State of the Union
Iranian Voters Stump the War Party
A spectre is haunting America’s war party. Last week, Iranians went to the polls and surprisingly and unambiguously voted for the most moderate candidate, Hossan Rohani, an establishment cleric who campaigned on the need to improve Iran’s economy and end its diplomatic isolation. Rohani is the vehicle for disparate hopes—not least those of Green movement, suppressed after the 2009 election. One should note the weaknesses of an electoral system where prospective candidates are vetted by the government, but there is little doubt that Rohani’s victory represented a vast outpouring of popular discontent—and raised prospects for an eventual détente between Iran and the West. In their way, the peoples of both Iran and the United States have both spoken—in America first by rejecting the more belligerent candidacies of first McCain and then Romney in favor of Obama; in Iran choosing, probably in the 2009 and certainly last week, the least confrontational candidate available.
Rohani threatens to deny the war party their cartoon image of an Iranian “Hitler,” one which which had been painstakingly, if dishonestly, constructed from the undisciplined and belligerent musings of his populist predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Rohani doesn’t have time to open his mouth before Jonathan Tobin of Commentary warns us that Iran remains a “totalitarian theocracy” and Obama better not “waste more time on sanctions and diplomacy” in an effort to end Iran’s nuclear program. (Tobin fails to explain that rather unique form of totalitarianism which allows meaningful competitive elections, nor does he mention which country in the Middle East has introduced to the region a huge nuclear arsenal.) Max Boot, also at Commentary, reminds readers that power in Iran rests with the Supreme Leader, not with the president, an interpretation of Iranian political dynamic not stressed when Ahmadinejad was president. Jeffrey Goldberg chimes in that the Iranian election was “fake.” Tobin rails about “useful idiots”—the Times editorial board in this instance—who prefer diplomacy to war. But one can sense the fear in the neocons: the broad spectrum of Western opinion is inclined to think the Iranian election result might be a good, not a bad thing. One can be sure a vast research enterprise is underway to find a quote from Rohani’s past that expresses something other than sheer joy at Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians. An editor at the war-hungry Wall Street Journal is already accusing Rohani of encouraging the murder of dissident students in the 1990′s.
The panic reminds me of the one which pulsed through neoconservative ranks during the emergence of Gorbachev. Then the situation was more ambiguous—the Soviets didn’t allow elections. But the neocons were unanimous (or nearly: Joshua Muravchik was a notable, and solitary exception) in presenting Gorbachev as a greater threat than previous leaders because he seemed moderate, seemed to desire the turning of bad pages and exploring new possibilities. It was a core neoconservative tenet that Soviet totalitarianism was incapable of reform and forever on the march, and in selecting Gorbachev they had found a clever new tool to lull and trick the West. Norman Podhoretz published one column—I recall struggling to write an appropriate headline for it—devoted to the Soviet leader’s devilish and mendacious smile. The danger of course was that Ronald Reagan would drop his guard, which he did, finding Gorbachev’s desire to move past the Cold War altogether credible.
In holding this election, the mullah’s regime in Iran, with all its obvious brutality and structural flaws, has already proved itself more “democratic” than the dictatorship the United States imposed upon Iran for a generation after 1953. Not surprisingly, many Iranians remember this. I don’t know whether Obama has the fortitude to explore the Iranian people’s peace overture—because it is they who made an unambiguous election choice—or whether he will bow to various Beltway hawks. But the existence of popular will on both sides for something other than continued confrontation seems impossible to deny.
And the nuclear issue: it seems to me making a core value of American policy that Israel should have hundreds of nuclear weapons and its regional neighbors not even the right to enrich uranium will always be perceived as inherently unjust, and thus inherently unstable. Margaret Thatcher, expressing frustration at Israel’s efforts to stonewall the peace process once told a Times interviewer ”[Y]ou cannot demand for yourself what you deny to other people.” The same principle can be applied to Israel’s and Iran’s respective nuclear programs.
‘Community Schools’: An Education Reform With Promise
Facing a series of social and academic woes, the city of Oakland is trying a new reform strategy. The Atlantic published an article on Monday detailing how, through its “community schools” initiative, the school district hopes to offer a more holistic education.
“Community schools,” according to The Atlantic and the Coalition for Community Schools, aim to reach beyond the realm of academics and foster students’ growth through “school-community partnerships.” Rather than one all-encompassing initiative or program, a community school focuses on addressing social issues on an individual level: “There’s no one model for community schools. Advocates say each school reflects the particular needs of its students and parents.”
Each school has a “campus resource center” with nurses, therapists, and social workers. The centers provide counseling and support for needy students. Although teachers had mixed reviews, an East Oakland high school principal said these new services have already reduced suspensions.
This is not the first time Oakland has tried a “smaller is better” education reform policy: in 2000, administrators tried breaking 12 large schools into 48 small ones “in order to nurture closer relationships between students and faculty.” Although the effort made promising gains at first, it failed by 2007. One teacher reported “a campus full of disengaged students, an excess of administrators and a cumbersome bureaucracy.”
In contrast, The Atlantic report indicates that community school initiatives have achieved marked success: “Cincinnati, one of the pioneers of the current community schools push, has seen higher test scores and graduation rates since beginning … Community schools in New York, Chicago and other California cities demonstrated improvement on test scores, better attendance and reduced dropout rates compared to traditional schools.”
Obama Escalates Syria’s Civil War
Barack Obama has just taken his first baby steps into a war in Syria that may define and destroy his presidency.
Thursday, while he was ringing in Gay Pride Month with LGBT revelers, a staffer, Ben Rhodes, informed the White House press that U.S. weapons will be going to the Syrian rebels.
For two years Obama has stayed out of this sectarian-civil war that has consumed 90,000 lives. Why is he going in now?
The White House claims it now has proof Bashar Assad used sarin gas to kill 100-150 people, thus crossing a “red line” Obama had set down as a “game changer.” Defied, his credibility challenged, he had to do something.
Yet Assad’s alleged use of sarin to justify U.S. intervention seems less like our reason for getting into this war than our excuse.
For the White House decided to intervene weeks ago, before the use of sarin was confirmed. And why would Assad have used only tiny traces? Where is the photographic evidence of the disfigured dead?
What proof have we the rebels did not fabricate the use of sarin or use it themselves to get the gullible Americans to fight their war?
Yet why would President Obama, whose proud boast is that he will have extricated us from the Afghan and Iraq wars, as Dwight Eisenhower did from the Korean War, plunge us into a new war?
He has been under severe political and foreign pressure to do something after Assad and Hezbollah recaptured the strategic town of Qusair and began preparing to recapture Aleppo, the largest city.
Should Assad succeed, it would mean a decisive defeat for the rebels and their backers: the Turks, Saudis and Qataris. And it would mean a geostrategic victory for Iran, Hezbollah and Russia, who have proven themselves reliable allies. Read More…
Gulf War Panel: We’re Being Purged for Contradicting the VA
Members of a heretofore independent panel on Gulf War Illness are accusing Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki of “shooting the messenger” by gutting their committee and slashing half its members in a recent charter rewrite.
A member of the Research Advisory Committee (RAC) on Gulf War Illness told The American Conservative over the weekend that Shinseki was retaliating against them for their unvarnished, public criticism of the agency—in the press and on Capitol Hill. Most recently, members Anthony Hardie, a Gulf War veteran and advocate for the estimated 250,000 vets suffering with Gulf War Illness (GWI), and Dr. Lea Steele, a longtime GWI researcher, testified with former VA scientist Steven Coughlin on the Hill. Both RAC members complained that bureaucrats and researchers in the agency were driven by an agenda that preferred viewing GWI as a psychological rather than physical condition.
TAC interviewed Coughlin and Hardie after the hearing. Coughlin said his bosses manipulated and ignored data that did not coincide with their agenda. Hardie concurred, saying that the RAC had been forced to deal with this VA bias for some time and that complaints about it had been ignored. In 2008 for example, the committee released a report saying that GWI was a physical condition caused by toxins, including pesticides and the pills that the soldiers were given to counteract the effects of nerve gas. Since then, committee members have accused the VA of trying to undermine their findings. (The VA’s critics say it is trying to avoid the massive expense of liability, a charge the VA has adamantly denied. Officials have also denied that the VA is trying to push the psychological explanation over the physiological one.)
The damage done to the 15-year-old RAC last month by Shinseki’s hand might forever take the teeth out of the scrappy committee, which is supposed to convene for a regular meeting this week in Washington. The changes to the RAC charter would ax six of its 12 members and replace them “in accordance with VA policy,” according to a letter to RAC chairman James Binns signed by Shinseki’s interim chief of staff, Jose Riojas. The letter was provided to reporter Kelly Kennedy, who wrote about it at USA Today on Friday. The measure also removes Binns—whom the committee called their “principled, fair, just, non-partisan, longstanding champion” of veterans—after a one-year “transition period.” The letter does not identify which other members will have to go. Read More…
The Banality of Good
With the release of the new biopic “Hannah Arendt,” about the political philosopher’s coverage of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, you can expect to be hearing a lot of Arendt’s concept “the banality of evil.”
Arendt famously saw in Adolf Eichmann (one of the key logistical organizers of the Holocaust) not a raging anti-Semite who delighted in murder, but a pencil-pusher who became a workaday tool of genocide merely by unreflectively and diligently following orders.
Critics of Eichmann In Jerusalem believe that Arendt, a great thinker but incompetent court reporter, was duped by Eichmann: Eichmann was in fact a racist true-believer, as were thousands of his countrymen, who did not “blindly” follow orders but became “Hitler’s willing executioners.” Furthermore, Ron Rosenbaum has urged the abandonment of the banality of evil on more general grounds: it denies the reality of conscious, willful, knowing evil.
But apart from the specifics of Eichmann and the Holocaust more generally—a still-raging debate I dare not touch—Barry Gewen reminds us why the “banality of evil” is in fact an important concept, a call to action:
Arendt’s approach was unyieldingly universalistic. Her analysis of Eichmann was a demand for individual responsibility, an insistence on the need constantly to exercise personal choice, whatever society might dictate. This is a cold ethic, as severe as Kant’s, so difficult it has a quality of the inhuman about it. For who among us can maintain the unceasing moral awareness she calls for? [emphasis mine]
The citizens of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a largely Huguenot village, rescued over five thousand Jews from Eichmann’s ilk in occupied France. But this was by no means inevitable: when the town’s church community tried to secure promises to help the anticipated stream of refugees, the townspeople largely refused. As James C. Scott recounts in Two Cheers for Anarchism (reviewed for TAC here), they only changed their minds when the Jews began to arrive:
The pastors’ wives found themselves with real, existing Jews on their hands, and they tried again. They would, for example, take an elderly Jew, thin and shivering in the cold, to the door of a farmer who had declined to commit himself earlier, and ask, “Would you give our friend here a meal and a warm coat, and show him the way to the next village?” The farmer now how had a living, breathing victim in front of him, looking him in the eye, perhaps imploringly, and would have to turn him away…
Once the individual villagers had made such a gesture, they typically became committed to helping the refugees for the duration. They were, in other words, able to draw the conclusions of their own practical gesture of solidarity—their actual line of conduct—and see it as the ethical thing to do. They did not enunciate a principle and then act on it. Rather, they acted, and then drew out the logic of that act. Abstract principle was the child of practical reason, not its parent.
Francois Rochat, contrasting this pattern with Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” calls it the “banality of goodness.”
The pastors’ wives answered Gewen’s question: Who can maintain unceasing moral awareness? None of us—our moral reasoning fails us constantly. We need, it would seem, to have our neighbor constantly put before us, his suffering shown to us.
Rick Santorum Locates a Clue
In a rapid response to Rep. Paul Ryan’s convention speech last August, I wrote:
In Ryan’s intellectual bubble, there are job creators and entrepreneurs on one side and parasites on the other. There is no account of the vast gray expanse of janitors, waitresses, hotel front-desk clerks, nurses, highway maintenance workers, airport baggage handlers, and taxi drivers. They work hard, but at the end of the day, what can they be said to have “built”?
In a speech late last week, former Sen. Rick Santorum did me one better. He remarked of the very same convention at which Ryan spoke:
One after another, they talked about the business they had built. But not a single—not a single—factory worker went out there. … Not a single janitor, waitress or person who worked in that company! We didn’t care about them. You know what? They built that company too!
Apparently, Santorum and I have a thing for janitors and waitresses. More importantly: They built that company too!
This is something of an intellectual breakthrough for a high-profile Republican.
At a gut level, most GOPers, including most especially the one who lost the 2012 presidential election, apply a rough sort of common sense to economic outcomes: people help themselves. Government may justifiably step in to come to the aid of those who can’t. Any market interference on top of that is an election-rigging “gift.” Read More…
Invasion of the Hashtags
Facebook announced this week that it is adopting the hashtag – supposedly to “help people more easily discover what others are saying about a specific topic and participate in public conversations.” Some writers herald this as a momentous occasion.
But though hashtags once served a constructive purpose (and still can, when used judiciously), most have devolved into meaningless quasi-expressions – and are even infecting our verbal language and grammar.
Chris Messina is credited with having invented the hashtag in August 2007; it was designed to “gather discussions and online exchanges” on Twitter. By prefixing a word or sentence with the pound sign, users created a searchable metdata tag.
Twitter founder Evan Williams initially thought hashtags were too technical to become popular; unfortunately, they’re now more popular than technical. While created as a “tag” for communities (#StudentsForObama), emerging debates (#StandWithRand), or historic events like #TahrirSquare, the hashtag has largely devolved into a cacophany of meta-communication. As Sam Biddle writes,
Hashtags at their best stand in as what linguists call “paralanguage,” like shoulder shrugs and intonations. That’s fine. But at their most annoying, the colloquial hashtag has burst out of its use as a sorting tool and become a linguistic tumor—a tic more irritating than any banal link or lazy image meme.
Instagram and Twitter are bombarded with hashtag gibberish every day. Many are primarily designed for self-focused clamor. Some examples: #likeforlike, #likeforalike (in case #likeforlike doesn’t cover it), #likeitup, #liketeam, #followme, #followforfollow, and #teamfollowback.
ＲＥＷＥＥＴ IF YOU WANT TO GAIN 150 NEWFOLLOWERS ＹＯＵ must be ＦＯＬＬＯＷmeＢＡＣＫ ✔#TeamFollowWack ✔#TeamFollowBack ✔#TFB ✔#AutoFollowBack ✔#150 aDay
— tsproductionsbeats (@tsproductionsuk) June 14, 2013
With each hashtag added, the user’s post theoretically reaches a larger number of people. But mostly they just get in the way of communicating in the first place. Often, even “context”-creating hashtags are meaningless and self-aggrandizing (#happy, #ilovemylife, #cutestboyfriendever, etc.).
Is Weiner’s Bigotry the New New York?
The Times on Thursday ran a lengthy profile of Anthony Weiner, former very liberal congressman and staunchly right-wing Zionist. The paper depicts him, basically, as a jerk. The piece doesn’t mention the sexting scandal that drove him from office two years ago but casts a baleful eye on his achievements as a politician. Weiner is now running for mayor of New York and stands second in the polls, surging in a weak Democratic field. He seems to have more political energy than his rivals. As a congressman, Wiener was a relentless attention seeker, wonderful at getting TV camera time, weak in actual legislative achievements, even liberal ones.
Surprisingly the Times can find no one among his peers with much good to say about him. He comes across as a caricature of driven selfishness, abusive of his staff, demanding that airline flights be rescheduled to fit his convenience, running traffic lights to reach events, heedless of any issues besides those which can benefit him politically or financially.
I saw Weiner in action once, at a debate on Israel, Palestine, and the attack on Gaza a little over two years ago at the New School in Manhattan. He was debating Brian Baird, the now retired congressman from Washington state who distinguished himself by visiting Gaza after Israel’s first assault in 2008 and describing on Capitol Hill the damage American weapons had inflicted on schools and homes. (I hope to see Baird, who is brave and thoughtful, emerge in some other public role soon).
Weiner was something else. He stunned the audience, and no doubt pleased his supporters, by making the most hard-right Zionist claims one could imagine. He claimed there was no Israeli occupation of the West Bank, he claimed Israel’s eastern border was the Jordan River. He wasn’t smooth or even educated on the subject, there was no phony hasbara about how he really desired a Palestinian state if the Palestinians only had better leadership. He simply claimed all the land for the Jews, Palestinians be damned. Read More…
A Question Libertarians Can Answer Easily
By asking “If libertarianism is such a good idea, why aren’t there any libertarian countries?” Michael Lind has set up the all-too familiar trap of the intellectual straw man, and it seems that many libertarians have fallen for it.
His question makes as little sense when you replace “libertarianism” with, say, “atheism” or “environmentalism” or “feminism.” Operating in a liberal-democratic system that is driven by what Isaiah Berlin described as “value pluralism,” libertarian intellectuals and activists aim at affecting the world of ideas and the political process through the policy concepts they propose, not at establishing a Utopia based on their principles.
From that perspective, it’s difficult to argue that libertarian or classical-liberal ideas as they apply to economic policies—a.k.a. “free-market ideology”—haven’t had a dramatic impact in the last four decades or so.
Anyone reading this post will be familiar with the growing power of the free-market ideas of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and the like, and their role in launching the shift towards the restructuring the welfare state under leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, a shift that in some cases (New Zealand, for example) was transformative in nature.
Lind is correct in reminding us that the welfare state remains alive and well in the United States, Britain, and other Western countries. Reaganism and Thatcherism didn’t take the form of revolutions that led to the creation of “libertarian countries.” And it’s possible that many of the reforms in the welfare state would have taken place in the form of pragmatic responses to economic stagnation and the process of globalization even without the direct infusion of libertarian ideology.
But the fact remains that for most of the 1980s and 1990s free-market ideas were in ascendancy and the political spectrum worldwide—including Democrats under Bill Clinton in the U.S. and Labour under Tony Blair in the UK, not to mention the leadership classes of post-Communist China, Russia, and India—moved in that direction.
That didn’t transform anyplace on earth into a libertarian Utopia, to be sure. In fact, Singapore, which Lind points to as an example of a libertarian state, is if anything the ultimate Nanny State, while the economic liberalization of Chile took place under a military dictatorship.
One of the main and obvious reasons why the libertarian movement in this country has failed to develop into an effective political force has been the existing two-party system. It’s not inconceivable that if the United States had a parliamentary system, a viable Libertarian Party could have played a role in shaping legislation and policy, not unlike that of the laissez-faire Free Democrats in Germany or the left-libertarian Liberal Democrats in Britain.
The good news for libertarians marginalized by the two-party system is that their thinkers and activists are not forced to implement their ideas by way of specific policies, a process that requires making formal coalitions, concessions to other political groups, and embracing a nuanced approach to issues ranging from free trade to drug legalization. Libertarians can remain ideologically pure—which is also the bad news since it allows Lind to ridicule them as dogmatic ideologues and Utopians.
When the Drone War Comes Home
Defense News parses this new, totally surprising, threat:
“We need to be cognizant of the fact that nations elsewhere, and non-nation players, can easily develop unmanned systems themselves,” Chung said. “So that leaves us to think about the adversarial unmanned systems. We need to think not just about our unmanned system but the ones that want to attack us.”
One suggested solution is body armor, which should be fun for senators and DOD officials to wear all day in a globally warming world.
