Posts For: July 2007

Casualty Counts

07.31.2007 - 4:09 PM

Critics of the troop surge have been arguing that it isn’t making any difference on the ground—the only thing it’s doing, they claim, is driving up American casualties. The facts are starting to contradict their claims.

I’ve recently posted a couple of items noting that reliable on-the-ground observers—namely Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of The Brookings Institution and John Burns of the New York Times—have found that violence against Iraqis is falling. Now comes news that the number of American casualties is also declining, at least temporarily.

There were spikes in the number of Americans killed in action in April (104), May (126), and June (101)—up from 83 in January, 81 in February, and 81 in March. The increases were to be expected because this was the period when more American troops were arriving in Iraq, and were starting to go on the offensive against Shiite and Sunni insurgents. All along, the theory behind the surge was that while there might be a short-term spike in casualties, eventually, as the troops started to get the situation under better control, our losses would decline.

If George F. Kennan Met Osama bin Laden

Gabriel Schoenfeld 07.31.2007 - 2:28 PM

“Did George Kennan know the best way to fight terror?” is the question asked by a New York Times op-ed today. My question in return is: why is so much that appears on the op-ed page of our leading newspaper so fatuous?

In 1947, writes Nicholas Thompson, the author of a forthcoming book about Kennan, the late American strategist published his famous article in Foreign Affairs under the byline of X, setting forth the strategy of containment. The Soviet challenge, as Kennan understood it, Thompson explains, was political and not military, and it required a political not a military response: “The United States should refrain from provoking Moscow, whether through confrontation or histrionics,” Thompson paraphrases. “Patience would lead to success.”

Alas, Thompson continues, containment was massively misinterpreted and militarized by American cold warriors and turned into an instrument of aggression and bellicosity. This in turn led into the horrors of the cold war:

We soon built up our forces to defend Western Europe, created NATO and engaged in a huge arms race. Eventually containment would mean soldiers in Vietnam and thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at the Soviet Union.

Has Thompson has given us a fair summary of Kennan’s position? In Foreign Affairs, after all, Kennan offered a strategy of “firm containment designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interest of a peaceful and stable world.” It is impossible to read this as a call for pacifism or disengagement or even “patience”—try as Thompson might (and, in his later years, Kennan himself did). In fact, as I have argued in COMMENTARY, there were actually two George Kennans, the second of whom waged a life-long war against the writings of the first, grossly distorting his own ideas and the historical record along the way.

John Burns

Max Boot | @MaxBoot

07.31.2007 - 1:55 PM

Say what you will about reporters in general or the New York Times in particular: John Burns breaks all the stereotypes. As the Times’ longtime Baghdad bureau chief, he has been a fearless and honest chronicler of the war. He has presented plenty of evidence of disasters, but he isn’t afraid to highlight successes when they occur, and to warn of the dangers of American disengagement.
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Silence on Nahr al-Bared

Khaled Abu Toameh 07.31.2007 - 11:16 AM

For the past three months, a Palestinian refugee camp in the Middle East has been under attack, resulting in the death of hundreds of people and the displacement of nearly half of the camp’s 40,000 residents. Yet the United Nations Security Council has not held an emergency session to condemn the attack. Nor have the governments of France and Britain issued statements condemning the “atrocities” against the Palestinian refugees in the Nahr al-Bared camp in northern Lebanon. For those who may wonder why there is no public outcry, the answer is simple. The army that is attacking the camp with heavy artillery and helicopter warships is not the IDF. It’s an Arab army—the Lebanese Army.
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Who Knew?

Emanuele Ottolenghi | @eottolenghi

07.31.2007 - 9:36 AM

According to the Sudanese defense minister, 24 Jewish organizations are behind the Darfur conflict.

We may be wrong, but the honorable minister might have taken this video a bit too seriously.

Bookshelf

Terry Teachout 07.30.2007 - 4:22 PM

• What did Leonard Bernstein, Victor Borge, Dave Brubeck, the Budapest String Quartet, Johnny Cash, Noël Coward, Miles Davis, Doris Day, Bob Dylan, Vladimir Horowitz, John Gielgud, Glenn Gould, Michael Jackson, Marshall McLuhan, Albert Schweitzer, Frank Sinatra, Bruce Springsteen, Igor Stravinsky, and the original casts of Waiting for Godot and West Side Story have in common? They all recorded for Columbia. Gary Marmorstein’s The Label: The Story of Columbia Records is a breezily written primary-source history of the company whose artistically serious, technically innovative approach to the making of records—it was Columbia’s engineers who invented the long-playing record album in 1948—left a permanent mark on the history of American music.

Although Columbia was founded in 1889, it wasn’t until a half-century later, when it was bought by CBS, that it began its rise to cultural power. To an insufficiently appreciated extent, the label was soon reinvented in the image of one man, an aspiring classical composer turned record-company executive named Goddard Lieberson, whose wit, elegance, and unshakable self-assurance set the tone for Columbia’s postwar activities. Lieberson is more than deserving of a full-length biography of his own, but The Label offers the most detailed portrait to date of this spectacularly improbable character. A polymath who wrote a string quartet and a comic novel, Lieberson stole one of George Balanchine’s wives and used the profits raked in by such Mitch Miller-produced exercises in sugar-frosted pop banality as Rosemary Clooney’s “Come On-A My House” (as well as the Lieberson-produced original-cast albums of such Broadway musicals as South Pacific and My Fair Lady) to underwrite the recordings of the complete works of Stravinsky, Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and Anton Webern.

Questions for the EU

Emanuele Ottolenghi | @eottolenghi

07.30.2007 - 2:50 PM

The European Union has guidelines on ensuring protection for human rights defenders, whom it defines as people “combating cultures of impunity which serve to cloak systematic and repeated breaches of human rights and fundamental freedoms.”

Questions for students of a 101 course on the EU: how does the above definition square with recent developments in the Franco-Libyan relationship? With the EU’s robust relations with Egypt, despite its handling of dissidents? With Spanish Prime Minister Luis Zapatero’s words at the Arab League summit of 2005? In particular, how do the EU’s protective guidelines affect trade relations with Iran? This last is a particularly difficult question to answer, in light of the EU parliament’s condemnation of Iran’s human rights record, and the subsequent suspension on Iran’s part of the EU-Iran “dialogue on human rights.” Any thoughts?

One Step Back, Two Steps Forward

Max Boot | @MaxBoot

07.30.2007 - 1:29 PM

An interesting article appeared in the Sunday New York Times updating developments in Basra. Things are not going so well in this large city in southern Iraq, where various Shiite militias are battling one another for control of political power, oil, and various criminal enterprises.

The British had prided themselves for years on having a better approach than their more heavy-handed American counterparts to counterinsurgency, but, lo and behold, four years into the war, the trends seem more positive in Anbar than in Basra.

What went wrong?

Anti-Anti-Anti-Missile Defense

Gabriel Schoenfeld 07.30.2007 - 11:31 AM

As always in the realm of national security, we do not know what we do not know. But one thing we do know–perhaps not to a certainty, but to a high degree of probability–is that next year, or in the next few years at most, unless it is stopped by diplomacy or force, Iran will develop a nuclear weapon. We also know, or should know, that if we permit this catastrophe to happen, we will urgently need defensive weapons to protect ourselves and our allies.

But are programs to develop such weapons on track, or are they being held back by those who would prefer to keep us defenseless?

Goodbye, Abe

Gordon G. Chang 07.30.2007 - 10:29 AM

Yesterday, the coalition led by the Liberal Democratic Party of Prime Minster Shinzo Abe lost its majority in the Upper House of the Diet, the national legislature. The LDP, with junior partner New Komeito, won 46 seats; its chief rival, the Democratic Party, won 60.

The Japanese sometimes complain that their country is not “normal.” Yet there was nothing out of the ordinary about Sunday’s landslide against the LDP, which has dominated Japan’s politics since 1955. Unlike Junichiro Koizumi, his charismatic predecessor, Abe presented a cold and diffident face to the average citizen. His central policy goals—improving relations with China and South Korea and bolstering the military capabilities of Japan—are critical tasks for any Japanese leader. But they were not high priorities for voters far more concerned about worrying economic trends.

Spitzer, Stained

Harry Siegel 07.28.2007 - 3:09 PM

It’s been a swift fall from grace for New York’s new governor, Eliot Spitzer, who took office in January with 69 percent of the vote and (many think) visions of a future presidential run. Spitzer vowed, as a candidate, that “on Day One” of his administration, “everything changes.” But little has changed in scandal-rich Albany. Spitzer is now involved in an affaire some are calling Troopergate, and the governor is being compared to Richard Nixon. [Full disclosure: I worked as Policy Director for Tom Suozzi, the Nassau County Executive who ran against Spitzer for the Democratic nomination.]

Spitzer stormed into office with a series of high profile and frequently profane battles with the powers-that-be, calling himself a “f***ing steamroller” and State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno “a senile piece of sh*t.” Name-calling helped shore up Spitzer’s reform credentials even as he signed a budget that dramatically increased spending, and dressed up anodyne compromises as bold reforms. Now it appears that high-ranking members of Spitzer’s administration concocted a scheme to take out Bruno, his chief legislative antagonist. Spitzer’s team leaked state police records of Bruno’s frequent use of state planes and helicopters to the Albany Times Union.

The Sochi Effect

Gordon G. Chang 07.28.2007 - 10:43 AM

Earlier this month, the International Olympic Committee awarded the 2014 Winter Games to Sochi, a Russian resort near the Black Sea. “It was a historic decision for all countries,” said Dmitry Chernychenko, the city’s bid chief, after the announcement. “Russia will become even more open, more democratic.” He may be right. The IOC claims it’s only concerned about a city’s ability to stage the Games, but many awards appear to have been made to encourage a host country’s political liberalization. That’s largely why Moscow got the 1980 Summer Olympics and Seoul the 1988 ones. Many analysts, pointing to these two events, have maintained that hard-line governments do not last long after the athletes go home.

But don’t bet on such liberalization happening in Russia. The country’s leaders are already using the 2014 extravaganza as a means of advancing their legitimacy, both at home and abroad. Vladimir Putin, who flew to Guatemala City to address the IOC before the vote, crowed that Sochi’s victory had international significance. “This is, without doubt, not just a recognition of Russia’s sporting achievements,” Putin said, “but it is, beyond any doubt, a judgment on our country.” Boris Gryzlov, Speaker of the Duma, called the award “a confirmation that the world is not unipolar, that there are forces which support Russia, which is once again becoming a global leader.” Russian leaders, it seems, cannot help themselves from making the Sochi award into a pat on the head for their policies.

We all hope that Chernychenko is right when he says the Sochi Olympics “will help Russia’s transition as a young democracy.” If only all Russian officials felt that way!

Weekend Reading

Davi Bernstein 07.27.2007 - 5:34 PM

New York City recently celebrated Restaurant Week, a biannual affair in which the city’s “best” restaurants offer discounted—and shrunken—prix fixe meals. The summer slump that high-end restaurants experience (due to summer vacations, shuttered concert halls, etc.) is an opportunity for them to attract new customers. It’s also the perfect occasion for neophytes to experience haute cuisine at reasonable prices. Blogs, sadly, experience a summer slump, too, and in that spirit we offer a free sampling of food-related articles from the COMMENTARY archive for this weekend’s reading.

The Zagat Effect
Steven Shaw — November 2000

Culinary Correctness
Steven Shaw — October 2000

Sushi and Other Jewish Foods
Alan Mintz — October 1998

The High Cost of Eating
Ben B. Seligman — July 1967

Forbidden Foods
Erich Isaac — January 1966

Bon Appétit!

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em…

Gordon G. Chang 07.27.2007 - 3:30 PM

Today, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her Indian counterpart Shri Pranab Mukherjee issued a joint statement that their two countries completed negotiations on the long-stalled nuclear pact, known as the “123 agreement.” Under this agreement, the United States will provide nuclear fuel and equipment to India for the first time in three decades. Before it can be implemented, however, the U.S. Congress, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the Nuclear Suppliers Group must approve the arrangement, which was first announced by President Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh two years ago this month.

The agreement has aroused the opposition of proliferation experts because it sets a number of troubling precedents. India, for instance, is not a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Indians will be reprocessing nuclear fuel from the United States, even though Washington is trying to prevent Iran, an NPT signatory, from enriching and reprocessing uranium. And New Delhi has made no promises about not testing nuclear weapons (India detonated a “peaceful nuclear explosive” in 1974 and five devices in 1998).

So the “123 agreement” marks a turning point: America has apparently given up trying to stop the spread of nukes, and is now trying to counter proliferators by enhancing New Delhi’s nuclear capabilities. Both Beijing and Moscow have stymied Washington’s nonproliferation efforts for decades, and the Bush administration has started playing their own game. The Chinese, of course, will be the big losers: the Indians have been their historic competitors in this arena.

Yet the nuclear deal with India represents much more than a momentous change in American proliferation policy. The pact symbolizes the growing relationship between the world’s largest democracy and its most powerful one. The United States and India could end up as the core of a loose alliance of democratic nations matched against the planet’s authoritarian ones. Which means that his administration’s handling of the “123 agreement” may become President Bush’s most enduring legacy.

More on Johnson’s Glass House

Michael J. Lewis 07.27.2007 - 2:00 PM

Benjamin Ivry’s fascinating post does a welcome job of setting the record straight on Philip Johnson and his appalling record of cheerleading for the Nazis. If anything, it is even more shocking than Ivry relates. He might have mentioned how Johnson accompanied Hitler’s panzer divisions on their Blitzkrieg through Poland in September 1939 and watched the bombardment of Warsaw. (His chipper report? “It was a stirring spectacle.”) An obituary of Johnson by Anne Applebaum, published in the Washington Post on February 2, 2005, provides much additional useful material.

In his response to Ivry’s post, Lawrence Gulotta asks if we can “enjoy the art and ignore the politics.” The answer is maybe—but not until we have fully and honestly explored the connections between the art and politics. In the case of Leni Riefenstahl, for example, the political content of their work is explicit, and we know precisely how much we may permit ourselves to admire the editing of Triumph of the Will. In the case of Johnson, is there a connection between the sinister politics and the frosty, impersonal austerity of his International Style architecture? So far, there has been no thoughtful exploration of the question. It is easy to see why: for over sixty years, Johnson was the most influential figure in the Museum of Modern Art, exerting ferocious power in the architectural profession, architectural publishing, and schools of architecture. No such investigation was possible. Now it is, and until it has been completed, perhaps Johnson’s architectural legacy must be accompanied by an asterisk, much like those that mark the records of steroid-using baseball stars.

Mahmoud, Hugo, Kim, Fidel, Barack, and Hillary

Gabriel Schoenfeld 07.27.2007 - 11:57 AM

The Miami Herald calls it one of the “biggest dust-ups of the presidential race so far,” and the sprinkling continues.

At the YouTube Democratic presidential debate on Monday, Barack Obama was asked whether he would meet with the leaders of Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, and Iran without preconditions. “I would,” he replied, saying it was a “disgrace” that we were not. Hillary Clinton, for her part, demurred, saying that “Certainly, we’re not going to just have our President meet with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez and you know, the president of North Korea, Iran, and Syria until we know better what the way forward would be.”

Obama has subsequently called Hillary’s stance “Bush-Cheney lite.” Clinton has called the Illinois Senator’s comments “irresponsible and frankly naive.”

Thus far, conservatives and conservative outlets have tended at least implicitly to side with Clinton. Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney of Massachusetts called Obama’s statement “outrageous,” saying it “suggests an agenda that is not in keeping with an agenda focused on building friendships with our allies.” Investor’s Business Daily said it bespeaks an inability to handle “curveballs,” reinforcing “the idea that [Obama is] an inexperienced lightweight.”

As for Clinton’s entourage, it has weighed in with arguments of its own. At the behest of Hillary’s campaign organization, Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, held a conference call with reporters in which she characterized Hillary’s approach as meaning that we should not engage in talks without preparation. “Without having done the diplomatic spade work, it would not really prove anything,” Albright said.

What are the real issues here, and who is right?

Hizballah’s Racket

Emanuele Ottolenghi | @eottolenghi

07.27.2007 - 10:23 AM

While Lebanon’s army is busy completing the “urban restructuring” of the refugee camp at Nahr el Bared (no doubt in full compliance with international and human rights law), UNIFIL forces in the South have sought to avoid future surprises by “turning to Hizballah for protection.”

According to reports quoting UNIFIL sources, intelligence agents from Italy, France, and Spain met with Hezbollah representatives in the southern city of Sidon in April. As a result, some Spanish peacekeepers subsequently were “escorted” on some of their patrols by Hizballah members in civilian vehicles. Too bad there were no such escorts on the day six members of the Spanish contingent were blown to bits by a roadside bomb. But not to worry—UNIFIL/Hizballah collaboration continues. After the attack, Spanish foreign minister Miguel Moratinos promptly spoke with his Iranian counterpart Manucher Mottaki, and (according to the same reports) Spanish UNIFIL officers and Hizballah officials have met once at least since the bombing took place.

Why should this surprise anyone? After all, this practice goes beyond the confines of Lebanon. Mme. Sarkozy’s trip to Lybia involved the same kind of logic, which is in line with a time-honored Mediterranean tradition. Protection has its price, after all, and extortion sooner or later yields dividends for all involved. The extortionists get what they want (money for a hospital, trade with Europe, docile peacekeepers). And those who pay them, in whatever currency, stay alive.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

Fred Siegel 07.26.2007 - 5:29 PM

Hypocrisy is an abiding weakness of most politicians. Republicans tend to specialize in hypocrisy regarding sex and family—think of Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, or Robert Livingstone—while Democrats go in for financial or class hypocrisy—think of John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, or John Edwards.

Recently, I went with friends to a talk by former Senator Edwards at New York’s Cooper Union, to hear, in the candidate’s words, how he plans to “dramatically reduce poverty.” Laudably, he wants to cut the current poverty rate of 12.6 percent by a third within a decade. But he offered few specifics. Those that were trotted out, such as more job-training programs, sounded like leftovers from the Great Society days. But if Edwards is retrogressive about poverty, he’s been very progressive in building up a fortune of as much as $62 million.

Tim Middleton of MSN, evaluating the former Senator’s new financial disclosure statement, describes Edwards as a man “of the people and profits” with “substantial investments in limited partnerships, sub-prime mortgage lenders, and an offshore hedge fund.” Edwards has (to some degree rightly) criticized offshore hedge funds as unpatriotic, and sub-prime lenders as piratical. He’s described the sub-prime lending business as the “wild west of the credit industry, where . . . abusive and predatory lenders are robbing families blind.”

Free Trade on Planet Kristof

Gordon G. Chang 07.26.2007 - 3:40 PM

This morning, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof launched a full-throated—and empty-headed—defense of free trade. Along the way he praised President Bush and attacked Senators Clinton and Obama.

Their offense? The pair of presidential hopefuls engaged in “cowboy diplomacy” by co-sponsoring legislation that targets China for manipulating the value of its currency (he was referring to the bipartisan Baucus-Grassley-Schumer-Graham bill). The proposed legislation, in Kristof’s view, will antagonize the Chinese, politicize trade disputes, and betray President Clinton’s “outstanding legacy on economic issues.”

Outstanding legacy? There may be many magnificent aspects of Bill Clinton’s economic policies, but his strategy for dealing with the mercantilists in Beijing is not one of them. It was he, after all, who decided that China should be permitted to join the World Trade Organization without first reforming its currency regime. The Chinese, once admitted to the global trading body, pegged the renminbi and from July 2005 on have maintained a managed float. As a result, Middle Kingdom manufacturers have obtained an enormous price advantage, which has translated into outsized Chinese trade surpluses against the United States.

Will the Real Sarkozy Please Stand Up

Davi Bernstein 07.26.2007 - 2:08 PM

In his victory speech on election night this past May, Nicolas Sarkozy declared that under his reign, “the pride and the duty of France” will be on the side of “all those who are persecuted by tyranny and dictatorship.” Sarkozy appealed to “all those in the world who believe in the values of tolerance and democracy” to join him. Specifically, Sarkozy pledged, “France will be on the side of the locked-up nurses in Libya.” Whereas his predecessor Jacques Chirac acted out of delusions of grandeur, Sarkozy’s goal is to restore identity to a nation imbued with failure and doubt.

This week Sarkozy produced a “success,” bringing home the nurses. But aiding the persecuted should not entail paying off their persecutors. Sarkozy’s pledge became farce when Madame Sarkozy, followed by le président de la République himself, sat in Colonel Qaddafi’s tent, after which the Madame said that she and the Libyan dictator had built “a real relationship of trust.”

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