Ronald Radosh's Blog, page 21

The Obama Administration and Syria: A Situation with No Good Choices Available

The administration finally acknowledged, in a press release issued by Deputy National Security Adviser for strategic communications Ben Rhodes, that the U.S. now believes that on two occasions Assad has used the chemical agent sarin on the civilian population. So the so-called “red line” that Barack Obama said Bashar Assad would not be permitted to cross has been crossed.

Some conservatives, like Max Boot, are not happy. “That’s it?,” he writes. “No announcement of air strikes on chemical-weapons stockpiles or other government targets. No imposition of a no-fly zone. Not even an announcement that emergency shipments of arms would be rushed to the rebels.”

The result will be—as we have seen—an increased level of rhetoric, plus skimpily promised statements that we will increase arms shipments to Syrian rebels. With over 90,000 dead (more by some estimates), the ranks of those clamoring for intervention to stop the Syrian regime from more slaughter are increasing.

Perhaps if Barack Obama had acted two years ago, when Syria’s rebels were spontaneously emerging from the oppressed populace and were not dominated by radical Islamists and the ranks of al-Qaeda, it might have done some good.  Now, when to give the rebels arms means backing one group of fanatical Islamists against another, a victory for the rebels would make things no better for the Syrian people than would the victory of Assad.

This is one of the rare times I agree with the political philosopher Michael Walzer, who said in an interview with The Times of Israel that “now you have jihadi fighters on the one hand and Hezbollah on the other, and it really doesn’t look like there’s much to choose between. It’s almost impossible to describe a desirable outcome in this civil war, and if you don’t have a desirable outcome — you can’t intervene.”

Walzer’s rules for intervening should be taken seriously by the likes of John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman, who continue to advocate intervening on behalf of Assad’s opponents. Walzer argues that if the U.S. were to intervene, the following conditions should be prerequisites:

Firstly, the US must “pick a winner” and make sure he is capable of governing Syria; secondly, the US must secure Assad’s weapons arsenal and prevent it from leaking into neighboring countries; and finally the new (presumably) Sunni government must guarantee the physical safety of the country’s minorities: Alawites, Druze, Christians and Kurds.

And these conditions cannot be met simply by establishing no-fly zones. They require American and European troops, something that the American population will not support and that NATO will not back, unlike when Bill Clinton was president and the bombing campaign against the Serb government  took place to stop the slaughter of the Bosnian people by the Serbian military.

As for former President Clinton, he fired the first shot in his wife’s forthcoming presidential campaign when he told a conference organized by Senator McCain that Obama should act more forcefully to aid the anti-Assad rebels. He argued the American public elected presidents “to see down the road and to win.” Speaking at a closed event (Clinton said he did not realize his remarks were being recorded), he said Obama risked looking like a “total fool” if he listened too closely to public-opinion polls and acted too cautiously.

Balancing National Security and Civil Liberties: A Guide to the Debate

The more one learns, the harder it is to reach a conclusion on the vital issue of what trade-offs we should support when it comes to protecting our national security while keeping our civil liberties intact.

It was so much easier in the early days of the Cold War. The forces of the American Left ludicrously charged that America had gone fascist because the Truman administration had created an employee security program that set up loyalty boards to inquire whether government employees belonged to the Communist Party or any of its myriad front groups. Scores of government employees resigned to avoid being questioned, and others were dismissed after hearings.

There were abuses of the program, but one point had been made. The U.S. government did not owe anyone a job, and those who were enemies of our country had a right to be fired. The disputes were over whether or not those who were innocent were subject to dismissal only because of their opinions.

John B. Judis writes about his own FBI files at TNR.com, discussing how his public writing put him under constant surveillance by the FBI and other agencies of the government — although everything he did was public, peaceful, and protected by our constitutional rights. The intrusions he suffered, “which to this day may or may not have had something to do with my politics, certainly make me sympathetic to the rightwing groups who were barraged by inquiries from the IRS — whether or not these inquiries were directed by higher-ups in the administration.” Hence Judis worries that the government has learned little, and is targeting all citizens without real reason. As he sees it, the Cold War era has lessons for today.

In our own day and age, the issues have become far more complex. Should we support an ever-larger national-security state that allows our government to adopt programs that could, now or at some future time, impinge on our rights? Is it necessary to have the NSA meta-mine our phone and Internet data in order to find the terrorist cell that might exist or the one individual planning to do us harm?

Where do conservatives and liberals line up on this issue?

First, let us look at the libertarians. A few months ago, Rand Paul released a video explaining his fear that our country has reached the conditions spelled out in George Orwell’s classic Cold War novel 1984. Having reached this conclusion before the current brouhaha, it is not surprising that Paul has introduced legislation that would curb the NSA’s current programs. Paul speaks coherently and sincerely about his fears, and his realization that Orwell’s predictions, meant to convey the reality of totalitarianism that existed in the Soviet bloc, now speaks to our predicament. Whether he is exaggerating his conclusion is up to viewers to decide.

A more restrained and responsible argument has been made at Reason by Mike Riggs, who argues that keeping our surveillance programs totally secret negates the very power of our democracy: “In the event that they have doubts that the American people will support a program they believe is necessary to national security, they are obligated to bring that program up for debate, not classify it and hope no one finds out.”

Second, let us turn to the arguments of the defenders of the Obama administration’s program. In today’s Washington Post, Marc Thiessen develops the view that the leaks by former Booz Allen consultant Edward Snowden “are incredibly damaging to national security.” To Thiessen, the arguments of Paul and company are downright ridiculous. The NSA programs, he writes, are “lawful, constitutional and absolutely vital to protecting the country.” It is simply a matter of gaining material so that dots can be connected and a potential terrorist attack can be stopped in its tracks. Thiessen believes that it is done with a warrant, approved by a federal judge in the FISA court.

Agreeing with Thiessen is the Wall Street Journal editorial board. Criticizing “self-styled civil libertarians,” the editors argue that if the meta-mining is stopped, it is likely to harm more individual rights than if it did not exist, since the NSA is searching for algorithms and patterns, and not targeting individuals per se. As for PRISM, the other program exposed by Mr. Snowden, the editors argue that it targets only foreigners and does not impinge at all on American citizens. “What our self-styled civil libertarians should really fear,” the editors write, “is another successful terror attack like 9/11, or one with WMD.”

Also writing on its editorial page is Michael Mukasey, the U.S. attorney general from 2007 to 2009. Arguing that the data collected is neither pervasive nor unlawful, Mukasey writes that those who see the “specter of George Orwell” in the NSA programs are essentially crazy. Always yelling “1984,” Mukasey writes, these critics on both the left and right ignore the fact that we know one terrorist attack in New York City was prevented by the program. Mukasey concludes that those who think the programs are perverse and dangerous are “downright irrational.” As for Snowden and his releases, Mukasey says they indeed did real damage to our nation, since “every time we tell terrorists how we can detect them, we encourage them to find ways to avoid detection.”

Just What Does Samantha Power Believe, and Why Do Some Conservatives Support Her Appointment?

What precisely do we know about Samantha Power, the president’s new nominee for the post of ambassador to the United Nations?

I ask the question for one reason: Power, it seems, has won the support of some conservatives, as well as some friends of Israel. Judging from the numerous articles appearing in the past day or so that have fully sketched out some of her most loathsome views, the support she is receiving is more than troubling. Indeed, it is perplexing.

I suspect the favorable response to the president’s appointment comes from her reputation as a liberal interventionist who is at the forefront of supporting U.S. action when a regime abroad is moving towards genocide or a gross abuse of human rights, and when the United States in her eyes is capable of doing something to stop it. As we know, Power, who wrote a major prize-winning book about genocide, was at the forefront of those urging U.S. action against Colonel Moammar Qaddafi in Libya.

I once quipped that liberals favor humanitarian intervention and the use of American military force when human rights are being threatened and when the regime in question cannot be said to be harming basic American national security interests. On the other hand, these same liberals oppose the use of force when our interests are threatened directly, and often call advocates of U.S. military actions “imperialists” who are acting to protect the American empire.

Hence they are for intervention when it isn’t necessary, and against it when it is!

If we look back at Libya, two things are most clear. Qaddafi led a vile and oppressive regime that under his command had directly harmed the United States. But under pressure — unlike Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong-Un — he gave up his nuclear-power complex and stopped developing a nuclear arsenal. Yet, because he publicly threatened to obliterate his domestic opponents and physically destroy them, President Obama argued that the U.S. was obliged to act to depose him in order to prevent a major human rights catastrophe.

Part of his reasoning came right from Samantha Power’s arguments — particularly the one in which she asserted the argument known as “Responsibility to Protect.” As Monica Crowley writes, her doctrine states that “the U.S. has a moral responsibility to intervene anywhere there is a slaughter or the potential of slaughter (whether our strategic interests are involved or not). She successfully argued ‘R2P’ (as it’s known) and Obama led the NATO operation that helped to overthrow Moammar Qaddafi (who had not initiated an assault against his people).”

One has only to compare Obama’s actions on Libya with those he took against Assad in Syria. Except for endlessly repeating that Assad has to step down, Obama did nothing at all. Even after Assad began to kill thousands of people, the president did not act.

He acted in Libya when there was no slaughter; he did not act in Syria when there was.

Now over 80,000 have been killed, and Assad has used sarin, a poison gas. So much for Power’s policy of “humanitarian intervention.”

As for Power’s views on other critical questions, others have already gone through them and offered a rundown of what she stands for. You can find her worst statements at the Washington Free Beacon. A more extensive summary can be found in Arnold Ahlert’s article at Frontpagemag.com.

Perhaps the most famous of her views come from her 2003 article in The New Republic, in which she outlined what became the Obama policy of apologizing to the world for America’s sins. Here, Power wrote:

Some anti-Americanism derives simply from our being a colossus that bestrides the earth. This resentment may be incurable. But much anti- Americanism derives from the role U.S. political, economic, and military power has played in denying such freedoms to others.

…

U.S. foreign policy has to be rethought. It needs not tweaking but overhauling. We need: a historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored, or permitted by the United States. This would entail restoring FOIA to its pre- Bush stature, opening the files, and acknowledging the force of a mantra we have spent the last decade promoting in Guatemala, South Africa, and Yugoslavia: A country has to look back before it can move forward. Instituting a doctrine of the mea culpa would enhance our credibility by showing that American decision-makers do not endorse the sins of their predecessors

Then there are Power’s views on Israel. Calling for a major U.S. military force to be placed in Israel to enforce an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, she argued that it might be difficult, since it “might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and social import.” She obviously meant American Jews and groups like AIPAC.

A few years later, when asked about her own statement at the time, she answered: “Even I don’t understand it … it doesn’t make sense to me.” Actually, Power did obviously remember why she said that. Relatively young and very smart, Power could hardly forget.

Martin Kramer, president-elect of Shalem College in Jerusalem and a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, revealed the truth about why she made that statement. Writing in 2008, Kramer showed that Power’s disavowal of her own statement, which she attempted to say occurred because it was stated in the context of “discussing the deployment of international peacekeepers,” was meant to make it seem plausible.

Kramer reveals that at that time Power was influenced by the Canadian intellectual Michael Ignatieff. Ten days before Power called for U.S. troops to be stationed in Israel, Ignatieff had written his own op-ed titled “Why Bush must send in his troops.” That editorial, Kramer comments, “includes every trendy calumny against Israel.”

Ignatieff’s point was that the United States had to use force to get Israel to accept and to move towards a two-state solution. Powers, he concludes, shared this vision “with her closest colleague” at Harvard’s Carr Center.

His text, Kramer writes, “was exactly what Power meant.”

Memo to NBC News: Time to Fire Rev. Al Sharpton!

Do you remember Tawana Brawley? If not, you must go and watch the video co-produced by RetroReport and the New York Times. The Times starts by giving us a wrap-up of the case:

The news reports at the time, in the late 1980s, were horrific. Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old African-American girl from New York State, was said to have been abducted and repeatedly raped by six white men. She was found with “KKK” written across her chest, a racial epithet on her stomach and her hair smeared with feces. She was so traumatized, according to reports, that at the hospital she answered yes-or-no questions by blinking her eyes. Making the crime even more vile, if that were possible, she and her lawyers later claimed that two of the rapists were law enforcement officials.

Enter a relatively unknown (at the time) African-American activist named Reverend Al Sharpton. Rushing to get in touch with young Tawana, Reverend Al became her mentor, spokesman, and leader of the mass protests demanding justice for Brawley, the victim of an apparent white racist attack. In the process, Sharpton accused the police officer — who Sharpton said had actually attacked her — along with the assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case, Steven Pagones. “The evidence,” Sharpton said, proved that “an assistant district attorney and a state trooper did this.” Sharpton led mass picket lines at New York state offices, which I recall at times included the always gullible folk singer Pete Seeger.

We all know the outcome, although with this new short documentary, a new generation may be hearing about it for the first time. The Times notes: “After seven months, 6,000 pages of testimony and 180 witnesses, a grand jury found Ms. Brawley’s story to be a lie. Neither the police officer nor the district attorney accused by Ms. Brawley and Mr. Sharpton had been involved in any way, the report concluded.” It was too late for Officer Harry Crist Jr., who committed suicide because of the false accusations made against him, or for Assistant DA Pagones, whose career was ruined and whose reputation was smeared.

Writing today at The Daily Beast, Stuart Stevens calls it a “shocking reminder of the toxic mix racial exploitation and personal ambition can produce.” It should be, he writes, “required viewing for the NBC News executives who are heavily invested in rehabilitating a key culprit of this loathsome episode: the Rev. Al Sharpton.” Stevens is correct, and let me put it more boldly: It is time for MSNBC and its parent, NBC News, to fire Rev. Al Sharpton.

The Ideological Fight Ahead: Two Articles Pinpoint the Real Options We Face

Reading two recent essays, I was struck by how they put forth contesting views of the ideological struggle that lies before us. To put it plainly, the way forward is either that of a new conservative reformism, or the growth of a new American path to socialism.

The first is presented in journals like National Affairs and The New Atlantis, both affiliated with the Ethics and Public Policy Center. In thoughtful and penetrating articles, the writers in these journals address the kind of serious alternatives to liberalism and social-democracy that go beyond attacks on the current policies of the Obama administration. The case for moving our country to socialism is one presented in scores of upcoming conferences, including this one that brings together the supposedly democratic Democratic Socialists of America and the totalitarian Communist Party USA. The case is also made in many left publications, including, of course, The Nation magazine in particular, as well as in many other lesser-known vehicles. 

The first article I read is by historian Robert W. Merry, editor of The National Interest, in which he has written “The Myth of a Moderate Obama.” Merry’s article is not just a case for explicating the nature of Obama’s real agenda, it is a stark juxtaposition of the differences between a socialist or social-democratic future and one that accepts the limits of a growing entitlement state. Merry begins by stating what Obama hopes to achieve before he leaves the White House, and his statement brings to mind the president’s 2008 campaign promise that we were minutes away from attaining “the fundamental transformation” of America:

The greatest myth in American politics today is the view, perpetrated by the Democratic Left and elements of the news media, that Barack Obama is a political moderate. In truth he represents an ideology that is barely within the American mainstream as understood over two and a quarter centuries of political experience. … [His] agenda turns on a number of pivots related mostly to the size and role of government and its level of intrusiveness into the lives of Americans. If Obama has his way through the remainder of his presidency, and he thoroughly intends to, he will leave behind an American polity very different from the one he inherited.

As Merry continues, he writes of the fault line that exists:

[It] has divided those who wish to enhance and aggrandize the power of government and those who fear the abuse of unchecked governmental prerogative. Every citizen with a political consciousness stands on one side or the other of that divide. Those who want more power invested in government are liberals; those who don’t are conservatives. Thus can one determine the fundamental political outlook of his fellow citizens though this one litmus test.

Merry uses the term “liberal”; I think it more accurate to say “social-democratic” or “socialist,” since in reality, most self-proclaimed “liberals” are in fact, even if they do not realize it, already in the socialist camp. They have moved far from the old liberalism to where European leftists were decades earlier.

Merry moves through a brief history of where different administrations lay in this division, from the earliest days of our republic up to the present. As he puts it, one group shared a commitment to lower taxes, small government, and respect for the Constitution; the other favored “governmental aggrandizement,” a vast expansion of the powers of the federal government, and a larger government bureaucracy to enforce the new measures.

FDR may have been both popular and successful, but Merry singles him out for waging an “economic assault on the nation’s wealthy” and of starting the tradition of waging class warfare and encouraging populist upheaval by irresponsible rhetoric. The result, he writes, was “a new America with a much larger and more intrusive government.”

Merry argues that at present, Barack Obama seeks to build upon what FDR and Lyndon Johnson began by creating a “new era of big government,” using a new tax code as his ideological weapon and class-baiting as the tactic for gathering support. Obama Care, Dodd-Frank, and other measures vastly increase government’s reach and power, and his desire for power has bred “contempt for the legislative and judicial branches of government.” Rather than accept reality and acknowledge that our entitlement system is out of control and responsible for our plight, Obama seeks a “class-driven assault” on House Republicans which he hopes will divert the public’s attention away from any serious proposals to put a stop to growing entitlements.

The Ideological Fight Ahead: Two Articles Pinpoint the Real Alternatives we Face

Reading two recent essays, I was struck by how they put forth contesting view of the ideological struggle that lies before us. To put it boldly, the way forward is that of a new conservative reformism, or the growth of a new American path to socialism. The first is presented in journals like National Affairs and The New Atlantis, both affiliated with the Ethics and Public Policy Center. In thoughtful and penetrating articles, the writers in these journals address the kind of serious alternatives to liberalism and social-democracy that go beyond attacks on the current policies of the Obama administration. The case for moving our country to socialism is one presented in scores of upcoming conferences, including this one that brings together the supposedly democratic Democratic Socialists of America and the totalitarian Communist Party, USA. It also takes place in many left publications including of course The Nation magazine in particular, as well as many other lesser-known vehicles. 

The first article I read is by the historian Robert W. Merry, who is editor of The National Interest, in which he has written “The Myth of a Moderate Obama.” Merry’s article in not just a case for explicating the nature of Obama’s real agenda, it is a stark juxtaposition of the differences between a socialist or social-democratic future or one that accepts the limits of a growing entitlement state. Merry begins by stating what Obama hopes to achieve before he leaves the White House, and his statement brings to mind the President’s 2008 campaign promise that we were minutes away from attaining “the fundamental transformation” of America:

THE GREATEST myth in American politics today is the view, perpetrated by the Democratic Left and elements of the news media, that Barack Obama is a political moderate. In truth he represents an ideology that is barely within the American mainstream as understood over two and a quarter centuries of political experience….[His] agenda turns on a number of pivots related mostly to the size and role of government and its level of intrusiveness into the lives of Americans. If Obama has his way through the remainder of his presidency, and he thoroughly intends to, he will leave behind an American polity very different from the one he inherited.

As Merry continues, he writes that the fault line that exists  “has divided those who wish to enhance and aggrandize the power of government and those who fear the abuse of unchecked governmental prerogative. Every citizen with a political consciousness stands on one side or the other of that divide. Those who want more power invested in government are liberals; those who don’t are conservatives. Thus can one determine the fundamental political outlook of his fellow citizens though this one litmus test.”

Merry uses the term liberal, while I think it more accurate to say social-democratic or socialist, since in reality, most self-proclaimed “liberals” are in fact, even if they do not realize it, already in the socialist camp. They have moved far from the old liberalism to where European leftists were decades earlier.

Merry moves through a brief history where different administrations lay in this division, from the earliest days of our Republic up to the present.  As he puts it, one group shared a commitment to lower taxes, small government and respect for the Constitution; the other favored “governmental aggrandizement” and a vast expansion of the powers of the federal government and a larger government bureaucracy to enforce the new measures.

FDR may have been both popular and successful, but Merry singles him out for waging an “economic assault on the nation’s wealthy” and of starting the tradition of waging class warfare and encouraging populist upheaval by irresponsible rhetoric. The result, he writes, was “a new America with a much larger and more intrusive government.”

At present, Barack Obama seeks, Merry argues, to build upon what FDR and Lyndon Johnson began, by creating a “new era of big government,” using a new tax code as his ideological weapon and class baiting as the tactic for gathering support. Obama Care, Dodd-Frank and other measures vastly increase government’s reach and power, and his desire for power has bred “contempt for the legislative and judicial branches of government.” Rather than accept reality, and acknowledge that our entitlement system is out of control and responsible for our plight, Obama seeks a “class-driven assault” on House Republicans which he hopes will divert the public’s attention away from any serious proposals to put a stop to growing entitlements.

The second article is a stark contrast to that by Merry. It appears in the latest issue of The Nation , but is written the editor of the new pre-eminent journal of what its editor calls the Next Left.  That journal is Jacobin, which describes itself as a journal of “culture and polemic.” The print edition does not look like the other old dreary publications one is familiar with; rather, it is snazzy, hip and modern. Already, months ago, The New York Times ran a big feature on the editor, and the arrival of the new journal. Dedicated to “creating a magazine dedicated to bringing jargon-free neo-Marxist thinking to the masses,” the Times’ reporter proclaimed it an“ improbable hit, buoyed by the radical stirrings of the Occupy movement and a bitingly satirical but serious-minded style.”

Editor Bhaskar Sunkara’s cover article, “Letter to The Nation from a Young Radical,” subtitled “Has Liberalism Failed?” can be construed as a proposal for the future diametrically opposite to that advocated by Robert Merry. Merry, unlike those Alinskyite radicals who call themselves liberals and try to advance socialism through a stealth tactic, Sunkara is honest and up front.  He favors something like “the Russian Revolution before its degeneration into Stalinism,” a belief that reveals his ignorance that the betrayal of the Revolution was inherent in its very formation. As Richard Pipes and many others have shown, Stalinism was the direct and logical descendant of Leninism.

What irks young Mr. Sunkara is that he finds liberalism deficient and not serious; a movement “without teeth” that ignores what he thinks the time demands: structural reforms leading to real socialism. Liberalism, unlike socialism, he says, has failure “embedded deeply in its roots,” and has “no dynamic theory of power.” As for Obama, not only does Sunkara think, and would undoubtedly respond once he reads Merry’s piece, that the President’s failure is one of the liberalism he believes in, that has forgotten all the lessons its leaders once learned “from radicals in the past.”

In the fight between those he calls “welfare liberals” and “technocratic liberals,” Sunkara says both disconnect policy from politics and have not moored their programs to “the working class,” the old agent of change of classic Marxism. The welfare liberals are well-meaning, but he argues, do not take account of the crisis of the welfare state that began in the 1970’s, thus helping to undermine “the social basis for progressive politics in America.”

The Democratic Party, which many conservatives including myself see as the equivalent of Europe’s social-democratic parties, is to Sunkara is only a “social liberal” party, and definitely not “a social democratic, formation.” And without such a party, tied to the workers, he believes there cannot be a “more expansive welfare state.”

Mr. Sunkara might be presenting his ideas in a vividly new graphic form, but reading them, anyone familiar with socialist doctrine and the ideas of the early and later New Left can see immediately how retrogressive and old they are. Indeed, everything he says is packaging old ideas in a new lively looking vehicle. Like older radicals, he sees Democrats as anything but “good-faith partners with progressives.” In his eyes, they are backsliding wishy-washy politicians, geared to satisfying the middle class and the center, rather than the workers who alone can guarantee social revolution

As for the so-called technocratic liberals- he calls journalist Ezra Klein symptomatic of this group- he writes that they are “less nostalgic for the post-war Fordist compromise between a strong labor movement and growing corporations.” Thus they too favor reduced government spending and introduction of markets in place of regulation. They in his eyes have acquiesced “in the conservative consensus on welfare entitlements.” It is clear that Mr. Sunkara thinks entitlements are not only endless, but should be increased ad infinitum. What he wants is pure “working-class power and long-term progressive advance.”

What is admirable is that he believes that “Socialists would not make this mistake,” and “neither would conservatives.” He sees conservatives as ideological and organized, and praises Grover Norquist for wielding a whip that keeps his cadre in line, much like the European socialist parties do with its members. The political right, he thinks, “is generally more confident, more ideologically consistent and better organized than those who oppose it.” (Would that were so.)

So Mr. Sunkara believes it is his and his journal’s task to align the technocratic liberals with the welfare-state liberals, promoting a broad “anti-austerity coalition” forged “through actual struggle.” The left and liberals, he argues, have to unite to defend social goods, and have to stand up against “pro-corporate members of the Democratic Party like Rahm Emanuel.”  That means new tactics by public sector unions, creation of a broad movement to end restrictive labor laws and organization of the unorganized. In many ways, he is not aware how much he sounds like a Communist organizer in the late 1930’s demanding that same task and proposing a new campaign to organize the South in the post-World War II era.

Finally, Mr. Sunkara calls for creation of a “class politics” of “the Next Left,” based on an anti-austerity coalition. To prepare for that, he argues that his journal is going back to the 1960s, when “journals like Studies on the Left anticipated the upsurges that were soon to come,” while old line groups like the Socialist Party “were in terminal decline.”

At this point, I cannot help smiling. The journal he mentions, Studies on the Left, (SOL) was the intellectual organ of a group of Madison, Wisconsin radicals, of which I was a part. But that journal was anything but similar to Jacobin. It carried serious analytical articles, debates on scores of issues, historical documents, and regularly questioned old shibboleths of the Left.

Most striking is that its major editor and one of its key founders, Martin J. Sklar, along with myself, have long since reevaluated the failures of American liberalism and the forces of those who today call themselves the Left. Here, I refer readers to the latest E-book of Sklar, Letters on Obama (from the Left), in which this historian- the man who first used the term “corporate liberalism,” –concludes as reviewer Norton Wheeler writes, “that the wing of the Democratic Party that has been ascendant since, roughly, the beginning of the 21st century has become a fetter on the forces of production, adopting state-centric, low-growth policies (“capitolism”) that inhibit both general prosperity and vibrant democracy. Relatedly, he argues that the same tendency has constrained the historical role of the United States as promoter of free societies on a global scale.”

Sunkara would be wise, since he thinks he is carrying on in the tradition of SOL, to read how Sklar, like Robert Merry, concludes that Obama’s agenda harms the United States both home and abroad.

Rather than developing any really new ideas,  Bhaskar Sunkara is trying to revive old and discredited bromides in a new veneer. He calls for “a society free from class exploitation,” a true social and democratic future, “a world dramatically transformed.” Isn’t this, indeed, precisely what Barack Obama hoped for publicly in 2008? At least he is honest. He favors “a pitched battle for supremacy within the broader progressive movement.”

So let us take him up on our own terms. Conservatives and centrists much do nothing less than work to defeat the ideological agenda so fervently put forward by Mr. Sunkara. Indeed, we too have our work cut out for us.

 

Obama’s Confused and Contradictory Defense Speech

Barack Obama has given what may turn out to be his most important foreign policy speech. It certainly is, as the editors of The New York Times put it, “the most important statement on counterterrorism policy since the 2001 attacks, a momentous turning point in post-9/11 America.” But what exactly is the president’s point? What is different about this new counterterrorism policy and is it putting us on the right path going forward?

Of course, the Times editors are quite happy with it. They are pleased that it marks an end to “extraordinary acts like indefinite detention without charges and the targeted killing of terrorist suspects.” And, as you might expect, they are pleased that from now on, counterterrorism will be handled “primarily by law enforcement and the intelligence agencies.” Those of us who believe that acts of war should actually be handled differently have reason to be disappointed and worried.

No wonder that when Code Pink’s leader Medea Benjamin shouted out her protests, she was not removed and the president admonished the audience that “the voice of that woman is worth paying attention to.” Evidently, the angry Ms. Benjamin was too stupid to understand — perhaps because she was not really listening to the president, who was telling us that he was preparing to implement precisely the kind of measures that Code Pink has always proposed. As the Times editors wrote, he was “briefly stopped by a heckler from outlining the very closure [of Guantanamo] plans that she demanded.”

Obama said he was no longer going to keep the country “on a perpetual wartime footing.” In particular, he promised a new policy on the use of unmanned drones against terrorists, a policy that has over the past few years come under attack from both those on the left and the right. Drones have, for example, drawn the ire of both Rand Paul and the editors of The Nation. Others in the conservative community, such as Kenneth Anderson in Commentary magazine, have presented cogent arguments in defense of their use. As Anderson writes, “The strategy has worked far better than anyone expected. It is effective, and has rightfully assumed an indispensable place on the list of strategic elements of U.S. counterterrorism-on-offense.”

Indeed, in the period when Barack Obama increased the use of drones to a much greater level than the sparing use of them by George W. Bush, liberals remained silent and supportive, while only those like the Code Pink left-wing extremists, the Nation editors, and New York Review of Books writer David Cole yelled about it. Cole was quite pleased with the speech:

Until now, the administration has exercised the authority to order lethal drone strikes entirely in secret, without a precise or clear set of rules, and under the veil of such secrecy that it would not even acknowledge the killing of US citizens. The day before the speech, the administration revealed for the first time that it had killed four Americans with drones—only one of whom, Anwar al-Awlaki, was actually targeted. This ends the administration’s unconstitutional practice of killing citizens in secret. During the speech, moreover, President Obama announced that he has issued a Presidential Policy Guidance setting forth the substantive criteria and procedures for employing drone strikes outside active areas of combat. Although those guidelines are themselves classified, the White House issued an unclassified summary, and the rules appear to narrow the previously understood criteria for such strikes in important ways.

The problem, as Jonathan S. Tobin writes, is that the president covers all his bases, and has presented a speech in which he seeks to satisfy both critics and supporters of his old terrorism policy.  He wants an end to an “endless” war, although al-Qeda and our other opponents have not ended their war against our country. How can one side say its war is continuing, and the other simply pretend that it is not going on? It is so reminiscent of the left’s suggestion in the waning days of the Vietnam War that our leaders simply say that we have won and unilaterally withdraw.

We may actually do that now, but does anyone really think that once we leave Afghanistan, the Taliban won’t move to quickly take over that sad country and once again make it a haven for terrorists and their training camps? The president acknowledged that “our nation is still threatened by terrorists.” But he went on to argue that we are safer than we ever have been, and he repeated that al-Qaeda’s leadership has been decimated, so that now “America is at a crossroads.”

Then there is the critical question of ideology. The president said that “state-sponsored networks like Hezbollah” have engaged in acts of terror on behalf of political goals. He did not mention the state in question– Iran — or propose any measures that would effectively deal with the threat posed by the ayatollahs in control of that country, now on the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon. He seemed to suggest that “radicalized individuals here in the United States” pose a threat, without mentioning who radicalized them and the nature of the belief system that spurred them on. We all know it is radical Islam.

Again, Obama harked back to the themes of his disastrous Cairo speech, referring to “a belief by some extremists that Islam is in conflict with the United States and the West, and that violence against Western targets…is justified in pursuit of a larger cause.” The president assured the Muslim world that ideology is “based on a lie, for the United States is not at war with Islam,” and he emphasized that “the vast majority of Muslims” do not share in the radical belief.

Here, the waffling is amazing. The truth is that radical Islam (a version in fact accepted by large numbers of Muslims in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere) and its adherents are at war with the United States and the West. President Obama is correct that we are not at war with Islam, but the problem is that our leadership does not seem to comprehend that if radical Islamists are at war with us, we cannot deal with their beliefs by simply ignoring that they exist and are dangerous. And although the Islamists may be a minority of Muslims, they are not only a loud and very vocal minority, but in absolute terms they number in the hundreds of thousands. Moreover, their ideology is accurately based on their reading of the Koran, of which they can cite chapter and verse to prove that they are motivated by Islam.

So again, turning to drones, the president presented the arguments on their behalf, after assuring us he is toning down their use. So if their use is beneficial, and here Obama made arguments similar to those of conservative supporters and opposite to those of liberals like David Cole, why is he then limiting their use? The president made the case for use of drones in a strong fashion, since, as he said, “doing nothing is not an option.” In these paragraphs, it is almost a different Obama speaking than the one cited favorably by the Times editors and David Cole. Here is one of the president’s most tough and strongly stated passages, in which he defends the drone attack that killed Anwar Awlaki:

But when a U.S. citizen goes abroad to wage war against America and is actively plotting to kill U.S. citizens, and when neither the United States, nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot, his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a SWAT team.

And here is Obama’s defense of drones, and of the military action we have taken to date:

Moreover, America’s actions are legal.  We were attacked on 9/11.  Within a week, Congress overwhelmingly authorized the use of force.  Under domestic law, and international law, the United States is at war with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces.  We are at war with an organization that right now would kill as many Americans as they could if we did not stop them first.  So this is a just war — a war waged proportionally, in last resort, and in self-defense.

The above is true.  In that paragraph, the president seemed to acknowledge that others, motivated by Islamist thought, are fighting us in a real war. If that is the case, then why is he now proclaiming an end to the measures that to date have kept us safe, and promising to limit the very drones that he has argued have worked so well?  Could it be that his left-wing heart is fighting an internal battle with his own comprehension that measures he does not like have to be taken?

Finally, Obama turned to the question of freedom of the press. Here, he made  two contradictory statements. First, he said “we must keep information secret that protects our operations and our people in the field.” Thus law-breakers and leakers must be prosecuted for failing to protect classified information. Then he added that “I’m troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable.” Calling for a media shield law, he stated that “journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs.” How will he square the circle? He answered that he has raised “these issues with the Attorney General, who shares my concerns.” As we all know, Eric Holder is the very man who signed off on the DOJ’s and FBI’s investigation of Fox News journalist James Rosen, whom the FBI argued should be a co-conspirator for violating the Espionage Act of 1917!

So the president has given the nation a confused, contradictory, and sometimes powerful speech, one that each side will find things to agree with. He appears to not know which arguments he has presented he really believes in, preferring to lay them out and have us put our trust in his hands. With a president as indecisive as ever, and continuing to lead from behind, our nation is supposed to hope that all will turn out well with Obama in charge. For many of us, that is not sufficient.

When Revolution was in the Air: A Fine Movie about the 60′s New Left

“There was music in the cafés at night

And revolution in the air:”

Bob Dylan, “Tangled Up in Blue”

 

 

Finally, a movie has arrived that treats the story of the New Left honestly and in a realistic, mature manner. That film is not Robert Redford’s dreadful The Company You Keep, a paean to the Weather Underground- but the movie by the French director Oliver Assayas, Something in the Air. It takes place in various European locales in the summer of 1971, when the hopes of the European revolutionaries were shattered after the failure of 1968 to lead to revolution.  Assayas’ film covers an assorted group of European New Leftists and some American tourist counterparts, as they attempt to both get on with their lives and for some, to keep alive their crushed hopes in a period of ideological and political retreat.

Assays, who made the quintessential and powerful biographical movie Carlos about Carlos the Jackal, the Left’s most well known 70’s and 80’s terrorist, now turns his attention in particular to the plight of the young graduating high school student Gilles, played by Clement Mattayer, and his new girl friend, Christine, played by Lola Creton. Each takes different paths. Gilles is guilt ridden over his desire to become an artist and study painting instead of serving the revolution, while Christine, plagued with guilt over her bourgeois existence, opts instead to live with an older man in a revolutionary collective, and to devote herself to the task of organizing the proletariat in France and Italy. (All she does, we learn, is to shop, cook and clean for the male comrades, as well as provide sex.)

The power of Assayas’ movie is that it takes place in real time, instead of flashbacks and narrative based in the present, as aging radicals try to come to terms with their past. We see these young people facing the options in front of them, each deciding which way to turn, as they experience the pulls to go one way and the warning signs that they had better think twice before acting on their impulses.

The movie is in many ways a critique of France’s once most highly regarded leftist filmmaker, Jean-Luc Godard, who made many pretentious and preening leftist screeds in that very era. Indeed, we meet a Godard like filmmaker devoted to chronicling the revolution and spouting its message, as well as radical film collectives that screen horrendous didactic and boring documentaries for small leftist audiences, meant to encourage them to keep “making the revolution.” (The films they watch, as we learn in the end credits, were in fact real leftist documentaries of that era.) Many of them tout the “victories” of Third World revolutionaries that we now know turned out to be failures or led to new totalitarian regimes like that of Pol Pot’s Cambodia. The viewer is well aware that Pol Pot himself learned his Marxism-Leninism while studying at the Sorbonne. Similarly, we see Gilles’ high school class as his politics teacher instructs the class in the intricate dialectics of Marxism, asking the class to explain why Marx and Engels rejected the “revisionists” of their theory.

The documentary they watch takes place in Florence, and was a real film about Laos, in which the peasant army is shown marching to victory. Gilles and Christine watch the screening and the discussion afterwards, as revolutionary Italians mock the director’s leftist credentials. The dialogue of these revolutionaries is at the same time hilarious, arcane, arrogant and sad.  “Shouldn’t revolutionary cinema employ revolutionary syntax?” asks one communist audience member. The director answers: “Such a style would be a shock to the proletariat. Our role is to enlighten them.” The audience member has an answer. Wasn’t the filmmaker in fact revealing an “individualist style of the petit bourgeoisie?” The director has yet another answer. “You can’t make entertainment in revolutionary times.” Gilles has a more accurate thought, which he boldly tells the others with him. They are all “boring films” with “primitive politics.”

Assayas, in fact, has produced a film that is really about his own experience as a young radical of that era. His counterparts enthusiastically start by giving out leaflets for meaningless demonstrations, quickly graduate to vandalism and Molotov cocktails, one of which harms a school guard and ruins his life. Later they join their comrades in violent street demonstrations against the police, who since 1968, were a ubiquitous presence in the streets of Paris each summer, vigilant against any repeat of the events that almost led to the collapse of Charles de Gaulle’s government a few years earlier.

Indeed, that very summer I was in Paris, and recall the police with sub-machine guns throughout the city. Once, I was stopped in a car and asked for my passport, as the police, viewing a car with a few young men in it, decided to check us out and not take any chances. The graffiti on buildings and the revolutionary slogans and signs still had not all been taken down, and the whiff of revolution was still in the air, just as Assays portrays it.

An American New Leftist,  Leslie, played by India Salvor Menuez, who reminds one of a young Julianne Moore, captures the revolutionary posturing of a young American taking time off to live the counter-cultural and revolutionary dream in Europe. Leslie becomes the lover of an artistic French revolutionary, traveling with him to Nepal, where she and others live the adventurous life of smoking dope, having sex, and regularly getting stoned. As summer comes to an end, she has an abortion, abandons the revolution, and returns home to New York where she will finish her studies at Julliard and ready herself for a career in dance. Ever the pragmatist, she makes a classic American conclusion. She realizes that the hopes and dreams of her New Left summer friends would lead nowhere, and she chooses reality after a summer’s fling.

What is most striking is that the soundtrack of their lives was American and British rock and folk music.  Assayas’ choice is not the obvious ones; there is no Bob Dylan, although we see LP’s displayed as Gilles picks records to listen to while painting, of the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo and a blues album by Hot Tuna. We hear Mike Heron, Clive Palmer and Robin Williamson of The Incredible String Band, a highly influential 60’s group but hardly The Rolling Stones. In one sequence, at an outdoor party of the young revolutionaries, a young American New Left folksinger tourist serenades the European comrades with one of the late Phil Ochs’ most least remembered songs, which he sings in its entirety, as Leslie explains its meaning and context to the assembled listeners. (The song is actually about an individual who once blurbed one of my books.)

The film, realistically and honestly filmed, presents viewers with the choices his subjects faced as they enter adulthood. Assayas does not preach or hector. We watch, of course, from our present context, and we see a group of narcissistic, foolish yet idealistic privileged children seeking to become revolutionaries. Some give up the dream, while others perish. Rather than glamorize or eulogize these New Leftists as principled and heroic youngsters, Assayas lets us see them as they were.

Assayas himself, of course, became a filmmaker in his own right, often making movies today that confront the truth about the leftist illusions of his youth. We get a glimpse of this when Gilles picks up a book by Simon Leys, an expose of Maoist China published in the 60’s, at a time when his comrades all were singing the praises of the Cultural Revolution and extolling the virtues of Maoism. Even then, we know that Gilles future is most likely promising, since back in the day, he could read forbidden literature and glimpse the truth about what revolution really meant for those suffered to living in the society its spokesman created.

The film opened this week in Landmark theaters, and for those who have “On Demand” in their cable systems, can be rented for home viewing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why the IRS Targets Conservatives: The Apparent Reasoning Behind Their Actions

Harry S. Truman had a famous sign on his desk: “The buck stops here.” Barack Obama seems to have one that says: “I only learned about it when you did, from the television news.” This is, of course, almost exactly what Jay Carney said in his second embarrassing press conference: “We have no knowledge of phone snooping …beyond the press reports that we’ve read.” Or, as Dana Milbank writes, Obama “responded as though he were just some bloke on a bar stool, getting his information from the evening news.” If you believe this, I’ve got a nice White House in the District of Columbia to sell you.

In fact, as USA Today reports in its lead story, the IRS “gave liberals a pass.” The newspaper’s investigation concluded the following:

As applications from conservative groups sat in limbo, groups with obviously liberal names were approved in as little as nine months. With names including words like “Progress” or “Progressive,” these groups applied for the same tax status and were engaged in the same kinds of activities as the conservative groups.

The groups that easily got non-profit tax status were the exact liberal-activist counterparts of the conservative Tea Party outfits. The paper mentions specifically a few of them: “Bus for Progress,” “Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment,”  and “Progress Florida.” All were groups that worked for goals such as increasing the minimum wage, support for “progressive” politicians, and expansion of Medicaid. The USA Today report continues:

Like the Tea Party groups, the liberal groups sought recognition as social welfare groups under Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, based on activities like “citizen participation” or “voter education and registration.”

In a conference call with reporters last week, the IRS official responsible for granting tax-exempt status said that it was a mistake to subject Tea Party groups to additional scrutiny based solely on the organization’s name. But she said ideology played no part in the process.

It was simply an accident, of course. It was “not a partisan selection,” IRS official Lois Lerner told reporters. Before you laugh and ask “does she really believe her own words?” consider the following.  One must remember that many liberals and leftists see their actions as non-partisan. After all, they are only serving the public interest by stopping conservatives from organizing and expressing their views.

Reassessing Victoria Nuland’s Role in the Benghazi Cover-up: Was the CIA Trying to Set Up the State Department?

In my last column at PJM, I wrote that Jonathan Karl of ABC News held Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokesperson, and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney responsible for dissembling about Benghazi.

Now, in the Washington Post, conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin — once the D.C. bureau chief of PJ Media — casts grave doubt about Victoria Nuland’s involvement in a cover-up, and puts Nuland’s e-mail in a very different context than that put forth by Jonathan Karl of ABC News. Rubin writes: 

A summary of e-mail exchanges involving her has circulated to news outlets, and it places [Nuland], falsely, in the thick of the controversy about the talking points that U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice eventually used on the Sunday shows.

As Rubin explains, most of the people working at the State Department believed what took place at Benghazi was a terrorist attack, but that they could not publicly state that since they were awaiting confirmation from the CIA, which ran the second compound at the Benghazi consulate. 

When Nuland received another e-mail with talking points from CIA chief David Petraeus, it included points State was not allowed to make which made it seem that the agency was trying to implicate the State Department as the government agency that was ignoring warnings, rather than the CIA. Rubin is arguing that the CIA was engaged in a PR exercise meant to make it look good and was trying to cast blame for the Benghazi tragedy on the State Department. As Rubin writes:

This, by the way, gets to the heart of the matter involving Benghazi. It was primarily a CIA operation, as others have reported. If there really were warnings, why had the CIA’s station chief not been alerted? Why was its men in peril? It is not atypical for the CIA to point fingers at other agencies, but it was particularly jarring when their own personnel were victimized.

When Nuland wrote that concerns in her “building” were not being addressed, she meant only that “her department was being singled out inaccurately and unfairly by the CIA.” Rubin also stresses that all of these e-mail exchanges involved communications staff, and did not include policy-makers or high-level administration appointments at State: Rubin writes:

It is not the communications people who bear any responsibility for the scrubbing that went on over the weekend. In my own reporting, I have previously noted that Nuland studiously refused to confirm the “video made them do it” story line or the spontaneous demonstration cover story coming out of the White House. The difference between what she was saying (it’s under investigation, we don’t know, ask the White House) was noticeably different from what we heard coming from the White House, which perpetuated the video narrative again and again. 

So, please read Rubin’s post in its entirety. We can all agree, I think, on her ending. Rubin writes that Petraeus and Hillary Clinton have to be brought back to testify before Rep. Darrell Issa’s Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. It was the secretary of State herself who called on her top deputy Cheryl Mills to cover for her. I also think that Victoria Nuland should voluntarily appear to clarify her role, and to be given a chance to answer those like Jonathan Karl who made her the centerpiece of their stories.