Starting out.
Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat
That’s the headline in the NY Times, and the concept is as straightforward as it comes.
A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.
The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.
The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,” it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.
An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.
Pasted from <http://www.dailykos.com/>
and
An interview with Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, author of The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment, And the Remaking of Liberal Internationalism.
Elizabeth Edwards Spalding: FDR thought he could keep the Soviet Union satisfied through spheres of influence and his personal style of diplomacy. So FDR was willing to legitimate the Kremlin in a way that Truman never allowed. Even before he became president, Truman understood that the combination of the Soviet communist regime and its totalitarian practices was a global threat. Pasted from <http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NWUyODAzMzk3NWZjZGZjYjI1MjU1M2VmMjA4MGY3ZDk=>
Dc: but that should be a question. Was it? Was FDR sort of right?
And Juan Cole
Here is the BBC World Monitoring translation of Hasan Nasrullah’s speech on Friday to an enormous crowd in bombed-out South Beirut.
Pasted from <http://www.juancole.com/>
Praise be to God, who fulfilled His promise to us and who granted us, Lebanon, and the people of Lebanon victory over the enemy of Lebanon. Praise be to God who made us proud, enabled us to hold fast, and gave us security. Praise be to God, on whom we relied and to whom we turned repentantly. As He promised, He has always been the best protector. Praise be to God for His victory, assistance, and support.
Brothers and sisters, Ladies and Gentlemen.
On 22 September, you once again surprised the world and truly proved that you are a great, proud, loyal, and courageous people. [Applause]
We are neither a disorganized and sophistic resistance, nor a resistance pulled to the ground that sees before it nothing but soil, nor a resistance of chaos. The pious, God-reliant, loving, and knowledgeable resistance is also the conscious, wise, trained, and equipped resistance that has plans. This is the secret of the victory we are today celebrating, brothers and sisters.
Brothers and sisters, we should today stress that this war was an American war in terms of decision, weapons, planning, and desire, and by giving several deadlines for the Zionists; one, two, three, and four weeks. What stopped the war is the failure of the Zionists. If you recall the last days, the largest number of tanks was destroyed on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday; the largest number of the occupation soldiers was killed on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday; the helicopters crashed on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Therefore, the Zionists realized that if they had continued [the war], it would have been a disaster. The Americans intervened and even accepted the drafts [of resolutions] for the war to stop. They stopped the war not for the sake of Lebanon, not for the sake of the children of Lebanon, not for the sake of the blood of women in Lebanon, and not for the sake of beautiful Lebanon. They stopped the war only for the sake of Israel. They came to peddle it to us in Lebanon; namely, that our American friends stopped the war
Dc: the whole is worth reading and deeply saddening.
Pasted from <http://www.juancole.com/>
and
Trading Up
An embryonic model for easing the human costs of free markets
Michael J. Piore and Andrew Schrank
Latin American economic and social policy is at a turning point: the emblem of that turn is the growing list of successful presidential candidates who have run against neo-liberalism—Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Tabare Vázquez in Uruguay, Néstor Carlos Kirchner in Argentina, Michelle Bachelet in Chile, and Evo Morales in Bolivia—and the near misses of populist candidates in Peru and Mexico.
The new regimes are riding a wave of discontent directed against the market, but are they simply reverting to the past practices against which the Washington Consensus was a reaction? Or are they creating something new that might temper or replace market mechanisms? And if they are innovating, what are the new institutions and how are they likely to evolve?
It is hard not to be reminded here of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. Polanyi described the economic policies of industrial society as the product of a “double movement.” The first movement is toward a free market, particularly in labor and land, and also in international trade. But free markets generate enormous pressures for the continual redeployment of resources, especially human resources. So Polanyi’s second movement is a response, an attempt to protect society from these pressures. While the movement toward the market is guided and directed by a coherent theory and the ideology of political and economic liberalism (the Washington Consensus is but its most recent expression), the second movement is visceral, an instinctive effort to rescue society from the ravages of unfettered economic competition and the constant redeployment of resources that destroys the context in which people understand themselves and create meaning and purpose in their lives.
Our age is distinctive in offering no alternative vision of institutions or terms that might ease tensions between economic and social needs. In the past, there have been a number of visions, perhaps too many. Polanyi himself saw the makings of alternatives in Robert Owen’s factory organization in the early 19th century and in the International Labour Organization in the early 20th. Another, much more articulated vision was, of course, Marxism. When Polanyi was writing, in the 1930s, fascism also constituted an influential alternative. By the time his book was actually published, in 1944, Keynesian economics had captured the public imagination and seemed not only to complete his argument but to provide a framework for the reconciliation of social and economic forces that avoided the twin pitfalls of Marxism and fascism. But each of these philosophies has since been discredited
In this unprecedented intellectual vacuum, one way to begin creating a coherent alternative would be to try to construct such a vision inductively, working from the changes that are actually happening on the ground. In studying what people are already doing locally in response to the conflict between market and social forces and identifying the particular institutions that are emerging in that process, we might find a way of working those institutions into the broader structure of the economy, using them as the starting point for an alternative model of social and economic organization.
This last step crosses the threshold from a conception of labor inspection narrowly focused upon work standards to a notion of labor inspection as a much broader approach to social and economic policy. The agency then becomes a bridge between economic and social forces, at least one piece of an alternative to the Washington Consensus, or rather to the vacuum in which the reaction to the Washington Consensus is emerging.
These examples, it is to be emphasized, are of interest not because of their quantitative significance. Indeed, their number is actually quite limited. But they point to the ways in which the Latin model of labor inspection might constitute the vehicle for a much broader approach to economic development—one that brings firms up to the standards imposed by their regulatory obligations rather than bringing regulatory obligations down to the productivity levels characteristic of firms.
To realize this potential would require a concerted and organized effort beyond national boundaries to articulate the broader implications of existing practice and to disseminate both the practices and the underlying model of regulation. What is called for is leadership that can play a role in developing and disseminating the new model analogous to the role played by the World Bank and the IMF in the diffusion of the Washington Consensus. The obvious agency to play this role is the International Labour Organization.
Pasted from <http://bostonreview.net/BR31.5/pioreschrank.html>
And, another review of Fukuyama but lets see if the dialog is developing.
From TLS, a review of Francis Fukuyama’s America at the Crossroads.
During the early Bush years, as liberal and conservative thought in America became increasingly polarized, Fukuyama and other conservative thinkers continued to set the tone of the administration. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, as we now know, intellectuals with a very different idea were also at work. They too had a global political vision; but theirs was a dream, not of the end of history, but of a rebirth, a resumption of the long march of Islam, stalled by centuries of Western expansion but reinvigorated by contemporary global demography.
Pasted from <http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25346-2367095,00.html>
OK, go read it. But to my mind, it is a messy story.
And
A review on Frank Rich’s The Greatest Story Ever Sold (and more).
Accordingly, most of “The Greatest Story” is a straight, well-researched, clearly written narrative of Bush and his cohorts’ lies, deceptions and misdeeds, and of the cowardly and lazy press and “opposition party” that let him get away with them.
As it lied its way to war in Iraq, the Bush administration had powerful allies at the New York Times. Judith Miller, whose stenographic reporting on Saddam’s WMD helped the administration make the case for war, was the most notorious. And the intellectual support of Thomas Friedman, widely considered to be the most influential foreign-policy columnist in the world, was also key.
One was an economics professor named Paul Krugman, who from his perch on the Op-Ed page ventured far beyond the confines of the dismal science to savage the administration. The other was the paper’s former drama critic, Frank Rich, who used his feature-length column in the Arts & Leisure section (it was later moved to the Week in Review) to expose the way the Bush team manipulated the facts, staged events, intimidated critics, and generally created a convincing but utterly fake narrative about itself and its disastrous war.
Rich situates this sad story in a larger cultural frame, which he alludes to in his subtitle: “The Decline and Fall of Truth.” In a brilliantly incisive and damning epilogue — these 20 pages alone are worth the price of the book — he writes, “the very idea of truth is an afterthought and an irrelevancy in a culture where the best story wins.” That culture, he notes, took off in the mid 1990s, when “the American electronic news media jumped the shark. That’s when CNN was joined by even more boisterous rival 24/7 cable networks, when the Internet became a mass medium, and when television news operations, by far the main source of news for most Americans, were gobbled up by entertainment giants such as Disney, Viacom, and Time Warner. While there had always been a strong entertainment component to TV news, that packaging was now omnipresent … In this new mediathon environment, drama counted more than judicious journalism.” The Bush administration did not create this culture, he notes, but it “was brilliant at exploiting it to serve its own selfish reality-remaking ends.” To his credit, Rich does not claim that America’s infotainment culture was the decisive factor that allowed Bush to wage a war whose likely consequences, as he points out, could cause Bush to be judged the worst president in American history. But he is indisputably correct that it played an important role.
Perhaps this is because Americans, in their innocence, cannot accept that any president would deliberately launch a major war simply to win the midterm elections. Yet Rich makes a powerful argument that that is the case.
Playing the key role, not surprisingly, is Karl Rove. “To track down Rove’s role, it’s necessary to flash back to January 2002,” Rich writes. The Afghanistan war had been a success. “In a triumphalist speech to the Republican National Committee, Rove for the first time openly advanced the idea that the war on terror was the path to victory for that November’s midterm elections.” Rove decided Bush needed to be a “war president.” The problem, however, was that Afghanistan was fading from American minds, Osama bin Laden had escaped, and the secret, unglamorous — and actually effective — approach America was taking to fighting terror wasn’t a political winner. “How do you run as a vainglorious ‘war president’ if the war looks as if it’s winding down and the number one evildoer has escaped?”
Now ideology comes in, along with the peculiar alliance of neocons and Cold War hawks that had been waiting for their chance. “Enter Scooter Libby, stage right.” As Rich explains, Libby, Cheney and Wolfowitz had wanted to attack Iraq for a long time, not to stop terrorism but for the familiar neocon reasons of remaking the Middle East and the familiar Cold War hawk reasons of trumpeting America’s might. “Here, ready and waiting on the shelf in-house, were the grounds for a grand new battle that would be showy, not secret, in its success — just the political Viagra that Rove needed for an election year.”
Dc: will he discuss Israel?
It is now widely accepted that the Iraq war is one of the greatest foreign policy blunders, if not the greatest, in U.S. history. Some have gone further: The respected Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld argues that it is “the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C. sent his legions into Germany and lost them.” Not a few regard Iraq as spelling the beginning of the end of American dominance in the world.
Pasted from <http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/09/21/rich/index1.html>
Pasted from <http://www.politicaltheory.info/>
