Remora

Judicial Watch, a site whose motto is because no one is above the law! -- by which they mean, we'll smear people who are too famous to sue us for libel -- has aligned the decent impulses in my soul with a man I usually consider indecent ab ovo, George Bush I. But the mccarthyite association of GBI with everybody's archeterrorist, O. bin Laden,
Judicial Watch: Because no one is above the law!, is too ridiculous to stomach. Judicial Watch takes Bush's investment in a company in which bin Laden's family has invested as some absurd complicity with O. bin Laden himself. For those fans of the internicene Clinton wars, Judicial Watch was continually intruding itself into the public notice by dogging Clinton for such crimes as were attributed to him by the paranoid right. Using the same poor logic, they are going after GBI:

"Judicial Watch, the public interest law firm that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and abuse, reacted with disbelief to The Wall Street Journal report of yesterday that George H.W. Bush, the father of President Bush, works for the bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia through the Carlyle Group, an international consulting firm. The senior Bush had met with the bin Laden family at least twice. (Other top Republicans are also associated with the Carlyle group, such as former Secretary of State James A. Baker.) The terrorist leader Osama bin Laden had supposedly been �disowned� by his family, which runs a multi-billion dollar business in Saudi Arabia and is a major investor in the senior Bush�s firm." If you read further in the article, you'll find that Judicial Watch, the public interest firm that spreads intellectual corruption like an infected rat spreads plague, has no evidence whatsoever that bin Laden's ties with his family's business haven't been cut. But witchhunting groups racial profiling happily through the Wall Street Journal don't care, really.

Actually, it wouldn't surprise me at all if O. bin Laden did have money in the Carlyle group, but it wouldn't surprise me, either, if he had money in Judicial Watch -- the way investment has been freed up from those national agencies that wish to track it is pretty well known among real public interest groups.

Remora.
More about Thieu's passing - here's the first chapter of No Peace, No Honor. Larry Berman's book shows that the previous two schools of thought about the end of the Vietnam war are both wrong. Nixon's version was that Congress lost the war, by stripping him of his power to intervene after the 73 treaty was signed. The "decent interval" theory, of Frank Snepp - whose last book I reviewed here - is that the treaty was forged with the utmost cynicism by Kissinger and Nixon, fully conscious that under the terms of it, South Vietnam was doomed unless the US intervened, long distance, with the utmost brutality -- a futile brutality too, as would seem self-evident to anybody else.
Remember, though, this is the administration whose bombing planners in Cambodia didn't even have current maps of the place. Random bombing didn't bother them -- chances were you'd kill some enemy somewhere if you dropped enough tonnage of explosives.
Berman's interpretation is different:

"No Peace, No Honor draws on recently declassified records to show that the true picture is worse than either of these perspectives suggests. The reality was the opposite of the decent interval hypothesis and far beyond Nixon's and Kissinger's claims. The record shows that the United States expected that the signed treaty would be immediately violated and that this would trigger a brutal military response. Permanent war (air war, not ground operations) at acceptable cost was what Nixon and Kissinger anticipated from the so-called peace agreement. They believed that the only way the American public would accept it was if there was a signed agreement. Nixon recognized that winning the peace, like the war, would be impossible to achieve, but he planned for indefinite stalemate by using the B-52s to prop up the government of South Vietnam until the end of his presidency. Just as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution provided a pretext for an American engagement in South Vietnam, the Paris Accords were intended to fulfill a similar role for remaining permanently engaged in Vietnam. Watergate derailed the plan.

The declassified record shows that the South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, and the United States disregarded key elements of the treaty because all perceived it was in their interest to do so. No one took the agreement seriously because each party viewed it as a means for securing something unstated. For the United States, as part of the Nixon Doctrine, it was a means of remaining permanently involved in Southeast Asia; for the North Vietnamese, it was the means for eventual conquest and unification of Vietnam; for the South Vietnamese, it was a means for securing continued support from the United States."

Air war. Nixon really was a visionary -- he realized that what America wanted was a war with zero American casualties. It took a while, but Clinton pulled it off in Kosovo. Of course, the question is: how long can you stick to that kind of policy?
Ah, the sickness of it, the sickness unto death.

Remora
Blues for President Thieu

He dead, as they said of Kurz. Except that he was not, like Kurz, a product of
some Western power shipped out to one of the dark places of the earth, as the colonial officers put it pretentiously on their various veranda.

What he was -- an obituary can't tell us that. In fact, in his adopted home town, Boston, the obituarist in the Globe has a surprisingly distant knowledge of where Nguyen Van Thieu came from. Here's an astonishing graf:
Boston Globe Online / Obituaries / Nguyen Van Thieu, 78

"Born April 5, 1923, the youngest child of a struggling farmer, Mr. Thieu worked in rice fields as a boy and went to a French Catholic high school. At 23, he briefly joined Ho Chi Minh's anticolonial struggle, but he left the movement that would become his enemy and joined the army of South Vietnam."
Simple math should have made the Globe deadhead re-read his factsheet. How could he have briefly joined the Viet Minh in 1946, and then joined the army of South Vietnam, a nation which emphatically didn't exist until ten years later? It is, perhaps, appropriate that in his passing, America add one more white lie to the pile we graciously bestowed upon him when he was the "democratically' elected ruler of our protectorate. America suffered from short term memory loss in Vietnam. We kept forgetting the pasts of the leaders we would periodically dredge up to lead our forces against the alien Ho Chi Minh -- we had that problem with Marshal Key, our favorite for a bit, who had the embarrassing habit of praising Hitler in public; and we certainly had that problem with Thieu. Thieu didn't really have a problem with his own place in the world. He had no quarrel with democratic theory, he just didn't see how it applied to him. In another time and place, he might have made a passable dictator. He wasn't overly brutal; I'd put him in the mid-brutal range. If he disappeared political opponents, didn't the PRI, in Mexico, do the same? Hell, didn't even Mayor Daley want to? Certainly among our allies he wasn't even in the league with, say, Sukarno. He simply wasn't the knight to lead our crusade, so the American government lied about it. They lied stenuously, they lied foolishly, and they even came up with prop elections, wonderfully managed even as we were supporting the Phoenix program in the villages. The cognitive disconnect was total. He wasn't lionhearted. He was instinctively anti-communist, and he was uncomfortably allied with some of the shabbiest persons (Nixon and the ever unbearable Kissinger) to ever run an American administration, which in the end undid him.

Remora
Paul Krugman is not my favorite economist. I think of him as the Economist from Glib -- he's absorbed monetary theory into a highly attenuated Keynsianism, resulting in that sweet sleep of reason, Clintonomics.

However, his article in the NYT Magazine this Sunday
is definitely worth reading, even if its potted history of How we learned to Make Macroeconomic Policy seems pretty suspect to me. He uses a military/ sports metaphor to adumbrate our two "lines of defense" against a Depression -- which, by the way, he defines wholly in terms of consumer demand. To quote from his article:

"The first line of defense against an economic slump is monetary policy: the ability of the central bank -- the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan -- to cut interest rates. Lower interest rates are supposed to persuade businesses and consumers to borrow and spend, which creates new jobs, which encourages people to spend even more, and so on. And since the 1930's, this strategy has consistently worked. Specifically, interest-rate cuts have pulled the United States out of each of its big recessions over the past 30 years -- in 1975, 1982 and 1991. "

...
"Behind the first line of defense is a second line, fiscal policy. If cutting interest rates isn't enough to support the economy, the government can pump up demand by cutting taxes or increasing its own spending. "

Notice the dates in the first quoted paragraphs. You'll notice that they correspond with the dawning of the age of Friedman (truly the age of acquarius for neo-classical economists)-- and that Krugman is not counting the slowdown of 59-60, or even the slowdown of 73-74. Moreover, it is, to say the least, not evident that interest-rate cuts "pulled" the United States out of these recessions. Interest rate cuts are responses to economic slowdowns, certainly, but the experience of, for instance the stagflation-slowdown that started in 1980 doesn't have the electric switch characteristics Krugman wants to convey. As a corrective to Krugman's views, William Greider's The Temple, which is a journalistic account of Fed decision-making, is recommended. I recommend it the more given Krugman's notorious contempt for Greider.

The problem with his analysis is in what he takes to be the second line of defense. Notice how he confines fiscal policy, in the traditional time-honored fashion of economists, in terms of discretionary spending over a short-term time frame. What is missing, here, are long-term governmental fiscal structures - such as college loans, FHA, on-going infrastructural support for highways, R&D, the environment, and the rest of it -- which are, I would contend, the enduring vector of government intervention in the economy which, as a structure (apart from its yearly budgeting) has generated a stabilizing influence on the economy. It is upon these structures that the American economy has built an internal consumer market fueled by debt. In his whole article, Krugman never mentions consumer debt, but it is crucial to understanding how our present economy differs from the economy of the 30s, and how the dangers of recession differ, too.

However, even if I find Krugman's frame of analysis inadequate, his rehearsal of the woes to which the Japanese economy is presently heir is pretty good, even if his idea that America, unlike Japan, has a much smarter central bank is pretty funny. This idea is widespread among American economists, and it has its roots in vanity. They recognize kindred spirits on the board of the Fed -- hell, they are kindred spirits, coming from the same universities, publishing in the same journals, using the same models. This doesn't really mean they are smarter. This simply means they share the same delusions -- like the Glass family in Salinger's short stories. You can only be so smart in economics, because, pace Krugman, it is not and never will be a positive science.

Remora
Speaking of the bulletin of the atomic scientists, there is a truly brilliant bit of reportage by Jessica Stern, listening to the Muj, from January of this year.

Meeting with the Muj | The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Here's two grafs:

"As part of a research project on violent religious extremism, I have been interviewing Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and Muslim militants around the world for the last two years. Last June I returned to South Asia to visit the Line of Control, the always tense and often bloody border between Indian-held and Pakistan-held Kashmir. I wanted to meet with mujahideen and to learn more about Pakistan's radical madrisas, which churn out so many of the mujahideen, boys who court death in the name of god.
I also met with families of "martyrs," Pakistani boys who have lost their lives fighting in Kashmir. I had been communicating with a few mujahideen over the past two years, trying to understand what motivates them to become cannon fodder in what appears to be a losing battle."

Remora

Nice article in last month's Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
Surveying the nuclear cities | The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

It makes more compelling reading, now, for obvious reasons. It is amazing how careless we are about the abandoned coral reefs of the Cold War -- the chemicals, germs, nuclear weapons, the stockpiles of Apocalypse.
Here's the final Graf:

"The results of Tikhonov�s study and the apparent conditions in the cities make it all the more difficult to understand the Bush administration�s move to cut funding for the Nuclear Cities Initiative, a U.S. program designed to help create new jobs in several of Russia�s nuclear cities. The administration favors reducing last year�s already reduced budget of $25 million to a request for only $6.6 million. Experts within the program question whether this sum is sufficient to maintain operations in even one of the cities, let alone expand to new areas. While congressional supporters will try to restore the budget to this year�s level, the lack of political support within the administration could threaten the very survival of the program."

Remora

I like Christopher Hitchens, even if sometimes I think he is batty. His latest blast at the "no-brain" pacifist left has produced some small echo, and it is definitely worth reading, even if I felt it was fueled by temper working on the nerve more than by the painstaking charcuterie of H.'s analytic intelligence at its best.
Guardian Unlimited | Archive Search

Especially as he lets loose in the penultimate paragraph, he loses his grip on what he usually does very well -- making sure that his invective is undergirded by a strict sense of definition:

"But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about "the west", to put it in a phrase, is not what western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content. Indiscriminate murder is not a judgment, even obliquely, on the victims or their way of life, or ours. Any observant follower of the prophet Mohammed could have been on one of those planes, or in one of those buildings - yes, even in the Pentagon."

Falwell and Robertson have become a rhetorical convenience of the unity crowd -- you invoke them, you invoke some lefty protesting against US policy, and you say, same dif. Well, that's not really true ( - and I have to make a sidenote here: I have a theory that Pat Robertson bullies the roly-poly Falwell, making him say awful things that Falwell wouldn't say otherwise -- it is a playground dynamic widespread among first graders. I remember once being bullied by Jacky Barnhart, when I was six, to swear on a Bible. Now, I'd been told that you couldn't swear on a Bible, or you'd go to hell. Surely I wasn't told this by my mother -- I think it was some schoolkid superstition I picked up somewhere. And I definitely knew, back in those days, that hell was a lurid and awful place. I swore anyway, not because Jacky would beat me up, but in order not to lose face with Jacky and his cohorts.). Two groups can oppose one action for completely different reasons, and one of those reasons can be irrational, and one can be rational. That should be obvious to CH, since his notorious opposition to Clinton put him in the same group as the Newt Gingriches of the world, but the content of his opposition was at the other end of the political spectrum from Newt's.

Similarly, the fascism with an Islamic face line works as a jibe directed against, say, Saddam Hussein, with his oily embrace of Allah in the period of the Gulf War and the consciously fascistic structure of the Ba'athist party, but not against the hijackers. There was nothing really fascistic about their tactics or motives -- the assault upon unarmed civilians, the invocation of God, the alarmingly childish, self-hypnotic memo released by the FBI last week (apparently composed to put steel in the spines of the slackers among them), reveal a mindset that the term 'fascism' simply doesn't describe.

CH thunders about the pacifist Chomsky -- Znet axis. He's been a consistent critic of that line since the Serbian invasion of Bosnia. But Hitchens own view of the extent to which American interventionism is justified has a Wilsonian tone that is annealed against reality by the rhetorical heat of its idealism. Hitchens takes the view, practically, that American soldiers have a historical role similar to Napoleon's soldiers, spreading the enlightenment, by force, over the cobwebbed principalities of Central Europe. To make this case, he has to overlook the reality of American interests, which is a pretty big blind spot. And so every use of American soldiers is sure to produce some disappointed thunder from Hitchens.Reality betrays theory, the oppressed Albanians become the terrorist and drug-running Albanians, the American soldiers show a disconcerting carefulness about their own hides, and enlightenment is stymied once more. To be fair, if Americans consistently pay out of their pockets a premium to sustain a military in gross disproportion to their real needs, it is easy to see someone thinking, why not take that military surplus value and use it to right wrongs? but History has not annointed the Yank as today's crusaders, to be shuffled about the planet when evil rears its head, because a, there is no support for that kind of thing in this country, and b, like the reallife crusaders, the Yank is more interested in the profit motive than liberte, egalite and fraternite. This isn't really to criticize. The bright side of the profit motive is that it operates like a brake against the perils of imperialism, however idealistic. Fighting for money has a way of being a self-limiting enterprise.