Flogging Mali

As often happens, my TAI colleague Walter Russell Mead, with his team of intrepid assistants ever at the ready, has beaten me into print—or electrons, as the case may be—over what is going on in Mali. He takes his cue from the extraordinary story in yesterday’s New York Times. Pardon me for repeating any of Walter’s points here; I may need to do so in order to get a running start on the one or two additional insights I would like to bring.

The Times story, written by Adam Nossiter, Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazetti, and datelined Bamako, Mali, really was extraordinary, but in what has become a depressingly common way for the most part. In the twenty paragraphs that make up this news story, the word “Libya” is not mentioned until the ninth paragraph, and then only in passing along with several other countries. The word “Tuareg” is not mentioned until the fifteenth paragraph. The article is suffused with superficial contemporary description and amply populated with quotations mostly from unnamed sources, but anything about motives or interests or critical background circumstances is almost completely missing. You get a lot of “what” and “where”, and you get a tad of “who” (within which lies one real data nugget of genuine interest, of which more in a moment). But you don’t really get much “how” or “why.” Is this because the reporters have not done their homework and really have no idea where they are or what is going on around them? Or is it because that’s just not how such newspaper stories are supposed to be written anymore? I wish I knew.

The upshot is that unless a reader brings his or her own stock of knowledge to bear, he or she would never know that Mali is an extreme example of a modern state cobbled together from various ethnic and religious groups. (Look up an ethnographic map of Mali and you will see that, even by West African standards, it looks like a jigsaw puzzle.) One would never know, until a passing phrase toward the very end of the article, that the Tuareg are the main group that has been in periodic revolt against the central government for decades. One would never know that the catalyst for what has been going on in this country, as well as in neighboring Niger for many months now, was the Obama Administration’s decision to start a war in Libya. One would never know that the Tuareg are kindred to the Berbers who are rising, and raising hell, all over North Africa. One would never know that the Tuareg founded a vast empire long before the advent of European colonialism, and that their capital was then, as it is again now, Timbuktu. One would not even know from this article that the victorious Tuareg declared the independent state of Azawad in what they consider to be reclaimed, liberated territory, back in the beginning of last year.

Students have asked me frequently how it is possible to actually find out what is going on in relatively off-the-radar places like the Sahel, and I have to confess to them that, these days, with serious foreign affairs journalism having declined so dramatically in the United States since the end of the Cold War, it really is difficult. It’s virtually a day job, and one that requires knowledge of much history, anthropology and some language skills so that one can read, in this Malian case, the better-informed French press.

Speaking of full-frontal ignorance, this brings me to the only real revelation in the New York Times story—that data nugget I mentioned just above. Way down at the bottom of the piece we learn that the U.S. counterterrorism training mission in Mali made the stupefying mistake of choosing three of four northern unit commanders to train who were Tuareg. As the article says, when the Tuareg rebellion in Mali gained steam after the denouement of the Libya caper, greatly stimulated by the return of heavily armed Tuareg brethren from that fight, these three Tuareg commanders defected to the rebels, bringing soldiers, vehicles, ammunition and more to the anti-government side. Anyone who was surprised by this is an idiot, or at the very least a terminal ignoramus. And anyone in the U.S. military who failed to understand the ethnic composition of the country’s politico-military cleavages, such that he let U.S. Special Forces training be lavished on Tuareg commanders, was clearly insufficiently trained to do his job. And believe me, that’s about as nice a way to put that as I can summon.

How do things like this (still) happen, after what we should have learned from years of dealing with Iraqis and Afghans and others on their home turf? I happen to know someone who teaches in the U.S. military education system, and this person happens to be a field-experienced Harvard Ph.D. in anthropology. This person tries very hard to clear away the thick fog created by the innocent Enlightenment universalism that pervades the American mind—the toxic fog that tries to convince us that all people, everywhere, are basically the same, have the same value hierarchies, the same habits of moral and tactical judgment, and mean the same things by roughly comparable translated words.

Sometimes this person senses success, because the Special Forces officers in class who are still climbing the promotion tree tend to “get it.” They “get it” because they have collected personal experience—whether in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Somalia, or Pakistan, or the Philippines, or even in Mali—that what they are learning in class corresponds to the realities they know. I have been to this person’s classes on several occasions to guest-teach, and I agree: A lot of the guys (and the few women in the spec ops field) who have been on the ground do “get it.” But it seems that a lot of their senior officers don’t yet get much of anything at all. It is almost inconceivable to me that we could screw-up so badly. Understanding basic Malian circumstances isn’t rocket science, as they say, so why did this get botched? I am trying to find out; so patience, please.

Alas, as useful as the Times article is for revealing this critical datum, it is misleading in other ways. Now that the election is over, Walter supposes, it’s okay for the Times to call a failed policy what it is. That’s true about the Times and the election being over, so that the paper can now switch off the political advocacy button for a while. But it obscures two things that are more important.

First, the article makes it seem as though the training missions in the Sahel area are the brainchild of the Obama Administration. This is not so. This special forces anti-terrorism training has been going on for quite a while. It certainly was going on when I was in government in the 2003–05 period. Indeed, there was a certain natural muss and fuss associated with small complements of marines going into places like Mali and Niger to train local antiterrorist special forces. I remember a certain American Ambassador (whom I will not name) in one of these places objecting strenuously to the arrival of the marines and, with them, a very few serious embedded journalist like Robert Kaplan.

Second, not only is the policy nothing new, but it did not have to fail. Even reasonably intelligent policies that, as in this case, are designed to be hedges against worst-case developments can fail if oblivious, poorly prepared officials get their hands on implementation. (This is a good case for State Department officials helping the military rather than trying to foul their grub.) I still refuse to believe that the nitwit factor is an inevitable one in the U.S. military or in the U.S. government as a whole. And what exactly was, and is, a better reasonable alternative than training local forces? Do the Times reporters think that sending large numbers of American or allied soldiers to these countries, even in the absence of manifest threats to their governments, would have been a good idea? The article bristles with criticism, usually imported through piquant quotes that enable the reporters to distance themselves from it if challenged. But they offer nothing as substitute except implied praise for French boldness.

And this is crap. Obviously, things in Mali have come to a point where the Tuareg, in the form of a radical Islamist coup that has displaced the traditional national movement, have become capable of threatening the capital. That is the reason, one has to assume, that the French government has unleashed its air force against the rebels. The press, both here and in France, are characterizing this act of war in a former French colony as a bold step by the heretofore meek-seeming Socialist Party President François Hollande. It is no such thing, at least not yet. This was, and still is, a defensive operation cobbled together quickly to avoid catastrophe. Only if the French and their allies try to retake independent Azawad and reattach it to the Malian state—a policy for which they would very likely seek American support and specialized assistance—can the policy be said to qualify as bold.

Is that likely to happen? In Paris anything is possible, but I frankly doubt that it will. The price of success would be hard to calculate but probably quite high, since one cannot retake and hold territory just by using airpower. The price of failure would be even higher. I doubt that the French President, who has to sense the increasing fragility of the domestic economy these days, would take that on.

Hence, what’s going on in Mali is going to keep going on, in one form or another. It is likely to spread to Niger, possibly to Mauritania, too. I can barely wait for the next drive-by, nomad-journalism New York Times potshots aimed at trying to convey the shape of this burgeoning mess. Maybe one day they’ll even figure out how to connect the dots back to Libya. Maybe…

The Khedive's Revenge?

When, on Tuesday morning, I finished reading David Brooks’s column in the New York Times [“Another Fiscal Flop”], I scribbled two words at the bottom of the newsprint. First let’s hear how his typically excellent column, this one on the nature and scope of the debt we are amassing and are refusing to responsibly address, ended:

The country either doesn't know or doesn't care about the burdens we are placing on our children. No coalition of leaders has successfully confronted the voters, and made them heedful of the ruin they are bringing upon the nation.

And then let’s look in on the two words I cursively scribbled in blue ink from my fountain pen:

Khedive Ismail

When I wrote those two words I had no inkling whatsoever that I would see in today's news the announcement that Al Jazeera had purchased Current, which the New York Times describes as “the low-rated cable channel that was founded by Al Gore. . . and his business partners seven years ago.” According to the paper, Al Jazeera––which really means the government of Qatar––paid something like $500 million for Current, about $100 million of which will supposedly end up in the former vice president's pocket.

The reason for the purchase, supposedly, is that Al Jazeera is trying to convince Americans that it is a legitimate news organization, as the New York Times put it, “not a parrot of Middle Eastern propaganda or something more sinister.” The problem is that Al Jazeera does have a selectively propagandistic bias, not in all of its English-language reporting, but in virtually anything that has to do with Arabs, Israelis, the Middle East and Islam. Over time that bias, subtly and effectively communicated, can make a difference in American opinion. My guess is that's the real motive for the purchase.

Now let's take a step back and connect some dots. Why did my mind flit from the end of David Brooks's column on the debt to the Khedive Ismail to the unanticipated Al Jazeera purchase of Current? Because I'm crazy, some of you might propose. Well, you may be right, but not all forms of insanity are created equal. Here, in any event, is the method to my particular madness.

To understand how I connect these dots, I realize that it would be helpful if my readers knew who––yes, who, not what––the Khedive Ismail refers to. From my experience teaching undergraduates and graduate students alike about the Middle East, I am prepared to wager that not one in a million Americans recognizes this biographical phrase; so let me introduce you.

There once was a fellow named Mohammed Ali––no, not the boxer, but presumably the man after whom Cassius Clay renamed himself. He is known to historians as the Albanian adventurer who rose to power in Egypt and, after failed Ottoman attempts to remove him, set out in 1831 to conquer Syria and Crete from the Sublime Porte. What happened next is complicated enough to have filled several books, and we will not concern ourselves with that. All you need to know for present purposes is that Mohammed Ali established himself as ruler of Egypt, and the man who, following on and in some respects imitating Napoleon’s attack on Egypt in 1798, crushed the ruling centuries-old Mamluke order in that country. His son, Ibrahim Pasha, continued in his brief rule his father's modernizing and reforming ways, turning carefully to the European powers for assistance in that regard. Ibrahim Pasha was followed both literally and in terms of policy direction by two other relatives until Ismail Pasha rose to head the dynasty in 1863. In 1867 Ismail was formally recognized by the Ottoman sultan as the khedive, a term that roughly means viceroy—in the Ottoman period designating an independent ruler whose status was nevertheless below that of caliph.

It was during Ismail’s reign as khedive that the main symbol of Egyptian–European cooperation—in this case mainly Egyptian–French cooperation—came into being: the Suez Canal, constructed in 1869. The British had opposed the canal, seeing it as a vehicle for French influence in and around Egypt. But then, in 1874, the Khedive found himself in considerable financial difficulty. He couldn’t decide whether to spend money on Egypt’s modernization or on himself, so he did both. Now, as a means to secure the rights to construct the canal, the Egyptians in the person of the Khedive himself had been allotted a large number of foundation shares in the Suez Canal Company. To alleviate his financial distress, the Khedive let it be known that he wished to sell his shares.

There then occurred one of the most storied dramas of 19^th-century European colonial history. (It is so wonderful that someone ought to make a movie of it.) At the instigation of the then new British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, the British government quickly came forward as a buyer. It purchased the Khedive’s shares for the then enormous sum of £4 million, the vast majority of which Disraeli borrowed on the fly from banks owned by various Rothschilds. In a trice, the British government found itself the majority shareholder in the Suez Canal Company, and there was not a thing the French could do about it. (The fact that a lot of the borrowed money came from the French wing of the Rothschilds suggests that le banquier and the French government of the day were not exactly getting along; that would have to be a major subplot in the movie….)

Unfortunately for the Khedive, the money he got from the British for his shares did not really turned the trick for him financially. Such was his extravagance and the incompetence of his administration that he again found himself deeply in debt, chiefly to British and French bondholders, just a year later. Much as the United States did in the Caribbean a century or so ago, the British government determined to take action in order to secure repayment of its nationals who had lent money to Egypt. The French, meanwhile, encouraged by none other than Otto von Bismarck, whose motive was to distract the French from their contemplation of a war of revenge over Alsace-Lorraine, joined with the British to depose the recalcitrant Ismail in favor of his son Tawfiq.

What happened next would turn the movie into something of a wry comedy. The British and the French found it far more difficult to extract money from Egypt than they had anticipated. All that cash somehow defied auditing, let alone recovery, along the Nile. Here is how the remarkable Clara Erskine Clement described it in her revised and enlarged 1903 edition of Egypt:

Then began a series of investigations of the Finances of Egypt, conducted by Mr. Cave, Mr. Goschen, Mr. Romaine, and by a Commission of Inquiry. All these investigators were unable to come at the exact truth, for they were met at each and every point with deceit and falsehood, so that the results shown by their figures are probably but an approach to the whole truth of the rottenness of the Khedive’s government [pp. 454-55].

The French eventually gave up, leaving the British to continue the effort. By 1881 the task transferred unwillingly to the new Gladstone administration, which, at first sincerely anxious to be rid of ancillary imperial commitments, found itself with no choice but to take over control of financial matters within Egypt. Tawfiq Pasha was in no position to object, and neither was the Sultan in Istanbul, over whom the British held a certain amount of useful influence. Control of financial affairs grew willy-nilly into essential control of the Egyptian economy and before long to de facto control of the whole country—sparking a failed proto-nationalist uprising in 1882. Indeed, before long British involvement spread to fighting a war in the Sudan (movies have been made about that—Chinese Gordon, the Mahdi and the rest).

And so it was that, despite the inner convictions of the Liberal cabinet, Britain was drawn ever further into Egyptian affairs. Having defeated Prime Minister Disraeli at the polls on the very issue of colonial expansion, Gladstone found himself driven to adopt the policy of imperialism, if not always the rhetoric, that he and his colleagues had themselves denounced. It was in reaction to Gladstone’s episodic if feckless idealist leadership that Macauley had written: “There is nothing so ridiculous as the British public in a periodic fit of morality.” But a Prime Minister captured by the fates to do what he never intended is sort of ridiculous in its own way, too. I can’t stop myself from remembering this episode whenever memories of the Obama Administration’s “surge” and nation-building fantasies in Afghanistan come upon me; ah, but that is another story.

Our story, to get back to the point and to contemporary matters, is that Britain insinuated itself into Egypt because that government allowed its finances to deteriorate to the point that it made itself prey to foreign influence. I'm not suggesting that the U.S. debt will ever allow American sovereignty itself to be pocketed by its many foreign creditors. After all, the Japanese in their heyday financially bought a lot of American real estate back in the 1980s, even Rockefeller Center in New York City, and a whole lot of good it did them. But while it differs greatly in scale, the Qatari purchase of Current really does not differ in kind from the sort of dynamic that ensconced the British in Egypt. When George W. Bush was fine with Dubai managing some ports in the United States back in February 2006, it caused a political firestorm. I doubt that these days, under current conditions, the purchase of Current will raise so much as an eyebrow, despite its probably being a far less innocent affair.

Yes, and some American states are renting tolled highways to foreign governments. American for-profit hospitals are increasingly importing lower-cost nurses from abroad—in-sourcing—because they don’t want to or can’t afford domestic-trained labor. What else in future will we ask foreign companies, with foreign governments looking on, to do for us that we can’t do for ourselves because we’re unable to toilet train our budgetary habits? What are we dealing with here, the Khedive’s revenge?

New Year's Eve: A Guide to What You're Celebrating

Dec. 31, 2012:

It’s one thing to be a Jew on Christmas in a majority-Christian land like the United States, a meme made famous (infamous?) by recent cultural creations stretching all the way from Adam Sandler to South Park. But it’s another to be a Jew on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. That meme isn’t famous at all. Yet.

Now, as everyone knows, the evening of December 31 is New Year’s Eve. And that’s right, if one reckons by the common calendar, used pretty much worldwide these days thanks to the antique successes of European imperialism, in which this coming year is 2013. But why is December 31 the eve of the new year? How did it get to be that way?

If you’re like most normal, sensible, historically oblivious Americans or Europeans, or most others who live in a majority-Christian society, this question simply does not come up. It’s New Year’s Eve on December 31 because it is and always has been, and the year ahead is 2013 because it follows 2012, dummy—so what on earth are you talking about?

A moment’s reflection, however, can convince even the densest person, sober or not, that, no, it hasn’t always been this way—“always” being a pretty long time when pointed backwards as well as forwards. Here is a very short history of the matter.

In 46 or 45 BCE, the Roman emperor Julius Caesar established January 1 as New Year’s Day even as he introduced a new calendar that was far more accurate than the one Rome had been using up to that point. The old calendar had only 304 days, divided among only ten months. Not good if you want to concord solar and lunar cycles and have years that are roughly symmetrical astronomically from one to the next. Ceasar named January after the Roman god of doors and gates, Janus, who had two faces, one looking forward and one looking backward. This was a terrific idea.

Unfortunately, Caesar celebrated the first New Year by ordering a major attack on Jewish insurgent forces in the Galilee. Blood flowed in what then passed for streets. Some time later, Roman pagans began marking December 31 with drunken orgies. They apparently thought this constituted a re-enactment of the chaotic void that existed before the gods brought order to the cosmos. Even way back then, people would take any excuse to booze it up and screw someone whose name wasn’t particularly important at the time.

But December 31/January 1 did not remain the start of the year for long. (And never mind for now how the Romans numbered their years. Ceasar obviously didn’t think it was 46 BCE in 46 BCE!) As Christianity spread, and then became the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380 (Constantine had allowed the toleration of Christianity in 313, but it was left to Emperor Theodosius to do the deed for which Constantine is often credited), pagan holidays were either incorporated into the Christian calendar or abandoned. In the case of January 1, it very conveniently became the Festival of the Circumcision. Yes, that’s right, if you count inclusively from December 25 to January 1 you get eight, as in the eight days of circumcision. That was painfully obvious to 4^th-century Christians.

January 1 thus became an important day in early Christianity, but not as New Year’s Day. The Festival of the Circumcision came to symbolize the triumphal rise and reign of Christianity and the would-be death of Judaism—the supersession of the Church over the Jews as God’s chosen. By the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, this interpretation was standard fare, and it seems to have been formally ratified theologically at that Council.

Now, it so happens that the Pope at the time, whose name was Sylvester, convinced Constantine to prohibit Jews from living in Jerusalem. At the Council of Nicaea, too, Sylvester promulgated a host of new anti-Semitic legislation. Not surprisingly, Sylvester became a saint in the Church for this and other achievements, and his Saint’s Day is (you guessed it) December 31. That’s why Israelis today call the secular New Year’s Eve revelries and New Year’s Day (since Jews mark the beginning of a day at sunset) “Sylvester.” Why they do this I don’t know, since Sylvester was sort of an ass from a Jewish point of view, and since over the centuries in medieval Europe the night of December 31 was often enough reserved for synagogue and Hebrew book burnings, tortures and standard-issue murder-for-sport.

But already by that time, as I have suggested, January 1 was not New Year anymore. It was still associated with pagan Rome, and Christians wanted to separate themselves from that image. Most of Christian Europe regarded March 25, Annunciation Day, as the beginning of the year. That made sense, too, because it was near the vernal equinox, the new year for many of the European tribes the Church sought to convert. The one exception worth noting, starting in the 11^th century, was England.

William the Conqueror was crowned King of England on December 25, 1066, and at that time (his transition team was very efficient) he decreed that January 1 should once again be the New Year. He thus ensured that, with Jesus’ birthday aligning with his coronation, Jesus’ circumcision would start the new year and symbolize the supersession of the Normans over the earlier inhabitants of Britain. He tried, in other words, to make the calendar of Christian Norman England align with his personal biography.

This was very clever, but William’s innovation eventually lost favor. England’s Catholic clergy realigned English custom to fit the rest of the Christian West. March 25 it was to mark the new year, and there it remained for roughly half a millennium.

Then, in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII moved it back to January 1. Like Caesar, the occasion was the introduction of a new calendar, the “Gregorian” one used today. The problem with the Julian calendar, as is well known, is that its slight inaccuracy caused Easter to creep too far back from the vernal equinox at the rate of about one day per century. That creep had amounted to 14 days by the time Gregory XIII became Pope, really screwing up the religious calendar. The Pope based his new calendar on the day, 1,257 years earlier, when Council of Nicaea convened on the vernal equinox: March 21, 325. Otherwise, the vernal equinox would have fallen in 1582 on March 11, way off from where the sun and stars were supposed to be for an equinox. He kicked the calendar ahead ten days, turning the day after October 4, 1582 into October 15, 1582.  January 1 again became the new year.

Except in England and, by extension, its American colonies. The English resisted the change, not because they were still ticked at William the Conqueror’s vanity, but for reasons having to do with the Reformation and resisting the Pope’s authority and all that. The Gregorian calendar did not win adoption in England and in America until 1752, and oh what a mess that caused. To get the math to work out, 1751 consisted of only 282 days, from March 25 to December 31. The year 1752 began on January 1, but January 1 had to be advanced 11 days to catch up the Gregorian count, so 1752 had only 355 days. I’m sure this is the origin of wild drunkenness in Britain and America on New Year’s Eve. How else was a typical person to cope with such disturbing stuff? (This explanation does not apply to the Irish.)

What does this have to do with the Jews? Well, back on New Year’s Day 1577 Pope Gregory decreed that all Roman Jews had to attend a Catholic conversion sermon given in Roman synagogues after Friday night services. The penalty for skipping out was death. Then, on New Year’s Day the next year the Pope signed a law forcing Jews to pay for a “House of Conversion” whose purpose was to convert Jews to Christianity. The sermons and the House did not work so well, however, so on New Year’s 1581 he confiscated all of the Roman Jewish community’s Hebrew books. That caused a lot of violence; the Jews took it in the neck, as usual, when, virtually unarmed, they faced a vastly superior military force.

Does any of this matter? It might, except that very few Jews know this history, whether they live in Israel, America or anywhere else. Very few non-Jews in the West associate New Year’s Eve and January 1 as New Year's Day with Pope Sylvester or with the Festival of the Circumcision. Indeed, the whole shebang is presumed to be secular in nature, having nothing to do with any church calendar (Catholic and Anglican, anyway) going back some 1,680 years. Except that it very much does. Besides, if New Year’s Eve and January 1 as New Year’s Day really were secular in origin, then they could not be much older than a few centuries—which would contradict the “always” premise, would it not? But to answer the question; no, it doesn't matter. It's just harmless historical fun to know these things.

I guess it comes down to this: If you join in the revelry of New Year’s Eve, you can do it because of Julius Caesar and the gods turning chaos to cosmos (perfect for pagans), you can do it in memory of Pope Sylvester (perfect for anti-Semites), you can do it to commemorate William the Conqueror (perfect for Anglophiles), you can do it to mark the advent of Pope Gregory’s calendar (perfect for math/science types), you can do it to celebrate Jesus’s bris (my personal favorite), or you can do it just because it’s a convenient pretext to get hammered (everyone else’s favorite, judging by all appearances). So Happy New Year…whatever your reasons.

And next in this series…yes, you guessed it, the origins of Groundhogs Day!

Secretary Hagel?

Dec. 22, 2012:

So, I am given to understand that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B‘nai B‘rith, which more or less boils down to its national director Abe Foxman’s personal view of the planet from his Manhattan bubble, is not thrilled with the prospective (not even real yet) nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense. According to Foxman, Hagel is not pro-Israel or anti-Iran enough for the job. Foxman has accused Hagel of invoking stereotypes that suggest not just anti-Israel attitudes but even anti-Semitism. He used the record of an interview Hagel gave to Aaron David Miller a few years back (more about that anon) when he was writing The Much Too Promised Land (2008) to support his accusation.

It’s sort of ironic that an organization with the phrase “anti-defamation” in its own name should resort to defaming others. Well, maybe “ironic” isn’t quite the right word; a few others also come to mind. But defamation it is, because the idea that Chuck Hagel is either anti-Israel or anti-Semitic is risible. It seems pretty clear that Mr. Foxman doesn’t understand how much damage he does by tossing around such innuendo. It’s even clearer that he doesn’t want my advice. (I met him years ago within the confines of a closed meeting, but that’s another story.) The damage done, and how it is done, is not clear to everybody, however—hence this note.

As it happens, Senator Hagel is in very good company as one of Mr. Foxman’s targets. Another of those targets has been none other than Harry Truman.

It came to light in 2003 that Harry S. Truman’s private diary contained what Abe Foxman referred to as “anti-Semitic canards.” Foxman declaimed in a statement that, “sadly, President Truman was a man of his times, and much less a man because of it.” A few days later Foxman published a short essay in the Forward in which he accused Truman of “attributing classic stereotypes about Jews.” He quoted Truman’s diary as follows: “The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish. When they have power, physical financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment of the underdog.” Citing his childhood as a Holocaust survivor and a displaced person, who believed in 1950 that Harry Truman had personally enabled him to become an American, Foxman wrote: “It personally saddens me to learn that he too was flawed.”

Foxman’s comments were unfortunate, to say the least. In the first place, it did not take until 2003 for anyone to learn that Truman had made disparaging remarks about Jews. One example, from Truman’s memoirs published many years earlier, concerns the President’s anger and resentment in the autumn of 1947 against what he calls some “extreme Zionist leaders”:

. . . not only were there pressure movements around the United Nations unlike anything that had been seen there before, but that the White House, too, was subjected to a constant barrage. I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders—actuated by a political motive and engaging in political threats—disturbed and annoyed me. (Truman Memoirs, Vol. II, p. 158)

The President noted at the time in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, “I regret this situation very much because my sympathy has always been on their side.” (Quoted in Margaret Truman, Harry S. Truman, p. 420)

Was Truman really guilty of anti-Semitic thoughts–and thoughts are all they could possibly have been, since we are talking here about a private diary, not any public statement. Let’s look at the whole diary entry, for July 21, 1947, six p.m., not just the part Foxman chose to quote:

Had ten minutes conversation with Henry Morgenthau about Jewish ship in Palistine [sic]. Told him I would talk to Gen[eral] Marshall about it. He’d no business, whatever to call me. The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgement on world affairs.

Henry brought a thousand Jews to New York on a supposedly temporary basis and they stayed. When the country went backward—and Republican in the election of 1946, this incident loomed large on the D[isplaced] P[ersons] program.

The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I’ve found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes.

Is Truman irritated at his Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau? Yes, and he is irritated in part because something he did, Truman believes, had negative political consequences for him and the Democratic Party. Probably it did, too. Did Truman not understand the dire plight of the ship Secretary Morgenthau must have been talking about, given the date: the later-to-be-very-famous Haganah ship Exodus? Probably he didn’t. Was Morgenthau justified in trying to get the President’s attention, despite the risks of irking him? Yes, he was.

Let’s now look carefully at the key passages. Is Truman making a statement about Jews, or is he making a statement about what power seems to do to all people? Well, some of both. Grating that his comparison with Hitler and even Stalin was pretty over the top, Truman first says that Jews have no sense of proportion or judgment on world affairs. This might well have been true under the circumstances in July 1947: What sentient adult Jew at the time did not feel at least a little bit unbalanced, with the blood and ashes of European Jewry not yet settled and a deeply frightening war brewing in Palestine? But Truman is not talking about what sets Jews apart from others—a key aspect of anti-Semitism—but rather what makes them the same as all others. Truman is merely asserting that, in this respect anyway, Jews are just like everyone else. Truman made a perfectly non-Jewcentric remark, ample evidence for which resides throughout much of Jewish history. But Foxman saw the reverse: anti-Semitism. And unlike a private diary, he shouted it out loud in an institutional statement and then in a newspaper.

This makes Foxman the kind of Professional Jew that pisses off Presidents (George H.W. Bush, for example), Secretaries of State (James Baker, for example), and other usually well-meaning high-placed people—even friends. This sort of thing may play well to the ADL professional crowd, but it is broadly counterproductive to American Jewry and to Israel. Look at the reality back in 1947: Truman sympathized with the Jews, with Zionism and with what would soon become Israel, and he acted boldly on those sympathies. But some Jews managed to irritate him all the same.

The obvious point is that it is possible to push a friendship so far as to jeopardize it. Today’s “extreme Zionists” have made an art out of it, particularly those who seem unaware that the standard crass, abrasive and cocky demeanor common among New Yorkers is not the national norm. The quickest and most reliable way to turn a harmless, more or less neutral observer into an anti-Israel zealot is to accuse him of bias where there is none. And the quickest way to make a hero out of someone like Patrick Buchanan is to shove the equivalent of nouveau riche political power into the faces of powerful people.

*****

Why do Abe Foxman and leaders of some other secular Jewish advocacy organizations do counterproductive things like this? To answer this question we need to take a small step back to set the context.

The reasons that major Jewish-American organizations exist today are several, and the distinctions among organizations and their rationales are important to get straight. Some organizations, like the American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Hebrew Immigration and Aid Society (HIAS), Friends of Hadassah and others exist to do good works in the United States and worldwide. It is not unreasonable for Jews to want to maximize specifically Jewish philanthropy. Such service groups embody the rabbinic principle that all Jews are responsible for each other, wherever they may be: “Kol yisrael areyvim zeh ba-zeh” (Babylonian Talmud, Shavuot, 39a). So deeply embedded is this principle that the only country in the world today that ranks higher than the United States in per capita charitable giving is Israel.

Jewish-American service groups differ, however, from those, like the ADL, that advocate on high-profile political issues such as separation of church and state, abortion and a host of foreign policy issues. The reasons why these groups still exist today are more complex and have rather little to do with Talmudic principles.

American Jews used to feel they needed special help to attain the first-class citizenship that was their legal due. America was a far more hospital place for Jews, even in the 19^th century, than most other places, but there was still plenty of social ostracism and some outright bigotry to boot. When B‘nai B‘rith and later the ADL came into existence, there really was anti-Semitism in America and good reason to lobby against it. There was about as much sense in what the ADL did in its founding era as there was in what the NAACP did. Until fairly recently Jews have not felt they had a level playing field on which to compete in the United States. “Recently” in this case has a specific definition: 1964–65.

Everyone “knows” that the Civil Rights Act was not about Jews but about Negroes, as the term used at the time read. And that’s true. But what everyone does not know is that the change in the law, and how the courts interpreted the law, had a vast impact on Jewish social status and achievement in America. Old restrictions against Jews, whether at Ivy League universities or in professional associations, became illegal. They were literally actionable in court. Decades-old constraints fell rapidly, and Jews advanced rapidly as they did. The supposedly old joke—“What’s the difference between a Jewish peddler and a Jewish nuclear physicist? One generation.”—isn’t really so old: It has been fully true in America for only the past forty-some years.

It is an open question how much envy or resentment there is of Jewish success in America. Not much, probably. Jewish success is far more admired than resented in a society that values success as an emblem of virtue as much as of luck. Those who do resent it either reside at the lower echelons of American society, where denizens resent not just Jewish success but everyone else’s as well; or among the déclassé, the classic carriers of resentments large and small. But resentment of Jewish success, to the modest extent it exists, isn’t the same as genuine anti-Semitism, which is very scarce in the United States today. The ADL, however, does not agree. In 1992, for example, the ADL claimed, on the basis of what it called a nationwide survey, that nearly forty million Americans—one in five adults—expressed strong anti-Semitic views (See Sue Fishkoff, “Survey Finds One in Five Americans holds ‘Strongly Antisemitic Opinions’”, Philadelphia Jewish Exponent, November 17, 1992). This was and remains utter nonsense.

Even more bizarre, Foxman claimed in his 2003 book Never Again? that high rates of Jewish assimilation were being caused by anti-Semitic discrimination, not by the faux-Judaism that substitutes the State of Israel for God and Holocaust memorials for the siddur (i.e., the traditional Jewish prayer book). If ADL leaders really believe this stuff, they are paranoid. If they don’t believe it, but find it useful to say anyway, they are dishonest. No other construction for such views is possible.

Of course, no organization, Jewish or otherwise, wants to close up shop even if its raison d’être has disappeared. That’s as true of the World Bank as it is of the ADL. What the ADL was originally set up to do no longer requires doing; the ADL, however, does it anyway. It often fundraises for what has been recently an annual $50 million budget through what can only be described as anti-Semitism scaremongering. It finds anti-Semitism where it does not exist because it needs to. As an organization it is an anti-anti-Semitic hammer, and so it sees, or chooses to see, only anti-Semitic nails.

Any American Jew who is honest about the community’s problems knows that anti-Semitism is not the number one issue; extraordinary and accelerating rates of assimilation are. The reasons for those rates have nothing to do with anti-Semitism, but plenty to do with the dwindling of religious education and observance in American Jewish families and the substitution of a kind of Jewish ideology based on the Holocaust and an ideal, dreamlike image of Israel for Judaism. That ideology is simply not transmissible generation to generation in the same way that genuine Judaism has been, particularly insofar as it focuses on tragedy, mass murder and presumptions of widespread anti-Jewish hatred. What healthy kid would embrace such a nightmarish vision?

But the ADL and other, similarly oriented organizations, feel something between uncomfortable and ambivalent trying to raise money on behalf of Jewish education, say, despite the fact that American Jewish fundraising for Israel has long since become kind of ridiculous. Just as Israel became more important for American Jews as a symbol of their identity—and here were talking about the period from the late 1960s and forward—the objective importance of American Jewish help for Israel declined. Israel today is far more important to American Jewry than American Jewry is to Israel. Hence the shock to the system of secular Jewish-Americans working on behalf of Israel when, twenty years after the Six-Day War, some prominent Israelis—Yossi Beilin among them—told them to keep their money at home and use it instead to educate their own children.

And it fell in part to Hirsh Goodman, then editor of The Jerusalem Report, to explain to American Jews how paltry their UJA contributions were in the context of Israel’s thriving economy. When American Jews buy Israeli bonds, he explained, they cost Israel in bureaucratic expenses more than the investment is worth. Goodman quoted a senior official of the Israeli Treasury Ministry, “If these people really love Israel, they should know that probably the last thing they should do is buy Israeli bonds.” When Goodman tried to suggest that American Jewish organizations raise money instead for Jewish education to stem the tide of assimilation and intermarriage, here is what he was told: “Do you really think we could raise a dime for Jewish education? . . . Go tell Haim Shmerl that you want a pledge for Jewish continuity and you’ll see the money go to the local golf course. We need Israel, even if Israel does not need us” (Hirsh Goodman, “The Real Threat”, Jerusalem Report, September 23, 1993).

Alas, there’s another reason, too. Dealing with assimilation means being forthright about its causes, but many of the elite within secular Jewish advocacy organizations are themselves implicated in those causes. It’s awkward for those who have not done what is necessary to educate and be good Jewish role models for their children to lecture or try to raise money from others on those grounds. Such people heaved private sighs of relief over the supposed recrudescence of anti-Semitism because that, anyway, is a problem they know something about, and a problem that doesn’t roil their kishkes (a Slavic-origin Yiddish word meaning “guts”, for those in need of a translation).

*****

I wonder if Chuck Hagel understands all this, really grasps the dense, dank and convoluted backstory behind Abe Foxman’s most recent fulmination. It would be extraordinary if he did. In my few personal encounters with the Senator, he has seemed to be a reasonably normal fellow from Nebraska, hence not someone you would expect to be expert or even much interested in the historical neuroses of a certain long-wandering Near Eastern tribe.

Aaron David Miller understands it, however. When I saw Aaron’s name taken in vain the other day over the Hagel business, I pointed it out to him. He seemed mildly irritated, which may account for the way yesterday’s New York Times read, with Aaron quoted about those old interviews, explaining that he has no beef whatsoever with Senator Hagel’s understanding of Israel and the Middle East.

Do I? Well, I don’t share Senator Hagel’s views on certain subjects, but that’s not the point. The point is actually twofold.

First, the President deserves to have in his service whatever advisers he prefers. If the President is wrongheaded about strategy or policy, he deserves to have advisers who are similarly wrongheaded. The reason could hardly be simpler: It’s the President’s policy because he is the senior ranking one of only two members of the entire Executive Branch who are elected. Everyone else serves at his pleasure. That’s the democratic system we have, and that’s how it needs to work.

Second, Chuck Hagel’s views on how to deal with Iran or Arab-Israeli conflicts would not be especially relevant were he to become Secretary of Defense. Any Secretary of Defense necessarily has his hands full managing American military assets––their creation, their husbanding, their management, and above all their use. Cabinet Secretaries do not make, or certainly should not be making, policy all by themselves. If the President decides when all is said and done that U.S. military force should be used to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapons breakout, Chuck Hagel’s former (necessarily unevolved) statements on the matter won’t stop him.

Insofar as Senator Hagel has said things in the past relevant to defense, he did say that he thought that the Defense Department was bloated from many successive years of large budget hikes. Amazingly, some people took umbrage at that remark, but anyone who thinks it’s not true can’t possibly have his or her head screwed on straight. Spending on defense and intelligence has about doubled in real terms in the past decade. No organization can spend that much onrushing money wisely.

Obviously, there are intelligent and not-so-intelligent ways to deal with the bloat, and a massive and sudden $500 billion sequestration is definitely the wrong way to go about this sort of thing. We must get stronger even as we get leaner, and we can do that with strong leadership that knows to head off parochial bureaucratic selfishness among the uniformed services. Here, too, Hagel is not alone. When I talked with Brent Scowcroft a few years ago about the coming age of austerity for foreign and defense policy, he said more or less the same thing. Were he a few years younger, does anybody think that General Scowcroft couldn’t be an effective Secretary of Defense, just because he once said that the Defense Department needs to learn to do more with less?

Is Chuck Hagel the best choice to run the Pentagon? Maybe, maybe not. He has successful business experience, and he served in uniform in Vietnam. But he has no experience running an organization as massive as Defense. Nor has he served in any other senior capacity in the department (as has, for example, Ashton Carter), an experience that at least would have given him a valuable intuitive sense of how the place works. But there is usually no perfect candidate for this job.

Again, all of this is somewhat beside the point. If the President nominates him, the Senate should confirm him. If his nomination hearings were to become contentious on the basis of Senator Hagel’s policy views that have little to do with his prospective responsibilities, it would be a Jewcentric shame. We’re already in a situation ripe with harm. If the President now declines to nominate Senator Hagel, it will appear to many that his nomination was derailed by the so-called Jewish Lobby, a euphemism for what is construed to be a more or less monolithic Jewish view—this despite the fact that the American Jewish community in no way elected or endorsed the leadership of any secular Jewish advocacy organization. That will only embolden the tactics we’ve seen again in recent days, as, perhaps, the derailment of Chas Freeman’s nomination to head the National Intelligence Council back in March 2009 may have encouraged the current anti-Hagel effort.

Worse, whether contentious hearings derail or fail to derail Chuck Hagel’s route to the Pentagon, it would add to an unfortunate pattern that, one day, could backfire on both American Jewry and Israel. As Ben Shahn once said, “You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.” It is one thing to state a case, offer a point of view, deign to speak truth to power; doing so is both commendable and a right in a free society. (I’m availing myself of that right now.) But coordinated campaigns of verbal intimidation breed resentment, and resentment accumulated within men can break forth as spite in forms of payback that are by no means limited to the merely verbal.