April 13, 2017--Bromance Kaput

The New York Times lead story on Wednesday said it all--"Trump's Sudden Shift on Russia Leaves Heads Spinning."

It referred to the White House's accusation Tuesday that Russia is engaged in a cover-up of the Syrian government's deployment of Sarin gas on its civilian population. This accusation was based on an alleged declassified National Security Council report on the attack which also included a rebuttal of Moscow's assertion that insurgents were responsible for the use of chemical weapons. Trump's people claimed that the Syrians and Russians released "false narratives" to mislead the world community about their own complicitous involvement.

What happened to all the flattering references to Vladimir Putin? What happened to the possibility of a new partnership if Donald Trump were elected? Why does it feel as if the Cold War has been resumed? What are all the accusations and saber rattling about?

As in the past I am looking for the simplest explanation that answers the most seemingly-puzzling questions.

Mainly, what's in it for Putin to allow or encourage its Syrian ally to use poison gas and why is Trump so suddenly accusing Putin of being an international war criminal? What happened to the bromance?

To answer these questions requires us to explore each of their likely motives.

For Trump it is to try once more to deflect and overwhelm the on-going investigations about Russia's hacking the 2016 presidential election to undermine Hillary Clinton's campaign in an attempt to help Trump emerge victorious.

Trump's pinprick bombing of a Syrian airfield, his movements on the world stage, especially the recent meeting with the Chinese president Xi and Secretary of State Tillerson's Moscow visit did in fact for a day or two deflect attention from the Trump campaign team's possible collaboration with the Russian hackers.

But Xi is back in China and the focus has shifted again to what did or did not happen during the campaign. Ominous for Trump is the new story that one of his senior foreign policy advisors, Carter Page, with FISA authorization, is being investigated by the F.B.I. to see if he was or is a covert Russian operative. With former NSC director Michael Flynn seeking immunity, the Page investigation is a potential bombshell and it is thus understandable that Trump would want to change the subject. The best way at the moment to change it is to demonologize Putin.

Putin has a much more complex agenda. He is seeking nothing less than the destabilization of the Western world and the resulting return of Russia to its prior Soviet glory. This process is greatly assisted by direct Russian interference in democratic elections from France to Germany to of course the United States.

This process of Sovietization is also facilitated by helping to bring about chaos in Western societies. So it should be no surprise that Putin's Russia would ally itself directly and indirectly with murderous dictators such as Bashar al-Assad, rogue states such as Iran, and terrorist groups including Hezbollah.

Trump wants to survive; Putin wants to dominate. Their tangled relationship serves both of their purposes--Putin having the goods on Trump effectively neutralizes him and Trump as intentional disruptor thrives in a roiled world.

Here, though, is what to worry about--

We do not want to see either of them become desperate. In addition to historical forces we are talking about two very fragile people. Individuals with fragile egos can be particularly dangerous if they have powerful tools or wield catastrophic weapon systems. Obviously, both Putin and Trump do.

Which brings me again to North Korea--

If Trump's survival strategy, his desperate and increasing need to deflect the search for the truth about his possible involvement with the hackers, if that strategy includes looking for opportunities to have the tail wag the dog, the most  fearsome example of that is not more targeted raids on Syria but a nuclear encounter with North Korea. If that were to occur, and I fear we may be headed in that direction, who any longer would be asking what Paul Manafort knew-and-when-did-he-know-it or on which Russia payroll Michael Flynn or Carter Page are to be found.

We would have our eyes on other matters. Mushroom clouds, for example.

April 25, 2016--Dateline: The Rest of the World

While waiting for election returns from Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Maryland, and Prince's autopsy findings, a new Cold War is breaking out. This time not only with Russia but also China. And, who knows, maybe with Saudi Arabia.

Vladimir Putin's Russia is beginning to sound and look like the old Soviet Union with economic dislocation fueling an aggressive foreign policy to both reannimate dreams of a restored Imperial Russia and as a chauvinistic distraction for the Russian people who will soon likely be needing to line up for hours to buy a loaf of bread or a liter of vodka. But while in line they will have their nationalistic dreams to sustain them.

Circuses but no bread.

Rather than acting like a European partner, which we saw signs of for a decade or so, Putin is leading Russia's military buildup and deploying forces on numerous fronts in an attempt to secure what it sees as its sphere of influence and to provide opportunities to flex military muscle in order to poke the US and Western Europeans in the eye, partly as a response to the economic sanctions we and our European allies have imposed on Russia in retaliation for its expansionist moves in Ukraine.

And, while they're at it, they've taken to buzzing U.S. warships in open waters

Under Putin's leadership they have of course reannexed Crimea, threatened various parties in the Balkans, and have become actively involved in Syria, deploying an entirely new mix of smart weapons whose existence has caught Western observes by surprise.

What happened to all those clunky Soviet tanks and misfiring missiles? Clearly once again avoiding CIA detection, right under the noses of our various surveillance agencies, the Russians seemingly overnight on the ground and in the skies in Syria are putting on display a whole range of new, sophisticated 21st century weapons systems.

So much for recent efforts under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to "reset" relations with Putin and Russia. He and Obama can't even talk to each other. Even Stalin and Roosevelt got along better!

Meanwhile, in Asia, also with thoughts about a restored Dynasty, President Xi Jinping of China, also in part to distract the Chinese people from a cooling economy and to deflect thoughts from rampant governmental and corporate corruption (which directly involves his own family), Xi has been investing heavily in modernizing and rapidly expanding China's military capacities and reach.

New fighter jets, aircraft carriers, and a modern submarine fleet are among recent acquisitions. In addition, as an extension of its imperial moves in the South China Sea, encroaching on what we impotently claim to be international waters, and pushing toward South Korean and Japanese waters, under Xi, China is creating a series of new islands which already include air strips and naval facilities. We talk and talk and threaten and threaten while China dredges and dredges and builds and builds.

Perhaps most ominous is Russia's and China's moves to modernize their nuclear weapons. Making warheads smaller and smaller so that they can be mounted on advanced intercontinental missiles with vastly increased capacities to avoid detection. In retaliation, the Obama administration, has quietly begun to do the same for our aging nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

Ironically, Barak Obama who came to office proclaiming that nuclear disarmament was his highest priority, and thus quickly received the Noble Peace Prize, is leaving office engaged in a restored full-tilt nuclear arms race with Russia and China.

And also while we have been obsessing about our presidential election and other entertainments, in response to the bold nuclear deal we struck with Iran, Saudi Arabia is talking quietly, in response to that, of developing its own nuclear weapons.

Sic transit . . .

March 10, 2015--Lincoln Brigade

Last weekend reading about how Mohammed Emwazi ("Jihad John") was drawn to ISIS and became its most infamous executioner and how three young men from Brooklyn were apparently headed in the same direction, I was reminded of other examples of young men being drawn to ideological struggles, signing up for them because they believed in what they were seeking to accomplish, often by bloody means.

I want to be careful here. What ISIS is perpetrating is as evil as anything we have seen in a century. And so I do not want even to imply a false equivalency. But when we struggle to figure out what about ISIS is so compelling to these gullible and pathetic young people, we might want to take a close look at what drew other young men from around the world to take sides in the Spanish Civil War, especially Americans who made their way there as part of the Lincoln Brigade.

Though many of liberal persuasion today see what the Brigade stood for to be admirable--it was militantly anti-fascist and, in the case of many Brigade members, pro-Soviet, socialist, and communist--still, like ISIS, it was a magnet for thousands of alienated, revolutionary youth of its era and, as much as some supported its agenda, at least as many saw these foreign volunteers as outsider interlopers who had no business meddling in what initially a local struggle.

The Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939 pitted Nationalist fascist forces under General Francisco Franco against the army of the duly elected socialist Republican or Loyalist government. The former were supported militarily by Nazi Germany, who field-tested modern forms of blitzkrieg and air warfare in Spain, including the indiscriminate bombing of civil populations, while the Republicans were directly aided by the Soviet Union. Thus, the war was seen to be a dress rehearsal for World War II.

The Nationalists won and Franco ruled Spain with an iron fist for 36 years.

It was in support of the Loyalists that the Lincoln Brigade was organized and attracted 2,800 fiercely committed Americans. 750 died in combat. At the time, those who left for Spain were roundly criticized as radicals who had no business fighting for a country other than the United States.

Attempts to understand the appeal of causes and movements of these kinds find that though ideologies may differ--even radically--there are psychological characteristics among recruits that are consistent across the spectrum. The best thinking suggests that groups that are most appealing offer disaffiliated recruits what they crave most--a sense of belonging and a place to act out their resentments.

This may sound like psychobabble, as is any attempt to summarize something as complex as the appeal of radical groups and cults, but to dismiss participation as a simple expression of evil is not helpful. Again, to join ISIS is far from the same as enlisting in the Lincoln Brigade, but there are useful lessons that might help offer alternative appeals to youth seeking affiliation and, failing that, suggest ways to fight the scourge that is the Islamic State.

October 8, 2014--E=MC2

The speed of light is very fast, in fact there is nothing faster in the universe. It is a very big number--light travels at 186,000 miles per second, or 299,792,458 miles an hour, which means that the light emanating from the sun, which is about 93 million miles from Earth, takes only 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach us.

But on a cosmic scale, this is small potatoes.

The galaxy in which our solar system is located is so huge that that hugeness is expressed not in miles but in light years--how many miles light travels in a year. At 186,000 per second, that's very, very far. To give you a sense of that, our galaxy, the disk of the Milky Way, is about 100,000 light years in diameter.

Then, the ultimate measurement, our universe, everything that there is, is 93 billion light years in size, an almost infinitely large number to comprehend.

I have been thinking about the speed of light because a friend, Leslie Woodhead, is writing a book about the Atomic Era, not so much about the science as about the cultural and political consequence of a world full of atomic weapons. He wants to interview me because I am obsessed with The Bomb and how it has affected life on our planet. To satisfy my obsession, I have read and thought much about these issues. In addition, since he's British he wants to gather reflections from Americans who lived as youngsters through the early days of the Atomic Era and Cold War. I qualify in that regard as well.

In thinking what to say to him, I have dipped a bit into the science of the A-Bomb, especially the theory Einstein developed that defined and quantified the convertibility of mass to energy. As evidence and to demonstrate what that would mean in practical terms, converting a relatively smallish mass of Uranium-235 or Plutonium into a massive amount of energy (an atomic explosion), he propounded perhaps the most famous of all mathematical equations--E=MC2, with E representing Energy, M Mass, and C-squared the speed of light times itself.

With the speed of light by far the latest number in the equation, and then squaring it (multiplying it by itself), and then multiplying it additionally by the mass in question, reveals how such a powerful explosion could result in converting such a relatively small mass of radioactive material into energy--the cataclysmic force of an atomic explosion.

For example, a bomb weighing less than 10 tons with a Uranium-235 core weighing only141 pounds of which just one kilogram (2.2 pounds) underwent nuclear fission, an atomic bomb called Little Boy, was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, exploded with the force of 63,000 tons of TNT. Tons. And killed 135,000 Japanese.

I will want to talk with Leslie about take-cover drills in school where we were taught to dive under our desks if we saw a "blinding flash of light" from an A-Bomb exploding over Times Square, ground zero; and how, after the end of World War II, under Cold War pressure all presidents from Truman to Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson to Nixon were under pressure from their military advisers to use nuclear weapons preemptively, in turn, against the Soviets, the North Koreans, Cubans, and Vietnamese; and how this led to the establishment of a "national security state" with inordinate power accruing to the President with Congress assigned a subsidiary role, effectively resulting in  the end of  the Founders' concept of the "separation of powers."

But it will be hard to not be thinking about E=MC2, the speed of light, that kilogram of U-235, and those 135,000 killed that August.

August 15, 2104--Best of Behind: The Dead Rosenbergs

This is from a fictional memoir that I have been working on for a number of years. I posted this chapter on Behind on September 28, 2012. 

Yes, on June 20, 1953, Heshy Perlmutter and I made our way to the I. J. Morris Funeral Parlor in Brooklyn to see the bodies of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg who had been executed the day before in the electric chair at Sing Sing. I had never seen a dead person and the prospect of seeing two, and such notorious Soviet spies, was irresistible--

When we heard that the Rosenbergs had been electrocuted up in Sing Sing and that their bodies would be laid out and available for viewing at the I. J. Morris Funeral Parlor just six blocks from where we lived, Heshy and I raced over so we could for the first time see some real dead people. In my neighborhood we had seen lots of dead cats and dogs, but no dead bodies and thus had developed an inordinate interest in death.

But a lot of others had the same idea that hot June night, and thus we wound up near the end of a line that stretched around the corner. Since it took hours for the line to crawl toward the entrance, we learned from what we overheard that no one else shared our morbid obsession: We were there to see some corpses. Everyone else was lined up to pay their respects to these martyrs of “progressivism” and to protest not just their executions but the injustice of the entire American and Capitalist System. We barely understood any of this—the raging about Judge Kaufman, the abuse heaped on President Eisenhower who refused to stay their “murder,” and especially the fury reserved for someone named Roy Cohn, who, as a Jew, was venomously vilified for his role in their prosecution.

“He should rot in Hell,” we heard these atheists mutter.

Heshy and I understood what they were feeling. His father, Mr. Perly, was the local glazier and window blind maker but was better known for wandering the streets at night talking to himself, debating some inner furies, waving like a saber a rolled-up copy of the Daily Worker. Heshy knew that what his father was so agitated about also had something to do with Capitalism and “surplus value,” whatever that was, and lynchings and anti-Semitism and McCarthy and also that betrayer Roy Cohn.

More important, having Heshy with me meant that we would actually be allowed to enter I. J. Morris. You see, as we got closer to the door, word filtered back to us that to be admitted you had to be at least sixteen. He and I were a few years younger than that and were worried that they wouldn't let us in and that we would have to wait for subsequent executions before being able to see some dead people. But when we got to the entrance, the man guarding the velvet rope took one look at me, already almost six feet tall, and especially at Heshy’s premature beard, and waved us in. Heshy’s nickname, you should also know, was Big Dick.

Once inside, things settled to a hush. No more sputterings about the Running Dogs of Capitalism, just the muted sound of shuffling feet as we inched our way toward the chapel. As we crept forward, Heshy and I were whispering to each other about what to expect. We thought Julius and Ethel would probably just look like the dead cats—with stiff arms and legs and bulging, staring eyes (would they be attracting flies too?); but we grew increasingly nervous about how dead people who had been electrocuted would look.  We had never seen an electrocuted cat or dog.

What we knew from The Street was that when someone from Murder Incorporated went to The Chair, the next morning, screaming in six inch type from the front pages of the Daily News and Mirror would be the headline, “Bugsy Berkowitz Fries!” And since we knew how my mother’s fried liver looked—the closest thing to shoe leather not worn on a foot—we were trepidiously expecting the dead Rosenbergs to look like huge slabs of fried liver in side-by-side coffins. We were thus rethinking the whole situation: Maybe we should wait until we were really sixteen when perhaps someone would just die of a heart attack or something. That would be a better way to get started with dead bodies.

But before we could reconsider and get out of there, we were pushed through the chapel door by some grizzled shoemaker.  If we had thought about it, we might actually have been glad to have a shoemaker nearby as we approached the leathery Rosenbergs. He again began to spit about that “Jew bastard Roy Cohen.”

And then, there we were face to face with the dead Rosenbergs whose side-by-side coffins were tipped forward for better viewing. Dead they were, but under spot lights with orange faces and black hair that looked as if it had been touched up with shoe polish.  Julius’ mustache was so blackened that he appeared more like a Semitic Hitler than a Jew from the Bronx. It was not hard to believe, from their squirrelly looks, that they had been spies and had indeed given away to Russia the secret to the Atomic Bomb, which as a result caused us to have to practice taking cover under our desks in school in case the Reds decided to drop one on the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

The undertakers moved us along quickly so we had time for just a quick but sufficient glimpse and, in truth, a sniff because all the dead cats and dogs we knew stank something awful. We were curious about that too. But the Rosenbergs smelled more like the science lab in school, which was fitting since this whole experience was more like an experiment to us than a pilgrimage, except perhaps to Heshy who would be interrogated and lectured, we were certain, by Mr. Perly, about more than their hair, painted faces, and smell.

I had entered this cult of death as the result of being most responsible for taking care of the family plot in Mount Lebanon Cemetery. We couldn’t afford Perpetual Care for the graves so unless we were willing to let them become a jungle, someone had to go there regularly, spring through fall, to cut the grass and pull the weeds that were indigenous to that part of Queens. As the most dexterous family member this truly awesome responsibility fell to me. So clip and pull I did with barely disguised eagerness.

As I would work my way among the headstones that multiplied through the years, as I drifted further from the bench where my mother and aunts sat huddled, talking silently to their deceased mother and father, I began to think about more than what was growing above ground. What, I wondered, was happening below the ground? That was not a question I could openly ask about poor Uncle Hyman who, I had been told, died of a heart attack before he was fifty. The weeds, by the way, were thickest at his grave.

In the spirit of experiment, when one day Chirps my parakeet died, rather than leave it to my mother do whatever she did to dispose of our dead pet birds and guppies. I suspected the guppies got flushed away, I absconded with him, found an empty Hellmann’s Mayonnaise jar, washed and dried it thoroughly, put Chirps inside, screwed the top back on securely, and buried him in a shallow hole of a grave in the vacant lot next door. Thinking I would dig him up periodically to see what was happening to him in that jar, interred as I imagined he was, not so unlike Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Hyman at Mount Lebanon. That would finally answer my existential question.

A week later, when I exhumed Chirps, he looked a little dried out, sort of what an apricot left too long in the sun begins to look like, with his flesh now sucked tight against his tiny bones. The second week it appeared that his eyes had disappeared. Where they went I couldn’t figure out—though I turned and shook the jar they didn’t seem to be in there anymore. This was getting profoundly interesting, and mysterious.

But when I went to unearth him for the third time, about a month after he died, I couldn’t find him or the jar. I had marked his place with a distinctive stone but couldn’t find it; and without that, I couldn’t remember precisely enough where he was buried. And so over the course of the next week, I dug up virtually the entire lot, which must have been 30 feet wide and 75 feet deep.

My mother wanted to know what I was doing out there at all hours. I reminded her that in the past I had planted a successful, even legendary vegetable garden and was thinking about doing that again.

She said, “But it’s November.”

And thus I gave up on Chirps, but not on my quest.

Next came my obsession with Egyptian mummies. Even before I was aware of King Tut and all the stories surrounding his discovery and his treasures, from Richard Haliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels, a huge and enthralling book given to me one birthday by my well-traveled Aunt Helen, I learned about the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, which included the Pyramids at Giza. And how they were in reality giant tombs for the most famous pharaohs. And that the dead pharaohs, turned into mummies, were sealed in those pyramids.

So when our public school class went on a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I managed to sneak away from the group and got “lost” for an hour in the labyrinth of the Egyptian Hall where, secured in glass cabinets in open coffins, what the Ancient Egyptians called sarcophagi, I could see actual mummies, dead pharaohs’ bodies that were more than 4,000 years old.

I was getting closer to the real thing. But there was still a problem—I couldn’t actually see the pharaohs’ bodies since they were so tightly wrapped in cloth shrouds. But the fact that I could sense more or less full bodies obscured within those wrappings suggested to me that both Chirps and Grandpa and Grandma might still be recognizable if somehow I could only get to them. After all, if the mummies were in such good shape after 4,000 years, Grandpa and Grandma and Chirps might still be quite like I remembered them.

Little did I know that before very long I would have a close encounter with a dead body, right in my own family, when one of Aunt Madeline’s husbands killed himself by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.

I barely knew him because they had been married less than six months. He seemed nice enough to me. Minimally he was the first of her husbands who wasn’t bald and, even more important to her, was taller than she and thus a better dance partner. Stories circulating in the family suggested that after living with Madeline for a few short months, he took the “easy way out” by killing himself. Though he may have had enough of her, from her carrying on after his death, she appeared to have lost the love of her life. In fact, things were so bad with her, and his ten year old son from a previous marriage, that it took her brothers’ and their wives’ total attention to console her.

Perhaps because of my experience weeding the family plot, I was assigned to help make arrangements for his funeral.

My primary responsibility was to give the mortician a suit in which to bury him. As you might imagine, at twelve, though tall for my age, I was not fully prepared for this. So I just grabbed the first suit I saw from his closet and spent the rest of my time hoping that at the service they would have an open coffin so I could at last . . .

To my considerable disappointment they didn’t.  But at the chapel, the funeral director to whom I had given Morty’s suit, pulled me aside and directed me to a very private corner where he whispered so as not to disturb anyone, “Was that his suit you gave me?”

“Certainly,” I said, “It was in his closet.”

“Are you sure?”

“I think so,” I stuttered, my certainty now eroding, “Why are you asking?”

“Because it looked as if it was a suit for a ten year old.”

I looked over to where Morty’s ten year old son was sitting and saw that he was in casual clothes. He was not wearing a suit.

The undertaker rasped in my ear, “I can’t tell you what we had to do to get it on the body.” I was cringing, “But we did,” he added with a twisted smile.

And so, on that day when I got to see the Rosenbergs, I was reminded of the guilt I felt about what I had inadvertently done to poor Morty.  But more, I couldn’t stop thinking about what the I. J. Morris needed to do to get that suit to fit.

My education and interests took some new directions as I began to grow into my body. And though a total failure at Hebrew School, where I was presumably to receive a religious education, in spite of my lack of facility for things of this kind, I begin to think about what one might call “spiritual things.”  Adolescent meaning-of-life questions—Where did we come from (not Facts of Life kinds of matters)? And where were we going (and I didn’t mean Mount Lebanon)?   Heshy, under the influence of Mr. Perly and his surging hormones, was ever the materialist and said, non-biblically, that we’re just a bunch of atoms and molecules and thus to a version of dust we shall revert, if we're lucky, after a life of feeling up the Siegel Twins in the school coat closet.

By then I was also into atoms (remember the A Bomb), but the dust-to-dust thing didn’t work for me. I had begun to think there were higher issues and meanings to being human. I saw a very different place in the world for us as compared to Chirps, the neighborhood cats,  and my guppies.

                                                                *    *    *

Many years later my father, well into his eighties, began to fail. He had always been such a force of nature. I know to children fathers often seem to be that powerful and arbitrary, but my father was truly tectonic. When he raged, all trembled; when he commanded, all obeyed; what he expected, we did; and when he acknowledged and in his own coded-way loved, we were smitten. So when his big body was being reduced by time and he could no longer move forward but was afflicted by what the medical people called “retrograde movement,” which meant he fell backwards when he attempted to move ahead, I saw this to be a metaphor for his decline—he was heading backwards, even while attempting still to cut his way through life.

To see him like this raised many more questions about the meaning of life, at least the meaning of a life. The answers I came up with were not comforting. Everything seemed to reduce itself to biology—eating and pissing and shitting was the final summing up. Not so different from what Heshy had been saying some years earlier.

Dad lived in Florida and we in New York; and so when my mother called to say, “Come down,” we got on a plane to Fort Lauderdale. We immediately lost our way from the airport to the hospital, grinding in frustration that we would miss the end. From my mother’s voice and her deserved fame as the family “witch,” invariably perceiving the future, we knew there was very little time and every missed turn made it less likely that we would find him still alive.

But with a sense of the miraculous, the hospital appeared just as we were about to make another futile U turn. We skidded the car into the parking lot and raced up the steps afraid that even to wait for the elevator would make us fatally late. We found his room and him in bed, unconscious, breathing with obvious final distress.

I sat beside him and held his withered hand, saying what I knew would be a few last words. There was no way to know if he heard me as I attempted to sum up what I had by then come to conclude about us (contested), his life (contradictory), and life itself (still imponderable). I longed to feel even a reflexive squeeze from him and perhaps there was one or at the very least a last spasm to let me know he understood, and that was what he too had come to understand.

And then all was utter, utter stillness.

I closed his quickly cooling eyelids and put my hand to his chest as he had done so many times to me when he would say to me as child and adult, “Such a good boy. Such a lucky boy.”

And then he was no longer there. Even during his last unconscious moments it was apparent that whatever he was was present but then that was gone. Just gone.

I looked at his body to see if I could perceive his spirit depart or whatever it was that was him.

But all there was was just a body.

June 16, 2014--The Middle East? Hands Off

As President Obama feels the pressure to provide military assistance to the collapsing regime in Iraq, he and we should step back and review the last 2,500 years of history. Just a few pertinent highlights!

The major lesson is that no outside power, from Alexander the Great of Macedonia to the French and British imperialists, from the Soviet Union and now the United States, no one has been able to impose their will on the region.

All interventions, all attempts to subjugate proud and defiant peoples have failed. And worse--have reverberated back disastrously on the invaders, colonizers, and occupiers.

After 330 BC Alexander never recovered; the British and French colonial powers after the First World War never recovered; the Soviet Union collapsed and never recovered; and the United States lost treasure, power, and influence in the region and I suspect will also not recover.

So what to do now?

The right answer is nothing.

We should get out of the way and allow the people living there figure out their own futures, very much including their own borders.

If we could impose a sane and just plan of our own that would endure, I would consider supporting it. But the long reach of history teaches that any attempt to do so is doomed to fail and, worse, will only make things worse.

Look at the current situation in Iraq. The Sunni jihadists have already overrun a third of the country, a country that was arbitrarily constructed at the end of WW I. From the videos showing ISIS's triumphant advance, while the so-called Iraqi army discards its uniforms and attempts to blend in with the benighted civilian population, we see the invaders already in possession of American military equipment that also was abandoned by the Iraqi army.

This was evocative of the experience in Afghanistan where the U.S., still entangled in the Cold War, armed the Mujahideen who were fighting the invading Soviets and, after defeating them (which contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union), morphed into the Taliban which proceeded to overthrow the Afghan government and then turned its weapons, the ones we supplied, on us when we invaded at the end of 2001. And does anyone doubt that as soon as we finish leaving Afghanistan the Taliban will once again take over?

Sounds like current-day Iraq to me.

Seven years ago, presidential candidate Joe Biden was ridiculed when he said that Iraq should be allowed to devolve into three countries--Shiite in the south, Sunni in the middle, and Turkistan in the north.

He was right.

In fact, he could have advocated similar things for the rest of the region, from at least Tunisia in the west to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the east.

Few of the countries in that geographic span have cultural borders--Iran (formerly Persia) and Egypt are perhaps the exceptions--but rather ones drawn for them by various conquerers and occupiers.

For centuries, for their own strategic and economic purposes, dominant Western powers have attempted to contain and control the essentially tribal people who live in this vast region. Since the end of the Second World War, country-by-country this has been unraveling. And at an accelerated pace for the past four or five years. Recall the Arab Spring of 2010.

The emergence of jihadist and terrorist groups--ISIS is just the most recent example--feels especially threatening to our national interest. But it may be more dangerous to attempt to continue to contain these aspirations and energies than let to them play out.

The genie of various forms of liberation cannot be stuffed back in the bottle. It is much too late for that.

It may be less risky to step back and allow these contesting forces to work things out. We may not like this idea or the potential outcomes; but, in reality, do we realistically have the ability and resources to impose an alternative scenario?

Do we see ourselves intervening on the side of the Shia-dominated government in Iraq allied with Iran's Revolutionary Guard? As unlikely, even as preposterous as this may sound, it is being seriously discussed.

Frightening as that prospect is--very much including the blow to our national ego--it represents another reason to back off. If there is to be fighting, and of course there is and will be, at least it will be focused within the region, internecine, and less directed toward us. That could be truly in our national interest.

March 24, 2104--The Blinding Dawn of a New Russian Revolution

If we approach matters with Russia assuming Vladimir Putin and his advisors and supporters are motivated by rational self-interest, we will be sadly disappointed.

Rational self-interest, which assumes he and they care more about the Russian economy, the wellbeing of the Russian people, and their standing in the international community than in the emotions that patriotism and nationalism unleash.

It is rather these latter forces that are motivating and driving the agenda for Putin and his allies.

Anyone who knows anything about Russian history and literature knows about the surging psychological and xenophobic passions that have driven Russian imperial ambitions for centuries.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground alone should be on all Western policymakers' desks as they and our president try to understand what to think about, expect, and then do. Little of what they learn will make conventional sense and thus would provide essential insights.

In Notes, the unnamed narrator, a retried civil servant living in isolation, is so guided by subterranean, underground forces that he repeatedly acts, as Dostoyevsky puts it, against his own seeming self-interest.

He takes pleasure in pain and unhappiness, even when his liver throbs or he has a toothache. None of this, in a post-Enlightenment world, makes "sense." But, then again, to him it does and to the Russian people for whom he is an exemplar.

It is in this way that he and they validate their existence.

We have been seeing this kind of paranoiac behavior on display recently in Russia as it reappropriates Crimea and in Putin's behavior.

After the Crimeans voted to reaffiliate with Russia, Putin made an impassioned speech to the country's political elite in which he spoke about perceived slights from the West, how Russia had been humiliated following the collapse of the Soviet Union and in turn denounced the domination of the U.S. and Western Europe.

He said, "They cheated us again and again, made decisions behind our back, presented us with completed facts. That's the way it was with the expansion of NATO . . . They always told us the same thing, 'Well, this doesn't involve you.'"

According to the New York Times, at a public rally later that night, reaching deep into Russian and Soviet history to embrace the national soul, Putin anointed himself the guardian of the greater Russian people, including those living beyond current Russian borders. He spoke about restoring a part of the old Russian Empire that the collapse of the USSR had overthrown.

"Millions of Russians went to bed in one country and woke up abroad,"he intoned, "Overnight, they were minorities in the former Soviet republic, and the Russian people became the biggest divided nation in the world."

He then joined the rally in singing nationalistic songs as tears flowed among the enormous Moscow crowd.

Even more disturbing was a second piece in the Times that reported about Putin's inner-circle of confidential advisors--individuals steeped in Russian imperial aspirations and mysticism.

Take Russian political scientist Aleksandr Dugin, who in the late 1990s called for "the blinding dawn of a new Russian Revolution, fascism--borderless as our lands, and red as our blood," for a flavor of those who have Putin's ear--

Aggressively anti-American he has called for a "conservative revolution" that combines socialist economic thinking with ultra-conservative cultural traditionalism. He is responsible for the movement to establish a Eurasian empire, "constructed on the fundamental principle of the common enemy," which he called "Atlanticism," a concoction of liberal values and U.S. hegemony.

Also in Putin's circle of private advisors is Vladimir Yakunin, president of Russian Railroads. He points to a "global financial oligarchy" and the "global domination that is being carried out by the U.S."

Last week, he offered plans for a Soviet-style megaproject to develop transportation infrastructure in Siberia, something he called "an economics of a spiritual type" that would insulate Russia from the West's alien values. He compared this vision to the adoption of Christianity in ancient Rus, the conquest of Siberia, the electrification of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet space program. As a bone to his friend Vladimir Putin, not as an after thought, he added the recent Sochi Olympics to that list of historic accomplishments.

Looked at through Western eyes, none of this makes much sense--the Soviet Union is no more, a government-directed version of a market economy has resulted in a large Russian middle class, tens of millions have been brought out of poverty, and the new Russia has been a powerful and respected player on the world stage. Why place these gains in jeopardy--the Russian economy is already showing signs of serious decline just over the past few weeks?

The answers may best be found in a collective longing for the Russian past and a form of self-abnegation that embraces behavior that appears to be against Russia's self-interest. We would be wise, however, to understand that what looks like that to us may very well be their own unique and characteristic form of self-interest. And dangerous at that.

March 5, 2014--Putin

About Vladimir Putin, George W. Bush famously said, "I looked the man in the eye . . . [and] was able to get a sense of his soul."

This was after their first meeting in Slovenia and things, to Bush, felt warm and fuzzy.

Subsequently, the new Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with her Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in March, 2009 in Switzerland, and to symbolize that she and Barack Obama were hoping for a "reset" in U.S.-Russian relations, gave him an gift-wrapped, actual reset button that she swiped from a Jacuzzi tub in Geneva.

On the other hand, there is Iran where Russia seems reluctant to endorse strong action in response to Iran's seeking to develop nuclear weapons and less than reluctance, intransigence in fact, when it comes to joining the West in intervening in the civil war in Syria, a client state of Russia's.

And now there is Ukraine.

It is feeling to some that the Cold War has resumed and people such as John McCain are sounding almost giddy about the possibility of dusting off the nukes.

If Barack Obama were to look in Putin's eyes, something he has clearly avoided doing, he would likely see the old KGB colonel residing there. he would peer into cold, emotionless, bitter killer's eyes. He might conclude that Putin is no partner for peace and stability but rather never stopped fighting the Cold War and couldn't care less about what the U.S or anyone in Europe might feel about his dictatorial, aggressive stance toward former coerced members of the Soviet Union.

But maybe, maybe Obama might see something else.

Back in 2008, the last time Putin's Russians intervened militarily in a former Soviet republic, in Georgia, Russia lived in a very different world. They were not then, as now, a fully integrated part of the global, especially Western economy.

There is lots of talk right now that European leaders will not act that tough when if comes to imposing economic sanctions because they are so dependent on Russian energy resources--mainly natural gas--with much of that coming west through pipelines that crisscross Ukraine.

But less discussed is the reaction within Russia to all of this saber rattling by another countervailing force--that of the hundreds of Russian plutocrat billionaires. They have a huge stack in seeing international market stability. They can't be happy seeing their wealth affected by the collapsing ruble and looming sanctions on their far-reaching operations and investments. Do not underestimate their political power. Particularly if the growing crisis further threatens their ill-gotten gains.

Then there is, my own speculation--Putin not wanting to spend his remaining years isolated in Russia, rejected by other members of the G-8. With his new girlfriend he appears to enjoy being out and gadding about, especially welcomed in places such as France where the food is so much better that Russian stuffed cabbage.

October 30, 2013--Garrison State

I've been reading about President Eisenhower--a more interesting and complex man than popularly remembered. He was not just an overachiever--supreme commander of allied forces during the Second World War or the bumbling political amateur who in 1952, mainly through his open smile, was elected to the first of two terms as president.

He may have seemed more interested in playing bridge than governing and may have appeared to be more focused on his putting than foreign affairs, but that is a self-deprecating image he carefully cultivated. He famously said to an aide just before a critical press conference, "Don't worry, I'll confuse them." And he did!

By pretending to be less than he in fact was, he enhanced his power to steer the country through perilous times. Recall, he served during the height of the Cold War when there was the real possibility that America and the Soviets would become involved in a civilization-ending nuclear war.

He is best known and most highly regarded by liberals for his farewell address in which he warned about the spreading power of the "military-industrial complex." But there is more in that speech, largely overlooked, that offers additional lessons for our own time--Eisenhower's concern that in our fear of an atomic attack by the Soviets we would become what he called a "garrison state"; and in so becoming, run the danger of losing basic civil liberties and irrevocably altering the democratic character of our country.

At the time, policymakers and the public had little reliable information about the nature of the Soviet threat and this uncertainty added to the fear citizens felt. This fear, among some, turned into paranoia, Red-baiting witch-hunts, and calls for unbridled military spending to meet the unknown and therefore menacing nature of Soviet military power.

Eisenhower was concerned that fear-driven loose talk about the nature of Soviet intentions could in itself be dangerous to U.S. security. He felt that Soviet capacity for war was being overstated by self-interested military leaders and demagogues such as Senator Joseph McCarthy. 

Additionally, he contended, there was a high price to pay for exaggerating Soviet motivations. That paying too much attention to the alleged military potential of the Soviet Union would turn the United States into a state armed beyond our needs; deeply in debt because of all the military spending; with the economy, as a result, dominated by the arms race. And, because of the fear of external, and more significant, purported internal enemies, we were in danger of seeing our civil liberties eroded.


As, during the Red scare, they were.


From his farewell address, in Eisenhower's words—

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. 

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

We would do well today to heed these words. 

We are becoming a national security state in which most of our resources are being diverted to defense spending. Fearing terrorism--as Americans in the 50s feared communism and Soviet threats--the public is passive as we spend most of our national treasure on weapon systems we do not in fact need; run up massive debts to pay for them; and, most distressing, overwhelmed by fear, seem complacent when an every-expanding government tramples on constitutional rights to privacy and free expression. 

August 8, 2013--Boys . . .

Barack Obama's decision to cancel his summit meeting scheduled for September with Vladimir Putin is a sad example of how even silly emotions can get in the way of acting wisely.

Obama is upset that the Russians refused to extradite Edward Snowdon, the Booz Allen contract worker who downloaded and distributed thousands of documents that reveal how the NSA and CIA extra-legally gather data about virtually all of us and many citizens of other countries as part of the war on terrorism.

Yes, Putin should have found a way to fudge things, including swallowing some of his own pride and sense of manhood and turned him over to American authorities. But he is so angry that the Soviet Union lost the Cold War (he was a KGB spy during those years) and is no longer a true superpower, that he is emotionally primed to behave like a child with a temper tantrum whenever an American president wants to talk about making mutually-advantageos deals. And in Obama, in that regard, he has found his macho-challeneged match.

Just look at the mopey pictures of the two of them at the recent G-8 summit. This is no way for grown men to act. Particularly seemingly grown men who in many ways hold the fate of the world in their hands.

These leaders do not have to like each other, but they need to talk and talk and talk with each other to see if through persistence, if nothing else, they can agree about a few things.

Things such as nuclear arms limitation. Though this is not a sexy subject at the moment, we should remind ourselves that the U.S. and Russia still have thousands of warheads that are relics of the Cold War that are hardly needed in today's world unless Putin and Obama, in their mutual petulance, stumble into restarting it.

Then, there is Syria. Russia is Bashar al-Aasad's main backer, supplying sophisticated arms to prop up his genocidal regime as a way of Russia maintaining its influence in the region.

And Russia, an ally of Iran's, is well-positioned to help broker a deal to get them to back away from their self-destructive nuclear weapons program. Again, currently refusing to do so, Putin does not want to appear to be an instrument or lap dog of the West (particularly of the U.S.) to friends and foes in that neighborhood.

Big-power diplomacy shouldn't be personal. In this case, it should be about what is in the best interest of each of our countries. Presidents Obama and Putin should take a step back, turn off the frowns and negative body language, and get to work as if they were adults.