White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Fighting the Socialist Straw Man

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Don’t look now, but there’s a monster hiding in the attic; or is it crouching behind the garden wall? Maybe it’s lurking with a troll under the bridge? There are a growing number of Americans who think that socialism is a threat to our free-market economy.

 

Now, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says it will commit millions dollars—maybe as much as $100 million–to a long-term campaign to teach the verities of capitalism and free markets.

 

“Supporters and critics alike agree that capitalism is at a crossroads,” said U.S. Chamber President and CEO Thomas J. Donohue, “It’s time to remind all Americans that it was a free enterprise system based on the values of individual initiative, hard work, risk, innovation, and profit that built our great country. We must take immediate action to reaffirm the spirit of enterprise in America.”

 

In his statement, Donohue did not mention socialism; but the implication is that it is coming in with the policies of the Obama administration.

 

Indeed, President Obama has not been squeamish about government intervention in the market. The economic stimulus package, the bailout of the banks, General Motors and possibly some states, the wishful “green”energy bill on Capitol Hill, and, front and center, health care reform all add up to a fear by many Americans that the United States is headed toward European-style democratic socialism.

 

The U.S. Chamber’s “Campaign for Free Enterprise” will feature a grass-roots movement, a “vigorous” media and public education campaign, focusing on the “economic literacy of younger Americans,” and issue-advocacy program, leading up to the 2010 elections and, of course, lobbying. It reflects a deep concern by the board of the chamber that the country really is heading down the path of Euro-socialism.

 

This concern begs the question: Is that so bad?

 

Putting aside those who think Europe’s social contracts of today are a kind of Marxism redux (they are not), what are the fears? Mostly, Europeans like their system and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development finds the countries of western Europe out-score the United States in terms of national happiness. The socialized service most feared in the United States,

nationalized medicine, is both criticized, particularly in the United Kingdom and Italy, and loved. No politicians dare suggest privatizing it. The same goes for subsidized and pervasive public transportation,

 

The real problem for Europe is rigidity. Business has no freedom to act, and successive governments have mortgaged themselves to public service unions in country after country.

 

Margaret Thatcher loosened some of those bonds in Britain; but compared to the United States, business is still shackled in a way that would be hard to swallow here. Particularly, the American employment model is at odds with the European one. U.S. employment law is built on the concept of employment “at will.” In Britain, and most of the rest of western Europe, a fired employee can drag the employer before a labor tribunal and force an arbitration that usually will side with the worker.

 

This may be noble in concept, but it is devastating in reality. Even in good times, employers fear increasing payrolls. So permanent jobs are treated as temporary, and contract employees are favored over regular ones to protect employers from the rigors of hiring.

 

European governments do try to fix everything, and pass laws and rules to implement the fixes. I have heard social workers complain that they have to tell people who rip off the system how to do it more efficiently. In Britain, welfare, unemployment insurance, and other welfare-state handouts are known as “benefit”–and it can work like an annuity, especially in disability cases. I have heard British social workers complain that they feel complicit in abusing the system.

 

In Scandinavia the father, as well as the mother, can get a year of maternity leave, The “coddled society,” you might say. Yet as Harold Meyerson, a declared liberal, writes in The Washington Post, conservative parties embrace most of the same goals as the left-of-center ones.

 

Certainly cradle-to-grave Euro-socialism is expensive. It also stifles the business dynamic; business just has so much more to overcome to succeed and to survive in Europe. If you want to start a business, better do it in the United States. But if you want your opera produced, try Europe. Good and bad things come in the European package.

 

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce will get something for its efforts and its money if it admits that the door to more government was opened not by incipient socialists but by the excesses of capital managers, and that the threat to American business is wrong regulation not regulation itself. The specter of socialism in the U.S. context is a political device to frighten the gullible. –For Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Right-Wing Publishing: Musical Chairs

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Word is out that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is on the verge of selling its conservative political magazine, The Weekly Standard, to the publishing company owned by billionaire Philip Anschutz. If the deal goes through, it does not bode well for The Standard, founded and edited by William Kristol and Fred Barnes.

More than any other conservative paper, The Standard has been able to find and develop new and original talent.

The list of writers of real ability who have passed through the portals of The Standard, located on 17th Street in Northwest Washington, includes David Brooks of The New York Times; broadcaster and writer Tucker Carlson; and Christopher Caldwell, Matt Labash and Matt Continetti, who still write for the magazine.

By comparison Anschutz’s current Washington property, The Examiner, a free daily newspaper, is home to some old standards like Michael Barone, Byron York and Mark Tapscott, who came to the paper from The Heritage Foundation. No one pioneering or fresh. The Examiner is the exemplar of your father’s conservatism.

But worse, leaving aside the politics, which is why The Examiner and The Standard exist, is the basic newspapering of The Examiner. It needs work–just to make it more of a plausible newspaper. The headlines are too small. It covers national politics, but in all other respects, it is a local newspaper with wobbly news judgment.

If any of these weaknesses are to infect The Standard, an important voice of erudite conservatism will be lost. Scintillating new writers will not get a start. Bashing liberals is not enough.

At 10th birthday party for The Standard (founded it in 1995, when Irwin Stelzer, a News Corp adviser, persuaded Murdoch `that the United States needed a magazine of opinion and literary comment like the venerable Spectator in England), Brooks said The Standard was a magazine conceived to serve a government in power not to whine in opposition, which by implication is what Human Events, The American Spectator and National Review do. Even in opposition, it has kept its optimistic tenor and its book reviewing is of a high order.

Sadly, The Standard has never been able to totally learn from its English cousin. American conservatives want just conservative views in their political magazines, not the occasional piece of amusing heresy.

There is a third player is Washington conservative journalism: The Washington Times, a respectable daily with a definite rightward slant, sometimes in its coverage as well as on its opinion pages. It is the home to old-line conservative writers and some liberal ones, including Pat Buchanan and Larry Kudlow on the right, and Nat Hentoff and Clarence Page on the center-left.

The quality of the newspaper craft in The Times dwarfs The Examiner. But those two papers and The Standard are the toy things of rich men with a political point of view. The Times is owned by the Unification Church, led by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. You could say that all three are vanity publications: They lose money, lots of it.

But this is not new. The late great New York Herald Tribune was bought by oil billionaire Jock Whitney to counter the liberal New York Times, and to save an important conservative voice in New York at a time of liberal ascendancy.

Earlier, during World War I, Max Aitken, a Canadian, bought the London Daily Express, at the behest of the Conservative Party, to keep a conservative voice in Fleet Street. The Tories were so grateful that they elevated Aitken to the Peerage, as Lord Beaverbrook. Both Beaverbrook and Tories lived to rue the day. Beaverbrook because he realized his chances of being prime minister had evaporated with the honor and the Tories because Beaverbrook was a maverick. Also, Beaverbrook soon started making money–lots of it–off his newspaper and did not have to worry about conservative orthodoxy anymore. Neither Murdoch nor Anschutz nor Moon is ever likely to make any money out of their publishing properties.

Amazing how unbusinesslike conservatives can be when it comes to defending the faith.  –for North Star Writers Group

Shut Up and Think of Something

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In early 1943, Britain’s Bomber Command had been wrestling with the thorny problem of how to breach two critical dams in the Ruhr valley, cutting electricity production and incapacitating industrial production. Taking them out was a high priority of the war cabinet and Bomber Command.

 

But the problems were daunting. The dams, the Eder and the Mohne, were heavily protected with anti-aircraft batteries, and bombing at the time lacked precision. Bomber Command knew that it had to deliver its explosives to the lower part of the dam walls, if they were to be breached.

 

The solution came from a scientist and engineer, Barnes Wallis, who watched children skipping stones on water: Drop the bombs well away from the dam walls and have them bounce to the wall, sink and explode. Simple technology to the rescue.

 

The bombs would be circular and would be rotated so they hit the water, spinning backward but with overall forward motion. Like a stone skimmed along the surface of a pond they would travel to the wall, sink and detonate at the foot of the dam.

 

The scheme was fiendishly clever and extremely dangerous. It was conceived in January 1943 and executed on May 17, 1943.

 

To avoid detection, waves of bombers flew across Holland into Germany, maintaining an altitude of 100 feet and making their runs at 60 feet above the water. Many aircraft and their crews were lost, but the Eder and Mohne were breached, wrecking havoc in the Ruhr Valley.

 

There is a lesson here in how to deal with nuclear proliferation: Call off the politicians and the commentators and send in the scientists and engineers.

 

With Iran and North Korea, the West is not only suffering huge frustration but its impotence is revealed, tempting every other aspiring nuclear power to forge ahead. Neither of the options on the table is any good at all. Sanctions don’t work and reigniting war on the Korean Peninsula by bombing North Korean nuclear installations is unpalatable. As should be further destabilizing the Middle East by bombing Iran, thus consolidating hatred of the West and pushing oil above $200-a-barrel.

 

So forget about bombing and sanctions. Bombing, even if it were to dent the nuclear development in the countries concerned, is clumsy, wrought with unintended consequences and calculated to produce years, if not centuries, of resentment.

 

Yet morally, those who are in the nuclear club are obliged to keep their awful institution small. Preemptive action is reasonable but it needs to be stealthy and, ideally, anonymous. In this case, the moral weight is on the side of intervention.

 

There are many ways of enriching uranium, which involves concentrating the fissionable isotope, uranium 235, by stripping away the dominant isotope, uranium 238. The preferred way is using gas centrifuges, which is the way Iran has chosen, To understand the technology, think of a cream churn: Rather than being filled with milk these vessels are filled with a gas, uranium hexafluoride, and spun at 1,500 revolutions a second in batteries of hundreds of centrifuges.

 

These machines have two important vulnerabilities: They are so highly engineered that supposedly a fingerprint can throw them off and initiate failure, and they consume a lot of electricity.

 

Electric systems are vulnerable to cyber-attack, if they are computer- controlled (almost certainly the case in Iran and probably not in North Korea). Iran, which is apparently working toward a highly enriched uranium weapon, is vulnerable through its centrifuges–a cyber-attack on its electricity supply, causing wild functions in voltage, could be damaging, as could harmonic resonance and vibration, if these can be delivered secretly.

 

North Korea is more problematic because they already have a weapon and it is unclear whether they stuck with their original plan to use plutonium from a Soviet-era reactor or whether, as they said, they switched to uranium enrichment. These are the two paths to making a weapon: plutonium or highly enriched uranium.

 

With North Korea–so paranoid and insecure–their vulnerability is with their delivery rockets. The West’s imperative: find a way of messing with their guidance systems. If surreptitiously their rockets could be destroyed early in flight, or redirected back towards their launch pads, the Pyongyang military might rethink their whole program.

 

Bombs skittering across the surface of German dams in 1943 point to the potency of technological solutions–and a third way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Send in the Cyber-Battalions

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Thirty years ago, I was asked to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on nuclear proliferation. Like many people asked to testify, I was blindsided by the honor of the thing; and when I came to write my testimony, like others before and since, I was limited to a litany of the woes of proliferation. There were no good answers. Now, there are technological possibilities for intruding into a proliferator’s workplace.

 

I did emphasize to the Senate the difficult moral argument involved: I told the senators that our posture was to ask the world’s lesser countries to trust us because we did not trust them. A ticklish point that–made all the more so by the inevitable appeal of a nuclear arsenal to non-entity countries.

 

But when it comes to proliferation, the nuclear club has a larger obligation: to keep itself small.

 

Every new proliferator is a threat to the world, and most likely a threat to itself. The fact is that a primitive nuclear weapon is a danger to its makers as well as to the world at large.

 

Throughout the Cold War, the United States handed safety technology to the Soviet Union, including failsafe switching and insensitive TNT. Both sides realized that an accidental detonation could lead to a hostile exchange in the confusion. It would have been world annihilation by mistake.

 

So dangerous were the earliest U.S. nuclear weapons that Fat Man and Little Boy were assembled on their flights to Japan. One has to wonder, and to worry, about the safety of North Korea’s bombs and even of Pakistan’s.

 

Thirty years ago, there was no answer to proliferation except hand-wringing and sanctions, which historically have not worked. The Iranian sanctions have been broken by Russia, China and many European countries; and the North Korean sanctions have been broken by China, which provides food and fuel to control the flood of refugees from North Korea into China.

 

So the stealthy technological option becomes imperative.

 

That possibility involves a secret, anonymous attack on the proliferator that can be confused with an earthquake or with the failure guidance systems of the proliferator’s rockets. These would appear to be design malfunctions not secret attacks. Particularly with North Korea, rocket failure will undermine its fragile sense of worth, and cause the military to think it is very vulnerable.

 

It is believed that North Korea set out to build a plutonium weapon from plutonium bred in a Russian-supplied research reactor. But North Korea apparently switched from a planned plutonium weapon to a highly enriched uranium weapon. If so, good. It is easier to disrupt uranium enrichment than the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel to extract plutonium.

 

This is also our advantage with Iran. There are many ways to enrich uranium, but three stand out: gaseous diffusion of the kind used by the United States during World War II, gas centrifuges, and the South African nozzle method. All have the same objective: to separate and concentrate uranium 235 from the more plentiful uranium 238.

 

Gas centrifuge is the most favored. It is what the Iranians are pursuing, and probably what the North Koreans are using. It is efficient, but it requires incredible engineering.

 

Think of a centrifuge as a great cream churn, except this one spins at 1,500

revolutions per second. One report says that a centrifuge can fail as a result of the imbalance produced by a single fingerprint. In order to stop a proliferator using enriched uranium, you would need either to create a huge vibration that would cause the centrifuges to fly apart or cut the electricity supply.

 

The electricity option is tempting. It is difficult to conceal a power plant and easier to disrupt its output if it is computer-controlled, as most are. If North Korea’s plants are so primitive that they are not vulnerable through computers, other vulnerabilities need exploiting.

 

Some commentators have called for war against North Korea and for the Israelis to bomb the Iranian installations. The former would bring all-out war back to the Korean Peninsula and the latter would unite the Arabs with the Iranians, incite war and starve the world of oil.

 

A better way is to surreptitiously throw science at the miscreants, disrupt the flow of electricity in Iran and the flight of rockets in North Korea.

 

Thirty years ago, we were babes in the woods about arresting nuclear proliferation. Today, we can look to the countermeasures of stealthy cyber-invasion. No bombs, please. Send in the electrons.


 

Republicans Need an English Lesson from Thatcher and Blair

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Before Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, Britain was in trouble and headed for worse. The story was told on radio news every morning. Along with the weather and the traffic reports, there was daily a list of trouble spots of a different sort: industrial action.

 

Industrial action was the euphemism of the time for strikes; most of them unofficial, all of them debilitating. The national mood was sour, the economy perilous, and Britain’s international competitiveness was slipping fast. Commentators around the world talked about “the English disease.”

 

Thatcher’s challenge was to curb the unions; but before she could do that, she had to convince a doubting nation that the unions could become, or be made, responsible. Over the years, the unions had amassed quite extraordinary power that reached into lives of people who had never thought they were affected by unions.

 

Union excess was everywhere but because the British believed in the importance of unions, their strengths and excesses were taken as the necessary price for the fundamental right of collective bargaining.

 

The Labor Party derived much of its support and financing from the union movement. They were structurally entwined: The unions represented the core, or the “base,” of the party. Unfortunately for Labor, the base was toxic and threatened the health of the economy and, as the election of 1979 showed, the electability of the party.

 

Thatcher, though hard to love, did three enormous things for Britain. She restored the primacy of the free market, curbed union excess and, ironically, saved the Labor Party. Thatcher’s changes made it possible for what was to be called New Labor to modify its relations with its trade union base. The politicians got back the politics, which had been progressively assumed by union bosses of the base.

 

The British experience is redolent with lessons for the Republican Party. The “base,” represented by the aggressive broadcasters like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham, is goading the party in Congress to adopt positions that satisfy them, but not the electorate.

 

Building on the new reality created by Thatcher’s Conservatives, Tony Blair and his political brain, Peter Mandelson, were able to discipline or silence the trade unions in the Labor Party and present an alternative to the Conservatives that could plunder the best ideas of the right. When nobody was looking, Blair must have thanked God for Thatcher.

 

The agony of the Republicans is clearly on display with the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court: To oppose her blindly is to kiss off millions of Hispanic voters, maybe for generations. The party clearly had no strategy to deal with a candidate like Sotamayor. None.

 

The far right came out with, well, with an old argument: She is a liberal activist. Not much evidence of that, but the conservative talk-show hosts were ready for war. The last war. Or the one before that.

 

More damaging to serious Republicans has been the conversion, almost entirely on Fox, of respected Republican philosophers into political Vaudevillians. Enter, center stage, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee and Karl Rove. Their collective TV antics are damaging to the movement they once led.

 

A lot of good thinking about the future of the Republican Party is taking place in the think tanks, particularly the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. But the solid work of restructuring the party for the new realities at home and abroad is drowned out by the eponymous broadcast wing of the party.

 

It is hard to believe that Newt Gingrich, broadcaster, is the same Newt Gingrich who masterminded the 1994 Republican midterm sweep. Or that Karl Rove was the genius who saw that George W. Bush could be presented as a convincing presidential candidate.

 

Absent any possibility of reform of the Republican base from the outside, in the Thatcher way, it has to come from the inside. Several astute conservative writers, like David Frum and Mickey Edwards, have lighted a path. A first step down that path could be a more even-handed examination of President Obama’s Supreme Court picks. He could have as many as four of them in his first term. Clearly he has an eye to the electorate, as much as to jurisprudence, if Sotomayor is a harbinger.

 

Thatcher built herself an entirely new base. Blair dismantled an old one. The Republicans need to examine both.

 

 

The Supremes Have It Made

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Oh, to be a federal judge, a lifetime judge. Ah, to interpret the U.S. Constitution for lawmakers or to have the unbridled joy of deciding what Congress meant without being able to ask it.

It is delightful to be on the federal bench and divine to be on the Supreme Court, where you can play mind games and search for writers’ clues hidden in the 222-year-old Constitution. It is the treasure hunt that never ends. More: You can look at plain words–such as those in the Second Amendment—and, depending on your personal interests, opine on what they mean with two radically different interpretations.

You can also stir things up by interpreting what your predecessors had already interpreted. Stare decisis et non quieta mouvere (settled law)? That is just what they tell the kids in law school. The pranksters on the highest court in the land will have none of it. Hence, Roe v. Wade hangs in the balance all the time. No stare decisis there.

Can anything be as much fun as deciding what a group of, albeit exceptional and erudite, 18th-century white men thought about the Internet? Talk about trivial pursuit. But it is not trivial; it can reshape the country. As each term approaches, fancy contemplating how much fun it would be to rearrange history by persuading just four of your fellow justices.

But that is not all. Working conditions are pretty nice. You cannot be fired. The pay is good. There is no mandatory retirement. All heavy lifting, from your suitcase to a weighty opinion, can be delegated to those too-eager clerks. The little buggers plan to make millions on the strength of clerking for you. Make them work for it, whether it is picking up your laundry or redefining the rights of the press.

But that is still not all. As an added bonus, the evidence suggests you will live a long time. After all, there is no strain. You are treated with unctuous deference. Even if you are so gaga you cannot tell one colleague from another, a thousand law schools will hang on your ramblings. Clerks will write opinions for you based on what they think you said. Deferential colleagues will try to side with you, even if they think you’re full of it.

And do not forget the sheer exhilaration of writing a minority opinion. You can really let off steam in those. It is the next best thing to talk radio for venting, and it has a much greater impact. Just savor the shock on your colleagues’ faces when you turn against them and, quoting you smartest clerk, you tell them what the Founders meant.

You have enjoyed the reality television show “Survivor.” Well, that is what life on the court can be like–with the additional pleasure that you can’t be voted off, canceled or bitten by a poisonous snake.

The greatest pleasure of all, though, is to go against the constituency that endorsed you. From Earl Warren to David Souter, this fun has been intense. Appointing a justice is a crap shoot: Like Henry II appointing Thomas Becket to be Archbishop of Canterbury, high perfidy is possible.

In recent years, things have been changing for the justices: more women and minorities have joined the all-white-male rumpus room. This change to a representative court brings up issues we should be informed about. Have the Great Ones had to clean up their language, or put down the seat on the highest legal throne in the land? Does Clarence Thomas speak without being spoken to? Does Antonin Scalia smirk in private as well as in public? And does John Paul Stevens remember when he was born?

However democratic we try to be, when presidents nominate someone for the highest court in the land, they create a demigod, beyond the reach of politicians and their jackals, journalists. They enter their own Pantheon, as sanctified and superior as the gods of ancient Rome who were given, like the Supreme Court, a marble temple, courtesy of the Emperor Hadrian.

 

 

 

 

 

Letter to the Site

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Hello, young man (I’m 90). I was listening to your reaction [on Sirius XM Radio, Channels 110 and 130] to the diatribe against you, when you evidently said something favorable about socialism.

Let me tell you about my experience with socialism in the late-1930s, when the sawmill shut down in our town in north Idaho.

Since no jobs were to be had in the private sector, I joined the CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps]: a socialistic project.

In my home state of Washington, before the Grand Coulee Dam was built, central Washington was inhabited by nothing but sagebrush, jackrabbits and rattlesnakes. The result of that socialistic project caused central Washington to bloom like the Garden of Eden.

I’m now on Medicare: another socialistic project. Enough said.

JERRY KESSLER via e-mail

Eiffel and Ferris, Engineers of Joy

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With so much talk of infrastructure renewal, a case needs to be made for a few new toys for grownups of the kind that enliven London today, and once enlivened cities and nations.

 

Time was when you wanted to get your city spruced up, you held a world’s fair. All through the19th century and well into the 20th century, the legacy of world’s fairs was that they left permanent attractions for the public to enjoy long after the gates had closed.

London’s fair of 1851 left behind the glorious Crystal Palace, which sadly burned down in 1936.But the idea was sowed for the two legacies that outlasted all the other world’s fairs: Gustave Eiffel’s tower for the Paris Exhibition of 1889 and George Ferris’s wheel for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. Both men were great bridge builders and enormously gifted engineers.

Eiffel, who originally wanted to build his tower for an exhibition in Spain but was rejected, faced limitless criticism. Architects, authors, journalists and poets formed a common front against the tower. They said it would destroy the beauty of Paris; it was ugly and dangerous; and, of course, it was too expensive.

Supposedly the writer Guy de Maupassant ate his lunch in the tower every day after it went up, so that he did not have to look at the “high and skinny pyramid of iron ladders.” Eiffel built himself an apartment at the top of the tower, and threw lavish parties there.

Today the Eiffel Tower is the symbol of Paris, and the most popular tourist attraction in the world.

When it became clear that the organizers of the Chicago exhibition were having trouble in coming up with a spectacular structure of their own, Eiffel, whose ego matched the height of the tower, offered to help them out. But the planners could not face the humiliation of bringing in a Frenchman to save the day.

Luckily for them Ferris, who was attending an engineering meeting where the lack of a project was lamented, sketched a passenger wheel on a napkin and the day was saved. Ferris’s original wheel did not survive, but countless Ferris Wheels have enhanced public entertainment ever since.

The London Eye, which opened on the South Bank of the Thames River in 2000, as part of the millennium celebrations (it is also known as the Millennium Wheel), is the most popular tourist attraction in Britain. Take another bow, George Ferris.

The Eye, designed by David Marks and Julia Barfield, a husband and wife architect team, was briefly the largest passenger wheel in the world. But Singapore and the eastern Chinese city of Nanchang rushed to build bigger wheels. However, the Eye is the largest cantilevered wheel–which means, like a windmill, it is supported only on one side–and this is what makes it so elegant.

World’s fairs are a thing of the past in the age of television, and the fact is their legacy has not always been as great the legacies from Chicago and Paris. The 1964 World’s Fair left behind nothing special in Flushing Meadow, N.Y. Its Unisphere still stands, but it is not a big attraction. Likewise, nothing spectacular remains from the 1967world’s fair in Montreal. And the Space Needle in Seattle is a local rather than a national attraction.

The message is that people want beauty, but also participation; a wheel to ride on, a tower to ascend.

When it comes to toys for millions, London stands front and center–and is even a little egocentric. Those buses! Those taxis! Where else? Recent additions to the public amusements of London, besides the Eye, the foot bridge over the Thames River, dubbed the Wobbly Bridge; the New Tate art gallery in the old Battersea power station; new subways and a revived St. Pancras railway station, which is even grander than it was in its Victorian heyday.

Not all of London’s attractions required public money. The Eye was largely funded by British Airways and is operated by the people who run Madame Tussauds.

Once, London ruled much of the world. Now, it beckons it. In America, we are losing the race for public fun–and profit. –For Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

British Socialist Idealism and Pakistan’s Road to Ruin

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You can blame the mess that is Pakistan on an excess of liberal idealism in London after World War II. When the Labor Party under Clement Atlee trounced Churchill’s Conservatives, it came into power with an agenda of idealistic socialism that was to have consequences down through the decades.

 

At home this socialist administration planned for national insurance in health and pensions, which Churchill supported, and for an almost immediate British withdrawal from India, which he vehemently opposed.

 

India was already far along toward some kind of independence by the outbreak of World War II. The manner of Britain’s going was more the issue than that it would happen. The speed and the nature of the withdrawal are debated to this day, as is the rough partition of British India into India and West and East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.

 

In the end the withdrawal was swift, ill thought out, and led to enormous loss of life: an immediate slaughter of more than a million people in religious violence. If you add the deaths in the 1965 and 1971 wars, the toll rises by more millions, especially when you count in the endless violence over the disputed territory of Kashmir.

 

There were many weaknesses in the British withdrawal, including the absurd idea of two Pakistans separated by India. Pakistan was an idea supported by Muslim leaders going back to the 19th century, but the creation of a modern country based solely on religion had yet to be tested.

 

Where the socialist idealists in Britain failed was in realizing that the industrial and entrepreneurial heart of British India (The Raj) lay not in the poor Muslim areas but in the more sophisticated cities of India, with its diversity of languages and religions–even though Hinduism dominated.

 

What is now Pakistan was poor, feudal, corrupt and torn between the two sects of Islam, Sunni and Shia.

 

Pakistan might have been left to stew, if it had not been for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, coupled with the Indian championing of regimes hostile to the United States. Through this support of the unaligned movement (a bunch of troublemakers like Cuba and Tanzania), India thought it could play the United States against the Soviet Union. All it did was to accelerate the U.S. tilt to its unstable neighbor, Pakistan.

 

The Soviet incursion into Afghanistan lured the United States deeply into the region. Pakistan became our ally and we willfully overlooked its feudalism and corruption and, most importantly, the spread of a potent Islamic militancy, through its religious schools (madrassas). We heavily favored Pakistan, even though we knew the country was trying to build a bomb.

 

In the mid-1980s, I interviewed Gen. Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistan’s strong man. He denied Pakistan was working on a weapon, but his own detailed knowledge of bomb construction gave the lie to his protestations. I left Pakistan convinced that a nuclear weapon was in the works. What one did not know was the willingness of the rogue scientist, A.Q. Khan, to sell the technology to all comers, like North Korea and Iran.

 

This week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came to the White House briefing room to announce that the United States was committing $100 million to refugee aid in Pakistan, on top of the $60 million already committed. She also asked people to use their cell phones to dial more dollars for refugees.

 

There is irony here. It was American food aid that supported Afghan refugees and their Pakistani supporters from the tribal areas during the Soviet war in Afghanistan. I stood outside Peshawar and watched convoys of trucks with sacks of American grain heading to the refugee camps where the Taliban was incubating. When I went to those camps, beneficiaries of our food complained that it was not accompanied by enough cooking oil. American policy and food have nurtured the Taliban.

 

While India’s economy strengthens and the country celebrates 60 years of democracy, Pakistan is in chaos, fed by the ancient evils of religion and corruption.

 

In a further irony, Britain’s ill-planned withdrawal from India, in a frenzy of liberal idealism, had no effect in Britain beyond opening the door to floods of poor immigrants from Pakistan: immigrants who have vastly complicated Britain’s response to terrorism.  –For North Star Writers Group

 

 

 

 

 

The Long Shadows of the British Empire

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Corruption in Kenya? Blame it on the British and the psychological damage of colonialism. The partition of Cyprus? Step forward the social engineers in London, who underestimated the depth of feeling in the Turkish minority when the British were finally forced out.

When it comes to the Middle East, one can really get exercised about “Perfidious Albion.” The British had their fingers in every territorial dispute: They created whole countries and, with the help of the French, imposed borders from Morocco to China.

Trouble with Iran? Even before the CIA started meddling there in 1953, it was Winston Churchill who, as First Sea Lord in 1913, decided the Royal Navy would move faster, cleaner and have greater range if it switched from coal to oil. So he partially nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the forerunner of BP, to exploit the newly discovered oil fields in Iran. Later, this led to a surge in Iranian nationalism and the CIA plot to restore the Shah.

On to Pakistan and the British legacy in the autonomous tribal lands, now home to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Put the British colonial administration of the 18th to 20th centuries in the dock. Yes, three centuries of British commission and omission.

The British interest in Afghanistan, which they failed to subdue in a series of wars, was largely as a buffer between British India and the growing territorial interests of the Russian Empire. It was here that The Great Game was played: the romanticized espionage that flourished in the region. The British divided the traditional Pashtun lands with the Durand Treaty of 1893, creating a northwestern border for British India, and later Pakistan. It amounted to a land grab. However, the British did recognize the separateness of the people in the Northwest Territories and left them to their tribal and religious ways.

With independence and the partition of India in 1947, the incoming Pakistani government had enough problems without encouraging ethnic strife between the largely Punjabi Pakistanis and their difficult Pashtun brothers in the territories. So the government in Islamabad continued the British policy of benign indifference to the Pashtuns, with whom they were more closely linked by religion than ethnicity or politics.

Yet, the border dispute smoldered and periodically erupted. Kabul and Islamabad do not agree, both blaming the border drawn by the British.

What neither the British nor the Pakistanis wanted was a strong movement for a Pashtun state that would carve out territory from Afghanistan, as well as the tribal territories in Pakistan. There was a failed attempt to bring this about in 1949. Segments of the Pakistani army and the intelligentsia have feared this ever since. They are haunted by another stateless people living on both sides of a border: the Kurds who straddle the border between Iraq, a largely British creation, and Turkey and Iraq and Iran.

The message is that simply being Muslim does not wipe out tribal and ethnic identity any more than borders drawn by others create a new identity. If it were so, Cyprus would not be divided; Yugoslavia would have held together, as would have Czechoslovakia; and Britain would not be considering the possibility of an independent Scotland–after 300 years of union.

The current hostilities in the Pakistani tribal areas, U.S. drone strikes on suspected Taliban strongholds and renewed determination from the Pakistani army to crush extremists in the region could renew a sense of nationhood among the Pashtuns, and a movement toward the creation of Pashtunistan across the British-drawn border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In the long reaches of the night President Obama’s special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, may wish one of the following had happened in the days of the British Raj: 1. the British had stayed home; 2. the British had insisted the Pashtuns submit to central authority; 3. the British had created a new country, Pashtunistan; or 4. the British had never created that troublesome border.

One way or the other, he can blame the Brits.