There But for Fortune

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong." H.L. Mencken. Despite losing $14 million last quarter, The New York Times produced on Sunday the kind of in-depth journalism that is disappearing from newsrooms around the world. “Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart,” Scott Anderson’s 18-month-in-the-making article on the disintegration of the Middle East, is a remarkable tribute to one newspaper’s determination to stick to its mission in hard times. There are a number of reasons for the decline of newspapers. Many are self-inflicted, but more dangerous now are the constant and gratuitous assaults on the press from politicians who despise transparency. We need a strong and free press.

The second lesson I took away from the article is how disastrous has been the West’s refusal to grasp the diverse histories and cultures of the Middle East’s people. We continue to lump all Muslims and Arabs together, to seek simple solutions to terrorism, like “carpet-bomb[ing] them into oblivion,” and to pat ourselves on the back for our “priceless gift” of liberation to the Iraqi people. We need leaders who understand complexity.

The third lesson is how quickly things can change. We are easily lulled into the belief that our lives are on a predictable path into a foreseeable future. And then, suddenly and unexpectedly, our familiar world is upended. For many in the Middle East that’s become the new normal – a life in which the past has been obliterated and the future reduced to getting through today. We need to take responsibility for our part in making that so.

Magic Carpet Bombing

Scott Atran, a French-American anthropologist who lives in Paris, is a thoughtful and challenging expert on terrorism, who argues in “ISIS is a revolution,” that “we are not only failing to stop the spread of radical Islam, but our efforts often appear to contribute to it.” Michael Jetter, a German-born, US-educated economist who teaches in Medellín, Colombia, has found that “media attention devoted to terrorism actively encourages future attacks.”

Atran contends that, however brutal and repugnant ISIS is to us and most Muslims, it speaks directly to people who “yearn for the revival of a Muslim Caliphate and the end to a nation-state order the Great Powers invented and imposed” and who long “for something in their history, in their traditions, with their heroes and their morals” – in other words, marginalized people seeking a homeland. This is not the first quest for a homeland in the region, and it has fired adherents around the world “in the service of some indomitable moral and spiritual force” – and created “the largest and most diverse volunteer fighting force” since WWII.

Jetter found that “one additional NYT article [increases] the number of attacks in the following week by 11 to 15 percent.”

Together, the studies suggest we: (1) rethink strategies, such as the “tired call to shore up the broken nation-state system;” (2) recognize that bellicosity, fear mongering and sensationalism play into ISIS’ hands; and (3) realize that retreating into Fortress America makes the world – and America – a more dangerous place. Finally, the authors’ multinational perspectives underscore how our xenophobic fears keep us from understanding a world in which borders are increasingly outdated.

I am grateful to friends who sent both articles.

The Topsy Turvy TPP

Today’s question: What famous manifesto ends with the words: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!” (More famously, "Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!") Correct. The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels’ 1848 exhortation to working people everywhere. So it was startling to read this headline, “Communist Vietnam Says It Will Allow Unions and Strikes” – a condition insisted on by the Obama administration for admission into the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

“I think this is the best opportunity we’ve had in years to encourage deep institutional reform in Vietnam that will advance human rights,” the state department’s Tom Malinowski told The New York Times. Hopefully, it will work out better than our last effort to democratize Vietnam.

Yet to pass legislation he considers critical to his legacy, Obama must rely on Republican votes in the face of fierce opposition from very strange bedfellows: environmentalists, organized labor and the Tea Party.

So here is America, which seems headed toward the wealth disparities described in the Manifesto and where politicians rise to prominence by attacking unions, telling one of the most “communist” nations on Earth to treat its workers better. On that anomaly alone, this agreement is more interesting than the reflexive responses it has evoked from both sides.

The legislation also contains a human rights agreement with Brunei, which recently instituted Sharia law and a return to “flogging, dismemberment and death by stoning.”

Confused?

Ireland’s Referendum (Part 3)

Like many nationalist revolutionaries, Éamon de Valera was a deeply conservative man. Born in Brooklyn to an Irish mother, he was a leader for over 60 years of the movement that took Ireland from a British colony to independence, from Civil War to a Republic. It was a violent time, and de Valera sought to mold an Irish identity that would hold the country together after centuries of English oppression. His building blocks were the conservative values of the peasantry, the Irish language and, above all, the Catholic Church. And a gloomy disposition settled over the land, particularly on Sunday mornings. But anyone who enters an Irish pub on Saturday night – and much of Ireland does – learns quickly that gloom is not the default position of the Irish spirit. Here people spar with words and sometimes fists. The lyrical Irish language seems fashioned for poetic jousting – so de Valera made Irish mandatory in the schools and almost nobody speaks it anymore. Then came the revelations of what the church had done, not to young boys only, but to unmarried pregnant girls, and people reacted with the special anger of betrayed believers.

But as the old foundation came down, it seemed to release something deeper than the “us-vs-them” mentality to which Ireland had clung for so long. It's impossible not to be struck by the gaiety that infused last week’s marriage referendum, the sheer joy of reaching out. Memo from Ireland to us: inclusion is good for the soul.

Ireland’s Referendum (Part 2)

I lived for several months in Ireland, much of it with Catherine, her husband Pee and their nine children, in a small farmhouse without plumbing and powered by turf. I also spent time on the road, hitchhiking around Waterford and Cork, and later up the west coast from Dingle Bay to Donegal. Ireland is a small place, just 300 miles long and 170 miles across, and yet its landscape and culture are remarkably varied. I discovered, in my travels, three very different countries: the fertile pastures of the east and south where Anglicans and Catholics lived amicably together; the barren, rock-strewn west to which Cromwell had driven the conquered Irish 300 years earlier – where beneath a thin veneer flourished a pagan world of fairies and leprechauns and mythic giants, where Gaelic was still the language of daily life; and the midlands, Catherine’s Ireland, impoverished, ruled by priests, steadfastly holding to the old ways. Last week, when Ireland’s voters overwhelmingly approved the gay marriage referendum, the single district to vote against it was in the midlands. I wonder what Catherine would have made of it all. She never questioned the Church or the priests who ran her parish as a fiefdom, and yet she was the kindest person I have ever known. And so, when her youngest, beloved daughter, Kathleen, got pregnant as a teenager, Catherine overcame her catechism and opened her heart to her grandchild. And when Kathleen died from cancer a few years later, it could not rock her mother’s faith.

Ireland’s Referendum (Part 1)

I got off the bus at Moyne Cross and followed the one-lane road until, after about a mile, I turned into a narrow lane and walked up a hill toward a stone farmhouse. A woman just coming out of a small barn stopped and looked at the unshorn wanderer walking toward her. It was June 1972 in Longford, a rural county in the center of Ireland, and I had come in search of the woman who had nursed me through rheumatic fever when I was five – and who a few years later, as my own family was falling apart, had returned here to begin a family of her own. I had sent a letter to her maiden name, at the last address my mother had, and set out to find her. I had come to one of the poorest, most remote parts of Ireland, a place of small farms still without plumbing, where families sold milk from their few cows at the nearby creamery and grew potatoes, onions and cabbages in the rocky soil. A place where the Catholic Church and the pub were the centers of communal life, where the parish priest was the unquestioned arbiter of morality and politics, where divorce was prohibited, contraception illegal and ideas sternly censored. A place, I think today, where gay marriage was unimaginable.

But that afternoon I wondered only if, after all the years, she would know me.

“Catherine,” I said as I approached her.

“So it’s you, is it,” she answered.

Deportees

Europe’s leaders, who have come under heavy criticism for an inadequate response to the thousands of refugees trying to reach their shores, are calling the latest events on the Mediterranean a humanitarian crisis. This seems a small ray of hope in the ongoing disaster – because you can’t have a humanitarian crisis without humans, and it's a step forward to see a human tragedy where others see a border-security breakdown or an immigrant problem. It seems unfair to blame Europe for the desperate people embarking from North Africa on overcrowded boats owned by unscrupulous human traffickers, as a Boston Globe editorial did yesterday, arguing that “the European Union has a moral duty to provide the financial resources and manpower to stem this escalating humanitarian crisis.” Europe didn’t cause the crisis, at least in its present incarnation, and it is not going to be able to stop it – and I can't think of many countries that would make the efforts Italy has made to rescue those at sea.

We need to stop flaying ourselves long enough to recognize that while the West isn’t perfect, there’s a reason why millions of desperate people are trying to get here, and no amount of wishing or wall building is going to make them stop coming. One lesson from Europe is that, whether out of humanitarianism or self-interest, we need to accept the responsibility our success has given us by continuing to engage with the world, which has become a very small place indeed.

Bananas

And we thought all the wackos were in the House. The completely bizarre “Open Letter to the Leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” dated March 9^th and signed by 47 Republican senators, should put that quaint notion to rest. The letter seeks to undermine ongoing nuclear negotiations by helping Iran’s unnamed leaders understand the American constitutional system, including the length and limits of presidential and senatorial terms. Such as: “Applied today, for instance, President Obama will leave office in January 2017, while most of us will remain in office well beyond then – perhaps decades,” a truly terrifying thought. The condescending letter reads like a misguided middle-school social studies assignment. (“Write a letter to the leaders of a foreign country describing our system of government.”) Never mind that it describes our system incorrectly or that the senators' knowledge of Iran apparently doesn’t include who should actually get their letter. Bibi Netanyahu told them all they needed to know about the ayatollahs just last week.

In related news, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, wrote an op-ed piece in the Lexington Herald-Leader urging states to refuse to implement federal environmental regulations, which only goes to show that the Iranians aren't the only political leaders who don't understand our Constitutional separation of powers.

All their extracurricular writing assignments and lawsuits have left our legislators very little time to pass actual laws. But fear not, no matter how dysfunctional our government may seem, we still import bananas, so we aren't a “banana republic” yet.

One Week

We live obliviously in a dangerous world, a world where Putin appropriates territory as he pleases and his critics are murdered in the public square, where China smothers dissent and rattles its sabers, where ISIS – and its even more brutal disciples in Nigeria – have made slavery and beheadings instruments of dogma and recruitment. North Korea launched a couple of missiles yesterday, and Israel seems bent on instituting a policy of apartheid. And what do we do in the face of these challenges? On Friday, after the pettiest of brinksmanship, Congress extended funding for homeland security for one week. One week. And they had to go to zero hour to accomplish even that. Not that anybody particularly noticed. Sure, the press played up the melodrama leading up to the vote, although with far less ink than it gave the Oscars. When the vote was over and homeland security had been funded for seven whole days, the media returned to covering the 2016 presidential horse race as if that were the most immediate issue we faced.

This is America the exceptional, the nation that seeks to export our form of government to the rest of the world because it is so much better than everyone else’s. We can’t even govern ourselves. We have elected a Congress that has substituted grandstanding for governing and equates the empty gesture with “standing on principle.” For more proof, tune in tomorrow when Benjamin Netanyahu comes before Congress to insult the president of the United States.

Duck, Cheney

Unsurprisingly, Dick Cheney is unrepentant. In an interview on Fox News, the former vice-president called the Senate report on the CIA's interrogation practices “full of crap,” although he confessed he had read neither the report nor its summary. (Full disclosure: Neither have I.) But he trashed the document nonetheless, praising the CIA and defending the legality, morality and effectiveness of its techniques. Four times he invoked the 3,000 Americans killed on 9/11, and he took responsibility for measures he asserted had prevented a second such attack on American soil. What he has never taken responsibility for is this: On whose watch did the first attack take place? Thankfully, we have had only one. It happened while Dick Cheney was overseeing our national security.

I’m not suggesting that Cheney is responsible for 9/11 in the same way the current Congress keeps trying to pin Benghazi – another horrific terrorist attack, which left four Americans dead – on Barack Obama. So far, five (!) House committees, all with Republican majorities bent on sticking it to the president, have investigated Benghazi. They have found no evidence of a conspiracy or cover-up. But don't worry, they’re still looking.

I don’t believe there was any conspiracy or cover-up with regard to 9/11. But if the head of the secret service is fired because a guy jumped over the White House fence and the VA administrator is disgraced over hospital conditions, why is nobody deemed accountable for 9/11?

Dick Cheney poses as a stand-up guy. But on this issue, he lies low.

City on a Hill

In a recent column on “America’s bipolar mental condition regarding foreign policy,” George Will quoted from Henry Kissinger’s World Order: “The conviction that American principles are universal has introduced a challenging element into the international system because it implies that governments not practicing them are less than fully legitimate,” which “suggests that a significant portion of the world lives under a kind of unsatisfactory, probationary arrangement, and will one day be redeemed.” This is one of those sweepingly simple insights that make you wonder, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

It is also the flip side of “American exceptionalism,” the idea currently in vogue that America is different from (and indeed better than) other countries, that we have somehow managed to evolve outside of history, chosen by God to be “a city upon a hill,” as John Winthrop preached 384 years ago. “The eyes of all people are on us.”

Both philosophies are predicated on the belief that the rest of world exists in some state of original sin from which only America can save it. Everybody wants what we have; but the forces of evil stand in the way. “They hate our freedoms,” George Bush said, as he launched the invasion of Iraq. “The world must be made safe for democracy,” Woodrow Wilson said, as America entered World War I.

It’s a foreign policy, often based on good intentions, with a fatal, tragic, flaw: it has impeded Americans from approaching the world from any perspective but our own.

Why We Need Poets

The most poignant and searing reporting I have read on the Islamic State’s treatment of hostages was written by a poet. Rukmini Callimachi is a Romanian-American poet and journalist who has covered the aftermath of Katrina, hunger in West Africa and al-Qaeda. Yesterday The New York Times published her article on the two-year ordeal and last days of James Foley – and the other 22 hostages held by ISIS in Syria. In it, Callimachi transcends the video pornography of much current Middle East reporting to focus on the human tragedy of the hostages. In doing so, she confronts the absolute evil of ISIS. This is why we need poets. It is remarkable to see the hostages, who often have only their suffering in common, build a community and tell stories to survive under the most awful conditions – as humans have done over and over again in the face of evil. For there is no other word to describe ISIS. This is not about cultural differences or historical grievances. It is an assault on our definition of humanity – infinitely more so when we realize that films of good people being beheaded have become tools for enlisting fighters from across the globe. Almost all those kidnapped have been aid workers and journalists, people who came to help the afflicted and inform the world. Some say they shouldn’t be there, that they are pawns in a deadly game. I think they embody the human kindness and courage that ISIS seeks to destroy.

Lost and Found

We found them, those elusive weapons of mass destruction that sent us to war in Iraq. In what some are calling a belated vindication of the Bush-Cheney administration, C.J. Chivers reported in The New York Times this week that during the last decade American troops unearthed several caches of chemical weapons, including thousands of nerve-agent rockets. It took Chivers a lot of digging, though, because the Pentagon had suppressed the information for years, going so far as to deny adequate care to affected soldiers and refusing to give them Purple Hearts. Why all the secrecy instead of a jubilant “we found ‘em” from Vice President Cheney? Well, it turns out these weren’t exactly the weapons everybody had been looking for in 2002, the ones we assured the United Nations that Saddam Hussein was secretly developing. All the weapons our soldiers dug up had been manufactured before 1991, when Saddam was an American ally engaged in a brutal war with Iran and Dick Cheney was the U.S. Secretary of Defense. But there is another reason we knew they were there. We helped make them. In fact, Chivers reported, “in five of six incidents in which [U.S.] troops were wounded by chemical agents, the munitions appeared to have been designed in the United States, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies.”

No such weapons manufactured after 1991 have ever been found.

The compound where most of the weapons were stored is now controlled by ISIS.

A Sobering Thought

Here’s a sobering thought: three reasonably intelligent old men of diverse political views are sailing off the coast of Maine. When the conversation veers from reminiscing about the old days to current foreign policy, not one of them can articulate a coherent plan about what the United States should do in the Middle East. They can’t even quarrel, which is unusual. They agree on two things: the situation, including the cultures and players involved, is too complicated to completely comprehend; and regardless of what we do or don’t do, the U.S. can neither control nor even predict the outcome. I think we are hardly alone in this, not just among ordinary people but among those who represent us in Washington. With so much uncertainty and so little power to affect the outcome, the time seems unripe to rush into frenzied action. And yet the pressure to do something builds unrelentingly, whipped up by pundits at home and the despicable behavior of ISIS – which seems bent on goading us to act – abroad.

President Obama’s announcement that he will send 475 military advisors to the Middle East seems modest and humane, but I came of age with a war that began with military advisors, ended with 55,000 American – and countless more Vietnamese – dead, and spawned books with titles like The Making of a Quagmire. The U.S. didn’t understand the culture then, and it couldn’t control the outcome.

Wearied by sobering thoughts, we poured a drink and changed the subject to Ukraine.

Reclaiming the Commons

One little-noted thread running through many current issues – from the slaughters in the Middle East to the ethnic wars in Africa and Asia to the drought in the American west – is the growing irrelevance of national and state borders for either understanding modern problems or providing a framework for their solution. When European powers began conquering and settling the rest of the world, they divided it up according to their needs and rivalries, ignoring the realities they encountered. One of the most striking examples occurred in the states west of the Mississippi, where the national government imposed a two-dimensional grid on a three-dimensional landscape, without regard for the land’s physical features or native inhabitants.

Over 100 years ago, John Wesley Powell, who made the first recorded passage through the Grand Canyon despite having lost his arm at the Battle of Shiloh, argued that the only effective planning unit for western settlement was the watershed: "that area of land . . . within which all living things are inextricably linked by their common water course and where, as humans settled, simple logic demanded that they become part of a community."

Two months ago, Thomas Friedman wrote of environmentalists’ vision for the eastern Mediterranean as a “region without borders because only by managing it as an integrated river system and water basin . . . can you sustainably manage its resources for the good of all. “

We can no longer afford to carve up the only world we have. We must learn now to share it.

“Warre of every one against every one”

Amid the western world’s preparations to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of World War I, maybe it’s a good time to think about World War III. Maybe not. It’s a depressing subject, and most of us prefer to live our lives removed from both the threat and the reality of war. But that’s not so easy in a world where war seems to be everywhere, including places where we spent many years, thousands of lives and trillions of dollars to avert it. “You break it, you own it,” Colin Powell famously told George Bush before the Iraq war, and we certainly broke it. But what does it mean to own it? Clearly, we don’t control it, and it seems foolish and dangerous to think we can. Moreover, whenever we concentrate on one war, others break out elsewhere. What’s a great power to do?

We can no more disengage from the world than control it, much as Americans might like to, and, as the big business of tourism demonstrates, the world beyond our borders is not just a dangerous place. It’s also an interesting place. Perhaps for us armchair policy makers, that’s a start. We can’t change the world, but we can engage it differently. Just as the movement to reclaim city parks considered too dangerous to enter began when people refused to cede them to muggers, so, instead of pulling up the drawbridge, we can go out into the world with curiosity and an open mind. Just be careful.

The Souls of His Shoes

On our last day in Sicily, we climbed on Mt. Etna, one of the world’s most active volcanoes, whose snow-covered summit rises 11,000 feet above the Mediterranean Sea. Walking on hardened lava left from an enormous eruption in 2002, we came to an ominous hole in the mountain floor. Our guide explained that the source of Etna’s magma is – incredibly – beneath the African continent across the Mediterranean, and then he casually tossed in a rock. “It is a very, very deep hole,” he said. “Listen for the sound of the bottom.” We listened . . . and listened, but there was no sound. It was beyond eerie, and we all immediately stepped back from the rim. I envisioned people walking around China with stones embedded in their heads. I was, for some reason, reminded of George Bush’s remark on first meeting Vladimir Putin in 2001: “I looked into his eyes and saw his soul.” In a career filled with loony utterances, none has proved more delusional. The Decider touted his ability to “read people” and make decisions with “his gut,” but maybe this wasn’t the best way to make policy. The Russians have long built Potemkin villages, and unimaginative men rarely see past the façade. As events unfold in Ukraine and Russia, and we watch Putin metamorphose into Stalin with a pretty face, it’s hard to find much evidence of a soul. I think of Bush bedazzled, and wonder when he looked in Putin’s eyes, whether he saw only the soles of his feet.

Friends Like Us

Everybody’s doing it, but nobody does it quite like us. I’m talking, of course, about America’s insatiable penchant for scarfing up information from tapped telephones and redirected emails around the world. Le Monde reported, for example, that in a single month the U.S. collected data from 70 million French phones. And that’s just France. And yet, it was only 84 ago that Secretary of State Henry Stimson shut down the government’s cryptanalytic office with the words, "Gentlemen don't read each other's mail." Now we are told we should have no expectations of privacy because if the government isn’t reading our mail, Google is.

Still, yesterday’s revelations that the National Security Agency had tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s personal cellphone has Europe seething, even though this is hardly a novel practice there. The most famous episode was the 1989 bugging that overheard Prince Charles telling Camilla Parker Bowles he wanted to be reincarnated as her tampon. It’s important to know these things.

While the U.S. government offers fumbling explanations for spying on its foreign friends – not to mention its own citizens – it sees little irony in its indictment of Edward Snowden for espionage. And Senator Diane Feinstein has urged that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange be “prosecuted under the Espionage Act.”

As for me, the final damage from the computer crash I reported last week is the permanent loss of seven months of files that contain pretty much my entire life. Not to worry, I have a call in to the NSA.