The Classroom

A Family Affair

2008-06-06T06:11:00.001-06:00

For one reason or another, about every four months my family tears into each other about politics. Being one of only two vocally "liberal" members of the fam, it puts me in the somewhat enviable position of getting to take almost them all end. Considering it's election season, the theme of the most reason debate, by and large, has been domestic policy. My cousin Doug's definition of a conservative platform is first, followed by my response.

DISCLAIMER:
I went on far longer than I had planned with this, and I almost feel guilty posting it on the website. But then I would feel stupid for writing it all in the first place if I didn’t post it. So here it is! Just beware, it’s long…

Ask and ye shall receive, Michael. I was going to let Jeffrey and Thomas speak for me, but since you called me out, I gotta sound off. They articulated some of my feelings on some of the issues, but I’ll elaborate a little further – perhaps provide you with a more concrete political “platform.” Although, I must warn you, the platform is based on IDEOLOGY (I could not disagree more with your statement that
“ideology has very little to do with anything”). This ideology – the set of beliefs in certain principles that are eternal (inalienable, if you will) – guides everything true conservatives say and do, no matter the circumstance, no matter how much times have changed. And if people would rely on these true principles, many of our country’s problems would be alleviated, if not completely eradicated.

To give one example, the solution to the so-called healthcare crisis (which is almost as big a hoax as the global warming hoax – oh wait, it’s now been changed to global “climate change” now, since the whole warming thing has started to cool down – no matter what the temperature is, we can blame it on climate change! which can’t possibly be caused by anything other than humans) is not UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE provided by the government.

When Senator Clinton as First Lady advocated universal healthcare coverage for all Americans, 560 economists wrote her husband to plead with him to put a stop to her
madness. They argued, based on eternal free market principles, that “price controls produce shortages, black markets, and reduced quality.” So government instituted price controls don’t “control” the true cost of goods at all. People end up paying in other ways.

The answer to the “crisis” is not more government regulation, but more privatization. The healthcare system needs to be opened up to market forces. Healthcare services would be based on market prices,and healthcare providers would compete for patients. “Compete” is the key word here; “competition,” the eternal principle. With private health insurance, private medical practice, and private healthcare establishments, competition would drive costs down and enhance the
quality of the healthcare, and would provide patients with a CHOICE between a much wider range of services depending on their needs and the quality of service required for that need.

In order to afford healthcare, a person will have to work for it, just as a person has to work for food and shelter, just as a person has to work to make a car payment, just as a person has to work if he wants to go the movies on the weekend. Thank God we live in a country where we can work where we want to work, be what we want to be, and earn what we want to earn. Of course there are exceptions! People get laid off, people are disabled, etc. And there’s nothing wrong with providing subsidies for the people in these circumstances. But the vast majority has the choice to make of themselves whatever they want to be.

This is a far cry from the liberal idea that everyone is a “victim” – of racism or sexism or whatever other – ism there is out there – and that salvation lies in the government. The truth is, no matter the circumstance, whether others have been blessed with more money, better connections, a better home environment, or even better looks, a person can succeed through hard work, perseverance, and education.

Which brings me to my next point: Education! And the solution for the problem with the education system is the same solution to the problem with the healthcare system:

EDUCATION – Take the government out!

Before the mid 1800s, elementary and secondary education was largely parent financed. Today, taxpayers spend more than $6,000 a year per student, more than virtually any other country, including Japan. With what result? Poor test scores, high dropout rates, kids incapable of filling out employment applications… The private sector ought to assume this responsibility. Vouchers are a great way to take
us in that direction. Let schools compete for students, increasing the quality of the teachers and paying them what they deserve, and giving parents a choice as to where they will send their children.

And sure, some schools and teachers will be better than others (as they are now), but an individual’s level of effort, dedication, curiosity, and willingness to grow will determine what they learn.

I’m going on way longer than I initially planned. Let me just finish with a
couple more platform items (I’ll try and be brief).

TAX CUTS – As JFK once said, after signing off on across-the-board tax cuts in the 60’s, “It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low — and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now.” We pay an obscene amount of taxes in this country. The mere thought of the government taking more of that money to spend on more inane programs and useless committees makes me ill. A government that’s too big to function without resorting to extortion is a government that’s too big. Period.

The argument that the Bush tax cuts unfairly benefit the rich is ridiculous. First of all, it’s insulting and presumptuous to think that anyone’s entitled to that money but the individual who EARNED it! That aside, the statistics show that the top 1 percent of taxpayers – those making more than $364,000 annually – pay 39 percent of all federal income taxes! Any across-the-board tax cut would, by definition, “unfairly” benefit the rich.

In order to cut the deficit, shrink the government! In order to increase revenue, decrease taxes!

SHRINKING THE GOVERNMENT - Less than 2 percent of Americans are farmers, yet the Department of Agriculture continues to add more and more bureaucrats. And what in tarnation does the Department of Commerce do?! Do we need the Small Business Administration? Amtrak? The Tennessee Valley Authority????

Before 1950, the government largely stayed out of the housing business, thank goodness. Now we have housing projects in all of our major cities, and don’t just speak for the City of Los Angeles, when I say that they have become sewers of crime and drugs. Why? When everybody owns something, NOBODY owns it (a principle I learned while living in the former Soviet Union). Without ownership, who’s going to take the responsibility of upkeep and repairs? The government is an absentee landlord and really couldn’t care less about what happens in these projects.

The private sector can build housing more cheaply, with an INCENTIVE to maintain the property and screen tenants.

On top of getting rid of ridiculous government programs, we can shrink the government by ending welfare, entitlements, and other special privileges.

Welfare for the poor works out to a national average of $12,000 to $13,000 a year per recipient. That’s almost as much as Frannie and I made COMBINED last year! So why
even get a job when the government shields you from financial responsibility? As detrimental as welfare is for the economy and hard-working citizens’ pocket books, it’s probably more detrimental to the recipient in the long run. Do we not remember the saying, “give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime?”

And don’t get me started on Social Security! The average recipient has put in fifteen cents for every dollar he or she takes out! How much more inefficient and unfair can it get?

Conservatives would simply like people take control of their own destiny and earn whatever life they want to live. Let the government worry about policing the streets, enforcing the law, and keeping its citizens safe from foreign enemies.

WAR ON TERRORISM – Al Qaida has been significantly weakened, Sadaam Hussein is gone, there’s a democracy in Iraq! and the surge is working. A withdrawal in Iraq would create a staging ground for al-Qaida, increase the influence of Iran over Iraq, and result in “the biggest civil war we’ve ever seen,” according to former Secretary of State Jim Baker of the Baker-Hamilton Report.

The criticism President Bush gets for going to war in Iraq is unfair, and seems to be a product of the culture’s hateful obsession with the man, as opposed to something
founded on reason. All 16 intelligence agencies felt with "high confidence" that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of WMDs (there’s far more dissent among credible scientists about global warning than there was among American intelligence analysts about Iraq). And just because we didn’t find them when we got there, doesn’t mean they didn’t exist and doesn’t mean they still don’t exist! It just means we didn’t find them. Perhaps it’s because we let the bureaucracy take its sweet time in debating whether or not Sadaam had the things, giving him ample time to hide them away in a cave somewhere. Even if they never did exist (even though the intelligence claims otherwise), who’s to say we’re not safer now thanks to the fact that Bush wasn’t afraid to take the war to the enemy, rather than wait for another September 11?

And while I don’t much care for John McCain, I’m happy to hear that he will not risk everything our soldiers have fought and died for by pulling out early.
If you want to hear more on global warming, abortion, illegal immigration, etc., let me know.

Before this starts the, I might as well warn everyone that it's as comprehensive as I could be, in other words LONG.

Dearest Douglas,

Unfortunately, the last couple of weeks have seen my Internet availability reduced to almost nil. The only spot left for me in town is the astronomically expensive DSL Internet Club, which I can afford to use for about an hour a week. I apologize for being so late in getting back to you and lacking the same amount of data that you have in your post. If I generalize or overstate, call me out. I'll try to find better data to make more concrete claims, although that may still happen at a lackadaisical pace. Honestly, I won't be surprised if this is the death knell of our small domestic debate club. We've had a pretty good run though.

You make me very wary of trying to talk about things that you derisively call "hoaxes," but I guess it's worth a shot anyway. If it's worth anything, you've made me really think through some of these issues before offering a response. In fact, my answer about education was almost six pages long before getting scrapped and wrenched into its current version. Thanks. What I don't appreciate though, is that hashing out all of these policy issues alone here in Kazakhstan has given me some very intense nightmares. I keep arguing with all of you in my dreams, but everyone just ignores me. And I kept getting more and more frustrated, shouting at the top of my lungs, only to notice that everyone else is more concerned with dinner (Hank barbequed some brachiosaur version of ribs). Well, here's to hoping that they weren't entirely portentous.

EDUCATION AND HEALTH CARE
I've been every which way but sideways over this issue, and have really found myself in a deadlock. It seems that I'm confronted with a fact that I entirely dislike but nonetheless have to accept: private schools are better. There's an overwhelming amount of hard and cursory evidence to consider. Take the enrollment rates at my alma mater, for example. At Yale, there was one kid from the entire state of Wyoming; one from either Dakotas; one from Nebraska; and one kid from each of a whole swath of Midwestern states. The only reason most of these kids got in is through an affirmative action program of sorts: Yale prides itself on having a student body that represents each and every state in the country (this is also there for more nefarious reasons as well, to help keep a cap on the number of New York City Jews coming into the University). So, where does the most significant group of Yale freshman come from? Private New England boarding schools. While there's only one kid from the state of Wyoming (one of maybe 2000 graduating seniors), there were 27 kids coming from Philips Exeter Academy (which had only a couple hundred graduating seniors). There were a couple dozen from Philips Andover, a couple dozen from Deerfield, a couple dozen from St. Paul's.

While these students were all undoubtedly qualified to go to Yale (true, these are some of the best high schools in the entire world; and honestly speaking, they were all much more "competitive" applicants than I was), it's not necessarily true to say that they were CONSIDERABLY more qualified than the thousands of students who weren't admitted. More importantly, it is very easy to imagine thousands of other students who would be just as qualified as they were, given the opportunity to attend such an elite prep school. There's nothing innately different in these students from the rest of those graduating seniors who are trying to attend elite universities. With one exception: nearly all of these students come from very wealthy families. Each of this small number of New England boarding schools is VERY expensive, upwards of $30,000 a year with a generally weak system of financial aid.

We can look at this in a more concrete way as well. There is, already in fact, a vibrant, largely private education system already existing in the United States - our colleges and universities. While our "public," universities are subsidized considerably; the average cost of a year at a state university is still around $10,000 (my data is a little old for this, is could be higher). As we all know, attending university is very expensive, but there is no doubt to it's value. According to Fareed Zakaria, in his new book "The Post-America World":

"The United States' universities are the finest in the world, making up 8 of the top ten and 37 of the top fifty, according to a prominent ranking produced by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. A few years the National Science Foundation put out a scary and much-discussed statistic. In 2004, the group said, 950,000 engineers graduated from China and India, while 70,000 graduated from the United States. But those numbers are wildly off the mark. If you exclude the car mechanics and repairmen - who are all counted as engineers in Chinese and Indian statistics - the numbers look quite different. Per capita, it turns out, the United States trains more engineers than either or the Asian giants."

For those able to enroll in these universities, there really isn't a better available system of higher education in the entire world. And, even more encouraging, there are now more people enrolled in American universities than there are in high schools; according to my World Book Encyclopedia, as of 2001, there are 14.9 million high school students to 15.3 million university students. Unfortunately, the data becomes a little more murky when you look at exactly who these students are:

"But America's hidden secret is that most of these engineers are immigrants. Foreign students account for almost 50 percent of all science researchers in the country. In 2006 they received 40 percent of all PhDs. By 2010, 75 percent of all science PhDs in this country will be awarded to foreign students. When these graduates settle in the country, they create economic opportunity. Half of all Silicon Valley start-ups have one founder who is an immigrant or first-generation American. The potential for a new burst of American productivity depends not on our education system or R&D spending, but on our immigration policies. If these people are allowed and encouraged to stay, then innovation will happen here. If they leave, they'll take it with them."

The problem with our current university system is access. Getting into a top university is very difficult (and becoming more so every year) and paying for that school when you get there is often too expensive for most middle-class families. Here, competition is not benefiting the American students, and driving costs down, because the demand to get into a school will only to continue to grow, if not accelerate with increased international pressure. There has also been much discussion about the competition between the very universities in the US. To attract the most promising students, many universities have been shelling out shovelfuls of money to offer their students world-class facilities. Yale has basically renovated the entire city of New Haven over the last fifteen years, and has such lofty expansion plans for the next decade that it'll hardly be recognizable when I finally go back. Financing these massive projects have forced Yale to steadily raise tuition rates. Last time I checked, the cost of a year at Yale passed $45,000. Here, once again, competition is not helping with cost.

In fact, for all of the hullabaloo about education in Japan, their system of education is not particularly inclusive either. Like in the United States, it is very important for a Japanese student to attend a renowned university. But in order to matriculate to one of the country's best universities it's almost mandatory that the student graduate from a private prep school as well. Because it is so expensive to get a student simply enrolled in a University, many families just don't put the same effort in for their daughters as they would for their sons. Japan has strict gender roles, and women are not expected to be the breadwinners of their families. Not surprisingly, boys outnumber girls at the university level 2 to 1, a statistic that would be entirely unacceptable in the US. (That's not to say that the majority of girls in Japan go entirely uneducated, most just tend to wind up in the less competitive, and less expensive, system of Japanese junior colleges)

Yes, Japanese students do very well on tests, particularly in math in science. Unfortunately, these numbers aren't entirely trustworthy, because they mask the differences in curriculum between Japan and America. To get into a prep school, you have to pass entrance exams. From a much younger age than in the United States, Japanese teachers, students and parents take testing incredibly seriously. Just like we have the variety of College Board products for the SATs, Japan has their own specialized industry dedicated to passing these exams. It's not surprising that they whip our butts on standardized tests; their system of education provides much more incentive and support to do well on standardized tests than ours.

(Sorry Mom and Bri) I think if we're really serious about having more globally competitive test results - and I'm not sure if we are - we would continue to push for top to bottom education standards as well as a more nationalized curriculum. This comes at a great cost for the overall development of our students though. Parents in Japan (as well as throughout the former USSR, whose rigid nationalized curriculum make No Child Left Behind look like hippy school), constantly complain about how their focus on testing leaves little room for the development of creative and critical thinking skills. Art and music classes, creative writing, and lengthy class discussion are all counter-productive if your goal is to see students reproduce knowledge for a test.

Adding more private schools might also help increase test scores, especially if private schools begin requiring entrance exams. But I'm not sure if the overall quality of the US education system will become better. As some schools would attract better students and teachers, they'd also become more expensive and exclusive. Many schools may in fact get worse; especially when you consider the positive effect a single teacher can have on an entire department (look at Ms. Panozzo). And which schools would be hit hardest? Underperforming urban schools, which are already strapped for funding because of the inane system that funds them (property taxes; which means that white suburban schools are almost always much better funded than their urban counterparts), and need our attention most. The absolute last thing these schools need is more incentive for teachers and students to run off to somewhere else.

Doug, you're right to say that competition tends to lower costs (although when supply is not very elastic, as is the case with education, and demand is only increasing, it becomes very difficult to curtail prices), but you forget to mention that privatization never lowers costs equally. In fact, market-based economic systems create a wide variety of primarily highly exclusive, high-end products and mass consumed low-end products. There are literally millions of examples here: Burberry vs. Wal-mart; Miso vs. Chili's; Bentley vs. Kia; Apple vs. Dell. The prices and fortunes of these high end products, catering to the wealthy, generally increase (or at least that's what my Newsweek tells me -- economic turmoil aside, the vast majority of "luxury" brands worldwide have shown healthy growth), while there is constantly downward pressure on the latter. Not surprisingly there is a vast difference in quality between these two types of products, as one stakes its fortunes on being the best available, while the other on being the least expensive. If you completely privatize education, the market will do as it always does, decisively separating the best and most exclusive from that available to everyone else

In the end, the problem with US education is actually very similar to the problem with health care. For those able to go to the best universities, or see the best doctors, there is no comparison anywhere else in the world. The challenge, I believe, is to make these things more accessible. As far as education goes, we need to continue make sure that more American students to enroll in universities and do whatever it takes to be sure that: a) middle-class families can continue to afford to send their kids to college and b) ensure that college graduates aren't drowning in debt. Considering that most state universities are subsidized by state taxes, I guess we all know where at least some of this revenue will have to come from. At the high school level, this is more challenging (but keep in mind that most everyone in the US without a college degree is already basically on 5th street, and that there is already considerable incentive for many students to achieve at the high school level: admission to an exceptional university), and unfortunately I'm not very well read on the subject. Newsweek published a special awhile back, focusing on the differences between the US and many other education systems around the world, but I didn't get a chance to read it. If you're interested, it's here. (insert Newsweek website).

That said, I know for a fact that I’ll be sending my kids to private schools. Like I already said, they’re simply, empirically better. I’ll still happily pay my taxes in support of public school funding, but I’m not willing to bet my children’s future on the often-uneven quality of public education.

TAXES AND SPENDING
But here's where the fun stops. Our national budget is in a serious state of crisis, with a deficit of $407 billion dollars for the last fiscal year (pop quiz, which two presidents have run the highest deficits in American history? If you guessed Bush Jr. and Reagan, you'd be right, but not too happy about "conservative" fiscal policy). Everyone seems to be in a tiff over the oncoming "recession," but nobody seems willing to recognize that a key contributor, the nosediving value of the dollar, is directly related to maintaining a balanced budget. There is constant talk of reducing the size of the government - Bush made a truly laudable effort by trimming 18 billion dollars, a WHOPPING .6 percent of government spending, while continuing to exclude the cost of the war in Iraq from his budgetary projections - but all of it is a little more than bulls****. The fact of the matter is that for a variety of reasons, most of them relating to selfishness, vested interests, entitlement and short-sightedness, it is almost impossible right now to reign in government spending. The only way we will balance the budget in the foreseeable future is to raise taxes. (Although as we become forced to continually to raise taxes to pay for all the fat in our government, we'll become a lot more encouraged to trim said fat)

The good news is that the Bush tax cuts are not permanent and that they will definitely expire with the current Democratic congress (knock on wood). Fairness aside (for now), the tax cuts were the single largest contributor to the current deficit. You can see the numbers at the Center for Budgetary Policy's website. Actually, when you look at the burden that each citizen has to repaying the current deficit, the Bush tax cuts will actually cost most US citizen's money in the long term, excluding, of course, that often-alluded to upper quintile. There's also almost no evidence of the benefit of tax cuts, or these ridiculous economic stimulus packages ($500, yipee!), for the overall economy. The CBP website has some good data on this as well.

Ever since income tax has existed in the United States, it has been progressive tax system; i.e. the wealthiest Americans are taxed more and pay a much larger percentage of the country’s overall tax revenue. Nonetheless, the last couple of decades have seen a considerable "flattening," of taxes. From a high of almost 70% in the 1970s, the upper quintile now pays around 35% of their income in taxes, while the middle quintiles pay a little over 20%. But if you keep in mind that wealthier tax payers have a much higher percentage of deductibles, and that social security is capped (meaning that income for social security is taxed only up to a fixed point, in other words - and I wished I had the exact numbers - only the first 50,000 dollars of your income, for example, is subject to FICA, everything after that is untaxed), these numbers in reality are much closer together.

But why tax the wealthier more? A lot of it simply has to do with because we can. Because people simply require a certain amount of money to live in on, its ethically less disagreeable to take a bigger portion of a rich man’s salary than starve a poor man by taking too much of his. Smaller amounts of money have a greater impact on poorer people as well. $1000 means a lot less to someone who makes $150,000 a year than it does to someone who only makes $18,000. I also personally believe that the individual accumulation of wealth is bad for the overall health of the country. As my dad often reminds me, there’s “never been such a gap between rich a poor without starting a revolution” (Dad’s political outlook is a little whacky and a lot apocalyptic). Money breed’s corruption, and it tends to discourage democratic principles: case and point, modern Russia. Money’s also a source of class discontent (just look at me!). I also disagree with the idea that high taxes on the wealthy discourage people from being successful. There will always be people who will do whatever it takes to live better than those around them – ibankers don’t do it for the warm, fuzzy feeling that crunching numbers gives them – even if that distinction is next to nothing. Solzhenitsyn taught me that.

Going further, we should reinstate the estate tax. People should have to earn their keep in life. I’m absolutely flabbergasted that there are actually people who sympathize with those social leeches whose goal in life is to sit around and wait for their trust fund to mature. A strong estate tax would be a good measure against the Paris Hiltons of the world.

While the cost of welfare is under control - the Clinton welfare reforms of the 90s made it much more difficult to stay on public assistance for more than 5 years – there are some serious landmines on the horizon. As the baby boomers retire en masse, we simply won’t be able to raise taxes fast enough to meet their financial needs. Peter G Peterson, from the Blackstone financial group, estimates that the costs of Social Security and Medicare will reach 44 trillion dollars when the baby boomers retire. That happens to be three times our current national GDP, and would require at least doubling taxes to pay for it. Not only will the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare have to be raised, it will also be necessary to eliminate benefits for the majority of Americans who are financially stable at retirement. Love or it hate, social security will have to start to resemble our national welfare policy much more if it’s not going to hamstring our economy.

THE ENVIRONMENT AND FOREIGN POLICY
Well, I’m probably wasting my breathe on this one, because even discussing environmentally sound public policy depends first on admitting that we have a seriously unhealthy relationship to carbon-based fuels in the United States. But here goes nothing. 70 billion tons a day, that’s the most important number to think about. Globally, we put 70 billion tons of carbon waste into the air every single day, and the United States is by far the worst contributor to this problem. You can see it every major US city: that disgusting brown haze that hanging over everything. We know for a fact that there is a direct correlation between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and the overall temperature of the planet. We have been able to observe this with of 600,000 years worth of data from glacial core drills in the artic. Right now, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is TWICE as high as it has ever been (as far as 600,000 years of data shows) and it continues to climb at an ever-accelerating rate. I don’t know where you’re getting your “cooling period” idea from, because all of the hottest years ever recorded have come in the last decade. Every summer, it’s becoming a common occurrence to see record-breaking heat waves and temperature highs around the globe. We can see the greatest effect at the poles. Not a single person can seriously argue that the Northern polar ice cap, and every major body of ice in the world for that matter, isn’t shrinking; Russia created an international relations mess last year by trying to claim the a huge portion of the land in the artic for resource exploitation. There’s literally a gold mine of corroborating evidence for the general environmental changes occurring because of global warming: higher frequency of tornados and wildfires, increased ocean temperatures (especially on the surface) creating stronger storms (floods, severe storms and fires have shown a drastic increase in insurance claims over the last decade), increased water demands around the world; changing Ph balance throughout our oceans (thanks to carbon absorption); a dramatic decrease in global permafrost; changing lengths of the seasons.

Even if you roll your eyes at the environmental data, keep in mind that a sizeable number of foreign conflicts that the Unite States has been involved in since Vietnam have directly concerned our access to oil. Also the bulk of our current relations problems stem from rogue countries with serious petrodollars backing them: Venezuela, Iraq, Iran, Russia. Being able to reduce the amount of our imported oil to zero, or at least the oil we import from the Middle East, greatly simplifies our national security situation. Perhaps unbelievably, it is actually possible for the United States to accomplish this; keep in mind that the largest supplier of oil to the US is still America herself. Brazil, with a population of 175 million people, has been able stop importing oil by converting sugar cane into ethanol, and many other countries are moving in that direction. Coupled with the fact that oil prices will reach $200 a barrel by 2010 (over $10 a gallon at the pump), a statistic proposed by both the head OPEC financial minister and a leading analyst at Goldman Sachs, there is overwhelming incentive for the United States to become independent from foreign oil.

For us, we’d need to seriously focus on the fuel-efficiency rating of most of our cars. While hopefully going up soon (last time I heard, even Mr. Big-time Texas Oil himself supporting this kind of legislation), the minimum FER in the US is 24 mpg; in Japan, on the other hand, its 47; most of Europe is in the 40s and will end up passing Japan soon into the 50s; and in China, even, it’s 36. Yup, there are many brands of American cars that can’t be sold in China because they aren’t efficient enough. Considering how desperate many American automakers have become these days, making cars that we can actually sell in China would be sound global strategy. We’d also need to start exploring something like coal-to-gas as a supplementary source (the US is to coal what Saudia Arabia is to crude). Corn to ethanol is not a good idea for a couple of reasons. First, it requires just about as much petroleum to make corn into ethanol as it you save by using it. And second, with food costs going up around the world, it seems much more responsible to grow food for people to actually eat instead of put into our gas tanks.

The market for creating more energy efficient products and renewable sources of energy is ripe for tapping as well. Iceland leads the world in geothermal energy, and is becoming a hub for all sorts of energy-intensive industries because its energy costs are so low. We have an abundance of wind and sun throughout the US, and many American communities have already shown the ability to run entire power grids on renewables alone. We already have the technology, crudely called carbon-capture-and-sequestration, to create coal power plants with almost no emissions. Everywhere you turn these days companies are developing more environmentally friendly household products and even houses themselves that are completely carbon independent. Efficient products may sense for the consumer as well; simply replacing your light bulbs to fluorescents (or even better LCDs), can save hundreds of dollars a year. The same goes for installing electronic thermostats, properly winterizing your home, and buying a hybrid car.

Confronting global climate change is a telling part of American foreign policy over the next century. Fareed Zakaria’s book, which I quoted from above, is much less about American education policy as it is about the rapidly transforming world and America’s new role in it. As he is quick to point out, “To bring [rapidly developing countries] into this world [of peaceful democracies and mutual prosperity], the United States needs to make its own commitment to this system clear. So far, America has been able to have it both ways. It is the global rule-maker but doesn’t always play by the rules. And forget about standards created by others.” America is one of the only countries to still not sign the Kyoto treaties for carbon emissions. It’s the one of the only countries that refuses to participate in the international court system at the Hague. It’s one of the few countries to still use the death penalty. It’s one of the few countries to employ a global system of secret prisons and accept that fact that people are tortured, or “harshly interrogated,” there. It’s one of only three countries that doesn’t use the metric system. It conducts unilateral military occupations foreign countries.

As Americans, it’s imperative that we become better global citizens ourselves to encourage the emerging world to do the same. While the surge has decreased the amount of violence in Iraq, this transition has less to do with an increased number of troops as it does better policies for community building. For the first time in this war, American troops have shown a real commitment to developing relationships with all Iraqi people. The same is true for the overall decrease in terrorist activity recently. Lebanon, Saudia Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan have all made admirable strides to stop both the ideology and funding that supports terrorism, while the rest of the rest of the world has become better capable of identifying threats and reacting quickly to then (two instances: the failed bombing in London and the French solution to a recent airjacking). The King of Saud is currently building a massive university complex to combat the overall influence of Wahhabiists (spelling) on the system of Saudi higher education. The fact of the matter is that conventional military might, what America excels at, is becoming less and less relevant. The world is safer, more prosperous, and friendlier to human rights now that it has ever been. Every day, millions of people are being lifted out of poverty. Countries the world over are having truly unbelievable amounts of economic growth. And America is more than capable of leading this new world peacefully, but it has to make a commitment to being an example instead of an exception.

MISC, OR MORE ECONOMIC STICKING POINTS
Yes Doug, public housing is crap. That doesn't mean that cities should altogether abandon planning (zoning laws) and regulation (Giuliani’s - I think that's misspelled - heavy fines for broken windows and abandoned buildings). Sound development policy does actually make a world of difference: compare Houston to Manhattan. If anything, the money spent on public housing could at least be used to help low-income families buy, own and care for their own properties.

Speaking of government-funded building projects that lead to nowhere, $250 billion for a wall between the US and Mexico? Do we have a Mongolian problem all of the sudden? Look, only two things are going to affect the amount of people coming into this country, a booming Mexican economy or a tanking American one (luckily both are happening RIGHT NOW!). That money could be much better spent on improving border patrols and coming up with a legitimate guest worker program. It should be easy from for Mexican workers to migrate to and fro - part of the reason that people simply stay here is that its almost impossible to go back after illegally crossing, have limits in place for the amount of time that worker could stay, and strict enforcement and punishment for violating these laws for employers (perhaps the biggest loop hole in the whole deal; if the fines were high enough to make hiring an illegal unprofitable we'd see much less incentive for bringing them over). Regardless, we have 15 million illegals in US right now, many who've been living here for decades, we'll probably need to start consider extending citizenship to a considerable number of them sometime soon.

I know that this is a pet cause, but why in the world do we still have farm subsidies? Or why do we still have such intense tariffs on imported foods? Most of that money goes to either large international companies or encouraging farms to grow corn for biofuel (see above), which is criminally stupid when we're currently facing global food shortages. Food markets all around the world need to be opened up. A fair agricultural trade policy with Africa would create more economic stimulus in a year than decades of direct aid.

I'm absolutely embarrassed that congress refuses to finish free trade agreements with Columbia and is actually hinting that they might eff with NAFTA. If China is proof of anything, free trade benefits everyone; it makes life in developed countries far less expensive while lifting less developed countries out of poverty (which in turn actually encourages things like personal liberties and democratic institutions much better than any “regime change” every could). I find it strange that right now, when there is so much economic prosperity everywhere around the world, that America wouldn't be doing everything to it can to dip into every single available pie. Forcing China to appreciate its currency (another vacuous protectionist idea) is a dumb too. In the end it hurts us far more than it helps us. If China's currency actually floated, the American economy would drop from 1st to 20th in the world rankings of per capita GDP. We need to be much more concerned with the value of our own currency than the value of other countries'.

***

Last but not least, since it is a custom to toast a vanquished foe (or at least Tom Hanks tells me so in Charlie Wilson's War - a solid 3, the completely superfluous nudity and Russia bating do a lot to help hold the whole thing together), I'd like to raise a glass to Hilary Clinton: it must suck having everyone hate you so much...

Thank you, thank you, thank you everyone for reading. And a big thank you to everyone who put in so much effort to generate such thought out, eloquent responses. I'm sorry this post was such a monster (5377 words; it did take almost a week to get together). Ideological issues aside (and I stand my ground when I say that ideology is nothing but mere trifles, Dr. Zhivago is a really good at emphasizing this), I love you all so incredibly much, and miss you all terribly (that, if anything, is why I don't mind putting so much effort into this). This was a lot of fun, especially when we avoided being p****s to one another, and hopefully we'll get a chance to do it again soon. In person even.

Oh yeah, and don’t forget to vote…

…Democrat.

A Little Spare Time from Work

2008-06-06T06:08:00.001-06:00

I'm literaly months behind the ball on this one. But since I was in a feverish writing mood this weekend, I thought that it was more than about time to finally wrap up my response to Robert Strauss's diatribe but young Peace Corps volunteers. First, is the poop sandwich of an article that he wrote, second is mine. My views don't reflect the Peace Corps' blah blah blah.

Too Many Innocents Abroad
by Robert L Strauss
Published: January 9, 2008
The New York Times

THE Peace Corps recently began a laudable initiative to increase the number of volunteers who are 50 and older. As the Peace Corps’ country director in Cameroon from 2002 until last February, I observed how many older volunteers brought something to their service that most young volunteers could not: extensive professional and life experience and the ability to mentor younger volunteers.

However, even if the Peace Corps reaches its goal of having 15 percent of its volunteers over 50, the overwhelming majority will remain recently minted college graduates. And too often these young volunteers lack the maturity and professional experience to be effective development workers in the 21st century.

This wasn’t the case in 1961 when the Peace Corps sent its first volunteers overseas. Back then, enthusiastic young Americans offered something that many newly independent nations counted in double and even single digits: college graduates. But today, those same nations have millions of well-educated citizens of their own desperately in need of work. So it’s much less clear what inexperienced Americans have to offer.

The Peace Corps has long shipped out well-meaning young people possessing little more than good intentions and a college diploma. What the agency should begin doing is recruiting only the best of recent graduates — as the top professional schools do — and only those older people whose skills and personal characteristics are a solid fit for the needs of the host country.

The Peace Corps has resisted doing this for fear that it would cause the number of volunteers to plummet. The name of the game has been getting volunteers into the field, qualified or not.

In Cameroon, we had many volunteers sent to serve in the agriculture program whose only experience was puttering around in their mom and dad’s backyard during high school. I wrote to our headquarters in Washington to ask if anyone had considered how an American farmer would feel if a fresh-out-of-college Cameroonian with a liberal arts degree who had occasionally visited Grandma’s cassava plot were sent to Iowa to consult on pig-raising techniques learned in a three-month crash course. I’m pretty sure the American farmer would see it as a publicity stunt and a bunch of hooey, but I never heard back from headquarters.

For the Peace Corps, the number of volunteers has always trumped the quality of their work, perhaps because the agency fears that an objective assessment of its impact would reveal that while volunteers generate good will for the United States, they do little or nothing to actually aid development in poor countries. The agency has no comprehensive system for self-evaluation, but rather relies heavily on personal anecdote to demonstrate its worth.

Every few years, the agency polls its volunteers, but in my experience it does not systematically ask the people it is supposedly helping what they think the volunteers have achieved. This is a clear indication of how the Peace Corps neglects its customers; as long as the volunteers are enjoying themselves, it doesn’t matter whether they improve the quality of life in the host countries. Any well-run organization must know what its customers want and then deliver the goods, but this is something the Peace Corps has never learned.

This lack of organizational introspection allows the agency to continue sending, for example, unqualified volunteers to teach English when nearly every developing country could easily find high-caliber English teachers among its own population. Even after Cameroonian teachers and education officials ranked English instruction as their lowest priority (after help with computer literacy, math and science, for example), headquarters in Washington continued to send trainees with little or no classroom experience to teach English in Cameroonian schools. One volunteer told me that the only possible reason he could think of for having been selected was that he was a native English speaker.

The Peace Corps was born during the glory days of the early Kennedy administration. Since then, its leaders and many of the more than 190,000 volunteers who have served have mythologized the agency into something that can never be questioned or improved. The result is an organization that finds itself less and less able to provide what the people of developing countries need — at a time when the United States has never had a greater need for their good will.

Robert L. Strauss has been a Peace Corps volunteer, recruiter and country director. He now heads a management consulting company.

For all of Mr. Strauss’ article’s rhetorical merits – he does present a convincing, albeit limited argument, his article contains one glaring flaw: sheer ignorance. Mr. Strauss has absolutely no understanding of the Peace Corps and has especially no understanding of the individual volunteer experience. How this can be the case with a former country director is entirely beyond me. Then again, Mr. Strauss’ general tone doesn’t exactly convey a willingness to be completely involved in the lives of the volunteers that he oversaw. Peace Corps Volunteers are much more than “fussy innocents with nothing more than a liberal arts degree.” Mr. Strauss’ blatant unwillingness to acknowledge this shows incredible disrespect to the thousands of men and women who have sacrificed two years of their lives in hopes of spreading peace and friendship through the underdeveloped world. Seriously, who the hell has the gall to piss on Peace Corps Volunteers?

In general, Mr. Strauss’ intentions are good; he wishes to improve the effectiveness of the Peace Corps. He plans to accomplish this by encouraging the recruitment of older volunteers while at the same time decreasing the number of younger volunteers in the field. Older volunteers, those holy grails of the baby boomer generation, are a largely untapped resource; one that Peace Corps Director Ron Tschetter has already proposed catering towards. By 2010, the Peace Corps hopes that 15% of each recruiting class will be comprised of “more experienced” volunteers. But unlike Mr. Strauss’ proposal, the Peace Corps plans to do this while doubling the number of current volunteers in the field. Mr. Strauss’ proposed reforms would hobble the Peace Corps. The voicing of his opinion only demonstrates public ignorance towards the daily workings of the Peace Corps and its overall goals as an organization.

In relation to the strength of the myth that Peace Corps holds within the general American consciousness, actual knowledge of Peace Corps service in America is shockingly limited. This is the result of few processes. Few Americans have never heard of the Peace Corps, yet at the same time, the number of returned volunteers is very small, barely 190,000 over a span of 40 years. In and of itself, this is a recipe for substantial myth making. The majority of Americans still believe that Peace Corps volunteers are doing the exact same thing that the highly publicized first groups of volunteers were doing in the sixties. This is clearly evinced by the overwhelming number of volunteers who, during the first few months of service, are overwhelmed because “they never imagined the Peace Corps to be like this” (The Europe, Mediterranean, and Asia region, generally the most developed group countries to still host Peace Corps Volunteers, has the highest attrition rate in the Peace Corps for this very reason). Furthermore, the vast majority of “work” within the Peace Corps is very unglamorous. Few people care to hear about how a volunteer went to work everyday, did they job as well as they could, even if that entailed killing a lot of time, and then went right back home. Outside of only a handful of “flash” projects existing in each country, most volunteer work is just that: showing up, trying hard, building connections with coworkers.

But even if the number of volunteers was greatly increased – into the millions that John F Kennedy imagined by this time when he originally signed the Peace Corps act, and the nature of their service was better disseminated, this would not do much to alleviate the general problem. Peace Corps service is, for better or worse, a highly individualized experience, varying not only between decades, service fields and regions, but also differing incredibly from volunteer to volunteer serving in the same country and field at the exact same time. In general, living standards and economic resources throughout the developing world vary wildly from one town to the next. It shouldn’t be surprising then that living in the developing world for an extended period of time would yield a myriad of contrasting, and often contradictory, experiences.

To risk the danger of skirting generalization, here’s a rough description of life in the 21st century Peace Corps in a highly developed country like Kazakhstan. While life here is certainly less comfortable than the traditional Western standard, the living conditions are far from unmanageable. The majority of volunteers have access to relatively normal amenities, and when they don’t it is usually the more result of Peace Corps’ expectation that volunteers live modestly within their communities than actual lacking infrastructure. That’s not to say that many volunteers face intense physical hardship, after all the weather here often touches negative 40 degrees below zero, but the number of those that do is dwindling rapidly as this country quickly modernizes.

Professionally, Peace Corps volunteers aren’t exactly the pioneers they once were as much as they are now professional consultants. In the Peace Corps’ largest field of service in Kazakhstan, education, a volunteer’s main duty is to increase the teaching capacity of local teachers. Most prominently, volunteers do this simply through exposure. Considering that, for many Kazakhstanis, meeting a volunteer might be the first time they’ve ever seen an American, having a native English speaker in the classroom, and having to interact with this native speaker on a daily basis, is immensely beneficial for local teachers. The effect on an individual volunteer on a classroom is universal. It’s obvious, when meeting a local teacher, whether they’ve worked with a volunteer before or not; they speak English substantially better than anyone else around them. Beyond simple exposure, Peace Corps volunteers typically offer methodological approaches that local teachers have never been exposed to. Particularly in former Soviet countries, education systems throughout the developing world often rely on outdated models of education that can be easily improved with the elimination of a few bad habits. Peace Corps volunteers also have access to resources that their local counterparts don’t, such as teaching materials, technological fluency, and grants.

The Peace Corps is unique, among all service organizations in the United States, in the length of time that all volunteers are required to serve in the field. Cut any way, 27 months is a very long time to sacrifice for almost no material return. But it’s vital to the overall success of service that volunteers remain in country for this long, because, as Mr. Strauss so perfunctorily points out, volunteers aren’t especially good at their jobs upon arrival. Why anyone would assume otherwise, even when three intensive months of training are factored in, is absolutely ludicrous. Even with a substantial background in their field, which the majority of volunteers don’t even have, Peace Corps volunteers are confronted from day one with immense language and cultural challenges. Most volunteers report that they don’t feel comfortable in their job, or particularly effective, until nearly a year into their service.

What’s even more ludicrous on Mr. Strauss’ part, though, is his neglect of the fact that volunteers rapidly improve both their abilities to do their jobs and their understanding of the language and (once unfamiliar) culture around them. Although Mr. Strauss condemns the Peace Corps’ focus on integration when determining a volunteer’s effectiveness during service, integration is in fact the key factor in determining a volunteer’s effectiveness. At the end of service, volunteers possess a unique, hard-earned expertise on the community they live in, having experienced from both the out and inside. Unfortunately, spending time, meeting locals, making friends, reflecting on the surrounding situation is the only route to obtain this kind of knowledge. Hopefully, the volunteer acquired this expertise with enough time left in their service to create substantial, lasting benefits before they have to leave.

The truth of it all is that individually, the majority Peace Corps volunteers do not have incredible impacts on their communities. Even the best stories of service in Peace Corps lore - a woman who started a credit union that eventually transformed an entire community or a young man that taught a community to plant watermelon and become the biggest watermelon producer in the region, illustrate change that was started by the volunteer, but took decades to fully develop. In my opinion, truly great volunteers create a significant impact on only a handful of people, but this effect transforms them (and eventually the people around them) for the rest of their lives. For English teachers, it may be sending a student to America or encouraging a counterpart to use only English in the classroom. Taken case by case, this may not seem like much. But there are over 5,000 volunteers serving around the world right now, and enough of these small pools of change add up to something truly significant over time.

The greatest of an idea is often the result of its simplicity, and in this regard, the Peace Corps is not unique. While it is true that cost of living is increasing globally, and the American economy is significantly slowing down, the Peace Corps remains a remarkably inexpensive organization to manage. All told, Peace Corps uses less than one percent of the overall foreign policy budget for the State Department. Considering that all volunteers live with host families for a significant portion of service, and that many volunteers stay with families throughout, it’s very inexpensive to keep a volunteer in the field. All told, I make around 350 dollars month, and as a volunteer in Kazakhstan I’m one of the best paid volunteers in the world. While it is important to increase volunteer accountability and have more specific project plans and goals as the Peace Corps grows into the 21st century, the Peace Corps’ three underlying goals – supplying manpower, increasing exposure of America and American values, and making Americans more aware of the rest of the world – are eternal.

But perhaps most importantly, Strauss completely ignores the effect that Peace Corps service has on a young person; how service can transform them and create a more responsible, publicly active individual. Returned volunteers constantly talk about the forging of values, growth of character, public awareness, and development of survival skills that only the Peace Corps offers. If we are to continue using the Peace Corps as not only a tool for international development, but also for the further strengthening of America after service, it makes only sense to continue to send as many young people abroad as possible.

Some Commentary

2007-07-27T22:19:00.001-06:00

Fred Kaplan has a bit to say about Peter Galbraith's article, which is the last part of the series of articles posted earlier. Without a doubt, there isn't any "serious" solution towards ending the Iraq war that is more thought out than Galbraith's. Kaplan simply enters the conversation by pointing out the moral ramifications of this solution, how preventing mass murder is our last (and perhaps only) accomplishable goal over there. That makes me a sad panda.

Defeat Without Disaster
The least bad plan for leaving Iraq.
By Fred Kaplan
www.slate.com
Posted Friday, July 27, 2007, at 2:45 PM ET

Peter Galbraith's article in the current New York Review of Books, "Iraq: The Way to Go," is one of the most bracing essays written on the subject lately—a provocative but logical case for a U.S. withdrawal (though not a total withdrawal) that still manages to achieve a few of the war's original goals.

I don't agree with every plank of Galbraith's proposal (more on that later), but anyone seeking a solution to this disaster needs at least to contend with his arguments.

Back in the spring of 2004, when Galbraith first proposed splitting Iraq into a loose federation of three ethnic enclaves, I criticized the idea. He did have a point. "Iraq" was an artifice from its outset, the product of a scheme to widen the British Empire in the wake of the First World War. When the American-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein, it also imploded the artifice of a unified Iraqi nation, and there was no way to put the monster back together. It would be better, Galbraith argued, to let the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds govern themselves in autonomous regions, with a central authority doing little more than equitably distributing oil revenue.

At the time, and a few times since, I expressed serious problems with Galbraith's plan. First, Iraq's ethnic divisions were not clear-cut geographically: Many cities, notably Baghdad and Kirkuk, had mixed populations. Where should the ethno-regional lines be drawn? Second, since the central authority would be weak by design, it wouldn't have the power to make, much less enforce, decisions on divvying up revenue. Third, the plan would have the effect of creating three "weak states," which would likely spawn civil wars and possibly a regional conflagration, as the neighbors felt tempted or compelled to fill the power vacuums.

My objections remain, but the context has changed. Amputation seems a terrible idea when one's limbs are still flexing. It's a bit more palatable when the alternative is death, and, in Iraq, the gangrene is spreading.

"The Iraq war is lost," Galbraith starkly declares in his new article. "Defeat," he continues, "is defined by America's failure to accomplish its objective of a self-sustaining, democratic, and unified Iraq. And that failure has already taken place."

He has now abandoned his plan for a partitioned federation, regarding the southern two-thirds of Iraq—the areas dominated by Shiite and Sunni Arabs—as hopeless. Instead, he calls for withdrawing U.S. troops from those areas and redeploying some of them to the northern sector, in order to protect the Kurds.

Galbraith has long been a consultant to the Kurds and, long before that, a passionate advocate for their cause. Still, an objective case can be made that the United States has a moral and strategic interest in Kurdish independence. Redeploying troops to the Kurdistan region accomplishes four goals, Galbraith argues. It "secures the one part of Iraq that has emerged as stable, democratic, and pro-Western." It deters "a potentially destabilizing Turkish-Kurdish war." It "provides U.S. forces a secure base that can be used to strike at al-Qaida in adjacent Sunni territories." And it limits "Iran's increasing domination."

All of these goals are worth pursuing; they are worth some sacrifice; finally, unlike other goals of this war, they are achievable.

And yet, the plan leaves out one thing—the people in the rest of Iraq.

Galbraith no longer describes Iraq as consisting of Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. Rather, he calls it "a land divided along ethnic lines into Arab and Kurdish states with a civil war being fought within its Arab part."

At one point in his article, he writes that his redeployment plan "discharges a moral debt to our Kurdish allies." Fine, but if we're talking morality, have we incurred any such debt to the Shiites—who were also oppressed by Saddam and whom the United States (specifically, President Bush's father) abandoned in the endgame of the first Gulf War? Do we, for that matter, owe anything to the non-Baathist Sunni Arabs—who are also residents of this country that we destroyed without rebuilding?

Galbraith's plan reflects a blindness—or perhaps indifference—toward the plight of those still trapped in the crossfire. "We need to recognize … that Iraq no longer exists as a unified country," he writes. "In the parts where we can accomplish nothing, we should withdraw."

He is probably right on both counts, but in those parts—by which he means the Arab parts—there are still millions of people who once called (or still do call) themselves Iraqis. And for them, can we really "accomplish nothing"? Before we withdraw from the Arab parts, can we at least try to limit the sectarian bloodbath that—even Galbraith acknowledges—will likely follow?

Galbraith's own analysis points to one possible approach. Back when he advocated a tripartite federation, he noted (correctly) that Iraq was already moving in that direction—only violently. Now, more each day, sectarian militias are ethnically cleansing neighborhoods, even whole towns, where Shiites and Sunnis once casually mixed.

Before they withdraw, U.S. troops could try to help minorities relocate into areas where their ethnic brethren are in the majority—providing the means of transportation and, to the extent possible, safe passage. Iraqi troops and police may be very keen to assist, if not lead the way, in this mission—at least if Shiite forces are called on to help Shiites, Sunni forces to help Sunnis.

It's extremely discomfiting to abet ethnic segregation—but less so when the alternative might open the gates to mass murder.

The Rotting Corpse

2007-07-18T12:13:00.001-06:00

What follows is a review of the "benchmark report" and NIE analysis about the current state of affairs in Iraq. Hint: it's not going well. The last article is another realistic assessment of Iraq as well as some reasonable exit solutions. Unfortunately, all of this - at least in the short-term - is speculative, considering there is no possible way to force this issue through the current Congress.

You Call That Progress?
The outrageous White House report on Iraq.
By Fred Kaplan
www.slate.com
Posted Thursday, July 12, 2007, at 5:47 PM ET

The White House report released today, on how far Iraq has progressed toward 18 political and military benchmarks, is a sham.

According to the report, which was required by Congress, progress has been "satisfactory" on eight of the benchmarks, "unsatisfactory" on another eight, and mixed on two. At his press conference this morning, President Bush, seeing the glass half full, pronounced the report "a cause for optimism"—and for staying on course.

Yet a close look at the 25-page report reveals a far more dismal picture and a deliberately distorted assessment. The eight instances of "satisfactory" progress are not at all satisfactory by any reasonable measure—or, in some cases, they indicate a purely procedural advance. The eight "unsatisfactory" categories concern the central issues of Iraqi politics—the disputes that must be resolved if Iraq is to be a viable state and if the U.S. mission is to have the slightest chance of success.

Here are the benchmarks at which, even the White House acknowledges, the Iraqi government has not made satisfactory progress:

• Legislation on de-Baathification reform
• Legislation to ensure equitable distribution of oil revenue without regard to sect or ethnicity
• Setting up provincial elections
• Establishing a strong militia-disarmament program
• Allowing Iraqi commanders to pursue militias without political interference
• Ensuring that the Iraqi army and police enforce the law evenhandedly
• Increasing the number of Iraqi security forces capable of operating independently (here, the number has actually gone down)
• Ensuring that Iraq's political authorities are not undermining or making false accusations against members of Iraqi security forces

The status of former Baathists, distribution of oil revenue, local elections, disarming militias, sectarianism within the police, the legitimacy of the national army—these are the main issues grinding the parliament to a standstill, aggravating ethnic conflict, and forcing millions of Iraqis to flee the country. These are the issues that the Iraqi political leaders are supposed to be resolving while American troops fight and die to make Baghdad secure.

Yet the White House is admitting that the Iraqis have made no real progress on any of these fronts.

In its legislation requiring this report, Congress stated, "The United States strategy in Iraq, hereafter, shall be conditioned on the Iraqi government meeting [these 18] benchmarks." Yet even on the eight benchmarks that it admits are not met, the White House report explicitly denies the need to change strategy.

The report's account of the eight supposedly successful benchmarks is, on inspection, no less dismaying.

Take Benchmark No. 1: "Forming a Constitutional Review Committee and then completing the constitutional review." The report admits that Iraq's "political blocs still need to reach an accommodation on these difficult political issues." (The report neglects to point out that many of the Sunni blocs are boycotting the parliament.) And yet it declares that the Iraqi government has made "satisfactory progress" because the constitutional review is "now underway."

Or Benchmark No. 9: "Providing three trained and ready Iraqi brigades to support Baghdad operations." The report admits, "Manning levels for deploying units continues to be of concern." The report doesn't explain what this means—namely, that Iraq's brigades have only 50 percent to 75 percent of their soldiers. And yet it concludes that the Iraqi government has made "satisfactory progress" because it "has provided" the brigades.

Then there's Benchmark No. 12: "Ensuring that … the Baghdad security plan will not provide a safe haven for any outlaws, regardless of sectarian or political affiliation." The report admits this task "remains a significant challenge" in "some parts of Baghdad." However, it claims "satisfactory progress" because U.S. commanders report "overall satisfaction with their ability to target any and all extremist groups" and because U.S. diplomats, in their talks with Iraqi officials, "continue to stress the importance" of the topic.

The good mark for Benchmark No. 17 is particularly dubious: "Allocating and spending $10 billion in Iraqi revenues for reconstruction projects, including delivery of essential services, on an equitable basis." The report admits that the Iraqi government has spent only 22 percent of its capital budget, that "it remains unclear" whether the oil ministry has "made any real effort" to spend its share of the funds, that it's hard to track the budget, and that the effects of new spending are felt "unevenly." Still, it claims "satisfactory progress" because some of the revenue is dribbling into the economy.

The other four "satisfactory" grades concern purely procedural matters. They assess legislation on "procedures to form semi-autonomous regions" (not on whether the regions have been formed); "establishing … political, media, economic, and service committees in support of the Baghdad Security Plan" (not whether their support has been effective); "establishing … joint security stations in neighborhoods across Baghdad" (not whether they're effective, either); and "ensuring that the rights of minority political parties in the Iraqi legislature are protected" (not in Iraqi society).

The report card was rigged from the outset by how the White House defined "satisfactory."

The legislation required the president to submit a report "declaring, in his judgment, whether satisfactory progress toward meeting these benchmarks is, or is not, being achieved."

The White House report states, "In order to make this judgment … we … asked the following question: As measured from a January 2007 baseline, do we assess that present trend data demonstrates a positive trajectory, which is tracking toward satisfactory accomplishment in the near term? If the answer is yes, we have provided a 'Satisfactory' assessment; if the answer is no, the assessment is 'Unsatisfactory.' " (All italics added.)

Subtle but pernicious wordplay is going on here. "Satisfactory progress" toward a benchmark is very different from "a positive trajectory … toward satisfactory accomplishment." The congressional language requires a satisfactory degree of progress. The White House interpretation allows high marks for the slightest bit of progress—the "positive trajectory" could be an angstrom, as long as it's "tracking toward" the goal; the degree of progress doesn't need to be addressed.

Yet even by this extraordinarily lenient standard, the White House authors could not bring themselves to give a passing grade to the Iraqi government on half of the benchmarks—and the most important benchmarks, at that.

This is no academic matter. As President Bush and Gen. David Petraeus have said many times, the point of the surge and its strategy is to make Baghdad secure, so that Iraq's political leaders have the "breathing room" to resolve their disputes. Yet if they are incapable of resolving their disputes—if they have made no measurable progress on the major issues and if the Iraqi military hasn't advanced much either—then the surge may be a hopeless cause. Certainly, members of Congress are right to question the strategy, and Bush is deceptive in dismissing their challenges out of hand.

Read It and Weep
Even Bush's intelligence report says the war in Iraq is making us less safe at home.
By Fred Kaplan
www.slate.com
Posted Tuesday, July 17, 2007, at 6:15 PM ET

The National Intelligence Estimate that was released today—titled "The Terrorist Threat to the Homeland"—amounts to a devastating critique of the Bush administration's policies on Iraq, Iran, and the terrorist threat itself.

Its main point is that the threat—after having greatly receded over the past five years—is back in full force. Al-Qaida has "protected or regenerated key elements" of its ability to attack the United States. It has a "safe haven" in Pakistan. Its "top leadership" and "operational lieutenants" are intact. It is cooperating more with "regional terrorist groups."

As a result, the report concludes, "the U.S. Homeland will face a persistent and evolving terrorist threat over the next three years" and is, even now, "in a heightened threat environment."

This is bad enough news for President Bush, who has tried to bank support for his policies on the claim that the terrorist threat has diminished.

Worse news still is the report's further observation—never stated explicitly but clear nonetheless—that the threat has re-emerged as a result of the war in Iraq.

The report—the unclassified version of a consensus product by the 16 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community—also notes that the threat will grow still larger if we appear to threaten Iran.

One major reason for al-Qaida's resurgence, according to the report, is its "association with" al-Qaida in Iraq. (Note, by the way, that these two organizations are said to be "associated" or "affiliated" with each other; contrary to what Bush has said in recent speeches, they are not the same entity.) This affiliation "helps al-Qaida to energize the broader Sunni extremist community, raise resources, and to recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for Homeland attacks." (Italics added.)

Al-Qaida in Iraq—or AQI, as the report identifies it—is not merely al-Qaida's "most visible and capable affiliate." More significant, it is "the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the Homeland." (Italics added.)

Let's put together the syllogism: Al-Qaida is more inclined to attack the United States because of its affiliation with AQI; AQI is the only affiliate that wants to attack the United States; therefore, if there were no AQI, the danger of an attack would be far less severe, if it existed at all.

Let's add one more link to the logical chain (which the NIE leaves out but which is self-evident): If there were no U.S. occupation of Iraq, there would be no AQI. (Certainly the organization didn't exist until well into the occupation. It has gained a foothold in Iraq—energizing "the broader Sunni extremist community"—by playing off their anti-American sentiments.)

Many times, President Bush has said that we're fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here. It is an absurd argument in many ways. But the NIE reveals that the opposite is the case—that because we're fighting them in Iraq, we are more likely to face them here.

Does this mean that we should stop fighting AQI or negotiate some separate peace? No, the organization's presence in Iraq—however exaggerated by some officials—is genuinely dangerous, and there is no negotiating with any al-Qaida affiliate in any event.

But it does mean we should do more to co-opt the Sunnis—even some of the Sunni extremists—that serve as AQI's base of support. (We have started to do just that, with some success, in Anbar province.)

And it also means—for yet one more reason, beyond the many others—that we should start to get out of Iraq. (The question, as always, remains how to do so without unleashing catastrophic chaos. One reasonable inference of the NIE is that we should seek a regional resolution of the crisis as a matter of great urgency to the security not only of the Middle East but also of the United States.)

It's worth recalling that, back in the spring of 2003, as the war was getting under way, Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense (and one of the war's outspoken architects), told Vanity Fair that one reason to invade Iraq was to allow U.S. troops to leave Saudi Arabia. The presence of "infidel" soldiers on holy soil had been "a huge recruiting device for al-Qaida," Wolfowitz said. (Osama Bin Laden had publicly cited their presence as a rationale for the attack on the World Trade Center.) Yet the troops couldn't safely leave Saudi Arabia as long as Saddam Hussein was still in Iraq. Hence, Saddam had to be removed first. (Though Wolfowitz didn't say so, another element of the plan was to relocate the U.S. bases from Saudi Arabia to the new, presumably pro-Western Iraq.)

Now, in a horrible irony, the troops in Iraq have become no less "a huge recruiting device for al-Qaida." (Some of Wolfowitz's erstwhile comrades insist he never wanted an occupation; perhaps he didn't grasp that occupations often follow the forced toppling of a government, especially when the entire social structure collapses as a result.)

Some hawks and neocons want to deepen the involvement and attack Iran—either simply to destroy its bourgeoning nuclear program or (in a more fantasy-drenched scenario) to overthrow its unfriendly regime, too.

The NIE warns against this adventurism in only the most slightly veiled terms. While discussing other threats besides al-Qaida, the report states that Lebanon's Hezbollah—which, till now, has confined its attacks to targets outside the United States—"may be more likely to consider attacking the Homeland … if it perceives the United States as posing a direct threat to the group or Iran." (Italics added.)

This amounts to a direct warning to the White House: Don't attack Iran, the entire U.S. intelligence community is saying—and, if you do, you should expect to get hit back.

The Iraq war is lost
Bush and his band of backers won't admit that -- but their strategy is already defined by the specter of American defeat.
By Peter Galbraith
www.salon.com
Jul. 18, 2007

On May 30, the Coalition held a ceremony in the Kurdistan town of Erbil to mark its handover of security in Iraq's three Kurdish provinces from the Coalition to the Iraqi government. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, the U.S. commander for northern Iraq, praised the Iraqi government for overseeing all aspects of the handover. And he drew attention to the "benchmark" now achieved: With the handover, he said, Iraqis now controlled security in seven of Iraq's 18 provinces.

In fact, nothing was handed over. The only Coalition force in Kurdistan is the peshmerga, a disciplined army that fought alongside the Americans in the 2003 campaign to oust Saddam Hussein; it is loyal to the Kurdistan government in Erbil. The peshmerga provided security in the three Kurdish provinces before the handover and after. The Iraqi army has not been on Kurdistan's territory since 1996 and is effectively prohibited from being there. Nor did the Iraqi flag fly at the ceremony. It is banned in Kurdistan.

Although the Erbil handover was a sham that Prince Potemkin might have admired, it was not easily arranged. The Bush administration had wanted the handover to take place before the U.S. congressional elections in November. But it also wanted an Iraqi flag flown at the ceremony and some acknowledgment that Iraq, not Kurdistan, was in charge. The Kurds were prepared to include a reference to Iraq in the ceremony, but they were adamant that there be no Iraqi flags. It took months to work out a compromise ceremony with no flags at all. Thus the ceremony was followed by a military parade without a single flag -- an event so unusual that one observer thought it might merit mention in "Ripley's Believe it or Not."

Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security advisor, attended the ceremony alongside Kurdistan's prime minister, Nechirvan Barzani, but the Iraqi government had no part in supervising the nonexistent handover. While Mixon, a highly regarded strategist with excellent ties to the Kurds, had no choice but to make the remarks he did, al-Rubaie acknowledged Kurdistan's distinct nature and the right of the Kurds -- approximately 6 million people, or some 20 percent of Iraq's population -- to chart their own course.

On July 12, the White House released a congressionally mandated report on progress in Iraq. As with the sham handover, the report reflected the administration's desperate search for indicators of progress since it began its "surge" by sending five additional combat brigades to the country in February 2007. In recent months the Bush administration and its advocates have been promoting the success of the surge in reducing sectarian killing in Baghdad and achieving a turnaround in Anbar province, where former Sunni insurgents are signing up with local militias to fight al-Qaida.

Although reliable statistics about Iraq are notoriously hard to come by, it does appear that the overall civilian death toll in Baghdad has declined from its pre-surge peak, although it is still at the extremely high levels of the summer of 2006. Moreover, the number of unidentified bodies -- usually the victims of Shiite death squads -- has risen in May and June to pre-surge levels. How much of the modest decline in civilian deaths in Baghdad is attributable to the surge is not knowable, nor is there any way to know if it will last.

The developments in Anbar are more significant. Tribesmen who had been attacking U.S. troops in support of the insurgency are now taking U.S. weapons to fight al-Qaida and other Sunni extremists. Unfortunately, the Sunni fundamentalists are not the only enemy of these new U.S.-sponsored militias. The Sunni tribes also regard Iraq's Shiite-led government as an enemy, and the United States appears now to be in the business of arming both the Sunni and Shiite factions in what has long since become a civil war.

Against the backdrop of modest progress, much has not changed, or has gotten worse. The Baghdad Green Zone is subject to increasingly accurate mortar attacks and is deemed at greater risk of penetration by suicide bombers. Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric whose Mahdi Army was a major target of Bush's surge strategy, remains one of Iraq's most powerful political figures. The military activity against his forces seems only to have enhanced his standing with the public.

Even if the surge has had some modest military success, it has failed to accomplish its political objectives. The idea behind Bush's new strategy was to increase temporarily the number of U.S. troops in Baghdad and Anbar. The aim was to provide breathing space so that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government might enact a program of national reconciliation that would accommodate enough Sunnis to isolate the insurgents. Meanwhile, Iraqi forces, improved by their close relations with U.S. troops and additional training, would take over security.

The core of the national reconciliation program is a series of legislative and political steps that the government should take to address the concerns of Iraq's Sunnis, who feel left out of the country they dominated until 2003. These steps include enacting an oil-revenue-sharing law (to ensure that the oil-poor Sunni regions get their share of revenue); holding provincial elections (the Sunnis boycotted the January 2005 provincial and parliamentary elections, leaving them underrepresented even in Sunni-majority provinces); revising Iraq's constitution (the Sunnis want a more centralized state); revising the ban on public-sector employment of former Baathists (Sunnis dominated the upper ranks of the Baath Party and of the Saddam-era public service); and providing for a fair distribution of reconstruction funds. Both the administration and Congress have placed great emphasis on the obligation of the Iraqi government to achieve these so-called benchmarks. Congress has, by law, linked U.S. strategy on Iraq and financial support of the Iraqi government to progress on these benchmarks and other steps.

Iraq's government has not met one of the benchmarks, and, with the exception of the revenue-sharing law, most are unlikely to happen. But even if they were all enacted, it would not help. Provincial elections will make Iraq less governable, while the process of constitutional revision could break the country apart.

Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, likes to talk of the disparity between the Iraqi clock and the U.S. clock, suggesting that Iraqis believe they have more time to reach agreement than the American political calendar will tolerate. Crocker is the State Department's foremost Iraq hand but, more generally, American impatience often reflects ignorance. For example, both Congress and the administration have expressed frustration that the ban on public service by ex-Baathists has not been relaxed, since this appears to be a straightforward change, easily accomplished and already promised by Iraq's leaders.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim leads the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC, previously known as SCIRI), which is Iraq's leading Shiite party and a critical component of Prime Minister al-Maliki's coalition. He is the sole survivor of eight brothers. During Saddam's rule, Baathists executed six of them. On Aug. 29, 2003, a suicide bomber, possibly linked to the Baathists, blew up his last surviving brother, and predecessor as SCIRI leader, at the shrine of Ali in Najaf. Muqtada al-Sadr, Hakim's main rival, comes from Iraq's other prominent Shiite religious family. Saddam's Baath regime murdered his father and two brothers in 1999. Earlier, in April 1980, the regime had arrested Muqtada's father-in-law and the father-in-law's sister -- the Grand Ayatollah Baqir al-Sadr and Bint al-Huda. While the ayatollah watched, the Baath security men raped and killed his sister. They then set fire to the ayatollah's beard before driving nails into his head. De-Baathification is an intensely personal issue for Iraq's two most powerful Shiite political leaders, as it is to hundreds of thousands of their followers who suffered similar atrocities.

Iraq's Shiite leaders are reluctant to spend reconstruction money in Sunni areas because they believe, not without reason, that such funds support the Sunni side in the civil war. In a speech in late June on the Senate floor, Indiana Republican Richard Lugar reported that Iraq's Shiite-led government has gone "out of its way to bottle up money budgeted for Sunni provinces" and that the "strident intervention" of the U.S. Embassy was required in order to get food rations delivered to Sunni towns.

Iraq's mainstream Shiite leaders resist holding new provincial elections because they know what such elections are likely to bring. Because the Sunnis boycotted the January 2005 elections, they do not control the northern governorate, or province, of Nineveh, in which there is a Sunni majority, and they are not represented in governorates with mixed populations, such as Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. New elections would, it is argued, give Sunnis a greater voice in the places where they live, and the Shiites say they do not have a problem with this, although just how they would treat the militant Sunnis who would be elected is far from clear. The Kurds reluctantly accept new elections in the Sunni governorates even though it means they will lose control of Nineveh and have a much-reduced presence in Diyala.

The American benchmark of holding provincial elections would also require new elections in southern Iraq and Baghdad. If they were held, al-Hakim's Shiite party, the SIIC, which now controls seven of the nine southern governorates, would certainly lose ground to Muqtada al-Sadr. His main base is in Baghdad, and new elections would almost certainly leave his followers in control of Baghdad Governorate, with one-quarter of Iraq's population. Iraq's decentralized constitution gives the governorates enormous powers and significant shares of the national budget if they choose to exercise these powers. New local elections are not required until 2009, and it is hard to see how early elections strengthening al-Sadr, who is hostile to the United States and appears to have close ties to Iran, serve American interests. But this is precisely what the Bush administration is pushing for and Congress seems to want.

Constitutional revision is the most significant benchmark, and it could break Iraq apart. Iraq's constitution, approved by 79 percent of voters in an October 2005 referendum, is the product of a Kurdish–Shiite deal: The Kurds supported the establishment of a Shiite-led government in exchange for Shiite support for a confederal arrangement in which Kurdistan and other regions like the one SIIC hopes to set up in the south, are virtually independent.

Since there is no common ground among the Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis on any significant constitutional changes in favor of the Sunnis, such changes must come at the expense of the Kurds or Shiites. Since voters in these communities have a veto on any constitutional amendments, they are certain to fail in a referendum. A revised constitution has no chance of being enacted, but its failure will exacerbate tensions among Iraq's three groups.

Constitutionally, Iraq's central government has almost no power, and the Bush administration is partially to blame for this. When the constitution was being drafted in 2005, the United Nations came up with a series of proposals that would have made for a more workable sharing of power between regions and the central government. The U.S. Embassy stopped the U.N. from presenting these proposals because it hoped for a final document as centralized as (and textually close to) the interim constitution written by the Americans.

When the constitution finally emerged in its present form, then-U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad brokered a deal with several Sunni leaders whereby, in exchange for Sunni support for ratification, there would be a fast-track process to revise the constitution in the months following ratification to meet Sunni concerns. Like the Bush administration, the Sunnis want a more centralized state. While the United States insists that constitutional revision is a moral obligation, the Sunnis actually never lived up to their end of the bargain. Almost unanimously, they voted against ratification of the current constitution.

With input from the United Nations (belatedly brought back into the process last year), the Iraqi Parliament's mainly Arab Constitutional Review Committee (CRC) is considering amendments that would strip Kurdistan of many of its powers, including its right to cancel federal laws, to decide on taxes applicable in its own territory, and to control its own oil and water. The Sunni Arabs would also like Iraq declared an Arab state, a measure the non-Arab Kurds consider racist and exclusionary.

Thanks to Khalilzad's expedited procedures, constitutional revision may be the final wedge between Kurdistan and Arab Iraq. If approved by the CRC, the constitutional amendments will be subject to a vote in the Parliament as a single package and then to a nationwide referendum. Kurdistan's voters are certain to reject the proposed package (or any package affecting Kurdistan's powers), and this could push tense Sunni-Kurdish relations into open conflict. Kurdish nongovernmental organizations, who ran a 2005 independence referendum, are poised to make a "No" campaign on constitutional revision a "No to Iraq" vote. In its July 12 report to Congress, the White House graded the CRC's work as "satisfactory," an evaluation that was either grossly dishonest, or, more likely, out of touch with Iraqi reality.

For the most part, Iraq's leaders are not personally stubborn or uncooperative. They find it impossible to reach agreement on the benchmarks because their constituents don't agree on any common vision for Iraq. The Shiites voted twice in 2005 for parties that seek to define Iraq as a Shiite state. By their boycotts and votes the Sunni Arabs have almost unanimously rejected the Shiite vision of Iraq's future, including the new constitution. The Kurds' envisage an Iraq that does not include them. In the 2005 parliamentary elections, 99 percent of them voted for Kurdish nationalist parties, and in the January 2005 referendum, 98 percent voted for an independent Kurdistan.

But even if Iraq's politicians could agree to the benchmarks, this wouldn't end the insurgency or the civil war. Sunni insurgents object to Iraq's being run by Shiite religious parties, which they see as installed by the Americans, loyal to Iran, and wanting to define Iraq in a way that excludes the Sunnis. Sunni fundamentalists consider the Shiites apostates who deserve death, not power. The Shiites believe that their democratic majority and their historical suffering under the Baathist dictatorship entitle them to rule. They are not inclined to compromise with Sunnis, whom they see as their long-standing oppressors, especially when they believe most Iraqi Sunnis are sympathetic to the suicide bombers that have killed thousands of ordinary Shiites. The differences are fundamental and cannot be papered over by sharing oil revenues, reemploying ex-Baathists, or revising the constitution. The war is not about those things.

The Iraq war is lost. Of course, neither the president nor the war's intellectual architects are prepared to admit this. Nonetheless, the specter of defeat shapes their thinking in telling ways.

The case for the war is no longer defined by the benefits of winning -- a stable Iraq, democracy on the march in the Middle East, the collapse of the evil Iranian and Syrian regimes -- but by the consequences of defeat. As President Bush put it, "The consequences of failure in Iraq would be death and destruction in the Middle East and here in America."

Tellingly, the Iraq war's intellectual boosters, while insisting the surge is working, are moving to assign the blame for defeat. And they have already picked their target: the American people. In the Weekly Standard, Tom Donnelly, a fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote, "Those who believe the war is already lost -- call it the Clinton-Lugar axis -- are mounting a surge of their own. Ground won in Iraq becomes ground lost at home." Lugar provoked Donnelly's anger by noting that the American people had lost confidence in Bush's Iraq strategy as demonstrated by the Democratic takeover of both houses of Congress. (This "blame the American people" approach has, through repetition, almost become the accepted explanation for the outcome in Vietnam, attributing defeat to a loss of public support and not to 15 years of military failure.)

Indeed, Vietnam is the image many Americans have of defeat in Iraq. Al-Qaida would overrun the Green Zone and the last Americans would evacuate from the rooftop of the still-unfinished largest embassy in the world. Bush feeds on this imagery. In his May 5, 2007, radio address to the nation, he explained:
If radicals and terrorists emerge from this battle with control of Iraq, they would have control of a nation with massive oil reserves, which they could use to fund their dangerous ambitions and spread their influence. The al-Qaida terrorists who behead captives or order suicide bombings would not be satisfied to see America defeated and gone from Iraq. They would be emboldened by their victory, protected by their new sanctuary, eager to impose their hateful vision on surrounding countries, and eager to harm Americans.

But there will be no Saigon moment in Iraq. Iraq's Shiite-led government is in no danger of losing the civil war to al-Qaida, or a more inclusive Sunni front. Iraq's Shiites are three times as numerous as Iraq's Sunni Arabs; they dominate Iraq's military and police and have a powerful ally in neighboring Iran. The Arab states that might support the Sunnis are small, far away (vast deserts separate the inhabited parts of Jordan and Saudi Arabia from the main Iraqi population centers), and can only provide money, something the insurgency has in great amounts already.

Iraq after an American defeat will look very much like Iraq today -- a land divided along ethnic lines into Arab and Kurdish states with a civil war being fought within its Arab part. Defeat is defined by America's failure to accomplish its objective of a self-sustaining, democratic and unified Iraq. And that failure has already taken place, along with the increase of Iranian power in the region.

Iraq's Kurdish leaders and Iraq's dwindling band of secular Arab democrats fear that a complete U.S. withdrawal will leave all of Iraq under Iranian influence. Sen. Hillary Clinton, Foreign Relations Committee chairman Joe Biden, and former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke are among the prominent Democrats who have called for the United States to protect Kurdistan militarily should there be a withdrawal from Iraq. The argument for so doing is straightforward: It secures the one part of Iraq that has emerged as stable, democratic, and pro-Western; it discharges a moral debt to our Kurdish allies; it deters both Turkish intervention and a potentially destabilizing Turkish-Kurdish war; it provides U.S. forces a secure base that can be used to strike at al-Qaida in adjacent Sunni territories; and it limits Iran's gains.

In laying out his dark vision of an American failure, Bush never discusses Iran's domination of Iraq even though this is a far more likely consequence of American defeat than an al-Qaida victory. Bush's reticence is understandable, since it was his miscalculations and incompetent management of the postwar occupation that gave Iran its opportunity. While opposing talks with Iran, the neoconservatives also prefer not to discuss its current powerful influence over Iraq's central government and southern region, persisting in the fantasy -- notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary -- that Iran is deeply unpopular among Iraq's Shiites and clerics. (At the same time, U.S. officials accuse Iran of supplying Iraqi Shiite militias with particularly lethal roadside bombs.)

***

On June 25, without giving the press or White House any advance notice, Richard Lugar, the most respected Republican voice on foreign affairs in Congress, spoke in the Senate about "connecting our Iraq strategy to our vital interests." On the face of it, the idea is as sensible and conservative as the senator delivering the speech. He observed that political fragmentation in Iraq, the stress suffered by the U.S. military, and growing antiwar sentiment at home "make it almost impossible for the United States to engineer a stable, multi-sectarian government in Iraq in a reasonable time frame." Lugar noted that agreements reached with Iraqi leaders are most often not implemented, partly, as Lugar observed, because the leaders do not control their followers but also because Iraqi leaders have also discovered that telling the Bush administration what it wants to hear is a fully acceptable substitute for action.

Lugar is blunt in his description of the situation in Iraq:
Few Iraqis have demonstrated that they want to be Iraqis ... In this context, the possibility that the United States can set meaningful benchmarks that would provide an indication of impending success or failure is remote. Perhaps some benchmarks or agreements will be initially achieved, but most can be undermined or reversed by a contrary edict of the Iraqi government, a decision by a faction to ignore agreements, or the next terrorist attack or wave of sectarian killings. American manpower cannot keep the lid on indefinitely. The anticipation that our training operations could produce an effective Iraqi army loyal to a cohesive central government is still just a hopeful plan for the future.

Lugar concluded his speech by urging that we "refocus our policy in Iraq on realistic assessments of what can be achieved, and on a sober review of our vital interests in the Middle East." After four years of a war driven more by wishful thinking than strategy, this is hardly a radical idea, but it has produced a barrage of covert criticism of Lugar from the administration and overt attack from the neoconservatives.

Lugar's focus on the achievable runs against main currents of opinion in a nation increasingly polarized between the growing number who want to withdraw from Iraq and the die-hard defenders of a failure. We need to recognize, as Lugar implicitly does, that Iraq no longer exists as a unified country. In the parts where we can accomplish nothing, we should withdraw. But there are still three missions that may be achievable -- disrupting al-Qaida, preserving Kurdistan's democracy and limiting Iran's increasing domination. These can all be served by a modest U.S. presence in Kurdistan. We need an Iraq policy with sufficient nuance to protect American interests. Unfortunately, we probably won't get it.

The Manipulator

2007-07-10T05:00:00.000-06:00

I know that this topic has been more than beaten to death, but Halberstam's piece has a least a little value because of the thoroughness with which it addresses the historical issues. If you must, just skim the Bush parts (you won't learn anything new there anyway). If anything, it's at least a damn solid piece of writing.

Enjoy.

The History Boys
In the twilight of his presidency, George W. Bush and his inner circle have been feeding the press with historical parallels: he is Harry Truman—unpopular, besieged, yet ultimately to be vindicated—while Iraq under Saddam was Europe held by Hitler. To a serious student of the past, that's preposterous. Writing just before his untimely death, David Halberstam asserts that Bush's "history," like his war, is based on wishful thinking, arrogance, and a total disdain for the facts.
by David Halberstam
www.vanityfair.com
August 2007

We are a long way from the glory days of Mission Accomplished, when the Iraq war was over before it was over—indeed before it really began—and the president could dress up like a fighter pilot and land on an aircraft carrier, and the nation, led by a pliable media, would applaud. Now, late in this sad, terribly diminished presidency, mired in an unwinnable war of their own making, and increasingly on the defensive about events which, to their surprise, they do not control, the president and his men have turned, with some degree of desperation, to history. In their view Iraq under Saddam was like Europe dominated by Hitler, and the Democrats and critics in the media are likened to the appeasers of the 1930s. The Iraqi people, shorn of their immensely complicated history, become either the people of Europe eager to be liberated from the Germans, or a little nation that great powerful nations ought to protect. Most recently in this history rummage sale—and perhaps most surprisingly—Bush has become Harry Truman.

We have lately been getting so many history lessons from the White House that I have come to think of Bush, Cheney, Rice, and the late, unlamented Rumsfeld as the History Boys. They are people groping for rationales for their failed policy, and as the criticism becomes ever harsher, they cling to the idea that a true judgment will come only in the future, and history will save them.

Ironically, it is the president himself, a man notoriously careless about, indeed almost indifferent to, the intellectual underpinnings of his actions, who has come to trumpet loudest his close scrutiny of the lessons of the past. Though, before, he tended to boast about making critical decisions based on instinct and religious faith, he now talks more and more about historical mandates. Usually he does this in the broadest—and vaguest—sense: History teaches us … We know from history … History shows us. In one of his speaking appearances in March 2006, in Cleveland, I counted four references to history, and what it meant for today, as if he had had dinner the night before with Arnold Toynbee, or at the very least Barbara Tuchman, and then gone home for a few hours to read his Gibbon.

I am deeply suspicious of these presidential seminars. We have, after all, come to know George Bush fairly well by now, and many of us have come to feel—not only because of what he says, but also because of the sheer cockiness in how he says it—that he has a tendency to decide what he wants to do first, and only then leaves it to his staff to look for intellectual justification. Many of us have always sensed a deep and visceral anti-intellectual streak in the president, that there was a great chip on his shoulder, and that the burden of the fancy schools he attended—Andover and Yale—and even simply being a member of the Bush family were too much for him. It was as if he needed not only to escape but also to put down those of his peers who had been more successful. From that mind-set, I think, came his rather unattractive habit of bestowing nicknames, most of them unflattering, on the people around him, to remind them that he was in charge, that despite their greater achievements they still worked for him.

He is infinitely more comfortable with the cowboy persona he has adopted, the Texas transplant who has learned to speak the down-home vernacular. "Country boy," as Johnny Cash once sang, "I wish I was you, and you were me." Bush's accent, not always there in public appearances when he was younger, tends to thicken these days, the final g's consistently dropped so that doing becomes doin', going becomes goin', and making, makin'. In this lexicon al-Qaeda becomes "the folks" who did 9/11. Unfortunately, it is not just the speech that got dumbed down—so also were the ideas at play. The president's world, unlike the one we live in, is dangerously simple, full of traps, not just for him but, sadly, for us as well.

When David Frum, a presidential speechwriter, presented Bush with the phrase "axis of evil," to characterize North Korea, Iran, and Iraq, it was meant to recall the Axis powers of World War II. Frum was much praised, for it is a fine phrase, perfect for Madison Avenue. Of course, the problem is that it doesn't really track. This new Axis turned out to contain, apparently much to our surprise, two countries, Iraq and Iran, that were sworn enemies, and if you moved against Iraq, you ended up de-stabilizing it and involuntarily strengthening Iran, the far more dangerous country in the region. While "axis of evil" was intended to serve as a sort of historical banner, embodying the highest moral vision imaginable, it ended up only helping to weaken us.

Despite his recent conversion to history, the president probably still believes, deep down, as do many of his admirers, that the righteous, religious vision he brings to geopolitics is a source of strength—almost as if the less he knows about the issues the better and the truer his decision-making will be. Around any president, all the time, are men and women with different agendas, who compete for his time and attention with messy, conflicting versions of events and complicated facts that seem all too often to contradict one another. With their hard-won experience the people from the State Department and the C.I.A. and even, on occasion, the armed forces tend to be cautious and short on certitude. They are the kind of people whose advice his father often took, but who in the son's view use their knowledge and experience merely to limit a president's ability to act. How much easier and cleaner to make decisions in consultation with a higher authority.

Therefore, when I hear the president cite history so casually, an alarm goes off. Those who know history best tend to be tempered by it. They rarely refer to it so sweepingly and with such complete confidence. They know that it is the most mischievous of mistresses and that it touts sure things about as regularly as the tip sheets at the local track. Its most important lessons sometimes come cloaked in bitter irony. By no means does it march in a straight line toward the desired result, and the good guys do not always win. Occasionally it is like a sport with upsets, in which the weak and small defeat the great and mighty—take, for instance, the American revolutionaries vanquishing the British Army, or the Vietnamese Communists, with their limited hardware, stalemating the mighty American Army.

There was, I thought, one member of the first President Bush's team who had a real sense of history, a man of intellectual superiority and enormous common sense. (Naturally, he did not make it onto the Bush Two team.) That was Brent Scowcroft, George H. W. Bush's national-security adviser. Scowcroft was so close to the senior Bush that they collaborated on Bush's 1998 presidential memoir, A World Transformed. Scowcroft struck me as a lineal descendant of Truman's secretary of state George Catlett Marshall, arguably the most extraordinary of the postwar architects of American foreign policy. Marshall was a formidable figure, much praised for his awesome sense of duty and not enough, I think, for his intellect. If he lacked the self-evident brilliance of George Kennan (the author of Truman's Communist-containment policy), he had a remarkable ability to shed light on the present by extrapolating from the the past.

Like Marshall, I think, Scowcroft has a sense of history in his bones, even if his are smaller lessons, learned piece by piece over a longer period of time. His is perhaps a more pragmatic and less dazzling mind, but he saw all the dangers of the 2003 move into Iraq, argued against the invasion, and for his troubles was dismissed as chairman of the prestigious President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

I. The Truman Analogy
Recently, Harry Truman, for reasons that would surely puzzle him if he were still alive, has become the Republicans' favorite Democratic president. In fact, the men around Bush who attempt to feed the White House line to journalists have begun to talk about the current president as a latter-day Truman: Yes, goes the line, Truman's rise to an ever more elevated status in the presidential pantheon is all ex post facto, conferred by historians long after he left office a beleaguered man, his poll numbers hopelessly low. Thus Bush and the people around him predict that a similar Trumanization will ride to the rescue for them.

I've been living with Truman on and off for the last five years, while I was writing a book on the Korean War, The Coldest Winter [to be published in September by Hyperion], and I've been thinking a lot about the differences between Truman and Bush and their respective wars, Korea and Iraq. Yes, like Bush, Truman was embattled, and, yes, his popularity had plummeted at the end of his presidency, and, yes, he governed during an increasingly unpopular war. But the similarities end there.

Even before Truman sent troops to Korea, in 1950, the national political mood was toxic. The Republicans had lost five presidential elections in a row, and Truman was under fierce partisan assault from the Republican far right, which felt marginalized even within its own party. It seized on the dubious issue of Communist subversion—especially with regard to China—as a way of getting even. (Knowing how ideological both Bush and Cheney are, it is easy to envision them as harsh critics of Truman at that moment.)

Truman had inherited General Douglas MacArthur, "an untouchable," in Dwight Eisenhower's shrewd estimate, a man who was by then as much myth and legend as he was flesh and blood. The mastermind of America's victory in the Pacific, MacArthur was unquestionably talented, but also vainglorious, highly political, and partisan. Truman had twice invited him to come home from Japan, where, as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, he was supervising the reconstruction, to meet with him and address a joint session of Congress. Twice MacArthur turned him down, although a presidential invitation is really an order. MacArthur was saving his homecoming, it was clear, for a more dramatic moment, one that might just have been connected to a presidential run. He not only looked down on Truman personally, he never really accepted the primacy of the president in the constitutional hierarchy. For a president trying to govern during an extremely difficult moment in international politics, it was a monstrous political equation.

Truman had been forced into the Korean War in 1950 when the Chinese authorized the North Koreans to cross the 38th parallel and attack South Korea. But MacArthur did not accept the president's vision of a limited war in Korea, and argued instead for a larger one with the Chinese. Truman wanted none of that. He might have been the last American president who did not graduate from college, but he was quite possibly our best-read modern president. History was always with him. With MacArthur pushing for a wider war with China, Truman liked to quote Napoleon, writing about his disastrous Russian adventure: "I beat them in every battle, but it does not get me anywhere."

In time, MacArthur made an all-out frontal challenge to Truman, criticizing him to the press, almost daring the president to get rid of him. Knowing that the general had title to the flag and to the emotions of the country, while he himself merely had title to the Constitution, Truman nonetheless fired him. It was a grave constitutional crisis—nothing less than the concept of civilian control of the military was at stake. If there was an irony to this, it was that MacArthur and his journalistic boosters, such as Time-magazine owner Henry Luce, always saw Truman as the little man and MacArthur as the big man. ("MacArthur," wrote Time at the moment of the firing, "was the personification of the big man, with the many admirers who look to a great man for leadership.… Truman was almost a professional little man.") But it was Truman's decision to meet MacArthur's challenge, even though he surely knew he would be the short-term loser, that has elevated his presidential stock.

George W. Bush's relationship with his military commander was precisely the opposite. He dealt with the ever so malleable General Tommy Franks, a man, Presidential Medal of Freedom or no, who is still having a difficult time explaining to his peers in the military how Iraq happened, and how he agreed to so large a military undertaking with so small a force. It was the president, not the military or the public, who wanted the Iraq war, and Bush used the extra leverage granted him by 9/11 to get it. His people skillfully manipulated the intelligence in order to make the war seem necessary, and they snookered the military on force levels and the American public on the cost of it all. The key operative in all this was clearly Vice President Cheney, supremely arrogant, the most skilled of bureaucrats, seemingly the toughest tough guy of them all, but eventually revealed as a man who knew nothing of the country he wanted to invade and what that invasion might provoke.

II. The New Red-Baiting
If Bush takes his cues from anyone in the Truman era, it is not Truman but the Republican far right. This can be seen clearly from one of his history lessons, a speech the president gave on a visit to Riga, Latvia, in May 2005, when, in order to justify the Iraq intervention, he cited Yalta, the 1945 summit at which Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill met. Hailing Latvian freedom, Bush took a side shot at Roosevelt (and, whether he meant to or not, at Churchill, supposedly his great hero) and the Yalta accords, which effectively ceded Eastern Europe to the Soviets. Yalta, he said, "followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history."

This is some statement. Yalta is connected first to the Munich Agreement of 1938 (in which the Western democracies, at their most vulnerable and well behind the curve of military preparedness, ceded Czechoslovakia to Hitler), then, in the same breath, Bush blends in seamlessly (and sleazily) the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the temporary and cynical agreement between the Soviets and Nazis allowing the Germans to invade Poland and the Soviets to move into the Baltic nations. And from Molotov-Ribbentrop we jump ahead to Yalta itself, where, Bush implies, the two great leaders of the West casually sat by and gave away vast parts of Europe to the Soviet Union.

After some 60 years Yalta has largely slipped from our political vocabulary, but for a time it was one of the great buzzwords in American politics, the first shot across the bow by the Republican right in their long, venomous, immensely destructive assault upon Roosevelt (albeit posthumously), Truman, and the Democratic Party as soft on Communism—just as today's White House attacks Democrats and other critics for being soft on terrorism, less patriotic, defeatists, underminers of the true strength of our country. Crucial to the right's exploitation of Yalta was the idea of a tired, sick, and left-leaning Roosevelt having given away too much and betraying the people of Eastern Europe, who, as a result, had to live under the brutal Soviet thumb—a distortion of history that resonated greatly with the many Eastern European ethnic groups in America, whose people, blue-collar workers, most of them, had voted solidly Democratic.

The right got away with it, because, of all the fronts in the Second World War, the one least known in this country—our interest tends to disappear for those battles in which we did not participate—is ironically the most important: the Eastern Front, where the battle between the Germans and Russians took place and where, essentially, the outcome of the war was decided. It began with a classic act of hubris—Hitler's invasion of Russia, in June 1941, three years before we landed our troops in Normandy. Some three million German troops were involved in the attack, and in the early months the penetrations were quick and decisive. Minsk was quickly taken, the Germans crossed the Dnieper by July 10, and Smolensk fell shortly after. Some 700,000 men of the Red Army, its leadership already devastated by the madness of Stalin's purges, were captured by mid-September 1941. The Russian troops fell back and moved as much of their industry back east as they could. Then, slowly, the Russian lines stiffened, and the Germans, their supply lines too far extended, faltered as winter came on. The turning point was the Battle of Stalingrad, which began in late August 1942. It proved to be the most brutal battle of the war, with as many as two million combatants on both sides killed and wounded, but in the end the Russians held the city and captured what remained of the German Army there.

In early 1943, the Red Army was on the offensive, the Germans in full retreat. By the middle of 1944, the Russians had 120 divisions driving west, some 2.3 million troops against an increasingly exhausted German Army of 800,000. By mid-July 1944, as the Allies were still trying to break out of the Normandy hedgerows, the Red Army was at the old Polish-Russian border. By the time of Yalta, they were closing in on Berlin. A month earlier, in January 1945, Churchill had acknowledged the inability of the West to limit the Soviet reach into much of Eastern and Central Europe. "Make no mistake, all the Balkans, except Greece, are going to be Bolshevized, and there is nothing I can do to prevent it. There is nothing I can do for Poland either."

Yalta reflected not a sellout but a fait accompli.

President Bush lives in a world where in effect it is always the summer of 1945, the Allies have just defeated the Axis, and a world filled with darkness for some six years has been rescued by a new and optimistic democracy, on its way to becoming a superpower. His is a world where other nations admire America or damned well ought to, and America is always right, always on the side of good, in a world of evil, and it's just a matter of getting the rest of the world to understand this. One of Bush's favorite conceits, used repeatedly in his speeches, is that democracies are peaceful and don't go to war against one another. Most citizens of the West tend to accept this view without question, but that is not how most of Africa, Asia, South America, and the Middle East, having felt the burden of the white man's colonial rule for much of the past two centuries, see it. The non-Western world does not think of the West as a citadel of pacifism and generosity, and many people in the U.S. State Department and the different intelligence agencies (and even the military) understand the resentments and suspicions of our intentions that exist in those regions. We are, you might say, fighting the forces of history in Iraq—religious, cultural, social, and inevitably political—created over centuries of conflict and oppressive rule.

The president tends to drop off in his history lessons after World War II, especially when we get to Vietnam and things get a bit murkier. Had he made any serious study of our involvement there, he might have learned that the sheer ferocity of our firepower created enemies of people who were until then on the sidelines, thereby doing our enemies' recruiting for them. And still, today, our inability to concentrate such "shock and awe" on precisely whom we would like—causing what is now called collateral killing—creates a growing resentment among civilians, who may decide that whatever values we bring are not in the end worth it, because we have also brought too much killing and destruction to their country. The French fought in Vietnam before us, and when a French patrol went through a village, the Vietminh would on occasion kill a single French soldier, knowing that the French in a fury would retaliate by wiping out half the village—in effect, the Vietminh were baiting the trap for collateral killing.

III. The Perils of Empire
You don't hear other members of the current administration citing the lessons of Vietnam much, either, especially Cheney and Karl Rove, both of them gifted at working the bureaucracy for short-range political benefits, both highly partisan and manipulative, both unspeakably narrow and largely uninterested in understanding and learning about the larger world. As Joan Didion pointed out in her brilliant essay on Cheney in The New York Review of Books, it was Rumsfeld and Cheney who explained to Henry Kissinger, not usually slow on the draw when it came to the political impact of foreign policy, that Vietnam was likely to create a vast political backlash against the liberal McGovern forces. The two, relatively junior operators back then, were interested less in what had gone wrong in Vietnam than in getting some political benefit out of it. Cheney still speaks of Vietnam as a noble rather than a tragic endeavor, not that he felt at the time—with his five military deferments—that he needed to be part of that nobility.

Still, it is hard for me to believe that anyone who knew anything about Vietnam, or for that matter the Algerian war, which directly followed Indochina for the French, couldn't see that going into Iraq was, in effect, punching our fist into the largest hornet's nest in the world. As in Vietnam, our military superiority is neutralized by political vulnerabilities. The borders are wide open. We operate quite predictably on marginal military intelligence. The adversary knows exactly where we are at all times, as we do not know where he is. Their weaponry fits an asymmetrical war, and they have the capacity to blend into the daily flow of Iraqi life, as we cannot. Our allies—the good Iraqi people the president likes to talk about—appear to be more and more ambivalent about the idea of a Christian, Caucasian liberation, and they do not seem to share many of our geopolitical goals.

The book that brought me to history some 53 years ago, when I was a junior in college, was Cecil Woodham-Smith's wondrous The Reason Why, the story of why the Light Brigade marched into the Valley of Death, to be senselessly slaughtered, in the Crimean War. It is a tale of such folly and incompetence in leadership (then, in the British military, a man could buy the command of a regiment) that it is not just the story of a battle but an indictment of the entire British Empire. It is a story from the past we read again and again, that the most dangerous time for any nation may be that moment in its history when things are going unusually well, because its leaders become carried away with hubris and a sense of entitlement cloaked as rectitude. The arrogance of power, Senator William Fulbright called it during the Vietnam years.

I have my own sense that this is what went wrong in the current administration, not just in the immediate miscalculation of Iraq but in the larger sense of misreading the historical moment we now live in. It is that the president and the men around him—most particularly the vice president—simply misunderstood what the collapse of the Soviet empire meant for America in national-security terms. Rumsfeld and Cheney are genuine triumphalists. Steeped in the culture of the Cold War and the benefits it always presented to their side in domestic political terms, they genuinely believed that we were infinitely more powerful as a nation throughout the world once the Soviet empire collapsed. Which we both were and very much were not. Certainly, the great obsessive struggle with the threat of a comparable superpower was removed, but that threat had probably been in decline in real terms for well more than 30 years, after the high-water mark of the Cuban missile crisis, in 1962. During the 80s, as advanced computer technology became increasingly important in defense apparatuses, and as the failures in the Russian economy had greater impact on that country's military capacity, the gap between us and the Soviets dramatically and continuously widened. The Soviets had become, at the end, as West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt liked to say, Upper Volta with missiles.

At the time of the collapse of Communism, I thought there was far too much talk in America about how we had won the Cold War, rather than about how the Soviet Union, whose economy never worked, simply had imploded. I was never that comfortable with the idea that we as a nation had won, or that it was a personal victory for Ronald Reagan. To the degree that there was credit to be handed out, I thought it should go to those people in the satellite nations who had never lost faith in the cause of freedom and had endured year after year in difficult times under the Soviet thumb. If any Americans deserved credit, I thought it should be Truman and his advisers—Marshall, Kennan, Dean Acheson, and Chip Bohlen—all of them harshly attacked at one time or another by the Republican right for being soft on Communism. (The right tried particularly hard to block Eisenhower's nomination of Bohlen as ambassador to Moscow, in 1953, because he had been at Yalta.)

After the Soviet Union fell, we were at once more powerful and, curiously, less so, because our military might was less applicable against the new, very different kind of threat that now existed in the world. Yet we stayed with the norms of the Cold War long after any genuine threat from it had receded, in no small part because our domestic politics were still keyed to it. At the same time, the checks and balances imposed on us by the Cold War were gone, the restraints fewer, and the temptations to misuse our power greater. What we neglected to consider was a warning from those who had gone before us—that there was, at moments like this, a historic temptation for nations to overreach.

David Halberstam was a Vanity Fair contributing editor and the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Best and the Brightest and The Fifties. He was killed in a car accident on April 23.

Whoa

2007-06-26T01:00:00.000-06:00

You can't help but be reminded of Arthur Clarke's third law of prediction: "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Science is amazing.

Animal Farm
The recombination of man and beast.
By William Saletan
Posted Friday, June 22, 2007, at 6:31 PM ET
Slate Magazine

If you've been laughing at those Neanderthal presidential candidates who still don't believe in evolution, it's time to sober up. Every serious scientist knows we evolved from animals. The question now is whether to put our DNA and theirs back together.

We've been putting baboon hearts, pig valves, and other animal parts in people for decades. We've derived stem cells by inserting human genomes in rabbit eggs. We've made mice with human prostate glands. We've made sheep with nearly half-human livers. This week, Britain's Academy of Medical Sciences reported (PDF) that scientists have created "thousands of examples of transgenic animals" carrying human DNA. According to the report, "the introduction of human gene sequences into mouse cells in vitro is a technique now practiced in virtually every biomedical research institution across the world."

Why have we done this? To save lives. If you can't get a human heart valve, a pig valve will do. If you can't get human eggs to clone embryos for stem-cell research, rabbit eggs will do. If you can't use people as guinea pigs in gruesome but necessary experiments on human tissues, guinea pigs will do. All you have to do is put—or grow—the human tissues in the guinea pigs. You're free to inflict any disease or drug on a human system, as long as that human system lives in an animal.

In stem-cell research, moreover, human cells are the therapy. Under FDA rules, you have to test them in animals before you test them in people. That means implanting them to see how they change the animals. Meanwhile, we're using hamster cells to make a human protein to treat anemia (PDF). We're using mice to make humanized antibodies that produce cancer drugs. We've grown human kidney tissue in rats.

So far, our mixtures are modest. To make humanized animals really creepy, you'd have to do several things. You'd increase the ratio of human to animal DNA. You'd transplant human cells that spread throughout the body. You'd do it early in embryonic development, so the human cells would shape the animals' architecture, not just blend in. You'd grow the embryos to maturity. And you'd start messing with the brain.

We're doing all of those things.

According to the British academy's report, "researchers have constructed ever more ambitious transgenic animals"—some with an entire human chromosome—and it's "likely that the process of engineering ever larger amounts of human DNA into mice will continue." Four months ago in Nature, biologists outlined several ways to pursue this, starting with "genetic modifications to humanize the host strain further." We're transplanting pluripotent stem cells, which proliferate and grow many kinds of human tissue. We're doing it early in mouse embryogenesis, and we're implanting the resulting embryos in "foster mice" so they can develop.

We're not doing these things because they're creepy. We're doing them because they're logical. The more you humanize animals, the better they serve their purpose as lab models of humanity. That's what's scary about species mixing. It's not some crazy Frankenstein project. It's the future of medicine.

Now comes the brain.

Neurological disorders affect 1 billion people and kill nearly 7 million per year. To study these disorders, we're doing to brain tissue what we've done to liver and kidney tissue: We're replicating it in animals. We've made humanized mice with Alzheimer's symptoms. We've put human neural stem cells in monkey brains. We've put human stem cells in the brains of fetal mice and grown them into adult mice with human neurons. According to the British academy, it's now standard practice to test human neural stem cells by assessing whether they "integrate appropriately into mouse or rat brain."

Last month, ethicists from Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin detailed a proposal by a Stanford scientist to substitute human brain stem cells for dying neurons in fetal mice. "The result would be a mouse brain, the neurons of which were mainly human in origin," they reported. The payoff, if the fetuses survived, would be "a laboratory animal that could be used for experiments on living, in vivo, human neurons." Imagine that: a humanoid brain network you can treat like a lab animal, because it is a lab animal.

The Stanford experiment wouldn't actually produce a human brain. Most brain cells aren't neurons, and the experiment called for inserting human cells after the mice had constructed their brain architecture. But last year in Developmental Biology, researchers proposed to insert human stem cells in mice before this architectural stage. The resulting "mouse/human chimeras," they argued, "would be of considerable value for the modeling of human development and disease in live animals."

When Stanford's ethicists first heard the proposal for humanized mouse brains, they were grossed out. But after thinking it over, they tentatively endorsed the idea and decided that it might not be bad to endow mice with "some aspects of human consciousness or some human cognitive abilities." The British academy and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences have likewise refused to permanently restrict the humanization of animals.

If you want permanent restrictions, your best bet is the senator who tried to impose them two years ago. He's the same presidential candidate now leading the charge against evolution: Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas. He thinks we're separate from other animals, "unique in the created order." Too bad that isn't true of the past—or the future.

Comments available at Slate Magazine's Fray.

Hey! A Debate!

2007-06-17T23:16:00.001-06:00

First of all, read Rich's article on Hostel II (disclosure: love it, love it, love it, love it, love it), and then start going through the comments at the bottom. Obviously, I've commented as the Professor, i.e. that guy that talks to much for his own good.

Ready? Set? GO!

The Wartime Experience

2007-06-07T13:36:00.000-06:00

The following mini-memior is from Gunter Grass, the author of The Tin Drum, a German (un)lucky enough to have lived through Weimarch, Hitler, WWII, and the GDR. This piece focuses exclusively on his experience as a boy-soldier in the Waffen S.S. While Grass is (restrospectively) very realistic about the political situation in 1940s Germany, what's overwhelmingly surprising about this piece is how typical the war experience actually was. No matter who you are (even if you happen to, gasp, be a bad guy), war is hell, and the sounds, smells, and experiences that make it so are shared by all. Enjoy.

How I Spent the War
A recruit in the Waffen S.S.
by Günter Grass
The New Yorker
June 4, 2007

In 1943, when I was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy in Danzig, I volunteered for active duty. When? Why? Since I do not know the exact date and cannot recall the by then unstable climate of the war, or list its hot spots from the Arctic to the Caucasus, all I can do for now is string together the circumstances that probably triggered and nourished my decision to enlist. No mitigating epithets allowed. What I did cannot be put down to youthful folly. No pressure from above. Nor did I feel the need to assuage a sense of guilt, at, say, doubting the Führer’s infallibility, with my zeal to volunteer.

It happened while I was serving in the Luftwaffe auxiliary—a force made up of boys too young to be conscripts, who were deployed to defend Germany in its air war. The service was not voluntary but compulsory then for boys of my age, though we experienced it as a liberation from our school routine and accepted its not very taxing drills. Rabidly pubescent, we considered ourselves the mainstays of the home front. The Kaiserhafen battery became our second home. At first there were attempts to keep school going, but, as classes were too often interrupted by field exercises, the mostly frail, elderly teachers refused to travel the wearisome dirt road to our battery.

We got to use our 88-mm. guns only two or three times, when a few enemy bombers were sighted in our airspace in the beam of the searchlights. Massive raids—the kind that Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, and the Ruhr Basin cities suffered—we did not experience. No damage worthy of the name, few casualties. We were proud to have shot down a four-engined Lancaster bomber; the “rather charred” crew members were said to have been Canadians. As a rule, however, service in the Luftwaffe auxiliary was dreary, though dreary in a different way from school. We were especially turned off by nightly guard duty and ballistics classes, which dragged on forever in the musty classroom barracks.

We had every other weekend off. We could, as they put it, “go home to Mama.” And, each time, my joy at the thought of the visit was tempered by my pain at the thought of our cramped quarters—a two-room flat adjoining the small grocery store that my parents ran, where the only space that I could call my own was a low niche under the sill of the right-hand living-room window.

At home, I kept bumping into things and into the lack of things: a bathroom and a toilet, for instance. All we had at the battery was a common shower room and, beyond it, a common latrine. There we would squat next to one another, shitting into a pit, and that didn’t bother me at all. But, at home, the toilet on the landing, shared by four flats, grew more and more distasteful to me: it was always filthy from the neighbors’ children, or occupied when you needed it. It stank, and its walls were smeared with fingerprints.

The two-room hole. The family trap. Everything there conspired to constrain the weekend visitor. Not even the mother’s hand could smooth away the son’s distress. True, he was no longer expected to sleep in his parents’ bedroom like his sister, but even on the couch made up for him in the living room he remained a witness to the married life that continued unbroken from Saturday to Sunday. That is, I could hear—or thought I could hear—sounds I had heard, muffled as they were, from childhood on, sounds that had lodged in my mind in the form of a monstrous ritual: the anticipatory whispers, the lip-smacking, the creaking bedsprings, the sighing horsehair mattress, the moaning, the groaning, the entire aural repertory of lovemaking, so potent, especially in the dark. I had a clear picture of all the variations on marital coupling, and in my cinematic version of the act the mother was always the victim: she yielded, she gave the go-ahead, she held out to the point of exhaustion.

The hatred of a mother’s boy for his father, the subliminal battleground that determined the course of Greek tragedies and has been so eloquently updated by Dr. Freud and his disciples, was thus, if not the primary cause, then at least one of the factors in my push to leave home.

I racked my brain for flight routes. They all ran in one direction: the front, or one of the many fronts, as quickly as possible.

I tried to pick a quarrel with my father. It wasn’t easy. It would have taken massive recriminations, and, peace-loving family man that he was, he was quick to give in. Anything to maintain harmony. The progenitor had a constant wish for the offspring on his lips: “I want your life to be better. . . . You will have a better life than ours.” Try as I might to turn him into a bugbear, he was not made for the role.

Yet the suddenly unbearable two-room flat and four-family toilet on the half-landing could not have been the sole cause of my urge to enlist. My schoolmates had grown up in five-room flats with their own bathrooms, supplied with rolls of toilet paper instead of the newsprint we tore into squares. Some of them even lived in fancy private houses and had rooms of their own, yet they, too, yearned to get away, to go to the front. Like me, they wanted to face danger without fear, to sink ship after ship, knock out tank after tank, or fly through the skies in the latest-model Messerschmitts, picking off enemy bombers.

After Stalingrad, however, the situation at the front went downhill. Anyone who, like my Uncle Friedel, was tracking it with colored thumbtacks on specially enlarged, cardboard-backed maps had trouble keeping up with developments in the East and in North Africa. At best, he could register the successes of our ally Japan at sea and in Burma, though our submarines occasionally padded the bulletins with the number and register tonnage of ships they had sunk. In the Atlantic and up near the Arctic, they’d attack convoys in packs.

No, it wasn’t the newspapers that fed my hero worship but the newsreels: I was a pushover for the prettified black-and-white “truth” they served up. Not one newsreel failed to show the submarines returning home victorious, and since I, when home on leave, would lie awake for hours on the living-room couch after seeing them on the screen, I had plenty of opportunity to picture myself as a ship’s mate during a stormy tower watch, swathed in oilskins, covered with spray, spyglass trained on the dancing horizon. . . .

It must have been possible for a Luftwaffe auxiliary to trade a weekend leave for a Wednesday or Thursday off. In any case, one thing is clear: after one long day’s march, I took the tram from Heubude to the Central Station, and from there the train via Langfuhr and Zoppot to Gotenhafen, where Navy recruits were trained to handle submarines. It took all of an hour to reach the goal of my dreams of heroism. I found the recruitment office in a low, Polish-period building where, behind a row of doors with signs, bureaucratic rigmarole was processed, passed on, filed. After signing in, I was told to wait for my name to be called. There were two or three older boys ahead of me. I did not have much to say to them.

The sergeant and the seaman first class I spoke to rejected me out of hand: I was too young; my age group hadn’t come up yet; it would soon enough; no reason for excessive haste.

They were smoking and drinking coffee with milk out of big, bulbous cups. One of these—from my perspective—elderly gentlemen (the sergeant?) was sharpening a supply of pencils while I spoke. Or did I pick up this dramatic detail from some movie or other?

I must have stood my ground even as I was told that there was no need for submarine volunteers at present: they had stopped accepting applications. And then they reminded me that the war was not being fought entirely underwater, and said that they would make a note of my name and pass it on to other branches of the military. Provisions were being made for new panzer divisions. “Patience, young man, patience. We’ll come and get you soon enough. ”

As I summon forth the boy I was then, making him stand at attention in laced-up, spit-shined shoes and striped socks topped by naked knees, I seem to hear those two men in uniform laughing sardonically, thinking perhaps of what the boy still in shorts has in store: the sergeant’s left sleeve was empty.

Time passed. Things at home ran their wartime course. I managed to keep the animosity that I felt toward my father within bounds for the length of my weekend leaves. I presumably enjoyed disdaining him: first, because he existed; next, because he would stand or sit in the living room in a suit and tie and felt slippers; next, because he was forever mixing pastry dough in the same stoneware bowl while wearing the same apron; next, because he was always the one who carefully tore the newspapers into toilet paper; and, finally, because, having been declared “exempt from military service,” he would never go to the front and therefore never get out of my hair. But my father did give me a Kienzle wristwatch for my birthday.

Mother’s take on the general situation boiled down to the following: “I have my doubts.” Though I once heard her say, “Too bad Hess is gone. I liked him better than our Führer.” She was also known to come out with “I can’t understand why they’ve got it in for the Jews. We used to have a haberdashery sales rep by the name of Zuckermann. As nice as could be, and always gave a discount.”

All winter long, the front moved closer to home. The Wehrmacht’s high command tried to tone down the retreat by dubbing it a front-straightening operation. Victory bulletins virtually ceased, and more and more bombardment victims were seeking refuge in our city and its environs. The urge to break away, to flee to any front that would have me, had lost its force. My desire was moving in another direction: I read Eichendorff and Lenau at their most romantic, pored over Kleist’s “Kohlhaas” and Hölderlin’s “Hyperion,” and stood guard by the ack-ack guns, lost in thought, my eyes wandering over the frozen sea.

This leisurely pace could have gone on all spring, which had finally come, and into the summer, but, shortly after I was called in for the physical given to all potential recruits, in the building of the local military command, I received official notification that I had been inducted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst, the Labor Service, another auxiliary force, intended to provide support for the war in civilian areas. I was not the only one who received that piece of certified mail. It all went like clockwork, according to age group. Length of service: three months. I was to report in late April or early May.

My knowledge of geography had been expanding again with reports of front movements in the east (Kiev evacuated), of battles for islands in the Pacific between the Japanese and the Americans, of developments in southern Europe. After our Italian allies broke with us, a move we saw as base treason, and our parachutists liberated Il Duce from his hideout in the Abruzzi Apennines—Skorzeny was the latest hero’s name—came the battle for the ruins of Monte Cassino Abbey. The British and the Americans had landed on the coast just south of Rome and were extending a beachhead that was still under fire when I had to give up my chic Luftwaffe auxiliary uniform for the less than flattering Labor Service garb. Shit-brown, it made us look shitty, we would say. The most ludicrous part of it was the headgear, a felt hat that looked like a big bump with a crease down the middle and seemed to have been made only to be torn off. We dubbed it “ass with a handle.”

From the outset, I had what was known in the Labor Service as a cushy job: I was good at drawing and had a way with colors, and was therefore considered privileged. The walls of the canteen in our stone mess hall were to be adorned with pictures inspired by the juniper bushes, the water hole complete with reflected clouds, and the birches of the half-flat, half-hilly heath. Desired but not essential: a frolicking water nymph.

After the usual morning drill—rifle practice, first with a spade, then with a 98 carbine—I was released to make sketches from nature: all afternoon I could absent myself from the camp with my watercolors, water bottle, and drawing pad. Beautiful clouds, shiny black ponds, birches in front of or behind gigantic erratic boulders made their way onto the paper in saturated colors. I soon had a pile of sketches to paint in distemper on the canteen’s white walls.

Day after day in the morning drill, we went through a ceremony conducted by the corporal in charge of weapons, a man who looked serious on principle. He handed them out, we grabbed them. It goes without saying: every member of the Labor Service was to feel honored by the touch of the wood and metal, the butt and barrel of the carbine in his hands.

And we boys did, in fact, inflate ourselves to men when we stood at attention with our guns by our sides or presented them or marched with them on our shoulders. You might say that we took the expression “A soldier’s gun is a soldier’s bride” literally. We thought of ourselves as engaged, if not quite married, to the 98 carbine.

Though I make a point of using “we” here, there was an exception to that rank-and-file, somewhat facile plural. This exception was a lanky boy who was so blond and blue-eyed, and whose profile revealed a skull so elongated that the likes of him could be found only in propaganda promoting the Nordic race. Chin, mouth, nose, forehead—each was the epitome of “racial purity.” He was untainted: no trace of a wart on neck or temple. He neither lisped nor stuttered when ordered to report. No one could beat him in long-distance running; no one could match his daring when leaping over musty ditches or his agility when clambering over a wall. He could do fifty knee bends without getting tired. There was nothing, no flaw, to sully the picture. But what made him an exception was that he—his name eludes my memory—was an insubordinate: he refused to take part in rifle drill; worse still, he refused to take butt or barrel in hand; and, worst of all, when our dead-earnest drill instructor pressed the carbine on him, he would drop it. Which made him or his fingers criminal.

With the spade, a basic utensil for everyone in the Labor Service, he did all that he was ordered to do. He would also have received top marks in camaraderie. He was the friendly, good-natured type, always ready to help, and he never complained. Upon request, he would give his comrades’ boots such a regulation shine that they would be a feast for sore eyes, even the eyes of the strictest N.C.O. during roll call. He had no trouble with brushes or dustcloths; it was only the firearm he refused to wield.

Every possible sort of punitive labor was imposed upon him, but nothing helped. He would work conscientiously for hours without a peep, emptying the latrine with a worm-infested bucket on a long stick—a punishment known as “honey-slinging” in soldiers’ slang—only to appear, freshly showered, at rifle drill shortly thereafter and refuse to wield the weapon once again. I can see it falling to the ground as if in slow motion.

At first we merely asked him questions and tried to talk him out of it. We actually liked the fellow, this oddball, this knucklehead: “Take it! Just hold it!” But when they took to punishing us on his account and tormented us in the hot sun until we collapsed, we all began to hate him. I, too, worked up my ire against him. We were expected to give him a hard time, and so we did. He had put us under pressure; we would return the favor. He was beaten in his barracks by the very boys whose boots he had polished mirror-bright. All against one. Through the boards that divided room from room, I could hear his whimper, the snap of the leather belt, the loud counting. These sounds are ingrained in my memory. But neither the hazing nor the beatings, nor anything else, could force him to carry arms.

Morning after morning, when we gathered for roll call and the drill instructor started passing out the weapons, the incorrigible insubordinate would let the one meant for him fall to the ground like the proverbial hot potato and immediately return to his ramrod position, hands pressed to trouser seams, eyes fixed on a distant point.

I cannot count the number of times he repeated his mantra, a catchphrase that has never left me: “We don’t do that.” He stuck to the plural. In a voice neither loud nor soft, he pronounced what he and his refused to do. Four words fusing into one: Wedontdothat.

When he was asked what he meant, he repeated the indefinite “that” and refused to call the object he would not take in his hands by its name.

His behavior transformed us. From day to day, what had seemed solid crumbled. Our hatred was mixed first with amazement, then with admiration expressed in questions like “How can that idiot keep it up?” “What makes him so hard-nosed?” “How come he doesn’t report sick? He’s been pale as a ghost lately.”

Then we let him be. No more beatings on the bare behind. The insubordinate stood above us, as if on a pedestal.

In the end, this morning ritual was cut off by his arrest. “Off to the cooler with him!” came the command.

From then on, discipline and order reigned. Every once in a while, the “convict” came up in our conversations. Someone—was it the drill instructor or one of us?—would say, “He must be a Jehovah’s Witness.” Or, “He’s a Bible nut. No doubt about it.” But the blond, blue-eyed boy with the racially pure profile had never referred to the Bible or Jehovah or any other Almighty; he had said simply, “Wedontdothat.”

One day his locker was cleared out: private things, including religious pamphlets. Then he was gone—“transferred,” it was called. We did not ask where to. I did not ask. But we all knew. He had not been discharged as unfit for service; no, we whispered, “he has long been ripe for the concentration camp.”

And since we knew of the camp, Stutthof, only by hearsay, we thought Wedontdothat—which was what we called him in secret—was in good hands. “They’ll bring old Wedontdothat down a peg or two.”

Was it all as simple as that?

Did no one shed a tear?

Did everything go on as it had before?

I must say that I was, if not glad, then at least relieved when the boy disappeared. The storm of doubts about everything in which I’d had rock-solid faith died down, and the resulting calm in my head prevented any further thought from taking wing: mindlessness had filled the space. I was pleased with myself and sated. A self-portrait from that period would have shown me well nourished.

When the bulletin of the Wehrmacht high command, which was tacked up daily on the notice board, announced the landing of the British and American forces on the Atlantic coast, the battle for the Atlantic Wall pushed everything that had preceded it into the background.

Increased vigilance was the order of the day. One of our duties was to fortify the camp: we dug trenches, set up mined wire barriers. We also had to install a complex alarm system, though nothing alarming ever happened, except that one Sunday we were ordered out onto the parade ground in full force, all two hundred and fifty of us, in our shit-brown garb plus ass-with-handle headgear on our closely cropped hair.

In the middle of the square, right next to the flagpole, a Reich Labor Service leader, who had arrived out of nowhere with a tightly knit retinue, was reeling off clipped pronouncements about shame and craven betrayal; that is, about the base and insidious plot on the part of a coterie of well-born officers—unsuccessful, thank heaven—to assassinate our dearly beloved Führer, and about merciless revenge, the “extermination of this vile clique.” And on and on about the Führer, who—“It was truly a miracle!”—had survived.

A shiver ran through us. Something akin to piety sent the sweat seeping out of our pores. The Führer saved! The heavens were once more, or still, on our side.

We sang both our national anthems. We shouted Sieg heil! three times. We were irate, we were incensed at the still nameless traitors.

We were dismissed from the Labor Service soon after the assassination attempt, our term served. Back in mufti, I was ashamed of my naked knees, my forever sagging kneesocks: I was beyond all that now, no longer a schoolboy.

It took less than two months for my induction letter to arrive, black and white on the kitchen table, signed, dated, and stamped. In September, 1944, my train pulled out of Danzig Central Station, headed for Berlin.

Mother had refused to accompany son to the station. She was smaller than I was, and when she hugged me in the living room she seemed to dissolve into tears between the piano and the grandfather clock. “All I ask is that you come back in one piece,” she said.

Father accompanied me. We didn’t say a word to each other on the tram. Then he had to buy a platform ticket. His velvet hat gave him a soigné, bourgeois look: a man in his mid-forties who had managed to stay a civilian and stay alive.

He insisted on carrying my cardboard suitcase. The man I had pushed away the moment I started growing, the man who, though he was my father, I had never got close to except when we quarrelled; this vivacious, easygoing, easily tempted man with a mania for good posture and, as he put it, “nice, neat handwriting,” who loved me after his fashion, the eternal husband; this man stood next to me as the train pulled in through a cloud of steam.

I didn’t cry; he did. He hugged me; I hugged him back. Or did we only do the manly handshake thing? Were we provident, even stinting, with our words—“Take care, my boy,” “See you, Papa”?

All I remember seeing clearly was the city with its towers against the evening sky in the distance. I also think I heard the bells of nearby St. Catherine’s: “Be ever true and forthright till to the grave thou comest.”

After a night’s journey broken by repeated stops, the train finally pulled in late to Berlin. It was going so slowly as to invite the passengers to write everything down, or at least fill in the potential memory gaps ahead of time.

Here is what I retained: there were houses, entire apartment houses, on fire on either side of the embankment; there were flames coming out of the windows of the upper stories, and glimpses of dark gorgelike streets and courtyards with trees. The only people I saw were isolated silhouettes. No crowds.

Fires were considered normal by then; Berlin was in the throes of dissolution, and the situation worsened by the day. The city had just been bombed and the all-clear signal sounded. That was why the train was moving so slowly, offering what seemed like a personal sightseeing tour.

People at the station appeared oblivious of the fires. It was business as usual: shoving crowds, curses, sudden salvos of laughter; soldiers on leave hurrying back to the front, soldiers on leave hurrying home; representatives from the female arm of the Hitler Youth, the League of German Girls, passing out hot drinks and giggling when the soldiers pawed them.

In the hall with the ticket windows, I joined a group of recent recruits my own age and, after a brief wait, was handed marching orders naming Dresden as my destination.

I can picture my fellow-recruits jabbering. We are curious, as if on an adventure. We’re in a good mood. I hear myself laughing too loudly, about what I don’t know.

Suddenly, an air-raid siren chased us all into the station’s voluminous basement, the nearest shelter. A motley crew was soon crammed together there, soldiers and civilians, and a lot of children. There were wounded soldiers lying on stretchers and leaning on crutches. There was also a troupe of music-hall performers. They were all in costume: the siren had sent them directly from stage to cellar.

While outside the gunfire hammered on and bombs dropped far and near, they continued their show: a dwarf juggler who kept ninepins, balls, and colored hoops all in the air at one time had us mesmerized; a dainty little lady tied herself gracefully in knots while blowing kisses to the wildly applauding crowd. The troupe, whose job it was to entertain front-line soldiers, was led by a tiny old man who performed as a clown. He also coaxed a sweet, melancholy music out of a row of empty to full glasses by stroking their rims with his fingers, the smile never leaving his rouged lips. An image that has stuck with me.

As soon as the all-clear sounded, I took a tram to another station. The train for Dresden waited for departure in the gray light of morning.

It was not until here, in a Dresden as yet untouched by the war, that I understood what division I had been attached to. My new marching orders made it clear where the recruit with my name was to undergo basic training: on a drill ground of the Waffen S.S., as a panzer gunner, somewhere far off in the Bohemian Woods.

The question is: Was I frightened by what was obvious then in the recruitment office, as I am terrified now by the double “S,” even as I write this more than sixty years later?

There is nothing carved into the onion skin of my memory that can be read as a sign of shock, let alone horror. I most likely viewed the Waffen S.S. as an élite unit that was sent into action whenever a breach in the front line had to be stopped up. I did not find the double rune on the uniform collar repellent. The boy, who saw himself as a man, was probably more concerned with the branch of the service: if he was not destined for the submarines, then he would be a tank gunner in a division that was named in honor of Jörg von Frundsberg, whom I knew as the leader of the Swabian League during the sixteenth-century Peasant Wars and the “father of the Landsknechts”—crack infantry mercenaries. Someone who stood for freedom, liberation. Besides, the Waffen S.S. had a European aura to it: it included separate volunteer divisions of French and Walloon, Dutch, and Belgian, and many Norwegian and Danish soldiers; there were even said to be neutral Swedes on the Eastern Front in the defensive battle, as the rhetoric went, to save the West from the Bolshevik flood.

So there were plenty of excuses. Yet for decades I refused to admit to the word, to the double letters. What I accepted with the stupid pride of youth I wanted to conceal after the war out of a recurrent sense of shame. But the burden remained, and no one could alleviate it.

True, during the tank-gunner training, which kept me numb throughout the autumn and winter, there was no mention of the war crimes that later came to light. But the ignorance I claim cannot blind me to the fact that I had been incorporated into a system that had planned, organized, and carried out the extermination of millions of people. Even if I could not be accused of active complicity, there remains to this day a residue that is all too commonly called joint responsibility. I will have to live with it for the rest of my life.

We were trained on Panzer III and Panzer IV tanks, and we were driven like slaves. At first I thought that that was how it had to be, but my initial supply of enthusiasm soon dwindled. All of us—recruits my age and old-timers who had been transferred to the Waffen S.S. as part of what was ironically called the Hermann Göring Fund—were drilled hard from dawn to dusk and, as we had been warned from the outset, constantly raked over the coals.

I had read about it in books. I intentionally suppressed the names of the slave drivers, even the worst of them. All that I learned from the experience was mute compliance or clever tricks. I got out of drill once by feigning jaundice—I swallowed some heated oil from sardine cans—and once because of an outbreak of boils, but the infirmary, which was chronically packed, could offer only temporary refuge.

Our instructors, who were young in years but had been turned into hard-boiled cynics by their year or two at the front, were eager now to pass on the experience they had gained at the Kuban bridgehead or in tank warfare at Kursk. They did so in bitter earnest or with merciless wit or however they felt like it. Now loudly, now softly, they plied us with military lingo and outdid one another in bullying us with newfangled or time-honored Army tortures.

I did everything I was ordered to do without a second thought. Crawling under the sump of our practice tank to the command “Measure ground clearance!” Shooting at moving targets. Night marches with combat pack. Knee bends with rifle held at arm’s length. It was all supposed to make a man of me.

Belatedly, a present for my seventeenth birthday arrived in the mail: a package containing woollen socks, a cake that was mostly crumbs, and a double-sided letter full of clueless worries in my father’s fine penmanship. From then until Christmas, only letters; after Christmas, nothing.

The notice board led us to believe that the Ardennes offensive—the Battle of the Bulge—was going swimmingly and would turn things around at last, but soon came the bulletin admitting that the Russians had entered East Prussia. Reports of the rape and murder of German women in the Gumbinnen region occupied my thoughts during theory lectures. All day we saw enemy squadrons sending bundles of vapor trails through the frost-bright sky, wending their unimpeded way—where? It looked quite beautiful, actually, but where were our fighter pilots?

There was still a lot of talk about the V1 and V2 rockets, to say nothing of the miracle weapon that was expected to materialize any minute. Toward the end of February, when rumors of the Dresden firestorm started making the rounds, we took the oath. The moon was full, the night freezing cold. A chorus sang “If Others Prove Untrue, Yet We Shall Steadfast Be,” the song of the Waffen S.S.

Soon thereafter, I witnessed an event that should have made the downfall of the German Reich evident—the organized chaos of defeat moving slowly, then with dispatch, and finally at breakneck speed. Was I able to recognize what things were coming to? Did the never-ending activity, the all-consuming need for a ladle of soup and a crust of Army bread, along with fears of various magnitudes, leave any room for insight into the general situation?

From the training camp in the Bohemian Woods we were transferred group by group to a number of outlying garrisons: one lot set off in the direction of Vienna; another was sent to defend Stettin. Mine was taken one night on a freight train via Tetschen-Bodenbach to Dresden, then farther east into Lower Silesia, where the front was reputed to be. All that remains of Dresden in my mind is the smell of burning and the sight—through the slightly open sliding door of the freight car—of charred bundles piled one on top of the other between tracks and in front of scorched façades. Some claimed to have seen shrivelled corpses, others heaven knows what. We covered up our horror then by quarrelling over what had happened; much as today what happened in Dresden lies buried under verbiage.

After being shifted in one direction, then the next, we finally found the company that we had been assigned to and joined its as yet incomplete squad in an evacuated school. The school benches piled up outside were being sawed into firewood by the kitchen crew. The accommodation awaiting us in the courtyard made it clear that the barracks existence I had led since my days as a Luftwaffe auxiliary was not over yet.

And there we sat, waiting for our famous Tiger tanks to arrive. The wait proved long but, given the regular meals and the loose discipline, tolerable. We even got to see movies.

Eventually, we received three or four Jagdpanthers, Hunting Panthers—instead of the promised Königstigers, King Tigers—which had guns with no revolving turret. And although we lacked the training to operate them, we had to clear out of the barracks and mount them in our capacity as escorts, equipped with rifles and other assault weapons.

The front was supposedly the Silesian town of Sagan, which had been recaptured but was still under fire. From Sagan, there was to be an offensive, or so we were told, to liberate Breslau, which the Russians had besieged.

At that point the film rips and, when I splice it together and switch the projector back on, all I get is a jumble of images: somewhere I throw away my threadbare footcloths and put on the woollen socks we have found in an evacuated military storehouse. We have stopped in an alluvial plain and I am stroking the first pussy willows. Did I hear an early cuckoo? Did I count its calls?

And then I see my first bodies. Soldiers young and old, in Wehrmacht uniforms. Hanging from trees still bare along the road, in marketplaces. With cardboard signs on their chests branding them as cowards and subversive elements. A boy my age—his hair, like mine, parted on the left—dangling next to a middle-aged officer of indeterminate rank, or, rather, stripped of his rank by a court-martial. A procession of corpses that we ride past with our deafening tank-track rattle.

Off to the side, I see peasants working their fields, furrow after furrow, as if nothing were wrong. One has a cow hitched to his plow.

Then I see more refugees, filling the streets: horse carts and overladen handcarts pushed and pulled by old women and adolescents; I see children clutching dolls, perched on suitcases and rope-bound bundles. An old man is pulling a cart containing two lambs, hoping to survive the war.

At this point, the reel of my first contact with the enemy must be singled out from the arbitrary concatenation of images. I can only assume that the encounter took place sometime in mid-April, when, after lengthy artillery bombardment, the Soviet Armies broke through the German lines along the Oder and the Neisse between Forst and Muskau to take revenge for their millions of dead, to conquer, to triumph.

I see our Jagdpanthers, a few armored personnel carriers, several trucks, the field kitchen, and a thrown-together troop of infantrymen and tank gunners taking up position in a grove of young trees, either to launch a counteroffensive or to form a line of defense.

Buds on the trees, birches among others. The sun giving warmth. The birds chirping. We wait, half drowsing. Someone is playing a harmonica. A private lathers up, starts shaving. And then, out of the blue—or was the birds’ sudden silence a loud enough warning?—a Stalin organ overhead.

There is no time to wonder where the name comes from. Is it the way it howls, hisses, and whines? Two or three rocket launchers blanket the grove. They are ruthlessly thorough, mowing down whatever cover the young trees might promise. There is no place to hide, or is there? I see myself doing as I was taught: crawling under one of the Jagdpanthers, where I find someone else—the driver, the gunner, the commander?—measuring the space between sump and soil. Our boots touch. We are protected by the tracks on either side. The organ goes on playing for what is most likely a three-minute eternity—scared to death, I piss my pants—and then silence.

Beside me, chattering teeth.

No, the chattering had begun even before the organ had played its piece to the end; nor did it stop when the screams of the wounded overpowered all other noise.

When I crawled out from under the Jagdpanther, I was assaulted by images. There were bodies everywhere, one next to the other and one on top of the other, dead, still alive, writhing, impaled by branches, peppered with shell splinters. Many were in acrobatic contortions. Body parts were strewn around.

Isn’t that the boy who was tootling away on the harmonica? And there’s that private, his lather not yet dry. . . .

The survivors were either crawling here and there or, like me, rooted to the spot. Some wailed, though not wounded. I made no sound; I just stood there in my piss-soaked pants, staring at the innards of a boy I had been shooting the breeze with. Death seemed to have shrunk his round face.

But I had already read everything I write here. I had read it in Remarque or Céline, who—like Grimmelshausen before them, in his description of the Battle of Wittstock, when the Swedes hacked the Kaiser’s troops to pieces—were merely quoting the scenes of horror that had been handed down to them. . . .

Then, suddenly, the teeth-chatterer was at my side, pulling himself up to his full height and exhibiting the rather elevated Waffen S.S. rank on his collar, his Knight’s Cross medal only slightly awry under his chin, the very picture of a newsreel hero such as we schoolboys had been fed from the screen for years.

“Get a move on, soldier,” he barked at me, the witness to his fear. “Assemble all able men. On the double. Get them back into formation, chop-chop. Prepare for the counterattack.”

I watch him stepping over shattered bodies, both dead and alive. He looks ridiculous striding along, waving his arms, the picture-book hero no more.

From then on, the units I belonged to had no names. Battalions, companies kept dissolving. The Frundsberg was no more—if it ever had been. The Soviet Armies had moved on beyond the Oder and Neisse and formed a broad front. Our main battle lines, steamrollered and broken through, existed only on paper, but what did I know of battle lines and what they were or meant.

In the chaos of retreat, I sought to join up with scattered soldiers who were likewise trying to find their units. Even though I had had no direct contact with the enemy, I was scared to death. The soldiers hanging from the trees along the road were a constant warning of the risk run by every one of us who could not prove that he belonged to a company or was on his way to this or that unit with signed and sealed travel orders.

The central section of the Eastern Front, now retreating inexorably west, was under the command of the infamous General Schörner. According to “Schörner’s orders,” military police—bloodhounds, the lot of them—were to go after soldiers without marching papers and haul them, no matter what their rank, before mobile courts-martial as malingerers, cowards, and deserters. They would then be summarily and conspicuously hanged. Schörner and his orders were more to be feared than the enemy.

Twice in mid-April, I ended up behind Russian lines as part of an improvised unit. Both times I was attached to a reconnaissance troop with an unclear mission, and both times I was saved by luck, if not by chance.

My first opportunity to croak under machine-gun fire or be taken prisoner and learn to survive in Siberia presented itself when a troop of six or seven men led by a sergeant attempted to break out of the cellar of a one-story house. The house was in the Russian-occupied part of a village still under dispute.

How we’d got behind Russian lines and into the cellar of this house is unclear, but breaking out of it and racing to one of the houses on the other side of the street, which was still occupied by Germans, was supposed to save us. I can hear the sergeant, a beanpole in a cocked field hat, saying, “Now or never!”

Through the cellar window we could hear shots—single shots and machine-gun fire—going back and forth at intervals. There was nothing edible on the cellar shelves, but we could tell that the man living there, who had obviously cleared out just in time, had owned a bicycle shop, because he had used the cellar to hide his much sought-after wares, a number of which were hanging by their front wheels from wooden racks, their tires pumped and ready to go.

The sergeant must have been prone to snap decisions, because just after saying “Now or never!” he whispered rather than commanded, “Get a move on. Grab a bike, each one of you, and make a run for it.”

My embarrassed but precisely formulated response—“Sorry, Sergeant, I can’t ride a bike”—must have sounded like a bad joke to him. Nobody laughed. There was no time to go into the deeper reasons for my disgraceful failing: “My mother, who runs a no more than marginally profitable grocery, was unfortunately so chronically short of funds that she could not afford to buy me a bicycle, new or used, thus preventing me from acquiring a skill that might now possibly save my life. . . .”

Before I could go on, the sergeant made another snap decision: “All right, then. Grab the machine gun and cover us. We’ll come back for you later.”

It may be that one or another of the privates, while dutifully removing his bike from the rack, tried to allay my fear. If so, his words went unheeded. I was at the cellar window taking up a position with a weapon I had not been trained to operate. The doubly incapable soldier never had a chance to fire, however, because no sooner had the five or six men emerged from the cellar, bicycles and all, than they were mowed down by machine-gun fire out of nowhere—that is, from one side of the street or the other or both.

I think I see a wriggling, then only a twitching pile. Someone—the lanky sergeant?—turns head over heels as he falls. Then nothing moves. I may also see a front wheel sticking out of the pile, turning and turning.

I departed the bicycle-shop owner’s house without the light machine gun entrusted to me, but with my rifle, and made a run for it through the back garden and the creaky gate. Behind and between gardens, I was hidden by bushes already in bud, and, having left the village still ringing with gunfire, I suddenly came to the tracks of a narrow-gauge railway bordered on both sides by shrubbery along embankments the height of a man. They ran straight in the presumed direction of our front.

After little more than a kilometre of gravel and wooden ties, I saw an undamaged bridge arching the tracks. Crossing it were jeeps and trucks carrying infantry, then a horse-drawn howitzer, then small groups of unmistakably German foot soldiers dragging their feet. Blindly, I joined their column.

I found myself in a group of twelve to fifteen men, with no heavy artillery and therefore classified as a raiding party, belonging to an “ascension commando”—soldiers’ slang for suicide squad. Since I had managed to lose my rifle, I was given a submachine gun of Italian manufacture, which, had there been occasion for me to use it, would have bee in unsure hands.

Our orders were to advance and seek contact with the enemy.

Dusk was descending, and after a number of false starts we wandered onto a forest path churned up by tank tracks. The tracks had been made only hours before, we learned, by a column of Tigers and armored personnel carriers racing forward to serve as an advance guard. But, hard as we tried to make radio contact with them, all that came over our walkie-talkie was gibberish and static.

The tree stock on both sides of the road was highly repetitive, pine giving way to pine. We may have had no heavy artillery to weigh us down, but we had picked up an old man along the way—his armband identified him as a member of the Volkssturm, the Home Front Army—as well as two lightly wounded soldiers, both of them, like twins, with lame left legs. The man from the Volkssturm was constantly babbling about something, quarrelling with God or cursing his neighbor; the wounded men had to be helped along, half carried. We made slow progress.

After further vain attempts to contact the tank brigade, the sergeant called for a halt. Putting to use his evident front-line savvy, he had decided to wait for the armored personnel carriers that were expected for the retreat, in the hope that they would provide transport for at least the hobblers and the Home Front bore. We’d had it for the day, in any case. Luckily, he singled me out to stand watch and ordered me to keep my eyes open.

I see another picture: Myself in my own imagination. Myself under my sliding helmet. Myself obeying an order. Myself eager to do a good job.

And that, tired as I was, I did. It wasn’t long before I spied a speck of light on the now night-black path running through the woods. It divided in two as it drew nearer. After delivering my required report—“Motorized vehicle, probably armored personnel carrier, straight ahead!”—I positioned myself in the middle of the path so as to be easily spotted and, according to my orders, ready to stop the tank with, since I am left-handed, a raised left hand.

My first intimation of surprise may have come from the fact that the rapidly approaching vehicle had its headlights on full beam, and when it came to a halt two steps in front of me I realized why. Only Russians would waste lights like that. . . .

“It’s the Ivans!” I shouted to the group at the side of the road, but did not take the time to differentiate the gunners sitting cheek by jowl on the enemy tank and thus meet my first Soviet soldier face to face. I broke ranks before they could shoot, diving into a stand of young pines to the right of the road, out of sight, though not out of danger.

I heard shouting in two languages immediately overlaid by gunfire, until only the Russian submachine guns had their say.

Crawling through the dense pine thicket and slowly increasing my distance from the road, I was shot at from right and left but not hit, which was not necessarily the case with the group around the sergeant. The old man was no longer cursing God or his neighbor or calling for scores to be settled. The only voices I heard were Russian voices, now quite far off. Someone was laughing. He must have been in a good mood.

Because the dry twigs made such a racket, the isolated tank gunner stopped inching forward on his elbows as he had been trained to do, and played dead, as if he could thereby escape the march of history. Not until the enemy tank, which had been followed by others, started moving did he begin to crawl forward again, and he crawled on until the pine cover turned into a mature wood with Prussian-neat rows. No, I had no desire to go back and find only corpses; besides, the pale lights and engine noises coming from the road confirmed the enemy’s advance.

What do I see when I hold up that lone tank gunner by the half-moonlight and view him as an early edition of the man to come?

He looks like a character who has escaped from a Grimms’ fairy tale. He is about to cry. He clearly doesn’t like the story in which he appears. He is still armed, still holding his submachine gun at the ready. A gas mask dangles uselessly from him like an elongated drum. All he has left in his haversack is a few crumbs of zwieback from his last ration. His canteen is half empty. His Kienzle luminous-dial wristwatch, the birthday present from his father, has long since stopped.

Now he is asleep, propped against a tree. Now he casts a shadow like the tree trunks, because it is day, but he cannot find his way out of the wood and stumbles around in a circle without knowing it, takes some crumbs out of his haversack, unscrews the top of his canteen, and drinks, sending the helmet back over his neck.

Now it is dark again and an owl is calling, and, hungry and abandoned under the moderately cloudy night sky, he chews his last crumbs.

A prisoner of the dark, he tries to recall the prayers he said as a child—“Please, dear God, stand by my side, that I may in Heav’n abide”—and maybe even calls out, “Mama, Mama,” and hears his mother’s voice, luring him home from far away: “Come back, my boy! I’ll give you egg yolk and sugar in a glass!” But he stays where he is, alone as can be, and then something happens.

I heard steps, or something that could be construed as steps. Twigs crackling underfoot. An animal of some kind? A boar? Maybe even a unicorn?

I stood stock still and made not a sound; he or it—the animal, man, or imaginary beast that had been stepping through the wood—followed suit. Then a figure appeared, drew nearer, withdrew, only to come near again. Too near.

Careful! Don’t swallow too loud. Take cover behind the tree trunks. Lessons from military training. Release the weapon’s safety catch, as the other man’s safety catch is almost certainly being released.

Two men assuming each other to be enemies. Conceivably, many years down the line, an idea for a ballet or a movie scene. Like the one that sets up the climax in every classic Western: the ritual dance before the final shootout.

Whistling is said to help dispel fear in a dark wood. I did not whistle. Something, perhaps the thought of my far-off mother, made me sing instead. I did not seek out a melody from among the marches we had been taught. No, it was a nursery rhyme relevant to my situation that came unbidden to my lips, and I sang the first line over and over—“Hans left home, on his own”—until I finally heard its mate: “Went into the world alone.”

I can’t say how long this antiphonal singing continued. Most likely until the message behind the words—two native speakers of German are wandering through the pitch-dark woods—was clear enough to allow both sides to drop cover, address each other in German soldierspeak, lower their weapons, and move within arm’s length, then even closer.

My singing partner was equipped with a rifle, several more years, and several fewer centimetres than me. What I saw under his field cap—he had no helmet—was a puny little man, and what I heard was a Berlin drawl that you could cut with a knife. The scare was over the moment he lit up: a cigarette in a sullen face that said nothing.

Later, I learned that in the course of the war, starting with the Polish campaign, moving on to France and Greece, and getting as far as the Crimean peninsula, he had made it to the rank of private first class. He had no desire to advance any further. Nothing could throw him, a characteristic that in our precarious situation soon proved its worth. He became my guardian angel: he led me out of the woods and over the fields and across the Russian front line.

Since, unlike me, the private first class had been to the edge of the woods and had several opportunities to observe the bivouac fires in the open field beyond, which he judged to be enemy territory, we looked for a place that was not lit by fire. That is, he looked; I remained two paces behind him.

During a halt, he lathered his face by the light of the lingering moon and shaved off a three-day growth. I held my superior’s pocket mirror for him.

Not until a field with a furrow leading westward into the darkness bolstered our courage did we abandon the protection afforded by the trees. The field looked freshly plowed and came to an end behind a swell in the soil, after which we followed a bush-lined country road that bridged a stream. The bridge was unguarded. We filled our canteens, drank, and filled them again. He had a smoke.

Two bridges down—could these have been tributaries of the Spree?—we saw the flicker of a fire in the distance. Laughter, snippets of words floated in our direction; shadow figures flitted back and forth in the glow.

After crossing the bridge, we heard a “Stoi!” and then another.

At the third “Stoi!”—the bridge was quite far behind us—my pfc. issued his directive: “Run, and as fast as you can!”

And so we ran, but we ran the sluggish run that I ran through many a postwar dream: across a field, its clumps and clods clinging to our boot soles, falling off, sticking back on, making us look as if we were running in slow motion—though we were now under submachine-gun fire and a sky exploding with signal rockets—through an extended film sequence that finally came to an end in the cover of a ditch at the far end of the field.

The Russians made no effort to flush us out. The shooting ebbed; the rockets stopped. The moon took back the sky. A rabbit hopped past leisurely, as if we were not to be feared.

On we trudged through the fields, crossing no more bridges, and just as the sun came up we saw a village that the enemy had apparently not yet occupied. It lay tranquil in the morning mist, huddled up to a church, peaceful, as if fallen out of time.

Strange that I can still picture the rather grouchy cavalry captain of Austrian descent who met us at the entry to the village behind a poorly guarded roadblock, complete with eye pouches and toothbrush mustache, even though we were exposed to him and his Home Front men for only a minute. He seemed anxious by nature, and interrupted our detailed report with a nonchalant “Just show me your marching orders,” as if that were a mere catchphrase.

Since without official papers we were court-martial fodder, he had us taken away by three old men armed with hunting rifles and anti-tank guns, one of whom made a great show of being the mayor and the head of the local farmers’ organization. They locked us up in the cellar of a farmhouse. Oddly enough, though, they failed to disarm us.

The cellar was lined with shelves full of bottled preserves, their labels written in grandmotherly Sütterlin script: asparagus, pickled gherkins with mustard seed, pumpkin, and green peas, as well as a blood-and-vinegar ragout and goose giblets. The jars weren’t even dusty. There were also bottles of cloudy apple and elderberry juice, and, in a corner, a pile of potatoes with sprouts the size of a little finger.

We spooned lard with pork chunks straight from the jar and munched on the gherkins, washing it all down with the juice and stopping only when we were on the point of vomiting. Then the pfc. smoked a cigarette. Like my mother, he was a master at blowing smoke rings. I took my gas mask out of its case and filled the case with jam.

Having waited two hours to be summoned to our court-martial, the likely verdict of which we refrained from discussing—we had probably slipped into an after-dinner doze, because I do not recall the interval as a period of apprehension—the pfc. tried the cellar door. It was unlocked. The key was hanging from the outside keyhole. No one was guarding us.

The village must have been evacuated in the meantime. The officer had either forgotten us or in a fit of melancholy delivered us into the hands of a capricious fate. The sparrows were doing their calisthenics on the roadblock’s freshly chopped pine logs. The sun was warm. We felt like bursting into song.

On one side of the block, we had an unobstructed view of the fields: the enemy, the Russian infantry, was advancing in protective ranks. I couldn’t make out any faces, but the distance was closing step by step. You could count them from left to right. Each a target.

Yet I did not aim my submachine gun, nor did my pfc. attempt to defend the village with his rifle. We made tracks, noiseless tracks. Even if the Ivans had shot on command or out of habit, we would not have shot back.

We did not act out of brotherly love and we deserve no credit. What kept us from aiming and pulling the trigger was more like reason, or the absence of necessity. That is why the claim I have so often made—namely, that during the week in which the war had me firmly in its grasp I never fired a shot—is at best a way of alleviating in retrospect the shame that remains. Yet the fact remains: we did not shoot. What is less certain is when I exchanged my uniform jacket for one less onerous. Did I do so of my own accord?

It was more likely the pfc. who, his eye on the runes on my collar, recommended the change of jacket. He could not have been pleased about my markings. Through me, though he did not put it in those terms, he had got into bad company. What he did say at some point, either in the larder of a cellar or while shaving or puffing on his cigarette, was: “Listen, boy, if those Ivans nab us, you’re in for it. They see those ornaments on your collar, they’ll shoot you in the neck. No questions asked.”

How he did it I don’t know, but he managed to “organize”—as the soldiers used to say—an ordinary Wehrmacht jacket somewhere. One without bullet holes or bloodstains. It even fit. Minus the double rune, he liked me a lot better. I came to like me better, too.

After is always before. What we call the present, this fleeting nownownow, is constantly overshadowed by a past now, in such a way that the escape route known as the future can be marched to only in lead-soled shoes.

Thus encumbered and at a distance of sixty years, I see a seventeen-year-old with an indecently bulging gas-mask case and a like-new tailored uniform jacket, doing everything possible to join up with the units flooding back through Germany, side by side with a tough slyboots of a pfc. who has seen it all and whom you’d never guess to be a barber by trade. Together, they repeatedly make their way around the “bloodhounds.” There are always holes to be found. The front is not easy to recognize. And they are only two among thousands of soldiers who have lost their regiments.

Then, on the road from Senftenberg to Spremberg, which is packed with horses and carts full of refugees, the two of them, in the same field-gray battle dress yet so ill-matched, take advantage of the crush to negotiate purchase of an official document, life-giving marching orders, at an improvised assembly point, which is out in the open at the side of the road and consists of a table and a stool. There is some printed paper on the table. The war-weary master sergeant on the stool asks no questions, writes quickly, slams down his stamp.

Now we are protected: we belong to a newly assembled combat group. True, for the time being it exists only on paper, as a vague promise, but we can see a perfectly concrete mobile field kitchen—the “goulash cannon” of soldiers’ slang—set up in the meadow behind the table, its kettle steaming and sending out a soupy aroma.

We join the line. All together. Not even officers may pull rank. Come the end, fate dishes out moments of rank-free anarchy.

We have potato soup with bits of meat floating in it. The mess boy ladles each of us a scoop from the bottom, then a half scoop from the top. The mess tin we each have buckled onto our haversacks is just the right size. The mood is neither down nor up. Typical April weather. The sun is out.

Now we are facing each other, our spoons moving in rhythm. “Hey,” says somebody a few steps away, without breaking the rhythm of his spoon, “isn’t today Adolf’s birthday? So where’s the extra ration? And the chocolate, the cigarettes, a shot of brandy for the toast! Heil, mein Führer!”

Now somebody tries to tell a joke, but gets all mixed up. Infectious laughter. A peaceful scene. All it needs is an accordion player.

We were standing near a street on which a column of tanks trying to advance and counterattack was being obstructed by a column of refugees advancing in the opposite direction. There was no room to maneuver on one side of the road.

And then came the first explosions of the Soviet tank grenades.

Between one spoonful and another, my pfc. said, “Those are T-34s.”

“T-34s,” said his echo. Me.

A number of tanks had emerged from the woods and begun climbing the deep quarry by the opposite side of the road. Small as toys, they stopped and fired. The traffic on the street had come to a halt, presenting the enemy fire with an easy target. The shots came closer. Our Jagdpanther tanks, because of their fixed barrels, had to turn before they could respond. Commands vying with screams, our tanks pushed packed carts and their passengers and horses over the edge of the road into the quarry pit, tipping them over like trinkets.

Now I see a handsome lieutenant gesticulating out of an open turret as if trying to change the direction of the barrels with his bare hands; I see Silesian peasants refusing to let their possessions go; I see doll-like children on carts sliding off the road; I see women screaming, but I fail to hear their cries; I see grenades exploding, sometimes far off, sometimes nearby—silently they find their targets. So as not to see, I stare at the remains of the soup in my mess tin. On the one hand, I am still a hungry man; on the other, a dumbfounded observer, a mere witness to the filmlike action. I seem to be dreaming, but I am and remain awake until the helmet, its strap now flapping, flies off my head, and my senses vanish.

Where is my pfc.? Where is my submachine gun, my two magazines of ammunition? Why am I still standing—or standing again?

The badly bleeding wound in my right thigh drenching my trousers. The pain in my chin caused by the helmet strap. A limp arm dangling from my left shoulder, which refuses to obey when I try, with the help of someone else, to lift—there he is!—my pfc.

His legs torn to pieces. His torso apparently intact. His eyes open wide, amazed, unbelieving . . .

Then a whirl of sand dust shifts my gaze to the field kitchen, still steaming, unscathed, where it remains until we—he carried, I supported—and another wounded man are loaded into a field ambulance. An orderly climbs in. Other victims, left behind, curse; one of them insists on coming with us and clings to the vehicle. . . . At last the door is shut and bolted.

We rumble along, presumably to the dressing station.

The smell of Lysol. I must have felt safe in the ambulance. The war had taken a break. At any rate, nothing much was going on, especially as we were so slow in finding the way. The pfc. lay flat on his back. His formerly smooth, pink, shiny face—the result of frequent shaves—was tinged with green, and stubble was beginning to show. He seemed to have shrunk. His legs were bandaged, wrapped in gauze.

He lay, conscious, on a plank bed, looking at me out of the corner of his eye. He was trying to form words, and finally, in a softer version of his drawl, managed to ask for a cigarette. I extracted one from the crumpled packet in his breast pocket, together with his lighter.

I, the nonsmoker, lit it for him and stuck it between his lips. The lips suddenly stopped trembling. He took a few greedy puffs, shut his eyes, but immediately opened them in terror, as if he had only then understood his condition. Now I saw fear written on his face, and it startled me. Then, after an interval, during which I heard the groans of the wounded and the curses of the orderly—he was short on gauze—and wondered at my own oddly pain-free condition, my pfc. asked me—no, ordered me—to open his trousers and his underpants, too, and reach in and check between his legs.

Having received confirmation that everything was present and accounted for, he let out a quiet groan, took a few more puffs, then dropped off, breathed calmly, looked tranquil.

We were separated at the dressing station: he was put in a tent, I left out in the open. When the time came for my thigh to be bandaged, I became a laughingstock for the following reason: the gas-mask case, which was still attached to me, had been slit open by a finger-length grenade splinter and the contents had gushed out and made a mess of jam in my pants. From then on, my trouser seat stuck to me whenever I sat down. In time it attracted ants, which was nothing to laugh at.

Not until after my thigh was bandaged did they bandage my left shoulder, which was hardly bleeding, though it was likely that a foreign object made of metal, however small, had lodged there. The hole it had made in my new uniform jacket was all but invisible. The dangling arm was now supported by a sling. As evident as the war was all around us, it was suddenly over for me.

We were loaded onto a train that evening. It must have been the night of the twentieth to the twenty-first of April, because the Army doctor, the orderlies, and my fellow walking wounded were making the same complaints I’d heard being bandied about the field kitchen that afternoon: Where were the extras they’d passed around every year on the Führer’s birthday? No cigarettes, no sardines, no bottle of Doppelkorn per four men, no nothing. All the soldiers—even me, a nonsmoker—found this situation more upsetting and of greater import than the fall of the German Reich so obviously taking place.

Where the freight train in which I lay with all the wounded was headed I had no idea. It made frequent endlessly long and occasional short stops and was shunted several times onto different tracks. Soon, it was dark out. The only light we had came from a primitive acetylene lamp.

We lay on rotten, piss-smelling straw. The man to the left of me, a member of the mountain troops with a bandage around his head, was reading a religious book by the glimmer of a pocket flashlight. He was moving his lips. The man to my right had been shot in the stomach and writhed and screamed until he writhed and screamed no more.

There was no water to be had, no orderly to tend to the pleas of the wounded.

The night seemed never-ending; it lasted in my dreams through the early postwar years. When the train came to its final stop, the goods, both the quick and the dead, were unloaded, and an Army doctor checked off our names on the list, separating the seriously wounded from the rest. A glance was enough. It took no time at all.

The ancient and miraculously undamaged cathedral town of Meissen lay bathed in the spring-morning light. True to the folk song, the birds were all there.

The seriously wounded were hauled away in trucks; the rest of us, propping each other up, hobbled along the path leading to the fortress, which had been turned into a military hospital. Locals, mostly women, lined the path, and many helped the disabled.

I was anything but well cared for there in the fortress. The hospital was full to bursting, its corridors lined with emergency pallets. Exhausted doctors, harried nurses. Everything was in short supply, especially medicine. All they could do for me was put fresh bandages on my right thigh and my left shoulder, in which—it was now official, confirmed by a signed and stamped document—a small grenade splinter had lodged. They did not deem me worthy of an operation, nor did they waste a tetanus shot on me.

Finally, along with a document promising the shot and a pair of trousers, I was handed new marching orders, my last: destination Marienbad. Once a spa for the rich and famous, much celebrated in literature—as an old man, Goethe had fallen in love with a young thing there, was given the brushoff, and sublimated his grief in a “Marienbad Elegy”—it lay on the other side of the Ore Mountains, far off in the Sudetenland.

While I was waiting for the orders, my pfc. was pushed out of the operating room in a wheelchair. His legless torso wrapped in gauze rolled past deep in sleep, leaving behind the question of whether his coming out of that sleep was to be desired or feared. He had never told me his name.

I have no idea how I made it over the Ore Mountains. Some stretches by train and—since trains were then a rarity—by horse and cart through villages whose names now escape me. Somehow, I managed to make progress. And never did I deviate from my marching orders.

I spent one night in the mountains with a couple who kept rabbits behind their house. Man and wife were both teachers. I had begun to run a temperature, and they offered to look after me, give me civilian clothes, and hide me in the cellar until, as they said, “it’s all finally over.” Their son, whose picture, ringed in black, I saw in a bookcase, had fallen at the Battle of Sevastopol. He was about twenty years young. His clothing would have fit me. I could reach out and take down his books.

I didn’t stay. I wanted to go where my travel papers ordered me to go, to cross the mountains in my own trousers, which after a thorough washing had ceased to attract ants. The couple stood in front of their shingle-roofed cottage and watched me disappear.

And I made it, heaven knows how, all the way to Karlsbad, that other spa with literary and—given its connection with Metternich—political connotations, where I fell to my knees in the street and couldn’t get up.

I had a fever. It may have been caused by the grenade splinter in my shoulder or by the lack of a tetanus shot. My left arm was now stiff down to my fingertips, but I don’t recall being in pain.

The military policeman who picked me up followed my marching orders to the letter. He apparently draped me over the back seat of his motorcycle—I was unconscious—buckled me down, and drove me to Marienbad, where for the panzer gunner the war had indeed ended. By the time he had dropped me off and I had been placed, still feverish, in a freshly made bed, the Führer was no more.
(Translated, from the German, by Michael Henry Heim.)

Hot Damn

2007-06-05T01:43:00.001-06:00

This might be the best short story I've read in a long time. The rest of Judd Trichter's stuff (fellow Yalie, hell yeah) is amazing as well. Check it out.

The Contract
Judd Trichter
May 30, 2007

It got to the point where I was no longer poor -- I was wretched. Like something out of a Dickens novel. My clothes were torn in places where it is not fashionable for clothes to be torn. I couldn't afford to eat, let alone pay my bills, and Sally Struthers was calling my house asking if she could come over with a film crew.

But worst of all were the roaches. Despite the fact that an old friend of mine, Rodney Maciejewski, exterminator extraordinaire, had taken out their leadership and left them with an interim government, the roaches mounted a counter-offensive during a holiday cease-fire that left them firmly in control of the kitchen. They controlled the closets too, and the battle for the bathroom was tipping in their favor. Aided by sympathizers from neighboring apartments, the roaches conducted suicide raids in my bedroom, invoking the name of their God as they dive-bombed off the ceiling in a campaign to sew terror amongst any woman who dared sleep in my bed. I needed help to squash the insurgency, but having antagonized my allies by running up enormous debts, I found myself having to go it alone. And it wasn't going well.

It was then that they came to me with The Contract.

In this particular case, the they I am referring to is also known as The Network. Actually, it is unclear whether it was The Network or The Conglomerate That Owns The Network. Since there are but four conglomerates that own all of the networks, and since they all use the same document, signing The Contract with The Network is a bit like swallowing the pill in The Matrix: you don't quite know whom you're dealing with, but you suspect they look like self-replicating monsters who wear suits and carry briefcases.

Everyone who lives in our society is familiar with The Contract or some similar version of this document. It works thusly: in return for financial gain, The Contract requires that one violate the one thing in The Universe that one values. If one values truth, one will be forced to lie. If one values virginity, one will be forced to fuck. If one values nothing, one will NOT be offered The Contract.

The language in The Contract is worded in such a way that only people trained in reading contracts can understand its true intent. This particular contract was written in Latin. Lucky for me, I studied Latin in school. But this was a different Latin. This was legal Latin. Scary Latin. The kind of Latin Jesus heard before they nailed him to the cross.

Also in The Contract, there was a set of parentheses, between which rested a number. This number represented the financial gain. The reason this number is in parentheses is because it is the one part of The Contract that is negotiable. Everything else in The Contract is standard and therefore non-negotiable. In order to negotiate the number in the parentheses, one needs to hire a person trained to read and negotiate a contract. We call such people Lawyers.

Now I have a very good lawyer. I know he's very good because he lives in an expensive neighborhood, drives an expensive car, and sends his kids to an expensive school. I know that if I ask my very good lawyer to negotiate a contract, he can get me a 3% increase in the amount between the parentheses. For that service, he will charge me 5% of the amount between the parentheses. This is how he pays for his house, his car, and the education of his spawn. This is what makes him a very good lawyer.

"I don't know why I even bother with you," he told me as I sat in his office. "And no, I won't validate your parking." He ate a sandwich as we spoke.

"I don't understand The Contract," I told him. "Why is it two hundred pages long? What am I giving away? Why won't anyone, even you, explain it to me and tell me exactly what it is I am getting myself into?"

"The Contract says what it says and means what it means," he offered, as a piece of pastrami shot from his mouth. "Nobody is forcing you to sign it." He belched then swallowed another hunk of meat. "But before you do anything rash," he used his finger to unstick a piece of food from his gums, "allow me to remind you how much it is you owe." He examined the half-chewed meat in his finger tips. "In fact this conversation we're having bills out to more than your gross earnings for the last five years." He put the meat back in his mouth for further mastication. "Let me also remind you that I can have you declared insane and force your ass into a receivership." He lifted a leg, emphasizing his ruthlessness. "This I can do because you have proven that you are unable to make even the simplest of decisions." He unleashed a loud and angry fart. "And there ain't one kike doctor from here to Park Avenue who'd disagree." He inhaled through his nose and smiled, admiring the quality of his work. "And do you want to know why they wouldn't disagree?" He fanned the fart toward me with his hand. "Because only a brain dead idiot wouldn't sign that fucking contract."

And yet I couldn't do it. I was thirty-one years old, and nothing in my life had gone well. None of my goals had been accomplished. None of my dreams had materialized. And signing this contract would assure that none of them ever would. For me, it was better to suffer with my integrity intact. It would lend a certain romance to my struggle if I died wretched rather than having succumbed to temptation.

"What integrity? What romance? You think because you've failed until now that makes you an Artist?" Intimate Relationship #9.5 had stopped by my apartment to weigh in. "Artists don't spend their days jerking off to internet porn, watching Court TV." I wondered if Beatrice spoke to Dante this way. "You think you're Marlon Brando?" she asked. "You're not even Marlon fuckin' Wayans. You're a half-assed, failed child actor lucky as hell to be getting this offer." She was yelling now. "Have you ever even seen your work? You suck! I'm twice the actor you'll ever be. You should be doing dinner theater on a cruise ship, instead they're giving you prime-fucking-time. Or is it your writing career you're worried about? Those shit-ass articles you write for a blog no one can find. That misogynistic column you send to your friends -- none of whom can read -- always about the poor, self-destructive asshole with a heart of gold. Most women have boyfriends who take care of them, who buy them dinner and presents, who take them on vacations, who listen! I could have been married," she said. "I could have had a house and a family. Instead, I've sacrificed everything for you, and what have I received in return? Nothing! Nothing's been earned or accomplished, no great art has been produced, no one's been inspired by your work. I hate you for sucking me into this." She was breaking things now. "I hate myself for being stupid enough to fall for you. I hate the world that it allows someone like you to be rewarded. I hope you die the slow and agonizing death a fraud like you deserves!"

My mother called. As usual, she'd been crying.

"Everything I've done for you, all the money I spent on your education, all the money I lent you over the years. I could have had a life of my own. I could have traveled and seen the world. I could have put your grandmother into a nursing home instead of caring for her myself. Did you know she threw her colostomy bag at me today?"

"Mom, please..."

"I have shit all over me. There is shit all over the apartment. I can't even afford a maid to clean it because my ungrateful son is too good to sign a fucking contract. Your generation thinks it's so entitled. Thinks it shouldn't have to suffer. Thinks it should enjoy its work. Do I enjoy my work? I despise my work. That is why it is called Work. But I do it anyway because your grandmother survived Aushwitz so that you should one day exist and have a life in America, where there is freedom and democracy. In America, where a Jew can live without the fear of being exterminated like a dumb animal. No wonder the woman shot-puts her shit at me, I raised a despicable child!"

A Very Famous Celebrity sat down next to me on the couch in his office. He smiled as only one who had once signed a similar contract could smile. I explained to him what I felt. I explained to him that it seemed too soon. That I was too young to give up on my artistic dreams. That there was something I needed to hold on to, something I was not yet willing to surrender for financial gain. I told him that if I signed The Contract, I wouldn't be me anymore. I would be someone I didn't like, and I didn't want to be someone I didn't like.

The Very Famous Celebrity put a fleshy hand on my shoulder, a little too close to my neck.

"I think," he said, "you should go home... and you should get... some sleep."

That night, I dreamt of revolution. I dreamt I was a drug lord, an arms dealer, an outlaw living in the jungle leading a band of rebels. I dreamt that men's lives depended on me. That the decisions I made toppled governments and determined the outcomes of history.

And the roaches marched on in their formations. They gathered in the dark behind the walls of my apartment. They scurried over countertops, breeding in the damp beneath the pipes, pouring over their plans for my annihilation. In the morning, I would poison them. I would set traps to capture them where they fed. I would crush them with my boot heel. Fearing nothing, their fleeing at the light would be nothing more than an innate response to a perceived threat. Roaches lack the capacity for decision-making. They know nothing but survival. They will endure long after I am gone.

Leaving Our Footprints

2007-05-31T12:03:00.000-06:00

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.

A Culmination of Sorts

2007-05-29T22:02:00.000-06:00

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.

My Wet Dream

2007-05-29T21:53:00.001-06:00

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.

It Can't Be Any Simpler

2007-05-16T22:51:00.000-06:00

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.

Forget Abortion, Here's a Culture War

2007-05-04T21:58:00.001-06:00

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.

In the Hopper

2007-05-04T21:57:00.001-06:00

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."

Sound Familiar?

2007-05-04T21:56:00.001-06:00

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.

I mean, seriously

2007-05-03T18:24:00.000-06:00

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."

Professional Issues

2007-04-28T14:48:00.001-06:00

For the majority of my time at Yale, I studied nonsense. With the devotion that a flagellist would envy, I spent four years trying to disect the intracacies of modern psychoanalysis (which, of course, is as scientific and practical as scientology). In essence, I ended up learning less than a sliver of actual practical knowledge. Although I can guarantee that the first time that I read this article I was in the ecstatic throes of my literary theory mania (which kept it from making any more than a soft dent on my psyche), I think this article is a perfect example of what my thought process - and the maturation of - is currently at concerning academia.

Plus it offers a decent history of modern literary criticism.

The opportunity to reread this article was provoked by a conversation about this, which you should only read if you're currently not involved in any Nabokov-related activity.

The Death of Literary Theory
Is it really a good thing?
By Stephen Metcalf
www.slate.com
Posted Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005, at 1:47 PM ET

Hugh Blair was the very first English professor. His official title was the regius professor of rhetoric and belles lettres at the University of Edinburgh, and when he was appointed in 1762, almost no one in the world did what he did: formally teach literary works written in English. A few years earlier, Blair had been shown a manuscript of some ancient Gaelic verse, a fragment of an epic by a third-century poet named Ossian. The fragment—translated into modern English—was called "The Death of Oscar," and it recounted a heroic past in which the Scots had defended the British Isles against foreign invasion. "The Death of Oscar" thrilled Blair, and in 1760 he helped finance a trip into the northern Highlands to recover more of what he was now calling "our epic." Blair didn't know that, even as he was bankrolling its painstaking restoration, "our epic" was being composed in the apartment directly below his. The Ossian fragments were a fake, a miscellany of oral ballads and Irish saga cycles and Viking lore that had been cleverly patched together to flatter the tastes and expectations of—well, Hugh Blair, whose enthusiasm helped make them an international sensation. (Napoleon carried a translation in his vest pocket; Goethe incorporated sections into The Sorrows of Young Werther.) The first professor of English was, in other words, a sucker. Why should he have been the last?

For most of the 240-odd years since Hugh Blair, English professors have been suckers, and for the same reason Blair made such a glorious one: No one knows what an English professor does. In waking up each day only to rejustify their entire existence—to jealous colleagues, to class-shopping undergraduates, to the administrative purse strings—professors of literature invoke the literary past in whatever way will most advance their own institutional self-interest. Blair's was simply the most aggravated instance of the case. As the first English professor, he needed a work of literature in English, sufficiently venerable to justify teaching it instead of the Greek and Latin classics, but not a work of English literature, which would only confirm to him and his students their second-class status as Scottish provincials. In Ossian, he wish-fulfilled into existence an entire Scottish epic past.

At each subsequent stage in the history of the modern university, English professors have repurposed literary history to suit expedient needs. When English classes were one way of carrying forward the religious mood of schools once devoted to educating a ministry, literature was made an occasion for conversion or homily. "I escaped from the gall of bitterness and the bond of my philistine iniquity, into the kingdom of light," is how William Phelps, the man who pioneered the modern English class at Yale, colorfully described his discovery of Tennyson. Meanwhile, Irving Babbitt, the great Harvard professor of the '20s and '30s, cleansed the great books of their incest and gore in a font of anodyne moralism. "[Babbitt] almost succeeded in giving Sophocles and Plato the aspect of pious English dons," said Edmund Wilson, an avowed nonprofessor. "[He] has turned Sophocles into something even worse and even more alien to his true nature; he has turned him into a Harvard Humanist."

For all its pretense to being a grand irruption, the great age of literary theory was not so different. It started with New Criticism in the '30s and '40s, which, if you think about it, was less a literary movement than one of the great public works projects launched in the wake of World War II, by which the teaching of literature was democratized to fit the needs of a rapidly expanding university system. New Criticism is always described as a method of close reading (mostly of poems) that assumes no historical or biographical facts about the author. But its great virtue was as a mass-scalable method of teaching, as it assumed no biographical or historical knowledge on the part of the student. It was, in short, a reading technique that could be taught to any bright learner, whatever his or her cultural background. By flattering students for their aptitude and not their moral or aesthetic sensitivity, New Criticism allowed the English department to grow alongside a newly meritocratic and increasingly professionalized university.

With New Criticism, literary history was still being customized to fit the professor's expedient needs. In were the Augustans and the Metaphysicals and T.S. Eliot, whose poems supposedly reward close reading; out were the slovenly Romantics, whose poems supposedly don't. But something had started to change. The English professor himself was slowly evolving. The key to that evolution was what is sometimes called "the linguistic turn." Language is of course the necessary medium for all advanced learning; but after Wittgenstein, the default position of the tenured philosophe has been that only within language can we order and experience human reality. If the English professor is the expert in charge of understanding how we use language—how metaphors shape history, how history shapes our metaphors, etc., etc.—he holds a position of enormous intellectual authority on a college campus. For a brief period, climaxing with the reign of terror of the Yale Deconstructionists, the English professor appeared to have arrogated, not only all of literary history, but all possible knowledge to his own powers of interpretation. The English professor had completed the transition. He was no longer a sucker. He was now a con man extraordinaire.

The end of the era of the English professor as con man, and his return to sucker status (at least in the public imagination), can be dated with some precision. In 1996, a physics professor at NYU named Alan Sokal submitted an article to the then cutting-edge journal Social Text in which he argued that the idea of an external world obedient to invariable physical laws was an Enlightenment fiction. Sokal went to great lengths to make the editors of Social Text appear as inane as possible: In support of an outrageous thesis he offered only banal recitations of trendy Post-Modernist dogma, and a lot of what he asserted in the name of science was either absurd or demonstrably false. Sokal had designed his bogus arguments to flatter the editors of Social Text in much the same way another trickster, 250 years earlier, had designed Ossian to flatter Hugh Blair. The con man's game is always the same: sensing what the gull most wants to be true. Sokal knew that a respected physicist admitting that the scientific method is itself a social construct—subject to the same protocols of interpretation as King Lear or Lamia—would complete the English department's grab for intellectual pre-eminence. The same day the issue of Social Text appeared, Sokal announced in the magazine Lingua Franca that his article had been a prank. Fustian know-nothings have been celebrating ever since.

I started graduate school a few years before the Sokal hoax, when what was still transgressive and sexy about literary theory was fighting it out with the sheer ay, caramba factor of such pronouncements as "E=MC2 is a sexed equation." By the time I exited grad school, the feeling of an era being over—however meretricious in some of its particulars the era might have been—was unmistakable. These days, no think tank pundit would bother to denounce literary theory; its biggest stars, by way of generating some final headlines, have publicly disowned it; and no fresh cohort of terrifying intellectual charismatics has crossed the Atlantic to revive it.

Great critics continue to write brilliantly about novels and poems, both within the academy and without. But something was lost when the English department relinquished its status as the all-purpose intellectual nerve center on the American college campus. In its weakness lay its great strength: For not knowing exactly what an English professor does, the English department, though vulnerable to charlatanism and dupery, was also the last great repository for the nonutilitarian hopes of the university. These Cardinal Newman had in mind when he wrote in The Idea of a University that "intellectual self-possession and repose" should be the ideal of a humanist education, and that these lie prior to any specific vocational end. Newman railed against the insistence that higher education must "at once make this man a lawyer, that an engineer, and that a surgeon." Though intellectual repose was hardly what the editors of Social Text had in mind, it's worth remembering that it wasn't Sokal who came out best in his eponymous hoax, but an English professor. As Stanley Fish gently explained to professor Sokal in an op-ed to the New York Times,

"What sociologists of science say is that of course the world is real and independent of our observations but that accounts of the world are produced by observers and are therefore relative to their capacities, education, training, etc. It is not the world or its properties but the vocabularies in whose terms we know them that are socially constructed—fashioned by human beings—which is why our understanding of those properties is continually changing.

"Distinguishing fact from fiction is surely the business of science, but the means of doing so are not perspicuous in nature—for if they were, there would be no work to be done. Consequently, the history of science is a record of controversies about what counts as evidence and how facts are to be established.

"Those who concern themselves with this history neither dispute the accomplishments of science nor deny the existence or power of scientific procedure. They just maintain and demonstrate that the nature of scientific procedure is a question continually debated in its own precincts."

Did Post-Modernism—in this instance, some twilit mélange of Gadamer and Lyotard and Habermas and Kuhn and Latour, many of whose original beachhead in America had been the credulous English department—overreach in taking on science? Maybe. But on its way to producing a new generation of lawyers and engineers and surgeons (and risk arbitrageurs and pharma lobbyists), was it so wrong for a university to indulge one department whose time was spent agonizing over the entire mission of knowledge production itself? By never firmly establishing what it itself was for, the English department cultivated habits of withering self-reflection and so became one mechanism by which the university could stay in touch with its nonutilitarian self and subject its own practices to ongoing critique. Did the theory era produce bullshit by the mountain-load? Of course it did. But by allowing "literary theory" to turn into a pundit's byword, signifying the pompous, the outmoded, the shallow, the faddish, we may have quietly resolved the argument over what a university is for in favor of no self-reflection whatsoever.

The Anatomy of a Global Scam

2007-04-27T15:48:00.001-06:00

I was raised mormon, and can't for the life of me find a single word here that I disagree with.

Robert Greene would be proud

Mormonism: A Racket Becomes a Religion
from: Christopher Hitchens
God Is Not Great
Posted Friday, April 27, 2007, at 7:23 AM ET

If the followers of the prophet Muhammad hoped to put an end to any future "revelations" after the immaculate conception of the Koran, they reckoned without the founder of what is now one of the world's fastest-growing faiths. And they did not foresee (how could they, mammals as they were?) that the prophet of this ridiculous cult would model himself on theirs. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—hereafter known as the Mormons—was founded by a gifted opportunist who, despite couching his text in openly plagiarized Christian terms, announced that "I shall be to this generation a new Muhammad" and adopted as his fighting slogan the words, which he thought he had learned from Islam, "Either the Al-Koran or the sword." He was too ignorant to know that if you use the word al you do not need another definite article, but then he did resemble Muhammad in being able only to make a borrowing out of other people's bibles.

In March 1826 a court in Bainbridge, New York, convicted a twenty-one-year-old man of being "a disorderly person and an impostor." That ought to have been all we ever heard of Joseph Smith, who at trial admitted to defrauding citizens by organizing mad gold-digging expeditions and also to claiming to possess dark or "necromantic" powers. However, within four years he was back in the local newspapers (all of which one may still read) as the discoverer of the "Book of Mormon." He had two huge local advantages which most mountebanks and charlatans do not possess. First, he was operating in the same hectically pious district that gave us the Shakers and several other self-proclaimed American prophets. So notorious did this local tendency become that the region became known as the "Burned-Over District," in honor of the way in which it had surrendered to one religious craze after another. Second, he was operating in an area which, unlike large tracts of the newly opening North America, did possess the signs of an ancient history.

A vanished and vanquished Indian civilization had bequeathed a considerable number of burial mounds, which when randomly and amateurishly desecrated were found to contain not merely bones but also quite advanced artifacts of stone, copper, and beaten silver. There were eight of these sites within twelve miles of the underperforming farm which the Smith family called home. There were two equally stupid schools or factions who took a fascinated interest in such matters: the first were the gold-diggers and treasure-diviners who brought their magic sticks and crystals and stuffed toads to bear in the search for lucre, and the second those who hoped to find the resting place of a lost tribe of Israel. Smith's cleverness was to be a member of both groups, and to unite cupidity with half-baked anthropology.

The actual story of the imposture is almost embarrassing to read, and almost embarrassingly easy to uncover. (It has been best told by Dr. Fawn Brodie, whose 1945 book No Man Knows My History was a good-faith attempt by a professional historian to put the kindest possible interpretation on the relevant "events.") In brief, Joseph Smith announced that he had been visited (three times, as is customary) by an angel named Moroni. The said angel informed him of a book, "written upon gold plates," which explained the origins of those living on the North American continent as well as the truths of the gospel. There were, further, two magic stones, set in the twin breastplates Urim and Thummim of the Old Testament, that would enable Smith himself to translate the aforesaid book. After many wrestlings, he brought this buried apparatus home with him on September 21, 1827, about eighteen months after his conviction for fraud. He then set about producing a translation.

The resulting "books" turned out to be a record set down by ancient prophets, beginning with Nephi, son of Lephi, who had fled Jerusalem in approximately 600 BC and come to America. Many battles, curses, and afflictions accompanied their subsequent wanderings and those of their numerous progeny. How did the books turn out to be this way? Smith refused to show the golden plates to anybody, claiming that for other eyes to view them would mean death. But he encountered a problem that will be familiar to students of Islam. He was extremely glib and fluent as a debater and story-weaver, as many accounts attest. But he was illiterate, at least in the sense that while he could read a little, he could not write. A scribe was therefore necessary to take his inspired dictation. This scribe was at first his wife Emma and then, when more hands were necessary, a luckless neighbor named Martin Harris. Hearing Smith cite the words of Isaiah 29, verses 11–12, concerning the repeated injunction to "Read," Harris mortgaged his farm to help in the task and moved in with the Smiths. He sat on one side of a blanket hung across the kitchen, and Smith sat on the other with his translation stones, intoning through the blanket. As if to make this an even happier scene, Harris was warned that if he tried to glimpse the plates, or look at the prophet, he would be struck dead.

Mrs. Harris was having none of this, and was already furious with the fecklessness of her husband. She stole the first hundred and sixteen pages and challenged Smith to reproduce them, as presumably—given his power of revelation—he could. (Determined women like this appear far too seldom in the history of religion.) After a very bad few weeks, the ingenious Smith countered with another revelation. He could not replicate the original, which might be in the devil's hands by now and open to a "satanic verses" interpretation. But the all-foreseeing Lord had meanwhile furnished some smaller plates, indeed the very plates of Nephi, which told a fairly similar tale. With infinite labor, the translation was resumed, with new scriveners behind the blanket as occasion demanded, and when it was completed all the original golden plates were transported to heaven, where apparently they remain to this day.

Mormon partisans sometimes say, as do Muslims, that this cannot have been fraudulent because the work of deception would have been too much for one poor and illiterate man. They have on their side two useful points: if Muhammad was ever convicted in public of fraud and attempted necromancy we have no record of the fact, and Arabic is a language that is somewhat opaque even to the fairly fluent outsider. However, we know the Koran to be made up in part of earlier books and stories, and in the case of Smith it is likewise a simple if tedious task to discover that twenty-five thousand words of the Book of Mormon are taken directly from the Old Testament. These words can mainly be found in the chapters of Isaiah available in Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews: The Ten Tribes of Israel in America. This then popular work by a pious loony, claiming that the American Indians originated in the Middle East, seems to have started the other Smith on his gold-digging in the first place. A further two thousand words of the Book of Mormon are taken from the New Testament. Of the three hundred and fifty "names" in the book, more than one hundred come straight from the Bible and a hundred more are as near stolen as makes no difference. (The great Mark Twain famously referred to it as "chloroform in print," but I accuse him of hitting too soft a target, since the book does actually contain "The Book of Ether.") The words "and it came to pass" can be found at least two thousand times, which does admittedly have a soporific effect. Quite recent scholarship has exposed every single other Mormon "document" as at best a scrawny compromise and at worst a pitiful fake, as Dr. Brodie was obliged to notice when she reissued and updated her remarkable book in 1973.

Like Muhammad, Smith could produce divine revelations at short notice and often simply to suit himself (especially, and like Muhammad, when he wanted a new girl and wished to take her as another wife). As a result, he overreached himself and came to a violent end, having meanwhile excommunicated almost all the poor men who had been his first disciples and who had been browbeaten into taking his dictation. Still, this story raises some very absorbing questions, concerning what happens when a plain racket turns into a serious religion before our eyes.

It must be said for the "Latter-day Saints" (these conceited words were added to Smith's original "Church of Jesus Christ" in 1833) that they have squarely faced one of the great difficulties of revealed religion. This is the problem of what to do about those who were born before the exclusive "revelation," or who died without ever having the opportunity to share in its wonders. Christians used to resolve this problem by saying that Jesus descended into hell after his crucifixion, where it is thought that he saved or converted the dead. There is indeed a fine passage in Dante's Inferno where he comes to rescue the spirits of great men like Aristotle, who had presumably been boiling away for centuries until he got around to them. (In another less ecumenical scene from the same book, the Prophet Muhammad is found being disemboweled in revolting detail.) The Mormons have improved on this rather backdated solution with something very literal-minded. They have assembled a gigantic genealogical database at a huge repository in Utah, and are busy filling it with the names of all people whose births, marriages, and deaths have been tabulated since records began. This is very useful if you want to look up your own family tree, and as long as you do not object to having your ancestors becoming Mormons. Every week, at special ceremonies in Mormon temples, the congregations meet and are given a certain quota of names of the departed to "pray in" to their church. This retrospective baptism of the dead seems harmless enough to me, but the American Jewish Committee became incensed when it was discovered that the Mormons had acquired the records of the Nazi "final solution," and were industriously baptizing what for once could truly be called a "lost tribe": the murdered Jews of Europe. For all its touching inefficacy, this exercise seemed in poor taste. I sympathize with the American Jewish Committee, but I nonetheless think that the followers of Mr. Smith should be congratulated for hitting upon even the most simpleminded technological solution to a problem that has defied solution ever since man first invented religion.

Towards Specifics

2007-04-26T23:16:00.002-06:00

A brief history of Islam, including a critique of its assumed authority.

Was Muhammad Epileptic?
from: Christopher Hitchens
God Is Not Great
Posted Thursday, April 26, 2007

There is some question as to whether Islam is a separate religion at all. It initially fulfilled a need among Arabs for a distinctive or special creed, and is forever identified with their language and their impressive later conquests, which, while not as striking as those of the young Alexander of Macedonia, certainly conveyed an idea of being backed by a divine will until they petered out at the fringes of the Balkans and the Mediterranean. But Islam when examined is not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as occasion appeared to require. Thus, far from being "born in the clear light of history," as Ernest Renan so generously phrased it, Islam in its origins is just as shady and approximate as those from which it took its borrowings. It makes immense claims for itself, invokes prostrate submission or "surrender" as a maxim to its adherents, and demands deference and respect from nonbelievers into the bargain. There is nothing—absolutely nothing—in its teachings that can even begin to justify such arrogance and presumption.

The prophet died in the year 632 of our own approximate calendar. The first account of his life was set down a full hundred and twenty years later by Ibn Ishaq, whose original was lost and can only be consulted through its reworked form, authored by Ibn Hisham, who died in 834. Adding to this hearsay and obscurity, there is no agreed-upon account of how the Prophet's followers assembled the Koran, or of how his various sayings (some of them written down by secretaries) became codified. And this familiar problem is further complicated—even more than in the Christian case—by the matter of succession. Unlike Jesus, who apparently undertook to return to earth very soon and who (pace the absurd Dan Brown) left no known descendants, Muhammad was a general and a politician and—though unlike Alexander of Macedonia a prolific father—left no instruction as to who was to take up his mantle. Quarrels over the leadership began almost as soon as he died, and so Islam had its first major schism—between the Sunni and the Shia—before it had even established itself as a system. We need take no side in the schism, except to point out that one at least of the schools of interpretation must be quite mistaken. And the initial identification of Islam with an earthly caliphate, made up of disputatious contenders for the said mantle, marked it from the very beginning as man-made.

It is said by some Muslim authorities that during the first caliphate of Abu Bakr, immediately after Muhammad's death, concern arose that his orally transmitted words might be forgotten. So many Muslim soldiers had been killed in battle that the number who had the Koran safely lodged in their memories had become alarmingly small. It was therefore decided to assemble every living witness, together with "pieces of paper, stones, palm leaves, shoulder-blades, ribs and bits of leather" on which sayings had been scribbled, and give them to Zaid ibn Thabit, one of the Prophet's former secretaries, for an authoritative collation. Once this had been done, the believers had something like an authorized version.

If true, this would date the Koran to a time fairly close to Muhammad's own life. But we swiftly discover that there is no certainty or agreement about the truth of the story. Some say that it was Ali—the fourth and not the first caliph, and the founder of Shiism—who had the idea. Many others—the Sunni majority—assert that it was Caliph Uthman, who reigned from 644 to 656, who made the finalized decision. Told by one of his generals that soldiers from different provinces were fighting over discrepant accounts of the Koran, Uthman ordered Zaid ibn Thabit to bring together the various texts, unify them, and have them transcribed into one. When this task was complete, Uthman ordered standard copies to be sent to Kufa, Basra, Damascus, and elsewhere, with a master copy retained in Medina. Uthman thus played the canonical role that had been taken, in the standardization and purging and censorship of the Christian Bible, by Irenaeus and by Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria. The roll was called, and some texts were declared sacred and inerrant while others became "apocryphal." Outdoing Athanasius, Uthman ordered that all earlier and rival editions be destroyed.

Even supposing this version of events to be correct, which would mean that no chance existed for scholars ever to determine or even dispute what really happened in Muhammad's time, Uthman's attempt to abolish disagreement was a vain one. The written Arabic language has two features that make it difficult for an outsider to learn: it uses dots to distinguish consonants like "b" and "t," and in its original form it had no sign or symbol for short vowels, which could be rendered by various dashes or comma-type marks. Vastly different readings even of Uthman's version were enabled by these variations. Arabic script itself was not standardized until the later part of the ninth century, and in the meantime the undotted and oddly voweled Koran was generating wildly different explanations of itself, as it still does. This might not matter in the case of the Iliad, but remember that we are supposed to be talking about the unalterable (and final) word of god. There is obviously a connection between the sheer feebleness of this claim and the absolutely fanatical certainty with which it is advanced. To take one instance that can hardly be called negligible, the Arabic words written on the outside of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem are different from any version that appears in the Koran.

The situation is even more shaky and deplorable when we come to the hadith, or that vast orally generated secondary literature which supposedly conveys the sayings and actions of Muhammad, the tale of the Koran's compilation, and the sayings of "the companions of the Prophet." Each hadith, in order to be considered authentic, must be supported in turn by an isnad, or chain, of supposedly reliable witnesses. Many Muslims allow their attitude to everyday life to be determined by these anecdotes: regarding dogs as unclean, for example, on the sole ground that Muhammad is said to have done so.

As one might expect, the six authorized collections of hadith, which pile hearsay upon hearsay through the unwinding of the long spool of isnads ("A told B, who had it from C, who learned it from D"), were put together centuries after the events they purport to describe. One of the most famous of the six compilers, Bukhari, died 238 years after the death of Muhammad. Bukhari is deemed unusually reliable and honest by Muslims, and seems to have deserved his reputation in that, of the three hundred thousand attestations he accumulated in a lifetime devoted to the project, he ruled that two hundred thousand of them were entirely valueless and unsupported. Further exclusion of dubious traditions and questionable isnads reduced his grand total to ten thousand hadith. You are free to believe, if you so choose, that out of this formless mass of illiterate and half-remembered witnessing the pious Bukhari, more than two centuries later, managed to select only the pure and undefiled ones that would bear examination.

The likelihood that any of this humanly derived rhetoric is "inerrant," let alone "final," is conclusively disproved not just by its innumerable contradictions and incoherencies but by the famous episode of the Koran's alleged "satanic verses," out of which Salman Rushdie was later to make a literary project. On this much-discussed occasion, Muhammad was seeking to conciliate some leading Meccan poly-theists and in due course experienced a "revelation" that allowed them after all to continue worshipping some of the older local deities. It struck him later that this could not be right and that he must have inadvertently been "channeled" by the devil, who for some reason had briefly chosen to relax his habit of combating monotheists on their own ground. (Muhammad believed devoutly not just in the devil himself but in minor desert devils, or djinns, as well.) It was noticed even by some of his wives that the Prophet was capable of having a "revelation" that happened to suit his short-term needs, and he was sometimes teased about it. We are further told—on no authority that need be believed—that when he experienced revelation in public he would sometimes be gripped by pain and experience loud ringing in his ears. Beads of sweat would burst out on him, even on the chilliest of days. Some heartless Christian critics have suggested that he was an epileptic (though they fail to notice the same symptoms in the seizure experienced by Paul on the road to Damascus), but there is no need for us to speculate in this way. It is enough to rephrase David Hume's unavoidable question. Which is more likely—that a man should be used as a transmitter by god to deliver some already existing revelations, or that he should utter some already existing revelations and believe himself to be, or claim to be, ordered by god to do so? As for the pains and the noises in the head, or the sweat, one can only regret the seeming fact that direct communication with god is not an experience of calm, beauty, and lucidity.