WhirledView

When in the Course of human events...

by Cheryl Rofer

The Los Angeles Times has annotated the Declaration of Independence in today's mode, with hyperlinks.

Check it out. Even if you don't click on the links, it's worth reading again.

America's Unsuccessful War in Pakistan

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Pakistan is the world’s sixth largest country, with a population of nearly 168,000,000 people, most of them Muslims, which means there are multiple deeply held divergences in the interpretation and practice of Islam, although these chasms may disappear when outside force is applied—U.S. force included. To understand this dynamic, Americans might remember how bipartisanship crops up when external threats appear. So Americans should not be surprised that even relatively secular urban Pakistanis are not enthusiastic about American efforts to vigorously pursue or eradicate “Islamist insurgents” within their northern borderland. There is certainly a problem of law and order in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, a problem that is acquiring urgency because the ferment is spilling out and into other parts of Pakistan. Terrorists have threatened Islamabad and Lahore as well as the ever volatile megacity of Karachi, for example. Above all, longstanding, largely tacit understandings about cultural autonomy and spheres of influence within and across national boundaries have been abused and violated by many players.

But employing the Pakistani Army to slaughter unruly tribals by the hundreds or thousands in order to pluck Osama bin laden, America’s Enemy Number One, out of his mountainous safe haven would appear, to most Pakistanis, like swatting a fly with an atom bomb: a strategy certain to do more harm than good. And Pakistan is jealous of its sovereignty.

“Half of all Pakistanis want their government to negotiate and not fight Al Qaeda, with less than a third saying military action by the Pakistani government is called for,” according to a recent poll by Terror Free Tomorrow. They'd prefer to negotiate with the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban, too. Some 73 per cent of those polled said that “the real purpose of [America's] war on terror is to weaken the Muslim world and dominate Pakistan.” Part of me wonders if a more effective Public Diplomacy effort might have led to less negativity. Part of me replies, "It's the policy, stupid."

American policymakers should pay attention to such disheartening poll results. Pakistan, as a semi-cooperative ally, is endlessly exasperating to American policy makers. Pakistan as a sullen ex-ally would be far worse, and all it would take to accomplish such a divorce is the capture and public parading of a few U.S. special forces operatives nabbed on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan. The furor over America's border-crossing bombs, called in to kill alleged insurgents who turned out to be Pakistan Border Corps troops, of whom 11 died, gives a tiny hint of the likely reaction. American popularity in Pakistan is at an all time low these days, while sympathy for Al Qaeda’s goals, if not the violence with which those goals are pursued, is rising. Thus, the secular elite that has been governing Pakistan since its inception is increasingly under siege. To stay in power the non-religious parties must maintain their nationalist if not their Islamist credentials. A popular way of criticizing Pervez Musharraf, George W. Bush’s increasingly marginalized ally in the “war against terror,” is to call him an American tool.

Hands Across the Border

Once upon a time India served as the juicy scapegoat for Pakistan’s nationalists, and not so long ago outside observers worried that India (or Pakistan) might inadvertently (or intentionally) lob a nuclear device across the border. To defend the brand new country against the threat of Indian irredentism is what the Pakistan army was created for. And why did Pakistan originally encourage the activities of violent Islamists who are now, in classic blowback fashion, threatening a form of Islamic revolution within Pakistan itself? Why, to weaken India on the cheap, by forcing New Delhi to deal with incessant insurgency in Muslim majority Kashmir.

But things may be changing on the Indian front. When asked the tired old question as to whether a “foreign hand” might be “fanning trouble in the tribal belt,” Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani replied “yes.” Yet India wasn’t named this time. The alleged culprits were “some foreigners from Central Asian States.” No doubt American policymakers would have preferred a Gilani diatribe against Arabs, as in Osama bin Laden, or Egyptians, as in Aymen Al Zawahri, but the latest series of talks between India and Pakistan seem to be achieving some degree of trust between the traditional enemies. The still wary neighbors are discussing peach and security, confidence building measures in Kashmir, economic ties, prisoner exchanges and anti-terrorism.

Better yet, from that point of view, a recent editorial in Dawn applauds the new sanity:

....detente between Indian and Pakistan will impact positively on global politics. With no signs of Islamabad winning the “war on terror” in the immediate future and the militants recognizing no borders, a wise strategy demands that India and Pakistan join hands in their security endeavour.

However, the Dawn editorial ends with a twist that may not please Washington:

In that context their agreement...to hold meetings of their anti-terrorism mechanism regularly is encouraging. It would also reduce Islamabad’s dependence on Washington in world politics.

Speaking of Washington, when asked about making Pakistan’s Dr. Strangelove, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, available for further interrogation from IAEA as a result of recently uncovered evidence that his one-man proliferation operation was even more generous than previously known, Gilani said, “the issue of Dr. Qadeer is over.” This will displease the Americans. So will Gilani’s present position on the Pakistani nuclear weapons program: “we are not a rogue state and are neither indulging in an arms race with any one” although “minimum deterrence will be maintained in this regard.

Desperately Seeking Bin Laden

Above all, the Americans are definitely not happy with Pakistan’s failure to nab Osama bin Laden or to permit American forces to nip over the border from Afghanistan to do the job for them.

Not Fare Well...

by Cheryl Rofer

We actually have a few clouds in the sky today, and I'm wishing that my blogfriends would send some of their excess rain rather than another of these silly memes. Both Shane and Dave tossed this one my way. I'm wondering how many times it's been around the world electronically. It resembles some I've seen before, with mutations. If we knew the rate of mutation, we might be able to calculate how many times it's been around the world.

The Rules:
1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
5. Present an image of martial discord from whatever period or situation you'd like.

1. Done
2/1. I have an aunt named Albert. (Extra credit to anyone who can tell me where this comes from.)
2/2. I lost my little brother on the New York Subway on the way to the Museum of Natural History.
2/3. I can't think of four more things.
3/4. I don't do this. You guys should know that by now!
5.

The post that I didn't get to writing in place of this one involves India, so here is Krishna instructing Arjuna at the battle of Kurukshetra. I'm not much of a student of the Bhagavad Gita, so I may be getting some things wrong here.

This encounter, as I've understood it, has always bothered me and seems to have some resonances for today. Arjuna looks at the field of battle, sees his relatives on the side he will fight, and says no, I just can't do it, I don't see any way that any good will come of this. The god Krishna sees Arjuna's hesitation and instructs him that the war is his destiny, and therefore, no matter what Arjuna's mortal mind tells him, it is right for Arjuna to use his bowman's skill to kill his relatives. Arjuna goes along with this, and the end is far from a marvelous triumph.

T. S. Eliot used this moment in The Dry Salvages, one of his Four Quartets.

So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle.
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.

I've found that admonition sometimes to be comforting on a personal level, but as a collective justification for war, it's been too much used.

Image from here.

The Odoms: Father and Son

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Last night as I was flipping through Middlebury College’s Magazine spring 2008 edition I came across “The Road to Hawr Rajab,” a feature story on alum Mark Odom by The New York Times chief military correspondent Michael Gordon. Now, I am not a Middlebury graduate, but I think highly of the college and its magazine. But Odom’s name, in particular, drew my attention.

Yes, US Army Lieutenant Colonel Mark Odom is the son of the recently deceased William E. Odom, the retired Army lieutenant general, former NSA director and long time Soviet expert who was openly and critically outspoken of the US invasion of Iraq and US heavy handed policy towards Iran. He foremost expressed a pragmatic view of US interests and his wisdom will be missed. One hopes his realistic view of the world has also rubbed off on his son. It is, above all, patriotic.

Why Mark Odom chose the career military is best left to Gordon’s article to explain. Whether in his heart of hearts the son truly thinks the US has a chance of achieving its goals and creating a unified, stable Iraq that is also democratic is questionable – although given his employer – wisely left unstated at this time.

Whether Mark Odom will rise to the heights of his father's profession is also an open question – the son, after all, entered the service through ROTC not West Point. It seems to me, regardless, that the next generation of US professional military leaders is likely to come from those who, like Odom, have “been there and done that,” e.g. served multiple tours on the ground in Iraq and/or Afghanistan, have learned how to adapt to different forms of conflict and can speak from real life experience not just the podium of some ideologically driven Washington, DC-based think tank.

I first came across Bill Odom’s name when I was working as a very junior editor on USIA’s then academic and intellectual journal Problems of Communism which expired after the Cold War ended. Odom had recently returned from the US Embassy in Moscow as a military attaché from 1972-4 where he, according to his recent Washington Post obituary, “studied Soviet life." An aside: Wonder who thought up that, ahem, euphemism. Questionable choice of words for an otherwise excellent obit.

Unlike most professional military or Foreign Service Officers, Odom wrote prolifically for publication even while on active duty. What I remember him writing for POC at the time was an article about the Soviet military – not the Bolshoi, the Tretyakov Gallery, the metro, the Soviet jazz underground or any other form of “Soviet life” that I experienced there three years later. He truly was an expert in his field. That he was considered a “hard liner” who also understood the political faces of the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire before it is undeniable: the country’s military and politics were, of course, intertwined. Odom really was a Soviet specialist with an MA and a PhD from Columbia University and taught at Yale after his government service had ended.

What also comes through in Gordon’s article about the son, is that Mark Odom understands the realities on the ground in Iraq as his father did while serving in Vietnam - but like his father is keeping his views to himself, that the broader question is “more political than military” and that the role of a military officer is “to place the ball in the air” to allow the political decisions made “to complete the pass.” Yet Odom’s copious readings, Gordon tells us after a look at his bookshelf, suggest that that will likely be a “very hard, perhaps even impossible" task.

The Manichaean Conservatives

by Cheryl Rofer

U.S. vs. Them, by J. Peter Scoblic, Viking Penguin, 2008.

Peter Scoblic has a grand unified theory of conservatism and national security: the division into good and evil comes before everything else for conservatives. He uses this theory to make sense of a long history of defective conservative prescriptions for national security.

Today’s conservatism was born in the years after World War II, when the world was more Manichaean than it is today: the United States faced the Soviet Union. Conservatives, reeling from their economic failure in the Great Depression and political failure in pushing an isolationist foreign policy in response to Hitler’s rise, needed a New Look. William Buckley and others supplied it: a combination of moralism based on absolute good and absolute evil, along with a preference for war over diplomacy.

Scoblic makes his case persuasively for the the last half of the twentieth century. I’m not so sure that the case works as well for the George W. Bush administration. Perhaps, however, we are too close to the Bush administration, not yet able to shear away the detail to show the clear lines of conservative thought. Nor can we yet read the minutes of the meetings, the proposals for action, the written arguments for and against those proposals.

The conservative record is impressive: MacArthur’s insistence on taking the Korean War to China; the insistence that Eisenhower roll back the Soviet Union by nuclear strikes; opposition to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty; opposition to and denigration of the United Nations; distrust of the CIA; a love of missile defense; a hatred of treaties. All fruitless and wrongheaded, some actively dangerous.

Layers Upon Layers

by CKR

James made a nice observation about American exceptionalism last week that I expanded on at Washington Monthly.

What I didn’t say in the detail I was thinking it was that our American blinders eliminate far too much of what’s going on in the world. That goes for liberals as well as conservatives, Obama or Clinton supporters.

Here’s an example that bothers me every time it comes up in Doonesbury: Central Asia.

Central Asia is probably as far away from us as it’s possible to get, maybe with the exception of some of northern Siberia. That’s not just in miles, but culture as well. It’s further than Africa because Europe colonized Africa and layered onto it governmental and social practices we can recognize. It’s further than Antarctica because environmental organizations don’t sponsor luxury cruises there.

So Duke and company supervise a radio interview of Trff Bmzklfrpz, dictator of Berzerkistan, anti-semite and genocidaire.

Yes, I know, Doonesbury is satire. And there are indeed both corruption and despotism in Central Asia. But I wonder how much good this is doing for our understanding of what’s happening there. (And isn’t this a repeat? I think I read somewhere that Garry Trudeau is taking a leave of absence?)

Start with the dictator’s name. Yes, I know that Central Asian names are not usually Smith or Jones. But getting names right is a fundamental mark of respect. And then there’s the name of his country, which implies that its citizens share his, er, issues.

Turkmenistan is most likely Garry Trudeau’s model for Bezerkistan. Its former leader, Saparmurat Niyazov, insitituted a cult of personality that makes Stalin look like a small-town sheriff. Gold statues of himself, renaming the months and days for his family, all that. But he died in 2006 and was succeeded by Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov. (C’mon, you can sound that out!) It was hard to know how Berdymukhammedov would rule; what a person does when working for someone like Niyazov does not reveal his opinions and preferences.

Tuesday Tsi-p'in-owinge Blogging

by CKR

On Saturday, the School for Advanced Research sponsored a field trip to Tsi-p'in-owinge Pueblo. Tsi-p'in-owinge means Village at Flaking Stone Mountain. It was probably inhabited from the late thirteenth century through the mid-fifteenth, abandoned before the Spanish came to New Mexico.

Tsi-p'in-owinge is on a mesa above the town of Cañones, above Abiquiu, between Ghost Ranch and Cerro Pedernal. Georgia O'Keeffe fans will recognize some of those places. Cañones is a very tucked-away New Mexico village. The trail to Tsi-p'in-owinge used to start in Cañones. But too many people looking in windows, asking directions, disrupted the residents' lives, so we used the new trail, eight switchbacks down from a still-higher mesa. We stopped at Bode's General Store in Abiquiu for delicious breakfast burritos, and then drove up a Forest Service road to the trailhead.

We could see across the valley to Abiquiu Reservoir on the Chama River and Ghost Ranch beyond, and to Pedernal in the other direction. The first photo shows Cañones in the lower right-hand corner. The mesa on which Tsi-p'in-owinge sits is the red-sided one in the lower foreground. Close inspection shows that I was sufficiently overwhelmed by the scenery that I didn't get any photos of the ruins, which contain many, many worked blocks of tuff. The village was on this side of the mesa, out of the photo to the left, and was on the mesa top with rooms also built along the sides of the cliff.

The next photo is, of course, Pedernal, from the mesa near the village. O'Keeffe claimed that God told her that Pedernal would be hers if she painted it enough, and its distinctive flat top shows up in many of her paintings.

We tend not to take photos of what is too familiar, and I found that Tsi-p'in-owinge looked a lot (really a lot) like Tsankawi, which I have visited too many times to count. The rock is the same Bandelier tuff, the result of the explosion of the Jemez volcano a little over a million years ago. The vertical sides of the mesa are the same as on the road to Los Alamos. So I have no photos of the ruins.

Tsi-p'in-owinge still had pottery and flint shards on the ground, just as Tsankawi did when I first came to New Mexico. "Take only pictures" hasn't worked all that well where it's easy for people to walk to.

The flint was lovely pink and white, from Cerro Pedernal, whose name means "Flint Mountain" in English.

I also got some photos of plants. We hiked down (and up!) the north side of the mesa we started from, and the soil is always more developed on the north side. We had also had rain last week, but the trail and plants were fairly dry. The paintbrush is near the ruins. The next is a clematis on the north side trail, and the last is a tiny little succulent, maybe a centimeter across, living in the mossy shadow of a boulder.

Learning From History

by CKR

I may be the world’s worst person to write a review of “The Singing Revolution.” It’s a story I know well, having sought it out because it was so inspiring. So I know, not only how the story turns out, but also every step along the way. Shortly after Pat Kushlis and I met, we realized that we both wanted to write the same book: the history that this film recounts. The reason for that was that it seemed to contain so many lessons for the United States and other big countries that might be overimpressed with the power of their guns and tanks.

If you want a feel-good documentary with impressive historical footage, this is it. The vastly outnumbered and overpowered Estonians outlast and outsmart the latest in a long string of occupiers, the Soviet Union, through patience, pluck, luck and song. The songs selected tend toward the most rousingly patriotic of those sung at the song festivals; I would have liked to hear just a bit of “Sinu Aknal Tuvid” or “Sireli, Kas Mul Õnne” There were a few tiny lines from “Viire Takka,” not enough.

The Estonians were astute in their political judgements and their juggling of demonstrations and legislation through Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika, which gave the Estonians the openings they needed to press forward, cautiously, relentlessly, toward reinstating their country’s independence.

And they won.

The story is told very well indeed. I have imagined so many events for which the film had footage; the singing of the substitute national anthem at the 1969 song festival; the first flying of the sini, must, valge (blue, black, white) flags in Tartu in 1988 and the popping up of the real Estonian flags later that year at the song festival grounds in Tallinn; the human chain from Tallinn to Vilnius on the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in August 1989; or, most impressively, the Estonian response to Russian demonstrations at the parliament building in Tallinn.

Massive Retaliation

by CKR

Hillary Clinton, answering a question that contained two hypotheticals—that Iran had its own nuclear weapons and that it attacked Israel with them—threatened to “obliterate” Iran with “massive retaliation.” Not once, but five times (one, two, three, four, five), mostly under direct questioning. So we may presume that she means it, that it wasn’t too late at night, and she didn’t misspeak.

Gary Sick gives us some background on “dual containment,” which may be what is behind Clinton’s pairing of nuclear threats with her concept of a nuclear umbrella for the non-Iran states of the Middle East.

The idea presumably would be to prevent the sort of nuclear proliferation that Joby Warrick writes about in today’s Washington Post. Forty or more developing countries have signaled interest in starting nuclear power programs, and of them, a half dozen have said that they are planning to enrich uranium or reprocess nuclear fuel. Those capabilities, in particular, make a weapons program possible. Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Yemen, Egypt, and Turkey are all interested in nuclear power. United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have vowed never to pursue uranium enrichment or fuel reprocessing, but they are interested in nuclear power.

The price of oil is one of the motivators to own the nuclear fuel cycle, but regional stability may be more important to the Middle Eastern states, along with the prestige of having nuclear weapons, a way of signaling to the world that they have arrived militarily.

It’s easy and convenient to blame this on Iran, but let’s step back a bit.

An Historical Note on Reacting to Catastrophe: Jeremiah Wright and Jonathan Edwards

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Since the response to the now infamous “the chickens have come home to roost” sermon has been hysterical and irrational in the extreme, I thought it might be useful to share a snippet I’ve just come across in a book I’m reading. The book is a recent biography of the great American theologian and philosopher Jonathan Edwards by George M. Marsden. Edwards, as students of American literature may recall, was the preacher who delivered the famous sermon entitled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” whose gist was: if you don’t get your act together, you are going to spend a pretty nasty eternity burning in hell. The dominant image was that of a spider being held over a flame by a furious patriarch.

Edwards was a Puritan and a Calvinist and he believed in heavy duty soul-searching of the sort in which deep-rooted guilt and inescapable personal responsibility play major roles. He’d hate my putting it this way, but Edwards believed in karma big time. Actions have reactions. Events have repercussions. Chickens, etc., etc.

The congregational network in which Jonathan Edwards played his powerful polemical role is also the very church that is ancestral to the United Church of Christ. On 9/11 Jeremiah Wright was pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, and he preached a thundering sermon afterwards. He wanted his congregation to do some serious soul-searching. Whether or not Barak Obama was in a Trinity pew when that sermon was preached, he was a member of that congregation, and that sermon may, unjustly, be the undoing of his presidential aspirations.

In fact, Wright’s reaction to 9/11 would have made perfect sense to Calvinistic eighteenth century America. Had he said anything less, he would have been shirking his duty, which brings me to my snippet.

When General Edward Braddock was defeated on his way to Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh) in 1755 during the French and Indian War, the catastrophe was seen as apocalyptic by the English colonists. An entire column of Red Coats had been slaughtered. The future of the English enterprise in North America was doubtful.

One of Jonathan Edwards’s daughters was married to Aaron Burr, who was President of the College of New Jersey, a religiously conservative theological seminary that would evolve into the Princeton University we know today. When the news of the French victory reached her, Esther Edwards Burr wrote in great consternation to a friend in Boston:

O the dreadful, awful news! General Braddock is killed and his army is defeated....Oh my dear, what will, what must become of us! O our sins, our sins—they are grown up to the very heavens, and call aloud for vengeance, the vengeance that the Lord has sent—‘Tis just, ‘tis right.

Esther’s lamentations are perfectly consistent with her father’s preaching. In short, what Wright preached that day in Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago is as American as apple pie—or Jonathan Edwards.

As for Jonathan Edwards: A Life, I highly recommend it, if you're into philosophy, theology history—and tales of bang up small town squabbling.