had no choice but to
stand with the people.
an even more surprising revelation
is that alinsky admired sen. Barry
Goldwater, whose libertarian objections
to the proposed 1964 civil-rights act he
shared. countervailing power from organizations, not decisions made by courts,
alinsky thought, was the only way to
achieve permanent change. Thus, von
hoffman tells us, “he was less than enthusiastic about much civil-rights legislation,” and during Goldwater’s run for the
presidency, he had at least one secret
meeting with the conservative senator,
during which they discussed lyndon Johnson’s civil-rights proposal. “saul,” von
hoffman writes, “shared the conservative
misgivings about the mischief such laws
could cause if abused,” but would not
publicly oppose the bill, since he had no
better idea to propose in its place.
alinsky also opposed martin luther
King Jr.’s attempted march in chicago in
1965, criticizing King for not building a
“stable, disciplined, mass-based power
organization.” he saw King as a man
without local roots, who did not know
the community, and who did not have
any idea about how to organize it. von
hoffman writes that King led “a little
army stranded inside a vast and hostile
terrain,” whose efforts “accomplished
nothing except to reinforce the perception” that King “was an outsider.”
But what did alinsky think about the
other major liberal ideas of the time—for
example, lyndon Johnson’s Great society
program, or Robert f. Kennedy’s program for the poor? according to David
horowitz, the conservative activist and
author—in his very influential pamphlet
“Barack obama’s Rules for Revolution:
The alinsky model”—alinsky’s radical
41
BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS
organizers had a responsibility to work
“within the system.” They did not follow
the path advocated by the New Left, who
preferred to utter meaningless calls for
“revolution.” Thus, Horowitz writes, they
“infiltrated the War on Poverty, made
alliances with the Kennedys and the
Democratic Party, and secured funds from
the federal government. Like termites,
they set about to eat away at the foundations of the building in expectation that
one day they could cause it to collapse.”
While the New Left created riots like that
at the Chicago Democratic convention in
1968, “Alinsky’s organizers were insinuating themselves into Johnson’s War on
Poverty program and directing federal
funds into their own organizations and
causes.”
According to von Hoffman, though,
Alinsky had nothing but contempt for
activists who gladly took money from the
government, and hence his own group
did not work within or for the government’s War on Poverty programs. Writes
von Hoffman:
mental action was the last resort, not
the ideal one.
Moreover, according to von Hoffman,
Alinsky also opposed putting community
organizers on the government payroll, as
Bobby Kennedy sought to do, since “it
made an independent civil life next to
impossible.” It also created the conditions by which any administration could
use their work for “social and political
control.” It would “stifle independent
action,” and possibly turn paid organizers
“into police spies.” As von Hoffman sees
his mentor, Alinsky opposed not only big
government, but also large corporations
and big labor. What he wanted was not
revolution—despite his radical rhetoric
meant to appeal to the New Left—but
“democratic organizations which could
pose countervailing power against modern bureaucracies.” Thus, in von Hoff man’s view, Saul Alinsky was a radical,
but a Tory radical or a radical conservative: a man with a libertarian sensibility
who supported all the little men fighting
against any large structure, whether it
was the government, a corporation, or
organized labor.
In today’s America, conservatives have
paid a great deal of attention to what
was—until its recent demise after a series
of scandals—the largest and most successful community organization, ACORN
(Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). Critics have
accused the group of electoral fraud, of
Although Alinsky is described as some
kind of liberal left-winger[,] in actuality big government worried him. He had
no use for President Lyndon Johnson’s
Great Society with its War on Poverty.
He used to say that if Washington was
going to spend that kind of dough the
government might as well station people on the ghetto street corners and
hand out hundred-dollar bills to the
passing pedestrians. For him govern-
ONE 14TH OF JULY
We met them at a block party on Sansom Street
One Bastille Day,
Two Berliners, true believers,
Who met when the Wall fell,
A night he remembered
For the chunk of concrete
He carried home
And they carried with them for several years
Until she made him get rid of it.
It turned out she was from the east
And what was a symbol to him
Was real to her
And you realized that the Wall
Had two sides
And she tore hers down
One night in New Jersey.
—LAWRENCE DUGAN
42
|
shakedowns of large banking and manufacturing firms, and of helping to create
the housing bubble by fighting to have
community banks grant loans to those
who had no way to pay them back. Many
of the critics claim that the organization,
formed in 1970, was inspired by Alinsky’s
methods and concepts—but Alinsky had
nothing to do with its founding.
This is an important issue, because the
great interest Alinsky has for commentators today stems largely from his reputed
influence on Barack Obama. One often
hears critics of President Obama’s policies proclaim that he is acting “straight
out of the Alinsky playbook.” Because
Obama was a community organizer for a
brief time before going to law school,
many people have assumed that, as a disciple of Saul Alinsky, he was committed
thereafter to apply Alinsky’s principles as
a guide for whatever position he held in
life. Many therefore assume that he is
now acting on them as president.
It is true that Obama’s mentors were
trained by Alinsky’s organization. In researching a piece for The New Republic
in 2007, Ryan Lizza spoke to Gregory
Galluzzo, one of the three men who
instructed Obama when he became a
community organizer. Galluzzo told
Lizza that many organizers would start
as idealists, and that he urged them
to become realists and not be averse to
Alinsky’s candid advocacy of gaining
power, since “power is good” and “powerlessness is evil.” Galluzzo taught
Obama that people have to be organized
according to their self-interest, and not on
the basis of what Obama himself has
characterized as “pie-in-the-sky idealism.”
In 1992, Obama famously worked for a
voter-registration group called Project
Vote, which was an ACORN partner, and
helped Carol Moseley Braun defeat an
incumbent U.S. senator in the 1992 Democratic primary. A few years later, Lizza
reported, Obama became ACORN’s attorney, and won a decision forcing Illinois
to implement the Motor Voter Law, with
what the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund
called “loose voter-registration requirements that would later be exploited by
ACORN employees in an effort to flood
voter rolls with fake names.” Obama cited
ACORN first on a list he composed in
1996 of key supporters for his campaign
for the state senate.
So Obama’s association with ACORN
AUGUST 30, 2010
was real, and close. This, combined with
the fact that obama taught Alinsky’s
methods when he worked with commu nity organizers, has led many to
assume that Alinsky himself approved
of ACorN. Von Hoffman, however,
challenges this notion. He writes:
“[ACorN’s] cheekiness, truculence, and
imaginative tactical tropes have an
Alinskyan touch but the organization’s
handling of money, embezzlement, and
nepotism would have drawn his scorn.
Nor would he have been comfortable
with the large amounts of government
money flowing into the organization.”
(Emphasis added.) This conclusion is
essentially confirmed by the activist and
writer John Atlas, whose new proACorN book, Seeds of Change: The
Story of ACORN, explains that the group
broke with the Alinsky model in a number of ways—most importantly, by applying for and receiving government
contracts.
According to von Hoffman, Alinsky
had nothing but disdain for the New Left
with which obama was associated. He
thought Bill Ayers was wedded to “petulant ego decision making,” as well as a
“comic-book leftism whose principal
feature was anger at a government which
did not do as they bade it. Their footstamping anger and humiliation at their
failures . . . made them believe they were
justified in taking up violence.” He saw
the Weather Underground as a group
prone to tantrums and “rumpelstiltskin
politics.”
Alinsky’s own approach had some
major successes. In rochester, N.Y., he
got Eastman Kodak to agree to hire more
blacks. In 1965, he had been approached
by ministers from rochester after martin
Luther King Jr. had turned down an overture from them. This in itself provides
an interesting contrast with some of the
activism of later times: Alinsky took
action after he was asked to intervene by
community ministers. This was quite different from the kind of shakedown associated in more recent years with rev.
Jesse Jackson and rev. Al Sharpton, the
kind in which large corporations fill an
organization’s coffers with money in
exchange for a hands-off agreement.
Yet, even in the rochester fight, Alinsky’s methods often appeared rather comical, and it is rather hard to believe that
they were taken seriously. According to
von Hoffman, what Alinsky proposed, and
scared the city’s elite with, was a scheduled “fart-in” at the Kodak-sponsored
rochester Symphony. He planned to gather black activists—for whom concert tickets had been bought—for a pre-concert
dinner made up exclusively of baked
beans. This would be his substitute for
sit-ins and picket lines. Alinsky called it a
“flatulent blitzkrieg,” and the result of
this threat (along with other tactics, including the use of proxies at stockholder meetings) evidently was a settlement in which
the city fathers agreed to the demands.
In Chicago, he threatened a “piss-in” at
o’Hare Airport, which immediately led
the city to the bargaining table. That such
juvenile tactics worked perhaps says more
about the fears of the politicians than the
genius of Alinsky.
Alinsky had some impressive backers.
Among them was the old giant of the
mine workers’ union, John L. Lewis, who
advised him and supported him. (Like
Lewis, he used Communists as organizers on his staff. He disdained the
Communist Party and its marxist and
pro-Soviet positions, and regarded its
members as “servants of an antidemocratic foreign power”—but because he
valued the organizing skill of individual
Communists, he hired them as staffers
anyway.) He also bonded with key figures in the Catholic archdiocese of
Chicago. The whites he sought to organize were mainly believing Catholics,
and thus Alinsky became particularly
close to Fr. John o’Grady, whom von
Hoffman credits with doing away with
clerically dominated local charities and
replacing them with charities run by professionals from social-work schools in
Catholic colleges and universities. Later,
Alinsky became close to the Catholic
philosopher Jacques maritain, with whom
he regularly corresponded. He also be friended Cardinal Stritch and Fr. Jack
Egan, who got the archdiocese to give
him the money to launch organizing
drives in the 1950s. This constituency is
hardly what one thinks of as a force for
social revolution in America.
So what were Alinsky’s goals in the
end? Von Hoffman does not really
answer this question, perhaps because
Alinsky never did. Before people decide
whether Saul Alinsky was a man with an
actual revolutionary plan, they owe it to
themselves to take into consideration von
Hoffman’s contrary assessment of the
father of community organizing.
The Greatly
Ghastly
Rand
JASON LEE STEORTS
‘F
rom almost any page of
Atlas Shrugged,” Whittaker
Chambers wrote here 53
years ago, “a voice can be
heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber—go!’” What he
did not write is that Ayn rand throws in
a gas chamber.
It’s about two-thirds through, in a chapter called “The moratorium on Brains,”
than which I reread no farther. (our president seems to have inspired—which is not
quite the word—half the country to read
miss rand, and I wanted to remind myself
what she was teaching them.) A train is carrying 300 passengers through the rocky
mountains to San Francisco. America is
falling altogether to pieces, its citizens
starving to death, because the prime
movers—rand’s term for the productive
men and women on whom economic creation and therefore life-or-death depend—
have called a strike. They are hanging
out in a mountain valley that their leader,
mr. John Galt, has cleverly hidden from
the world by means of refractor-ray shield.
The world scarcely has diesel locomotives. When the one attached to that train
breaks down, the only replacements are
coal-burning, which is a problem, because
the train is about to pass through an eightmile tunnel that is not properly ventilated
for locomotives of this type. It happens that
an important looter—rand’s term for the
half-wits running and ruining the country—is on the train and has strong feelings
about getting to San Francisco. His name
is Kip Chalmers. “It’s not my problem to
figure out how you get the train through
the tunnel, that’s for you to figure out!” Kip
Chalmers screams at a station agent. “But
if you don’t get me an engine and don’t
start that train, you can kiss good-bye to
your jobs, your work permits and this
whole goddamn railroad!”
This is persuasive. “The station agent
had never heard of Kip Chalmers and did
not know the nature of his position. But he
knew that this was the day when unknown
men in undefined positions held unlimited
43
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Fast forward to November 3—the morning after the elections.
Whether you find yourself bemoaning another two years of
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NR trips are marked by riveting political shoptalk, wonderful
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Ft. Lauderdale, FL
7:00AM
our courts from Ed Whelan? Picture
H
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power—the power of life or death.” And so
the station officials, knowing that the loss
of their jobs means the loss of their lives,
call in a coal engine, procure a drunken
engineer, and condemn every passenger
on the train to death by asphyxiation.
But that isn’t why I stopped reading.
I stopped because Rand thinks they deserve it.
It is said that catastrophes are a matter
of pure chance, and there were those
who would have said that the passengers
of the Comet [that’s the train] were not
guilty [note that word] or responsible
for the thing that happened to them.
The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 1,
was a professor of sociology who
taught that individual ability is of
no consequence. . . .
. . . The woman in Bedroom D, Car
No. 10, was a mother who had put her
two children to sleep in the berth above
her, carefully tucking them in, protecting
them from drafts and jolts; a mother
whose husband held a government job
enforcing directives, which she defended
by saying, “I don’t care, it’s only the rich
that they hurt. After all, I must think of
my children.” . . .
. . . These passengers were awake;
there was not a man aboard the train who
did not share one or more of their ideas.
Now there are two important defenses
of Rand. The first is that it is the looters,
not the prime movers, who make the gas
chamber possible and send the train into it.
The second is that Rand’s philosophy is
incompatible with totalitarianism, and
no one who believed it would ever send
anyone to a gas chamber. Both are true.
Neither has anything to do with what troubles me about this gas chamber, and about
Ayn Rand. And to explain that, I must say
something about Rand at her best, which I
believe is to be found in the second half of
The Fountainhead, a book I did successfully reread.
In her introduction to its 25th-anniversary
printing, she says: “This is the motive and
purpose of my writing: the projection of an
ideal man.” Yet this man—the architect
Howard Roark—turns out to be pretty boring. He rarely speaks. When he does, it is
rarely interesting (and when it is, it is transparently didactic). He has no sense of
humor. As his enemies try to destroy him,
he shows so little emotion that the reader
must rely upon an abstract sense of justice
in order to give a damn. Howard Roark is
a ghost of a protagonist.
46
|
To some degree this was inevitable,
however—Roark will conduct himself
with a minimum of drama, for Roark is
egoless. I realize that’s a dirty word in The
Fountainhead, but I’m using it in a special
sense, one I think Rand could accept. For
Rand, “egoless” means self-negating,
sacrificing yourself to something or someone else. What I will use it to mean is an
absence of self-consciousness about your
ego—a self-esteem secure enough that you
don’t compare yourself with others, a focus
on your work complete enough that you
don’t worry whether it will succeed, a general freedom from thinking of your identity abstractly and trying to justify or glorify
it. This sense is approximately the antonym
of “egotistical”—the word, Rand explains
in her introduction, that she mistakenly
used for “egoistical” when writing The
Fountainhead. “I don’t make comparisons,” Roark says. “I don’t want to be the
symbol of anything.” He does not want to
be a great architect; he wants to build his
buildings. That’s egolessness.
Its antithesis is Roark’s foil, Peter Keating, also an architect, whom we meet graduating from college as valedictorian and
self-consciously enjoying the fact that
many people are looking at him. The crucial distinction between these types is that
only a Roark can be creative. A Keating, a
man who must justify himself before and
in comparison with the world, is essentially derivative. He cannot create anything his
own, because he has accepted a standard
not his own. And this principle comes with
a corollary for anyone who wishes to be a
creator: He must not—as Rand puts it in a
note that her heir, Leonard Peikoff, reprints
in his Atlas Shrugged introduction—
“place his wish primarily within others” or
“attempt or desire anything that . . .
requires primarily the exercise of the will
of others. . . . If he attempts that, he is out
of a creator’s province and in that of the
collectivist and the second-hander.”
This corollary is not, properly speaking,
a moral imperative, because no obligation
has been established to try to be creative.
But the Randian hero is creative, and will
observe the corollary, and that is why, in
addition to never sacrificing his interests
for another’s, he will never ask others to
sacrifice their interests for his. Much like
the Nietzschean superman, the Randian
hero cannot be predatory or exploitative;
this would not give him what he wants,
because no one outside himself has it
to give. (Chambers’s statement that the
Randian voice commands “from painful
necessity,” his belief that Rand favors rule
by a technocratic elite, and the title of his
review, “Big Sister Is Watching You,” are
all, therefore, in error.)
Most of The Fountainhead’s secondhanders are mediocrities out to make themselves feel better by cutting down their
betters. This isn’t very interesting either.
Rand doesn’t care enough about many of
these characters to make real people of
them, and she draws their personalities in
a manner both crude and incoherent. Keating, for example, is both devilishly calculating—as when he forces out a partner at
the firm, making room for himself, by
accosting him with such violence as to
induce a heart attack—and stupidly inert—
as when his mother manipulates him into
not marrying the woman he loves.
The book finally starts to get interesting
when we meet its Devil, an architecture
critic and public intellectual named Ellsworth Toohey. Toohey is a second-order
second-hander: He preaches a gospel of
collectivism so as to win power over the
Keatings. He is out to “collect souls,” and
they will consent to his rule because he will
secure their egos (in my sense of the word)
by destroying the egoless. His weapon is
to invert values, so that the creators are
despised. He is witty, urbane, eloquent,
ironically colloquial, physically repulsive,
smashingly dressed, surgically subtle, and
purely ruthless.
Two other characters will come to life.
One is Gail Wynand, the aristocratic newspaper baron who publishes Toohey’s column. Wynand has made a Devil’s bargain
and his papers have no soul: They print
whatever the public wants, no matter how
indecent, dishonest, or ugly, and it is in deed ugly. Wynand tells himself he doesn’t
care, because the ugliness pays for his
private gallery of the most priceless and
exquisite art. But because deep down he
is an incomparably noble man, his conscience is tearing him to shreds. He has
long attempted to blast it away by recreationally forcing honorable men to betray
their integrity. We meet him holding a gun
to his temple and deciding not to pull the
trigger.
The other is a beautiful young woman
named Dominique Francon. Dominique
seems not to love anyone or anything, but
is secretly possessed by a reverence for
beauty. Her hobby is to destroy priceless
and exquisite art. We meet her shortly
after she has thrown a sculpture down a
AUGUST 30, 2010
ventilation shaft. She thinks it is too
beautiful to be seen by mankind.
Neither of these two is, properly
speaking, realistic, but then neither are
Dostoevsky’s characters. Wynand and
Dominique remind me of something
Robert Nozick writes in The Examined
Life: “Some literary characters are . . .
‘realer than life,’ more sharply etched, with
few extraneous details that do not fit. In
the characteristics they exhibit they are
more concentrated centers of psychological organization. . . . They are intensely
concentrated portions of reality.” What
is intensely concentrated in Wynand and
Dominique is a passionate but thwarted
idealism. Each is gripped by his conception of the beautiful and the good, but each
betrays it without cease, and ironically out
of loyalty to it.
Roark gives each a chance to redeem
himself. For Dominique, redemption means
learning not to worry about those who
scorn what she finds beautiful—only when
she can overcome her ego’s vulnerability
is she able to marry Roark, with whom
she has long been in love. For Wynand,
redemption means devoting his premier
newspaper to Roark’s defense as Roark
stands trial for victimlessly dynamiting a
building that, in violation of a contract, was
not being constructed according to his
specifications.
Such is the public fury against Roark
that Wynand’s editorials provoke a reader
backlash and a strike of his staff. He even
seems to be making Roark more hated. But
Roark does not care:
“Gail, it doesn’t matter, as far as I’m
concerned. I’m not counting on public
opinion, one way or the other.”
“You want me to give in?”
“I want you to hold out if it takes
everything you own.”
Roark wants Wynand to save his soul,
you see. Wynand has sinned against the
creator’s code. He has spent his life, not
bringing forth the best within himself, but
debasing it for the worst in his readers.
Roark sees that he is “the worst secondhander of all—the man who goes after
power.” And now that he wants to yoke this
supposed power to his own convictions, it
vanishes: He can lay no claim to the minds
of others.
I, too, want mightily for Wynand to
hold out. He becomes magnificent, aweinspiring, in the discovery of his integrity.
When he does not hold out—when he
betrays Roark rather than close his paper—
I feel as I do when I dream I have done
something unforgivable. When in his final
conversation with Roark—whom he feels
too guilty ever to see again,
even though, as atonement,
he has shut down the paper
anyway—he commissions the
tallest building in New York,
a “monument to that spirit
which is yours . . . and could
have been mine,” I feel the
relief of redemption. There is a
passage in which Roark does
not know that something he has said has
given a passing character “the courage to
face a lifetime.” Rand’s hymn to integrity
might achieve the same effect.
Which makes it all the harder to take
Atlas Shrugged.
It’s not just the gas chamber. She piles
offense upon offense, and they all come
down to this: Instead of bringing forth the
best within her, she brings forth the barely
comprehensible hatred of her derangedly
insecure ego.
How do we see this?
In her contempt for her creation. There
is no Ellsworth Toohey, no villain we can
respect and—as readers—enjoy. These
looters possess, at best, “the cunning of the
unintelligent and the frantic energy of the
lazy.” Their chief speaks in a voice “high
with anger and thin with fear.” You know
by looking at them that they are evil, the
physical signs of evil being obesity, baldness, round-facedness, and soft- or wateryeyedness. The heroes, by contrast, are
flawlessly, violently beautiful. The men
invariantly have sharp features; the heroine’s hair slashes across her face. This
projection of virtue and vice into physiognomy and physique disfigures The
Fountainhead as well, but less. In Atlas
Shrugged Rand seems to grow more spiteful with every page turn, so that the looter
on page 7 has “a small, petulant mouth, and
thin hair clinging to a bald forehead,” while
the two on page 560 have a “pendulous
face . . . with the small slits of pig’s eyes”
and a “doughy face . . . that scurried away
from any speaker and any fact.” Even their
names are belittling: Buzzy Watts, Chick
Morrison, Tinky Holloway.
Then there is the fact that some of the
heroes are first-class haters. Foremost here
is Francisco d’Anconia, who is pretending
to be a worthless playboy so that the looters won’t respect him enough to notice
how he is tricking them into destroying
their copper supply. He charms with such
proclamations as: “The rotter who simpers
that he sees no difference between the
power of the dollar and the power of the
whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide—as, I
think, he will”; and, of women
he has manipulated into falsely
claiming affairs with him and
so destroying their reputa tions: “I gave those b**ches
what they wanted.” How I
long for the boring Roark, who
is almost incapable of anger.
(“It’s because of that absolute health of
yours,” a friend tells him. “You’re so
healthy that you can’t conceive of disease.”)
And of course the damnation. Rand calls
to mind Thomas Aquinas’s notion that the
righteous in Heaven will be able to observe
the torments of the wicked in Hell, the better to enjoy their blessedness, with the difference that Rand, as the creator of this
world, is analogous not to the righteous but
to God. One suspects God would feel less
pleasure damning people. You don’t do this
with the word “little,” for example, unless
you are really having a good time: “The
man in Roomette 3, Car No. 11, was a
sniveling little neurotic who wrote cheap
little plays into which, as a social message,
he inserted cowardly little obscenities.”
What, then, went wrong? How could the
woman who gave me Gail Wynand give
me this? Rand answers the question herself, in the notes for Atlas Shrugged (which
was originally to be called “The Strike”):
The Strike is to be a much more “social” novel than The Fountainhead. The
Fountainhead was about “individualism
and collectivism within man’s soul”; it
showed the nature and function of the
creator and the second-hander. . . . Their
relations to each other—which is society,
men in relation to men—were secondary,
an unavoidable, direct consequence of
Roark set against Toohey. But it is not the
theme.
Now, it is this relation that must be the
theme. . . .
. . . I set out to show how desperately
the world needs prime movers, and how
viciously it treats them.
What I think is that because The
Fountainhead is not primarily a social
novel—because Rand was concerned primarily with presenting the ideal man’s
47
soul—she looked into herself and gave
expression to the finest things she found.
She did this by imprinting them on her fictional landscape, which is why even the
villains of The Fountainhead possess a
measure of dignity and humanity. But in
Atlas Shrugged Rand instead looked out
and showed us the world of men as she
sees them. And she sees them viciously.
There is so much to be said against Rand
as an artist. There is the inept dialogue—
characters begin a great many sentences by
shouting each other’s names or saying
“You know”; the heroes speak, every one
of them, in exactly the same voice; the
averagely intelligent advance the plot by
blurting out their secrets. There is the Girl
Scout banality of Atlas Shrugged’s heroine, who seems to have escaped from the
young-adult section. There is the preposterous omnicompetence of the heroes,
equally at home on the Harvard faculty or
in a Vin Diesel movie, and the endless
gushing about their exalted feelings,
Rand’s attempt to steal with treacle what
she has not earned with character development. There is that editorial discipline
which gave us John Galt’s speech.
I don’t care. I don’t require of my artists
that they be perfect craftsmen; I require
that they inspire me. What is sad to me
about Rand is that she could, but that the
creator of Gail Wynand could create only
one; that she could no longer imagine him
when she looked out at mankind; that what
she showed us instead was her need to
reassure herself, in terms frankly delusional, of her superiority to it.
There is a desperately sad moment in
The Fountainhead when Keating, who
originally wanted to be a painter and upon
the collapse of his career has acquired an
easel, offers his canvases to Roark and
asks—though he cannot say the words—
whether they’re any good.
“It’s too late, Peter,” [Roark] said
gently.
Keating nodded. “Guess I . . . knew
that.”
When Keating had gone, Roark
leaned against the door, closing his
eyes. He was sick with pity.
This is the feeling that stopped me at the
gas chamber. I cannot damn Ayn Rand, and
for the too few hours of deep inspiration
she offered me, I give my thanks. But it
got too painful to look any longer, and so,
exercising the right of any self-interested
reader, I simply closed the book.
48
|
Petronoia
I A I N M U R R AY
Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st
Century, by Tom Bower (Grand Central,
512 pp., $26.99)
T
OM BOWER is a British investigative journalist who made
his name writing hard-hitting
exposés of the activities of such
major British business figures as Robert
Maxwell, Mohamed Al-Fayed, and Richard Branson. He has now turned his attention to an entire industry, and he chose
to start at the top. Oil is a 20-year his tory of the oil industry, taking up around
1990, where Daniel Yergin’s Pulitzer
Prize–winning The Prize (1991) left off.
Those used to Bower’s exposés of corruption will not be disappointed, for there is
plenty of underhanded dirty dealing to
be documented. Yet the real villains of
Bower’s tale are not corporate executives.
Bower makes it clear from the very start
that all-powerful Big Oil is actually nothing but a pawn in the hands of governments and traders, and the greatest player
of energy chess is Vladimir Putin.
This is underlined at the start of the
book. What is generally a chronological
narrative from 1990 onwards begins in
2003. In a chapter titled “The Emperor,”
Bower tells the tale of how ExxonMobil’s
bid to take over Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s
oil company, Yukos, was foiled by thenpresident Putin. Shortly afterwards, Kho dorkovsky was arrested and Putin’s
inexorable march toward regaining central
control of Russia’s energy resources
began in earnest. It’s a dominant theme of
the latter half of the book. The author thus
set the stage early for the book’s over -
Mr. Murray is a vice-president at the Competitive
Enterprise Institute.
arching narrative: The 1990s were a time
of a genuine free-market in oil, with resultant low prices and trouble for the oil
industry; and the following decade was
dominated by regulation, environmentalism, peak-oil theory, and nationalism,
resulting in high prices—and trouble for
the oil industry.
The other main player in the first chapter is Lee Raymond, the former head of
ExxonMobil. Exxon and its chairman
come across as all-American, reliable,
convinced of their superiority because
their long-established procedures have
been proven to work. Bower depicts the
company’s culture as both stifling and successful: It entertains an overriding, and
rather off-putting, belief that there are two
ways to do things, the Exxon way and the
wrong way; but, time and time again, the
Exxon way is shown indeed to be the right
way. By sticking to its norms and procedures, Exxon has consistently avoided the
sort of troubles that bedeviled the other
majors throughout the past two decades.
John Browne, the group chief executive
of BP from 1995 to 2007, is portrayed as
flamboyant where Raymond was solid,
and risk-taking where Raymond was riskaverse. Browne, Bower shows us, was
clearly a genius, but a flawed one whose
genius led BP to disaster as well as triumph. It’s a shame that Bower’s book was
written before the Deepwater Horizon oil
spill, because that calamity can be seen as
a natural consequence of the trail of decisions taken by Browne and his sycophantic management team: BP’s concentration
on cost-cutting—something that Bower
makes clear Exxon would never indulge
in—was instrumental in a string of fatal
and/or damaging accidents that bedeviled
BP toward the end of Browne’s time as
head of the company.
In Bower’s account, all of BP’s other
senior figures come across as, if not outright incompetent, mired at some level of
competence below Browne’s. That includes recently departed CEO Tony Hayward and newly installed CEO Robert
Dudley, who had rings run around him in
Russia by the Kremlin and the energy oligarchs. Indeed, the tale of how Dudley
was, almost literally, run out of town by
the oligarch Mikhail Fridman is one of the
most revealing in the book, as it illustrates
just how little power the oil majors have
over the security of massive investments
they have made in the non-Western world.
If the Obama administration succeeds in
AUGUST 30, 2010
reinstating an offshore-drilling moratorium, this will be an indication that, even in
the West, the oil companies have little
recourse when politicians turn against
them.
If the majors are at the mercy of politicians, they are equally impotent when it
comes to the activities of oil traders. David
Hall, who traded at various organizations
over the time span of the book, is the central figure here. Bower shows how Hall
and his colleagues and rivals caused the
collapse of oil prices in the 1990s by instituting a completely free market in oil. In
fact, the British edition of Bower’s book
was called The Squeeze, in reference to the
maneuvers the traders engaged in to maximize their profits at the expense of the
majors and the oil-producing countries.
The story of how the traders worked
around OPEC, the majors, regulators, and
journalists to keep the oil-derivatives market profitable makes for fascinating reading. What is especially interesting is that
illegal activity was usually punished, and
that the traders themselves were always on
the edge of disaster, with even the mighty
Hall being squeezed himself at points.
foolish, and that those in Congress who try
to search for one such factor are equally
foolish. This sort of old-fashioned “show,
don’t tell” journalism is refreshing.
So is the fact that much of the book is set
in Russia. The tale of the rise and fall of the
energy oligarchs and the survivors’ rapprochement with Vladimir Putin is fascinating in itself, and the book is a valuable
window into the overall character of postSoviet Russia, a country that is desperate
to regain past nationalist glories and is,
as a result, suspicious of even genuine
attempts by foreigners to invest in it.
When it comes to oil, Russia is faced with
an almost impossible dilemma. It wishes
to retain full control over its resources, but
it lacks the technical abilities to develop
them, abilities that only the Western
majors can deliver. So it veers between
a form of “petronoia,” a belief that the
majors are trying to exploit it, and willingness to deal.
The tale of Shell, a company that comes
across as hapless throughout the book, and
its troubled investments in Sakhalin, is
particularly instructive. Despite bringing
much to the table, the company consis-
Tom Bower’s old-fashioned
‘show, don’t tell’ journalism
is refreshing.
Yet Hall and his colleagues were also
guilty, to some extent, of causing the
recent spikes in oil prices. Hall became
an adherent of peak-oil theory (a theory
Bower obviously thinks little of), and
started laying his bets on the oil supply’s
dwindling in the near future. Aided by
nationalism in a number of countries
(notably Russia and Venezuela), China’s
huge demand for oil in the run-up to the
Olympics (a demand inflated by China’s
inefficiency in using oil), and environmental restrictions on drilling, Hall and his
colleagues were able to cash in on their
long positions. With a weak dollar, massive numbers jumped on the oil bandwagon, and the number of contracts for
delivery held by Nymex traders rose from
850,000 in 2003 to 2,700,000 in 2008.
Bower, to his credit, does not say that this
proves that speculation was to blame for
the oil-price spike. He makes it clear that
there were so many factors in play that
to say any one factor caused the spike is
tently found itself on the receiving end
of everything the Russians could throw
at it. Shell, proud of its environmental
consciousness, was even the victim of a
spontaneously generated Russian envi ronmental movement, at least until the
Russian government wrung another round
of concessions out of it. Yet the prize of
Russian oil is so enticing that all the majors
keep going back for more. Only Exxon,
burned by the Yukos incident, is wary.
Oil is a gripping book: Its plots are so
intertwined that it could have been written
as a mystery, albeit one that would be dismissed as unbelievable. There are a lot of
names, so many that, at times, the reader
will have trouble remembering just whom
Bower is referring to; but that’s a relatively minor flaw. For anyone who wants to
understand just why oil is at the center of
so many geopolitical intrigues, and for
those on the left who still labor under the
delusion that Big Oil runs the world, this
book is an essential read.
On Thin Ice
MARIO LOYOLA
Skating on Stilts: Why We Aren’t Stopping
Tomorrow’s Terrorism, by Stewart A. Baker
(Hoover, 375 pp., $19.95)
A
HuNDRED years ago, Europeans could not have ima gined the horrors that lay
ahead for them. Our current
century was ushered in with an awful
demonstration of what may lie ahead for
us; can we make the adjustments necessary to avoid the worst? “I’d like to think
we can do that before there’s been a
disaster,” writes Stewart Baker, “but,
really, I’m not sure we can.”
That prognosis is more than a little
unsettling, given Baker’s résumé. As
general counsel to the National Security Agency (the Pentagon’s foreignelectronic-surveillance arm) during the
presidency of George H. W. Bush, he
was a staunch privacy advocate. As policy chief at the Department of Homeland
Security during that of George W. Bush,
he spent years locked in a tug-of-war
with privacy advocates over every initiative to adjust our security strategies.
The title of his new book refers to
accelerating technological change and
the new dangers it’s creating. Our society is advancing, technologically, at a
very rapid clip; but so, unfortunately, are
the terrorists. “It’s like skating on stilts
that get a little longer each year,” he
writes. “Every year we get faster and
more powerful. Every year we’re a little
more at risk. We are skating for a fall,
and the fall grows worse every year.”
If Baker is not precisely a pessimist,
Mr. Loyola works at the Armstrong Center for
Energy and Environment of the Texas Public Policy
Foundation, in Austin.
49
he is certainly gloomy; but even the
most optimistic national-security official
would find himself chronically dispirited
by the effectiveness of the constituencies
arrayed against all efforts to devise new
ways of protecting ourselves from terrorists. Baker’s book is a treasury of examples. Readers may be outraged to learn
that European Union officials routinely
threaten not to disclose vital information
about threats to the U.S.—information
on which the safety of Americans depends—unless we conform our specific
privacy standards to theirs, despite the
fact that no country in Europe offers the
abundance of civil liberty guaranteed by
the U.S. Constitution. Neither will most
readers be happy to be reminded about
the vital intelligence-gathering pro grams that the New York Times has singlehandedly shut down by revealing their
existence, motivated by concerns over
the danger to public safety in the dramatically expanding power of terrorists.
This results in a pattern in which safeguards against even the most hypothetical privacy concerns win out over
safeguards against the gravest threats
to public safety. Rather than let privacy protections be driven reactively,
by actual cases of privacy violations (of
which very few have been documented
since 9/11), officials too often relegate
national-security measures to after-thefact reactions—and ineffectual ones,
such as the ridiculous banning of liquid
containers larger than 3.4 ounces from
our luggage after the British luckily discovered a plot to destroy airliners over
the Atlantic using common household
chemicals.
No one can point to any privacy abuses
arising from cooperation between the
intelligence and the law-enforcement
that raw data, along with the information
we had about two of the 9/11 hijackers,
would have allowed us to catch all of
them before the attacks materialized. In
August 2001, the FBI was desperate for
access to that information, which was
available to other parts of the U.S. government, but lawyers said they couldn’t
have it. Regardless, the Europeans in the
post-9/11 era wanted to deny us this kind
of information unless the U.S. put back
in place the very walls between intelligence and criminal investigations that
the 9/11 Commission had faulted for our
failure to “connect the dots.”
Fortunately, DHS eventually won
that battle. “Persistence and full-throated
defense of our program,” writes Baker,
“had won the day.” The book recounts
some important successes, and in his
unremitting gloominess Baker is almost
certainly guilty of not giving himself, or
In his unremitting gloominess, Stewart Baker is
almost certainly guilty of not giving himself, or the
Bush administration, quite enough credit.
legality that proved to be unfounded, and
taking upon itself vital public responsibilities that it had no competence or
mandate to assume (such as determining
which of the nation’s highly classified
secrets can be revealed at an acceptable
risk to public safety).
Over time, most damaging of all are
the privacy advocates who have allowed
themselves to be sucked into the blood
sport of automatic and absolute opposition to any new security measure.
Baker’s book is, at root, a narrative of
the enormous effort to wrest modest
protections from these constituencies.
The privacy advocates include strange
bedfellows of the Left and the far libertarian Right, and in their propagandistic
hyperbole have an effect far beyond their
numbers.
Because public opinion is the decisive battleground for many of these
often excruciatingly esoteric contests of
policy, propaganda becomes an especially effective tool. And though you
would think this tool is equally available to both sides, in fact it proves much
easier to demagogue the dangers to privacy in the marginally expanding powers of government than to demagogue
50
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agencies of the United States, while
nearly 3,000 graves are a testament to
what can happen when they don’t cooperate. But as Baker writes, “all the
Washington-wise knew that the way to
bureaucratic glory and good press lay in
defending privacy. Actually, more to the
point, they knew that bad press and
bureaucratic disgrace were the likely
result if your actions could be characterized as hurting privacy.” Meanwhile,
nobody suffers disgrace from failing to
prevent mass civilian casualties, nor
from advocating privacy policies that
made those casualties inevitable. Pri vacy advocates are no doubt motivated
by a healthy skepticism about gov ernment; but their message encourages
people to lose faith in government officials and institutions that both deserve
the public’s trust and cannot be effective
without it.
A large portion of the book is devoted
to the battle between DHS and the
European Union (and between DHS
and other agencies of our government)
for access to the most basic information
in the airline-reservation systems about
who is coming to the U.S. Baker explains that simple pattern analysis on
the Bush administration, quite enough
credit.
One reason the successes do not
come through more clearly is that there
is often, in this book, insufficient detail to provide a solid understanding of
what happened. During my years in
Washington, I often heard that government is 90 percent process and 10 percent policy, and it is admittedly daunting
to render bureaucratic process in a way
that is interesting to popular audiences.
But the detail, literary merit, and popular
success of books such as those by Henry
Kissinger and Dean Acheson show that
it can be done.
In his almost flawless 18th Brumaire
of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx wrote,
“Men make their own history, but they
do not make it just as they please.” As we
reach the tenth year after 9/11, and the
hindsight of history begins to shed some
clarity on how little we’ve managed to
change course, that saturnine observation is one Stewart Baker might share.
“In my experience, government rarely
offers clear victories,” he writes. But
“rarely” is not the same as “never,” and
therein lies the hope in this frightening
little book.
AUGUST 30, 2010
City Desk
Cancerland
RICHARD BROOKHISER
I
vIsIted cancerland in 1992, and
now my wife is traveling there. I
took the testicular tour, she is on
the breast package. Her prognosis
is excellent, as was mine. this piece is
not about our particular experiences, but
about the country itself.
Geography. Cancerland has many
outposts in the city. every Manhattanite
knows where our great hospitals are; the
far east side is so thick with them you
have to be wearing a stethoscope to hail a
cab. But as treatments (and cases?) have
proliferated, all of these institutions have
spun off satellite offices—by the Mount
vernon Hotel, a 200-year-old stone building; over the entrance to the Midtown
tunnel; around the corner from NatIoNal
RevIeW (a historic district for sure). the
people ducking in that doorway you pass
every day might not be ordinary Gothamites; they may be inhabitants of cancerland.
Population. Who are the inhabitants?
Patients, of course. then doctors. one
thing the former must do with the latter
is evaluate them before signing up for
treatment. this is an anxious process,
since doctors by definition know more
than patients. Yet patients have to make
a choice. a doctor who is too know-itall may not in fact know enough; a doctor who is brusque or anomic maybe
should be working with test tubes, not
your innards. Get second opinions,
compare and contrast, consult your
gut.
Many of the city’s hospitals are teaching institutions, which means the first
doctor you see on a first visit is likely to
be a resident, getting his or her feet wet.
don’t hesitate to banish residents if they
bumble. learning is important, but no
one has to learn on you.
a bad doctor can attract bad nurses and
technicians, but generally the people in
this tier of care-giving are saintly. Remember to thank them by name (that may also
dispose them to move you up in the queue
sometime).
How many of your friends will accompany you to cancerland? this turns out to
be a strict test. Many come through with
flying colors, some, from fear of death or
pain or responsibility, flunk. Be sure you
pass it when it’s your turn to be examined.
Rules and regulations. Cancerland runs
on forms. GPs in black-and-white movies
carried doctor bags; now they all have laptops or PCs for all the info they need to
collect. the Health Insurance Portability
and accountability act alone accounts for
one flash drive. You are asked the same
questions over and over again. Your answers—your medical history, your family’s medical history, your insurance
provider—become a sing-song, like the
Pledge of allegiance.
Politics. Politics looms over cancerland,
as over so many places. leave aside the
big issue of obamacare. every era has a
disease that is the focus of fear and fasci-
sufferer knows it better than you). Rarely
appropriate are accounts of one’s own
treatment. In a time of volunteer armies
and sporadic peace, medical stories are our
war stories. But unless yours contain specific tips, give them a rest.
For patients, news bulletins can be a
draining experience. the e-mail urbi et
orbi seems rude, yet how many times can
you tell your story without feeling like
leno grinding out another monologue?
Yet cancer can also empower. as my wife
said, “If you have cancer, make cancerade.” she was trying to clear up minor
medical business before radiation. Her eye
doctor’s secretary gave her a song and
dance about how there were no slots for a
check-up. she played the cancer card, and
bingo—read the fourth line please?
Resources. When you pause in the
lobby of the hospital, and read on the wall
the names of all the donors; when you
consider the machinery that probes,
records, and assays; when you reflect on
the thought and imagination that went into
so many aspects of treatment and cure,
from the decision to administer radiation
to women face-down so as to spare their
hearts and lungs, to the discovery of different strategies for inhibiting the flow of
Within cancerland, some cancers
are more popular than others.
nation. In many centuries it was the plague;
in the 19th it was consumption. Now it is
cancer. and these days, when medicine
cures more people than it kills—when did
that ratio tip? disturbingly recently, I bet—
attention means research, expenditure, and
progress. But within cancerland, some cancers are more popular than others. Breast
is a winner, for many reasons. Feminism
makes us remember the ladies; breasts are
icons of maternity and sexuality. so there
is a market for pink ribbons. What is the
ribbon color for pancreatic cancer?
Manners. one of the minor arguments
for religion is that it gives believers something appropriate to say to those who enter
cancerland. “I will pray for you” is short
and heartfelt. Not up there with the ontological proof, but noteworthy all the same.
(But see also below.) Never appropriate
are long accounts of acquaintances who
died; long accounts of obscure alternative
therapies; long worries about side effects,
or the malice of insurance companies (the
estrogen to cancer cells—you add up all
this money, time, effort, brainpower, and
good will, and think, suppose this could
have been applied to productivity? to
beauty? so much genius, heroism, and
hard work, spent on patch jobs.
Theodicy. and we need to patch because . . . ? the banker’s model of
Christian salvation (we took out a whopping subprime mortgage, only Jesus can
be our Fed), though painfully thin-looking
and arbitrary from the outside, is clear
enough on its own terms. Where does disease fit even on those terms? You expect
Pol Pot from sinful man; do you expect
cancer from sinful cells? You can make
poetry out of the side-effects of the Fall
(“so saying, with delight he snuffed the
smell of mortal change on earth”—
Milton). You can’t make sense of them.
We live in a world of random explosions
whose maker says he’ll make it up some
way or other. I wish him luck. Wish us the
same.
51
backpage_QXP-1127940387.qxp 8/11/2010 1:37 PM Page 52
Athwart
BY JAMES LILEKS
Shat and Scat
V reflects our standards; TV changes our standards. If you want to know where standards are
heading when it comes to salty lingo on the tube,
consider the name of a new show: “$#*! My Dad
Says.” As we all know from reading comics, the shiftkey/number-key string stands for a naughty word. Or, if you
like, a perfectly ordinary word used by millions of people,
universally known even by those who never employ it, a
word with an equivalent in every tongue, and possibly the
first word ever spoken by a humanoid after he stood erect,
looked around, and saw a tiger in the bush about to
pounce. The word is less fully bleeped in the book title from
which the show derives, and not bleeped at all in the
Twitter account—yes, this is a TV show based on a Twitter
account—that preceded the book. If there’s a movie, you can
expect the title will be “$#*!,” with the possible addition of
“3D.”
The star is William Shatner, a.k.a. James T. Kirk, a
man who had a second career as T. J.
Hooker, and a third career as William
Shatner. Asked about the controversial
title, he said he wished they’d use the
word.
“The word [$#*!] is around us,” he
said at a meeting with TV journalists.
“It isn’t a terrible term, it’s a natural
function. Why are we pussyfooting
around?”
And now, the obligatory parental
objection: What about the children?
You teach your kids to keep their language on an elevated plane, you refrain
from using the word at home—many a
dad has shouted OH GOSH! when banging his head into the
corner of a cupboard door, then gone in the basement and
shouted something worse into an empty coffee can—but then
one day you might drive past a billboard with THAT WORD.
Fine, some say; it’s part of language; you can’t shield them
forever. They’ll pick it up on YouTube when they Google
Winnie the Pooh and find someone’s remixed a cartoon
with a rap video.
Still, you’d like to think you could set some standards for
your kids—but that’s a term that gives hives. Standards are
The Man’s way of stifling authenticity! Standards are manifestations of a bourgeois mentality that confuses repression
for civilization! Slavery was a “standard”! And so on.
Heaven forbid you want some sort of limit on naughty
words on TV while using them yourself. That is hypocrisy
and hypocrisy makes Holden Caulfield cry, ya phony. But
there is a public realm and a private realm, and since we all
inhabit the former, there doesn’t seem to be a significant loss
if we discourage the verbal equivalent of scratching your
T
CBS
Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com.
nether parts with great vigor. But maybe that’s just how I was
brought up. My dad never said $#*!.
Foul language has its uses. A well-timed curse can be like
a dash of Tabasco. The ornate and baroque profanity of Al
Swearengen in the HBO series Deadwood was probably
anachronistic, but it was also mesmerizing and vastly entertaining, if you enjoy the pleasures of a masterful blue streak.
Sometimes not cursing can seem strange; Norman Mailer’s
first novel, The Naked and the Dead, was noted for its use of
“fug,” which everyone knew meant something else. You
could do a mental search-and-replace as you read, if you
pleased.
“Fug” has its children, who soldier on in their father’s
stead. In Battlestar Galactica, the humans said “frak,”
which became actual slang for the online crowd. You can
even find a contribution in the gangster parody film
Johnny Dangerously, where the crazed Italian mobster
moiders the language so he can curse but keep the rating
family-friendly: “You farging ice hole,”
he mutters. They’re all meaningless
words—but they have emanations of
penumbras, if you like. They put the
other word in your head without even
saying it. That’s what the sitcom title
does—but only if you know what
word is being bleeped.
Critics aren’t satisfied with the typographic euphemism. The Parents Television Council has sent warning letters
to 300 advertisers, suggesting that they
might want to rethink putting their
products on the show “unless they wish
to associate their hard earned brands
with excrement.” Said PTC president Tim Winter: “The
premise of the show offers potential for good entertainment.
The question is why CBS feels the need to shove harsh profanity into the faces of Americans through the program’s title.
Their reliance on symbols as a veil is feeble at best.”
Makes you wonder why they didn’t use $#*! for the name
of the lead actor. What’s the first syllable of his last name,
again? So it’s okay if it’s past-tense?
This isn’t a battle the pro-standards crowd will win. A
recent Supreme Court ruling requires the FCC to wink at
occasional Grade A cuss words, if dropped by mistake.
Satellite and Internet radio will change the rules, inasmuch as
they don’t have any. The Big Bad Effenheimer will be on a
billboard some day, and our shoulders will slump: Great;
thanks, George Carlin. “Obscenity” will be in the eye of
the beholder—wherever he looks.
You can object, of course, but someone might well ask,
“Who are you to judge?” As it happens, that question was put
to Captain Kirk in an episode of Star Trek, and Shatner’s
character snapped back: “Who do I have to be?”
It’s a good retort. Certainly beats “%*&@ off!”
52
|
AUGUST 30, 2010
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