Kirkuk

Recently in my U.S. as Global Power class we spoke briefly of the situation with the Kurds in Kirkuk. An article and an op-ed worth reading in the Times:

Ballot Strength Leads Kurds to Press a Role as Deal Makers
By EDWARD WONG
Published: February 9, 2005

And:

The Coming Clash Over Kirkuk
By SANDRA MACKEY
Published: February 9, 2005

Tonight on PBS: Slavery and the Making of America

Don't forget to watch Slavery and the Making of America on PBS tonight at 9.

The Times review:

A Harrowing Look at a Murderous Institution
By NED MARTEL
Published: February 9, 2005

The Women Behind the Myths

Lot's of good stuff in the Times today (and I haven't even got to the op-ed page yet).

In my Historical Methods class we are studing popular culture this semester. Last night we were talking about questions of interpretation -- understanding the various ways pop culture both reflects and influences other social trends and issues. Today's Times has an interesting article on how mythologies surrounding Marilyn Monroe and the Bronte sisters have proliferated over the years:

The Women Behind the Myths
By CARYN JAMES
Published: February 9, 2005

History and National Identity -- Colonialism

Interesting article in the Times today about a new exhibit in Belgium on their colonial experience in the Congo:

Art Show Forces Belgium to Ask Hard Questions About Its Colonial Past
By ALAN RIDING
Published: February 9, 2005

Global warming: a threat to world security?

Nice roundup of recent articles on global warming from the Christian Science Monitor:

Global warming: a threat to world security?
With Kyoto starting next week, a bevy of experts and scientists warn of future conflict over disappearing resources.
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

Richard Clarke on the war on terror

Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism advisor to President's Clinton and Bush, has a new (weekly?) column called "The Security Advisor" in the New York Times Magazine. Here is his inaugural effort to explain in brief what the battle is about:

No Returns
By RICHARD A. CLARKE
Published: February 6, 2005

Why does David Kay hate America?

David Kay, the head of the Iraq Survey Group appointed by President Bush to find WMD in Iraq, warns us to be wary of the rush to war with Iran:

Let's Not Make the Same Mistakes in Iran
By David Kay
Monday, February 7, 2005; Page A21

In the current New York Review of Books, review of Kenneth Pollack's new book The Persian Puzzle goes into great detail about the Iranian nuclear situation:

Bush, Iran & the Bomb
By Christopher de Bellaigue

Michelle Chen on Ground Zero -- Part 3

Michelle writes:

Hey everyone. Here is the final installment in the WTC article series, which coincides nicely with initiatives in Congress right now to provide medical support for Ground Zero residents and workers. Read it in good health:

Lingering Threats: Contamination May Still Lurk Near Ground Zero
Part Three of Three
by Michelle Chen

Opposition to Social Security

A nice historical overview on the longstanding Republican project to end Social Security is here.

More Social Security

On my brief list of reliable commentators on Social Security, I left off Atrios and Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo who has been following things very closely. Or you can just read the President's own words over at Hullabaloo.

Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series @ Rutgers-Newark

Richard Kearney sends along this notice: "This looks like a first-rate program and a chance to meet some major contemporary historians....right down the road at my alma mater Rutgers-Newark. And it's FREE too."

One of New Jersey's oldest and most highly esteemed Black History Month events, the Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series, will mark its 25th anniversary by examining evolutionary changes in the study and scholarship of African-American history. Co-sponsored by the Institute on Ethnicity, Culture and the Modern Experience, the Federated Dept. of History, Rutgers-Newark/ New Jersey Institute of Technology; and the New Jersey Historical Commission, Dept. of State, this free lecture series will take place at the Paul Robeson Campus Center on the Rutgers-Newark campus, Friday, Feb. 18, 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., and Saturday, Feb. 19, 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

The event features keynote speaker Dr. James Oliver Horton, president of the Organization of American Historians and the Benjamin Banneker Professor of American Studies and History at George Washington University. His address, "A Different Story: The Meaning of African American History for America," will headline Saturday's agenda.

Eminent historians, including Professors P. Sterling Stuckey of the University of California, Riverside, Nell Irvin Painter of Princeton University and David Roediger of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will kick-off the two-day program on Friday, February 18, at 4 p.m. with a panel discussion, "Reflections on the Evolution of African American Historical Scholarship." Professor Adrienne Petty of Rutgers-Newark will moderate the panel, which will be followed by a wine and cheese reception, featuring the Bradford Hayes Trio.

Saturday's lecture program will continue in the afternoon with Cornell University Professor Margaret Washington, the award-winning author of "A Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Community Culture Among the Gullahs," sharing her expertise on slave religion, culture and the social and political dimensions of African American cultural expressions. Michael Gomez of New York University will follow her with a discussion on "Diasporic Africa in Slavery and Freedom."

Special panel discussions will offer an insightful look into "Black Beauty Parlors and the Political Maturation of 20th Century Women," by Professor Tiffany Gill of the University of Texas and an assessment of the impact of "African American Hollywood Stars of the 1930's" by Dr. Miriam Petty, the 2004-2005 Geraldine R. Dodge Fellow at Rutgers-Newark. And, Professor Anastasia C. Curwood of Boston College will examine "The Private Lives of Black Americans during the Life and Times of E. Franklin Frazier, 1894-1962."

For more information, email ethnicity@andromeda.rutgers.edu or call 973/353-1871, ext.11.
--
Marisa Pierson
Program Coordinator
Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience (IECME)
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
337 Conklin Hall, 175 University Ave.
Newark, NJ 07102
Phone: 973.353.1871 x11
Fax: 973.353.5218
E-Mail: mpierson@andromeda.rutgers.edu
ethnicity.rutgers.edu

Global Warming

Tom Englehardt complains that Americans are so in denial about global warming that even his readership goes down when he discusses the subject. Prove him wrong by checking out Dropping in on the Apocalypse.

Ward Churchill

Fox News viewers have no doubt heard of Ward Churchill. If you haven't, a simple Google, NY Times, or Nexis search should tell you more than you want to know. I haven't weighed in because I don't have anything particularly insightful to add. So I will point you to a few good writings on the topic.

Timothy Burke at his fantastic and thoughtful blog Easily Distracted captures exactly my own sense of frustration with this kind of tiresome and predictable media hokum. But he also takes Churchill to task for being a slopping scholar. See Off the Hook

Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly does a nice job showing how the story gained media traction -- a formula that has been played out countless times in the past 15 years.

Digby in Witnessing History gives his usual acerbic and insightful take on the whole story, linking it clearly to broader issues in our culture and politics.

The folks at Cliopatria the blog at History News Network have been doing a good job following the story.

I was appalled by his remarks and appalled that his visit to Hamilton College was cancelled after threats of violence. Which is a greater danger to our republic: the fact that college professors can be idiots (something that should come as no surprise to my students) or the fact that intimidation silences dissenting speech?

Thoughts on Social Security

I can't competently parse the intricacies of the Bush Social Security Plan. There are others out there (Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, Matthew Yglesias et al.) who have been doing a good job explaining the real story. But I am struck by a number of things about it. One is the strange racism in the way it is being sold to African Americans. I note also the obvious fear-mongering and lying that are the staple of this administration. Don't forget the Orwellian attempts to change and control the language that journalists use.

What strikes me as really odd, though, are that they admit this won't solve the fiscal problem that they claim exists. Thus, the real reason for getting rid of Social Security must lie elsewhere. I believe -- and a few quotes have leaked out here and there to this effect -- that this is part of a long-term stategy to destroy the program BECUASE it works. The battle is ideological: a federal program that works to help out all Americans, a program that is social and provides security, contradicts that conservative philosophy of government.

Even odder yet are these words from the State of the Union:

The goal here is greater security in retirement, so we will set careful guidelines for personal accounts. We will make sure the money can only go into a conservative mix of bonds and stock funds. We will make sure that your earnings are not eaten up by hidden Wall Street fees. We will make sure there are good options to protect your investments from sudden market swings on the eve of your retirement. We will make sure a personal account can't be emptied out all at once, but rather paid out over time, as an addition to traditional Social Security benefits. And we will make sure this plan is fiscally responsible, by starting personal retirement accounts gradually, and raising the yearly limits on contributions over time, eventually permitting all workers to set aside four percentage points of their payroll taxes in their accounts.

How is this conservative? "We will make sure ... we will make sure ... we will make sure...." Doesn't that sound like the ultimate in goverment paternalism? Bush keeps telling people in his tour around the country that they will not be able to use their retirement money in dice games. Well, why not? I thought this was supposed to be my money?

Oh, by the way, no one dared take the quiz I posted a few days ago: True or False: "By the year 2042, the entire system would be exhausted and bankrupt." The answer, of course, is: FALSE. Entirely false. A bald-faced lie.

Historical Parallels

In response to my posting of a 1967 article about elections in Vietnam that sounded eerily familiar (U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote -- Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror), reader Steve writes:

The post on Vietnam elections was interesting. Now if the Iraq election would have gone worse and failed would you have posted that article to show that failed elections are good because successful ones didn't work in Vietnam? It would seem that failed elections would break the "parallel" between Iraq and Vietnam so that would have to of been a good thing no? Or would you have simply reinforced your previous comments on the doubts surrounding the election and look at the election as vindication?

I am always amused when historians use "parallels" to compare historical events. I've always felt that forming "parallels" was the weakest form of critique or analyses a historian could use. Writing on "parallels" is similar to someone asking why apples fall from trees and answering them with "Apples fall from trees, just like oranges that's just the way it is". So the person goes on with their life knowing that apples fall from trees because oranges do too but one day they run across a pear tree. Now they have a problem, pears don't look like apples or oranges. Oranges and apples are fairly rounded but the pear doesn't look anything like them. It would impossible to use any "parallel" between the fruits. The fault being that when the person first asked the question, the answer should have been gravity but instead, they were told it happens because that’s what happens to other things like it. No one is any smarter from comparing historical events; you get smarted by understanding them and not making cosmetic "parallels".

I agree. But let me add some more thoughts.

Steve's analogy is interesting to me because just this week in my "West and the World" course we are covering the Scientific Revolution and reading a bit of Newton. Newton, of course, argued that if you see apples and oranges fall from trees, you can infer that pears do too, according to some universal principle. I don't want to push the idea of "universal laws" into history, but your analogy doesn't really prove your point. I wouldn't say that because something similar-sounding has happened before (even if it has happened many times) that, therefore today's event will follow the same pattern according to some universal principle. We do that to some degree, in history, and, just as with science, our conclusions and theories must continually be tested against the evidence.

That is as far as I want to push the scientific analogy, but there are other ways we can read that newspaper article from 1967. I agree with Steve that the article doesn't really answer any questions for us, but it SHOULD make us raise questions. I agree that Iraq is not Vietnam, and the Iraq War is not the Vietnam War, but that doesn't mean there are not some similarities worth investigating. To what degree are there parallels between Iraq and Vietnam? Or a better question: Can we learn anything from our experience in Vietnam that would help us better understand and influence what is happening today?

In the case of the article I posted, I think the "lesson" to be drawn -- or, really, the question to be raised, is: is our government wrong again about "turning the corner" (today's version of the Vietnam War's "light at the end of the tunnel"). Can this article from 1967 help us to raise questions about how our government understands and communicates the situation? Can it help us raise questions about how a foreign government in a land occupied by American troops establishes legitimacy? For example, the South Vietnamese government "elected" in 1967 never established legitimacy within the country. Clearly, the historical situations are very different between then and now, but I believe the article can raise questions about a similar problem with legitimacy.

A very different potential historical parallel was brought up by the eminent historian David Kennedy in this month's Atlantic Monthly (if it is not available through their website, you can go to the Cheng library's e-journal page):

What "W" Owes to "WW"
President Bush may not even know it, but he can trace his view of the world to Woodrow Wilson, who defined a diplomatic destiny for America that we can't escape

A similar point was made a while back in the New Republic (available through cheng's e-journal page) and a book called The Folly of Empire:

WHAT WOODROW WILSON CAN TEACH TODAY'S IMPERIALISTS.
History Lesson
by John B. Judis
Post date 06.02.03 | Issue date 06.09.03

Kennedy doesn't draw out the "lessons" in the same way Judis does, but I wish he did because he (Kennedy) makes some interesting and important points:

[...]Wilson would recognize George W. Bush as his natural successor, and he would recognize today's Americans as the direct spiritual descendants of the people he so reluctantly led into that conflict. For Wilson did not think that what came to be known, and often derided, as "Wilsonianism" was just a policy selected from a palette of possible choices. Rather, he saw it as the sole approach to international relations that his countrymen would embrace as consistent with their past and their principles. Wilson did not so much invent American foreign policy as discover it.

[...]

Woodrow Wilson instinctively reacted to the onset of the Great War by issuing a proclamation of neutrality. But as the conflict grew in scale and duration, wreaking devastation previously unimaginable, he became increasingly convinced that isolation was no longer a viable posture for the United States. Yet Wilson also felt (along with many other Americans) that Theodore Roosevelt's philosophy, with its embrace of raw power and cold national interest, was irrelevant, even alien. If neither traditional isolationism nor conventional realpolitik would do, then it fell to Wilson to craft an authentically American foreign policy that would so resonate in the hearts of his countrymen as to provide a sustainable basis for American international engagement.

Two assumptions underlay Wilson's thinking: that the circumstances of the modern era were utterly novel, and that providence had entrusted America with a mandate to carry out a singular mission in the world.[...]

What Kennedy points out is that Wilson didn't have "Wilsonianism" as a set of ideals to frame his worldview, he had to invent it, though out of the raw materials of American national mythology, at a time when the other ideals of isolationism and Rooseveltian imperialism/militarism seemed to offer no good answers. So, for Wilson, historical parallels were irrelevant, or only partially helpful.

Kennedy also reminds us that Wilson was very reluctant to go to war. This is where I wish he had engaged more directly with how Bush is or is not heir to Wilson. One could argue that Bush, like Wilson, found himself after 9/11 in a world where the reigning foreign policy worldviews provided no clear guide, thus he had to invent a new paradigm. (And one could argue that in seeing terrorism as a global war he did this successfully.) But where does that leave Wilson? Is Bush "properly" applying Wilsonian logic? Is he using the words but not the spirit? Is he adapting Wilsonianism to a changed world?

In his book and article Judis argues that both Wilson and T. Roosevelt learned from their experiences and their policies and worldviews eventually converged on a kind of internationalist pragmatic idealism (I am summarizing from memory, so don't take my word for it). I would like to hear more from Kennedy about whether he thinks Bush's Wilsonianism fits today's world or not.

"What I Heard About Iraq"

I linked to this article below, but here I just want to emphasize that if you read only one article about the U.S. and the Iraq War, read What I Heard about Iraq by Eliot Weinberger in the London Review of Books. Devastating.

Wolcott B. Goode

Juan Cole is an academic who actually knows something about the Middle East. Jonah Goldberg is a hacktackular pontificant who doesn't. Mediating their dispute is James Wolcott who can string words together just like he's ringin' a bell.

Haliburton in Iran

I have no problem with Halliburton Doing Business With the 'Axis of Evil'. I don't even care if they are breaking the law. In fact, I am sure they are too smart to do that:

Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall said the company had not broken the law because all of the work in the South Pars gas field would be done by non-Americans employed by a subsidiary registered in the Cayman Islands.

See how great those offshore subsidiaries are? What pleases me is that Haliburton can now over-bill and cheat another country into bankruptcy. They are actually doing a great public service to the U.S. -- the highest form of patriotism.

Now, if only they would stop bilking American citizens.

[update: I missed this: Halliburton Will Withdraw From Energy Projects in Iran. I guess they're gettin' out before the war destroys their investments.]

A Quiz

True or False: "By the year 2042, the entire system would be exhausted and bankrupt."

You can count on me...

... to harp on the negative -- or at least offer some cautionary perspectives.

Remember, I danced around my house in my undies (boxer-briefs, if you must know) when I saw Iraqis danding in the streets of "liberated" Baghdad a couple of years ago. Sucker for democracy, indeed. So you will excuse me if I don't swallow the freedom on the march thing whole hog (and, no, I will not be watching tonight -- I always find the State of the Union address to be too much of a royal affair).

So, here are some perspectives and issues you probably haven't seen on the teevee.

Juan Cole, in The Iraq Election: First Impressions, reminds us that Bush opposed this whole election thing initially until Sistani forced his hand.

Jeff Jacoby finally looks at himself in the mirror: Saying nothing is torture in itself. An excerpt:

As regular readers know, I write as a war hawk. I strongly support the mission in Iraq. I voted for President Bush. I believe the struggle against Islamist totalitarianism is the most urgent conflict of our time.

But none of that justifies the administration's apparent willingness to countenance -- under at least some circumstances -- the indecent abuse of prisoners in military custody. Something is very wrong when the Justice Department advises the president's legal adviser that a wartime president is not bound by the international Convention Against Torture or the US laws incorporating it. Or when that legal adviser tells the Senate, as Alberto Gonzales did last week, that ''there is no legal prohibition under the Convention Against Torture on cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment with respect to aliens overseas."

If this were happening on a Democratic president's watch, the criticism from Republicans and conservatives would be deafening. Why the near-silence now? Who has better reason to be outraged by this scandal than those of us who support the war? More than anyone, it is the war hawks who should be infuriated by it. It shouldn't have taken me this long to say so.

Nick Turse continues his series Bringing It All Back Home: The Emergence of the Homeland Security State at Tomdispatch.

Jack Shafer has an amazing column at Slate, Together, Again: Judith Miller and Ahmad Chalabi -- killing democracy in two countries in one fell swoop!

In What I Heard about Iraq -- e.g. "I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war'" -- Eliot Weinberger lists page after page of truth and lies that will make you weep.

And, finally, what would my neighbor Yogi have to say about this?

U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote
Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror

by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3-- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.

According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.

....A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam. The election was the culmination of a constitutional development that began in January, 1966, to which President Johnson gave his personal commitment when he met Premier Ky and General Thieu, the chief of state, in Honolulu in February.

The purpose of the voting was to give legitimacy to the Saigon Government, which has been founded only on coups and power plays since November, 1963, when President Ngo Dinh Deim was overthrown by a military junta.