The Precautionary Principle, Ignored Again

An item in Wednesday's paper caught my eye. I mean the Washington Post, and I mean p. A17 of December 23's paper. It's an AP-signed piece entitled "U.S. wants farmers to use coal waste." The piece describes an EPA/Ag Dept. idea that, on the face of it, looks completely insane, a full-frontal violation of the precautionary principle. The government, starting back in the Bush Administration, wants farmers to spread something called FGD gypsum on their fields. This product is what happens when coal scrubbers work; it's the residue from the process. The residue contains trace amounts of arsenic, mercury and lead, but the EPA assures us it's safe.

Right.

Into my head rushes the memory of the geniuses who said it was safe to feed animal by-products to herbivores, like cows. What did we get? Mad Cow disease. I remember pthalitomide (or however you spell it). That was supposed to be safe, too. I remember no one thinking that massive amounts of plastic in the environment was anything to be concerned about, even microwaving veggies under plastic wrap, with all those long polymers falling into the food by the millions. Now some of us at least know better.

There is a common denominator to all these disasters and many more. Actually, it is a compound common denominator: a lack of scientific imagination and knowledge coupled with the fact that someone stands to gain financially from doing the wrong thing in ignoring the precautionary principle. The right question to ask here in this new example is, as always, Cui bono? Who stands to gain here?

Unfortunately, the AP article does not really help us understand this. There is zero investigative journalism involved here. Read the article; you'll be as frustrated as always, waiting for the real news behind the headline.....and never getting it. The article doesn't say what "encourage farmers" means. Do farmers have to pay for the substance, or not? How much, and who sets the price? Who gets the money? How much does it cost to dispose of this crap otherwise, and who pays for that? The article doesn't say. All we can infer is that, since there is something called an American Coal Ash Association, "a utility industry group", there is money moving somewhere that we citizens cannot see.

The EPA proposes to regulate for the first time coal wastes. No doubt Congress will eventually have some oversight responsibilities here, perhaps even some legislative prerogatives. You know what that means: graft, payola, outright crime and lying as Congressmen desperately seek campaign funds to make and buy the TV ads that have become the toxins of our political system. If we expect to prevent the creation of yet another source of plutocratic corruption in our political system, we have to first get to the bottom of this FGD gypsum caper. The Associated Press hasn't.

Maybe there's nothing wrong with this idea. Maybe it really is safe. Maybe it's even economical. OK, well explain it to me. Prove it to me. Show me the data. I dare you.

Some Literary Notes

Just a few selected comments on this weekend's newspaper reading, as it were.

First, in the NYT "Week in Review" section for December 13, on page 2 under the headline "Our Decade of Deluded Thinking," an unsigned comment makes some astonishing comments, one astonishingly good but most astonishingly bad. First the good: the article admits that Mossadegh did not fall in 1953 owing mainly to the intrigues of U.S. intelligence. That's of course right, and the same can be rightly said about Allende in Chile in the early 1970s. It's nice to see this in the NYT, and it may come in handy one day when the common reverse view shows up there, as it certainly will. But the piece starts, "It is not often that large-scale crises are due to intellectual error,. . ." Oh yes they are: They are more than often so; they are almost invariably so. Thus Auguste Comte: "Intellectual confusion is at the bottom of every historical crisis." Score one for Comte; the NYT is wrong. And last, at the bottom of the second paragraph, Francis Fukuyama is once again, for the umpteenth time, vulgarized into holding the view, twenty years ago, of the very modernization theorists with whom he has always disagreed--that all modernization is of a piece and leads to Westernization. That's not what he meant by the phrase "end of history", but it's his own fault for using a philosophical concept and ever expecting that most people, journalists certainly not excepted, would ever understand what he meant. If a typical Washington-beat journalists ever sits down and actually reads Hegal, I am sure the world will suddenly come to an end. But I am not worried about that happening

Second, Joshua Kurlantzick, in the "Outlook" section of the Washington Post, same day, front page, under the title "A Nobel Winner who went wrong on rights", takes the President to task for deemphasizing democracy and human rights. He contrasts the Nobel speech, the best speech by far the Preisdent has given while in office, with the Administration's prior policy choices, as best he can make them out. The Administration is right; Kurlantzick, and all the other people who like to wear human rights on their sleeves--and who have no understanding at all of Samuel Huntington's "democracy paradox"--are wrong. The best way to advance human rights and democracy is slowly, steadily, in the context of other dimensions of policy, and with full understanding of the opportunities and limits afforded by political culture. It is not by sounding like the mother-in-law of the world. And it is not by presuming the ridiculous argument that realism and its interests--like preventive mass violence, preserving civil and interstate order and the principles that order enables to become reality, and so forth--have no moral implcations. The President was channeling Reinhold Niehbur in Oslo. He could do a lot worse, and Kurlantzick should do some reading.

Third, Ed Begley's new book, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters (Yale), reviewed in this week's New York Times Book Review, p. 30, carries a thesis that sounds very much overstated but that is, in any case, not original: that the sins of the French government against Dreyfus resembled the "crimes" of the George W. Bush Administration. I can prove it isn't original. Just read the TAI essay by the historian Paul Schroeder, "Mirror, Mirror on the War," Spring 2006--that's more than three years ago. I commissioned that essay, and while I do not agree with parts of it (and did not at the time, either), I think it's a brilliant essay. I wonder if Begley's book is as good. Naturally, I also wonder, but cannot expect to ever find out, where he got his idea.

Just an Accident

I tell all my students, whenever I am fortunate enough to have some, that they need a fiction reading habit. I won't go here into the reasons I give this advice, but an excellent example of one such reason--fortuity, and the accidental inspiration it sometimes produces--came upon me unawares recently. I will now tell you about it, distressing though this particular episode of fortuity happened to be.

I am a big A. S. Byatt fan. I think she is probably the finest living English-language prose stylist. I love reading her even when I don't manage to care much about her characters, which happens from time to time. Since I can read faster than she can write and publish (unlike some bloggers I know, who can actually write faster than I can read), the appearance of a new book by A.S. Byatt works as the opposite of what I call a petty subversion of everyday life. It is, therefore, something of a petty, or more than petty, boon to everyday life. I look forward to these, and the latest is The Children's Story, which my wife, Lord love her, gave me as a gift some weeks ago.

I don't want to ruin the book for those now reading it or who intend to read it, but it is curious how the petty subversions and the petty boons of everyday life have a way of intersecting. The petty, or not so petty, subversion of everyday life bothering me lately is the utter tanking of my book, Jewcentricity: Why the Jews Are Praised, Blamed, and Used to Explain Nearly Everything. The book came out in September (from John Wiley & Sons), with back-jacket praise from Les Gelb, Itamar Rabinovich, Michael Mandelbaum, Peter Berger, Joe Joffe, and Robert D. Kaplan. I heard unsolicited praise for the book from Dov Zakheim, Aaron Miller, Eliot Cohen and others. So I know it is a good book; all these people are not just being polite. Everyone who see it takes an interest in it -- the publisher did a fine cover. Yet it has gotten zero reviews. No newspaper will publish a op-ed related to it. Sales are terrible. I have been to three bookfests trying to hawk it, and given a series of other talks and radio interviews as well--small time stuff, to be sure--and I have found that nothing works, and so I give up. The ratio of time invested to benefit extracted is appalling. I'd rather stay home and read novels (or wait to be drawn back to my Gibson F-4).

Now, of course, the book is about exaggerations about the Jews, of which there are a lot (of exaggerations that, is, not Jews). So when I immerse myself in something where I can detect no trace of Jewcentricity, I am rather delighted these days. Having written a book about exaggeration, in which I myself very carefully did not exaggerate, took a psychic toll on me. I am therefore a little bit sick of thinking about the Jews just now--all of the Jews, some of the Jews, and any one of the Jews, including myself. What better way to heal that sickness than to get absorbed into a wonderful novel that is, to be precise about it, Judenrein! A.S. Byatt to the rescue, to my rescue, in any case.

The Children's Story begins, in Britain of course, in 1895 and ends in 1918. It is not just a story about specific children, the Wellwood children and their friends in this case. It is about a cultural phenomenon as well, wherein some upper-class British and other European do-gooders and assorted confused radicals elevated the idea of childhood as a metaphor for cleansing the human race from the degradations associated with industrial civilization. We humans need be simpler and more childlike, was the general idea, more natural and unadorned with the artificial; so we write stories like Peter Pan, swim naked and c0-ed in forest streams (there's a bit of that in the book) and otherwise indulge in fantasies and pretend to love new arts & crafts styles like Jungenstil to express, knowingly and not, that longing for the child-likely authentic.

This impulse is anything but child-like and simple as it plays out in the book, of course. It turns out, for example, that some of the children of Humphrey and Olive Wellwood are not exactly the children of Humphrey and Olive Wellwood. Many of the men in the book are real rounders, some of them sweet and almost forgivable, others quite monstrous and hurtful. But Olive has had a fling herself, back before 1895 in Munich, and one of the children in the house, Dorothy, we learn is not in fact the daughter of Humphrey, whom Dorothy had always believed was her real father until a disturbing whiskey-fueled incident and a subsequent confession revealed otherwise.

Now, without either boring you or entirely ruining the story for those who want to read (or finish) the book, let me simply say that Dorothy's real father is a German artist named Anselm Stern, from Munich. He appears early in the book, in the Wellwood's garden at a midsummer eve's party, but we do not know then about Olive and Anselm Stern's brief intimate history. We also do not yet know about Wolfgang and Leon, Anselm Stern's two sons with his German wife, who are, of course, Dorothy's half-brothers.

Now Dorothy, of all the children in the Wellwood household, is serious as a student and resolves at a tender young age to become a medical doctor and surgeon, at a time when that was no easy course of ambition for a female. She succeeds, and we readers are most glad for her. Her friend and (she thought) her cousin on her father's side, Griselda, is the most beautiful woman of the younger set in the book; they are confidantes. So it goes, on and on, in Britain and in Paris and in Munich, and the story is fine fun as the narrative weaves and wobbles its focus on a large clutch of main characters. And then, for me, Byatt ruins everything in the last few pages of a 675-page novel. She crashes the petty boon into the petty subversion, and makes a complete hash of everything. How?

Well, after having mentioned Jews only once in some 670 pages--a passing remark about a Boer War-era financial scandal in the City involving the Montagu family having frothed up some mild anti-Semitism--she suddely reveals that Anselm Stern is a Jew. She reveals this in the context of a discussion of the hair-raising goings on in Bavaria near the end of World War I, telling the reader in brief the wild but true tale of Kurt Eisner, Gerhard Landauer, and Erich Muhlsem--all of whom were Jews. And now we see it: Dorothy, the only kid of the whole lot to become a professional success, a doctor no less, is half Jewish. Griselda, the beauty, falls in love with her half-brother Wolfgang--a Jew. Everyone else either commits suicide, gets killed in the war, or in some other way melts out of the story. Damn you, Byatt! Damn you.

So I finish the book, with some sense of unease, naturally. I have been Jewcentricized, most unwillingly. But you know how it goes: Those of us who must always be reading some kind of fiction cannot survive long after finishing one novel without starting another. Otherwise we end up weeping for the death of the fantasy we have just completed, and it doesn't matter if the book has a happy ending, more or less, or a sad one, less or more. The key is that it's over and reality rushes back in, filling up more cognitive space than I wish to relinquish.

So I ask my wife, "What else is there around here to read, that I have not already read and failed to completely forget (because you see, if I have read something and managed to completely forget it, why would I want to read it again?)?" And then I see and remark about this little paperback (little compared to the hardback copy of The Children's Story) by Laurie E. King called The Beekeeper's Apprentice. "Oh, that," she says. That's just a little light summer stuff I picked up, in the summer of course, that I did not get far with. Something about Sherlock Holmes, as I recall."

So I pick up The Beekeeper's Apprentice and start into it, and I am delighted. It is preposterous by design: the author nicely pretends to be the charmed recipient of an old truck within which is there is an old manuscript written by a woman named Mary Russell, born January 1900, and the manuscript is about her "real" encounters with the real Sherlock Holmes. This is pretty rich, since Watson writes of Holmes according to Conan Doyle. So here we have King on Russell off to the side of Watson and Doyle, all about Holmes. Watson is real as amanuensis to Holmes, but he is fiction within Doyle; and now Doyle is real within Russell, but Russell is fiction within King. Isn't this fun? We get so involved, momentarily, trying to figure out what is fictional and fanciful and what is not that we forget that, layered though the authorship seems to be, it is all fictional and fanciful.

King does not write with the grace or intricacy of Byatt, but some novels don't need either to keep me happy, at least for a while. There is the lovely coincidence that where Byatt leaves off chronologically, 1918, King picks up with but modest overlap, in 1917. Some themes about women and society and the war's impact on Britain's class stratification overlap nicely, too, and entirely by accident as far as my eyes are concerned. And most important by far, there are, I say to myself, going to be no Jews sneaking around in this silly little summer book.

Ta-dum...... On page 16--just page 16, mind you--it turns out that Mary (named for Magdalene and not the virgin, we're told a few pages earlier) not only has one Jewish parent, but reads and writes Hebrew! Holmes deduces this, you see, from the shape of the ink-smudges on Mary's left thumb and second finger. Had I not been on a fairly crowded Metro car when I read this, I might have thrown the book--Dorothy Parker-style--against the nearest wall. Damn, damn, damn!

I know it's all just an accident, a minor irritating accident. I know it's not aimed at me, this mocking episode of fortuity. It's not kismet, and it's not mystical. But damn, damn, damn it is annoying.

Free Advice

A few days ago I had lunch at a newly renovated hotel in downtown Washington with an old colleague, by which I mean both someone I have known for many years and someone beyond age 60--not that 60 signifies anything in particular for someone, like myself, who is a mere 58. The conversation touched on many things in no particular order, as a midweek Washington luncheon conversation should. We both have new books; that took some time, each of us complaining in turn about what readers don't read, editors don't review, and publishers don't help with. At one point, I don't know why, I expressed some sense of being more tired lately than I remember and would like to be. My friend, who will remain unnamed for an excellent reason that will become clear in a second, offered me empathetic counsel based on his own experience: "Slim down at the gym, shave off your beard, and get a mistress. Does wonders."

"What does wonders--which one, I mean?", I asked.

"All three," he replied.

This is not the sort of advice I get every day, or even every decade. It's true: This friend was not born and raised in the United States (or Britain), and so that may help explain the novelty. My reaction, immediate and unshakable, was that "this is impossible."

"Which one?", he asked.

"All three," I answered, and it's true. But I like to think that either going to the gym regularly or shaving the beard would be hardest.

The lunch was overpriced; the advice free. Do you really get what you pay for?

Sunday's New York Times carried a front page story on Genentech lobbyists perverting the health care debate, such as it's been. Seems that lobbyists provided copy to House staffs, which made its way into the record verbatim, thus leading to a bunch of Congressmen saying exactly the same things. Genentech had of course earlier poured dollars into these Congressmen's campaign coffers. This is mildly embarrassing, but what Genentech and related lobbyists said about the episode was not embarrassing--it was outrageous.

Note the quote from Even L. Morris, head of Genentech's Washington office: "There was no connection between the contributions and the statements." If you believe that, there's a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to talk with you about. Worse, another lobbyist said: "This happens all the time. There is nothing nefarious about it." The fact that, indeed, it does happen all the time is precisely what is nefarious about it. That someone can say such a thing with a straight face, and maybe even believe it, is the truest measure of what a state of decay this democracy is in.

It's get more and more frustrating to see the New York Times on Sundays. The Magazine might as well be named The National Homosexual Advancement Journal. The Book Review has turned into a journalists' delight: almost no standards, no rules of evidence, few serious books reviewed, and only journalists who know less than the authors seem to be able to review them. What is Sam Tanenhaus doing?

Case in point from a month or so ago -- Tony Horwitz reviewing Rich Cohen's book Israel is Real. It was hard to tell from the review essay which made the largest number of factual mistakes, the book or the review. Certainly the book, now that I've seen it. I even saw the author at a Bookfest at the JCC in San Francisco, but I couldn't bring myself to go over and introduce myself. What would I say? "Gee, Rich, you sure write well; too bad you don't have a clue what you're talking about"? There was a intro to the Horwitz review, in the form of a brief interview, on the inside cover of the Book Review that week, in which Horwitz let his discomfort with synagogues and rabbis and Judaism hang out for all to see. Cohen, apparently, too. So one semi-alienated Jew who feels heroic about it reviews a book by another semi-alienated Jew who feels heroic about it, and what do you think is going to happen? Well, it happened.

And then there's this week--nothing (thank G-d) to do with Judaism, only with a few Jews. We have in the November 9, 2009 issue Hanna Rosin reviewing a book by Barbara Ehrenreich -- her book entitled Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Ehrenreich lampoons positive thinking, which is right but she goes a little overboard. Rosin somehow managed to love the book even while dissenting from Ehrenrich's thesis--which is that corporate greed and connivance is behind the positive thinking plague. Of course Ehrenreich and Rosin appreciate the uses of sadness and angst--they're both reasonably well educated and well accultured Jews, after all; how could they not? But, that said, it is usually hard to like a book so well but at the same time disagree with its core argument. Do you think? But no, not in the NYTimes Book Review, where you get maximum points for striking the right mood and disliking the right things. Logic? Argument? Please don't bother me with that stuff.

And then there's Nicholas Thompson's review of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's The Preditioneer's Game. Bueno de Mesquita is a political scientist (I've even published him myself once, or half of once -- he was a co-author...) who seems to have been bitten by the rational choice bug. He argues that people act in their own self-interest, and that most collective behavior can be predicted from this insight. The reviewer wonders at one point if Bueno de Mesquita is full of baloney, so the reviewer is clearly not a complete idiot. Of course, Bueno de Mesquita is at least half full of baloney. Sure, one has to start with self-interest, but one cannot possibly stop there. Self-interest can be interpreted in all sorts of ways by individuals, rationally and not so rationally. After all, all of us are emotional creatures, and some of us are stupid, too. Moreover, collective behavior -- of governments, corporations, large organizations of all kinds, not to mention societies -- is not a simple aggregation of individual behaviors. Anyone who hasn't appreciated that little fact yet needs remedial training in the act of having an adult consciousness. Rational choice modeling is a a step backwards, and it is only as popular as it is because it seems you can load a lot of data into a computer and watch it gurgle and purr. Oh what fun. Oh what alchemistic baloney. Oh what "stuff" to ignore in a New York Times Book Review essay.

Thank heaven, at least, for TLS.

I Have No Idea

I give up trying to be a regular blogger. Too lazy; too little time. So once in a while, when the spirit moves me, I will post. No promises beyond that.

The spirit moves me. The spirit of bureaucracy moves me.

Vignette 1. Some weeks ago I became the president of my family's real estate holding corporation. I will spare you the bizarre details of this matter, but suffice it to say that when the corporation's officers changed, we had to get a new bank account to service our needs. That meant we had to get new cheques. We used the same bank as the previous officers, Chevy Chase Bank, transferred the money and all seemed well. But the bank sent the new cheques to the treasurer, my cousin Debbie, via UPS, and left them on her front porch during the middle of a Wednesday, while she was at work. The cheques disappeared, probably into the arms of opportunistic thieves trawling after the UPS truck. This is common. So I went into the bank and told them of the problem. The bank manager, Marsha Brogdon, put a restriction on the account until we could find out what happened. This was on August 11. The cheques never showed up, and meanwhile we needed to use the account to pay some federal and local taxes. So the bank put a hold on those cheques that were lost and ordered new ones printed. In the meantime, four temporary cheques were given to us to use for urgent purposes. I assumed, and was told, that the account would work, except for the cancelled range of cheques that had gone missing. We used the temporary cheques, three of them, one to pay our accountant for services rendered, one to pay the IRS and one to pay the District of Columbia government.

A little while later, the accountant called me to say his cheque had bounced, and he got tagged for a $35 fee. So I went to the bank to find out what the hell was going on. The assistant manager, Barry Robinson, looked at the account on-line and said nothing was wrong. He showed me that all three cheques had been paid and the money removed from the account. This was on August 31. So I told the accountant that something must be wrong on his end. That was not so. Then the IRS cheque came back, having bounced. I asked my cousin to call the bank, and she was told the cheques bounced because there was a restriction on the account. Incredulous, I called the bank. Neither Ms. Brogdon nor Mr. Robinson was there. I left a message to have someone call back before 5 pm (this was around 12:30). I got no call. The next morning I went into the bank; again, neither Ms. Brogdon nor Mr. Robinson was there. I left a message to call. Mr. Robinson finally did, and when he did I let him know in no uncertain terms how irritated and disappointed I was. It seemed not to occur to him that if a hold was put on a missing range of cheques, there was no longer a need for a restriction on the whole account. We needed for the account to work; why else would we request and the bank give those temporary cheques? I also explained that the bank's stupidity had and would cost us money: the accountant's bounce charge, probably the IRS and the DC government's bounce charges, and probably late fees from them as well. I told him the corporation would not be responsible for those fees because it was Chevy Chase's stupidity that caused them. I explained that if he did not see things my way, I would close the account and take it elsewhere. He saw things my way.

This whole stupid thing took up hours of my time, however. I hate clerical incompetence. The routine mismanagement of ordinary tasks is a mark of the Third World (along with massive deferred maintenance and the systematic evasion of personal responsibility for anything), not this world. What does that really mean? Is America becoming more like the Third World, while the Third World itself is becoming something else? I have no idea.

Vignette 2. In mid-August we refinanced our mortgage to take out money to pay off a dangerous and unstable mountain of college loan debt. I wrote a cheque for $68K and change, and send it to a Plus-Loan DoED address in Atlanta with a plain-as-day note saying, in effect, "Hey, look, I paid this off in full before the deadline for this payout amount to expire, August 31, so do not--repeat, do NOT--take $939 and change from my account electronically as of Sept. 7."

They took it out anyway. I called to scream at them, of course. A guy named Leroy looked it all up, admitted I was paid off, and said the money would be returned to me. Then the conversation went like this.

Me: "When and how?"

Leroy in Atlanta: "Well, takes about 60-80 days."

Me: "What? !?! An electronic credit takes 60-80 days? Why?"

Leroy: "It's not done that way. DoED does not return your money, the Treasury does, and they do it by cutting a cheque."

Me: "Why? Why does DoED involve another Executive Branch department in a simple transaction?"

Leroy: "I have no idea."

Me: "Seems sort of crazy, doesn't it?"

Leroy: "Well......I suppose...er"

Me: "Leroy, why is it that with all the fancy computers and telecommunications technology we have, it now takes much, much longer to complete a simple clerical operation than it did even before the invention of an IBM Selectric typewriter?"

Leroy: "I have no idea."

Me:"Say Leroy, how much interest is the Treasury going to pay me for the privilege of holding my money for so long?"

Leroy: "They won't pay you any interest."

Me: "Leroy, if I have to pay interest when I hold the government's money in loan, why doesn't the government pay me interest when they hold my money?"

Leroy: "I have no idea."

Me: "Do you think that's fair?"

Leroy: "I have no idea."

Me: "Leroy, do you have any ideas?"

Leroy: "Not between 9 and 5 I don't, no sir."

Me: "Have a nice life, Leroy."

Leroy: " You betcha."

Vignette 3. I take the 37 Ride-On rush-hour bus to the Metro in the cold, dark weather and when it rains. Yesterday morning the bus was 15-20 minutes late in a light rain, way off schedule. This morning, something much stranger happened. Instead of moving in a little clockwise loop in our part of the route, as the bus has done every weekday morning for the past ten years, not one but two busses came round in a counterclockwise direction. A woman who got off the bus on the other side of the road mumbled something about locos driving d'buuus, and said she thought the schedule had changed. Well, we knew vaguely that the schedule would change September 6, not so much the times as where the bus would go after the Grosvenor Metro, for the 37 route had been partly merged with another (this is amazingly complicated for a simple thing). Finally a bus came headed in the right direction. I asked the driver if the schedule had changed.

He said, "I have no idea. I'm not the regular driver on this route."

I said: "Well, OK, what's your schedule today. When are you, were you, supposed to be at this stop?

He said: "I have no idea. You need to ask the county about that."

I said: "You mean you're just driving the route and have no idea when you're supposed to be where?"

He said: "Please just have a seat, sir."

When I got to work I called Ride-On. They knew nothing about any of this. The schedule had not changed. So why has the bus been way off the last two days, and why are buses headed in the wrong direction around the loop, and why don't your drivers even pretend to care about their passengers?"

And she said: "I have no idea."

Two speeches

Alas, another long hiatus between posts. Why? Well, again, I've either been "busy" or "lazy", two of the most fungible words in the English language (perhaps, probably, mutatis mutandis with the vocabulary, in every language). But I just had to comment on the Obama Administration's speechmaking of late in foreign policy. Had to.

The President gave a major, architectural speech in Moscow on July 7 at the New Economics School graduation. At least it was supposed to be an architectural speech. It had five major elements, pillars or points, and it was very far-reaching in its language (wait just a minute and I'll come back to that). So this, I and others thought, was THE speech, the one given near the beginning of an administration that tells the world what the purposes of American power are. Usually THE speech, the architectural blueprint, is given by the Secretary of State, but since, by nearly all accounts, this President is acting as his own Secretary of State with the help of the Vice-President, this did not come as such a surprise.

But then, just eight days later, the Secretary of State gave a speech at the Washington offices of CFR that--you could have knocked me over with a feather--looked, smelled, quacked and read like THE speech, an architectural blueprint for U.S. foreign policy. This was a surprise. At the beginning of the Bush Administration, for various reasons I know but don't want to spend time explaining here, we got no such speech. This time we got two.

It would not have been so surprising if Secretary Clinton's speech had tracked along with the President's. It too featured five elements or pillars or main points, after all. And as these things are properly done, for a Secretary of State to echo and elaborate on the President's policy would have been a good idea, and it would have been proper and standard practice. But it didn't track with the President's speech.

Here are President Obama's five pillars from July 7: anti-WMD proliferation; isolating and defeating violent extremism; global prosperity; democracy; and international system that advances cooperation while respecting sovereignty. Here are Secretary Clinton's five pillars from July 15: build stronger mechanisms for cooperation; lead with diplomacy; make development as a core priority; coordinate civil-military efforts in conflict zones; and shore up the traditional sources of American influence, notably the international economy.

There is some overlap here. Obama's #3 matches, sort of, Clinton's #5. Obama's #5 could be read as akin to Clinton's #3. Clinton mentions democracy and human rights, Obama's #4, but does not call them a pillar. Basically, however, these are two separate speeches saying different things in different tones and with different emphases. Obama's five pillars are goals or aspirations, living at a high level of abstraction, if one had to describe them; Clinton's are less goals than operational principles, living at a high--but not as high--level of abstraction. I can see some clever White House type, if asked, claiming that the speeches are complementary on this basis--the President lays out what we want to do and the Secretary lays out how we're going to do it. But no one has done so because the press, so far anyway, has been too stupid, or too fawning, to notice the disconnect and ask any questions about it. And it would be cleverness without substance, because in fact these are what they appear to be: two uncoordinated speeches.

How did this happen? I don't know the lead time on the President's speech, but I do know, or can surmise, that the lead time on Clinton's was more than eight days. That means that the speech was being prepared before Obama spoke in Moscow. I don't know how these folks operate, but I do know that when I was writing Colin Powell's major speeches, and the first two that Condoleezza Rice gave before I left her service, it would not have occurred to us to keep the White House uninformed as to what we were doing; in short, we would have cleared a mature draft at some point. Even more important, it would never have occurred to Powell, and certainly not to Rice, to essentially ignore what the President had said or was about to say on the same subject. They would have made it their business to know and align their language. They would have told me or the chief-of-staff or somebody to call over to the White House and talk to the speechwriters and find out what was going down. Powell used to insist that there never be any publicly perceivable "blue sky" between himself and President Bush, because that would just reduce his leverage, such as it was, on the President in private. What was Clinton thinking when she stood up there at the CFR podium, just days after the President's Moscow speech, knowing she was about to give a speech of parallel purpose to the President's but not of parallel content? Beats me.

Now, as to the speeches themselves, both are pretty bad as expressions of the "black arts" of speechwriting, to invoke Peggy Noonan's wonderful old phrase. Neither one is memorable, and neither sticks conceptually to the wall, as it were. But Obama's is worse. Good thing, I suppose, that no one noticed it since Michael Jackson died..... Clinton's at least has a theme that transcends pure banality, something the Building can understand and be lifted by, and the pieces fit together logically, sort of. Obama's, meanwhile, is all over the place; there is no logical thread connecting the parts, no theme one can remember as a take-away, no deliverables, no proposals or plans revealed. And there is way too much sentimental eyewash toward the end, and this in front of an extremely cynical Russian audience. Bad audience read.

But again, the real problem is that the President and the Secretary of State don't seem to be in the same huddle. I don't know this crowd--don't know the staffers who know the principals. But from the looks of this spate of speechmaking, I'd have to suppose that these teams are simply not speaking to one another on any level that matters. Maybe there's another explanation, but if so I can't see what it might be. So I'd have to conclude that this episode confirms my original view that Obama was on balance wrong to offer Hillary Clinton this job, and she was wrong to have accepted it.

It has been a long time since I wrote here.  Been busy, I guess.  But I just had to make a small remark for posterity's sake:  I heard Robert McNamara is finally dead. I know it is considered in poor taste to express happiness over the death of a fellow human being, but the only thing that would have made me happier is if the son-of-a-bitch had died a long time ago.  I hope he suffered.  What a horrible man, not just as Secretary of Defense, but also as World Bank president and then as semi-retired moron for many, many years.  Oh, I am so glad he's finally dead.  I want to know where his grave is.  I won't go out of my way to visit, but if I find myself nearby I hope to have my dancing shoes handy.

I needed this, too.  It has not been a great morning.  Squirrels in the plum trees this morning, and I missed, as usual, the one shot I managed to squeeze off. Just got back from attending a wedding in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin; cost me $1,700 and I can't honestly say I had any fun doing it. Gained a few pounds, too. Was late to work despite being awake early; more slowness on the Red Line....  Great weather for July, nice and cool. Otherwise, have not played my instruments for weeks, longest break I can ever remember, and don't have much taste even for listening to music.  Don't know what's the matter with me. So thanks, McNamara, for cheering me up at least a little.

I finally read it, the June 4 Cairo speech, and read it carefully. I’ve also seen lots of comments on it.

I could either have a lot, a whole lot, or a lot less to say about it, depending on how much time you have, oh dear reader. But basically, I think the speech was pretty good, and may well have accomplished what the President wanted to accomplish by it. That’s the right measure, not whether he said some things that were not strictly true. Which he did. 

That said, I have lots of criticisms, many of them small, some of them a little larger.

First, addressing “the Muslim world” and equating it to America is unfortunate. That sets up the ummah as a political actor and diminishes the authority of the state. It speaks al-Qaeda language and cedes the vocabulary to the bad guys. This is not a very smart thing to do, and would worry me a lot more if I worried a lot more about the power of this enemy.

Second, some of what he said was culturally clueless. Like speaking out loud what you know to be so in private being a virtue. This is not how Middle Easterners see the world. They will see a statement like that not as noble but naïve.

Third, he was a little too much fawning. Using the word “revealed” for Islam and quoted Quran 4 times. That’s fawning.

Fourth, relatedly, he missed the subtle difference between being modest (which is good) and being humble (which isn’t good). You never apologize.

Fifth, related to the first comment, there is something a little awkward about conflating a sermonesque delivery to the Muslims with a point-by-point policy review (Afghanistan, Iraq, Arab-Israeli, etc) because you’re bound to leave something out, (Lebanon,eg) giving the impression that you don’t really care about it. That also accounts for the seemingly pathetic “deliverable” part, about the programs we’ll run and the money we’ll spend. It mixes tones, and it gives the whole a disrupted, rocky feel. The “deliverable” sounded like a box-checking exercise, but it need not have had the front of the speech not been so abstract.

Sixth, at one point early on he referred to the speech (anticipation of it) in the speech. You never do that. It’s not Presidential and it breaks frame.

Seventh, at one point he referred proudly to the democratically elected government of Iraq, but given his criticism of Iraq as a (wrong) war of choice, it was a little too obvious that had Sen. Obama’s views prevailed, there would be no democratically-elected government of Iraq.

All that said, it was a strong speech and in many ways brave. As I said, I think it did in the region what he meant it to do --- hit a kind of re-set button, not be preachy or threatening, and especially not be so self-referential and self-possessed. That’s not “manly” in Arab culture, and Bush did way too much of it — it was all about us. I think Obama was wise not to use the “T” word. He was explicit that we did not seek permanent bases in Iraq or a lock on Iraqi oil, something Bush could have said on umpteen occasions, should have, and foolishly never did. He mentioned justice twice and dignity four times, and those are the right vocab buttons to push. 

I also reject the accusations that he equated the Holocaust and Palestinian displacement; he did not.He merely pointed out that both peoples carry historical baggage that affects their perceptions. Anyone who denies that has to be some kind of imbecile. Really, too, from a Jewish point of view, anyone who had trouble with this speech was looking for ways to have trouble with it. I reject the accusation that POTUS made the U.S. “neutral” in the Arab-Israeli conflict; most of what he said on that score could have been cribbed from any number of speeches given by former Presidents and SectStates.

So what am I really saying? That it could have been a lot worse, and that I could have written it better.  Sure as hell I could have, too.  But not bad; pretty good; in some places brave; in a very few really masterful. 

Yesterday's New York Times Magazine carried David Leonhardt's interview of President Obama on the economy and, I am glad to say, in at least one respect (if not also others) it was very heartening. I refer specifically to the fact the POTUS clearly gets the analytical problems involved in the health care cost acceleration, especially the problem of spending on terminal care.  He exaggerated the estimated percentage this might come to -- as much as 80%, he said -- but that's not important. What's important is that he takes the subject seriously enough to have learned something about it.  And, of course, his understanding thus tracks perfectly with my own, as discussed in an earlier post on this blog. You could look it up. 

I was amused too by Obama's remarks about his economic advisers -- the ones in government service and a few not.  He mentioned by name Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Paul Volcker, Peter Orszag, Robert Reich, Paul Krugman, Joe Steiglitz and Christine Romer. He noted that Summers is now sounding more like Reich sounded inside the Clinton Administration ten years ago--i.e., more structural and radical in terms of analysis.  What he did not mention is that all of these advisors except, I think, Romer, are Jewish. Is Obama trying to get the economy moving or to make a minyan?

Of course there is an explanation for this.  It's not (just) funny. It's in my new book: Jewcentricity: Why the Jews Get Praised, Blamed and Used to Explain Nearly Everything.  Out in September. Buy it please, because I don't make a dime from this blog.

More, on Bulgaria and Savoie Libre, later.

Three weeks is a a long time to take off for a blogger, and so I apologize--to myself as well as to anyone else accustomed to reading this space. But I needed a vacation.  My wife and I went to France, Switzerland (briefly) and Bulgaria. There was work of a sort interspersed in the trip, but mainly it was a vacation, our first in almost three years. While in France we were not only in Paris but also Haute Savoie.  Or what in English used to be called Savoy. Savoy was an independent polity for longer than the United States has been organized territorially, from around 1516 to 1860. But unless you know a little European history, this will come as news to most Americans. One sees signs here and there while driving around the mountains (these are the French Alps, of course) that read "Savoie libre."  The white-on-red Savoy cross is everywhere, too. Ah, European regionalism raising its head under the high blue sky of the European Union umbrella. A phenomenon with a future--noting Catalonia, Lombardy, Scotland and many other examples? I think so. 

But that has nothing to do with Barack Obama. So let me only say that I will write more about my trip later, particularly about my first time in Bulgaria. For now, however, just a short comment about the President. 

Last thing I heard the President say was that he "can't just push a button and have the banks do what he wants them to do", or "flip a switch" and make Congress obey his desires. Of course, the President-as-pedagogue explains to the American people, there are counterpoised centers of power in the United States. The President is not a king or a dictator.  All of this is true, certainly, but that is not the point I wish to make. The point I wish to make coalesces around a question: It is wise to say things that are true, just because they are true?

Short answer: no.  I do not see how it helps the President or his program to admit his weaknesses. I do not see either why it helps the President get what he wants, as opposed to keeping his popularity ratings high, to go on the Jay Leno Show and otherwise indulge in forms of postmodern populism.  The American people are nervous right now, and have every right to be. There is a sharp deficit in anonymous trust in our institutions--not just the financial ones, all of them (except maybe the U.S. Army). The American people, if they can be distracted from their bread-and-circus entertainments, do not need a pal; they need a leader. They do not need commiseration from the Oval Office; they need confidence-building. They do not need a rock star, but a rock.

President Obama really has his hands full. He's in not a classical double-bind, but a triple bind. He wants to change the country, invest in human capital and social trust, but he cannot afford to do those things (assuming he knows how, which I don't assume except maybe in the energy area) until the economy rights itself. He doesn't know when that will happen or really know how to make it happen faster, but the way he has chosen to try will make his desire to invest that much harder a goal to reach. He knows that once (if?) the economy starts to rebound, he needs to throw on the spending brakes lest we end up with devastating inflation, and he seems honestly to be a sincere fiscal conservative. But he'll never get a grip on spending with this Congress in his face; they simply won't let him. He can't even roll Senator Conrad on farm subsidies, for heaven's sake. And thanks to the Congress, too, his underlying goal that he sees as a the key to making American democracy work again--to change the K Street transactional culture--recedes in the face of the other sides of the bind. 

In the end, of course, being stuck in this bind--economic straits, the investment limits they impose, and the impossibility of structural reform as a result of his being beholden to the Congress to deal with the first two parts of the bind--will ultimately hurt his popularity, and here timing, as usual, is everything.  He needs to avoid the Democrats getting pasted in the 2010 midterm elections if he is to rack up enough of a second-term victory to get real leverage over the Congress. He also needs to try again at bipartisanship, even though it is distasteful to him for good reason. But if he acts weak, even and especially if he is weak, he won't get the GOP help he could use.

He is still smiling; he is still popular; he is charmed in Europe and elsewhere. But he is not being effective yet in turning the great wheels of the ship of state. He doesn't have a lot of troops, a lot of "his" guys (think, by comparison, for example, how many chits Lyndon Johnson could call in by the time he got to the White House). He is dependent on others, and their interests are not the same as his. In this light to call attention publicly to what he can't do is not very wise.  He needs to cut that stuff out.

President Obama’s speech to the Turkish parliament yesterday was, to my way of thinking, an anti-climactic event. For months now we have been tantalized by the promise that Obama would go to a majority-Muslim country and tell it like it is. And this is what we get? This was a box-checking speech, full of duck-billed platitudes and not a single deliverable. The only things noteworthy about it were that: a) it happened; b) there was no quid pro quo protocol equilibration to Greece; and c) the speech abjured the old language that Turkey is a “moderate Muslim nation.” Turkey, we learn, is a secular democracy, just as Ataturk and his secular fundamentalist followers have insisted it is ever since 1924. This at a time when Turkey has a government, and a fairly popular one, that makes that description less resonant politically than ever. Why go talk to a Muslim-majority society only to pretend, sort of, at the same time that you’re not?

As for the “key” line—that we are not at war with Islam—well, Obama buried his lead four-fifths the way down the text, and of course that statement is nothing Bush Administration principals, including the President, did not say dozens of times. If it suits your interests not to believe that statement, it’s not going to matter much which U.S. president says it. If it suits your interests now to stop saying you don’t believe it, then any President who is not George W. will do. If some Muslims have now heard this statement for the first time, just because it was delivered in Turkey by Barack Obama, fine: better eventually than not at all. But no, that statement in and of itself is not a game-changer, not with more U.S. soldiers headed to Afghanistan, more missiles fired into Pakistan’s border areas, more violence inevitable in Iraq over the next two years. Those of the conspiratorial persuasion seeking evidence that Obama is a liar will be able to find it just as easily as those who were sure George W. was a liar.

As for the speech itself as a form of the “black arts”, as Peggy Noonan once put it about speechwriting, it’s the worst major presentation the President has given (or delivered) so far. Judging from the official transcript pulled off of whitehouse.gov, I counted at least two dozen mild infelicities, bonafied clunkers and grammatical errors that never should have made it past a second draft. One of these days people will stop comparing Obama to the hopeless George W. Marblemouth and recognize how mediocre this stuff really is.

Am I saying I could have done better as a speechwriter for this occasion? Yes, I actually believe that. There were oh so many missed opportunities in that speech--so many ways to have better concretized U.S.-Turkish friendship, and so many ways to have recognized that tolerance, hospitality, rule of law and other virtues (not to exclude democracy) that apply to Turkey, historically and at present, do not have to be expressed in an American idiom to be real and worthy of sincere admiration.

Maybe the lack of a unifying theme and anything remotely resembling a deliverable is the good news here. Some people have been hoping that Obama would use this occasion to launch a Presidential initiative on Israel/Palestine, stating U.S. parameters for a settlement, inviting the world to sign up to them, and implying muscular suasion on all engaged sides to make it happen. That we did not hear. Though I am skeptical that such a policy is wise, I’m almost sad it didn’t happen: that, at least, would have made the speech memorable.

Since my last post--and yes, I know, it's been a while--I've been for the first time to Las Vegas, Nevada. I went with my wife, just for a weekend. The occasion was a history teachers' conference on the nuclear age, held at the Desert Research Institute, which houses the Museum of Nuclear Testing. Yes, there really is such a thing, and it's where it is, of course, because the testing site for lots of U.S. tests was in the nearby Nevada desert. Pretty good conference: Jeremy Bernstein, a eminent senior scientist who personally witnessed the 1946 test, was there and told some great stories. He told us Leibling's Gambler's Prayer, for example: "Oh Lord, let me at least break even....because I really need the money." Ambassadors Avis Bohlen and Jim Goodby were there, also Hans Mark, former Secretary of the Air Force and an MIT physics PhD, and several other not-too-shabby presenters. And, of course me. But that's not what I want to talk about. 

Las Vegas is just weird, and since most of Nevada's two million people live there, Nevada is weird. We're told that these days Las Vegas is a normal town, and that less than half its economic activity depends on The Strip of hotel-casinos and associated activities. Well, maybe, but it doesn't matter: If hadn't been for the gambling and the booze and the whores in the first place, none of the rest of that stuff would ever have developed. The whole place is built on what amounts to once-removed theft. It's not outright theft, but it's a systematic taking advantage of people who, for one reason or another, think that probability and statistics apply to everyone on the planet except them. 

In every other American town I've ever been in, and I've seen a few, the freebie newspaper kiosk things are full of real estate brochures, restaurant coupons and stuff like that.  In Las Vegas, they're full of dial-up naked women. There are hordes of Mexicans on the street, lined up in gaggles of six, eight, twelve -- some of them older women -- handing out little cards, just slightly smaller than a baseball card, with pictures of mostly naked women on them, and the members of the advertising gaggle are all wearing the same orange t-shirts emblazoned with black letters reading "Girls, in 20 minutes" and some other gibberish and a phone number.  And yet this is a city of family entertainment, you bet; and absolutely there are huge number of people there with their little kids, infants, toddlers, elementary school kids, junior high school kids.  Are these people out of their minds?!

And you never saw such gaudy, ugly footwear in your life. I always wondered what kind of woman would buy high heels that looked like they've been dunked in birthday cake glitter. Now I know.

There are some elegant things to see and experience, it is true.  I liked the Bellagio best, all of it, but especially the fountain water ballet, and that especially at night. We took in a  Cirque de Soliel show, which was magnificent. But my basic inner feeling was one that drove me to a long, hot shower as soon as I could avail myself of one, just to wash off all the inner filth I felt from being there. 

We did not gamble. Not one penny. No reason to.  I did not understand some of the card games, and I've been playing poker since I was eight years old. Long enough ago to have since learned that playing against the house is not my idea of a fair fight. As for the machines, there not slot machines anymore like the old ones my parents took me to out route 301 in the old days around Waldorf, Maryland.  No arm to pull down; no obvious randomizer at work. The new machines are not electro-mechanical but digital. They can be programmed to a zillion sequences, and while they will pay a win now and then, it has nothing to do with the player, or with counting the odds seeing how the machine patterns out. You cannot reason that there even is a randomizer at work, except by inference that if there weren't, the credibility of the whole thing would suffer and people wouldn't come so much. But it just did not seem right to me, did not feel right, and I didn't play. It's not even the money I cared about; it's the extremely unpleasant feeling of being had.  I'd rather lose $1,000 at a fair game than 30 cents at a fixed one. 

The city was crowded; shows were sold out; if there's a recession in this country, you can't readily tell it from walking around Las Vegas. The local news show had a story while we were there talking about how many more girls -- I think they mean young women -- are going in for stripping and more besides. The experts opined that the common explanation for this--hard times so they need the money--seems right, but probably isn't. They said it just provides a pretext for women who are looking to do this anyway. Well, I don't know. No way for me to know. All I know is, if I had a ten year-old, I wouldn't take him, and especially her, there. 

Oh, and what about President Obama? Well, there's been the Geithner bank plan playing out and getting hammered by experts left and right. 

There's been the revelation of the new Afpak strategy, and attacks on it. 

There's been the vaunted return of U.S.-Russian strategic arms control, a useful activity in its own right, but something easy to do only when one doesn't really need it. 

And a NATO and G-20 Summit is going on right now. It won't end so well, but it won't matter so much either.  It's an initiation ritual. The sides will get serious later. 

There's been the revisitation of the lunatic North Korean regime with its missile test, and the Secretary of Defense pronouncing in public how we were not going to knock it down on the launch pad, and how the Pyongyang crowd seems uninterested in diplomacy--not, in my view, the sorts of things it is wise to say out loud. 

Our Secretary of State actually told the truth, out loud, about Mexican drug-gang warfare actually being our fault, in this case I think a wise thing to say out loud. But then there was that handing of some letters from Ambassador Holbrooke to an Iranian, and the the State Department had the audacity to say it was a chance, unanticipated encounter. Folks, you don't prepare diplomatic correspondence in the hopes of a chance encounter. Lies are fine if they serve a purpose in this sort of game. But when they are transparently false, obviously false, it is embarrassing even to try to lie.  Maybe the State Department should hire some unemployed types from Wall Street.  They're experts.

A lot has happened lately, in fact.....but it'll have to wait for comment later. Too much other work to do. 

Just a short note for today, again on Afghanistan.

Since I wrote last on U.S. policy in Afghanistan, I have read at least half a dozen pieces arguing against the minimalist approach--the idea that the Administration is doing more and promising less in order to bring capabilities into lines with a pessimistic assessment of achievable outcomes. The arguments insist that a real counterinsurgeny strategy can win the war. We are warned, at the same time, that victory will cost plenty and take many years, but indeed we can win. They plead for money, time and patience from the American people. I'm an American people, and here's how that sounds to me.

Well OK, Senators Lieberman and McCain, Max Boot, and the other nine people I've heard this from lately, let me ask you this.  Suppose I grant the thesis that we can in fact win: But what are the opportunity costs of spending resources, lives and time in Afghanistan against wherever else they may be needed?  Tilt as you will against real decreases in defense spending, they are here and they will stay for a while whether we like it or not. Are you sure Afghanistan is where we should be spending so much?  

Another question: Suppose we win -- how secure will victory be?  It's a nasty neighborhood, and Afghanistan has never been a normal conventional state. Another question: What will winning in Afghanistan mean for Pakistan, arguably a more important stake -- a much more populous country, with nuclear weapons. How do you win in Afghanistan without doing things that risk destabilizing Pakistan further?  If you don't have an answer to this one, you need to go back to start, do not pass go and do not collect anything expect history books and aspirin. 

In short, a lot of commentators seem to me to be looking very shortsightedly at this problem despite claiming they are looking out 10, 12 years.  They are looking out, but they are doing so as through a tunnel: no sense of what's outside, or what the other side of the journey really looks like. I'm skeptical we can ever win in Afghanistan as I define "win", but even if we can I am even more skeptical that the result will be stable enough to justify the costs. The vision in my mind is the kid on the seashore who spends the whole afternoon building the most amazing sand castle ever, besting his own expectation and wowing the spectators. Cool; great; wonderful; amazing. Hey, but then the tide rolls in.

Maybe I'm wrong, but at least I am starting my analysis with all the factors on the table. Those who say we can win, it seems to me, are not.

Today's news registers in a major and a minor key and a still more minor key, maybe a minor 7th.  The major key concerns the Geithner bank rescue plan. That's the one that has garnered all the big headlines and attracted the star journalists.  The minor key concerns the EPA "finding", so to speak, that it has the authority to use the Clean Air Act to enforce "global warming" policy. Hardly anyone will even read this news. The minor 7th concerns the President's remarks on energy. 

I am no financial expert, so I am not in a position to judge what Geithner has rolled out.  A lot of experts say it won't work, despite Wall Street's enthusiastic response to its details. That just makes me think, however, that in fact it won't work. We have an essay coming up in the magazine, one of our toolboxes, arguing for Limited Purpose Banking. When I first read it and sort of understood it, it struck me as a very radical, but still quite logical and sensible a proposal. None of the criticisms to the Geithner approach, so far anyway, for all the alternative approaches they propose, come close to Limited Purpose Banking. But the reason I'm prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to the LPB approach is that, unlike almost all the alternatives I've heard of, it proposes changing the incentive structure of banks and bankers. Right now, banks gamble with other people's money, but bankers do well from commissions and bonuses whether their gambles pay off or not. Their gambles, moreover, are all more or less variations on a single theme: arrange things so you borrow short and safe but lend long and risky.  That way you'll make enough from high-yield loans to more than cover your obligations, even if a fair number of your loans come a cropper. But when too many loans come a cropper, the whole edifice fails, and the losers are other people, not oneself. That being the case, there's not much incentive against irrational behavior, particularly when other bankers are mainly doing the same thing. This just means that individually rational behaviors don't necessarily add up to collectively rational behavior. But every social science PhD already knows that.

Anyway, LPB would change what banks do.  It would prevent them from gambling with other people's money. It would limit them to intermediating between depositors and borrowers, between those who offer investments and those who purchase them. It would earn a fee for its service, and its own money the bank could invest.  But not other people's money. That changes the incentive structure. It has always seemed to me -- but what do I know? -- that if we keep giving banks money, from TARP reservoirs or from some public-private scheme like Geithner's, but we don't change what bankers can do and how they think, then eventually we'll end up with another crisis.  It's true, sure, that we haven't had a whole lot of banking crises since the FDIC was created, and the S&L crisis was not exactly the same thing. But the system we have ensures that when we do have a crisis it's a real doozy. 

Maybe the practical thing is to reliquify the system as it is, and stabilize it--and then change it radically so this can't happen again. But that'll never happen, because it takes a crisis to get real change in this country -- always has. Solve the crisis, or the sense of it, and the motivating force for real reform will evaporate overnight.

I am tempted, while I am on this subject, to refer back to a Senate Banking Committee hearing last week in which Senator Chris Dodd mused that, well, maybe we should not get ourselves into a "too big to fail" situation in the first place. Dodd is no philosopher. But better he and his colleagues wake up later than not at all. Gigantism in American society is the problem, and at many levels. It's nothing new, however; go back to W.J. Byran, TR, Woodrow Wilson, and all the Populists, Progressives, Bull Moosers, Mugwumps and the rest, and you see it all fresh and clean a century ago. Go back and read William Allen White.  Kirkpatrick Sale and his 1970 book Human Scale had nothing on WAW. The problem here, from the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1888 forward, is that if you let corporate scale get very large, you will have to also let countervailing forces in society--unions but especially government--get very large to balance against potential abuses. This is what J.K. Galbraith understood in the 1950s -- that grand scale qualitatively changes the dynamics of "invisible hand" competition in a market economy.  This is what C. Wright Mills understood (though he got a lot wrong, too) when he wrote about The Power Elite. This is what Murray Bookchin and dozens of other intellectual anarchists (as opposed to the old-fashioned bomb-throwing type) have been trying to tell us for 50 years. If you depersonalize economic relations--all kinds, production, owner-worker interactions, marketing, banking, you name it--you hollow out the stickiness of ethical considerations in keeping everyone honest.  To return to the point, most bankers will not gamble with just any other people's money, just other people they don't know. So if we let banks and investment houses and insurance companies get as big as Lehman Brothers and Citibank and Bank of America and AIG, then we enable a too-big-to-fail problem to form,  we have only ourselves to blame for it. It would be one thing if there were real and widely shared economies of scale from such gigantism, but there are not. Instead there are usually diseconomies related to large transaction costs, as can be seen clearly in the whole medical insurance racket. 

Now for the minor key news, which could end up being a lot more important than the major. If EPA uses the Clean Air Act to regulate hydrocarbon emissions, the U.S. economy may never recover. Carol Browner and the rest of the new crowd at EPA are true-believing pantheists, as best I can tell. They approach "global warming" as though it were a surrogate religion, and as such their catechism has become impervious to actual facts. They don't care about the economic and political costs of "saving the world", as they see it. Because they are, after all, "saving the world."

OK, so let me say it, flat out--say what has almost become unspeakable in many polite quarters these days: I don't believe that global warming is mostly anthropogenic, and I don't think it's a crisis. I also don't believe that acute weather events are driven by warming trends, though I am open-minded about what the science has to say here, once we have enough of it to reach a reasonable conclusion. 

Speaking of facts, most of the global warming pantheists who claim facts are on their side wouldn't know how to evaluate genuine scientific evidence if their lives depended on it. It is true that global temperature rise and energy use increases track upward together generally from around 1850 to the present, but they do not track exactly. For example, according to data no one disputes, from 1850 to 1880 energy consumption increased little but temperatures increased a lot. Between 1880 and 1910 the data show that energy use doubled, but temperatures actually declined!  Again, if you measure from 1935 to 1965, fossil fuel consumption doubled, but global temperatures remained essentially flat. 

This means either that there is no lock-step relationship between energy use and temperature increases; that the measurement techniques have been wrong; and/or that something else is driving temperature patterns. One of those things may be the rotation and wobble of the earth and how it affects ocean currents and weather. We have had global warming before. We had it, for example, in and around the 6th-7th century CE, and again in the 14th-15th century. Scandinavian types were able to grow grapes in Greenland, after all, long before the Industrial Revolution. (We also had great plagues in temperate zones during those warming trends, so the CDC is right to be concerned about tracking diseases and pests.)

Add to that the fact--yes, the fact--that we rarely if ever measure actual particulates in the atmosphere, but only extrapolate what's going on up there from measuring emissions down here, and any reasonable, scientifically literate person would pause before rushing to alarmist conclusions. And as many observers have pointed out, to behave as though a long-term trend is a crisis is to cripple rationality in public policy. For what it would cost to stop and reverse global warming, we could do lots of other praiseworthy things. But the religious attitude typically taken toward the problem makes the idea that propositions ought to be examined on the merits a form of heresy.

I am all for reducing emissions, for a smaller societal carbon footprint, and I am all for cleaner energy. I am for these things because it is, in the end, more efficient and healthy. I am for them too, as in President Obama's energy plan also rolled out in more detail in today's news, because this is indeed a major source of new productive jobs. We have underinvested by orders of magnitude in energy R&D in the past thirty years--the fault of Congress and the K-Street lobby mafia, once again. (It's everywhere rotting out public policy.)  I am not for these things because I fear global warming. And I hate to think that only an irrational, scientifically specious fear is powerful enough to get us to do what we should want to do anyway.  It's enough to drive a person crazy.

Final comment for now, about what the President had to say yesterday about energy policy. He spoke, as so many have, about energy independence, about not being dependent on foreign oil. This isn't completely stupid, but it mainly is. 

We chose, as a nation, to become more dependent on international commerce in oil because it was a whole lot cheaper to import than to use domestic sources. We did it, starting in the Eisenhower Administration, for economic advantage: the cheaper our energy inputs, the more efficient our economy all else equal. We do this in general, as do other countries. It's called comparative advantage; that's why there is international trade, and international trade is in the main good. So why do so many people think oil is an exception?

These days there are really two reasons. The first, which is valid, is that the money we pay to buy foreign oil (which is no longer as cheap on a regular basis as it was before) helps nasty regimes and sometimes trickles down to nasty terrorists. This is true, but if we don't buy Saudi oil, say, someone else will. So we don't eliminate the problem by not being dependent on foreign oil; we only loose ourselves from moral responsibility for it. 

The other is that we can't depend on the supply; it might get embargoed for political reasons or interdicted. This is pretty much nonsense nowadays. The vertically integrated nature of the industry makes embargoes very hard to pull off. The Arab embargo of 1974 failed, in point of fact. As for interdiction, that was a worry we planned for during the Cold War; it is not a serious worry anymore. (I have detailed all this in a Harvard Middle East Paper recently, which can be found, if you look around long enough, at MESH.org.) Middle Eastern and other oil producers have to sell their oil; they want to sell it at least as much as we and others want to buy it, or it becomes worthless to them in fact. We should not rue our "dependence"on foreign oil really any more than we should rue our dependence on imports of kiwi fruit, yak hides or copper ore.  We should not rush to pay a lot more for domestic sources of energy over foreign any more than we should want to pay a lot more for domestic sources over foreign of anything else.

Ah, but here is the rub. As I said, oil isn't so cheap anymore--at least it hasn't been fairly recently and, after economic recovery, could go quite high again and pretty much stay high. So if we can figure out how to produce domestic energy that is lots cheaper than oil, whether foreign or domestic, we'll be in pretty fine shape, which is why all kinds of efforts, public and private, should be devoted to and incentivized toward that end. 

Can we do this?  Yes, I am sure we can, and I am sure we can do it a lot faster than many people think. Some guy in Japan last month unveiled a car that runs on water.  That's right, plain old water. It has a hydrogen-gas producing mechanism that has to run on something else, so I don't know the devices' thermodynamic balance sheet, but whatever it is, it promises to be non-carbon and possibly pretty damned cheap compared to $200/barrel sweet crude. And that's just one thing, out of dozens we can put to use. We can do this.  What's stopping us, or slowing us down?  Just the K-Street-Congressional circus, as usual.  

So, taking all this into consideration, will the President please stop talking nonsense about our dependence on foreign oil? It's just the wrong way to think about these things. We should not be thinking about oil at all. We should be thinking about calories, or about energy packets, if you like. We should be asking how much does it cost us to produce (and clean up after) enough energy to do some arbitrary amount of work, defined scientifically, not casually: How many calories to push a ten-kilo weight two meters, say. We should work to develop and use the cheapest net source (net meaning after clean-up and taking into account all externalities) we can devise. If that turns out still to be imported oil, fine.  Except that it won't.  If that turns out to be food to feed a human or an animal who then pushes that ten-kilo weight two meters, fine. That also used to be the case, a long time ago; but it won't be in the future. 

Science really is useful, folks. It really does help us to see clearly and to solve problems. It can't make critical value judgments, but it is still the best bet on the block for a problem like energy. So can we please stop nattering about climate crises and energy dependencies that are either figments of addled imaginations or entirely besides the point? No, we probably can't.....

Let's talk just a little about Afghanistan (because I am speechless about the trillion dollar headlines......). The papers say the Obama Administrations wants to dramatically expand the size of the Afghan Army and police, and is prepared to pay a huge amount of money to do it. Everyone from General Barno to Senator Levin are on board with the idea, as are many other analysts whose opinions I have come to respect. So why does the idea make me nervous?

Well, first, I confess that I have to agree that the alternatives to a larger force are not appealing. We can't or at any rate should not do it ourselves, even in coalition with other outsiders. Afghans don't like outsiders in their midst telling them what to do. And it's not a good idea to just let the Taliban 2.0 take over, although it does not necessarily follow that a Taliban 2.0 government would do the same stupid and terrible things the Taliban 1.0 government did--i.e., provide welcome and save haven for al-Qaeda. 

Still. And the "still" comes down to three things. First, and most important, I am not soothed by General Barno's assurances that the army will remain loyal to civilian authority. That depends on whether the civilian authority remains worthy of their loyalty. I have a lot less animosity toward Hamid Karzai than the Obama Administration seems to have.  As I have said before, I don't think they appreciate sufficiently the cultural relativity of corruption. Karzai, or whomever tries to run the country from Kabul, has to be tough, flexible and lucky to make a go of it. He can't act like a Philadelphia lawyer or a boy scout and expect to get anywhere. So the key is whether the government can persuade the army that any cruelty, double-dealing and corruption it deploys it deploys on behalf of the national interest rather than its own pocketbooks. It's not what it does that matters as such; it's the perception of on whose behalf it is done. If Kabul becomes selfish and narrow, we'll end up with a military government there. Karzai will end up either dead or back in India, most likely.  

That, of course, is not the end of the world as far as I am concerned. But it will look like a colossal U.S. policy failure if it happens.  It will look especially heinous because the Obama Administration has dropped the 4th "D" from its vocabulary--the "democracy" D. So a lot of people, no doubt, will conclude that these Democratic Machiavellian realists actually plotted all along that there be a military coup and a military dictatorship in Kabul. It won't be true, but so what?

Second, it is very important how this larger army and police force are recruited and balanced.  If the Pashtun tribal leaders see either one as a front, basically, for the Tajiks or for de-tribalized Pashtuns in league with foreigners, a larger army will just set the stage for the next iteration of civil war.  That would be much worse than a military government in Kabul. In other words, not all larger armies and police forces are created equal.

Third, on a rather different level, I find it sort of amazing that the New York Times can report, and here is how today's article starts, "President Obama and his advisers have decided to significantly expand Afghanistan's security forces. . . ."  Like what, like Afghanistan is Ohio or something?  Like it is normal for one sovereign government to decide how large the security forces of another nominally sovereign government should be?  We fall into this language without even being aware of how weird it is.  We should listen to how we talk sometimes; we might learn a thing or two. 

Obviously, the reason for the seamless obliviousness in the way we talk about these things is that the Afghans themselves cannot afford to build up their own army and police themselves. Still, there appears to be no mention in the article of what the elected Afghan government thinks about this idea. Did we ask them? We're not told.  How can we boast about the Afghan election and Afghanistan's new budding democracy, and then go and make critical decisions about that country's future as if the presidential palace and the parliament were about as relevant to the policy discussion as a day-care center?  If you don't find this attention-arresting, well, what do you find attention-arresting?

 

I've been even more delinquent since my last post, I know. I have an excuse, however: getting both a book and a magazine to press.  This is time-consuming stuff; don't try it at home. 

A lot has happened since March 12, a fair bit of it strange.  The strangest thing of all, seems to me, is the decision of the Obama Administration to turn all bubbly, warm and fuzzy about the economy. The buzz this past weekend and into Monday, or the spin rather, was that things are looking up.  Recovery in `09 even, not just 2010, they're now saying.  I am skeptical. But I think I understand the reason for this.  These guys understand herd instinct. They understand the psychology of fear. So there're trying to use the media, which has been harmful to the economy for a year, to turn the spin around.  I doubt this will work, and it amounts to a huge political wager. Indeed, I think it is likely to turn out a calamitous wager come the mid-term elections. We'll see. 

I promised last time to comment on education and science. Let me do that now, very briefly.

When the President reversed Bush Administration  policy on stem cells last week, he didn't literally do much.  This was always mainly a symbolic issue, since the ban only applied to U.S. government funding, and that was never the major source of funding.  But it was a good thing to do all the same; the "Catholic/Evangelical" opposition to stem cell research is not frivolous, but on balance it is mistaken. So good.

The President's broader remarks about science regaining its "rightful place", however--a line from the Inaugural you will remember--were both mistaken and, intellectually speaking, quite frivolous.  Does the President really think that decisions scientists make about the life sciences are value free?  Yuval Levin said it all in a Washington Post column the next day, in which he wisely quoted an abominable speech John Kennedy made in 1962 in Ann Arbor, the one in which he said that all the moral questions were answered, and that all that was left to do was of a technical nature. In the Skinnerian climate of that time, one can perhaps forgive Kennedy's naivete. But to say such things now?!  Has Obama never read a book on the sociology of science?  Did he miss that class in high school?  Sheesh. The idea that only right-wing religious types politicize science is about the the most outrageous thing, again, intellectually speaking, that Obama has ever said (at least that I know of). Someone should clue him in before he embarrasses himself further.  This is my way of doing what George W. Bush says -- that we should all help the President. (Bush is already a better ex-President than he was a President.)

As to education, well, the headlines last week said the NEA might get mad at Obama for proposing merit pay for excellent teachers. Anything that pisses off the NEA, the most hidebound pseudo-liberal union in town, is OK by me. But all this misses the point, and is so small bore as to bring one to tears. 

Do these guys have any real ideas?  They propose stringing up nicer wires for the electrical/communications grid, instead of burying the lines like anyone with a brain would do. And so in education, the President talks about merit pay for good teachers and a longer school year. Folks, this is embarrassing, too. How does anyone know who is really a good teacher?  Can a really good teacher be isolated from the overall quality of a school or from the socio-economic echelon sending its children there?  All else equal, a teacher is going to be successful if the school is well-funded, well-managed, and if the kids coming to it are from a hearth culture that cares about and encourages high achievement in education. The teacher who will be best for kids at West Philly high is not the same teacher who will be best for kids in Scarsdale, where the median family income is ten-times higher and the schools many times better funded, and where the kids' parents have been reading to them and having coherent conversations with them since they were 2. So by what universally applicable criteria does one reward a very good teacher?  And who chooses--parents, administrators, other teachers, the union!?  All this is fraught with potential abuse and misuse. It's a stupid idea, and not just because the NEA doesn't like it -- because it dislikes it for all the wrong reasons.

And it's not how long kids are in school that matters, it's what they do when they're there. Like, duh.  Our schools for the most part still resemble the 19th century model upon which they were built. Here's just one example out of about 50 I can name. 

Why do we teach math separate from natural science?  This is dumb. Math and science, at least once kids get past about 3rd grade, should always be team-taught.  The science should come first -- the concepts explained and illustrated. Then, once basics are done with, the math that allows the science to be used should be taught. Then the next science unit, and then the math that goes with it, and so on up to advanced physics and the calculus you need to do it. This is how math developed anyway, for the most part--cf Leibnitz and Newton. It's the natural sequence. Very few students can understand math in its rarified form because they just don't care about it, they don't see what it's good for. There are some students who happen to be fascinated with abstract logic, because that is what pure math is, but they are a tiny minority. If math is taught as a practical joined-at-the-hip adjunct to science, which is inherently fascinating and obviously purposeful, we'll end up with students who're better at both math and science. That would be a good thing.

This is so obvious once you think about it that you could just shit for how dense we've been. Just think of how many millions of hours of student time we've wasted trying to get kids to see what math is for. What's stopping us from restructuring the science/math curricula to make better sense? Well, NEA for one......

And finally for today, I will mainly resist the urge to comment on AIG and Sect. Geithner and so on....except to say the following.  I once travelled to Russia and back with former AIG chairman Hank (Maurice) Greenberg.  I did not like him. Now that I know what AIG was really up to all those years, I sort of see why my instincts acted as they did. I can't say that old Hank ought to be in jail, like another old magazine benefactor of mine, Conrad Black. (I know him, too, yes.) I don't know that Hank technically broke any laws, anymore than the assholes who directed and received these AIG bonuses with TARP money actually broke any laws. But legalities aside, I can't help how I feel about it, and hey, that's right, you don't have to be a card-carrying Democrat right now to be plenty pissed off at these plutocrats. 

Just one caveat: this is nothing new. Rich people have been using jerkwads in Congress to tilt the playing field in their favor since before Mark Twain was born. From time to time we get rid of them: think Andrew Jackson, think W. J. Bryan and Teddy Roosevelt (and William Allen White) and, well, it's time again, isn't it?  Norm Ornstein and a buddy did a book not too long ago called The Broken Branch, in which they tried to show what's wrong with Congress. It's a good book, but it doesn't tell the whole sordid story. It all goes back to money, to the TV ad syndrome and to the basic sleaze associated with lobbying. As I have said before, unless the Obama Administration changes the transactional culture of this town and gets rid of the human filth that keeps it going, he's not only not going to accomplish anything lasting, he is going to blow the opportunity of a lifetime.

Yes, yes, I've been a delinquent blogger lately, and it's not because nothing has happened worth writing about. I've simply been too busy with preparing the May-June issue of The American Interest, and with getting my Jewcentricity book finally to Wiley & Sons to press. And then there was Purim, and a presentation I had to prepare for my neighborhood civic association group's pre-Purim party, which we hosted. I am a board member of the association (I believe in local community and local government, you know -- my insistence on metis and subsidiarity), and later, sometime or other, I will explain the reasons for having a Purim party in the first place. But not now. 

Now I want to comment briefly on three things: the Chas Freeman affair; the POTUS comments on science in the context of the stem-call research ban removal; and his pre-proposals concerning education. Today I'll do the first, the second tomorrow and the third, well, after that.

On the Chas affair, it is, to me at least, amazing how much ink got spilled on this little business in so short a time--most of it unfortunately splashed about. I have no intention of wading through it all, or dragging you with me even were I to do it in private (which I more or less have done). So I will be relatively brief. 

NDI Denny Blair made a bad choice in picking Chas Freeman for the job of Director of the National Intelligence Council, what everyone in this town who knows the govenment calls the NIC ("nick"). That job is important, and because of its nature requires someone who is buttoned down, someone who keeps his personal opinions to him or herself, someone who can attend an official function and, like a skilled referee in a basketball game, manage to become more or less invisible. It is not a job for someone who likes to make headlines, likes to talk to the press, or carries even an impression of having sub rosa dealings with other countries. Chas, for those who do not know him, is a born contrarian, a provocateur (mainly in a good way), a guy who is a pretty much what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of guy. Not the right personality for the NIC, not even close.

So why did Blair do this?  I don't know; I only know him slightly. But several people have suggested to me that this is just something admirals tend to do.  Anyone who has ever commanded a large ship inherently becomes a kind of autocrat, and begins to imagine that context is what he says it is. Maybe this is so. I have no better explanation for this mistake.

However it came to be, how it ended reflects poorly on the overall personnel vetting problem in what still appears to me to be a highly sub-adult administration, at least when it comes to internal management. How could the White House personnel people let a man who has made comments about China and human rights like Chas Freeman has be appointed to a post like that without first clearing it with Nancy Pelosi and others?  This is just too clumsy for words. Did Blair do this entirely on his own, with no White House vetting process?  We don't know, or at least I don't know. If that's the case, it's a helluva way to run the show. If it's not the case, then someone screwed up, and Rahm Emanuel should by now have his or her balls in his pocket (assuming it wasn't Rahm Emanuel who is the one who screwed up). Either way, a real mess.

Now, a lot of nasty things have been said about Chas Freeman in the past few weeks. Many of them could only have been said by people who do not know the man, who've never had a single face-to-face conversation with him.  One blog, by my friend Rod Radosh, even claimed he is a Jew, if I read it right. This is, I think, not possible. Not only was Chas born in Rhode Island, and not only does he give every appearance of being a dyed-in-the-wool WASP, but he was, after all, Ambassador to Saudi Arabia.  The Saudis would never have accepted, and we would not have dared appoint, a Jew to that position--not, anyway, if we wanted a useful ambassador there. 

Opposition to Freeman arose on two separate grounds: one his views on China and Tiananman Square, and the other his views on Israel and the Middle East. It was, pretty clearly I think, his views on China that got him cashiered. His views have been widely quoted and there is no reason for me to repeat them here, but basically, Chas is a realist--both self-styled and really. His observation that Tiananman would never have happened if the Chinese leadership had not been so irresolute at the beginning is not a value judgment; it is an analytical judgment. And I think it is inarguable. His contention that China will become liberal and even democratic in due course is arguable, but it is not reprehensible. Again, it is an analytical judgment, not an indication that Chas dislikes democracy or admires Asian authoritarianism. What it shows, I think, is that Chas dislikes those who wear democracy promotion and human rights on their sleeves to make themselves feel noble, even when doing so often has counterproductive consequences on the ground. Well, I agree with Chas on this. That is a separate matter from whether someone so outspoken on the subject should be at the NIC. 

As for Israel, Chas's views, as best I can make them out, are not much different from the standard State Department realist view. He has referred to Israel's settlements policies as a form of colonization, and as taking land from Arabs. This wounds a lot of pro-Israeli Jews, I know. But it is factually wrong?  Has the State of Israel expropriated privately owned Arab land for settlements?  Sometimes it has. It is incendiary to call this colonization?  Maybe, but it's not literally false according to a dictionary definition of the term, which many Israelis will have no qualms about telling you. 

But has Chas ever called for Israel's destruction? Has he ever said that Zionism is racism? Has he ever whitewashed Palestinian or Arab terrorism?  Not that I have ever heard. To some people, like Steven Walt, Chas's criticisms of Israeli policy are "mild." To blood-on-the-saddle American supporters of Israel there are neo-genocidal, to judge by some of the comments. I'd say his comments are slightly beyond mild as criticisms, but there are nowhere in the vicinity of hateful or extreme. It is the critics who are more often extreme. 

Certainly, those critics who exaggerated his views are blameworthy. Certainly, too, those critics who insinuated, without evidence, that Chas has acted as an agent for a foreign government are way out of line. That is slander. It's not wrong to wonder, given Chas's apparent vulnerability to forms of localitis. But it is wrong, very wrong, to make accusations without evidence. These people should be ashamed of themselves. 

Unfortunately, Chas has failed to understand the reasons for his nomination's collapse. In a parting shot, he blamed the Israel Lobby for what happened to him. This is really unfortunate, and makes me sad. Here is what he said, not in part, but in full, with the key parts, for my purposes, in italics: 

"To all who supported me or gave me words of encouragement during the controversy of the past two weeks, you have my gratitude and respect. You will by now have seen the statement by Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair reporting that I have withdrawn my previous acceptance of his invitation to chair the National Intelligence Council.

I have concluded that the barrage of libelous distortions of my record would not cease upon my entry into office. The effort to smear me and to destroy my credibility would instead continue. I do not believe the National Intelligence Council could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country. I agreed to chair the NIC to strengthen it and protect it against politicization, not to introduce it to efforts by a special interest group to assert control over it through a protracted political campaign.

As those who know me are well aware, I have greatly enjoyed life since retiring from government. Nothing was further from my mind than a return to public service. When Admiral Blair asked me to chair the NIC I responded that I understood he was “asking me to give my freedom of speech, my leisure, the greater part of my income, subject myself to the mental colonoscopy of a polygraph, and resume a daily commute to a job with long working hours and a daily ration of political abuse.” I added that I wondered “whether there wasn’t some sort of downside to this offer.” I was mindful that no one is indispensable; I am not an exception. It took weeks of reflection for me to conclude that, given the unprecedentedly challenging circumstances in which our country now finds itself abroad and at home, I had no choice but accept the call to return to public service. I thereupon resigned from all positions that I had held and all activities in which I was engaged. I now look forward to returning to private life, freed of all previous obligations.

I am not so immodest as to believe that this controversy was about me rather than issues of public policy. These issues had little to do with the NIC and were not at the heart of what I hoped to contribute to the quality of analysis available to President Obama and his administration. Still, I am saddened by what the controversy and the manner in which the public vitriol of those who devoted themselves to sustaining it have revealed about the state of our civil society. It is apparent that we Americans cannot any longer conduct a serious public discussion or exercise independent judgment about matters of great importance to our country as well as to our allies and friends.

The libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively that there is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends and events in the Middle East. The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth. The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors.

There is a special irony in having been accused of improper regard for the opinions of foreign governments and societies by a group so clearly intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government – in this case, the government of Israel. I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the state of Israel. It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say so. This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States.

The outrageous agitation that followed the leak of my pending appointment will be seen by many to raise serious questions about whether the Obama administration will be able to make its own decisions about the Middle East and related issues. I regret that my willingness to serve the new administration has ended by casting doubt on its ability to consider, let alone decide what policies might best serve the interests of the United States rather than those of a Lobby intent on enforcing the will and interests of a foreign government.

In the court of public opinion, unlike a court of law, one is guilty until proven innocent. The speeches from which quotations have been lifted from their context are available for anyone interested in the truth to read. The injustice of the accusations made against me has been obvious to those with open minds. Those who have sought to impugn my character are uninterested in any rebuttal that I or anyone else might make.

Still, for the record: I have never sought to be paid or accepted payment from any foreign government, including Saudi Arabia or China, for any service, nor have I ever spoken on behalf of a foreign government, its interests, or its policies. I have never lobbied any branch of our government for any cause, foreign or domestic. I am my own man, no one else’s, and with my return to private life, I will once again – to my pleasure – serve no master other than myself. I will continue to speak out as I choose on issues of concern to me and other Americans.

I retain my respect and confidence in President Obama and DNI Blair. Our country now faces terrible challenges abroad as well as at home. Like all patriotic Americans, I continue to pray that our president can successfully lead us in surmounting them."

Chas is right and justified to defend himself against slander. But his comments about the Israel Lobby are manifestly false. Rather than say so in my own words, let me instead quote from today's Washington Post editorial on the matter, which is spot on: 

"For the record, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee says that it took no formal position on Mr. Freeman's appointment and undertook no lobbying against him. If there was a campaign, its leaders didn't bother to contact the Post editorial board. According to a report by Newsweek, Mr. Freeman's most formidable critic -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- was incensed by his position on dissent in China.

But let's consider the ambassador's broader charge: He describes `an inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for U.S. policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics.' That will certainly be news to Israel's `ruling faction,' which in the past few years alone has seen the U.S. government promote a Palestinian election that it opposed; refuse it weapons it might have used for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities; and adopt a policy of direct negotiations with a regime that denies the Holocaust and that promises to wipe Israel off the map. Two Israeli governments have been forced from office since the early 1990s after open clashes with Washington over matters such as settlement construction in the occupied territories.

What's striking about the charges by Mr. Freeman and like-minded conspiracy theorists is their blatant disregard for such established facts. Mr. Freeman darkly claims that 'it is not permitted for anyone in the United States' to describe Israel's nefarious influence. But several of his allies have made themselves famous (and advanced their careers) by making such charges -- and no doubt Mr. Freeman himself will now win plenty of admiring attention. Crackpot tirades such as his have always had an eager audience here and around the world. The real question is why an administration that says it aims to depoliticize U.S. intelligence estimates would have chosen such a man to oversee them."

As I say, this is spot on. Freeman does the same as Mearsheimer and Walt. He imagines all supporters of Israel to be a monolith--the hallmark of a conspiracy theory. By claiming that those opposed to it are not allowed to speak, he utters not only obvious bullshit, but in fact does precisely what he accuses the Lobby of doing -- preemptively muzzling or trying to discredit any other view. 

It is true, however, that even if AIPAC did not take a formal position on the nomination, there was a campaign, informal but widespread, to scuttle it. This was, in the main, a stupid thing to do. The China stuff would have sunk him anyway, so why add fuel to the imaginary fires stoked by the Mearsheimer/Walt camp?  There really are, unfortunately, Israel partisans in the United States who are so blind to other points of view, so ignorant even of what most Israelis think and worry about, that they make claims and use such shrill language that only do their own cause harm.  But you can never tell a zealot that; they just think you're part of a conspiracy against them for they, too -- and this is the shocking truth -- are conspiracy mongers. Chas Freeman isn't part of any anti-Israel conspiracy. He is not pro-Arab either; he is pro-U.S. as he sees it. He may be mistaken about some of this matters -- I think he is -- but he's neither hateful nor disingenuous. He is also, not that it much matters, a lot smarter and vastly more experienced than most of his critics. 

Even though I disagree with Chas on a lot of things, I still admire him in some ways. When he was Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, he tried to assemble all the regional U.S. ambassadors in Riyadh to talk stuff over.  Logical and wise, you may say? Well, sure, but totally against State Department policy. That kind of thing can only be ordered from 22nd and C Streets by the Assistant Secretary of State for that region, except that it wasn't happening. So Chas took the initiative, knowing that he could get canned for it. Others may hail the kind of Foreign Service Officer who never raises his head above the trench, who never has an idea to express, a criticism to make in public, who just waits until it's time to collect the pension and go make silly speeches to senior citizen groups. Chas was not like that. He broke some China (and that's not a pun). He made some useful trouble for people who needed it made. It's a damn shame, as I see it, that his public service has been marred by Denny Blair's poor judgment and by Chas's own unfortunate reaction to it.