A recession approaches, but can porn save us? May 20, 2008
Posted by franklittle in media, Media and Journalism, United States, US Media, US Politics.4 comments
Quirky little story from the US. According to CNN imaginative ways are being considered to deal with California’s budget crisis. Despite roles in Kindergarten Cop and Twins, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger finds himself presiding over a budget deficit of $17 billion and growing.
The solution, proposed by one of those notorious tax and spend Democrats, is to target the adult entertainment industry with what can only be described as a vicious 25% tax rate. Adult entertainment, claims Dem Assemblyman Charles Calderon, has a greater revenue than ABC, NBC and CBC combined. Such a tax could bring in upwards of $700 million every year.
The porn industry, calling itself the Free Speech Coalition, has pledged to fight the proposal.
Leaving me with only three questions. If the recession starts to bite here in Ireland, could we see Revenue agents going after the adult shops on Capel Street? How many pictures of scantily clad women can CNN get into a piece on the California budget crisis? And is this the best I can do as first story back after two months away?
The answer to the last question is clear enough.
Who fears to speak of ’68? May 9, 2008
Posted by smiffy in European Politics, History, International Politics, Other Stuff, The Left, United States.23 comments
40 years on, and the legacy of 1968 remains contested. This is probably inevitable. While it’s one of those few years like 1789, 1848 or 1989 that are synonymous with uprising and revolution, 1968 is unique in that there’s little or no consensus on what it meant then or what it means now.
Sean O’Hagen, in a recent feature for The Observer, gives a good overview of the events of that year. Over on the Prospect website, you can find a variety of views on ’68 under the title ‘1968: liberty or its illusion?’ from a slew of writers ranging from Tsvetan Todorov to PJ O’Rourke. Don’t miss this characteristically bitter little piece from Alan Johnson. Not to be outdone in the bitterness stakes, of course, our own John Waters (sub req’d) describes 1968 as ‘The tragic conflict between freedom and tradition’. A little more coherent than most of Waters’ pieces, he does descend into his typically nonsensically quasi-mysticalism towards the end, stating that:
(F)reedom is a deceptive word which, in its modern meaning, conveys a pursuit of desire without limit. Because of the structural limitations of the human mechanism, there is a point at which the pursuit of desire, in any direction, becomes destructive. One of the consequences of the disrespecting of tradition since the 1960s is that this consciousness of limits has been mislaid.
Hours of fun could be had speculating about where John Waters thinks the ‘structural limitations of the human mechanism’ lie, but we’ll simply gesture towards the area between the navel and the knees and move on.
Over on Comment is Free, the fight is being played out between Geoffrey Wheatcroft, who argues that the actual consequences of 1968 are four decades of near uninterrupted right-wing political control and 17-year olds being offered positions as strippers at the Job Centre, and Peter Lennon, who instead argues that the events of May 1968 in Paris had substantial positive effects lasting even to the present day (although he does include a rather gratuitous ‘My demonstration is bigger than your demonstration’ dig at the British soixante-huitards).
As disparate as Wheatcroft and Lennon’s positions are, they both, I think, fall into the same error: that of seeing 1968 solely in terms of events in Western Europe and the United States (Lennon, in fact, implies that only the Parisian ’68 is the authentic one). This is a perception shared by many of the Prospect writers and writers elsewhere, as well as in the popular consciousness. When one thinks of 1968 one immediately thinks of either French students digging up cobblestones to throw at policemen or the mixture of rioting and assassination that characterised the US Presidential campaign that year.
This is, without a doubt, the sexier side of ’68, the side which appeals to those who prefer the ‘Street-Fighting Man’ of the Rolling Stones to the ‘Revolution’ of the Beatles. However, it’s also extremely limited and the more we look back on the legacy of 1968, the more limited such a view appears.
While, for example, the anti-war movement in the United States, and globally, was hugely significant at the time, and was a crucible from which major figures in contemporary US politics emerged, it’s important not to see it as a spontaneous mass phenomenon which emerged sui generis on the Washington Mall and on campuses across the continent. It evolved slowly, and gradually, over the course of half a decade. As Chomsky writes in the current edition of New Statesman, contrasting the anti-war movement of the 1960s with the opposition to the invasion of Iraq five years ago:
You have to remember that, during Vietnam, there was no opposition at the beginning of the war. It did develop, but only six years after John F Kennedy attacked South Vietnam and troop casualties were mounting. However, with the Iraq War, opposition was there from the very beginning, before an attack was even initiated. The Iraq War was the first conflict in western history in which an imperialist war was massively protested against before it had even been launched.
It’s also worth recalling the extent to which the anti-Vietnam war movement, the student movement, was dependent on the civil rights movement for its very existence. Even though the formal civil rights movement had, to a large extent, played itself out by ’68, when one looks at leaders like Tom Hayden, David Dellinger, even Abbie Hoffman, what’s particularly notable is how many of them either had their political baptism or were heavily involvement in the Freedom Riders or the voter registration projects from earlier in the decade. Indeed, many of the tactics employed by the anti-war protestors were perfected on the streets of Selma, Birmingham, Albany and other towns across the deep South. It’s fair to say that without the initial work of the NAACP, the SCLC and the SNCC, there wouldn’t have been an anti-war movement, certainly of the scale that came to exist. However, this doesn’t tend to be part of the dominant narrative of 1968, or to feature prominently in the Sunday newspaper nostalgia pieces, where the massive significance of the civil rights movement at the time, and its legacy to the present day, tends to be reduced to the assassinations of that year.
Similarly, when one considers whether 1968 represented a turning point in the United States’ engagement with Vietnam, one should overplay the significance of the anti-war movement. Important though the domestic and international demonstrations were, they paled in comparison to the actions of the Tet Offensive of the same year, which demonstrated that the United States military machine could be defeated on its own terms, and acted as a call to arms for anti-imperialist movements across the world.
Turning East, or West (depending on your perspective) there’s also a tendency to diminish the significance of the uprisings and protests across Eastern Europe (not to mention in Southern Europe, where the term ‘fascist government’ carried much more weight than just a rather self-indulgent hippy cliché) as an off-shoot of the demonstrations in Paris or Chicago, where the main event was happening. However, in hindsight we can see that what occurred in Czechoslovakia, as well as in Poland and elsewhere during that year, proved to have a far greater impact than the equivalent Western activities. Far from being a failure, as they may have appeared at the time, they proved – as Timothy Garton Ash notes – in time to have laid the ground for the revolutions of 1989, arguably the most important mass social movements since the Second World War.
None of this is intended to in any way denigrate the achievements and the commitment of the students, workers and revolutionaries who took to the streets in Paris, Berlin, London, Chicago and elsewhere in 1968. Many argue that the lasting legacy of 1968 is the dominance of right-wing politics over the last forty years, that the backlash which thrust Nixon, Reagan, Thatcher and, latterly, Sarkozy into power can be laid at the feet of those who fought for a better world at the time. This strikes me as a rather myopic, not to mention begrudging view, of those events. The achievements of feminism, of the gay rights and anti-racist movements and the rise of Green politics are, at the very least, just as much the outcome of 1968 as the emergence of the Red Army Faction of the ex-Trotskyists of neo-conservatism, and those of the left should be unashamed to claim this legacy as their own. It’s far more plausible to state that the civil rights movement – by breaking the stranglehold of the Democratic Party on the Southern states of the US – inadvertantly caused the near permanent dominance of the Republicans in US politics, but no one would suggest that, because of this, perhaps it would have been best if Rosa Parks had taken a different bus after all.
It is probably a mistake to speak of 1968 as a single phenomenon. Rather, it might best be remembered as a confluence of different events, movements and individuals which together formed something greater than the sum of their parts. However, on one point they were as one. Like the proverbial stopped clock, John Waters is actually correct on one point. What the various strands we understand as ‘1968’ have in common was the determination to challenge authority, particularly traditional authority, in the name of human freedom. Of course, for Waters, this is a bad thing, being synonymous with the uppity women he despises (particularly those who play house). However, if one imagines the kind of Ireland that Waters seems to advocate in his criticism of those who challenge authority – one where the Roman Catholic Church retains a tight grip on social policy, women are still treated as second-class citizens, where Northern Catholics never demanded their rights from a state which structurally discriminated against them and where gay people remain in fear of criminal prosecution, one can see that the spirit of ’68 is something which should still be held dear.
Reverend Wright redux…Obama goes for the thermonuclear option… April 30, 2008
Posted by WorldbyStorm in United States.12 comments
With friends like this Obama can hardly wish any new enemies, for as CL notes “Wright thrown under bus: is Obama finished?” and in the Irish Times we read that:
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama denounced his former pastor in his strongest language to date today, saying he was outraged by Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s assertions about the US government and race.
“His comments were not only divisive … but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate,” Mr Obama told reporters.
And lest the good reverend think that there is wriggle room in that for their continued friendship…well, best not to count on it…
“Whatever relationship I had with Reverend Wright has changed as a consequence of this,” Mr Obama said.
And all this on foot of Wright attempting to get out of the hole he had been inadvertently dug into by the dynamics of the US Presidential nomination campaign, by recourse to… er… further digging.
So it was that he suggested that:
…the US government as imperialist and stood by his suggestion that the United States invented the HIV virus as a means of genocide against minorities.
“Based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything,” he said.
Now this is impolitic stuff, to be sure and as also reported, it is potentially worse for the Senator, for Wright decided to do a bit of looking into, well, not his own heart but that of Obama and came out with…
“If Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected,” Rev Wright said. “Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls.”
Now, whatever one thinks of the these matters, this is supremely odd as statements go during election campaigns. Odd, to the point of destructive of his supposed friends campaign. Which makes one wonder why these sentences were uttered. Is this the cuing up of a sort of sub-Kinnock Militant moment where Obama can shine as he slays a dragon? The danger is that this sort of talk is uncontainable, that it feeds into a discourse of ‘we always knew that’s what he believed, how he felt, etc’…
Certainly Obama’s response has been sharp and rapid, damage limitation at its best (but perhaps most ineffective):
“What became clear to me is that he was presenting a world view that contradicts who I am and what I stand for,” Mr Obama said. “And what I think particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing. Anybody who knows me and anybody who knows what I’m about knows that I am about trying to bridge gaps and I see the commonality in all people.”
Ouch. I think Reverend Wright should forget about Christmas cards this year.
Pope to Officer Krupke: “Society’s to blame!” April 20, 2008
Posted by smiffy in Religion, United States.8 comments
A lot of time and many column inches have been spent covering this week’s visit to the United States of the Pope (much to Gordon Brown’s chagrin, perhaps) in particular in relation to the issue of clerical sexual abuse. The Pope, the story goes, has devoted much of his time apologising for the Catholic Church’s rather unsavory history in this regard. However, does he really deserve the kind of praise he’s receiving and is the apology all that it’s cracked up to be?
The most sustained examination of the issue on the part of the Pope during the trip so far has been the address to the US bishops in Washington on Wednesday. While the issue of abuse receives relatively little attention in the course of an extremely long speech, it is worth examining it in some detail to reveal the precise nature of the apology and the Catholic Church’s understanding of its own role in the scandals of recent decades. He tells his fellow clergymen:
Among the countersigns to the Gospel of life found in America and elsewhere is one that causes deep shame: the sexual abuse of minors. Many of you have spoken to me of the enormous pain that your communities have suffered when clerics have betrayed their priestly obligations and duties by such gravely immoral behavior. As you strive to eliminate this evil wherever it occurs, you may be assured of the prayerful support of God’s people throughout the world. Rightly, you attach priority to showing compassion and care to the victims. It is your God-given responsibility as pastors to bind up the wounds caused by every breach of trust, to foster healing, to promote reconciliation and to reach out with loving concern to those so seriously wronged.
Even taking into account the fact that he’s speaking to an audience of bishop’s, it is surely in rather poor taste to open his remarks on the abuse of children by Catholic clergy by speaking about the pain of Catholic ‘communities’. Don’t the victims (i.e. those who were actually assaulted, as opposed to those devout Catholics who suffered the ‘pain’ of betrayal when the crimes became known) deserve a little more than that.
However, far more distasteful is the rather self-congratulatory note in the piece. How great the bishops are in striving to eliminate this evil (the evil, unquestionably, being the actions of individual priests who in no way reflect the immense goodness and piety of the vast, vast majority of clergy in the country … or so the story goes).
Except, of course, that this is only part of the story. Horrific as the actual abuse was, what turned the phenomenon into a scandal is the complicity of the institutional church. By attempting to cover it up, by moving priests from parish to parish when accusations of abuse arose and by failing to report the crimes to the state (perhaps one should say ‘temporal’) authorities, they made themselves accessories after the fact. None of this is reflected in the tone of the Pope’s address. Dealing directly with the point, he says:
Responding to this situation has not been easy and, as the President of your Episcopal Conference has indicated, it was “sometimes very badly handled”. Now that the scale and gravity of the problem is more clearly understood, you have been able to adopt more focused remedial and disciplinary measures and to promote a safe environment that gives greater protection to young people. While it must be remembered that the overwhelming majority of clergy and religious in America do outstanding work in bringing the liberating message of the Gospel to the people entrusted to their care, it is vitally important that the vulnerable always be shielded from those who would cause harm. In this regard, your efforts to heal and protect are bearing great fruit not only for those directly under your pastoral care, but for all of society.
So, in effect, it was a tricky situation, perhaps some mistakes were made (note the mealy-mouthed use of sentiments attributed to others, something for which we’ve noticed the present Pope has a fondness), you guys can’t really be blamed for the past as no one really understood what was going on, but you’re doing a great job now. Keep it up!
Worst of all, however, is the following section:
If they are to achieve their full purpose, however, the policies and programs you have adopted need to be placed in a wider context. Children deserve to grow up with a healthy understanding of sexuality and its proper place in human relationships. They should be spared the degrading manifestations and the crude manipulation of sexuality so prevalent today. They have a right to be educated in authentic moral values rooted in the dignity of the human person. This brings us back to our consideration of the centrality of the family and the need to promote the Gospel of life. What does it mean to speak of child protection when pornography and violence can be viewed in so many homes through media widely available today? We need to reassess urgently the values underpinning society, so that a sound moral formation can be offered to young people and adults alike.
Now, I would have thought the the head of an organisation which colluded in the rape of children on an industrial scale over decades might be a little more humble, a little more circumspect in discussing issues of sexuality and children. I would certainly have imagined that such an individual would have lacked the sheer gall to start drawing implicit moral comparisons between the crimes of the clergy against children and internet pornography (as if the abuse should be seen in the context of the degraded sexuality of secular society, in contrast the more spiritual and pure attitude towards sexuality held by the devout).
I suppose, however, that when you see yourself as being chosen by God to be Pope (as opposed having attained the position through the internecine squabbling of a roomful of septuagenarian celibates) you’re bound to be a little bit cocky.
What this does suggest is that despite all the crocodile tears for victims and hand-wringing about ‘hurt’ from the likes of Breda O’Brien, the old Catholic Church is still there, as arrogant and sure of itself as ever, ready to make excuses for its own crimes, and continue to assert its own moral superiority in contrast with the world around it. As the Jets might say of Ratzinger:
It ain’t just a question of misunderstood
Deep down inside him, he’s no good!
We are Change: Who are you? April 16, 2008
Posted by smiffy in 9/11, Irish Politics, Labour Party, Lisbon Treaty.72 comments
The Lisbon Treaty referendum campaign took a swerve into the bizarre on Monday night, with the alleged assault on Prionsias de Rossa after a debate in Liberty Hall. While the details are still rather sketchy (and I’ve heard about it from a number of sources, including those who were present) it’s been covered in the Irish Times and on yesterday afternoon’s Liveline. The discussion on politics.ie is as tasteful and informative as one might expect, although it is depressingly aging to hear de Rossa described as an ‘elderly gentleman’ (all the more so, given that it’s accurate).
It seems that those responsible for the assault come from the strange ‘We Are Change Ireland‘ group, a local branch of a loose organisation based primarily in the United States but with affiliates in the UK, Canada and here. While one shouldn’t read too much into yesterday’s incident at this stage, it may represent the first strand of a more worrying trend.
WAC originate in the crazier extremes of the so-called 9/11 Truth movement. Glancing at the self-produced videos on their website, they come across as a group of rather amateurish Michael Moore wannabes, the kind of people who have never met a conspiracy theory they didn’t like, or accept. Incidentally, the ‘confrontation’ of Gerry Adams is hilarious, as is the encounter between our old comrade Nick Cohen and the We Are Change UK group.
Despite their image as a humourous misfits, it’s very hard to place them on the political spectrum. While some of the jargon they employ about civil liberties and the militarization of the European Union might suggest a leftist bent, they also appear to have some sympathy with a certain kind of right-wing extremism exemplified in the likes of Lyndon LaRouche and, to an extent, Alex Jones. There’s even the pseudo-religious strands (see the interview with arch-crank Michael Tsarion) which resemble the worldview outlined in online films like Zeitgeist and the pronouncements of David Icke.
Indeed, this kind of Ickean mixture of conspiracy theory politics and crazy, mystical cod philosophy does tend to leave a rather nasty taste in the mouth. In Jon Ronson’s chapter on Icke in his great book Them: Adventures with Extremists, he recounts the debate about whether, when Icke talks about giant, blood-drinking lizards ruling the world, he actually means Jews (and the more he protests that he really means lizards, the more this is interpreted by his opponents as really meaning Jews). Amusing as that particular anecdote is, what Ronson’s book is particularly good at is demonstrating the overlap between the outlook of conspiracy theorists and that of genuine neo-fascist organisations.
I am conscious of using the terms ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’ are perjoratives. This is not to suggest, of course, that political conspiracies don’t exist and that states don’t engage in activities about which they would prefer the public remained ignorant. However, the problem with a certain kind of individual or group – best analysed in Richard Hofstadter’s classic essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, a little dated in the age of the internet but well worth reading – is that it substitutes ‘analysis’ (to be generous) for activism. It seems to see the process of uncovering hidden motivations, alliances and activities as progressive in and of itself. It provides no attempt to actually change anything or to improve anyone’s life (except insofar as seeing the hidden hand of the Illuminati everywhere enhances your life). It’s a recipe for political quietism.
Perhaps it would be accurate to see WAC as anti-political, in this sense – in engaging in a simulcarum of activist politics but with no real political goals or objectives other than as a self-perpetuating mechanism for generating new and even more bizarre conspiracy tales.
This alone would make them an interesting phenomenon – a group whose political outlook is entirely generating from the internet and devoid of any substantial content – and certainly worth noting. However, Monday’s events seem a little more sinsiter. The tactics employed both within the meeting and afterwards would be familiar to those who have followed the development of Youth Defence (a genuinely far-right organisation) over the last 15 years. One hopes that WAC are, and will remain, a tiny group of crackpots, rather than the tip of the iceberg of something much worse.
Samantha Power and the Obama Campaign February 26, 2008
Posted by smiffy in Books, Democrats, International Politics, Iraq, United States, US Politics.60 comments
Via Normblog, a rather disappointing Sunday Times interview with the very intriguing Samantha Power.Power’s an interesting character. She’s a strong human rights advocate who doesn’t fall into any easy ideological categories. Her opposition to the invasion of Iraq distinguishes her from both the hawkish elements within the current US administration who use the language of human rights to cloak a rather more base military adventurism and the Nick Cohen-ite ‘muscular liberals’ so comprehensively ridiculed in the always brilliant Encyclopedia of Decency. However, she’s by no means a pacifist and her support for military intervention in certain cases puts her at odds with much of what might loosely be described as the broad-left anti-war movement.
Power’s 2002 book A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide is a compelling and illuminating piece of work which analyses the evolution of the international community’s understanding of genocide as a distinct crime, and the responses of various US administrations to it throughout the 20th century. The material on the Kurds is particularly good, specifically in detailing the internal politics driving the State Department’s response to the Anfal campaign.
Her new book, Chasing the Flame, is a biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the senior UN diplomat most notable for overseeing the transition of the then East Timor to independence and for his death at the hands of jihadists in a car bomb attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003. Even prior to his death Vieira de Mello was a fascinating figure and was profiled in Paul Berman’s Power and the Idealists as one of a number of soixante-huitards (the others including Joshka Fischer and Bernard Kouchner) who came to a difficult accomodation with the defence of human rights and the need for humanitarian interventionism in the 40 years since the riots of the summer of ’68. Berman’s review of Power’s book can be found here: ironically, his main criticism of the work
But the biggest difficulty, or so my reading of Chasing the Flame leads me to suppose, is a problem of the imagination. A philosophical issue. It’s the same problem that keeps popping up in Power’s earlier book as well: an inability to imagine why some people might set out to destroy whole populations. Vieira de Mello participated in U.N. missions that followed any of several logics—the logic of peacekeeping, or of establishing safe havens for the persecuted, or of providing humanitarian aid. But each of those logics presumes that if horrific conflicts have broken out, it is because otherwise reasonable people have fallen into misunderstandings and a neutral broker like the U.N. might usefully intercede. Yet conflicts sometimes break out because one or another popular political movement has arrived at a sincere belief in the virtue of exterminating its enemies, and horrific ideologies lie at the origin. Neutral mediations in a case like that are bound only to obscure the reality—which has happened several times over, as Power usefully demonstrates.
is precisely the aspect of Berman’s own writing which is the weakest. Particularly in Terror and Liberalism, but also elsewhere, he has a tendency to move from relatively well-considered fact-based arguments to vague theorising about ideology – in particular about the ‘irrationality’ of certain ‘death-cults’ – which isn’t really supported by convincing evidence and which one suspects is only thrown in to allow Berman to make spurious analogies between Fascism, Stalinism and (for want of a more accurate term) Jihadism.
While Chasing the Flame isn’t published (this side of the Atlantic) until next week, I hope it will examine in some detail how possible the post-invasion reconstruction of Iraq was at the time of Vieria de Mello’s death. Recent books like Imperial Life in the Emerald City and The Occupation suggest that the reconstruction efforts were always doomed to failure, due to the, at best, incompetence and, at worst, criminal and deliberate negligence of the Coalition Provisional Authority. However, what the argument that the current morass in Iraq was the inevitable and unavoidable outcome of the invasion doesn’t consider is what might have happened had the initial reconstruction effort been headed up by the United Nations rather than Paul Bremer and co. It’s something of a pointless debate, of course: we have no real way of knowing what might have happened had things been otherwise, and it certainly doesn’t assist in considering a possible solution to the present situation. However, it’s an argument worth having, to inform future questions of military intervention (however unlikely these may be in the short term).
What’s so disappointing about the Sunday Times piece, though, is that there’s so little in it. Power’s close involvement with the Obama campaign certainly cause me to pay closer attention to his campaign (although her somewhat star-struck descriptions of him in the interview do tend to grate). However, nowhere in the article is the question of what US foreign policy under an Obama administration might look like, particularly in the area of human rights and humanitarian intervention. That said, her presence is still something to keep an eye on in the course of the campaign and certainly if Obama manages to win the Democratic nomination and becomes an actual Presidential candidate.
US casualties in Iraq January 14, 2008
Posted by franklittle in Iraq, Middle East, The War On Terror, United States, US Media, US Politics.9 comments
In December 2007 15 US troops lost their lives as a result of hostile action in Iraq according to CNN’s tracking of Coalition casualties in Iraq and Afganistan. Another eight died from non-hostile action, amounting to 23 in total. In order to find similarly low figures, it’s necessary to go back to February 2004 when 12 US troops were killed as a result of hostile action and another nine from non-hostile action amounting to total fatalities of 23. Last week six US soldiers were killed in a booby-trap bomb north of Baghdad. It was the first incident involing multiple deaths of of US soldiers since September and the bloodiest attack since May.
Suggesting the decrease US casualties is not a blip, US fatalities have been steadily declining since May 2007, with month on month decreases. Newspaper reports have indicated a growing number of military successes for US forces since the ‘surge’ began almost a year ago. While everything coming from official sources in Iraq needs to be treated with a large dose of salt there have been numerous reports of Sunni tribes who have switched sides having been alienated by Al Qaeda tactics. Last week the US launched the largest air offensive in Iraq since 2006 dropping 40,000 pounds of explosives on almost 50 targets following which US forces claimed they were able to move into previously insurgent held areas. Bush indicated on his visit to Kuwait in a piece in the LA Times yesterday that the proposed reduction in US troop levels of 30,000 in July remains on track.
This throws up a couple of interesting questions. Are the US actually beating the insurgents or have Iraqi militants calaculated that the better option is to hunker down, hit more vulnerable Iraqi civilian and security targets and wait for the surge to die away knowing the US doesn’t have the ability to sustain it? Is the Bush administration, and the US Republican party, trying to create an image of success in Iraq ahead of the Presidential election that will allow them to bring home 20-30,000 US combat troops weakening the ability of the Democrats to use the war as an issue to attack whomever is the Republican nominee? Or is it possible that the new strategy and new troops are having as sizeable an impact as official sources claim and the insurgency has been delivered multiple hard blows in a short space of time? Could the US military strategy in Iraq be starting to work?
Let slip the dogs: US Presidential attack ads January 13, 2008
Posted by franklittle in Film and Television, United States, US Media, US Politics.15 comments
In 1984 Wayne Dummond was put in prison for the rape of a 17 year old girl. Convinced of his innocence, and suspecting that Dummond had been railroaded into prison because the victim was related to the Clintons, then Arkansas Governor Mick Huckabee campaigned for his release, which took place in 1999. A year late, Dummond sexually assaulted and murdered a 39 year old woman named Carol Sue Shields.
With the South Carolina Primary coming up a group called ‘Victims Voice’ has started to air a pretty tough attack ad against Huckabee, starring Shields’ mother who ends the ad by saying ‘If not for Mike Huckabee, Wayne Dummond would be in prison and Carol Sue would be with us.’ Mother Jones has the story and the ad.
They also have a feature piece profiling, and re-showing, some of the attack ads used in recent elections, including the notorious one from 2006 targetting Democrat Senate candidate Harold Ford and the 1988 Willie Horton ad used by the Republicans to target Dukakis. The Horton ad was widely perceived at the time as being very damaging to Dukakis who was crippled by the crime issue right through the campaign culminating in him telling moderators during the Presidential debate that he would not support the Death Penalty for someone convicted of murdering his wife, who was a couple of rows away from him when the question was asked. Worth noting that only ads attacking Democrat candidates are shown.
Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see what impact this ad has on Huckabee, if any. But when the most vicious clash in the last election consisted of Gormley and McDowell swinging handbags at each other in Ranelagh, it’s clear just how much more vicious US elections tend to be.
Obama, Iowa and a different image of the United States… January 4, 2008
Posted by WorldbyStorm in United States, US Politics.79 comments
A very good speech from Barack Obama on winning the Iowa Caucus, and one which demonstrated why – on the personal level – he may well be as good as Bill Clinton. He was fluent, forceful and clearly in control of his support base. There was the usual obeisance at the alter of the ‘working people’ and the middle classes – even Obama doesn’t do ‘working class’, but, on the other hand it was heartening to hear full-blooded support for health care and withdrawal from Iraq.
Interesting then listening to Left Right and Centre on podcast. Talking about Iowa before the event they thought that Clinton could be third – as she was – and that would be enormously problematic for her. They noted that Edwards had a ‘tough’ crew around him, much of it drawn from the Unions. His anti-corporate message was also clearly resonating. As for Hilary Clinton, well, the consensus was that she might be able to survive coming in second, but could she survive coming in third. Hard to know, or as I’m always saying… it’s too early to tell really.
Even so the Clinton camp was thought to prefer Edwards coming in first than Obama, because they knew they could stop Edwards easier than Obama.
I won’t pretend to know enough about US politics to predict the future… other than that I doubt Edwards has the momentum to take himself to the top. However, I’ve always been dubious about Obama’s ability to go all the way. However, at the least this result does place Obama in a strong position to wield eventual power in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party even should his campaign falter elsewhere as it may well do.
Timothy Garton Ash suggested something similar when he argued that it should be a Clinton-Obama ticket.
That leaves the Democrats. I started 2007 as an enthusiastic Obamaite. I go into 2008 a sober Clintonian. I continue to believe that Barack Obama is the only candidate who could change the United States’ image overnight. It is now consistently less popular across the globe than at any time since international polling began. Obama personifies those aspects of American society that even some of Washington’s fiercest critics admire, and he has some good ideas too. The trouble is, the more I watched him last year, the more convinced I became that he is not yet ready for the job.
I’m not so certain about that though. He is above all credible and not quite the neophyte that some would present him as. For example Garton Ash cites:
One small moment sticks in my mind: responding to a question in one of the debates, he said he would start to address the problem by calling the presidents of Mexico and Canada (the latter does not have a president). A trivial slip in itself, but there have been too many like it, as well as too much waffling. Of course, an inexperienced president can learn on the job, as the last two did. But look how disastrous that was in Bush’s first term. And Bill Clinton’s was not that hot either; witness the disgrace of inaction over Rwanda, not to mention dithering over Bosnia. In an increasingly dangerous world, with this new year ushered in by a nuclear-armed Pakistan trembling on the verge of anarchy, we can’t afford that blunder-time any more.
Indeed, it is trivial. Obama is vastly more experienced on international relations than Bush was when he came into office so the comparison is inappropriate. As regards Clinton, well… it’s a difficult and dangerous planet, hardly more so than in the late 1990s, and one assumes that Obama has learned at least something from these mistakes.
But I think Garton Ash is absolutely correct as regards one thing. There is part of me that wonders just what sort of face the US would present to the world, and just what would it say about the US as a state were Obama to make it to the top. For those of us on the left who have more than a sneaking regard for the US the past seven years have been beyond difficult both in terms of having to deal with an administration – and more broadly a political culture – which appeared to relish confrontation and diktat, while also having to engage with the reality of a left and centre for whom the US had become the most convenient short hand for all the worlds ills. An Obama Presidency might well serve to redress the balance on both counts and indicate that there is no single US, and indeed no single world.
Meanwhile it’s oddly comforting to hear Tony Blankley, the resident and very able conservative, on Left Right and Centre say that as time goes on the Republican candidates actually look less impressive. He’s not wrong there. Still, it would be foolish to underestimate their ability to rescue themselves. So that will bear watching too.
Foreign Affairs journal, the US Presidential Candidates and Russia, going, going… Well, no, perhaps not. December 21, 2007
Posted by WorldbyStorm in International Politics, Russia, United States.16 comments
Interesting to see in the same week as Putin’s significant victory in the Russian elections an article by Dimitri Simes in Foreign Affairs journal.
Incidentally, Foreign Affairs is a great read. The last half year we’ve been treated to the ‘thoughts’ of the rival contenders for the US Presidency on foreign affairs. A dispiriting prospect I can tell you. Mitt Romney “Rising to a New Generation of Global Challenges” and telling us ‘we are a unique nation’… Barack Obama asserting that ‘today, we are again called to provide visionary leadership’, John McCain assures us that ‘since the dawn of our Republic, Americans have believed that our nation was created for a purpose, we are… ‘a people of great destinies’, and Hilary Clinton? Well actually she avoided the boosterism and gave a fairly solid and almost downbeat analysis of the situation… she concluded by noting that “Daniel Webster (secretary of state in 1825)… gloried not in American power but rather in the power of the American idea, the idea that ‘with wisdom and knowledge men may govern themselves’. And he urged his audience, and all Americans, to maintain this example and ‘take care that nothing weakens its authority with the world’.
Other than that you’ll find useful pieces on Burma, a rather entertaining and critical review of “The Israel Lobby” and some frankly bizarre thoughts on “After the War on Terror”. Which leads me back to Simes article.
Simes is President of the Nixon Centre, but let not that information put you off his central thesis. Realpolitik prevails.
In it he notes that the relationship following the fall of the Soviet Union was one where the US treated Russia as if it were a defeated nation. Yet as he points out Russia wasn’t defeated in any conventional sense. The USSR withdrew from Eastern Europe, it wasn’t forced. If anything the Soviet Union could probably have staggered on for a good decade more or longer. And he entirely dismisses the idea that the US ‘won’ the Cold War pointing out that ‘misunderstanding and misrepresentations of the end of the Cold War have been significant factors in fueling misguided U.S. policies towards Russia. Although Washington played an important role in hastening the fall of the Soviet Empire [i.e. Soviet influence in the Warsaw Pact countries], reformers in Moscow deserve far more credit than they generally receive’. He also makes the crucial point that if anything the U.S. ‘played even less of a role in bringing about the disintegration of the Soviet Union….by allowing pro-independence parties to compete and win in relatively free elections and refusing to use security forces decisively to remove them Gorbachev virtually assured that the Baltic states would leave the USSR. Russia itself delivered the final blow, by demanding institutional status equal to the other union republics. Gorbachev told the Politburo that permitting the change would spell ‘the end of empire’.’ [incidentally, for an analysis of this period you could do worse than read Virtual History (ed. Niall Ferguson, 1998) which has an excoriatingly conservative piece by Mark Almond which manages to simultaneously blame Germany and Europe for being too cynical in their dealings with the Warsaw Pact while also blaming Gorbachev for not being cynical enough and manipulating the CPSU in the aftermath of the failed coup in order to shore up his political position).
While this is fascinating, it is the subsequent relationship between the US and Russia which is of immediate interest.
Simes compares the Reagan/Bush administrations ‘respectful’ treatment of Gorbachev ‘without making concessions at the expense of US interests’ with ‘the Clinton administrations greatest failure… [which was its] decision to take advantage of Russian weakness’. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott admitted that US officials ‘even exploited Yeltsin’s excessive drinkign during negotiations. Many Russians believed that the Clinton administration was doing the same with Russia writ large. The problem was that Russia eventually did sober up, and it remembered the night before angrily and selectively’. It’s fair to point out that Simes is probably seeing this through a Republican filter. Yet..
…it also has to be said, some of what was imposed on Russia in the 1990s was – and there is no other word for it – criminal and explains (in economic terms, as any good Marxist analysis would) the roots of the new Russia which flexes muscles unused for almost two decades and finds them in markedly better condition than most would have expected.
The unconstitutional attacks on the Duma both political and physical by Yeltsin arguably delegitimised the democracy process by effectively cutting out the representative element of the Russian people from the equation as the polity hurled itself headlong towards a fully executive Presidency. That those in the Duma took a line which was leftish, or perhaps more honestly populist-ish, is in a way neither here nor there. They fell foul – indirectly – to Washingtons ‘pressure…for the harsh and hugely unpopular monetary policies’. Collateral political damage if you will. The tragedy continued throughout the 1990s as NATO effectively ignored Russian objections with regards to Serbia. It worsened as the US began to perceive Russia not as near-ally, but as adversary, and aligned itself with former Soviet states such as Georgia.
But, all had changed by 2001. A new US President. A new global threat. Putin threw Russian weight behind US international efforts to curb Islamist terrorism (indeed the Russians had offered just such a joint approach as early as 1999 but were turned down by the US – not unreasonably the latter was in part influenced by the Chechen morass). Yet… despite the positive moves new issues arose. Georgia was joined by the Ukraine as another state where Russian influence was beginning to somewhat decline and US influence to increase. The latter was seen as a worrying development by the Russians. And it is fair to say that relations between Russia and the US have become frostier and frostier.
Simes notes that ‘despite these growing tensions, Russia has not yet become a U.S. adversary’. Indeed he argues that ‘most importantly the US must recognize that it no longer enjoys unlimited leverage over Russia. Today Washington simply cannot force its will on Moscow as it did in the 1990s’. Simes notes that ‘the power of the United States’ moral advantage has been damaged’.
And Simes argues that ‘numerous disagreements do not mean that Russia is an enemy’. It has not ‘invaded or threatened to invade its neighbours’. It does not ‘support any terrorist group at war with the US’. But ‘Putin [and Russia] is no longer willing to adjust their behaviour to fit U.S. preferences, particularly at the expense of their own interests’.
Here is the thing. Today Russia has no over-arching ‘global’ ideology, albeit there are nods towards the ancien regime in terms of rhetoric and iconography. It has transitioned from global co-hegemon to near failed state and back to effective Great Power. It now operates purely according to its own national interest. And curiously that could bring it into greater conflict with the de facto hegemon the US which does have a near global ideology, that of a certain strain of liberal democracy. Granted the latter is near rhetorical in many instances, but… as a prevailing socio-political narrative it is of great significance and underpins the sort of thinking exemplified by the statements of Obama, McCain and Clinton above.
But Russia has legitimate interests, has a zone of influence, and an appetite to play the great game. It seems to me that Gorbachev envisioned a partnership between the US and the USSR – perhaps even thought aspects of the latter could influence the former. That now seems unlikely if only because of the disparities in global power. But this is a world in which the unipolar is being replaced by the multipolar. Russia is once more a player, along with China and the EU. One can point to some other nations in South East Asia and South America which are moving to join them.
I don’t share the stance of some of the former CP parties which appear to see Russia as a sort of hobbled continuation of the Soviet Union and therefore tailor their argument to position it within a framework of malevolent US imperialism and profound Russian victimhood. I think that’s a self-serving analysis. The USSR was a political, not a national, entity. Russia is a national entity more than a political entity. It is also a state with neo-imperial pretensions of its own, particularly as regards the zone of influence. This demands that it is treated with the ‘respectful’ approach noted by Simes above. If anything – while there are clear dangers, particularly where there are misperceptions of divergent (but not antagonistic) national interests – the situation is an improvement on a hegemon which has over the last four years been proven to have significant limitations. A strong Russia can, almost counterintuitively, provide both balance and support for an international system that badly requires it. But this can also tip into essentially a continuation of ‘business as usual’ which is also profoundly cynical where the respective ‘powers’ carve up the cake as they see fit. That is something to be profoundly wary of. So, two and a half cheers for a stronger Russia. But let’s keep in mind that powers do what powers must. Still, caution at the United Nations is no harm after a period of willful and energetic abandon. The sooner the better some might say.
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 