Happy Thanksgiving: and here’s your pre- or post-prandial podcast

The New Neo Posted on by

I hope everyone is now safely ensconced with the relatives and friends of your choice, with the turkey about to be eaten, or roasting away merrily in the oven, right on schedule.

In my family (I’m here in NY, by the way) we tend to have a late, leisurely, really fine meal. This year features a reunion of sorts with various distant and usually unseen familial elements; should be interesting.

Hope you have a lot to be thankful for. And hope that one of those things is the latest Sanity Squad podcast, one with a Thanksgiving theme. (How’s that for a segue?)

Listen to it pre- or post-dinner (I would not suggest during). And a wonderful holiday to all–even to my friends around the globe who don’t celebrate it!

Talking with the enemy: Syria and Iran

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[The follow-up second part of yesterday’s post on Vietnamization and Iraqization is coming soon. It was postponed for this one.]

Assassinations are a dime a dozen in the Middle East. Lebanon, in particular, has seen quite a spate of them within the last two years.

And now it’s Industry Minister Pierre Gemayal’s turn. His death is a whodunit worthy of Agatha Christie, most especially And Then There Were None:

Anti-Syrian Parliamentary leader Saad Hariri interrupted a press conference to accuse the Syrian regime of “trying to kill every free person” in Lebanon.

“The cycle (of killings) has resumed,” he said.

The usual suspects? Syria. With Iran perhaps somewhere in the mix. With the resignation of Shiite Cabinet ministers about a week ago in a bid for power and control by Hezbollah (see this), the idea is to topple the fragile “Cedar Revolution” government.

It’s the old Mideast dilemma: how can a democratic government stay in power, when murderous thugs who will stop at nothing to undermine that government see it (and all non-thug governments) as inherently weak? Beats me. But that’s what realpolitik was all about; the propping up of a thug who was “our thug,” but a thug nevertheless, because thuggery was seen as necessary to fight even worse thuggery.

One of the few silver linings in the dark Lebanese cloud is this: “Lebanese Murder May Weaken Push in US to Engage Syria in Iraq.”

Was there ever really such a push, and how strong was it? I can’t bring myself to believe that the Administration was ever that insane. Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, seems to agree with me. He says that deeper U.S. engagement with Syria on Iraq “was unlikely and is now even more unlikely.” Sounds reasonable to me.

James Baker may think otherwise. But how did his Iraq Study Group suddenly get elevated to superstar status? It will be making recommendations, it’s true. But we don’t even know what those recommendations are yet, although Baker himself is on record as advocating (as a general principle, at least) talking with the enemy.

But all rumors of the recommendations the Iraq Study Group will make seem to be just that at the moment–unsourced rumor, reverberating in the echo chamber that is the MSM. And, even if the MSM turns out to be correct, and the ISG does end up making a recommendation to talk to Syria and Iran re Iraqi “stabilization,” no one need act on those recommendations.

Mary Madigan thinks such talk would be like trying to negotiate with the Mob. I like the analogy, except that the mob had far more honor and far less power than these guys in Syria and Iran. Tony Blankly, in an article in RealClearPolitics, writes what appears to me basic common sense on the matter:

Iran has been our persistent enemy for 27 years — Syria longer. They may well be glad to give us cover while we retreat, but that would merely be an exercise in slightly delayed gratification, not self-denial, let alone benignity.

What’s up with this belief in the power of talk? Yes, sometimes, if there’s something in it for them, one can talk with the enemy and convince them to cooperate in an endeavor that gives them some sort of secondary gain. Or, it can work if we couple it with a big enough threat; but our threats are getting a bit hollow these days.

I read this editorial, and especially the quoted paragraph that follows, over and over, trying to parse some sort of sense from its Alice-in-Wonderland reasoning. I failed; perhaps you can enlighten me:

There is little doubt that Iran and Syria, especially the former, can play a crucial role in bringing peace to Iraq. Teheran’s influence on Iraq’s Shia political alliance and their numerous militias is hardly a secret. Iran has skilfully used its friends in Iraq to send the message to Washington that it could add to its woes, if the US pressured it on the question of nuclear programme.

Let’s see; I could paraphrase it something like this:

There is little doubt that the fox can play a crucial role in bringing peace to the henhouse. The fox’s raids on the chickens are hardly a secret. The fox has skillfully sent a message to the chicken farmers that it could add to their woes, if the chicken farmers tried to shoot it.

Even for therapists–and therapists believe in talk–there’s a time when talk is not appropriate–in dealing with relationships in which there are massive differentials of power, and ones that involve violence, for example. That’s when the law steps in.

There’s an almost unbelievably ridiculous and misplaced faith in talk across the land, a faith not-above-board players such as Syria and Iran do not share. They view our devotion to talk and to pacts and truths as a wonderful opportunity to exploit the naivete and weakness of the West. And they are right.

Munich was a wonderful talkfest, as well. And the ever-eloquent Churchill had something to say about it, too:

…[T]he terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting”. And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.

Churchill didn’t want a world war; he wanted to prevent one by taking a stand at the right time for the right thing. But he knew that trusting the words of an enemy such as Hitler was no way to go about avoiding one; au contraire.

[ADDENDUM: Victor Davis Hanson agrees.]

Vietnamization; Iraqization (Part I)

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Wars tend to be hard on Presidents as well as on nations. Lincoln barely survived the Civil War before he was assassinated. Wilson’s health permanently deteriorated in the immediate aftermath of WWI, when he undertook a grueling speaking tour in a vain attempt to rally the country around support for the League of Nations. FDR died shortly before WWII ended, leaving the unseasoned Harry Truman to make vital decisions at its conclusion.

The Vietnam War was a bit different; no executive died (although my guess is that it may have hastened the death of Johnson, who already had a bad heart). But there’s little doubt that it prematurely ended the political career of Johnson, who’d been elected in a huge landslide in 1964 but declined to run in 1968. And of course Richard Nixon, the proximate cause of whose political demise was Watergate rather than Vietnam, had to leave office before the war was over, leaving the unelected Gerald Ford to preside inneffectually over Congress’s final financial abandonment of the South Vietnamese.

President Bush is still with us, despite the war (and those who wish he’d drop dead). This time, the casualty was Republican control of Congress. The Iraq War will have been started by a Republican executive paired with a Republican Congress, and will now be continued by a Republican President (at least for now) and a Democratic Congress.

Many people who have only a passing acquaintance with the history of the Vietnam War fail to realize that the first phase, escalation of American combat forces in the country, was engineered by two Democrat Presidents (Kennedy but then much more importantly Johnson) and a strongly Democratic Congress. The second part–Vietnamization, or the drawing down of US combat forces, ceding the actual fighting to the South Vietnamese–was undertaken by a Republican executive, Nixon, working with a profoundly Democratic Congress. The third stage, occurring when there were no more US combat troops in Vietnam, was presided over by a weak and unelected Republican President and a Democratic Congress, although it was the Democratic Congress that was the main player in the cutoff of funding to the South Vietnamese, sealing their fate; President Ford was active in that decision mainly by his failure to fight it, or to suggest alternatives. We can say that the Vietnam War was a bipartisan affair, but Democrats had the leading role, especially in stages one and three.

Why am I bringing this up now? We seem to be facing a decision somewhat similar to that faced by Nixon on his election: how to deal with a war that isn’t going as anyone would have hoped. This commission or that commission or the other commission is studying the problem: realpolitik or not? more troops or fewer? big, long, or home?

Victor Davis Hanson, an expert on military history, has recently written a column in which he weighs current suggestions for Iraq policy, especially troop increases. He says–and I agree–that it’s the second stage of the Vietnam War our present involvement should try to resemble (only we need to accomplish it more effectively, of course): that of Vietnamization.

In contrast to Vietnam, the US political parties involved in the Iraq War are somewhat reversed. The first stage of the Iraq War (if this election can be said to mark the end of the first stage, which I believe it does) was as much a Republication endeavor as the first stage of Vietnam was a Democratic one: Republican President, Republican Congress. And now, although the change of party power is different than it was in 1968 (change of legislature rather than executive) the Democrats get a chance to try their luck at the second stage, Iraqization, just as the Republican Nixon did back in early 1969 when he introduced Vietnamization. It can either be done slowly and carefully, or quickly and recklessly.

As with all parallels to Vietnam, this one is far from an exact comparison. For one thing, President Bush and the Defense Department have been trying for years to Iraqicize the conflict, although without enough success. Another difference is that the American presence in Iraq has never been close to what it was in Vietnam in terms of numbers or casualties. We deposed Saddam’s regime at the outset of the war, and in record time; we never achieved that goal in Vietnam with the North Vietnamese (in fact, it doesn’t really seem to have been one of our goals there). In Iraq, we’re facing a conflict that’s less clear geographically (although Vietnam was far from clearly demarcated), and involves far more sides, including ancient religious clashes as well as modern-day jockeying for secular power, and an enemy that’s even more brutal than the North Vietnamese were (and that’s saying something).

Vietnam became a war in which both Democrats and Republicans had a chance to make decisions. Peggy Noonan writes, reflecting on the change represented in the recent midterm election:

We are in a 30-year war. It is no good for it to be led by, identified with, one party. It is no good for half the nation to feel estranged from its government’s decisions. It’s no good for us to be broken up more than a nation normally would be. And straight down the middle is a bad break, the kind that snaps.

“Vietnamization” was a word that became a sort of joke to many liberals and those on the Left, representing the shoring up of a corrupt regime in South Vietnam, the secret bombings of Cambodia (and thus, more deception to the American people), and the final retreat and abandonment of the country. In Part II, I plan to take up a discussion of what Vietnamization actually was, and how it might relate to the decisions we face today.

You heard it here first: Charles Rangel, the draft, and the Hegelian dialectic

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It seems to me that Representative Charles Rangel’s suggestion to reintroduce the draft should get some sort of prize for cynical ploys in Congress. Granted, he’s got a lot of competition, but this one is designed to offend almost everyone, including the vast majority of his fellow Democrats, and even Rangel doesn’t think for a moment that his proposal has a chance of passing.

Whether or not he’s serious about the actual institution of an actual draft, Rangel certainly has been serious about suggesting such a thing. He did it back in January of 2003, to a resounding defeat–and, interestingly enough, Rangel was one of the defeaters: he voted against his own bill.

Those Republicans and Independents who turned on the Republican Congress this past election and either stayed home from the polls or voted for Democrats in protest may be rethinking just a bit when they learn that Rangel is going to be chairman of the influential House Ways and Means Committee. But the moving finger has writ.

And now it’s deja vu all over again, especially if Rangel has his way. Paraphrasing one of my personal heroes, Groucho Marx, Rangel said “you bet your life” when asked yesterday on “Face the Nation” if he would renew his call for a draft.

What’s motivating Rangel, besides the desire for publicity? He says he thinks a draft would make future administrations more wary of going to war in the first place; no doubt he’s studied the Vietnam years and knows that the war protests were at least partly fueled by the understandable self-interest of the youth of America, who were reluctant to be drafted into a far-off war that seemed both unwinnable and strategically unnecessary. But Rangel also says he wants the army to be more socioeconomically even-handed; he believes it’s the poor who are exploited by the present system.

Of course, Rangel is ignoring the evidence that indicates the composition of today’s armed forces do not at all correspond to his vision (see this, for example.) Perception is all, after all. Not to mention the fact that the highly specialized nature of today’s military does not lend itself to a draft.

Even among his constituents, many seem to regard Rangel as a sort of buffoon or even the enemy:

Along 125th Street in New York City on Sunday, Rangel’s draft plan was met mostly with derision.

“What, he was smoking pot or something?” said 58-year-old James Brown [no; not this James Brown].

“He doesn’t represent the people of Harlem if he’s for the draft,” Neil Davis, 48, said.

But I don’t think Rangel is dumb. In fact, he may be extremely smart. Certainly, he’s about to become a great deal more powerful when he ascends to his new chairmanship. And it occurs to me, attempting to drag some hazy facts from the dim reaches of my college memory (an era in my life that grows further and further away even as I write this), it seems to me that Rangel may be one of the few people on earth who understands the concept of the Hegelian dialectic.

Yes, you read me right: the Hegelian dialectic. As I recall, it’s one of those things where you go in one direction in order to end up in the opposite one by causing some sort of outraged reaction and backlash–but, as I said, my recollection is a trifle dim (the dialectic hasn’t come up too often in my daily life of the past few decades). So I decided to Google it.

And immediately fell into a deep morass of obfuscation. You take a look if you like; I’m weary. It reminds me of just why I decided not to become a philosophy major: impenetrability. Perhaps my interpretation of the dialectic is wrong; if so, I can count on you readers to set me straight.

But if–as I suspect–Charles Rangel understands and is operationalizing all of this, he’s got some heavy-duty intellectual chops to go with his heavy-duty audacity.

I’m just a Richard Thompson groupie

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I went to a Richard Thompson concert the other night.

Who’s he? Just one of those old guys (in his fities!) still churning out the music and touring round the world. He’s never become a household word despite a career that’s lasted over thirty years.

But here’s my small effort to promote one of the most electrifying and intense performers of all time. And I’m not even getting a fee, although a meeting with the guy, if anyone could arrange one, might be awfully nice (in this latter endeavor I’m inspired by The Anchoress’s call for a similar rendezvous with Bryn Terfel. Each to his [her] own).

I discovered Thompson about fifteen years ago and the minute I heard him I knew I was hooked. I was idly listening to one of those FM stations that specialize in what’s known as “folk” music nowadays, a genre that bears little or no resemblance to the folk music of my youth (I’m not complaining). Yes, every now and then Thompson, a Brit, does compose a ballad (although never a conventional one; see this) that harks back to traditional folk roots. But most of his music is indefinable, except that it partakes of his caustic, often bitter and yet poetic sensibility, and sometimes a biting humor.

And, to those of you who call me anti-Muslim, let it be said here and now that years ago Thompson converted to Sufism (not exactly mainstream Islam, of course). Which is irrelevant, except to him; he’s no Cat Stevens. The main thing is the music and the lyrics.

Thompson writes both, and it’s hard to say which is better. His recordings are good (listen to some of the cuts here, for example). But it’s live that he shines–although “shines” isn’t exactly the right word–he smoulders, and then explodes in a very controlled burn.

Thompson is an astounding guitar player; aficionados consider him the best or one of the best in the world. In person, he emanates a deceptive stillness that contains within it a coiled tension. He moves hardly at all when he plays and sings; all that energy is focused on his hands, face, and mouth. Every now and then a leg kicks out in a small karate-like action, potential energy transformed to kinetic. But within his control is an emotionality that can break the heart and reach the soul, especially through the remarkably expressive instrument that is Thompson’s voice (listen, for example, to the cut “Persuasion,” here).

I’ve seen Thompson in concert five or six times, and all of them have been extraordinary. He never flags and never gives less than his all, which is far more than most people’s all. Go see him if you can–and oh, yeah; give him my love.

[NOTE: When I wrote this piece, I had no idea how to embed YouTube videos on the blog. Now I do.

So, since one video is worth a thousand words, I’ll offer more than one. The first is Thompson in a pensive, deeply poignant mood (the music begins about forty seconds into the clip):

The second is Thompson with more flash and bite (wait for the guitar solos):

Oh here, have another. You’ll be glad you did:

Ah, just one more. Back to the simplicity that shows Thompson’s astounding versatility:

Oh, just go to You Tube and watch them all.]

That was a mighty short honeymoon: Pelosi

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Nancy Pelosi may have gotten the kid-gloves treatment from the media during the election, but now the gloves are off. Her championing of Murtha for Majority leader (and her simultaneous abandonment of her former deputy, Hoyer) seems to have struck a nerve.

We expected her stand to offend Republicans; that’s not news. But it offended Democrats as well, not to mention Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, previously labeled “…probably the most anti-Bush reporter currently assigned to the White House by a major news organization” by John J. Miller of National Review.

Milbank doesn’t sound all that fond of Pelosi’s track record so far, either; he seems to think this Speaker might do well to do less Speaking and just STFU.

And it’s hard to blame him, or those Democrats who are angry that Pelosi’s misguided boosting of Murtha put a damper on their victory party as well as their party unity. And then there are statements by Pelosi such as the following, made after Murtha’s defeat; it’s almost beyond parody:

Let there be peace on Earth, and let it begin with us. Let the healing begin.”

It’s a noble sentiment, but better suited to the pulpit than the Speaker’s podium. Perhaps she was speaking ironically? At any rate, it appears that nobody’s listening:

For Pelosi, who led Democrats back to a majority in the House after 12 years, yesterday should have been a coronation for the first woman to be speaker. Instead, her party had plunged into fratricide, and cable news was running nonstop clips of Murtha talking with FBI agents posing as sheiks in the Abscam sting.

Was this a great moment for Democrats, or “total crap”? “The latter,” Pelosi spokeswoman Jennifer Crider had to admit as she surveyed the melee outside the caucus room.

Personally, I don’t really care if the Democrats unite or not–what I care about is what they accomplish, or fail to accomplish. If they somehow, despite Murtha et al, refuse to cut and run in Iraq, and manage to force the administration into formulating a better plan for dealing with the situation in Iraq here-and-now–that would be a consummation devoutly to be wished. I’m interested in results, not who gets us there.

[NOTE: Why did Pelosi abandon Hoyer, despite his great popularity among fellow Democrats? Perhaps it’s because he’s too much of a centrist? And see this–those Blue Dog Democrats seem to be up for another Pelosi challenge. I wish them well; Hastings is a lousy choice, but Pelosi appears determined to strong-arm her candidates into place over the objections of many, rather than having learned the lesson of the Murtha defeat. “Peace on earth” indeed.]

[ADDENDUM: I mentioned the Pelosi-bashing in the Post; Tigerhawk notices something similar at the Times.]

[ADDENDUM II: It occurs to me that this honeymoon was so short and unsweet that some Democrats might prefer an annulment.]

Glee may be premature, on both sides

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Amir Taheri was the executive editor-in-chief of the largest newspaper in Iran during the 1970s. Ever since, he’s been writing about the Middle East and Iran for a wide variety of Western papers, as well as the Arab News and the pan-Arab daily Asharq Alawsat. You might say he’s well-versed in the region.

Taheri sees the Islamist totalitarian jihadis as jubilant after last week’s US election. In fact, as Taheri describes them, our enemies of that ilk from Baghdad to Tehran to Beirut–and everywhere in-between–are probably far more gleeful right now than even the Democrats in Congress. The former view the election as a sign of America’s weakness, and are convinced the fix is in for Iraq: it’s cut and run time. Showing those films of American helicopters on the roof in Saigon seems awfully prescient for Saddam, who even as he marches off to the gallows may get to shout a triumphant “I told you so!” to his former subjects.

Or maybe not.

Maybe one of the reasons the Democrats aren’t feeling so sanguine is that they realize, as Taheri says; it’s one of those “be careful what you wish for” things:

Some Democrats may have promised cut-and-run. But, once in power, the party as a whole may realize (to its horror) that, this time, those from whom Americans run away will come after them.

Leaving Iraq precipitously is by no means a foregone conclusion, even with the Democrats in power in Congress. The jihadis make an error if they automatically assume that it is. Although there’s no denying that Taheri is correct–this election sends a very bad message regarding American resolve–as he also points out, the Democrats might surprise the Arab world by countermanding that message.

RIP Milton Friedman

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It seems as though it must have been an awfully good life: a long one filled with accomplishments, a happy marriage, and countless friends. Milton Friedman, who died today, was the economist nearly everyone’s heard of, the architect of libertarian economic theories followed by Reagan and Thatcher, predictor of the inflationary problems of the 70s (“stagflation”), and hero of former Communist nations struggling to become capitalist.

Friedman believed that government should interfere as little as possible in the economy except for taking a hand in controlling the supply of money. His ideas were revolutionary at the time, since Keynes held sway, but they harked back to earlier thinkers such as Adam Smith.

I’m interested, as usual, in what factors about Friedman’s life may have formed him. The shaping of a human being is always, at heart, a mystery, but here are a few clues:

Mr. Friedman’s father died in his son’s senior year at Rahway High School. Young Milton later waited on tables and clerked in stores to supplement a scholarship he had earned at Rutgers University. He entered Rutgers in 1929, the year the stock market crashed and the Depression began.

Mr. Friedman attributed his success to “accidents”: the immigration of his teenage parents from Czechoslovakia, enabling him to be an American and not the citizen of a Soviet-bloc state; the skill of a high-school geometry teacher who showed him a connection between Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn” and the Pythagorean theorem, allowing him to see the beauty in the mathematical truth that the square of the sides of a right triangle equals the square of the hypotenuse; the receipt of a scholarship that enabled him to attend Rutgers and there have Arthur F. Burns and Homer Jones as teachers…

In his first economic-theory class at Chicago, he was the beneficiary of another accident ”” the fact that his last name began with an “F.” The class was seated alphabetically, and he was placed next to Rose Director, a master’s-degree candidate from Portland, Ore. That seating arrangement shaped his whole life, he said. He married Ms. Director six years later. And she, after becoming an important economist in her own right, helped Mr. Friedman form his ideas and maintain his intellectual rigor.

After he became something of a celebrity, Mr. Friedman said, many people became reluctant to challenge him directly. “They can’t come right out and say something stinks,” he said. “Rose can.”

In 1998, he and his wife published a memoir, “Two Lucky People” (University of Chicago Press.

His wife survives him…

Lucky people, indeed–but not blind luck. Friedman was obviously brilliant, but with a creative mind able to synthesize, some experience with the school of hard knocks as well as academia, and a heart that recognized a good potential spouse when he saw one plus the good sense to stick with her for what must have been something like seventy years.

Friedman had the ability to earn the grudging respect even of his opponents, and sometimes even their reluctant acquiescence in the end. That’s the mark of a formidable thinker, one whose theories had predictive value. It’s also the mark of an honest and open-minded opponent:

Mr. Samuelson…of M.I.T., [who often disagreed with Friedman], who was not above wisecracking himself, had a standard line in his economics classes that always brought down the house: “Just because Milton Friedman says it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily untrue.”

But Professor Samuelson said he never joked in class unless he was serious ”” that his friend and intellectual opponent was, in fact, often right when at first he sounded wrong.

Mr. Friedman’s opposition to rent control after World War II, for example, incurred the wrath of many colleagues. They took it as an unpatriotic criticism of economic policies that had been successful in helping the nation mobilize for war. Later, Mr. Sameulson said, “probably 98 percent of them would agree that he was right.”

Friedman’s major achievement, the one for which he received the Nobel prize, was linking rising unemployment to rising inflation. He also suggested a remedy, one that’s generally been followed: to have the Federal Reserve keep the money supply growing steadily.

Here are some visuals for the imagination (I’ve seen Galbraith in person, by the way, and though far be it from me to doubt the veracity of the Times, he appeared even taller than this, if possible):

In forums [Friedman] would spar over the role of government with his more liberal adversaries, including John Kenneth Galbraith, who was also a longtime friend (and who died in May 2006). The two would often share a stage, presenting a study in contrasts as much visual as intellectual: Mr. Friedman stood 5 feet 3; Mr. Galbraith, 6 feet 8.

But–in a metaphor that’s almost inescapable–Friedman was a giant of a man.

[NOTE: Liberals and leftists have criticized Friedman for giving economic advice to the government of Pinochet in Chile. I wouldn’t doubt it if some commenters here feel like doing the same (criticizing him, that is, not giving advice to Pinochet). Friedman’s pragmatic answer was this:

…if he could help reestablish a free market in Chile, political freedom would eventually triumph there as well.

For a fuller explanation by Friedman, see this as well.]

And now for some good news: repealing sharia rape law in Pakistan

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Pakistan has taken a step forward after taking several steps backward. Yesterday Pakistan’s legislature voted to end the sway of sharia in dealing with the crime of rape.

Ah, sharia. That famous Muslim legal system, steeped in a religion that’s so very respectful of women and human rights. But it’s not, you say? Ah, but we need to respect a different culture, as the British imperialist warmongers so famously did not regarding the quaint and ancient Hindu practice of suttee:

When General George Napier was governor of Sind province in India in the 1840s, he vigorously enforced the ban on suttee, the practice of throwing a Hindu widow on to the funeral pyre of her husband. A delegation of Brahmins came to him to explain that he must not prohibit the practice at the funeral of a particular maharaja, as it was an important cultural custom.

“If it is your custom to burn a widow alive, please go on,” Napier responded.

“We have a custom in our country that whoever burns a person alive shall be hanged. While you prepare the funeral pyre, my carpenters will be making the gallows to hang all of you. Let us all act according to our customs” The Brahmins thought better of it, and the widow lived.

Old-fashioned imperialism is dead–at least, of the Western variety–despite leftist claims that we are the worst imperialists ever. So Napier’s solution is not available to us.

But even Leftists and feminists ought to be privately rejoicing in their publicly multi-cultural hearts at the news from Pakistan. No longer does a raped woman require the corroborative testimony of four Muslim men to confirm her account of a sexual assault. And, praise be, judges are now able to consider forensic and circumstantial evidence of rape, as well. Not only that, but flogging and stoning to death will no longer be on the books for consensual sex outside marriage.

But all is not well in Pakistan for those who want to mess around; far from it. All extramarital sex is still punishable by five years in prison and fines. And we only got a tongue-lashing from our parents, and fear of pregnancy (although I seem to recall that, when I was in college, the crime of fornication was still on the books in several states).

Members of Parliament from Islamist parties boycotted the vote, but it still passed. And President Musharraf, who has pushed for this change for years but always backed off in the past when Islamist groups threatened protests, seems to have gotten his way this time.

Why success now? Perhaps the key was international embarrassment:

Pakistan’s rape laws came under international scrutiny when last year when a high court overturned the convictions of five men accused of gang-raping villager Mukhtar Mai, as a form of punishment for an adulterous act by her brother and another woman. She had to flee the country because of the backlash against her.

I’m not sure whether pressures like that would work in a country less Westernized than Pakistan. It’s also interesting to note that sharia has not held sway there for very long; these laws were part of a legal “reform” movement that was introduced in 1979. It was a very good year–for turning back the clock to a medieval version of civil rights: 1979 was also, of course, the year of the Iranian revolution.

Government lies, press lies: finding the truthtellers on that island

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Since last week’s election, I’ve been thinking about Vietnam. Again.

Back in earlier installments of my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series (and no, readers, I’ve not given up on composing new installments; they’re just so lengthy that I have to find a huge chunk of free time in which to tackle them), I wrote at least four pieces on the subject: here, here, here, and especially here.

A deja vu feeling engendered by this post-election week harks back to the early seventies, the time of Vietnamization and the phased withdrawal of US troops, and then the final pulling of the financial plug on the South Vietnamese in 1975. That war ended, for most Americans, not with a bang but a whimper, as well as a sigh of relief.

Back then, my thoughts about Vietnam–and therefore many of my opinions and feelings–were formed mainly by reading what we now call the MSM but what at the time was simply the press, the newspapers, the papers of record, all the news fit to print. Part of my revisiting of the Vietnam story has been to re-evaluate some of the information and impressions I and many others swallowed at the time, and to look at them in the harsh light of a new day.

There’s nothing easy about that process. How does one evaluate what is truth, what is lies, and what is the bias and subtle shading in between? On the island of the truth tellers and the liars, how can you tell the difference, when knowing the answer could be a matter of life and death?

One way, of course, is to look at the track record for accuracy and the known biases of the presenter of such “truths” Another, and my favorite, is to read on both sides and then try to decide. But in the end, the reader is faced with the fact that truth is an elusive beast to stalk.

But it’s not a unicorn. I’m not one to throw up my hands in despair and decide that all truths are equally equal and equally unknowable, so why bother. I believe we can–and must–try to learn history as best we can, or be condemned to repeat it. Sometimes I fear that even if we do learn it, we’ll still be condemned to repeat it, simply because human nature doesn’t change.

Which brings us (in laborious fashion; I know, I know!) back to Vietnam.

One of the constant themes of many critics of the US role in Vietnam was that our government lied. There’s no question this was a watershed experience for many Americans who lived through it; for them, ever afterwards, a deep and bitter skepticism towards our government replaced an earlier too-naive trust. For many such people, there was a concomitant attitude change towards members of the press, who were now seen as heroic giant-slayers and (pardon the word) crusaders, bravely exposing those government lies.

I was never one who saw it in such very stark terms. But yes, early on, it became evident that Vietnam was one of the most complex endeavors in American history, one in which the government did appear to lie (or at least bend the truth) about some key issues, such as, for example, the possibilities of actually ever “winning” the conflict. But it’s also become clear that the press also had a horse in that race, and wasn’t averse to some shady doings of its own.

Anyone who’s read my “change” series knows that a goodly part of my post-9/11 thinking has been a process of evaluating press lies, truth-shadings, and biases. One reason the press can get away with this so easily is because of human laziness: how many people are going to make it their business to become the MSM’s fact-checkers? That would be far more than a full time job, although it’s become a bit easier with advent of the internet.

Take the Pentagon Papers. We all know the drill: fearless Daniel Ellsberg, at the risk of prosecution, spirits away classified information (not in his pants a la Sandy Berger–the Papers were originally 7,000 pages long, and Ellsberg was a skinny guy) and gives it to the press, who publish it in brave defiance of government efforts and a Supreme Court case trying to enjoin them from doing so. But Ellsberg’s–and the Times and Post‘s–devotion to truth won out, the American people were informed of the government’s deceptions, and we finally disengaged from an unwinnable battle.

We can forever debate the Vietnam war itself–its morality, justification, execution, and results; I’m trying not to do that in this post. This is about the sorting through of information.

So, what about the press lies about the government lies? Who will tell that story, and who has the patience to listen? It’s a marathon, not a sprint; to tell it requires a laborious wade through a mind-numbing number of documents, and to even read about it requires a bit of work, as well, and a troubling rethinking of old perceptions.

For example, just for the Pentagon Papers alone, the task of evaluation would require actually reading the original Papers, and then reading all the major press stories about them, sorting through the excerpts from the Papers that were published in newspapers at the time, and seeing how they compare to the Papers as a whole. It’s something I must confess I’ve never done, and probably never will do. But others have, and they report some curious goings-on.

A fascinating piece on the subject of war coverage by the MSM–both then and now–was written by James Q. Wilson and appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal. Take a look at this, on the Papers:

Journalist Edward Jay Epstein has shown that in crucial respects, the Times coverage was at odds with what the documents actually said. The lead of the Times story was that in 1964 the Johnson administration reached a consensus to bomb North Vietnam at a time when the president was publicly saying that he would not bomb the north. In fact, the Pentagon papers actually said that, in 1964, the White House had rejected the idea of bombing the north. The Times went on to assert that American forces had deliberately provoked the alleged attacks on its ships in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify a congressional resolution supporting our war efforts. In fact, the Pentagon papers said the opposite: there was no evidence that we had provoked whatever attacks may have occurred.

In short, a key newspaper said that politicians had manipulated us into a war by means of deception. This claim, wrong as it was, was part of a chain of reporting and editorializing that helped convince upper-middle-class Americans that the government could not be trusted.

We’re not on that island of the truth-tellers and the liars, where a single cleverly-worded question can discern the truth. Would that we were; our task would be a great deal easier. But it’s plain that there were enough lies to go around, and that the MSM’s lies must lead every thinking person to question the earlier version of history that was learned back when events were happening, and when newspaper and television coverage combined to give us our primary perception of the blooming buzzing confusion around us.

In writing this post, I went back and read a few of the comments to my earlier Vietnam essays. I happened across this one, that deals with the very subject at hand: media coverage of the Pentagon Papers:

The NYT and WaPo reporters (Neil Sheehan, et al) who provided a highly abridged (paraphrased and quoted) version [of the Pentagon Papers] to the public of that era (’71) distorted the originals in sundry and fundamental ways in order to imply or more directly state that Pres. Johnson and others employed deceptions at critical junctures in the conflict when in fact (as stated in the original document as well as the scaled down version) they did not. A specific example (and a critical one in that era) taken from Michael Lind’s Vietnam: The Necessary War:

The June 14, ’71 NYT edition of their edited version of the Pentagon Papers indicates Pres. Johnson had virtually concluded his decision to initiate a bombing campaign against the North by Nov. 3, 1964. (If true this would have made Johnson out to be deceitful toward the American public at an early and critical stage in the conflict.) However the Pentagon Papers itself states: “… the President was not ready to approve a program of air strikes against North Vietnam, at least until the available alternatives could be carefully and thoroughly re-examined.” That quote, reflecting November, 1964 circumstances, can be located via a search in this section of the Pentagon Papers.

This single distortion may not appear to be dramatic in and of itself, but there were other overt and more subtle distortions in the NYT’s and WaPo’s paraphrased versions of this document. In sum they always and consistently distorted the picture in a manner which eroded Pres. Johnson’s (and others) reputation, broadly characterizing him as being willfully deceitful; that general mischaracterization is what proved to be critical at the time rather than any single aspect of the paraphrased report.

I’m not trying to absolve Johnson of all wrongdoing; there’s enough blame to go around. And some of it most definitely goes to our old friends, those dragon slayers in the MSM.