In this vein, Imperial Life in the Emerald City is also required reading.
Colossus of Baghdad
by TOM ENGELHARDT
[posted online on May 29, 2007]
www.tomdispatch.com
Of the seven wonders of the ancient Mediterranean world, including the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Colossus of Rhodes, four were destroyed by earthquakes, two by fire. Only the Great Pyramid of Giza today remains.
We no longer know who built those fabled monuments to the grandiosity of kings, pharaohs, and gods; nowadays, at least, it's easier to identify the various wonders of our world with their architects. Maya Lin, for instance, spun the moving black marble Vietnam Memorial from her remarkable brain for the veterans of that war; Frank Gehry dreamt up his visionary titanium-covered museum in Bilbao, Spain, for the Guggenheim; and the architectural firm of BDY (Berger Devine Yaeger), previously responsible for the Sprint Corporation's world headquarters in Overland Park, Kansas; the Visitation Church in Kansas City, Missouri; and Harrah's Hotel and Casino in North Kansas City, Missouri, turns out to have designed the biggest wonder of all -- an embassy large enough to embody the Bush administration's vision of an American-reordered Middle East. We're talking, of course, about the still-uncompleted American embassy, the largest on the planet, being constructed on a 104-acre stretch of land in the heart of Baghdad's embattled Green Zone, now regularly under mortar fire. As Patrick Lenahan, Senior Architect and Project Manager at BDY, has put it (according to the firm's website): "We understand how to involve the client most effectively as we direct our resources to make our client's vision a reality."
And what a vision it was! What a reality it's turned out to be!
Who can forget the grandiose architecture of pre-Bush-administration Baghdad: Saddam Hussein's mighty vision of kitsch Orientalism melting into terror, based on which, in those last years of his rule, he reconstructed parts of the Iraqi capital? He ensured that what was soon to become the Green Zone would be dotted with overheated, Disneyesque, Arabian-Nights palaces by the score, filled with every luxury imaginable in a country whose population was growing increasingly desperate under the weight of UN sanctions. Who can forget those vast, sculpted hands, "The Hands of Victory," supposedly modeled on Saddam's own, holding 12-story-high giant crossed swords (over piles of Iranian helmets) on a vast Baghdad parade ground? Meant to commemorate a triumph over Iran that the despot never actually achieved, they still sit there, partially dismantled and a monument to folly; while, as Jane Arraf has written, Saddam's actual hands,"the hands that wrote the orders for the war against Iran and the destruction of Iraqi villages, the hands handcuffed behind his back as he went to trial and then was led to his execution are moldering under ground."
It is worth remembering that, when the American commanders whose troops had just taken Baghdad, wanted their victory photo snapped, they memorably seated themselves, grinning happily, behind a marble table in one of those captured palaces; that American soldiers and newly arrived officials marveled at the former tyrant's exotic symbols of power; that they swam in Saddam's pools, fed rare antelopes from his son Uday's private zoo to its lions (and elsewhere shot his herd of gazelles and ate them themselves); and, when in need of someplace to set up an American embassy, the newly arrived occupation officials chose -- are you surprised? -- one of his former dream palaces. They found nothing strange in the symbolism of this (though it was carefully noted by Baghdadis), even as they swore they were bringing liberation and democracy to Saddam's benighted land.
And then, as the Iraqi capital's landscape became ever more dangerous, as an insurgency gained traction while the administration's dreams of a redesigned American Middle East remained as strong as ever, its officials evidently concluded that even one of Saddam's palaces, roomy enough for a dictator interested in the control of a single country (or the odd neighboring state), wasn't faintly big enough, or safe enough, or modern enough for the representatives of the planet's New Rome.
Hence, Missouri's BDY. That midwestern firm's designers can now be classified as architects to the wildest imperial dreamers and schemers of our time. And the company seems proud of it. You can go to its website and take a little tour in sketch form, a blast-resistant spin, through its Bush-inspired wonder, its particular colossus of the modern world. Imagine this: At $592 million, its proudest boast is that, unlike almost any other American construction project in that country, it is coming in on budget and on time. Of course, with a 30 percent increase in staffing size since Congress approved the project two years ago, it is now estimated that being "represented" in Baghdad will cost a staggering $1.2 billion per year. No wonder, with a crew of perhaps 1,000 officials assigned to it and a supporting staff (from food service workers to Marine guards and private security contractors) of several thousand more.
When the BDY-designed embassy opens in September (undoubtedly to the sound of mortar fire), its facilities will lack the gold-plated faucets installed in some of Saddam's palaces and villas (and those of his sons), but they won't lack for the amenities that Americans consider part and parcel of the good life, even in a "hardship" post. Take a look, for instance, at the embassy's "pool house," as imagined by BDY. (There's a lovely sketch of it at their site.) Note the palm trees dotted around it, the expansive lawns, and those tennis courts discretely in the background. For an American official not likely to leave the constricted, heavily fortified, four-mile square Green Zone during a year's tour of duty, practicing his or her serve (on the taxpayer's dollar) is undoubtedly no small thing.
Admittedly, it may be hard to take that refreshing dip or catch a few sets of tennis in Baghdad's heat if the present order for all U.S. personnel in the Green Zone to wear flak jackets and helmets at all times remains in effect -- or if, as in the present palace/embassy, the pool (and ping-pong tables) are declared, thanks to increasing mortar and missile attacks, temporarily "off limits." In that case, more time will probably be spent in the massive, largely windowless-looking Recreation Center, one of over 20 blast-resistant buildings BDY has planned. Perhaps this will house the promised embassy cinema. (Pirates of the Middle East, anyone?) Perhaps hours will be wiled away in the no less massive-looking, low-slung Post Exchange/Community Center, or in the promised commissary, the "retail and shopping areas," the restaurants, or even, so the BDY website assures us, the "schools" (though it's a difficult to imagine the State Department allowing children at this particular post).
And don't forget the "fire station" (mentioned but not shown by BDY), surely so handy once the first rockets hit. Small warning: If you are among the officials about to staff this post, keep in mind that the PX and commissary might be slightly understocked. The Washington Post recently reported that "virtually every bite and sip consumed [in the embassy] is imported from the United States, entering Iraq via Kuwait in huge truck convoys that bring fresh and processed food, including a full range of Baskin-Robbins ice cream flavors, every seven to 10 days." Recently, there has been a "Theater-Wide Delay in Food Deliveries," due to unexplained convoy problems. Even the yogurt supplies have been running low.
But those of you visiting our new embassy via BDY's website have no such worries. So get that container of Baskin-Robbins from the freezer and take another moment to consider this new wonder of our world with its own self-contained electricity-generation, water-purification, and sewage systems in a city lacking most of the above. When you look at the plans for it, you have to wonder: Can it, in any meaningful sense, be considered an embassy? And if so, an embassy to whom?
The Guardian's Jonathan Freedland in the most recent issue of the New York Review of Books terms it a "base" like our other vast, multibillion dollar permanent bases in Iraq. It is also a headquarters. But what a head! What quarters! It is neither town, nor quite city-state, but it could be considered a citadel, with its own anti-missile defenses, inside the increasingly breachable citadel of the Green Zone. It may already be the last piece of ground (excepting those other bases) that the United States, surge or no, can actually claim to fully occupy and control in Iraq -- and yet it already has something of the look of the Alamo (with amenities). Someday, perhaps, it will turn out to be the "White House" (though, in BDY's sketches, its buildings look more like those prison-style schools being built in embattled American urban neighborhoods) for Moqtada al-Sadr, or some future Shiite Party, or a Sunni strongman, or a home for squatters. Who knows?
What we know is that such an embassy is remarkably outsized for Iraq. Even as a headquarters for a vast, secret set of operations in that chaotic land, it doesn't quite add up. After all, our military headquarters in Iraq is already at Camp Victory on the outskirts of Baghdad. We can certainly assume -- though no one in our mainstream media world would think to say such a thing -- that this new embassy will house a rousing set of CIA (and probably Pentagon) intelligence operations for the country and region, and will be a massive hive for American spooks of all sorts. But whatever its specific functions, it might best be described as the imperial Mother Ship dropping into Baghdad.
Amazingly, despite complaints from Congress, the present U.S. ambassador is stumped when it comes to cutting down on that planned staff of his -- every one more essential than the last -- and the State Department is actually lobbying Congress for an extra $50 million to construct yet more "blast-resistant housing" on the vast site. Maybe this is what the "build and hold" strategy, pushed by many counterinsurgency types, really means. We'll simply plan in Washington, design in Kansas City, build through a Kuwaiti construction firm using cheap imported labor, and try to keep building out forever from our "embassy" in Baghad.
As an outpost, this vast compound reeks of one thing: imperial impunity. It was never meant to be an embassy from a democracy that had liberated an oppressed land. From the first thought, the first sketch, it was to be the sort of imperial control center suitable for the planet's sole "hyperpower," dropped into the middle of the oil heartlands of the globe. It was to be Washington's dream and Kansas City's idea of a palace fit for an embattled American proconsul -- or a khan.
When completed, it will indeed be the perfect folly, as well as the perfect embassy, for a country that finds it absolutely normal to build vast base-worlds across the planet; that considers it just a regular day's work to send its aircraft carrier "strike forces" and various battleships through the Straits of Hormuz in daylight as a visible warning to a "neighboring" regional power; whose Central Intelligence Agency operatives feel free to organize and launch Baluchi tribal warriors from Pakistan into the Baluchi areas of Iran to commit acts of terror and mayhem; whose commander-in-chief President can sign a "nonlethal presidential finding" that commits our nation to a "soft power" version of the economic destabilization of Iran, involving, according to ABC News, "a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran's currency and international financial transactions"; whose Vice President can appear on the deck of the USS John C. Stennis to address a "rally for the troops," while that aircraft carrier is on station in the Persian Gulf, readying itself to pass through those Straits and can insist to the world: "With two carrier strike groups in the Gulf, we're sending clear messages to friends and adversaries alike. We'll keep the sea lanes open. We'll stand with our friends in opposing extremism and strategic threats. We'll disrupt attacks on our own forces.... And we'll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region"; whose military men can refer to Iraqi insurgents as "anti-Iraqi forces"; members of whose Congressional opposition can offer plans for the dismemberment of Iraq into three or more parts; and all of whose movers and shakers, participating in the Washington Consensus, can agree that one "benchmark" the Iraqi government, also locked inside the Green Zone, must fulfill is signing off on an oil law designed in Washington and meant to turn the energy clock in the Middle East back several decades; but why go on.
To recognize such imperial impunity and its symbols for what they are, all you really need to do is try to reverse any of these examples. In most cases, that's essentially inconceivable. Imagine any country building the equivalent Mother Ship "embassy" on the equivalent of two-thirds of the Washington Mall; or sailing its warships into the Gulf of Mexico and putting its second-in-command aboard the flagship of the fleet to insist on keeping the sea lanes "open"; or sending Caribbean terrorists into Florida to blow up local buses and police stations; or signing a "finding" to economically destabilize the American government; or planning the future shape of our country from a foreign capital. But you get the idea. Most of these actions, if aimed against the United States, would be treated as tantamount to acts of war and dealt with accordingly in this country, with unbelievable hue and cry.
When it's a matter of other countries halfway across the planet, however, Americans largely consider such things, even if revealed in the news, at worst tactical errors or miscalculations. The imperial mindset goes deep. It also thinks unbearably well of itself and so, naturally, wants to memorialize itself, to give itself the surroundings that only the great, the super, the hyper deserves.
Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "Ozymandias," inspired by the arrival in London in 1816 of an enormous statue of the Pharaoh Ramesses II, comes to mind:
"I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
In Baghdad, Saddam's giant hands are already on the road to ruin. Still going up in New York and Baghdad are two half-billion dollar-plus monuments to the Bush imperial moment. A 9/11 memorial so grotesquely expensive that, when completed, it will be a reminder only of a time, already long past, when we could imagine ourselves as the Greatest Victims on the planet; and in Baghdad's Green Zone, a monument to the Bush administration's conviction that we were also destined to be the Greatest Dominators this world, and history, had ever seen.
From both these monuments, someday--and in the case of the embassy in Baghdad that day may not be so very distant--those lone and level sands will undoubtedly stretch far, far away.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
A Culmination of Sorts
Why privatization is evil, and in retrospect why I've been so fixated on it recently. A perfect comparison for an overwhelmingly important issue.
The Sack of Washington
Comparisons of America and Rome are everywhere these days, whether deploring an over-extended military, social decadence, or illegal immigration. A more disturbing—and largely ignored—similarity lies in the wholesale privatization of the U.S. government, which has blurred the line between public good and personal gain. In an excerpt from his new book, Cullen Murphy charts a dynamic that is more dangerous than corruption, unprecedented in scale, and visible everywhere from Hurricane Katrina to the Iraq war, to the justice system.
by Cullen Murphy
June 2007
www.vanityfair.com
Excerpted from Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America, by Cullen Murphy, to be published this month by Houghton Mifflin; © 2007 by the author.
President and emperor, America and Rome: the matchup is by now so familiar, so natural, that you just can't help yourself—it comes to mind unbidden, in the reflexive way that the behavior of chimps reminds you of the behavior of people. Everyone gets it whenever a comparison of Rome and America is drawn—for instance, the offhand allusion to welfare and televised sports as "bread and circuses," or to illegal immigrants as "barbarian hordes." If reference is made to an "imperial presidency," or to the deployment abroad of "American legions," no one raises an eyebrow and wonders what you could possibly be talking about. Invoke the phrase "decline and fall" and thoughts turn simultaneously to the Roman past and the American present.
To be sure, a lot of Rome-and-America comparisons are glib, and if you're looking for reasons to brush parallels aside, it's easy enough to find them. The two entities, Rome and America, are dissimilar in countless ways. But some parallels really do hold up, though maybe not the ones that have been most in the public eye. Think less about decadence, less about military might—and think more about the parochial way these two societies view the outside world, and more about the slow decay of homegrown institutions. Think less about threats from unwelcome barbarians, and more about the powerful dynamics of a multi-ethnic society. Think less about the ability of a superpower to influence everything on earth, and more about how everything on earth affects a superpower.
One core similarity is almost always overlooked—it has to do with "privatization," which sometimes means "corruption," though it's actually a far broader phenomenon. Rome had trouble maintaining a distinction between public and private responsibilities—and between public and private resources. The line between these is never fixed, anywhere. But when it becomes too hazy, or fades altogether, central government becomes impossible to steer. It took a long time to happen, but the fraying connection between imperial will and concrete action is a big part of What Went Wrong in ancient Rome. America has in recent years embarked on a privatization binge like no other in its history, putting into private hands all manner of activities that once were thought to be public tasks—overseeing the nation's highways, patrolling its neighborhoods, inspecting its food, protecting its borders. This may make sense in the short term—and sometimes, like Rome, we may have no choice in the matter. But how will the consequences play out over decades, or centuries? In all likelihood, very badly.
A little more than 50 years ago, the Oxford historian Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, a radical thinker and formidable classicist, decided to take a close look at the change in connotation over five centuries of the Latin word suffragium, which originally meant "voting tablet" or "ballot." That change, he concluded, illustrated something fundamental about Roman society and its "inner political evolution."
The original meaning went back to the days of the Roman Republic, which had possessed modest elements of democracy. The citizens of Rome, by means of the suffragium, could exercise their influence in electing people to certain offices. In practice, the great men of Rome controlled large blocs of votes, corresponding to their patronage networks. Over time Rome's republican forms of government calcified into empty ritual or withered away entirely. Suffragium meaning "ballot" no longer served any real political function. But the web of patrons and clients was still the Roman system's substructure, and in this context suffragium came to mean the pressure that could be exerted on one's behalf by a powerful man, whether to obtain a job or to influence a court case or to secure a contract. To ask a patron for this form of intervention and to exert suffragium on behalf of a client would have been a routine social interaction.
Now stir large amounts of money into this system. It is not a great conceptual distance, Ste. Croix observes, to move from the idea of exercising suffragium because of an age-old sense of reciprocal duty to that of exercising it because doing so could be lucrative. And this, indeed, is where the future lies, the idea of quid pro quo eventually becoming so accepted and ingrained that emperors stop trying to halt the practice and instead seek to contain it by codifying it. Thus, in the fourth century, decrees are promulgated to ensure that the person seeking the quid actually delivers the quo. Before long, suffragium has changed its meaning once again. Now it refers not to the influence brought to bear but to the money being paid for it: "a gift, payment or bribe." By empire's end, all public transactions require the payment of money, and the pursuit of money and personal advancement has become the purpose of all public jobs.
Looking back at the change, from ballot box to cash box, Ste. Croix composes this epitaph: "Here, in miniature, is the political history of Rome."
The arc traced by suffragium covers not just the political history of Rome but its social and military history. It goes to the heart of a question that is only just starting to be asked in America: Where is the boundary between public good and private advantage, between "ours" and "mine"? From this question others follow: What happens when public and private interests are not aligned? Which outsiders, if any, should be allowed to put their hands on the machinery of government? How can governments exert collective power if the levers and winches and cogs lie increasingly outside public control?
The phenomenon with which all these questions intersect was called the "privatization of power," or sometimes just "privatization," by the historian Ramsay MacMullen in his classic study Corruption and the Decline of Rome (1988). MacMullen's subject is "the diverting of governmental force, its misdirection." In other words, how does it come about that the word and writ of a powerful central government lose all vector and force? Serious challenges to any society can come from outside factors—environmental catastrophe, foreign invasion. Privatization is fundamentally an internal factor. Such deflection of purpose occurs in any number of ways. It occurs whenever official positions are bought and sold. It occurs when people must pay before officials will act, and it occurs if payment also determines how they will act. And it can occur anytime public tasks (the collecting of taxes, the quartering of troops, the management of projects) are lodged in private hands, no matter how honest the intention or efficient the arrangement, because private and public interests tend to diverge over time.
Let's start with how the Roman system worked during the many centuries when it actually did. By modern standards there were not a great many officials or bureaucrats in Rome until late in the empire; the administration and well-being of the capital and all the other cities and towns depended on the talents and the largesse of the upper classes. A memorable passage in Jérôme Carcopino's Daily Life in Ancient Rome describes what happened every morning soon after Romans woke up, when all around the city clients visited their patrons, and each was alert to the other's needs. On those rare mornings when I've found myself sipping $15 orange juice at the Four Seasons, I've enjoyed imagining the breakfast convergences at tables all around me as an elite remnant of the old Roman dynamic. But to get Rome right you'd have to extend the scene to every suburban Hyatt, every neighborhood diner; you'd have to see these relationships governing every business transaction, every trip to the doctor's office, every college application.
The patron-client relationship was so pervasive that it helps illuminate not only Rome's social architecture but also, frequently, its way of conducting foreign affairs. The term "client state" came into being for a reason. As Julius Caesar fought his way through Gaul, he brought tribal chieftains over to his side and described their professions of loyalty to him—and thus to Rome—as those of clients to a patron. The relationships of the Bush family with various world leaders have often been essentially personal. The longtime Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz, spent so much time at Bush family gatherings that he came to be known as Bandar Bush.
Patronage spilled over into communal adornment; it was in fact inseparable from it. The Roman magnates competed with one another to endow the capital with improvements. Rome's wealthiest class, the senatorial aristocracy, constituted by one estimate two-thousandths of 1 percent of the population; then came the equestrian class, with perhaps a tenth of a percent. Collectively these people owned almost everything. Americans are well aware of the nation's worsening income inequality, with those in the top 1 percent earning nearly 50 times more a year than those in the bottom 20 percent. The average C.E.O. earns more than 400 times as much as a typical worker. In Rome, the gap between the elite and everyone else was on the order of 5,000 or 10,000 to 1. ("Nothing is more unfair than equality," observed a very comfortable Pliny the Younger, who would have felt at home in many Washington circles.) The expectation in Rome was that affluent citizens, as individuals rather than as taxpayers, should provide for community needs. Did the city require another aqueduct? New roads? A stadium? Some magnate would surely provide it—in return, implicitly, for a measure of public power, and, of course, for ample public recognition. Inscriptions on countless marble fragments attest to such generosity—an early version of "Brought to you by … "
On Rome's edifice of private giving—whether with the seemliness of an Andrew Carnegie or the vulgarity of a Donald Trump—an empire was built. The Roman system was a remarkable contrivance. But it contained the seeds of its own destruction. For one thing, it fostered an expectation that "others" would always provide. If public amenities came into being through private munificence—and if these in turn served to enhance private glory—then why should the public pay for their upkeep? This way of doing business "did not work for the common benefit of the overall urban fabric," writes one historian, much less nurture a sense of common purpose and shared responsibility. I've seen the same mind-set at work within my state, Massachusetts, in hardscrabble mill towns whose philanthropic founding families have departed, where local taxpayers resist the idea that support of libraries and hospitals must now rest with the community as a whole. Moreover, even at its most uncorrupted, the patronage system was greased by small considerations: "It was a genial, oily, present-giving world," Ramsay MacMullen writes.
Now gradually remove from all this any sense of public spirit or public obligation and replace it at every level of government—in the barracks, the courts, the city councils, the provincial prefectures—with an attitude of "What's in it for me?" To see this transition in starkly American terms, first consider the idealistic sensibility of a letter of introduction written from France by Benjamin Franklin to George Washington in 1777, on a matter of public business: "The Gentleman who will have the Honour of waiting upon you with this Letter is the Baron de Steuben He goes to America with a true Zeal for our Cause, and a View of engaging in it and rendring it all the Service in his Power. He is recommended to us by two of the best Judges of military Merit in this Country."
For comparison, consider the more contemporary sentiments in proposals and e-mails from Jack Abramoff's lobbying team, also on a matter of public business: in this instance, mounting a political operation to reopen the Speaking Rock Casino, in Texas, in return for millions of dollars in fees and political contributions. In 2002, the Abramoff team explained to its clients the Tigua Indian tribe: "This political operation will result in a Majority of both federal chambers either becoming close friends of the tribe or fearing the tribe in a very short period of time. Simply put, you need 218 friends in the U.S. House and 51 Senators on your side very quickly, and we will do that through both love and fear." Abramoff, who would eventually plead guilty to corruption charges, explained to his clients that favors might need to be topped off: "Our friend … asked if you could help (as in cover) a Scotland golf trip for him and some staff (his committee chief of staff) for August. The trip will be quite expensive … (we did this for another member—you know who) 2 years ago. Let me know if you guys could do $50 K."
This is the story MacMullen traces, as throughout the empire a lubricious glaze of venality came to coat every governmental surface. I don't know how it would be phrased in Latin, but one of Jack Abramoff's e-mails ("Da man! You iz da man! Do you hear me?! You da man!! How much $$ coming tomorrow? Did we get some more $$ in?") captures some of the spirit of public service in the late empire. What accounts for the change? No one factor but a combination of many, including the sheer growth in the government's administrative reach and the resultant transformation of "public service" from the rotating duty of the upper class into a lifelong career for a larger group. A bronze plaque was affixed to a public building in Timgad, in Numidia (now Algeria), a city built as a bastion against the Berbers, which literally provided a recommended price list for payments to ensure the prosecution and success of various kinds of litigation. We don't have anything exactly like that now, I suppose, but have you ever received a fund-raising solicitation from one of the political parties, with degrees of access and other perquisites tied to specific contribution levels? Here's the Republican contribution hierarchy for the 2004 elections, which I can't help visualizing as a Numidian bronze plaque:
$300,000 Super Ranger
$250,000 Republican Regent
$200,000 Ranger
$100,000 Pioneer
Time and again imperial decrees throughout the later empire attempt to put a stop to skimming, extortion, and the illicit use of office—or, failing that, to codify what may be permissible. But the emperors are standing athwart the tide, and the imperial pronouncements have a doomed, forlorn, ritual feel to them. Modern newspaper headlines along the lines of congress votes new curbs on lobbyists convey something of the same formulaic quality.
How does the buying and selling of influence hollow out government? Some make the argument that, whatever its moral shortcomings, the profit motive, including its corrupt dimension, is in fact an efficient economic mechanism: it gets things done. As one character argues in the movie Syriana, corruption is why we win. But as MacMullen points out, for a government to be effective on a national or an imperial scale, there needs to be a presumption that information is traveling accurately up and down the administrative chain of command, and that every link in the chain between a command and its execution is reliable and strong. Putting power into private hands frequently ends up breaking that link. Making the exercise of power contingent on payment by definition breaks the link.
Privatization today often makes itself felt in ways that would have turned no heads in ancient Rome. Naturally, it still includes influence peddling and bribery and the buying and selling of public office. Former California representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham, now in jail, infamously drafted a "bribe menu" on official stationery, linking the size of defense contracts he would deliver with the size of payments he received. Representative Bob Ney, implicated in the Abramoff scandals, resigned his congressional seat, having been reportedly warned by his majority leader that if he stayed and lost his seat for his party, he "could not expect a lucrative career on K Street"—that is, he would jeopardize any future as an influence peddler, what the Romans called a suffragator. (All for naught in Ney's case: he's now in jail.) And as in Rome, privatization still includes turning over government departments to incompetent cronies, empowering private individuals at the expense of public intentions. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, staffed by inexperienced political appointees and unable to cope with the Hurricane Katrina disaster, is only the most prominent instance.
But the dominant form of privatization today is something relatively new, at least in its dimensions. Government on its stupendous modern scale—regulating every industry; re-distributing treasure from one sector of society to another; forecasting the weather and mapping the human genome—simply did not exist in ancient Rome. Because the extent of government is larger, privatization has more scope. Its most pervasive form is perfectly legal: the hiring of profit-making companies by the thousands to do government jobs. The ostensible motives may be pure, but the result is to diminish government's capacity. For one thing, government loses the ability to perform certain functions; it's hard to un-privatize. Moreover, the effect in every case is to insert an independent agent, with its own interests to consider and protect, into the space between public will and public outcome—a dynamic that represents a potential "diverting of governmental force" far more systemic and insidious than outright venality.
Privatization along these lines has occurred most decisively in America and Britain. In 1976 a book was published in the United States called The Shadow Government, written by Daniel Guttman and Barry Willner; its subtitle spoke ominously of "the government's multi-billion-dollar giveaway" of decision-making authority. Government agencies, the authors warned, were farming out various functions to high-priced consultants, secretive think tanks, and corporate vested interests—accountable to no one! And "outsourcing" was not the only issue. Some parts of the government, they went on, might even be sold off completely—turned into private businesses! The process was "cloaked in contractual and other formal approvals by the various executive departments," but make no mistake: it amounted to nothing less than a "drive to merge Government and business power to the advantage of the latter."
A little more than a decade later, the shadow government was out of the shadow. There is a plausible rationale for privatization—one that often makes sense in the short run and for specific tasks. Private contractors may be able to operate more efficiently than government agencies do. Marketplace signals may prove to be more direct and powerful than bureaucratic ones. And why shouldn't the government hire outside specialists for help with certain chores, the way any household or business does? In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan created a presidential commission on privatization to study not how the boundary between public and private might be bolstered but how it could be pushed out of the way even further, to give private interests more opportunity to move in. The same idea surfaces in the "re-inventing government" movement taken up by the Clinton administration: "We would do well," one proponent wrote, "to glory in the blurring of public and private and not keep trying to draw a disappearing line in the water." Since then privatization has affected every aspect of American public life.
The most visible surge in government outsourcing has come in the realm of the military. Rome hired barbarian soldiers to make up for its acute manpower shortages (not a good long-run solution, history would show). America is hiring private military companies for the very same reason—not the Visigothi or the Ostrogothi but the Halliburtoni and Wackenhuti. Conan the Barbarian has become Conan the Contractor. But in fact every facet of "personal security" is increasingly in the hands of private business. It was not until the mid–19th century that America's urban governments, by setting up local police forces, managed to make an ordinary person's safety a matter of real public responsibility. This was a major advance, though perhaps only temporary. No one with money relies on such guarantees any longer (nor did they in Rome, where police forces as we know them were virtually nonexistent). More and more people have withdrawn into protected enclaves. Private security is a major growth industry; in 1960 there were more police officers than hired security guards in America, whereas today private guards outnumber the police by a margin of 50 percent. Individuals may owe nominal allegiance to a town or a state, but their true oath of fealty is to Securitas or Guardsmark.
One of the chief obligations of any government is simply to dispense justice—to resolve disputes, oversee legal business, mete out punishment. These functions were once held in private hands. After a stint as a public responsibility, they are now migrating back. Lawyers and clients increasingly shun the civil courts—congested, expensive, fickle—and instead buy themselves some private arbitration, provided by a growing cadre of profitable "rent-a-judge" companies. As for the criminal-justice system, those sentenced to prison may very well do their time in a private facility, run on behalf of state and federal governments and operated by a company with some former public official in its management to grease the wheels. Faced with rising numbers of inmates, and unwilling to raise taxes to build more public prisons, governments at all levels have found that the easy, cost-effective way is to turn the prison industry over to the private sector: to a behemoth such as the Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America, or to one of many smaller companies.
America's public colleges and universities are fast losing their public character. These institutions were created under the terms of an act signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, providing federal land grants to the states as a basis for public financing of higher education. But state support is diminishing. Nationwide, state legislatures are picking up only about two-thirds of the annual cost of public higher education. For the University of Illinois, the figure is 25 percent. For the University of Michigan, it's 18 percent. What makes up the difference in funding? To a large degree it's money from private donors and private corporations, creating an incipient "academic-industrial complex" at public and private institutions alike. You can't escape the signs. At the University of California at Berkeley, one administrator is officially known as the Bank of America Dean of the Haas School of Business. But for a conviction or two, Rice University would have had a Ken Lay Center for the Study of Markets in Transition, endowed by the late former chairman of Enron. Much money for universities comes with strings attached—for instance, the power to push research in certain directions and perhaps away from others, and the ownership of patents deriving from sponsored research.
Sociologists have a term for what is occurring: they call it the "externalization of state functions." Water and sewage systems are being privatized, as are airports and highways and public hospitals. Voucher programs and charter schools are a way of shifting education toward the private sector. The protection of nuclear waste is in private hands. Meat inspection is done largely by the meatpacking companies themselves. Americans were up in arms last year when they learned that DP World, a company in the United Arab Emirates, would soon be in control of the terminals at half a dozen major U.S. seaports—only to discover that the privatization of terminal operations at American ports had begun three decades ago, and that 80 percent of them were already operated by foreign companies, the largest of which is Chinese. Serious proposals to privatize portions of Social Security have been on the table, and the new Medicare prescription-drug plan effectively puts an enormous government program into the hands of private insurance and drug companies.
Many services that used to be provided free of charge now must be paid for—government by user fee. Detailed statistical data from the Census Bureau and other agencies were once available to everyone; now they're being sold, mainly for marketing purposes, and often at prices that only private corporations can afford. The vaults of the Smithsonian were once open to documentary-film makers regardless of provenance and financing. Now an agreement between the Smithsonian and the cable company Showtime has created something called the Smithsonian Networks, which has jurisdiction over, and priority access to, certain kinds of material.
Is there any government function that can't be transferred to some private party? A considerable amount of tax collection is now done, in effect, by casinos; rather than raise taxes to pay for services, legislatures legalize gambling and then take a rake-off from the profits earned by private casino companies. It's "tax farming" for the modern age, recalling the hated Roman practice of selling the right to collect taxes to private individuals (including the apostle Matthew in the Gospels), who were then allowed to keep anything over what they had agreed to collect for the government. As the recent revelations about torture have made clear, even official interrogations for national-security purposes have been outsourced—in this instance to other countries through the process known as "extraordinary rendition." The sale of naming rights for public facilities and other amenities attracts notice mostly for the ungainly nomenclature that results—mutants such as the Mitsubishi Wild Wetland Trail, at the New York Botanical Garden, in the Bronx, and Whataburger Field, in Corpus Christi. To attract more corporate underwriting, the Department of the Interior has proposed that America's national parks be liberally opened up to the sale of naming rights. No one is suggesting that there will soon be a J. Crew Cape Cod National Seashore. But might there be a Sherwin-Williams Painted Desert Trailhead?
An analyst at Johns Hopkins observes, "Contractors have become so big and entrenched that it's a fiction that the government maintains any control." One obvious recent example is the rebuilding effort in Iraq. To supply the army or provide other services, traders and contractors often traveled with Roman legions; Julius Caesar had such a person with him during the Gallic Wars, explicitly "for the sake of business." There may have been no alternative to giving the reconstruction job in Iraq to private corporations, including giant combines such as Bechtel and Halliburton, but the result has been an effort that defies management or accountability. The evidence of widespread corruption in the Iraq rebuilding effort is beyond dispute. Corruption aside, private companies are exempt from many regulations that would apply to government agencies. The records of private companies can't be obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. They can use foreign subsidiaries to avoid laws meant to restrain American companies. Before the war, Halliburton itself used subsidiaries to do business with Iran, Iraq, and Libya, despite official American trade sanctions against all three countries.
More and more secret intelligence work—translation, airborne surveillance, computing, interrogation, analysis, reporting, briefing—is being farmed out to private entities. Not only is the intelligence community becoming further fragmented, but, because the new jobs pay so well, a "spy drain" is drawing officers out of the public sector and into the private market. And the drain isn't restricted to spies: at least 90 former top officials at the Department of Homeland Security and the White House Office of Homeland Security are now working for private companies in the domestic-security business. Meanwhile, the government seems poised to turn the job of border police over to multi-national contractors, a task that will in turn be subcontracted out to dozens of smaller companies. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman were among the corporations that indicated they would submit bids to build a high-tech "virtual fence" along the Mexican border, with an array of motion detectors, satellite monitors, and aerial drones. (Boeing eventually won.) A Homeland Security official conceded the abdication of government leadership, saying to the companies, "We're asking you to come back and tell us how to do our business."
One study from the late 1990s suggests that the "privatization rate"—the rate at which public functions are being outsourced—is roughly doubling every year. On paper the federal workforce nationwide, leaving the military aside, appears to total about two million people. But if you add in all the people in the private sector doing essentially government jobs with federal grants and contracts, then the figure rises by 10.5 million. The commercialization of government probably explains why so many Washington entities are now referred to as shops: "lobby shop," "counterterrorism shop." There's no question that in certain ways the private sector can outperform the public sector. Users of Federal Express, U.P.S., and DHL would sooner renounce citizenship than go back to relying only on the U.S. Postal Service. The problem is the cumulative effect of privatization across the board—projected out over decades, over a century, over two—and the leaching of management capacity from government. This is the same "misdirection" of government force that MacMullen discerns in Rome: easier to observe in retrospect, when the whole film is available, than in the brief, real-time clip any of us is allowed to see.
The activities of government are, in effect, being franchised out. You can't help lingering over the concept of "franchise," wondering what a latter-day Geoffrey de Ste. Croix would make of it. Like suffragium, the word originally had to do with notions of political freedom and civic responsibility. Derived from the Old French word franc, meaning "free," it later came to be associated with the most fundamental political freedom of all: to exercise your franchise meant to exercise your right to vote. Only much later, in the mid–20th century, did the idea of being granted "certain rights" acquire its commercial connotation: the right to market a company's services or products, such as fried chicken or Tupperware. Today, to have a franchise on something is in effect to have control over it.
Looking at the history of the word, it's tempting to write this epitaph: Here, in miniature, is the political history of America.
The Sack of Washington
Comparisons of America and Rome are everywhere these days, whether deploring an over-extended military, social decadence, or illegal immigration. A more disturbing—and largely ignored—similarity lies in the wholesale privatization of the U.S. government, which has blurred the line between public good and personal gain. In an excerpt from his new book, Cullen Murphy charts a dynamic that is more dangerous than corruption, unprecedented in scale, and visible everywhere from Hurricane Katrina to the Iraq war, to the justice system.
by Cullen Murphy
June 2007
www.vanityfair.com
Excerpted from Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America, by Cullen Murphy, to be published this month by Houghton Mifflin; © 2007 by the author.
President and emperor, America and Rome: the matchup is by now so familiar, so natural, that you just can't help yourself—it comes to mind unbidden, in the reflexive way that the behavior of chimps reminds you of the behavior of people. Everyone gets it whenever a comparison of Rome and America is drawn—for instance, the offhand allusion to welfare and televised sports as "bread and circuses," or to illegal immigrants as "barbarian hordes." If reference is made to an "imperial presidency," or to the deployment abroad of "American legions," no one raises an eyebrow and wonders what you could possibly be talking about. Invoke the phrase "decline and fall" and thoughts turn simultaneously to the Roman past and the American present.
To be sure, a lot of Rome-and-America comparisons are glib, and if you're looking for reasons to brush parallels aside, it's easy enough to find them. The two entities, Rome and America, are dissimilar in countless ways. But some parallels really do hold up, though maybe not the ones that have been most in the public eye. Think less about decadence, less about military might—and think more about the parochial way these two societies view the outside world, and more about the slow decay of homegrown institutions. Think less about threats from unwelcome barbarians, and more about the powerful dynamics of a multi-ethnic society. Think less about the ability of a superpower to influence everything on earth, and more about how everything on earth affects a superpower.
One core similarity is almost always overlooked—it has to do with "privatization," which sometimes means "corruption," though it's actually a far broader phenomenon. Rome had trouble maintaining a distinction between public and private responsibilities—and between public and private resources. The line between these is never fixed, anywhere. But when it becomes too hazy, or fades altogether, central government becomes impossible to steer. It took a long time to happen, but the fraying connection between imperial will and concrete action is a big part of What Went Wrong in ancient Rome. America has in recent years embarked on a privatization binge like no other in its history, putting into private hands all manner of activities that once were thought to be public tasks—overseeing the nation's highways, patrolling its neighborhoods, inspecting its food, protecting its borders. This may make sense in the short term—and sometimes, like Rome, we may have no choice in the matter. But how will the consequences play out over decades, or centuries? In all likelihood, very badly.
A little more than 50 years ago, the Oxford historian Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, a radical thinker and formidable classicist, decided to take a close look at the change in connotation over five centuries of the Latin word suffragium, which originally meant "voting tablet" or "ballot." That change, he concluded, illustrated something fundamental about Roman society and its "inner political evolution."
The original meaning went back to the days of the Roman Republic, which had possessed modest elements of democracy. The citizens of Rome, by means of the suffragium, could exercise their influence in electing people to certain offices. In practice, the great men of Rome controlled large blocs of votes, corresponding to their patronage networks. Over time Rome's republican forms of government calcified into empty ritual or withered away entirely. Suffragium meaning "ballot" no longer served any real political function. But the web of patrons and clients was still the Roman system's substructure, and in this context suffragium came to mean the pressure that could be exerted on one's behalf by a powerful man, whether to obtain a job or to influence a court case or to secure a contract. To ask a patron for this form of intervention and to exert suffragium on behalf of a client would have been a routine social interaction.
Now stir large amounts of money into this system. It is not a great conceptual distance, Ste. Croix observes, to move from the idea of exercising suffragium because of an age-old sense of reciprocal duty to that of exercising it because doing so could be lucrative. And this, indeed, is where the future lies, the idea of quid pro quo eventually becoming so accepted and ingrained that emperors stop trying to halt the practice and instead seek to contain it by codifying it. Thus, in the fourth century, decrees are promulgated to ensure that the person seeking the quid actually delivers the quo. Before long, suffragium has changed its meaning once again. Now it refers not to the influence brought to bear but to the money being paid for it: "a gift, payment or bribe." By empire's end, all public transactions require the payment of money, and the pursuit of money and personal advancement has become the purpose of all public jobs.
Looking back at the change, from ballot box to cash box, Ste. Croix composes this epitaph: "Here, in miniature, is the political history of Rome."
The arc traced by suffragium covers not just the political history of Rome but its social and military history. It goes to the heart of a question that is only just starting to be asked in America: Where is the boundary between public good and private advantage, between "ours" and "mine"? From this question others follow: What happens when public and private interests are not aligned? Which outsiders, if any, should be allowed to put their hands on the machinery of government? How can governments exert collective power if the levers and winches and cogs lie increasingly outside public control?
The phenomenon with which all these questions intersect was called the "privatization of power," or sometimes just "privatization," by the historian Ramsay MacMullen in his classic study Corruption and the Decline of Rome (1988). MacMullen's subject is "the diverting of governmental force, its misdirection." In other words, how does it come about that the word and writ of a powerful central government lose all vector and force? Serious challenges to any society can come from outside factors—environmental catastrophe, foreign invasion. Privatization is fundamentally an internal factor. Such deflection of purpose occurs in any number of ways. It occurs whenever official positions are bought and sold. It occurs when people must pay before officials will act, and it occurs if payment also determines how they will act. And it can occur anytime public tasks (the collecting of taxes, the quartering of troops, the management of projects) are lodged in private hands, no matter how honest the intention or efficient the arrangement, because private and public interests tend to diverge over time.
Let's start with how the Roman system worked during the many centuries when it actually did. By modern standards there were not a great many officials or bureaucrats in Rome until late in the empire; the administration and well-being of the capital and all the other cities and towns depended on the talents and the largesse of the upper classes. A memorable passage in Jérôme Carcopino's Daily Life in Ancient Rome describes what happened every morning soon after Romans woke up, when all around the city clients visited their patrons, and each was alert to the other's needs. On those rare mornings when I've found myself sipping $15 orange juice at the Four Seasons, I've enjoyed imagining the breakfast convergences at tables all around me as an elite remnant of the old Roman dynamic. But to get Rome right you'd have to extend the scene to every suburban Hyatt, every neighborhood diner; you'd have to see these relationships governing every business transaction, every trip to the doctor's office, every college application.
The patron-client relationship was so pervasive that it helps illuminate not only Rome's social architecture but also, frequently, its way of conducting foreign affairs. The term "client state" came into being for a reason. As Julius Caesar fought his way through Gaul, he brought tribal chieftains over to his side and described their professions of loyalty to him—and thus to Rome—as those of clients to a patron. The relationships of the Bush family with various world leaders have often been essentially personal. The longtime Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz, spent so much time at Bush family gatherings that he came to be known as Bandar Bush.
Patronage spilled over into communal adornment; it was in fact inseparable from it. The Roman magnates competed with one another to endow the capital with improvements. Rome's wealthiest class, the senatorial aristocracy, constituted by one estimate two-thousandths of 1 percent of the population; then came the equestrian class, with perhaps a tenth of a percent. Collectively these people owned almost everything. Americans are well aware of the nation's worsening income inequality, with those in the top 1 percent earning nearly 50 times more a year than those in the bottom 20 percent. The average C.E.O. earns more than 400 times as much as a typical worker. In Rome, the gap between the elite and everyone else was on the order of 5,000 or 10,000 to 1. ("Nothing is more unfair than equality," observed a very comfortable Pliny the Younger, who would have felt at home in many Washington circles.) The expectation in Rome was that affluent citizens, as individuals rather than as taxpayers, should provide for community needs. Did the city require another aqueduct? New roads? A stadium? Some magnate would surely provide it—in return, implicitly, for a measure of public power, and, of course, for ample public recognition. Inscriptions on countless marble fragments attest to such generosity—an early version of "Brought to you by … "
On Rome's edifice of private giving—whether with the seemliness of an Andrew Carnegie or the vulgarity of a Donald Trump—an empire was built. The Roman system was a remarkable contrivance. But it contained the seeds of its own destruction. For one thing, it fostered an expectation that "others" would always provide. If public amenities came into being through private munificence—and if these in turn served to enhance private glory—then why should the public pay for their upkeep? This way of doing business "did not work for the common benefit of the overall urban fabric," writes one historian, much less nurture a sense of common purpose and shared responsibility. I've seen the same mind-set at work within my state, Massachusetts, in hardscrabble mill towns whose philanthropic founding families have departed, where local taxpayers resist the idea that support of libraries and hospitals must now rest with the community as a whole. Moreover, even at its most uncorrupted, the patronage system was greased by small considerations: "It was a genial, oily, present-giving world," Ramsay MacMullen writes.
Now gradually remove from all this any sense of public spirit or public obligation and replace it at every level of government—in the barracks, the courts, the city councils, the provincial prefectures—with an attitude of "What's in it for me?" To see this transition in starkly American terms, first consider the idealistic sensibility of a letter of introduction written from France by Benjamin Franklin to George Washington in 1777, on a matter of public business: "The Gentleman who will have the Honour of waiting upon you with this Letter is the Baron de Steuben He goes to America with a true Zeal for our Cause, and a View of engaging in it and rendring it all the Service in his Power. He is recommended to us by two of the best Judges of military Merit in this Country."
For comparison, consider the more contemporary sentiments in proposals and e-mails from Jack Abramoff's lobbying team, also on a matter of public business: in this instance, mounting a political operation to reopen the Speaking Rock Casino, in Texas, in return for millions of dollars in fees and political contributions. In 2002, the Abramoff team explained to its clients the Tigua Indian tribe: "This political operation will result in a Majority of both federal chambers either becoming close friends of the tribe or fearing the tribe in a very short period of time. Simply put, you need 218 friends in the U.S. House and 51 Senators on your side very quickly, and we will do that through both love and fear." Abramoff, who would eventually plead guilty to corruption charges, explained to his clients that favors might need to be topped off: "Our friend … asked if you could help (as in cover) a Scotland golf trip for him and some staff (his committee chief of staff) for August. The trip will be quite expensive … (we did this for another member—you know who) 2 years ago. Let me know if you guys could do $50 K."
This is the story MacMullen traces, as throughout the empire a lubricious glaze of venality came to coat every governmental surface. I don't know how it would be phrased in Latin, but one of Jack Abramoff's e-mails ("Da man! You iz da man! Do you hear me?! You da man!! How much $$ coming tomorrow? Did we get some more $$ in?") captures some of the spirit of public service in the late empire. What accounts for the change? No one factor but a combination of many, including the sheer growth in the government's administrative reach and the resultant transformation of "public service" from the rotating duty of the upper class into a lifelong career for a larger group. A bronze plaque was affixed to a public building in Timgad, in Numidia (now Algeria), a city built as a bastion against the Berbers, which literally provided a recommended price list for payments to ensure the prosecution and success of various kinds of litigation. We don't have anything exactly like that now, I suppose, but have you ever received a fund-raising solicitation from one of the political parties, with degrees of access and other perquisites tied to specific contribution levels? Here's the Republican contribution hierarchy for the 2004 elections, which I can't help visualizing as a Numidian bronze plaque:
$300,000 Super Ranger
$250,000 Republican Regent
$200,000 Ranger
$100,000 Pioneer
Time and again imperial decrees throughout the later empire attempt to put a stop to skimming, extortion, and the illicit use of office—or, failing that, to codify what may be permissible. But the emperors are standing athwart the tide, and the imperial pronouncements have a doomed, forlorn, ritual feel to them. Modern newspaper headlines along the lines of congress votes new curbs on lobbyists convey something of the same formulaic quality.
How does the buying and selling of influence hollow out government? Some make the argument that, whatever its moral shortcomings, the profit motive, including its corrupt dimension, is in fact an efficient economic mechanism: it gets things done. As one character argues in the movie Syriana, corruption is why we win. But as MacMullen points out, for a government to be effective on a national or an imperial scale, there needs to be a presumption that information is traveling accurately up and down the administrative chain of command, and that every link in the chain between a command and its execution is reliable and strong. Putting power into private hands frequently ends up breaking that link. Making the exercise of power contingent on payment by definition breaks the link.
Privatization today often makes itself felt in ways that would have turned no heads in ancient Rome. Naturally, it still includes influence peddling and bribery and the buying and selling of public office. Former California representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham, now in jail, infamously drafted a "bribe menu" on official stationery, linking the size of defense contracts he would deliver with the size of payments he received. Representative Bob Ney, implicated in the Abramoff scandals, resigned his congressional seat, having been reportedly warned by his majority leader that if he stayed and lost his seat for his party, he "could not expect a lucrative career on K Street"—that is, he would jeopardize any future as an influence peddler, what the Romans called a suffragator. (All for naught in Ney's case: he's now in jail.) And as in Rome, privatization still includes turning over government departments to incompetent cronies, empowering private individuals at the expense of public intentions. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, staffed by inexperienced political appointees and unable to cope with the Hurricane Katrina disaster, is only the most prominent instance.
But the dominant form of privatization today is something relatively new, at least in its dimensions. Government on its stupendous modern scale—regulating every industry; re-distributing treasure from one sector of society to another; forecasting the weather and mapping the human genome—simply did not exist in ancient Rome. Because the extent of government is larger, privatization has more scope. Its most pervasive form is perfectly legal: the hiring of profit-making companies by the thousands to do government jobs. The ostensible motives may be pure, but the result is to diminish government's capacity. For one thing, government loses the ability to perform certain functions; it's hard to un-privatize. Moreover, the effect in every case is to insert an independent agent, with its own interests to consider and protect, into the space between public will and public outcome—a dynamic that represents a potential "diverting of governmental force" far more systemic and insidious than outright venality.
Privatization along these lines has occurred most decisively in America and Britain. In 1976 a book was published in the United States called The Shadow Government, written by Daniel Guttman and Barry Willner; its subtitle spoke ominously of "the government's multi-billion-dollar giveaway" of decision-making authority. Government agencies, the authors warned, were farming out various functions to high-priced consultants, secretive think tanks, and corporate vested interests—accountable to no one! And "outsourcing" was not the only issue. Some parts of the government, they went on, might even be sold off completely—turned into private businesses! The process was "cloaked in contractual and other formal approvals by the various executive departments," but make no mistake: it amounted to nothing less than a "drive to merge Government and business power to the advantage of the latter."
A little more than a decade later, the shadow government was out of the shadow. There is a plausible rationale for privatization—one that often makes sense in the short run and for specific tasks. Private contractors may be able to operate more efficiently than government agencies do. Marketplace signals may prove to be more direct and powerful than bureaucratic ones. And why shouldn't the government hire outside specialists for help with certain chores, the way any household or business does? In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan created a presidential commission on privatization to study not how the boundary between public and private might be bolstered but how it could be pushed out of the way even further, to give private interests more opportunity to move in. The same idea surfaces in the "re-inventing government" movement taken up by the Clinton administration: "We would do well," one proponent wrote, "to glory in the blurring of public and private and not keep trying to draw a disappearing line in the water." Since then privatization has affected every aspect of American public life.
The most visible surge in government outsourcing has come in the realm of the military. Rome hired barbarian soldiers to make up for its acute manpower shortages (not a good long-run solution, history would show). America is hiring private military companies for the very same reason—not the Visigothi or the Ostrogothi but the Halliburtoni and Wackenhuti. Conan the Barbarian has become Conan the Contractor. But in fact every facet of "personal security" is increasingly in the hands of private business. It was not until the mid–19th century that America's urban governments, by setting up local police forces, managed to make an ordinary person's safety a matter of real public responsibility. This was a major advance, though perhaps only temporary. No one with money relies on such guarantees any longer (nor did they in Rome, where police forces as we know them were virtually nonexistent). More and more people have withdrawn into protected enclaves. Private security is a major growth industry; in 1960 there were more police officers than hired security guards in America, whereas today private guards outnumber the police by a margin of 50 percent. Individuals may owe nominal allegiance to a town or a state, but their true oath of fealty is to Securitas or Guardsmark.
One of the chief obligations of any government is simply to dispense justice—to resolve disputes, oversee legal business, mete out punishment. These functions were once held in private hands. After a stint as a public responsibility, they are now migrating back. Lawyers and clients increasingly shun the civil courts—congested, expensive, fickle—and instead buy themselves some private arbitration, provided by a growing cadre of profitable "rent-a-judge" companies. As for the criminal-justice system, those sentenced to prison may very well do their time in a private facility, run on behalf of state and federal governments and operated by a company with some former public official in its management to grease the wheels. Faced with rising numbers of inmates, and unwilling to raise taxes to build more public prisons, governments at all levels have found that the easy, cost-effective way is to turn the prison industry over to the private sector: to a behemoth such as the Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America, or to one of many smaller companies.
America's public colleges and universities are fast losing their public character. These institutions were created under the terms of an act signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, providing federal land grants to the states as a basis for public financing of higher education. But state support is diminishing. Nationwide, state legislatures are picking up only about two-thirds of the annual cost of public higher education. For the University of Illinois, the figure is 25 percent. For the University of Michigan, it's 18 percent. What makes up the difference in funding? To a large degree it's money from private donors and private corporations, creating an incipient "academic-industrial complex" at public and private institutions alike. You can't escape the signs. At the University of California at Berkeley, one administrator is officially known as the Bank of America Dean of the Haas School of Business. But for a conviction or two, Rice University would have had a Ken Lay Center for the Study of Markets in Transition, endowed by the late former chairman of Enron. Much money for universities comes with strings attached—for instance, the power to push research in certain directions and perhaps away from others, and the ownership of patents deriving from sponsored research.
Sociologists have a term for what is occurring: they call it the "externalization of state functions." Water and sewage systems are being privatized, as are airports and highways and public hospitals. Voucher programs and charter schools are a way of shifting education toward the private sector. The protection of nuclear waste is in private hands. Meat inspection is done largely by the meatpacking companies themselves. Americans were up in arms last year when they learned that DP World, a company in the United Arab Emirates, would soon be in control of the terminals at half a dozen major U.S. seaports—only to discover that the privatization of terminal operations at American ports had begun three decades ago, and that 80 percent of them were already operated by foreign companies, the largest of which is Chinese. Serious proposals to privatize portions of Social Security have been on the table, and the new Medicare prescription-drug plan effectively puts an enormous government program into the hands of private insurance and drug companies.
Many services that used to be provided free of charge now must be paid for—government by user fee. Detailed statistical data from the Census Bureau and other agencies were once available to everyone; now they're being sold, mainly for marketing purposes, and often at prices that only private corporations can afford. The vaults of the Smithsonian were once open to documentary-film makers regardless of provenance and financing. Now an agreement between the Smithsonian and the cable company Showtime has created something called the Smithsonian Networks, which has jurisdiction over, and priority access to, certain kinds of material.
Is there any government function that can't be transferred to some private party? A considerable amount of tax collection is now done, in effect, by casinos; rather than raise taxes to pay for services, legislatures legalize gambling and then take a rake-off from the profits earned by private casino companies. It's "tax farming" for the modern age, recalling the hated Roman practice of selling the right to collect taxes to private individuals (including the apostle Matthew in the Gospels), who were then allowed to keep anything over what they had agreed to collect for the government. As the recent revelations about torture have made clear, even official interrogations for national-security purposes have been outsourced—in this instance to other countries through the process known as "extraordinary rendition." The sale of naming rights for public facilities and other amenities attracts notice mostly for the ungainly nomenclature that results—mutants such as the Mitsubishi Wild Wetland Trail, at the New York Botanical Garden, in the Bronx, and Whataburger Field, in Corpus Christi. To attract more corporate underwriting, the Department of the Interior has proposed that America's national parks be liberally opened up to the sale of naming rights. No one is suggesting that there will soon be a J. Crew Cape Cod National Seashore. But might there be a Sherwin-Williams Painted Desert Trailhead?
An analyst at Johns Hopkins observes, "Contractors have become so big and entrenched that it's a fiction that the government maintains any control." One obvious recent example is the rebuilding effort in Iraq. To supply the army or provide other services, traders and contractors often traveled with Roman legions; Julius Caesar had such a person with him during the Gallic Wars, explicitly "for the sake of business." There may have been no alternative to giving the reconstruction job in Iraq to private corporations, including giant combines such as Bechtel and Halliburton, but the result has been an effort that defies management or accountability. The evidence of widespread corruption in the Iraq rebuilding effort is beyond dispute. Corruption aside, private companies are exempt from many regulations that would apply to government agencies. The records of private companies can't be obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. They can use foreign subsidiaries to avoid laws meant to restrain American companies. Before the war, Halliburton itself used subsidiaries to do business with Iran, Iraq, and Libya, despite official American trade sanctions against all three countries.
More and more secret intelligence work—translation, airborne surveillance, computing, interrogation, analysis, reporting, briefing—is being farmed out to private entities. Not only is the intelligence community becoming further fragmented, but, because the new jobs pay so well, a "spy drain" is drawing officers out of the public sector and into the private market. And the drain isn't restricted to spies: at least 90 former top officials at the Department of Homeland Security and the White House Office of Homeland Security are now working for private companies in the domestic-security business. Meanwhile, the government seems poised to turn the job of border police over to multi-national contractors, a task that will in turn be subcontracted out to dozens of smaller companies. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman were among the corporations that indicated they would submit bids to build a high-tech "virtual fence" along the Mexican border, with an array of motion detectors, satellite monitors, and aerial drones. (Boeing eventually won.) A Homeland Security official conceded the abdication of government leadership, saying to the companies, "We're asking you to come back and tell us how to do our business."
One study from the late 1990s suggests that the "privatization rate"—the rate at which public functions are being outsourced—is roughly doubling every year. On paper the federal workforce nationwide, leaving the military aside, appears to total about two million people. But if you add in all the people in the private sector doing essentially government jobs with federal grants and contracts, then the figure rises by 10.5 million. The commercialization of government probably explains why so many Washington entities are now referred to as shops: "lobby shop," "counterterrorism shop." There's no question that in certain ways the private sector can outperform the public sector. Users of Federal Express, U.P.S., and DHL would sooner renounce citizenship than go back to relying only on the U.S. Postal Service. The problem is the cumulative effect of privatization across the board—projected out over decades, over a century, over two—and the leaching of management capacity from government. This is the same "misdirection" of government force that MacMullen discerns in Rome: easier to observe in retrospect, when the whole film is available, than in the brief, real-time clip any of us is allowed to see.
The activities of government are, in effect, being franchised out. You can't help lingering over the concept of "franchise," wondering what a latter-day Geoffrey de Ste. Croix would make of it. Like suffragium, the word originally had to do with notions of political freedom and civic responsibility. Derived from the Old French word franc, meaning "free," it later came to be associated with the most fundamental political freedom of all: to exercise your franchise meant to exercise your right to vote. Only much later, in the mid–20th century, did the idea of being granted "certain rights" acquire its commercial connotation: the right to market a company's services or products, such as fried chicken or Tupperware. Today, to have a franchise on something is in effect to have control over it.
Looking at the history of the word, it's tempting to write this epitaph: Here, in miniature, is the political history of America.
My Wet Dream
For Memorial Day, my mom was fixed on the idea of steak, which I was more than happy to oblige. "Steak" became a balsamic syrup drizzled over grilled ribeyes accompanied with roasted tomatoes and mushrooms, a ceasar salad, and garlic toast. Not bad, but not nearly as orgasmic as the beef balsamic at the paella place in Piacenza (thanks for letting me steal that idea). This meal comes less than two weeks after the "greatest meal that I have ever cooked": boeuf bourguignon - in my opinion the epitomy of traditional french cooking, sauted parsnips in herbed butter, and roasted garlic smeared over toast. Garlic that was so sweet, so amazingly spreadable, that it resembled melted taffy more than the onion's cousin. Just a faint hint of that familiar aroma was the only reminder of what I was actually eating off my chunk of baguette. I like food.
And yet, I can't help but feel a pinch of shame in the left side of my ribcage as Tosches describes the art of real sushi and the monastic ideals of perfection that surrounds it. Strange as it sounds, I'm truly jealous of the few men lucky enough to spend an entire life searching for and delicately slicing the world's best tuna. The type of insanity that only an estranged Mormon can truly appreciate.
If you don't have the time to read the whole thing, the money shot is about three quarters of the way through the article, when Tosches describes a single a meal from Masa in New York. Come hell or high water, I swear that I'm going to eat that meal. $500 a pop sounds like a bargain. A boy can dream right?
If You Knew Sushi
In search of the ultimate sushi experience, the author plunges into the frenzy of the world's biggest seafood market—Tokyo's Tsukiji, where a bluefin tuna can fetch more than $170,000 at auction—and discovers the artistry between ocean and plate, as well as some fishy surprises.
by Nick Tosches
June 2007
www.vanityfair.com
It looks like a samurai sword, and it's almost as long as he is tall. His hands are on the hilt. He raises and steadies the blade.
Two apprentices help to guide it. Twelve years ago, when it was new, this knife was much longer, but the apprentices' daily hours of tending to it, of sharpening and polishing it, have reduced it greatly.
It was made by the house of Masahisa, sword-makers for centuries to the samurai of the Minamoto, the founders of the first shogunate. In the 1870s, when the power of the shoguns was broken and the swords of the samurai were outlawed, Masahisa began making these things, longer and more deadly than the samurai swords of old.
The little guy with the big knife is Tsunenori Iida. He speaks not as an individual but as an emanation, the present voice, of the generations whose blood flows in him and who held the long knife in lifetimes before him, just as he speaks of Masahisa as if he were the same Masahisa who wrought the first samurai sword, in the days of dark mist. Thus it is that he tells me he's been here since 1861, during the Tokugawa shogunate, when this city, Tokyo, was still called Edo.
Iida-san is the master of the house of Hicho, one of the oldest and most venerable of the nakaoroshi gyosha, intermediate wholesalers of tuna, or tuna middlemen, if you will.
The tuna that lies before Iida-san on its belly was swimming fast and heavy after mackerel a few days ago under cold North Atlantic waves. In an hour or so, its flesh will be dispatched in parcels to the various sushi chefs who have chosen to buy it. Iida-san is about to make the first of the expert cuts that will quarter the 300-pound tuna lengthwise.
His long knife, with the mark of the maker Masahisa engraved in the shank of the blade, connects not only the past to the present but also the deep blue sea to the sushi counter.
Everything around him seems to turn still for a breath as he draws the blade toward him and lays open the tuna with surgical precision. And everything around him is a lot, for we are in the frantic heart of a madness unto itself: the wild, engulfing, blood-drenched madness of Tsukiji.
Until the summer of 1972, bluefin tuna was basically worthless to American fishermen. Nobody ever ate it, and its sole commercial use was as an ingredient in canned cat food. The only tuna that people ate, the white stuff, also in cans, was processed from smaller, albacore tuna, and even that probably would not have gotten into the American diet if a California cannery hadn't run out of sardines and begun selling it in 1903.
Theodore C. Bestor is the author of Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World, the standard work on the subject. He, the chair of the Anthropology Department of Harvard, and I, the chair of nothing, spent some time together in Tokyo. It was Ted who taught me how to correctly pronounce the name of this place: "tskee-gee." (In her new book, The Sushi Economy, Sasha Issenberg says it's "pronounced roughly like 'squeegee,'" but it's not. Her book, however, is an engaging one.)
"I grew up in central Illinois," Ted told me, "and as a kid I don't remember ever eating fresh fish. I'm not sure I ever even saw one. As far as I knew, fish came frozen, already breaded and cut into oblongs for frying. And tuna, of course, was something that appeared only in cans like hockey pucks and ended up in sandwiches. I had absolutely no idea of what a tuna looked like, its size or anything else."
Tuna is the main event at Tsukiji, but everything from the sea—fresh fish, live fish, shrimp—is auctioned and sold here. At five in the morning, preceding the tuna auction, in another hall, there's the sea-urchin-roe auction. The most prized uni come from Hokkaido and its islands, and it's said that if you want to taste the best, freshest uni you must go there and eat it straight from the sea. But much of the uni laid out here in little boxes, often repackaged in Hokkaido, comes from California or Maine. Only in July, when sea urchins from the United States aren't available, are these boxes of uni not present. Color means more than size, and men roam the hall before the auction, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee from paper cups, searching for uni of the most vibrant orange-golden hues. The northern-Japanese uni can fetch about ¥7,000, or about $60, for a little, 100-gram box, while the Maine uni go for much less, from a low of about ¥800 to a high of about ¥1,500, or between $6 and $13. Being from Newark, I wonder if they ever douse these things with dye.
This place, the all of it—formally the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Central Wholesale Market, a name by which few know it—is, as Ted Bestor puts it, the "fishmonger for the seven seas." Its history reaches back 400 years, to the Nihonbashi fish market, which was located not far from the present site of Tsukiji, in the Chuo Ward. On September 1, 1923, Tokyo was devastated by the Great Kanto Earthquake, which killed more than 140,000 people. Nihonbashi was gone, and a new market came into being in the town of Tsukiji, within Tokyo. Tsunenori Iida, whose great-grandfather had a fish-selling stall at the old market, is one of only four men whose family businesses began at Nihonbashi and are still in operation at Tsukiji today.
It's hard to say how much of what is sold at Tsukiji is exported to high-class sushi chefs abroad.
"My guess, and it is a guess," says Ted Bestor, "would be that the total amounts are probably on the order of a thousand or two kilograms worldwide each day. This is minuscule by comparison with the roughly two million kilograms of seafood Tsukiji handles every day."
Two million kilos is about four and a half million pounds, more than 2,000 tons. The Fulton Fish Market, in New York City, the second-largest fish market in the world, moves only 115 tons a year, an average of less than half a ton each working day.
Tsukiji occupies about 22½ hectares on the Sumida River—about 55½ acres, or well over two million square feet: bigger than 40 football fields. Near the Kaiko Bridge entrance, tucked away in relative serenity, an altar bell is rung by rope at the Namiyoke Jinja, a small Shinto shrine whose name can be translated as the Shrine to Protect from Waves. Outside the shrine are stone monuments honoring the seafood that passes through Tsukiji: a big black sculpted fish, a big egg-like roe. Marketmen leave offerings of sake at these deific figures. And for a few yen a miniature scroll of oracular hoodoo can be had. It was thus, after I had genuflected before the uni god, that it was revealed to me that the last dangerous year that a man passes through in life is his 62nd, while a woman is free of danger after 38.
At the main gate, not far from the shrine but far from serenity, a sign warns entrants to please pay attention to the traffic and walk carefully because the market is crowded with trucks and special vehicles and the floor in the market is very slippery.
Big trucks, little trucks, forklifts. And, everywhere, these things called turret trucks: high-lift vehicles designed to negotiate narrow passages and aisles. Old, diesel-fueled turrets; new, battery-powered turrets: every one of them driven by a single standing man who seems invariably to have both hands occupied with lighting up a smoke rather than with steering as he careens round and among the other vehicles that lurch and speed every which way, a surprise at every turn, over the bloody cobblestones amid the pedestrian traffic of the rest of the 60,000 or so people who work at Tsukiji. While no-hands driving seems to be purely optional, smoking at times does seem to be obligatory, and smokers outnumber by far the many no-smoking signs that are posted everywhere. Only the lowly Chinese stevedores who push or draw carts are deprived of the option of no-hands driving, and they squint through the smoke of teeth-clenched cigarettes as they trudge.
Lethal Delicacy
Wandering through Tsukiji in the good company of Ted Bestor and Tomohiro Asakawa, the senior commercial specialist of the Fisheries Service of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (noaa) at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, I become aware that the full array of the Lord's fishy chillun on sale here is beyond knowing.
There are shrimp from everywhere and of every kind, live and sprightly, in open plastic sacks in Styrofoam boxes with bubbling aeration tubes: red Japanese shrimp, sweet Japanese shrimp (ama-ebi), striped Asian kuruma shrimp, along with Alaskan shrimp and Maine shrimp on ice, and frozen shrimp of every size and sort. Live lobsters in boxes of wood shavings; abalone; fresh and frozen marlin, fresh and frozen swordfish, from Japanese waters or caught off Cape Town or Iran. The swordfish, Tom tells me, is not too popular here for sushi. Most of it goes to mountain resorts that serve it as sashimi to tourists.
There are tanks of live fugu swimming madly about. These are the costly blowfish with neurotoxic poison in their genital areas, a sometimes lethal delicacy which a sushi chef needs a special license to prepare and serve. Tetrodotoxin, the poison in fugu, can also produce a sense of euphoria when ingested in less than lethal amounts. The best fugu is from the waters of Kyushu, in the South.
In other tanks, live sea bass (suzuki), live sea bream (tai), and live flounder (hirame). There are flying fish (tobiuo), Pacific mackerel (saba), Spanish mackerel (sawara), and horse mackerel (aji).
From a profile of "the Controller in Charge of Horse Mackerel" in the corporate literature of Chuo Gyorui, one of the largest wholesalers here: "When Mitsuo Owada joined Chuo Gyorui in 1974, he became charmed by horse mackerel Owada used to eat several horse mackerel almost every day.… Both shippers and buyers … say, 'Depend on this man for horse mackerel traded at Tsukiji.'" The honored controller moves about 25 tons of horse mackerel through the market every day.
There are sardines and there are salmon, fresh from Norway and Japan. The salmon is not to be eaten raw, Tom explains, as its movement between freshwater and salt water renders it the host to many parasites. I ask him why I see no shark for sale. Shark, he says, can be eaten raw when fresh from the hook, but its muscle tissue is loaded with urea, which breaks down fast after death, releasing levels of ammonia that stink and can be toxic.
Eels: tanks, barrels, bushels, and bins of eels of all the shapes, colors, and sizes of slitheration, from the prized conger eel (anago) of the seas to the freshwater eel (unagi) of the rivers and lakes. All manner of squid—baby squid, big squid—and all manner of crabs—baby crabs, giant crabs; scallops and oysters and clams; periwinkles, cockles, and—what?—barnacles, yes, even barnacles, going for ¥1,600, or about 14 bucks, a kilo. I'd always thought these black footstalks were only an ugliness to be scraped from the hulls of old wooden ships.
"Broth," says Tom. "Some people make broth with them." He smiles, shakes his head. He apparently is not one of those people.
Giant oysters from Tsuruga Bay, with sea steaks of meat inside them; tairagi-gai, the enormous green mussels from the Aichi waters. Bizarre white fish laced with black, Paraplagusia japonica, known colloquially as "black-tongues." Sunfish intestines—chitlins of the sea—priced at ¥1,000, or about $8.50, a kilo; grotesque scorpion fish; monkfish; freshwater turtles, which the Japanese much prefer to the saltwater kind. Amid sizzle and smoke, a guy is selling grilled tuna cheeks. From his tuna stall, Tsunenori Iida frowns on him. He says that the cheek of the tuna is eaten by poor young workers. It's their subsistence and it's not right to make money from tuna cheeks. Actually, he says, the head and tail of the tuna should be used for fertilizer.
Sheets of kombu (kelp) covered with herring roe; big white sacs of octopus roe. Among a biochromatic wealth of mysterious mollusks and other sea invertebrates of unknown nature, I see the weirdest creature I've ever seen. Now, that's a fucking organism. Tom Asakawa looks at it awhile, too.
"Sea pineapple," he says. "Attaches to rocks in the ocean. Tastes something like iodine. Sendai people like it."
It looks nothing like a pineapple. It looks like something that could exist only in a purely hallucinatory eco-system. It looks like, I don't know, maybe an otherworldly marital aid of inscrutable purpose for the brides of Satan.
"I need to eat that," I say.
"I'll see what I can do," Tom says.
And there, near the seaweed stalls, in those orange packages—yes, that's what the label says in Japanese: research whaling. And that's what it is: whale meat.
Twenty-four people have been to the moon. Only two have been to the deepest trench in the sea, and that was more than 45 years ago. They saw strange fish down there, and I'm sure that if those strange, abyssal fish could be brought to the surface they'd be here, at Tsukiji.
But as I said, tuna will always be the main event. The bluefin tuna, which can grow to more than 1,500 pounds and almost 12 feet in length, is a migratory fish that can be found in many parts of the world. According to Tsunenori Iida, the source of the best and most costly bluefin changes from season to season. In the winter, the most prized tuna is from the waters of northern Japan, near Oma and Hokkaido. But in the summer it is from the northeastern waters of the United States. This wasn't known in Japan until the summer of 1972, when the first such tuna was successfully brought fresh by air to Tokyo for sale at Tsukiji. (An account of the events leading up to that first successful tuna flight can be found in Sasha Issenberg's book.) Since then, fishers off the New England coast have seen the value of what used to be cat food rise to tens of thousands of dollars for a single fish. That's a lot of Puss 'n Boots.
And here, right here, let's stop trying to make sense, because very little of what is about to unfold harbors much sense.
A commercial trawler unloads its bluefin at a dock in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Awaiting the bluefin are agents of one or more of the five big fish wholesalers from Tsukiji, who set about examining the tuna.
"I tell you, Nicky, these Japanese guys, they take a little, thin slice from the tail, hold it to the light, look at it for a minute, then make an offer. God knows what they see."
This is what a Sicilian fish seller in New York once told me, describing a scene that occurs not only in Gloucester but also in ports throughout the world.
What the Japanese buying agent determines by his quick and practiced analysis of that sliver of tail is an indication of the tuna's inner color, its oil content, and the presence, if any, of parasitic disease. A smooth-grained and marbled tail is a prime indication of quality. The richness of the tuna's lipid content, its fat, can be gauged by how slippery the slice of tail feels between the fingers. Pockmarks reveal parasites. It's a complex diagnostic method that is mastered only with years of practice. The overall form and color of the tuna are also quickly assessed at the same time. The ideal of these qualities, inner and outer—the word for this ideal is kata—is also a bit of a mystery to outsiders.
If a tuna is deemed worthy, negotiations begin immediately. The buyer sees to it that the fish is properly gutted, packed with coolant, wrapped or sacked in polyethylene, and placed in an insulated box known as a "tuna coffin." In the case of a Gloucester catch, the tuna coffin is transported to John F. Kennedy International Airport, in New York, and secured in the refrigerated hold of the next flight to Narita International Airport, where it is unloaded and trucked to the Tsukiji market, in central Tokyo, a few days after having left the sea.
The five big fish wholesalers at Tsukiji are also the five big auction houses at Tsukiji. In the dark of early morning, their tuna are graded and laid out in long rows on aluminum pallets in pools of blood in the big tuna-auction hall, in a quay of the main building. These tuna are from everywhere. Some were caught off the Australian coast, others were farmed in Mexico. Every one of them has the number of its grading painted on it in red. The tuna that bears the number 1 this morning is from Boston and weighs 150 kilos. No. 2 is from Spain. No. 3 is from the seaport of Sakai, south of Osaka.
Prospective bidders and their bidding agents roam the ranks of the dead fish, hunkering down here and there to peer intently into belly cavities with flashlights, and take notes.
The fish are auctioned in a squall of finger signals and utterances that are a language unto themselves. Assistants to the auctioneer execute invoices with astounding rapidity as the auctioneer's bellowing voice moves the bidding with speed from one fish to another. Bids are in yen per kilogram. These auctions are closed to the public. Tom Asakawa has hung a special permit around my neck. As we walk among the rows of tuna, Tom tells me that he has lived in Tokyo almost all his life and that, 30 or 35 years ago, long before he came to the U.S. Embassy, he worked here as a seafood importer. From the agents on the docks to the graders to the guys poking around in body cavities with flashlights, the challenge is the same: to evaluate through clues the inside of a fish that you can't simply cut open, because you don't yet own it.
Bluefin Madness
Occasionally tuna mania overtakes an auction. Hiroyasu Ito, the president of Chuo Gyorui, the biggest of the wholesalers and auction houses in terms of sales volume, tells me of a January morning in 1999 when an Oma tuna came to auction through his firm. It appeared to be the perfect tuna, a vision of true kata.
Ito-san remembers that the auction started modestly at ¥9,000, or about 75 bucks, per kilo. "And then ¥10,000, ¥20,000, ¥30,000, and ¥40,000. And then three men wanted that tuna very badly." The bidding among them escalated furiously. "At ¥50,000 per kilo, one of them gave up." The remaining two continued to compete. "Ninety thousand, and then ¥100,000 was the last."
The tuna weighed 200 kilos. At ¥100,000 per kilo, the possessed bidder had paid ¥20 million—the equivalent of more than $170,000—for a fish whose parceled meat could never recoup that amount.
"Big loss, big loss."
Tsunenori Iida remembers that unfortunate winner very well. He was a very wealthy man who was driven to have the most expensive tuna. He went bankrupt, Iida-san says, is out of the business, and is seen no more.
In December of 2005, Ito-san's company auctioned off a 285-kilo tuna from Oma for ¥39,000 per kilo: a total of ¥11,115,000, or about $95,000—the company's second-highest auction price.
As soon as a tuna is sold at auction, it is hauled off to the buyer's stall by cart. This morning the No. 1 tuna, the 150-kilo tuna from Boston, has been won by Iida-san, who paid ¥5,700 per kilo. Given the tuna's weight of 150 kilos, this comes to ¥855,000, or a bit over $7,250, a little less than $23 a pound.
A tuna's quality can't truly be judged until it is laid open with the long knife—that is, until after it has been bought. Iida-san isn't so impressed with this No. 1 tuna his man has brought him. He says that its quality isn't worth its price. Nonetheless, many of his regular customers, including some of the best sushi chefs and their apprentices, have already visited his stall, seen the tuna, and placed their orders. These include the owner of Nakahisa, in Roppongi, which Iida-san considers to be one of the three best sushi restaurants in Tokyo. (The others are in the Ginza district. They all have one thing in common: they are his patrons.)
With a smaller knife, the long quarters of the fish are cut into sections. Iida-san uses the breadth of four fingers to measure these sections before cutting.
"Generally speaking, Japanese man has eight centimeter."
The work area of the classic sushi counter is 26 centimeters deep. Three widths of Iida-san's hand equal 24 centimeters.
"Just right for the counter of 26."
Iida-san's is one of 1,677 stalls at Tsukiji, and his is one of 1,677 licenses to bid at the Tsukiji auctions and to resell what he has bought. Some of the other licensed buyers and resellers serve an international market, filling the orders of master sushi chefs in New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. And so it is that our bluefin tuna from Gloucester, Massachusetts, flown from New York to Tokyo, where it is auctioned, bought, and cut into pieces of three hand widths at Tsukiji, is flown back to New York and delivered—three to nine days after it has left the sea—to a sushi chef there, or even in Boston. The average bluefin can yield more than 10,000 half-ounce pieces of sushi tuna from cuts that, like cuts of beef, vary in kind, quality, and price.
The words of the late movie director Don Siegel come to mind. He once took me to a very fancy and very formal seafood restaurant in Beverly Hills. We ordered some kind of fish that was presented in phyllo pastry, into which the eyes, fins, gill lines, and scales of the fish within had been etched with exacting care. Siegel looked down at it and said, "Imagine going through all that trouble for a dead fish."
Some say that good tuna is like good beef, that aging enhances it, up to a point. As to the enhancement of the price, there is no question. From dock to auction to resale to restaurant, the price of the fish steadily increases. And, as we've seen in the case of Tsunenori Iida's No. 1 tuna of this morning, the quality of the "best" bluefin varies from day to day, and so the quality of the tuna offered by a sushi chef, be it in Tokyo or New York, who serves only the "best" is also bound to be better on one day than another. The greatest of the sushi masters will tell you that the quality of fish served as sashimi should be higher than the quality of the fish served as sushi. But this distinction seems rarely to be evident in practice, and slices from the same piece of fish are usually used for both, whether or not that piece is of the highest quality.
Frozen bluefin, from tuna boats with flash-freezers, are auctioned separately at Tsukiji. The hard, frost-covered tuna are inspected with the aid of tekagi, the hand hooks that, like rubber boots, seem to be an essential accessory among all who work here. And the subtle cutting art of maguro no kaiwa, "the conversation of the tuna," as practiced by Iida-san and others, is replaced by loud electric bandsawing in an outdoor area, where the frozen tuna are cut into icy five-kilo blocks and run under water to speed thawing. The auctions are smaller and less spectacular. A few buyers prefer frozen tuna, saying that flash-freezing captures the freshness of the fish at its peak.
While auction prices for fresh fish are more volatile, there is little difference in the bids for the fresh and for the frozen. Sushi eaters rarely know if what they are eating is "fresh" (having remained so on its long transoceanic journeys to and from market in and out of its coffin) or thawed. The same supplier will often provide different sushi chefs with different grades of fish, depending on what the chef wants, what sort of operation he's running. A piece of tuna sushi that goes for 6 bucks at one restaurant and a piece of tuna that goes for 20 bucks at another restaurant may be from the same supplier but of very different quality. Likewise, a $20 piece of sushi is not necessarily the same at one sushi restaurant as at another, if the sources are different. Some suppliers get better fish than others. As I think it says somewhere in the Bible, "He who knows dead fish shall know me." Beware always of those "spicy" rolls sold at lower-end sushi places. The spices are often used to disguise the taste of fish that is bad or going bad.
High-end retail food markets in major American cities have taken to describing their tuna as "sushi-grade." Judging by the wide range of quality represented by the fish auctioned off at a wide range of prices every day at Tsukiji, one can only ask: What isn't sushi-grade tuna? "The label 'sushi-grade' doesn't ensure that the fish is safe for raw consumption," advises Hiroko Shimbo in her excellent book The Sushi Experience. "Most fishmongers don't sell sushi fish." I would go further and say that the label "sushi-grade" doesn't even ensure that the fish is any good whatsoever, raw or cooked. Be especially wary of tuna that has a fresh, rich crimson color but a dull, gelatinous texture. This is an indication of cat-food-grade tuna, no matter what it's called. It's likely that it has been gassed with carbon monoxide, which binds with hemoglobin to arrest the browning and graying of a fish whose time, even in death, has passed.
Evolving from a way to preserve fish in rice to a way to serve fresh fish on rice, sushi has been around for many centuries.
In the United States, where frozen fish sticks and canned albacore represented the bounty of the sea, the uni god has come only recently to threaten the sovereignty of Mrs. Paul and Charlie the Tuna. Today the Gorton Fisherman works for Nippon Suisan Kaisha of Tokyo.
The rise of sushi in America, and more lately in Europe, came at a time when omega-3 had turned into a shibboleth of the middle class and the so-called Mediterranean diet captured its cholesterol-ridden heart.
My grandfather's sister, my great-aunt Helen, lived well into her 90s. She enjoyed fish, and she never drank coffee, only tea. But her older brother, my great-uncle Giovanni, who lived even longer than she, breakfasted on fried salsiccia and a can of Rheingold beer, and enjoyed raw eggs, which he sucked through a hole he had poked in the shell. He was from a poor region in Southern Italy, and he once revealed to me in few words the real Mediterranean diet: "Eat everything you can get your hands on."
The one thing they had in common, along with every other very old person I've ever known, is that they never, ever ate anything simply because it was supposed to be "good for you," and they never, ever took any of the "nutritional supplements" that are the snake-oil nostrums of our ever growing modern-day medicine show.
Alice Mabel Bacon, who spent much time in Japan, introduced the word "sushi" into the English language in 1893, in her book A Japanese Interior. It is doubtful that this sushi, which she described as "rice sandwiches," was made with fish. We do know that the "sushi" included on the menu of a Japanese dinner in the fall of 1894 at the Club of All Nations in Manhattan was not. Almost 30 years later, in the spring of 1924, "sushi" was served on the lawn of the Vanderlip estate, in Scarborough-on-Hudson, at a fund-raising event for a women's college in Tokyo, but it is almost certain that no raw fish was involved. All these early references to sushi are likely to variations of the simple treats of sweet sushi rice wrapped in seaweed or in little soybean cakes that were so popular among Japanese children.
In 1929, Ladies' Home Journal evinced an awareness of sushi and sashimi in an article introducing American housewives to Japanese cooking: "Any recipes using the delicate and raw tuna," said the magazine, were "purposely omitted." Our first account of raw fish being served in America also dates to 1929. In its coverage of a celebration in honor of the arrival of two Japanese cruisers in Los Angeles Harbor, the Times of that city noted, on August 24, that "sashimi, raw fish," was on the menu "at a dinner last night at the Japanese Cafe." The newspaper account referred to "Little Tokio," explaining that it was "the Japanese quarter of the city on East First street."
It was at 204 East First Street, in the heart of Little Tokyo, that the Kawafuku Cafe was located, having moved there from Weller Street, where it had opened in 1923. Like Miyako, the Japanese restaurant in New York that since 1910 had occupied a former brownstone mansion at 340 West 58th Street, Kawafuku was a swanky sukiyaki restaurant, run by Takichi and Hana Kato. An advertisement published on July 30, 1932, the opening day of the Los Angeles Olympics, described the "beautifully decorated" Kawafuku as "Featuring Japanese and Chinese Foods: 'sukiyaki' our Specialty." The Chinese cook, Chester, who worked for the Katos, is said to have made a mean chashu pork. But it's not for old Chester's pork that Kawafuku is remembered.
Kawafuku may have been the first restaurant in America to serve sushi. "My grandparents never dreamed that Caucasians would ever eat sushi," says Becky Kato Applegate, the granddaughter of Takichi and Hana Kato. But in 1946, Nakajima Tokijiro took over Kawafuku from 63-year-old Takichi Kato, and his dreams were different.
"The Suki-yaki Is Genuine"
Throughout the 30s, New York and Hollywood sophisticates had remained provincial in their taste. In 1930, Rian James, in Dining in New York, wrote of Miyako as a restaurant where "white-coated Japs hover about you" and "there are no American dishes for the timid adventurer. Here, you will eat your beef Suki-yaki." A year later, in Nightlife: Vanity Fair's Intimate Guide to New York After Dark, Charles G. Shaw praised Miyako as "the best Japanese cooking on Manhattan Isle," but the cooking he praised was fairly Westernized: "The shrimp soufflé and steamed fish with rice are mouth-watering delights." It was much the same in 1939, when George Rector, in Dining in New York with Rector, declared that "the suki-yaki is genuine."
On February 19, 1942, Executive Order 9066 was issued in the United States by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Japanese in America were rounded up and put into concentration camps, or "internment camps," as we more politely had it. Miyako had already been hit, shut down by the police on December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed.
When the years of war and internment ended, Little Tokyo was reborn with a strengthened sense of identity. In the summer of 1950, the Los Angeles Times reporter Gene Sherman ventured there during Nisei Week.
"War-inspired incidents are nil now. Slang-slinging Nisei are too concerned with their festival to give them much thought. And I am too concerned with sukiyaki." He went to the Kawafuku Cafe, the restaurant that Nakajima Tokijiro had taken over from Takichi and Hana Kato.
"Just sukiyaki," the round-eyed man told the waitress. As he explained to his readers, "She asked if I would like some sashimi. That's fresh raw fish."
He held out for his sukiyaki, and he got it.
"The idea of eating raw fish may be repellent to Americans, but only until they recall that they do the same with oysters and clams," wrote June Owen in The New York Times of August 18, 1954. She went on to tell of a man named Tom Tamura who sold "fish for sashimi" at his Kinko Fish Market, on Amsterdam Avenue. "His customers include not only those of Japanese background but also Caucasians who have tasted and liked this specialty."
Kabuki opened in downtown New York in early 1961. "Not all of the dishes at the Kabuki will appeal to American palates. Count among these sashimi, or raw fish," wrote Craig Claiborne in the Times. Nippon, with its sushi bar, opened in Midtown Manhattan in 1963, the year that Ronald McDonald entered the world through the McMiracle of parthenogenesis. "New Yorkers seem to take to the raw fish dishes, sashimi and sushi, with almost the same enthusiasm they display for tempura and sukiyaki," wrote Claiborne. But McDonald's Filet-o-Fish sandwich, introduced in 1964, was the real vanguard of fish-eating in America.
By 1967, Miyako, which had reopened on West 56th Street, was looked upon as a place of the past. "New Yorkers may have become spoiled by a wealth of adventurous Japanese restaurants, and at the Miyako the food seems more Westernized than in some of the more recent ventures," wrote Claiborne. Eventually, even Miyako began serving sushi.
Regardless of what Claiborne said, it was Benihana, the restaurant that Rocky Aoki opened on West 56th Street in 1964, that defined the new Japanese food of America into the 70s. Serving steak cooked on hibachis at the center of diners' tables, Benihana was all the rage and soon became a chain that spread through the country, where most people still hadn't yet heard of sushi.
In July 1971, McDonald's came to Japan, opening in the Ginza Mitsukoshi department store, in Tokyo. It was the summer before that first New England tuna to be auctioned at Tsukiji made its transoceanic journey. And it was at this time, the early 70s, that an increasing number of people in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago became increasingly familiar with the increasing number of sushi restaurants in their cities.
These sushi eaters remained somewhat in the dark as to the subtleties of what they were eating. Wasabi was referred to as horseradish by The New York Times in 1954, and it was still referred to as horseradish by the Times in 1963. Used as a food and a medicine in Japan for more than a thousand years, wasabi, like horseradish, is a rootstock of the mustard family, but there is a world of difference between them. Wasabi grows naturally only in Japan, only on the northern slopes of shaded valleys near cold running streams, where it takes two or three years to mature. In preparing it for sushi, the chef or his apprentice finely grinds the root to a paste on a piece of rough sharkskin affixed to a small wooden board. Wasabi loses much of its flavor and pungency within minutes after it's grated, and so its preparation is timely.
Almost all the real wasabi used by sushi chefs today is farmed, and the more distinct and intense taste of wild wasabi, which grows much smaller than its farmed variant, is all but unknown to modern sushi eaters. If one is fortunate enough to encounter the rare sushi chef who prepares his own wasabi, it will almost invariably be farmed wasabi, the best of which comes from the paddies of Amagi, in Shizuoka Prefecture. But these days even fresh farmed wasabi is hardly ever used by sushi chefs. As Hiroko Shimbo says in The Sushi Experience, cheaper sushi restaurants—I would say most sushi restaurants—rely on wasabi powder, which is mixed with water, or wasabi paste from a tube. "These are not really wasabi at all; they are mixtures of ordinary white horseradish, mustard powder, and artificial flavor and color." Or worse. Far removed from those shaded valleys and cold running country streams, one common commercial "wasabi" is concocted of horseradish, lactose, corn oil, sorbitol, salt, water, artificial flavoring, turmeric, xanthan gum, citric acid, FD&C Yellow No. 5, and FD&C Blue No. 1.
If referring to wasabi as horseradish—and even one of the first, and still one of the best, Japanese-authored English-language guides to sushi, The Book of Sushi, brought out by Kodansha, in 1981, does so—is like referring to horseradish as wasabi, referring to the artificially flavored, artificially colored gunk of today as wasabi is even more absurd. Such stuff is a fitting complement to those little pieces of green sawtooth plastic used in presentation in many sushi places. These green plastic things are called baran, the name of a type of actual bamboo leaf on which sushi was often traditionally placed.
The ascent of sushi's popularity in urban America in the years 1972 to 1982 was phenomenal, as was its ascent throughout the rest of the country in the decades that followed. This ascent reached its peak on January 1, 2004, when a place called Tiger Sushi opened at the Mall of America, in Minnesota. Since then, like the ruler of two domains, sushi has reigned as America's new favorite fast food and favorite slow food as well, and its imperium is extending to Europe and beyond.
Why? I'm sure there are social-anthropological theories, all of them bound to be as boring as they are meaningless. The real answer, I think, is simple.
America is addicted to sugar, but it seeks increasingly to veil its addiction. Power Bars. Sounds healthy. Main ingredient: fructose syrup. Almost 25 percent sugar. The guy, Brian Maxwell, who got rich selling these things, selling sugar as nutrition, swore by them and croaked at the age of 51. Eat a Power Bar and nobody gives a glance. Run up a bag of dope and people look at you funny. I don't get it. How about a nice, large Tazo Chai Frappuccino Blended Crème from Starbucks? Sounds healthy—I mean, after all, chai—and classy too: crème? Sugar content: 17 teaspoons.
A killer sugar addiction, a preoccupation with health, no matter how misguided, and pretensions, or delusions, of worldly sophistication. Sushi perfectly satisfies them all.
In a nation that never ate much fresh fish, it's interesting that eel sushi is so very popular. I mean, from fish sticks and Filet-o-Fish sandwiches to conger eels? "Mommy, Mommy, I want eels, I want eels." This can't be understood other than in light of the fact that the sauce, anago no tsume, used in confecting eel sushi is a syrupy reduction made with table sugar, sake, soy sauce, and the sweet wine called mirin, and that during this reduction caramelizing causes the browning sugar to grow in mass through the formation of fructose and glucose. The oldest known menu from Kawafuku, probably from the 50s, lists broiled eel along with sashimi and sushi among its à la carte dishes, at the head of which is still to be found that old standby, sukiyaki.
As for the other types of sushi, they are all made with rice to which both table sugar and sweet rice vinegar have been added. Gari, the pickled ginger served with sushi, is also made with rice vinegar and table sugar. If it's cobalt pink rather than pale rose in color, it has been treated with a chemical bath of dye and extra sweetening agents.
But what care I for health? Sloth and gluttony alone vie within me for dominion, and I've already outlived the Power Bar guy. So let's get down.
The difference between a bad sushi joint and a good sushi joint is: at a good sushi joint the sweetness of the sushi doesn't challenge the taste of the fish. The difference between a good sushi joint and a very good sushi joint is: at a very good sushi joint the sweetness of the sushi doesn't challenge the taste of the fish, and the fish is very good. The difference between a very good sushi joint and a great sushi joint is: at a great sushi joint the sweetness of the sushi doesn't challenge the taste of the fish, the fish is excellent, and, piece after piece—sushi should never be served more than one piece at a time; each piece should come freshly made directly from the chef's hands to you—the meal unfolds in a concert of many varied tastes, some delicate and some strong, all in a sequence of subtle harmony and balance that leaves you exquisitely satisfied, in a way that Mrs. Paul never could.
Some Breakfast
In the end, it is all in the eating, and Tokyo, with Tsukiji at its heart, is surely a place to eat it.
Everyone at Tsukiji seems to know Tom, who has been coming here for more than 30 years, first as a seafood importer, later as a representative of noaa, and Ted, who speaks Japanese and also has been coming here for years, is a familiar figure as well. But on my second morning at the market, when we walk through the aisles and narrow passageways with Hiroyasu Ito, the president of Chuo Gyoru, one of the most powerful of the wholesalers and auction houses, he is more than recognized. Most of those we pass bow to him.
Yesterday, at his office in the Tsukiji compound, I asked him to tell me the name of the best sushi restaurant in Tokyo. He smiled and was silent. It was an awkward matter. After all, he knew many great sushi chefs personally, and he wished to offend no one. So, without directly answering my question, he said that we should meet in the morning and we would eat.
Now we wind through Tsukiji toward the northeastern outskirts of the market. It strikes me that here we are in the biggest fish market in the world and there is not a fishy whiff to be had. I've been told that only bad fish smells, but this is remarkable. When I pass the fish section at my local Food Emporium back home in New York, it stinks. When I pass Nobu on a summer morning, after the garbage has been hauled away, it stinks. Here the only smell is the sweet, smoky scent of the newly shaved flakes of dried bonito at the katsuobushi stand in the outer market.
Hiroyasu Ito leads us to a small, nondescript restaurant on a narrow street with no name. It's barely seven in the morning, and already there's a long line of people waiting to enter. Tom Asakawa tells me it's almost impossible to get into this place. People from all over Japan, from all over the world, come here in search of it. Ito-san looks at the queue and gestures for us to follow him. We turn a corner to another nameless, alley-like street, and come to an open kitchen door. The young girl scrubbing pans outside greets Ito-san with a happy smile. We enter through this back door, and emerge amid bows in a poky restaurant with a counter that seats fewer than a dozen. But somehow there are seats awaiting us. Small glasses and big bottles of Asahi Super Dry beer are set before us. The owner and chef, Shinichi Irino, immediately starts talking to Ito-san about the water's being good in this or that fishing port right now, and this or that fish came from this or that port; and as he talks, he prepares and serves us sushi made with this or that fish from this or that port.
"Southern bluefin. Indian Ocean."
Irino-san buys from 15 different dealers at Tsukiji, including five different tuna dealers.
The maguro toro sushi—the fatty bluefin-belly-meat sushi—is almost synesthetic and, to coin a phrase, melts in the mouth.
Daiwa, the name of this place, means "great harmony." Irino-san directs our eyes to the sign on the wall that bears this name in four-character calligraphy. He tells us proudly that it was painted by Kitanoumi, the youngest sumo wrestler to achieve the top rank of Yokozuna and now the chairman of the Japan Sumo Association.
"Personal friend."
Sardine sushi. Mackerel sushi. Uni sushi. More beer. This is breakfast as she should be et, Jack-san.
I ask Irino-san who is the best sushi chef in New York.
"Keita Sato. Hatsuhana restaurant."
Has Irino-san ever been to New York?
No. But he was invited to Norway last year.
It's explained to me that Keita Sato, the owner of Hatsuhana, is an old friend of his.
Hiroyasu Ito smiles with satisfaction. "This," he says, "is the absolute best way to eat sushi, just sitting at a small counter, talking to the chef, and having piece by piece unfolding in front of you."
"And always a joke."
Tomohiro Asakawa is a man of his word. He hasn't forgotten about me and the sea pineapple. On my last day in Tokyo, he gives me the name of a restaurant that serves sea pineapple. It's a drinking place, he says, a sake place. "They serve mostly whale meat, but they also have sea pineapple." He pauses and smiles. "And other things."
Whaling in Japan dates back to the prehistoric Jomon period. Today the Japanese government allows a number of certain species to be killed by permit every year. Many of them are from Antarctic waters and the seas of the Ogasawara Islands, an archipelago of more than 30 subtropical islands, including Iwo Jima, some one thousand kilometers, or about 540 nautical miles, a day's journey by ship, south of Tokyo. These whales, I'm told, are captured for "research." I recall the label on those packages of whale meat: research whaling.
Kabukicho, ablaze with neon, is Tokyo's red-light district. It's where the pleasure-houses are, and the fugu joints, and the clubs where yakuza gamble with flower cards. It's where, on the fifth floor of an old building on Kabukicho Street, the whale-meat restaurant is to be found. The name of the restaurant is Taruichi, which means something like "No. 1 sake barrel."
My companion, the Japanese translator Eva Yagino, speaks to the chef, Hiroyoshi Gota, who tells her that, among the many sakes sold here, there's a special sake, made by the Miyagi brewer Uragasumi, that's rarely available. The waitress pours us some, letting the cold sake overflow to the ceramic saucer beneath the masu, the sake box, made of the same pale wood, hinoki—a cypress that grows only in Japan—from which the best sushi-bar counters are crafted. A ceramic dish of sea salt is placed on the table, and Eva-san sets me straight: I'm to put a pinch of the salt on a corner of the masu, drink from that corner, raising the masu and ceramic saucer together, replenish the salt in the corner whenever I want, and in the end drink all the spillage in the saucer; then order more sake and do it again. As we sip our salted spillage, Eva-san translates the menu for me.
"Nodo-kuro," she says. "A white fish with a black throat from the Sea of Japan. It is rarely caught."
As she continues, I recall the way Tom Asakawa smiled when he said, " … and other things."
"Anglerfish liver. Ayu-fish guts. Sea-cucumber guts. Oh, and look at all these whale dishes: whale sushi; hari-hari nabe—that's whale meat with mizuna, a sort of Japanese mustard green that looks like a dandelion green; whale bacon; whale skin; whale tongue; whale brain; shinzo (that's whale heart); whale ovary—and, oh, here's your hoya sashi, your raw sea pineapple. Sashi is what the restaurant people call sashimi."
As I ponder my choices, Eva-san tells me about mamushi-zake. It's a sake to which, during fermentation, a mamushi is added. The mamushi, a type of pit viper, is one of the two species of poisonous snakes indigenous to Japan. Introduced live into the fermenting sake, it releases its poison into the brew as it leaves this vale of tears. Unlike the Chinese, the Japanese are not big on snake eating, but there is this sake.
"I need to drink that," I say.
But this is my last night in town, and the Asakusabashi snake store will be closed for the evening. She'll send it to me by air. Good. Back to the menu.
Just my luck: they're out of the whale ovary. I get me a big, juicy, red-meat whale steak. I get some whale heart too. And, of course, the sea pineapple, which comes with a little dipping bowl of su, rice-wine vinegar. I'm living. And what more fitting an end than whale ice cream, made with green-tea powder and whale morsels? Mmm, no?
Sea pineapple, good. Whale heart, bad. The ice cream, I don't remember.
I want to know what kind of whale I've eaten. Eva-san talks to the boss.
"Minke. A sort of small baleen."
I want to know what kind of whale makes for the best grub. Eva-san talks to the boss. He makes a forlorn gesture to a poster on the wall that pictures all the species of whales in the sea, and, forlornly, he expounds awhile.
The great blue whale, the largest animal that has ever lived, is by far the best, he says. But, as it's considered one of the world's most endangered species, it has been unobtainable for more than 35 years. I feel for the guy.
"No black market?"
"Too big to hide."
The Full Abundance
Some may have the temerity to disagree with me, but, for my money, the greatest Japanese restaurant is Sugiyama, in New York. There is no sushi here, no wasabi, but no shortage of raw fish, if you like it straight.
Nao Sugiyama, who is from Okayama, is a master of kaiseki. Of Zen origin, kaiseki is held as the highest form of Japanese cuisine, presenting through a series of courses and interludes the finest tastes of the shun, or season. But, more than that, Sugiyama-san is a master at bringing out—and allowing you to luxuriate in—the complexity that lies in simplicity and the simplicity that lies in complexity.
I've tried for a long time to better describe what Sugiyama-san does with what he carefully selects, on this day or that, in this season or that, from the full abundance of sea, stream, and woods. But whatever the secret is, it more than eludes description (he himself only shrugs and smiles at what he does); it subdues and silences the very desire to describe it as it bears you away.
He arrives at his restaurant at half past nine in the morning, prepares until half past five, then opens the door at six. I last ate there on an evening when lingering winter was giving way to spring. Here's what he fed me:
First, a course of monkfish liver, vinegared baby eel, which seems to have been filleted, and a jelly cake of crab and vegetables. (Later, I find out that the "baby eel," noresore, which I assumed to have been filleted, is actually pre–baby eel—the flat, transparent larvae, whose season is brief and now, of the Japanese conger.) Then slices of raw bluefin tuna, raw bluefin toro, raw hamachi, raw hamachi toro, raw tilefish, steamed octopus, ama-ebi (sweet shrimp; the sweetness is in the meat of the brain), a raw Kumamoto oyster, and a fragrant spray of small, purple shiso flowers. Then a clear soup of seaweed, whitefish cake, bamboo, and asari (a sort of springtime Japanese littleneck). Then grilled black cod from Toyama and crisp-roasted mild green peppers. Then half a lobster (served with a spoon to blend the soft, dark meat of the head into the white tail meat) and shiitake and oyster mushrooms. Then a miso soup with straw mushrooms and seaweed. Then minced grilled eel, tilefish, and bonito steamed in a mixture of botan rice and sticky rice, wrapped in a large, salted houba leaf, served with pickled Japanese radish. Then hoji tea, which Sugiyama-san describes as "sticky" tea. He means it was made from tea twigs, and "sticky" is to be taken as an adjectival form of "stick," which in fact turns out to be the first definition of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary. Then a grapefruit-and-cream thing, invented by Sugiyama-san many years ago, made from hand-squeezed grapefruit juice, powdered sugar, lemon, Chardonnay, and scotch—all of which, magicked into a chilled semi-solid sphere, somehow ends up seeming to be an idealized peeled grapefruit, with no fibrous membranes, no pulp, no pits—served in very cold cream with a sprig of mint.
As to what all this looked like and how it tasted, well, you can't eat metaphors, and if I ever use words such as "succulent," shoot me, but suffice it to say that I remember thinking as I walked into the night: If the Roman emperors can be said to have missed out on anything, it was this.
Unless you've an intense jones for something special, food at the hands of a Japanese master chef should always be taken omakase, entrusting all to him. This is true of sushi, and it is certainly true of kaiseki. But once, when I was sick, I requested that Sugiyama-san prepare me a meal built around a hard-to-find Japanese turtle that he mentioned could cure me of what ailed me. It took him some days to get the turtle, but he did it. Whether it fixed me, I'll never know. By the time he secured the turtle, I was probably about to get better anyway.
Sugiyama-san is one of a handful of chefs in America with a fugu license, allowing him to prepare this poisonous and mildly intoxicating fish. I find it pretty bland, and I never got off on it, but Sugiyama-san does a great imitation of someone overdosing on the stuff and begging for more, as has been known to happen in the old country.
Masa, the New York sushi restaurant of Masayoshi Takayama, is within short walking distance of Sugiyama, and from one to the other, you could eat yourself to death, or new life, in a manner most sublime. If you could afford it, that is. Masa is the most expensive restaurant in the country, if not the world. It is also the best sushi restaurant in the country, if not the world.
It's a beautiful place. The small sushi bar, crafted from a single, solid, $60,000 piece of blond virgin-forest hinoki, is cared for daily: lightly sanded, cleaned, buffed to renew its soft, natural luster by apprentices, who also, like those of Tsunenori Iida at Tsukiji, spend hours each day tending to knives that are kept razor-sharp and brilliantly gleaming. The surface on which Takayama-san uses those knives is an imposing thick block of ginkgo. Hinoki, he says, is a very hard wood, even though it looks quite soft. But the wood of the ginkgo tree—a unique tree, a botanical "living fossil" that constitutes a genus of its own—is soft and perfectly suited for knifework, as it won't dull the blade during the trimming and oblique slicing of piece after piece of raw fish that must be performed with uninterrupted and meticulous precision from the first to the last course of a sushi meal.
Watching Takayama-san at work at his block of ginkgo, or Sugiyama-san at his Yamaken low-density polyethylene (jyushi) manaita—as when watching Tsunenori Iida at his stall in Tsukiji—there is something to be sensed of the ancient belief in the soul, tamashii, of the knife.
As when I was last at Sugiyama, winter is giving way to spring. Behind Takayama-san as he works are big fresh-cut branches of spring-blooming Asian forsythia, their yellow, bell-shaped flowers blossoming bright. The plates, bowls, and cups, everything here right down to the ohashi-oki, the little ceramic chopstick rests, have been made by craftsmen in Japan especially for Takayama-san according to his own exacting designs. Even the spoons are of his design, carved of Ishikawa wood from the seaside north of Kyoto, then finished with the sap of the tree from which they were made. The door through which one enters Masa is made of 2,000-year-old Japanese bogwood.
This is a far cry from Daiwa, the hole-in-the-wall at Tsukiji, which Takayama-san agrees has the best sushi in Tokyo, though he adds that the best sushi restaurant in all Japan is Kameki, in Sendai, in the Northeast.
But you don't eat wallpaper. You eat this: baby firefly squid (hotaru ika) in a sauce of Japanese mustard (karashi) with rape-blossom buds (nanohana). Then chopped raw toro topped with caviar. Then seared bonito (katsuo tataki) with crispy seaweed (ogo), woodland ginger and bamboo (myoga take), wasabi greens, and those little purple shiso flowers. Then steamed asari clams from Chiba in their broth. Then icefish (shirauo)—tiny, almost translucent fish with buggy little black eyeballs which can be had for only a few weeks in early spring—served in sizzling white-sesame oil with Kalamata-olive paste and sprigs of newly budded prickly-ash leaves (kinome). Then a hot pot of cherry trout (sakura masu), whose season also lasts only a few weeks in spring. And then, after the kaiseki overture, the sushi feast begins.
Each piece of sushi is prepared individually and served immediately, as Takayama-san slices the fish, reaches into a cloth-covered barrel of rice, applies fresh-made wasabi paste to the side of the sliced fish that will be pressed to the rice, and, piece after piece, forms perfect sushi with dexterous rapidity in the palm of one hand with the nimble fingers of the other, placing it before you on a stoneware dish. He tells you to eat it with your hand. At humble little Daiwa, in Tsukiji, we had respectfully followed Hiroyasu Ito's manner of eating sushi with chopsticks. Now here, in the most opulent sushi restaurant on earth, the guy is telling me to use my hands. It's really just a matter of preference, but you don't want to piss this guy off while he's feeding you. You're given a small bowl of shoyu, into which only certain sushi should be dipped, and another small bowl of pale pickled ginger to be nibbled between courses.
The toro sushi is first. Then, in succession: striped jack; fluke; sea bream; snapper; squid; ama-ebi (the little shrimp with the sweet brain); cockle; red clam; giant clam; baby scallop; Nantucket scallop (freshly caught by a diver who sells only to Takayama-san and a few others); grilled toro sinew; herring; horse mackerel; uni; octopus; cooked shrimp; sea eel; freshwater eel; shiitake sushi; black-truffle sushi; a seaweed-wrapped roll of chopped toro and green, negi onion; young ume, a sort of Japanese plum, enclosed in a shiso leaf.
"And that's all," says Takayama-san with a smile.
Then there's a slice of Japanese muskmelon and buckwheat tea. (Also shoot me if I use the word "infusion.") And, of course, there's the check. My cohort and I drank two bottles of water, one Hoyo sake, and one glass of Sancerre. Our bill for two, including a 20 percent service charge but not including the additional tip, was $1,102.74.
My meal at Daiwa was free because the owner and chef, Shinichi Irino, wouldn't charge Hiroyasu Ito or anyone with him. Ted Bestor, who was with us that morning, says, "We were undoubtedly being served the top-of-the-line stuff, since we were guests of Mr. Ito, president of Chuo Gyorui, so who knows what it might have cost, but probably no more than ¥6,000 or ¥7,000"—50 or 60 bucks—"per person. I was in Daiwa early this month, and their standard menu price for the 'in-season chef's selection' was around ¥4,500," or about $38. "I also had dinner for four at an excellent and tiny Ginza sushi restaurant, with a celebrity chef. Four of us had a superb dinner for ¥15,000," or about $125, "per person."
The funny thing is, Masa's prices don't seem to be as exorbitantly jacked up as they might first appear. There's no way of knowing what you're paying for a particular piece of sushi, as dinner here is at the fixed price of $400 a person. But next door, at Bar Masa, there's a bar menu, and one of the items on it is toro tartare with caviar, the customary second course of a dinner at Masa, and the price is $68. Toro is costly, and the Sterling Royal caviar Takayama-san uses goes for about $70 an ounce, so what could the profit margin be? This dish alone is nearly a fifth of the cost of a dinner at Masa that includes five other overture dishes and 23 varieties of sushi, among them rare and expensive delicacies such as icefish. (In the past, he's also offered fish such as sayori, needlefish, and hamo, daggertooth conger pike, an eel-like summer-season thing so bony that no one could figure out how to eat it until the people of Kyoto devised a special technique called hone-giri, to which Takayama-san has added variations of his own.)
I first encountered Takayama-san in Beverly Hills, where he had Ginza Sushi-ko, named for the Tokyo restaurant where, after leaving his hometown of Kuroiso, in the mountainous prefecture of Tochigi, north of Tokyo, he served his years of apprenticeship. His own apprentice on the West Coast, Hiro Urasawa, took over the place, renamed it Urasawa, and Takayama-san moved to the East Coast and opened Masa in February 2004, at about the same time Tiger Sushi opened at the Mall of America. Since then, he seems not to have raised the price of a meal all that much. In the end, it's one of those choices we have to make in life: icefish and tuna sinew or that new H.D. TV for the next season of American Idol.
Guess what Takayama-san does when he takes his vacation every August? He goes to the mountains of Japan to fish and hunt for wild wasabi. And he is a fool for hoya, sea pineapple, too. These things say something.
I first ate Nobuyuki Matsuhisa's food years ago on the West Coast as well, when Matsuhisa, also in Beverly Hills, was the only restaurant he had. It was a good place. As for his Nobu in New York, my friend Chiemi Karasawa put it best: "a theme park of a restaurant, sort of a homogenized extraction of the real thing for the masses: a bunch of Caucasians serving things they don't even know how to pronounce."
High Holy Fish
From both Sugiyama-san and Takayama-san, I get intimations that Tsukiji's rule is no longer absolute. They both have suppliers who fly in most of their fish from Tokyo. The relationship between them, chef and supplier, and the process of choosing fish long-distance, involves much established trust and a daily and complicated exchange of faxes and calls. Besides a supplier who provides from Tsukiji, Takayama-san also has a supplier who provides from the smaller fish market in Osaka, for, he says, there are some northern fish, such as icefish and certain eels, that are more readily available in desirable quality and quantities in Osaka than in Tokyo. He told me the names of his suppliers on the condition that I would not reveal them. Sugiyama-san isn't so guarded as to his sources, and he told me his primary supplier is True World Foods, which runs fleets of boats and dozens of distribution centers, and supplies most of the sushi chefs in the United States.
True World, a major presence from Gloucester to Tokyo, is part of the global empire of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the 87-year-old founder of the Unification Church and self-proclaimed "Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord, and True Parent" of all humanity. Representatives of the firm were not forthcoming when I tried to arrange a meeting with True World buyers at the Tsukiji market. Later a representative of True World did tell me that the True World buyer arrives at Tsukiji every morning at two o'clock. "We purchase in the neighborhood of 30,000 pounds of fresh fish monthly from Tsukiji and other Japanese fish markets, of which over 6,000 pounds makes its way to customers in the Greater New York area."
Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord. Hell, no big deal. Maybe Charlie the Tuna was a Satanist, or a Scientologist even. I long ago lost interest in religion and politics except in their most extreme and entertaining forms. But I will say this: His High Holiness, or whatever the fuck he is, sure deals some damned good fish.
In partnership with Kyokuyo, which, like Hiroyasu Ito's Chuo Gyorui, is one of the biggest of the wholesalers and auction houses at Tsukiji, True World has recently introduced Polar Seas Frozen Sushi, which may become what frozen fish sticks and frozen fish cakes were in pre-sushi America.
Like Masa's primary supplier, True World now obtains many fish directly from their sources. At both Sugiyama and Masa on the nights I last visited them, the uni was from California and had been delivered directly from there. The shared feeling seems to be that if a box of 15 Maine or California uni are of high-enough quality and can be had for 15 bucks, why should one pay 65 for a similar small box of Hokkaido uni that comes through Tsukiji? And at Masa, in addition to the Nantucket scallops procured by a private diver, the bluefin tuna, which was from Spain, had been purchased at the Fulton Fish Market by one of Takayama-san's apprentices.
Now that the Japanese economy isn't what it was, Takayama-san says, more of the best tuna can be found locally, where it can fetch almost as good, or as good, a price as if it were sold to the Tsukiji buyers. Both men try simply to get the best fish they can, and the best fish is no longer to be found only at Tsukiji.
I tell Ted Bestor about encountering a Fulton Fish Market bluefin at Masa, and of my puzzlement as to how, on any particular day, one could figure out if the tuna is better at Tsukiji or here.
"I am not surprised that he gets Spanish tuna directly from Fulton rather than from Tokyo," Ted tells me. "Everyone at Tsukiji says Japanese buyers are increasingly being outbought by buyers from other countries. China, Taiwan, the U.S.—all with strong economies and a newly vigorous demand for the finest seafood, for sushi and for other cuisines, create stronger markets for the best fish in places other than Japan.
"The long-distance calculus of determining whether the fish are better at Tsukiji or at Fulton would be fascinating to figure out. I would guess that it involves a fair amount of hunchwork but also very close communications among people who have worked together for a very long time."
Thus, what was written so recently, by Sasha Issenberg, in The Sushi Economy—that a fish market such as Rungis, south of Paris, "in effect serves as a destination for Tsukiji's Mediterranean leftovers (and for tuna from other oceans that don't meet Japanese standards)"—is no longer necessarily so. In fact, there is now a very good sushi restaurant in Paris, Isami, on the Quai d'Orléans, on Île Saint-Louis, and the chef, Katsuo Nakamura, who is from Hokkaido, gets almost all his stuff from the Rungis market. The French—who often still associate Japanese food strictly with older restaurants such as Taka, in Montmartre—are warned when calling to make a reservation at Isami that only raw fish is served. (This isn't exactly true. There is carrelet grillé, grilled plaice, a European flatfish that has both eyes on the right side of its head.)
There are relocation plans under way for Tsukiji, and the market is scheduled to move, in 2012, to an even bigger site, in the Toyosu district, an industrial area on the other side of Tokyo Bay
.
The bay is very polluted. The local fishing industry that once busied its wharves died off after the war. One small live-fish boat remains docked at Tsukiji, near where the Sumida River empties into the bay. It is a relic that goes nowhere.
Tsunenori Iida wipes the blood from the long knife. His family has been here at Tsukiji since the beginning. They were here, doing what they did, doing what he does, long before this market was here, back in the final days of the shoguns, in the old Nihonbashi market, when Tokyo was Edo. And he has been here all his life. What does he think of this move to come?
"I don't think there will be a big difference," he says. He returns his attention to the knife. "I don't like to think."
The fate of the market unsettles many at Tsukiji. Meanwhile, in the candyland of the West, where few people have ever heard of Tsukiji, what once was repulsive—the raw flesh of that laid-open tuna, the raw flesh of all that swims and slithers at Tsukiji—is now craved, more widely and more ravenously each day.
After returning from Japan, I see that one of the joints in my neighborhood has posted a new menu in an attempt to revive its dying business. Now, besides the cheeseburger deluxe, there is yellowtail pastrami and bigeye-tuna mignon with potato "gnocci" and red-wine, mushroom, and foie-gras broth. Around the corner from that place is a sushi place called Tokyo Bay, whose name now evokes dioxins. Contaminated-sediment sushi. Nearby are Ninja New York, a gimmicky and overpriced place where, as The New York Times put it, "servers, in black costumes, play the parts of ninjas and perform magic, something the kitchen doesn't do," and Kuki Sushi, describing itself as "Korean-Japanese cuisine" and offering take-out tuna, and of course eel, sushi at a buck seventy-five a piece. The local natural-food dump sells vegetarian sushi. The two local supermarkets sell prepared, refrigerated sushi. The supermarkets are close to yet another sushi place. From my windows I can see three more sushi restaurants.
From "the sukiyaki is genuine" and not for "the timid adventurer" to this. I'm waiting for the uni ice cream to hit those supermarket freezers.
My snake sake arrived, as Eva-san promised it would. It's right here, the dead viper coiled with its fanged mouth open at the bottom of the jar, looking as if it's trying to tell me something from beyond. He sure doesn't seem to be at peace, if you get my drift. What can I say? I don't know. I will drink responsibly.
And yet, I can't help but feel a pinch of shame in the left side of my ribcage as Tosches describes the art of real sushi and the monastic ideals of perfection that surrounds it. Strange as it sounds, I'm truly jealous of the few men lucky enough to spend an entire life searching for and delicately slicing the world's best tuna. The type of insanity that only an estranged Mormon can truly appreciate.
If you don't have the time to read the whole thing, the money shot is about three quarters of the way through the article, when Tosches describes a single a meal from Masa in New York. Come hell or high water, I swear that I'm going to eat that meal. $500 a pop sounds like a bargain. A boy can dream right?
If You Knew Sushi
In search of the ultimate sushi experience, the author plunges into the frenzy of the world's biggest seafood market—Tokyo's Tsukiji, where a bluefin tuna can fetch more than $170,000 at auction—and discovers the artistry between ocean and plate, as well as some fishy surprises.
by Nick Tosches
June 2007
www.vanityfair.com
It looks like a samurai sword, and it's almost as long as he is tall. His hands are on the hilt. He raises and steadies the blade.
Two apprentices help to guide it. Twelve years ago, when it was new, this knife was much longer, but the apprentices' daily hours of tending to it, of sharpening and polishing it, have reduced it greatly.
It was made by the house of Masahisa, sword-makers for centuries to the samurai of the Minamoto, the founders of the first shogunate. In the 1870s, when the power of the shoguns was broken and the swords of the samurai were outlawed, Masahisa began making these things, longer and more deadly than the samurai swords of old.
The little guy with the big knife is Tsunenori Iida. He speaks not as an individual but as an emanation, the present voice, of the generations whose blood flows in him and who held the long knife in lifetimes before him, just as he speaks of Masahisa as if he were the same Masahisa who wrought the first samurai sword, in the days of dark mist. Thus it is that he tells me he's been here since 1861, during the Tokugawa shogunate, when this city, Tokyo, was still called Edo.
Iida-san is the master of the house of Hicho, one of the oldest and most venerable of the nakaoroshi gyosha, intermediate wholesalers of tuna, or tuna middlemen, if you will.
The tuna that lies before Iida-san on its belly was swimming fast and heavy after mackerel a few days ago under cold North Atlantic waves. In an hour or so, its flesh will be dispatched in parcels to the various sushi chefs who have chosen to buy it. Iida-san is about to make the first of the expert cuts that will quarter the 300-pound tuna lengthwise.
His long knife, with the mark of the maker Masahisa engraved in the shank of the blade, connects not only the past to the present but also the deep blue sea to the sushi counter.
Everything around him seems to turn still for a breath as he draws the blade toward him and lays open the tuna with surgical precision. And everything around him is a lot, for we are in the frantic heart of a madness unto itself: the wild, engulfing, blood-drenched madness of Tsukiji.
Until the summer of 1972, bluefin tuna was basically worthless to American fishermen. Nobody ever ate it, and its sole commercial use was as an ingredient in canned cat food. The only tuna that people ate, the white stuff, also in cans, was processed from smaller, albacore tuna, and even that probably would not have gotten into the American diet if a California cannery hadn't run out of sardines and begun selling it in 1903.
Theodore C. Bestor is the author of Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World, the standard work on the subject. He, the chair of the Anthropology Department of Harvard, and I, the chair of nothing, spent some time together in Tokyo. It was Ted who taught me how to correctly pronounce the name of this place: "tskee-gee." (In her new book, The Sushi Economy, Sasha Issenberg says it's "pronounced roughly like 'squeegee,'" but it's not. Her book, however, is an engaging one.)
"I grew up in central Illinois," Ted told me, "and as a kid I don't remember ever eating fresh fish. I'm not sure I ever even saw one. As far as I knew, fish came frozen, already breaded and cut into oblongs for frying. And tuna, of course, was something that appeared only in cans like hockey pucks and ended up in sandwiches. I had absolutely no idea of what a tuna looked like, its size or anything else."
Tuna is the main event at Tsukiji, but everything from the sea—fresh fish, live fish, shrimp—is auctioned and sold here. At five in the morning, preceding the tuna auction, in another hall, there's the sea-urchin-roe auction. The most prized uni come from Hokkaido and its islands, and it's said that if you want to taste the best, freshest uni you must go there and eat it straight from the sea. But much of the uni laid out here in little boxes, often repackaged in Hokkaido, comes from California or Maine. Only in July, when sea urchins from the United States aren't available, are these boxes of uni not present. Color means more than size, and men roam the hall before the auction, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee from paper cups, searching for uni of the most vibrant orange-golden hues. The northern-Japanese uni can fetch about ¥7,000, or about $60, for a little, 100-gram box, while the Maine uni go for much less, from a low of about ¥800 to a high of about ¥1,500, or between $6 and $13. Being from Newark, I wonder if they ever douse these things with dye.
This place, the all of it—formally the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Central Wholesale Market, a name by which few know it—is, as Ted Bestor puts it, the "fishmonger for the seven seas." Its history reaches back 400 years, to the Nihonbashi fish market, which was located not far from the present site of Tsukiji, in the Chuo Ward. On September 1, 1923, Tokyo was devastated by the Great Kanto Earthquake, which killed more than 140,000 people. Nihonbashi was gone, and a new market came into being in the town of Tsukiji, within Tokyo. Tsunenori Iida, whose great-grandfather had a fish-selling stall at the old market, is one of only four men whose family businesses began at Nihonbashi and are still in operation at Tsukiji today.
It's hard to say how much of what is sold at Tsukiji is exported to high-class sushi chefs abroad.
"My guess, and it is a guess," says Ted Bestor, "would be that the total amounts are probably on the order of a thousand or two kilograms worldwide each day. This is minuscule by comparison with the roughly two million kilograms of seafood Tsukiji handles every day."
Two million kilos is about four and a half million pounds, more than 2,000 tons. The Fulton Fish Market, in New York City, the second-largest fish market in the world, moves only 115 tons a year, an average of less than half a ton each working day.
Tsukiji occupies about 22½ hectares on the Sumida River—about 55½ acres, or well over two million square feet: bigger than 40 football fields. Near the Kaiko Bridge entrance, tucked away in relative serenity, an altar bell is rung by rope at the Namiyoke Jinja, a small Shinto shrine whose name can be translated as the Shrine to Protect from Waves. Outside the shrine are stone monuments honoring the seafood that passes through Tsukiji: a big black sculpted fish, a big egg-like roe. Marketmen leave offerings of sake at these deific figures. And for a few yen a miniature scroll of oracular hoodoo can be had. It was thus, after I had genuflected before the uni god, that it was revealed to me that the last dangerous year that a man passes through in life is his 62nd, while a woman is free of danger after 38.
At the main gate, not far from the shrine but far from serenity, a sign warns entrants to please pay attention to the traffic and walk carefully because the market is crowded with trucks and special vehicles and the floor in the market is very slippery.
Big trucks, little trucks, forklifts. And, everywhere, these things called turret trucks: high-lift vehicles designed to negotiate narrow passages and aisles. Old, diesel-fueled turrets; new, battery-powered turrets: every one of them driven by a single standing man who seems invariably to have both hands occupied with lighting up a smoke rather than with steering as he careens round and among the other vehicles that lurch and speed every which way, a surprise at every turn, over the bloody cobblestones amid the pedestrian traffic of the rest of the 60,000 or so people who work at Tsukiji. While no-hands driving seems to be purely optional, smoking at times does seem to be obligatory, and smokers outnumber by far the many no-smoking signs that are posted everywhere. Only the lowly Chinese stevedores who push or draw carts are deprived of the option of no-hands driving, and they squint through the smoke of teeth-clenched cigarettes as they trudge.
Lethal Delicacy
Wandering through Tsukiji in the good company of Ted Bestor and Tomohiro Asakawa, the senior commercial specialist of the Fisheries Service of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (noaa) at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, I become aware that the full array of the Lord's fishy chillun on sale here is beyond knowing.
There are shrimp from everywhere and of every kind, live and sprightly, in open plastic sacks in Styrofoam boxes with bubbling aeration tubes: red Japanese shrimp, sweet Japanese shrimp (ama-ebi), striped Asian kuruma shrimp, along with Alaskan shrimp and Maine shrimp on ice, and frozen shrimp of every size and sort. Live lobsters in boxes of wood shavings; abalone; fresh and frozen marlin, fresh and frozen swordfish, from Japanese waters or caught off Cape Town or Iran. The swordfish, Tom tells me, is not too popular here for sushi. Most of it goes to mountain resorts that serve it as sashimi to tourists.
There are tanks of live fugu swimming madly about. These are the costly blowfish with neurotoxic poison in their genital areas, a sometimes lethal delicacy which a sushi chef needs a special license to prepare and serve. Tetrodotoxin, the poison in fugu, can also produce a sense of euphoria when ingested in less than lethal amounts. The best fugu is from the waters of Kyushu, in the South.
In other tanks, live sea bass (suzuki), live sea bream (tai), and live flounder (hirame). There are flying fish (tobiuo), Pacific mackerel (saba), Spanish mackerel (sawara), and horse mackerel (aji).
From a profile of "the Controller in Charge of Horse Mackerel" in the corporate literature of Chuo Gyorui, one of the largest wholesalers here: "When Mitsuo Owada joined Chuo Gyorui in 1974, he became charmed by horse mackerel Owada used to eat several horse mackerel almost every day.… Both shippers and buyers … say, 'Depend on this man for horse mackerel traded at Tsukiji.'" The honored controller moves about 25 tons of horse mackerel through the market every day.
There are sardines and there are salmon, fresh from Norway and Japan. The salmon is not to be eaten raw, Tom explains, as its movement between freshwater and salt water renders it the host to many parasites. I ask him why I see no shark for sale. Shark, he says, can be eaten raw when fresh from the hook, but its muscle tissue is loaded with urea, which breaks down fast after death, releasing levels of ammonia that stink and can be toxic.
Eels: tanks, barrels, bushels, and bins of eels of all the shapes, colors, and sizes of slitheration, from the prized conger eel (anago) of the seas to the freshwater eel (unagi) of the rivers and lakes. All manner of squid—baby squid, big squid—and all manner of crabs—baby crabs, giant crabs; scallops and oysters and clams; periwinkles, cockles, and—what?—barnacles, yes, even barnacles, going for ¥1,600, or about 14 bucks, a kilo. I'd always thought these black footstalks were only an ugliness to be scraped from the hulls of old wooden ships.
"Broth," says Tom. "Some people make broth with them." He smiles, shakes his head. He apparently is not one of those people.
Giant oysters from Tsuruga Bay, with sea steaks of meat inside them; tairagi-gai, the enormous green mussels from the Aichi waters. Bizarre white fish laced with black, Paraplagusia japonica, known colloquially as "black-tongues." Sunfish intestines—chitlins of the sea—priced at ¥1,000, or about $8.50, a kilo; grotesque scorpion fish; monkfish; freshwater turtles, which the Japanese much prefer to the saltwater kind. Amid sizzle and smoke, a guy is selling grilled tuna cheeks. From his tuna stall, Tsunenori Iida frowns on him. He says that the cheek of the tuna is eaten by poor young workers. It's their subsistence and it's not right to make money from tuna cheeks. Actually, he says, the head and tail of the tuna should be used for fertilizer.
Sheets of kombu (kelp) covered with herring roe; big white sacs of octopus roe. Among a biochromatic wealth of mysterious mollusks and other sea invertebrates of unknown nature, I see the weirdest creature I've ever seen. Now, that's a fucking organism. Tom Asakawa looks at it awhile, too.
"Sea pineapple," he says. "Attaches to rocks in the ocean. Tastes something like iodine. Sendai people like it."
It looks nothing like a pineapple. It looks like something that could exist only in a purely hallucinatory eco-system. It looks like, I don't know, maybe an otherworldly marital aid of inscrutable purpose for the brides of Satan.
"I need to eat that," I say.
"I'll see what I can do," Tom says.
And there, near the seaweed stalls, in those orange packages—yes, that's what the label says in Japanese: research whaling. And that's what it is: whale meat.
Twenty-four people have been to the moon. Only two have been to the deepest trench in the sea, and that was more than 45 years ago. They saw strange fish down there, and I'm sure that if those strange, abyssal fish could be brought to the surface they'd be here, at Tsukiji.
But as I said, tuna will always be the main event. The bluefin tuna, which can grow to more than 1,500 pounds and almost 12 feet in length, is a migratory fish that can be found in many parts of the world. According to Tsunenori Iida, the source of the best and most costly bluefin changes from season to season. In the winter, the most prized tuna is from the waters of northern Japan, near Oma and Hokkaido. But in the summer it is from the northeastern waters of the United States. This wasn't known in Japan until the summer of 1972, when the first such tuna was successfully brought fresh by air to Tokyo for sale at Tsukiji. (An account of the events leading up to that first successful tuna flight can be found in Sasha Issenberg's book.) Since then, fishers off the New England coast have seen the value of what used to be cat food rise to tens of thousands of dollars for a single fish. That's a lot of Puss 'n Boots.
And here, right here, let's stop trying to make sense, because very little of what is about to unfold harbors much sense.
A commercial trawler unloads its bluefin at a dock in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Awaiting the bluefin are agents of one or more of the five big fish wholesalers from Tsukiji, who set about examining the tuna.
"I tell you, Nicky, these Japanese guys, they take a little, thin slice from the tail, hold it to the light, look at it for a minute, then make an offer. God knows what they see."
This is what a Sicilian fish seller in New York once told me, describing a scene that occurs not only in Gloucester but also in ports throughout the world.
What the Japanese buying agent determines by his quick and practiced analysis of that sliver of tail is an indication of the tuna's inner color, its oil content, and the presence, if any, of parasitic disease. A smooth-grained and marbled tail is a prime indication of quality. The richness of the tuna's lipid content, its fat, can be gauged by how slippery the slice of tail feels between the fingers. Pockmarks reveal parasites. It's a complex diagnostic method that is mastered only with years of practice. The overall form and color of the tuna are also quickly assessed at the same time. The ideal of these qualities, inner and outer—the word for this ideal is kata—is also a bit of a mystery to outsiders.
If a tuna is deemed worthy, negotiations begin immediately. The buyer sees to it that the fish is properly gutted, packed with coolant, wrapped or sacked in polyethylene, and placed in an insulated box known as a "tuna coffin." In the case of a Gloucester catch, the tuna coffin is transported to John F. Kennedy International Airport, in New York, and secured in the refrigerated hold of the next flight to Narita International Airport, where it is unloaded and trucked to the Tsukiji market, in central Tokyo, a few days after having left the sea.
The five big fish wholesalers at Tsukiji are also the five big auction houses at Tsukiji. In the dark of early morning, their tuna are graded and laid out in long rows on aluminum pallets in pools of blood in the big tuna-auction hall, in a quay of the main building. These tuna are from everywhere. Some were caught off the Australian coast, others were farmed in Mexico. Every one of them has the number of its grading painted on it in red. The tuna that bears the number 1 this morning is from Boston and weighs 150 kilos. No. 2 is from Spain. No. 3 is from the seaport of Sakai, south of Osaka.
Prospective bidders and their bidding agents roam the ranks of the dead fish, hunkering down here and there to peer intently into belly cavities with flashlights, and take notes.
The fish are auctioned in a squall of finger signals and utterances that are a language unto themselves. Assistants to the auctioneer execute invoices with astounding rapidity as the auctioneer's bellowing voice moves the bidding with speed from one fish to another. Bids are in yen per kilogram. These auctions are closed to the public. Tom Asakawa has hung a special permit around my neck. As we walk among the rows of tuna, Tom tells me that he has lived in Tokyo almost all his life and that, 30 or 35 years ago, long before he came to the U.S. Embassy, he worked here as a seafood importer. From the agents on the docks to the graders to the guys poking around in body cavities with flashlights, the challenge is the same: to evaluate through clues the inside of a fish that you can't simply cut open, because you don't yet own it.
Bluefin Madness
Occasionally tuna mania overtakes an auction. Hiroyasu Ito, the president of Chuo Gyorui, the biggest of the wholesalers and auction houses in terms of sales volume, tells me of a January morning in 1999 when an Oma tuna came to auction through his firm. It appeared to be the perfect tuna, a vision of true kata.
Ito-san remembers that the auction started modestly at ¥9,000, or about 75 bucks, per kilo. "And then ¥10,000, ¥20,000, ¥30,000, and ¥40,000. And then three men wanted that tuna very badly." The bidding among them escalated furiously. "At ¥50,000 per kilo, one of them gave up." The remaining two continued to compete. "Ninety thousand, and then ¥100,000 was the last."
The tuna weighed 200 kilos. At ¥100,000 per kilo, the possessed bidder had paid ¥20 million—the equivalent of more than $170,000—for a fish whose parceled meat could never recoup that amount.
"Big loss, big loss."
Tsunenori Iida remembers that unfortunate winner very well. He was a very wealthy man who was driven to have the most expensive tuna. He went bankrupt, Iida-san says, is out of the business, and is seen no more.
In December of 2005, Ito-san's company auctioned off a 285-kilo tuna from Oma for ¥39,000 per kilo: a total of ¥11,115,000, or about $95,000—the company's second-highest auction price.
As soon as a tuna is sold at auction, it is hauled off to the buyer's stall by cart. This morning the No. 1 tuna, the 150-kilo tuna from Boston, has been won by Iida-san, who paid ¥5,700 per kilo. Given the tuna's weight of 150 kilos, this comes to ¥855,000, or a bit over $7,250, a little less than $23 a pound.
A tuna's quality can't truly be judged until it is laid open with the long knife—that is, until after it has been bought. Iida-san isn't so impressed with this No. 1 tuna his man has brought him. He says that its quality isn't worth its price. Nonetheless, many of his regular customers, including some of the best sushi chefs and their apprentices, have already visited his stall, seen the tuna, and placed their orders. These include the owner of Nakahisa, in Roppongi, which Iida-san considers to be one of the three best sushi restaurants in Tokyo. (The others are in the Ginza district. They all have one thing in common: they are his patrons.)
With a smaller knife, the long quarters of the fish are cut into sections. Iida-san uses the breadth of four fingers to measure these sections before cutting.
"Generally speaking, Japanese man has eight centimeter."
The work area of the classic sushi counter is 26 centimeters deep. Three widths of Iida-san's hand equal 24 centimeters.
"Just right for the counter of 26."
Iida-san's is one of 1,677 stalls at Tsukiji, and his is one of 1,677 licenses to bid at the Tsukiji auctions and to resell what he has bought. Some of the other licensed buyers and resellers serve an international market, filling the orders of master sushi chefs in New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. And so it is that our bluefin tuna from Gloucester, Massachusetts, flown from New York to Tokyo, where it is auctioned, bought, and cut into pieces of three hand widths at Tsukiji, is flown back to New York and delivered—three to nine days after it has left the sea—to a sushi chef there, or even in Boston. The average bluefin can yield more than 10,000 half-ounce pieces of sushi tuna from cuts that, like cuts of beef, vary in kind, quality, and price.
The words of the late movie director Don Siegel come to mind. He once took me to a very fancy and very formal seafood restaurant in Beverly Hills. We ordered some kind of fish that was presented in phyllo pastry, into which the eyes, fins, gill lines, and scales of the fish within had been etched with exacting care. Siegel looked down at it and said, "Imagine going through all that trouble for a dead fish."
Some say that good tuna is like good beef, that aging enhances it, up to a point. As to the enhancement of the price, there is no question. From dock to auction to resale to restaurant, the price of the fish steadily increases. And, as we've seen in the case of Tsunenori Iida's No. 1 tuna of this morning, the quality of the "best" bluefin varies from day to day, and so the quality of the tuna offered by a sushi chef, be it in Tokyo or New York, who serves only the "best" is also bound to be better on one day than another. The greatest of the sushi masters will tell you that the quality of fish served as sashimi should be higher than the quality of the fish served as sushi. But this distinction seems rarely to be evident in practice, and slices from the same piece of fish are usually used for both, whether or not that piece is of the highest quality.
Frozen bluefin, from tuna boats with flash-freezers, are auctioned separately at Tsukiji. The hard, frost-covered tuna are inspected with the aid of tekagi, the hand hooks that, like rubber boots, seem to be an essential accessory among all who work here. And the subtle cutting art of maguro no kaiwa, "the conversation of the tuna," as practiced by Iida-san and others, is replaced by loud electric bandsawing in an outdoor area, where the frozen tuna are cut into icy five-kilo blocks and run under water to speed thawing. The auctions are smaller and less spectacular. A few buyers prefer frozen tuna, saying that flash-freezing captures the freshness of the fish at its peak.
While auction prices for fresh fish are more volatile, there is little difference in the bids for the fresh and for the frozen. Sushi eaters rarely know if what they are eating is "fresh" (having remained so on its long transoceanic journeys to and from market in and out of its coffin) or thawed. The same supplier will often provide different sushi chefs with different grades of fish, depending on what the chef wants, what sort of operation he's running. A piece of tuna sushi that goes for 6 bucks at one restaurant and a piece of tuna that goes for 20 bucks at another restaurant may be from the same supplier but of very different quality. Likewise, a $20 piece of sushi is not necessarily the same at one sushi restaurant as at another, if the sources are different. Some suppliers get better fish than others. As I think it says somewhere in the Bible, "He who knows dead fish shall know me." Beware always of those "spicy" rolls sold at lower-end sushi places. The spices are often used to disguise the taste of fish that is bad or going bad.
High-end retail food markets in major American cities have taken to describing their tuna as "sushi-grade." Judging by the wide range of quality represented by the fish auctioned off at a wide range of prices every day at Tsukiji, one can only ask: What isn't sushi-grade tuna? "The label 'sushi-grade' doesn't ensure that the fish is safe for raw consumption," advises Hiroko Shimbo in her excellent book The Sushi Experience. "Most fishmongers don't sell sushi fish." I would go further and say that the label "sushi-grade" doesn't even ensure that the fish is any good whatsoever, raw or cooked. Be especially wary of tuna that has a fresh, rich crimson color but a dull, gelatinous texture. This is an indication of cat-food-grade tuna, no matter what it's called. It's likely that it has been gassed with carbon monoxide, which binds with hemoglobin to arrest the browning and graying of a fish whose time, even in death, has passed.
Evolving from a way to preserve fish in rice to a way to serve fresh fish on rice, sushi has been around for many centuries.
In the United States, where frozen fish sticks and canned albacore represented the bounty of the sea, the uni god has come only recently to threaten the sovereignty of Mrs. Paul and Charlie the Tuna. Today the Gorton Fisherman works for Nippon Suisan Kaisha of Tokyo.
The rise of sushi in America, and more lately in Europe, came at a time when omega-3 had turned into a shibboleth of the middle class and the so-called Mediterranean diet captured its cholesterol-ridden heart.
My grandfather's sister, my great-aunt Helen, lived well into her 90s. She enjoyed fish, and she never drank coffee, only tea. But her older brother, my great-uncle Giovanni, who lived even longer than she, breakfasted on fried salsiccia and a can of Rheingold beer, and enjoyed raw eggs, which he sucked through a hole he had poked in the shell. He was from a poor region in Southern Italy, and he once revealed to me in few words the real Mediterranean diet: "Eat everything you can get your hands on."
The one thing they had in common, along with every other very old person I've ever known, is that they never, ever ate anything simply because it was supposed to be "good for you," and they never, ever took any of the "nutritional supplements" that are the snake-oil nostrums of our ever growing modern-day medicine show.
Alice Mabel Bacon, who spent much time in Japan, introduced the word "sushi" into the English language in 1893, in her book A Japanese Interior. It is doubtful that this sushi, which she described as "rice sandwiches," was made with fish. We do know that the "sushi" included on the menu of a Japanese dinner in the fall of 1894 at the Club of All Nations in Manhattan was not. Almost 30 years later, in the spring of 1924, "sushi" was served on the lawn of the Vanderlip estate, in Scarborough-on-Hudson, at a fund-raising event for a women's college in Tokyo, but it is almost certain that no raw fish was involved. All these early references to sushi are likely to variations of the simple treats of sweet sushi rice wrapped in seaweed or in little soybean cakes that were so popular among Japanese children.
In 1929, Ladies' Home Journal evinced an awareness of sushi and sashimi in an article introducing American housewives to Japanese cooking: "Any recipes using the delicate and raw tuna," said the magazine, were "purposely omitted." Our first account of raw fish being served in America also dates to 1929. In its coverage of a celebration in honor of the arrival of two Japanese cruisers in Los Angeles Harbor, the Times of that city noted, on August 24, that "sashimi, raw fish," was on the menu "at a dinner last night at the Japanese Cafe." The newspaper account referred to "Little Tokio," explaining that it was "the Japanese quarter of the city on East First street."
It was at 204 East First Street, in the heart of Little Tokyo, that the Kawafuku Cafe was located, having moved there from Weller Street, where it had opened in 1923. Like Miyako, the Japanese restaurant in New York that since 1910 had occupied a former brownstone mansion at 340 West 58th Street, Kawafuku was a swanky sukiyaki restaurant, run by Takichi and Hana Kato. An advertisement published on July 30, 1932, the opening day of the Los Angeles Olympics, described the "beautifully decorated" Kawafuku as "Featuring Japanese and Chinese Foods: 'sukiyaki' our Specialty." The Chinese cook, Chester, who worked for the Katos, is said to have made a mean chashu pork. But it's not for old Chester's pork that Kawafuku is remembered.
Kawafuku may have been the first restaurant in America to serve sushi. "My grandparents never dreamed that Caucasians would ever eat sushi," says Becky Kato Applegate, the granddaughter of Takichi and Hana Kato. But in 1946, Nakajima Tokijiro took over Kawafuku from 63-year-old Takichi Kato, and his dreams were different.
"The Suki-yaki Is Genuine"
Throughout the 30s, New York and Hollywood sophisticates had remained provincial in their taste. In 1930, Rian James, in Dining in New York, wrote of Miyako as a restaurant where "white-coated Japs hover about you" and "there are no American dishes for the timid adventurer. Here, you will eat your beef Suki-yaki." A year later, in Nightlife: Vanity Fair's Intimate Guide to New York After Dark, Charles G. Shaw praised Miyako as "the best Japanese cooking on Manhattan Isle," but the cooking he praised was fairly Westernized: "The shrimp soufflé and steamed fish with rice are mouth-watering delights." It was much the same in 1939, when George Rector, in Dining in New York with Rector, declared that "the suki-yaki is genuine."
On February 19, 1942, Executive Order 9066 was issued in the United States by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Japanese in America were rounded up and put into concentration camps, or "internment camps," as we more politely had it. Miyako had already been hit, shut down by the police on December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed.
When the years of war and internment ended, Little Tokyo was reborn with a strengthened sense of identity. In the summer of 1950, the Los Angeles Times reporter Gene Sherman ventured there during Nisei Week.
"War-inspired incidents are nil now. Slang-slinging Nisei are too concerned with their festival to give them much thought. And I am too concerned with sukiyaki." He went to the Kawafuku Cafe, the restaurant that Nakajima Tokijiro had taken over from Takichi and Hana Kato.
"Just sukiyaki," the round-eyed man told the waitress. As he explained to his readers, "She asked if I would like some sashimi. That's fresh raw fish."
He held out for his sukiyaki, and he got it.
"The idea of eating raw fish may be repellent to Americans, but only until they recall that they do the same with oysters and clams," wrote June Owen in The New York Times of August 18, 1954. She went on to tell of a man named Tom Tamura who sold "fish for sashimi" at his Kinko Fish Market, on Amsterdam Avenue. "His customers include not only those of Japanese background but also Caucasians who have tasted and liked this specialty."
Kabuki opened in downtown New York in early 1961. "Not all of the dishes at the Kabuki will appeal to American palates. Count among these sashimi, or raw fish," wrote Craig Claiborne in the Times. Nippon, with its sushi bar, opened in Midtown Manhattan in 1963, the year that Ronald McDonald entered the world through the McMiracle of parthenogenesis. "New Yorkers seem to take to the raw fish dishes, sashimi and sushi, with almost the same enthusiasm they display for tempura and sukiyaki," wrote Claiborne. But McDonald's Filet-o-Fish sandwich, introduced in 1964, was the real vanguard of fish-eating in America.
By 1967, Miyako, which had reopened on West 56th Street, was looked upon as a place of the past. "New Yorkers may have become spoiled by a wealth of adventurous Japanese restaurants, and at the Miyako the food seems more Westernized than in some of the more recent ventures," wrote Claiborne. Eventually, even Miyako began serving sushi.
Regardless of what Claiborne said, it was Benihana, the restaurant that Rocky Aoki opened on West 56th Street in 1964, that defined the new Japanese food of America into the 70s. Serving steak cooked on hibachis at the center of diners' tables, Benihana was all the rage and soon became a chain that spread through the country, where most people still hadn't yet heard of sushi.
In July 1971, McDonald's came to Japan, opening in the Ginza Mitsukoshi department store, in Tokyo. It was the summer before that first New England tuna to be auctioned at Tsukiji made its transoceanic journey. And it was at this time, the early 70s, that an increasing number of people in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago became increasingly familiar with the increasing number of sushi restaurants in their cities.
These sushi eaters remained somewhat in the dark as to the subtleties of what they were eating. Wasabi was referred to as horseradish by The New York Times in 1954, and it was still referred to as horseradish by the Times in 1963. Used as a food and a medicine in Japan for more than a thousand years, wasabi, like horseradish, is a rootstock of the mustard family, but there is a world of difference between them. Wasabi grows naturally only in Japan, only on the northern slopes of shaded valleys near cold running streams, where it takes two or three years to mature. In preparing it for sushi, the chef or his apprentice finely grinds the root to a paste on a piece of rough sharkskin affixed to a small wooden board. Wasabi loses much of its flavor and pungency within minutes after it's grated, and so its preparation is timely.
Almost all the real wasabi used by sushi chefs today is farmed, and the more distinct and intense taste of wild wasabi, which grows much smaller than its farmed variant, is all but unknown to modern sushi eaters. If one is fortunate enough to encounter the rare sushi chef who prepares his own wasabi, it will almost invariably be farmed wasabi, the best of which comes from the paddies of Amagi, in Shizuoka Prefecture. But these days even fresh farmed wasabi is hardly ever used by sushi chefs. As Hiroko Shimbo says in The Sushi Experience, cheaper sushi restaurants—I would say most sushi restaurants—rely on wasabi powder, which is mixed with water, or wasabi paste from a tube. "These are not really wasabi at all; they are mixtures of ordinary white horseradish, mustard powder, and artificial flavor and color." Or worse. Far removed from those shaded valleys and cold running country streams, one common commercial "wasabi" is concocted of horseradish, lactose, corn oil, sorbitol, salt, water, artificial flavoring, turmeric, xanthan gum, citric acid, FD&C Yellow No. 5, and FD&C Blue No. 1.
If referring to wasabi as horseradish—and even one of the first, and still one of the best, Japanese-authored English-language guides to sushi, The Book of Sushi, brought out by Kodansha, in 1981, does so—is like referring to horseradish as wasabi, referring to the artificially flavored, artificially colored gunk of today as wasabi is even more absurd. Such stuff is a fitting complement to those little pieces of green sawtooth plastic used in presentation in many sushi places. These green plastic things are called baran, the name of a type of actual bamboo leaf on which sushi was often traditionally placed.
The ascent of sushi's popularity in urban America in the years 1972 to 1982 was phenomenal, as was its ascent throughout the rest of the country in the decades that followed. This ascent reached its peak on January 1, 2004, when a place called Tiger Sushi opened at the Mall of America, in Minnesota. Since then, like the ruler of two domains, sushi has reigned as America's new favorite fast food and favorite slow food as well, and its imperium is extending to Europe and beyond.
Why? I'm sure there are social-anthropological theories, all of them bound to be as boring as they are meaningless. The real answer, I think, is simple.
America is addicted to sugar, but it seeks increasingly to veil its addiction. Power Bars. Sounds healthy. Main ingredient: fructose syrup. Almost 25 percent sugar. The guy, Brian Maxwell, who got rich selling these things, selling sugar as nutrition, swore by them and croaked at the age of 51. Eat a Power Bar and nobody gives a glance. Run up a bag of dope and people look at you funny. I don't get it. How about a nice, large Tazo Chai Frappuccino Blended Crème from Starbucks? Sounds healthy—I mean, after all, chai—and classy too: crème? Sugar content: 17 teaspoons.
A killer sugar addiction, a preoccupation with health, no matter how misguided, and pretensions, or delusions, of worldly sophistication. Sushi perfectly satisfies them all.
In a nation that never ate much fresh fish, it's interesting that eel sushi is so very popular. I mean, from fish sticks and Filet-o-Fish sandwiches to conger eels? "Mommy, Mommy, I want eels, I want eels." This can't be understood other than in light of the fact that the sauce, anago no tsume, used in confecting eel sushi is a syrupy reduction made with table sugar, sake, soy sauce, and the sweet wine called mirin, and that during this reduction caramelizing causes the browning sugar to grow in mass through the formation of fructose and glucose. The oldest known menu from Kawafuku, probably from the 50s, lists broiled eel along with sashimi and sushi among its à la carte dishes, at the head of which is still to be found that old standby, sukiyaki.
As for the other types of sushi, they are all made with rice to which both table sugar and sweet rice vinegar have been added. Gari, the pickled ginger served with sushi, is also made with rice vinegar and table sugar. If it's cobalt pink rather than pale rose in color, it has been treated with a chemical bath of dye and extra sweetening agents.
But what care I for health? Sloth and gluttony alone vie within me for dominion, and I've already outlived the Power Bar guy. So let's get down.
The difference between a bad sushi joint and a good sushi joint is: at a good sushi joint the sweetness of the sushi doesn't challenge the taste of the fish. The difference between a good sushi joint and a very good sushi joint is: at a very good sushi joint the sweetness of the sushi doesn't challenge the taste of the fish, and the fish is very good. The difference between a very good sushi joint and a great sushi joint is: at a great sushi joint the sweetness of the sushi doesn't challenge the taste of the fish, the fish is excellent, and, piece after piece—sushi should never be served more than one piece at a time; each piece should come freshly made directly from the chef's hands to you—the meal unfolds in a concert of many varied tastes, some delicate and some strong, all in a sequence of subtle harmony and balance that leaves you exquisitely satisfied, in a way that Mrs. Paul never could.
Some Breakfast
In the end, it is all in the eating, and Tokyo, with Tsukiji at its heart, is surely a place to eat it.
Everyone at Tsukiji seems to know Tom, who has been coming here for more than 30 years, first as a seafood importer, later as a representative of noaa, and Ted, who speaks Japanese and also has been coming here for years, is a familiar figure as well. But on my second morning at the market, when we walk through the aisles and narrow passageways with Hiroyasu Ito, the president of Chuo Gyoru, one of the most powerful of the wholesalers and auction houses, he is more than recognized. Most of those we pass bow to him.
Yesterday, at his office in the Tsukiji compound, I asked him to tell me the name of the best sushi restaurant in Tokyo. He smiled and was silent. It was an awkward matter. After all, he knew many great sushi chefs personally, and he wished to offend no one. So, without directly answering my question, he said that we should meet in the morning and we would eat.
Now we wind through Tsukiji toward the northeastern outskirts of the market. It strikes me that here we are in the biggest fish market in the world and there is not a fishy whiff to be had. I've been told that only bad fish smells, but this is remarkable. When I pass the fish section at my local Food Emporium back home in New York, it stinks. When I pass Nobu on a summer morning, after the garbage has been hauled away, it stinks. Here the only smell is the sweet, smoky scent of the newly shaved flakes of dried bonito at the katsuobushi stand in the outer market.
Hiroyasu Ito leads us to a small, nondescript restaurant on a narrow street with no name. It's barely seven in the morning, and already there's a long line of people waiting to enter. Tom Asakawa tells me it's almost impossible to get into this place. People from all over Japan, from all over the world, come here in search of it. Ito-san looks at the queue and gestures for us to follow him. We turn a corner to another nameless, alley-like street, and come to an open kitchen door. The young girl scrubbing pans outside greets Ito-san with a happy smile. We enter through this back door, and emerge amid bows in a poky restaurant with a counter that seats fewer than a dozen. But somehow there are seats awaiting us. Small glasses and big bottles of Asahi Super Dry beer are set before us. The owner and chef, Shinichi Irino, immediately starts talking to Ito-san about the water's being good in this or that fishing port right now, and this or that fish came from this or that port; and as he talks, he prepares and serves us sushi made with this or that fish from this or that port.
"Southern bluefin. Indian Ocean."
Irino-san buys from 15 different dealers at Tsukiji, including five different tuna dealers.
The maguro toro sushi—the fatty bluefin-belly-meat sushi—is almost synesthetic and, to coin a phrase, melts in the mouth.
Daiwa, the name of this place, means "great harmony." Irino-san directs our eyes to the sign on the wall that bears this name in four-character calligraphy. He tells us proudly that it was painted by Kitanoumi, the youngest sumo wrestler to achieve the top rank of Yokozuna and now the chairman of the Japan Sumo Association.
"Personal friend."
Sardine sushi. Mackerel sushi. Uni sushi. More beer. This is breakfast as she should be et, Jack-san.
I ask Irino-san who is the best sushi chef in New York.
"Keita Sato. Hatsuhana restaurant."
Has Irino-san ever been to New York?
No. But he was invited to Norway last year.
It's explained to me that Keita Sato, the owner of Hatsuhana, is an old friend of his.
Hiroyasu Ito smiles with satisfaction. "This," he says, "is the absolute best way to eat sushi, just sitting at a small counter, talking to the chef, and having piece by piece unfolding in front of you."
"And always a joke."
Tomohiro Asakawa is a man of his word. He hasn't forgotten about me and the sea pineapple. On my last day in Tokyo, he gives me the name of a restaurant that serves sea pineapple. It's a drinking place, he says, a sake place. "They serve mostly whale meat, but they also have sea pineapple." He pauses and smiles. "And other things."
Whaling in Japan dates back to the prehistoric Jomon period. Today the Japanese government allows a number of certain species to be killed by permit every year. Many of them are from Antarctic waters and the seas of the Ogasawara Islands, an archipelago of more than 30 subtropical islands, including Iwo Jima, some one thousand kilometers, or about 540 nautical miles, a day's journey by ship, south of Tokyo. These whales, I'm told, are captured for "research." I recall the label on those packages of whale meat: research whaling.
Kabukicho, ablaze with neon, is Tokyo's red-light district. It's where the pleasure-houses are, and the fugu joints, and the clubs where yakuza gamble with flower cards. It's where, on the fifth floor of an old building on Kabukicho Street, the whale-meat restaurant is to be found. The name of the restaurant is Taruichi, which means something like "No. 1 sake barrel."
My companion, the Japanese translator Eva Yagino, speaks to the chef, Hiroyoshi Gota, who tells her that, among the many sakes sold here, there's a special sake, made by the Miyagi brewer Uragasumi, that's rarely available. The waitress pours us some, letting the cold sake overflow to the ceramic saucer beneath the masu, the sake box, made of the same pale wood, hinoki—a cypress that grows only in Japan—from which the best sushi-bar counters are crafted. A ceramic dish of sea salt is placed on the table, and Eva-san sets me straight: I'm to put a pinch of the salt on a corner of the masu, drink from that corner, raising the masu and ceramic saucer together, replenish the salt in the corner whenever I want, and in the end drink all the spillage in the saucer; then order more sake and do it again. As we sip our salted spillage, Eva-san translates the menu for me.
"Nodo-kuro," she says. "A white fish with a black throat from the Sea of Japan. It is rarely caught."
As she continues, I recall the way Tom Asakawa smiled when he said, " … and other things."
"Anglerfish liver. Ayu-fish guts. Sea-cucumber guts. Oh, and look at all these whale dishes: whale sushi; hari-hari nabe—that's whale meat with mizuna, a sort of Japanese mustard green that looks like a dandelion green; whale bacon; whale skin; whale tongue; whale brain; shinzo (that's whale heart); whale ovary—and, oh, here's your hoya sashi, your raw sea pineapple. Sashi is what the restaurant people call sashimi."
As I ponder my choices, Eva-san tells me about mamushi-zake. It's a sake to which, during fermentation, a mamushi is added. The mamushi, a type of pit viper, is one of the two species of poisonous snakes indigenous to Japan. Introduced live into the fermenting sake, it releases its poison into the brew as it leaves this vale of tears. Unlike the Chinese, the Japanese are not big on snake eating, but there is this sake.
"I need to drink that," I say.
But this is my last night in town, and the Asakusabashi snake store will be closed for the evening. She'll send it to me by air. Good. Back to the menu.
Just my luck: they're out of the whale ovary. I get me a big, juicy, red-meat whale steak. I get some whale heart too. And, of course, the sea pineapple, which comes with a little dipping bowl of su, rice-wine vinegar. I'm living. And what more fitting an end than whale ice cream, made with green-tea powder and whale morsels? Mmm, no?
Sea pineapple, good. Whale heart, bad. The ice cream, I don't remember.
I want to know what kind of whale I've eaten. Eva-san talks to the boss.
"Minke. A sort of small baleen."
I want to know what kind of whale makes for the best grub. Eva-san talks to the boss. He makes a forlorn gesture to a poster on the wall that pictures all the species of whales in the sea, and, forlornly, he expounds awhile.
The great blue whale, the largest animal that has ever lived, is by far the best, he says. But, as it's considered one of the world's most endangered species, it has been unobtainable for more than 35 years. I feel for the guy.
"No black market?"
"Too big to hide."
The Full Abundance
Some may have the temerity to disagree with me, but, for my money, the greatest Japanese restaurant is Sugiyama, in New York. There is no sushi here, no wasabi, but no shortage of raw fish, if you like it straight.
Nao Sugiyama, who is from Okayama, is a master of kaiseki. Of Zen origin, kaiseki is held as the highest form of Japanese cuisine, presenting through a series of courses and interludes the finest tastes of the shun, or season. But, more than that, Sugiyama-san is a master at bringing out—and allowing you to luxuriate in—the complexity that lies in simplicity and the simplicity that lies in complexity.
I've tried for a long time to better describe what Sugiyama-san does with what he carefully selects, on this day or that, in this season or that, from the full abundance of sea, stream, and woods. But whatever the secret is, it more than eludes description (he himself only shrugs and smiles at what he does); it subdues and silences the very desire to describe it as it bears you away.
He arrives at his restaurant at half past nine in the morning, prepares until half past five, then opens the door at six. I last ate there on an evening when lingering winter was giving way to spring. Here's what he fed me:
First, a course of monkfish liver, vinegared baby eel, which seems to have been filleted, and a jelly cake of crab and vegetables. (Later, I find out that the "baby eel," noresore, which I assumed to have been filleted, is actually pre–baby eel—the flat, transparent larvae, whose season is brief and now, of the Japanese conger.) Then slices of raw bluefin tuna, raw bluefin toro, raw hamachi, raw hamachi toro, raw tilefish, steamed octopus, ama-ebi (sweet shrimp; the sweetness is in the meat of the brain), a raw Kumamoto oyster, and a fragrant spray of small, purple shiso flowers. Then a clear soup of seaweed, whitefish cake, bamboo, and asari (a sort of springtime Japanese littleneck). Then grilled black cod from Toyama and crisp-roasted mild green peppers. Then half a lobster (served with a spoon to blend the soft, dark meat of the head into the white tail meat) and shiitake and oyster mushrooms. Then a miso soup with straw mushrooms and seaweed. Then minced grilled eel, tilefish, and bonito steamed in a mixture of botan rice and sticky rice, wrapped in a large, salted houba leaf, served with pickled Japanese radish. Then hoji tea, which Sugiyama-san describes as "sticky" tea. He means it was made from tea twigs, and "sticky" is to be taken as an adjectival form of "stick," which in fact turns out to be the first definition of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary. Then a grapefruit-and-cream thing, invented by Sugiyama-san many years ago, made from hand-squeezed grapefruit juice, powdered sugar, lemon, Chardonnay, and scotch—all of which, magicked into a chilled semi-solid sphere, somehow ends up seeming to be an idealized peeled grapefruit, with no fibrous membranes, no pulp, no pits—served in very cold cream with a sprig of mint.
As to what all this looked like and how it tasted, well, you can't eat metaphors, and if I ever use words such as "succulent," shoot me, but suffice it to say that I remember thinking as I walked into the night: If the Roman emperors can be said to have missed out on anything, it was this.
Unless you've an intense jones for something special, food at the hands of a Japanese master chef should always be taken omakase, entrusting all to him. This is true of sushi, and it is certainly true of kaiseki. But once, when I was sick, I requested that Sugiyama-san prepare me a meal built around a hard-to-find Japanese turtle that he mentioned could cure me of what ailed me. It took him some days to get the turtle, but he did it. Whether it fixed me, I'll never know. By the time he secured the turtle, I was probably about to get better anyway.
Sugiyama-san is one of a handful of chefs in America with a fugu license, allowing him to prepare this poisonous and mildly intoxicating fish. I find it pretty bland, and I never got off on it, but Sugiyama-san does a great imitation of someone overdosing on the stuff and begging for more, as has been known to happen in the old country.
Masa, the New York sushi restaurant of Masayoshi Takayama, is within short walking distance of Sugiyama, and from one to the other, you could eat yourself to death, or new life, in a manner most sublime. If you could afford it, that is. Masa is the most expensive restaurant in the country, if not the world. It is also the best sushi restaurant in the country, if not the world.
It's a beautiful place. The small sushi bar, crafted from a single, solid, $60,000 piece of blond virgin-forest hinoki, is cared for daily: lightly sanded, cleaned, buffed to renew its soft, natural luster by apprentices, who also, like those of Tsunenori Iida at Tsukiji, spend hours each day tending to knives that are kept razor-sharp and brilliantly gleaming. The surface on which Takayama-san uses those knives is an imposing thick block of ginkgo. Hinoki, he says, is a very hard wood, even though it looks quite soft. But the wood of the ginkgo tree—a unique tree, a botanical "living fossil" that constitutes a genus of its own—is soft and perfectly suited for knifework, as it won't dull the blade during the trimming and oblique slicing of piece after piece of raw fish that must be performed with uninterrupted and meticulous precision from the first to the last course of a sushi meal.
Watching Takayama-san at work at his block of ginkgo, or Sugiyama-san at his Yamaken low-density polyethylene (jyushi) manaita—as when watching Tsunenori Iida at his stall in Tsukiji—there is something to be sensed of the ancient belief in the soul, tamashii, of the knife.
As when I was last at Sugiyama, winter is giving way to spring. Behind Takayama-san as he works are big fresh-cut branches of spring-blooming Asian forsythia, their yellow, bell-shaped flowers blossoming bright. The plates, bowls, and cups, everything here right down to the ohashi-oki, the little ceramic chopstick rests, have been made by craftsmen in Japan especially for Takayama-san according to his own exacting designs. Even the spoons are of his design, carved of Ishikawa wood from the seaside north of Kyoto, then finished with the sap of the tree from which they were made. The door through which one enters Masa is made of 2,000-year-old Japanese bogwood.
This is a far cry from Daiwa, the hole-in-the-wall at Tsukiji, which Takayama-san agrees has the best sushi in Tokyo, though he adds that the best sushi restaurant in all Japan is Kameki, in Sendai, in the Northeast.
But you don't eat wallpaper. You eat this: baby firefly squid (hotaru ika) in a sauce of Japanese mustard (karashi) with rape-blossom buds (nanohana). Then chopped raw toro topped with caviar. Then seared bonito (katsuo tataki) with crispy seaweed (ogo), woodland ginger and bamboo (myoga take), wasabi greens, and those little purple shiso flowers. Then steamed asari clams from Chiba in their broth. Then icefish (shirauo)—tiny, almost translucent fish with buggy little black eyeballs which can be had for only a few weeks in early spring—served in sizzling white-sesame oil with Kalamata-olive paste and sprigs of newly budded prickly-ash leaves (kinome). Then a hot pot of cherry trout (sakura masu), whose season also lasts only a few weeks in spring. And then, after the kaiseki overture, the sushi feast begins.
Each piece of sushi is prepared individually and served immediately, as Takayama-san slices the fish, reaches into a cloth-covered barrel of rice, applies fresh-made wasabi paste to the side of the sliced fish that will be pressed to the rice, and, piece after piece, forms perfect sushi with dexterous rapidity in the palm of one hand with the nimble fingers of the other, placing it before you on a stoneware dish. He tells you to eat it with your hand. At humble little Daiwa, in Tsukiji, we had respectfully followed Hiroyasu Ito's manner of eating sushi with chopsticks. Now here, in the most opulent sushi restaurant on earth, the guy is telling me to use my hands. It's really just a matter of preference, but you don't want to piss this guy off while he's feeding you. You're given a small bowl of shoyu, into which only certain sushi should be dipped, and another small bowl of pale pickled ginger to be nibbled between courses.
The toro sushi is first. Then, in succession: striped jack; fluke; sea bream; snapper; squid; ama-ebi (the little shrimp with the sweet brain); cockle; red clam; giant clam; baby scallop; Nantucket scallop (freshly caught by a diver who sells only to Takayama-san and a few others); grilled toro sinew; herring; horse mackerel; uni; octopus; cooked shrimp; sea eel; freshwater eel; shiitake sushi; black-truffle sushi; a seaweed-wrapped roll of chopped toro and green, negi onion; young ume, a sort of Japanese plum, enclosed in a shiso leaf.
"And that's all," says Takayama-san with a smile.
Then there's a slice of Japanese muskmelon and buckwheat tea. (Also shoot me if I use the word "infusion.") And, of course, there's the check. My cohort and I drank two bottles of water, one Hoyo sake, and one glass of Sancerre. Our bill for two, including a 20 percent service charge but not including the additional tip, was $1,102.74.
My meal at Daiwa was free because the owner and chef, Shinichi Irino, wouldn't charge Hiroyasu Ito or anyone with him. Ted Bestor, who was with us that morning, says, "We were undoubtedly being served the top-of-the-line stuff, since we were guests of Mr. Ito, president of Chuo Gyorui, so who knows what it might have cost, but probably no more than ¥6,000 or ¥7,000"—50 or 60 bucks—"per person. I was in Daiwa early this month, and their standard menu price for the 'in-season chef's selection' was around ¥4,500," or about $38. "I also had dinner for four at an excellent and tiny Ginza sushi restaurant, with a celebrity chef. Four of us had a superb dinner for ¥15,000," or about $125, "per person."
The funny thing is, Masa's prices don't seem to be as exorbitantly jacked up as they might first appear. There's no way of knowing what you're paying for a particular piece of sushi, as dinner here is at the fixed price of $400 a person. But next door, at Bar Masa, there's a bar menu, and one of the items on it is toro tartare with caviar, the customary second course of a dinner at Masa, and the price is $68. Toro is costly, and the Sterling Royal caviar Takayama-san uses goes for about $70 an ounce, so what could the profit margin be? This dish alone is nearly a fifth of the cost of a dinner at Masa that includes five other overture dishes and 23 varieties of sushi, among them rare and expensive delicacies such as icefish. (In the past, he's also offered fish such as sayori, needlefish, and hamo, daggertooth conger pike, an eel-like summer-season thing so bony that no one could figure out how to eat it until the people of Kyoto devised a special technique called hone-giri, to which Takayama-san has added variations of his own.)
I first encountered Takayama-san in Beverly Hills, where he had Ginza Sushi-ko, named for the Tokyo restaurant where, after leaving his hometown of Kuroiso, in the mountainous prefecture of Tochigi, north of Tokyo, he served his years of apprenticeship. His own apprentice on the West Coast, Hiro Urasawa, took over the place, renamed it Urasawa, and Takayama-san moved to the East Coast and opened Masa in February 2004, at about the same time Tiger Sushi opened at the Mall of America. Since then, he seems not to have raised the price of a meal all that much. In the end, it's one of those choices we have to make in life: icefish and tuna sinew or that new H.D. TV for the next season of American Idol.
Guess what Takayama-san does when he takes his vacation every August? He goes to the mountains of Japan to fish and hunt for wild wasabi. And he is a fool for hoya, sea pineapple, too. These things say something.
I first ate Nobuyuki Matsuhisa's food years ago on the West Coast as well, when Matsuhisa, also in Beverly Hills, was the only restaurant he had. It was a good place. As for his Nobu in New York, my friend Chiemi Karasawa put it best: "a theme park of a restaurant, sort of a homogenized extraction of the real thing for the masses: a bunch of Caucasians serving things they don't even know how to pronounce."
High Holy Fish
From both Sugiyama-san and Takayama-san, I get intimations that Tsukiji's rule is no longer absolute. They both have suppliers who fly in most of their fish from Tokyo. The relationship between them, chef and supplier, and the process of choosing fish long-distance, involves much established trust and a daily and complicated exchange of faxes and calls. Besides a supplier who provides from Tsukiji, Takayama-san also has a supplier who provides from the smaller fish market in Osaka, for, he says, there are some northern fish, such as icefish and certain eels, that are more readily available in desirable quality and quantities in Osaka than in Tokyo. He told me the names of his suppliers on the condition that I would not reveal them. Sugiyama-san isn't so guarded as to his sources, and he told me his primary supplier is True World Foods, which runs fleets of boats and dozens of distribution centers, and supplies most of the sushi chefs in the United States.
True World, a major presence from Gloucester to Tokyo, is part of the global empire of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the 87-year-old founder of the Unification Church and self-proclaimed "Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord, and True Parent" of all humanity. Representatives of the firm were not forthcoming when I tried to arrange a meeting with True World buyers at the Tsukiji market. Later a representative of True World did tell me that the True World buyer arrives at Tsukiji every morning at two o'clock. "We purchase in the neighborhood of 30,000 pounds of fresh fish monthly from Tsukiji and other Japanese fish markets, of which over 6,000 pounds makes its way to customers in the Greater New York area."
Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord. Hell, no big deal. Maybe Charlie the Tuna was a Satanist, or a Scientologist even. I long ago lost interest in religion and politics except in their most extreme and entertaining forms. But I will say this: His High Holiness, or whatever the fuck he is, sure deals some damned good fish.
In partnership with Kyokuyo, which, like Hiroyasu Ito's Chuo Gyorui, is one of the biggest of the wholesalers and auction houses at Tsukiji, True World has recently introduced Polar Seas Frozen Sushi, which may become what frozen fish sticks and frozen fish cakes were in pre-sushi America.
Like Masa's primary supplier, True World now obtains many fish directly from their sources. At both Sugiyama and Masa on the nights I last visited them, the uni was from California and had been delivered directly from there. The shared feeling seems to be that if a box of 15 Maine or California uni are of high-enough quality and can be had for 15 bucks, why should one pay 65 for a similar small box of Hokkaido uni that comes through Tsukiji? And at Masa, in addition to the Nantucket scallops procured by a private diver, the bluefin tuna, which was from Spain, had been purchased at the Fulton Fish Market by one of Takayama-san's apprentices.
Now that the Japanese economy isn't what it was, Takayama-san says, more of the best tuna can be found locally, where it can fetch almost as good, or as good, a price as if it were sold to the Tsukiji buyers. Both men try simply to get the best fish they can, and the best fish is no longer to be found only at Tsukiji.
I tell Ted Bestor about encountering a Fulton Fish Market bluefin at Masa, and of my puzzlement as to how, on any particular day, one could figure out if the tuna is better at Tsukiji or here.
"I am not surprised that he gets Spanish tuna directly from Fulton rather than from Tokyo," Ted tells me. "Everyone at Tsukiji says Japanese buyers are increasingly being outbought by buyers from other countries. China, Taiwan, the U.S.—all with strong economies and a newly vigorous demand for the finest seafood, for sushi and for other cuisines, create stronger markets for the best fish in places other than Japan.
"The long-distance calculus of determining whether the fish are better at Tsukiji or at Fulton would be fascinating to figure out. I would guess that it involves a fair amount of hunchwork but also very close communications among people who have worked together for a very long time."
Thus, what was written so recently, by Sasha Issenberg, in The Sushi Economy—that a fish market such as Rungis, south of Paris, "in effect serves as a destination for Tsukiji's Mediterranean leftovers (and for tuna from other oceans that don't meet Japanese standards)"—is no longer necessarily so. In fact, there is now a very good sushi restaurant in Paris, Isami, on the Quai d'Orléans, on Île Saint-Louis, and the chef, Katsuo Nakamura, who is from Hokkaido, gets almost all his stuff from the Rungis market. The French—who often still associate Japanese food strictly with older restaurants such as Taka, in Montmartre—are warned when calling to make a reservation at Isami that only raw fish is served. (This isn't exactly true. There is carrelet grillé, grilled plaice, a European flatfish that has both eyes on the right side of its head.)
There are relocation plans under way for Tsukiji, and the market is scheduled to move, in 2012, to an even bigger site, in the Toyosu district, an industrial area on the other side of Tokyo Bay
.
The bay is very polluted. The local fishing industry that once busied its wharves died off after the war. One small live-fish boat remains docked at Tsukiji, near where the Sumida River empties into the bay. It is a relic that goes nowhere.
Tsunenori Iida wipes the blood from the long knife. His family has been here at Tsukiji since the beginning. They were here, doing what they did, doing what he does, long before this market was here, back in the final days of the shoguns, in the old Nihonbashi market, when Tokyo was Edo. And he has been here all his life. What does he think of this move to come?
"I don't think there will be a big difference," he says. He returns his attention to the knife. "I don't like to think."
The fate of the market unsettles many at Tsukiji. Meanwhile, in the candyland of the West, where few people have ever heard of Tsukiji, what once was repulsive—the raw flesh of that laid-open tuna, the raw flesh of all that swims and slithers at Tsukiji—is now craved, more widely and more ravenously each day.
After returning from Japan, I see that one of the joints in my neighborhood has posted a new menu in an attempt to revive its dying business. Now, besides the cheeseburger deluxe, there is yellowtail pastrami and bigeye-tuna mignon with potato "gnocci" and red-wine, mushroom, and foie-gras broth. Around the corner from that place is a sushi place called Tokyo Bay, whose name now evokes dioxins. Contaminated-sediment sushi. Nearby are Ninja New York, a gimmicky and overpriced place where, as The New York Times put it, "servers, in black costumes, play the parts of ninjas and perform magic, something the kitchen doesn't do," and Kuki Sushi, describing itself as "Korean-Japanese cuisine" and offering take-out tuna, and of course eel, sushi at a buck seventy-five a piece. The local natural-food dump sells vegetarian sushi. The two local supermarkets sell prepared, refrigerated sushi. The supermarkets are close to yet another sushi place. From my windows I can see three more sushi restaurants.
From "the sukiyaki is genuine" and not for "the timid adventurer" to this. I'm waiting for the uni ice cream to hit those supermarket freezers.
My snake sake arrived, as Eva-san promised it would. It's right here, the dead viper coiled with its fanged mouth open at the bottom of the jar, looking as if it's trying to tell me something from beyond. He sure doesn't seem to be at peace, if you get my drift. What can I say? I don't know. I will drink responsibly.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
It Can't Be Any Simpler
Perhaps the most intelligent and realistic assessment of the clusterfuck that led into Iraq that I have ever read. Yingling's entire article is posted below.
It's Patriotic To Criticize
How our generals got so mediocre.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, May 16, 2007, at 5:30 PM ET
www.slate.com
Since Donald Rumsfeld's departure from the Pentagon, American military officers are starting to speak their minds again—and what some of the best of them are saying is even darker than expected.
The latest outburst of frankness came on May 12, when Maj. Gen. Benjamin "Randy" Mixon, commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq, told reporters, via teleconference from Tikrit, that he didn't have enough troops to stem the growing violence in Diyala province, east of Baghdad.
Under Rumsfeld's reign, commanders were effectively under orders not to request more troops in private, much less in front of the press.
Yet in the scheme of things, Gen. Mixon was merely filing a complaint. Two weeks earlier, a lower-ranking officer, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling—deputy commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment—issued a jeremiad.
In a blistering article in the May issue of Armed Forces Journal, published on April 27, Yingling likened the debacle in Iraq to the disaster in Vietnam and blamed them both on "a crisis in an entire institution, America's general officer corps."
Yingling's essay is the most stunning—and maybe the most fiercely intelligent and patriotic—public statement I have ever read from an active-duty officer.
Were Rumsfeld still secretary, Yingling would likely find himself reassigned to some humdrum logistical-supply depot. Even now, his prospects for getting promoted to general have been dealt a severe setback.
Tomorrow's generals are chosen by today's generals, and Yingling charges most of this generation's generals with lacking "professional character," "moral courage," and "creative intelligence."
The author is no crank. At 41, a veteran of both Iraq wars and a graduate of the School for Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, the Army's elite postgraduate strategy center, Yingling is widely thought to be one of the brightest, most dedicated up-and-coming officers. The 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment was the unit that brought order to Tal Afar through classic counterinsurgency methods (at least until the unit left, at which point things fell apart). Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, has cited the Tal Afar campaign as the model of what he is now trying to do—with less adequate resources, under more dire conditions—in Baghdad.
Yingling's argument is tightly reasoned. Policy-makers go to war to accomplish political objectives. Generals must provide the policy-makers with an estimate of the war's likely success. "The general," he writes, "describes both the means necessary for the successful prosecution of war and the ways in which the nation will employ those means. If the policymaker desires ends for which the means he provides are insufficient, the general is responsible for advising the statesman of this incongruence. … If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means, he shares culpability for the results."
Sound familiar?
"America's generals," he goes on, "have repeated the mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq. First, throughout the 1990s, our generals failed to envision the conditions of future combat and prepare their forces accordingly. Second, America's generals failed to estimate correctly both the means and the ways necessary to achieve the aims of policy prior to beginning the war in Iraq." Finally, "the military never explained to the president the magnitude of the challenges inherent in stabilizing postwar Iraq."
He finds it "almost surreal" that "professional military men blame their recent lack of candor on the intimidating management style of their civilian masters." The real problem, he writes, is a shortfall of moral courage—reinforced by institutional incentives.
The "tendency of the executive branch [is] to seek out mild-mannered team players to serve as senior generals," he writes. But, he adds, the services "are equally to blame. The system that produces our generals does little to reward creativity and moral courage. … In a system in which senior officers select for promotion those like themselves, there are powerful incentives for conformity. It is unreasonable to expect that an officer who spends 25 years conforming to … expectations will emerge as an innovator in his late forties."
Yingling proposes an overhaul in the military's system of promotion, allowing generals to be selected by junior, as well as senior, officers. In combat, he writes, junior officers "are often the first to adapt because they bear the brunt of failed tactics most directly." Therefore, they are also more likely to recognize—and reward—innovative, adaptive commanders.
He also proposes measures of accountability. For instance, generals who fail in their responsibilities should be demoted so they don't receive their full rank's retirement pay. "As matters stand now," he writes, "a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war."
Yingling's essay has received scant attention in the mainstream American press. (Several papers and magazines printed a couple of sentences about it, but, as far as I can tell, only Thomas Ricks in the Washington Post devoted an entire article to its contents and significance.) But the essay has been avidly discussed in military blogs and, very much for the most part, endorsed. One typical entry, from a soldier at Fort Knox: "He's only putting to paper what has been said in most every TOC [tactical operations center] and chow hall in the last 4 years."
The key question is whether the piece has been discussed in general officers' dining quarters, in the E Ring of the Pentagon, or among the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Nobody in those realms has contacted Yingling, in any case.
A little-realized fact is that, though President Bush keeps saying we're in a war for Western civilization, the military is still operating under its normal, bureaucratic, peacetime promotional system. There is no way a combatant commander can summarily dismiss an incompetent general; no way he can bump a brilliant lieutenant colonel up three steps to lieutenant general.
At the outset of World War II, U.S. commanders fired 55 generals and 245 colonels—and that was during a severe shortage of senior officers. (The numbers come from Newt Gingrich, who is, besides his more famous attributes, a serious military historian.)
There are, of course, some extremely talented strategists and tacticians among today's general officer corps. Which leads us back to Maj. Gen. Mixon, who said publicly what many officers have been saying privately for some time now: that there aren't enough troops to keep order in Iraq, or at least not in his sector.
Mixon is no doomsayer, simply a practical commander. "I'm going to need additional forces," he said during his teleconference, "to get [the violence] to a more acceptable level, so the Iraqi security forces will be able in the future to handle that."
He has just one U.S. combat brigade, about 3,500 troops, in Diyala province, compared with four brigades in Anbar and 10 in Baghdad.
And, as he no doubt knows, there are no plans to send more troops his way—mainly because no such troops exist. Of the five extra brigades that President Bush ordered to Baghdad as part of his "surge" back in February, only three have arrived; the fifth won't be on the ground until late summer. Why not? Because they won't be ready until then; they won't be fully manned, trained, or equipped. When critics and retired officers say that the U.S. Army is at the end of its tether, they're not exaggerating. If a crisis in another hot spot erupted, and if the president wanted to send ground troops to deal with it, he couldn't without transferring units from Iraq or Afghanistan. There is no slack.
And here is where the messages of Maj. Gen. Mixon and Lt. Col. Yingling intersect. Yingling makes clear that it's the political leaders who decide whether to go to war. Once the policy-maker receives military advice that there aren't enough troops to achieve the war's strategic objectives, he or she "must then scale back the ends of policy or mobilize popular passions to provide greater means."
President Bush has done neither. He has evaded this calculation from the beginning and continues to do so now that everyone plainly realizes there are not, and never were, enough troops. The next president will have to take up the big questions: What kind of threats do we face? What kind of military forces—and military leaders—do we need? How much will that effort cost? If we don't have the resources (in troops, money, or will), should we whip up the passions to get more—or scale back to a more realistic policy? The current course—pursuing grand global visions with depleted means—is a surefire road to disaster.
A Failure in Generalship
By Lt. Col. Paul Yingling
Armed Forces Journal
"You officers amuse yourselves with God knows what buffooneries and never dream in the least of serious service. This is a source of stupidity which would become most dangerous in case of a serious conflict."
- Frederick the Great
For the second time in a generation, the United States faces the prospect of defeat at the hands of an insurgency. In April 1975, the U.S. fled the Republic of Vietnam, abandoning our allies to their fate at the hands of North Vietnamese communists. In 2007, Iraq's grave and deteriorating condition offers diminishing hope for an American victory and portends risk of an even wider and more destructive regional war.
These debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America's general officer corps. America's generals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy. The argument that follows consists of three elements. First, generals have a responsibility to society to provide policymakers with a correct estimate of strategic probabilities. Second, America's generals in Vietnam and Iraq failed to perform this responsibility. Third, remedying the crisis in American generalship requires the intervention of Congress.
The Responsibilities of Generalship
Armies do not fight wars; nations fight wars. War is not a military activity conducted by soldiers, but rather a social activity that involves entire nations. Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted that passion, probability and policy each play their role in war. Any understanding of war that ignores one of these elements is fundamentally flawed.
The passion of the people is necessary to endure the sacrifices inherent in war. Regardless of the system of government, the people supply the blood and treasure required to prosecute war. The statesman must stir these passions to a level commensurate with the popular sacrifices required. When the ends of policy are small, the statesman can prosecute a conflict without asking the public for great sacrifice. Global conflicts such as World War II require the full mobilization of entire societies to provide the men and materiel necessary for the successful prosecution of war. The greatest error the statesman can make is to commit his nation to a great conflict without mobilizing popular passions to a level commensurate with the stakes of the conflict.
Popular passions are necessary for the successful prosecution of war, but cannot be sufficient. To prevail, generals must provide policymakers and the public with a correct estimation of strategic probabilities. The general is responsible for estimating the likelihood of success in applying force to achieve the aims of policy. The general describes both the means necessary for the successful prosecution of war and the ways in which the nation will employ those means. If the policymaker desires ends for which the means he provides are insufficient, the general is responsible for advising the statesman of this incongruence. The statesman must then scale back the ends of policy or mobilize popular passions to provide greater means. If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means, he shares culpability for the results.
However much it is influenced by passion and probability, war is ultimately an instrument of policy and its conduct is the responsibility of policymakers. War is a social activity undertaken on behalf of the nation; Augustine counsels us that the only purpose of war is to achieve a better peace. The choice of making war to achieve a better peace is inherently a value judgment in which the statesman must decide those interests and beliefs worth killing and dying for. The military man is no better qualified than the common citizen to make such judgments. He must therefore confine his input to his area of expertise — the estimation of strategic probabilities.
The correct estimation of strategic possibilities can be further subdivided into the preparation for war and the conduct of war. Preparation for war consists in the raising, arming, equipping and training of forces. The conduct of war consists of both planning for the use of those forces and directing those forces in operations.
To prepare forces for war, the general must visualize the conditions of future combat. To raise military forces properly, the general must visualize the quality and quantity of forces needed in the next war. To arm and equip military forces properly, the general must visualize the materiel requirements of future engagements. To train military forces properly, the general must visualize the human demands on future battlefields, and replicate those conditions in peacetime exercises. Of course, not even the most skilled general can visualize precisely how future wars will be fought. According to British military historian and soldier Sir Michael Howard, "In structuring and preparing an army for war, you can be clear that you will not get it precisely right, but the important thing is not to be too far wrong, so that you can put it right quickly."
The most tragic error a general can make is to assume without much reflection that wars of the future will look much like wars of the past. Following World War I, French generals committed this error, assuming that the next war would involve static battles dominated by firepower and fixed fortifications. Throughout the interwar years, French generals raised, equipped, armed and trained the French military to fight the last war. In stark contrast, German generals spent the interwar years attempting to break the stalemate created by firepower and fortifications. They developed a new form of war — the blitzkrieg — that integrated mobility, firepower and decentralized tactics. The German Army did not get this new form of warfare precisely right. After the 1939 conquest of Poland, the German Army undertook a critical self-examination of its operations. However, German generals did not get it too far wrong either, and in less than a year had adapted their tactics for the invasion of France.
After visualizing the conditions of future combat, the general is responsible for explaining to civilian policymakers the demands of future combat and the risks entailed in failing to meet those demands. Civilian policymakers have neither the expertise nor the inclination to think deeply about strategic probabilities in the distant future. Policymakers, especially elected representatives, face powerful incentives to focus on near-term challenges that are of immediate concern to the public. Generating military capability is the labor of decades. If the general waits until the public and its elected representatives are immediately concerned with national security threats before finding his voice, he has waited too long. The general who speaks too loudly of preparing for war while the nation is at peace places at risk his position and status. However, the general who speaks too softly places at risk the security of his country.
Failing to visualize future battlefields represents a lapse in professional competence, but seeing those fields clearly and saying nothing is an even more serious lapse in professional character. Moral courage is often inversely proportional to popularity and this observation in nowhere more true than in the profession of arms. The history of military innovation is littered with the truncated careers of reformers who saw gathering threats clearly and advocated change boldly. A military professional must possess both the physical courage to face the hazards of battle and the moral courage to withstand the barbs of public scorn. On and off the battlefield, courage is the first characteristic of generalship.
Failures of Generalship in Vietnam
America's defeat in Vietnam is the most egregious failure in the history of American arms. America's general officer corps refused to prepare the Army to fight unconventional wars, despite ample indications that such preparations were in order. Having failed to prepare for such wars, America's generals sent our forces into battle without a coherent plan for victory. Unprepared for war and lacking a coherent strategy, America lost the war and the lives of more than 58,000 service members.
Following World War II, there were ample indicators that America's enemies would turn to insurgency to negate our advantages in firepower and mobility. The French experiences in Indochina and Algeria offered object lessons to Western armies facing unconventional foes. These lessons were not lost on the more astute members of America's political class. In 1961, President Kennedy warned of "another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin — war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat, by infiltration instead of aggression, seeking victory by evading and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him." In response to these threats, Kennedy undertook a comprehensive program to prepare America's armed forces for counterinsurgency.
Despite the experience of their allies and the urging of their president, America's generals failed to prepare their forces for counterinsurgency. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Decker assured his young president, "Any good soldier can handle guerrillas." Despite Kennedy's guidance to the contrary, the Army viewed the conflict in Vietnam in conventional terms. As late as 1964, Gen. Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated flatly that "the essence of the problem in Vietnam is military." While the Army made minor organizational adjustments at the urging of the president, the generals clung to what Andrew Krepinevich has called "the Army concept," a vision of warfare focused on the destruction of the enemy's forces.
Having failed to visualize accurately the conditions of combat in Vietnam, America's generals prosecuted the war in conventional terms. The U.S. military embarked on a graduated attrition strategy intended to compel North Vietnam to accept a negotiated peace. The U.S. undertook modest efforts at innovation in Vietnam. Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), spearheaded by the State Department's "Blowtorch" Bob Kromer, was a serious effort to address the political and economic causes of the insurgency. The Marine Corps' Combined Action Program (CAP) was an innovative approach to population security. However, these efforts are best described as too little, too late. Innovations such as CORDS and CAP never received the resources necessary to make a large-scale difference. The U.S. military grudgingly accepted these innovations late in the war, after the American public's commitment to the conflict began to wane.
America's generals not only failed to develop a strategy for victory in Vietnam, but also remained largely silent while the strategy developed by civilian politicians led to defeat. As H.R. McMaster noted in "Dereliction of Duty," the Joint Chiefs of Staff were divided by service parochialism and failed to develop a unified and coherent recommendation to the president for prosecuting the war to a successful conclusion. Army Chief of Staff Harold K. Johnson estimated in 1965 that victory would require as many as 700,000 troops for up to five years. Commandant of the Marine Corps Wallace Greene made a similar estimate on troop levels. As President Johnson incrementally escalated the war, neither man made his views known to the president or Congress. President Johnson made a concerted effort to conceal the costs and consequences of Vietnam from the public, but such duplicity required the passive consent of America's generals.
Having participated in the deception of the American people during the war, the Army chose after the war to deceive itself. In "Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife," John Nagl argued that instead of learning from defeat, the Army after Vietnam focused its energies on the kind of wars it knew how to win — high-technology conventional wars. An essential contribution to this strategy of denial was the publication of "On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War," by Col. Harry Summers. Summers, a faculty member of the U.S. Army War College, argued that the Army had erred by not focusing enough on conventional warfare in Vietnam, a lesson the Army was happy to hear. Despite having been recently defeated by an insurgency, the Army slashed training and resources devoted to counterinsurgency.
By the early 1990s, the Army's focus on conventional war-fighting appeared to have been vindicated. During the 1980s, the U.S. military benefited from the largest peacetime military buildup in the nation's history. High-technology equipment dramatically increased the mobility and lethality of our ground forces. The Army's National Training Center honed the Army's conventional war-fighting skills to a razor's edge. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the demise of the Soviet Union and the futility of direct confrontation with the U.S. Despite the fact the U.S. supported insurgencies in Afghanistan, Nicaragua and Angola to hasten the Soviet Union's demise, the U.S. military gave little thought to counterinsurgency throughout the 1990s. America's generals assumed without much reflection that the wars of the future would look much like the wars of the past — state-on-state conflicts against conventional forces. America's swift defeat of the Iraqi Army, the world's fourth-largest, in 1991 seemed to confirm the wisdom of the U.S. military's post-Vietnam reforms. But the military learned the wrong lessons from Operation Desert Storm. It continued to prepare for the last war, while its future enemies prepared for a new kind of war.
Failures of Generalship in Iraq
America's generals have repeated the mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq. First, throughout the 1990s our generals failed to envision the conditions of future combat and prepare their forces accordingly. Second, America's generals failed to estimate correctly both the means and the ways necessary to achieve the aims of policy prior to beginning the war in Iraq. Finally, America's generals did not provide Congress and the public with an accurate assessment of the conflict in Iraq.
Despite paying lip service to "transformation" throughout the 1990s, America's armed forces failed to change in significant ways after the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In "The Sling and the Stone," T.X. Hammes argues that the Defense Department's transformation strategy focuses almost exclusively on high-technology conventional wars. The doctrine, organizations, equipment and training of the U.S. military confirm this observation. The armed forces fought the global war on terrorism for the first five years with a counterinsurgency doctrine last revised in the Reagan administration. Despite engaging in numerous stability operations throughout the 1990s, the armed forces did little to bolster their capabilities for civic reconstruction and security force development. Procurement priorities during the 1990s followed the Cold War model, with significant funding devoted to new fighter aircraft and artillery systems. The most commonly used tactical scenarios in both schools and training centers replicated high-intensity interstate conflict. At the dawn of the 21st century, the U.S. is fighting brutal, adaptive insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, while our armed forces have spent the preceding decade having done little to prepare for such conflicts.
Having spent a decade preparing to fight the wrong war, America's generals then miscalculated both the means and ways necessary to succeed in Iraq. The most fundamental military miscalculation in Iraq has been the failure to commit sufficient forces to provide security to Iraq's population. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) estimated in its 1998 war plan that 380,000 troops would be necessary for an invasion of Iraq. Using operations in Bosnia and Kosovo as a model for predicting troop requirements, one Army study estimated a need for 470,000 troops. Alone among America's generals, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki publicly stated that "several hundred thousand soldiers" would be necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. Prior to the war, President Bush promised to give field commanders everything necessary for victory. Privately, many senior general officers both active and retired expressed serious misgivings about the insufficiency of forces for Iraq. These leaders would later express their concerns in tell-all books such as "Fiasco" and "Cobra II." However, when the U.S. went to war in Iraq with less than half the strength required to win, these leaders did not make their objections public.
Given the lack of troop strength, not even the most brilliant general could have devised the ways necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. However, inept planning for postwar Iraq took the crisis caused by a lack of troops and quickly transformed it into a debacle. In 1997, the U.S. Central Command exercise "Desert Crossing" demonstrated that many postwar stabilization tasks would fall to the military. The other branches of the U.S. government lacked sufficient capability to do such work on the scale required in Iraq. Despite these results, CENTCOM accepted the assumption that the State Department would administer postwar Iraq. The military never explained to the president the magnitude of the challenges inherent in stabilizing postwar Iraq.
After failing to visualize the conditions of combat in Iraq, America's generals failed to adapt to the demands of counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency theory prescribes providing continuous security to the population. However, for most of the war American forces in Iraq have been concentrated on large forward-operating bases, isolated from the Iraqi people and focused on capturing or killing insurgents. Counterinsurgency theory requires strengthening the capability of host-nation institutions to provide security and other essential services to the population. America's generals treated efforts to create transition teams to develop local security forces and provincial reconstruction teams to improve essential services as afterthoughts, never providing the quantity or quality of personnel necessary for success.
After going into Iraq with too few troops and no coherent plan for postwar stabilization, America's general officer corps did not accurately portray the intensity of the insurgency to the American public. The Iraq Study Group concluded that "there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq." The ISG noted that "on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals." Population security is the most important measure of effectiveness in counterinsurgency. For more than three years, America's generals continued to insist that the U.S. was making progress in Iraq. However, for Iraqi civilians, each year from 2003 onward was more deadly than the one preceding it. For reasons that are not yet clear, America's general officer corps underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq's government and security forces and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of security conditions in Iraq. Moreover, America's generals have not explained clearly the larger strategic risks of committing so large a portion of the nation's deployable land power to a single theater of operations.
The intellectual and moral failures common to America's general officer corps in Vietnam and Iraq constitute a crisis in American generalship. Any explanation that fixes culpability on individuals is insufficient. No one leader, civilian or military, caused failure in Vietnam or Iraq. Different military and civilian leaders in the two conflicts produced similar results. In both conflicts, the general officer corps designed to advise policymakers, prepare forces and conduct operations failed to perform its intended functions. To understand how the U.S. could face defeat at the hands of a weaker insurgent enemy for the second time in a generation, we must look at the structural influences that produce our general officer corps.
The Generals We Need
The most insightful examination of failed generalship comes from J.F.C. Fuller's "Generalship: Its Diseases and Their Cure." Fuller was a British major general who saw action in the first attempts at armored warfare in World War I. He found three common characteristics in great generals — courage, creative intelligence and physical fitness.
The need for intelligent, creative and courageous general officers is self-evident. An understanding of the larger aspects of war is essential to great generalship. However, a survey of Army three- and four-star generals shows that only 25 percent hold advanced degrees from civilian institutions in the social sciences or humanities. Counterinsurgency theory holds that proficiency in foreign languages is essential to success, yet only one in four of the Army's senior generals speaks another language. While the physical courage of America's generals is not in doubt, there is less certainty regarding their moral courage. In almost surreal language, professional military men blame their recent lack of candor on the intimidating management style of their civilian masters. Now that the public is immediately concerned with the crisis in Iraq, some of our generals are finding their voices. They may have waited too long.
Neither the executive branch nor the services themselves are likely to remedy the shortcomings in America's general officer corps. Indeed, the tendency of the executive branch to seek out mild-mannered team players to serve as senior generals is part of the problem. The services themselves are equally to blame. The system that produces our generals does little to reward creativity and moral courage. Officers rise to flag rank by following remarkably similar career patterns. Senior generals, both active and retired, are the most important figures in determining an officer's potential for flag rank. The views of subordinates and peers play no role in an officer's advancement; to move up he must only please his superiors. In a system in which senior officers select for promotion those like themselves, there are powerful incentives for conformity. It is unreasonable to expect that an officer who spends 25 years conforming to institutional expectations will emerge as an innovator in his late forties.
If America desires creative intelligence and moral courage in its general officer corps, it must create a system that rewards these qualities. Congress can create such incentives by exercising its proper oversight function in three areas. First, Congress must change the system for selecting general officers. Second, oversight committees must apply increased scrutiny over generating the necessary means and pursuing appropriate ways for applying America's military power. Third, the Senate must hold accountable through its confirmation powers those officers who fail to achieve the aims of policy at an acceptable cost in blood and treasure.
To improve the creative intelligence of our generals, Congress must change the officer promotion system in ways that reward adaptation and intellectual achievement. Congress should require the armed services to implement 360-degree evaluations for field-grade and flag officers. Junior officers and noncommissioned officers are often the first to adapt because they bear the brunt of failed tactics most directly. They are also less wed to organizational norms and less influenced by organizational taboos. Junior leaders have valuable insights regarding the effectiveness of their leaders, but the current promotion system excludes these judgments. Incorporating subordinate and peer reviews into promotion decisions for senior leaders would produce officers more willing to adapt to changing circumstances, and less likely to conform to outmoded practices.
Congress should also modify the officer promotion system in ways that reward intellectual achievement. The Senate should examine the education and professional writing of nominees for three- and four-star billets as part of the confirmation process. The Senate would never confirm to the Supreme Court a nominee who had neither been to law school nor written legal opinions. However, it routinely confirms four-star generals who possess neither graduate education in the social sciences or humanities nor the capability to speak a foreign language. Senior general officers must have a vision of what future conflicts will look like and what capabilities the U.S. requires to prevail in those conflicts. They must possess the capability to understand and interact with foreign cultures. A solid record of intellectual achievement and fluency in foreign languages are effective indicators of an officer's potential for senior leadership.
To reward moral courage in our general officers, Congress must ask hard questions about the means and ways for war as part of its oversight responsibility. Some of the answers will be shocking, which is perhaps why Congress has not asked and the generals have not told. Congress must ask for a candid assessment of the money and manpower required over the next generation to prevail in the Long War. The money required to prevail may place fiscal constraints on popular domestic priorities. The quantity and quality of manpower required may call into question the viability of the all-volunteer military. Congress must re-examine the allocation of existing resources, and demand that procurement priorities reflect the most likely threats we will face. Congress must be equally rigorous in ensuring that the ways of war contribute to conflict termination consistent with the aims of national policy. If our operations produce more enemies than they defeat, no amount of force is sufficient to prevail. Current oversight efforts have proved inadequate, allowing the executive branch, the services and lobbyists to present information that is sometimes incomplete, inaccurate or self-serving. Exercising adequate oversight will require members of Congress to develop the expertise necessary to ask the right questions and display the courage to follow the truth wherever it leads them.
Finally, Congress must enhance accountability by exercising its little-used authority to confirm the retired rank of general officers. By law, Congress must confirm an officer who retires at three- or four-star rank. In the past this requirement has been pro forma in all but a few cases. A general who presides over a massive human rights scandal or a substantial deterioration in security ought to be retired at a lower rank than one who serves with distinction. A general who fails to provide Congress with an accurate and candid assessment of strategic probabilities ought to suffer the same penalty. As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war. By exercising its powers to confirm the retired ranks of general officers, Congress can restore accountability among senior military leaders.
Mortal Danger
This article began with Frederick the Great's admonition to his officers to focus their energies on the larger aspects of war. The Prussian monarch's innovations had made his army the terror of Europe, but he knew that his adversaries were learning and adapting. Frederick feared that his generals would master his system of war without thinking deeply about the ever-changing nature of war, and in doing so would place Prussia's security at risk. These fears would prove prophetic. At the Battle of Valmy in 1792, Frederick's successors were checked by France's ragtag citizen army. In the fourteen years that followed, Prussia's generals assumed without much reflection that the wars of the future would look much like those of the past. In 1806, the Prussian Army marched lockstep into defeat and disaster at the hands of Napoleon at Jena. Frederick's prophecy had come to pass; Prussia became a French vassal.
Iraq is America's Valmy. America's generals have been checked by a form of war that they did not prepare for and do not understand. They spent the years following the 1991 Gulf War mastering a system of war without thinking deeply about the ever changing nature of war. They marched into Iraq having assumed without much reflection that the wars of the future would look much like the wars of the past. Those few who saw clearly our vulnerability to insurgent tactics said and did little to prepare for these dangers. As at Valmy, this one debacle, however humiliating, will not in itself signal national disaster. The hour is late, but not too late to prepare for the challenges of the Long War. We still have time to select as our generals those who possess the intelligence to visualize future conflicts and the moral courage to advise civilian policymakers on the preparations needed for our security. The power and the responsibility to identify such generals lie with the U.S. Congress. If Congress does not act, our Jena awaits us.
It's Patriotic To Criticize
How our generals got so mediocre.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, May 16, 2007, at 5:30 PM ET
www.slate.com
Since Donald Rumsfeld's departure from the Pentagon, American military officers are starting to speak their minds again—and what some of the best of them are saying is even darker than expected.
The latest outburst of frankness came on May 12, when Maj. Gen. Benjamin "Randy" Mixon, commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq, told reporters, via teleconference from Tikrit, that he didn't have enough troops to stem the growing violence in Diyala province, east of Baghdad.
Under Rumsfeld's reign, commanders were effectively under orders not to request more troops in private, much less in front of the press.
Yet in the scheme of things, Gen. Mixon was merely filing a complaint. Two weeks earlier, a lower-ranking officer, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling—deputy commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment—issued a jeremiad.
In a blistering article in the May issue of Armed Forces Journal, published on April 27, Yingling likened the debacle in Iraq to the disaster in Vietnam and blamed them both on "a crisis in an entire institution, America's general officer corps."
Yingling's essay is the most stunning—and maybe the most fiercely intelligent and patriotic—public statement I have ever read from an active-duty officer.
Were Rumsfeld still secretary, Yingling would likely find himself reassigned to some humdrum logistical-supply depot. Even now, his prospects for getting promoted to general have been dealt a severe setback.
Tomorrow's generals are chosen by today's generals, and Yingling charges most of this generation's generals with lacking "professional character," "moral courage," and "creative intelligence."
The author is no crank. At 41, a veteran of both Iraq wars and a graduate of the School for Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, the Army's elite postgraduate strategy center, Yingling is widely thought to be one of the brightest, most dedicated up-and-coming officers. The 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment was the unit that brought order to Tal Afar through classic counterinsurgency methods (at least until the unit left, at which point things fell apart). Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, has cited the Tal Afar campaign as the model of what he is now trying to do—with less adequate resources, under more dire conditions—in Baghdad.
Yingling's argument is tightly reasoned. Policy-makers go to war to accomplish political objectives. Generals must provide the policy-makers with an estimate of the war's likely success. "The general," he writes, "describes both the means necessary for the successful prosecution of war and the ways in which the nation will employ those means. If the policymaker desires ends for which the means he provides are insufficient, the general is responsible for advising the statesman of this incongruence. … If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means, he shares culpability for the results."
Sound familiar?
"America's generals," he goes on, "have repeated the mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq. First, throughout the 1990s, our generals failed to envision the conditions of future combat and prepare their forces accordingly. Second, America's generals failed to estimate correctly both the means and the ways necessary to achieve the aims of policy prior to beginning the war in Iraq." Finally, "the military never explained to the president the magnitude of the challenges inherent in stabilizing postwar Iraq."
He finds it "almost surreal" that "professional military men blame their recent lack of candor on the intimidating management style of their civilian masters." The real problem, he writes, is a shortfall of moral courage—reinforced by institutional incentives.
The "tendency of the executive branch [is] to seek out mild-mannered team players to serve as senior generals," he writes. But, he adds, the services "are equally to blame. The system that produces our generals does little to reward creativity and moral courage. … In a system in which senior officers select for promotion those like themselves, there are powerful incentives for conformity. It is unreasonable to expect that an officer who spends 25 years conforming to … expectations will emerge as an innovator in his late forties."
Yingling proposes an overhaul in the military's system of promotion, allowing generals to be selected by junior, as well as senior, officers. In combat, he writes, junior officers "are often the first to adapt because they bear the brunt of failed tactics most directly." Therefore, they are also more likely to recognize—and reward—innovative, adaptive commanders.
He also proposes measures of accountability. For instance, generals who fail in their responsibilities should be demoted so they don't receive their full rank's retirement pay. "As matters stand now," he writes, "a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war."
Yingling's essay has received scant attention in the mainstream American press. (Several papers and magazines printed a couple of sentences about it, but, as far as I can tell, only Thomas Ricks in the Washington Post devoted an entire article to its contents and significance.) But the essay has been avidly discussed in military blogs and, very much for the most part, endorsed. One typical entry, from a soldier at Fort Knox: "He's only putting to paper what has been said in most every TOC [tactical operations center] and chow hall in the last 4 years."
The key question is whether the piece has been discussed in general officers' dining quarters, in the E Ring of the Pentagon, or among the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Nobody in those realms has contacted Yingling, in any case.
A little-realized fact is that, though President Bush keeps saying we're in a war for Western civilization, the military is still operating under its normal, bureaucratic, peacetime promotional system. There is no way a combatant commander can summarily dismiss an incompetent general; no way he can bump a brilliant lieutenant colonel up three steps to lieutenant general.
At the outset of World War II, U.S. commanders fired 55 generals and 245 colonels—and that was during a severe shortage of senior officers. (The numbers come from Newt Gingrich, who is, besides his more famous attributes, a serious military historian.)
There are, of course, some extremely talented strategists and tacticians among today's general officer corps. Which leads us back to Maj. Gen. Mixon, who said publicly what many officers have been saying privately for some time now: that there aren't enough troops to keep order in Iraq, or at least not in his sector.
Mixon is no doomsayer, simply a practical commander. "I'm going to need additional forces," he said during his teleconference, "to get [the violence] to a more acceptable level, so the Iraqi security forces will be able in the future to handle that."
He has just one U.S. combat brigade, about 3,500 troops, in Diyala province, compared with four brigades in Anbar and 10 in Baghdad.
And, as he no doubt knows, there are no plans to send more troops his way—mainly because no such troops exist. Of the five extra brigades that President Bush ordered to Baghdad as part of his "surge" back in February, only three have arrived; the fifth won't be on the ground until late summer. Why not? Because they won't be ready until then; they won't be fully manned, trained, or equipped. When critics and retired officers say that the U.S. Army is at the end of its tether, they're not exaggerating. If a crisis in another hot spot erupted, and if the president wanted to send ground troops to deal with it, he couldn't without transferring units from Iraq or Afghanistan. There is no slack.
And here is where the messages of Maj. Gen. Mixon and Lt. Col. Yingling intersect. Yingling makes clear that it's the political leaders who decide whether to go to war. Once the policy-maker receives military advice that there aren't enough troops to achieve the war's strategic objectives, he or she "must then scale back the ends of policy or mobilize popular passions to provide greater means."
President Bush has done neither. He has evaded this calculation from the beginning and continues to do so now that everyone plainly realizes there are not, and never were, enough troops. The next president will have to take up the big questions: What kind of threats do we face? What kind of military forces—and military leaders—do we need? How much will that effort cost? If we don't have the resources (in troops, money, or will), should we whip up the passions to get more—or scale back to a more realistic policy? The current course—pursuing grand global visions with depleted means—is a surefire road to disaster.
A Failure in Generalship
By Lt. Col. Paul Yingling
Armed Forces Journal
"You officers amuse yourselves with God knows what buffooneries and never dream in the least of serious service. This is a source of stupidity which would become most dangerous in case of a serious conflict."
- Frederick the Great
For the second time in a generation, the United States faces the prospect of defeat at the hands of an insurgency. In April 1975, the U.S. fled the Republic of Vietnam, abandoning our allies to their fate at the hands of North Vietnamese communists. In 2007, Iraq's grave and deteriorating condition offers diminishing hope for an American victory and portends risk of an even wider and more destructive regional war.
These debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America's general officer corps. America's generals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy. The argument that follows consists of three elements. First, generals have a responsibility to society to provide policymakers with a correct estimate of strategic probabilities. Second, America's generals in Vietnam and Iraq failed to perform this responsibility. Third, remedying the crisis in American generalship requires the intervention of Congress.
The Responsibilities of Generalship
Armies do not fight wars; nations fight wars. War is not a military activity conducted by soldiers, but rather a social activity that involves entire nations. Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted that passion, probability and policy each play their role in war. Any understanding of war that ignores one of these elements is fundamentally flawed.
The passion of the people is necessary to endure the sacrifices inherent in war. Regardless of the system of government, the people supply the blood and treasure required to prosecute war. The statesman must stir these passions to a level commensurate with the popular sacrifices required. When the ends of policy are small, the statesman can prosecute a conflict without asking the public for great sacrifice. Global conflicts such as World War II require the full mobilization of entire societies to provide the men and materiel necessary for the successful prosecution of war. The greatest error the statesman can make is to commit his nation to a great conflict without mobilizing popular passions to a level commensurate with the stakes of the conflict.
Popular passions are necessary for the successful prosecution of war, but cannot be sufficient. To prevail, generals must provide policymakers and the public with a correct estimation of strategic probabilities. The general is responsible for estimating the likelihood of success in applying force to achieve the aims of policy. The general describes both the means necessary for the successful prosecution of war and the ways in which the nation will employ those means. If the policymaker desires ends for which the means he provides are insufficient, the general is responsible for advising the statesman of this incongruence. The statesman must then scale back the ends of policy or mobilize popular passions to provide greater means. If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means, he shares culpability for the results.
However much it is influenced by passion and probability, war is ultimately an instrument of policy and its conduct is the responsibility of policymakers. War is a social activity undertaken on behalf of the nation; Augustine counsels us that the only purpose of war is to achieve a better peace. The choice of making war to achieve a better peace is inherently a value judgment in which the statesman must decide those interests and beliefs worth killing and dying for. The military man is no better qualified than the common citizen to make such judgments. He must therefore confine his input to his area of expertise — the estimation of strategic probabilities.
The correct estimation of strategic possibilities can be further subdivided into the preparation for war and the conduct of war. Preparation for war consists in the raising, arming, equipping and training of forces. The conduct of war consists of both planning for the use of those forces and directing those forces in operations.
To prepare forces for war, the general must visualize the conditions of future combat. To raise military forces properly, the general must visualize the quality and quantity of forces needed in the next war. To arm and equip military forces properly, the general must visualize the materiel requirements of future engagements. To train military forces properly, the general must visualize the human demands on future battlefields, and replicate those conditions in peacetime exercises. Of course, not even the most skilled general can visualize precisely how future wars will be fought. According to British military historian and soldier Sir Michael Howard, "In structuring and preparing an army for war, you can be clear that you will not get it precisely right, but the important thing is not to be too far wrong, so that you can put it right quickly."
The most tragic error a general can make is to assume without much reflection that wars of the future will look much like wars of the past. Following World War I, French generals committed this error, assuming that the next war would involve static battles dominated by firepower and fixed fortifications. Throughout the interwar years, French generals raised, equipped, armed and trained the French military to fight the last war. In stark contrast, German generals spent the interwar years attempting to break the stalemate created by firepower and fortifications. They developed a new form of war — the blitzkrieg — that integrated mobility, firepower and decentralized tactics. The German Army did not get this new form of warfare precisely right. After the 1939 conquest of Poland, the German Army undertook a critical self-examination of its operations. However, German generals did not get it too far wrong either, and in less than a year had adapted their tactics for the invasion of France.
After visualizing the conditions of future combat, the general is responsible for explaining to civilian policymakers the demands of future combat and the risks entailed in failing to meet those demands. Civilian policymakers have neither the expertise nor the inclination to think deeply about strategic probabilities in the distant future. Policymakers, especially elected representatives, face powerful incentives to focus on near-term challenges that are of immediate concern to the public. Generating military capability is the labor of decades. If the general waits until the public and its elected representatives are immediately concerned with national security threats before finding his voice, he has waited too long. The general who speaks too loudly of preparing for war while the nation is at peace places at risk his position and status. However, the general who speaks too softly places at risk the security of his country.
Failing to visualize future battlefields represents a lapse in professional competence, but seeing those fields clearly and saying nothing is an even more serious lapse in professional character. Moral courage is often inversely proportional to popularity and this observation in nowhere more true than in the profession of arms. The history of military innovation is littered with the truncated careers of reformers who saw gathering threats clearly and advocated change boldly. A military professional must possess both the physical courage to face the hazards of battle and the moral courage to withstand the barbs of public scorn. On and off the battlefield, courage is the first characteristic of generalship.
Failures of Generalship in Vietnam
America's defeat in Vietnam is the most egregious failure in the history of American arms. America's general officer corps refused to prepare the Army to fight unconventional wars, despite ample indications that such preparations were in order. Having failed to prepare for such wars, America's generals sent our forces into battle without a coherent plan for victory. Unprepared for war and lacking a coherent strategy, America lost the war and the lives of more than 58,000 service members.
Following World War II, there were ample indicators that America's enemies would turn to insurgency to negate our advantages in firepower and mobility. The French experiences in Indochina and Algeria offered object lessons to Western armies facing unconventional foes. These lessons were not lost on the more astute members of America's political class. In 1961, President Kennedy warned of "another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin — war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat, by infiltration instead of aggression, seeking victory by evading and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him." In response to these threats, Kennedy undertook a comprehensive program to prepare America's armed forces for counterinsurgency.
Despite the experience of their allies and the urging of their president, America's generals failed to prepare their forces for counterinsurgency. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Decker assured his young president, "Any good soldier can handle guerrillas." Despite Kennedy's guidance to the contrary, the Army viewed the conflict in Vietnam in conventional terms. As late as 1964, Gen. Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated flatly that "the essence of the problem in Vietnam is military." While the Army made minor organizational adjustments at the urging of the president, the generals clung to what Andrew Krepinevich has called "the Army concept," a vision of warfare focused on the destruction of the enemy's forces.
Having failed to visualize accurately the conditions of combat in Vietnam, America's generals prosecuted the war in conventional terms. The U.S. military embarked on a graduated attrition strategy intended to compel North Vietnam to accept a negotiated peace. The U.S. undertook modest efforts at innovation in Vietnam. Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), spearheaded by the State Department's "Blowtorch" Bob Kromer, was a serious effort to address the political and economic causes of the insurgency. The Marine Corps' Combined Action Program (CAP) was an innovative approach to population security. However, these efforts are best described as too little, too late. Innovations such as CORDS and CAP never received the resources necessary to make a large-scale difference. The U.S. military grudgingly accepted these innovations late in the war, after the American public's commitment to the conflict began to wane.
America's generals not only failed to develop a strategy for victory in Vietnam, but also remained largely silent while the strategy developed by civilian politicians led to defeat. As H.R. McMaster noted in "Dereliction of Duty," the Joint Chiefs of Staff were divided by service parochialism and failed to develop a unified and coherent recommendation to the president for prosecuting the war to a successful conclusion. Army Chief of Staff Harold K. Johnson estimated in 1965 that victory would require as many as 700,000 troops for up to five years. Commandant of the Marine Corps Wallace Greene made a similar estimate on troop levels. As President Johnson incrementally escalated the war, neither man made his views known to the president or Congress. President Johnson made a concerted effort to conceal the costs and consequences of Vietnam from the public, but such duplicity required the passive consent of America's generals.
Having participated in the deception of the American people during the war, the Army chose after the war to deceive itself. In "Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife," John Nagl argued that instead of learning from defeat, the Army after Vietnam focused its energies on the kind of wars it knew how to win — high-technology conventional wars. An essential contribution to this strategy of denial was the publication of "On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War," by Col. Harry Summers. Summers, a faculty member of the U.S. Army War College, argued that the Army had erred by not focusing enough on conventional warfare in Vietnam, a lesson the Army was happy to hear. Despite having been recently defeated by an insurgency, the Army slashed training and resources devoted to counterinsurgency.
By the early 1990s, the Army's focus on conventional war-fighting appeared to have been vindicated. During the 1980s, the U.S. military benefited from the largest peacetime military buildup in the nation's history. High-technology equipment dramatically increased the mobility and lethality of our ground forces. The Army's National Training Center honed the Army's conventional war-fighting skills to a razor's edge. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the demise of the Soviet Union and the futility of direct confrontation with the U.S. Despite the fact the U.S. supported insurgencies in Afghanistan, Nicaragua and Angola to hasten the Soviet Union's demise, the U.S. military gave little thought to counterinsurgency throughout the 1990s. America's generals assumed without much reflection that the wars of the future would look much like the wars of the past — state-on-state conflicts against conventional forces. America's swift defeat of the Iraqi Army, the world's fourth-largest, in 1991 seemed to confirm the wisdom of the U.S. military's post-Vietnam reforms. But the military learned the wrong lessons from Operation Desert Storm. It continued to prepare for the last war, while its future enemies prepared for a new kind of war.
Failures of Generalship in Iraq
America's generals have repeated the mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq. First, throughout the 1990s our generals failed to envision the conditions of future combat and prepare their forces accordingly. Second, America's generals failed to estimate correctly both the means and the ways necessary to achieve the aims of policy prior to beginning the war in Iraq. Finally, America's generals did not provide Congress and the public with an accurate assessment of the conflict in Iraq.
Despite paying lip service to "transformation" throughout the 1990s, America's armed forces failed to change in significant ways after the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In "The Sling and the Stone," T.X. Hammes argues that the Defense Department's transformation strategy focuses almost exclusively on high-technology conventional wars. The doctrine, organizations, equipment and training of the U.S. military confirm this observation. The armed forces fought the global war on terrorism for the first five years with a counterinsurgency doctrine last revised in the Reagan administration. Despite engaging in numerous stability operations throughout the 1990s, the armed forces did little to bolster their capabilities for civic reconstruction and security force development. Procurement priorities during the 1990s followed the Cold War model, with significant funding devoted to new fighter aircraft and artillery systems. The most commonly used tactical scenarios in both schools and training centers replicated high-intensity interstate conflict. At the dawn of the 21st century, the U.S. is fighting brutal, adaptive insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, while our armed forces have spent the preceding decade having done little to prepare for such conflicts.
Having spent a decade preparing to fight the wrong war, America's generals then miscalculated both the means and ways necessary to succeed in Iraq. The most fundamental military miscalculation in Iraq has been the failure to commit sufficient forces to provide security to Iraq's population. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) estimated in its 1998 war plan that 380,000 troops would be necessary for an invasion of Iraq. Using operations in Bosnia and Kosovo as a model for predicting troop requirements, one Army study estimated a need for 470,000 troops. Alone among America's generals, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki publicly stated that "several hundred thousand soldiers" would be necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. Prior to the war, President Bush promised to give field commanders everything necessary for victory. Privately, many senior general officers both active and retired expressed serious misgivings about the insufficiency of forces for Iraq. These leaders would later express their concerns in tell-all books such as "Fiasco" and "Cobra II." However, when the U.S. went to war in Iraq with less than half the strength required to win, these leaders did not make their objections public.
Given the lack of troop strength, not even the most brilliant general could have devised the ways necessary to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. However, inept planning for postwar Iraq took the crisis caused by a lack of troops and quickly transformed it into a debacle. In 1997, the U.S. Central Command exercise "Desert Crossing" demonstrated that many postwar stabilization tasks would fall to the military. The other branches of the U.S. government lacked sufficient capability to do such work on the scale required in Iraq. Despite these results, CENTCOM accepted the assumption that the State Department would administer postwar Iraq. The military never explained to the president the magnitude of the challenges inherent in stabilizing postwar Iraq.
After failing to visualize the conditions of combat in Iraq, America's generals failed to adapt to the demands of counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency theory prescribes providing continuous security to the population. However, for most of the war American forces in Iraq have been concentrated on large forward-operating bases, isolated from the Iraqi people and focused on capturing or killing insurgents. Counterinsurgency theory requires strengthening the capability of host-nation institutions to provide security and other essential services to the population. America's generals treated efforts to create transition teams to develop local security forces and provincial reconstruction teams to improve essential services as afterthoughts, never providing the quantity or quality of personnel necessary for success.
After going into Iraq with too few troops and no coherent plan for postwar stabilization, America's general officer corps did not accurately portray the intensity of the insurgency to the American public. The Iraq Study Group concluded that "there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq." The ISG noted that "on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals." Population security is the most important measure of effectiveness in counterinsurgency. For more than three years, America's generals continued to insist that the U.S. was making progress in Iraq. However, for Iraqi civilians, each year from 2003 onward was more deadly than the one preceding it. For reasons that are not yet clear, America's general officer corps underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq's government and security forces and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of security conditions in Iraq. Moreover, America's generals have not explained clearly the larger strategic risks of committing so large a portion of the nation's deployable land power to a single theater of operations.
The intellectual and moral failures common to America's general officer corps in Vietnam and Iraq constitute a crisis in American generalship. Any explanation that fixes culpability on individuals is insufficient. No one leader, civilian or military, caused failure in Vietnam or Iraq. Different military and civilian leaders in the two conflicts produced similar results. In both conflicts, the general officer corps designed to advise policymakers, prepare forces and conduct operations failed to perform its intended functions. To understand how the U.S. could face defeat at the hands of a weaker insurgent enemy for the second time in a generation, we must look at the structural influences that produce our general officer corps.
The Generals We Need
The most insightful examination of failed generalship comes from J.F.C. Fuller's "Generalship: Its Diseases and Their Cure." Fuller was a British major general who saw action in the first attempts at armored warfare in World War I. He found three common characteristics in great generals — courage, creative intelligence and physical fitness.
The need for intelligent, creative and courageous general officers is self-evident. An understanding of the larger aspects of war is essential to great generalship. However, a survey of Army three- and four-star generals shows that only 25 percent hold advanced degrees from civilian institutions in the social sciences or humanities. Counterinsurgency theory holds that proficiency in foreign languages is essential to success, yet only one in four of the Army's senior generals speaks another language. While the physical courage of America's generals is not in doubt, there is less certainty regarding their moral courage. In almost surreal language, professional military men blame their recent lack of candor on the intimidating management style of their civilian masters. Now that the public is immediately concerned with the crisis in Iraq, some of our generals are finding their voices. They may have waited too long.
Neither the executive branch nor the services themselves are likely to remedy the shortcomings in America's general officer corps. Indeed, the tendency of the executive branch to seek out mild-mannered team players to serve as senior generals is part of the problem. The services themselves are equally to blame. The system that produces our generals does little to reward creativity and moral courage. Officers rise to flag rank by following remarkably similar career patterns. Senior generals, both active and retired, are the most important figures in determining an officer's potential for flag rank. The views of subordinates and peers play no role in an officer's advancement; to move up he must only please his superiors. In a system in which senior officers select for promotion those like themselves, there are powerful incentives for conformity. It is unreasonable to expect that an officer who spends 25 years conforming to institutional expectations will emerge as an innovator in his late forties.
If America desires creative intelligence and moral courage in its general officer corps, it must create a system that rewards these qualities. Congress can create such incentives by exercising its proper oversight function in three areas. First, Congress must change the system for selecting general officers. Second, oversight committees must apply increased scrutiny over generating the necessary means and pursuing appropriate ways for applying America's military power. Third, the Senate must hold accountable through its confirmation powers those officers who fail to achieve the aims of policy at an acceptable cost in blood and treasure.
To improve the creative intelligence of our generals, Congress must change the officer promotion system in ways that reward adaptation and intellectual achievement. Congress should require the armed services to implement 360-degree evaluations for field-grade and flag officers. Junior officers and noncommissioned officers are often the first to adapt because they bear the brunt of failed tactics most directly. They are also less wed to organizational norms and less influenced by organizational taboos. Junior leaders have valuable insights regarding the effectiveness of their leaders, but the current promotion system excludes these judgments. Incorporating subordinate and peer reviews into promotion decisions for senior leaders would produce officers more willing to adapt to changing circumstances, and less likely to conform to outmoded practices.
Congress should also modify the officer promotion system in ways that reward intellectual achievement. The Senate should examine the education and professional writing of nominees for three- and four-star billets as part of the confirmation process. The Senate would never confirm to the Supreme Court a nominee who had neither been to law school nor written legal opinions. However, it routinely confirms four-star generals who possess neither graduate education in the social sciences or humanities nor the capability to speak a foreign language. Senior general officers must have a vision of what future conflicts will look like and what capabilities the U.S. requires to prevail in those conflicts. They must possess the capability to understand and interact with foreign cultures. A solid record of intellectual achievement and fluency in foreign languages are effective indicators of an officer's potential for senior leadership.
To reward moral courage in our general officers, Congress must ask hard questions about the means and ways for war as part of its oversight responsibility. Some of the answers will be shocking, which is perhaps why Congress has not asked and the generals have not told. Congress must ask for a candid assessment of the money and manpower required over the next generation to prevail in the Long War. The money required to prevail may place fiscal constraints on popular domestic priorities. The quantity and quality of manpower required may call into question the viability of the all-volunteer military. Congress must re-examine the allocation of existing resources, and demand that procurement priorities reflect the most likely threats we will face. Congress must be equally rigorous in ensuring that the ways of war contribute to conflict termination consistent with the aims of national policy. If our operations produce more enemies than they defeat, no amount of force is sufficient to prevail. Current oversight efforts have proved inadequate, allowing the executive branch, the services and lobbyists to present information that is sometimes incomplete, inaccurate or self-serving. Exercising adequate oversight will require members of Congress to develop the expertise necessary to ask the right questions and display the courage to follow the truth wherever it leads them.
Finally, Congress must enhance accountability by exercising its little-used authority to confirm the retired rank of general officers. By law, Congress must confirm an officer who retires at three- or four-star rank. In the past this requirement has been pro forma in all but a few cases. A general who presides over a massive human rights scandal or a substantial deterioration in security ought to be retired at a lower rank than one who serves with distinction. A general who fails to provide Congress with an accurate and candid assessment of strategic probabilities ought to suffer the same penalty. As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war. By exercising its powers to confirm the retired ranks of general officers, Congress can restore accountability among senior military leaders.
Mortal Danger
This article began with Frederick the Great's admonition to his officers to focus their energies on the larger aspects of war. The Prussian monarch's innovations had made his army the terror of Europe, but he knew that his adversaries were learning and adapting. Frederick feared that his generals would master his system of war without thinking deeply about the ever-changing nature of war, and in doing so would place Prussia's security at risk. These fears would prove prophetic. At the Battle of Valmy in 1792, Frederick's successors were checked by France's ragtag citizen army. In the fourteen years that followed, Prussia's generals assumed without much reflection that the wars of the future would look much like those of the past. In 1806, the Prussian Army marched lockstep into defeat and disaster at the hands of Napoleon at Jena. Frederick's prophecy had come to pass; Prussia became a French vassal.
Iraq is America's Valmy. America's generals have been checked by a form of war that they did not prepare for and do not understand. They spent the years following the 1991 Gulf War mastering a system of war without thinking deeply about the ever changing nature of war. They marched into Iraq having assumed without much reflection that the wars of the future would look much like the wars of the past. Those few who saw clearly our vulnerability to insurgent tactics said and did little to prepare for these dangers. As at Valmy, this one debacle, however humiliating, will not in itself signal national disaster. The hour is late, but not too late to prepare for the challenges of the Long War. We still have time to select as our generals those who possess the intelligence to visualize future conflicts and the moral courage to advise civilian policymakers on the preparations needed for our security. The power and the responsibility to identify such generals lie with the U.S. Congress. If Congress does not act, our Jena awaits us.
Friday, May 4, 2007
Forget Abortion, Here's a Culture War
I need to really take the time to back off Chris Hitchens' cock (my crush is starting to border on creepy recently). Nonetheless, this is another great article, that happens to scrare the living shit out of me. Especially that last sentence.
Londonistan Calling
The London neighborhood of the author's youth, Finsbury Park, is now one of the breeding grounds for a new phenomenon: the British jihadist. How did a nation move from cricket and fish-and-chips to burkas and shoe-bombers in a single generation?
by Christopher Hitchens June 2007
www.vanityfair.com
They say that the past is another country, but let me tell you that it's much more unsettling to find that the present has become another country, too. In my lost youth I lived in Finsbury Park, a shabby area of North London, roughly between the old Arsenal football ground and the Seven Sisters Road. It was a working-class neighborhood, with a good number of Irish and Cypriot immigrants. Your food choices were the inevitable fish-and-chips, plus the curry joint, plus a strong pitch from the Greek and Turkish kebab sellers. There was never much "bother," as the British say, in Finsbury Park. Greeks and Turks might be fighting in Cyprus, but they never lifted a hand to one another in London. Many of the Irish had republican allegiances, but they didn't take that out on the local Protestants. And, even though both Cyprus and Ireland had all the grievances of partitioned former British colonies, it would have seemed inconceivable—unimaginable—that any of their sons would put a bomb on the bus their neighbors used.
Returning to the old place after a long absence, I found that it was the scent of Algeria that now predominated along the main thoroughfare of Blackstock Road. This had had a good effect on the quality of the coffee and the spiciness of the grocery stores. But it felt odd, under the gray skies of London, to see women wearing the veil, and even swathed in the chador or the all-enveloping burka. Many of these Algerians, Bangladeshis, and others are also refugees from conflict in their own country. Indeed, they have often been the losers in battles against Middle Eastern and Asian regimes which they regard as insufficiently Islamic. Quite unlike the Irish and the Cypriots, they bring these far-off quarrels along with them. And they also bring a religion which is not ashamed to speak of conquest and violence.
Until he was jailed last year on charges of soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred, a man known to the police of several countries as Abu Hamza al-Masri was the imam of the Finsbury Park Mosque. He was a conspicuous figure because, having lost the use of an eye and both hands in an exchange of views in Afghanistan, he sported an opaque eye plus a hook to theatrical effect. Not as nice as he looked, Abu Hamza was nonetheless unfailingly generous with his hospitality. Overnight guests at his mosque's sleeping quarters have included Richard Reid, the man in whose honor we now all have to take off our shoes at the airport, and Zacarias Moussaoui, the missing team member of September 11, 2001. Other visitors included Ahmed Ressam, arrested for trying to blow up LAX for the millennium, and Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian who planned to don an explosive vest and penetrate the American Embassy in Paris. On July 7, 2005 ("7/7," as the British call it), a clutch of bombs exploded in London's transport system. It emerged that one of the suicide murderers had been influenced by the preachings of Abu Hamza, as had two of those attempting to replicate the mission two weeks later.
In fact, the British jihadist is becoming quite a feature on the international scene. In 1998, six British citizens of Pakistani and North African descent along with two other British residents were arrested by the government of Yemen and convicted of planning to kidnap a group of tourists and attack British targets in the port of Aden (scene of the near-sinking of the U.S.S. Cole two years later). One of the youths was the son of the tireless Abu Hamza, and another was his stepson. In December 2001, Richard Reid made his bid on the Paris–Miami flight. By then, two or three Britons had been killed in Afghanistan—fighting on the side of the Taliban. The following year came the video butchering of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, whose abduction and murder were organized by another Briton—a former student at the London School of Economics—named Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh. And the year after that, two British-passport holders, Asif Mohammed Hanif and Omar Khan Sharif, took part in a suicide attack on Mike's Place, a Tel Aviv bar.
The British have always been proud of their tradition of hospitality and asylum, which has benefited Huguenots escaping persecution, European Jewry, and many political dissidents from Marx to Mazzini. But the appellation "Londonistan," which apparently originated with a sarcastic remark by a French intelligence officer, has come to describe a city which became home to people wanted for terrorist crimes as far afield as Cairo and Karachi. The capital of the United Kingdom is, in the words of Steven Simon, a former White House counterterrorism official, "the Star Wars bar scene," catering promiscuously to all manner of Islamist recruiters and fund-raisers for, and actual practitioners of, holy war.
In the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings, which killed 52 civilians (including a young Afghan, Atique Sharifi, who had fled to London to escape the Taliban) and injured hundreds more, I found that American television interviewers were all asking me the same question: How can this be? Britain is the country of warm beer and cricket and rain-lashed seaside resorts, not a place of arms for exotic and morbid cults. British press coverage struck the same plaintive note. One of the murderers, Shehzad Tanweer, was a cricket enthusiast from Leeds, in Yorkshire, whose family ran a fish-and-chips shop. You can't get much more assimilated than that. Yet Britain's former head of domestic intelligence, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller (and you can't get much more British than that, either), said last year that there are more than "1,600 identified individuals" within the borders of the kingdom who are ready to follow Tanweer's example (including those in whose honor we now all have to part with our liquids and gels at the airport). And, according to Manningham-Buller, "over 100,000 of our citizens consider the July 2005 attacks in London justified."
I told those who were interviewing me to go back and review the 1997 film of Hanif Kureishi's brilliant short story "My Son the Fanatic," and then to reread Monica Ali's 2003 novel, Brick Lane. The film is set in a dilapidated Yorkshire mill town very like the ones that spawned the 7/7 bombers, and the book is named for an area of East London that is now mainly Bengali and Muslim but has been home to successive waves of Huguenot and Jewish immigration. I remember leaving the cinema after seeing My Son the Fanatic, and feeling a heavy sense of depression, along with a strong premonition of trouble to come. In the figures of Parvez, the Pakistani cabdriver, and his morose son, Farid, Kureishi had captured the generational essence of the problem. In the 1960s, many Asians moved to Britain in quest of employment and education. They worked hard, were law-abiding, and spent much of their time combating prejudice. Their mosques were more like social centers. But their children, now grown, are frequently contemptuous of what they see as their parents' passivity. Often stirred by Internet accounts of jihadists in faraway countries like Chechnya or Kashmir, they perhaps also feel the urge to prove that they have not "sold out" by living in the comfortable, consumerist West. A recent poll by the Policy Exchange think tank captures the problem in one finding: 59 percent of British Muslims would prefer to live under British law rather than Shari'a; 28 percent would choose Shari'a. But among those 55 and older, only 17 percent prefer Shari'a, whereas in the 16-to-24 age group the figure rises to 37 percent. Almost exactly the same proportions apply when the question is whether or not a Muslim who converts to another faith should be put to death …
"They remind me of the 60s revolutionaries in some ways," said Hanif Kureishi as we sat in one of London's finest Indian restaurants. "A lot of romantic talk, but a hard-core faction who will actually volunteer to go to training camps." Making a rather sharp distinction between the new young fundamentalists and the 1960s rebels, he added that he had never met a jihadist who wasn't militantly anti-Semitic. Monica Ali, whose lovely novel also emphasizes the generational divide and captures the Third World–type pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric, independently told me the same thing. She had seen British television cave in to extremists who did not want her book made into a film, and who threatened trouble if the cameras were brought to the East End, but this did not alarm her as much as "the way that hatred of the Jews has become absolutely standard, all across the community."
It's interesting that it should be authors from Muslim backgrounds—Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, the broadcaster and co-author of the Policy Exchange report Munira Mirza—who are issuing the warnings. For the British mainstream, multiculturalism has been the official civic religion for so long that any criticism of any minority group has become the equivalent of profanity. And Islamic extremists have long understood that they need only suggest a racial bias—or a hint of the newly invented and meaningless term "Islamophobia"—in order to make the British cough and shuffle with embarrassment. Prince Charles himself, the heir to the throne and thus the heir to the headship of the Church of England, has announced his sympathy for Islam and his wish to be the head of all faiths and not just one. This may sound good, if absurd (a chinless prince who becomes head of a church because his mother dies?), but only if you forget that it was Prince Charles who encouraged the late King Fahd, of Saudi Arabia, to contribute more than a million pounds to build … the Finsbury Park Mosque! If you want my opinion, our old district was a lot better off when the crowned heads of the world were busy neglecting it.
Anyway, you can't be multicultural and preach murderous loathing of Jews, Britain's oldest and most successful (and most consistently anti-racist) minority. And you can't be multicultural and preach equally homicidal hatred of India, Britain's most important ally and friend after the United States. My colleague Henry Porter sat me down in his West London home and made me watch a documentary that he thought had received far too little attention when shown on Britain's Channel 4. It is entitled Undercover Mosque, and it shows film shot in quite mainstream Islamic centers in Birmingham and London (you can now find it easily on the Internet). And there it all is: foaming, bearded preachers calling for crucifixion of unbelievers, for homosexuals to be thrown off mountaintops, for disobedient and "deficient" women to be beaten into submission, and for Jewish and Indian property and life to be destroyed. "You have to bomb the Indian businesses, and as for the Jews, you kill them physically," as one sermonizer, calling himself Sheikh al-Faisal, so prettily puts it. This stuff is being inculcated in small children—who are also informed that the age of consent should be nine years old, in honor of the prophet Muhammad's youngest spouse. Again, these were not tin-roof storefront mosques but well-appointed and well-attended places of worship, often the beneficiaries of Saudi Arabian largesse. It's not just the mosques, either. In West London there is a school named for Prince Charles's friend King Fahd, with 650 pupils, funded and run by the government of Saudi Arabia. According to Colin Cook, a British convert to Islam (initially inspired by the former crooner Cat Stevens) who taught there for 19 years, teaching materials said that Jews "engage in witchcraft and sorcery and obey Satan," and incited pupils to list the defects of worthless heresies such as Judaism and Christianity.
What this shows is the utter futility of the soft-centered explanations of the 7/7 bombings and other outrages. It was argued for a while that the 7/7 perpetrators were victims of unemployment and poverty, until their remains were identified and it became clear that most of them came from educated and reasonably well-off backgrounds. The excuses then abruptly switched, and we were asked to believe that it was Tony Blair's policy in Iraq and Afghanistan that motivated the killers. Suppose the latter to be true. It would still be the case that they belong to a movement that hates Jews and Indians and all kuffar, or "unbelievers": a fanatical sect that believes itself entitled to use deadly violence at any time. The roots of violence, that is to say, are in the preaching of it, and the sanctification of it.
If anything, Tony Blair is far too indulgent to this phenomenon. It is his policy of encouraging "faith schools" that has written sectarianism into the very fabric of British life. A non-Muslim child who lives in a Muslim-majority area may now find herself attending a school that requires headscarves. The idea of separate schools for separate faiths—the idea that worked so beautifully in Northern Ireland—has meant that children are encouraged to think of themselves as belonging to a distinct religious "community" rather than a nation. As Undercover Mosque also shows, Blair's government has appeased leading Muslim apologists by inviting them to join "commissions" to investigate the 7/7 attacks, and thus awarding them credibility well beyond their deserts. A preposterous and sinister individual named Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain and a man with a public record of support for Osama bin Laden, was made a convener of Blair's task force on extremism despite his stated belief that the BBC and the rest of the media are "Zionist controlled."
It's impossible to exaggerate how far and how fast this situation has deteriorated. Even at the time of the Satanic Verses affair, as long ago as 1989, Muslim demonstrations may have demanded Rushdie's death, but they did so, if you like, peacefully. And they confined their lurid rhetorical attacks to Muslims who had become apostate. But at least since the time of the Danish-cartoon furor, threats have been made against non-Muslims as well as ex-Muslims, the killing of Shiite Muslim heretics has been applauded and justified, and the general resort to indiscriminate violence has been rationalized in the name of god. Traditional Islamic law says that Muslims who live in non-Muslim societies must obey the law of the majority. But this does not restrain those who now believe that they can proselytize Islam by force, and need not obey kuffar law in the meantime. I find myself haunted by a challenge that was offered on the BBC by a Muslim activist named Anjem Choudary: a man who has praised the 9/11 murders as "magnificent" and proclaimed that "Britain belongs to Allah." When asked if he might prefer to move to a country which practices Shari'a, he replied: "Who says you own Britain anyway?" A question that will have to be answered one way or another.
Londonistan Calling
The London neighborhood of the author's youth, Finsbury Park, is now one of the breeding grounds for a new phenomenon: the British jihadist. How did a nation move from cricket and fish-and-chips to burkas and shoe-bombers in a single generation?
by Christopher Hitchens June 2007
www.vanityfair.com
They say that the past is another country, but let me tell you that it's much more unsettling to find that the present has become another country, too. In my lost youth I lived in Finsbury Park, a shabby area of North London, roughly between the old Arsenal football ground and the Seven Sisters Road. It was a working-class neighborhood, with a good number of Irish and Cypriot immigrants. Your food choices were the inevitable fish-and-chips, plus the curry joint, plus a strong pitch from the Greek and Turkish kebab sellers. There was never much "bother," as the British say, in Finsbury Park. Greeks and Turks might be fighting in Cyprus, but they never lifted a hand to one another in London. Many of the Irish had republican allegiances, but they didn't take that out on the local Protestants. And, even though both Cyprus and Ireland had all the grievances of partitioned former British colonies, it would have seemed inconceivable—unimaginable—that any of their sons would put a bomb on the bus their neighbors used.
Returning to the old place after a long absence, I found that it was the scent of Algeria that now predominated along the main thoroughfare of Blackstock Road. This had had a good effect on the quality of the coffee and the spiciness of the grocery stores. But it felt odd, under the gray skies of London, to see women wearing the veil, and even swathed in the chador or the all-enveloping burka. Many of these Algerians, Bangladeshis, and others are also refugees from conflict in their own country. Indeed, they have often been the losers in battles against Middle Eastern and Asian regimes which they regard as insufficiently Islamic. Quite unlike the Irish and the Cypriots, they bring these far-off quarrels along with them. And they also bring a religion which is not ashamed to speak of conquest and violence.
Until he was jailed last year on charges of soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred, a man known to the police of several countries as Abu Hamza al-Masri was the imam of the Finsbury Park Mosque. He was a conspicuous figure because, having lost the use of an eye and both hands in an exchange of views in Afghanistan, he sported an opaque eye plus a hook to theatrical effect. Not as nice as he looked, Abu Hamza was nonetheless unfailingly generous with his hospitality. Overnight guests at his mosque's sleeping quarters have included Richard Reid, the man in whose honor we now all have to take off our shoes at the airport, and Zacarias Moussaoui, the missing team member of September 11, 2001. Other visitors included Ahmed Ressam, arrested for trying to blow up LAX for the millennium, and Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian who planned to don an explosive vest and penetrate the American Embassy in Paris. On July 7, 2005 ("7/7," as the British call it), a clutch of bombs exploded in London's transport system. It emerged that one of the suicide murderers had been influenced by the preachings of Abu Hamza, as had two of those attempting to replicate the mission two weeks later.
In fact, the British jihadist is becoming quite a feature on the international scene. In 1998, six British citizens of Pakistani and North African descent along with two other British residents were arrested by the government of Yemen and convicted of planning to kidnap a group of tourists and attack British targets in the port of Aden (scene of the near-sinking of the U.S.S. Cole two years later). One of the youths was the son of the tireless Abu Hamza, and another was his stepson. In December 2001, Richard Reid made his bid on the Paris–Miami flight. By then, two or three Britons had been killed in Afghanistan—fighting on the side of the Taliban. The following year came the video butchering of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, whose abduction and murder were organized by another Briton—a former student at the London School of Economics—named Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh. And the year after that, two British-passport holders, Asif Mohammed Hanif and Omar Khan Sharif, took part in a suicide attack on Mike's Place, a Tel Aviv bar.
The British have always been proud of their tradition of hospitality and asylum, which has benefited Huguenots escaping persecution, European Jewry, and many political dissidents from Marx to Mazzini. But the appellation "Londonistan," which apparently originated with a sarcastic remark by a French intelligence officer, has come to describe a city which became home to people wanted for terrorist crimes as far afield as Cairo and Karachi. The capital of the United Kingdom is, in the words of Steven Simon, a former White House counterterrorism official, "the Star Wars bar scene," catering promiscuously to all manner of Islamist recruiters and fund-raisers for, and actual practitioners of, holy war.
In the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings, which killed 52 civilians (including a young Afghan, Atique Sharifi, who had fled to London to escape the Taliban) and injured hundreds more, I found that American television interviewers were all asking me the same question: How can this be? Britain is the country of warm beer and cricket and rain-lashed seaside resorts, not a place of arms for exotic and morbid cults. British press coverage struck the same plaintive note. One of the murderers, Shehzad Tanweer, was a cricket enthusiast from Leeds, in Yorkshire, whose family ran a fish-and-chips shop. You can't get much more assimilated than that. Yet Britain's former head of domestic intelligence, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller (and you can't get much more British than that, either), said last year that there are more than "1,600 identified individuals" within the borders of the kingdom who are ready to follow Tanweer's example (including those in whose honor we now all have to part with our liquids and gels at the airport). And, according to Manningham-Buller, "over 100,000 of our citizens consider the July 2005 attacks in London justified."
I told those who were interviewing me to go back and review the 1997 film of Hanif Kureishi's brilliant short story "My Son the Fanatic," and then to reread Monica Ali's 2003 novel, Brick Lane. The film is set in a dilapidated Yorkshire mill town very like the ones that spawned the 7/7 bombers, and the book is named for an area of East London that is now mainly Bengali and Muslim but has been home to successive waves of Huguenot and Jewish immigration. I remember leaving the cinema after seeing My Son the Fanatic, and feeling a heavy sense of depression, along with a strong premonition of trouble to come. In the figures of Parvez, the Pakistani cabdriver, and his morose son, Farid, Kureishi had captured the generational essence of the problem. In the 1960s, many Asians moved to Britain in quest of employment and education. They worked hard, were law-abiding, and spent much of their time combating prejudice. Their mosques were more like social centers. But their children, now grown, are frequently contemptuous of what they see as their parents' passivity. Often stirred by Internet accounts of jihadists in faraway countries like Chechnya or Kashmir, they perhaps also feel the urge to prove that they have not "sold out" by living in the comfortable, consumerist West. A recent poll by the Policy Exchange think tank captures the problem in one finding: 59 percent of British Muslims would prefer to live under British law rather than Shari'a; 28 percent would choose Shari'a. But among those 55 and older, only 17 percent prefer Shari'a, whereas in the 16-to-24 age group the figure rises to 37 percent. Almost exactly the same proportions apply when the question is whether or not a Muslim who converts to another faith should be put to death …
"They remind me of the 60s revolutionaries in some ways," said Hanif Kureishi as we sat in one of London's finest Indian restaurants. "A lot of romantic talk, but a hard-core faction who will actually volunteer to go to training camps." Making a rather sharp distinction between the new young fundamentalists and the 1960s rebels, he added that he had never met a jihadist who wasn't militantly anti-Semitic. Monica Ali, whose lovely novel also emphasizes the generational divide and captures the Third World–type pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric, independently told me the same thing. She had seen British television cave in to extremists who did not want her book made into a film, and who threatened trouble if the cameras were brought to the East End, but this did not alarm her as much as "the way that hatred of the Jews has become absolutely standard, all across the community."
It's interesting that it should be authors from Muslim backgrounds—Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, the broadcaster and co-author of the Policy Exchange report Munira Mirza—who are issuing the warnings. For the British mainstream, multiculturalism has been the official civic religion for so long that any criticism of any minority group has become the equivalent of profanity. And Islamic extremists have long understood that they need only suggest a racial bias—or a hint of the newly invented and meaningless term "Islamophobia"—in order to make the British cough and shuffle with embarrassment. Prince Charles himself, the heir to the throne and thus the heir to the headship of the Church of England, has announced his sympathy for Islam and his wish to be the head of all faiths and not just one. This may sound good, if absurd (a chinless prince who becomes head of a church because his mother dies?), but only if you forget that it was Prince Charles who encouraged the late King Fahd, of Saudi Arabia, to contribute more than a million pounds to build … the Finsbury Park Mosque! If you want my opinion, our old district was a lot better off when the crowned heads of the world were busy neglecting it.
Anyway, you can't be multicultural and preach murderous loathing of Jews, Britain's oldest and most successful (and most consistently anti-racist) minority. And you can't be multicultural and preach equally homicidal hatred of India, Britain's most important ally and friend after the United States. My colleague Henry Porter sat me down in his West London home and made me watch a documentary that he thought had received far too little attention when shown on Britain's Channel 4. It is entitled Undercover Mosque, and it shows film shot in quite mainstream Islamic centers in Birmingham and London (you can now find it easily on the Internet). And there it all is: foaming, bearded preachers calling for crucifixion of unbelievers, for homosexuals to be thrown off mountaintops, for disobedient and "deficient" women to be beaten into submission, and for Jewish and Indian property and life to be destroyed. "You have to bomb the Indian businesses, and as for the Jews, you kill them physically," as one sermonizer, calling himself Sheikh al-Faisal, so prettily puts it. This stuff is being inculcated in small children—who are also informed that the age of consent should be nine years old, in honor of the prophet Muhammad's youngest spouse. Again, these were not tin-roof storefront mosques but well-appointed and well-attended places of worship, often the beneficiaries of Saudi Arabian largesse. It's not just the mosques, either. In West London there is a school named for Prince Charles's friend King Fahd, with 650 pupils, funded and run by the government of Saudi Arabia. According to Colin Cook, a British convert to Islam (initially inspired by the former crooner Cat Stevens) who taught there for 19 years, teaching materials said that Jews "engage in witchcraft and sorcery and obey Satan," and incited pupils to list the defects of worthless heresies such as Judaism and Christianity.
What this shows is the utter futility of the soft-centered explanations of the 7/7 bombings and other outrages. It was argued for a while that the 7/7 perpetrators were victims of unemployment and poverty, until their remains were identified and it became clear that most of them came from educated and reasonably well-off backgrounds. The excuses then abruptly switched, and we were asked to believe that it was Tony Blair's policy in Iraq and Afghanistan that motivated the killers. Suppose the latter to be true. It would still be the case that they belong to a movement that hates Jews and Indians and all kuffar, or "unbelievers": a fanatical sect that believes itself entitled to use deadly violence at any time. The roots of violence, that is to say, are in the preaching of it, and the sanctification of it.
If anything, Tony Blair is far too indulgent to this phenomenon. It is his policy of encouraging "faith schools" that has written sectarianism into the very fabric of British life. A non-Muslim child who lives in a Muslim-majority area may now find herself attending a school that requires headscarves. The idea of separate schools for separate faiths—the idea that worked so beautifully in Northern Ireland—has meant that children are encouraged to think of themselves as belonging to a distinct religious "community" rather than a nation. As Undercover Mosque also shows, Blair's government has appeased leading Muslim apologists by inviting them to join "commissions" to investigate the 7/7 attacks, and thus awarding them credibility well beyond their deserts. A preposterous and sinister individual named Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain and a man with a public record of support for Osama bin Laden, was made a convener of Blair's task force on extremism despite his stated belief that the BBC and the rest of the media are "Zionist controlled."
It's impossible to exaggerate how far and how fast this situation has deteriorated. Even at the time of the Satanic Verses affair, as long ago as 1989, Muslim demonstrations may have demanded Rushdie's death, but they did so, if you like, peacefully. And they confined their lurid rhetorical attacks to Muslims who had become apostate. But at least since the time of the Danish-cartoon furor, threats have been made against non-Muslims as well as ex-Muslims, the killing of Shiite Muslim heretics has been applauded and justified, and the general resort to indiscriminate violence has been rationalized in the name of god. Traditional Islamic law says that Muslims who live in non-Muslim societies must obey the law of the majority. But this does not restrain those who now believe that they can proselytize Islam by force, and need not obey kuffar law in the meantime. I find myself haunted by a challenge that was offered on the BBC by a Muslim activist named Anjem Choudary: a man who has praised the 9/11 murders as "magnificent" and proclaimed that "Britain belongs to Allah." When asked if he might prefer to move to a country which practices Shari'a, he replied: "Who says you own Britain anyway?" A question that will have to be answered one way or another.
In the Hopper
While an improvised book club - therefore reading fiction - has definitely occupied most of my available reading time, Darwin is getting moved closer towards the front of the list of things that I need to read in the next year. Too bad that list is something like 300 titles long right now. Well, reading everything I ever wanted to read is as good a reason as any to join the Peace Corps.
Darwin's Delay
Portrait of the naturalist as a brilliant writer.
By Jonathan Weiner
Posted Thursday, May 3, 2007, at 1:09 PM ET
www.slate.com
In 2009, On the Origin of Species will be 150 years old. On Feb. 12, 2009, its author would have turned 200.* Dozens of new books will be published to mark this double anniversary, and at last, Darwin the writer will receive the attention he deserves. Darwin the scientist is beyond famous. Darwin the scribbler is comparatively obscure. But I think he should be a hero for everyone who tries and tries again to put words on paper.
I first read Darwin's Origin back in 1990, before a trip to the Galapagos. At the time, the pleasure of reading the book—as opposed to reading about the book—felt almost like a private discovery. Darwin was not celebrated for his prose. The only Darwin fans I knew were biologists. A British literary critic, Gillian Beer, had examined his influence on Victorian novelists in her book Darwin's Plots. An American literary critic, Stanley Edgar Hyman, had praised Darwin as an imaginative writer in his own right (along with Marx, Fraser, and Freud) in a book called The Tangled Bank. But there was much more to say, and it seemed to me that no one ever said it.
That's changing now, and Darwin fans bump into each other more often—like tourists in the Galapagos. In 2005, for instance, E.O. Wilson and James D. Watson collided when they each published a massive Darwin reader, both of which include the complete texts of Darwin's four greatest books: The Voyage of the H. M. S. Beagle (1845); On the Origin of Species (1859); The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871); and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Wilson and Watson also use the same epigraph—the sentence in which Darwin, with infinite tact and reluctance, spells out the one point in his argument he knew would shock his readers most: "that man with all his noble qualities … still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin." Darwin had known that to be true as early as 1837, one year after the Beagle voyage. But he did not declare it until The Descent, in 1871, a delay of 34 years.
"Darwin's Delay is by now nearly as famous as Hamlet's," Adam Gopnik wrote last fall in The New Yorker in a long essay in praise of "Charles Darwin, natural novelist." Gopnik examines the immense skill with which Darwin moves and persuades, and he explains how much it took out of Darwin to say what he said. In Darwin's Origin of Species: A Biography, Janet Browne, the pre-eminent biographer of Darwin, provides an account not just of that masterpiece, but of a wonderful, miserable writer, as well.
Suppose there are a dozen stages in the life of a great writer. For every one of them, Darwin is not only representative, he is monumental—sometimes inspiring, sometimes hugely comforting, always larger than life.
Lost Youth. Darwin's father and grandfather were both rich, successful doctors. But Darwin wasn't much of a student. He dropped out of medical school, and then spent most of his time at Cambridge hunting or wandering around the woods, collecting beetles. His father—an overbearing man who weighed 300 pounds—cried, "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family."
The Wanderjahr. When the chance came for Charles to sail around the world on the Beagle, a surveying ship, his father did not want to let him go. Why pile wandering on wandering? Fortunately, Robert Darwin changed his mind. Although Charles was sick as a dog from his first day at sea to his last, no young writer ever had a better Wanderjahr, and no one ever left a better record of one. Some of the best features of his style—his charm, curiosity, excitement, and sincerity—are right there on the first page of the journal of his voyage, in the entry of Jan. 16, 1832, the day the Beagle landed for the first time, in the Cape de Verd Islands. "The scene, as beheld through the hazy atmosphere of this climate, is one of the greatest interest," Darwin writes; "if, indeed, a person, fresh from the sea, and who has just walked, for the first time, in a grove of cocoa-nut trees, can be a judge of any thing but his own happiness."
The Great Idea. The wander-year lasted five years. Soon after, Darwin arrived at the greatest idea of his life. It was also the greatest idea of his century. It has been called the greatest idea of all time. In its light, everything he had seen in his circumnavigation of the world suffered a sea change into something rich and strange. Darwin began scribbling in secret notebooks. He endured what he called "mental riot."
Sitzfleisch. Robert Oppenheimer once observed that a physicist needs not only inspiration but also sitzfleisch—the ability to keep one's flesh sitting in a chair. Writers need the same gift, and Darwin was a hero of sitzfleisch. Even his patience was larger than life. His motto was, "It's dogged as does it." After his big idea, he spent 20 years sitting at his desk, in the bosom of his growing family, working out his theory and its implications.
Troubles. He was as sick at his desk as he had been at sea. He came down with everything from nausea and palpitations of the heart to boils. It may have been the anxiety of his secret work that destroyed his health. He hated controversy and knew that his views would bring him so much of it that he might be disgraced. He and his wife, Emma, also suffered the deaths of several of their children, including their favorite daughter, Annie.
Procrastination. Almost as famous as Hamlet's.
Competition. In June 1858, Darwin got a letter from a young naturalist expounding on Darwin's great idea: evolution by natural selection. "I never saw a more striking coincidence," Darwin wrote to a friend and mentor, the great geologist Charles Lyell. Lyell and a few other friends arranged for a paper of Darwin's and a paper of Alfred Russel Wallace's to be read together the next month at a meeting of the Linnean Society of London. Then Darwin began to scribble his masterpiece at last.
Agony. "There seems to be a sort of fatality in my mind leading me to put at first my statement and proposition in a wrong or awkward form," he lamented years later in his Autobiography. Writing the Origin was more than the usual torture. "I am becoming as weak as a child," he complained to one of his best friends, "miserably unwell & shattered."
Breakthrough. Though it came with so much effort, he wrote the Origin in a single year. For a writer, it was his wonder-year, as Browne says, "the traveler at last approaching his goal."
Voice. "His voice was in turn dazzling, persuasive, friendly, humble and dark," Browne writes. At still other turns it was "mild in the extreme." But even the mildest passages are dramatic, reined in, serving as they do a ferociously shocking and revolutionary view of life.
Controversy. Again monumental, of course: the greatest controversy of his century. Even some of his best friends could not agree with him. Charles Lyell told Thomas Henry Huxley that he "could not go the whole orang."
Fame. After the Origin was published, Darwin wrote as many as 500 letters a year. He became to the 19th century what Newton had been to the 18th century and Einstein would be in the 20th—the epitome of wisdom, the smartest man alive. "Towards the end of his life," Browne writes, "it could almost be said that the Origin of Species devoured Darwin."
Influence. It has been said that no writer since the time the Hebrew Scriptures were inscribed has had an influence more profound. "At the deepest, most satisfying symbolic level," Browne writes, "Darwin replaced the ancient imagery of the tree of knowledge, the tree of life, with something similar. His tree was time. It was history. It was knowledge. It was life. But it was not divine."
Darwin's Delay
Portrait of the naturalist as a brilliant writer.
By Jonathan Weiner
Posted Thursday, May 3, 2007, at 1:09 PM ET
www.slate.com
In 2009, On the Origin of Species will be 150 years old. On Feb. 12, 2009, its author would have turned 200.* Dozens of new books will be published to mark this double anniversary, and at last, Darwin the writer will receive the attention he deserves. Darwin the scientist is beyond famous. Darwin the scribbler is comparatively obscure. But I think he should be a hero for everyone who tries and tries again to put words on paper.
I first read Darwin's Origin back in 1990, before a trip to the Galapagos. At the time, the pleasure of reading the book—as opposed to reading about the book—felt almost like a private discovery. Darwin was not celebrated for his prose. The only Darwin fans I knew were biologists. A British literary critic, Gillian Beer, had examined his influence on Victorian novelists in her book Darwin's Plots. An American literary critic, Stanley Edgar Hyman, had praised Darwin as an imaginative writer in his own right (along with Marx, Fraser, and Freud) in a book called The Tangled Bank. But there was much more to say, and it seemed to me that no one ever said it.
That's changing now, and Darwin fans bump into each other more often—like tourists in the Galapagos. In 2005, for instance, E.O. Wilson and James D. Watson collided when they each published a massive Darwin reader, both of which include the complete texts of Darwin's four greatest books: The Voyage of the H. M. S. Beagle (1845); On the Origin of Species (1859); The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871); and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Wilson and Watson also use the same epigraph—the sentence in which Darwin, with infinite tact and reluctance, spells out the one point in his argument he knew would shock his readers most: "that man with all his noble qualities … still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin." Darwin had known that to be true as early as 1837, one year after the Beagle voyage. But he did not declare it until The Descent, in 1871, a delay of 34 years.
"Darwin's Delay is by now nearly as famous as Hamlet's," Adam Gopnik wrote last fall in The New Yorker in a long essay in praise of "Charles Darwin, natural novelist." Gopnik examines the immense skill with which Darwin moves and persuades, and he explains how much it took out of Darwin to say what he said. In Darwin's Origin of Species: A Biography, Janet Browne, the pre-eminent biographer of Darwin, provides an account not just of that masterpiece, but of a wonderful, miserable writer, as well.
Suppose there are a dozen stages in the life of a great writer. For every one of them, Darwin is not only representative, he is monumental—sometimes inspiring, sometimes hugely comforting, always larger than life.
Lost Youth. Darwin's father and grandfather were both rich, successful doctors. But Darwin wasn't much of a student. He dropped out of medical school, and then spent most of his time at Cambridge hunting or wandering around the woods, collecting beetles. His father—an overbearing man who weighed 300 pounds—cried, "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family."
The Wanderjahr. When the chance came for Charles to sail around the world on the Beagle, a surveying ship, his father did not want to let him go. Why pile wandering on wandering? Fortunately, Robert Darwin changed his mind. Although Charles was sick as a dog from his first day at sea to his last, no young writer ever had a better Wanderjahr, and no one ever left a better record of one. Some of the best features of his style—his charm, curiosity, excitement, and sincerity—are right there on the first page of the journal of his voyage, in the entry of Jan. 16, 1832, the day the Beagle landed for the first time, in the Cape de Verd Islands. "The scene, as beheld through the hazy atmosphere of this climate, is one of the greatest interest," Darwin writes; "if, indeed, a person, fresh from the sea, and who has just walked, for the first time, in a grove of cocoa-nut trees, can be a judge of any thing but his own happiness."
The Great Idea. The wander-year lasted five years. Soon after, Darwin arrived at the greatest idea of his life. It was also the greatest idea of his century. It has been called the greatest idea of all time. In its light, everything he had seen in his circumnavigation of the world suffered a sea change into something rich and strange. Darwin began scribbling in secret notebooks. He endured what he called "mental riot."
Sitzfleisch. Robert Oppenheimer once observed that a physicist needs not only inspiration but also sitzfleisch—the ability to keep one's flesh sitting in a chair. Writers need the same gift, and Darwin was a hero of sitzfleisch. Even his patience was larger than life. His motto was, "It's dogged as does it." After his big idea, he spent 20 years sitting at his desk, in the bosom of his growing family, working out his theory and its implications.
Troubles. He was as sick at his desk as he had been at sea. He came down with everything from nausea and palpitations of the heart to boils. It may have been the anxiety of his secret work that destroyed his health. He hated controversy and knew that his views would bring him so much of it that he might be disgraced. He and his wife, Emma, also suffered the deaths of several of their children, including their favorite daughter, Annie.
Procrastination. Almost as famous as Hamlet's.
Competition. In June 1858, Darwin got a letter from a young naturalist expounding on Darwin's great idea: evolution by natural selection. "I never saw a more striking coincidence," Darwin wrote to a friend and mentor, the great geologist Charles Lyell. Lyell and a few other friends arranged for a paper of Darwin's and a paper of Alfred Russel Wallace's to be read together the next month at a meeting of the Linnean Society of London. Then Darwin began to scribble his masterpiece at last.
Agony. "There seems to be a sort of fatality in my mind leading me to put at first my statement and proposition in a wrong or awkward form," he lamented years later in his Autobiography. Writing the Origin was more than the usual torture. "I am becoming as weak as a child," he complained to one of his best friends, "miserably unwell & shattered."
Breakthrough. Though it came with so much effort, he wrote the Origin in a single year. For a writer, it was his wonder-year, as Browne says, "the traveler at last approaching his goal."
Voice. "His voice was in turn dazzling, persuasive, friendly, humble and dark," Browne writes. At still other turns it was "mild in the extreme." But even the mildest passages are dramatic, reined in, serving as they do a ferociously shocking and revolutionary view of life.
Controversy. Again monumental, of course: the greatest controversy of his century. Even some of his best friends could not agree with him. Charles Lyell told Thomas Henry Huxley that he "could not go the whole orang."
Fame. After the Origin was published, Darwin wrote as many as 500 letters a year. He became to the 19th century what Newton had been to the 18th century and Einstein would be in the 20th—the epitome of wisdom, the smartest man alive. "Towards the end of his life," Browne writes, "it could almost be said that the Origin of Species devoured Darwin."
Influence. It has been said that no writer since the time the Hebrew Scriptures were inscribed has had an influence more profound. "At the deepest, most satisfying symbolic level," Browne writes, "Darwin replaced the ancient imagery of the tree of knowledge, the tree of life, with something similar. His tree was time. It was history. It was knowledge. It was life. But it was not divine."
Sound Familiar?
I wish I could remember the source, but it's too illuminating to leave out: the Winograd report points to a strange occurrence in modern history, that all wars are fought, won and lost in very similar fashions.
Israel's wounds of war
By Aluf Benn
www.salon.com
May 2, 2007 | TEL AVIV, Israel -- Even in a crisis-prone country like Israel, the Winograd report on the second Lebanon war, published on Monday, came as an unexpected bombshell. Israelis have a penchant for commissions of inquiry, but the Winograd Commission has broken all previously known records of national self-criticism. It concluded that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert "failed as a leader" in his hasty decision to go to war last summer. His accomplices, Defense Minister Amir Peretz and the outgoing military chief, Gen. Dan Halutz, fared no better. And this is just for starters: The current partial report covers only the opening days of the war. The final document, expected in August, is bound to be even harsher.
The severe criticisms about his leadership and Olmert's refusal to resign are, of course, making headlines in Israel. But the Winograd Commission did not criticize only the top leaders and their decision-making process. It criticized the very logic of going to war at all, without proper goals, and without sufficient operational plans and training. It cast serious doubts on the Israeli reflex of retaliation and reliance on military force.
Ironically, a key problem, according to the commission, was the perception that such wars were no longer necessary. In a carefully worded statement, the commission found that many in Israel's political-military establishment believe wrongly that the "era of wars is over" -- that Israel is strong enough to deter its adversaries and will never need to go to war again against its will, beyond fighting low-intensity conflicts like the Palestinian intifada. "By this analysis, there was no need to prepare for war, but there was also no need to seek eagerly paths towards stable, long-term agreements with our neighbors." In other words, Israel's false sense of military invincibility has been a major obstacle for peace with its Arab neighbors. If there will be no more war, then there will be no need for lasting peace. Why bother with territorial concessions when the other side is too weak to get them by force?
Israel's national security policy was thus trapped in a fateful purgatory, only to plunge into what would become its longest-ever war with a neighboring foe.
It all happened within a few hours last July 12. Around 9 a.m., Hezbollah fighters crossed the Lebanon-Israel border and abducted two reservist soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, from a patrol vehicle. That was followed by artillery and rocket fire along the border. Olmert heard the bad news in his Jerusalem office, while he was meeting the parents of Gilad Shalit, a conscript who had been abducted two and a half weeks before in a similar manner in Gaza.
This was too much to take; barely six months in office, Olmert felt he had to prove his strength as a national leader. His predecessor, Ariel Sharon, had been Israel's top battlefield commander, but Olmert hardly did any military service. He felt that the country's enemies, Hamas and Hezbollah, were putting him to test -- indeed, Hezbollah leader Hassa Nasrallah had mocked his inexperience -- and Olmert vowed to teach them a lesson.
Olmert praises himself on his ability to make quick decisions instead of hesitating and deliberating. Here was his chance to be the new Churchill. Sharon had been traumatized by his failure in the first Lebanon war, in 1982, and during the previous five years sought to "contain" periodic Hezbollah attacks and avoid reopening the northern front. Olmert apparently believed that he could do better, and he was not held back by the haunting history Sharon had carried.
At lunchtime, reporters gathered at the inner yard of the prime minister's official residence in Jerusalem, among flowerpots of red geraniums. Olmert came out with his guest, then Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. The Japanese leader spoke at length about Mideast peacemaking, while Olmert showed obvious signs of impatience. Peace was the last thing on his mind that day, in lieu of fierce retaliation against Hezbollah. When his turn to speak came, he announced that "our response will be very, very, very painful" for the Lebanese. "This is war," concluded the reporters who rushed to file.
And that was it. The Winograd report found no trace of serious consideration at the highest levels of government about this pivotal decision, which it likened to having taken place inside a black box.
But the unfolding tragedy quickly became national in scope. By midnight, the Israeli Cabinet unanimously approved a military plan to bomb Hezbollah's long-range rockets and other facilities inside Lebanon. The public gave overwhelming support to the government, with even die-hard left-wingers backing the massive retaliation and calling for more. Nobody stood in the way. Dissenters within the Cabinet, such as former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, whispered some concerns about possible complications but, quickly rebuffed, eventually voted with the crowd. It was groupthink at its worst.
And they were deadly wrong, concluded the Winograd report. Instead of singing the chorus, the ministers should have asked the enthusiastic Olmert and the overconfident chief of staff, Halutz, how they planned to defeat a well-positioned guerrilla force armed with thousands of rockets trained on the entire northern part of Israel. Hezbollah had prepared for exactly this kind of war for six years, ever since Israel's unilateral withdrawal from south Lebanon in May 2000. Yet the Israel Defense Forces lacked a credible, tested operational plan for the northern front. Moreover, in the fateful summer of 2006, the commission found, Israel was led by a team of rookies who lacked both experience in matters of war and intimate knowledge of the Lebanese theater.
Israeli culture is built upon improvisation. According to an old military slogan, "Every plan is merely the basis for changes." Nevertheless, this was outright negligence, the Winograd Commission said. Occupied for six years with fighting in the occupied territories against the Palestinians -- who lacked a military organization, modern weaponry or fortifications -- the Israeli army was untrained for the well-organized, well-armed force entrenched in Lebanon. But Halutz told Olmert, who visited general headquarters the day before the war, "You can trust us" to crush Hezbollah.
That was enough for the Israeli prime minister. Olmert, Halutz and others did not bother to weigh options other than a massive bombing campaign. They did not ask whether Sharon's policy of restraint and containment should be preserved, despite the abduction. They did not set credible, attainable goals for the operation. They did not conceive an exit strategy. And despite their understanding that Hezbollah would retaliate by targeting Israel's north, they ignored the implications that a barrage of rocket attacks would have "on the operational plan, its timeline or its chances of success."
Indeed, what started as a blitzkrieg-style aerial bombing developed into a quagmire. The IDF failed to destroy Hezbollah or stop the daily barrage of rockets. And despite their reluctance, Olmert and Halutz were eventually dragged into large-scale ground operations, carried out halfheartedly and with few achievements, while proving costly in lives.
The Winograd Commission, appointed by Olmert shortly after the war, was seen initially as a whitewash to fend off public criticism. But its five members, led by the 80-year-old former district judge Eliahu Winograd, took the country by surprise. They mocked Olmert's argument that his decision making was flawless, along with his declaration that the war had ended in an Israeli victory. And they ripped into the hierarchical status quo, which they said overemphasizes military considerations and gives the IDF too much influence over national policy.
Olmert has vowed to embrace the "organizational" conclusions of the Winograd report, but where will that lead Israel? In the short term, the report has thrown the country further into familiar political turmoil. Israelis were less than enthusiastic with Olmert's leadership from the beginning, giving him only lukewarm support in the March 2006 election. The failed war in Lebanon was followed by an endless string of sex and corruption scandals at the highest levels of government. At around 13 percent, Olmert's approval ratings have been the lowest in Israel's history. But Olmert has kept on, relying on a coalition of weak parties and fearing another election while having at least some floor under him from a booming economy and a decline in Palestinian terrorism. (The latter, however, is largely considered a legacy of Sharon's.)
True to stubborn form, Olmert has vowed to keep his job and overcome the blow to his already tenuous hold on power. He is doubtful of his success, but he is trying to fight anyway, arguing that the Winograd report does not explicitly call for his resignation and that his ouster would inevitably throw the country into another election. He may survive for several more months, pending his ability to ignore public protest and keep his coalition partners beside him. On Tuesday morning, Eitan Cabel, a junior minister from the Labor Party, submitted his resignation. But Cabel is a political lightweight; Olmert's fate hangs on Tzipi Livni, the popular foreign minister and Olmert's deputy. If Livni -- who got a more positive nod from Winograd for her initiative to find a diplomatic way out in the early days of the war -- jumps off Olmert's sinking ship and is joined by several more members of the Kadima ruling party, it would prove fatal to Olmert.
Olmert's downfall may lead to an early election, which would probably be another contest between two former premiers, Benjamin Netanyahu (who leads the opinion polls) and Ehud Barak, who is currently running for Labor Party leadership. Another scenario holds the 83-year-old Peres returning as an interim steward of the country. After all, the Winograd Commission favors experienced leaders, and nobody has more experience than Peres, who started his political career in the 1940s.
But either way, whatever slim hopes there were for a resumed Israeli-Palestinian peace process are doomed for now. Olmert is unable to make any real decisions, and his Palestinian counterpart, President Mahmoud Abbas, is hardly any stronger. Israelis are preoccupied with the leadership crisis; they want a leader they can trust under fire. Before the Winograd report, Olmert tried to persuade prominent members of Israel's peace camp that he was willing to go full speed ahead with the Palestinians if the left would shore up his political survival. But this appears no more than a fairy tale now, given his precarious position.
The censure of Olmert is not only ominous for the career of the beleaguered prime minister, but for the prospect of regional stability. Israel's military is warning of explosive upheaval in Gaza, or another war in the north, perhaps with Syria. And an American-led confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program is looming. The second Lebanon war convinced Israelis anew that Iran, with its rocket-armed allies and proxies in Syria, Lebanon and Gaza, is aiming toward Israel's collapse -- emboldened by America's perceived weakness in the region because of the debacle in Iraq. The Winograd Commission affirmed this analysis in its report.
Indeed, some worry that the power of deterrence stemming from Israel's military might was seriously damaged by the failure in Lebanon. The IDF lost its image of invincibility -- clearly, it is not the same military that defeated three Arab states in six days in 1967 and brought back hostages from Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976. However, the world stood idly by while Israel's air force crushed Lebanon for almost five weeks, killing hundreds of civilians and destroying roads and bridges. (Washington did, however, veto Halutz's plan to black out Lebanon's electric grid.) If Syria is tempted, or lured by Iran, to liberate its occupied Golan Heights by force, it would still have to worry about suffering the wrath of Israeli air power. Olmert publicly warned Damascus of "miscalculation," in a recent meeting with visiting U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and the threat is still hanging in the air.
Middle East wars usually erupt when nobody wants them. Following the war in Lebanon, the government increased the IDF budget, and the military launched a massive retraining program. But the perception of a leadership vacuum in Jerusalem may prompt Israel's adversaries to attack before the IDF completes its reconstruction.
Yet, dark as its conclusions are, the Winograd report gives hope in the longer term for a change in the national attitude. It calls for recasting the policy-making process and giving stronger emphasis to civilian institutions, such as the foreign ministry. It also seeks to strengthen Israel's National Security Council, now a secondary instrument of the prime minister's office, and give it authority over interagency intelligence assessments and preparations for Cabinet sessions. Such recommendations were made, and rejected, in the past. But the fallout from the Winograd report may be unique enough to force true reform, which if implemented could motivate Israelis to consider peaceful options before rushing to the battlefield. Feeling vulnerable, rather than invincible, may be the greater source of security in the long run.
Israel's wounds of war
By Aluf Benn
www.salon.com
May 2, 2007 | TEL AVIV, Israel -- Even in a crisis-prone country like Israel, the Winograd report on the second Lebanon war, published on Monday, came as an unexpected bombshell. Israelis have a penchant for commissions of inquiry, but the Winograd Commission has broken all previously known records of national self-criticism. It concluded that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert "failed as a leader" in his hasty decision to go to war last summer. His accomplices, Defense Minister Amir Peretz and the outgoing military chief, Gen. Dan Halutz, fared no better. And this is just for starters: The current partial report covers only the opening days of the war. The final document, expected in August, is bound to be even harsher.
The severe criticisms about his leadership and Olmert's refusal to resign are, of course, making headlines in Israel. But the Winograd Commission did not criticize only the top leaders and their decision-making process. It criticized the very logic of going to war at all, without proper goals, and without sufficient operational plans and training. It cast serious doubts on the Israeli reflex of retaliation and reliance on military force.
Ironically, a key problem, according to the commission, was the perception that such wars were no longer necessary. In a carefully worded statement, the commission found that many in Israel's political-military establishment believe wrongly that the "era of wars is over" -- that Israel is strong enough to deter its adversaries and will never need to go to war again against its will, beyond fighting low-intensity conflicts like the Palestinian intifada. "By this analysis, there was no need to prepare for war, but there was also no need to seek eagerly paths towards stable, long-term agreements with our neighbors." In other words, Israel's false sense of military invincibility has been a major obstacle for peace with its Arab neighbors. If there will be no more war, then there will be no need for lasting peace. Why bother with territorial concessions when the other side is too weak to get them by force?
Israel's national security policy was thus trapped in a fateful purgatory, only to plunge into what would become its longest-ever war with a neighboring foe.
It all happened within a few hours last July 12. Around 9 a.m., Hezbollah fighters crossed the Lebanon-Israel border and abducted two reservist soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, from a patrol vehicle. That was followed by artillery and rocket fire along the border. Olmert heard the bad news in his Jerusalem office, while he was meeting the parents of Gilad Shalit, a conscript who had been abducted two and a half weeks before in a similar manner in Gaza.
This was too much to take; barely six months in office, Olmert felt he had to prove his strength as a national leader. His predecessor, Ariel Sharon, had been Israel's top battlefield commander, but Olmert hardly did any military service. He felt that the country's enemies, Hamas and Hezbollah, were putting him to test -- indeed, Hezbollah leader Hassa Nasrallah had mocked his inexperience -- and Olmert vowed to teach them a lesson.
Olmert praises himself on his ability to make quick decisions instead of hesitating and deliberating. Here was his chance to be the new Churchill. Sharon had been traumatized by his failure in the first Lebanon war, in 1982, and during the previous five years sought to "contain" periodic Hezbollah attacks and avoid reopening the northern front. Olmert apparently believed that he could do better, and he was not held back by the haunting history Sharon had carried.
At lunchtime, reporters gathered at the inner yard of the prime minister's official residence in Jerusalem, among flowerpots of red geraniums. Olmert came out with his guest, then Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. The Japanese leader spoke at length about Mideast peacemaking, while Olmert showed obvious signs of impatience. Peace was the last thing on his mind that day, in lieu of fierce retaliation against Hezbollah. When his turn to speak came, he announced that "our response will be very, very, very painful" for the Lebanese. "This is war," concluded the reporters who rushed to file.
And that was it. The Winograd report found no trace of serious consideration at the highest levels of government about this pivotal decision, which it likened to having taken place inside a black box.
But the unfolding tragedy quickly became national in scope. By midnight, the Israeli Cabinet unanimously approved a military plan to bomb Hezbollah's long-range rockets and other facilities inside Lebanon. The public gave overwhelming support to the government, with even die-hard left-wingers backing the massive retaliation and calling for more. Nobody stood in the way. Dissenters within the Cabinet, such as former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, whispered some concerns about possible complications but, quickly rebuffed, eventually voted with the crowd. It was groupthink at its worst.
And they were deadly wrong, concluded the Winograd report. Instead of singing the chorus, the ministers should have asked the enthusiastic Olmert and the overconfident chief of staff, Halutz, how they planned to defeat a well-positioned guerrilla force armed with thousands of rockets trained on the entire northern part of Israel. Hezbollah had prepared for exactly this kind of war for six years, ever since Israel's unilateral withdrawal from south Lebanon in May 2000. Yet the Israel Defense Forces lacked a credible, tested operational plan for the northern front. Moreover, in the fateful summer of 2006, the commission found, Israel was led by a team of rookies who lacked both experience in matters of war and intimate knowledge of the Lebanese theater.
Israeli culture is built upon improvisation. According to an old military slogan, "Every plan is merely the basis for changes." Nevertheless, this was outright negligence, the Winograd Commission said. Occupied for six years with fighting in the occupied territories against the Palestinians -- who lacked a military organization, modern weaponry or fortifications -- the Israeli army was untrained for the well-organized, well-armed force entrenched in Lebanon. But Halutz told Olmert, who visited general headquarters the day before the war, "You can trust us" to crush Hezbollah.
That was enough for the Israeli prime minister. Olmert, Halutz and others did not bother to weigh options other than a massive bombing campaign. They did not ask whether Sharon's policy of restraint and containment should be preserved, despite the abduction. They did not set credible, attainable goals for the operation. They did not conceive an exit strategy. And despite their understanding that Hezbollah would retaliate by targeting Israel's north, they ignored the implications that a barrage of rocket attacks would have "on the operational plan, its timeline or its chances of success."
Indeed, what started as a blitzkrieg-style aerial bombing developed into a quagmire. The IDF failed to destroy Hezbollah or stop the daily barrage of rockets. And despite their reluctance, Olmert and Halutz were eventually dragged into large-scale ground operations, carried out halfheartedly and with few achievements, while proving costly in lives.
The Winograd Commission, appointed by Olmert shortly after the war, was seen initially as a whitewash to fend off public criticism. But its five members, led by the 80-year-old former district judge Eliahu Winograd, took the country by surprise. They mocked Olmert's argument that his decision making was flawless, along with his declaration that the war had ended in an Israeli victory. And they ripped into the hierarchical status quo, which they said overemphasizes military considerations and gives the IDF too much influence over national policy.
Olmert has vowed to embrace the "organizational" conclusions of the Winograd report, but where will that lead Israel? In the short term, the report has thrown the country further into familiar political turmoil. Israelis were less than enthusiastic with Olmert's leadership from the beginning, giving him only lukewarm support in the March 2006 election. The failed war in Lebanon was followed by an endless string of sex and corruption scandals at the highest levels of government. At around 13 percent, Olmert's approval ratings have been the lowest in Israel's history. But Olmert has kept on, relying on a coalition of weak parties and fearing another election while having at least some floor under him from a booming economy and a decline in Palestinian terrorism. (The latter, however, is largely considered a legacy of Sharon's.)
True to stubborn form, Olmert has vowed to keep his job and overcome the blow to his already tenuous hold on power. He is doubtful of his success, but he is trying to fight anyway, arguing that the Winograd report does not explicitly call for his resignation and that his ouster would inevitably throw the country into another election. He may survive for several more months, pending his ability to ignore public protest and keep his coalition partners beside him. On Tuesday morning, Eitan Cabel, a junior minister from the Labor Party, submitted his resignation. But Cabel is a political lightweight; Olmert's fate hangs on Tzipi Livni, the popular foreign minister and Olmert's deputy. If Livni -- who got a more positive nod from Winograd for her initiative to find a diplomatic way out in the early days of the war -- jumps off Olmert's sinking ship and is joined by several more members of the Kadima ruling party, it would prove fatal to Olmert.
Olmert's downfall may lead to an early election, which would probably be another contest between two former premiers, Benjamin Netanyahu (who leads the opinion polls) and Ehud Barak, who is currently running for Labor Party leadership. Another scenario holds the 83-year-old Peres returning as an interim steward of the country. After all, the Winograd Commission favors experienced leaders, and nobody has more experience than Peres, who started his political career in the 1940s.
But either way, whatever slim hopes there were for a resumed Israeli-Palestinian peace process are doomed for now. Olmert is unable to make any real decisions, and his Palestinian counterpart, President Mahmoud Abbas, is hardly any stronger. Israelis are preoccupied with the leadership crisis; they want a leader they can trust under fire. Before the Winograd report, Olmert tried to persuade prominent members of Israel's peace camp that he was willing to go full speed ahead with the Palestinians if the left would shore up his political survival. But this appears no more than a fairy tale now, given his precarious position.
The censure of Olmert is not only ominous for the career of the beleaguered prime minister, but for the prospect of regional stability. Israel's military is warning of explosive upheaval in Gaza, or another war in the north, perhaps with Syria. And an American-led confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program is looming. The second Lebanon war convinced Israelis anew that Iran, with its rocket-armed allies and proxies in Syria, Lebanon and Gaza, is aiming toward Israel's collapse -- emboldened by America's perceived weakness in the region because of the debacle in Iraq. The Winograd Commission affirmed this analysis in its report.
Indeed, some worry that the power of deterrence stemming from Israel's military might was seriously damaged by the failure in Lebanon. The IDF lost its image of invincibility -- clearly, it is not the same military that defeated three Arab states in six days in 1967 and brought back hostages from Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976. However, the world stood idly by while Israel's air force crushed Lebanon for almost five weeks, killing hundreds of civilians and destroying roads and bridges. (Washington did, however, veto Halutz's plan to black out Lebanon's electric grid.) If Syria is tempted, or lured by Iran, to liberate its occupied Golan Heights by force, it would still have to worry about suffering the wrath of Israeli air power. Olmert publicly warned Damascus of "miscalculation," in a recent meeting with visiting U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and the threat is still hanging in the air.
Middle East wars usually erupt when nobody wants them. Following the war in Lebanon, the government increased the IDF budget, and the military launched a massive retraining program. But the perception of a leadership vacuum in Jerusalem may prompt Israel's adversaries to attack before the IDF completes its reconstruction.
Yet, dark as its conclusions are, the Winograd report gives hope in the longer term for a change in the national attitude. It calls for recasting the policy-making process and giving stronger emphasis to civilian institutions, such as the foreign ministry. It also seeks to strengthen Israel's National Security Council, now a secondary instrument of the prime minister's office, and give it authority over interagency intelligence assessments and preparations for Cabinet sessions. Such recommendations were made, and rejected, in the past. But the fallout from the Winograd report may be unique enough to force true reform, which if implemented could motivate Israelis to consider peaceful options before rushing to the battlefield. Feeling vulnerable, rather than invincible, may be the greater source of security in the long run.
Thursday, May 3, 2007
I mean, seriously
I'm deeply embarassed. There's nothing else that I can say.
The other Guantánamo.
Black Hole
by Eliza Griswold
www.tnr.com
Post date 05.02.07 | Issue date 05.07.07
Early last spring, outside a guesthouse in Kabul where I was staying, an injured Afghan man limped up to the locked gate. He wore a blazer with suede elbow patches and leaned on crutches. Because a suicide bomber had attacked the building not long before, a guard blocked the entrance of the unannounced supplicant. The fact that the man refused to give his name didn't help his case. But, finally, once inside, he blurted his reason for traveling across a war zone to the building: He had heard that American lawyers with whom I was traveling were staying there and that these lawyers wanted to represent prisoners held by the Americans at Bagram Airbase, some 40 miles north. "My son is in prison at Bagram," the man said, clutching a cell phone: A sympathetic Afghan guard inside Bagram Theater Internment Facility (btif) had sent him a photograph of his son after he had been badly beaten, his eye swollen shut.
Btif is currently home to about 650 detainees. Unlike the prison in Guantánamo, there aren't congressional junkets regularly touring the facility, let alone any reporters. Inside one of the low-slung, pale concrete buildings, on the vast floor of what was once a machine shop, is a scene one former interrogator describes as a dungeon, full of "medieval sounds"--the dragging of leg shackles, shouts from military police. Most of its windows, initially installed by the Soviet army, are broken and boarded up. There are six large 60-foot-long cages ringed in coiled barbed wire where detainees are kept, 15 to 20 prisoners to a cage. Before the prisoners enter or leave these cages, they are transferred temporarily to cages large enough for only one prisoner called "sally ports," which are encased in coils of concertina wire and reinforced with steel beams. On a level above the machine shop floor, there are isolation rooms walled in plywood with chicken-wire ceilings.
The man had come to the guest house on bad information. The lawyers with whom I traveled represented prisoners in Guantánamo, and they weren't seeking new clients from Bagram. As the man took in this depressing fact, he grew irate and began pressing his case with even greater fervor. "There are more photographs," he exclaimed, turning to leave. "Someday, you will see them."
That day may be fast approaching. The photos accompanying this piece are the first to be published from inside the prison. Last month, lawyers pleaded two separate cases before the D.C. District Court, demanding that the justices review petitions of habeas corpus for Bagram detainees. These cases represent the rare moment when Bagram will actually receive scrutiny. Unlike Guantánamo, a puddle-jumper away from Miami, Bagram is tucked into the Afghan countryside, not far from where combat with the Taliban still flares. And this remoteness has made the plight of its prisoners all the more dire: Only the International Committee of the Red Cross knows the names of Bagram's occupants. Eric Lewis, a co-counsel in one of the habeas cases, says, "The nightmare of Guantánamo is something of a picnic compared to Bagram," a fact that prisoners can relate with firsthand knowledge: A good portion of the detainees in Guantánamo were first held in Bagram. "Our clients were beaten more badly in Afghanistan than in Guantánamo, basically because, in Cuba, the whole world is watching," says Lewis.
Bagram is a 6.5-square-mile plot located on the vast, once-verdant Shomali plain and encircled by the snowy Panjshir mountains. After the Soviet invasion in the late '70s, the Russians built a two-mile runway and airbase at Bagram. During the decades of civil war, the defunct base repeatedly switched between Taliban and Northern Alliance control. In late 2001, as it trounced the Taliban, the United States took possession of the base and outfitted its cavernous machine shop to detain captured combatants. Former prisoners and interrogators say that there were old Soviet signs written in Cyrillic still on the walls.
The detention facility was designed as a short-term collection point, where American interrogators sorted erroneous and low-level captures from those of higher intelligence value. And, at first, the prison actually served this purpose: Detainees from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and North Africa were transported to Guantánamo--although there are still some Arabs held at Bagram. (We know this, in part, because a Yemeni prisoner, held virtually incommunicado for more than five years, sent his father a letter through the Red Cross. "BT," meaning Bagram Theater, was marked on the upper-left-hand corner.)
From the start, the processing of prisoners entailed some grisly practices. When Captain Carolyn Wood assumed control of the prison in the summer of 2002--she ran it until taking over Abu Ghraib a year later--interrogation tactics came to include beatings, anal violation with sharp objects, blows to the genitals, and "peroneal" strikes (an incapacitating blow to the leg with a baton, a knee, or a shin). We know about these tactics because an internal Army investigation into two prisoner deaths was obtained by The New York Times. These detainees--a 22-year-old taxi driver and the brother of a Taliban commander--were found dead and hanging from the wrists by shackles. A coroner's report said the two men died after being subjected to dozens of peroneal strikes. According to the coroner's report, the "pulpified" legs of one of the corpses looked as if they had "been run over by a bus."
During these early years, one of the most notorious figures at the prison was Private First Class Damien M. Corsetti, known in turns as the "King of Torture" and "Monster." Corsetti tattooed an Italian translation of the latter moniker across his stomach. In the end, a military tribunal cleared Corsetti of all charges. His lawyer successfully argued before the tribunal that the rules for detainee treatment were unclear: "The president of the United States doesn't know what the rules are. The secretary of defense doesn't know what the rules are. But the government expects this Pfc. to know what the rules are?" But, in the course of proving his innocence, Corsetti revealed several damning details. One of the prisoners he called to testify on his behalf told the military judges that a Saudi detainee recounted how Corsetti had threatened to rape him. He had even taken out his penis and yelled, "This is your God!"
It's not that Bagram has entirely escaped scrutiny. Army investigators have recommended criminal charges for 27 alleged Bagram-based torturers. But, of these 27, only four soldiers have been sentenced to prison time--for no more than several months. The alleged abusers have evaded punishment largely with the help of, among others, Donald Rumsfeld, who approved a December 2002 memorandum that permitted the use of stripping, dogs, and stress positions in interrogations. In fact, many of the top brass who presided over Bagram have done more than escape punishment. Despite the many accounts of Captain Wood's encouragement of torture--Amnesty International has called her a "torture architect"--she has received two Bronze Stars.
While Bagram began as a temporary jail, it has over time morphed into a more permanent facility. As the bulk of its Arab prisoners were shipped to Guantánamo, it increasingly held Afghans for long (and in many cases indefinite) terms. "One of the worst aspects of Bagram is that no one knows how long they'll be held there," says Sam Zia-Zarifi, the research director for the Asia division of Human Rights Watch. The secrecy shrouding the prison makes it hard to discern the precise composition of its occupants. But we do know that, last year, its population swelled by about 100 detainees, thanks to new U.S.-nato operations aimed at routing the resurgent Taliban. And even the Pentagon has implicitly conceded that the prison no longer serves its initial short-term purpose, changing its name from Bagram Collection Point to the Bagram Theater Internment Facility.
During this transformation, some of the worst abuses at Bagram, such as anal violations and beatings, have been curbed, according to former detainees, the Afghan Human Rights Commission, and Human Rights Watch. The Department of Defense claims that prisoners now gain an average of 15 pounds during their detention. And, several weeks ago, the first Afghan prisoners were transferred from Bagram into Afghan custody in the U.S.-built wing of the infamous Policharki prison. Lieutenant Colonel Todd Vician, a spokesman for the Department of Defense, tells me, "We have no desire to be the world's jailer."
But, for all these changes, the growing detainee population still lives in overcrowded cages. Prisoners don't even have the limited access to lawyers available to prisoners in Guantánamo. Nor do they have the right to Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which Guantánamo detainees won in the 2004 Supreme Court ruling in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. Instead, if a combat commander chooses, he can convene an Enemy Combatant Review Board (ecrb), at which the detainee has no right to a personal advocate, no chance to speak in his own defense, and no opportunity to review the evidence against him. The detainee isn't even allowed to attend. And, thanks to such limited access to justice, many former detainees say they have no idea why they were either detained or released.
With a victory in the pending habeas cases, Bagram detainees might eventually win the same legal rights now held by Guantánamo prisoners. But, according to Tina Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network and co-counsel on the habeas petitions, "Even if the cases are successful, we are unlikely to see dramatic changes at Bagram any time soon." It will remain too far from the public eye, too deep in a war zone, to receive the public pressure that forced the reform of Guantánamo. That's a shame, because the prison--and, more precisely, its infamy--has hurt the American cause in Afghanistan. "[It] undermines our legitimacy in building democracy and human rights in Afghanistan," says Barnett Rubin, director of studies at New York University's Center on International Cooperation.
I began to understand this cost as I sat in the Kabul guesthouse with the American lawyers. Over a cup of tea, one local official named Zalmay Shah told us that he had once worked closely with U.S. Special Forces. At the beginning of the U.S. invasion, he had helped a commander named "Tony" round up a handful of midlevel Taliban. The soldiers had awarded him a letter of commendation for his efforts, and he developed a sincere affection for the Americans. That soon changed.
While delivering one wanted man into U.S. custody, Shah was himself arrested, hooded, shackled, and stripped. Soldiers taped his mouth shut, refusing to let him spit out the snuff he was chewing. For three days, his jailers in Bagram denied him food. All the while, Shah pleaded his innocence and reminded the Americans of his friendship with "Tony." And, eventually, the Americans concluded that they had mistakenly identified the man as a Taliban official and released him. Despite all this, the U.S. military has continued to ask Shah for his help. "I have refused," he told us. "When the Americans came, we thought we would be free. But, on the contrary, we have suffered." Placing his elbows on the table, he hunched forward and cupped his hands around the now cold tea. "If the Americans don't change their policies soon, neither we nor they will have a way out."
The other Guantánamo.
Black Hole
by Eliza Griswold
www.tnr.com
Post date 05.02.07 | Issue date 05.07.07
Early last spring, outside a guesthouse in Kabul where I was staying, an injured Afghan man limped up to the locked gate. He wore a blazer with suede elbow patches and leaned on crutches. Because a suicide bomber had attacked the building not long before, a guard blocked the entrance of the unannounced supplicant. The fact that the man refused to give his name didn't help his case. But, finally, once inside, he blurted his reason for traveling across a war zone to the building: He had heard that American lawyers with whom I was traveling were staying there and that these lawyers wanted to represent prisoners held by the Americans at Bagram Airbase, some 40 miles north. "My son is in prison at Bagram," the man said, clutching a cell phone: A sympathetic Afghan guard inside Bagram Theater Internment Facility (btif) had sent him a photograph of his son after he had been badly beaten, his eye swollen shut.
Btif is currently home to about 650 detainees. Unlike the prison in Guantánamo, there aren't congressional junkets regularly touring the facility, let alone any reporters. Inside one of the low-slung, pale concrete buildings, on the vast floor of what was once a machine shop, is a scene one former interrogator describes as a dungeon, full of "medieval sounds"--the dragging of leg shackles, shouts from military police. Most of its windows, initially installed by the Soviet army, are broken and boarded up. There are six large 60-foot-long cages ringed in coiled barbed wire where detainees are kept, 15 to 20 prisoners to a cage. Before the prisoners enter or leave these cages, they are transferred temporarily to cages large enough for only one prisoner called "sally ports," which are encased in coils of concertina wire and reinforced with steel beams. On a level above the machine shop floor, there are isolation rooms walled in plywood with chicken-wire ceilings.
The man had come to the guest house on bad information. The lawyers with whom I traveled represented prisoners in Guantánamo, and they weren't seeking new clients from Bagram. As the man took in this depressing fact, he grew irate and began pressing his case with even greater fervor. "There are more photographs," he exclaimed, turning to leave. "Someday, you will see them."
That day may be fast approaching. The photos accompanying this piece are the first to be published from inside the prison. Last month, lawyers pleaded two separate cases before the D.C. District Court, demanding that the justices review petitions of habeas corpus for Bagram detainees. These cases represent the rare moment when Bagram will actually receive scrutiny. Unlike Guantánamo, a puddle-jumper away from Miami, Bagram is tucked into the Afghan countryside, not far from where combat with the Taliban still flares. And this remoteness has made the plight of its prisoners all the more dire: Only the International Committee of the Red Cross knows the names of Bagram's occupants. Eric Lewis, a co-counsel in one of the habeas cases, says, "The nightmare of Guantánamo is something of a picnic compared to Bagram," a fact that prisoners can relate with firsthand knowledge: A good portion of the detainees in Guantánamo were first held in Bagram. "Our clients were beaten more badly in Afghanistan than in Guantánamo, basically because, in Cuba, the whole world is watching," says Lewis.
Bagram is a 6.5-square-mile plot located on the vast, once-verdant Shomali plain and encircled by the snowy Panjshir mountains. After the Soviet invasion in the late '70s, the Russians built a two-mile runway and airbase at Bagram. During the decades of civil war, the defunct base repeatedly switched between Taliban and Northern Alliance control. In late 2001, as it trounced the Taliban, the United States took possession of the base and outfitted its cavernous machine shop to detain captured combatants. Former prisoners and interrogators say that there were old Soviet signs written in Cyrillic still on the walls.
The detention facility was designed as a short-term collection point, where American interrogators sorted erroneous and low-level captures from those of higher intelligence value. And, at first, the prison actually served this purpose: Detainees from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and North Africa were transported to Guantánamo--although there are still some Arabs held at Bagram. (We know this, in part, because a Yemeni prisoner, held virtually incommunicado for more than five years, sent his father a letter through the Red Cross. "BT," meaning Bagram Theater, was marked on the upper-left-hand corner.)
From the start, the processing of prisoners entailed some grisly practices. When Captain Carolyn Wood assumed control of the prison in the summer of 2002--she ran it until taking over Abu Ghraib a year later--interrogation tactics came to include beatings, anal violation with sharp objects, blows to the genitals, and "peroneal" strikes (an incapacitating blow to the leg with a baton, a knee, or a shin). We know about these tactics because an internal Army investigation into two prisoner deaths was obtained by The New York Times. These detainees--a 22-year-old taxi driver and the brother of a Taliban commander--were found dead and hanging from the wrists by shackles. A coroner's report said the two men died after being subjected to dozens of peroneal strikes. According to the coroner's report, the "pulpified" legs of one of the corpses looked as if they had "been run over by a bus."
During these early years, one of the most notorious figures at the prison was Private First Class Damien M. Corsetti, known in turns as the "King of Torture" and "Monster." Corsetti tattooed an Italian translation of the latter moniker across his stomach. In the end, a military tribunal cleared Corsetti of all charges. His lawyer successfully argued before the tribunal that the rules for detainee treatment were unclear: "The president of the United States doesn't know what the rules are. The secretary of defense doesn't know what the rules are. But the government expects this Pfc. to know what the rules are?" But, in the course of proving his innocence, Corsetti revealed several damning details. One of the prisoners he called to testify on his behalf told the military judges that a Saudi detainee recounted how Corsetti had threatened to rape him. He had even taken out his penis and yelled, "This is your God!"
It's not that Bagram has entirely escaped scrutiny. Army investigators have recommended criminal charges for 27 alleged Bagram-based torturers. But, of these 27, only four soldiers have been sentenced to prison time--for no more than several months. The alleged abusers have evaded punishment largely with the help of, among others, Donald Rumsfeld, who approved a December 2002 memorandum that permitted the use of stripping, dogs, and stress positions in interrogations. In fact, many of the top brass who presided over Bagram have done more than escape punishment. Despite the many accounts of Captain Wood's encouragement of torture--Amnesty International has called her a "torture architect"--she has received two Bronze Stars.
While Bagram began as a temporary jail, it has over time morphed into a more permanent facility. As the bulk of its Arab prisoners were shipped to Guantánamo, it increasingly held Afghans for long (and in many cases indefinite) terms. "One of the worst aspects of Bagram is that no one knows how long they'll be held there," says Sam Zia-Zarifi, the research director for the Asia division of Human Rights Watch. The secrecy shrouding the prison makes it hard to discern the precise composition of its occupants. But we do know that, last year, its population swelled by about 100 detainees, thanks to new U.S.-nato operations aimed at routing the resurgent Taliban. And even the Pentagon has implicitly conceded that the prison no longer serves its initial short-term purpose, changing its name from Bagram Collection Point to the Bagram Theater Internment Facility.
During this transformation, some of the worst abuses at Bagram, such as anal violations and beatings, have been curbed, according to former detainees, the Afghan Human Rights Commission, and Human Rights Watch. The Department of Defense claims that prisoners now gain an average of 15 pounds during their detention. And, several weeks ago, the first Afghan prisoners were transferred from Bagram into Afghan custody in the U.S.-built wing of the infamous Policharki prison. Lieutenant Colonel Todd Vician, a spokesman for the Department of Defense, tells me, "We have no desire to be the world's jailer."
But, for all these changes, the growing detainee population still lives in overcrowded cages. Prisoners don't even have the limited access to lawyers available to prisoners in Guantánamo. Nor do they have the right to Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which Guantánamo detainees won in the 2004 Supreme Court ruling in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. Instead, if a combat commander chooses, he can convene an Enemy Combatant Review Board (ecrb), at which the detainee has no right to a personal advocate, no chance to speak in his own defense, and no opportunity to review the evidence against him. The detainee isn't even allowed to attend. And, thanks to such limited access to justice, many former detainees say they have no idea why they were either detained or released.
With a victory in the pending habeas cases, Bagram detainees might eventually win the same legal rights now held by Guantánamo prisoners. But, according to Tina Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network and co-counsel on the habeas petitions, "Even if the cases are successful, we are unlikely to see dramatic changes at Bagram any time soon." It will remain too far from the public eye, too deep in a war zone, to receive the public pressure that forced the reform of Guantánamo. That's a shame, because the prison--and, more precisely, its infamy--has hurt the American cause in Afghanistan. "[It] undermines our legitimacy in building democracy and human rights in Afghanistan," says Barnett Rubin, director of studies at New York University's Center on International Cooperation.
I began to understand this cost as I sat in the Kabul guesthouse with the American lawyers. Over a cup of tea, one local official named Zalmay Shah told us that he had once worked closely with U.S. Special Forces. At the beginning of the U.S. invasion, he had helped a commander named "Tony" round up a handful of midlevel Taliban. The soldiers had awarded him a letter of commendation for his efforts, and he developed a sincere affection for the Americans. That soon changed.
While delivering one wanted man into U.S. custody, Shah was himself arrested, hooded, shackled, and stripped. Soldiers taped his mouth shut, refusing to let him spit out the snuff he was chewing. For three days, his jailers in Bagram denied him food. All the while, Shah pleaded his innocence and reminded the Americans of his friendship with "Tony." And, eventually, the Americans concluded that they had mistakenly identified the man as a Taliban official and released him. Despite all this, the U.S. military has continued to ask Shah for his help. "I have refused," he told us. "When the Americans came, we thought we would be free. But, on the contrary, we have suffered." Placing his elbows on the table, he hunched forward and cupped his hands around the now cold tea. "If the Americans don't change their policies soon, neither we nor they will have a way out."
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