Remora

The NYT does a soft soap job on Jose Maria Aznar, who represents the dwindled ghost of Francisco Franco and is otherwise employed as the Prime Minister of Spain, in today's paper. As part of the comedy of human relations, we are told that the U.S. is shifting its strategic priorities to such as Aznar, and Burlesque-oni in Italy, and whoever in Poland. What this could possibly mean, in military or economic terms, is beyond LI. Are they planning on kicking the Daimler factory out of South Carolina and alluring in its place, uh, the Polish branch of Fiat? Beyond rhetorical support, we know that Aznar is not so incautious as to commit the Spanish army to the invasion of Iraq. Like his model, Franco, who wisely avoided involvement in that unpleasantness known as World War II in spite of his debt to two of the war's big players, Aznar realizes the exchange value of rhetoric, in this case, is way beyond its real value. Pen a letter, get your profile in the Times. The idea is, surely Bush can do something for the most syncophantic of his allies. However, that is one problem with the administration's unipolar policy. Allies are not rewarded on the Cold War scale anymore. Instead, promises slowly melt into cheap dribs and drabs of aid. Krugman has a column about Bush's followup today that sums it up.


To return to the Aznar soft soaping: in the last grafs of the piece, the picture changes, somewhat:

"This does not always play well at home, especially in an atmosphere of prewar tension heightened by popular opposition to a war in Iraq. Opinion polls show that more than 70 percent of Spaniards oppose intervention in Iraq.

Asked about anti-Americanism in Spain, Mr. Aznar said: "There might be people who believe that to ensure peace and security in the world, we must distance ourselves from the U.S., but I don't see it like that. I believe that rifts between the U.S. and Europe have signaled bad times for global peace."

Mr. Aznar's arguments in support of force to disarm Mr. Hussein are dismissed by other Spanish political parties. Most scorn what they see as Mr. Aznar's willingness to fall into line with Washington.

The opposition Socialist leader, Jos� Luis Rodr�guez Zapatero, accused Mr. Aznar of seeking support for "whatever Mr. Bush says." Guillerme V�zquez of the Galician Nationalist Bloc told Mr. Aznar, "You are the voice of your master," while Gaspar Llamazares, leader of the United Left Party, called him "a vassal" of the United States. "

Vassal is a good one, but 'voice of your master" isn't. Aznar is, to say the least, not in the inner circle of his master; he's no where near the voice box. The article makes the obligatory reference to Bush's spanish speaking skills. It makes no reference to his last spanish language buddy, Mexican President Fox. If Aznar wants to find out what being close to the inner circle and then being discarded like a stray piece of toilet paper feels like, he might ask Fox.

Remora

First, let's note that the D.C. crowd that has told us, for months, that France wouldn't go eye to eye with the U.S. over Iraq seem to be wrong. And the LI, of course (our record is as perfect as the Wizard of Oz's) spotted this assumption for what it was: baseless confidence.

However, there is trepidation all over Europe about this. Tageszeitung, which is certainly a lefty paper, calls the way the German's casually told the press, first, about the Franco-German initiative Stuemperei -- bungling.


"And even the healthy suggestion that Washington with its power dynamic driving it to war should be braked by the massive strengthening of the inspection regime in Irak has been, almost certainly, condemned to fail through the manner in which the whole undertaking was pursued by Berlin."

The editorialist for Point could work for the Washington Post, so eager is he for this war, so repelled is he that Chirac would desert the American side for the confused pacificism of those Germans


"L'�tonnant, chez nous, est d'avoir paru �pouser d'aussi pr�s la contorsion �lectoraliste allemande d'un chancelier chancelant, encore �trill�, dimanche dernier, dans son propre fief de Basse-Saxe. Etonnant, encore, d'avoir n�glig� � ce point l'�cart des nations latines - Italie, Espagne, Portugal -, dont la solidarit� importe tant � la France dans les �quilibres europ�ens. Par quelle outrecuidance euphorique avons-nous pu ignorer la division europ�enne que nous allions ainsi fomenter ? Quant au l�galisme international invoqu� pour l'Irak, convenons que nous l'avions ailleurs, et par deux fois, �corn� : d'abord en d�cidant de recevoir � Paris le tyran zimbabw�en Mugabe ; ensuite en nous abstenant dans le vote bouffon qui allait porter la Libye � la pr�sidence de la Commission des droits de l'homme des Nations unies."

(Astonishingly, we appear to have nearly espoused the German electoral contorsions of a tottering chancellor, still injured by the results, last sunday, of the elections in his own fief, Lower Saxony. And even more astonishing, we have neglected to this point the latin nations: Italy, Spain and Portugal -- whose solidarity means so much to France in the european balance of power. By what overbroiled euphoria could we have ignored the european divisions that we are fomenting? As to the international legalism invoked for Iraq, lets agree that we have not been so tender two other times, recently: firstly, in deciding to receive Mugabe in Paris, and then in abstaining in the clownish vote that carried Libya to the post of presidency of the commisssionof the rights of man at the UN.)


Finally, the Independent columnist Donald Macintyre is most distressed at the French German proposal, too. He contrasts the U.N's finest hour (which turns out to be the Bush I coalition) with today's mess:

How different now. "It's the UN that's really on the line," says Professor Michael Mandelbaum, one of America's best foreign policy specialists.

"Transatlantic relations will be noisy and contentious. But they'll be like the workings of a democracy, where disputes ultimately are secondary to what bind the parties together.

"Iraq is now shaping up for the UN's credibility as the 1930s Manchurian crisis did for the League of Nations. The odd thing is that those who profess to love the UN the most (ie the French) are undermining it, while those that don't greatly like it (the US), are trying to give it teeth. If it fails, no one would lose more than the French."

The latter is something we doubt. It is clearly the intent of the US, under the present regime, to go it alone if it feels like it. Columnists have decided to loftily eliminate popular sentiment from the equation. But is it true that, say, in Spain, where 70% of the population opposes any war, France is losing respect? I think not. Bush is urging a course upon the nations of Europe which is directly opposed to the popular sentiment, and has been for the past year. We've already seen Schroeder get re-elected on the strength of that sentiment -- in spite of his economic record. Of course, the Spanish and the Italians prime ministers, signing love letters to the US via the Wall Street Journal, is one thing -- paying for invading Iraq is quite another thing. For that, America wants to turn to Old Europe. But Old Europe doesn't want to spring for this party.

Dope

We've been preparting to review Neill Ferguson's Empire for a certain paper. So we have been drifting through The Cash Nexus, Ferguson's hefty volume about money and power in the world system since 1700. We found the chapter on state deficits quite helpful in getting our bearings about the coming red inkiness that will be the legacy of the Bush era.

Ferguson points out that governments in the early modern period were quite cavalier about owing money. The French defaulted on their debts almost every decade, until Louis XVI fatally called a halt to the practice. It was the refusal of France's creditor's to lend more money that prompted the court to call the Estates General into session, and we know that heads literally rolled after that. So never say that a national debt has no effect on our real lives. although that is the current smoke drifting out of D.C. Interesting, too, is the US history of debt. After the Civil War, the debt level was around 50% of GNP -- which was extraordinarily low for a state the size of the U.S. We suspect that this figure is not quite accurate -- does it include Confederate debts that were repudiated, as well as the distributed debts of the states? The federal system has a way of spreading out the true indebtedness of the government, just as it spreads out the tax burden. Interestingly, for a Tory, Ferguson is pretty calm himself about governmental borrowing -- not for him the nostrums of the balanced budget. Which already puts him ahead of the IMF crowd, at least.

However, looking over his dense stats, the one thing that stands out is that debt and the military are indissolubly linked, the price of the latter being paid for by the former, and the former then driving the policies that inevitably resulting in the use of the latter. The cash nexus, here, is an arms nexus. From the money spent by the British establishment to destroy Napoleon to the money spent by LBJ to destroy Ho Chi Minh, it is obvious that "defense" -- or, to give it another, more appropriate name, "offense" -- has driven government economics. A level can be reached at which the commonwealth is ruined to the extent that it can no longer re-arm -- but this simply means that others will arm in its place, and often on its soil. Germany has been the most pacific of nations during the last fifty years, but it has also been the place with the largest concentration of tactical nuclear missiles, as well as a vast staging area for US and, until 1989, Russian troops.

Pacifists often act as though war is simply a matter of directed violence; what they ignore is that violence is a functioning part of a larger culture: that it creates an order; that that order creates dependents on the order; and that those dependents have a tradition to draw on that is quite attractive to the leaders of a state, who are often (as in the case of Cheney, et al) one and the same people. The unimaginableness of an economy from which violence had been eliminated acts on states to create seemingly irrational situations. Whatever else we say about Saddam Hussein, we have to say that his resistance to exploring weapons research for weapons he cannot effectively use -- since he has been in no position to use them for the past ten years -- shows that he is, even fatally, addicted to the cash-arms nexus.

Peacetime economics has not actually happened, at least in the modern era. We wonder what it would look like.

Samuel Brittan has an interesting review of Ferguson's book that seems, now, to be pretty prescient. Here's a graf that we especially liked:

"In conclusion Ferguson moves onto more interesting ground in his theory of "under-stretch". He looks at a world full of rogue states and genocidal regimes. In deliberate contrast to Kennedy, he considers that this world can only be made safe if the US and its allies are prepared to restore defence budgets which have shrunk so much since the end of the Cold War. I wonder. In the Kosovo conflict which the West only won - if it did win - by luck and bluff, it was not the lack of military spending but the refusal to risk a single American casualty which handicapped the campaign."

Unexpectedly, the American aversion to risk has so far magnified casualties of those who oppose American forces, by upping the amount of firepower thrown upon them, as well as stimulating technologies that will massively decimate them. This is solidly in the American military tradition. It takes Grant's inelegant, but efficient, military strategy of overwhelming might and tries to eliminate its glaring vice, to American eyes: the high casualties. You might say it is Grant's strategy combined with McClellan's timidity. The failure of this strategy in Vietnam stemmed from the fact that a rate of small casualty losses, strung out over an extended period, has an effect on the morale equal to large casualties suffered over a short period. We think this hypothesis is about to be tested.

Remora

All Terrorism, all the time

There's a profile of the dangerous Mr. Zoellick, Bush's free trade ambassador, in the NYT today, penned by ELIZABETH BECKER and EDMUND L. ANDREWS

Inevitably, Zoellick spouts the Bush line about what he does:

"The long-term war against terrorism has to include trade, openness and development," he said in a recent interview."

I can't wait until somebody tells us that the war against terrorism has to include privatizing social security. Or has it already happened?

Anyway, the profile is worth reading not only to find out what Zoellick is up to, but also because there's an unexpected bitchiness in the thing. This is our favorite part"

"A prolific writer and a man driven to make his mark on the world stage, Mr. Zoellick has been plagued throughout his career with assertions that he lacks the kind of bonhomie and people skills that would help him widen his influence inside the administration and build broad-based coalitions outside it.

"I am a big fan and friend of Bob's, but I have to say it is amazing he's gotten as far as he has, given the number of enemies he's made," said a former official who spoke on the condition of anonymity."

Also, in terms of in-fighting: Zoellick distances himself from the debacle of blocking generic anti-AIDS drugs to third world countries -- one of the many sterling skuzzy moments of our administration's recent history.

Oddly, the article doesn't mention Bob's Enron connection. However, he's mentioned in the Harvard Watch report, the one that fingered Harken/Harvard connection. Here's his bio through the lens of Enron.
Robert B. Zoellick
Harvard affiliation
: J.D., MPP, Harvard; former director and faculty member of Harvard's
Belfer Center
Enron affiliation
: U.S. Trade Representative; Enron Advisory Board; board member of Alliance
Capital, major Enron shareholder
Zoellick sits precariously at the nexus of Harvard, the Bush White House and Enron. While at Harvard, Zoellick directed a pro-corporate energy research center funded by Enron's largest shareholder.

Remora

Ah, for the time to make a long, leisurely post about the tax shelter shell game that was apparently played by Ernst and Young! To sing of how they roped in the greedy, incompetent CEO class (their pockets bulging with stock option money they evidently did nothing to earn, and that soon receded into the electronic ether from whence it came, paper wealth to paper loss, dust to dust, worldcom without end, amen)! I mean, is LI above smirking at such a relic of the nineties as this piece of news, from the NYT business section?


"Two firms being sued, Ernst & Young and KPMG, offered shelters that they said would make taxes on salaries, stock option profits and capital gains from the sale of a business either shrink to pennies on the dollar or disappear.

:The fees and savings on taxes can be enormous. Ernst & Young charged some clients $1 million just to hear a sales pitch, according to court papers. And the firms made millions from the sale of each shelter. The shelters allowed accounting firms, their clients and the law firms that blessed the deals to share money that otherwise would have gone to the government."

As Oscar Wilde once said about the death of Nell, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at all of this. To our tender hearted president, however, this is no laughing matter. With the Great Giveaway, we can see a day coming when the rich will no longer be suckered into tax shelters like these -- the government itself will provide the ultimate tax shelter by abolishing their taxes, and hence wiping away the tears of such paragons of virtue as Sprint's former CEO, Ronald T. LeMay. NYT columnist
Floyd Norris reports:

"Thanks to the clever Ernst tax strategy, it appears that Mr. LeMay may have paid no taxes on the $149 million in profits he recorded by exercising his stock options in 1999 and 2000. That meant he did not have to sell shares to pay the taxes, as it appears he did in prior years, when his profits were far smaller."

We imagine the reader in the White House, starting this story (Once upon a time, Mr. President, there was a valiant prince of the Spint Corporation, Ron LeMay, who for his various manly virtues earned himself $149 million dollars. That was his money, right Mr. President? Well, just think, there were some tailors that came along, Ernst and Young were their names, and they promised to weave Mr. LeMay a beautiful invisible suit, which they called a Tax Shelter. Isn't that sweet, Mr. President? But listen to what happened to our poor and noble knight!) will splutter with indignation at how it all turned out so badly. Mr. Norris explains where the $149 million came from:

"In his years at Sprint, Mr. LeMay was well paid, but his annual cash compensation never exceeded $2.7 million. It was stock options that offered him the opportunity to become really wealthy.

"It was emblematic of the times that Sprint's board was willing to award millions of options to Mr. LeMay in 2000, the same year he gained a paper profit of $127 million by exercising options. But he obviously wanted more, and he acted as if there was no chance that his tax strategy would fail or his Sprint shares would fall."

Ah, yes. It is for the victims of the stock crash like these that Bush is acting like Providence itself. Only problem is, his drunk driving of the national treasury isn't going to help with his buds in the end. It's a typical frathouse beer run -- Junior is going to get into trouble before it is all over.

Note

Our best friend Dave leaves a message on the recorder: your last refutations didn�t refute anything.
Ah, he knows how to stick the knife into LI�s heart. We imagine that we are the great refuters, the universal refuters. Like a village wrestler, our world is bounded by our strength, and our strength is untested by the wide world. So� it turns out we didn�t present an overwhelming case for peace in our last couple of posts. But� we can�t help but think that the real value of the post that Dave is referring to (not the Kipling post, surely, which wasn�t a refutation) is our use of the words "surreption" and "clanculation." Long after our Mesopotamian misadventure has sunk to the dusty status of the War of Jenkins Ear, we like to imagine that the OED will have an entry for clanculation, quoting, well, we blush to say, but LI. What are current events compared to the long history of the language?

Remora

And now, for an entre-act in LI's unremitting stream of anti-belligerent propaganda:

There's a nice essay about Kipling in Hudson Review -- one with which LI disagrees mutitudinously, but one which we urge our readers to look at. Or those of our readers who have read Kipling. The concentration here is on Kim, but we must admit never to have finished Kim. Our Kipling is the Kipling of the short stories. We were recently reading the short stories again (background to our endless paper about James Fitzjames Stephen) so that we came to the Hudson Review essay with some thoughts of our own.

Every essay about Kipling begins with the same note: he was a secret pleasure, for political reasons, of the dominant literary class. His art, by achieving an uncritical popularity, became, perforce, suspect among those who were popular only, sometimes, among the critics. He was admired by Eliot, Orwell, and Wilson. The politics of these tropes goes back to that certain pall of resentment that seems to hang over the rightwing writer --- as though, having once and for all dissented from the pursuit of happiness (that liberal buNch of bunk), he were virtuously intent on the pursuit of gloom. Recently, Weekly Standard writers like Christopher Caldwell have pondered the reversal of fortune between left and right -- pointing out how much happier, and more fun, right wing publications are than left wing ones. There is some justification for this -- the left has its puritanical side, as well as its factious inquisitions, and cycles through periods of paranoid dread, and the right, with reason, believes itself politically dominant right now -- but in the sphere of culture, the right is far from happy and gay. One has merely to read the New Criterion to discover that the barbarians are at the gates and have the tenure, drat their hides.

Clara Claibourne Park is an exceptionally good writer, however, and goes through the minefield pretty easily. She isn't intent on scoring points -- a rare quality in Kipling scholarship. She takes as her guide to Kipling two studies -- Harry Ricketts� Rudyard Kipling, and David Gilmour�s The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling.

Her comments on Gilmour mix appreciation and disavowal. To our taste, however, there is not enough disavowal. For instance, here:

"Gilmour is not afraid to take on �The White Man�s Burden.� It is important, of course, to correct the common impression that by �lesser breeds without the law� Kipling meant Britain�s colonial subjects. Rather, the phrase was aimed at European imperialists (probably German) less responsible than the British. For �in spite of the prejudice and violence of expression, the message of �The White Man�s Burden� is idealistic.�

'Take up the White Man�s Burden,
The savage wars of peace,
Fill full the mouth of famine,
And bid the sickness cease . . .'

Long before, barely out of his teens, Kipling had written from India a passionate reply to his cousin Margaret Burne-Jones, who had asked, �Do the English as a rule feel the welfare of the natives at heart?� �For what else do the best men . . . die from overwork and disease, if not to keep the people alive in the first place and healthy in the second [?] . . . Do you know how many Englishmen, Oxford men expensively educated, are turned off . . . to make their own arrangements for the cholera camps; for the prevention of disorder; or for famine relief, to pull the business through or die, whichever God wills [?]� Gilmour reminds us that Kipling wrote in a world �without Oxfam or the United Nations�; he leaves it to us to substitute AIDS for cholera, and to recall the disorder unprevented in Nigeria, in Kashmir, and in other places that maps once tinted red�not least Zimbabwe, the land once part of Cecil Rhodes�s dream and now its own people�s nightmare."

This won't do. India, as we know, suffered a series of famines after the Mutiny was put down that are to be measured in the millions of casualties: 6 million, perhaps, for the 1875-1876 famine, and 4 million for the famines of the 1890s, under Curzon. The fact of famine is invariably treated, by the colonial apologists, as a natural given -- something that happened because of the weather. And that the British, heroically gallant, were helping out about. It is never pointed out that the money the British were using was from taxes collected from Indians. It is never pointed out that there is no reason to think that if the Indians had succeeded, after the Mutiny of 1857, in throwing off the British, that they wouldn't have been as successful as the Russians in attracting financing for railroads and other technology. That is, it isn't pointed out by those for whom the British Raj was a pageant staged by PBS. However, as long ago as the 1780s, Edmund Burke was not having this myth of British altruism. As he pointed out in his speech in support of Fox's Reform of the East India Company, hunger that is caused by natural calamity is magnified by political calamity. He describes the Company's policy of invariable greed as having this effect on a (somewhat idealized) countryside:

This object required a command of money; and there was no Pollam, or castle, which in the happy days of the Carnatic was without some hoard of treasure, by which the governors were enabled to combat with the irregularity of the seasons, and to resist or to buy off the invasion of an enemy. In all the cities were multitudes of merchants and bankers, for all occasions of monied assistance; and on the other hand, the native princes were in condition to obtain credit from them. The manufacturer was paid by the return of commodities, or by imported money, and not, as at present, in the taxes that had been originally exacted from his industry. In aid of casual distress, the country was full of choultries, which were inns and hospitals, where the traveller and the poor were relieved. All ranks of people had their place in the public concern, and their share in the common stock and common prosperity; but the chartered rights of men, and the right which it was thought proper to set up in the Nabob of Arcot, introduced a new system. It was their policy to consider hoards of money as crimes; to regard moderate rents as frauds on the sovereign; and to view, in the lesser princes, any claim of exemption from more than settled tribute, as an act of rebellion. Accordingly all the castles were, one after the other, plundered and destroyed. The native princes were expelled; the hospitals fell to ruin; the reservoirs of water went to decay; the merchants, bankers, and manufacturers disappeared; and sterility, indigence, and depopulation, overspread the face of these once flourishing provinces."

Burke put his finger on the essentials of the system. Kipling's India was the result of a revolution. The revolution came from above, through the British administration. Its goal was to create an export economy and a completely monetized internal market. To do this, it was necessary to get the peasantry to think in terms of money, instead of in terms of sufficiency. To effect this, the British demanded their tax in money, not goods. In order to get money, the peasants turned to a new class, the money-lenders promoted by the British with the idea that these money-lenders would invest in the land and become a rural middle class. They didn't. The system of subsistence was intentionally uprooted, and a system put in place that exposed the peasantry to the cycle of the climate, and the possibility of food shortage, without the traditional buffers to hardship. As we've mentioned before, Mike Davis's documentation in The Victorian Holocaust is quite overwhelming. Of the famines that occured in 1876, Robert Conquest's term, terror-famine, seems appropriate. Conquest, setting out the case against Stalin's agricultural policy, says this, in the Harvest of Sorrow: "... in 1932-3 came what may be described as a terror-famine inflicted on the collectivized peasants of the Ukraine and the largely Ukrainian Kuban... by methods of setting for their grain quotas far above the possible, removing every handful of food, and preventing help from the outside..."

Similarly, the much vaunted British technology -- i.e. the trains -- operated, in 1876, to take grain AWAY from effected areas in accordance with the British policy of export; the state operated to ensure a free market by making sure that grain distribution was kept to a minimum -- as Viceroy Lytton put it, the relief camps were like picnics, and so they were made unpleasant places indeed. A pound of grain a day was the amount given to the unfortunates at these camps -- was, indeed, all the food distributed to them, so that they died numerously. As Davis has pointed out, the Nazis distributed food more generously at Dachau. There's no getting over the failure of British policy in India. There is only... forgetting it. So Park can bear with much more equanimity than LI Gilmour's absurd assertions. As in this graf:

"For us, of course, the deterrents to the imperialist worldview are appreciable, to say the least. Current history, however, gives some weight to Gilmour�s observation that �when all appropriate qualifications are made, minorities usually fare better within imperial or multinational systems than in nations dominated by the ethos or ethnicity of a majority,� particularly when we are thinking about Bosnia, or Saudi Arabia�or India and Pakistan."

That India is, if anything, a society in which majorities are vigorously disputed -- much more vigorously than in, say, the apartheid South of my youth -- should be pointed out. As is the fact that the most various multi-national empire in Europe, the Austro-Hungarian one, saw born in it and nurtured by its politics one Adolf Hitler. Not a high recommendation, we'd say.