Posts
By MAUREEN DOWD
James Baker ran after W. with a butterfly net for a while, but it is now clear that the inmates are still running the asylum.
The Defiant Ones came striding from the Pentagon yesterday, the troika of wayward warriors marching abreast in their dark suits and power ties. W., Rummy and Dick Cheney were so full of quick-draw confidence that they might have been sauntering down the main drag of Deadwood.
Far from being run out of town, the defense czar who rivals Robert McNamara for deadly incompetence has been on a victory lap in Baghdad, Mosul and Washington. Yesterday’s tribute had full military honors, a color guard, a 19-gun salute, an Old Guard performance with marching musicians — including piccolo players — in Revolutionary War costumes, John Philip Sousa music and the chuckleheaded neocons and ex-Rummy deputies who helped screw up the occupation, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, cheering in the audience.
It was surreal: the septuagenarian who arrogantly dismissed initial advice to send more troops to secure Iraq, being praised as “the finest secretary of defense this nation has ever had” by his pal, the vice president, even as a desperate White House drafted ways to reinvade Iraq by sending more troops in a grasping-at-straws effort to reverse the chaos caused by Rummy’s mistakes.
Just imagine the send-off a defense secretary would have gotten who hadn’t sabotaged the Army, Iraq, global security, our chance to get Osama, our moral credibility, the deficit and American military confidence.
Even Joyce Rumsfeld got a Distinguished Public Service Award ribbon placed around her neck. The grandiose ceremony featured everything but the gold-plated matching set of pistols Tommy Franks, another failed warrior, and his wife, Cathy, recently received from a weapons manufacturer. (His had four stars and diamonds; hers, rubies and their marriage date.)
W. never seems as alarmed about the devastation in Iraq as he should be. He told People magazine, “I must tell you, I’m sleeping a lot better than people would assume,” and he told Brit Hume that his presidency was “a joyful experience.”
He slacked off on his slacker effort to form a new Iraq plan. (Can’t these guys ever order pizzas and pull some all-nighters?) Mr. Bush was busy this week hosting Christmas parties for a press corps he disdains; convening a malaria conference at the National Geographic with Dr. Burke of “Grey’s Anatomy,” Isaiah Washington; and presiding over a hero’s departure for the defense secretary he actually dumped, not because of incompetence but for political expediency.
The Rummy hoopla was a way for W. to signal his decision to shred the Baker-Hamilton study, after reportedly denouncing it as a flaming cow pie. Condi Rice signaled the same, telling The Washington Post that she did not want to negotiate with Syria and Iran, as the Iraq Study Group had proposed, because “the compensation” might be too high.
The Democrats thought that when they had won the election, they won the debate on the war and they had W. cornered. But the president is leaning toward surging over the Democrats, voters, Baker and the Bush 41 crowd and some of his own commanders.
W. seems gratified by the idea that rather than having his ears boxed by his father’s best friend, he’s going to go down swinging, or double down, in the metaphor du jour, on his macho bet in Iraq. He’s reading about Harry Truman and casting himself as a feisty Truman, but he’s heading toward late L.B.J. The White House budget office is studying how much it will cost to finance The Surge, an infusion of 20,000 to 50,000 troops into Baghdad to make one last try at “victory.” The policy would devolve from “We stand down as they stand up” to “We stand up more and maybe someday they will, too.”
Some serving commanders are not in favor of The Surge because they fret that it will infantilize Iraqis even more about assuming responsibility for their own security. They also fear that the insurgents, who have nowhere to go, will outwait our troops.
But W. would rather take a risk in Iraq than risk being a wimp. So he continued to wrap himself in muscular delusions, asserting that on Rummy’s watch, “the United States military helped the Iraqi people establish a constitutional democracy in the heart of the Middle East, a watershed event in the story of freedom.”
Dick Cheney offered this praise to his friend: “On the professional side, I would not be where I am today but for the confidence that Don first placed in me those many years ago.”
Alas, we wouldn’t be where we are today, either.
Sunday, December 17
Saturday, December 16
The Enemy Within: Dueling Constitutional Law Professors
By FAREED ZAKARIA
Everyone accepts that “the rule of law” is the foundation of liberties in the Western world. But when did this hallowed tradition begin? Obviously there’s no exact moment, but one could reasonably point to the day in 1215 when, in a small borough outside London called Runnymede, King John was forced by his barons to sign Magna Carta. That document protected the rights of feudal lords, but in doing so it outlined — for the first time in history — legal procedures that even the king had to follow. These limitations are set out in Article 39 of the document, which states that “No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.”
This writ — or written order — has developed over the years as the principal check on arbitrary state power, the original human right, allowing a person who has been arrested to challenge the legality of that detention. It is called the “great writ,” habeas corpus, or “produce the body so that it may be examined.” Habeas corpus was codified by the British Parliament in 1640 and 1679 and is one of a handful of common laws explicitly referred to and protected in the American Constitution. Alexander Hamilton, the most zealous exponent of executive power among the founding fathers, noted that habeas corpus provided “perhaps greater securities to liberty and republicanism” than any clause of the Constitution.
But as of Oct. 17 of this year, this great writ has been substantially weakened in the United States by the assent of both the presidency and Congress. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 eliminates habeas corpus for anyone defined as an “unlawful enemy combatant,” as well as all aliens, including permanent residents — green-card holders — of the United States. There remains a form of judicial review for “unlawful enemy combatants,” but it is one that the administration seems allowed to bypass (though the exact legal status of unlawful combatants remains unclear). In effect, federal courts appear to have been stripped of their historic role in assessing the legality of detentions if the executive branch claims that these arrests are part of the war on terror.
How did we come to this point? Do the dangers of terrorists and terrorism require so broad a shift in the balance of powers and such an outright challenge to the liberty of the Republic? What is the justification behind these moves? John Yoo has tried to answer these questions in “War by Other Means: An Insider’s Account of the War on Terror.” He is well placed to do so. He was a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department from 2001 to 2003 and became one of the principal authors of the Bush administration’s policies regarding arrests, detentions, interrogations and the treatment of prisoners. Since 2003, as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Law School, Yoo has vigorously defended the Bush administration’s legal actions and approaches.
At the heart of Yoo’s argument is the notion that we are at war. “If, during the cold war,” he writes, “the Soviet Union had sent K.G.B. agents to drive airplanes through American skyscrapers, the United States would have retaliated, our nation would have gone on a war footing. ... Why should status as an international terrorist organization rather than a nation-state make a difference as to whether we are at war?”
Everything in Yoo’s analysis follows from this fundamental premise. Detaining operatives of Al Qaeda presents no constitutional problem because they are, in effect, prisoners of war. “Hundreds of thousands of enemy prisoners of war were captured in Vietnam, Korea and World Wars I or II, and their imprisonment was never reviewed by an American court.” Think of all the objections people have made to the Bush administration’s policies and ask yourself, “If we were in the middle of World War II and these were German soldiers, would it be permissible?” Yoo acknowledges, for example, that the administration chose Guantánamo as the prison camp for suspected Qaeda warriors precisely because it did not want federal courts to have any jurisdiction over the place. For Yoo, since we are at war, we need an aggressive interpretation of executive power — inherent in the president’s role as commander in chief — and one that bypasses Congress, the courts and peacetime protections like checks and balances.
But are we really at war? And if so, who are we at war against? Is it just Al Qaeda or more than that one organization? Is it, as the president has often said, a war on terror itself? Many experts have pointed out that you cannot declare war on a tactic (terrorism). As the international policy analyst Grenville Byford noted in Foreign Affairs, wars are more fruitfully declared against proper nouns (Germany, Japan) than common nouns (terror, poverty). If this is a war, moreover, when will it end? How will we know it has ended and whether we have won or lost? These questions do not have easy answers, as Yoo’s own analysis demonstrates. While arguing throughout the book that we are at war, he also insists that we should not apply the most well established rules of war, the Geneva Conventions, to Qaeda prisoners because, well, we are not at war. The conventions are meant to apply to uniformed soldiers captured in war, and that does not describe prisoners in the current conflict.
The practical problems in applying the war model reveal the complexity of our circumstances. During World War II, there was rarely any doubt whether captured German soldiers were in fact fighting for the enemy. But with many of those captured as part of the war on terror, it remains extremely unclear whether they are, in fact, enemies of the United States. Is it necessary to torture some of them in ways that peacetime laws might prohibit? Yoo tends to answer these questions with assertions like “Both Porter Goss, the past director of the C.I.A., and Vice President Cheney, who know far more than they can reveal publicly, have said that such operations are vital to protect the United States from attack.” Well, that settles it then.
Against this “trust us” doctrine we have Ron Suskind’s richly reported details in his recent book, “The One Percent Doctrine,” which reveal how many people have been wrongly arrested, how often torture produced bad information and how few real benefits have been derived from these aggressive interpretations of law and foreign policy. Yoo explains that torturing Abu Zubaydah — Al Qaeda’s No. 3 leader — was vital to uncovering new plots against America. The president described Zubaydah’s harsh interrogation as crucial to the war on terror. But Suskind actually talked to those who did the roughhousing, and they told him that Zubaydah was in fact unimportant, a man in charge of minor logistics for Al Qaeda like travel for wives and children. What’s more, he was mentally unstable. “The guy is insane, certifiable, split personality,” the F.B.I.’s top Qaeda analyst told Suskind. He provided no information of value whatsoever.
Another complication is that traditionally P.O.W.’s have been held without trial because they were usually released when hostilities ended. But does this model apply in a war of indefinite duration? As the administration has found, as a practical matter, it cannot detain hundreds of people in a legal black hole with no end in sight. Yoo argues that “indefinite” does not mean “forever” and that if prisoners can be returned to their home countries without fear that they will start up terrorist activities again, then they should be released. But, as with much of Yoo’s analysis, everything is left to the discretion of the commander in chief. We are at war, after all.
But it is abundantly clear that the “war on terror” is not a war in the traditional sense and that we do not have an enemy in the traditional sense. In “Before the Next Attack,” Bruce Ackerman, a Yale law professor, points out that the problem of terrorism is not one of a single overarching state that has attacked us and threatens our existence. In fact a key feature of the modern world is that the state has lost control over violence. “The root of our problem is not Islam or any ideology, but a fundamental change in the relationship between the state, the market and technologies of destruction,” Ackerman writes. “If the Middle East were magically transformed into a vast oasis of peace and democracy, fringe groups from other places would rise to fill the gap.” Ackerman’s argument could be put differently. We are facing a situation that is actually more revolutionary than the one portrayed by the Bush administration. It’s not that we’re at war. It’s that the nature of peace has been fundamentally altered. From now on, we will have to worry about small groups, without countries or uniforms, who can cause us serious harm.
Ackerman accepts that the law-enforcement model is not appropriate for the challenge of terrorism, since our aim is not to investigate the next terror attack but to prevent it, in fact to pre-empt it. But that is still a different problem from the threat of a full-scale invasion by a great power. Most important, what we now face is likely to be a permanent condition, and this means we need new rules. Ackerman proposes an emergency constitution that would take effect after a major terrorist attack and would include some of the restrictions of the Bush administration’s approach. But it would also expire periodically and could be renewed only by ever-increasing Congressional majorities. Additionally, courts would be able to review any revisions. Ackerman’s solution may or may not be practical, but at least he confronts the problem intelligently, and he is surely correct to say that it’s not a good idea to respond to particular crises with ad hoc changes to our laws. If we don’t think through the basic structure of rules, rights and protections we want, every new attack will produce creeping but permanent limits on freedom.
There is one aspect of our new condition that neither Yoo nor Ackerman addresses in much depth — the broader political context. The United States is fighting a strange war indeed, one that is, in some fundamental ways, an extended campaign of public diplomacy against ideologies of extremism and violence. This campaign is not simply a matter of battling on the air waves with Al Jazeera across the Arab world. It is a matter of reaching into communities. The best sources of intelligence on jihadi cells have tended to come from within localities and neighborhoods. This information has probably been more useful than any we have obtained from waterboarding or sleep deprivation.
Yoo frequently cites a famous case of Nazi agents — Germans and German-Americans — who landed secretly on Long Island in 1942, planning to destroy key elements of America’s industrial strength: power plants, factories and bridges. They were arrested by the F.B.I. and tried by a military tribunal. The case reached the Supreme Court, which upheld the Roosevelt administration’s actions. Many of the justices did so uneasily, but they felt they could not really overturn the administration’s decision in the midst of World War II. The more notable aspect of this story, however, is that these men were arrested not because of any emergency powers of the executive branch. One of them, who had lived for some years in the United States, turned out to have stronger feelings of affection for America than for Germany. Soon after the agents landed, he contacted the F.B.I., which dismissed his tale at first, but he persisted and, finally, the men were arrested.
In its campaign against terror groups, the United States must summon all the strength and skills it can muster. But perhaps our most potent weapons are the sense people around the world have had that the United States is an exemplar of rights and liberties and that it lives by those principles even under storm and stress. When we suspend the writ of habeas corpus, we cast aside these distinctive weapons and trade them for the traditional tools of dictatorships — arbitrary arrests, indefinite imprisonments and aggressive interrogations. Will this trade really help us prevail?
Fareed Zakaria is the editor of Newsweek International, the author of “The Future of Freedom” and the host of the PBS program “Foreign Exchange.”
Everyone accepts that “the rule of law” is the foundation of liberties in the Western world. But when did this hallowed tradition begin? Obviously there’s no exact moment, but one could reasonably point to the day in 1215 when, in a small borough outside London called Runnymede, King John was forced by his barons to sign Magna Carta. That document protected the rights of feudal lords, but in doing so it outlined — for the first time in history — legal procedures that even the king had to follow. These limitations are set out in Article 39 of the document, which states that “No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.”
This writ — or written order — has developed over the years as the principal check on arbitrary state power, the original human right, allowing a person who has been arrested to challenge the legality of that detention. It is called the “great writ,” habeas corpus, or “produce the body so that it may be examined.” Habeas corpus was codified by the British Parliament in 1640 and 1679 and is one of a handful of common laws explicitly referred to and protected in the American Constitution. Alexander Hamilton, the most zealous exponent of executive power among the founding fathers, noted that habeas corpus provided “perhaps greater securities to liberty and republicanism” than any clause of the Constitution.
But as of Oct. 17 of this year, this great writ has been substantially weakened in the United States by the assent of both the presidency and Congress. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 eliminates habeas corpus for anyone defined as an “unlawful enemy combatant,” as well as all aliens, including permanent residents — green-card holders — of the United States. There remains a form of judicial review for “unlawful enemy combatants,” but it is one that the administration seems allowed to bypass (though the exact legal status of unlawful combatants remains unclear). In effect, federal courts appear to have been stripped of their historic role in assessing the legality of detentions if the executive branch claims that these arrests are part of the war on terror.
How did we come to this point? Do the dangers of terrorists and terrorism require so broad a shift in the balance of powers and such an outright challenge to the liberty of the Republic? What is the justification behind these moves? John Yoo has tried to answer these questions in “War by Other Means: An Insider’s Account of the War on Terror.” He is well placed to do so. He was a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department from 2001 to 2003 and became one of the principal authors of the Bush administration’s policies regarding arrests, detentions, interrogations and the treatment of prisoners. Since 2003, as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Law School, Yoo has vigorously defended the Bush administration’s legal actions and approaches.
At the heart of Yoo’s argument is the notion that we are at war. “If, during the cold war,” he writes, “the Soviet Union had sent K.G.B. agents to drive airplanes through American skyscrapers, the United States would have retaliated, our nation would have gone on a war footing. ... Why should status as an international terrorist organization rather than a nation-state make a difference as to whether we are at war?”
Everything in Yoo’s analysis follows from this fundamental premise. Detaining operatives of Al Qaeda presents no constitutional problem because they are, in effect, prisoners of war. “Hundreds of thousands of enemy prisoners of war were captured in Vietnam, Korea and World Wars I or II, and their imprisonment was never reviewed by an American court.” Think of all the objections people have made to the Bush administration’s policies and ask yourself, “If we were in the middle of World War II and these were German soldiers, would it be permissible?” Yoo acknowledges, for example, that the administration chose Guantánamo as the prison camp for suspected Qaeda warriors precisely because it did not want federal courts to have any jurisdiction over the place. For Yoo, since we are at war, we need an aggressive interpretation of executive power — inherent in the president’s role as commander in chief — and one that bypasses Congress, the courts and peacetime protections like checks and balances.
But are we really at war? And if so, who are we at war against? Is it just Al Qaeda or more than that one organization? Is it, as the president has often said, a war on terror itself? Many experts have pointed out that you cannot declare war on a tactic (terrorism). As the international policy analyst Grenville Byford noted in Foreign Affairs, wars are more fruitfully declared against proper nouns (Germany, Japan) than common nouns (terror, poverty). If this is a war, moreover, when will it end? How will we know it has ended and whether we have won or lost? These questions do not have easy answers, as Yoo’s own analysis demonstrates. While arguing throughout the book that we are at war, he also insists that we should not apply the most well established rules of war, the Geneva Conventions, to Qaeda prisoners because, well, we are not at war. The conventions are meant to apply to uniformed soldiers captured in war, and that does not describe prisoners in the current conflict.
The practical problems in applying the war model reveal the complexity of our circumstances. During World War II, there was rarely any doubt whether captured German soldiers were in fact fighting for the enemy. But with many of those captured as part of the war on terror, it remains extremely unclear whether they are, in fact, enemies of the United States. Is it necessary to torture some of them in ways that peacetime laws might prohibit? Yoo tends to answer these questions with assertions like “Both Porter Goss, the past director of the C.I.A., and Vice President Cheney, who know far more than they can reveal publicly, have said that such operations are vital to protect the United States from attack.” Well, that settles it then.
Against this “trust us” doctrine we have Ron Suskind’s richly reported details in his recent book, “The One Percent Doctrine,” which reveal how many people have been wrongly arrested, how often torture produced bad information and how few real benefits have been derived from these aggressive interpretations of law and foreign policy. Yoo explains that torturing Abu Zubaydah — Al Qaeda’s No. 3 leader — was vital to uncovering new plots against America. The president described Zubaydah’s harsh interrogation as crucial to the war on terror. But Suskind actually talked to those who did the roughhousing, and they told him that Zubaydah was in fact unimportant, a man in charge of minor logistics for Al Qaeda like travel for wives and children. What’s more, he was mentally unstable. “The guy is insane, certifiable, split personality,” the F.B.I.’s top Qaeda analyst told Suskind. He provided no information of value whatsoever.
Another complication is that traditionally P.O.W.’s have been held without trial because they were usually released when hostilities ended. But does this model apply in a war of indefinite duration? As the administration has found, as a practical matter, it cannot detain hundreds of people in a legal black hole with no end in sight. Yoo argues that “indefinite” does not mean “forever” and that if prisoners can be returned to their home countries without fear that they will start up terrorist activities again, then they should be released. But, as with much of Yoo’s analysis, everything is left to the discretion of the commander in chief. We are at war, after all.
But it is abundantly clear that the “war on terror” is not a war in the traditional sense and that we do not have an enemy in the traditional sense. In “Before the Next Attack,” Bruce Ackerman, a Yale law professor, points out that the problem of terrorism is not one of a single overarching state that has attacked us and threatens our existence. In fact a key feature of the modern world is that the state has lost control over violence. “The root of our problem is not Islam or any ideology, but a fundamental change in the relationship between the state, the market and technologies of destruction,” Ackerman writes. “If the Middle East were magically transformed into a vast oasis of peace and democracy, fringe groups from other places would rise to fill the gap.” Ackerman’s argument could be put differently. We are facing a situation that is actually more revolutionary than the one portrayed by the Bush administration. It’s not that we’re at war. It’s that the nature of peace has been fundamentally altered. From now on, we will have to worry about small groups, without countries or uniforms, who can cause us serious harm.
Ackerman accepts that the law-enforcement model is not appropriate for the challenge of terrorism, since our aim is not to investigate the next terror attack but to prevent it, in fact to pre-empt it. But that is still a different problem from the threat of a full-scale invasion by a great power. Most important, what we now face is likely to be a permanent condition, and this means we need new rules. Ackerman proposes an emergency constitution that would take effect after a major terrorist attack and would include some of the restrictions of the Bush administration’s approach. But it would also expire periodically and could be renewed only by ever-increasing Congressional majorities. Additionally, courts would be able to review any revisions. Ackerman’s solution may or may not be practical, but at least he confronts the problem intelligently, and he is surely correct to say that it’s not a good idea to respond to particular crises with ad hoc changes to our laws. If we don’t think through the basic structure of rules, rights and protections we want, every new attack will produce creeping but permanent limits on freedom.
There is one aspect of our new condition that neither Yoo nor Ackerman addresses in much depth — the broader political context. The United States is fighting a strange war indeed, one that is, in some fundamental ways, an extended campaign of public diplomacy against ideologies of extremism and violence. This campaign is not simply a matter of battling on the air waves with Al Jazeera across the Arab world. It is a matter of reaching into communities. The best sources of intelligence on jihadi cells have tended to come from within localities and neighborhoods. This information has probably been more useful than any we have obtained from waterboarding or sleep deprivation.
Yoo frequently cites a famous case of Nazi agents — Germans and German-Americans — who landed secretly on Long Island in 1942, planning to destroy key elements of America’s industrial strength: power plants, factories and bridges. They were arrested by the F.B.I. and tried by a military tribunal. The case reached the Supreme Court, which upheld the Roosevelt administration’s actions. Many of the justices did so uneasily, but they felt they could not really overturn the administration’s decision in the midst of World War II. The more notable aspect of this story, however, is that these men were arrested not because of any emergency powers of the executive branch. One of them, who had lived for some years in the United States, turned out to have stronger feelings of affection for America than for Germany. Soon after the agents landed, he contacted the F.B.I., which dismissed his tale at first, but he persisted and, finally, the men were arrested.
In its campaign against terror groups, the United States must summon all the strength and skills it can muster. But perhaps our most potent weapons are the sense people around the world have had that the United States is an exemplar of rights and liberties and that it lives by those principles even under storm and stress. When we suspend the writ of habeas corpus, we cast aside these distinctive weapons and trade them for the traditional tools of dictatorships — arbitrary arrests, indefinite imprisonments and aggressive interrogations. Will this trade really help us prevail?
Fareed Zakaria is the editor of Newsweek International, the author of “The Future of Freedom” and the host of the PBS program “Foreign Exchange.”
Friday, December 15
Whichever Way the Wind Blows
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Midland, Tex.
Time for another news quiz: Which American state produces more wind-generated electricity than any other? Answer: Texas. Next question — this one you’ll never get: Which politician launched the Texas wind industry? Answer: Former Gov., now President, George W. Bush.
Yes, there are many things that baffle me about President Bush, but none more than how the same man who initiated one of the most effective renewable energy programs in America, has presided over an administration that for six years has dragged its feet on alternative energy, used its regulatory powers to weaken efficiency standards for major appliances and stuck its head in the sand on global warming.
I’ll wait for historians to sort that out. But here is some immediate advice I can give the president: If you want to salvage any positive legacy, it will not come from Iraq. There are only tears left there. No, the only way for you, Mr. President, to salvage any legacy is to get back in touch with your green Texas roots and devote the rest of your term to REALLY ending America’s oil addiction, liberating us from dependence on petro-authoritarian regimes and making America the leader in renewable energies that combat climate change.
If this isn’t the core of Mr. Bush’s next State of the Union, he might as well go back to Crawford now. At least there he might be able to contemplate what went wrong with his presidency under lights powered by clean, wind-generated electricity that he promoted.
I came down to West Texas, the Saudi Arabia of wind, to find out how it all happened. Pat Wood, a friend of the president, was chairman of Texas’s Public Utility Commission when the push for wind energy started.
“At the end of a meeting on transmission policy in mid-1996,” he recalled, “I was on my way out the door of the governor’s office, when Governor Bush said to me, ‘Pat, we like wind.’ He was at his desk. I said, ‘We what?’ He said: ‘You heard me. Go get smart on wind.’ ”
Mr. Wood, his fellow commissioners and the Texas utilities did just that. They conducted polls and were stunned by the results: Texas electricity customers were ready to pay a little extra to get more clean renewable energy. So Mr. Bush instructed Mr. Wood to work on wind with the utilities and the environmentalists. Together, they created the Texas Renewable Portfolio Mandate, which Mr. Bush got passed by the Texas Legislature in 1999, as part of a power competition bill. The mandate stipulated that Texas power companies had to produce 2,000 new megawatts of electricity from renewables, mostly wind, by 2009.
What happened? A dozen new companies jumped into the Texas market and built wind turbines to meet the mandate — so many that the 2,000-megawatt goal was reached in 2005. So now the Texas Legislature has upped the mandate to 5,000 megawatts by 2015. Everyone knows they’ll beat that, too, because all this investment has driven down the costs and made wind power in Texas competitive with clean coal, nuclear and natural gas, even without the temporary tax break. Mr. Wood says he thinks Texas could be producing 15 percent of all its energy from renewables by 2015.
An energy wiz, Mr. Wood now advises Airtricity, an Irish wind-power company that also entered the Texas market. He and I toured its new wind farm near Midland, which will provide enough wind electricity — 125 megawatts — to power 40,000 homes in Dallas, replacing gas, nuclear and coal. The farm consists of giant turbines that sprout like Star Wars machine-monsters from the hardscrabble plains around Midland — amid the mesquite, rattlesnakes and oil-pumping jacks.
When Mr. Bush ran for governor, his motto was: “What Texans can dream, Texans can do.” Just substitute “Americans” for “Texans,” and he’s already got the last line of his next State of the Union. What would the substance be? First, let’s set a Texas-like renewable energy mandate for every state. Second, let’s forge a national electricity transmission grid from the Dakotas to Texas to take wind electricity from where it is best produced to the big cities where it is most needed. Finally, let’s create a long-term tax subsidy for building and buying plug-in hybrid cars. Wind energy is produced abundantly at night, when demand is lowest. Electric hybrids would be charged at night. That would mean hybrid electric cars, which emit virtually no carbon, could be powered by wind, which produces no carbon. If that scaled, it could be better than Kyoto.
You got something better to do, Mr. President?
Midland, Tex.
Time for another news quiz: Which American state produces more wind-generated electricity than any other? Answer: Texas. Next question — this one you’ll never get: Which politician launched the Texas wind industry? Answer: Former Gov., now President, George W. Bush.
Yes, there are many things that baffle me about President Bush, but none more than how the same man who initiated one of the most effective renewable energy programs in America, has presided over an administration that for six years has dragged its feet on alternative energy, used its regulatory powers to weaken efficiency standards for major appliances and stuck its head in the sand on global warming.
I’ll wait for historians to sort that out. But here is some immediate advice I can give the president: If you want to salvage any positive legacy, it will not come from Iraq. There are only tears left there. No, the only way for you, Mr. President, to salvage any legacy is to get back in touch with your green Texas roots and devote the rest of your term to REALLY ending America’s oil addiction, liberating us from dependence on petro-authoritarian regimes and making America the leader in renewable energies that combat climate change.
If this isn’t the core of Mr. Bush’s next State of the Union, he might as well go back to Crawford now. At least there he might be able to contemplate what went wrong with his presidency under lights powered by clean, wind-generated electricity that he promoted.
I came down to West Texas, the Saudi Arabia of wind, to find out how it all happened. Pat Wood, a friend of the president, was chairman of Texas’s Public Utility Commission when the push for wind energy started.
“At the end of a meeting on transmission policy in mid-1996,” he recalled, “I was on my way out the door of the governor’s office, when Governor Bush said to me, ‘Pat, we like wind.’ He was at his desk. I said, ‘We what?’ He said: ‘You heard me. Go get smart on wind.’ ”
Mr. Wood, his fellow commissioners and the Texas utilities did just that. They conducted polls and were stunned by the results: Texas electricity customers were ready to pay a little extra to get more clean renewable energy. So Mr. Bush instructed Mr. Wood to work on wind with the utilities and the environmentalists. Together, they created the Texas Renewable Portfolio Mandate, which Mr. Bush got passed by the Texas Legislature in 1999, as part of a power competition bill. The mandate stipulated that Texas power companies had to produce 2,000 new megawatts of electricity from renewables, mostly wind, by 2009.
What happened? A dozen new companies jumped into the Texas market and built wind turbines to meet the mandate — so many that the 2,000-megawatt goal was reached in 2005. So now the Texas Legislature has upped the mandate to 5,000 megawatts by 2015. Everyone knows they’ll beat that, too, because all this investment has driven down the costs and made wind power in Texas competitive with clean coal, nuclear and natural gas, even without the temporary tax break. Mr. Wood says he thinks Texas could be producing 15 percent of all its energy from renewables by 2015.
An energy wiz, Mr. Wood now advises Airtricity, an Irish wind-power company that also entered the Texas market. He and I toured its new wind farm near Midland, which will provide enough wind electricity — 125 megawatts — to power 40,000 homes in Dallas, replacing gas, nuclear and coal. The farm consists of giant turbines that sprout like Star Wars machine-monsters from the hardscrabble plains around Midland — amid the mesquite, rattlesnakes and oil-pumping jacks.
When Mr. Bush ran for governor, his motto was: “What Texans can dream, Texans can do.” Just substitute “Americans” for “Texans,” and he’s already got the last line of his next State of the Union. What would the substance be? First, let’s set a Texas-like renewable energy mandate for every state. Second, let’s forge a national electricity transmission grid from the Dakotas to Texas to take wind electricity from where it is best produced to the big cities where it is most needed. Finally, let’s create a long-term tax subsidy for building and buying plug-in hybrid cars. Wind energy is produced abundantly at night, when demand is lowest. Electric hybrids would be charged at night. That would mean hybrid electric cars, which emit virtually no carbon, could be powered by wind, which produces no carbon. If that scaled, it could be better than Kyoto.
You got something better to do, Mr. President?
Monday, December 11
Outsourcer in Chief
By PAUL KRUGMAN
According to U.S. News & World Report, President Bush has told aides that he won’t respond in detail to the Iraq Study Group’s report because he doesn’t want to “outsource” the role of commander in chief.
That’s pretty ironic. You see, outsourcing of the government’s responsibilities — not to panels of supposed wise men, but to private companies with the right connections — has been one of the hallmarks of his administration. And privatization through outsourcing is one reason the administration has failed on so many fronts.
For example, an article in Saturday’s New York Times describes how the Coast Guard has run a $17 billion modernization program: “Instead of managing the project itself, the Coast Guard hired Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, two of the nation’s largest military contractors, to plan, supervise and deliver the new vessels and helicopters.”
The result? Expensive ships that aren’t seaworthy. The Coast Guard ignored “repeated warnings from its own engineers that the boats and ships were poorly designed and perhaps unsafe,” while “the contractors failed to fulfill their obligation to make sure the government got the best price, frequently steering work to their subsidiaries or business partners instead of competitors.”
In Afghanistan, the job of training a new police force was outsourced to DynCorp International, a private contractor, under very loose supervision: when conducting a recent review, auditors couldn’t even find a copy of DynCorp’s contract to see what it called for. And $1.1 billion later, Afghanistan still doesn’t have an effective police training program.
In July 2004, Government Executive magazine published an article titled “Outsourcing Iraq,” documenting how the U.S. occupation authorities had transferred responsibility for reconstruction to private contractors, with hardly any oversight. “The only plan,” it said, “appears to have been to let the private sector manage nation-building, mostly on their own.” We all know how that turned out.
On the home front, the Bush administration outsourced many responsibilities of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. For example, the job of evacuating people from disaster areas was given to a trucking logistics firm, Landstar Express America. When Hurricane Katrina struck, Landstar didn’t even know where to get buses. According to Carey Limousine, which was eventually hired, Landstar “found us on the Web site.”
It’s now clear that there’s a fundamental error in the antigovernment ideology embraced by today’s conservative movement. Conservatives look at the virtues of market competition and leap to the conclusion that private ownership, in itself, is some kind of magic elixir. But there’s no reason to assume that a private company hired to perform a public service will do better than people employed directly by the government.
In fact, the private company will almost surely do a worse job if its political connections insulate it from accountability — which has, of course, consistently been the case under Mr. Bush. The inspectors’ report on Afghanistan’s police conspicuously avoided assessing DynCorp’s performance; even as government auditors found fault with Landstar, the company received a plaque from the Department of Transportation honoring its hurricane relief efforts.
Underlying this lack of accountability are the real motives for turning government functions over to private companies, which have little to do with efficiency. To say the obvious: when you see a story about failed outsourcing, you can be sure that the company in question is a major contributor to the Republican Party, is run by people with strong G.O.P. connections, or both.
So what happens now? The failure of privatization under the Bush administration offers a target-rich environment to newly empowered Congressional Democrats — and I say, let the subpoenas fly. Bear in mind that we’re not talking just about wasted money: contracting failures in Iraq helped us lose one war, similar failures in Afghanistan may help us lose another, and FEMA’s failures helped us lose a great American city.
And maybe, just maybe, the abject failure of this administration’s efforts to outsource essential functions to the private sector will diminish the antigovernment prejudice created by decades of right-wing propaganda.
That’s important, because the presumption that the private sector can do no wrong and the government can do nothing right prevents us from coming to grips with some of America’s biggest problems — in particular, our wildly dysfunctional health care system. More on that in future columns.
According to U.S. News & World Report, President Bush has told aides that he won’t respond in detail to the Iraq Study Group’s report because he doesn’t want to “outsource” the role of commander in chief.
That’s pretty ironic. You see, outsourcing of the government’s responsibilities — not to panels of supposed wise men, but to private companies with the right connections — has been one of the hallmarks of his administration. And privatization through outsourcing is one reason the administration has failed on so many fronts.
For example, an article in Saturday’s New York Times describes how the Coast Guard has run a $17 billion modernization program: “Instead of managing the project itself, the Coast Guard hired Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, two of the nation’s largest military contractors, to plan, supervise and deliver the new vessels and helicopters.”
The result? Expensive ships that aren’t seaworthy. The Coast Guard ignored “repeated warnings from its own engineers that the boats and ships were poorly designed and perhaps unsafe,” while “the contractors failed to fulfill their obligation to make sure the government got the best price, frequently steering work to their subsidiaries or business partners instead of competitors.”
In Afghanistan, the job of training a new police force was outsourced to DynCorp International, a private contractor, under very loose supervision: when conducting a recent review, auditors couldn’t even find a copy of DynCorp’s contract to see what it called for. And $1.1 billion later, Afghanistan still doesn’t have an effective police training program.
In July 2004, Government Executive magazine published an article titled “Outsourcing Iraq,” documenting how the U.S. occupation authorities had transferred responsibility for reconstruction to private contractors, with hardly any oversight. “The only plan,” it said, “appears to have been to let the private sector manage nation-building, mostly on their own.” We all know how that turned out.
On the home front, the Bush administration outsourced many responsibilities of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. For example, the job of evacuating people from disaster areas was given to a trucking logistics firm, Landstar Express America. When Hurricane Katrina struck, Landstar didn’t even know where to get buses. According to Carey Limousine, which was eventually hired, Landstar “found us on the Web site.”
It’s now clear that there’s a fundamental error in the antigovernment ideology embraced by today’s conservative movement. Conservatives look at the virtues of market competition and leap to the conclusion that private ownership, in itself, is some kind of magic elixir. But there’s no reason to assume that a private company hired to perform a public service will do better than people employed directly by the government.
In fact, the private company will almost surely do a worse job if its political connections insulate it from accountability — which has, of course, consistently been the case under Mr. Bush. The inspectors’ report on Afghanistan’s police conspicuously avoided assessing DynCorp’s performance; even as government auditors found fault with Landstar, the company received a plaque from the Department of Transportation honoring its hurricane relief efforts.
Underlying this lack of accountability are the real motives for turning government functions over to private companies, which have little to do with efficiency. To say the obvious: when you see a story about failed outsourcing, you can be sure that the company in question is a major contributor to the Republican Party, is run by people with strong G.O.P. connections, or both.
So what happens now? The failure of privatization under the Bush administration offers a target-rich environment to newly empowered Congressional Democrats — and I say, let the subpoenas fly. Bear in mind that we’re not talking just about wasted money: contracting failures in Iraq helped us lose one war, similar failures in Afghanistan may help us lose another, and FEMA’s failures helped us lose a great American city.
And maybe, just maybe, the abject failure of this administration’s efforts to outsource essential functions to the private sector will diminish the antigovernment prejudice created by decades of right-wing propaganda.
That’s important, because the presumption that the private sector can do no wrong and the government can do nothing right prevents us from coming to grips with some of America’s biggest problems — in particular, our wildly dysfunctional health care system. More on that in future columns.
Sunday, December 10
The Sunshine Boys Can’t Save Iraq
Iraq is already lost. Leave it quick.
By FRANK RICH
IN America we like quick fixes, closure and an uplifting show. Such were the high hopes for the Iraq Study Group, and on one of the three it delivered.
The report of the 10 Washington elders was rolled out like a heartwarming Hollywood holiday release. There was a feel-good title, “The Way Forward,” unfortunately chosen as well by Ford Motor to promote its last-ditch plan to stave off bankruptcy. There was a months-long buildup, with titillating sneak previews to whip up anticipation. There was the gala publicity tour on opening day, starting with a President Bush cameo timed for morning television and building to a “Sunshine Boys” curtain call by James Baker and Lee Hamilton on “Larry King Live.”
The wizard behind it all was the public relations giant Edelman, which has lately been recruited by Wal-Mart to put down the populist insurgency threatening its bottom line. Edelman’s vice chairman is Michael Deaver, the imagineer extraordinaire of the Reagan presidency, and “The Way Forward” had a nostalgic dash of that old Morning-in-America vibe. In The Washington Post, David Broder gushingly quoted one member of the group, Alan Simpson, musing that “immigration, Social Security and all those other things that have been hung up for so long” might benefit from similar ex-officio bipartisanship. Only in Washington could an unelected panel of retirees pass for public-policy Viagra.
Mr. Simpson notwithstanding, the former senator who most comes to mind is Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. In the early 1990’s he famously coined the phrase “defining deviancy down” to describe the erosion of civic standards for what constitutes criminal behavior. In 2006, our governmental ailment is defining reality down. “The Way Forward” is its apotheosis.
This syndrome begins at the top, with the president, who has cut and run from reality in Iraq for nearly four years. His case is extreme but hardly unique. Take Robert Gates, the next defense secretary, who was hailed as a paragon of realism by Washington last week simply for agreeing with his Senate questioners that we’re “not winning” in Iraq. While that may be a step closer to candor than Mr. Bush’s “absolutely, we’re winning” of late October, it’s hardly the whole truth and nothing but. The actual reality is that we have lost in Iraq.
That’s what Donald Rumsfeld at long last acknowledged, between the lines, as he fled the Pentagon to make way for Mr. Gates. The most revealing passage in his parting memo listing possible options for the war was his suggestion that public expectations for success be downsized so we would “therefore not ‘lose.’ ” By putting the word lose in quotes, Mr. Rumsfeld revealed his hand: the administration must not utter that L word even though lose is exactly what we’ve done. The illusion of not losing must be preserved no matter what the price in blood.
The Iraq Study Group takes a similarly disingenuous tack. Its account of how the country Mr. Bush called a “grave and gathering danger” in September 2002 has devolved into a “grave and deteriorating” catastrophe today is unsparing and accurate. But everyone except the president knew this already, and that patina of realism evaporates once the report moves from diagnosis to prescription.
Its recommendations are bogus because the few that have any teeth are completely unattainable. Of course, it would be fantastic if additional Iraqi troops would stand up en masse after an infusion of new American military advisers. And if reconciliation among the country’s warring ethnicities could be mandated on a tight schedule. And if the Bush White House could be persuaded to persuade Iran and Syria to “influence events” for America’s benefit. It would also be nice if we could all break the bank in Vegas.
The group’s coulda-woulda recommendations are either nonstarters, equivocations (it endorses withdrawal of combat troops by 2008 but is averse to timelines) or contradictions of its own findings of fact. To take just one example: Even if we could wave a magic wand and quickly create thousands more military advisers (and Arabic-speaking ones at that), there’s no reason to believe they could build a crack Iraqi army and police force where all those who came before have failed. As the report points out, the loyalties and capabilities of the existing units are suspect as it is.
By prescribing such placebos, the Iraq Study Group isn’t plotting a way forward but delaying the recognition of our defeat. Its real aim is to enact a charade of progress to pacify the public while Washington waits, no doubt in vain, for Mr. Bush to return to the real world. The tip-off to the cynical game can be found in a single sentence: “We agree with the goal of U.S. policy in Iraq, as stated by the president: ‘an Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself.’ ” This studious group knows that even that modest goal, a radical devaluation of the administration’s ambition to spread democracy throughout the Middle East, has long been proven a mirage. The Iraqi government’s ability to defend anything is so inoperative that the group’s members visited the country but once, with just one (Chuck Robb) daring to leave the Green Zone. The Bush-Maliki rendezvous 10 days ago was at the Four Seasons hotel in Amman.
The only recommendations that might alter that reality, however evanescently, come not from “The Way Forward” but from its critics on the right who want significantly more troops and no withdrawal timetables whatsoever. But a Pentagon review leaked to The Washington Post three weeks ago estimates that a true counterinsurgency campaign would “require several hundred thousand additional U.S. and Iraqi soldiers as well as heavily armed Iraqi police,” not the 20,000 or so envisioned as a short-term booster shot by John McCain.
Since these troops don’t exist and there is no public support in either America or Iraq for mobilizing them, the president can’t satisfy the hawks even if he chooses to do so. Since he’s also dead set against a prompt withdrawal, we already know what his policy will be, no matter how many “reviews” he conducts. He will stay the course, with various fake-outs along the way to keep us from thinking we’ve “lost,” until the whole mess is deposited in the lap of the next president.
But as Chuck Hagel said last week, “The impending disaster in Iraq is unwinding at a rate that we can’t quite calibrate.” It is yet another, even more reckless flight from reality to suppose that the world will stand still while we dally. The Iraq Study Group’s insistence on dragging out its deliberations until after Election Day for the sake of domestic politics mocked and undermined the urgency of its own mission. Meanwhile the violence metastasized. Eleven more of our soldiers were killed on the day the group finally put on its show. The antagonists in Iraq are not about to take a recess while we celebrate Christmas. The mass exodus of Iraqis, some 100,000 per month, was labeled “the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world” by Refugees International last week and might soon rival Darfur’s.
THE Iraq-Vietnam parallels at this juncture are striking. In January 1968, L.B.J. replaced his arrogant failed defense secretary, Robert McNamara, with a practiced Washington hand, Clark Clifford. The war’s violence boiled over soon after (Tet), prompting a downturn in American public opinion. Allies in our coalition of the willing — Thailand, the Philippines, Australia — had balked at tossing in new troops. Clifford commissioned a re-evaluation of American policy that churned up such ideas as a troop pullback, increased training of South Vietnamese forces and a warning to the South Vietnamese government that American assistance would depend on its performance. In March, a bipartisan group of wise men (from Dean Acheson to Omar Bradley) was summoned to the White House, where it seconded the notion of disengagement.
But there the stories of Vietnam and Iraq diverge. Those wise men, unlike the Iraq Study Group, were clear in their verdict. And that Texan president, unlike ours, paid more than lip service to changing course. He abruptly announced he would abjure re-election, restrict American bombing and entertain the idea of peace talks. But as Stanley Karnow recounts in “Vietnam: A History,” it was already too late, after some 20,000 casualties and three years of all-out war, for an easy escape: “The frustrating talks were to drag on for another five years. More Americans would be killed in Vietnam than had died there previously. And the United States itself would be torn apart by the worst internal upheavals in a century.”
The lesson in that is clear and sobering: As bad as things may seem now, they can yet become worse, and not just in Iraq. The longer we pretend that we have not lost there, the more we risk losing other wars we still may salvage, starting with Afghanistan.
The members of the Iraq Study Group are all good Americans of proven service to their country. But to the extent that their report forestalls reality and promotes pipe dreams of one last chance for success in this fiasco, it will be remembered as just one more delusional milestone in the tragedy of our age.
By FRANK RICH
IN America we like quick fixes, closure and an uplifting show. Such were the high hopes for the Iraq Study Group, and on one of the three it delivered.
The report of the 10 Washington elders was rolled out like a heartwarming Hollywood holiday release. There was a feel-good title, “The Way Forward,” unfortunately chosen as well by Ford Motor to promote its last-ditch plan to stave off bankruptcy. There was a months-long buildup, with titillating sneak previews to whip up anticipation. There was the gala publicity tour on opening day, starting with a President Bush cameo timed for morning television and building to a “Sunshine Boys” curtain call by James Baker and Lee Hamilton on “Larry King Live.”
The wizard behind it all was the public relations giant Edelman, which has lately been recruited by Wal-Mart to put down the populist insurgency threatening its bottom line. Edelman’s vice chairman is Michael Deaver, the imagineer extraordinaire of the Reagan presidency, and “The Way Forward” had a nostalgic dash of that old Morning-in-America vibe. In The Washington Post, David Broder gushingly quoted one member of the group, Alan Simpson, musing that “immigration, Social Security and all those other things that have been hung up for so long” might benefit from similar ex-officio bipartisanship. Only in Washington could an unelected panel of retirees pass for public-policy Viagra.
Mr. Simpson notwithstanding, the former senator who most comes to mind is Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. In the early 1990’s he famously coined the phrase “defining deviancy down” to describe the erosion of civic standards for what constitutes criminal behavior. In 2006, our governmental ailment is defining reality down. “The Way Forward” is its apotheosis.
This syndrome begins at the top, with the president, who has cut and run from reality in Iraq for nearly four years. His case is extreme but hardly unique. Take Robert Gates, the next defense secretary, who was hailed as a paragon of realism by Washington last week simply for agreeing with his Senate questioners that we’re “not winning” in Iraq. While that may be a step closer to candor than Mr. Bush’s “absolutely, we’re winning” of late October, it’s hardly the whole truth and nothing but. The actual reality is that we have lost in Iraq.
That’s what Donald Rumsfeld at long last acknowledged, between the lines, as he fled the Pentagon to make way for Mr. Gates. The most revealing passage in his parting memo listing possible options for the war was his suggestion that public expectations for success be downsized so we would “therefore not ‘lose.’ ” By putting the word lose in quotes, Mr. Rumsfeld revealed his hand: the administration must not utter that L word even though lose is exactly what we’ve done. The illusion of not losing must be preserved no matter what the price in blood.
The Iraq Study Group takes a similarly disingenuous tack. Its account of how the country Mr. Bush called a “grave and gathering danger” in September 2002 has devolved into a “grave and deteriorating” catastrophe today is unsparing and accurate. But everyone except the president knew this already, and that patina of realism evaporates once the report moves from diagnosis to prescription.
Its recommendations are bogus because the few that have any teeth are completely unattainable. Of course, it would be fantastic if additional Iraqi troops would stand up en masse after an infusion of new American military advisers. And if reconciliation among the country’s warring ethnicities could be mandated on a tight schedule. And if the Bush White House could be persuaded to persuade Iran and Syria to “influence events” for America’s benefit. It would also be nice if we could all break the bank in Vegas.
The group’s coulda-woulda recommendations are either nonstarters, equivocations (it endorses withdrawal of combat troops by 2008 but is averse to timelines) or contradictions of its own findings of fact. To take just one example: Even if we could wave a magic wand and quickly create thousands more military advisers (and Arabic-speaking ones at that), there’s no reason to believe they could build a crack Iraqi army and police force where all those who came before have failed. As the report points out, the loyalties and capabilities of the existing units are suspect as it is.
By prescribing such placebos, the Iraq Study Group isn’t plotting a way forward but delaying the recognition of our defeat. Its real aim is to enact a charade of progress to pacify the public while Washington waits, no doubt in vain, for Mr. Bush to return to the real world. The tip-off to the cynical game can be found in a single sentence: “We agree with the goal of U.S. policy in Iraq, as stated by the president: ‘an Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself.’ ” This studious group knows that even that modest goal, a radical devaluation of the administration’s ambition to spread democracy throughout the Middle East, has long been proven a mirage. The Iraqi government’s ability to defend anything is so inoperative that the group’s members visited the country but once, with just one (Chuck Robb) daring to leave the Green Zone. The Bush-Maliki rendezvous 10 days ago was at the Four Seasons hotel in Amman.
The only recommendations that might alter that reality, however evanescently, come not from “The Way Forward” but from its critics on the right who want significantly more troops and no withdrawal timetables whatsoever. But a Pentagon review leaked to The Washington Post three weeks ago estimates that a true counterinsurgency campaign would “require several hundred thousand additional U.S. and Iraqi soldiers as well as heavily armed Iraqi police,” not the 20,000 or so envisioned as a short-term booster shot by John McCain.
Since these troops don’t exist and there is no public support in either America or Iraq for mobilizing them, the president can’t satisfy the hawks even if he chooses to do so. Since he’s also dead set against a prompt withdrawal, we already know what his policy will be, no matter how many “reviews” he conducts. He will stay the course, with various fake-outs along the way to keep us from thinking we’ve “lost,” until the whole mess is deposited in the lap of the next president.
But as Chuck Hagel said last week, “The impending disaster in Iraq is unwinding at a rate that we can’t quite calibrate.” It is yet another, even more reckless flight from reality to suppose that the world will stand still while we dally. The Iraq Study Group’s insistence on dragging out its deliberations until after Election Day for the sake of domestic politics mocked and undermined the urgency of its own mission. Meanwhile the violence metastasized. Eleven more of our soldiers were killed on the day the group finally put on its show. The antagonists in Iraq are not about to take a recess while we celebrate Christmas. The mass exodus of Iraqis, some 100,000 per month, was labeled “the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world” by Refugees International last week and might soon rival Darfur’s.
THE Iraq-Vietnam parallels at this juncture are striking. In January 1968, L.B.J. replaced his arrogant failed defense secretary, Robert McNamara, with a practiced Washington hand, Clark Clifford. The war’s violence boiled over soon after (Tet), prompting a downturn in American public opinion. Allies in our coalition of the willing — Thailand, the Philippines, Australia — had balked at tossing in new troops. Clifford commissioned a re-evaluation of American policy that churned up such ideas as a troop pullback, increased training of South Vietnamese forces and a warning to the South Vietnamese government that American assistance would depend on its performance. In March, a bipartisan group of wise men (from Dean Acheson to Omar Bradley) was summoned to the White House, where it seconded the notion of disengagement.
But there the stories of Vietnam and Iraq diverge. Those wise men, unlike the Iraq Study Group, were clear in their verdict. And that Texan president, unlike ours, paid more than lip service to changing course. He abruptly announced he would abjure re-election, restrict American bombing and entertain the idea of peace talks. But as Stanley Karnow recounts in “Vietnam: A History,” it was already too late, after some 20,000 casualties and three years of all-out war, for an easy escape: “The frustrating talks were to drag on for another five years. More Americans would be killed in Vietnam than had died there previously. And the United States itself would be torn apart by the worst internal upheavals in a century.”
The lesson in that is clear and sobering: As bad as things may seem now, they can yet become worse, and not just in Iraq. The longer we pretend that we have not lost there, the more we risk losing other wars we still may salvage, starting with Afghanistan.
The members of the Iraq Study Group are all good Americans of proven service to their country. But to the extent that their report forestalls reality and promotes pipe dreams of one last chance for success in this fiasco, it will be remembered as just one more delusional milestone in the tragedy of our age.
Friday, December 8
They Told You So
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times
Shortly after U.S. forces marched into Baghdad in 2003, The Weekly Standard published a jeering article titled, “The Cassandra Chronicles: The stupidity of the antiwar doomsayers.” Among those the article mocked was a “war novelist” named James Webb, who is now the senator-elect from Virginia.
The article’s title was more revealing than its authors knew. People forget the nature of Cassandra’s curse: although nobody would believe her, all her prophecies came true.
And so it was with those who warned against invading Iraq. At best, they were ignored. A recent article in The Washington Post ruefully conceded that the paper’s account of the debate in the House of Representatives over the resolution authorizing the Iraq war — a resolution opposed by a majority of the Democrats — gave no coverage at all to those antiwar arguments that now seem prescient.
At worst, those who were skeptical about the case for war had their patriotism and/or their sanity questioned. The New Republic now says that it “deeply regrets its early support for this war.” Does it also deeply regret accusing those who opposed rushing into war of “abject pacifism?”
Now, only a few neocon dead-enders still believe that this war was anything but a vast exercise in folly. And those who braved political pressure and ridicule to oppose what Al Gore has rightly called “the worst strategic mistake in the history of the United States” deserve some credit.
Unlike The Weekly Standard, which singled out those it thought had been proved wrong, I’d like to offer some praise to those who got it right. Here’s a partial honor roll:
Former President George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, explaining in 1998 why they didn’t go on to Baghdad in 1991: “Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.”
Representative Ike Skelton, September 2002: “I have no doubt that our military would decisively defeat Iraq’s forces and remove Saddam. But like the proverbial dog chasing the car down the road, we must consider what we would do after we caught it.”
Al Gore, September 2002: “I am deeply concerned that the course of action that we are presently embarking upon with respect to Iraq has the potential to seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism and to weaken our ability to lead the world in this new century.”
Barack Obama, now a United States senator, September 2002: “I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”
Representative John Spratt, October 2002: “The outcome after the conflict is actually going to be the hardest part, and it is far less certain.”
Representative Nancy Pelosi, now the House speaker-elect, October 2002: “When we go in, the occupation, which is now being called the liberation, could be interminable and the amount of money it costs could be unlimited.”
Senator Russ Feingold, October 2002: “I am increasingly troubled by the seemingly shifting justifications for an invasion at this time. ... When the administration moves back and forth from one argument to another, I think it undercuts the credibility of the case and the belief in its urgency. I believe that this practice of shifting justifications has much to do with the troubling phenomenon of many Americans questioning the administration’s motives.”
Howard Dean, then a candidate for president and now the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, February 2003: “I firmly believe that the president is focusing our diplomats, our military, our intelligence agencies, and even our people on the wrong war, at the wrong time. ... Iraq is a divided country, with Sunni, Shia and Kurdish factions that share both bitter rivalries and access to large quantities of arms.”
We should honor these people for their wisdom and courage. We should also ask why anyone who didn’t raise questions about the war — or, at any rate, anyone who acted as a cheerleader for this march of folly — should be taken seriously when he or she talks about matters of national security.
New York Times
Shortly after U.S. forces marched into Baghdad in 2003, The Weekly Standard published a jeering article titled, “The Cassandra Chronicles: The stupidity of the antiwar doomsayers.” Among those the article mocked was a “war novelist” named James Webb, who is now the senator-elect from Virginia.
The article’s title was more revealing than its authors knew. People forget the nature of Cassandra’s curse: although nobody would believe her, all her prophecies came true.
And so it was with those who warned against invading Iraq. At best, they were ignored. A recent article in The Washington Post ruefully conceded that the paper’s account of the debate in the House of Representatives over the resolution authorizing the Iraq war — a resolution opposed by a majority of the Democrats — gave no coverage at all to those antiwar arguments that now seem prescient.
At worst, those who were skeptical about the case for war had their patriotism and/or their sanity questioned. The New Republic now says that it “deeply regrets its early support for this war.” Does it also deeply regret accusing those who opposed rushing into war of “abject pacifism?”
Now, only a few neocon dead-enders still believe that this war was anything but a vast exercise in folly. And those who braved political pressure and ridicule to oppose what Al Gore has rightly called “the worst strategic mistake in the history of the United States” deserve some credit.
Unlike The Weekly Standard, which singled out those it thought had been proved wrong, I’d like to offer some praise to those who got it right. Here’s a partial honor roll:
Former President George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, explaining in 1998 why they didn’t go on to Baghdad in 1991: “Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.”
Representative Ike Skelton, September 2002: “I have no doubt that our military would decisively defeat Iraq’s forces and remove Saddam. But like the proverbial dog chasing the car down the road, we must consider what we would do after we caught it.”
Al Gore, September 2002: “I am deeply concerned that the course of action that we are presently embarking upon with respect to Iraq has the potential to seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism and to weaken our ability to lead the world in this new century.”
Barack Obama, now a United States senator, September 2002: “I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”
Representative John Spratt, October 2002: “The outcome after the conflict is actually going to be the hardest part, and it is far less certain.”
Representative Nancy Pelosi, now the House speaker-elect, October 2002: “When we go in, the occupation, which is now being called the liberation, could be interminable and the amount of money it costs could be unlimited.”
Senator Russ Feingold, October 2002: “I am increasingly troubled by the seemingly shifting justifications for an invasion at this time. ... When the administration moves back and forth from one argument to another, I think it undercuts the credibility of the case and the belief in its urgency. I believe that this practice of shifting justifications has much to do with the troubling phenomenon of many Americans questioning the administration’s motives.”
Howard Dean, then a candidate for president and now the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, February 2003: “I firmly believe that the president is focusing our diplomats, our military, our intelligence agencies, and even our people on the wrong war, at the wrong time. ... Iraq is a divided country, with Sunni, Shia and Kurdish factions that share both bitter rivalries and access to large quantities of arms.”
We should honor these people for their wisdom and courage. We should also ask why anyone who didn’t raise questions about the war — or, at any rate, anyone who acted as a cheerleader for this march of folly — should be taken seriously when he or she talks about matters of national security.
Tuesday, December 5
On the value of diversity
So in what follows, I've assembled what seems to be an interesting conjunction of recent writing on diversity, specifically on what Walter Benn Michaels considers the false solace of our society's attention to racial and sexual pluralism to our inattention to issues of economic disparity. To wit, we have a new book by Michaels out on the topic. We also have the supreme court returning to the question of affirmative action in schools today. Finally, we have Christopher Hitchens on the eerie and sanctimonious way in which the media have decided that words like "nigger" shall not be uttered, in whatever context for whatever purpose.
Provisionally speaking, what seems to tie these together is the way in which our society has chosen to believe in education- rather than, say, labor unions or the socialization of industries, as in europe- as the promise for socioeconomic transformation. We basically want to believe that if we give children a level playing field, that innate differences in ability and willpower will allow the most worthy to rise in their station.
The problem is, of course, the persistent and undeniable evidence that our supposedly "universal" system of education does very little to compensate for the vast socioeconomic inequities into which a child is born. Thus the most elite private universities like Harvard are able to hand out free tuition to their impoverished applicants precisely because there are so few impoverished applicants with a prayer of getting accepted in the first place.
This allows us, as a society, to play a little game with ourselves - we get to feel morally and ethically righteous about our committment to overcoming prejudice and celebrating diversity, even while the vast and increasing chasm between the "haves" - destined to reproduce themselves in wealthy high schools and colleges - and the "have nots" - destined to continue on in the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.
Like the Lotto jackpot winner, we pick out the crazy longshot who manages to triumph despite incredible odds, and present him or her as evidence that the system is not totally disfunctional. And we use the time-honored tradition of blaming the messenger: as when John Kerry was crucified by all right minded people for having the timerity to suggest that those with high education and career potential - read, the "haves"- seem to disproportionally avoid getting shot at in other parts of the world, while making several times as much money without a hint of personal danger.
Why don't we get rid of race based affirmative action altogether, as well as private schools, and exchange them both for a system of class-based affirmative action? Since research has repeatedly shown that children from poor families need MUCH MORE individual attention and better teachers than children of middle-class families, why don't we bus all the poor students to the schools in the best parts of town and let the kids from the wealthest families make due with the rest?
If even the suggestion of such a change is anathema, it is difficult to see how we, as a nation, are seriously committed to an idea of equal opportunity for all. We seem, much more, to remain a nation of haves and have nots. A more color- and gender-balanced nation of haves and have nots.
-Andrew V. Uroskie
Provisionally speaking, what seems to tie these together is the way in which our society has chosen to believe in education- rather than, say, labor unions or the socialization of industries, as in europe- as the promise for socioeconomic transformation. We basically want to believe that if we give children a level playing field, that innate differences in ability and willpower will allow the most worthy to rise in their station.
The problem is, of course, the persistent and undeniable evidence that our supposedly "universal" system of education does very little to compensate for the vast socioeconomic inequities into which a child is born. Thus the most elite private universities like Harvard are able to hand out free tuition to their impoverished applicants precisely because there are so few impoverished applicants with a prayer of getting accepted in the first place.
This allows us, as a society, to play a little game with ourselves - we get to feel morally and ethically righteous about our committment to overcoming prejudice and celebrating diversity, even while the vast and increasing chasm between the "haves" - destined to reproduce themselves in wealthy high schools and colleges - and the "have nots" - destined to continue on in the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.
Like the Lotto jackpot winner, we pick out the crazy longshot who manages to triumph despite incredible odds, and present him or her as evidence that the system is not totally disfunctional. And we use the time-honored tradition of blaming the messenger: as when John Kerry was crucified by all right minded people for having the timerity to suggest that those with high education and career potential - read, the "haves"- seem to disproportionally avoid getting shot at in other parts of the world, while making several times as much money without a hint of personal danger.
Why don't we get rid of race based affirmative action altogether, as well as private schools, and exchange them both for a system of class-based affirmative action? Since research has repeatedly shown that children from poor families need MUCH MORE individual attention and better teachers than children of middle-class families, why don't we bus all the poor students to the schools in the best parts of town and let the kids from the wealthest families make due with the rest?
If even the suggestion of such a change is anathema, it is difficult to see how we, as a nation, are seriously committed to an idea of equal opportunity for all. We seem, much more, to remain a nation of haves and have nots. A more color- and gender-balanced nation of haves and have nots.
-Andrew V. Uroskie
Diversity's False Solace
By WALTER BENN MICHAELS
The university where I have taught for the last three years -- the University of Illinois, Chicago -- is a large, increasingly underfinanced public university. Our classrooms are overcrowded. Our physical plant is deteriorating. Many departments cannot afford to hire any new professors.
But as we, like other universities around the country, send out our final admissions letters this month, there is at least one bright spot, one area where we have done well and are poised to do even better. Seemingly every piece of literature that U.I.C. distributes about itself announces that we have been ''ranked among the Top 10 universities in the country for the diversity'' of ''our student body.'' And that diversity, the literature goes on to point out, ''is one of the greatest aspects of our campus.'' The bad news about our current condition is that you may be jammed into a classroom so full that you can't find a place to sit. But the good news is that 46 percent of the people jammed in there with you will be Caucasian, 21 percent will be Asian, 13 percent will be Hispanic and 9 percent will be African-American.
It is often said that Americans don't like to talk about race, but no remark is more false. The eagerness of other schools to produce their own versions of U.I.C.'s diversity figures makes it obvious that, in fact, we love to talk about race. And we not only talk about it, we also write books about it, we teach classes about it and we arrange our admissions policies to take it into account.
It is true, however, that we don't so much like to call it race. Students, faculty members and administrators often prefer to speak of their cultural identities. Unimpressed by the objection that -- speaking the same language, wearing the same clothes, reading the same books -- they all seem to me to belong to the same culture, my students speak proudly of their own cultures and respectfully of others'. Some might be taller than others, some might be smarter than others, some might be better-looking than others, but all belong to cultures, and all the cultures are worthy of respect. And that's the advantage of the idea of culture: it gives us a world of differences without inequality.
And the enthusiasm for such differences is widespread. When I asked a group of Harvard literature students about what distinguished them from a parallel group of literature students at U.I.C., they were prepared to acknowledge that the U.I.C. students might be even more diverse than they were, but they were unable to see the relevance of the fact that the U.I.C. group was also less wealthy. And this is equally true of the students at U.I.C. who identify themselves as black, white, Arab, Asian and Hispanic and not as poor or working class. After all, your ethnicity is something you can be proud of in a way that your poverty or even your wealth (since it's your parents' wealth) is not.
But the real value of diversity is not primarily in the contribution it makes to students' self-esteem. Its real value is in the contribution it makes to the collective fantasy that institutions ranging from U.I.C. to Harvard are meritocracies that reward individuals for their own efforts and abilities -- as opposed to rewarding them for the advantages of their birth. For if we find that the students at an elite university like Harvard or Yale are almost as diverse as the students at U.I.C., then we know that no student is being kept from a Harvard because of his or her culture. And white students can understand themselves to be there on merit because they didn't get there at the expense of black people.
We are often reminded of how white our classrooms would look if we did away with affirmative action. But imagine what Harvard would look like if instead we replaced race-based affirmative action with a strong dose of class-based affirmative action. Ninety percent of the undergraduates come from families earning more than $42,000 a year (the median household income in the U.S.) -- and some 77 percent come from families with incomes of more than $80,000, although only about 20 percent of American households have incomes that high. If the income distribution at Harvard were made to look like the income distribution of the United States, some 57 percent of the displaced students would be rich, and most of them would be white. It's no wonder that many rich white kids and their parents seem to like diversity. Race-based affirmative action, from this standpoint, is a kind of collective bribe rich people pay themselves for ignoring economic inequality. The fact (and it is a fact) that it doesn't help to be white to get into Harvard replaces the much more fundamental fact that it does help to be rich and that it's virtually essential not to be poor.
Hence the irrelevance of Harvard's recent announcement that it won't ask parents who earn less than $40,000 a year to help pay for their children's education. While this is no doubt great news to those financially pressed students who have gone to great schools, taken college-prep courses and scored well on their SAT's, it's bound to seem a little beside the point to the great majority of the poor, since what's keeping them out of elite universities is not their inability to pay the bill but their inability to qualify for admission in the first place.
In the end, we like policies like affirmative action not so much because they solve the problem of racism but because they tell us that racism is the problem we need to solve. And the reason we like the problem of racism is that solving it just requires us to give up our prejudices, whereas solving the problem of economic inequality might require something more -- it might require us to give up our money. It's not surprising that universities of the upper middle class should want their students to feel comfortable. What is surprising is that diversity should have become the hallmark of liberalism.
This, if you're on the right, is the gratifying thing about campus radicalism. When student and faculty activists struggle for cultural diversity, they are in large part battling over what skin color the rich kids should have. Diversity, like gout, is a rich people's problem. And it is also a rich people's solution. For as long as we're committed to thinking of difference as something that should be respected, we don't have to worry about it as something that should be eliminated. As long as we think that our best universities are fair if they are appropriately diverse, we don't have to worry that most people can't go to them, while others get to do so because they've had the good luck to be born into relatively wealthy families. In other words, as long as the left continues to worry about diversity, the right won't have to worry about inequality.
Walter Benn Michaels is professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
The university where I have taught for the last three years -- the University of Illinois, Chicago -- is a large, increasingly underfinanced public university. Our classrooms are overcrowded. Our physical plant is deteriorating. Many departments cannot afford to hire any new professors.
But as we, like other universities around the country, send out our final admissions letters this month, there is at least one bright spot, one area where we have done well and are poised to do even better. Seemingly every piece of literature that U.I.C. distributes about itself announces that we have been ''ranked among the Top 10 universities in the country for the diversity'' of ''our student body.'' And that diversity, the literature goes on to point out, ''is one of the greatest aspects of our campus.'' The bad news about our current condition is that you may be jammed into a classroom so full that you can't find a place to sit. But the good news is that 46 percent of the people jammed in there with you will be Caucasian, 21 percent will be Asian, 13 percent will be Hispanic and 9 percent will be African-American.
It is often said that Americans don't like to talk about race, but no remark is more false. The eagerness of other schools to produce their own versions of U.I.C.'s diversity figures makes it obvious that, in fact, we love to talk about race. And we not only talk about it, we also write books about it, we teach classes about it and we arrange our admissions policies to take it into account.
It is true, however, that we don't so much like to call it race. Students, faculty members and administrators often prefer to speak of their cultural identities. Unimpressed by the objection that -- speaking the same language, wearing the same clothes, reading the same books -- they all seem to me to belong to the same culture, my students speak proudly of their own cultures and respectfully of others'. Some might be taller than others, some might be smarter than others, some might be better-looking than others, but all belong to cultures, and all the cultures are worthy of respect. And that's the advantage of the idea of culture: it gives us a world of differences without inequality.
And the enthusiasm for such differences is widespread. When I asked a group of Harvard literature students about what distinguished them from a parallel group of literature students at U.I.C., they were prepared to acknowledge that the U.I.C. students might be even more diverse than they were, but they were unable to see the relevance of the fact that the U.I.C. group was also less wealthy. And this is equally true of the students at U.I.C. who identify themselves as black, white, Arab, Asian and Hispanic and not as poor or working class. After all, your ethnicity is something you can be proud of in a way that your poverty or even your wealth (since it's your parents' wealth) is not.
But the real value of diversity is not primarily in the contribution it makes to students' self-esteem. Its real value is in the contribution it makes to the collective fantasy that institutions ranging from U.I.C. to Harvard are meritocracies that reward individuals for their own efforts and abilities -- as opposed to rewarding them for the advantages of their birth. For if we find that the students at an elite university like Harvard or Yale are almost as diverse as the students at U.I.C., then we know that no student is being kept from a Harvard because of his or her culture. And white students can understand themselves to be there on merit because they didn't get there at the expense of black people.
We are often reminded of how white our classrooms would look if we did away with affirmative action. But imagine what Harvard would look like if instead we replaced race-based affirmative action with a strong dose of class-based affirmative action. Ninety percent of the undergraduates come from families earning more than $42,000 a year (the median household income in the U.S.) -- and some 77 percent come from families with incomes of more than $80,000, although only about 20 percent of American households have incomes that high. If the income distribution at Harvard were made to look like the income distribution of the United States, some 57 percent of the displaced students would be rich, and most of them would be white. It's no wonder that many rich white kids and their parents seem to like diversity. Race-based affirmative action, from this standpoint, is a kind of collective bribe rich people pay themselves for ignoring economic inequality. The fact (and it is a fact) that it doesn't help to be white to get into Harvard replaces the much more fundamental fact that it does help to be rich and that it's virtually essential not to be poor.
Hence the irrelevance of Harvard's recent announcement that it won't ask parents who earn less than $40,000 a year to help pay for their children's education. While this is no doubt great news to those financially pressed students who have gone to great schools, taken college-prep courses and scored well on their SAT's, it's bound to seem a little beside the point to the great majority of the poor, since what's keeping them out of elite universities is not their inability to pay the bill but their inability to qualify for admission in the first place.
In the end, we like policies like affirmative action not so much because they solve the problem of racism but because they tell us that racism is the problem we need to solve. And the reason we like the problem of racism is that solving it just requires us to give up our prejudices, whereas solving the problem of economic inequality might require something more -- it might require us to give up our money. It's not surprising that universities of the upper middle class should want their students to feel comfortable. What is surprising is that diversity should have become the hallmark of liberalism.
This, if you're on the right, is the gratifying thing about campus radicalism. When student and faculty activists struggle for cultural diversity, they are in large part battling over what skin color the rich kids should have. Diversity, like gout, is a rich people's problem. And it is also a rich people's solution. For as long as we're committed to thinking of difference as something that should be respected, we don't have to worry about it as something that should be eliminated. As long as we think that our best universities are fair if they are appropriately diverse, we don't have to worry that most people can't go to them, while others get to do so because they've had the good luck to be born into relatively wealthy families. In other words, as long as the left continues to worry about diversity, the right won't have to worry about inequality.
Walter Benn Michaels is professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
Love Me, I Celebrate Diversity
An Academic in America
So I am driving to work in my '98 Cherokee and in front of me is a gleaming, late-model BMW that must have cost more than I make in a year. The driver is a golden-coifed woman in sunglasses yakking on a cell phone. The rear window has a sticker: "Good neighbors come in all colors."
I get the message that driver is trying to convey: "You in that old car behind me. I am morally superior to you because I celebrate diversity, and, therefore, my wealth is deserved, as is your poverty." Somehow I doubt there is much diversity in her gated community, or her kids' school. I wonder if she thinks good neighbors come in all classes, too?
Let me be clear about my meaning here: I am not questioning the value of inclusiveness in higher education, employment, or housing. As an Americanist, I am familiar with the long history of slavery, genocide, and sexual inequality that has scarred our history right up to the present.
But I am also familiar -- by education and experience -- with our nation's history of class exploitation and the way that immigrants of nonmajority cultures and religions who are nominally "white," still bear the legacy of unequal treatment. My purpose here is to argue that academe can deal with its avowed concerns with social justice more effectively and honestly than it presently does and, in the process, it might be able to save affirmative action.
Sometimes white people (and some are much whiter than others) think that the rhetoric of "diversity" has talismanic power, as if it drives away suspicion of unmerited privilege the way crosses are supposed to scare away vampires.
By now every Babbitt in America has learned to celebrate diversity. People do so to signify that they are a good person, and, what's more, that they are hip, trendy, and "down with the program," even if the program is 10 years out of date. The head of the local chamber of commerce might even make air quotes with his fingers while talking about "changing the paradigm of white hegemonic domination." The rhetoric of diversity has become so pervasive that it is little more than another form of white noise.
So what happens to "diversity" when it loses its oppositional stance and becomes a ritual profession of faith at the core of the establishment?
As Walter Benn Michaels observes in his recent book The Trouble With Diversity, "Commitment to diversity is at best a distraction and at worst an essentially reactionary position that prevents us from putting equality at the center of the national agenda."
In academe, the word "diversity" still functions as a rhetorical trump card, always uttered with the tonal implication that the speaker is taking some kind of brave moral stand. But, these days, saying you support diversity has all the merit of standing up proudly, folding your arms on your chest, holding your head high, and saying, with a resolute air, "I don't know about you people, but I, for one, am opposed to terrorism." The speaker usually casts his or her eyes about the room, looking for the person who is not humming and head-bobbing with enough enthusiasm.
Such moments make me feel the way I imagine that people did in the McCarthy era when a speaker would ask listeners to stand up for America against godless Communists. You knew it was self-aggrandizing and oversimplified, but you didn't say anything either. After all, Stalin had killed millions. And racism is real.
One does not wish to oppose diversity, any more than one wants to have a nuanced conversation about pedophilia. To raise issues with diversity has become grossly déclassé. And that's the real source of its power.
Earnest concern about diversity, among affluent whites at least, has always struck me as more about class than race. Even 20 years ago, when I was just starting out in college, the theoretically inflected rhetoric of multiculturalism always seemed to me like an upper-middle-class affectation, like speaking French around the servants. What I learned as a working-class outsider with no relevant experience, is that, in academe, you had to speak a certain way and visibly approve of certain things to belong to the presumptive middle-class culture. If you didn't conform because you knew in your guts that the moral posturing was aimed directly against the interests of your class, you probably played along or kept silent because the price of the slightest misstep on issues of race would mean social and professional ostracism, particularly if you had aspirations to work in higher education.
Could you imagine someone with openly complicated views on affirmative action -- not conservative opposition, mind you, just ethical conflictedness about race preferences -- getting a job in any elite university in the last two decades? If so, that person probably had to fly under the radar until receiving tenure.
It seems strange to see people conform so absolutely to the academic establishment in a profession that celebrates subversion and resistance. But it doesn't take much theoretical sophistication to recognize power. All you have to do is think about what you are afraid to say. What kind of questions must not be asked? What kind of projects must not be undertaken? Whose interest does that serve?
Consider the recent allegations that the Educational Testing Service suppressed research that might have enabled admissions committees to identify "strivers" -- people who have overcome adversity -- which would have included large numbers of minority students (though of different economic backgrounds). Such a method certainly does have the potential to change the economic diversity of entering classes as well as racial diversity. It seems that higher education would prefer to see race-based preferences be shot down state-by-state rather than introduce selection processes that would aid poor Americans of all backgrounds.
Anyone who has ever been on an academic hiring committee has heard people say things like: "The last thing we need around here is more white males." Or, "We have to make sure that we don't accidentally interview any white males." And academic job advertisements usually reflect that position. As if there were not a vast range of diverse people simplified to the derisive category of "white." As if males could not have dependents who are women. As if there are not a great variety of ways a department can be diversified beyond the appearance of racial difference.
In any case, I have heard such remarks uttered by people whose elite status seemed beyond question to me (though perhaps -- if I had had more experience -- I would have seen that some of them were just exuberant conformists). But should I nod and hum in affirmation when people essentially say that I am not welcome (even if I do not regard myself as equally white), as if I didn't have to go through a long and uncertain struggle to get a foothold in academe? As if class, language, appearance, and religion, among many other variables, were not serious barriers that should be considered along with race?
It has always seemed clear to me that white elites have outsourced the hard work of their ethical positions to non-elites of all colors. To put it in Marxist terms, they are expropriators of moral capital. I would be impressed if one of them said, "I will step down from my position as a Highly Paid Professor to make room for three new assistant professors of diverse backgrounds." But to my knowledge no such offer has ever been made. In effect, white elites say, "not my job, not my school, not my neighborhood. Let the real work be done by someone else, but give me the moral credit. And if anyone disagrees, call them racist."
Maybe I am misreading that lady in the BMW, just as I might have misread some members of my profession. But when people who claim to be in favor of diversity actively help economically disadvantaged people of all colors; when they count people from China, Iran, Lithuania, South Boston, Camden, and Appalachia, as "diverse"; when they support the constitutional rights of people who disagree with them on ideological grounds, or on matters of faith; then I will believe that they mean what they say about diversity.
Instead, what I see is that race has become a proxy for all the forms of diversity that elite institutions can't, or don't want to, include.
I think most Americans of all races would agree that individuals of talent, who work hard but lack inherited privileges deserve some help, even if they do not belong to preferred minority groups. Any effort to truly diversify an educational setting has to take many variables into account, particularly class, or it will, in the end, become a magnifier of social inequality and a source of inter-group antagonism.
But perhaps that is the real purpose of higher education as it is currently organized, or at least that is how it looks to growing numbers of excluded people. And that's what people are voting against in states such as California and Michigan. It's about class.
In my next column, I will try to explain why I believe class matters, in addition to race and gender, for individuals hoping to enter higher education.
Thomas H. Benton is the pseudonym of an associate professor of English at a Midwestern liberal-arts college. He writes about academic culture and welcomes reader mail directed to his attention at careers@chronicle.com
Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
So I am driving to work in my '98 Cherokee and in front of me is a gleaming, late-model BMW that must have cost more than I make in a year. The driver is a golden-coifed woman in sunglasses yakking on a cell phone. The rear window has a sticker: "Good neighbors come in all colors."
I get the message that driver is trying to convey: "You in that old car behind me. I am morally superior to you because I celebrate diversity, and, therefore, my wealth is deserved, as is your poverty." Somehow I doubt there is much diversity in her gated community, or her kids' school. I wonder if she thinks good neighbors come in all classes, too?
Let me be clear about my meaning here: I am not questioning the value of inclusiveness in higher education, employment, or housing. As an Americanist, I am familiar with the long history of slavery, genocide, and sexual inequality that has scarred our history right up to the present.
But I am also familiar -- by education and experience -- with our nation's history of class exploitation and the way that immigrants of nonmajority cultures and religions who are nominally "white," still bear the legacy of unequal treatment. My purpose here is to argue that academe can deal with its avowed concerns with social justice more effectively and honestly than it presently does and, in the process, it might be able to save affirmative action.
Sometimes white people (and some are much whiter than others) think that the rhetoric of "diversity" has talismanic power, as if it drives away suspicion of unmerited privilege the way crosses are supposed to scare away vampires.
By now every Babbitt in America has learned to celebrate diversity. People do so to signify that they are a good person, and, what's more, that they are hip, trendy, and "down with the program," even if the program is 10 years out of date. The head of the local chamber of commerce might even make air quotes with his fingers while talking about "changing the paradigm of white hegemonic domination." The rhetoric of diversity has become so pervasive that it is little more than another form of white noise.
So what happens to "diversity" when it loses its oppositional stance and becomes a ritual profession of faith at the core of the establishment?
As Walter Benn Michaels observes in his recent book The Trouble With Diversity, "Commitment to diversity is at best a distraction and at worst an essentially reactionary position that prevents us from putting equality at the center of the national agenda."
In academe, the word "diversity" still functions as a rhetorical trump card, always uttered with the tonal implication that the speaker is taking some kind of brave moral stand. But, these days, saying you support diversity has all the merit of standing up proudly, folding your arms on your chest, holding your head high, and saying, with a resolute air, "I don't know about you people, but I, for one, am opposed to terrorism." The speaker usually casts his or her eyes about the room, looking for the person who is not humming and head-bobbing with enough enthusiasm.
Such moments make me feel the way I imagine that people did in the McCarthy era when a speaker would ask listeners to stand up for America against godless Communists. You knew it was self-aggrandizing and oversimplified, but you didn't say anything either. After all, Stalin had killed millions. And racism is real.
One does not wish to oppose diversity, any more than one wants to have a nuanced conversation about pedophilia. To raise issues with diversity has become grossly déclassé. And that's the real source of its power.
Earnest concern about diversity, among affluent whites at least, has always struck me as more about class than race. Even 20 years ago, when I was just starting out in college, the theoretically inflected rhetoric of multiculturalism always seemed to me like an upper-middle-class affectation, like speaking French around the servants. What I learned as a working-class outsider with no relevant experience, is that, in academe, you had to speak a certain way and visibly approve of certain things to belong to the presumptive middle-class culture. If you didn't conform because you knew in your guts that the moral posturing was aimed directly against the interests of your class, you probably played along or kept silent because the price of the slightest misstep on issues of race would mean social and professional ostracism, particularly if you had aspirations to work in higher education.
Could you imagine someone with openly complicated views on affirmative action -- not conservative opposition, mind you, just ethical conflictedness about race preferences -- getting a job in any elite university in the last two decades? If so, that person probably had to fly under the radar until receiving tenure.
It seems strange to see people conform so absolutely to the academic establishment in a profession that celebrates subversion and resistance. But it doesn't take much theoretical sophistication to recognize power. All you have to do is think about what you are afraid to say. What kind of questions must not be asked? What kind of projects must not be undertaken? Whose interest does that serve?
Consider the recent allegations that the Educational Testing Service suppressed research that might have enabled admissions committees to identify "strivers" -- people who have overcome adversity -- which would have included large numbers of minority students (though of different economic backgrounds). Such a method certainly does have the potential to change the economic diversity of entering classes as well as racial diversity. It seems that higher education would prefer to see race-based preferences be shot down state-by-state rather than introduce selection processes that would aid poor Americans of all backgrounds.
Anyone who has ever been on an academic hiring committee has heard people say things like: "The last thing we need around here is more white males." Or, "We have to make sure that we don't accidentally interview any white males." And academic job advertisements usually reflect that position. As if there were not a vast range of diverse people simplified to the derisive category of "white." As if males could not have dependents who are women. As if there are not a great variety of ways a department can be diversified beyond the appearance of racial difference.
In any case, I have heard such remarks uttered by people whose elite status seemed beyond question to me (though perhaps -- if I had had more experience -- I would have seen that some of them were just exuberant conformists). But should I nod and hum in affirmation when people essentially say that I am not welcome (even if I do not regard myself as equally white), as if I didn't have to go through a long and uncertain struggle to get a foothold in academe? As if class, language, appearance, and religion, among many other variables, were not serious barriers that should be considered along with race?
It has always seemed clear to me that white elites have outsourced the hard work of their ethical positions to non-elites of all colors. To put it in Marxist terms, they are expropriators of moral capital. I would be impressed if one of them said, "I will step down from my position as a Highly Paid Professor to make room for three new assistant professors of diverse backgrounds." But to my knowledge no such offer has ever been made. In effect, white elites say, "not my job, not my school, not my neighborhood. Let the real work be done by someone else, but give me the moral credit. And if anyone disagrees, call them racist."
Maybe I am misreading that lady in the BMW, just as I might have misread some members of my profession. But when people who claim to be in favor of diversity actively help economically disadvantaged people of all colors; when they count people from China, Iran, Lithuania, South Boston, Camden, and Appalachia, as "diverse"; when they support the constitutional rights of people who disagree with them on ideological grounds, or on matters of faith; then I will believe that they mean what they say about diversity.
Instead, what I see is that race has become a proxy for all the forms of diversity that elite institutions can't, or don't want to, include.
I think most Americans of all races would agree that individuals of talent, who work hard but lack inherited privileges deserve some help, even if they do not belong to preferred minority groups. Any effort to truly diversify an educational setting has to take many variables into account, particularly class, or it will, in the end, become a magnifier of social inequality and a source of inter-group antagonism.
But perhaps that is the real purpose of higher education as it is currently organized, or at least that is how it looks to growing numbers of excluded people. And that's what people are voting against in states such as California and Michigan. It's about class.
In my next column, I will try to explain why I believe class matters, in addition to race and gender, for individuals hoping to enter higher education.
Thomas H. Benton is the pseudonym of an associate professor of English at a Midwestern liberal-arts college. He writes about academic culture and welcomes reader mail directed to his attention at careers@chronicle.com
Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
The pernicious effects of banning words.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Dec. 4, 2006, at 1:16 PM ET
One effect of the witless racist tirade mounted by Michael Richards has been a call, made by Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rep. Maxine Waters and endorsed by black comedian Paul Mooney, for a moratorium on the use of the word nigger by those in the entertainment industry. If successful, this might, I suppose, put an end to the pathetic complaint made by some white people that it's unfair that blacks can use the word while they cannot. In fact, no question of "double standards" arises here. If white people call black people niggers, they are doing their very best to hurt and insult them, as well as to remind them that their ancestors used to be property. If black people use the word, they are either uttering an obscenity or trying to detoxify a word and rob it of its power to wound them. Not quite the same thing.
There is a third category here, which is the use of the word in what I can only call an objective way. Thus, professor Randall Kennedy not long ago became the second black American to publish a book called Nigger. (The first was Dick Gregory, who told his mother that henceforth whenever she heard the word, she could think of it as a promotion of her son's best seller.) Kennedy's milder justification, with which I agreed, was that he was writing a history of the word's power and pathology, and it did not need a mealy-mouthed title.
However, in mentioning Kennedy's book in its treatment of the Richards affair, the article in the Washington Post's "Style" section did not give its title at all, referring to it instead as "a controversial book about the word" and to the word itself as "the N-word." Indeed, the Post has a policy of not printing the word at all, as do many other media outlets.
I found this out myself recently, when I went on Hardball With Chris Matthews. It was just after John Kerry had (I thought unintentionally) given the impression that young people joining the armed forces were stupid. Chris asked me where liberals got the idea that conservatives were dumb. I said that it all went back to John Stuart Mill referring to the Tories as "the stupid party." After a while, the Tories themselves began to use this expression to describe themselves. I added that the word Tory was originally an insult—it means something like brigand in Gaelic—and it had also been adopted, by those at whom it was directed, as a badge of pride. In this respect, I went on to say, it anticipated other such appropriations—impressionist, suffragette—by which the target group inverted the taunt thrown at it and, by a kind of verbal jujitsu, turned it back on its originators. In more recent times, I finished with what I thought was a flourish, the words nigger and queer (and I may have added faggot) had undergone some of the same transmutation.
Very suddenly, we went to a break, and the studio filled with unsmiling people who detached my microphone and announced that the segment was extremely over. My protests were futile. Should I have remembered to cover myself and say "the N-word" instead? It would have seemed somehow inauthentic. Did MSNBC think that anything I had uttered was inflected with the smallest tinge of bigotry? Presumably not. So, what we now have is a taboo, which is something quite different from an agreement on etiquette.
The next day, I was teaching a class on Mark Twain at the New School in New York, explaining why it was that there had always been attempts to ban Huckleberry Finn. In the old days, this was because of its rough manners and alleged lack of refinement and moral uplift. But now, as I went on to say, it is because of the name of the character for whom Huck is willing to risk going to hell. Excuse me, but I did not refer to this character as "N-word Jim." I have more respect for my graduate students than that. I suppose I could have just called him "Jim," but that would somehow have been untrue to the spirit and shade of Samuel Clemens. And I would have thought of myself as a coward.
I did, once, decide to be a coward anyway. It was while giving a speech in Washington, to a very international audience, about the British theft of the Elgin marbles from the Parthenon. I described the attitude of the current British authorities as "niggardly." Nobody said anything, but I privately resolved—having felt the word hanging in the air a bit—to say "parsimonious" from then on. That's up to me, though.
Not long afterward, a senior member of the Washington, D.C., government used the word niggardly in a budget memo and was forced to resign, even though Mayor Anthony Williams said publicly that he knew the term was both harmless and precise. At this point, we see the effect of taboo. It got even worse a short while later, when a local teacher praised her class for being so "discriminating" and provoked floods of tears and much anguish. Now, the word niggardly can pass out of the language and leave us not much poorer. But the meaning of the verb to discriminate is of some importance and seems to me to be worth fighting over. It is odd, when you think about it, that we accuse racists of "discrimination." This is the very thing of which they are by definition incapable: They think all members of certain groups are the same. (The late Richard Pryor dropped the word nigger after he went to Africa, saying that he didn't meet anyone on that continent who answered to the description. Doubtless true, but when the Hutu militias in Rwanda referred to all Tutsis as "cockroaches," you can be sure they intended something more than a "stereotype.") Hatred will always find a way, and will certainly always be able to outpace linguistic correctness.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America.
Posted Monday, Dec. 4, 2006, at 1:16 PM ET
One effect of the witless racist tirade mounted by Michael Richards has been a call, made by Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rep. Maxine Waters and endorsed by black comedian Paul Mooney, for a moratorium on the use of the word nigger by those in the entertainment industry. If successful, this might, I suppose, put an end to the pathetic complaint made by some white people that it's unfair that blacks can use the word while they cannot. In fact, no question of "double standards" arises here. If white people call black people niggers, they are doing their very best to hurt and insult them, as well as to remind them that their ancestors used to be property. If black people use the word, they are either uttering an obscenity or trying to detoxify a word and rob it of its power to wound them. Not quite the same thing.
There is a third category here, which is the use of the word in what I can only call an objective way. Thus, professor Randall Kennedy not long ago became the second black American to publish a book called Nigger. (The first was Dick Gregory, who told his mother that henceforth whenever she heard the word, she could think of it as a promotion of her son's best seller.) Kennedy's milder justification, with which I agreed, was that he was writing a history of the word's power and pathology, and it did not need a mealy-mouthed title.
However, in mentioning Kennedy's book in its treatment of the Richards affair, the article in the Washington Post's "Style" section did not give its title at all, referring to it instead as "a controversial book about the word" and to the word itself as "the N-word." Indeed, the Post has a policy of not printing the word at all, as do many other media outlets.
I found this out myself recently, when I went on Hardball With Chris Matthews. It was just after John Kerry had (I thought unintentionally) given the impression that young people joining the armed forces were stupid. Chris asked me where liberals got the idea that conservatives were dumb. I said that it all went back to John Stuart Mill referring to the Tories as "the stupid party." After a while, the Tories themselves began to use this expression to describe themselves. I added that the word Tory was originally an insult—it means something like brigand in Gaelic—and it had also been adopted, by those at whom it was directed, as a badge of pride. In this respect, I went on to say, it anticipated other such appropriations—impressionist, suffragette—by which the target group inverted the taunt thrown at it and, by a kind of verbal jujitsu, turned it back on its originators. In more recent times, I finished with what I thought was a flourish, the words nigger and queer (and I may have added faggot) had undergone some of the same transmutation.
Very suddenly, we went to a break, and the studio filled with unsmiling people who detached my microphone and announced that the segment was extremely over. My protests were futile. Should I have remembered to cover myself and say "the N-word" instead? It would have seemed somehow inauthentic. Did MSNBC think that anything I had uttered was inflected with the smallest tinge of bigotry? Presumably not. So, what we now have is a taboo, which is something quite different from an agreement on etiquette.
The next day, I was teaching a class on Mark Twain at the New School in New York, explaining why it was that there had always been attempts to ban Huckleberry Finn. In the old days, this was because of its rough manners and alleged lack of refinement and moral uplift. But now, as I went on to say, it is because of the name of the character for whom Huck is willing to risk going to hell. Excuse me, but I did not refer to this character as "N-word Jim." I have more respect for my graduate students than that. I suppose I could have just called him "Jim," but that would somehow have been untrue to the spirit and shade of Samuel Clemens. And I would have thought of myself as a coward.
I did, once, decide to be a coward anyway. It was while giving a speech in Washington, to a very international audience, about the British theft of the Elgin marbles from the Parthenon. I described the attitude of the current British authorities as "niggardly." Nobody said anything, but I privately resolved—having felt the word hanging in the air a bit—to say "parsimonious" from then on. That's up to me, though.
Not long afterward, a senior member of the Washington, D.C., government used the word niggardly in a budget memo and was forced to resign, even though Mayor Anthony Williams said publicly that he knew the term was both harmless and precise. At this point, we see the effect of taboo. It got even worse a short while later, when a local teacher praised her class for being so "discriminating" and provoked floods of tears and much anguish. Now, the word niggardly can pass out of the language and leave us not much poorer. But the meaning of the verb to discriminate is of some importance and seems to me to be worth fighting over. It is odd, when you think about it, that we accuse racists of "discrimination." This is the very thing of which they are by definition incapable: They think all members of certain groups are the same. (The late Richard Pryor dropped the word nigger after he went to Africa, saying that he didn't meet anyone on that continent who answered to the description. Doubtless true, but when the Hutu militias in Rwanda referred to all Tutsis as "cockroaches," you can be sure they intended something more than a "stereotype.") Hatred will always find a way, and will certainly always be able to outpace linguistic correctness.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America.
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