A pundit’s rosy view of the Pax Americana

Andrew Bacevich reviews Robert Kagan’s The World America Made: Call it a hallowed tradition. To invest their views with greater authority, big thinkers—especially those given to pontificating about the course of world history—appropriate bits of wisdom penned by brand-name sages. Nothing adds ballast to an otherwise frothy argument like a pithy quotation from John Quincy Adams or George F. Kennan or Reinhold Niebuhr. In The World America Made, a slim volume of mythopoeia decked out in analytic drag, the historian and pundit Robert Kagan cites all three of those renowned figures. For real inspiration, however, he turns to a different and altogether unlikely source: Hollywood director Frank Capra. The World America Made begins and ends with Kagan urging Americans to heed the lessons of that hoariest of Christmas fantasies, It’s a Wonderful Life.

Remember Clarence, the probationary guardian angel? Clarence saves George Bailey from suicidal despair (and earns his wings) by showing George what a miserable place Bedford Falls would have been without him.

As Kagan sees it, America’s impact on history mirrors George Bailey’s impact on Bedford Falls. Thanks to the power wielded by the United States, the entire postwar era has been “a golden age for humanity.” Among the hallmarks of this golden age have been the spread of democracy, a huge reduction in world poverty, and, above all, “the absence of war among great powers.” All of this Kagan ascribes to the United States and to what he calls the “American world order.”

Accept any diminution of American preeminence and you can kiss the golden age goodbye. Just like Bedford Falls without George Bailey, the world will inevitably become a dark and miserable place. Upstart nations will “demand particular spheres of influence,” and the weakened United States will “have little choice but to retrench and cede some influence.” China, Russia, India, and others will begin flexing their expansionist muscles, with doom and gloom sure to follow. “The notion that the world could make a smooth and entirely peaceful transition” to a new order, Kagan writes, is mere “wishful thinking.”

Fortunately, none of this need come to pass if only Americans will be of good heart and heed the counsel of their own guardian angel, whose name happens to be Robert Kagan. His self-assigned mission is to prevent the United States from “committing preemptive superpower suicide out of a misplaced fear of declining power.” After all, our decline is far from inevitable. The key is to believe. Once George Bailey recovers his faith, “he solves his [firm’s] fiscal crisis and lives happily ever after.” If Americans just keep the faith, they can do likewise. [Continue reading…]

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We’re all minorities now

For the hotchpotch of Americans who are preoccupied by the odd concept of “whiteness”, July 2011 will be marked as an ominous but long anticipated turning point in this nation’s history: the Census Bureau now says that that was when non-white births for the “first time” outnumbered white births.

This might be the first time in the history of the Census Bureau although there must also have been another first time (not recorded) when white births first outnumbered those within the indigenous population, probably sometime in the mid-1700s.

The point at which this ceases to be a white dominated culture nevertheless does not appear to be near at hand. Even so, in anticipation of that event and in order to make that transition to a post-white America as unfraught as it should be, now would be a good juncture to start whittling away in earnest at the concept of a white race. Maybe by the time self-identified whites are no longer in charge we will have already discarded this ugly fabrication.

From an anthropological perspective the white race is pure fiction. We use Caucasian as a synonym for white but genetically Aasif Mandvi is just as Caucasian as Reese Witherspoon.

For those attached to the idea of an intrinsically European ethnicity, the only group who have a strong claim to such a thing are the Basques. Their ancestry is not only uniquely European but can be traced to the Cro-Magnon. Mind you, even if the Cro-Magnon qualify as the first modern humans in Europe, they didn’t originate from Europe.

And even if a tiny number of us can claim through Basque ancestry to possess a smidgen of Cro-Magnon blood, the fact remains that ultimately, without exception, our roots can all be traced to Africa.

The Associated Press reports: For the first time, racial and ethnic minorities make up more than half the children born in the U.S., capping decades of heady immigration growth that is now slowing.

New 2011 census estimates highlight sweeping changes in the nation’s racial makeup and the prolonged impact of a weak economy, which is now resulting in fewer Hispanics entering the U.S.

“This is an important landmark,” said Roderick Harrison, a former chief of racial statistics at the Census Bureau who is now a sociologist at Howard University. “This generation is growing up much more accustomed to diversity than its elders.”

The report comes as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on the legality of a strict immigration law in Arizona, with many states weighing similar get-tough measures.

“We remain in a dangerous period where those appealing to anti-immigration elements are fueling a divisiveness and hostility that might take decades to overcome,” Harrison said.

As a whole, the nation’s minority population continues to rise, following a higher-than-expected Hispanic count in the 2010 census. Minorities increased 1.9 percent to 114.1 million, or 36.6 percent of the total U.S. population, lifted by prior waves of immigration that brought in young families and boosted the number of Hispanic women in their prime childbearing years.

But a recent slowdown in the growth of the Hispanic and Asian populations is shifting notions on when the tipping point in U.S. diversity will come the time when non-Hispanic whites become a minority. After 2010 census results suggested a crossover as early as 2040, demographers now believe the pivotal moment may be pushed back several years when new projections are released in December.

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Attacks by Taliban rise in surge areas

The Wall Street Journal reports: Taliban attacks are jumping in the southern Afghan areas that were the focus of the 2010 U.S. troop surge, posing a renewed challenge to the American-led coalition that hoped to pacify the crucial region before withdrawing from the country.

Making sure the fledgling Afghan security forces will be able to hold the Taliban at bay here in Kandahar and elsewhere after most American forces pull out over the next two years is the focus of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit that begins in Chicago on Sunday.

The summit unfolds as the coalition, after saying it has reversed the Taliban’s momentum, is gradually transferring security responsibilities across the country to the Afghan troops.

Over the past two years, the farming districts of Zhari, Panjway and Maiwand northwest of Kandahar city—the cradle of the Taliban movement—were the key battlefield of the U.S.-led military campaign in southern Afghanistan. The U.S. has held up its successes in routing the Taliban there as proof that it is winning the war.

Pushed out of these rural districts by the surge, the Taliban last year concentrated on Kandahar city, ramping up their campaign of assassinating government officials. This fighting season, however, they appear to have trickled back to their old home turf.

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Israel becomes a target in Egypt’s presidential vote

Reuters reports: Israel has become a punchbag for politicians vying for votes in Egypt’s presidential race, playing on popular antipathy in Egypt towards its neighbor, but the realities of office are likely to ensure a 33-year-old peace treaty is not jeopardized.

An ex-air force commander in the race boasts of bringing down Israeli aircraft in 1973, the last of Egypt’s four wars with Israel. One Islamist often refers to Israel as the “Zionist entity”, rather than by name, and describes it as an “enemy”.

A leftist candidate pledges to support the Palestinian resistance against Israel, where officials have watched Egypt’s political turmoil with increasing wariness after the downfall of Mubarak who oversaw a cold yet stable peace.

None of the candidates want to tear up the document signed in 1979 but they repeatedly warn in rallies and debates it should be reviewed. Many of them grumble at provisions in the U.S.-brokered deal they say are biased in Israel’s favor.

Yet, beyond the bluster of the campaign trail, the next president’s in-tray will be full of more pressing issues such reviving an economy on the ropes.

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TED turns stupid

As readers here will know, I like TED talks. TED provides a great forum for lively, pithy presentations on “ideas worth spreading.”

Apparently, the organizers of TED have decided that the idea that widening income inequality is harming America is not an idea worth spreading.

National Journal reports: TED organizers invited a multimillionaire Seattle venture capitalist named Nick Hanauer – the first nonfamily investor in Amazon.com – to give a speech on March 1 at their TED University conference. Inequality was the topic – specifically, Hanauer’s contention that the middle class, and not wealthy innovators like himself, are America’s true “job creators.”

“We’ve had it backward for the last 30 years,” he said. “Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs. Rather they are a consequence of an ecosystemic feedback loop animated by middle-class consumers, and when they thrive, businesses grow and hire, and owners profit. That’s why taxing the rich to pay for investments that benefit all is a great deal for both the middle class and the rich.”

You can’t find that speech online. TED officials told Hanauer initially they were eager to distribute it. “I want to put this talk out into the world!” one of them wrote him in an e-mail in late April. But early this month they changed course, telling Hanauer that his remarks were too “political” and too controversial for posting.

Not only was this decision dumb — it was also bizarre.

Just six months ago TED posted Richard Wilkinson’s talk: “How economic inequality harms societies.”

Wilkinson is the co-author of The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger which documents in great detail how inequality worsens social problems and equality promotes social health — ideas worth spreading in 2011 but not 2012?

Hopefully TED will review their decision on Hanauer’s talk and acknowledge that what they did was dumb — that would be the smart thing to do. After all, Hanauer just appeared on Charlie Rose and he’s been on NPR, neither of which can be described as venues for political radicalism.

Hanauer was interviewed on NPR’s Weekend Edition in December:

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Who is delegitimizing Israel?

A recent poll conducted by the University of Maryland in which 24,090 citizens across 22 countries were interviewed, revealed that around the world Israel is viewed as negatively as North Korea.

Considering the fact that Israel has vastly greater opportunities and resources to promote its image than does North Korea and that the North Korean government has little apparent interest in improving its global image, Israelis should be asking themselves why they have a government that is doing such an appalling job of promoting their interests.

According to those whose job it is to represent Israel, the failure is not their own — it is the result of a powerful global movement hellbent on “delegitimizing” poor little Israel.

Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, laments:

[W]hy have anti-Israel libels once consigned to hate groups become media mainstays? How can we explain the assertion that an insidious “Israel Lobby” purchases votes in Congress, or that Israel oppresses Christians? Why is Israel’s record on gay rights dismissed as camouflage for discrimination against others?

The answer lies in the systematic delegitimization of the Jewish state. Having failed to destroy Israel by conventional arms and terrorism, Israel’s enemies alit on a subtler and more sinister tactic that hampers Israel’s ability to defend itself, even to justify its existence.

It began with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s 1974 speech to the U.N., when he received a standing ovation for equating Zionism with racism—a view the U.N. General Assembly endorsed the following year. It gained credibility on college campuses through anti-Israel courses and “Israel Apartheid Weeks.” It burgeoned through the boycott of Israeli scholars, artists and athletes, and the embargo of Israeli products. It was perpetuated by journalists who published doctored photos and false Palestinian accounts of Israeli massacres.

Israel must confront the acute dangers of delegitimization as it did armies and bombers in the past. Along with celebrating our technology, pioneering science and medicine, we need to stand by the facts of our past.

The fallacy embedded in the idea that Israel is threatened by delegitimization is that Israel does not face legitimate criticism it must answer. “There’s nothing wrong with criticizing Israel…” government officials dutifully repeat yet never acknowledge the specific ways in which Israel has a responsibility to answer its critics.

The real challenge Israel faces is that it is being defended by dissembling whiners like Oren and shrill ranters like Alan Dershowitz. The message of victimhood which they disseminate resonates only with those who already hold the same view. They utterly lack any ability to influence observers who are still in the process of weighing up the issues. Indeed, they do nothing more than present Israel as a crybaby which protests it is being treated unfairly.

Contrast these voices with those that they tar as “delegitimizers” and it becomes apparent that Israel’s image problem stems not only from Israel’s actions and political failings but the fact that among Israel’s defenders there appears to be no one who can speak with integrity.

Take note, Michael Oren, this is what integrity sounds like:

American actor, Mandy Patinkin, addressing the Peace Now conference in Tel Aviv, May 11, 2012

Anyone who is really afraid of the delegitimization of Israel should consider that Israel may face no greater threat than the one posed by its own defenders.

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Israel’s ties to MEK terrorism

NBC News reported in February: “Deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group that is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service, U.S. officials tell NBC News, confirming charges leveled by Iran’s leaders.”

Mohammad Javad Larijani, a senior aide to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, describes Israel’s role in training MEK operatives to conduct assassinations inside Iran:

Trita Parsi writes:

Exactly when Israel’s ties with the MEK were established is unclear. But by the early 1990s, as I describe in my book, a relationship was forming, though its full nature and extent remains unknown.

At the time, Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh pushed Yitzhak Rabin to signal Tehran that Israel could also play the terrorist card. Sneh argued that whenever Iran used Islamic Jihad or Hamas to blow up a bus in Jerusalem, Israel should use the MEK to respond in kind in Tehran.

But cooler heads prevailed. Rabin refrained from entering into a public relationship with the organization. But the Labor government left the door to the MEK half open: it permitted the Iranian terrorist group to use two Israeli satellites to beam their TV broadcasts into Iran.

Even the MEK’s alleged revelation of the Iranian nuclear facilities at Natanz in 2002 was based on information leaked to the organization by Israel, according to Israeli intelligence expert Ronen Bergman. Indeed, a former US State Department official told me recently that while Israel does not publicly acknowledge its ties to the MEK, Israeli officials privately tell the US that the MEK is “useful.”

All of this has fueled suspicions in DC that the current multi-million dollar lobbying campaign by the MEK to get off of the State Department’s terror list is bankrolled by Israeli sources. Dozens of former US officials have received tens and thousands of dollars in speakers’ fees from the MEK or its surrogates to speak out on their behalf. These former officials have likely violated US laws on material support to terrorist organizations, and several of them have had their records subpoenaed by the US Treasury in an ongoing investigation.

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The next money: As the big economies falter, micro-currencies rise

Eric Garland writes: People everywhere are fed up with the status quo of the economy. With the passion our official institutions show for this tepid “recovery,” many are concluding that progress will come not from the current system, which is after all what got us here in the first place, but from their own ingenuity and inventiveness. In pockets around the world, folks are declaring economic independence by starting small, local, but potentially revolutionary alternative currencies that could change not only how we buy goods and services — but how we relate to one other in society. If these micro-currencies catch on, we could be witnessing the replacement of our monocultural monetary system, which emphasizes a certain sort of free market capitalism above all else, with a variety of currencies that will represent more diverse sets of values belonging to the groups that hold them.

The next time you’re in the southside of London, you might find yourself standing next to a man purchasing his chicken tikka with pounds sterling that feature, rather than the Queen of England, David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust era. The man isn’t a counterfeiter with a love of 70s glam rock, but a resident of Brixton proudly using the Brixton Pound, a “complementary currency” meant to revitalize the famously tough London borough by encouraging people to spend their money as close to home as possible. Started in September 2009, the Brixton pound can now be used at 200 local businesses, some of which offer special deals to those who use the currency instead of plain-old pounds sterling. Not that normal British currency is useless: the Brixton pound is pegged directly to its national cousin, and all the notes in circulation are backed by sterling located at a local bank. The scheme is small in scope and totally transparent. And while the paper money is gorgeous and meaningful, it will soon be expanded to allow people to spend their Brixton pounds by text message.

Brixton is one of four “Transition Towns” in the United Kingdom — the others are Totnes, Lewes, and Stroud — currently using local currencies. The effort to energize local merchants and inspire local consumers to incorporate their values into their commerce may also be inspiring others. [Continue reading…]

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In Egypt, Mubarak’s repression machine is still alive and well

Hossam el-Hamalawy writes: A little over a week ago, in Obour City, hundreds of Egypt’s notorious Central Security Forces (CSF) conscripts mutinied over torture received at the hands of their officers. The conscripts took to the highway, blocked the road, and even started chanting a famous anti-police song composed by the Ultras White Knights, one of the country’s football fan groups. The mutiny was put down quickly by the army, together with concessions and promises offered.

This was not the first time such a mutiny has occurred since the January 2011 revolution. Several mutinies occurred on the “Friday of Anger“. The following day, I met a guy in Mohamed Mahmoud Street while marching on the interior ministry who was a CSF conscript who escaped from his camp to join the protesters. Repeated mutinies were reported in Cairo, Alexandria and elsewhere over the course of the following months, over ill treatment by officers, long working hours and bad food.

The CSF is the interior ministry’s army, and its central arm in crushing street dissent. Those conscripts are poorly paid, poorly fed, tortured, and made to do the state’s dirtiest job. The last time they undertook a full-scale mutiny was in 1986. It was brutally crushed by Mubarak who sent in the army. [Continue reading…]

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Top 10 facts you probably didn’t know about the Nakba

Yousef Munayyer writes:

1. Nakba is the Arabic word for catastrophe. It is used to describe the Palestinian loss of land and property during the depopulation of Palestine from 1947-1949 and does not refer simply to the declaration of a state of Israel.
Residents of Yaffa Pushed Into The Sea Prior to May15th, 1948

2. 212 localities depopulated and at least half of the refugees created during the Nakba were created prior to May 15th, which is, prior to the entry of armies of other Arab states. The largest Palestinian cities at the time, Yaffa and Haifa, were emptied of the vast majority of their inhabitants before May 15th, 1948. The idea that refugee creation happened only after, or only as a result of, the mobilization of Arab armies is patently false.

3. At every stage of the war, the Yishuv/Israeli forces were superior in training, equipment and numbers to the combined Arab armies.

4. The Zionists prepared extensive data collection efforts to map out intelligence relating to the Palestinian villages for a decade prior to the war. Detailed information about each village was kept including information on the number of inhabitants, the village’s resources, the potential activists that resided within it and what its political affiliations were. [Continue reading…]

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Rebel fighters build shadow state in Syria’s countryside

The Independent reports: In the rolling blue hills and lush olive groves of the north Syrian countryside, a fledgling rebel state is forming, as opponents of Bashar al-Assad’s regime attempt to take control.

The winding roads are criss-crossed with regular Free Syrian Army (FSA) checkpoints and although some are simply lines of rocks scattered across the road, others have kiosks painted with the colours of the opposition flag. Plain-clothes FSA men co-ordinate with short-wave radios, checking the roads ahead are clear and searching passing vehicles for weapons and regime forces.

“The army can’t come to here,” said Abu Mari, an FSA commander, recently returned from 30 years in exile. Driving through the streets of these villages, he receives salutes of recognition. He openly carries a gun, its butt taped with the colours of the new Syrian flag.

At the secret headquarters of the al-Haq brigade, hidden in a cave complex in the mountains, he outlined the plans for a future free zone here, modelled on the area around Benghazi in last year’s Libyan war. “First thing, we make checkpoints,” he explained. “Anyone who is working with the government, we capture him.”

“Idlib is our Benghazi,” agreed the dozen or so men slouched on the Persian carpets and cushions that lined the rocky walls and floor of the cave. A mix of army defectors and local volunteers, they’re part of a brigade of armed men. Their headquarters is equipped with a satellite dish powered by a stolen generator and routed through neighbouring Turkey. There’s satellite television and high-speed wireless internet. But it’s a long way from the Libyan safe haven protected by Nato air strikes, which was the springboard to the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi.

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