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The Nation's Day - Not Just the Crown's - Letter from the UK

By John Dyer, Guest Contributor

(John Dyer is an American dual citizen who relocated permanently to the UK in retirement from public life in the US. )

Today is 29 April, 2011, the day of The Wedding. What?  There is another one?   The wedding of William and Kate Wales, of course.  

So, who cares?  Prior to the Wedding BBC estimated that as many as 2 billion people would watch the Wedding on TV.   24 million watched in the UK alone, 18 million watching BBC.  According to BBC 80% of the United Kingdom supports the monarchy.  There have been block parties across the country as people celebrated. And they celebrated not just because it was a “Bank Holiday.”

The percentages are probably less supportive where I live in the North West of the UK. 

Lots of comments whispered about to the effect of “irrelevant rich people.”  But the speakers kept looking around for rotten eggs and tomatoes. 

North/South Divide

There are reasons for that. There is a “divide” between the North and the South, with the North generally feeling economically, socially, and politically the poor relations of the South, especially “The City” (London).   The swinge-ing “austerity” measures of the current government are hitting the North West harder than the South East, for sure.  (Photo left of The City by PHKushlis, 8-2010; photo right of Lytham Centre by John Dyer, St George Day Festival 2011)  

This past year has seen riots, anarchists smashing windows of “High Street” retailers, kicking Prince Charles’ car.    If the first obligation of a government is social stability the current Coalition is failing.  5 May will see an election where it is generally believed the voters will register their collective dismay.  (Note juxtaposition of the regal pageantry on the street in photo to right and headline on BBC ticker below it which reads in part "Bristol between police and protestors. . . " Ed.)

But today and increasingly for the 10 days prior, all that began to recede into the warm fuzzy fog of a jubilant nation celebrating that unique character and national identity- Britishness- even if their names happened to be Singh or Murti.   Today was the nation’s day as well as the Crown’s. 

The Prime Minister may have breathed a sigh of relief, but no doubt any relief is temporary.  The swinge-ing cuts are not going away and neither is reaction to them. But today the key question was, who designed Kate’s dress.  Ecstatic crowds waved the UK “Union Jack.”   I don’t think I have ever heard a crowd who more exhibited a “roar.”  There were a million people on the streets watching in person.

One more cultural tour de force

War Horse: A Critique of a critique

By Patricia H. Kushlis

 I saw War Horse at the New London Theatre in London’s West End last August on the advice of a friend. I found it riveting – all two and one-half hours of it. This play about a young man and his horse had been filling houses since it opened at the National Theatre of Great Britain in 2007.   

Yet as I read the articles (the first a story about the story’s story by Sarah Lyall and the second Ben Brantley’s official Times critique) in The New York Times when the play opened at Lincoln Center two weeks ago, I wondered if the reviewers – especially Brantley - and I had seen the same show.  

Was this, I wondered, a World War I story about Billy and Joey, a British boy and his horse that appealed to the home crowd but hadn’t traveled well across the Atlantic?

A tepid review - why?

Did Brantley somehow object to the fact that it was based on a children’s book and despite the fact that he liked the puppets as puppets, the star performers were see-through life-sized bamboo-framed skeleton puppets created by the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa which took on lifelike characteristics and emotions as they interacted with the human characters and each other to tell this heart-wrenching tale?   Was the story perhaps too trite?  The human characters too one dimensional – as he suggests.

Did War Horse lack emotional subtlety or elicit too much raw emotion? Or did Brantley have a strange kind of horse phobia perhaps as a result of attempting to ride dyspeptic and uncooperative nags as a child at summer camp?  Or maybe he just didn’t relate to simple villagers who lived hard-scrabble but straightforward lives nearly a century ago. 

Or did he recoil from the fact that the old-school German officer who rescued Joey from the bone pile was not portrayed as the enemy-incarnate but as a human being with a fondness for animals? 

Too old fashioned or too long ago?

Was the play’s plot too old fashioned or World War I too long ago to be of more than passing interest?  Or was the war too young to rate as the worthy subject for an updated equivalent to Ben Hur?

Let’s face it, World War I was not a nice war (if there are nice wars): it was fought at great cost and suffering and in the end settled nothing.  Instead it set the stage for a much worse war to come. 

Wasn’t the cavalier way so many horses were treated – of the 1-2 million British horses that had been sent to the front lines only about 65,000 had returned according to Lyall from an interview with the book’s author Michael Morpurgo – just as much a symbol of the immense carnage of human innocents that transpired through stalemated trench warfare in that horrible war – and others – sent to do someone else’s bidding in a war that needn’t have been fought?        

Too many performances over too few days?

Or was Brantley simply suffering from an overload of too many performances and reviews in too few days?  In all fairness, Brantley’s review was not the only less than stellar one War Horse has received. In an earlier critique, Guardian critic Michael Billington registered some similar objections to Brantley’s when he reviewed the play in London.

Regardless, Billington’s controversial review seemed to have had no effect on the London box office.    Word had gotten around otherwise – including via a rave review in The London Times.  Hopefully, that also will be the same for the Lincoln Center production.  Despite the minority of naysayers, most people who have seen War Horse have given it a thumb’s up including at least one other blogger who concentrates on the New York theater scene.

But don’t just take my, Brantley, Billington or anyone else’s word: go see War Horse for yourself.  

Note:  War Horse is playing at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, 150 West 65th Street, Lincoln Center.

 

The Way We Look When We look at Them

Patricia Lee Sharpe

Two thoughts come to mind: anti-democratic; simplistically reductive.

Have you noticed how American journalists and policy makers keep looking for some sort of know-it-all, I’m-in-charge supreme leader/sole source as they seek to interact with what’s happening in the Arab world? 

On the American side, there’s plenty of talk about democracy, which vests power in the citizenry, who rule through their elected representatives.  In many so-called advanced countries, including our own, this frequently gives rise to confusingly divided government.  Even deadlock.  As now in Washington.  But do-nothings can be voted out.  Interestingly enough, throughout the Arab world, one theme has sounded loud and clear recently: we the people must have a voice.

Getting there from Here

Yet there’s already, in the U.S., it seems, more than a little nostalgia for the good old days when the Arab power structure was a simple pyramid with the bottom having no say about who gets to the top—and the top dictating the nature of reality (like the Bush administration).  Seems the cynical expectation is dictator-out/dictator-in, as if a few days, weeks, months of uncertainty are evidence of hopelessness so far as the state formation process goes.  Even in Pakistan America clearly prefers to deal with the army.  As a result, the U.S. further undermines the very civilian system Americans like to complain about. As we formulate our policies toward current events in the Middle East, we should remember this. And avoid it, if we want to end up with a better working relationship than we have with the Pakistan we love to hate.

So, as we look toward the Arab world, we observe a multiplicity of voices, considerable inconsistency of demands, and lack of clarity as the exact shape of the end state in the countries undergoing revolution.  Of course, if the situation were otherwise, there would be no true revolution, which generally calls into question institutions as well as individuals. 

Let’s look closer to home to regain some perspective. How long did it take for the congeries of potential American leaders during the revolutionary period to get it together, before, during and after the revolutionary war?  The competition was fierce.  There was even one “failed state” experiment, under the Articles of Confederation, which had to be junked.  And getting all the states under one umbrella wasn’t exactly easy.  The necessary compromise was so vile that a dreadful civil war eventually had to be fought to end slavery once and for all.  So why should we expect Egypt or Tunisia, let alone the rebels in pre-modern  Libya, to come up with a perfectly formed government and a harmonious cadre of leaders in less than a year?

How Many Kinds?

Actually this preference for the simple over the complex but far more interesting actuality is not a new phenomenon when it comes to America’s dealing with the Muslim world, where an idiotic paradigm has long reigned—there are two types of Muslim: the America-hating fundies and the simpatico Moderates.  Outside the neurotic American imagination, of course, neither exists.  In fact, for the most part, the existence of America is irrelevant to the formation of Muslim character.
 
I got to thinking along these lines when I was reading S.A.A. Rizvi’s follow up to A.L. Basham’s classic The Wonder That was India.  Basham dealt with pre-Muslim Indian history.  Rizvi’s volume of the same name plus II, takes on the next 500 years of predominately Muslim rule.  It’s not an easy read, but the long chapter on religion rang more than a few bells.

Although too many Americans think of Islam as some sort of monolith, the truth is that schism has dogged Islam as persistently as it has dogged Christianity.   Most everyone is aware of the bloody Shi’a-Sunni split, which continues to this day, although both sects have themselves undergone further splintering.  There are disagreements over what Muslim law should be, over theological questions like free will, over the nature of the Koran itself.  Is it truly the word of God transmitted unaltered via the Prophet or must it be interpreted like any other historical document?   There are puritanical sects and there are secularists.  There are narrow minded bigots and strong believers who are tolerant of other faiths.  And, oh yes, there are the mystics, too.  Plus the eclectics always ready to borrow good ideas.  All these orientations come to light as Rizvi discusses the Kubrawiyya, the Qalandar and the Mahdawi, plus the many Sufi orders, including the Shattariyya, the Qadiriyya and the Naqshbandiyya, to say nothing of the Bohra, Ismaili and other branches of the Shi’i.  Not only did the exponents of these various approaches to Islam vie over minds and souls; they fought over political power.  Which would have the allegiance of the ruler?  Which would serve as the foundation of law?   A theologian close to one emperor might be put to death by his successor.  And so on.  What’s more, the picture in other countries would differ only in detail:  A great variety of approaches to Islam, sometimes co-existing peaceably, sometimes contesting violently.

We Should Try the Shoe

Today, the complex, many-sided  wars of religion within Islam continue, as we naively sort Muslims into those agin us and those fer us.  Imagine if some Arab state decided to get involved in the abortion debate in the U.S. Or presumed to tell us how we should resolve our loudly-contested, religion-based culture wars?   Suppose Muslims presumed to tell us what kind of Christianity is acceptable to them.  Probably not the kind that vigorously supports an expansionist Israel.  We would not be well disposed toward such meddlers, would we?  So why is it so hard to imagine how that shoe would feel if it were on the other foot?

The Unsettling Case of Sergei Magnitsky, Hermitage Capital and the Russian Mafia

By Patricia H. Kushlis

The last time I visited Moscow was three years after the Soviet Union collapsed.  It was an unsettling experience and one reason why I have yet to return.

Crime was rampant and one of our exchange professors – a young Russian speaking teacher – had just been assaulted on the Stari Arbat, one of Moscow’s most prestigious central shopping streets, by men in Russian army uniforms.  She had been physically attacked, robbed and her teeth smashed.  This had happened one early Friday evening in October during the height of an after work shopping excursion. 

This young woman and her friend and colleague - another American teacher who also spoke fluent Russian – blended in with the crowd in appearance and language.  Other Russians were horrified at what had happened and tried to help her. An Embassy officer and I interviewed her in her dormitory soon after.  The physical violence was painfully obvious.

A culture of seemingly senseless crime

This was not the first time I had experienced similar senseless street crime in that city.  When I was exchanges officer at the US Embassy nearly a decade earlier, three foreign women – two American exchangees and a Finnish nanny - had been physically accosted at different times and places during my two year tenure there by drunken Russians and a male student had reported seeing fresh blood smeared on the walls of his apartment building’s stairwell one weekend. 

Since the Soviets then tried to shield foreigners from the effects of the country’s rampant criminality and physical violence (bad press for a society that claimed to be the crimeless Communist Nirvana), I still wonder what occurred in less well guarded buildings – away from the possibility of prying foreign eyes.

In 1978, the caviar-packed-in-tuna-fish-cans-for-export scam broke.  This almost laughable crime against state property involved the highest levels of the Soviet government.  Essentially, profits from the sales of the expensive contents of the cans made their way into secret foreign bank accounts of high level Soviet officials.

That was then, this is now

Has anything changed subsequently since the Communist regime collapsed?

Certainly. Both for good and for bad.

Many more Russians are allowed to own private property.  Moscow is jammed with cars. Russians travel and live abroad.  They work for private companies formed after 1991.  They dress well and fashionably. And, more importantly they write about events such as the Magnitsky affair in print and post them on the Internet even though the country's major mass media messenger - television is thoroughly controlled by the Putin regime.

Beneath the surface, however, corruption and the violence that accompanies it thrive big time. Perhaps even bigger time than when the stakes were far smaller.  Now not just state property is the object of personal avarice – individual and corporate holdings have become subject to the dictum that operated during the Soviet Union - “what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine too – that is if I can get my hands on it – never mind how.”

The Law of the Jungle Still Applies

That’s what seems to have happened in terms of Sergei Magnitsky and the head of Tax Office Number 28, a woman named Olga Stepanova.  This former mid-level tax official who now works as an adviser to the head of Russia's new and powerful arms procurement agency clearly did not operate alone.  Investigative reporters have shown that she and her accomplices stole at least half a billion dollars, including or perhaps, in addition to, private property owned by individuals acquired by Stepanova by forging and issuing fraudulent deeds. 

The Potomac's Attention Deficit and America's Democracy Building Efforts Abroad

By Patricia H. Kushlis

There’s long been an attention deficit problem in Washington, D.C.  Multitasking is not that city’s strength.  Two weeks ago it was the bombing of Libya followed by a near-US government shut-down.  Earlier in the year it was the popular revolts in Tunisia, then the one in Egypt.

Last week it was the ongoing budget deficit battle.  It’s not that the town on the Potomac or its power players can necessarily choose the issue of the moment – it’s just that the people who run it cannot see beyond the crisis of the day. Moreover, they also have trouble coping with some of the more subtle inter-relationships between the issues - and their solutions.   This extends from the White House to Capitol Hill, engulfs the Pentagon and the State Department. The media is swept in along the way.  Or maybe the media does some of the sweeping.

One of the most intriguing stories along these lines was a report by Ron Nixon that appeared on the Friday April 14 front page of The New York Times. This article entitled “US Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings” has not been mentioned elsewhere – at least as far as I've seen.  Maybe because it is reasonably complex, maybe because reporters would need to understand the foreign affairs budgetary process and be able to explain them or maybe because complexity just doesn’t make for easy, sexy, reader-attractive headlines – like man bites dog – or tornado traps North Carolinian in her or his basement overnight with, oh, my gosh, her or his two well cared-for cats.   Or whatever.                      

Changing the face of the Middle East

Anyway, Ron Nixon tells us that $100 million of US government soft power funds administered through the National Endowment of Democracy and parceled out to the international democracy-building wings of the Democratic and Republican Parties and Freedom House have done more to change the face of the Middle East since December 2010 than the invasion of Iraq or half a trillion dollars spent each year on US military activities at home and abroad.

In comparison, this reporter tells us that $1.3 billion of mostly military aid went to Egypt in the past year alone.  Following right along, Harvard Professor Joseph Nye writes in a recent FP article that the annual budget for the State Department is only $36 billion.  I think this $36 billion also includes the $100 million annually for the National Endowment for Democracy – if, that is, I remember correctly. 

What IRI, NDI and Freedom House have done since US government funds were awarded directly to pro-democracy groups in Egypt and elsewhere throughout the Middle East beginning in 2005 under the Bush administration have been to train people in peaceful means of protest against authoritarian regimes.  If democracy promotion is a goal – which it has long been for both US political parties – then a tiny amount of money went an exceedingly long way.  Although, of course, it has taken more time to demonstrate effectiveness that the single year Congressionally mandated GPRA Act reporting cycle permits. 

Democracy-building funds began under Reagan

This soft-power funding began in 1983 under the Reagan administration.  Then it was aimed at promoting change throughout the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.  Five years later Eastern Europe began to unravel.   It took six years in the case of Egypt.       

When Mubarak, for instance, complained that the US government’s left and right hands were working at cross-purposes and the funding for Egyptian pro-democracy groups was under-mining his regime which the US also supported, the US response was that the goal was reform, not revolution.   

The amount of money spent this way, of course, was a pittance compared with the enormous US government mostly defense-related pay-offs Mubarak used to keep himself in power – and living the life of Reilly for not attacking Israel.

Yet in the end, both sides – the Egyptian military and Egyptian protestors - converged on a single goal this past winter:  Mubarak’s immediate departure as well as that of his heir-apparent son – who is now where?

Ready to roll - and not the Tanks

The pro-democracy folk in the streets and in Tahrir Square used the strategy and tactics they had learned through pro-democracy training from and in the West. This set off the chain reaction we witnessed in earlier this year. The Egyptian military’s decision to refrain from using violence against them was clearly encouraged by their American military counterparts whom they had known throughout the years of training and other contacts as a result of the close defense relationship between our two countries.  If this is what it cost, then money well spent.

This was an excellent – and perhaps unique - convergence between US soft and hard power interests.  But it may be sui genus since each country in the Middle East is so different – and the US relationships with them likewise differ substantially.

In fact, Egypt may be an isolated case of America’s left and right hands working together.  Meanwhile, the US simply does not have the same types of relationships with many of the other countries where Arab popular revolts are occurring or alternatively, the conditions on the ground and options available are very different.   

An unfortunate worsening imbalance  

In a recent article in FP, Harvard professor and “smart power” inventor Joseph Nye bemoans the decline of US government funds for soft power as a part of the latest budget cutting deal.  As Nye points out, even Secretary of Defense Bob Gates told the 2007 Smart Power Commission that more money needed to be devoted to soft power – that the Defense Department could not protect American interests abroad alone and a country that led with the military fist– even a military engaged in soft power activities like humanitarian assistance and keeping other militaries from attacking its own citizens. 

Since 2007, according to Nye, the ratio between non-military foreign affairs spending and for the military has become even more unbalanced.

What Nye doesn’t tell us, however, is that although Gates was quite willing to support new funds for the State Department, I don’t recall that he was also willing to transfer to State one penny of the Pentagon’s nearly 20% share of the US budget. A small amount, it seems to me, would not have been missed – and just think what a difference it might have made.

It still could – but only if the budget cutters rethink what works best (and by far the most cheaply) in the promulgation of US foreign policy.        

 

Facing Down That Al Qaeda Fear Factor

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Rumors abound that the Obama Administration is putting the finishing touches on an International Counter-Terrorism Communications Center likely to be housed in the State Department under the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. 

There are serious questions as to whether such an organization if it ever gets off the drawing board belongs under a State Department Under Secretary (more, hopefully, about this in a future post) but I fear that such an endeavor would most likely result in an outdated, overly costly, not to mention dysfunctional institution when American national security activities  in terms of public diplomacy - and isn't this what an Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy be focusing on - should have substantially shifted before such a center gets off the ground.

How should US public diplomacy be directed?

Or at least I wonder whether the number one target of the US government’s multi-bureaucratic international efforts should remain that of countering militant Islamic extremism when the people's revolts that are shifting the tectonic plates of the Arab world have little, if anything, to do with religion – extremist or not.  

The best the vanquished or soon to be vanquished can claim is that the unintended consequences of the Arab Spring could usher in a terrorist threat because over 95 percent of the non-radical populations are too disorganized to stand up to the militants.  But didn’t Congress already establish a humongous Homeland Security Department that is supposed to deter this country from terrorists launching a 9/11 repeat?  

The latest proposed counter-terrorism organizational mini-endeavor to placate whomever, needs to be thought out carefully as federal funds are reduced willy-nilly in the budget cutting frenzy – one that is likely, once again to favor the right wings’ favorite charity – the military – industrial – covert intelligence complex – when our foreign policy emphasis should be on soft-power connections with people in the Muslim world by means other than guns, tanks, smart bombs and “allies” attempting to manipulate this country to carry out questionable policies for them.  

Apres moi, le deluge?     

Then there’s another question that needs resolving: Why should this country continue to go easy on aging Middle Eastern dictators simply because they threaten the specter of  failed states ripe for an Al Qaeda takeover if, heaven forbid, said dictator is deposed and family sent packing?