The legacy of slavery

The Times as an interesting editorial today about the recognition by J.P. Morgan Chase of their participation in the slave trade: An Update on Corporate Slavery.

This comes from the website of J.P. Morgan Chase which also includes the research they did:

Recently, JPMorgan Chase completed extensive research examining our company's history for any links to slavery to meet a commitment to the city of Chicago. Today, we are reporting that this research found that between 1831 and 1865 two of our predecessor banks - Citizens Bank and Canal Bank in Louisiana - accepted approximately 13,000 enslaved individuals as collateral on loans and took ownership of approximately 1,250 of them when the plantation owners defaulted on the loans.

We all know slavery existed in our country, but it is quite different to see how our history and the institution of slavery were intertwined. Slavery was tragically ingrained in American society, but that is no excuse.

We apologize to the American public, and particularly to African-Americans, for the role that Citizens Bank and Canal Bank played during that period.

Although we cannot change the past, we are committed to learning from and emerging stronger because of it. Since these events took place in Louisiana, we are establishing a $5 million college scholarship program for students living in Louisiana.

Smart Start Louisiana will mirror Smart Start New York, an extremely successful program we created and operate in New York City. Through this program, JPMorgan Chase will provide an initial $5 million over five years for full-tuition, undergraduate scholarships to African-American students from Louisiana to attend colleges in their home state. Students will be selected based upon merit and need. In addition to receiving scholarships, the students will have the opportunity to intern at JPMorgan Chase during the summer with the goal of being hired upon graduation.

JPMorgan Chase is, of course, a very different company than the Citizens and Canal Banks of the 1800s. We are committed to creating opportunities for African-Americans within our own firm, and to supporting communities we serve through philanthropic programs focused on economic empowerment and education. For more information, visit the JPMC Today section of this website.

We also realize you may have questions about these research findings. This website provides further details about the research, methodology, and details of findings, including names of the enslaved individuals when identified, parish information and archival citations for those seeking to do further research.

Although much of the information is difficult to look at, we hope it will prove useful to those researching their ancestry, as well as for those seeking to learn more about this tragic period in our country's history.

What I think is important here is not only the apology, or the "reparations," but the way this kind of historical acknowledgement allows us to continually rethink our past and our relation to the past. While the people at J.P. Morgan Chase individually bear no responsibility for the evils of slavery, they do continue to earn benefits from slavery -- as do we all, to some extent. Slavery was instrumental in building up the wealth of this country, something we all are heirs to and beneficiaries of to this day.

Iraqi elections

Nice op-ed in the Times today on the Iraqi elections: Looking for Purple Fingers in Sadr City, by Bartle Breese Bull.

Historical origins and parallels

Is the latest Bush Doctrine simply an updating of the Monroe Doctrine? Tom Wolfe thinks so in The Doctrine That Never Died.

Is Iraq another Vietnam? Todd Purdum examines the resonances in Flashback to the 60's: A Sinking Sensation of Parallels Between Iraq and Vietnam. Frank Rich touches on some of the connections in Forget Armor. All You Need Is Love.

Charles Pierce on Iraq

I just love this guy's writing, available on Friday's on Eric Alterman's blog:

Correspondents’ Corner:

Name: Charles Pierce
Hometown: Newton: MA
Hey Doc --
Did I just hear Richard Perle on Nightline say that the biggest mistake we made in Iraq was not handing the country over to Ahmad Chalabi three years ago? Yes, and the biggest flaw in our national economy is that we haven't turned the Federal Reserve over to Ken Lay. Yes, and the biggest mistake I am likely to make in trying to understand this Festival of Fruitcakes is failing to have laid in enough mushrooms to get me through the State of the Union. To be fair, Perle tap-danced all around the name until Koppel finally brought it up, and then he said "Ahmad Chalabi" the way most people say, "trichinosis." Still, sweet storebought Jeebus.

The elections over there can put you in a tough spot. Of course, they've been oversold. Of course, they will be used as cheap ammunition for the various brave souls manning the guns at Fort Honorarium. Of course, they won't matter a damn as far as the violence is concerned; imagine the insurgent who says, well, we're going to stop killing these people because they have a national assembly now. This is Cakewalk Theory 2.0. And, now, one of the war's principal architects tells us that everything could have been avoided if we'd just "handed the keys" over to a passel of crooks you wouldn't trust to park your car. To hell with being fired. When are some of these clucks going to simply get laughed out of town?

Still...

Some people are going to vote even though they've been told they will be killed if they do. Nobody in this 40-percent turnout, sucker-for-the-cheap-wedge-issue, talk-show-babbling country of ours has a right to do anything but admire that, and make sure that the undeniable courage on display doesn't get sold down the river for a three-point bump in some future Gallup Poll. This war isn't just a monumental blunder. It's also an ongoing act of betrayal by a bunch of second-rate thinkers who never in their lives have displayed an ounce of the courage that some anonymous woman in Baghdad will evince today.

Voting took place today, apparently with some violence, but not as much as some might have feared. But the voting is only a part of the story, and maybe not even the most important right now. This report from the pro-war Senior Editor of the New Republic Lawrence Kaplan sees the project of liberal democracy as already failed in Iraq (note that he uses the word "liberal" in its more traditional sense, defining "liberal democracy" as "a political system that protects basic rights and freedoms").

Homeland Security State

Last week I posted an article by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts condemning today's conservatives. One thing he wrote struck me:

Once upon a time there was a liberal media. It developed out of the Great Depression and the New Deal. Liberals believed that the private sector is the source of greed that must be restrained by government acting in the public interest. The liberals' mistake was to identify morality with government. Liberals had great suspicion of private power and insufficient suspicion of the power and inclination of government to do good.

Liberals became Benthamites (after Jeremy Bentham). They believed that as the people controlled government through democracy, there was no reason to fear government power, which should be increased in order to accomplish more good.

The conservative movement that I grew up in did not share the liberals' abiding faith in government. "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

That is, I think, a fair enough thumbnail description of the differences between liberals and conservatives in the 20th century. I consider myself heir to the populists and progressives of the 1880s-1910s because they embraced the role of government in minimizing the effects of an increasingly powerful "plutocracy" and ensuring social justice. At that time it became clear that the government was not the seat of power in society, the corporate and banking world was. So I have seen government as part of the solution. And the conservative dream of a truly competitive, entrepreneurial capitalist world is at least one hundred years out of date.

I was often critical of the Clinton/Gore dream of international liberalization through capitalism -- corporate globalization -- becuase they did not emphasize workers' rights and environmental issues enough. An interesting op-ed in the Times criticizes Bush for not believing enough in the transformative and liberating power of capitalism: The Market Shall Set You Free, by Robert Wright.

While Thomas Jefferson wisely feared a strong and inaccessible central power, by the turn of the 20th century that power was no longer invested in the federal government but in corporations and financial institutions. And from the 14th Amendment to Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the federal government was often the instrument for overcoming obstacles to democracy placed by local powers.

I have also never really invested a whole lot of energy in fearing the feds will take my liberties away. I have often worried more about what the credit card companies do with my information than what the government does. Is it time to start worrying? Civil libertarians might want to take note of this Tomgram about the Homeland Security State.

Responsibility for the past

I have been talking in class about the relationship we have with our past. I am often accused by students of not being objective enough, of being too judgemental or too negative about particularly U.S. history. I accept this criticism, to some extent. Sometimes I overlook the beauty and glory and awfulness of the past as past, as separate and unbridgeable. My emphasis is on using the present to understand the past AND using the past to understand the present. Neither process is simple or easy. I have intellectual and epistemological reasons for looking at history this way, but I also have a moral, or even emotional reasons. To me the past is not dead. It is something we carry with us whether we know it or not. And as we put together our imagined communities -- particularly the nation, in our identities as "Americans" -- we assume some stories of the past as our own, again, without necessarily even knowing or acknowledging them. So, in part, my "negativity" about the American past is an attempt to counter our master narratives and myths which I believe to be not merely too positive, but evasive of central parts of our history, particularly slavery and the conquering of the west. This does not mean that we all should go around feeling bad all the time, or that our history is uniquely evil, but that our story is, at the least, very complex and morally ambiguous. For example, the more I read about the SCFF (So-Called Founding Fathers), the more I appreciate them. And the more I see of the world and its history, the more I appreciate the genius of the SCFF's ideas and implementation of those ideas. But we can't simply shift off to the side, as incidental or destined-to-be-overcome-by-progress, their slaveholding and any other parts of their stories we find to be less than admirable. Sometimes those stories are central; hence I like to think of Sally Hemings as a Founding Mother.

So I was interested to see German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, declare, "The overwhelming majority of Germans living today do not bear guilt for the Holocaust. But they do bear a special responsibility." What exactly that responsibility is needs to be continually discussed.

Brad DeLong quotes Amitai Etzioni on Germans' "communal responsibility" for the Holocaust:

Communal responsibility is based on the fact that we are born into a community and share its history, memories, identity, achievements, and failures. We are not simply individual human beings, who can retreat behind a Rawlsian "veil of ignorance," secure in our universal rights and historical innocence. We are also members of specific families and communities. We cannot help but share their burdens, just as we share in their treasures; their responsibilities as well as their privileges. Thus, an American inherits both the proud memory of the Boston Tea Party and the agony of slavery; both the marvelous work of the Framers of the Constitution and the slaughter of Native Americans; the vigilant protection of freedom--from Greece to Korea--and the killing of innocent children, women, and other civilians in My Lai. The memory of slavery is particularly telling. Abolished some 134 years ago, before the ancestors of most contemporary Americans had even immigrated, slavery is still part of the American past; we cannot erase or ignore it. Most important, our aggrieved past commands us all to act, not merely the sons and daughters of plantation owners. We are all co-responsible for that which our community has perpetrated and condoned, for both past sins of commission and omission.

In the same sense, just being a German means being part of both a great culture that gave the world Goethe, Kant, Bach, Schiller, Heine--and the Nazis. I am not saying that the brighter moments in all our histories shine to the same extent, nor that the darker ones are equally troubling. But I am pointing out that we are all members of a community, and as such, bearers of its burdens. Like others, I prefer the notion of responsibility over that of guilt, particularly when it concerns people who personally could not have been involved in the crimes committed. I do not hold that guilt is always harmful or inappropriate or a poor source of motivation for positive social and moral deeds. But it can generate negative feelings, and sometimes debilitating consequences. I know a fair number of younger Germans who are obsessed with Germany's past, who rather than drawing lessons from it, wallow in its wrongs. They turn morose and depressed, and are forever defensive and apologetic about their country. Unfortunately, like digging into an old wound, their pain does not lead them to make affirmative commitments. In contrast, the concept of communal responsibility calls attention to the fact that whether or not one is guilty in the personal sense, one has a responsibility to build on the particular past of one's community, drawing on its assets and learning from its liabilities...

Amazing History Day Project

Here at WPU we host New Jersey History Day, the winners of which go on to National History Day in DC. I have been a judge for the past couple of years and expect to continue til I am old and grey (if I am not completely bald first). It is a wonderful day -- the middle school and high school students go all out in preparing their exhibits, essays, videos and performances, and the winners are justifiably filled with pride when they receive their awards. Some of the projects are truly excellent historical productions. But I have never seen anything like this amazing story published in the Guardian:

Teen Documentarians Hail Miss. Arrest
Saturday January 8, 2005 2:01 AM

By NICOLE ZIEGLER DIZON
Associated Press Writer

CHICAGO (AP) - Hundreds of miles from a Mississippi courtroom where a suspect pleaded innocent Friday to the 1964 slayings of three civil rights workers, three suburban Chicago high school students received accolades for their role in publicizing the case.

Teenagers Sarah Siegel, Allison Nichols and Brittany Saltiel spent more than a year working on a 2004 documentary about the killings. The project included a rare phone interview conducted by their teacher with the man arrested Thursday, reputed Ku Klux Klan member Edgar Ray Killen, and helped generate a congressional resolution last June asking federal prosecutors to reopen the case.

``I was really happy for all the families who I knew had been waiting for this for 40 years,'' the 17-year-old Siegel said. ``It was also a little saddening to know that it took 40 years for justice to start working.''

Congressmen including Rep. John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat and civil rights activist who knew the three slain workers, credit the students for working to keep the case in the spotlight and unearthing new details.

``I was very inspired and very moved by the work that these three students brought before us,'' Lewis said Friday. ``I think they were crucial in bringing us to this point.''

In the summer of 2003, the girls met with Barry Bradford, their teacher at Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, to discuss possible projects for the annual National History Day competition. They stopped him after his first idea: telling the story of 21-year-old James Chaney, 20-year-old Andrew Goodman and 24-year-old Michael Schwerner.

The three young men were participating in Freedom Summer 1964, an effort to register blacks in the South to vote, when they were beaten and shot to death, allegedly by Klansmen. Their ages, not much older than the girls, struck a chord.

``We just thought something about those three men and their dedication to the movement really stood out,'' said Saltiel, 16.

The students pored over court transcripts and interviewed former prosecutors and investigators, witnesses, family members of the victims and government officials for their 10-minute documentary. They also sought out Killen, now 79, for a phone interview.

Bradford decided to conduct the interview after a Justice Department official expressed concern about the girls having to testify in the event Killen said something incriminating.

Killen didn't implicate himself, Bradford said, but he did say the reason civil rights workers were so hated at the time was because people thought they were recruiting blacks to be communists.

Soon after that interview, Bradford said his and the girls' names were posted on a white supremacist Web site that accused them of trying to skew the truth.

``I think it was truly a little startling to them to realize that there are still remnants of that archaic mind-set,'' Bradford said.

The students say the most rewarding part of their project was meeting with family members of the slain men, including Goodman's mother and Chaney's brother, who called them ``superhero girls.''

Frontline show on Al Qaeda

Frontline is usually pretty darn good. I don't know if Al Qaeda's New Front has aired yet, but I noticed it will be available online starting this friday. Their webpage for the show looks excellent too.

NPR on Chilean privatization of Social Security

I have been recommending NPR to students (even requiring one class to listen! I sneak into their garages at night and check the preset buttons on the radio), but yesterday I heard a report on the privatization of Social Security that didn't jibe with everything else I had been hearing on the issue. Hmmmm, I thought.

Well, Digby has the follow-up, run-down, take-down, and smack-down of NPR -- With Friends Like These. Thanks Digby!

"Pretty Words vs. Reality "

Rogier van Bakel in his blog Nobody's Business places Bush's Inaugural droppings up against real stuff from planet earth. Guess which side comes out ahead?

He also includes his take on Zakaria's article about the speech -- Pretty Words vs Reality — the Sequel

Gonzalez and Tyranny

DHinMI over at DailyKos builds a historical argument to claim that Alberto "Gonzales advocates policies consistent with tyranny." Is DHinMI just a loon, or does his historical case make sense?

For background, you might want to consult a couple of recent writings:

Conservative columnist and blogger Andrew Sullivan in the NY Times Book Review, Atrocities in Plain Sight

and

in the New York Review of Books Torture and Gonzales: An Exchange, By G. Jan Ligthart, Robert S. Rivkin, Reply by Mark Danner; In response to Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Story (October 7, 2004)

[Update on Sullivan: I am decidedly a non-fan of his work and thinking, but he has been very strong on the torture issue and, now that the election is over, seems ready to really turn against the war -- though like most conservatives-with-a-brain these days, he is having a hard time reconciling his love of power with his principles.]

Compare and Contrast...

this piece from the Times, Communicator in Chief Keeps the Focus on Iraq Positive

with this piece, Across Baghdad, Security Is Only an Ideal

and this, Anti-Vote Violence in Iraq Is Intensifying, Latest Data Show.

Your assignment is due immediately!

Wow...

Any conservatives out there care to respond to this extraordinary article from a staunch conservative, reprinted here in full from ZNet?

End-Timers & Neo-Cons
The End of Conservatives
by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts; January 19, 2005

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during 1981-82. He was also Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review.

I remember when friends would excitedly telephone to report that Rush Limbaugh or G. Gordon Liddy had just read one of my syndicated columns over the air. That was before I became a critic of the US invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration, and the neoconservative ideologues who have seized control of the US government.

America has blundered into a needless and dangerous war, and fully half of the country's population is enthusiastic. Many Christians think that war in the Middle East signals "end times" and that they are about to be wafted up to heaven. Many patriots think that, finally, America is standing up for itself and demonstrating its righteous might. Conservatives are taking out their Vietnam frustrations on Iraqis. Karl Rove is wrapping Bush in the protective cloak of war leader. The military-industrial complex is drooling over the profits of war. And neoconservatives are laying the groundwork for Israeli territorial expansion.

The evening before Thanksgiving Rush Limbaugh was on C-Span TV explaining that these glorious developments would have been impossible if talk radio and the conservative movement had not combined to break the power of the liberal media.

In the Thanksgiving issue of National Review, editor Richard Lowry and former editor John O'Sullivan celebrate Bush's reelection triumph over "a hostile press corps." "Try as they might," crowed O'Sullivan, "they couldn't put Kerry over the top." There was a time when I could rant about the "liberal media" with the best of them. But in recent years I have puzzled over the precise location of the "liberal media."

Not so long ago I would have identified the liberal media as the New York Times and Washington Post, CNN and the three TV networks, and National Public Radio. But both the Times and the Post fell for the Bush administration's lies about WMD and supported the US invasion of Iraq. On balance CNN, the networks, and NPR have not made an issue of the Bush administration's changing explanations for the invasion.

Apparently, Rush Limbaugh and National Review think there is a liberal media because the prison torture scandal could not be suppressed and a cameraman filmed the execution of a wounded Iraqi prisoner by a US Marine. Do the Village Voice and The Nation comprise the "liberal media"? The Village Voice is known for Nat Hentoff and his columns on civil liberties. Every good conservative believes that civil liberties are liberal because they interfere with the police and let criminals go free. The Nation favors spending on the poor and disfavors gun rights, but I don't see the "liberal hate" in The Nation's feeble pages that Rush Limbaugh was denouncing on C-Span.

In the ranks of the new conservatives, however, I see and experience much hate. It comes to me in violently worded, ignorant and irrational emails from self-professed conservatives who literally worship George Bush. Even Christians have fallen into idolatry. There appears to be a large number of Americans who are prepared to kill anyone for George Bush.

The Iraqi War is serving as a great catharsis for multiple conservative frustrations: job loss, drugs, crime, homosexuals, pornography, female promiscuity, abortion, restrictions on prayer in public places, Darwinism and attacks on religion. Liberals are the cause. Liberals are against America. Anyone against the war is against America and is a liberal. "You are with us or against us."

This is the mindset of delusion, and delusion permits no facts or analysis. Blind emotion rules. Americans are right and everyone else is wrong. End of the debate.

That, gentle reader, is the full extent of talk radio, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal Editorial page, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and, indeed, of the entire concentrated corporate media where noncontroversy in the interest of advertising revenue rules.

Once upon a time there was a liberal media. It developed out of the Great Depression and the New Deal. Liberals believed that the private sector is the source of greed that must be restrained by government acting in the public interest. The liberals' mistake was to identify morality with government. Liberals had great suspicion of private power and insufficient suspicion of the power and inclination of government to do good.

Liberals became Benthamites (after Jeremy Bentham). They believed that as the people controlled government through democracy, there was no reason to fear government power, which should be increased in order to accomplish more good.

The conservative movement that I grew up in did not share the liberals' abiding faith in government. "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Today it is liberals, not conservatives, who endeavor to defend civil liberties from the state. Conservatives have been won around to the old liberal view that as long as government power is in their hands, there is no reason to fear it or to limit it. Thus, the Patriot Act, which permits government to suspend a person's civil liberty by calling him a terrorist with or without proof. Thus, preemptive war, which permits the President to invade other countries based on unverified assertions.

There is nothing conservative about these positions. To label them conservative is to make the same error as labeling the 1930s German Brownshirts conservative.

American liberals called the Brownshirts "conservative," because the Brownshirts were obviously not liberal. They were ignorant, violent, delusional, and they worshipped a man of no known distinction. Brownshirts' delusions were protected by an emotional force field. Adulation of power and force prevented Brownshirts from recognizing implications for their country of their reckless doctrines.

Like Brownshirts, the new conservatives take personally any criticism of their leader and his policies. To be a critic is to be an enemy. I went overnight from being an object of conservative adulation to one of derision when I wrote that the US invasion of Iraq was a "strategic blunder."

It is amazing that only a short time ago the Bush administration and its supporters believed that all the US had to do was to appear in Iraq and we would be greeted with flowers. Has there ever been a greater example of delusion? Isn't this on a par with the Children's Crusade against the Saracens in the Middle Ages?

Delusion is still the defining characteristic of the Bush administration. We have smashed Fallujah, a city of 300,000, only to discover that the 10,000 US Marines are bogged down in the ruins of the city. If the Marines leave, the "defeated" insurgents will return. Meanwhile the insurgents have moved on to destabilize Mosul, a city five times as large. Thus, the call for more US troops.

There are no more troops. Our former allies are not going to send troops. The only way the Bush administration can continue with its Iraq policy is to reinstate the draft.

When the draft is reinstated, conservatives will loudly proclaim their pride that their sons, fathers, husbands and brothers are going to die for "our freedom." Not a single one of them will be able to explain why destroying Iraqi cities and occupying the ruins are necessary for "our freedom." But this inability will not lessen the enthusiasm for the project. To protect their delusions from "reality-based" critics, they will demand that the critics be arrested for treason and silenced. Many encouraged by talk radio already speak this way.

Because of the triumph of delusional "new conservatives" and the demise of the liberal media, this war is different from the Vietnam war. As more Americans are killed and maimed in the pointless carnage, more Americans have a powerful emotional stake that the war not be lost and not be in vain. Trapped in violence and unable to admit mistake, a reckless administration will escalate.

The rapidly collapsing US dollar is hard evidence that the world sees the US as bankrupt. Flight from the dollar as the reserve currency will adversely impact American living standards, which are already falling as a result of job outsourcing and offshore production. The US cannot afford a costly and interminable war.

Falling living standards and inability to impose our will on the Middle East will result in great frustrations that will diminish our country.

Navigating the Web

I just discovered this page from the Times, CyberTimes Navigator which provides a useful set of links to news, search, and reference sites. I notice they don't include any blogs -- which seems to be an oversight, but maybe that would just be too difficult a task.

Librarian-extraordinaire Richard Kearney's latest webliography for my Historical Methods course (this term on the history of popular culture) is up, and he will be updating it over the next week or so.

I will be updating my links (but it is very time-consuming) so that the random "blogrolling" list on the right side of the page will not be so unwieldy. Stay tuned.

Iraq update

As the Iraqi election day approaches, one can only hope that the date marks a "turning of the corner" -- unfortunately, we have turned so many corners in Iraq we seem to be either back where we started or lost or, at least, dizzy. "Turning the corner" is to this war what "light at the end of the tunnel" was to the Vietnam War. And that light turned out to be akin to the light people profess to see before leaving their embodied existence.

A couple of perspectives worth noting: Colin Powell, in the Financial Times (highlights are in bold):

Copyright 2005 The Financial Times Limited
Financial Times (London, England)
January 13, 2005 Thursday

HEADLINE: Powell gives bleak assessment of Iraq security problems
BYLINE: By GUY DINMORE

DATELINE: WASHINGTON

Colin Powell, outgoing secretary of state, says he would like to see US troops leave Iraq "as quickly as possible" but that the strength of the insurgency does not allow the Bush administration to set a timeframe for a withdrawal this year.

Mr Powell told National Public Radio yesterday the US leadership had been "in almost non-stop meetings for the last couple of days" reviewing the security problem while coalition forces were adjusting their "tactics and strategy and deployments".

"It's not possible right now to say that by the end of 2005, we'll be down to such and such a number. It really is dependent upon the situation," he said, referring to the training of the new Iraqi army and police.

Mr Powell's bleak assessment, less than three weeks before Iraqis are due to elect a parliament, reflects what advisers close to the administration and former officials describe as an understanding in the State Department and Pentagon of the depth of the crisis.

But, they say, this is not a view accepted by President George W. Bush.

One counterinsurgency expert said Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, had a "brutally accurate" picture of the situation and the potential dangers.

But a member of an influential neoconservative policy group said that such warnings "stop well short of the president".

He said Mr Rumsfeld, criticised for the conduct of the war, had an interest in hiding the true picture from the president.

According to Chas Freeman, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia and head of the independent Middle East Policy Council, Mr Bush recently asked Mr Powell for his view on the progress of the war. "We're losing," Mr Powell was quoted as saying. Mr Freeman said Mr Bush then asked the secretary of state to leave.

A senior White House official said he had no knowledge of such an exchange and added: "The president acknowledges there are significant challenges. "He does not characterise them as insurmountable. Others do."

Analysts are concerned that with the departure of Mr Powell and his replacement by Condoleezza Rice, the president's loyal national security adviser, the White House will be further shielded from dissent.

Mr Powell, who often clashed with Mr Rumsfeld over policy towards Iraq and Iran, seemed to allude to this when he said he had been "secure enough" in his relationship with the president to argue his point of view.

"A president is not well served when he has people in his cabinet who have points of view but are not prepared to argue those points of view forcefully for fear that it might leak or it looks like members of the cabinet are squabbling," Mr Powell told Fox News.

The White House is stressing the January 30 election is just the start of a process that is scheduled to lead to a national referendum on a constitution by October and another parliamentary election by December.

Mr Powell said there must be Sunni representation in the government to be formed after the elections. This reflects US efforts to persuade the main parties of the Shia majority, who are expected to sweep the polls, to co-opt members of the Sunni minority into the administration and the drafting of the constitution.

US leverage rests upon awareness among the Shia that their government is unlikely to survive a civil war without continued US military support.

High anxiety over the elections is also evident among Arab allies of the US. Karim Kawar, Jordan's ambassador to Washington, said that he feared that elections without solid Sunni participation would lead to an "Islamic republic of Iraq".

"That's not what the American taxpayers hoped for," he said.

Charles Boyd, a former general who had opposed the war, said he was dismayed at the administration's lack of commitment in fighting it.

"Our government is not mobilised for war of this size and complexity. We are acting on a 'business as usual' format," he said.

Another sign that our President disdains the nasty negativity of reality comes from the Nelson Report, a respected Washington-insider newsletter. Via the Al Franken show blog:

BUSH REJECTS BAD NEWS
The Nelson Report is a daily political tip sheet and analysis written for the past 20 years for the (US and Asian) corporate and government clients of Chris Nelson, a former Capitol Hill staffer and UPI reporter. (He was actually the first to break the looted explosives story before the election; Josh Marshall then posted it to his blog.) This Monday, he wrote:

There is rising concern amongst senior officials that President Bush does not grasp the increasingly grim reality of the security situation in Iraq because he refuses to listen to that type of information. Our sources say that attempts to brief Bush on various grim realities have been personally rebuffed by the President, who actually says that he does not want to hear “bad news.”

Rather, Bush makes clear that all he wants are progress reports, where they exist, and those facts which seem to support his declared mission in Iraq...building democracy. “That's all he wants to hear about,” we have been told. So “in” are the latest totals on school openings, and “out” are reports from senior US military commanders (and those intelligence experts still on the job) that they see an insurgency becoming increasingly effective, and their projection that “it will just get worse.”

Our sources are firm in that they conclude this “good news only” directive comes from Bush himself; that is, it is not a trap or cocoon thrown around the President by National Security Advisor Rice, Vice President Cheney, and DOD Secretary Rumsfeld. In any event, whether self-imposed, or due to manipulation by irresponsible subordinates, the information/intelligence vacuum at the highest levels of the White House increasingly frightens those officials interested in objective assessment, and not just selling a political message.

WaPo sites

The Washington Post as a couple of regular features that gather info and perspectives from other newspapers and blogs -- well worth checking out.

Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing

Howard Kurtz's Media Notes

Meanwhile, in today's WaPo Henry Kissinger and George Schultz in Results, Not Timetables, Matter in Iraq argue the "conservative realist" position on what to do about Iraq. They reject premature withdrawal, but I can't help suspect that it is the Bush Administration, not their opponents, who are most eager to see U.S. troops (or at least those not guarding our bases, embassy and business in interests) out of Iraq. I fear they want to use the election as an excuse to say, okay now we will respect the sovereignty of the Iraqi people and leave; any resulting problems will be your own to sort out. Declare victory and go home. I can't really believe that they would be that stupid, but then there ever-increasing capacity for stupidity continually surprises me.

The latest from Michelle Chen

Hey everyone. I've been in hibernation these past couple of weeks churning out an article series on the public health and environmental impacts of the World Trade Center disaster. With the dubious distinction of being both underreported and overreported, the infamous WTC cough is explored here through the eyes of workers, advocates and city agencies.

Parts 2 and 3 will explore different facets of the disaster's aftermath.

Read more at: http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/1402

Let Freedom Burn!

A student requested I watch or, at least, read Bush's Inaugural Address. Well, I found it hard to avoid, and heard much of it in snippets on the radio, finally succumbing to reading the whole thing. First impression: I don't buy any of it. It seemed like a perfectly fine address saying next to nothing. Many have commented on the number of times that the words "freedom" and "liberty" were used; I am in wholehearted support of both those concepts. But my first thoughts that they were merely empty rhetorical gestures. That is, nice speech, now back to work. I rarely pay much attention to Inaugural Addresses, and my indifference is usually perfectly apt. This case seems no different. The coming State of the Union speech will be more meaningful as a guide to what Bush wants to do in his second term.

Others have noted the obvious hypocrisy of Bush's remarks touting freedom while restricting freedom at home and cosying up to dictators who guard our access to vital resources and maintain political stability in places like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, etc. David Brooks, the reigning conservative over at the Times now that Safire has picked up his flackjacket and gone home, not only hails the speech but argues that it will lay down an important challenge to all U.S. leaders now and in the future: "It will be harder for future diplomats to sit on couches flattering dictators...." But Bobo, as the blogphiles call him, is more optimistic than I am about such things, and, of course, no where does he mention Saudi Arabia.

Fareed Zakaria, in today's Newsweek International, does a nice rundown of some of the complexities of the world we live in, arguing that Bush's speech highlights the gaps between what the U.S. says and what we do.

High Hopes, Hard Facts
The world’s a stage: His ideals are soaring, but now Bush must live and lead by his own code.

Orlando Patterson, in the Times on Saturday, had a brilliant piece on the historical changes in the meaning of the word "freedom." Patterson calls the Inaugural Address The Speech Misheard Round the World. Read it!

Finally, in the current Harpers Magazine there is an excerpt from an excellent article in the Fall 2004 Raritan Review (available through the library electronic journals page) by the historian Daniel T. Rodgers on "American exceptionalism" which I will post on my U.S. as a World Power course page (and other course pages if anyone asks). But it reminds me of the one passage that I haven't seen much commentary on from Bush's speech:

Across the generations, we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security and the calling of our time.

Uh, hello? "No one is fit to be a master ... no one ... a slave"??? This was the mission that created our nation? Only if you actually ignore the historical creation of our nation. Sorry, dear readers, but, see, there was this thing we call slavery back in the day. And it was not just some incidental leftover from the bad old days. Slavery was politically and economically central to the founding of our nation, whether we like it or not. This does not destroy the achievements of our so-called founding fathers, but it forces us to look at those achievements more closely, to wrestle with the contradictions in their lives, to face up to the contradictions in our founding and our society. Our national myth (what the historian Nathan Huggins called -- with exquisite balance of meaning -- our "master narrative") demands we ignore or sideline a central part of our national history.

Scenarios for alternative histories

Via Brad DeLong, I came across this posting from Mark Kleiman; I especially like the last line:

January 21, 2005
Scenarios for alternative histories

Here's a fact I'd never seen before:

Hume in his History of England, records that Columbus, having been rebuffed at the courts of Spain and Portugal, sent his brother Bartholomew to England to ask Henry VII for support. Henry liked the idea, and sent Bartholomew back with a message inviting Columbus to come to England. But Bartholomew's ship was taken by pirates, and Christopher stayed in Spain until Isabella finally came through.

How would the world have been different if Columbus had sailed for England rather than Spain? Perhaps Central and South America would be rich and democratic. Or perhaps the silver of Peru and Mexico would have corrupted England instead of Spain.

The mind boggles.

(This, it seems to me, is even better than my previous favorite, reported by Macaulay: that Pym, Hampden, and Cromwell all tried to leave England for Massachusetts in 1638 but were stopped by an order from Laud, who thought it best to keep troublemakers close by, the better to watch them.)

I don't know about you, but I find it frightening, at a metaphysical level, that randomness plays such a huge part in history. Imagine what the world would be like today if Palm Beach hadn't used that "butterly ballot."

Some of my favorite writers & sites

Here are some of the people I read regularly, usually because they have a nice way with words and sentences, and bring a fresh perspective:

Frank Rich, every saturday in the NYTimes, a smart guy and great stylist

James Wolcott, funny and insightful blog

Digby @ Hullabaloo, ascerbic and, more often than not, on-the-mark

Tom Englehardt @ TomDispatch, great reporting and interesting analysis

The websites for the magazines and journals I read are a mixed bunch (they don't want to give all their content away), but worth checking out if you don't subscribe; the full content of each is probably also available to WPU students through the Cheng Library Electronic Journals page:

The New Yorker

The Atlantic

Harper's

New York Review of Books

These two reporters are superb; I recommend you read anything with their bylines:
Seymour Hersh @ the New Yorker
James Fallows @ the Atlantic and elsewhere

There are plenty more I read regularly depending on the topic I am following closely at any given time.

Gang of Four

The Gang of Four -- no, not these guys, but the rock band -- is back together and the Times has a nice article about them. They gave a show in San Francisco in 1979 (?) that was so powerful that Greil Marcus didn't even bother to stick around for the headliners the Buzzcocks, no slouches themselves. I count myself fortunate to have seen them in '80 or '81 at California Hall in SF. I still consider their first album Entertainment! to be the greatest rock'n'roll album of all time. I look forward to getting their U.S. tour info.

Iran, anyone?

From tomorrow's New Yorker:

THE COMING WARS
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
What the Pentagon can now do in secret.
Issue of 2005-01-24 and 31
Posted 2005-01-17

George W. Bush’s reëlection was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control—against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism—during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way.

Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the Bush Administration has not reconsidered its basic long-range policy goal in the Middle East: the establishment of democracy throughout the region. Bush’s reëlection is regarded within the Administration as evidence of America’s support for his decision to go to war. It has reaffirmed the position of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon’s civilian leadership who advocated the invasion, including Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-secretary for Policy. According to a former high-level intelligence official, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the election and told them, in essence, that the naysayers had been heard and the American people did not accept their message. Rumsfeld added that America was committed to staying in Iraq and that there would be no second-guessing.

“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”

I haven't read the whole thing yet, but the White House says the story is "riddled with inacurracies" -- which makes me think Hersh must be on the mark, as he usually is.

Report of the National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project

New report from the CIA's National Intelligence Council, Mapping the Global Future.

From the Executive Summary:

At no time since the formation of the Western alliance system in 1949 have the shape and nature of international alignments been in such a state of flux. The end of the Cold War shifted the tectonic plates, but the repercussions from these momentous events are still unfolding. Emerging powers in Asia, retrenchment in Eurasia, a roiling Middle East, and transatlantic divisions are among the issues that have only come to a head in recent years. The very magnitude and speed of change resulting from a globalizing world—apart from its precise character—will be a defining feature of the world out to 2020. Other significant characteristics include: the rise of new powers, new challenges to governance, and a more pervasive sense of insecurity, including terrorism. As we map the future, the prospects for increasing global prosperity and the limited likelihood of great power conflict provide an overall favorable environment for coping with what are otherwise daunting challenges. The role of the United States will be an important variable in how the world is shaped, influencing the path that states and nonstate actors choose to follow.

The Washington Post summarizes:

Iraq New Terror Breeding Ground
War Created Haven, CIA Advisers Report

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 14, 2005; Page A01

Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of "professionalized" terrorists, according to a report released yesterday by the National Intelligence Council, the CIA director's think tank.

Iraq provides terrorists with "a training ground, a recruitment ground, the opportunity for enhancing technical skills," said David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats. "There is even, under the best scenario, over time, the likelihood that some of the jihadists who are not killed there will, in a sense, go home, wherever home is, and will therefore disperse to various other countries." [...]

Marianne Faithfull

Listening to Green Day's "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" has reminded me of Marianne Faithfull's brilliant version of the old cabaret song of the same name. Faithful has produced a lot of mediocre songs over the years, but some stupendous work as well. Her album "Vagabond Ways" from a few years back was an extraordinary comeback with her voice in fine, wasted, junkielife form. I am excited to hear that she has teamed up with my favorite songwriter of all time PJ Harvey on her new album due Jan 25th. Scroll down the page at NPR's All Songs Considered to hear the new single, a perfect and natural blending of these two brilliant talents. And, if you ever get a chance, check out her astounding version of John Lennon's "Working Class Hero."

Huygens probe

As I write, the Huygens probe is descending to Saturn's moon Titan, beaming back signals to the Cassini ship.

Great article in yesterday's NYT Under the Moon, By DAVID GRINSPOON.

More today from NPR -- Probe Set to Explore Saturn's Moon Titan

We should know by later today whether the mission is a success.

AWOL no more

Well, the grades are finally in, and the Daily Show is back on the air (and I even saw Stephen Colbert at the coffee shop yesterday!), so I can return to my post. If you don't like your grade go to ratemyprofessor.com and complain! I have been begging students to give me a chili pepper, but so far to no avail.

While I hadn't finished grading I felt that blogging would be an unseemly, guilty pleasure, so I held off; but I have been reading. Here is a sampling of stuff I have read recently and recommend:

From today's NYT, Mark Danner's aptly titled, We Are All Torturers Now. The things to remember about the Gonzalez nomination are two, as I see it: first, the obvious, that he gave the legal opinion rendering the Geneva Conventions "obsolete" and "quaint," making us -- who don't seem care -- all torturers, as Danner says, and endangering our troops in the process. There is a whole lot to say about that, but can't really add much (see Danner's work in the New York Review of Books and Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker for excellent coverage of the issue). But, the other issue that too often gets lost in the discussion is how Gonzalez's memo declared the President above all law. I hope this very serious constitutional issue will be raised in the hearings, but I don't hold out much hope.

Mark Danner has also written the best piece I have seen on the election: How Bush Really Won in the New York Review of Books

Other fine New York Review articles:
Jonathan Raban, The Truth About Terrorism
Michael Massing, Iraq, The Press, and the Election
Thomas Powers, Secret Intelligence and the 'War on Terror'
Chris Hedges, On War

The brand new issue of the Atlantic has some fascinating reading (but I don't know if it is all available online to non-subscribers):

Richard Clarke submits a fictional speech delivered on the 10th anniversary of September 11th -- chilling reading, based upon a plausible series of events, about the future of our country -- Ten Years Later: "Then the second wave of al-Qaeda attacks hit America. A leading expert on counterterrorism imagines the future history of the war on terror. A frightening picture of a country still at war in 2011

James Fallows, Success Without Victory: America won the Cold War because Americans embraced a set of strategic principles and pursued them steadily, decade after decade. Here's the outline of a "containment" strategy for the age of terror

Finally, William Langewiesche's chilling Letter from Baghdad. Some excerpts:

Several days before the U.S. elections in November, American officials revised their count of hard-core insurgents upward to as many as 12,000—or 20,000 if active sympathizers were included. [Update: the head of Iraqi intelligence now estimates the number of insurgents at 200,000; see Iraqi insurgents now outnumber coalition forces] Leaving aside the question of how isolated bureaucracies can derive such numbers in the midst of a genuine and popular insurrection, the cap at 20,000 elicited grim disbelief among ordinary Iraqis, frontline soldiers, and others with a sense of a struggle on the streets that has spun out of control. There are six million people in Baghdad alone, and another 10 million in the angriest areas of central Iraq, and many are young men with a taste for war. Meanwhile, foreign fighters continue to arrive from throughout the Middle East, across borders that are unpoliceable not merely because they are long and wild but, more significant, because of the support these travelers receive once they cross the line and mix into the local populations. Moreover, though they probably number a few thousand, the foreign fighters constitute only a small fraction of the forces now arrayed against the United States. As for the tactics involved, some are indeed crudely terroristic—the ongoing assassination of university professors, for instance, and the occasional car bombings of innocent market crowds in the cities. For the most part, however, the insurgents' attacks are less nihilistic than they are logical and precisely focused, whether against the American coalition and its camp followers or their Iraqi agents and collaborators. The truth is that however vicious or even sadistic the insurgents may be, they are acutely aware of their popular base, and are responsible for fewer unintentional "collateral" casualties than are the clumsy and overarmed American forces. Rhetoric aside, this is not a war on terror but a running fight with a large part of the Iraqi people. It is a classic struggle between the legions of a great power and the resistance of a native population. It is infinitely wider and deeper than officials can admit. And the United States is on the way to losing it.

Tragically, this was not the necessary outcome of the American invasion. After Baghdad fell, in the spring of 2003, the mood of the people was cautious but glad for the demise of Saddam Hussein, and open to the possibility that an American occupation would be a change for the better. By most measures it has not worked out that way. Though some of the blame lies with the immaturity and opportunism of the Iraqi people, these were factors that needed to be handled, and were not. The Iraqi people are far from stupid or unaware. But in the isolation and arrogance that have characterized the American occupation, never have we addressed them directly, explained ourselves honestly, humbly sought their support, respected their views of solutions, of political power, of American motivations, or of the history and future of Iraq. Even short of the killing we have done, we have broken down their doors, run them off the roads, swiveled our guns at them, shouted profanities at them, and disrespected their women—all this hundreds or thousands of times every day. We have dishonored them publicly, and within a society that places public honor above life itself. These are the roots of the fight we are in. Now Saddam himself is re-emerging as a symbol of national potency.

[...]

It is a new day in Iraq, yes. In the space of just a few months the interim government of Ayad Allawi has gutted many of the earlier reforms and has lost any hope of legitimacy in the eyes of the Iraqi people, who see it as a flimsy construct propped up by the United States, and powerless in the face of their own disdain. Corruption is rife on every level, and with it cynicism. The courts are bowing to political pressure. The Iraqi security forces are riddled with insurgents, not because the vetting is poor, or because agents have been planted, but because hatred of America has grown within the ranks just as it has in Iraqi society at large. There is still some hope attached to the coming elections—if only because most Shiites have so far stayed out of the fray. People have different thresholds for crossing over into the resistance, and different capacities for violent action, but even some of my old friends, once so welcoming to me as an American, are telling me that they are approaching those lines. The question is no longer who is against the United States in Iraq but who is not.[emphasis added]