Remora

Commoditizing exec compensation: a modest proposal

The news about Oracle comes, in LI's opinion, at just the right time. Larry Ellison should be a poster boy for bad corporate behavior. His total compensation package came in at number one in the Forbes CEO pay list. How did he win the greed sweepstakes? By taking home a cool 706 million dollars in stock options that he exercised. Ellison has a little gimmick he plays -- he paid himself, officially, a dollar in salary last year. Well, who needs a salary when your company dilutes its stock to the extent recorded by Mercury News

"Oracle CEO Ellison collected $706 million after exercising stock options and immediately selling the shares in January 2001. The gain meant Ellison set a record in business history for realized annual compensation -- which excludes the value of unexercised options. He received no salary, bonus or other pay last year. Oracle stock fell 61 percent to $15.30 during the fiscal year ended May 2001."

We just wrote a little review for the National Post about an Enron book. It hasn't been published yet. We excized a last paragraph considering extensively the underconsidered reason that executive total compensation has exploded: the insulated nature of the job market in upper management. It is a bit of a joke calling upper management a job market -- it seems more like the Big Fix.

Instead of seeking a market solution -- in other words, how do you make executive culture more competitive -- and letting that drive compensation downward, the idea that executives are something 'special' prevails among compensation reformers. The latest reform is reported this morning in the NYT

"A panel of business leaders proposed changes yesterday in the way corporations pay their top executives. Included in the changes are the prior disclosure of executive stock sales and the uniform treatment of stock options as expenses.

The panel, the Commission on Public Trust and Private Enterprise, was convened in June by the Conference Board, a research group based in New York. The group joined a long list of organizations offering recommendations on overhauling the way corporations govern themselves."

The panel's suggestions are good:

"Other proposals announced yesterday included a recommendation that companies seek shareholders' approval before stock options are repriced and that executives hold shares for a longer period before selling. In addition, the group recommended that compensation committees of corporate boards, not management, retain and direct the activities of outside consultants."

But they merely hint at what is needed to break the monopolistic practices that structure the interlocking interests of corporate boards, top executives, and 'consultants.' What is needed, with execs, was what was needed with electricity, natural gas, and metals: a way of commoditizing them, trading them, and hedging against exec compensation volatility. Is LI suggesting a futures market in executive compensation? Well, something like that. We need to make those compensation packages transparent; we need a way to index them; and we need to use that index to make executives compete among each other for positions, rather than having the holders of positions compete for the executives. It is as simple as that. The way in which corporations compete for executive talent makes sense if, indeed, the corporation is in a relatively new field -- such as PCs, in the late eighties. But as the field matures, prices for those executives should go down. Furthermore, those compensation packages shouldn't lift the compensation awarded to executives in more mature fields. Just that has been happening, however. One of the forces that drives Mergers and Acquisitions is the incentive, among the management class, to create something like a new field, and to then justify inflated compensation as the product of an unstable management situation. This is one of the reasons that M&As are a notoriously bad bet -- historically, they have a well known tendency to create underperforming companies.

However, don't expect LIs suggestion -- or any suggestion that we let the magic of the market-place intrude into the magic kingdoms of CEO-land -- to ever be taken seriously. That is, until boards of directors become real jobs, instead of part time honorariums, and those boards then begin to eye the incipient indexes that already exist -- the annual CEO salary list by Forbes, for instance -- and use it as an opportunity to cut exec cost.

Dope

The politics of war and popularity has been one of the great perils of democracy since Pitt the Younger played the patriot card in 1793. �We cannot arrange with our enemy in the present conjuncture, without abandoning the interest of mankind,� Burke wrote, in his �Letters �on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France,� which was Burke�s way of having it two ways: he simulated a moral interest such that the state could not refuse it, while pretending to decry any who would try to force the state to serve ideological interests. The latter was the letter of his indictment of the French revolutionaries � he claimed that they committed crimes in the name of an abstraction. Notice that the abstraction for which the French Revolutionaries were committing crimes was: the interest of mankind. Burke�s objections to the French Revolution became de facto state doctrine under Pitt - which is when the odd delusion was forged that the British empire was not simply a way of aggrandizing British interest, but was instead, mystically, in the interests of the subdued. This, of course, is the True Doctrine of the Neo-Con believers. The case Burke made carried the burden of legitimacy throughout the British-French conflict, up to 1815, and wrought havoc on the rights of Englishmen, as well as on their money.

This two-fold legitimation of war, which seeks to engraft its justification into the very tissue of the state�s legitimacy, is the path used to make any who oppose war unpatriotic, or enemies of the state. It�s a very fine maneuver, and it is being used now by the Bush regime to shift the boundaries of the war debate: it is no longer about the need for it, but the time we will have it. The social ostracism of the peace party is the practical correlate to the inevitability of war, the last few month�s media Muzak: a pervasive perversion of real reasons which operates much like Muzak, that pervasive perversion of real music, to obstruct thought. So those nations which might oppose our Iraqi action are discredited in sometimes laughable acts of propaganda. In the Sunday NYT, for instance, there was an article about the close ties between Iraq and France � ties that were, of course, cut during the Gulf war. There was even a graf showing the nations that traded with Iraq, and the arms they supplied, from Russia to France. Hey ho, however: there was no place there for the U.S. or the U.K. We�ve already published a partial inventory of products that went to Iraq from the U.S., taken from Jentleson�s book. Our sardonic laughter about the chart was increased by the fact that the Sunday NYT also published an article about businesses using misleading charts to disguise their true financial state.

:While other academic research over the last decade has established that financial charts are often designed to paint a rosier corporate picture than the numbers warrant, a study by Deanna Oxender Burgess, an accounting professor at Florida Gulf Coast University, goes a step further. It examined the effect of the chart design on readers of annual reports, who are mainly investors, stock analysts and shareholders.

"Dr. Burgess found that even slight distortions in a chart changed readers' perceptions of the information. "The danger is that people believe there's more growth than there really is or that performance isn't as poor, which could influence investment decisions," said Dr. Burgess, who conducted focus groups with 80 stockbrokers, bankers, accountants and business students."

Slight distortions in a chart � like the exclusion of two nations that, at one time, were making money on shipping those substances and technologies to Iraq that they now use to justify �regime change?� That's what I call a slight distortion.

Sometimes, coincidence really is the best artist.

Dope

Words written in anger. LI finds this incredible: writers are treated so badly by the media that it either stupifies us, forces us to quit, or demoralizes us beyond repair. This is the second time in the last five days that LI has had to go without food for a day. The reason? No money in the bank. The reason: One company has deliberately floated me -- not paid me -- for work I turned in in June, and that was published in July. One company has "lost" my invoice -- this makes the second time in the last month. For that company, I have reviewed approximately ten to fifteen books in the last five weeks. Result: I am living by leeching on my friends. Leeching only goes so far, however. So, today, I didn't have the money to buy ten dollars worth of groceries from the clerk, who makes more than me, and who is paid biweekly. The time divide is the major divide in this country: a company can take its time about paying you, in spite of the contracts they have you sign in order to spin your work off without you gaining a penny by it, and they can do this repeatedly, and they can do this without penalty. This has happened with Lefty magazines; it has happened with national newspapers. You wouldn't think so, but this is true.The writer cannot make the same bargain with the grocer, the landlord, or the electric company. These are my expenses this week: 30.00 for groceries. 5.00 for a meal -- a big treat for me, going out and getting a sandwich! 4.00 for coffees. I would like to see anybody survive on what I am forced to, with chronic, unexplained shortfalls making me truly unable to say that I can eat tomorrow. In the literal sense, I can't. I will find some body, I hope, who can take me out. Hurray.
This is the life of a beast.
This is the system that makes life beastly. I am living in nineteenth century squalor. I am imprisoned in my conditions, and no amount of labor seems to help. I am being driven mad by this. Literally.
I can howl and scream, I can beat my skinny belly, but nothing, nothing changes.
What to do?

Remora

September 11. LI was not going to post today. But then we thought, reading the NYT, and various media, that it might be a good idea to post today. After all, this is the week that Bush has chosen to press forward with his war against Iraq, with his address to the United Nations. And we were surprised to see Bush's comments on the NYT op-ed page -- surprised because we didn't expect to see a Washington Times guy like Bush appearing in same space used by Susan Sontag Monday.

So we decided, one year later, to take a look at Sontag's much condemned response to 9/11. It was easy to find on the web. A NYU finance professor has even taken the trouble to combine Sontag's 9/10 piece in the Times and the New Yorker piece. Here's the first paragraph, the one that drew down the wrath of the heavens last year:


"The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose
of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling & depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower; undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards. "

It was part of the disconnect from reality that much of the controversy about this graf had to do with whether or not the hijackers were or were not cowardly. The controversy seems, in retrospect, bizarre. On the one hand, to undertake to kill yourself in a cause can be construed as brave. On the other hand, to undertake to kill others without warning in a cause to which they are not clearly, if at all, connected can be construed as cowardly. It depends, obviously, on which end of the action you look at. In the end, I'd say that the story of war in this century is about the systematic displacement of all of the elements that were once engaged in the semantic field of "bravery." It is a field that fell to the technology of distance. Bombing Iraq is, indeed, another example in the endless story of 20th century fighting -- it is impervious to descriptions of cowardice and bravery. Once cowardice wins wars, and bravery loses them, the virtues begin to lose their luster.

That Bush would reach, instinctively, for the "coward" appelation had to do with forestalling criticism of his own regard for his skin, that day -- criticism that has been so reversed that we are now assured that the President nearly fought with his pilots to take Air Force one immediately to D.C., so brave a hero is he. This is blatantly untrue, and to the extent that Sontag takes on the press for "impression management," she is precisely right. That Sontag, a literary critic, fell for Bush's description of the act and the invitation to descriptions derived from an irrelevant system of virtues -- that in fact she doesn't make the elementary analysis of the coward trope that she, a good Barthesian, could easily have done -- gives us a measure of how confusing -- how stricken -- the period after 9/11 was. Criticism isn't simply opposition, and that, of course, was the whole problem with Sontag's piece.

The other thing to note, after a year, is that Sontag's numerous conservative critics -- who called her various names, like filthy, quisling, etc. -- now essentially agree with her that the whole thing was about Iraq. This would be funny, if it wasn't so not-funny. Of course, what we provisionally know, after a year of probing the Al Quaeda network, is that it wasn't at all about Iraq. It was about Saudi Arabia, first. It was about the perception that still lives, in the Arab world, among certain leaders, that the U.S. is a paper tiger -- a perception that arose from the bombing of the Marine Barracks in Lebanon in 83, and the subsequent American retreat from Lebanon. And if what has been reported about the preaching in the "radical" mosques in Hamburg is correct, it was about "Jewry" -- a soiled, disgusting theme that we are all too familiar with. The WP has an article, today, with the dime novel title, Hamburg's Cauldron of Terror, which quotes a typical sermon of the kind that, apparently, nourished Mohammed Atta's soul:


"The Al Quds mosque opened in 1993 and became a center for incendiary views. "The Jews and crusaders must have their throats slit," said Imam Mohammed bin Mohammed al Fizazi in a pre-Sept. 11 sermon, which was videotaped.

Such preaching has continued. The Post last month purchased a video at the Al Quds mosque in which an Islamic preacher, identified as Sheik Azid al Kirani, shouts out a call for mortal combat against "Jews, Israel and all unbelievers."

There is little common ground between the purveyors of this kind of Islamic ultramontanism and Iraq. There's good reason that none of the hijackers were Iraqi -- the issue between the U.S. and Iraq is definitely not at the center of the thinking of people like Atta, who detest the thought of secular Arabic power. "How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq?", Sontag justly asks. What she implies, however, is, distressingly, a view that has become very orthodox in right wing circles: the Middle East is one uniform mass, in which the differences between, say, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein melt down to a feeble few. This view is just plain wrong: its falsity can be spelled out in body counts.

To continue from our last post� the Eyre affair. Governor James Eyre�s suppression of a �rebellion� in the Crown colony of Jamaica, and his subsequent trial by commission, is so much antiquarian dust today, but it shouldn't be. So we are grateful to two economists, David M. Levy and Sandra Peart, who have publicized this affair. In an interview with Reason magazine, these two sum up what they think they have discovered: the dark connection between opposition to laissez faire economics and racism. They are particularly focused on the chief disputants in England: Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. These men, for Levy and Peart, stand not only for themselves, but also for two different ideologies: one statist, paternalistic, ultimately socialist, and one laissez faire, individualistic, and liberal � in the classical sense.

Q: What were the connections between the contempt for markets and defense of slavery?
A: Markets bust hierarchy. Carlyle also coined the term "consumer sovereignty" in 1833. It was a sneering reference to political economist Richard Whately�s exchange theory of government, in which policy is viewed as a trade between something like equals. Carlyle�s view of the world was that it should be ruled by hierarchy and the worship of heroes. Obedience to the demands of your superiors was everything. The exchange inherent in markets -- rather than the command of hierarchy -- was anarchy.


That markets don't bust hierarchy is a claim that, of course, the two don't consider -- even though it certainly animates a large tradition in the left, which goes from the French Revolution to Galbraith. However, the tie between hierarchy and racism is the one that concerns us here. The Eyre affair seems to seal their case. After showing that the motives behind the defense of Eyre were demonstrably racist -- that is, the supposition that blacks were inferior, and thus not subject to the judicial conventions protecting whites, animates the protection of Eyre from the consequences of having misused black subjects -- Levy and Peart make a few bold leaps. One of them we will get back to in a further post: the claim that the Reactionary clique gave rise to eugenics. This, it seems to us, is a serious distortion of the historical record.


First, let's get back to what happened in Jamaica, in October of 1865. To get a broader view of the facts in the affair, we turned to an article in the Winter, 2000 Clio by Howard Fulweiler, a literature professor at UNC: The Strange Case of Governor Eyre: Race and the "Victorian Frame of Mind". Fulweiler begins, as Levy and Peart do, by claiming that the Eyre affair did reflect distinct cultural differences about race. Astonishingly, in our view, there are academics who claim that the affair was "undetermined' by attitudes towards race. Levy and Peart, who have given a paper on this topic, have made a disheartening discovery about race and racism. The view, currently, is that the past was simply a monologue of racism, from which we fortunate few have somehow emerged. Thus, Mill and Carlyle are lumped together, an indistinguishable duo: Carlyle with his pathological fixation on black bodies, Mill with his defense of the authoritarian rule that the imperial powers could extend to �barbarians.�

"Four months ago when we presented some of our research on the Dismal Science, we heard two criticisms. Two months ago at a conference where we presented different but related papers, we heard similar comments. The first was a rather simple but damning consideration�'Everyone in Victorian England was a racist, so why be particularly annoyed with Carlyle, Ruskin or anyone else's attitudes?'

Clich� liquidates history in the name of stupidity. The dispute between Mill and Carlyle on race was not the nitpicking of two blind lacemakers over the pattern of the drapes. It was a fundamental, and stirring, conflict. Mill�s letter to Carlyle, when Carlyle wrote a piece in the Fraser magazine with the disgusting title, �The N- Question� (I bowdlerize because I don�t want hits to this site based on searches for the word. It is depressing enough to get hit on for �cocksucker� and the like), is an all too little known piece of liberatory lit. Here�s the beginning of it:

�SIR,� Your last month�s number contains a speech against the �rights of Negroes,� the doctrines and spirit of which ought not to pass without remonstrance. The author issues his opinions, or rather ordinances, under imposing auspices no less than those of the �immortal gods.� �The Powers,� �the Destinies,� announce, through him, not only what will be, but what shall be done; what they �have decided upon, passed their eternal act of parliament for.� This is speaking �as one having authority;� but authority from whom l If by the quality of the message we may judge of those who sent it, not from any powers to whom just or good men acknowledge allegiance. This so-called �eternal act of parliament� is no new law, but the old law of the strongest � a law against which the great teachers of mankind have in all ages protested � it is the law of force and cunning; the law that whoever is more powerful than an other, is �born lord� of that other, the other being born his �servant,� who must be �compelled to work� for him by �beneficent whip,� if �other methods avail not.� I see nothing divine in this injunction. If �the gods� will this, it is the first duty of human beings to resist such gods. Omnipotent these �gods� are not, for powers which demand human tyranny and injustice cannot accomplish their purpose unless human beings co�perate. The history of human improvement is the record of a struggle by which inch after inch of ground has been wrung from these maleficent powers, and more and more of human life rescued from the iniquitous dominion of the law of might. Much, very much of this work still remains to do; but the progress made in it is the best and greatest achievement yet performed by mankind, and it was hardly to be expected at this period of the world that we should be enjoined, by way of a great reform in human affair, to begin undoing it.�

This clear account of the case makes even passages in Ruskin, one of the great Victorian rhetoricians, look as shabby as peeling gilt. It is, by the way, interesting how pieces of prose on this side were regarded at the time. Bagehot, one of the many sympathizers of the Confederacy in the British press, found Lincoln�s speeches and writings grotesque and ungrammatical.

Fulweiler makes a move, in his article, that would have made Levy and Peart�s essay stronger: he provides some background for the revolt. This is crucial stuff, since it seems to contravene Levy and Peart's thesis, or at least gives them something to explain. The "rebellion" occurred in the context of unemployment and the disinclination of the colonial government to protect small freeholders against the plantation party. The period succeeding emancipation saw a great increase in unemployment in Jamaica. The slave-owners, who were plantation owners, responded to the liberation of the slaves in two ways: they held onto their position in the Island as the chief generators of wealth -- they did not break out of the sugar dominated system, in other words; and they refused outlay to create infrastructure for the ex-slaves. There was no schooling, none of the supports, even of legality, that would make it possible for the ex-slaves to establish autonomous economic structures. The black and mulatto population petitioned Queen Victoria for redress. In other words, they requested the state's intervention in their economic plight. This goes unmentioned in Levy and Peart's account, but it tells us something about the kind of intellectual history they are pursuing: they are careless of the constituencies of the ideas represented by their champions. In many ways, the rebel movement is consonant with the Chartists, and the nascent union movements in England, both of which were criticized by Carlyle. The intervention petitioned for was not �free trade,� but for some security net. Of course, Levy and Peart could argue that the only way to achieve economic viability would have been through free trade � trade, for instance, with countries outside the British domain � but it is hard to see how small freeholders in Jamaica would have benefited from this.


Governor Eyre's suppression of the rebellion, which amounted to a riot in which 25 people were killed, including some white plantation owners, was to declare martial law, march militia (interestingly, composed of white, mulatto and black Maroon soldiers) into St. Thomas Parish, where the revolt was centered, and kill and whip. But what truly stirred up the intellectuals in London was what happened next:



"At the center of the ensuing storm was George William Gordon, a mulatto landowner, magistrate, member of the Assembly, and Baptist minister, who had championed the cause of the black poor, and had been an implacable enemy of Governor Eyre. Gordon had spoken several times at Bogle's church [Bogle, you will remember from the last post, was the rebel leader- LI] and had ordained him as a Deacon. Governor Eyre believed, as did many others, that Gordon was the mastermind behind the rebellion. Since Gordon was in Kingston during the disturbance, where there was no martial law, the Governor had him arrested, transported on The Wolverine to Morant Bay where he was quickly courtmartialed by junior officers and hanged on October 23 with the express approval of Governor Eyre. Although many deplored the general brutality exercised by the troops, it was the execution of Gordon which later would offer an opportunity to charge Eyre with murder."



Gordon's murder was at the heart of Mill's indignation, Carlyle's defense of Eyre, and the alliance of the evangelicals with the evolutionists. We'll discuss this in another post. Probably not the next one - indignation calls, we have other issues and tasks -- but soon.

Dope

LI was on the horn with our friend, MB. MB mentions an article she's writing for a book on Philosophy and Race, which gets us onto the topic of philosophy and race. So LI mentioned that if the editor expanded his mandate, he ought to include the Eyre Incident. MB hadn't heard of the Eyre incident, and --- putting our cards on the table -- LI has gone many moons in complete Eyre ignorance too. We came across a reference to it in a biography of Mary Kingsley. So we explained what we knew -- that Governor Eyre, in Jamaica, brutally put down a revolt of agricultural workers there, mostly black, in the 1860s. And that he was put on trial for murder. And that the case became a sensation in England, where two different committees were formed, one pro-Eyre, one anti. The pro-Eyre committee was openly contemptuous of the idea that a white man should be prosecuted for murdering black men. Alas, Charles Dickens was on the pro-Eyre committee, as well as the ever racist Thomas Carlyle, and John Ruskin. On the side of the angels, though, was James Stuart Mills. As well as Charles Darwin.

Well, after we got off the horn, we decided to look up Governor Eyre, in order to expand our knowledge from the rather potted account we'd given MB. We were in luck. Two free market economists, David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart, have written a marvelous, long article that centers around the affair. For Levy and Peart, the themes are clear: critics of classical economics, the prototypical descendents of Adam Smith (who are, presumably, statists and other unspeakable things) are, from the beginning, advancing a racist agenda. Racist in the modern sense of refusing to grant, to blacks, or to disfavored ethnic groups (the Irish, mainly) a status of judicial equality, and backgrounding that refusal with a theory of racial or ethnic inferiority.

Now, LI doesn't buy Levy and Peart's entire argument. For one thing, the two make the mistake of taking ideological positions of circumstance to the be equivalent of ideological positions that unfold from logical necessity. Let me explain the difference with a more modern example. Religious conservatives in this country have been in the forefront of the attack on the whole language movement. The whole language movement seeks to teach reading by memorization, and using contextual clues -- whatever that means. Religious conservatives favor phonics.

Now, does is phonics somehow logically inferred from core conservative positions? I think not. LI thinks the whole language movement is, mostly, a crock, and that writing should be learned musically -- by way of phonics. We think this partly because it has been the more successful way to teach reading. We think it provides a more reliable interface between the text as a material object and the body. We think this for any number of reasons. But none of those reasons lead us to other conservative Christian positions. We think that, given other circumstances, the conservative position could as easily be whole language learning, and the liberal position phonics.

In the same way, we think that the racist positions taken by Ruskin and Dickens -- which, in spite of Levy and Peart's efforts, seem marginal to the work of both of those writers -- aren't to be deduced from their criticism of classical economics. With Carlyle, however, it is a wholly other matter.
We'll defend this thesis, and modify it, later on.

However, Levy and Peart are right to use the Eyre dispute as a sort of litmus test to tell us a lot about the intellectual playing field in Victorian England.

Here is the pair's simple, forceful abridgement of the affair:

The Eyre Controversy

"The controversy was triggered by a seemingly trivial event in the British colony of Jamaica. A contemporary witness wrote:

On Saturday the 7th October, 1865, a court of petty sessions was held at Morant Bay. A man made a noise in the court, and was ordered to be brought before justices. He was captured by the police outside, but immediately rescued by one Paul Bogle and several other persons, who had large bludgeons in their hands, and taken into the market-square, where some one hundred and fifty more persons joined them also with sticks: the police were severely beaten. ... On Monday, the 9th, warrants were issued against Paul Bogle and twenty seven others for riot and assault on the Saturday.1 Paul Bogle lives in the lyrics to Bob Marley's"So Much Things To Say."

On Wednesday the police came to enforce the warrants. Stones were thrown at the police. Then the shooting began. The island's Governor, Edward James Eyre, took command. Eyre imposed martial law and called in the army to restore order. By the time the army was done, over 400 Jamaicans were dead, and thousands homeless. Britons were horrified by the methods of state terror, including flogging with wire whips and the use of military courts to deny civilians their rights."

To understand how history, especially if it involves English or American injustice, can be covered up, compare this account to the account in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, in the entry under Eyre:

"1846 he was appointed lieutenant-governor of New Zealand, where he served under Sir George Grey. After successively governing St Vincent and Antigua, he was in 1862 appointed acting-governor of Jamaica and in 1864 governor. In Octobef~ ~865 a negro insurrection broke out and was repressed with laudable vigour, but the unquestionable severity and alleged illegality of Eyre�s subsequent proceedings raised a storm at home which induced the government to suspend him and to despatch a special commission of investigation, the effect of whose inquiries, declared by his successor, Sir John Peter Grant, to have been �admirably conducted,� was that he should not be reinstated in his office. The government, nevertheless, saw nothing in Eyre�s conduct to justify legal proceedings; indictments preferred by amateur prosecutors at home against him and military officers who had acted under his direction, resulted in failure, and he retired upon the pension of a colonial governor."

Laudable vigour -- unpack that phrase and what do you find? Flogging with wire whips and 400 deaths. Something to keep in mind as Bush uses America's "laudable vigour" as he sees fit.

The "amateur prosecutors" -- can't you hear the Tory sneer in that phrase? -- were stimulated by John Stuart Mill, in one of his greatest moments. To understand Levy and Peart's article, you have to understand the divide between Mill and Carlyle, and what it represented in England.
To be continued...

Remora

The Times' David Sanger's article about Bush's first strike doctrine quotes the man on the reasons for changing, fundamentally, the principles of American foreign policy :


"Implicitly, Mr. Bush has agreed to engage the country in a discussion over a fundamental change in America's national security strategy: his doctrine that perilous times have forced the United States to assert a right to launch pre-emptive strikes against any state that could put weapons of mass destruction into the hands of terrorists.

"After Pearl Harbor and the invasion of Kuwait, presidents sought Congressional approval to strike back. Mr. Bush seeks approval to strike first, because Sept. 11 taught him that any other strategy may be too costly. "We're in a new era," he said, adding: "We spend a lot of time thinking about how best to secure our homeland even further. And this is the debate the American people must hear, must understand. And the world must understand as well that its credibility is at stake."

Ah, the credibility of the world is at stake, here. As opposed, one wonders, to the other planets? Perhaps Bush is hinting that, if he doesn't get his war, like that guy from N'Sync, he's going to apply to be a cosmonaut, and leave this world in a huff. Let Dick Cheney get it back in order. Let Laura deal with the reporters.

Well, of course, Bush's nonsense will be made into solemn sense by the commentariat, which exists to preform the invaluable service of making this brain-dead lightweight seem something more than the cartoon figure he, in actuality, is.

Meanwhile, let's talk about the suddenly grave problem of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, LI has already posted a long, meandering account of Iraqi-US relations. While researching that post, we came across a reference to Bruce Jentleson's book, With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush and Saddam, 1982-1990. The book is about an earlier phase of American Foreign Policy. In this phase, we definitely liked the idea of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. We ought to have: we sold him the parts.

Jentleson provides two lists of "dual-use" items that Iraq (using credit supplied by the ever willing Export Import bank) purchased in the Reagan years, and in the Bush years -- before Saddam became the next Hitler. Here is the list from the Reagan years:

- Precision machine tools for 'general military use"
-a hybrid digital analog computer for 'materials research,' comparable to the one then in use at White Sands missile test range
-computers and other equipment for the 'Arab Company for Detergent Chemicals', a front for the production of chemical weapons
-numerous items for the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission
-bacterial and fungus cultures for 'research purposes'
- quartz crystals and frequency synthesizers
-high speed oscilloscopes, used for missile guidance
-fuel air explosive technology.

Hmm, does this sound like the shopping list of a harmless old lady? Actually, it sounds like fattening up a man who is engaged in a war with the means of mass destruction -- which, in fact, it was.

The years roll by. Pastoral scenes, etc. The glorious Reagan years, remember how we all made money, broke the wicked unions, and defeated the Soviets? And those chemicals, which came not just from the U.S. but from all over the helpful West, and those bacterial cultures -- well, they got put to various brilliant uses. In 1988, the Kurds got a sound whacking with chemical weapons, as well as simple mass deportation and massacre. The U.S. senate voted, unanimously, to put sanctions on Iraq. An idea that was vetoed by our man Reagan, who was definitely seconded in this by his V.P., who saw economic opportunity on the horizon with Iraq.
(As in all things Cold War, there's an odd Alice in Wonderland aspect that keeps intruding into history: where once it was Reaganites who opposed sanctions, it is now Leftists who oppose them. It sometimes seems like a game of musical chairs).

Well, the Iraq-Iran war ground, like a meatgrinder all too full of flesh, to a halt.

One would think that now there's less toss the rabid dog meat chunks. But no! Remember, under Bush I the mission was originally to talk nice and make friends. So in the pre-Gulf War period, the White House was more than willing to see goods and services transferred to Iraq and, even, to the Sa'ad 16 weapons research complex. Here's the list from those years:
-- equipment for the inevitable Arab Company for Detergent Chemicals (it cleans! it makes whiter and brighter! it kills Kurds!)
-bacteria samples to the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission and University of Baghdad
-nine high powered supply units for the steel industry that were diverted to the making of weapons grade uranium
-vacuum pump oil, later found by weapons inspectors to have been used to facilitate the corrosion preventing pumps used to keep uranium moving in the enrichment process
-communications and tracking equipment
-compasses, gyroscopes and accelerometers for the Iraqi air force
-helicopter guidance and fight equipment
-computers for the Iraqi navy
-command and control equipment for the Iraqi ministry of defense
Etc.

Now, there are readers who will say, what does this past history have to do with the current situation?

There are two answers to that.
One is, what is the moral background of the current US claim against Iraq? In other words, how has the US acted in that area before? If there is a pattern of promises and betrayals, if there is collaboration with military dictators followed by hostility to these same dictators followed by collaboration with succeeding dictators --well, that is a suspicious pattern. Patterns in the past are not to be discounted as predictors for patterns in the future. If an alcoholic swears off drinking on Monday, there's every reason to suspect you will find him drunk on Friday. If the U.S. has supported arming a nation that was visibly ruled by a military tyrant with regional ambitions on Monday, there's reason to suspect that it will be doing the same thing on Friday. Saddam Hussein or our current buddy, General Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan, are the same story. In Hussein's case, during the Reagan years the FPE (foreign policy establishment) was wont to produce canards like this one, one of Jentleson's more delicious quotes: "it is probably not just idle chatter when Iraqi officials express a hope that the end of the war [between Iraq and Iran] will bring more democracy affirming that Saddam Hussein is 'much concerned about democracy.'" As indeed he was -- he was concerned to torture to death anyone who suggested it. However, you have merely to transpose the word Iraq for Pakistan, or Afghanistan, to get similar stuff which floats around in the newspapers today. When the reality principle kicks in -- say, that Pervez' recent usurpation of power for the foreseeable future in Pakistan, regardless of elections -- and it becomes all too obvious what is happening, there is a switch in the American mind that simply turns to off. We forget what the struggle was all about. That switch, for instance, that makes Americans extremely incurious about the government of Kuwait, on whose rescue we expended 70 billion dollars a decade ago.
It is essentially the tabloid mindset. Does anyone remember Burt Reynolds divorce troubles? Does anyone remember Paula Jones? We pick up the dolls, we toss aside the dolls.
There is another reason, however, to look at the past. Bush's policy makers were intimately involved in crafting previous policy about Iraq, and the Middle East in general.
To be fair, this is also true of his Republican critics. But we should ask about the track records of people who are suddenly sensitive like the most liberal guys about the aches and pains of the oppressed Iraqi people. Why this sudden sensitivity?
Well, even if we grant LI's case weighing the moral reasons for a 'regime change' in Iraq against the suspicion that the structure of governance will not change by way of American intervention, if we maintain that we have every reason to believe that a post-Saddam Iraq will be ruled, with American connivance, by another bloody dictator -- even if we grant this, there still might be an American interest in going to war with Iraq. American interests aren't necessarily moral. Every war is not a crusade or a jihad, although of course, in talking up war, the powers that be have to make it seem like a crusade or a jihad. We'll discuss this at another time.