The End of Faith—Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
by Sam Harris
W.W. Norton & Co., 2004
237 pages, plus 62 pages of notes
and
Imperial Hubris--Why the West is Losing the War on Terror
By Michael Scheuer
Potomac Books, Inc., 2004
275 pages, plus 22 pages of notes
Now that we are past the mid-term election repudiation of George W. Bush and his policies, it may be anti-climactic to review a couple books that critique much that has been evil and foolhardy about his administration and party. But I doubt it.
Indeed, these two books speak to the on-going irrationality and horror that threaten us no matter who is in charge of the American republic. Taken in tandem, Sam Harris's The End of Faith and Michael Scheuer's Imperial Hubris ought to send a lightning bolt of fear through you. But it will be therapeutic.
Despite an unnecessary detouring chapter or two, Harris makes it clear that faith, itself—the notion of making decisions, especially national and international policy decisions based on religious faith—is dangerous to our survival.
Harris opens the book with a hair-raising description of a Muslim youth, wrapped in plastic explosives, about to blast himself and the infidels around him to, quite literally, Kingdom Come. His passing will not mourned. It will be celebrated by his family and friends because they, too, have faith. They really believe this stuff.
Our justified fear of such irrational, faith-based behavior must not be reserved for Muslim jihadists, says Harris. Fundamentalist Christians, such as the ones who have so enthusiastically supported Mr. Bush, are equally to be feared, he asserts. He quotes the Bible, Deuteronomy 13:12-16, and its commandment to “put to the sword” even those “of your own stock” who have led their fellow citizens astray, [by] saying ‘Let us go and serve other gods.’” Their towns, says this biblical command, must be "laid under the curse of destruction.”
Don’t like the Old Testament? Try the words of Jesus, himself, suggests Harris: “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.”
What is a person (and there are plenty of them) who thinks the Bible is the infallible word of God to do?
Harris answers his own question: “Whenever a man imagines that he needs only the truth of a proposition without evidence—that unbelievers will go to hell, that Jews drink the blood of infants—he becomes capable of anything.”
The last known burning of a Catholic heretic took place as recently as 1850, Harris notes, but faith manifests itself in contemporary American politics in ways that risk far more than one life at the stake. “For many years,” Harris writes, “U.S. policy in the Middle East has been shaped, at least in part, by the interests that fundamentalist Christians have in the future of a Jewish state … “Christians support Israel because they believe that the final consolidation of Jewish power in the Holy Land—specifically the rebuilding of Solomon’s temple—will usher in both the second coming of Christ and the final destruction of the Jews.”
In a footnote, we learn President Reagan is reported to have told a legislator that “everything was in place for the Battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ.” He had Jerry Falwell sit in on national security briefings, and had a fundamentalist Armageddon advocate lecture his generals.
In analyzing aerial photos of combat scenarios in Mogadishu, Lieutenant General William Boykin, deputy under secretary of defense for intelligence, said certain shadows in the image revealed “the principalities of darkness... a demonic presence in that city that God revealed to me as the enemy.” Congressman Christopher Shays of Connecticut recently said U.S. troops in Iraq were “surely doing God’s work.” Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said in a speech to the Chicago Divinity School, “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a supreme being…All this, I say, is most unEuropean and helps explain why our people are inclined to understand, as St. Paul did, that government carries the sword as the ‘minister of God,’ to ‘execute wrath’ upon the evildoer.’”
Sound familiar? Evildoer, of course, used to be a favorite term of the President who listens to a higher authority.
Are we governed by religious zealots? Or surrounded by them? “According to Gallup, 35 percent of Americans believe that the Bible is the literal and unerrant word of the Creator of the universe,” Harris writes. “Another 48 percent believe it is the inspired word of the same [unerrant God].” I'll do the math for you: that's 83 percent.
A 2003 Pew survey found that 44 percent of Americans believe God gave Israel to the Jews. This is probably the same 44 percent who believe or strongly believe that Jesus will return with the next 50 years, says Harris. A Zogby poll of October 2006 found that almost a third of all likely U.S. voters believe or strongly believe that “Israel must have all of the promised land, including Jerusalem, to facilitate the second coming of the messiah.”
“How is it,” Harris challenges his readers, “that, in this one area of our lives, we have convinced ourselves that our beliefs about the world can float entirely free of reason and evidence?”
“Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendents murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything—anything—be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we live in.”
On what basis could a rational person decide that the Christian faith is more credible than the Muslim suicide bomber’s faith?
Now put down that book and pick up Imperial Hubris. Author Michael Scheuer headed the CIA's al-Qai'ida unit until he quit in disgust at the ineptitude of the Bush administration's handling of the so-called war on terror. This on-the-job experience would seem to give him some insight, some credentials.
Although Scheuer can get tangled up in his own syntax sometimes to the point where you aren't quite sure what he wants you to think (clarified by reading interviews with him elsewhere), some points do emerge most vividly:
1. The Bush administration has been driven by faith in, at least, its own infallibility, so "don't confuse us with facts," even if you are an al Qai'ida expert.
2. Al Qai'ida is, in fact, a faith-driven organization. It's all about driving out the infidels, killing the infidels, and rebuilding the pre-crusades Islam empire from Spain to Indonesia.
3. Al Qai'ida isn't hard to figure out, says Scheuer. He says Osama bin Laden is a man of his word. He tells you in clear language what he intends to do, first giving you a chance to repent—it’s the Muslim custom—and then does it. It may take a year or two, but he will do it. Believe it.
4. In the world of Islam, bin Laden is the main man. He is their champion. Youth are flocking to him.
5. We are insane to describe this as a war on terror and then respond as though it were a criminal act by thugs to be brought to justice. We must treat it as a war, a true war, says Scheuer, with all the features and ferocity of war.
Where Scheuer’s book gets confusing is in his insistence that the continued presence of U.S. forces in Muslim lands, such as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, fuels the fires of radical Islam. He says there is no way we are going to win the war in Afghanistan because Muslims are committed to the long-haul struggle, and because our very presence inflames their faith-driven zeal. (Plus, “The idea that we can control Afghanistan with 22,000 soldiers, most of whom are indifferent to the task, is far-fetched,” says Scheuer in a Harper’s magazine inteview, August 23, 2006. “The Soviets couldn't do it with 150,000 soldiers and utter brutality.”)
The book fails to clearly reconcile this criticism with his insistence that we fight radical Islam as a true war. What would he suggest as a strategy? Barricade our ports? Nuke Kabul and Teheran? Again, we find this best clarified in a separate magazine interview. In an interview with the Minneapolis Tribune, Scheuer says there is a very real risk that agents of bin Laden will, in due course, set off a nuclear bomb in the United States. “I think we would be silly to assume they can't do it. Which is one reason I've been so outspoken about trying to control our borders.”
Scheuer’s hard-nosed analysis, taken together with Harris's highly rational expose’ of faith as the driving force behind radical Islam, and equally rational condemnation of faith as an American policy guide, is truly a reason for the terror we ought to be feeling.
We have nothing to fear but faith, itself.
Monday, November 20, 2006
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Book review: Triumph Forsaken--The Vietnam War, 1954-1965
by Mark Moyar
Cambridge University Press, 2006
416 pages, with 82 pages of notes
The difference between Mark Moyar’s enormously long and exquisitely detailed political-military history of Vietnam and Tolstoy’s War and Peace is that Moyar cites his sources. Unfortunately, his notes-—if one actually takes time to examine them—-often do not support his point. It might better have been cast as a novel.
Indeed, it appears to me Moyar’s obviously long and painstaking research does not even support one of his main theses: that the domino theory was, in fact, valid. His case for his second thesis is much stronger: the United States flubbed several opportunities to actually win something that might be called victory.
Harvard and Cambridge educated Mark Moyar is associate professor of military history at the U.S. Marine Corps University, which is itself something of a conundrum. When did the Marine Corps training facility at Quantico, Virginia, rise to the status of university? I digress, but the thought raises related questions about the bias that Moyar might bring to the debate.
And a debate it is. Big time. There is something of an academic insurgency growing around revisionist history of the Vietnam War, and Moyar, while not the point man on this patrol—-Cornell University professor Keith Taylor has that assignment-—is certainly one of its top intelligence officers.
Despite the failure of this book to connect facts to conclusions (maybe the conclusions were unnecessary?), a patient reader can learn a lot from it. Moyar takes us back to the twelfth century to see how political power and boundaries have shifted endlessly, how the influence of China, France, the Soviet Union, and Japan has ebbed and flowed over the centuries. He gives us a remarkable portrait of the activist as a young man: Ho Chi Minh. I had no idea that Ho was one of the founders of the Socialist Party in France, where he lived after WWII. I had no idea he was the communist agent-in-place who launched successively the communist movements in Laos, Thailand, and Indonesia.
Moyar informs us how Eisenhower kept troops uninvolved by consistently threatening to nuke adversaries, how newly elected President John F. Kennedy’s “dressing down” by Khrushchev in Vienna humiliated the young president into taking a stronger stand in Vietnam than he otherwise might have, and how then, like now, many highly regarded generals strongly advised involvement in Vietnam was a very bad idea.
Why do I trust Moyar’s assertions of these facts when I question others? It seems harmless to or irrelevant whether I take his word on these points. I am not prepared to do all the research to find out. Nevertheless, my scribbled dialogue with Moyar fills his pages: What is your evidence of this? How do you know that?
Case in point: Moyar writes, “The North Vietnamese published grossly inflated rice production statistics [late 1950s] in order to hide both their failures and the enormous disparity in agricultural productivity between North Vietnam and South Vietnam.” He cites two authors—-one a North Vietnamese-—to support this statement. But Moyar then adds, after his citation number, almost as though he can’t resist, “The only people who enjoyed better living conditions under Communist management than before were a select number of industrial workers and the functionaries of the Communist Party.”
How does he know that? At 35, he is too young to have been there. If he got it from a source who was there or who has statistics, he should cite him. If not, it’s a gratuitous, unfounded quip.
Case in point: Moyar writes, “Reports of killings by the Diem government [late 1950s] during the Denounce the Communists campaign, though, were much less plentiful than those on the North Vietnamese side during the same period, despite the West’s much greater access to the South and its people. In 1959, the Communists complained that from April 1955 to January 1959, the Denounce the Communists campaign took 4,971 lives. Even if the Communists were not exaggerating, the number of persons killed was much lower than the number killed by the Communists in 1945 and 1946 and in the later land reform campaign. (23)
O.K., hike back to note 23 and what do we find? “The Communist complaint is in Thayer, War by Other Means, 117. The Canadian component of the International Control Commission observed that the violence was substantially worse in the North than in the South. Ross, In the Interest of Peace. 121-2.”
I’m not a historian, nor do I play one on TV. But if Moyar’s wants to persuade the reader that he’s not stretching the true meaning of his sources’ statements, citations like that—-and there are many—-fail completely to persuade me. He gives me no confidence at all that his cited sources actually support his assertion. Further, should I accept his premise that his guys are the good guys because their 4,971 killings were-—maybe-—dwarfed by those of the other side ten years earlier? It’s a silly premise.
But read on. You’ll see where he’s headed: He’s building a case that Ngo Dinh Diem was “a wise and talented leader” who was on his way to success in warding off the communist threat, if only the United States had stepped up to the plate when they should have, if only there weren’t such incompetent U.S. ambassadors, if only JFK hadn’t appointed Henry Cabot Lodge for reasons of U.S. domestic politics, if only Henry Cabot Lodge hadn’t engineered (or at least acquiesced to) the assassination of Diem.
And what of the domino theory? To his credit, and rare for historians, Moyar says his research changed his mind. He had already published a history of the latter half of the Vietnam War. In that book, Moyar says, “I also contended that U.S. politicians were wrong to view the preservation of the South Vietnamese government as a vital U.S. interest. In the course of writing Triumph Forsaken, analysis of hitherto unappreciated facts caused me to alter this and other conclusions …”
To his credit, yes, but I’ll be darned if I can find an exposition of those “unappreciated facts” or his altered logic in Triumph Forsaken. At most, I find a laying out of 1960s opinions by politicians that Malaya, Singapore, and Indonesia were really the prize worth fighting for because they “yielded much of the world’s natural rubber and tin” and that Ho had spent time there building communist cells before hunkering down in Hanoi.
Moyar’s final sentence: "The war in Vietnam that America’s young men were about to fight, therefore, was not to be a foolish war fought under wise constraints, but a wise war fought under foolish constraints.”
It was a wise war only if one accepts the validity of the domino theory. Moyar’s case for this is weak, barely there at all, despite his enormously detailed descriptions of village fortifications, construction techniques of the Ho Chi Minh trail, and precisely how the bullets and knives were delivered to the body of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother. All interesting stuff, but irrelevant to his argument.
Perhaps the most compelling rebuttal (and there are many on the Internet) of all came in the New York Times October 25th. Journalist Keith Bradsher’s story, “Vietnam’s Roaring Economy is Set for World Stage,” offers this: “Nearly four decades ago, South Vietnamese leaders mapped out their battle plans inside the presidential palace here [Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon]. When they lost the war, the palace became the base for the People’s Committee, which worked to impose tight Communist control.
"But in September it was the scene of a very different gathering: a board meeting of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. In the three decades since Vietnam has gone from communism to a form of capitalism, it has begun surpassing many neighbors. It has Asia’s second-fastest-growing economy, with 8.4 percent growth last year, trailing only China’s, and the pace of exports to the United States is rising faster than even China’s.
“American companies like Intel and Nike, and investors across the region, are pouring billions of dollars into the country; overseas Vietnamese are returning to run the ventures.
“In the latest sign of Vietnam’s economic vitality, trade negotiators from around the world are preparing, after more than a decade of talks, to put the finishing touches on an agreement, possibly by Oct. 26, for Vietnam to join the World Trade Organization.”
In the games of international power politics, it seems Monopoly trumps dominoes.
Cambridge University Press, 2006
416 pages, with 82 pages of notes
The difference between Mark Moyar’s enormously long and exquisitely detailed political-military history of Vietnam and Tolstoy’s War and Peace is that Moyar cites his sources. Unfortunately, his notes-—if one actually takes time to examine them—-often do not support his point. It might better have been cast as a novel.
Indeed, it appears to me Moyar’s obviously long and painstaking research does not even support one of his main theses: that the domino theory was, in fact, valid. His case for his second thesis is much stronger: the United States flubbed several opportunities to actually win something that might be called victory.
Harvard and Cambridge educated Mark Moyar is associate professor of military history at the U.S. Marine Corps University, which is itself something of a conundrum. When did the Marine Corps training facility at Quantico, Virginia, rise to the status of university? I digress, but the thought raises related questions about the bias that Moyar might bring to the debate.
And a debate it is. Big time. There is something of an academic insurgency growing around revisionist history of the Vietnam War, and Moyar, while not the point man on this patrol—-Cornell University professor Keith Taylor has that assignment-—is certainly one of its top intelligence officers.
Despite the failure of this book to connect facts to conclusions (maybe the conclusions were unnecessary?), a patient reader can learn a lot from it. Moyar takes us back to the twelfth century to see how political power and boundaries have shifted endlessly, how the influence of China, France, the Soviet Union, and Japan has ebbed and flowed over the centuries. He gives us a remarkable portrait of the activist as a young man: Ho Chi Minh. I had no idea that Ho was one of the founders of the Socialist Party in France, where he lived after WWII. I had no idea he was the communist agent-in-place who launched successively the communist movements in Laos, Thailand, and Indonesia.
Moyar informs us how Eisenhower kept troops uninvolved by consistently threatening to nuke adversaries, how newly elected President John F. Kennedy’s “dressing down” by Khrushchev in Vienna humiliated the young president into taking a stronger stand in Vietnam than he otherwise might have, and how then, like now, many highly regarded generals strongly advised involvement in Vietnam was a very bad idea.
Why do I trust Moyar’s assertions of these facts when I question others? It seems harmless to or irrelevant whether I take his word on these points. I am not prepared to do all the research to find out. Nevertheless, my scribbled dialogue with Moyar fills his pages: What is your evidence of this? How do you know that?
Case in point: Moyar writes, “The North Vietnamese published grossly inflated rice production statistics [late 1950s] in order to hide both their failures and the enormous disparity in agricultural productivity between North Vietnam and South Vietnam.” He cites two authors—-one a North Vietnamese-—to support this statement. But Moyar then adds, after his citation number, almost as though he can’t resist, “The only people who enjoyed better living conditions under Communist management than before were a select number of industrial workers and the functionaries of the Communist Party.”
How does he know that? At 35, he is too young to have been there. If he got it from a source who was there or who has statistics, he should cite him. If not, it’s a gratuitous, unfounded quip.
Case in point: Moyar writes, “Reports of killings by the Diem government [late 1950s] during the Denounce the Communists campaign, though, were much less plentiful than those on the North Vietnamese side during the same period, despite the West’s much greater access to the South and its people. In 1959, the Communists complained that from April 1955 to January 1959, the Denounce the Communists campaign took 4,971 lives. Even if the Communists were not exaggerating, the number of persons killed was much lower than the number killed by the Communists in 1945 and 1946 and in the later land reform campaign. (23)
O.K., hike back to note 23 and what do we find? “The Communist complaint is in Thayer, War by Other Means, 117. The Canadian component of the International Control Commission observed that the violence was substantially worse in the North than in the South. Ross, In the Interest of Peace. 121-2.”
I’m not a historian, nor do I play one on TV. But if Moyar’s wants to persuade the reader that he’s not stretching the true meaning of his sources’ statements, citations like that—-and there are many—-fail completely to persuade me. He gives me no confidence at all that his cited sources actually support his assertion. Further, should I accept his premise that his guys are the good guys because their 4,971 killings were-—maybe-—dwarfed by those of the other side ten years earlier? It’s a silly premise.
But read on. You’ll see where he’s headed: He’s building a case that Ngo Dinh Diem was “a wise and talented leader” who was on his way to success in warding off the communist threat, if only the United States had stepped up to the plate when they should have, if only there weren’t such incompetent U.S. ambassadors, if only JFK hadn’t appointed Henry Cabot Lodge for reasons of U.S. domestic politics, if only Henry Cabot Lodge hadn’t engineered (or at least acquiesced to) the assassination of Diem.
And what of the domino theory? To his credit, and rare for historians, Moyar says his research changed his mind. He had already published a history of the latter half of the Vietnam War. In that book, Moyar says, “I also contended that U.S. politicians were wrong to view the preservation of the South Vietnamese government as a vital U.S. interest. In the course of writing Triumph Forsaken, analysis of hitherto unappreciated facts caused me to alter this and other conclusions …”
To his credit, yes, but I’ll be darned if I can find an exposition of those “unappreciated facts” or his altered logic in Triumph Forsaken. At most, I find a laying out of 1960s opinions by politicians that Malaya, Singapore, and Indonesia were really the prize worth fighting for because they “yielded much of the world’s natural rubber and tin” and that Ho had spent time there building communist cells before hunkering down in Hanoi.
Moyar’s final sentence: "The war in Vietnam that America’s young men were about to fight, therefore, was not to be a foolish war fought under wise constraints, but a wise war fought under foolish constraints.”
It was a wise war only if one accepts the validity of the domino theory. Moyar’s case for this is weak, barely there at all, despite his enormously detailed descriptions of village fortifications, construction techniques of the Ho Chi Minh trail, and precisely how the bullets and knives were delivered to the body of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother. All interesting stuff, but irrelevant to his argument.
Perhaps the most compelling rebuttal (and there are many on the Internet) of all came in the New York Times October 25th. Journalist Keith Bradsher’s story, “Vietnam’s Roaring Economy is Set for World Stage,” offers this: “Nearly four decades ago, South Vietnamese leaders mapped out their battle plans inside the presidential palace here [Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon]. When they lost the war, the palace became the base for the People’s Committee, which worked to impose tight Communist control.
"But in September it was the scene of a very different gathering: a board meeting of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. In the three decades since Vietnam has gone from communism to a form of capitalism, it has begun surpassing many neighbors. It has Asia’s second-fastest-growing economy, with 8.4 percent growth last year, trailing only China’s, and the pace of exports to the United States is rising faster than even China’s.
“American companies like Intel and Nike, and investors across the region, are pouring billions of dollars into the country; overseas Vietnamese are returning to run the ventures.
“In the latest sign of Vietnam’s economic vitality, trade negotiators from around the world are preparing, after more than a decade of talks, to put the finishing touches on an agreement, possibly by Oct. 26, for Vietnam to join the World Trade Organization.”
In the games of international power politics, it seems Monopoly trumps dominoes.
Book review: The End of Iraq: How American incompetence created a war without end
by Peter W. Galbraith
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2006
One of the guidelines learned decades ago in army intelligence officers' school was "evaluate the source as much as the information."
In approaching the pile of articles and books about Iraq that is piling up in places like The Atlantic Monthly and Borders bookstores -- trying to piece together a semblance of accurate history and truthful, realistic intelligence -- one must conclude that Peter W. Galbraith has a credibility that far surpasses that of just about anyone else. At least I have encountered none whose judgment on the matter I would trust more.
As the enigmatic New York Times columnist David Brooks puts it: "President Bush doesn't lack for critics when it comes to his Iraq policies, but the smartest and most devastating of these is Peter W. Galbraith."
Let's get two things out of the way right up front: Yes, he is the son of John Kenneth Galbraith. But the younger Galbraith makes his own way; he makes no mention of his family tree until a fine-print acknowledgement tucked-in near the index, when he writes movingly: "Here I will only say he that inspired me, by example and in his words, to pursue a career devoted to mitigating the consequences of war and, now, to write about it."
Second, when one grasps the details of how Galbraith gathered his knowledge during 25 years of service as a staff officer to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and ambassador to Croatia, when one sees where has been and when, with whom he has spoken to and under what circumstances, and his own private forays across Iraqi rivers on the edge of combat (because he cared enough), the conclusion can only be: This guy has been there. This guy knows the score. The miracle is that he survived to give us this book.
If you have read anything about T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), or even seen the movie, think "Galbraith of Iraq," moving behind the scenes, sometimes officially, often privately, coaching Iraqis and especially Kurds on how to deal with American illogic. But Galbraith needs no Lowell Thomas to spin tales of intrigue from the desert. He is his own man, writing from his own journals, and although less flamboyant and (apparently) less addicted to combat than Lawrence, his intimate knowledge and credibility among key Iraqis may do us a lot more good.
At bottom, the point of the book is that Iraq is a fabrication of Winston Churchill and friends as they closed the coffin on the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. As such, it forced Shiites, Sunni Arabs, and Kurds into an ethnic and religious salad bowl that was doomed from the start. It never was a real nation, contends Galbraith, and thus it is pointless to force it to be so now. Furthermore, he points out, the new Iraqi constitution, crammed down their throats by Paul Bremer and Condoleeza Rice, actually pretty much locks in an independent Kurdistan, anyway, even as the Bush administration continues to bluster futilely about a democratic nation called Iraq. We are wasting our time, Galbraith says, more or less.
The book can conveniently be divided into four sections: a laying-out of the first Bush administration's duplicity in dealing with the Kurds (it went far beyond anything we might have guessed), a mind-blowing (and painfully specific) expose' of the second Bush administration's chutzpah and stupidity in non-planning and then occupying Iraq, then a review of reality as he sees it, followed by a prescription.
Some highlights:
[regarding the looting Baghdad] "On April 11-two days after Saddam's regime collapsed and The United States became legally responsible for Baghdad-looters attacked the museum. The museum housed artifacts going back to the beginning of human civilization ... As the looters attacked, the museum staff begged for help from the Marines at a nearby traffic circle. Although they were just 100 yards away, they refused to help ... I arrived at the museum on the morning of April 15, the day after the Marines were fully deployed to protect the building ... over the three weeks I was in Iraq [one of scores of times], I went unchallenged into many Iraqi buildings and facilities. ... Looters were at work in every building I visited, but not once did I have any sense of danger ...I rescued several treaties ...Many of the sites had obvious intelligence value ...yet neither the Pentagon nor the CIA seems to have made any effort to mine these sites for intelligence ...As part of its case for war, the Bush administration alleged that Iraq was covertly acquiring materials for weapons of mass destruction, like yellowcake from Niger, while Vice President Cheney insisted Saddam's embassies were in contact with al-Qaeda. The Foreign Ministry would have been a logical place to find documents relating to Iraq's foreign intelligence activities and procurement of forbidden materials. But looters were the only people I saw prying open foreign ministry safes."
"On my return to Washington in May, I spent an hour at the Pentagon briefing Paul Wolfowitz on what I had seen in Iraq. My account of looting of government ministries and sites with dangerous materials visibly upset Wolfowitz. I hoped his anger was directed at the planning failures I was describing, but I realized he was angry with me for being critical. After that meeting, neither Wolfowitz nor his staff returned my phone calls and I had no further contact with the Pentagon." "For a full year before the war, the State Department had spent millions of dollars working with Iraqi exiles and experts to prepare a 15-volume blueprint for how Iraq might be governed after the war. The Administration was so disorganized and so faction-ridden that the Defense Department (for which Bremer would work and which handled his briefings) did not tell him that this State Department study existed. He would learn of it in the press sometime after arriving in Baghdad."
"Bremer's grand entry represented a 180-degree turn in strategy from Garner's."
"Bremer was Kissinger's protege'
"Two months before he ordered troops into [Iraq, Bush] didn't know that Islam was divided between Shiites and Sunnis."
Six young people who had not applied for jobs in post-war Iraq, and who had no relevant job experience, were hired without interview and without security clearance and ended up being responsible for spending Iraq's budget, writes Galbraith. "Finally the young people realized that the one thing they had in common was they had posted their resumes at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank. The Pentagon hired eleven people off the Heritage Foundation Web site, including those six who handled Iraq's budget."
"Without there being an Iraqi nation, it was impossible to create a genuine national army."
In recommending that Iraq be allowed to dissolve into a Shiastan (for the Shiites), a Sunni Arab zone, and a Kurdistan, Galbraith recognizes that critics will say such a solution will yield its own problems. But after weighing the possible repercussions, this experienced appraiser of Iraq thinks it is the best of only bad options.
"There is no good solution to the mess in Iraq," Galbraith writes. "The country has broken up and is in the throes of civil war. The Unites States cannot put the country back together again and it cannot stop the civil war."
To the nay-sayers who say Turkey would never stand by and let an independent Kurdistan arise, Galbraith has reasoned reply: "Turkish attitudes toward Iraqi Kurdistan have evolved significantly since 2003 ... a Turkish military intervention in northern Iraq would derail its chances of joining the European Union." (Moreover, he reminds us that a little-remembered add-on treaty of Sevres at the end of World War I -- which the Turks lost -- guarantees the Kurdish peoples of Turkey independence from Turkey if they should but ask for it. He doesn't make any claim that it could actually happen in today's modern context, though.)
And as for a Shiastan becoming a mere satellite of Iran, Galbraith says the Shiites of that region already are more loyal to Iran than to Iraq. It is their theology that binds them, not boundaries on a map.
Maybe Paul Wolfowitz didn't want to listen to Galbraith. But at least we can.
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2006
One of the guidelines learned decades ago in army intelligence officers' school was "evaluate the source as much as the information."
In approaching the pile of articles and books about Iraq that is piling up in places like The Atlantic Monthly and Borders bookstores -- trying to piece together a semblance of accurate history and truthful, realistic intelligence -- one must conclude that Peter W. Galbraith has a credibility that far surpasses that of just about anyone else. At least I have encountered none whose judgment on the matter I would trust more.
As the enigmatic New York Times columnist David Brooks puts it: "President Bush doesn't lack for critics when it comes to his Iraq policies, but the smartest and most devastating of these is Peter W. Galbraith."
Let's get two things out of the way right up front: Yes, he is the son of John Kenneth Galbraith. But the younger Galbraith makes his own way; he makes no mention of his family tree until a fine-print acknowledgement tucked-in near the index, when he writes movingly: "Here I will only say he that inspired me, by example and in his words, to pursue a career devoted to mitigating the consequences of war and, now, to write about it."
Second, when one grasps the details of how Galbraith gathered his knowledge during 25 years of service as a staff officer to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and ambassador to Croatia, when one sees where has been and when, with whom he has spoken to and under what circumstances, and his own private forays across Iraqi rivers on the edge of combat (because he cared enough), the conclusion can only be: This guy has been there. This guy knows the score. The miracle is that he survived to give us this book.
If you have read anything about T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), or even seen the movie, think "Galbraith of Iraq," moving behind the scenes, sometimes officially, often privately, coaching Iraqis and especially Kurds on how to deal with American illogic. But Galbraith needs no Lowell Thomas to spin tales of intrigue from the desert. He is his own man, writing from his own journals, and although less flamboyant and (apparently) less addicted to combat than Lawrence, his intimate knowledge and credibility among key Iraqis may do us a lot more good.
At bottom, the point of the book is that Iraq is a fabrication of Winston Churchill and friends as they closed the coffin on the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. As such, it forced Shiites, Sunni Arabs, and Kurds into an ethnic and religious salad bowl that was doomed from the start. It never was a real nation, contends Galbraith, and thus it is pointless to force it to be so now. Furthermore, he points out, the new Iraqi constitution, crammed down their throats by Paul Bremer and Condoleeza Rice, actually pretty much locks in an independent Kurdistan, anyway, even as the Bush administration continues to bluster futilely about a democratic nation called Iraq. We are wasting our time, Galbraith says, more or less.
The book can conveniently be divided into four sections: a laying-out of the first Bush administration's duplicity in dealing with the Kurds (it went far beyond anything we might have guessed), a mind-blowing (and painfully specific) expose' of the second Bush administration's chutzpah and stupidity in non-planning and then occupying Iraq, then a review of reality as he sees it, followed by a prescription.
Some highlights:
[regarding the looting Baghdad] "On April 11-two days after Saddam's regime collapsed and The United States became legally responsible for Baghdad-looters attacked the museum. The museum housed artifacts going back to the beginning of human civilization ... As the looters attacked, the museum staff begged for help from the Marines at a nearby traffic circle. Although they were just 100 yards away, they refused to help ... I arrived at the museum on the morning of April 15, the day after the Marines were fully deployed to protect the building ... over the three weeks I was in Iraq [one of scores of times], I went unchallenged into many Iraqi buildings and facilities. ... Looters were at work in every building I visited, but not once did I have any sense of danger ...I rescued several treaties ...Many of the sites had obvious intelligence value ...yet neither the Pentagon nor the CIA seems to have made any effort to mine these sites for intelligence ...As part of its case for war, the Bush administration alleged that Iraq was covertly acquiring materials for weapons of mass destruction, like yellowcake from Niger, while Vice President Cheney insisted Saddam's embassies were in contact with al-Qaeda. The Foreign Ministry would have been a logical place to find documents relating to Iraq's foreign intelligence activities and procurement of forbidden materials. But looters were the only people I saw prying open foreign ministry safes."
"On my return to Washington in May, I spent an hour at the Pentagon briefing Paul Wolfowitz on what I had seen in Iraq. My account of looting of government ministries and sites with dangerous materials visibly upset Wolfowitz. I hoped his anger was directed at the planning failures I was describing, but I realized he was angry with me for being critical. After that meeting, neither Wolfowitz nor his staff returned my phone calls and I had no further contact with the Pentagon." "For a full year before the war, the State Department had spent millions of dollars working with Iraqi exiles and experts to prepare a 15-volume blueprint for how Iraq might be governed after the war. The Administration was so disorganized and so faction-ridden that the Defense Department (for which Bremer would work and which handled his briefings) did not tell him that this State Department study existed. He would learn of it in the press sometime after arriving in Baghdad."
"Bremer's grand entry represented a 180-degree turn in strategy from Garner's."
"Bremer was Kissinger's protege'
"Two months before he ordered troops into [Iraq, Bush] didn't know that Islam was divided between Shiites and Sunnis."
Six young people who had not applied for jobs in post-war Iraq, and who had no relevant job experience, were hired without interview and without security clearance and ended up being responsible for spending Iraq's budget, writes Galbraith. "Finally the young people realized that the one thing they had in common was they had posted their resumes at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank. The Pentagon hired eleven people off the Heritage Foundation Web site, including those six who handled Iraq's budget."
"Without there being an Iraqi nation, it was impossible to create a genuine national army."
In recommending that Iraq be allowed to dissolve into a Shiastan (for the Shiites), a Sunni Arab zone, and a Kurdistan, Galbraith recognizes that critics will say such a solution will yield its own problems. But after weighing the possible repercussions, this experienced appraiser of Iraq thinks it is the best of only bad options.
"There is no good solution to the mess in Iraq," Galbraith writes. "The country has broken up and is in the throes of civil war. The Unites States cannot put the country back together again and it cannot stop the civil war."
To the nay-sayers who say Turkey would never stand by and let an independent Kurdistan arise, Galbraith has reasoned reply: "Turkish attitudes toward Iraqi Kurdistan have evolved significantly since 2003 ... a Turkish military intervention in northern Iraq would derail its chances of joining the European Union." (Moreover, he reminds us that a little-remembered add-on treaty of Sevres at the end of World War I -- which the Turks lost -- guarantees the Kurdish peoples of Turkey independence from Turkey if they should but ask for it. He doesn't make any claim that it could actually happen in today's modern context, though.)
And as for a Shiastan becoming a mere satellite of Iran, Galbraith says the Shiites of that region already are more loyal to Iran than to Iraq. It is their theology that binds them, not boundaries on a map.
Maybe Paul Wolfowitz didn't want to listen to Galbraith. But at least we can.
Book Review: Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution
by Francis Fukuyama
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
George Ace, a crusty old dairy farmer I once knew, had an expression: "The big print gives it all to you. The fine print takes it all away." That's rather much the way it is with Francis Fukuyama.
Fukuyama, a Johns Hopkins University professor and philosophical gadfly, lays on us provocative titles like, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, or, The End of History, his earlier book, and then starts chiseling away at definitions so as to say, in effect, "Oh, I didn't really mean THAT;" telling you instead that his definition of "human" or of "history" really means only his little narrow, contrived (and maybe marketable?) definition that fits his argument.
George Ace wouldn't have had time for it. Probably only academics and policy wonks would, and that's the dangerous part--dangerous because they might actually buy-into Fukuyama's contrivances. Still, the book is an intellectual pot of coffee: "Good morning! Wake up! There's an issue out there!"
Let me get right to the point, something Fukuyama never does. The book is a call for government to apply the brakes to biotechnology because he fears the nature of Man if an elite class unleashes its super-babies upon society.
The trouble is, it takes him 218 pages to get to the point, although it's a fascinating detour through the Philosophy Hall of Fame: Heidegger, Hegel, Mill, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Locke, and on into Jefferson and Lincoln, for at its core, this is NOT a book about biotechnololgy. It is a book about humanity, human nature, human rights, and therefore the question: What right have we to be tampering with "nature"?-whatever that is.
Indeed, the bulk of the book toys with terms, as the reader watches Fukuyama carve hand-crafted definitions that suit his purpose and shove aside those that-though perfectly logical-block his chosen path.
And where is it he wants to go? To a philosophically-sound-even if contrived or intellectually cooked-basis for saying biotechnology is too scary to be left unregulated, especially when it touches this magical, mystical thing called "human nature."
Fukuyama serves as intellectual tour guide through three schools of thought on human nature and its connection to human rights. The first school (my term, not his) is theology-based; that is, human rights are granted by God, a superior being. This school is no longer in control of western civilization, and hasn't been for a long time, says Fukuyama.
The second school, represented by and perhaps culminating in Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, says human rights come from human nature, though Fukuyama gets remarkably fuzzy when trying to link this human nature to genetics.
The third school says human rights are whatever a political body says they are. And that's what's wrong with society today, says Fukuyama in effect, because it lacks the moral compass of either of the first two schools.
Fukuyama begs us to return, please, the "human nature equals human rights" school of thought, while continually failing to close the deal intellectually as to how human nature automatically gets us to human rights (or even defining human nature in a way that solidifies his argument).
Indeed, his subsequent and perhaps accidental praise of civic control of pharmacology and agricultural biotechnology leave the reader thinking, "Gee, maybe human rights ARE whatever we agree they are," thereby supporting what he wants us to reject.
In the end, maybe it doesn't matter. Even if Fukuyama and his six research assistants cook the philosophical books, they are fascinating books. And even if they do get a few facts wrong here and there-too often citing activist-group propaganda as fact-in the end Francis Fukuyama puts on the table-almost despite himself-an interesting question. Would we accept a biotechnology-granted "soft tyranny" as envisioned in Brave New World, in which everyone is healthy and happy, but has forgotten the meaning of hope, fear, or struggle?
In so asking, he forgets he already gave us the answer, 50 pages back, and the answer is Yes.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
George Ace, a crusty old dairy farmer I once knew, had an expression: "The big print gives it all to you. The fine print takes it all away." That's rather much the way it is with Francis Fukuyama.
Fukuyama, a Johns Hopkins University professor and philosophical gadfly, lays on us provocative titles like, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, or, The End of History, his earlier book, and then starts chiseling away at definitions so as to say, in effect, "Oh, I didn't really mean THAT;" telling you instead that his definition of "human" or of "history" really means only his little narrow, contrived (and maybe marketable?) definition that fits his argument.
George Ace wouldn't have had time for it. Probably only academics and policy wonks would, and that's the dangerous part--dangerous because they might actually buy-into Fukuyama's contrivances. Still, the book is an intellectual pot of coffee: "Good morning! Wake up! There's an issue out there!"
Let me get right to the point, something Fukuyama never does. The book is a call for government to apply the brakes to biotechnology because he fears the nature of Man if an elite class unleashes its super-babies upon society.
The trouble is, it takes him 218 pages to get to the point, although it's a fascinating detour through the Philosophy Hall of Fame: Heidegger, Hegel, Mill, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Locke, and on into Jefferson and Lincoln, for at its core, this is NOT a book about biotechnololgy. It is a book about humanity, human nature, human rights, and therefore the question: What right have we to be tampering with "nature"?-whatever that is.
Indeed, the bulk of the book toys with terms, as the reader watches Fukuyama carve hand-crafted definitions that suit his purpose and shove aside those that-though perfectly logical-block his chosen path.
And where is it he wants to go? To a philosophically-sound-even if contrived or intellectually cooked-basis for saying biotechnology is too scary to be left unregulated, especially when it touches this magical, mystical thing called "human nature."
Fukuyama serves as intellectual tour guide through three schools of thought on human nature and its connection to human rights. The first school (my term, not his) is theology-based; that is, human rights are granted by God, a superior being. This school is no longer in control of western civilization, and hasn't been for a long time, says Fukuyama.
The second school, represented by and perhaps culminating in Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, says human rights come from human nature, though Fukuyama gets remarkably fuzzy when trying to link this human nature to genetics.
The third school says human rights are whatever a political body says they are. And that's what's wrong with society today, says Fukuyama in effect, because it lacks the moral compass of either of the first two schools.
Fukuyama begs us to return, please, the "human nature equals human rights" school of thought, while continually failing to close the deal intellectually as to how human nature automatically gets us to human rights (or even defining human nature in a way that solidifies his argument).
Indeed, his subsequent and perhaps accidental praise of civic control of pharmacology and agricultural biotechnology leave the reader thinking, "Gee, maybe human rights ARE whatever we agree they are," thereby supporting what he wants us to reject.
In the end, maybe it doesn't matter. Even if Fukuyama and his six research assistants cook the philosophical books, they are fascinating books. And even if they do get a few facts wrong here and there-too often citing activist-group propaganda as fact-in the end Francis Fukuyama puts on the table-almost despite himself-an interesting question. Would we accept a biotechnology-granted "soft tyranny" as envisioned in Brave New World, in which everyone is healthy and happy, but has forgotten the meaning of hope, fear, or struggle?
In so asking, he forgets he already gave us the answer, 50 pages back, and the answer is Yes.
Book Review: The Coming Generational Storm
By Lawrence J. Kotlikoff and Scott Burns
The MIT Press—2004
This book, hailed by such giants of the economics profession as Paul A. Samuelson and Daniel McFadden (both Nobel laureates), can be condensed to this: Because of the looming crush of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security costs, the United States is on its way to bankruptcy. Indeed, say Kotlikoff, a professor of economics at Boston University, and Burns, a personal finance columnist for the Dallas Morning News, we’re already bankrupt, but cooking the books so as to keep it quiet.
One consequence will be, they say, the inevitability of reneging on the promise that those 401(k) retirement funds we’ve all been banking on will be taxed at lower rates when we retire. Forget it, they say. Pay your taxes now, while you’ve got the money to do it, via the Roth 401(k) alternative. Or maybe the government will intentionally create inflation, they suggest, so that the big bill for baby boomers will be paid with an intentionally enlarged money supply.
Using surprisingly glib language for an economist—they must be Burns’s words—the book reminds us: “The most common way to renege on official debt is to create inflation. For a quick tutorial in how to do it, just drop by heaven, purgatory, or an even deeper location that may be housing former president Nixon. Ask him to tell you how he reneged on official debt to pay for the Vietnam War. He’ll tell you that he sold bonds to the public to get the money to pay the military. Then he got his buddy Arthur Burns at the Federal Reserve to print money to buy back the bonds.”
I think I counted something like 14 references to printing more money in the span of this book’s 247 pages, not counting notes and index. I got the message. Indeed, it began to irritate me. Did this economist not know that most money in “circulation” is never printed? It is, rather, a buhzillion electronic ledger entries and checkbook balances, largely created through private and governmental borrowing, a miracle of the fractional reserve monetary expansion system.
But more on that digression later.
Having spent seven chapters saying over and over again that we’re all going to financial hell in a hand basket, the authors reveal their prescription for personal salvation in chapter 8: forget the fiction of tax-deferred 401(k) plans; pay off your house before you retire; and buy gold.
That’s it.
Well, almost.
The annoyingly repeated threat of federal money printing really began to grate on me. So I found Kotlikoff’s e-mail address and shot him a note, beginning the dialogue with a question about the need to pay off one’s home when some financial advisors are recommending the opposite. He actually wrote back. Wow.
“Give me a call,” he said. “We can talk about it.” More wow: a best selling author who invites interchange with readers.
I called, and asked my mortgage question again.
“Have you ordered our financial planning software?” he asked.
Oh, jeez. I had been had.
Maybe Kotlikoff sees the future perfectly clear and has precisely the right prescription. But I can no longer take him at his word. Somehow the discovery that he—like everybody else—is trying to sell me something cracked open his credibility.
Yet he probably called his own forecasting home run on this point: The Federal Reserve ceased announcing the M3 figure in November 2005. M3 is the cumulative amount of money--of all kinds, printed and unprinted—in the economy. Critics of the quiet Fed move say it was intended to keep inflationary facts out of our collective economic psyche. Financial analysts saw a massive money supply increase in October.
And oh, yes. Kotlikoff was using the “print money” threat metaphorically, he told me, as a way to short-hand all those things the government does to influence money supply, like massive borrowing.
As accurate as the book seems to be on the coming generational storm and the in-progress inflation to pay for it, it’s the prescription part—the part they want me to order from their Web site—that keeps me wondering.
It’s worth a read. But read others for perspective.
The MIT Press—2004
This book, hailed by such giants of the economics profession as Paul A. Samuelson and Daniel McFadden (both Nobel laureates), can be condensed to this: Because of the looming crush of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security costs, the United States is on its way to bankruptcy. Indeed, say Kotlikoff, a professor of economics at Boston University, and Burns, a personal finance columnist for the Dallas Morning News, we’re already bankrupt, but cooking the books so as to keep it quiet.
One consequence will be, they say, the inevitability of reneging on the promise that those 401(k) retirement funds we’ve all been banking on will be taxed at lower rates when we retire. Forget it, they say. Pay your taxes now, while you’ve got the money to do it, via the Roth 401(k) alternative. Or maybe the government will intentionally create inflation, they suggest, so that the big bill for baby boomers will be paid with an intentionally enlarged money supply.
Using surprisingly glib language for an economist—they must be Burns’s words—the book reminds us: “The most common way to renege on official debt is to create inflation. For a quick tutorial in how to do it, just drop by heaven, purgatory, or an even deeper location that may be housing former president Nixon. Ask him to tell you how he reneged on official debt to pay for the Vietnam War. He’ll tell you that he sold bonds to the public to get the money to pay the military. Then he got his buddy Arthur Burns at the Federal Reserve to print money to buy back the bonds.”
I think I counted something like 14 references to printing more money in the span of this book’s 247 pages, not counting notes and index. I got the message. Indeed, it began to irritate me. Did this economist not know that most money in “circulation” is never printed? It is, rather, a buhzillion electronic ledger entries and checkbook balances, largely created through private and governmental borrowing, a miracle of the fractional reserve monetary expansion system.
But more on that digression later.
Having spent seven chapters saying over and over again that we’re all going to financial hell in a hand basket, the authors reveal their prescription for personal salvation in chapter 8: forget the fiction of tax-deferred 401(k) plans; pay off your house before you retire; and buy gold.
That’s it.
Well, almost.
The annoyingly repeated threat of federal money printing really began to grate on me. So I found Kotlikoff’s e-mail address and shot him a note, beginning the dialogue with a question about the need to pay off one’s home when some financial advisors are recommending the opposite. He actually wrote back. Wow.
“Give me a call,” he said. “We can talk about it.” More wow: a best selling author who invites interchange with readers.
I called, and asked my mortgage question again.
“Have you ordered our financial planning software?” he asked.
Oh, jeez. I had been had.
Maybe Kotlikoff sees the future perfectly clear and has precisely the right prescription. But I can no longer take him at his word. Somehow the discovery that he—like everybody else—is trying to sell me something cracked open his credibility.
Yet he probably called his own forecasting home run on this point: The Federal Reserve ceased announcing the M3 figure in November 2005. M3 is the cumulative amount of money--of all kinds, printed and unprinted—in the economy. Critics of the quiet Fed move say it was intended to keep inflationary facts out of our collective economic psyche. Financial analysts saw a massive money supply increase in October.
And oh, yes. Kotlikoff was using the “print money” threat metaphorically, he told me, as a way to short-hand all those things the government does to influence money supply, like massive borrowing.
As accurate as the book seems to be on the coming generational storm and the in-progress inflation to pay for it, it’s the prescription part—the part they want me to order from their Web site—that keeps me wondering.
It’s worth a read. But read others for perspective.
Book Review: The Real Lincoln: a new look at Abraham lincoln, his agenda, and an unnecessary war
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
I can’t stop thinking about this book. It changes everything I thought I knew about Abraham Lincoln and about U.S. history.
If one is to believe author and Loyola (of Maryland) College professor Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Abraham Lincoln—from the day he entered the political arena in 1832—was unhappy with the U.S. Constitution and campaigned for a highly centralized and powerful “American system,” as Lincoln called it, that would effectively ignore the Constiution or bypass it. And to install this American System that derived from the political lineage of Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay, Lincoln would intentionally goad the South to secede and, relying the new congressional majority created by the South’s absence, launch a brutal, merciless war he mistakenly thought would be a quickie lesson in power politics.
It was, notes DiLorenzo, a miscalculation of unspeakable dimension, the bloodiest, most costly war of our national life, and even so was not enough for Lincoln. Upon conclusion of the Civil War he immediately unleashed an even more ruthless war of extermination against native Americans to make way for that massive “American system” project—the railroads.
Wow. This is not your father’s old history book.
How is it, DiLorenzo asks, that every other nation of the western world—Argentina, Colombia, Chile, indeed all of South America, and the entire British Empire—emancipated slaves and ended slavery without war? Clearly, the Civil War was not about ending slavery, as DiLorenzo makes abundantly clear by quoting Lincoln, himself: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so [Lincoln’s first inaugural address].” Nor was he the least interested in integrating emancipated slaves—few that there were who qualified for emancipation—into mainstream American life. Far from it. He is on record an advocate for resettling Africans to the Caribbean so as not to compete with “free white labor.”
What, then, drove this man to preside over slaughter of thousands of his countrymen? What idea was so overwhelmingly compelling? The answer? “Internal improvements,” says DiLorenzo. Yes, internal improvements, a 19th century buzzword for “infrastructure” or “public works.”
Perhaps like the generation that grew up during the Great Depression, Lincoln may have been molded by the times and inspired by the heroes of his day. Early in his career, says DiLorenzo, Lincoln aspired to be the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois, a tribute to the New York governor who introduced to America both the Erie Canal and the political spoils system.
As a young attorney in Illinois, Lincoln pocketed many of his first fees from a railroad client. A centerpiece of Lincoln’s political apprenticeship was advocating for the interests of major corporations that sought—and got—major subsidies for track development, canal construction, and all manner of “internal improvements,” something the Confederate Constitution later would prohibit spending tax dollars on. These subsidized infrastructural developments—the essence of Alexander Hamilton’s anti-Jeffersonian Whig Party some two generations earlier and Henry Clay’s thereafter—became the heart of the Republican Party as its successor.
The South clung to the Jeffersonian ideal of state sovereignty, limited federal government deriving its powers from states free to secede, and free trade—free of tariffs on goods arriving from Europe. This—as much as any southern behavior—Lincoln and his Republican industrial cronies from the North could not tolerate, for goods entering Southern ports tariff-free would surely bankrupt the North. Indeed, there were pre-war calls for bombardment of Southern ports on these grounds alone.
DiLorenzo doesn’t like Lincoln. Sometimes I found myself wishing DiLorzenzo would dial-back his rhetoric and his running arguments with scholars of contrary view. His argument might be the more palatable for that. Yet the thoroughness of his scholarship and power of his citations carry him through.
In a section entitled, “What if the South had been allowed to leave in peace?” (a question I had asked myself a few times quite before I had ever heard of DiLorenzo or this book), the author lets his imagination run. “…the act of secession would have had exactly the effect the founding fathers expected it to have; it would have tempered the imperialistic proclivities of the central state… After a number of years, the same reasons that led the colonists to form a Union in the first place would likely have become more appealing to both sections, and the Union would probably have been reunited.
“After that, knowing that secession was a real threat, the federal government would have stuck closer to its constitutional bearings.”
DiLorenzo suggests that, as a result, empire building like the Spanish American War and concomitant tax burdens might never have happened. We might have kept out of World War I, the inadequate settlement of which festered into World War II, he notes. Even if one grants DiLorenzo total accuracy and validity on his major premise—that Lincoln intentionally overthrew the Constitution in a hideously bloody coup—one is tempted to ask, Could the America of Jefferson, Jackson, Calhoun, Tyler, and Grover Cleveland (the last President to mount any substantial defense of limited federal power) have stood up to Hitler? To Hirohito? To Khrushchev?
Even if this isn’t any longer the federation of states born in secession from England, is this new nation consecrated at Gettysburg by an ugly, cruel, and dictatorial Abraham Lincoln, better suited to survive in a world of ugly, cruel realities?
Maybe it is.
I can’t stop thinking about this book. It changes everything I thought I knew about Abraham Lincoln and about U.S. history.
If one is to believe author and Loyola (of Maryland) College professor Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Abraham Lincoln—from the day he entered the political arena in 1832—was unhappy with the U.S. Constitution and campaigned for a highly centralized and powerful “American system,” as Lincoln called it, that would effectively ignore the Constiution or bypass it. And to install this American System that derived from the political lineage of Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay, Lincoln would intentionally goad the South to secede and, relying the new congressional majority created by the South’s absence, launch a brutal, merciless war he mistakenly thought would be a quickie lesson in power politics.
It was, notes DiLorenzo, a miscalculation of unspeakable dimension, the bloodiest, most costly war of our national life, and even so was not enough for Lincoln. Upon conclusion of the Civil War he immediately unleashed an even more ruthless war of extermination against native Americans to make way for that massive “American system” project—the railroads.
Wow. This is not your father’s old history book.
How is it, DiLorenzo asks, that every other nation of the western world—Argentina, Colombia, Chile, indeed all of South America, and the entire British Empire—emancipated slaves and ended slavery without war? Clearly, the Civil War was not about ending slavery, as DiLorenzo makes abundantly clear by quoting Lincoln, himself: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so [Lincoln’s first inaugural address].” Nor was he the least interested in integrating emancipated slaves—few that there were who qualified for emancipation—into mainstream American life. Far from it. He is on record an advocate for resettling Africans to the Caribbean so as not to compete with “free white labor.”
What, then, drove this man to preside over slaughter of thousands of his countrymen? What idea was so overwhelmingly compelling? The answer? “Internal improvements,” says DiLorenzo. Yes, internal improvements, a 19th century buzzword for “infrastructure” or “public works.”
Perhaps like the generation that grew up during the Great Depression, Lincoln may have been molded by the times and inspired by the heroes of his day. Early in his career, says DiLorenzo, Lincoln aspired to be the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois, a tribute to the New York governor who introduced to America both the Erie Canal and the political spoils system.
As a young attorney in Illinois, Lincoln pocketed many of his first fees from a railroad client. A centerpiece of Lincoln’s political apprenticeship was advocating for the interests of major corporations that sought—and got—major subsidies for track development, canal construction, and all manner of “internal improvements,” something the Confederate Constitution later would prohibit spending tax dollars on. These subsidized infrastructural developments—the essence of Alexander Hamilton’s anti-Jeffersonian Whig Party some two generations earlier and Henry Clay’s thereafter—became the heart of the Republican Party as its successor.
The South clung to the Jeffersonian ideal of state sovereignty, limited federal government deriving its powers from states free to secede, and free trade—free of tariffs on goods arriving from Europe. This—as much as any southern behavior—Lincoln and his Republican industrial cronies from the North could not tolerate, for goods entering Southern ports tariff-free would surely bankrupt the North. Indeed, there were pre-war calls for bombardment of Southern ports on these grounds alone.
DiLorenzo doesn’t like Lincoln. Sometimes I found myself wishing DiLorzenzo would dial-back his rhetoric and his running arguments with scholars of contrary view. His argument might be the more palatable for that. Yet the thoroughness of his scholarship and power of his citations carry him through.
In a section entitled, “What if the South had been allowed to leave in peace?” (a question I had asked myself a few times quite before I had ever heard of DiLorenzo or this book), the author lets his imagination run. “…the act of secession would have had exactly the effect the founding fathers expected it to have; it would have tempered the imperialistic proclivities of the central state… After a number of years, the same reasons that led the colonists to form a Union in the first place would likely have become more appealing to both sections, and the Union would probably have been reunited.
“After that, knowing that secession was a real threat, the federal government would have stuck closer to its constitutional bearings.”
DiLorenzo suggests that, as a result, empire building like the Spanish American War and concomitant tax burdens might never have happened. We might have kept out of World War I, the inadequate settlement of which festered into World War II, he notes. Even if one grants DiLorenzo total accuracy and validity on his major premise—that Lincoln intentionally overthrew the Constitution in a hideously bloody coup—one is tempted to ask, Could the America of Jefferson, Jackson, Calhoun, Tyler, and Grover Cleveland (the last President to mount any substantial defense of limited federal power) have stood up to Hitler? To Hirohito? To Khrushchev?
Even if this isn’t any longer the federation of states born in secession from England, is this new nation consecrated at Gettysburg by an ugly, cruel, and dictatorial Abraham Lincoln, better suited to survive in a world of ugly, cruel realities?
Maybe it is.
Book Review: Alexander Hamilton
by Ron Chernow
Penguin Press
Ron Chernow writes no small books. His examination of Alexander Hamilton (The Penguin Press, 2004) runs 731 pages of ten-point text, and left this reader bedazzled by both Hamilton’s imperfect genius and Chernow’s perfect pursuit of detail and context.
In the context of contemporary political discourse—such as the recent confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito—perhaps no point in this biographical masterpiece lingers in the reader’s mind more powerfully than this: Those who admonish us to adhere to the goals of “the founding fathers”—excuse me, The Founding Fathers—ignore the reality that Hamilton, Jefferson, John Adams, Madison, Monroe, and their less famous colleagues were vicious political infighters who seldom agreed on anything, leaving it to George Washington to patch over the differences again and again. Indeed, Chernow surfaces credible evidence that Jefferson and Madison even conspired to put a hired-gun journalist on the government payroll for a nonexistent job so he could spend his time publishing murderous slander against Hamilton, largely, and Federalists, in general. It makes the hiring of make-believe journalists by the Bush administration seem like little more than an echo of, well, our founding fathers.
Ain’t reading history great?
When it’s Chernow, yes. His previous works, including Titan, a similarly massive and illuminating examination of John D. Rockefeller, The House of Morgan, and The Warburgs. All provide eyebrow-raising (and highly recommended) insight into past realities that shape our present.
From his illegitimate birth on the tiny Caribbean island of Nevis to Scots parentage, Alexander Hamilton rose to become what Theodore Roosevelt described as “our greatest constructive statesman, possessing the loftiest and keenest intellect of his time.” Chernow, himself, says, “In all probability, Alexander Hamilton is the foremost political figure in American history who never attained the presidency, yet he probably had a much deeper and more lasting impact than many who did.”
Our sixth-grade shorthand version—11th grade, for that matter—of U.S. history inevitably reduces Hamilton to the position of Jefferson adversary: Jefferson the visionary agrarian author of the Declaration of Independence; Hamilton the aristocratic-minded promoter of industry, banks, and professional military. How sad for the kids, for there is much in his conduct and prodigious output to inspire them. It was his precocious teen-age clerking in a Caribbean shipping company that gave him early insight into the workings of both international commerce and the slave trade. (He was one of America’s first and foremost abolitionist in thought and in deed). It was his youthful writings in a St. Croix newspaper, the Royal Danish American Gazette, that so impressed the local business community that they passed the hat to raise funds to send him to New York for a proper education. Upon arrival, he found he hadn’t quite the necessary background for admission to the young King’s College (now Columbia University), and so launched into a self-administered crash course in the classics, and then badgered professors to accelerate his program.
Says Chernow of Hamilton’s first writings, “Once his verbal fountain began to flow, it became a geyser that never ceased,” witnessed most famously by his rapid-fire production of most of The Federalist Papers” some twenty years later and Report on Manufactures, as Treasury Secretary. And it wasn’t just his writings. Hamilton, says Chernow, quickly exhibited a capacity to turn out perfectly formed paragraphs on the stump, a talent he demonstrated within months of his arrival in New York City.
His first big political moment was a rally to protest the Stamp Act, shortly after Paul Revere continued riding into New York to further spread the word. “The rich folklore surrounding this pivotal event in Hamilton’s life suggests that his speech came about spontaneously,” writes Chernow. “After mounting the platform, the slight, boyish speaker started out haltingly, then caught fire in a burst of oratory. If true to his later style, Hamilton gained energy as he spoke. He endorsed the Boston Tea Party, deplored the closure of Boston’s port, endorsed colonial unity against unfair taxation, and came down foursquare for a boycott of British goods…When his speech ended, the crowd stood transfixed in silence, staring at this spellbinding young orator before it erupted in a sustained ovation.”
Alexander Hamilton was but 19. It was a performance he would match again and again in his career: speaking, writing, leading, and creating by sheer force of will, energy and intellect.
Thirty years later, Hamilton’s career began to slide once Washington died in 1799 and was no longer there to moderate Hamilton’s passions. The Federalist Party—the party of Washington, Adams, Hamilton, and greater power for the federal government—crumbled under 10 years of political fratricide between Hamilton and Adams and pressure from Jefferson’s Republican party populism. By 1804, the Federalists couldn’t even find a candidate for New York governor, and many Federalists were reduced to supporting the least troublesome Republican they could find. (Sounds familiar.)
It was in that context, says Chernow, that an improbable chain of events put Hamilton onto the Weehawken, New Jersey, dueling grounds with Vice President Aaron Burr.
Burr’s street-savvy campaigning may have delivered the pivotal votes from New York and thus deprived Federalist John Adams re-election. But Burr could not get past being deprived of the presidency himself, losing it to Jefferson by a single vote in the House, and ending up with the vice presidency. His generally obnoxious behavior thereafter led Jefferson to excommunicate him from the Republican party.
Thus the duel that took Hamilton’s life was a contest of two waning political careers. Burr’s life was in shambles, Hamilton’s power in steep decline. Both were politically desperate. Hamilton saw deep intrigue—not without cause, as historians like Chernow reveal—in Burr’s desperation.
Burr—still Vice President but persona non grata in his own party—was later shown to be secretly negotiating with Britain for the separation of western territories from the United States and was even entertaining delusions of mounting an army to take Mexico (with himself as ruler). But for Hamilton, whose passion for the Union above all else was at a boil when he saw Burr conniving to get New England and New York to secede from Jefferson’s badly-led Union, it became necessary to defend himself on “a matter of honor,” the code words of the day that often led to either apology or a duel. Hamilton had to defend his honor and his reputation, Chernow theorizes with much evidence from Hamilton’s own writings, in order to regain the necessary political clout to defeat Burr and thus save the Union.
The chain of events began, of all places, on State Street, Albany, just up the street from a court where Hamilton, as an attorney, had only weeks before delivered one of the most powerful defenses of freedom of the press ever noted in American history. Afternoon tea-talk led a gentleman at the get-together to describe Hamilton’s unkind description there of Burr to a colleague in a letter. The letter was mischievously intercepted (as was often the case in early America, says Chernow) and delivered to a newspaper, instead.
Burr took exception to Hamilton’s now-published characterization of him, and in due course challenged him to a duel.
Within days, Burr’s pistol ball ripped through Hamilton while Hamilton shot into the air, a common practice to defuse a duel and allow both “gentlemen” to retreat from the grounds with their honor intact. Burr had practiced for days and had no intention of letting his career-long tormentor escape.
New Yorkers were stunned at the news. “French ships in New York harbor sent surgeons specially trained in treating gunshot wounds to see if they could resuscitate Hamilton,” writes Chernow.
“Everybody in New York knew that the city had lost its most distinguished citizen. As statesman Edward Everett later said, Hamilton had set the city on the path to becoming ‘the throne of the western commercial world.’ …For the rest of its term, The New York Supreme Court draped its bench in black fabric, while the Bank of New York building was also sheathed in black. For thirty days, New Yorkers wore black bands on their arms…The New York City Common Council, which paid for the funeral, issued a plea that all business in the city should halt out of respect for Hamilton…So huge was the throng of mourners that the procession streamed on for two hours before the last marchers arrived at Trinity Church.”
I mourned, too. I knew him well, now, thanks to Chernow. What greater compliment can I pay to a biographer?
# # #
Among Hamilton’s accomplishments:
* Top aide to General George Washington and chief speech writer for President George Washington;
* Participated in the founding in 1785 of the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves (abolition of slavery)
* Probably the singlemost influential actor in the movement to adopt the Constitution, recognizing early-on that “as New York went, so went the nation,” and so—with the assistance of James Madison (later his bitter enemy) and John Jay—planned and launched The Federalist Papers as a series of letters intended to sway the voters of New York;
* As first Secretary of the Treasury, laid out the financial basis for the new United States, relying heavily on borrowing and thus running smack into a jealous and contrary Thomas Jefferson while, in the process, establishing the New York Stock Exchange, the First National Bank of the United States, and The Bank of New York.
* Established U.S. Coast Guard
* Established U.S Customs Service
* Is considered to be the instigator behind the founding of the U.S. Military Academy and Naval Academy
* Eerily prescient prediction of the cause, scope, horror, and impact of the civil war
Penguin Press
Ron Chernow writes no small books. His examination of Alexander Hamilton (The Penguin Press, 2004) runs 731 pages of ten-point text, and left this reader bedazzled by both Hamilton’s imperfect genius and Chernow’s perfect pursuit of detail and context.
In the context of contemporary political discourse—such as the recent confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito—perhaps no point in this biographical masterpiece lingers in the reader’s mind more powerfully than this: Those who admonish us to adhere to the goals of “the founding fathers”—excuse me, The Founding Fathers—ignore the reality that Hamilton, Jefferson, John Adams, Madison, Monroe, and their less famous colleagues were vicious political infighters who seldom agreed on anything, leaving it to George Washington to patch over the differences again and again. Indeed, Chernow surfaces credible evidence that Jefferson and Madison even conspired to put a hired-gun journalist on the government payroll for a nonexistent job so he could spend his time publishing murderous slander against Hamilton, largely, and Federalists, in general. It makes the hiring of make-believe journalists by the Bush administration seem like little more than an echo of, well, our founding fathers.
Ain’t reading history great?
When it’s Chernow, yes. His previous works, including Titan, a similarly massive and illuminating examination of John D. Rockefeller, The House of Morgan, and The Warburgs. All provide eyebrow-raising (and highly recommended) insight into past realities that shape our present.
From his illegitimate birth on the tiny Caribbean island of Nevis to Scots parentage, Alexander Hamilton rose to become what Theodore Roosevelt described as “our greatest constructive statesman, possessing the loftiest and keenest intellect of his time.” Chernow, himself, says, “In all probability, Alexander Hamilton is the foremost political figure in American history who never attained the presidency, yet he probably had a much deeper and more lasting impact than many who did.”
Our sixth-grade shorthand version—11th grade, for that matter—of U.S. history inevitably reduces Hamilton to the position of Jefferson adversary: Jefferson the visionary agrarian author of the Declaration of Independence; Hamilton the aristocratic-minded promoter of industry, banks, and professional military. How sad for the kids, for there is much in his conduct and prodigious output to inspire them. It was his precocious teen-age clerking in a Caribbean shipping company that gave him early insight into the workings of both international commerce and the slave trade. (He was one of America’s first and foremost abolitionist in thought and in deed). It was his youthful writings in a St. Croix newspaper, the Royal Danish American Gazette, that so impressed the local business community that they passed the hat to raise funds to send him to New York for a proper education. Upon arrival, he found he hadn’t quite the necessary background for admission to the young King’s College (now Columbia University), and so launched into a self-administered crash course in the classics, and then badgered professors to accelerate his program.
Says Chernow of Hamilton’s first writings, “Once his verbal fountain began to flow, it became a geyser that never ceased,” witnessed most famously by his rapid-fire production of most of The Federalist Papers” some twenty years later and Report on Manufactures, as Treasury Secretary. And it wasn’t just his writings. Hamilton, says Chernow, quickly exhibited a capacity to turn out perfectly formed paragraphs on the stump, a talent he demonstrated within months of his arrival in New York City.
His first big political moment was a rally to protest the Stamp Act, shortly after Paul Revere continued riding into New York to further spread the word. “The rich folklore surrounding this pivotal event in Hamilton’s life suggests that his speech came about spontaneously,” writes Chernow. “After mounting the platform, the slight, boyish speaker started out haltingly, then caught fire in a burst of oratory. If true to his later style, Hamilton gained energy as he spoke. He endorsed the Boston Tea Party, deplored the closure of Boston’s port, endorsed colonial unity against unfair taxation, and came down foursquare for a boycott of British goods…When his speech ended, the crowd stood transfixed in silence, staring at this spellbinding young orator before it erupted in a sustained ovation.”
Alexander Hamilton was but 19. It was a performance he would match again and again in his career: speaking, writing, leading, and creating by sheer force of will, energy and intellect.
Thirty years later, Hamilton’s career began to slide once Washington died in 1799 and was no longer there to moderate Hamilton’s passions. The Federalist Party—the party of Washington, Adams, Hamilton, and greater power for the federal government—crumbled under 10 years of political fratricide between Hamilton and Adams and pressure from Jefferson’s Republican party populism. By 1804, the Federalists couldn’t even find a candidate for New York governor, and many Federalists were reduced to supporting the least troublesome Republican they could find. (Sounds familiar.)
It was in that context, says Chernow, that an improbable chain of events put Hamilton onto the Weehawken, New Jersey, dueling grounds with Vice President Aaron Burr.
Burr’s street-savvy campaigning may have delivered the pivotal votes from New York and thus deprived Federalist John Adams re-election. But Burr could not get past being deprived of the presidency himself, losing it to Jefferson by a single vote in the House, and ending up with the vice presidency. His generally obnoxious behavior thereafter led Jefferson to excommunicate him from the Republican party.
Thus the duel that took Hamilton’s life was a contest of two waning political careers. Burr’s life was in shambles, Hamilton’s power in steep decline. Both were politically desperate. Hamilton saw deep intrigue—not without cause, as historians like Chernow reveal—in Burr’s desperation.
Burr—still Vice President but persona non grata in his own party—was later shown to be secretly negotiating with Britain for the separation of western territories from the United States and was even entertaining delusions of mounting an army to take Mexico (with himself as ruler). But for Hamilton, whose passion for the Union above all else was at a boil when he saw Burr conniving to get New England and New York to secede from Jefferson’s badly-led Union, it became necessary to defend himself on “a matter of honor,” the code words of the day that often led to either apology or a duel. Hamilton had to defend his honor and his reputation, Chernow theorizes with much evidence from Hamilton’s own writings, in order to regain the necessary political clout to defeat Burr and thus save the Union.
The chain of events began, of all places, on State Street, Albany, just up the street from a court where Hamilton, as an attorney, had only weeks before delivered one of the most powerful defenses of freedom of the press ever noted in American history. Afternoon tea-talk led a gentleman at the get-together to describe Hamilton’s unkind description there of Burr to a colleague in a letter. The letter was mischievously intercepted (as was often the case in early America, says Chernow) and delivered to a newspaper, instead.
Burr took exception to Hamilton’s now-published characterization of him, and in due course challenged him to a duel.
Within days, Burr’s pistol ball ripped through Hamilton while Hamilton shot into the air, a common practice to defuse a duel and allow both “gentlemen” to retreat from the grounds with their honor intact. Burr had practiced for days and had no intention of letting his career-long tormentor escape.
New Yorkers were stunned at the news. “French ships in New York harbor sent surgeons specially trained in treating gunshot wounds to see if they could resuscitate Hamilton,” writes Chernow.
“Everybody in New York knew that the city had lost its most distinguished citizen. As statesman Edward Everett later said, Hamilton had set the city on the path to becoming ‘the throne of the western commercial world.’ …For the rest of its term, The New York Supreme Court draped its bench in black fabric, while the Bank of New York building was also sheathed in black. For thirty days, New Yorkers wore black bands on their arms…The New York City Common Council, which paid for the funeral, issued a plea that all business in the city should halt out of respect for Hamilton…So huge was the throng of mourners that the procession streamed on for two hours before the last marchers arrived at Trinity Church.”
I mourned, too. I knew him well, now, thanks to Chernow. What greater compliment can I pay to a biographer?
# # #
Among Hamilton’s accomplishments:
* Top aide to General George Washington and chief speech writer for President George Washington;
* Participated in the founding in 1785 of the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves (abolition of slavery)
* Probably the singlemost influential actor in the movement to adopt the Constitution, recognizing early-on that “as New York went, so went the nation,” and so—with the assistance of James Madison (later his bitter enemy) and John Jay—planned and launched The Federalist Papers as a series of letters intended to sway the voters of New York;
* As first Secretary of the Treasury, laid out the financial basis for the new United States, relying heavily on borrowing and thus running smack into a jealous and contrary Thomas Jefferson while, in the process, establishing the New York Stock Exchange, the First National Bank of the United States, and The Bank of New York.
* Established U.S. Coast Guard
* Established U.S Customs Service
* Is considered to be the instigator behind the founding of the U.S. Military Academy and Naval Academy
* Eerily prescient prediction of the cause, scope, horror, and impact of the civil war
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