Timur-I-Leng

A Lie Repeated : What's really going on in Tibet

2008-03-30T19:48:00.003-04:00

I don't often agree with leftists, but in this instance, I'll make an exception:

As a lifelong activist who has worked on human rights issues around the globe, I hold the view that the best representatives of a culture are its people; that people create their own history, and in the case of the colonized or the oppressed that history is often rewritten by the oppressor. I do not assume that simply because a country is communist or socialist or capitalist that its practices toward its own people or its foreign policies are more or less honorable; beyond all the rhetoric, the reality of a situation can always be measured by the affected people themselves.

"A lie repeated a hundred times becomes the truth."
-Chairman Mao

The Tibet issue is one that the left has found to be somewhat of a conundrum, for the simple reason that most other popular human rights struggles can be easily linked to a larger struggle against U.S. or European imperialism. Therefore these struggles - be it in Palestine, or East Timor, or Colombia, fit nicely into the larger - and often rather myopic - worldview of the leftist.

However, Tibet is a case in which the struggle for basic rights and nationhood is being carried out against a communist government, so it has brought with it a host of questions for the leftist, who naturally leans towards socialism or communism as an ideological example of a system that stands in contrast to the 'imperialist west'.

China, the country that invaded Tibet in 1950, has stood as one such example- though the Chinese government's practices over the last 53 years and its current bent towards totalitarian capitalism would tend to defy any labeling as a positive example. Nonetheless, China's history of socialism and revolution remains as something of an inspiration for the Western left, and therefore certain historians- predominantly scholars with some form of Marxist or Maoist agenda- have seen the current popularity of the movement for Tibetan statehood and have taken it upon themselves to give a glimpse into the grim reality of 'old Tibet.'

The most recent historian to embrace this view of 'old Tibet' is Dr. Michael Parenti, a Yale scholar who, in the course of his career, has written on a variety of populist causes. To be fair, Parenti stops short -barely- of condoning the Chinese occupation. He does however, cast a decidedly unflattering view of life in pre-1950 Tibet.

In his writing on Tibet, Parenti shares something in common with all of his predecessors -Anna Louise Strong, A. Tom Grunfeld, and Roma and Stuart
Gelder among them- in that his writing on Tibet is essentially argumentative. He is not writing in order to give an unbiased history of a nation, he is writing in order to prove a point. In this case, the point he is trying to prove is that the society of 'old Tibet' was a terrible place, and that the resistance movement that is so visible today is essentially a movement to re-establish this despicable regime.

In Parenti's words, old Tibet was "a social order that was little more than a despotic retrograde theocracy of serfdom and poverty, so damaging to the human spirit, where vast wealth was accumulated by a favored few who lived high and mighty off the blood, sweat, and tears of the many. For most of the Tibetan aristocrats in exile, that is the world to which they fervently desire to return. It is a long way from Shangri-La."

I have chosen to dissect this thesis because it houses many of the common arguments presented by Chinese government propagandists on Tibet, as well as many of the arguments that modern day Marxists and Maoists regularly hurl at Tibet activists on internet chat rooms and at protests. As we will see, the flawed premise of this thesis illuminates how the far left has gone woefully off the mark in its efforts to undermine the legitimate struggle for Tibetan rights and statehood.

Again, I am a firm believer in people's history. And the core problem with Parenti's position is that it is simply at odds with the statements, testimony, and shared history of the Tibetan people themselves - the people Parenti is supposedly defending. The view of Tibet that Parenti ascribes to has been commonly put forward by Chinese government officials - particularly the ones in the ministry of propaganda. Once upon a time it was a view embraced by a handful of British historians - most of them turn of the century explorers and colonists in their own right. But it has always been an outsider's view, completely divorced from the reality of how Tibetans of all walks of life view their own society and their own history.

In his descriptions of old Tibet, Parenti predominantly draws on the work of four historians - Anna Louise Strong, A. Tom Grunfeld, and Roma and Stuart Gelder. The fact that all of these historians had a romantic predilection towards Maoism and drew mostly on Chinese government statistics should surely be cause for concern as far as their legitimacy as source material. One certainly wouldn't trust the Indonesian government's party line on Aceh or East Timor. Or, for that matter, the U.S. government's continued assertion that the Iraqi people welcome the current American occupation. Such manipulations of public sentiment, in which an occupation is presented as 'the will of the people,' are – as a rule – only employed to further the agenda of the occupier.

For the most part, Parenti and the handful of historians who have adopted the view of old Tibet as a despotic feudal theocracy have had little if no contact with actual Tibetans either in or outside Tibet. Therefore, they have no real way of gauging the sentiments of the Tibetan people. Neither Parenti, Strong, Grunfeld, nor the Gelders speak Tibetan - or Chinese for that matter- so the body of historical literature on the Tibet issue that is available to them is extremely limited. Tom Grunfeld never went to Tibet until after his book was published. Anna Louise Strong – a diehard Marxist – was given a tightly monitored Chinese government tour of Lhasa and then went on to proclaim that "a million Tibetan serfs have stood up! They are burying the old serfdom and building a new tomorrow!" One might say that one doesn't need to go to Paris to know the Eiffel tower exists. However, before dismissing an entire culture's history as despotically repressive it is perhaps worth speaking to a few of its representatives.

Instead, Grunfeld repeatedly draws on the writings of a handful of British colonial explorers, who - as explorers often do - wrote down every piece of suspicious folklore and hearsay as fact. Grunfeld's source material for his depictions of Tibetans as cannibals, barbarians, and superstitious fanatics is no more credible than are the testimonials of early European explorers to Africa who spun yarns of three-headed natives. None of these depictions are corroborated by traditional Tibetan, Chinese, or Indian histories, which of course were not available to Grunfeld because of his lack of interest in learning the local language.

Grunfeld also makes extensive use of the writings of Sir Charles Bell, who he quotes regularly and with no apparent regard for context. Bell's stance was actually that Tibetans had been brutalized by the Chinese army and that Tibet was an independent nation of far greater 'character' than its neighbor. This seems to elude Grunfeld, who chops up Bell's sentences in order to isolate the worst and most sensational aspects of Tibetan society and present them as fact. Grunfeld also makes cultural blunders that would make freshmen history students squirm. As award-winning author Jamyang Norbu points out in his brilliant essay The Acme of Obscenity, Grunfeld even mistranslates the Tibetan word for 'Tibet'!

Parenti does little better in his treatment of history, erroneously stating that the first Dalai Lama was installed by 'the Chinese army'. One would presume that a Yale Ph.D. would know the difference between Chinese and Mongols. But apparently, in the Parenti-Grunfeld-Strong school of history, one word is as good as another and a Chinese is as good as a Mongol, as long as the point gets across.

With such evisceration of history as common practice it quickly becomes obvious that none these historians' writings on Tibet exist to illuminate true Tibetan history. In fact, neither Grunfeld, nor Strong, nor Parenti seem remotely interested in the specifics of the culture they're discussing.

For example, as Tashi Rapgey points out in her dissection of Tom Grunfeld's 'Making of Modern Tibet', the three social classes that Grunfeld and Strong lump Tibetans into - landowners, serfs, and slaves - have no relation to the actual breakdown of Tibetan society. It is a completely arbitrary classification that has no basis in reality-Tibetan society was never classified along these terms. Certainly a historian writing on the caste system in India would not reclassify Indian society according to their own liking or invent names to suit their own vision?

There were indeed indentured farmers in old Tibet. There were also merchants, nomads, traders, non-indentured farmers, hunters, herders, warlords, bandits, monks, nuns, musicians, theater actors and artists. Tibetan society was a vast, multi-faceted affair, as societies tend to be. To reduce it to three base experiences – and non-representative experiences at that – is to engage in the worst form of reductionism.

Not only are Strong and Grunfeld's breakdowns of Tibetan society grossly
miscategorized, their observations and criticisms are entirely removed from chronological and temporal reality. Folklore from hundreds of years ago, local myths, explorer's whimsy, and selective historical incidents are presented all together as static truth. Every single bad thing, every monstrosity real or imagined that occurred in Tibet between 1447 and October 6, 1950 is 'how it was' in 'old Tibet.' Fundamentally, this is not history. It is the crudest form of argumentative politics, drawing on selective quotes from non-native history - quite often the history of the occupiers themselves - and presenting it as fact.

In fact the entire notion of 'old Tibet' or Tibet under the Dalai Lamas as a static is erroneous. Life under the 13th Dalai Lama was drastically different that life under the 6th or the 5th. By the time the 13th Dalai Lama came along, for example, the Tibetan government had banned the death penalty – it was one of the first countries in the world to do so. But somehow, in the mind of Grunfeld and Parenti and Strong, Tibetans are to be held accountable for the actions of their distant predecessors.

That there was an imbalance of wealth in Tibet is quite true (There still is, only now the Chinese are the wealthy ones). Tibetans waged war, robbed each other, had strict laws and engaged in corporal punishment like all societies have done at various points in their history. But what is insidious about highlighting solely these aspects of Tibetan society is that these historians -Strong and Grunfeld particularly; Parenti is somewhat excused from this particular outrage-seem to be using 'how it was' in 'old Tibet' as a justification for invasion and occupation, just as the United States used the 'savagery' of the native populations as an excuse for their liquidation. This is the politics of the colonist to the core, in which the native is dehumanized and debased in order to make occupation more palatable, even necessary, or 'civilizing.' Strong does not even conceal her glee at the 'smashing' of old Tibet. Politics aside, its rather frightening to think of celebrating the demise of a culture that one hasn't had any direct contact with, whose existence one has only read about in books.

The romanticism that historians like Strong and Grunfeld hold for the Chinese invasion and occupation of Tibet and the smashing of the old ways is based on an inherently flawed presumption that the invasion was some kind of people's revolution. The Chinese government line, which Strong and Grunfeld and even Parenti seem to have bought into -is that the Tibetan people, and particularly the Tibetan peasantry, welcomed the occupation and in fact that it was they themselves who 'overthrew the landlords.' Such a supposition has no basis in fact.

The Chinese army rolled into Chamdo in Eastern Tibet in October of 1950 and decimated the 8,000-man Tibetan fighting force that was assembled to resist them. That there were Tibetans who initially greeted the arrival of the Chinese is without question; that these Tibetans were the vast minority is also without question. Legitimate histories of Tibet, such as Tsering Shakya's 'Dragon in the Land of Snows' corroborate this fact.

Whatever romantic picture the Chinese government's propaganda department paints of enslaved peasants casting off the bonds of feudalism, there is little in the way of factual evidence to support this. Most of the evidence produced by Beijing comes in the form of testimonials recorded by party cadres, whose questionable nature as a source of objective information should not even have to be mentioned, especially coming from a government that excels in 'extracting testimonials.' These testimonials are written in such propaganda-speak that it is nearly impossible to read them with a straight face; even more impossible to imagine anyone actually uttering the words.

Oddly enough, in contrast to the Chinese government line that it was the Tibetan peasantry who readily embraced communism, communism was in fact much more popular - as it is in this country - among the educated elite. The Tibetan communist party was a creation of sons of wealthy aristocrats; the Tibetan peasantry on the other hand were the ones who eventually formed the brunt of resistance to Chinese government rule.

Whatever the case, Tibetan opinion towards Beijing quickly cooled after the signing of the 17-point agreement in 1951, and certainly was not favorable by 1959, when a popular Tibetan uprising threatened China's very grip on the nation. This resistance was for the most part carried out by Khampa tribesmen in Eastern Tibet, who had suffered some of the most brutal treatment at the hands of the Chinese government. That these fighters were for a time funded by the CIA does not – as Parenti seems to presume – represent some kind of trump card that de-legitimizes the aims, aspirations, and existence of the Tibetan resistance movement. The CIA used the Tibetans just as it has it used nationalist movements in dozens of countries around the world; with little thought for the local people and as a means of waging their own cold war. The Tibetan resistance fighters, who came from poor frontier villages in Eastern Tibet, were happy to have anyone on their side. They had no way of knowing the larger political framework that they had been sucked into. Ironically, it was the Dalai Lama who put an end to this resistance, by calling on the fighters to drop their arms and embrace nonviolent means of conflict resolution.

As for the reality of the subsequent Chinese occupation, which every legitimate human rights organization in the world has labeled with terms like 'cultural genocide', it should hardly need further exposition. One of the most telling historical documents of the time is the Panchen Lama's 70,000 word treatise to Chairman Mao on behalf of the Tibetan people. Not only is this document considered by serious historians to be one of the only reliable texts from that time period, it illuminates the extraordinary kow-towing that was necessary in order for even an elevated Chinese official such as the Panchen Lama to speak to Chairman Mao at that time. Apparently, Mao was not interested in listening to the day-to-day problems of the 'serfs' he 'liberated'. The Panchen Lama was sent to prison for suggesting that people in Tibet were starving; the average Tibetan peasant who offered the same criticism to his local Chinese official did not fare nearly as well.

In his article Parenti again quotes Tom Grunfeld - whose idealism of the cultural revolution should automatically remove him from use as an unbiased source of historical data on the Chinese occupation of Tibet - and asserts that 'slavery and unpaid labor disappeared under Mao'. This sentence simply has no place in any legitimate historical writing. Perhaps Parenti would like to sit down and have a chat with the relatives of the thousands of Tibetans who were worked to death by Chinese soldiers at the infamous Borax mine in Changthang. I've met them myself, and they are far more deserving of a platform on Tibetan history and cultural issues than Parenti. Mao's forced sedentarization of Tibetan nomads was certainly not a liberation; nor was the government-enforced switch to growing foreign cereal crops which resulted in widespread famine in many regions of Tibet.

But again, the true testament to the fact that Tibetans have been far from content under Chinese rule lie in the actions of the people themselves. Ever since the Chinese invasion and occupation there has been substantial popular resistance to Chinese rule in Tibet. This resistance has taken many forms over the years - leafleting, public demonstration, mass non-cooperation, economic boycott, and armed uprising are all forms of protest have been practiced by Tibetans inside Tibet, at the risk of their own lives.

The Chinese government has faced phenomenal opposition from the Tibetan people, certainly far more opposition than the Lhasa government ever faced from its own population, which does not do much to further the argument that 'old Tibet' was a terribly repressive society. Nor does the fact that Tibetan refugees continue pour out of Tibet at a rate never seen prior to 1959. In a classic case of uninformed conjecture, Parenti supposes that Tibetan refugees never left prior to 1959 because the 'systems of control' were so deep and that Tibetans were 'afraid of amputation'. Any quick glance at a map of Tibet, with its vast, unpatrolable borders, or any basic knowledge of the structure of Tibetan society would quickly reveal that Tibetans - should they have wanted to escape their 'feudal masters' - would have had little problem doing so.

But perhaps there is no more telling testament to the Tibetan people's sentiment towards their own culture than the fact that in the early 1980's- when the Chinese government finally relaxed some of its draconian policies towards Tibet- the first thing Tibetans set about doing is rebuilding and repopulating monasteries - the very symbols of 'old Tibet.' The next thing they did was take to the streets and protest for freedom and for the Dalai Lama's return. This is not the behavior of a people who are trying to cast off their old ways. It sounds more like a people who are trying to get their culture back.

This brings up again the essential flaw in Parenti's reasoning-it is not based on the experience of Tibetans. The actuality is that there is now and always has been a people's movement of Tibetans- in fact the vast majority of Tibetans both inside and outside Tibet- who overwhelmingly support the Dalai Lama and more specifically are in favor of Tibetan statehood. This movement cannot simply be dismissed as incidental, or foreign-backed, or primarily aristocratic in nature. The argument that the Tibetan resistance is driven by aristocrats is fairly essential for Parenti et al because without it they would be forced to recognize the existence of this movement-and the existence of such a movement would suggest that perhaps the Tibetan people themselves are more enamored of the Dalai Lama than they ever were of Mao.

The Tibetan resistance, both historically and currently, has been made up of Tibetans from across the social spectrum. The Khampa fighters in the late 50s and early 60s were certainly not aristocrats, nor was Thrinley Chodron, a nun who led a bloody resistance battle against Chinese forces in 1969. The Tibetans who took to the streets and were gunned down in the late 80s were not former aristocrats. Nor are the hundreds of Tibetans currently languishing in Drapchi prison for expressing their desire for statehood.

Currently, there are over 150,000 Tibetans living in exile around the world. There are nomads-in-exile, farmers-in-exile, truck drivers-in-exile. To characterize this entire group as aristocrats or former aristocrats is ludicrous. In New York City alone, there are nearly 5,000 Tibetan refugees. I'm quite certain that Ngawang Rabgyal at the Office of Tibet, who is charged with helping this refugee community find jobs in the outer reaches of Queens, would raise an eyebrow at the description of Tibetan refugees as 'aristocrats.'

The notion that the Tibetan community in exile longs to return to a 'Shangri-la' and re-establish their aristocracy is a banal and uninformed argument that has nothing to do with the real and stated aspirations of the Tibetan freedom movement. First of all, Tibetans never called their country Shangri-La; it was an outsider, James Hilton, who first did that. They never saw their country as a paradise and the Tibetan community is certainly not seeking to reestablish the same political system that existed in pre-1959 Tibet (nor would it be possible). The Dalai Lama has all but abdicated his position as future leader of Tibet – despite the fact that 98% of Tibetans both in and outside Tibet would elect him in a heartbeat – saying that he would rather attend to his religious duties than be a political leader. The Tibetan Kashag is now made up of democratically elected officials and the Tibetan Government-in-Exile –- which, whether Parenti cares to acknowledge their existence or not, is a legitimate entity charged with the welfare of 150,000 refugees – has already outlined a democratic structure for the future government of Tibet.

The movement for Tibetan statehood permeates all segments of Tibetan society. Nomads in western Tibet, herders in Changtang, farmers in Amdo, merchants in Lhasa– the vast majority of Tibetans are vocal – as much as they can be – about their nationalist aspirations. Anyone who has spent time around Tibetans inside or outside Tibet knows this as fact. This fact does not have to be footnoted; it is experiential history.

By way of personal testimony, before I ever became involved in the Tibetan political struggle I went to Tibet myself. I was there during a period of martial law and at certain sensitive locations I had to be escorted by Chinese guides, who made a half-hearted attempt to show me the 'feudal torture chambers' of old Tibet and a statue of a liberated serf 'breaking the chains of bondage'; the guides barely seemed to believe it themselves. But even they could not produce Tibetan citizens who would rail against the Dalai Lama or speak of how they had 'cast off the bonds of
feudalism'. I know of no traveler to Tibet who has heard this type of testimony. There are Tibetans in government positions in Lhasa who will give you this line; and there are probably some Tibetans in Tibet who believe it. But again, for the vast majority of Tibetans, this is simply not part of the their experience. Get any Tibetan nomad, farmer, peasant, or monk a few hundred yards away from their local party cadre and the first thing they'll do is ask for a picture of the Dalai Lama; the second thing they'll do is ask you to help them free their country.

And there's the core of the matter: 'old Tibet', the Tibet that existed pre-1959, simply does not represent to the average Tibetan what it does to Michael Parenti, Tom Grunfeld, and Anna Louise Strong. Scholars like Parenti and Grunfeld and Strong, with limited source material and no firsthand experience, see old Tibet as a horrible place; but the bottom line is they're not Tibetan. And if Tibetans themselves don't see their past as a past of feudal lords and merciless repression, then do they really need scholars like Parenti to tell them what their past is all about?

Saying debasing things about a culture is certainly not extraordinarily difficult; seen through the lens that Parenti and Grunfeld apply to Tibet, most if not all societies would come up short, as would many resistance movements. The real story then, is not what these historians have to say, but why they have chosen to say it in the way they say it.

Many Tibetans do welcome commentary and criticism on aspects of their society; I have certainly been privy to many heated arguments on old Tibet and on the future direction of Tibetan politics. But that is because I have taken the time to really get to know Tibetan society. Perhaps what is most striking about the history that Parenti and Grunfeld and Strong present is the tone with which they speak of Tibetan culture, without ever having experienced it. The facts they deliver are clearly not being presented in order to help Tibetan people. They are fairly serious charges, and as objective as the authors pretend to be, these charges are delivered with venom.

Oddly, Parenti - like Grunfeld - seems taken aback at the emotional response that his writing has evoked among Tibetans and their supporters. It would seem fairly obvious to anyone with any common sense that dismissing an entire culture - particularly one in dire peril -and making statements that run completely contrary to everything the vast majority of its people know from firsthand experience would illicit an emotional response. Perhaps these scholars are surprised because they have forgotten that words carry weight, and that their actions actually have tangible results in the real world. In the Tibet movement, the results have been clearly measurable - Tibetan activists, who should be focused on returning basic rights to a people whose lack of freedoms is documented by every major human rights organization in the world, instead find themselves in the position of having to defend the actions of a bygone society. Former torture victims are accosted by nineteen year old American college students who have never been to Tibet, never met a Tibetan, and surely never had anyone in their family tortured with electric cattle prods. This, for a people who are in a very real struggle for rights, is not only extremely upsetting, it serves to forward the agenda of their oppressor.

It is no secret that the Chinese government views propaganda as a key weapon in its efforts to undermine the movement for Tibetan rights and statehood. Chinese state run media - whose use of manufactured and manipulated history is indisputable - regularly debases and assails Tibetan culture and specifically the Dalai Lama, who is dismissed with regularity - and relish. The Tibetan refugee population is treated with equal disdain, the Tibetan government-in-exile, which, again serves the very real function of looking after the welfare of 150,000 refugees and lobbying international institutions for rights and recognition, is dismissed entirely. Luckily for Tibetans, Beijing's Orwellian rants about Tibet - labeling the Dalai Lama a "serpent" and "the chief villain" - have bordered on the hilarious. That is, until recently. Now the war of words has spilled over into more legitimate circles.

Recognizing that Tibetans and the Tibetan struggle are generally well-perceived in the west, and seeking to win the war of perception,
Beijing's propaganda strategy has now grown, with regular meetings on external and internal Tibet-related propaganda. One key element of the new propaganda strategy is to make greater use of Tibet scholars, both Chinese and Western. In 2001 a leaked Chinese Government memo from the Chinese Communist Party's Ninth Meeting on Tibet-Related External Propaganda stated "Effective use of Tibetologists and specialists is the core of our external propaganda struggle for public opinion on Tibet..."

With this as the political backdrop, levying ill-researched and unsubstantiated charges at Tibetan culture - in fact the very charges often employed by their Chinese occupiers to delegitimize their entire society - is a dangerous game indeed. It is one thing to offer criticisms of a culture or religion that is not fighting for its very survival. It is quite another to rewrite the history of a people who are already the victims of a propaganda war at the hands of one of the largest propaganda machines in the world.

What surprises me most about the far left's flawed take on Tibet is how quickly a piece of propaganda turns into 'scholarship,' how a piece of hearsay becomes fact if given a footnote. Mao said 'a lie told a hundred times becomes the truth.' Sadly, in the case of the new Tibet 'scholarship', a lie footnoted once has already become truth. A pool of bad information now exists, ready for any scholar with an agenda to draw from and appear legitimate. Few will bother to look beneath the surface, at the highly questionable source of this information-colonists, oppressors, and outsiders, writing a history that they have no place writing. And what gets lost in the mix, as always, is the voice of the Tibetan people themselves.

There is one statement in Parenti's thesis that summarizes how completely disconnected he is from any kind of Tibetan reality. In his thesis, he states that old Tibet was a society that was 'damaging to the human spirit.' Any person who has spent any time with the Tibetan people would laugh at the irony. Being with Tibetans of all walks of life, inside and outside of Tibet, one is always struck by the incredible, contagious spirit of Tibetan culture. From the Khampa drinking songs to the picnics that are the preferred activity of all Tibetans, Tibetan society is known for its passion and exuberance. This spirit is something that grows directly from the culture that Parenti is so intent on debasing. This spirit is what the Chinese government has tried so desperately to crush – making the singing of freedom songs illegal and prohibiting traditional Tibetan festivals. The struggle against totalitarianism is precisely a struggle for spirit, and I'm willing to wager that a populist like Mr. Parenti would find far more joy drinking chang and singing songs with a party of exiled Tibetans than he ever would at a Chinese cadre meeting; sadly, he won't ever get to find out. He's chosen his bedfellows, and more power to him. In the end it is the Tibetan people who will be the arbiters of their own fate. By the time that fate is decided Parenti will be long gone, onto some other issue, and Tibetans will be no worse off because of it.

The critiques of Tibet as an excuse for Chinese imperialism are pretty nonsensical in the sense that even where abuses existed, they also existed in China. Death by slicing was ended in the early 20th century. The selling of women and children into bondage was common in China until the early 20th century. The Communists slaughtered millions of landowners when they won power in 1949 and starved tens of millions to death with Rube Goldberg economic schemes - where dissenting officials were executed (or more likely beaten to death in order to extract confessions of being capitalist roaders) for their apostasy. Does this mean that China is fit only to be ruled by foreigners - just as Tibetans are fit only to be ruled by Chinese, in the Han version of things as they ought to be?

The monetary value of time

2007-09-26T00:38:00.000-04:00

An academic explains why people don't take the train when they can drive instead:

Thought Experiment

One day in 1974 or so, I was sitting in my car (actually my thesis adviser's university car) inching across the George Washington Bridge on my way to Manhattan to meet a class where I was the teaching assistant. Suddenly I asked myself "Why am I doing this?" After all, I had alternatives. A bus ran right by the Lamont Observatory where I spent most of my time and went reasonably directly to the uptown bus terminal in Manhattan. From there I could take a subway straight to Columbia University. So as mass transit goes, it was a pretty straight shot. So why was I driving? Well, for openers, the mass transit really didn't save much time, especially counting waiting time at both ends and the transfer from bus to subway. And it was impossible to do anything productive riding mass transit. Plus there was no privacy or peace and quiet, which I finally decided was the major factor for me. And people in those days worried a lot about subway muggings (realistically, on the 7th Avenue IRT in the daytime, a minor risk), but carjacking was unheard of, so there was a safety issue.

Since I have never, in the 30 years since, seen any article by advocates of mass transit that bothered to ask why people don't take mass transit despite all its supposed advantages, I thought it might be useful to explain why people prefer to drive instead of take the bus. Most advocates of mass transit dismiss drivers as selfish, short-sighted and unconcerned about the environment instead of asking whether mass transit itself is to blame for its own problems.

After this page was linked by another site, I got a number of responses that suggested a bit of clarification is in order. This page is not calling for abandonment of mass transit or extolling the virtues of the automobile. It is an attempt to lay out what mass transit is up against if it is to succeed. Pretending that the economic issues I describe can be made to go away is a guaranteed recipe for failure. They won't. Lots of people seem determined to illustrate the is/ought fallacy in action.

Also I've gotten a number of responses from people who say the factors I outline here don't apply because they spend their time on the bus or subway reading or relaxing. This amounts to an attitude all too common in environmentalism: everything will be just fine once people get enlightened and see things the way I do. But don't take my word for it - see the exchange at the end of this page. If you have access to a user-friendly mass transit system and can use the commute time productively, bully for you. I'm trying to explain why so many other people don't see it that way.
The Value of Time

Apart from the cost of wages, economic planners rarely acknowledge the value of individual time, but that has absolutely no impact on the reality that people themselves do put value on their time. As John Naisbitt pointed out in Megatrends, one of the first thing people do when they acquire some affluence is begin to buy back their time. They hire out boring or unpleasant tasks like food preparation, housekeeping, child care and repairs. (Home delivery services are even enjoying a bit of a resurgence as two-earner families find themselves increasingly pressed for time.) Failure to recognize the value of time to individuals leads to unproductive results.

Nowhere is this issue clearer than in attempts to deal with the problems caused by the automobile. Critics of the automobile point out that in addition to the direct costs of the automobile like fuel, maintenance, and depreciation, there is the cost of highway construction, environmental damage, tax subsidies, defense of oil supplies, and so on – a host of “hidden costs.” For example, The International Center for Technology Assessment, in The Real Price of Gasoline, and Stephen H. Burrington in Road Kill: How Solo Driving Runs Down the Economy, both estimated the real cost of driving a car at about a dollar a mile. They estimated the cost of a bicycle at twelve cents a mile.

I live eight miles from campus. At a dollar a mile by car, it costs $16 to commute. It takes about 20 minutes each way, so figuring my salary at $25 an hour, the cost comes to about $33. Occasionally I bicycle. It takes 45 minutes each way. The cost of bicycling alone is only $2 a day, but the time cost is $37. It costs $39 a day to commute by bicycle. By mass transit, I have to walk to the bus stop, go downtown, transfer, and travel a winding route to campus. Total fare is $2.50, and counting time walking to and waiting at the bus stop at either end, it takes at least 45 minutes to make the trip by bus, bringing the total cost to around $40.

There are plenty of good reasons to encourage mass transit, but arguments about the hidden costs of the automobile fall on deaf ears because people, unconsciously or not, factor time and convenience into their decision making. The average driver knows perfectly well why she drives.

The cost of a transportation system is first of all, any flat fare. Call that F. Then there's a cost per mile (call it C) and the mileage (M). The value of your time we can call S (salary per hour), and the time it takes to travel is T. So we have Cost = F + CM + ST. Time will be mileage divided by your speed (V), so we have Cost = F + CM + SM/V = F + M(C + S/V). We can see that cost increases with mileage (obviously), high time value (every minute traveling costs more) and low speeds.

Conclusion 1: Transportation Costs Less at High Speeds. High-speed commuter rail is a great solution if there's easy access at both ends. If you have to drive five miles to a transit station only to find the commuter lot full, you may as well drive. HOV (high occupancy vehicles) and mass transit lanes on freeways are another good approach to this issue. The best features of HOV lanes for private vehicles is they offer a positive incentive to carpool (you get to pass all the solo drivers), rather than the negative penalties that are the only solution many advocates of mass transit seem capable of imagining.

Corollary: Low Speed Limits Raise the Cost of Travel. They may cut fuel consumption and costs of accidents, but the time cost rises steeply. Where I live, a nearby suburb has a four lane street with a speed limit of 25 miles an hour. It could easily be raised to 40 with no significant safety risk.

Corollary: Interruptions Raise the Cost of Travel. How much gasoline is burned daily by cars stopping and accelerating at stop signs where there is clearly no oncoming traffic, or waiting at empty intersections for traffic lights? Probably half of all stop signs could be changed to yield signs. And it should be legal to proceed through a red light if there is no oncoming traffic. Accidents would be wholly the responsibility of the driver going through the light. School buses should be required to wait for traffic to clear before turning on their signals and discharging students.

Let's assume, as critics of the automobile say, that a car costs $1 a mile and also assume a car averages 20 miles an hour in city traffic. The cost of operating a car becomes M(1 + S/20). If we assume a bicycle costs 1/8 as much per mile and goes 10 miles an hour, then the cost of riding a bicycle is M(1/8 + S/10). The extra cost of driving a car per mile is:

Cost (car M=1) - Cost (bicycle M=1) =

(1 + S/20) - (1/8 + S/10) = 7/8 - S/20.

If the cost difference is positive, bicycle is cheaper. If it's negative, a car is cheaper. When the cost difference is zero, both forms of transportation are equal. Call that the break-even point. That happens when S/20 = 7/8, or S = 17.5. If S is less than 17.5 ($17.50 an hour or $35,000 a year) then the cost is positive, otherwise it's negative; it costs more to go by bike than by car.

Conclusion 2: Slow Transportation Penalizes Affluent Customers. And these are the people most likely to have their own cars and to move further from work.

Corollary: Affluent Customers Will Not Use Mass Transit. It's not that they're selfish, or that they don't care about the environment. It's not cost-effective. The higher your salary, the more wasteful mass transit is. The only significant exception is commuter rail provided the fares offer a savings over driving and parking and the comfort and privacy allow relaxation or work en route.

Corollary: Infrequent Transit Schedules Discourage Use of Mass Transit. Duh. Or maybe not. My city is considering cutting frequency as a "cost-saving" measure.

If we assume the fare on a bus is $2, and there's no extra cost per mile, and buses average 15 miles an hour (because of stops and less direct routes), then the cost becomes 2 + S/15. The extra cost of driving is Cost (car) - Cost (bus) = M(1 + S/20) - (2 + SM/15) = M - 2 - MS/60. This is a bit harder to analyze because it's mileage-dependent. We can find the break-even point by making the cost zero and solving for S: S = 60(1 - 2/M). If M = 2, S =0; it always pays to drive because the cost of driving beats the flat fare. Regardless of how big M is, S is never greater than 60; if you earn over $120,000 a year, it always pays to drive. If M = 4, S = 30, and the break-even point is $60,000 a year. If you earn less, it pays to use mass transit.

But if the fare is $5, as it can be for long commutes, then S = 60(1 - 5/M). It never pays to take the bus for commutes less than 5 miles. For S = 30 ($60,000) a year, the break-even point is 10 miles - any longer than that and it pays to drive.

Conclusion 3: Flat Fares Discourage Use of Mass Transit for Short Commutes A fair number of cities seem to have figured this out and have free-travel zones downtown, unlimited travel passes, and similar offsets.

If traveling by car really does have high indirect costs not shared by public transportation, the case for making all mass transit free is so compelling you really have to wonder why advocates of mass transit don't propose it. Also, since a major cause of urban sprawl and congestion is the middle class moving to the suburbs, the obvious cure is to eliminate the problems that drive the middle class out. Unless there's some master plan to have buses, ambulances and fire trucks all get around on light rail, most of the indirect costs of the automobile will still plague mass transit. We can hope to lessen the dependence on petroleum, and hence ease prices and maybe reduce the defense threat. We might also hope to reduce the costs of road repair, reduce air pollution, and lessen the impact of the automobile.

There's a good reason why people who play the "hidden costs" game never factor in the value of personal time saved - it tips the balance so sharply in favor of existing technology that alternatives simply cannot compete. (Actually, when people say they "cannot" compete, they usually mean they will not compete because they don't think the rewards are great enough. Mass transit can compete against the private auto but it would require subsidies to the hated middle class and suburbs.)

One correspondent added:

An important wrinkle that I feel is missing from your analysis; Time saved in transit is added to my free time with my family, not to time at work. I value my time outside work much more than my hourly wage. That is why when my employer wants me to work more, he has to pay me time and a half. Or, when another firm wants to buy my extra hours, I charge them double to triple my hourly rate. (emphasis added)

Therefore, your point is stronger than you present. The time I save by driving is extremely valuable to me. Much more than my hourly wage. I think I'm not alone.

Funny how evil corporations routinely recognize the value of personal time by paying higher than normal salaries for overtime, but enlightened mass transit advocates, who care so much about people and the good of society, somehow just don't get it.
Additional Factors
Exact Change

Is there a single, more stupid tactic for discouraging mass transit than requiring exact change? Especially when fares change frequently enough that a new user can't find out the fare except by calling the transit company? Hopefully, rechargeable fare cards will become universal enough to remedy this problem. Systems like BART and many European systems that use vending machines for fare, of course, don't have this problem.
Fixed Costs

In addition to the per-mile indirect costs of owning a car, there are fixed costs that exist whether you drive the car or not. Chief among these is depreciation. Depreciation is not that much of an issue for people who buy used cars and drive them as long as possible, but for those who buy new cars and trade them in regularly it's a major cost. Depreciation has to be added to the cost of whatever transportation the individual uses. If the person drives, depreciation is part of the cost of driving, obviously. If the person uses mass transit, depreciation is still part of the cost of using mass transit because the person has a car sitting in the garage unused, but still declining in value. In fact, all hidden costs have to be added to the cost of mass transit - you still pay taxes to pave roads and defend oil supplies whatever you do. Only out of pocket expenses count in determining the cost-effectiveness of mass transit versus the automobile, because the indirect and "hidden" costs are still there whatever mode of transport you use.

Once someone decides to buy a car, the economic balance shifts sharply in favor of driving. The only way to shift the economic balance in favor of mass transit is to create a system where it becomes feasible for large numbers of people to give up owning a car. A few moments' thought will suffice to reveal the requirements for such a system:

1. The out of pocket costs must be the same or less for public transport as for private transport. You might get away with a slight overage if public transport offers a real premium in convenience or comfort, but it had better be a clear advantage to the consumer.
2. The time costs have to be comparable. This means:
1. Actual travel time has to be comparable. The convoluted fractal routes that buses typically travel to access the largest possible area with the fewest routes are a guaranteed recipe for a failed mass-transit system.
2. The schedule has to be frequent enough that transfers have negligible time impact. If you occasionally have to run errands en route, the transfer time factor demolishes mass transit.
3. The schedule has to be frequent enough that waiting time at the trip origin has negligible time impact.
4. The system has to be dense enough that transit time from the final stop to the destination has negligible time impact. Walking half a mile in the pouring rain negates anything positive mass transit has to offer (and no combination of rain protection will keep you dry in a real downpour.)
3. The system has to be more dependable than a private automobile. This means:
1. Work stoppages and strikes are absolutely impermissible. I met some folks recently who saved on the outrageous hotel prices in Venice by staying in nearby Padua. Then, when it came time to catch their cruise ship, the trains were out because of a strike to protest President Bush's visit to Rome. Because, you know, people traveling from Padua to Venice are directly responsible for the war in Iraq and globalization. And labor activists wonder why unions fell out of favor in the U.S.
2. The system has to have enough peak capacity to carry all passengers in reasonable comfort. Sitting down. With elbow room and a modicum of personal space.
3. Routes have to be simple and absolutely fixed. Far too many systems vary routes with time of day, use the same number for different routes, omit stops or entire segments of the route at times, or change routes frequently. When I'm in a city and have a choice of rail or bus, I take rail every time, simply because you can't rip up tracks capriciously and reroute them. (I did see a city once where it happened - would you be surprised if I said it was Sofia, Bulgaria?)
4. Information about the system has to be available everywhere. Every stop must have a map of the whole system with schedules and fare information, and the information must be current. Areas between stops must have frequent signs to the nearest transit stops.
5. The system layout has to be predictable. Ever been in a city and walked to a major artery hoping to find a bus stop, only to find the buses don't run on that street? Instead the buses run down some residential street because the system is trying to cover the most ground with the fewest buses, or some alderman lives there and wants convenient bus transportation. And how about that system of identifying routes by the end of the line? Boy, that sure makes navigating mass transit in a strange city a breeze!
6. Transportation has to be available at all times - 24/7/365. If you even occasionally find yourself going places on holidays or odd hours when transit is either unavailable or infrequent, you'll opt to get a car.
7. Car pooling? If the passengers all have similar origins and destinations, it's an option. But if people need to vary their schedules, run errands en route, be out of town on business, and so on, it won't work. The lack of flexibility is probably the main impediment to car pooling.
4. The system has to be absolutely safe. Law enforcement needs to be thorough enough, the penalties for crime severe enough and the judicial system hard-nosed enough that nobody would even think of committing a crime on a bus or subway.

Cargo

In New York City, someone who lives alone might be able to buy groceries every single day and tote them home. But what about someone with five kids? What about someone who needs to transport sheets of plywood or drywall, concrete blocks or sacks of fertilizer? In a few places, buses have provisions for carrying bicycles, but for the most part people who have frequent needs to haul cargo have no real alternative to the automobile. Delivery services might alleviate this problem somewhat.
Groups

While visiting my parents in the San Francisco Bay Area some years ago, we decided to take a trip to Fisherman's Wharf via the BART system. There were six of us altogether. We found the lot at the BART station full, so we drove in to San Francisco. Even counting bridge tolls and parking, it only cost a little more than riding BART.

When transporting a group, cars almost always beat mass transit. Mass transit systems that fail to recognize that the unit of travel is the group, not the individual, are doing more to promote automobiles than Detroit ever could.
A Visit to Philadelphia

I don't share W. C. Fields' dark view of Philadelphia. I like the city very much. Putting it far above average for large cities is its direct rail link from the airport to downtown (that's changing as more and more cities come on line). So on a recent trip to Philadelphia, I booked a motel close to the airport to save expenses and took the train to the convention center downtown.

Both ways the train I intended to take was canceled, meaning I had to wait an extra half hour. At both ends of the trip there were fare machines out of service (although conductors will collect fares on the train). There was a bus link from the airport to my motel, and once I found the bus schedule that part of the trip worked smoothly. The buses actually were right on schedule. But it took a number of tries on the automated phone system to get the inbound schedule, and the Visitor Center downtown didn't have printed schedules. What, post the schedules at the bus stops? Are you mad? They needed those big plastic panels for advertising. At least the stops did indicate the lines that stopped there. And there was the able bodied panhandler working the transit station downtown. All day. He hit me up coming and going, four hours apart.

On the whole, I got where I needed to go, but this anecdote illustrates all the minor indignities that mass transit advocates expect people to endure for the sake of society. And this is the state of affairs in a city with excellent mass transit. And we wonder why people prefer their cars.

Oh, and then I got the credit card bill for "long distance" calls from the airport to downtown to get schedule information. Factor that into the cost of mass transit because the information wasn't posted at bus stops or in the phone book, and the transit system didn't have a toll-free number.
Conclusions

In New York City, it can make sense not to own a car. Parking is prohibitive, the risk of damage from on-street parking is severe, and the transit system beats driving much of the time. In Moab, Utah, fuhgeddaboutit.

In sparsely-populated areas, there simply is no practical alternative to the automobile. People who live in those places need cars to get around and haul cargo. People who need to get to places not served by mass transit also have no alternative to the automobile. So what are the possible solutions?

1. Inexpensive Rental Cars. The cost of auto rental has come down to the point where it's pretty affordable, but it needs to come down still further to make it a really viable alternative to using the private auto.
2. Inexpensive Taxis. These need to be considered part of the overall public transit system. Fares need to be competitive with comparable distances on mass transit, and availability needs to be great enough to avoid significant time penalties.

Both of these have to be convenient and flexible enough that the time required to call a taxi or rent a car doesn't discourage use.

At off-peak times, there simply is no practical alternative to the automobile. The remedies are the same.

People who haul cargo have no practical alternative to the automobile. Remedies include inexpensive delivery services, but frequently bulk cargo purchases include small items or unanticipated on-the-spot purchases. Inexpensive shipping from the point of sale, or cheap truck rental, are additional possible remedies.

The only way to diminish reliance on the automobile is to create a mass transit system that is superior to the automobile by the standards of automobile users. In many circumstances the most effective system is the automobile and the only way to cut use of private automobiles is by supplying public automobiles, like rental cars and taxis. The sci-fi vision where you go up to a vending area, pop in a credit card, and drive off in a waiting car, needs serious consideration. Where density is high enough, the only way to cut reliance on private autos is with mass transit that is competitive with automobiles in out of pocket cost, speed, and convenience.

Attempts to promote mass transit through coercion will inevitably fail. Trying to make mass transit more competitive by raising auto registration fees, parking fees, bridge and tunnel tolls, gasoline taxes, and the like, will inevitably be seen for what it is: artificial manipulation of the marketplace to coerce drivers into using mass transit. Trying to encourage mass transit use by penalizing private auto use amounts to an open admission that mass transit cannot compete with the automobile.

Voodoo Economics won't work. I have to pay taxes to build roads and defend our oil supplies whether I drive or not, and fire trucks, ambulances, and delivery vehicles need streets to drive on. Pretending that I somehow avoid those "hidden costs" by taking the bus is beneath stupid. Telling me that 45 minutes in a crowded, lurching bus is better or a more effective use of my time than 20 minutes in my car is a couple of levels below that.

Wishful thinking won't cut it. It will do absolutely no good to say all these problems will go away if we can somehow persuade Americans to accept higher density and move back in from the suburbs. Suburbs began to sprawl back in the days of streetcars. Americans do not want to live in high density settings. Why not just accept it and plan accordingly?

Studies have repeatedly shown two things: the more transportation is available, the more people spread out. Second, commuters start to get irritable when commute times exceed half an hour. Basically, commuters move out to a distance where they feel the time cost is acceptable, and get angry when the rules change. Moral: Americans like to spread out until other individuals do not seriously impinge on their freedom of action. Deal with it.
What Gated Communities Teach Us

I consider gated communities (and their cousins, the restricted covenant communities) loathsome. Whenever I hear about some homeowner embroiled in a dispute with his homeowners' association, I am torn between despising the homeowners' association for being so petty, and the homeowner for being so stupid as to live in such a place. But they are growing in popularity, and that has something to tell us, and we'd better figure out what that is. What do these communities offer?

* Safety. Covenant communities merely merge into the surrounding neighborhoods, but gated communities are walled cities. Paradoxically, concern over crime seems to get worse as society gets safer and crimes, being rarer, become more newsworthy. Nevertheless, crime is a principal reason why affluent people leave cities. So if you want to revitalize the cities, extirpate street crime (people don't triple bolt their doors against inside traders or crooked lobbyists). Not reduce, not contain, not deter, extirpate it. Eliminate from public discourse any notion that crime is ever justified.
* Decorum. Covenants don't merely regulate gross misbehavior; they manage fine details. Most of the people governed by them don't see it as intrusive to have to mow their lawns at specified intervals because they do that anyway. So people who don't share the covenanters' values may see such communities as repressive, but the covenanters themselves don't because they prefer to live that way. They want to live among people who share their standards of behavior to a high degree.
* Personal Space. Americans like to spread out and always have. But what's wrong with living in an apartment complex and having lots of park space nearby? Why does it have to be personal space? Because personal space can be controlled. Your kid can pitch a tent in the back yard or build a tree fort (not in a lot of covenant communities, though). You can sit in your back yard and not worry about twenty people with loud radios and foul mouths parking right next to you. You don't have to worry about having your favorite picnic spot taken by someone else.

If you want to persuade people to move back into high density settlements, you had better figure out why so many people choose to live in restricted communities, and then see to it that the high density settlements offer the same advantages. Nobody has a right to disruptive, annoying, or anti-social behavior.

Incidentally, gated communities are murder on traffic patterns because they lack through streets and therefore channel large volumes of traffic into restricted arteries.
The End of Cheap Oil

What will happen when oil hits its peak (as it is close to doing?). Will that affect the decision to drive? Possibly. But consider:

* Transit companies don't get fuel for free - they will have to raise fares to cover the extra cost. They may also cut routes and frequency to cut costs, adding to all the negatives that keep people off mass transit in the first place.
* Generally speaking, when costs go up, mass transit systems cut schedules, raise fares, and generally do everything imaginable to discourage mass transit use.
* Between the higher cost of living and higher taxes, people strapped for income will probably resist attempts to subsidize mass transit.
* There will be pressure to increase social spending to help poor people cover home heating and cooling. Taxes will go up.
* People forced to work second jobs to cover the increased cost of living will face a killer time cost. Their free time will be so diminished they will not want to spend it riding a bus. And they may well be forced to drive to get from job to job on time.

Prognosis: we may see a marginal shift to mass transit among users for whom the negatives aren't too severe: they're close to transit at both ends of the trip and the time and out-of-pocket costs are not too dissimilar. Car pooling is an obvious win-win, and if it's made easier, it may well take off. If you own a used car, cutting your mileage extends the life of the car and decreases repairs.
Europe Leads The Way

Europeans use mass transit far more than Americans because of the high population density, and dense and long-established transit systems. So how transit-friendly is Europe?

A Eurail Select Pass for five countries and ten days of rail travel is $748. That's $1500 for two people. I found a Volkswagen Passat (midsize) for ten days for $672. Toss in another $400 for gas and it's $1072. You do the math.
And America Follows

From this morning's paper, an article on traveling across America by train. Cost of a sleeper car from Portland, Oregon to New York City: $1792.90.

Drive: 3000 miles at 20 miles per gallon = 150 gallons of fuel, say $500. Three nights in good lodgings, another $500. Total: $1000. Your car will depreciate whether you drive or go by train. Of course, on a train you don't have driving fatigue and can read, watch the scenery, or chat. But then again, by driving you get to see all the scenery by day if you choose. Back in 1989 I took my family from Wisconsin to San Francisco and back by train. Even without sleepers it was a remarkably nice experience. But we found a rock bottom last-minute fare.

Fly? Boo, hiss, huge carbon footprint. Also $300 if you book in advance and catch a good fare. Plus the value of three days' time not spent traveling. Of course, if you want to see the country from the ground, that's not a factor.

Amtrak wonders why more Americans don't take the train.

R Lee Ermey on his life and times - and the relationship between defeatism and morale

2007-07-22T00:44:00.000-04:00

Joe Mammy has an interesting interview with R Lee Ermey, the Marine who played the tough-as-nails drill instructor in "Full Metal Jacket":

“I’m Gunnery Sergeant Hartman your senior drill instructor...”

Like many people, that was my introduction to R. Lee Ermey the former drill instructor turned actor, advocate and host of the History Channel’s “Mail Call.” There’s a short list of the great Hollywood badasses today and Ermey continues to make a run at the top (if Eastwood does another “Bridges of Madison County” the title is his…) with roles like Hartman, the creepy Sheriff Hoyt (from the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” remake) supporting roles in films like “Seven” and “Dead Man Walking,” as well as a bevy of television roles (including Hugh Laurie’s father in “House” and Sergeant Hobo 678 in the classic but overlooked “Invader Zim”).

I’d always envisioned the Gunny as a tough-as-nails, take no prisoners sort, however when I got a hold of him he had just completed collecting toys for needy children. Ermey seemed like a bit of strange alchemy: part bulldog and part Santa Claus. So grab your choice of cool (or warm) beverage and sit back and check out my conversation with Lee Ermey.
*****

Joe Mammy: Looking over your career, if you looked back to 1961 where it all started for you as far as the military and everything, could you have ever imagined it would have come out the way it has?

R Lee Ermey: Oh hell, my objective was to be successful no matter where I had to go or what I had to do. I may have chosen different paths but I honestly and firmly believe that there’s no way I was going to be on welfare.

Joe: I was doing some reading—and maybe you can put this to rest, there seems to be a lot of urban myths surrounding you—how exactly did you get into the military?

RLE: Well, I had a bit of a problem and the judge recommended that I should look at the military very closely or he might have to send me where the sun doesn’t shine. Well, there really wasn’t much contest. I ended up in the Marine Corps simply because the Air Force and the Navy wouldn’t have me because I had a juvenile record, but it was probably the best thing. I guess the good Lord channeled me in this direction.

Joe: From there it sounds like you got into acting, was it Thailand you went to?

RLE: No, no. As a matter of fact I did the comedy clubs here in California for a while. I got retired out of the Marine Corps, all I owned was what I had in my sea bag and I didn’t have a car, I had a little money in pocket because I’d been hurt, I’d been in the hospital for awhile. I’d been an instructor for the last four years, five years in the Marine Corps and in order to be a good instructor you damn near have to be a stand up comic so I put together a script and I went up and did the comedy clubs for awhile. Then I heard they were going to do Vietnam War shows over in the Philippines and I ended up going over there. The only reason I went to college was to take advantage of the GI Bill of Rights, but I never ever finished a semester. I got so busy doing films, advertisements, and commercials that I just got so busy I dropped out of college, but I’ve been busy ever since.

Joe: Would you consider comedy your first love or just where you got your start?

RLE: speaker If you watch any shows that I do there’s a certain amount of humor involved. I prefer doing comedy. I would rather do feature films that are geared toward comedy. I feel more comfortable with it. I have a certain amount of wit and pretty good timing. Even “Full Metal Jacket,” you watch “Full Metal Jacket” you get some laughs out of that and I wrote most of it. I just feel more comfortable with comedy but I do anything. I can do just about anything you can think of.

I just finished a film called “Texas Chainsaw Massacre: the Beginning” and I starred in the show so that’ll give you a kind of idea, but if you watch that you get some laughs from the character as well even though he is deep, deep dark black, so black that his humor's not just black humor, it’s nearly purple it’s so black—

Joe: That’s the Sheriff Hoyt character from the first one?

RLE: Yes, and I was able to write it all this time. Nobody in Hollywood can write for my Ermey-Hotycharacter because no one is perverted enough, I guess, to understand my character. I know the character inside and out. I created the character in the remake—there was nothing written for the character in the remake. Basically I came up with everything I did in the remake. I had to develop and evolve the character. That warm, cuddly, lovable Sheriff Hoyt—he was what the critics raved about after the remake was done, so when New Line decided that they wanted to do a prequel they called me up and asked me if I would star in the prequel.

Joe: That’s good. That character had the most psychologically interesting and disturbing element in the entire film as far as I was concerned.

RLE: Well the thing is Sheriff Hoyt is a sexually perverted homicidal maniac. He’s a crazy man. I’ve always been one that I will take a character as far over the top as I can without falling off the other side and so I push my character to the limit. Well, if you’re a sexually perverted homicidal maniac there is no limit, is there? So he’s a crazy bastard anyway. Basically it gives me a license to do anything as crazy and as sick as I wanna do. I’m certainly not politically correct and I think that’s basically what the critics enjoyed about Sheriff Hoyt was the fact he really didn’t have any rules that he lived by. He doesn’t have any guidelines. Like I say, I like to push the character right to the limit and with Hoyt there was no limit so I could get by with murder and I loved it. I love the character. I would say—I’m convinced in my own mind that he’s one of the most colorful fun characters that I’ve ever played in my life and I’ve done what 72, 74 films, something like that.

Joe: I always get a kick out of the people who really work in Hollywood versus the really big names—you guys are out there just grinding away. That’s one thing I’ve always appreciated about what you’ve done. You manage to land these really interesting characters and make them even more interesting. Even in the smaller parts like in the old “Brisco County Jr.” show and more recently when you showed up in “House”—

RLE: Oh yes.

Joe: Are those the kind of roles that you enjoy because it allows you that kind of flexibility?

RLE: speaker I’m going to have fun with House’s father in “House,” yes, and the show’s a great show. I need for the producers and directors of “House” to back away a little bit and let me do my thing, you know? That’s always a problem, you know? Some producers and some directors in Hollywood really are very hesitant to let you do much that’s not written because it seems to me they have a lack of confidence on their part; you know what I’m saying?

The really good roles I’ve done have been characters I’ve put together, that I’ve manufactured with directors that would just let me have my head and let me go for it. Most damn directors and producers have this political correct thing, you know? “Oh no, we can’t do that, that would—“ or “Oh my God, nobody’s ever done that—" All that is as far as I’m concerned is a display of lack of confidence on their part.

Joe: You’re definitely not a shy guy—

RLE: Oh no, hell, I’ll climb that wall. I think that’s why I’m where I’m at today because I pushed my way through to the point where I try to be off-the-wall colorful and unpredictable and that’s just my style. It’s always been my style and that’s the way I like to do things.

One of the worst things a director can tell me is “less is more.” You’ve heard that, right? That’s sick. That is sad.

Joe: You’ve worked in some amazing films, “Full Metal Jacket” of course is the first to come to mind, but other films like “Seven” or “Dead Man Walking” you’ve had some really intense parts but aren’t as overstated as some of the ones you may be known for. How do you choose your roles; do you look forward to those roles?

RLE: I look forward to all of them. My main objective is to get the directors and producers to let me give them the best character I can give them, you know? In a few cases that isn’t allowed because of the lack of confidence they have. I’ve actually had producers and directors call other producers at two o’clock in the morning and ask if Lee Ermey can change two words in this damn dialogue. The two words we would replace them with of course have the exact same meaning the only difference is they’re words I would use or my character would use rather than some fifty cent word that some damn writer wrote down.

I look at it from this angle as well, that writer locks himself away in his little room Ermeythere and he writes for ten or twelve or fifteen different characters, I’m only worried about one character. I can concentrate on one character and I’m a pretty good writer. Most of the roles I’ve done throughout the years have been my own writing. I didn’t get here by being a dunce or a loser; I work hard at what I do. If I didn’t think it was ten times better than what the writer had to write I wouldn’t even suggest it, you know what I’m saying?

Joe: Is that characteristic of your experience in Hollywood that it has its own little culture that doesn’t necessarily seem to interact with actual culture at times?

RLE: speaker For instance, you’ve got a writer writing for a character that’s a military character, right? This writer’s never been in the military. The only thing he knows about the military is through a few military shows he’s seen. So a military guy is chosen to do the role, I mean, c’mon, who better can write for that military character? The writer doesn’t even know the jargon for chrissakes. I mean, the writer’s calling this Marine a soldier for chrissakes, you know? It’s totally disgusting in a lot of instances, but then when you approach the director to correct the matter, the director is just totally dumbfounded because he’s never been in the military either, right? He wouldn’t know his left from his right and he couldn’t be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, but yet because of their incompetence and their lack of confidence they don’t want to allow that actor, who has been in the military, to change one word of that dialogue, you see what I’m saying? Because if it happened to be something the producer might not like, well they might lose their job or they might be chastised, see what I’m saying? It’s kinda delicate; it’s a bit touchy in a lot of cases.

I think that if somebody hires me to do a goddamned character in their movie that they should at least have the goddamn confidence in me and my ability to pull this character off to let me have a little bit of headway and a little range so that I can improve the character. It really, really aggravates me to think that somebody would hire me and then think that I’m going to be their damn puppet that they can shove their hand up my butt and make my arms work and my mouth move the way they want it to. You see what I’m saying?

Joe: Yeah, nice mental image if nothing else. How did “Mail Call” come about, as far as your involvement with it? Was it something you came up with and pitched or was it something you were approached to do?

RLE: I was approached with it, and then I helped pitch it a little bit. Digital Ranch is Ermey-MailCallthe producers and they direct the show. The owner of Digital Ranch—it’s a small production company, small but busy and very, very good—directs each and every episode. I am given total creative freedom. Actually what the History Channel had in mind when we got geared up to do the show was they expected an Ollie North to come on board and flat out “here’s the news, the whole news, nothing but the news,”—no humor, no nothing, just pitching documentary film footage and I came on and put humor in it and actually the History Channel was a bit upset there for a while. They didn’t think that would work: “Oh my God, this is not the comedy channel, this is the History Channel.” And we’re one of the highest-rated shows on the History Channel. After an episode or two the folks at the History Channel realized that they had a winner and they backed off and we get along just fine.

Joe: It’s been fun for me, I’ve never been in the military but I come from a military town, I’ve got friends in the military, some of the best I’ve known have come from the military and the specials you’ve done in the last couple of seasons have been really powerful, like when you returned to Vietnam, or some of the World War II specials. How much of that has been an opportunity for you to explore some of these things and come in contact with these people and situations?

RLE: Much of it; a lot of it. The way the Vietnam show was supposed to have ended was I was supposed to be paddled down the river, the Perfume River, by an old mamasan in a little sanpan. I said, “Hey, this is not where this show should end. We should end this show at the Wall in Washington DC with me shining the emblem.”

It’s a joint effort, the Mail Call show. Rob Lihani, who is the director, producer and part-owner of Digital Ranch that produces the show spent seven years in the military himself. He and I together, we put our heads together, we’re pretty much an unstoppable force when it comes to dealing with the military. I guess the proof is in the pudding. It’s our show and it’s a give and take situation. Rob Lihani, even though he is the director and producer, listens to me as much as I listen to him and we cooperate with one another and we do what’s best for the show. The trouble is with many shows it’s written and that’s the way we’re going to do it, you know what I’m saying? In other words, there’s no creativity about it, this is the way the damn writer wrote it and this is the words we’re going to say and this is what we’re going to do regardless of whether that actor comes up with an idea that might be ten times better, that director and that producer stand their ground and it’s just sad. It’s too bad and I see it all the time in Hollywood where the producers and directors won’t even listen to reason, won’t even take suggestions from the actors and it’s a sad situation.

speaker But in my case with “Mail Call” it’s a joint effort. We even take recommendations from the cameraman for chrissakes. It’s a little small group we have. There’s only about six or seven of us that go off and do these shows in Imo Jima and Vietnam and so on and so forth, and everyone’s input is welcome, you know what I’m saying. Everyone has a vested interest. People are pretty loyal. We find this great cameraman and we want to keep him with us. So we had the same crew over and over for the show and we trust these people and they have a vested interest in this show's success as much as anyone else in the show. When they have a suggestion we listen to the suggestion, we weigh the suggestion, we figure out whether their suggestion has merit and if it would be better to do it the way they suggest or if it would be better to be left alone. Most of the guys don’t have a military background, but sometimes, you’d be surprised, some of the guys come up with some pretty doggone solid, logical ideas.

Joe: speaker It’s true. It’s different than the standard show. A friend of mine recently got into the show and thinks it’s a great show because they answer questions you want to know the way you like to hear it. Part of that appeal is in the reader mail when you have current and former military personnel writing in. How is the feedback from both the folks in the military and former military people?

RLE: The feedback is tremendous. You know, number one, the History Channel does support us very well. They’re behind us 100%. They’re a bunch of great guys and gals up there at the History Channel and they give us all the support in the world. It’s a wonderful channel. I love history, and how many people in America really do like history? We like to look back and see what’s going on and even on to the future.

When we first started the show, of course the Marine Corps knows me and has known me, I’ve been with Marine Corps for 45 years and I’ve always been with the Marine Corps and supported the Marine Corps so they’ve always been there for us. I want to do a show about a 155 Howitzer—bang, the door’s wide open, we go in and do the show. But, say for instance when we wanted to do a show about mid-air refueling with the KC-135’s, the Air Force drug their feet and drug their feet and they weren’t sure and they didn’t trust us. It took us about two months just to get the clearances and everything so that we could do the show on George Air Force Base. Then we finally got the “Okay you c’mon and do it,” and they didn’t trust us and they watched us close. After about eight or ten, fifteen episodes had aired with the Navy, the Air Force, the Coast Guard, the Marine Corps, the Army—all branches of the military, we suddenly started getting phone calls. “Hey, how about you guys comin’ up here and doing this?” or “How would the Gunny like to ride in an F-15? We’re up here in Oregon, we’d like the Gunny to come up here and do this with the Oregon Air National Guard.” But we won over the trust of the military.

We’ve even been invited up to Guantanamo Bay and do a show on what’s going on over there as far as the bad guys being confined over at Gitmo and the reason being is that the military has watched our show and realize that we call a spade a spade. We shoot from the hip. We don’t embellish. We don’t stretch people’s imaginations. We tell the damn story the way it is. The military—they’re quite honorable people. You know as well as I do, you live up at Minot so you deal with Air Force personnel on a daily basis up there for chrissakes and you realize that they’re honorable people. All the military ever has asked and all they requested and all they ever wanted was that if you go and tell our story go and tell the truth, tell it the way it is. Don’t exaggerate, don’t capitalize on a small mistake we may have made years ago, tell our story, tell the truth about us. A lot of shows go in and by the time they got this footage edited that they’ve shot they make the Air Force look like a bunch of fools, you know?

That’s something that over the years the media has done to the military so many times that the military has mistrusted the media and I don’t blame them at all. But they know, because they watch the show and they know that they can trust us and they know we call the shots the way we see them and we’ve gained the trust of the military to the point where we’re invited—we don’t even have to call them, they call us: “Hey, we’ve got USS Salt Lake City nuclear submarine here in port, would ‘Mail Call’ like to come down and do a show on that?”

They want their story told. Each branch of the military and each section of each branch of the military, be it 155 Howitzers, be it an A1 Abrams main battle tank, or be it 81mm mortar, each of these units that have these different components and these different weapons take huge pride in their product, in their weaponry, in their ability to wage war if that’s the case. All they want and all they ever request is that they be kept honorable and the story be told the way that it is, not the way some civilian liberal or some scum-sucking dirtbag wants to embellish it, you know what I’m saying.

Joe: It definitely comes through on the show. It seems like it’s the voice of today’s soldier. It doesn’t seem to have the political agenda as much as showing the guys who are out there doing it and this is a show that reflects what they do.

RLE: And the main thing that I’d like to stress is that we do not do this show for political gain. We do this show to pass on the knowledge to interested Americans, you know? Mom and dad—how many people, how many families in America today don’t have a niece, nephew, uncle, cousin, sister, brother in the military? And these families are hungry for information about what little Johnny is doing in the military. What is boot camp like these days? We’ve heard little Johnny is involved with this particular weapon or piece of equipment, gee I wonder how it really works and how it operates? We went to Iraq and did a one hour special live via satellite and people tuned in not only to gain the knowledge that we were going to give them about what was actually going on in Iraq but maybe they would catch a glimpse of little Johnny and his unit over there.

How much of that is a motivator is that for mom and dad and the family back home sitting there watching “Mail Call” on TV and their brother is doing his thing and he’s on TV and they’re proud of him and he’s wearing his uniform properly and he’s over there fighting for his country and he’s patriotic. How proud is that mother and father, how proud is that family of little Johnny when they see him on the History Channel on “Mail Call”? You see what I’m talking about? It means a lot to the guys and gals who are fighting the war and it means a tremendous amount to the mom, dad and the family back home as well.

We like to think we’re an informative show and an interesting show and some of the neatest stuff we do—I like going into some of the modern technology and getting into some of that stuff. It’s more interesting sometimes for me than it is anybody else. It’s fun for me. I’m having a great time doing the show. I love the History Channel; I love the folks up there that I’m working for and with. I love the military. I have huge tremendous respect for our men and women in uniform. They’re the patriots of this country. They’re the ones who step up to the plate and are willing to put their lives on the line so that the rest of us have the right to vote, the right to our own opinions, the right to publish things in the newspaper or our thoughts and opinions. You know, I don’t know how else I can say it; I respect those men and women that actually have the guts to step up to the plate so that some of the other people in America who don’t have the guts can sleep well at night.

And another thing that upsets me very much is I keep hearing these damn politicians talking about the poor go into the military. You know what, it’s a way to pull yourself out of the ghetto and become a respectable American, a respectable human being and a successful human being on top of that. And racially, boy I’ll tell ya, the military is so racially balanced there is no other employment in America that’s more racially balanced where people get along with one another. When your life is on the line it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference whether that guy on that machine gun laying down that base of fire is black, green, purple, or red or whatever color that he is—he’s got your back and that’s the important thing. I think a lot of civilian companies could actually learn from the military, I really do, as far as the racial aspects go in this country.

Joe: You’ve spent a lot of your time—I have the poseable figure that the proceeds were donated to charity, you work with Toys for Tots. What does it mean for you to give back to both the military and to the community?

RLE: speaker There’s not too many Sergeant Majors and Generals in the military, especially in the Marine Corps—and I am a bit partial of course, I respect them all, but the Marine Corps is my family, I figure I am where I am today is simply because of the leadership and the guidance and the role models I had when I was on active duty in the Marine Corps. I still say “I’m Gunnery Sergeant R. Lee Ermey, United States Marine Corps, V.A.—very active” because I remain just as active today as I ever was back in the old days when I was actually boots on the ground. The Marine Corps gave me a life, plain and simple. They taught me to be a respectable human being and I’ll always honor that, plain and simple. I do eight to ten Marine Corps Birthday Balls every year as guest of honor or guest speaker. Any Sergeant Major in the Marine Corps knows he can call my personal number and ask me to attend or come motivate the troops or attend a function they’re having with the troops and if that day on my calendar doesn’t already have an appointment on it, I’ll make every effort that I can to get down there and do that with them. That’s the way it is. The Commandant of the Marine Corps has my personal number and if he needs me to do anything he calls me up and he asks me to do it and I get it done.

And another thing I want to mention too: I’m an Independent. I’m not a Republican, I’m not a Democrat. I’m a middle-of-the-road guy and I call on logic and common sense, okay? I didn’t vote for John Kerry, however, if John Kerry was our president right now I’d be just as firmly behind him and support him just as firmly as I do George W. Bush and his administration and I wish more people would be like that. I can’t understand—I’m drifting further right all the time simply because that’s all I hear the far left doing is taking shots at our troops and telling our troops via the media that we’re losing the war, that we should pick up and run. That’s the biggest morale killer in the world. That’s what they did to us in Vietnam and now damned if they’re not doing it to us here. They say it doesn’t hurt morale? Baloney it doesn’t hurt morale—you bet it does. I keep hearing the left talk about the similarities between Vietnam and Iraq. The only damn similarity is the far left’s attempts to pull the plug and destroying the morale of the troops; that’s the only thing anywhere similar between the two wars.

Joe: Right now you’re doing work with the Toys for Tots program, could you tell me more about that in closing?

RLE: speaker Well I’ve been doing it for 25 years. I religiously come down and spend the last two weeks before Christmas down at San Diego which I consider my home port. I spend a lot of time in San Diego, love the people down here. I work with 4th Tank Battalion; I’ve gone through a lot of ‘em. I’ve watched ‘em come and I’ve watched ‘em retire but I’m always here. Toys for Tots, the way we work it is we collect toys—been going on since 1946. I’ve been doing it for many, many years. It’s something I do every year and kinda makes me sleep a little better every night.

The toys that the Marine Corps collects for Toys for Tots in each community stay right there in that community unlike other charities. They collect toys and they collect money and gain financially in some communities and that goes out to other communities. Well Toys for Tots is not like that; it’s a community effort. I go to Chicago every year, I do Toys for Tots there and then I come down to San Diego and I’ll be here until the 19th or 20th, and then I’ll go home and I’ll go to Wal-Mart and do my shopping. I’d just like to pass the word for Toys for Tots; it’s a community effort that helps your community. The toys don’t go some place else to some other community, it stays right there in your community. It’s a community situation, a community effort.

Joe: Well, for me, and a friend of mine who was in the military say “Make sure the Gunny knows that we all appreciate his efforts on our behalf for everything he goes out there and does” so I wanted to pass on a thank you and thank you for your time and good luck to you.

RLE: speaker Okay fine, Semper Fi. Ya’ll have a great rest of the day. Oorah! Take care now.

China to end tax breaks for foreign investors

2007-01-25T23:05:00.000-05:00

Chinese government officials now see the country as having reached the status of an ideal locale for foreign direct investors (i.e. those who build plants in-country) and have decided to end the tax breaks that lured them in despite China's many negatives from a foreign investor's standpoint. Will foreign investors continue flocking to China, given its pervasive corruption and onerous requirements* for foreign investors? Or will they divert their investments to China's regional (and out of region) competitors?

China appears close to ending tax breaks long enjoyed by foreign companies, a sign the government believes such incentives are no longer necessary to boost investment and growth.

Since the 1980s, China has offered reduced tax rates to woo foreign investors. These days it is having little trouble persuading them to set up shop or expand, thanks to the country's powerful export-manufacturing base and its robust economic growth -- which officials on Thursday said registered at 10.7% for 2006, surpassing 10% for the fourth straight year. Last year alone, Beijing says foreign companies poured $69.5 billion into Chinese operations.

Indeed, officials now worry that the rapid expansion of foreign-owned manufacturing businesses is using up scarce land and straining supplies of key raw materials. China is also focusing on developing its own domestic champions that can compete with multinationals. In a strategy document issued last year, the government said it will be more selective in foreign investment, and aim for quality, not quantity.

As a result, the government appears increasingly likely to pass a long-discussed tax law during China's annual legislative session in March that would, among other things, equalize tax rates for local and foreign companies. China's current official rate is generally higher than Hong Kong's and Singapore's, but lower than those of many European countries, and roughly in line with those of other developing nations.

According to a draft of the proposed "Enterprise Income Tax Law" that has been circulating among businesses in recent weeks, the tax rate for foreign and domestic companies will be set at 25%, and most existing tax holidays will be phased out over five years. Currently, the corporate-income tax rate is 33%, but local governments and development zones have often offered foreign companies rates as low as 15% to set up in their jurisdictions.

"Where I think the law has got its greatest impact is on the brand new investor," said Brendan Kelly, a tax partner in the Shanghai office of Baker & McKenzie LLP. Most foreign companies now operating in China are aware that they will have to deal with higher taxes in the future, he said. But "someone new to the marketplace may have been expecting a lot of tax holidays, and they may find it surprising how heavily this will impact them."

Compared with the wealth of incentives that are offered now, the draft law allows for only a few exceptions. Small companies with minimal profits would qualify for a 20% tax rate, while high-technology companies considered to be of national importance would still be granted a 15% rate. The new law would also permit areas with large ethnic-minority populations to offer income-tax breaks.

Wang Li, deputy commissioner of the State Administration of Taxation, said Wednesday that the law will be submitted to the National People's Congress, China's legislature, when it meets starting March 5. If passed, as now seems likely, the law could take effect in 2008. Mr. Wang, speaking at a news briefing, didn't comment on the contents of the draft law, which hasn't been officially released by the government, and which could still change before being adopted.

"In the past, having different tax policies for foreign and domestic companies was necessary, and played an important role in attracting foreign investment and stimulating economic growth," Mr. Wang said. However, he said, problems with the current system have since become apparent, such as the way it permits domestic companies to lower their taxes by setting up offshore, and the need for change has become more apparent.

Tax authorities first proposed a unified 25% income-tax rate in mid-2001. Domestic companies, more of which have been paying the statutory 33% rate, were eager supporters. But local governments, worried that the loss of tax breaks would hurt their economic-development programs, resisted.

* Among other things, foreign investors are required to hand over their technology to Chinese companies via joint-venture requirements. They are also not allowed to take their machinery with them if they decide to move their factory to some other country.

How will the upcoming housing bust affect the economy?

2007-01-16T16:01:00.000-05:00

Goldman Sachs is pessimistic:

The US Federal Reserve will need to slash interest rates three times this year as the housing slump goes from bad to worse and the American consumer begins to buckle, Goldman Sachs has warned.

"Americans have shown a complete lack of self-control. The personal savings rate is at its lowest point ever, and has actually been negative since April 2005.

"We believe that housing will soon become the proverbial 'straw that breaks the camel's back'," said David Kostin, the investment bank's US strategist.

Goldman Sachs said homeowners had treated windfall gains from rising house prices as if they were "recurring income", using home equity withdrawls to subsidize over-stretched lifestyles. This artificial boost to spending has already dropped from 7pc to 4pc of GDP over the last year, and is likely to halve again in 2007.

The US Federal Reserve will need to slash interest rates three times this year as the housing slump goes from bad to worse and the American consumer begins to buckle, Goldman Sachs has warned. ‘Americans have shown a complete lack of self-control. The personal savings rate is at its lowest point ever, and has actually been negative since April 2005.

Commenting on the article, MA writes:

I treat my place as though I were buying a car… just need to pay it off.

At current prices, buying a house is like buying a car - a Lamborghini, except you're actually getting a Honda Accord, despite paying premium prices. The reason these people are having to do home equity loans is because they've exercised no discipline - not in their consumption of luxury goods, but in their consumption of homes. Home prices are the reason for this debt. Buying overpriced homes is included in consumption, not in savings. And the mortgage payment is probably the biggest item in any homeowner's budget. Which is why I believe consumption will hold up and savings will increase as home prices collapse. Consumers will no longer chase overpriced homes and the exorbitant interest payments (at these home price levels, don't think of a mortgage payment as an investment - it's simply an oversized credit card bill) that come with them.

Lessons from the Quran

2007-01-15T10:25:00.000-05:00

The first American Muslim Congressman was sworn in using a copy of the Quran that once belonged to Thomas Jefferson. This Quran's background is a little more complicated than Ellison may be aware of:

Democrat Keith Ellison is now officially the first Muslim United States congressman. True to his pledge, he placed his hand on the Quran, the Muslim book of jihad and pledged his allegiance to the United States during his ceremonial swearing-in.

Capitol Hill staff said Ellison's swearing-in photo opportunity drew more media than they had ever seen in the history of the U.S. House. Ellison represents the 5th Congressional District of Minnesota.

The Quran Ellison used was no ordinary book. It once belonged to Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States and one of America's founding fathers. Ellison borrowed it from the Rare Book Section of the Library of Congress. It was one of the 6,500 Jefferson books archived in the library.

Ellison, who was born in Detroit and converted to Islam while in college, said he chose to use Jefferson's Quran because it showed that "a visionary like Jefferson" believed that wisdom could be gleaned from many sources.

There is no doubt Ellison was right about Jefferson believing wisdom could be "gleaned" from the Muslim Quran. At the time Jefferson owned the book, he needed to know everything possible about Muslims because he was about to advocate war against the Islamic "Barbary" states of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Tripoli.

Ellison's use of Jefferson's Quran as a prop illuminates a subject once well-known in the history of the United States, but, which today, is mostly forgotten - the Muslim pirate slavers who over many centuries enslaved millions of Africans and tens of thousands of Christian Europeans and Americans in the Islamic "Barbary" states.

Over the course of 10 centuries, Muslim pirates cruised the African and Mediterranean coastline, pillaging villages and seizing slaves.

The taking of slaves in pre-dawn raids on unsuspecting coastal villages had a high casualty rate. It was typical of Muslim raiders to kill off as many of the "non-Muslim" older men and women as possible so the preferred "booty" of only young women and children could be collected.

Young non-Muslim women were targeted because of their value as concubines in Islamic markets. Islamic law provides for the sexual interests of Muslim men by allowing them to take as many as four wives at one time and to have as many concubines as their fortunes allow.

Boys, as young as 9 or 10 years old, were often mutilated to create eunuchs who would bring higher prices in the slave markets of the Middle East. Muslim slave traders created "eunuch stations" along major African slave routes so the necessary surgery could be performed. It was estimated that only a small number of the boys subjected to the mutilation survived after the surgery.

When American colonists rebelled against British rule in 1776, American merchant ships lost Royal Navy protection. With no American Navy for protection, American ships were attacked and their Christian crews enslaved by Muslim pirates operating under the control of the "Dey of Algiers"--an Islamist warlord ruling Algeria.

Because American commerce in the Mediterranean was being destroyed by the pirates, the Continental Congress agreed in 1784 to negotiate treaties with the four Barbary States. Congress appointed a special commission consisting of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, to oversee the negotiations.

Lacking the ability to protect its merchant ships in the Mediterranean, the new America government tried to appease the Muslim slavers by agreeing to pay tribute and ransoms in order to retrieve seized American ships and buy the freedom of enslaved sailors.

Adams argued in favor of paying tribute as the cheapest way to get American commerce in the Mediterranean moving again. Jefferson was opposed. He believed there would be no end to the demands for tribute and wanted matters settled "through the medium of war." He proposed a league of trading nations to force an end to Muslim piracy.

In 1786, Jefferson, then the American ambassador to France, and Adams, then the American ambassador to Britain, met in London with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, the "Dey of Algiers" ambassador to Britain.

The Americans wanted to negotiate a peace treaty based on Congress' vote to appease.

During the meeting Jefferson and Adams asked the Dey's ambassador why Muslims held so much hostility towards America, a nation with which they had no previous contacts.

In a later meeting with the American Congress, the two future presidents reported that Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja had answered that Islam "was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Quran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman (Muslim) who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise."

For the following 15 years, the American government paid the Muslims millions of dollars for the safe passage of American ships or the return of American hostages. The payments in ransom and tribute amounted to 20 percent of United States government annual revenues in 1800.

Not long after Jefferson's inauguration as president in 1801, he dispatched a group of frigates to defend American interests in the Mediterranean, and informed Congress.

Declaring that America was going to spend "millions for defense but not one cent for tribute," Jefferson pressed the issue by deploying American Marines and many of America's best warships to the Muslim Barbary Coast.

The USS Constitution, USS Constellation, USS Philadelphia, USS Chesapeake, USS Argus, USS Syren and USS Intrepid all saw action.

In 1805, American Marines marched across the dessert from Egypt into Tripolitania, forcing the surrender of Tripoli and the freeing of all American slaves.

During the Jefferson administration, the Muslim Barbary States, crumbling as a result of intense American naval bombardment and on shore raids by Marines, finally officially agreed to abandon slavery and piracy.

Jefferson's victory over the Muslims lives on today in the Marine Hymn, with the line, "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, we will fight our country's battles on the land as on the sea."

It wasn't until 1815 that the problem was fully settled by the total defeat of all the Muslim slave trading pirates.

Jefferson had been right. The "medium of war" was the only way to put and end to the Muslim problem. Mr. Ellison was right about Jefferson. He was a "visionary" wise enough to read and learn about the enemy from their own Muslim book of jihad.

How are rubber bands made?

2007-01-09T13:52:00.000-05:00

In China, they are occasionally made from recycled materials - from a source you may find surprising:

A WOMAN surnamed Yu was surprised to find that a rubber band she had purchased to tie up her hair had been made out of a used or sub-standard condom, Chinanews.com.cn reported.
The woman from Qingdao, Shandong Province, said the product was of acceptable quality, having good flexibility.
The Qingdao government has launched an investigation into two stalls in the city's market that were selling the goods.
State-appointed prophylactics manufacturer Qingdao Shuangdie Group confirmed that the rubber bands were made out of bits of used and abandoned or low-quality condom.
Engineer Zhang Fan of Qingdao Shuangdie Group said there was strict control over production of condoms. Only eight plants had been appointed to undertake such production.
State regulations required rejected materials and shoddy products to be broken down and sent to a plastics factory in Beijing, the engineer said.
The hawkers at the stalls claimed the rubber bands had been procured from Yiwu in Zhejiang Province.
An investigation in Yiwu carried out by Zhejiang Jinhua Quality Supervision Bureau found that several stalls were selling the condom-made rubber bands. But most vendors claimed to be unaware of the fact.
By looking at the package of rubber bands, bureau officials were able to track down the wholesalers, who turned out to be a couple operating out of Qinyang, Henan Province.

Chinese restaurants

2007-01-07T21:39:00.000-05:00

Everything you wanted to know about Chinese restaurants, but were afraid to ask:

Chinese restaurant

(thing) by owlman (2 d) (print)

An establishment where you can dine on Chinese cuisine.
Sounds simple, right? Well, here's where I'm going to get all abstract on you.

In North America, Chinese restaurants range from the fairly authentic restaurants to the standard take-out. Note that I said fairly authentic. I emphasize this because you would be very hard pressed to find a TRULY authentic Chinese restaurant in North America. You want truly authentic Chinese cuisine? Come to my parents' home one day and feast on entrails, chicken heads, stinky salted fish, and more stuff that would make the participants of Survivor and Fear Factor squirm (props to Shi-Ann for making the most out of that chicken meal!).
I digress...

The Cuisine

Most of the fairly authentic Chinese restaurants in North America serve dishes that originate from Canton and Szechuan provinces. From the Cantonese side, you can expect a wide assortment of meat and greens dishes with a soy and oyster sauce base (and, therefore, somewhat sweet in flavour), usually stir-fried. These include Choy Sum, Chinese Broccoli, Straw Mushrooms, Bamboo Shoots, Baby Corns, along with beef, chicken, pork, or seafood.
From the Szechuan side, it consists of mostly (but not exclusively) hot and spicy numbers, utilizing dried red chilis.
Other fairly authentic Chinese restaurants may choose to be a bit more daring and serve dishes from the Northern provinces or cities, such as Tianjin or Shandong. This is where the flavours are a little more wilder and not for all tastes.
Of course, I haven't even started on the not-so-authentic Chinese restaurants. These include buffet houses, many takeout-only stores, and any place that calls itself Charlie Chan, Fu Manchu, or Wong Foo. At these places, you'll find crap - AKA chicken balls, garlic spareribs, egg rolls, chop suey. To call this stuff Chinese food is like calling KFC a fine example of American cuisine - it's just there to satisfy a bizarre craving, much like heroin. I won't get into the history behind this stuff because it's all debatable - suffice it to say, it doesn't come from China.
The Service

The running joke among us Chinese is that you can tell the quality of service at a Chinese restaurant by its clientele. If the client leans towards the non-Chinese side, service will be pretty good. The hosts will be friendly, the service will be with a smile, and the staff will be knowledgeable in the cuisine and gladly share that knowledge.
However, if the client base leans towards the Chinese population, you can expect the opposite. The hosts won't be as friendly (and may even ignore you when you walk through the doors), the service will most definitely be without a smile, and the staff will not even answer your questions because they really don't care what they serve to you.
Why the big difference? I'm not entirely sure but my father has told me that in Hong Kong, most people don't really care about good service because getting the product at a good price is all that matters - and, unfortunately, this applies also to dining out.
The MSG Factor

Ah, yes, what would a Chinese restaurant be without monosodium glutamate (MSG)? Chinese restaurants have long suffered the ignominy of using copious amounts of the flavour enhancer to perk up the dishes. Customers would complain of sensitivities to MSG, usually consisting of headaches to being thirsty for several hours after the meal.
To combat this stereotype, there has been a trend for many Chinese restaurants to declare that they are "MSG Free". This is complete and utter garbage. Unless the restaurant serves only organic foods, there is no way that it is MSG Free simply because of the fact that the use of oyster sauce and soy sauce already makes such a declaration moot - the popular brands of the sauces have MSG in them (albeit minute amounts in most cases).
What these restaurants should be saying is that they use considerably less MSG than their competitors. Instead of pouring teaspoons of the powder on the food, they may choose to use a pinch of it. In such cases, even the people who are truly sensitive to MSG can't tell the difference most of the time.
The best way to tell if a restaurant uses a lot of MSG is to take a look at how the meat dishes are prepared. If the beef is overly easy to bite and chew, it's because they've used a lot of meat tenderizer powder which kills the natural beef flavour. To counteract that, they're going to use a lot of MSG.
One more thing - many studies have shown that Chinese restaurants are unfairly targeted as heavy MSG users. In fact, restaurants based on other types of cuisine are also heavy MSG users, including Italian and American. Geez, you can't even eat a bag of chips these days without MSG being one of the main ingredients in them.
Don't come to my restaurant and ask me the following questions
Can I have Szechuan Beef/Chicken/Pork/Shrimp?

What you're probably looking for is something that's spicy. Contrary to popular belief, Szechuan does not always equal spicy. If you want something spicy, just say you want something spicy. Or go to Szechuan.
Oh, I love Chinese food! Can I have an order of chicken balls?

Everytime I hear people declare that they love Chinese food, my eyes light up and I begin to believe that they're really into the authentic cuisine or, at the very least, enjoy dim sum. Then the whole bubble is shattered when the chicken balls enter the picture, like some kind of Death Star. I'll give you the chicken balls, pal, but don't ever profess your love for Chinese food again or, so help me God...
Isn't rice free with my order?

Rice isn't a condiment - it's a side dish and the staple of every Chinese diet. So, no, you're not getting it free with your order.
What's the difference between General Tso's Chicken and General Tao's Chicken?

See General Tso's Chicken for my answer to this.

Why doesn't your Chinese tea taste like other places?

Probably because you didn't specify which kind of Chinese tea you wanted. Most places will serve you jasmine tea but I like to serve oolong. Next time, be more specific - kind of like going to Starbucks and asking for coffee.
Can you make me this dish but without any soy sauce, oyster sauce, garlic, nor ginger?

Go home and boil/steam your own meats and vegetables. Just don't call it Chinese food.

The author of the above gets it right at the beginning when he says that authentic isn't necessarily better or even suited to the American palate. Having tasted quite a few authentic dishes in Chinese restaurants in the People's Republic, I can attest to the fact that many of these dishes are an acquired taste. And this has nothing to do with exotic ingredients. To the American palate, much of what makes American Chinese food tasty has to do with Cantonese cooking. The so-called regional variations like Hunanese and Szechuanese cooking inside American Chinese restaurants are all dishes dreamed up by Cantonese cooks in America. You will not find these dishes in authentic Chinese menus, as I found to my disappointment during my travels in China.

Wartime Japanese delicacies

2006-06-07T22:21:00.000-04:00

It's generally understood that the Asian palate is used to foods at which the average American would blanch. During WWII, Japanese soldiers proved quite venturesome in their quest for new and unusual foods:

The former President George Bush narrowly escaped being beheaded and eaten by Japanese soldiers when he was shot down over the Pacific in the Second World War, a shocking new history published in America has revealed.

The book, Flyboys, is the result of historical detective work by James Bradley, whose father was among the marines later photographed raising the flag over the island of Iwo Jima.

Lt George Bush, then a 20-year-old pilot, was among nine airmen who escaped from their planes after being shot down during bombing raids on Chichi Jima, a tiny island 700 miles south of Tokyo, in September 1944 - and was the only one to evade capture by the Japanese.

The horrific fate of the other eight "flyboys" was established in subsequent war crimes trials on the island of Guam, but details were sealed in top secret files in Washington to spare their families distress.

Mr Bradley has established that they were tortured, beaten and then executed, either by beheading with swords or by multiple stab-wounds from bayonets and sharpened bamboo stakes. Four were then butchered by the island garrison's surgeons and their livers and meat from their thighs eaten by senior Japanese officers.

The future president escaped a similar fate because he ditched his plane further from the island than the other crews, and managed to scramble on to a liferaft. American planes launched a hail of fire at Japanese boats which set out to capture him, driving them back, and he was eventually rescued by a US submarine.

When the black hull of the USS Finback surfaced in front of him, he thought he was hallucinating, he told Mr Bradley in a television film made to coincide with the publication of Flyboys. He had been vomiting, bleeding from a head wound, and weeping with fear. He said only four words to his rescuers: "Happy to be aboard."

Mr Bush's part in the raid - for which he won the Distinguished Flying Cross - has long been known to Americans. Not known until now was the grim fate of his downed comrades - none from his own plane - who swam ashore.

Mr Bradley pieced together the horrific truth from secret transcripts of the war crimes trials, given to him by a former officer and lawyer who was an official witness at the time, and the testimony of surviving Japanese veterans.

A radio operator, Marve Mershon, was marched to a freshly dug grave, blindfolded, and made to kneel for beheading by sword, testified a Japanese soldier, named as Iwakawa, at the war crimes trial. "When the flyer was struck, he did not cry out, but made a slight groan."

The next day a Japanese officer, Major Sueo Matoba, decided to include American flesh in a sake-fuelled feast he laid on for officers including the commander-in-chief on the island, Gen Yoshio Tachibana. Both men were later tried and executed for war crimes.

A Japanese medical orderly who helped the surgeon prepare the ingredients said: "Dr Teraki cut open the chest and took out the liver. I removed a piece of flesh from the flyer's thigh, weighing about six pounds and measuring four inches wide, about a foot long."

Another crewman, Floyd Hall, met a similar fate. Adml Kinizo Mori, the senior naval officer on Chichi Jima, told the court that Major Matoba brought "a delicacy" to a party at his quarters - a specially prepared dish of Floyd Hall's liver.

According to Adml Mori, Matoba told him: "I had it pierced with bamboo sticks and cooked with soy sauce and vegetables." They ate it in "very small pieces", believing it "good medicine for the stomach", the admiral recalled.

A third victim of cannibalism, Jimmy Dye, had been put to work as a translator when, several weeks later, Capt Shizuo Yoshii - who was later tried and executed - called for his liver to be served at a party for fellow officers. Parts of a fourth airman, Warren Earl Vaughn, were also eaten and the remaining four were executed, one by being clubbed to death.

The parents of all the airmen are now dead, but Mr Bradley contacted all their families. "The first reaction was a stunned silence, a hush. But I think that at last knowing how these men died, however horrible their deaths, has allowed closure and in a word I heard from them, healing," he said. Mr Bush's first reaction was also to say nothing. "There was a lot of head-shaking, a lot of silence," the author told The Telegraph. "There was no disgust, shock or horror. He's a veteran of a different generation."

The former president returned to Chichi Jima with Mr Bradley for the first time since his rescue for the CNN documentary broadcast last week. Mr Bush looked sombre but never visibly upset, and ventured into the water in a modern liferaft to re-create his experience.

He recalled that while on the submarine he asked himself why he had survived. "Why had I been spared and what did God have in store for me? In my own view there's got to be some kind of destiny and I was being spared for something on Earth." Earlier he had told Mr Bradley: "I think about those guys all the time."

$70 oil and Chinese demand

2006-06-06T22:06:00.000-04:00

ST7699: Further, the Chinese won't be able to sustain buying oil at $70+USD for oil either, thus a major drop in demand and a dramatic drop in prices.

China's GDP per capita is growing in the high single digits annually, with salaries following in lockstep. This means that the ability of the Chinese consumer to buy more gas (than the limited amount he is using today) is increasing in the high single digits. This is why demand from China for various commodities is likely to increase for decades, because it is starting from extremely low bases, and growing its output per capita very rapidly.

Another important point is that the average Chinese consumer only recently graduated from the bicycle just over a decade ago - to the motorcycle. Even motorists live no more than 2 or 3 miles away from work. Chinese industry is extremely decentralized, meaning that people generally live not far from where they work. Bottom line, the average Chinese doesn't have a 2-hour commute to work, and he certainly doesn't drive an SUV. The average motorcyclist might spend 5% ($12.50) of his $250 monthly (two-income) household salary on gas*. If oil goes to $150 per barrel, that means he'll spend 10% of his salary on gas. That'll hurt, but it won't be crippling.

This actually brings to mind a curious Chinese arrangement. There are Chinese who work far from their homes (say, an hour's drive each way). The Chinese solution involves some hardship, but is eminently practical - employee dormitories next to the workplace. In fact, employee dormitories are an almost universal Chinese institution - government departments, hotels, garment factories, heavy industry - all have them. The big negative is that couples where one spouse works far away may see each other only during the weekend.

* How does he cart his only child around? China has no child restraint laws. The husband drives the motorcycle while child is squeezed between husband and wife.

ST7699: Nimble merchants will be shifting production from the mainland to elsewhere as the 'Central Committee' will be living in the classical 'interesting times' trying to deal with their first [and probably last] major recession.

The expression "may you live in interesting times" is not of Chinese origin. It may have originated either from Hollywood studios or from Western authors who wrote chinoiserie* in what they imagined was the Chinese style - probably cribbing from Western translations of Chinese classics.

* From Wikipedia: The term is also used in literary criticism to describe a mannered "Chinese-esque" style of writing, such as that employed by Ernest Bramah in his Kai Lung stories, Barry Hughart in his Master LI & Number 10 Ox novels and Stephen Marley in his Chia Black Dragon series (it should however be noted that Marley rejects the chinoiserie label in favour of his own term "Chinese Gothic").

Illegal aliens and the real estate market

2006-06-06T22:01:00.000-04:00

BJK: Well, if the new housing market is going to collapse we aren't going to need all those illegals the dems are always talking about to keep up our labor force.

Well, if a few million leave, that's really going to increase the supply of rental apartments. Which is going to further crater housing prices. For people who own houses, it's going to be a downer see their equity go up in smoke. For people looking to buy, it's going to be tempting, except house prices may go down for a while.

Just look at equities - roughly six years from its peak in September 2000, the S&P 500 is down 17% from its high. Note that equities weren't even very highly-leveraged, since you can only borrow $1 for every $1 of stock you own.

House prices can go down for a long time - the Japanese real estate market went down 15 years in a row during a time of declining, almost zero interest rates. And land in Japan is in short supply and the carrying costs are negligible, since property taxes are tiny there (like most of the rest of the world), unlike in the US.

It's not clear what a real estate bust will do to the US economy, but it really wrecked the Japanese economy. The Japanese stock index went from a high of 38,957 in December 1989 to 15,384 yesterday, a decline of 60% over 16+ years. The basic problem for Japan is that domestic consumption took a huge dive as house prices cratered, and over-leveraged Japanese households haven't yet recovered - it's Chinese demand that is getting the Japanese economy back into shape*. The same could happen stateside. This is why my view is cautious.

* Why Chinese? What about American demand? Well, American demand is far higher than Chinese demand for Japanese goods. But something needed to make up for the big hole in Japanese domestic demand - that's where China came in. The stability of American demand has been the bright spot for Japan over its extended recession. But this demand may be about to crater, thanks to the bursting of the US real estate bubble. Which means that Japan may be about to encounter phase 2 of its recession.

Japanese war crimes trials

2006-06-02T19:56:00.000-04:00

After the Japanese surrender in 1945, war crimes trials were convened to try Japanese officials for atrocities committed by Japanese forces during the war. Some of these trials were of a purely political nature - such as the ones that convicted various Japanese leaders of "Class A" war crimes: of leading Japan into an aggressive war. (This is hypocrisy of the first order, since *all* nations are formed on the basis of aggressive war - including every single participant in WWII). The more straightforward ones involved "Class C" war crimes, where individual Japanese soldiers killed or tortured to death enemy soldiers or civilians after they had surrendered, or Japanese officers ordered that these deeds be carried out. Japanese soldiers were quite inventive in their methods for disposing of those in their custody - cannibalism, vivisection (dissection while the subject was still alive), torture, immolation - all were part of the Japanese inventory. The following is an account of the trials that attempted to sort out the guilty from the innocent bystanders in the Japanese military:

General Tomoyuki Yamashita was hanged in Manila on February 23, 1946. The fate of this officer, a first-class fighting man,affirmed something new in the annals of war. For Yamashita did not die for murder, or for directing other men to do murder in his name. Yamashita lost his life not because he was a bad or evil commander, but simply because he was a commander, and the men he commanded had done unspeakably evil things.

Yamashita was tried by military commission, a panel of five general officers, all American, sitting in the great ballroom of the bullet-pocked U.S. high commissioner's residence in Manila. General Douglas MacArthur, as overall Pacific commander, had the power not only to convene such commissions but also to establish their powers and procedural rules. A military commission had sentenced to death certain German saboteurs landed in the United States in the summer of 1942. Such a commission was not bound by the procedural rules and safeguards inherent in both the civil and the court-martial systems.

Command responsibility is as old as war. So is guilt for murder done or murder ordered. What was different about Yamashita's case was responsibility--to the death--for murder tolerated, knowingly or not. Colonel Harry Clarke, the general's able and articulate chief defense counsel, put it plainly in his opening statement to the officers of the commission: "The Accused is not charged with having done something or having failed to do something, but solely with having been something....American jurisprudence recognizes no such principle so far as its own military personnel are concerned....No one would even suggest that the Commanding General of an American occupational force becomes a criminal every time an American soldier violates the law...one man is not held to answer for the crime of another." But Yamashita was.

Once the war had ended, details of the last hideous days in the Philippines began to see the light of day. For three weeks the commission heard ghastly details of slaughter and rape, of beheadings and burnings alive, of torture and wanton destruction, of the murders of the helpless--women and babies and priests and American prisoners of war.

The prosecution's position was simple. The atrocities committed by Japanese troops were so widespread that Yamashita must have known of them; if he did not, they argued less convincingly, "it was simply because he took affirmative action not to know." So the prosecution's case was that Yamashita knew or should have known of the horrors committed by his men, even though Japanese command and communication had broken down almost entirely during the last days of the war in the Philippines.

Although MacArthur's headquarters assisted in procuring defense witnesses, it also advised the commission that it was "disturbed by reports of possible recess" and that it doubted the "need of Defense for more time." Most specifically, MacArthur's deputy chief of staff announced that his boss "desires proceedings completed [at] earliest possible date." The military commission soon announced its opposition to any continuance save "for the most urgent and unavoidable reasons."

There was more for Yamashita's defense counsel to be uneasy about. Five American generals sat on the commission. None was legally trained. Throughout the hearing they seemed impatient with traditional legal procedure, including some of the safeguards accorded the accused. The commission repeatedly directed defense counsel to shorten their cross-examinations and forbade both sides to criticize any interpreter in open court. Counsel was to question, said the commission, with "short, simple questions as free from artifice as if examining a child."

Perhaps this apparent impatience was because the command feared a prolonged proceeding would eat up the time of the members and therefore delay the start of other war crimes hearings. One reporter observing the trial attributed a more sinister motive: "In the opinion of probably every correspondent covering the trial, the military commission came into the courtroom the first day with the decision already in its collective pocket."

Maybe so; if that was the case, however, it reflected no more than the opinion of most of the Western world and much of the Orient as well. The revealed horrors of Japanese occupation warped a lot of people's views. A Time magazine writer, for example, raged about Yamashita's brutality during the Bataan Death March. The writer forgot, if he knew or cared, that the general had been stationed in Manchuria in those far-off days. Time tended to take a somewhat disdainful tone anyhow, referring to the major Tokyo trials as a "third-string road company of the Nuremberg show."

The appearance of predetermination became even more pronounced when the defense revealed its intention to appeal to the Philippine Supreme Court. Both the commission and the American commander in the Philippines refused to provide copies of the transcript of trial; defense counsel prepared their own, working far into the night. And while the appeal was considered, the trial itself wound down.

By this time many observers were concerned that Yamashita was not being accorded due process. As the defense pointed out, some of the evidence against him was hearsay three times removed, and the defense was being continually directed to hurry up. Even worse, defense counsel had been confronted with allegations of 59 additional crimes even as the trial began. They had, they urged, been granted no time to prepare against these new accusations. The judges were paying little attention to the defense evidence, counsel argued, or rather to the lack of persuasive proof for the prosecution. Twelve international correspondents, they said, had taken a straw vote and unanimously found Yamashita not guilty.

Even before the Philippine court announced it had no jurisdiction over U.S. Army proceedings, defense counsel had petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, aware that the delay needed to transmit briefs to Washington might permit execution of Yamashita before the high court could hear the case.

The result of their appeal was titled In re Yamashita. Before the Supreme Court Yamashita's lawyers argued powerfully, as they had in Manila, that charges against Germans at Nuremberg had alleged "knowledge and participation" in criminal acts. No such accusation had been made against Yamashita, nor had the proof shown he even knew of such crimes.

But the high court was not, it said, "concerned with the guilt or innocence" of the general. It considered only its power to review the proceedings of the military commission, and found that it had none. Only military authorities were "authorized to review" what the commission had done. Over a vigorous dissent by Justices Frank Murphy and Wiley B. Rutledge, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

Even as the appellate proceedings ended in Washington, the trial moved to its dramatic conclusion in Manila. After counsel had finished its closing argument, the commission announced it would rule within 46 hours. Its verdict of guilty was no surprise to anybody, including Yamashita; neither was the sentence to death by hanging. Significantly, perhaps, the date of the judgment was December 7.

Yamashita was only one of thousands facing trial for their actions during World War II--and before the war for those who had participated in the rape of China. Japanese soldiers had been killing, raping, looting and torturing all across the East since the 1930s. In 1945, at long long last, the bill was coming due. Before the courts-martial and military commissions recessed for the last time, some 5,600 Japanese had been prosecuted in more than 2,200 trials. Of these men--and a few women--more than 4,400 were convicted, and about 1,000 were executed. Testifying to the Allies' determination to deal fairly with the enemy, there had also been about the same number of acquittals.

The nations that sat in judgment were the United States, Great Britain, Australia, the Netherlands, France, the Philippines and China. Some Japanese were "tried" by the Soviet Union at its Kafkaesque worst, the tribunals serving simply as mouths for the rawest sort of political slander of the West. In stark contrast to their comrades in arms tried elsewhere, the defendants almost uniformly pleaded guilty, apologized publicly, and had something warm and fuzzy to say about the exemplary justice of the "People's Paradise." Soviet trials are not included in the totals given above.

Preparation for dealing with war crimes had begun by mid- 1942. The Western powers by then knew a good deal about atrocities already committed during the war, to say nothing of the ghastly reign of terror that characterized the Japanese invasion of China from 1937 on. Both President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill warned Japan of the consequences of atrocities, and more British and American warnings were delivered to the Japanese government throughout the course of the war. France sent its own warning in 1945, after Japan attacked French garrisons and administrators in what was then French Indochina.

The most important and impressive warning came out of the Potsdam Conference in July 1945. The United States, Britain and China joined in it--the Russians assented later--and its language was blunt: "There must be eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest...stern justice must be meted out to all war criminals, including those who have visited cruelties upon our prisoners...."

The trial of major Japanese leaders was held in Tokyo--the International Military Tribunal for the Far East began sitting in May 1946--and has often been equated with the prosecution of the leading Nazis at Nuremberg; in fact, there were some important differences between the two proceedings. First, at Nuremberg there were just four judges, and each had an alternate. In Tokyo, there were 11 judges without alternates. Nuremberg operated in four languages, Tokyo in two. At Nuremberg, the four Allied nations were each represented by coequal prosecutors; in Tokyo, the United States led; everybody else assisted.

More important, the charges differed between the two trials. The charter under which the Tokyo court operated gave it jurisdiction only over persons accused of offenses that included the somewhat amorphous "crimes against peace," although such persons might be charged with other crimes as well. At Nuremberg, "crimes against peace" were only one of several categories of possible offenses. And, while Nuremberg included as defendants certain organizations such as the Gestapo, no Japanese organizations, such as the Black Dragon Society, were charged.

Moreover, conspiracy to "wage aggressive war" was the heart of the prosecution's case in Japan. The comparable Nuremberg indictments covered a more logical and broader ground: conspiracy to "plan, prepare, initiate and wage aggressive war." Another difference that provoked considerable comment was the absence from the dock of any of the zaibatsu, the powerful Japanese industrialists. The Nuremberg indictments had included some of the top businessmen in Germany, names such as Hjalmar Schacht and Alfred Krupp. The decision not to prosecute similar people in Japan rested on the paucity of proof to show that the industrialists had aided and abetted the government in preparing and carrying out wars of aggression.

Otherwise, the two trials were similar. The Tokyo court also held defendants accountable for conventional war crimes and "crimes against humanity," much as was done at Nuremberg.

The United States took the lead in the Far East war criminal trials. MacArthur, as supreme commander for the Allied powers, had the authority to convene the proceedings and largely controlled their progress. America's allies were content to have it so. The United States had carried the major burden of the war against Japan and had emerged by far the strongest power in the Pacific. Americans prosecuted more defendants than anybody else and considerably influenced the Allies' trials as well. From the beginning, however, the Allies agreed on one basic premise: The trials should be both public and fair, so that not only the world but also Japan herself should see how evenhandedly free nations dealt with evil.

Immediately after the shooting stopped, the Allies began work on an international military tribunal of the sort established at Nuremberg. The chief prosecutor would be Joseph B. Keenan, a well-known New Deal politician and adviser to President Roosevelt. Keenan turned out to be an able organizer and prosecutor, who worked well with the other Allies. Over time, more than 70 associate prosecutors worked within Keenan's International Prosecution Section. All contributed.

Their targets would be the major Japanese leaders, accused of "crimes against peace," that is, the planning and execution of aggressive war. Other defendants, less prominent and accused of more mundane crimes, would face courts-martial and other lesser tribunals. As at Nuremberg, the Tokyo defendants were to be accorded counsel, assistance in procuring evidence and witnesses, and adequate time to prepare.

The rules of procedure were otherwise relaxed because of the immense difficulty in locating witnesses. As one Englishman put it, this trial and others to follow should "be bound simply by ordinary opinions of fairness and justice." That was a pretty fair yardstick and accorded well with President Harry S. Truman's directive that the trials determine guilt substantially as was done at Nuremberg.

The Tokyo defendants were the politicians and generals, leading war makers in the eyes of the free world, headed by Hideki Tojo, premier of Japan through most of the war. This proceeding was staffed with attorneys in the same manner as the trials at Nuremberg. On the bench were judges from most of the nations whose citizens had been brutalized by the Japanese, led by the court president, Sir William Webb of Australia.

There were 25 defendants. Two more died during the trial. A third defendant deteriorated mentally so far that he could not stand trial. They were all officials of high rank, among them four prime ministers, four foreign ministers, five war ministers, two navy ministers and four ambassadors. Fourteen had been army generals. Another three were admirals.

Tojo was the best-known of the accused, for he had been a symbol of Japanese aggression in the West throughout the war, and had been prime minister during and after the time of Pearl Harbor. The wartime foreign ministers--Koki Hirota, Mamoru Shigemitsu and Shigenori Togo--held roughly the position occupied by Joachim von Ribbentrop in Nazi Germany. Perhaps ominously for the Tokyo defendants, he had been hanged at Nuremberg.

The accused faced a 55-count indictment, an extraordinary document drafted mostly by Arthur Comyns-Carr, the British prosecutor, with advice from many of the other national prosecutors. Comyns-Carr had to compromise, as one American lawyer put it, "between the eleven legal systems involved," but in the end he managed a coherent document that "fairly apprised the accused of the offense with which they were charged."

Every nation's prosecutor signed the indictment, which charged the accused with "crimes against peace"--36 counts; "murder"--16 counts; and "other conventional war crimes and crimes against humanity"--3 counts. In broad outline, the defendants were accused, somewhat imprecisely, of conspiring between 1928 and 1941 to wage "aggressive war," in order to gain "domination and control of East Asia." As in Yamashita's case, the prosecution argued that they either knew or should have known of widespread atrocities and did nothing to stop them.

One obvious defendant would be missing from the dock. Emperor Hirohito would not be tried, in spite of widespread demand that he be prosecuted. The ostensible reason was that he had been only a figurehead, overridden by a military cabal. In fact, the probable reason was MacArthur's insistence that conviction of the emperor would end whatever stability remained in Japan.

The Tokyo prosecution began in May 1946; after hundreds of sessions, it closed in November two years later. The trial was held, perhaps symbolically, in the auditorium of the Japanese War Ministry building, and in the audience were 100 correspondents, both Japanese and Allied, and several hundred spectators. Before it was over, the prosecution had produced more than 400 witnesses, almost 800 witness affidavits and about 1,000 other documents.

The trial was conducted under one serious handicap not present during the Nuremberg prosecutions. In spite of the presence of more than 150 Japanese staff, effective simultaneous translations could not be managed. Counsel was therefore limited to short questions posed in elementary language or written interrogatories submitted in advance. This restriction undoubtedly handicapped lawyers for both sides in getting at the truth.

As symbolically important as the Tokyo venue were the opening remarks of Sir William Webb. The tribunal would deal fairly, he said, without prejudging: "To our great task we bring open minds both on the facts and the law....The onus will be on the prosecution to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt."

That set the stage. Whatever abuses of justice Japan and the Japanese had committed, there would be no abuses here. Defense counsel were both Japanese and American. Although most of the defendants chose men of their own country to represent them, including some of the finest legal minds in Japan, the Americans were able to help their Japanese counterparts with Western legal concepts and procedure. In any event, counsel from the two recent enemies produced a tough and outspoken defense.

Defense counsel asserted that there could have been no conspiracy to make war. Fifteen Japanese cabinets had come and gone between 1928 and 1941. Moreover, the accused had often disagreed among themselves; some had opposed certain decisions of the Japanese leadership; some had opposed the war itself. Where there was neither continuity nor agreement, argued the defense, there could by definition be no conspiracy. It was a powerful argument.

Moreover, Tojo himself took responsibility, as premier, for anything either he or his country had done. He asserted, however, with the other defendants, that they--and Japan--had made war only in "self-defense," relying for defense on the West's freezing of Japanese assets, the provision of military assistance to China, and "inflexible and unsympathetic" demands that Japan withdraw from China.

The judgment at Tokyo was not handed down for seven months after all the evidence was in. When it appeared, in November 1948, it was 1,218 pages long, more than 1,000 of which were devoted to findings of fact. The judgment itself took a mere seven pages; the verdicts required 82 more. All defendants were found guilty, and the sentence was death by hanging for Tojo, Foreign Minister Koki Hirota and five generals (Kenji Doihara, Seishiro Itagaki, Hyoturo Kimura, Iwane Matsui and Akira Muto). Sixteen others got life. Two sometime foreign ministers, Shigenori Togo and Mamoru Shigemitsu, were sentenced to periods of years. Togo died in prison; Shigemitsu, a phoenix from the ashes, would again serve Japan as foreign minister.

The commission rejected Japanese self-defense claims out of hand. Prewar Western measures, said the opinion, were only in reaction to Japanese aggression begun years before. Japan had certainly waged aggressive war against the Western nations, said the tribunal, and had begun it by "unprovoked attacks." Those killed by Japan in the course of such an unlawful, aggressive war had therefore been murdered. Perhaps more damning, the commission found Japan had consistently violated the laws of war. Only 4 percent of American and British prisoners of war held by Germany and Italy had died during the war. Of those held by the Japanese, a shocking 27 percent had not survived. A good many had been murdered; most had died of disease, mistreatment and malnutrition.

The judgment was not unanimous. Eight of the judges, including the American Myron Cramer, judge advocate general of the U.S. Army, concurred in the judgment and sentences. Sir William Webb dissented, at least to the degree that he thought the offense of conspiracy had no basis in international law. He also thought that some of the sentences were excessive and suggested that Hirohito might well have been prosecuted with the rest.

By contrast, Delfin Jaramilla of the Philippines disagreed only in that he thought some of the sentences too lenient. H. Bernard of France found fault with the procedure of the tribunal, and therefore with the resulting judgment. B.V.A. Roeling of the Netherlands dissented in part, urging that Foreign Minister Hirota be acquitted since he could neither have known of atrocities nor prevented them. For similar reasons, he also voted to acquit four other defendants. At the same time, Roeling argued that three defendants who had been sentenced to life should have been given the death penalty for conventional war crimes.

The only complete dissent came from Radhabinod Pal of India. He had joined the tribunal quite late, after the British decision to grant independence to India. Pal's long dissent argued that all the defendants should have been acquitted on all counts. Japan had acted in "self-defense," he said, "really driven to take action." The thousands of atrocities had been "all stray incidents," he continued, along the way attacking the American decision to drop the atomic bomb. Pal's somewhat vitriolic dissent was generated by his complete commitment to "Asia for the Asians." In fact, he was a member of the Indian puppet army that served with the Japanese at a time when the vast majority of Indian soldiers remained true to their salt. One of the other judges believed Pal had come to the trial determined to vote for complete acquittal.

Before the curtain finally fell on the Tokyo trial, a final act was played out before the U.S. Supreme Court. Two defendants, Hirota and General Doihara, petitioned for review of their convictions. On December 20, 1948, the Supreme Court replied that it had no jurisdiction to hear the appeal; the International Military Tribunal was not a court of the United States, and therefore was beyond the Supreme Court's power to review. Three days later, the Tokyo death sentences were carried out.

It is almost impossible to accurately compare the results of the Tokyo trial to those reached at Nuremberg, although some have charged, on no particular evidence, that the results at Tokyo were more severe toward the accused than the verdicts at Nuremberg. For what it's worth, here are the numbers: 25 men were tried at Tokyo, all convicted; of 22 Nuremberg defendants, three were acquitted. There were 16 life sentences at Tokyo, only three at Nuremberg; but 12 Nazi defendants (including Martin Bormann in absentia) were sentenced to death, as against only five Japanese.

So the Tokyo prosecutions passed into history. If they had held center stage in the public eye, they were only a tiny fraction of the war crimes trials. The rest took place all across the Orient and did not end until 1951. These defendants--those who committed the acts and those who ordered them--were accused of more conventional crimes, violations of the laws of war and ordinary civilian crimes of rape, murder and maltreatment.

American military commissions required at least three members, almost always officers. One member ruled on evidentiary matters as "law member"; the law member was not required to be a lawyer, and usually was not. The accused--sometimes several of them--were entitled to counsel and to the production of evidence for the defense. All proceedings and sentences were reviewed by a staff of lawyers before approval.

Defense counsel, mostly American, worked hard and faithfully for their clients, and the American government expended many millions of dollars in finding documents and witnesses requested by the defense. Many trials turned into down-home dogfights between prosecution and defense. And if adversary trials took a little longer, they preserved the American tradition of fair play in the eyes of most observers. Commenting on the conduct of the trials, one American law professor paid the ultimate compliment: "The legal profession will say of defense counsel--'well done.'"

The Yamashita case was the most famous of the American trials, but there were hundreds of others. One defendant was Lt. Gen. Matsaharu Homma, author of the Bataan Death March and the bombing of undefended Manila. Homma's headquarters was less than 500 yards from the road down which suffering American and Filipino prisoners were marched; Homma admitted he had even driven down the road himself. From the evidence Homma had to have known what his men were doing on that blood-soaked road, and little criticism accompanied his hanging in April 1946.

In 1947, American authorities turned over to Filipino prosecutors the conduct of the remaining trials, including successful prosecution of Yamashita's predecessor, General Shigenori Kuroda, charged with more than 2,800 deaths. In spite of the long and ugly occupation of the Philippines, this trial and the rest showed the same dedication to fairness that had characterized most of the American prosecutions. The chief defense counsel, a Philippine army captain, put it pretty well. "I am duty bound to see that every Japanese accused of atrocities is given a fair trial...," he said. "No right-thinking citizen would like to see the Philippines commit a historical blunder through its courts by allowing conviction of innocent people just because they were former enemies."

The tribunals were scrupulously fair, and defense counsel fought as hard for their clients as they had under American administration...sometimes too hard. In one hotly contested case, the Filipino prosecutor and Japanese defense counsel came to blows in the courtroom. It is a testament to Filipino fair play that the defendant was acquitted in spite of the antics of his counsel.

In one spectacular display of generosity, Philippine President Manuel Roxas formally appealed to China's Chiang Kai-shek to spare a Japanese officer accused of war crimes in China. This officer, wrote Roxas, had saved several Filipino lives, including Roxas' own. Chiang Kai-shek granted the Philippine president's request.

By the time trials in the Philippines were over, 215 Japanese had faced military commissions. Twenty had been found not guilty; 92 had been sentenced to death. But those proceedings were only part of the work. There was a great deal more to do.

American personnel worked closely with nationalist authorities in China, especially in coordinating the movement of witnesses and suspects from Japan to China for Chinese war crimes trials. In Shanghai, American tribunals prepared to conduct their own trials, with the blessing of the Chinese. The defendants in those proceedings were mostly Japanese who had participated in the "trial" and execution of American airmen under something called the "Enemy Airmen's Act," promulgated after the surprise and shame of the Doolittle raid on Japan in April 1942.

Most of those trials resulted in convictions and a good number of executions. Still, the commissions had taken pains to ensure a fair trial for the accused and had shown considerable clemency to men who had acted under orders, even in the case of the Doolittle fliers. Obedience to high authority might not be a defense, but at least some of the commissions considered it a matter in mitigation. In the end, the American trials in China ended with about the same number of acquittals as those in the Philippines (10 percent) and many fewer death sentences.

Many American trials were held by the U.S. Navy for crimes committed in the Pacific islands. Three took place on Kwajalein in the Marshalls; 44 were tried on Guam. Many of those proceedings involved close cooperation with British, Australian and Indonesian authorities. In some cases, courts of one nation tried Japanese for offenses against personnel of an ally. The victims of the Japanese included not only Allied personnel but also Swiss, Spanish and many Pacific islanders.

Most of the crimes alleged were personal and ugly. Nineteen Japanese were tried for a series of medical "experiments" at Truk in 1944. The defendants had murdered American prisoners by--among other things--injecting them with streptococcus bacteria. Others clamped tourniquets on prisoners' arms and legs for seven hours. When these were removed, two prisoners died of shock.

Other notable trials included the prosecution of a rear admiral and others for the murder of 98 Pan American airline employees on Wake Island in 1943. The admiral and 10 more were sentenced to death. Another group of 18 was convicted of murdering civilians in the Palaus, and many others were held accountable for civilian murders in the islands, usually of natives executed as "spies" on no evidence.

Meanwhile, in Japan, a series of trials continued in Yokohama, the defendants including such disparate persons as Shinto priests, medical personnel, professors and farmers, in addition to military personnel of all ranks. Most of those proceedings involved maltreatment of prisoners, a bitter litany of starvation, beating and general neglect that caused thousands of deaths.

One case involved the notorious "hell ship" Oryoko Maru, on which some 1,300 prisoners died en route from the Philippines to Japan in 1944. The guard commander was sentenced to death, as was his interpreter, and four others were sent to prison. Significantly, the commission acquitted the ship captain, ruling that he had no power to intervene.

Particular targets of American prosecutions were members of the Kempeitai, the secret police, famous for its brutality and arrogance. Fatal beatings, beheadings, even poisonings of prisoners, were commonplace in the cells of this detested organization. Just as loathsome were the crimes of Japanese medical personnel who had murdered American prisoners by, as one angry indictment put it, "vivisecting them, mutilating and dissecting and removing parts from and otherwise desecrating the bodies of said prisoners." One medical defendant was the first woman to be tried by the commissions, an army nurse accused of participating in sadistic medical experiments.

Many of the crimes alleged against ex-servicemen were committed out of pure revenge, and for these defendants American tribunals had little mercy. Five Japanese seamen got life sentences for the murder of five Americans at sea in 1942. The accused had told the American victims that because they had killed "many Japanese soldiers on Wake Island...you are now going to be killed for revenge."

One case begun in Japan finished in America, the trial of one Tomaya Kawakita, who argued that because he was born in the United States and was therefore a citizen, he was entitled to trial before an American civilian court. A military commission in Yokohama agreed with him, but sometimes it is better not to get what you wish for. Returned to Los Angeles, Kawakita got his trial before an American court...and was sentenced to death.

The British commander in the Far East, Lord Louis Mountbatten, made it clear from the start that war crimes trials would be straightforward criminal matters. Britain would have nothing to do, he said, "with trials of a purely political nature." Conviction would be only by proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And, as one British prosecutor announced to his court, the trials should "demonstrate to the world that great distinction" between British and Japanese justice.

And so they did. British prosecutors tried accused Japanese all across the East--up and down the Malay Peninsula, in Borneo, New Britain, Rangoon and Singapore. British concern for fairness did not, however, imply any special leniency as to sentence. One trial of 35 Kempeitai for murders of Malay civilians produced 21 death sentences. A second trial of Kempeitai produced eight more sentences to the gallows, this time for torture of British prisoners.

Some British trials attracted special attention, like the American prosecutions of the Japanese who had brutalized and murdered American airmen after the Doolittle raid. The most notable of the British proceedings was the prosecution of the "River Kwai" defendants, the men responsible for the deaths of almost 600 of the 2,000 prisoners who built the BurmaSiam railroad. After hearing days of ghastly evidence from survivors of the deadly railroad, the British court sentenced two of the worst offenders to hang, the others to long terms in prison.

British defense counsel was generally able and dedicated and made much use of the "superior orders" defense. The Japanese social and military order was, they argued, dominated by the idea of absolute obedience to orders at all levels. And sometimes the plea worked. Like their American counterparts, British courts could also show mercy. One Japanese sergeant was convicted of brutality toward a British prisoner. However, since the evidence showed that the man had beaten his victim only under threat of punishment by his superior, the British court sentenced the Japanese soldier to a single day's confinement.

Like the British and Americans, Australia's courts were determined that justice not only be done fairly but also be perceived as fairly done. Unlike the other nations, however, the Australians compiled a detailed war crimes list of 35 separate offenses. It included "crimes against peace," of course, but also a litany of particular offenses including not only conventional crimes but also the unusual and the bizarre, such as "cannibalism" and "mutilation of a dead body." It was as well that Australia itemized such grotesque crimes, for that country would have to try them.

Depending on where trials were held, the Australians relied considerably on their allies. Offenses against Australians were tried by both British and American courts, sitting with an Australian member; sometimes Australian officers prosecuted before these Allied courts. The British, Chinese and Indians furnished officers to sit on Australian courts trying offenses against their own countrymen.

Perhaps more than any other, the Australian trials revealed the depths of depravity to which the Japanese sometimes sank. One trial on New Guinea condemned a Japanese officer who ate part of an Australian prisoner. Unimpressed by the defendant's claim that starvation had deprived him of his sense, the Australians hanged him. Another court convicted a defendant of crucifying four airmen, including one American, in the Celebes.

The Australians put on the largest trial of the entire postwar period, accusing 93 Japanese together with cruelty to American, Australian and Dutch prisoners in Amboina. And in Rabaul, New Britain, for most of the war a large Japanese base, an Australian court heard a hideous tale of calculated ill treatment of about 1,000 American and British prisoners of war. Ill, malnourished, mistreated, these men were driven 165 miles over very bad terrain. Only 183 survived the trip, and 150 of those died soon after arrival. The Japanese commander executed the survivors and survived the war himself. He did not survive the court's verdict.

China tried more than 800 defendants of whom there is record, including some of those responsible for the butchery in Nanking and Shanghai. Of the 800, some 500 were convicted. Of those, 149 were put to death. France and the Netherlands tried several hundred more. The French were still at it in 1951. Generally, the proceedings followed the same pattern set by the other trials, and like the other powers, France tried Japanese for offenses against Allied personnel as well as their own. And, like the other nations, the French tried many offenses against the civilian population, including some unusual crimes, like the Japanese civilian on Java who forced dozens of women into prostitution for the military authorities. He had acted only under orders, pleaded the defendant. It cost him 10 years.

In one of the ugliest trials in the Dutch East Indies a court condemned to death Vice Admiral Michiaki Kamada, who had directed the execution of some 1,500 natives of Borneo. Another four Japanese died for brutality and murder committed on 2,000 Dutch prisoners on Flores Island. Another case involved the death "through maltreatment" of 5,000 Indonesian forced laborers, 500 Allied prisoners and 1,000 civilians.

Although Japanese defendants regularly pleaded not guilty, from time to time some of them admitted the fearful things with which they were accused. One prison camp commander admitted he had gouged eyes and tortured prisoners. A Kempeitai officer was even moved to demonstrate how he had kicked a prisoner. Although the defendant claimed that his blows caused no harm, the scars on the wooden courtroom table he had kicked cost him five years in prison.

The French, who tried fewer cases than anybody else, quite practically approached most of their cases as trials of ordinary crimes. Prominent among the defendants were members of the vile Kempeitai, charged with hundreds of incidents of murder and torture of both French and Vietnamese prisoners. And, like the British, the French helped American war crimes teams seeking Japanese who had brutalized Americans. Five Japanese were executed for the murder of American airmen in Indochina, thanks to the assistance of the French.

The Russian trials were mostly pulpits for propaganda attacks on the West. The "imperialist policy" of their erstwhile allies, said the Russians, had led them to abandon "the struggle against war criminals." The Russians never tired of harping on Western decisions not to try the "greedy capitalists," the zaibatsu of Japanese industry.

The thrust of the Russian trials, such as they were, concentrated on alleged Japanese "manufacture and employment" of bacteriological weapons (of which the International Military Tribunal found no evidence at all). The Japanese had started these preparations as early as 1935, the Russians claimed, bred fleas to carry plague, and manufactured shells and bombs to spread contamination. Moreover, said the Russian prosecution, the Japanese had experimented on human guinea pigs and actually used bacteria in China between 1940 and 1942. Naturally, the zaibatsu were at the bottom of all these nefarious doings.

The Russian "defense," outdoing the prosecution in the production of sanctimonious claptrap, excused the participation of ordinary Japanese soldiers as due to a sort of arrested development. The accused had not had the advantages of those fortunate enough to live "under the sun of the Stalin Constitution." The Western press was excluded from these otherwise "public" trials for obvious reasons, but the tame Communist media let the world know that "Japan and its American allies" were plotting to use such hideous weapons against Russia.

Later, of course, they followed up with the nonsense that such weapons were actually used against North Korea and China. The West had "unleashed the most inhuman carnage in history, warfare with the assistance of microbes, fleas, lice and spiders...." And on and on.

By 1951 it was over. No doubt the justice meted out to a variety of criminals was important, but not nearly so important as the demonstration that the victorious West would deal fairly with its prostrate enemy, no matter how vile the crimes it had committed. A great many Japanese, including many of the accused, later commented on the fairness of the trials and the length to which the victorious powers went to provide and assist the defense.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Murphy accurately summed up the great danger the Allies had successfully faced in the Far Eastern trials, speaking in his powerful and vigorous dissent in In re Yamashita. Justice had to be preserved, he wrote, no matter what the cost, no matter what guilty men went free. "To conclude otherwise," he continued, "is to admit that the enemy has lost the battle but has destroyed our ideals."

The enemy had lost both battles.

An Uighur Muslim businesswoman speaks truth to power in China

2006-06-01T00:17:00.000-04:00

Her reward is a 6-1/2 year stint in prison, followed by freedom - and exile - in America:

Rebiya Kadeer is fighting to bring the Chinese leadership before an international human rights tribunal. She accuses the regime of repressing the Uighurs, a Muslim minority in northwest China.

Ablikim walks through the city of his childhood, looking for a place where he can feel safe talking about his mother. Ablikim is the son of Rebiya Kadeer, China’s most famous dissident.

It’s already late in the afternoon and the cold air is beginning to drift down from the nearby mountains. At first Ablikim decides on a snack bar, then a museum. He feels watched wherever he goes.

Earlier in the day, he had called a friend to ask him to translate. He used his mobile phone, but the friend declined, fearing that the police would be listening in on the conversation. “They’ll arrest my parents and harass my sister,” said the friend, “no one will help us.”

Most Uighurs are “chicken-hearted,” says Ablikim.

He finally decides on a restaurant that belongs to his family. It isn’t open yet, and the heat is off and only a few lights are on. A cut of raw meat glistens in a glass display case. The walls are paneled halfway up, and the room looks like someone’s halfhearted attempt to transform a bleak East bloc cafeteria into something cozy and inviting.

Ablikim eats nothing. It’s Ramadan, he says. As he orders a cup of tea, a man walks in: gray suit, dark blue turtleneck sweater, about 50 years old.

The man looks around the room. All the tables are empty. Then he sits down, two tables away.

Ablikim pushes his chair closer to the table. “Secret police,” he whispers.

The man has turned his back on Ablikim. He looks as if he were studying the menu. It’s completely quiet.

The police recently established a special unit, says Ablikim. It’s called “Office 307.” By this point he is speaking so quietly that he’s almost inaudible. The only purpose of “Office 307,” says Ablikim, is to monitor his family.

Ablikim wears his black hair short. He is clean-shaven and is wearing olive-green trousers and an American fleece jacket, probably the only one in all of Urumchi (Urumqi). Following him can’t be terribly difficult. When he stands up, the man in the turtleneck sweater also gets up from his table. He walks out onto the street, takes a few steps and turns around a few times. Then he waits.

Ablikim hails a cab. He wants to show me the prison where his mother was held.

The cab traverses Urumchi’s outlying districts on a three-lane highway, passing a scene of run-down prefab-concrete apartment buildings and windowless, abandoned houses and factories. Handicapped people sell laundry detergent and grapes by the roadside. Two and a half million people live in Urumchi — Chinese and Uighurs — and all road signs are in Arabic and Chinese. Kazakhstan is only a few hours by car, Mongolia lies to the east and Beijing is 2,400 kilometers (1,492 miles) away. The temperature in winter drops to below -40°C (-40°F).

A dark blue VW Santana with tinted windows follows the taxi at a distance.

Ablikim tells the driver to turn onto a path, then to turn around and return to the road on the same path. But the VW continues to bump along behind the cab.

That evening, the police pick up Ablikim for questioning. They interrogate him for five hours, and then they let him go.

A mother’s mission

Fourteen-thousand kilometers (8,701 miles) away, on the other side of the earth, Rebiya Kadeer sits in a small ground-floor apartment in Vienna, Virginia. It’s a warm, late-summer morning in the eastern United States, and the patio door is open. Kadeer, Ablikim’s mother, wears a black suit and a white scarf. Her voice sounds a little hoarse. The Koran sits on a bookshelf, flanked by videocassettes like “Gladiator” and “Titanic.”

She plans to drive to Washington this morning to meet with Tom Lantos, a powerful Democratic congressman from California. Lantos, the chairman of the Human Rights Caucus, helped secure Kadeer’s release from prison. Now she wants him to help her protect Ablikim and her other children.

A photo of a man wearing a white shirt hangs in Lantos’ office. He stands, his arms outstretched, facing a tank on Tiananmen Square. But today Lantos doesn’t have time to meet with Kadeer, and so she meets with Hans Hogrefe, his office manager, instead. He looks pale. He probably doesn’t get outside much; after all, there are so many ethnic groups in the world who are being persecuted. Hogrefe has reserved 20 minutes of his day for Kadeer.

“Has anything changed in the current situation?” he asks.

Until now, Kadeer says, there had been only accusations and charges. “But now they are simply taking people off the street and locking them up.”

Hogrefe says he admires her attitude, and then he stands up again. “Our door is always open to you,” he says.

“Hans is a good man,” Kadeer says outside, beaming.

She arrived in the US capital six months ago. When she was released in March, after five and a half years in prison, Chinese officials made Kadeer an offer: If she would agree to stop agitating against the government, she could become one of the richest women in China.

And if she refused?

If she refused, she would have to live with the fact that she would be leaving her businesses and her family behind in Urumchi.

Rebiya boarded the next plane to the United States, leaving four of her sons and one daughter behind in Urumchi. The Chinese government confiscated the children’s passports, turning them into hostages of their policies. Kadeer knows that she may never see her children again, but she is convinced that she had no other choice. Her imprisonment has turned her into a symbolic figure.

She wants to help the persecuted Uighurs, and she wants to haul the Chinese government before an international human rights tribunal. She is one woman against China, a mother of 11 children against one of the most powerful countries on earth.

Her family is fighting a regime that persecutes, tortures and kills its opponents. More people are executed in China each year than in all other countries combined.

Is she afraid for her children?

Kadeer says she is concerned but not afraid. She knows what the situation is like in her homeland because her fourth-eldest son Alim fills her in every evening on the phone.

She sits in a Greek restaurant in Vienna, a few blocks from her new home. She wants to talk about what the Chinese have done to her family.

Kadeer was one-year-old when Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. He said that he wanted China’s various ethnic groups to join him in creating a new country.

At the time, Rebiya’s parents ran a small farm, and they also owned a hair salon, a restaurant and a Turkish bath house. By communist standards, they were part of the bourgeoisie. Besides, they were Uighurs, members of an ethnic minority related to the Turks. The Uighurs are mainly Muslims, a people for whom Allah carries more weight than Mao, and a people who can look back on thousands of years of history. They didn’t want a new country. Instead, they dreamed of having their own country one day: East Turkestan.

A camel rests on a barren hill in China’s Xinjiang Province.
When the communists established the Uighur province of Xinjiang in 1955 — an entity covering an area of 1.6 million square kilometers (about 618,000 square miles) and rich in oil and natural gas, iron ore and uranium — they seized her parents’ property and forced the family to move from Altai in the north, where Rebiya was born, to the Tarim basin bordering the desert in the south.

She says she was 14 when a man asked for her hand in marriage. He was the deputy director of a small bank and 12 years her senior. He promised to take care of her. Rebiya accepted his proposal.

They married a year later, and at 17 Rebiya bore her first child. During a hospital stay, she shared a room with a woman who complained about her Uighur husband, a man, she claimed, who never thought of her, only of his people, and was in prison as a result.

Kadeer, impressed by the unknown husband’s self-sacrifice, offered to help the woman.

A political marriage made in heaven

She pauses at this point in her story to order another cup of tea and slice of strawberry cake. She says: “I want to tell you a story that sounds like a fairy tale.” It’s a story that will explain everything — her fight, her resolve and her confidence.

It’s the story of her life.

Her first marriage failed when she was 28. It was 1976, she had openly criticized the government in Beijing, and her husband could no longer stand the resulting pressure.

After her divorce, she wrote a list of ten conditions that her future husband would have to fulfill. Most of all, it had to be love at first sight — for both partners. He had to have been in prison for defending his convictions, and he could not have betrayed anyone while in prison. He also had to be willing to fight for the liberation of his country.

She received a visit from a friend a short time later. He told her that he knew of a man who could fulfill her requirements. “But he is poor,” the friend said. “He cannot feed your children. Do you stand by your conditions?”

“Where is he?” Rebiya asked.

She flew to Artux, a small city in the western part of the province. There she discovered that the man lived in a village, and so she continued her journey by donkey. When she finally stood facing the man, she fell in love at first sight. “My name is Rebiya Kadeer,” she said. “I am 29 years old. I have come here to marry you. Nine of my ten conditions are fulfilled. Only one remains open: Do you love me?”

The stranger asked her to tell her story. He had recently been released from prison and was suspicious of this woman. When she had finished, he asked her whether she was an agent of the Chinese government.

Rebiya slapped him and rode away.

She laughs when she tells this story.

Six months later, the friend brought her a book: 260 poems about Kadeer, written by the stranger she had slapped. It was the same man who had been married to Rebiya’s roommate in the hospital — the couple had since separated. The poet and the rebel were married in 1977.

Kadeer opened a laundry business in Urumchi, sold fruit, vegetables and leather goods, and even conducted business across the border in Kazakhstan. She knew that financial means were necessary to survive a fight. She opened a department store and a second one a short time later, renting store space to merchants. That was how she became wealthy.

She soon made her way to the top of the local chamber of commerce, first in Urumchi and then in Xinjiang Province.

By 1992, Rebiya Kadeer had become such a respected businesswoman in China that she was elected to the National People’s Congress.

Taking on the regime

In 1997, she felt so strong that she decided to challenge the regime. She planned to give a speech before the People’s Congress, an opportunity for which she had been waiting for years.

She submitted a copy of her speech to party leaders and told them that she wanted to talk about all the things the Chinese have done for the Uighurs. The party functionaries were relieved. They told her that she would speak at the beginning of the party congress, just after the president and party chairman and the chairman of the Politburo.

A day before the congress, Kadeer secretly met with the two interpreters who would be translating her speech into Chinese and showed them the real text of her speech. The two interpreters were afraid. “I am a woman,” she told them, “and you are men. You won’t have any difficulties. After all, you’re just translating what I say.”

Chinese policies in Xinjiang are false and unjust, she said before the congress, in the Great Hall of the People, with 4,800 delegates listening attentively. The Chinese government, she continued, must respect the Uighurs’ religious freedom, put an end to its arbitrary arrests and stop executing political prisoners. She demanded respect for the Uighurs’ history, literature and language. That day, Kadeer wore a white fur jacket and a “doppa,” the Uighurs’ traditional head dress. A few delegates were in tears by the time she returned to her seat.

The speech was a declaration of war.

Kadeer has kept a photo that was taken just after her speech. It depicts Jiang Zemin, the then-president and head of the Communist Party, shaking her hand and smiling. Zemin is surrounded by China’s power elite, including Prime Minister Li Peng and the defense minister — a small, delicate woman in a white fur jacket, surrounded by an army of predators, of old men wearing dark suits and horn-rimmed glasses.

They appear to be congratulating Kadeer, but what they are really doing is forming a barrier between her and the delegates and their questions.

Hu Jintao, then the fifth-ranking member of the ruling hierarchy and now China’s president, is visible in the background. “A very good speech,” Hu told her. “But you must discuss your problems with us. We can solve all problems.”

“The normal procedure is to approach them after giving a speech,” says Kadeer, “but they came to me, and it was because I was right.”

Four weeks later, she was banned from the People’s Congress and her passport was revoked.

In August 1999, just before she was scheduled to meet with a delegation from the US Congress at a hotel in Urumchi, the police arrested her.

A judge sentenced her to eight years in prison for “dissemination of state secrets.” Her crime? Attempting to send magazines to her husband, who had since fled into exile in the US, magazines that were widely available in China.

When her case was tried, there was no audience and she had no legal representation. “We will crush you like a snake,” the chief of police told her.

“And I will emerge from prison like an eagle,” Kadeer replied.

Books were banned in prison, and she was not allowed to receive visitors for two years. She talked to herself, recited verses of the Koran and made plans. Sometimes she screamed.

Persecuting the family

Ablikim, her fifth-eldest son, was arrested on the same day as his mother and was sentenced, without trial, to two years in a prison camp. There he was forced to work 20-hour days, and on several occasions he witnessed guards beating other prisoners with a baseball bat. He knew that prisoners in China are tortured with electroshocks, and that one of the preferred methods to torture a man is to insert horsehairs into his penis.

Kadeer’s sons have been managing the two department stores since she moved to Washington. The businesses are in a section of the city where only Uighurs live, on a street where merchants pushing two-wheeled carts sell dates and pomegranates, dog pelts and dried snakes — which are considered an aphrodisiac.

The family had to take out a loan of 9 million Yuan to build the department stores. When the police searched the business this spring and confiscated the family’s business records, the balance of the loan suddenly turned into 15 million Yuan.

Without her political activities, Kadeer’s life story would have been one of the many success stories in a new China. But she refused to play by the rules of the game.

The Uighurs in Xinjiang admire Kadeer, calling her “mother of the Uighurs,” but they don’t support her — at least not openly.

In late August, when Kadeer had just returned to the US from a visit to Germany, the head of the Communist Party in Xinjiang gave a press conference in which he accused her of having met with terrorists in the European country, and claimed she planned to sabotage festivities marking the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Xinjiang-Uighur Autonomous Region. In response, Rebiya’s son Alim called the party leader a liar in an interview with Radio Free Asia.

On the evening after the interview, the police paid a visit to Alim, just as he was on the phone with his mother in Washington. Alim put down the receiver but didn’t hang up, so that she could hear everything.

They demanded that he sign a document stating that Rebiya Kadeer owed taxes to the Chinese state. When he refused, they threatened to punish him. “You’ll see what we do with you,” they said.

Alim and Ablikim would prefer to leave China. They could try to make their way to Taiwan, but Rebiya doesn’t want her children to flee the country. She still hopes for a legal solution. But it’s not entirely clear that she has anything to offer the government in Beijing.

Her problem is that she makes life more difficult for her sons with each new public appearance. But she believes that her children can only live safely in Urumchi if the world knows more about them.

While she describes her vision, her husband, the poet, sits outside on the patio of their small apartment in Virginia and smokes thin Chinese cigarettes. His handshake is soft and he wears his white hair combed back. He says that he aged ten years during his five years in prison. He and his wife still agree on their goals, but they argue over how to achieve them.

For years, he was the more unyielding of the two, and this made him influential. But their roles have been reversed ever since Kadeer was released. When she travels, he stays at home writing a history of the Uighur people, a book he wants published when the Uighurs gain their independence. But he has yet to find a publisher.

When Chinese President Hu Jintao announced his intention to visit Washington earlier this year, Kadeer saw her chance to remind him of the suffering of her people. Hu had planned to meet with President George W. Bush in early September to discuss North Korea and China’s booming export economy. Kadeer, for her part, planned to assemble a group of Chinese political exiles to stage a demonstration against Hu, the world’s third most powerful man, directly across from the White House.

Kadeer had planned to give a speech, a speech about America. But then Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans and Hu cancelled his visit to the US capital.

Kadeer followed Hu to New York, where he was scheduled to visit the United Nations a few days later. She and a group of Tibetan exiles and members of the persecuted Falun Gong sect held a demonstration in front of the UN headquarters.

The protestors waved American flags and the colors of East Turkestan, and Kadeer held up a sign that read “Freedom for East Turkestan.”

She isn't sure whether Hu noticed.

Drugs chasing addicts, or addicts chasing drugs?

2006-05-31T22:05:00.000-04:00

Is drug withdrawal such a wrenching experience? Theodore Dalrymple argues that it is not:

In 1822, Thomas De Quincey published a short book, "The Confessions of an English Opium Eater." The nature of addiction to opiates has been misunderstood ever since.

De Quincey took opiates in the form of laudanum, which was tincture of opium in alcohol. He claimed that special philosophical insights and emotional states were available to opium-eaters, as they were then called, that were not available to abstainers; but he also claimed that the effort to stop taking opium involved a titanic struggle of almost superhuman misery. Thus, those who wanted to know the heights had also to plumb the depths.

This romantic nonsense has been accepted wholesale by doctors and litterateurs for nearly two centuries. It has given rise to an orthodoxy about opiate addiction, including heroin addiction, that the general public likewise takes for granted: To wit, a person takes a little of a drug, and is hooked; the drug renders him incapable of work, but since withdrawal from the drug is such a terrible experience, and since the drug is expensive, the addict is virtually forced into criminal activity to fund his habit. He cannot abandon the habit except under medical supervision, often by means of a substitute drug.

In each and every particular, this picture is not only mistaken, but obviously mistaken. It actually takes some considerable effort to addict oneself to opiates: The average heroin addict has been taking it for a year before he develops an addiction. Like many people who are able to take opiates intermittently, De Quincey took opium every week for several years before becoming habituated to it. William Burroughs, who lied about many things, admitted truthfully that you may take heroin many times, and for quite a long period, before becoming addicted.

Heroin doesn't hook people; rather, people hook heroin. It is quite untrue that withdrawal from heroin or other opiates is a serious business, so serious that it would justify or at least mitigate the commission of crimes such as mugging. Withdrawal effects from opiates are trivial, medically speaking (unlike those from alcohol, barbiturates or even, on occasion, benzodiazepines such as valium), and experiment demonstrates that they are largely, though not entirely, psychological in origin. Lurid descriptions in books and depictions in films exaggerate them à la De Quincey (and also Coleridge, who was a chronic self-dramatizer).

I have witnessed thousands of addicts withdraw; and, notwithstanding the histrionic displays of suffering, provoked by the presence of someone in a position to prescribe substitute opiates, and which cease when that person is no longer present, I have never had any reason to fear for their safety from the effects of withdrawal. It is well known that addicts present themselves differently according to whether they are speaking to doctors or fellow addicts. In front of doctors, they will emphasize their suffering; but among themselves, they will talk about where to get the best and cheapest heroin.

When, unbeknown to them, I have observed addicts before they entered my office, they were cheerful; in my office, they doubled up in pain and claimed never to have experienced suffering like it, threatening suicide unless I gave them what they wanted. When refused, they often turned abusive, but a few laughed and confessed that it had been worth a try. Somehow, doctors—most of whom have had similar experiences— never draw the appropriate conclusion from all of this. Insofar as there is a causative relation between criminality and opiate addiction, it is more likely that a criminal tendency causes addiction than that addiction causes criminality.

Furthermore, I discovered in the prison in which I worked that 67% of heroin addicts had been imprisoned before they ever took heroin. Since only one in 20 crimes in Britain leads to a conviction, and since most first-time prisoners have been convicted 10 times before they are ever imprisoned, it is safe to assume that most heroin addicts were confirmed and habitual criminals before they ever took heroin. In other words, whatever caused them to commit crimes in all probability caused them also to take heroin: perhaps an adversarial stance to the world caused by the emotional, spiritual, cultural and intellectual vacuity of their lives.

It is not true either that addicts cannot give up without the help of an apparatus of medical and paramedical care. Thousands of American servicemen returning from Vietnam, where they had addicted themselves to heroin, gave up on their return home without any assistance whatsoever. And in China, millions of Chinese addicts gave up with only minimal help: Mao Tse-Tung's credible offer to shoot them if they did not. There is thus no question that Mao was the greatest drug-addiction therapist in history.
Substitution of one drug for another is at best equivocal as a means of treating drug addicts. No doubt if you gave every burglar $10 million, each would burgle far less in the future; but this treatment of the disease of burglary would scarcely discourage burglary as a social, or rather antisocial, phenomenon. And the fact that there would be a dose-response relationship between the amount of money given to burglars and the number of burglaries they subsequently committed does not establish burglary as a real disease or money as a real treatment for it.

Why has the orthodox view swept all before it? First, the literary tradition sustains it: Works that deal with the subject continue to disregard pharmacological reality, from De Quincey and Coleridge through Baudelaire, Aleister Crowley, Bulgakov, Cocteau, Nelson Algren, Burroughs and others. Second, addicts and therapists have a vested interest in the orthodox view. Addicts want to place the responsibility for their plight elsewhere, and the orthodox view is the very raison d'être of the therapists. Finally, as a society, we are always on the lookout for a category of victims upon whom to expend our virtuous, which is to say conspicuous, compassion. Contrary to the orthodoxy, drug addiction is a matter of morals, which is why threats such as Mao's, and experiences such as religious conversion, are so often effective in "curing" addicts.

Have drugs always been illegal?

2006-05-31T18:10:00.000-04:00

No. At least not in the United Kingdom:

Drugs have been used on a widespread basis since the beginning of the modern period. In the 19th century, opium, morphine, cocaine and cannabis were all used by millions of people in Europe, America, Asia and Africa. None of these drugs were illegal at that time. In most countries, including the UK, opium could be purchased from the local apothecary or chemist, or even by the penny-worth in the local grocer's shop.

In the second half of the 19th century, the forces that would eventually lead to the establishment of drug prohibition began to appear and to lobby governments to enact laws against drug use.

These forces included:

A Public Health Campaign
The first UK law to seek to regulate drugs was the 1868 Pharmacy Act. This legislation was driven by concerns about cases of poisoning with drugs, either through accident or by intention.

At the time powerful drugs such as opium, morphine and cocaine were contained in numerous household remedies, and opium was employed by childminders in keeping children quiet and passive.

The pharmacy legislation was aimed primarily at preventing these problems, rather than stopping drug-taking for pleasure. However, the campaign later sounded the alarm in relation to what it claimed was extensive 'luxurious' or recreational use of opium and chloral hydrate (a sedative) by the working classes.

As the twentieth century approached, the relatively tolerant attitude to drug taking (which had been widespread when Thomas De Quincey's 'Confession of an English Opium-Eater'appeared in 1821) began to be replaced by disapproval.

The Temperance Movement:
Emerging in both Britain and the United States, the original focus of this religiously inspired movement was the banning of alcohol. Later, the target was expanded to include other drugs. The anti-opium component of the temperance movement was closely bound up with the British opium trade, which will be discussed below.

Many of the doctors and psychiatrists who started the specialism of drug treatment were prominent figures in the temperance movement. The 'disease' model of drug use was built upon the moral foundations of temperance, and featured an essentially moral judgement recast in terms that appeared 'scientific'. It is still possible to discern the moral elements of temperance ideology in contemporary drug treatment, drug policy and the laws devised to control drug-taking. Many opponents of drug law reform still believe that to take drugs is somehow simply 'wrong' in a moral sense.

Racial and Cultural Prejudice
With the advent of modern means of trade, transport and communication, drugs travelled across the world with the migrant groups who used them. The result was that the fears and prejudices that were directed at foreigners and at the new arrivals would also attach themselves to their preferred drug. Accordingly, in the USA, Australia and, to a lesser extent, the UK, Chinese immigrants found that native people became hostile to the opium that they enjoyed smoking. Later, the identification of ethnic groups with particular drugs meant that American blacks were associated with cocaine, Mexicans with marijuana, and so on down to the contemporary linking of crack cocaine with black urban youth.

In turn, it is impossible to understand racism and racial politics and the ways in which they became linked with drugs without understanding a little of the history of international relations and the power exercised through them.

International and Colonial Politics
The British colonisation of India was extremely important in the history of the drug laws. In British India, opium was grown under British control and exported in enormous quantities to China, generating large revenues for the treasury. At the end of the 19th century, the anti-opium movement (which had grown out of the Temperance Movement) inflamed opinion and guided international efforts to ban the trade. The United States became the global champion of the anti-opium cause, although the moral component of its crusade was certainly supplemented by a desire to establish US trade and commerce at the forefront of potentially very large Chinese markets.

Opium Dens in Darkest England
The politics enacted upon the world stage were intimately interwoven with racial stereotypes current in particular countries, regions and localities. A Chinese community had lived in the docklands area of London since the late eighteenth century. Their numbers had increased over the Victorian era with the growth of the Port of London and the trade associated with the Empire, and in 1881 there were some 665. The smoking of opium was practised amongst many of these immigrants, and was accepted in Chinese culture.

The earliest forms of sensational drugs journalism to appear in the British press were those in which intrepid reporters visited the East End, or 'Darkest London'. These accounts were themselves modelled on the travel writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where the first accounts of opium eating emerged. A favourite topic of these reports was the 'vice' of opium smoking, and no journalistic foray was complete without its visit to an opium den. In reality, this 'den' was generally just the home of one or other Chinese family, where a backroom might serve as a sort of impromptu social club.

As the nineteenth century drew towards a close, the tone of this reporting became increasingly hostile, and sought to emphasise the alleged threats posed by opium and those who attended the opium dens to indulge in the vice of smoking it. The threat took on overtly racial overtones, as evidenced by the statement of a London County Council inspector after a visit to the east end in 1904:

"...Oriental cunning and cruelty was hallmarked on every countenance...Until my visit to the Asiatic Sailors' Home, I had always considered some of the Jewish inhabitants of Whitechapel to be the worst type of humanity I had ever seen."

There were fears raised that the vice of opium would spread like a contagion and infect the local working classes: some saw this as divine judgement visited upon Britain for its involvement in the evils of the Indo-China opium trade.

The situation was paralleled in the United States, where the large Chinese community in San Francisco faced a sustained campaign of hate and hostility.

They became the scapegoats for the economic depression that hit San Francisco in the 1870s, and their 'vile practice' of opium smoking was outlawed within the city limits as early as 1874.

It was in America that the factors outlined here and others including the presence of a small number of highly motivated individuals came together. The result was that the USA would, over the course of the twentieth century, take up the prohibition of drugs as something resembling a crusade.

The International Opium Convention
At meetings at Shanghai in 1909 and at The Hague in the Netherlands in 1912, the United States initiated and pushed through the beginnings of the international drug control system that remains to this day. Although the First World War intervened, the 1912 drug control treaty known by its shorthand name of The Hague Convention went into force as part of the peace treaty signed at Versailles.

While this chronology deals primarily with drugs and the laws that attempt to control them in the context of the United Kingdom, it should be borne in mind that the UK legislation is formed within the framework of international treaties, to which the HM Government has signed up and which impose various obligations on UK drug law and policy.

In addition, the drug trade has always been and remains a global network, in which countries and their populations are interconnected and interdependent.

China throws a fit over the rejection of its wireless encryption standard, alleges American conspiracy

2006-05-31T17:18:00.000-04:00

The sticking point appears to have been the possibility that the Chinese standard was designed to facilitate Chinese espionage:

Back in March, it was reported that WAPI was rejected by ISO because China refused to disclose some details of the technology. This meant that ISO members weren't able to guarantee that WAPI did not allow backdoor access to encrypted material.

The Chinese reaction has been histrionic:

Chinese backers of the rejected WLAN Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure (WAPI) wireless security protocol have accused rivals of unethical behavior in a last-ditch attempt to revive their standardization hopes.

The semiofficial China Broadband Wireless IP Standards Working Group (BWIPS) singled out the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), accusing the group of acting improperly during the international standardization process. "IEEE has committed unethical and unjust activities trying to destroy WAPI by every means," it said.

Among the charges levelled at IEEE, its complaints about grammatical errors in the WAPI submission documents were evidence of "cultural chauvinism," BWIPS said.

The accusations over WAPI’s treatment come as International Organization for Standardization (ISO) members prepare for a June meeting to confirm a March vote that overwhelmingly approved a rival submission, the IEEE’s 802.11i standard.

During that vote, ISO members rejected WAPI as an international standard. The Chinese ISO delegation was outraged by the rejection. "China is strongly against the ethical and procedural violations and cannot accept the ballot results," BWIPS said.

"If these violations are not satisfactorily resolved, China reserve[s] the right to take additional actions to ensure that fairness, justice, procedural integrity and China’s rights and interests are all protected," the group said.

IEEE opposed the approval of WAPI as an international standard for several reasons, including the lack of backward compatibility with existing WLAN technologies. It also noted that its members had failed to obtain a working WAPI device. The group’s stance was outlined in a document published in January.

BWIPS has asked ISO to render "unfair and void" all negative comments made about WAPI during the voting process. In addition, the group wants ISO to reject the approval of 802.11i and consult with the Chinese delegation to determine WAPI’s status and "further processing plans."

WAPI has long been a source of controversy. The technology was introduced in 2003 as a mandatory WLAN standard for China. At the time, Chinese licensing rules for WAPI required foreign companies to share technical details of their own products with local companies in order to sell WLAN gear in China.

The attempt to establish a mandatory Chinese standard, which would have banned the sale of WLAN gear based on the IEEE’s 802.11 standard, was eventually shelved in the face of foreign opposition.

The surrender of Singapore - disastrous or inevitable?

2006-05-15T00:24:00.000-04:00

Churchill claimed that the fall of Singapore during WWII was a disaster because a supposedly outnumbered Japanese force overcame a British force three times its size. He appears to have lied - perhaps out of concern for the future loyalty of a territory from which he had diverted military materials in favor of British campaigns against Axis forces in North Africa:

Recently, I watched a historical documentary on the Pacific War. The show was produced by a reputable filmaker and was shown on a prominent channel.

Not far into the film they highlighted the Battle for Singapore and I was shocked at what I heard. Once again, as so many times before, the statement was made that the British “lost” Singapore to a Japanese force that numbered one third that of the British forces defending the island fortress. I was outraged that after all this time and with so much accurate information available, such a blatant mistake would be aired.

However, this is not surprising, for in the words of one of my American researcher friends, “many ‘so-called historians’ today never bother to really dig into the stories or check the facts for themselves. They just use information already published and repeat it again, thus perpetuating the errors of those who have gone before.”

This is what I have found to be the case with many of the the Allied intelligence reports on the Taiwan POW camps, and a great deal of other information supposedly ‘documenting’ the war in the Pacific. In the interests of truth and to hopefully help stop the continued perpetration of this myth, I have researched the numbers involved in that famous battle and submit them here for our readers to draw their own conclusions.The Japanese overrun Signapore February 1942

First of all, it should be emphasized that the British army did not “lose” Singapore. If General Percival had not surrendered, then thousands more would have died - including innocent civilians. The Japanese army had overrun most of the island, captured the water reservoirs and surrounded the main city itself. The British were very low on ammunition, food and other necessary supplies, so it would have been suicidal to have fought on as the Japanese would have killed all the soldiers and most likely many of the civilians too. The fault for the “loss” of Singapore lies squarely with Winston Churchill and the British government!

The poorly equipped RAF had been ordered out of Malaya and Singapore, and without adequate air support, the navy’s only two ships that could have made any difference were easily sunk by the Japanese Navy Air Arm. The Japanese had complete mastery of the air and could bomb and straffe at will. The land forces could not hope to win any kind of battle as they had little equipment to fight with. They had no tanks, and much of the equipment that accompanied the ill-fated 18th Division was never unloaded but was returned to England or other theatres. Churchill and his advisors knew that Singapore could not be defended but ordered that the army ‘fight to the last man’. Of course, that way there would be no one left to tell of their betrayal. It was fortunate indeed that General Percival had the good sense to surrender!

As to the numbers - by the first of December 1941, the Japanese had amassed more than 250,000 trained soldiers in Indo-China. On December 7 the landing force at Kota-Bahru, Malaya numbered 12,000 men, and as well, 50,000 troops had been secretly moved across Thailand to launch a simultaneous invasion on the west coast near Alor Star and Jitra.

A detailed breakdown of Japanese forces in Malaya on December 7, 1941 reveals that - the 25th Army under General Yamashita and Count Terrauchi had 83,000 men, the 15th Army commanded by General Lida had 55,000 men, the 26th Infantry Division led by General Mataguchi had 28,000 men, the Imperial Guards under General Nishimura had 38,000 men and they were re-inforced by 50,000 Korean soldiers. In addition, the Japanese forces had one armoured division with 500 tanks, two regiments of artillery, 500 aircraft with 80 in reserve, ten destroyers, two aircraft carriers, five submarines plus other support vessels. In total the Japanese had more that 265,000 men plus the 50,000 Korean conscripts - totalling more than 300,000 trained soldiers.

In his report to parliament after the fall of Singapore, Churchill concocted the figures - which seem to have remained in many historians’ books until the present - that a mere force of 30,000 Japanese defeated the 120,000 British and Allied forces on the island - implying a shameful defeat of the British army.

But even the figures he attributed to the Allies were incorrect. Allied forces in Malaya and Singapore on December 1, 1941 were as follows - 19,000 British, 15,000 Australian, 37,000 Indian Army - including the 11th Division which was largely made up of British soldiers trained in India, and 17,000 Malay Volunteers.

Approximately 25,000 Allied soldiers were killed, wounded, escaped or were listed missing in the Battle of Malaya. On January 29, 1942 approximately 20,000 green troops of the 18th Division arrived in Singapore, bringing the total Allied strength up to around 85,000 men. After Singapore fell, a tally of Allied losses revealed 7,000 killed and 2,000 wounded or missing.

On the Japanese side - more than 25,000 were killed or wounded in Malaya, while on Singapore the total reached more than 20,000 men killed and 5,000 wounded or missing.

As further proof and documentation of these numbers - the Japanese War Memorial at Tebong remembers 30,000 men who died in the Malaya campaign and 25,000 who died in Singapore. This figure alone is more than the number quoted by Churchill!

All of the above figures are verified by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, and also in Sir Basil Liddle’s ‘History of the Second World War’. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the numbers cited by Churchill were pure lies and fabrication.

So why did he do it? At the time, with things not going well for Britain, Churchill’s image and position were on shaky ground. Had the British public known that he and his government had betrayed thousands of young British servicemen and sacrificed them to the Japanese, it would have likely caused his political downfall. Better to distort and cover up the truth to save his own skin. (Sadly, it’s still the same today!)

The sad part is that many of those old soldiers have died believing that what Churchill said was true, and also that subsequent generations have been deprived of the knowledge and the truth about the Battle of Malaya and Singapore. It’s time to let the facts speak for themselves, and to correct the fallacies of history!

He could have saved himself the trouble - the residents of Malaya and Singapore never forgot that Britain left them alone to cope with the Japanese onslaught - a full year after the Battle of Britain was won - and the home islands were safe from invasion. The fearful atrocities inflicted by the Japanese on the territories' civilians - 100,000 tortured and killed among a population in the low millions - were mostly blamed on the Japanese themselves. But Churchill's decision to divert resources from the region's defense made these territories' decision to seek independence from the British empire inevitable.

Is Iraq really Vietnam redux?

2006-05-14T18:22:00.000-04:00

A US Army officer, formerly an instructor at West Point, suggests that the appropriate historical parallel for the current situation in Iraq isn't Vietnam, but the Iraq just after its formation upon the collapse of the Ottoman empire:

A number of pundits have recently noted the parallels between the United Kingdom’s experience eight decades ago and the United States’ today. The comparisons, however, have generally centered on the early and middle phases of both occupations. Too few have focused on the ignominious end of the United Kingdom’s reign in Mesopotamia and the lessons those events hold for the United States today. In fact, Washington’s current position bears a strong resemblance to London’s in the late 1920s, when the British were responsible for the tutelage of a fledgling Iraqi state suffering from immature institutions, active insurgencies, and the interference of hostile neighbors. Eventually, this tutelage was undermined by pressure from the British Parliament and the press to withdraw — forces quite similar to those in the United States now calling for a withdrawal from Iraq. Building a better understanding of the United Kingdom’s mistakes — and of the consequences of that country’s ultimate withdrawal from Iraq — could thus help illuminate the present occupation and provide answers to when and how to end it. If the British record teaches anything, it is this: costly and frustrating as the fostering of Iraqi democracy may be, the costs of leaving the job undone would likely be far higher, for both the occupiers and the Iraqis.

In 1920, a large-scale Shiite insurgency cost the British more than 2,000 casualties, and domestic pressure to withdraw from Iraq began to build. In the revolt’s aftermath, the war hero T. E. Lawrence led a chorus of critics in the press and Parliament denouncing London’s decision to continue the costly occupation. “The people of England,” Lawrence wrote, have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. … Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are to-day not far from a disaster….

“We say we are in Mesopotamia to develop it for the benefit of the world. … How long will we permit millions of pounds, thousands of Imperial troops, and tens of thousands of Arabs to be sacrificed on behalf of colonial administration which can benefit nobody but its administrators?” Although the London Times remained mainly supportive of the government’s policy in Iraq, other leading British papers, most notably the Manchester Guardian, echoed Lawrence’s call to end the occupation.

The result was what historians have called the “Quit Mesopotamia” campaign, which remained an issue in British politics until the end of the British mandate in Iraq in 1932. For more than a decade, a diverse collection of anti-imperialists, pacifists, Labourites, and Lawrence loyalists kept up a steady stream of criticism in the United Kingdom’s opposition press. The Quit Mesopotamia critics effectively tapped into the British sentiment against imperialism, which had become widespread after the end of World War I. The British public’s interest in maintaining a worldwide empire had waned; the working classes, which had sacrificed so much for the war, wanted their government to invest in the stagnant domestic economy, not in costly imperial adventures. Unlike their ally the United States, the United Kingdom experienced no economic boom in the Roaring Twenties, and unemployment steadily rose throughout the decade. British voters registered their disapproval of the Conservatives’ imperialist tendencies by voting the Labour Party of Ramsay MacDonald into power in 1923. Although that Labour government was short-lived (thanks to a scandal), the Conservatives got the message and in 1925 initiated a series of increasingly desperate measures to sell their Iraq policy to the public.

Colonial Secretary Leopold Amery led the rhetorical charge. In speeches in Parliament and before audiences throughout England, Amery blasted critics for their “reckless disregard … of the honour of their country.” Calls by British newspapers to pull out of Iraq only emboldened the country’s enemies, Amery said, and a “policy of scuttle” would expose the British to far greater dangers than those they would encounter while “fulfilling [their] obligations” to the Iraqi people. The London Times weighed in on Amery’s behalf on September 25, 1925, observing that the “cost of premature withdrawal” would probably be a Turkish invasion of Mosul.

Amery claimed that the situation in Iraq was significantly better than his critics realized. Returning from a fact-finding tour of the mandate in 1925, he said that Iraq’s development was proceeding well enough to promise the British a “substantial return” on their investment in that country. The whole Middle East was undergoing fundamental changes, he declared, and Iraq would soon be a model of development and democracy for the entire region. Besides, he said, Iraq was serving as “a splendid training ground” for the Royal Air Force (RAF), which since 1922 had been charged with defending Iraq and maintaining order there.

These arguments made little impression on the opponents of the occupation. The Labour Party accused the Conservatives of wanting to remain in Iraq for the sake of oil stockholders. “We should never get out of [Iraq] without wrenching something, such as the national honour or the interests of bondholders,” declared the senior Labour Party MP and future prime minister Clement Attlee in Parliament in 1926. “Therefore,” he said, “we had better wrench free at once.”

Nonetheless, Amery’s public defense of the occupation helped the policy withstand parliamentary challenges in 1925 and 1926, and the United Kingdom’s occupation looked set to continue indefinitely. In accepting the League of Nations mandate in 1920, the British government had committed itself to at least 20 years of guardianship of Iraq’s state and society, and when it signed the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1926, London promised to stick around until 1951 (or until an independent Iraq joined the league). Yet starting in 1925, the Conservatives began secretly looking for a way out. In 1927 — just one year after pledging to stay in Iraq for a quarter century — key ministers in Stanley Baldwin’s government proposed a pullout. According to Robert Cecil, a trusted Baldwin adviser, withdrawal from Iraq would be “a complete answer to those of our critics who allege that we are anxious to have a militarist or adventurous foreign policy. That charge has done us a great deal of harm already and may easily be fatal to our existence at the next election.”

Publicly, the Conservatives began to speak about the need to “reduce expenditure” in Iraq. In 1925, Sir Samuel Hoare, head of the Air Ministry and another close Baldwin adviser, acknowledged that “since the war we [have] spent a great deal in the Middle East, and the British taxpayer [has] asked whether the expenditure was worthwhile, and whether it could be reduced.” Returning from a trip to Iraq that year, Hoare announced that once the contested frontier near Mosul was settled with Turkey, the British could reduce their role in Iraq. As a government minister, Hoare could not have made this declaration without Baldwin’s approval; his statement therefore had the effect of an official promise to bring home some British troops. And indeed, the Conservatives soon made the promise a reality: by early 1927, the Baldwin government had pulled most British soldiers out of Iraq, leaving a few RAF squadrons and a battalion of Indian infantry to defend the country alongside a fledgling Iraqi army of only 9,000 men.

…in March 1927, the Baldwin government proclaimed the Iraqi army capable of defending the country itself and withdrew the last battalion of British ground troops. Mere months later, southern Iraq came under attack by thousands of Wahhabi Ikhwan (”brothers”). The Ikhwan were a puritanical sect that had brutally conquered the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in 1924. Like today’s insurgents under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Ikhwan were Salafi fighters who invaded Iraq from the desert to terrorize its Shiites (whom the Salafi consider apostates). For the better part of two years, starting in 1927, all that stood between the Ikhwan and the lightly armed Iraqi tribes was a small desert detachment of British-trained Iraqi troops under the leadership of Captain John Glubb, who would later head the Arab Legion in Transjordan. Only with great difficulty did Glubb obtain occasional air support from the overstretched RAF squadrons stationed near Basra and Baghdad.

British officials were slow to grasp the extent of the Ikhwan threat. The British high commissioner in Iraq at the time, Sir Henry Dobbs, declared the Ikhwan defeated in 1928. Acknowledging that the Wahhabi invaders had hurt Iraq’s economy by discouraging foreign investment, he informed the press that “the only grave injury done to Iraq … [has] been inflicted by wild reports manufacturing scare after scare.” In fact, although no official report was ever conducted, it is probable that the Ikhwan managed to kill hundreds of Iraqis. Dobbs’ assessment of the Ikhwan’s strength, meanwhile, was also wrong: the next year, they invaded again, in large numbers. Indeed, the Ikhwan continued to threaten Iraq until they were routed by the army of Ibn Saud in mid-1929.

During this same period, the resurgent Turkey of Mustafa Kemal (better known as Atatürk) threatened Iraq from the north. Kemalist Turkey mounted an unsuccessful invasion of Mosul in 1922 and thereafter continually intrigued against Iraqi rule among the Kurdish tribes in the region. Like Iraq’s Sunni Arabs today, the Kurds of the mandate period represented a communal threat that consumed the attention and resources of the Iraqi state. With Turkish support, the Pesh Merga of the Barzani tribe and its allies were able to sustain an insurgency against the Iraqi government for almost four years. At one point, the Iraqi army was forced to deploy three-quarters of its strength in the Kurdish Sulaimaniya region in an attempt to put down the insurgents. In the spring of 1931, as the formal handover of sovereignty to the Iraqis approached, the British roused themselves to pacify the Kurds for good. For over a month, the RAF bombed Kurdish villages, finally forcing the rebels to capitulate.

When the mandate actually ended in 1932, Iraq’s British-built institutions began, one by one, to collapse. With the occupiers gone, Iraq’s Sunni Arab elite used the army not to defend the state against foreign invaders, but to suppress Iraq’s Assyrians, Kurds, and Shiites. The Iraqi army of the 1930s was the most dangerous kind: it was easily the most powerful institution in the country, too strong to be checked by other groups and free from any real constitutional constraints, but it was also too weak to actually defend Iraq from outsiders. As the British-installed King Faisal lay dying in Switzerland in 1933, Iraqi troops massacred Assyrians in northern Iraq and returned to Baghdad as heroes. Army leaders then used their newfound prestige to meddle in the country’s politics, backing certain factions in parliament in return for the passage of conscription laws that bolstered the army’s strength but turned young Shiite men into a military underclass. By 1936, Iraq’s generals had gathered enough power to carry out a military coup, ending constitutional government and setting a precedent that would recur again and again.

At the same time, Iraqi society, the most ethnically diverse in the Arab world, came fully under the sway of Sunni Arab chauvinists. Typical of this development was the fate of Iraq’s educational system, which fell under the control of Sati al-Husri, a Syrian pan-Arabist who taught that Shiite Islam was heretical. Under his influence, the Iraqi government began to suppress Shiite religious holidays and practices — a policy that sparked large-scale Shiite uprisings in the mid-1930s. By the 1940s, Iraq, one of the least Sunni of all Arab states, had become a bulwark of what historian Elie Kedourie called “the Sunni spirit of domination.”

The coups following 1936 mostly involved the Sunni Arab officer corps. By 1939, Iraq’s military rulers had become openly hostile to the United Kingdom. When war broke out in Europe, Baghdad opened back channels to the Axis powers, and it finally offered up the country to Hitler in 1941. Faced with the prospect of an Axis stronghold on their line of communication to India, the British were forced to invade Iraq once again. As British troops approached Baghdad, Iraqi soldiers and police carried out a final act of official butchery, slaughtering hundreds of Iraqi Jews. There followed a second British occupation of the country that lasted until 1948.

Had the United Kingdom stayed longer the first time around, much of this mayhem could have been avoided. Continued British oversight would have prevented the Iraqi government from falling into the hands of military dictators, and the presence of a British force in the country would likely have restrained the Iraqi army from preying on Iraq’s minority communities. Since the British had opposed Iraqi conscription throughout the 1920s, it is safe to assume they would have continued to do so if the mandate had been extended, thereby removing a significant irritant from the relationships among Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian communities. The typically pragmatic British political advisers would also have been unlikely to allow Sunni Arab supremacists to pervert Iraq’s public educational system.

These restraints could have helped Iraq develop into a more stable society, in which Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, and other minorities would have somehow found a way to live together peacefully. Instead, these groups spent the next 70 years of Iraq’s independence with daggers drawn, each decade pocked by civil war.

Washington thus now finds itself facing roughly the same question that London faced between 1925 and 1927: Should it leave Iraq, or continue until its project there has truly fulfilled its aims? In the British case, both sides of the debate — the Quit Mesopotamia critics and the Conservative officials who minimized Iraq’s problems — apparently believed that the United Kingdom could leave Iraq without repercussions, regardless of whether the mandate had actually served its purpose. They came to assume that an independent Iraq would somehow muddle along — and that if it did not, the consequences would not affect the British.

Accordingly, the Conservative government succumbed to the political and media pressure to pull out. After 1925, as British officials continued to pay lip service to the original goals of the mandate, they privately began looking for ways to withdraw early, even though many of them recognized that chaos would ensue. To avoid a similar result today, the U.S. government and its allies must confront what the United Kingdom’s premature withdrawal achieved: namely, disaster both for Iraq and for its occupier. Having left the work of the mandate undone, the British were forced to return and attempt to finish the job nine misery-filled years later. The United States can ill afford to do the same.

Chinese credit card users stymie lenders

2006-05-12T01:16:00.000-04:00

By being a little too conscientious about paying off their balances:

Catherine Xia racks up about 8,000 yuan ($996) a month, almost 90 percent of her salary as an account manager at a Shanghai trading company, on her China Merchants Bank Co. credit cards. Yet she never rolls over payments.

``I use credit cards for convenience, not to mire myself in debt,'' says Xia, 28. ``My family tradition is that you save first, then you spend. My parents already frown upon my huge credit-card bills, so I won't push the limit too far.''

China Merchants, HSBC Holdings Plc and Citigroup Inc. must get more Chinese into the borrowing habit to make money in the nation's nascent credit-card market, says Ron Logan, who heads the credit-card unit of HSBC's venture with Shanghai-based Bank of Communications Ltd., China's No. 5 lender.

``While profit may not be immediately possible, this is something that will develop over the next few years,'' says Logan, 49. ``Crucial to achieving this is ensuring that the percentage of active cards grows along with revolving balances.''

The number of cards issued in China jumped 13-fold to 40 million in the past two years as incomes increased in the world's fastest-growing major economy. Only 2 percent of cardholders frequently roll over their bills, says Yi Wang, a partner at McKinsey & Co. in Shanghai. In the U.S., the rate is 56 percent, according to 2004 figures from the U.S. Federal Reserve.

``No one is using the credit line to borrow, so there is little interest income,'' Wang says. ``It's not that people don't use the cards, but to make money in this business is extremely difficult. I'm not sure anybody is.''

Mao's Legacy

China's recent history has reinforced a frugal mentality that dates back 25 centuries to the philosopher Confucius, who said: ``He who will not economize will have to agonize.''

Communist leader Mao Zedong outlawed private wealth after the revolution of 1949. During his Great Leap Forward, a failed push to turn the nation into an industrial powerhouse that began in 1958, food shortages caused millions to starve.

Today, Chinese consumers are reluctant to spend as the state scales back welfare programs, shifting education, health- care and retirement costs to individuals.

China's household savings represented 16 percent of the nation's gross domestic product at the end of 2004, compared with a minus 3.5 percent ratio in the U.S., where consumers spend more than they earn, according to International Monetary Fund statistics.

The revenue banks receive from credit cards issued in China will rise to more than $5 billion by 2010, from $500 million last year, according to a report by New York-based McKinsey. Wang expects ``major profitability'' within a decade as cardholders become accustomed to rolling over their bills. He didn't give detailed projections.

Credit Promotions

London-based HSBC -- Europe's biggest bank by market value -- and Bank of Communications are using special promotions to ease customers into the practice of borrowing.

The venture lets holders of its MasterCard cards make interest-free installment payments on purchases of 1,500 yuan or more. Customers pay a monthly service charge of 0.68 percent to 0.72 percent of the purchase price. The government-set interest rate of 0.05 percent a day, or 18.25 percent a year, kicks in when they miss installment payments.

Cardholders who earn at least 50,000 yuan a year can get a credit limit as high as 50,000 yuan and may defer payment interest-free for as long as 56 days, according to the card venture's brochure.

HSBC, which owns 20 percent of Bank of Communications, and its Chinese partner have issued 750,000 credit cards since they began offering them in July, according to the Chinese bank. They aim to raise that to 1 million by July 2006 -- a fraction of the 104 million credit cards HSBC had issued worldwide as of last year. HSBC doesn't disclose its credit-card earnings for China.

`Very Conservative'

``China is obviously a big market, but it will take a long time,'' says Bryan Yip, who helps manage $3 billion of stocks at Standard Life Investments Ltd. in Hong Kong. ``Borrowing habits are still very conservative.'' Standard Life owns shares of HSBC and Citigroup, according to Bloomberg data.

New York-based Citigroup, the world's biggest financial- services company, and partner Shanghai Pudong Development Bank Co. began offering co-branded credit cards in Shanghai in February 2004 and have since expanded to 10 cities. The venture had issued 300,000 cards as of November, Pudong Bank Vice President Shen Si said at the time.

Pudong Bank, China's No. 2 publicly traded lender, expects its credit-card unit to break even after issuing 1 million cards, assuming 70 percent of holders use the cards daily. Citigroup and Pudong Bank don't disclose credit-card earnings.

`Prudent' Approach

``Credit cards are the world's most popular retail payment tool and, given time, we believe this will also be the case in China,'' says Lee Ah Boon, manager of Citigroup's Shanghai-based Chinese consumer unit. ``Given China is such a new market for credit cards, we're placing a strong emphasis on being prudent in our approach.''

The Citigroup venture lets customers pay in installments for consumer electronics purchases that exceed a customer's credit limit and cost 4,000 yuan or more, according to its Web site. Customers don't pay service charges or interest if they make monthly installment payments in full.

China Merchants Bank, the nation's largest publicly traded lender, had 5 million dual-currency credit cards in circulation at the end of 2005 and aims to issue 3 million more this year, says President Ma Weihua, who describes the bank as China's leading credit-card issuer. The bank doesn't disclose credit- card earnings.

``Relatively few people are using the credit line to borrow, and that's limiting our ability to issue more cards and make a profit,'' Ma says. ``While we want people to roll over and earn interest on unpaid balances, we don't want to see them default.''

South Korean Defaults

Encouraging credit card-debt has backfired elsewhere in Asia. LG Card Co., South Korea's biggest credit-card company, required a 4 trillion won ($4.1 billion) bailout from creditors after a consumer borrowing spree encouraged by tax breaks and lax credit screening soured in 2002, pushing up defaults.

New York-based American Express Co., the No. 4 U.S. credit- card company, stopped issuing new cards in Taiwan in February, citing concerns over increasing bad debt. It resumed issuing cards last month.

China may eventually face similar risks, says Andy Xie, chief Asia economist at New York-based Morgan Stanley. While older consumers aren't likely to build up credit-card debts because they've known poverty, the banks may succeed in promoting borrowing by younger people raised in a more consumer- oriented society, Xie says.

``Banks can achieve that by giving credit cards to those born in the '80s who want to spend but don't have the income,'' he says. ``But you know they will default.''

Consumer Focus

China's banks are relying more heavily on consumers as their traditional source of revenue -- lending to state-run companies in industries such as steelmaking and property -- shrink. The government in 2004 ordered banks to reduce lending to such industries to prevent the economy from overheating.

With China preparing to let banks set their own interest rates for the first time, margins on loans may be squeezed as lenders vie for customers. The People's Bank of China hasn't said when it plans to deregulate interest rates.

``The traditional business of Chinese banks has started to shrink,'' Jiang Jianqing, president of Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, the nation's biggest lender, said in a November speech. ``We need to find other sustainable sources of revenue.''

That may not be easy. Even Merchants Bank President Ma says he won't roll over his credit-card bills.

``I would never let the bank earn interest on my credit card,'' Ma says.

As the above article notes, traditional values are no barrier to debt accumulation - South Korea went from negligible credit card debt to wave after wave of consumer bankruptcies. The historical irony is that credit cards were, of course, invented in the home of Yankee frugality.

Cocaine makes a splash in China

2006-05-10T13:13:00.000-04:00

Cocaine has traditionally been considered a rich country's drug. It appears that segments of the Chinese population are now wealthy enough to create a market for this drug:

Chinese and U.S. agents seized more than 300 pounds of cocaine smuggled from Colombia — the country's largest ever cocaine bust — and arrested nine people involved in a drug ring in southern China, authorities said today.

The case illustrates how South American drug gangs are aggressively moving into Asia to exploit new markets and expand their global distribution chains, said William Fiebig, a Beijing-based agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

"It's a market, a huge market," he said.

The seizure and arrests were made in March following a two-month investigation that was aided by key intelligence from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said Liu Guangping, spokesman for the Customs General Administration of China. It was the first time Chinese and U.S. authorities had worked together on a drug investigation.

Most of the drugs were found hidden inside a wooden bed frame in Zhongshan, an industrial district in southern China just hours from the border with Hong Kong, Liu said.

Those being held include two Colombian nationals, along with suspects from Hong Kong and mainland China, according to Chinese customs officials and the DEA.

Liu said police uncovered a secret drug lab during their investigation. No details were given, although photos provided from the police raid showed bottles of ethyl ether — a key ingredient in making crack cocaine. Officers also confiscated the equivalent of about $25,000 in Chinese and Hong Kong currency, Liu said.

Following the communist revolution in 1949, China virtually wiped out rampant opium addiction that had crippled the economy and was seen as a symbol of China's weakness in the face of bullying by Britain and other foreign powers who initially sponsored the trade. Stocks were destroyed, traffickers executed and millions of users forced to quit cold turkey or be sent to labor camps.

Yet drug use came roaring back in the 1980s following economic and social reforms that raised disposable incomes and curbed some government intrusions into daily life.

Most of the recent drug problems — including the spread of AIDS — have been linked to the use of heroin that seeps across the border with Southeast Asia's "Golden Triangle," as well as Central Asia's opium producing "Golden Crescent" region.

Yet, those woes now seem to be diversifying: Liu said Chinese agents have recorded a 435 percent rise in the amount of drugs seized in the first three months of this year from a year earlier, with almost half of them synthetic drugs such as methamphetamine, Ecstasy and ketamine. The remainder was mostly heroin.

"It's pretty clear from this just how daunting a task we face," Liu said.

Rogene Waite, a DEA spokeswoman in Washington, said, "As more money comes into the Chinese economy, the market for drugs, unfortunately, grows concomitantly."

Footage on state television showed plainclothes officers tackling suspects from behind and throwing them to the ground on the street and in a department store.

Bricks of plastic-wrapped cocaine were shown stored in a cabinet in a police warehouse. An unwrapped brick held up by a reporter was shown imprinted with a traditional Chinese yin-yang symbol.

Fiebig said the investigation revealed an alliance between Colombian drug gangs and those from Hong Kong and mainland China to distribute cocaine in Asia.

Fiebig wouldn't reveal details of the investigation but said the DEA and customs authorities from Hong Kong and mainland China "shared intelligence, combined investigation resources and coordinated investigation activities, all in real time."

Officials said they were still preparing charges against the nine suspects, who potentially face the death penalty in China if convicted of smuggling. No requests have been received on behalf of the two Colombian suspects to extradite them from Hong Kong to their homeland, they said.

The Associated Press regurgitates this Chinese shibboleth - something that every Chinese knows but is false - as unobjectionable fact:

Following the communist revolution in 1949, China virtually wiped out rampant opium addiction that had crippled the economy and was seen as a symbol of China's weakness in the face of bullying by Britain and other foreign powers who initially sponsored the trade. Stocks were destroyed, traffickers executed and millions of users forced to quit cold turkey or be sent to labor camps.

Drugs have never crippled any country's economy. 2000-odd years of imperial rule saw no famines on the scale of the Great Leap Forward, a Communist development program that resulted in the deaths from starvation of tens of millions of Chinese. Drugs were readily available on a de jure or de facto basis throughout all of the years when the Chinese masses lived under an absolute monarch. Drugs are readily available in Western Europe and the G-7 countries because they lack the draconian measures - death for the possession of small amounts of drugs - imposed in China. And yet Western per capita incomes are ten times that of the average Chinese.

Even the bit about "foreign bullying" and "sponsorship" of the opium trade during the mid-19th century is an instance of lying by omission. Britain was involved in the opium trade at a time when opium was legal in Britain and China.* The Chinese then imposed an ostensible ban on opium that in reality tolerated inferior Chinese opium but banned superior foreign imports - in order to shore up China's deteriorating balance of trade.

* Many addictive drugs started being banned in the West only in the early part of the 20th century.

The opiate of the people

2006-05-05T23:00:00.000-04:00

Lee Harris examines the reason that revolutionary socialism remains alive and well in a world where the brutality and sheer futility of its policy prescriptions have been exposed for all to see. He suggests that it persists, and drew so much support at its inception, not because it is particularly practical, but because it offers the promise of paradise on earth. For its followers, revolutionary socialism isn't so much about results as it is about a secular kind of religious faith that socialism will make it all work out in the end:

The President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, celebrated May Day by ordering soldiers to occupy his country's natural gas fields. The purpose of this exercise was not military, but economic: Morales has demanded that all foreign companies currently operating these fields must sign a contract with Bolivia that would allow them to retain only 18% of the production, while the remainder would go to Bolivia's state-owned oil company. The 18% concession to the foreign companies was not an act of generosity on the part of Morales, but simply of expediency: Bolivia needs these companies to tap its natural gas resources, because it is unable, at least at present, to operate the natural gas fields on its own.

Morales, a fiery populist who was elected in a landslide, is clearly seen as following in the footsteps of Venezuela's own firebrand populist President Hugo Chavez. Furthermore, only last week, Morales and Chavez met with Fidel Castro, enacting a kind of socialist love-fest that issued in a partnership agreement aimed at creating a web of economic alliances in South America that would resist the insidious lure of American-style free trade -- its ultimate aim would be economic autarky for the region, free from foreign control.

In addition to sending in the troops, Morales is also sending forth a good bit of inflammatory rhetoric. He refers to the foreign companies operating Bolivia's natural resources as having "looted" them, and his decision to send in troops on the traditional socialist holiday, May the First, was clearly not a coincidence. In a similar vein, Morales' mentor, Hugo Chavez, has also been preaching that to be rich is to be wicked, while to be poor is to be virtuous -- and though he may be quoting scripture to support his arguments, there can be no serious question that Chavez-style populism is simply socialism with a South American accent.

And this leads to the question I want to address, namely, Why isn't socialism dead?

The Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto, has argued in his book, The Mystery of Capital, that the failure of the various socialist experiments of the twentieth century has left mankind with only one rational choice about which economic system to go with, namely, capitalism. Socialism, he maintained, has been so discredited that any further attempt to revive it would be sheer irrationality. But if this is the case, which I personally think it is, then why are we witnessing what certainly appears to be a revival of socialist rhetoric and even socialist pseudo-solutions, such as the nationalization of foreign companies?

It should be stressed that de Soto is not arguing that, after the many socialist failures of the twentieth century, capitalism has became historically inevitable and that its expansion would occur according to some imaginary iron clad laws without any need for active intervention. On the contrary, de Soto is fully aware of the enormous obstacles to the expansion of capitalism, especially in regions like South America, and his book is full of dismal statistics that demonstrate the uphill battle against bureaucratic red-tape that is involved in getting a business license or even buying a house in many third world countries. But, here again, the question arises, If capitalism is mankind's only rational alternative, why do so many of the governments of third world nations make it so extraordinarily difficult for ordinary people to take the first small steps on the path of free enterprise?

For de Soto, the solution lies in democratizing capital. Minimize state interference. Cut the red-tape. Make it simple to start up a business. Devise ways for the poor to capitalize on their modest assets. If a person in the USA can get a loan based on the value of his $200,000 home, why shouldn't a much poorer fellow get a loan based on the value of his $2,000 shack?

These are all sensible ideas; they are all based on de Soto's belief that the only way to help the poor in the third world is to get the bloated bureaucratic state off their backs, and permit them to use their own creative initiative to do what so many poor immigrants to the USA were able to do in our past -- to start out as micro-entrepreneurs, and to work their way up to wealth and often fabulous riches. But again, we come back to the same question, only in a different form, Why are the people in Bolivia and Venezuela responding so enthusiastically to the socialist siren-song of Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez, instead of heeding the eminently rational counsel of Hernando de Soto? Why are they clamoring to give even more power and control to the state, instead of seeking to free themselves from the very obstacle that stands in the way of any genuine economic progress?

When Hernando de Soto asserts that capitalism is the only rational alternative left to mankind, he is maintaining that capitalism is the alternative that human beings ought to take because it is the rational thing to do. But what human beings ought to do and what they actually do are often two quite different things. For human beings frequently act quite irrationally, and without the least consideration of what economist called their "enlightened self-interest." And it is in this light that we must approach the problem, Why isn't socialism dead?

The Role of Myth

To try to answer this question, I want to return again to Georges Sorel.

National Review's Jonah Goldberg, in his response to my earlier piece on Sorel, made the excellent point that I had left out of my discussion what is unquestionably the heart of Sorel's thinking, namely, his concept of myth, and, in particular, his notion of the revolutionary myth. Furthermore, Jonah pointed out that Sorel's myth was a repudiation of what Marx has called "scientific socialism."

For Marx, scientific socialism had nothing to do with what Marx called utopian socialism; indeed, it was Marx's boast that he was the first socialist thinker to escape from the lure of fantasy thinking that had previously passed for socialist thought. Utopian socialists love to dream up ideal schemes for organizing human life; they engage in wishful politics, and design all sorts of utterly impractical but theoretically perfect social systems, none of which has the slightest chance of ever being actualized in concrete reality. For Marx, on the other hand, socialism had to be taken down from the clouds, and set firmly on the ground. Thus Marx, instead of spending his time writing about imaginary utopias, dedicated his life in trying to prove -- scientifically no less -- that socialism was not merely desirable, but historically inevitable. Capitalism, he argued, had been a good thing; a necessary step that mankind had to take to advance forward; but, according to Marx, capitalism would eventually suffer from an internal breakdown. It would simply stop producing the goods. Like feudalism before it, capitalism was inevitably bound to pass away as a viable system of social organization, and then, and only then, would socialism triumph.

But in this case, what was the role of the revolutionary? For Marx, it made no sense for revolutionaries to overthrow capitalism before it had fulfilled its historical destiny; on the contrary, to overthrow capitalism before it collapsed internally would be counter-productive: the precondition of viable socialism was, after all, a fully matured capitalist system that had already revolutionized the world through its amazing ability to organize labor, to make the best use of natural resources, to internationalize commerce and industry, and to create enormous wealth. Therefore, for Marx, there was no point in revolution for the sake of revolution. Instead, the would-be revolutionary had to learn to be patient; he had to wait until the capitalist system had failed on its own account, and only then would he be able to play out his historical role.

Yet even here the role of the revolutionary would be severely limited; there would only be a need for revolutionary violence if the dwindling class of capitalists were themselves prepared to use violence to defend their own political supremacy. This explains why Marx, toward the end of his life, argued that in the United States, which he regarded as the most progressive nation in the world, the transition from capitalism to socialism could in fact take place without any need for violent revolution at all -- the whole process, he said, could be brought about democratically and without bloodshed.

The school of Marxism represented by Eduard Bernstein adapted this approach in regard to all the advanced capitalist nations of Europe, especially Germany. Known as "revisionism," this form of Marxism came to dominate the socialist parties of Europe before the First World War, and, in particular, the German Social Democrats who demonstrated their repudiation of revolutionary violence by taking part in the German Parliament, of which they made up an enormous bloc. For them, there was a peaceful and democratic path to socialism. Not only would socialism itself be rational; it would also emerge rationally, and without any need for anyone to man the barricades or to seize by violence the state apparatus.

It was this approach that Sorel entirely rejected. As Jonah Goldberg writes: "Sorel had contempt for socialists who wanted to make their case with facts and reason. Sorel called the prominent Italian socialist Enrico Ferri, one of those 'retarded people who believe in the sovereign power of science' and who believed that socialism could be demonstrated 'as one demonstrates the laws of the equilibrium of fluids.' True revolutionaries needed to abandon 'rationalistic prejudices' in favor of the power of Myth."

But why did Sorel, trained as an engineer and knowledgeable about science, reject scientific socialism? The answer, I think, is that Sorel suspected that socialism, in practice, simply might not ever really work. Jonah Goldberg points out Sorel "remained at best agnostic" about whether the General Strike would usher in socialism; but I would go further: Sorel himself was skeptical not only about the efficacy of the General Strike, but about the possibility of socialism as a viable economic system.

For example, in the introduction to Reflections on Violence, Sorel says that the French thinker Renan "was very surprised to discover that Socialists are beyond discouragement." He then quotes Renan's comment about the indefatigable perseverance of socialists: "After each abortive experiment they recommence their work: the solution is not yet found, but it will be. The idea that no solution exists never occurs to them, and in this lies their strength." (Italics mine.)

Sorel's response to Renan's comment is not to say, "Renan is wrong; there is a socialist solution, and one day we will find it." Instead, he focuses on the fact that socialists gain their strength precisely from their refusal to recognize that no socialist solution exists. "No failure proves anything against Socialism since the latter has become a work of preparation (for revolution); if they are checked, it merely proves that their apprenticeship has been insufficient; they must set to work again with more courage, persistence, and confidence than before...." But what is the point for Sorel of this refusal to accept the repeated historical failure of socialism? Here again, Sorel refuses to embrace the orthodox position of socialist optimism; he does not say, "Try, try, try again, for one day socialism will succeed." Instead, he argues that it is only by refusing to accept the failure of socialism that one can become a "true revolutionary." Indeed, for Sorel, the whole point of the myth of the socialist revolution is not that the human societies will be transformed in the distant future, but that the individuals who dedicate their lives to this myth will be transformed into comrades and revolutionaries in the present. In short, revolution is not a means to achieve socialism; rather, the myth of socialism is a useful illusion that turns ordinary men into comrades and revolutionaries united in a common struggle -- a band of brothers, so to speak.

Sorel, for whom religion was important, drew a comparison between the Christian and the socialist revolutionary. The Christian's life is transformed because he accepts the myth that Christ will one day return and usher in the end of time; the revolutionary socialist's life is transformed because he accepts the myth that one day socialism will triumph, and justice for all will prevail. What mattered for Sorel, in both cases, is not the scientific truth or falsity of the myth believed in, but what believing in the myth does to the lives of those who have accepted it, and who refuse to be daunted by the repeated failure of their apocalyptic expectations. How many times have Christians in the last two thousand years been convinced that the Second Coming was at hand, only to be bitterly disappointed -- yet none of these disappointments was ever enough to keep them from holding on to their great myth. So, too, Sorel argued, the myth of socialism will continue to have power, despite the various failures of socialist experiments, so long as there are revolutionaries who are unwilling to relinquish their great myth. That is why he rejected scientific socialism -- if it was merely science, it lacked the power of a religion to change individual's lives. Thus for Sorel there was "an...analogy between religion and the revolutionary Socialism which aims at the apprenticeship, preparation, and even the reconstruction of the individual -- a gigantic task."

It should be emphasized here that when Renan spoke about the repeated failure of socialist experiments, he was referring to the rather modest and small-scaled experiments undertaken by various utopian socialists of the nineteenth century. In 1906, neither he nor Sorel knew that in the dawning century there would be socialist experiments far beyond the scope and scale of Brook Farm or the Owenite communes. They could hardly envision entire nations falling into the hands of men who thought of themselves as dedicated revolutionaries -- avowed communists like Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, and Ho Chi Min, but also avowed fascists, like Mussolini and Hitler. The Nazis regarded themselves as genuine revolutionaries, and they call themselves revolutionaries, just as they always referred to their take-over of the German state as their revolution: for the Nazi, their revolution, and not the Bolshevik revolution, represented true socialism -- national socialism.

Can Socialism Die?

In light of the horrors brought about in the twentieth century by the revolutionary myth of socialism, it is easy to sympathize with those who believe mankind could not possibly be tempted to try the socialist experiment again. If the liberal rationalist Renan was surprised that "Socialists were beyond discouragement" at the beginning of the twentieth century, how much more surprised must his contemporary counterparts be to discover that socialism is also beyond discouragement at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Yet this is a lesson that Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez, under the guidance of their mentor, Fidel Castro, seem determined to impress upon us.

It may well be that socialism isn't dead because socialism cannot die. As Sorel argued, the revolutionary myth may, like religion, continue to thrive in "the profounder regions of our mental life," in those realms unreachable by mere reason and argument, where even a hundred proofs of failure are insufficient to wean us from those primordial illusions that we so badly wish to be true. Who doesn't want to see the wicked and the arrogant put in their place? Who among the downtrodden and the dispossessed can fail to be stirred by the promise of a world in which all men are equal, and each has what he needs?

Here we have the problem facing those who, like Hernando de Soto, believe that capitalism is the only rational alternative left after the disastrous collapse of so many socialist experiments. Yes, capitalism is the only rational method of proceeding; but is the mere appeal to reason sufficient to make the mass of men and women, especially among the poor and the rejected, shut their ears to those who promise them the socialist apocalypse, especially when the men who are making these promises possess charisma and glamour, and are willing to stand up, in revolutionary defiance, to their oppressors?

The shrewd and realistic Florentine statesman and thinker, Guicciardini, once advised: "Never fight against religion...this concept has too much empire over the minds of men." And to the extent that socialism is a religion, then those who wish to fight it with mere reason and argument may well be in for a losing battle. Furthermore, as populism spreads, it is inevitable that the myth of socialism will gain in strength among the people who have the least cause to be happy with their place in the capitalist world-order, and who will naturally be overjoyed to put their faith in those who promise them a quick fix to their poverty and an end to their suffering.

Thus, in the coming century, those who are advocates of capitalism may well find themselves confronted with "a myth gap." Those who, like Chavez, Morales, and Castro, are preaching the old time religion of socialism may well be able to tap into something deeper and more primordial than mere reason and argument, while those who advocate the more rational path of capitalism may find that they have few listeners among those they most need to reach -- namely, the People. Worse, in a populist democracy, the People have historically demonstrated a knack of picking as their leaders those know the best and most efficient way to by-pass their reason -- demagogues who can reach deep down to their primordial and, alas, often utterly irrational instincts. This, after all, has been the genius of every great populist leader of the past, as it is proving to be the genius of those populist leaders who are now springing up around the world, from Bolivia to Iran.

This is why socialism isn't dead, and why in our own century it may well spring back into life with a force and vigor shocking to those who have, with good reason, declared socialism to be no longer viable. It is also why Georges Sorel is perhaps even more relevant today than he was a hundred years ago. He knew that it was hopeless to guide men by reason and argument alone. Men need myths -- and until capitalism can come up with a transformative myth of its own, it may well be that many men will prefer to find their myths in the same place they found them in the first part of the twentieth century -- the myth of revolutionary socialism.

This is the challenge that capitalism faces in the world today -- whether it will rise to the challenge is perhaps the most urgent question of our time, and those who refuse to confront this challenge are doing no service to reason or to human dignity and freedom. Bad myths can only be driven out by better myths, and unless capitalism can provide a better myth than socialism, the latter will again prevail.

Can democratic countries win counter insurgency wars?

2006-05-03T21:02:00.000-04:00

Dictatorships have a good record of doing so because they can muster levels of violence that would be unacceptable in a democratic society. Post-revolution Bolshevik Russia massacred millions of its political opponents with their entire families. Similarly, post-victory Communist China did away with millions of political opponents via summary execution. The physical elimination of potential opponents and their friends and relatives has worked to suppress rebellion throughout recorded history.

Without recourse to such methods, can democracies really win counter guerrilla wars? An Israeli analyst looks at the historical record and argues that they have not only won such wars in the past, they can continue winning them in the future. The key variable is strong leadership:

We live today in an age of small wars.1 In contrast to the last World War, which ended six decades ago and encompassed dozens of nations, spanning continents and seas, the current age is characterized by a different kind of armed conflict. The primary enemy confronting countries is no longer other countries, but guerilla armies and terrorist organizations–armed groups whose power is measured not by the amount of force they can bring to the battlefield or by the quality of their weapons, but by their ability to wear down the other side and break its will to continue fighting.

Because of the nature of unconventional warfare, many analysts believe that in a conflict between a state and a terrorist or guerilla force, the state, with its larger and better-equipped military, is actually the weaker side. U.S. Army Lt.-Col. Robert Cassidy, an expert in counter-insurgency warfare, writes that “big powers do not necessarily lose small wars; they simply fail to win them…. In the absence of a threat to survival, the big powers’ failure to quickly and decisively attain their strategic aim causes them to lose domestic support…. The war for the indigenous insurgents is total but it is inherently limited for the great power. This is because the insurgents pose no direct threat to the great power’s survival.”2 The militarily weaker side, says Cassidy, hopes to break the cohesiveness of the political consensus backing the enemy’s war effort while exploiting the fact that “big powers are less tolerant of casualties in small wars than their opponents are.”3 Gil Merom of Tel Aviv University points out that the weaker side’s advantage is that it “tends to involve potential catastrophic consequences, while victory promises an ultimate reward: Independence.”4 By contrast, a nation usually does not enjoy the benefits of such unanimity of purpose and tolerance for casualties, and thus sooner or later will abandon the struggle, as in the case of the Soviets after many years of war in Afghanistan.5

According to this widely held view, in a protracted conflict against a weaker but more determined opponent, the likelihood that a nation will lose is further increased when it is a democracy. Whereas non-democratic countries will often use extreme force against the weaker side even to the point of annihilating it or transferring or expelling entire populations, democratic countries, according to Merom, “are restricted by their domestic structure,” which is why “they find it extremely difficult to escalate the level of violence and brutality to that which can secure victory.”6 According to this view, the weakness of democracy stems from the influence of public opinion on the decisions of political leaders: The public generally frowns upon the use of overly violent means, and it does not have the patience for prolonged fighting. “The interaction of sensitivity to casualties, repugnance to brutal military behavior, and commitment to democratic life,”7 says Merom, often leads democracies into a situation where they cannot or will not use enough force to ensure victory. By contrast, countries that are “less liberal and less democratic can be expected to encounter fewer and lesser domestic obstacles … when they fight brutally small wars.”8

For those reasons, diplomats and military strategists make grim assessments about a democracy’s chances of winning a military struggle against guerilla forces. “The guerilla wins if he does not lose,” said Henry Kissinger. “The conventional army loses if it does not win.”9 Lieutenant-General Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, when he was the chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, announced that “it is impossible to defeat a guerilla.”10 This opinion has become so prevalent in Israel that some of today’s military commanders utterly deny that there is even such a thing as victory in small wars. For example, at the end of 2003, Brigadier-General Eival Gilady, former head of the Strategic Planning Division of the General Staff, said: “When I got this post I saw on plans the words ‘to achieve decisive victory against the Palestinians.’ I asked myself … what kind of nonsense is this? Who exactly are we subduing? What does it mean to achieve decisive victory? We tried to find substitutes for ‘decisive.’ At first I spoke of an ‘impression of victory,’ a sort of semblance.”11 As Major-General Yaakov Or, coordinator of government activities in the territories, declared several years ago, “there is no decisive military answer to popular national conflicts.”12

It seems obvious that if this view is correct, the implications for both Israel and the United States will be profound indeed, as each country decides whether to continue allocating resources and sacrificing lives in small wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, or the Palestinian Authority. But is it correct? Are democratic countries always fated to end up the loser against guerilla or terrorist forces, exhausted and lacking the will to continue fighting? If we take a look at several such conflicts from the last fifty years, the reverse seems to be the case: Not only have democracies been willing to escalate the violence of their tactics, they have also displayed an enormous capacity for seeing a long struggle through to victory.13 And in those cases where democracies in the end turned in defeat–such as France in Algeria or the United States in Vietnam–it was not the broader public but the upper echelons of leadership that determined the outcome. Contrary to the conventional wisdom among experts, democratic citizens do not shrink from a prolonged conflict if they are convinced that the fight is a just one. When they are convinced, their stamina is often far greater than that of their leaders.

On the whole, it is worth living under democratic regimes, even if only for the simple reason that they do not kill their citizens.14 For the most part, those living in liberal democracies need not fear persecution, internal purges, and political assassinations. Moreover, the openness and tolerance of democracies is evident in their foreign policies, especially in their attitude toward countries that also cherish political freedom. It is widely observed that democracies usually do not go to war against each other.

However, when democratic countries sense danger or even the possibility that their interests could be harmed, they are capable of acting decisively against their enemies and even starting full-scale wars. For example, Israel has twice instigated hostilities when it sensed an immediate danger to its existence–on the eve of the Six Day War, and eleven years earlier against Egypt in the Sinai Campaign. Britain declared war on Argentina in 1982 over the strategically unimportant Falkland Islands, and in 2001 the United States launched an all-out war in Afghanistan, despite the distance, inhospitable terrain, and an enemy that had succeeded in thwarting the Soviet invasion a decade earlier. Once a democratic country starts a war, it can escalate the violence to an extremely high level; it is enough to recall that the only country ever to use a nuclear weapon–the United States during World War II–was a democracy. During the same war, Allied forces struck at Germany and Japan with widespread bombing campaigns that claimed vast civilian casualties and reduced large cities such as Dresden and Tokyo to rubble.15

The willingness of democracies to use massive violence is evident not just in conflicts that threaten a nation’s survival. During the Vietnam War, the American military dropped seven million tons of bombs–three and a half times what it dropped on Germany during World War II, resulting in at least 65,000 North Vietnamese civilian deaths between 1964 and 1972.16 During the 1954-1962 war in Algeria, France lost approximately 20,000 soldiers and civilians, but losses among the rebels and the Muslim Algerian population totaled at least 300,000, and some say they were closer to one million.17

While democratic countries thus do not hesitate to exert massive force on the battlefield, moreover, it is worth noting that decidedly totalitarian countries, which have little compunction about using the most extreme measures, have sometimes found it equally difficult to defeat enemies many times weaker than them. That is the lesson the Nazis learned in Yugoslavia, for example, as did the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Yet there are examples of rebellions and guerilla wars that have been successfully quelled by democratic and quasi-democratic states. The British fought from 1948 to 1960 against guerilla forces in Malaya and won, and the war conducted by the Sultan of Oman, with the support of Western democracies, against communist guerillas between 1962 and 1976 also ended successfully, and with far fewer civilian casualties than those recorded in Algeria and Vietnam, in both absolute and relative terms.18

Probably the best example of how a democracy successfully defeated an insurgency in a protracted conflict can be seen in the way Britain handled its conflict with the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The IRA’s goal was to unify Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland as a sovereign nation independent of the United Kingdom. The final and most violent outbreak of the dispute started in 1969 and was triggered by several factors, including the Protestant British government’s discrimination against Catholics. The Provisional IRA and other radical Catholic groups launched a terrorist campaign against the British forces and Protestants, and at first the British methods, designed around fighting insurgents in the colonies, failed against urban insurgents.19 Public opinion and political considerations prevented the British from employing against the Irish methods they had used against the colonies–for example, burning down villages and transferring their residents to other areas, or wholesale administrative detention.20 The blatant discrimination practiced by the British army only helped undermine its cause and push many Catholics into the arms of the IRA. “Bloody Sunday,” in January 1972, in which British soldiers killed fourteen unarmed Catholic demonstrators, increased support for the IRA and inspired the group to escalate its activities.21 In the following years, the policies of successive British governments toward the organization were changed, as reforms were instituted and failed.22 Politicians refrained for a long time from using the words “war” or “civil war” in the context of Ireland (and by doing so they hurt their chance of enlisting public support).23 Human rights violations committed by Britain in Northern Ireland were internationally condemned. Starting in the late 1970s, the separatists achieved a number of resounding successes, such as the 1979 assassination of Lord Mountbatten, a war hero and a member of the English royal family, a bombing in Brighton that narrowly missed the entire British government, several bombings in central London, and a mortar fired at the prime minister’s official residence.

The death toll from 1972-1974, at the height of the first outbreak of violence, was 297 members of the security forces and 597 civilians.24 Between March 1973 and February 1977, 276 IRA bombs exploded in Britain, and 14 shootings were carried out by Republican organizations.25 In later years, the Irish Republicans were not idle; between 1984 and 1986, they were responsible for no fewer than 521 bombings throughout the United Kingdom,26 and in the early 1990s the organization launched a bombing campaign in London that included, among other attacks, firing mortars at the prime minister’s official residence and detonating explosive-laden trucks in the Baltic Exchange and the NatWest Bank tower, which together caused enormous economic damage.27 In 1977, Seamus Twomey, an IRA leader, said: “By hitting Mayfair restaurants, we were hitting the type of person that could bring pressure to bear on the British government.”28 The IRA violence was carefully directed at convincing British public opinion to favor giving up Northern Ireland.

At the height of the fighting, it was certainly possible to believe that the Irish separatists had a good chance of achieving their objective. Early in the conflict, some high-level members of the British government advocated acquiescence to the IRA. In a 1972 memo he wrote to the British prime minister and a number of senior members of the government, the British Foreign Minister Alex Douglas-Hume argued:

The real British interest would I think be served best by pushing them [the Irish] towards a United Ireland rather than tying them closer to the United Kingdom. Our own parliamentary history is one long story of trouble with the Irish.29

At certain stages of the conflict, “polls demonstrated clearly that the majority of the British electorate would be glad to relinquish any claim to Northern Ireland,” one scholar asserted.30 Ostensibly, the outcome should have been clear: A British surrender to IRA demands.

But in the end, it was the IRA that announced a ceasefire. In 1994 it abandoned armed struggle, and not because it had achieved its ends. By the end of the 1980s, the IRA was an army on the run, and its leaders began to face the reality that they could not achieve their ends by violent means. The British honed their methods and were hitting the IRA hard, while Protestant counter-terror groups, which between 1989 and 1993 killed at least 164 Catholics–among them 20 members of the IRA–demonstrated to the IRA and to the Catholic community as a whole that their struggle was not paying off.31 Equally discouraging to the IRA was the fact that even though the British from time to time negotiated with IRA representatives and were prepared for certain reforms, they never gave any indication that they would consider surrender. Martin Mansergh, an Irish adviser who participated in the negotiations leading to the 1994 ceasefire, said that “while I do not agree that violence has never had any political effect, I see absolutely no evidence from our dealings with the British government, or indeed its dealings with anyone else, that it was materially swayed by the bombings in the city of London.”32 Even when many British citizens, perhaps even most of them, were prepared to make concessions in Northern Ireland or even give it up, “successive British governments had made it clear that they would not and could not give way to ‘terrorism’”33–and the British public did not force its government to do so.

In the 1998 Good Friday agreement, the IRA leaders adopted “a settlement that only a few years ago would have been regarded as treason.” They succeeded in achieving concessions that reduced Protestant discrimination, but the accord was nonetheless “a defeat for Irish republicanism.”34 After more than 25 years of fighting and 3,600 dead,35 the British demonstrated that a guerilla force does not always “win when it does not lose.” On July 28, 2005, the IRA announced its decision fully to abandon armed struggle in favor of developing “purely political and democratic programs.”36 Northern Ireland is still part of Britain. The British government did not relent, and the public did not force it to give in to pressure and withdraw.37

Another meaningful example of a democracy defeating an unconventional enemy is the IDF’s confrontation with terrorists in the Gaza Strip between 1967 and 1973. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan maintained a policy of non-intervention toward the 316,000 Gaza inhabitants on the grounds that they should be left to manage their own affairs and that an improvement in their economic condition would help prevent terrorism: “You think twice about helping terrorists when your belly is full,” he quipped. The result of this hands-off approach was a sharp increase in the number of terrorist attacks in the Gaza Strip. Terrorist groups took advantage of the unmonitored environment and organized and armed themselves with the declared intention of bringing about results similar to those that had been achieved in Algeria and were going to be achieved, as they saw it, in Vietnam.38 The significant improvements in medical services, education, and economic conditions in the Gaza Strip between 1968 and 1971 not only failed to bring about a more peaceful atmosphere; they actually helped terrorist organizations operate more freely.39 The situation reached a point where Palestinians thought to be collaborating with Israel were publicly executed, and residents actively helped terrorists evade capture by the IDF. Israeli citizens began to detour around Gaza on their way to Sinai, and Palestinians, fearful of the terror organizations’ revenge, were afraid to work in Israel. In 1970 alone, terrorists murdered 128 Arabs and 15 Jews, injuring 580 Arabs and 120 Jews.40 Only in early 1971, after a Palestinian terrorist threw a grenade at a parked Israeli car, killing two Jewish children–an attack that shocked the nation–did Israel change its policy.

IDF forces poured into the Gaza Strip and adopted a “carrot and stick” policy: Rewards for areas and individuals that refused to assist the terrorists, and destruction of the homes of collaborators and their expulsion, insofar as it could be done within the limits of international law.41 Development work started and stopped according to the security situation in a particular area, so that the residents had a stake in keeping things quiet. Emphasis was put on the economic improvement of trouble-free areas and protecting workers with jobs in Israel. Identity cards were changed to prevent forgeries, the behavior of soldiers was carefully scrutinized, and Palestinian complaints about unbecoming behavior on the part of the IDF were dealt with promptly.42 A military approach was adopted that the commander, Ariel Sharon, described as “anti-terrorist guerilla warfare.”43 Large and fixed patrols were replaced with small, fast-acting squads that were in charge of specific areas and well acquainted with their residents. Special operations were designed to strike at the terrorists and undermine their control over the population. The refugee camps were thinned out, roads were built through them, and lighting was installed.44 At the same time, a massive information campaign was undertaken to win the cooperation of the civilian population, ranging from explanations of the IDF’s actions to the screening of Arabic-language films.

The IDF’s approach yielded impressive results. By the end of 1971, one of the most wanted terrorists, Ziad al-Husseini, was already complaining that “nobody will agree to set up bases for us in the area where we operate. The people are afraid and are beginning to let us down.”45 Moreover, the pacification of Gaza was accomplished with a remarkably low cost in innocent lives. For example, the Shaked commando unit, which was responsible for catching most of the wanted Palestinians, killed only one innocent person, an elderly deaf man who did not hear the soldiers’ warning.46 Some 180 guerillas were killed, around two thousand were captured and imprisoned, and the number of wanted fugitives was reduced to almost zero.47 The terrorists who had operated so freely had moved out of the Gaza Strip completely by 1972, without any political or other gain for the Palestinians. The Gaza Strip was quiet for fifteen years.48

Alongside these unambiguous democratic successes in Northern Ireland and Gaza, the case of Russia–less than fully “democratic” yet in many ways similar to democratic states in ways that are relevant for the debate–in the second Chechen war offers an additional example of how public resolve can affect the outcome in a small war. In post-communist Russia there was initially little public support for the first Chechen war, which erupted in 1994 and lasted twenty months. Insubordination in the Russian military was pervasive, a number of generals resigned or were dismissed because of their opposition to the war, and at certain stages only about a tenth of the Russian public was in favor of continuing it. When the war ended in a Chechen victory, the two sides signed a five-year interim peace agreement.49

The conflict erupted again in late summer 1999. Several months earlier, the Russian public was divided on the Chechen question, with 41 percent in favor of allowing the Chechens independence, and a slightly larger percentage against. The conventional wisdom holds that in such a situation, the Russian public could be convinced to favor granting independence to the breakaway republic by being subjected to a campaign of violence or terrorism.

As early as January 2000–a few months into the conflict–the BBC was quick to announce that Russians were “losing faith in the Chechen war.”50 But in spite of broad support, in theory, for negotiation,51 and in spite of the majority belief that the Russian government could not or did not want to stabilize the situation in Chechnya,52 and even though the number of Russian dead had already reached somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand–a level four to six times greater than during the war in Afghanistan, relative to population size53–despite all this, Russians re-elected Vladimir Putin twice after the beginning of the war: First in 2000, and then in 2004 with a decisive majority of 71 percent, after four years of bitter fighting.54

Considering the broad-based opposition in Russia to the first Chechen war, it is difficult to explain the Russian support for the second war only by the absence of democracy or the control Putin’s regime had over the media. Opinion polls show that the Russian public does not accept as gospel everything that Putin tells them about Chechnya.55 The explanation for the marked difference in support for the two Chechen wars seems to reside in other factors, such as differences in leadership and objectives.

What Putin offered his people was a consistent, clear message: The war in Chechnya was not being fought for economic reasons, such as control over oil resources. It was a defensive war, a struggle of Russia against Islamic terrorism. This description of the war has been accepted by a Russian public that now sees the conflict as a just war.56 Public support for the war has only increased following Putin’s various pronouncements on the subject, such as the speech he delivered after the terrorist attack in Beslan in September 2004, in which hundreds of schoolchildren were slaughtered. Putin, like President Johnson’s speech after the Tet Offensive in 1968 (about which more further on), expressed a willingness to end the war peacefully, but in contrast with the American president, his rhetoric was aggressive and hawkish:

We demonstrated weakness, and the weak are beaten.… This is a challenge to all of Russia…. Terrorists think that they are stronger, that they will be able to intimidate us, to paralyze our will, to erode our society. It seems that we have a choice: to resist or to cave in…. to give up and allow them to destroy and to take Russia apart, in hope that eventually they would leave us alone…. I am convinced that in fact we do not have any choice…. We are dealing… with total and full-scale war.… Such wars do not end quickly, in these conditions, we simply cannot, we should not, live as carelessly as before…. Terrorists meet the most effective rebuff where they confront not only the power of the state but also an organized and united civil society…. We have to be together. Only thus we shall defeat the enemy.57

Putin did not offer to compromise and did not promise his citizens an easy time; he demanded from them inner strength, unity, and a willingness to continue the struggle. Forty-eight percent of Russians endorsed the president’s speech; only 9 percent opposed it, some of them probably because of Russia’s inept handling of the crisis, and others due to their shock at the sight of so many murdered children. Fully 61 percent of Russians continued supporting Putin’s policies, while only 16 percent opposed them.58 After five years of Putin’s war leadership, Russian public opinion had only hardened against allowing Chechnya to secede: Just 20 percent of the Russian public favored granting independence, whereas 64 percent supported a solution that would keep Chechnya part of Russia.59 The public was convinced that Russia’s small war was important enough to continue,60 in no small part due to Putin’s ability to explain it clearly to Russian citizens.

What emerges from the cases of Northern Ireland, Gaza, and the second Chechen war is that even in the case of a prolonged, brutal, and bitter campaign of terror, victory is a possible thing. But if democracies such as the United Kingdom and Israel, or quasi-democracies like Russia, have successfully defeated guerillas in small wars, why in other cases have they so often failed?

The reason militarily superior democracies suffer defeats at the hands of weaker enemies lies not in the level of force they are willing to exert, nor in the weakness of the popular will, but somewhere else. A closer look at three important cases–the French war in Algeria, the American war in Vietnam, and Israel’s war in southern Lebanon–reveals that the Achilles’ heel of those powerful democracies was not a lack of staying power on the part of the public, but instead, enfeebled decision-making on the part of their leaders.

In 1954, a widespread rebellion broke out in Algeria, which had been a French colony since 1830. The Algerians demanded that their French rulers leave the country and allow its independence. French governments tried to settle the dispute in different ways, but failed. In 1958, Charles de Gaulle, ex-general and hero of the Second World War, was elected president on a platform of “French Algeria.” In a public opinion poll conducted in September 1958, about 80 percent of French voters supported de Gaulle’s stance against Algerian independence. Moreover, de Gaulle’s position was supported by an absolute majority of Algerian Muslims.61 French public opinion was clearly against withdrawal and was even opposed to compromise; the feeling was that the conflict was worth the cost.62

However, in September 1959 de Gaulle changed his mind and declared publicly that Algeria had a right to self-determination.63 The war had provoked opposition from the French public from the very outset, but before de Gaulle’s apostasy, support for withdrawal had not succeeded in becoming the dominant public view.64 In fact, most of the mass demonstrations and protests against the war occurred after the president’s declaration, as support for the war was quickly dissipating. The famous “Manifesto of the 121,” in which intellectuals called for insubordination in Algeria, was published in 1960, the year following de Gaulle’s about-face. François Maspéro, one of its signatories, declared in the preface to the 1961 edition of the Manifesto that 1960 had been the “turning point” in the French people’s attitude toward the war.65 In 1961, a majority of the French public–in a similar percentage to those who had expressed the opposite opinion three years earlier–voted for separation from Algeria, even though the French military had succeeded in quelling the rebellion. The French followed their president and reversed their support for the war, not because of escalating violence, but because of his announcement that there was nothing to be gained from fighting and that Algeria should be “Algerian.”66

The American war in Vietnam presents another striking example of how public opinion can be shaped by the pronouncements of democratic leaders. There are many who believe that the war came to an end because of the widespread protest against it and negative press coverage.67 Yet a closer look at the course of events shows that it was the political leadership, not public opinion, that was first to falter in the face of heavy fighting.

As in the case of Algeria, there was no shortage of Americans who opposed the war from the outset and expressed their views in various ways, such as protest songs68 and the march on the Pentagon in October 1967.69 But protests did not lead to any decisive change in American public opinion or in the attitude of politicians. In December 1967, the commander of American forces in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, made a speech to Congress and was applauded from both sides of the aisle. Public support for the war and for the president gradually fell in comparison to the beginning of the war, but at the end of 1967 and the beginning of 1968, a clear majority of Americans still felt that Westmoreland’s performance was satisfactory, the war was being properly managed, and that it even should be escalated.70

In early 1968, broad support for the war continued despite mixed messages coming out of the White House.71 Previously, Johnson had refrained from calling the conflict a war, and regularly spread easily refutable disinformation about it.72 Moreover, as scholar Dale Walton points out, the American government “offered no satisfying ‘one paragraph’ (let alone a one-line bumper sticker) explanation of why the effort in Vietnam was important to U.S. national interests.”73 In France it had at least been possible to sum up the objective of the war in two words: “French Algeria.” In 1968, British general Robert Thompson, an expert in counterinsurgency warfare,74 said that he had asked many Americans why the United States was fighting in Vietnam, but did not receive one clear answer. “The replies,” he said, “varied from containing China, preventing aggression and defeating the Vietcong to giving the people of South Vietnam a free choice.”75 And yet, despite the fact that three years of war in Vietnam had cost the lives of more than fifteen thousand Americans, there was twice as much support for the war at the beginning of 1968 as there was opposition to it.

Many have argued that support for the war began to dwindle after the Tet Offensive at the end of January 1968, shortly after the American government and military commanders had made statements about the end of the war being close at hand. In a wide-ranging attack, North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces took the American and South Vietnamese armies by surprise. Even though the attacks were repulsed everywhere but Hue City, the magnitude of the assault surprised the American press and public76 such that the Tet Offensive has come to be seen by many as the turning point of the war.77

After the Tet Offensive, there was a noticeable change in the way battles were covered on television. Even though the status of the war and the balance of forces remained more or less unchanged, fewer battles were reported as victories, slightly more were reported as defeats, and far more as draws.78 The administration’s statements about the war were treated with more skepticism: General Westmoreland was presented as a liar or deluded optimist, and President Johnson and his administration came under intense criticism. Arguably the final blow to America’s hopes of success in Vietnam was dealt by the legendary CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite, at the time often referred to as “the most trusted man in America.” When Cronkite visited Vietnam, he was shocked to see the mass graves of thousands of citizens murdered by North Vietnamese forces in Hue City during the Tet Offensive, and said that he would do everything he could to put an end to the war. On February 27, 1968, in one of the most famous broadcasts in the history of American television, Cronkite announced to his millions of viewers:

To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.79

Johnson was deeply affected by Cronkite’s statement. It is said that after the broadcast he remarked to his press secretary, “If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”80 David Halberstam of the New York Times later claimed that “The Vietnam War was declared over by a television anchorman.”81

Johnson’s poor showing two weeks later in the New Hampshire primary against an anti-war challenger further demoralized him.82 On March 22 he met with his “Wise Men,” as he called his foreign policy advisers. Most of them, heavily influenced by the media, took a pessimistic line. “As I walked back to my office,” Johnson later wrote, “I was turning over in my mind the opinions I had just heard and what these reactions meant as a reflection of broader opinion…. If they had been so deeply influenced by the reports of the Tet Offensive, what must the average citizen in the country be thinking?”83 That same day the president announced that Westmoreland would end his tour of duty in Vietnam by June 1968. In his famous speech of March 31, 1968, in which he announced he would not seek re-election, Johnson announced an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and expressed his hope that the government of North Vietnam would cease “its efforts to achieve a military victory.” The word “victory” was mentioned only twice in the forty-five minute speech, and even then only regarding North Vietnam’s military aspirations. “If they do mount another round of heavy attacks,” said Johnson, “they will not succeed in destroying the fighting power of South Vietnam and its allies.… Many men… will be lost… and the war will go on. There is no need for this to be so. There is no need to delay the talks that could bring an end to this long and this bloody war.”84

Johnson made no mention whatsoever of the possibility of an American victory. He did not tell the public what he wrote some time later in his memoirs–that the Tet Offensive had been “the most disastrous Communist defeat of the war in Vietnam.”85 He had claimed in his speech that the Tet Offensive had “failed to achieve its principal objectives,” but added that “the Communists may renew their attack any day.”86 It was difficult not to see Johnson’s speech as an attempt to extricate the United States from involvement in Vietnam. After all, if the president had thought that victory was imminent, why would he have proposed saving the North Vietnamese from defeat? Why would he have refused to send more troops to Vietnam or replaced Westmoreland at such a sensitive moment?

Taking a cue from Johnson’s gloomy view of the war, none of the 1968 presidential candidates talked anymore about victory in Vietnam. Even Richard Nixon, the Republican who went on to win the presidency and had criticized the administration after the Tet Offensive for not escalating the war, spoke about “peace with honor.” Even though it would be four years before America got out of Vietnam, in 1968 it was clear that the government was looking for a way to extricate the United States from a perceived morass.

What led to what? Did a change in public opinion affect the government’s position? What happened was in fact precisely the opposite. The Tet Offensive at first actually strengthened the hawks and weakened the doves; a great majority of the public favored escalating the war and opposed the cessation of bombing in North Vietnam. Even Cronkite’s famous newscast editorial did not have an immediate effect on the public. At the end of February 1968, the percentage of those supporting the war was identical to the percentage supporting it at the beginning of the month.87 One month later, for the first time there was a sharp drop in support for the war and doves slightly outnumbered hawks88–but even then a majority thought that Westmoreland was doing an “excellent” job conducting the war and expressed confidence in America’s military strategy in Vietnam.89 The level of support for the war was highest among young people, the age group that was serving in Vietnam, and only in August did it drop significantly.90

Looking at these facts, it seems likely that if Johnson had adopted a more hawkish posture after the Tet Offensive, public opinion would have followed him. The fact that support for escalating the war was far higher than support for the president suggests that it was the administration’s lack of clarity and resolve, not the war itself, that led to its downfall. Johnson almost never spoke to the nation from the beginning of the Tet Offensive until his speech at the end of March, and he virtually gave up any attempt to present the public with a coherent policy. He rejected the suggestions of those in favor of escalation but did not adopt the contrary policy, and he most certainly did not say anything to refute Cronkite. From the point of view of public opinion, Johnson suffered from what one scholar has called a “collapse of leadership.”91 “The media’s generalized portrait of ‘disaster’ in South Vietnam,” wrote journalist Peter Braestrup, who researched the role of the press in the Tet offensive, “affected political Washington far more than it did the general public.”92 Johnson was mistaken in thinking that along with Cronkite he had lost the ordinary citizen; he erred, according to Adam Garfinkel, when “at a crucial moment, his administration and its fabled Wise Men seem to have accorded a greater impact to the antiwar movement than it had and may have given it more influence than it deserved.”93

Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to seek a second term was motivated by several personal considerations: His failing health, his feeling that the public was turning against the war, and his belief that the American strategy in Vietnam was leading to a stalemate.94 According to William Hammond, a media historian who researched the press and the military in Vietnam, Johnson was “convinced that the conflict was necessary but believed that the American public and Congress lacked the will… to carry it through to a successful conclusion.”95 But clearly it was not the public that lacked the will to succeed, but the president, who had been influenced by advisers and a press riddled with doubt.96

The ability of political leaders to weaken public resolve in wartime is similarly seen in the IDF’s withdrawal from the security zone in southern Lebanon in 2000. The security zone had been part of Israel’s security posture for almost a decade before it began to be publicly debated.97 A large majority of the public thought that staying in the security zone was essential, a view that was not noticeably affected by the toll in Israeli lives in Lebanon.98 Even in June 1999, three weeks after Ehud Barak was elected to lead a government that came to power on a wave of promises to withdraw from Lebanon, the percentage of those opposed to a unilateral withdrawal, 61 percent, was almost exactly what it had been in February 1997.99

Yet on July 6, 1999, Prime Minister Barak declared that the IDF would pull out of Lebanon within a year. In the months that followed, Israeli public opinion turned dramatically in favor of that position.100 Barak’s declaration also affected IDF soldiers, who for the first time were outspoken in their support for the new policy. In February 2000, during a visit by Barak to an outpost in the Lebanon security zone, a group of enlisted soldiers mustered the courage to explain to the prime minister why they felt the IDF was failing in Lebanon and why they were in favor of an immediate pullout. One soldier summed up his thoughts by saying, “We have to start getting out now; why wait till July?”101 “Gilad,” a company commander serving in the security zone, wrote of his feelings in early 2000:

As a soldier I have never dared to ask why we are in Lebanon. My big brother… also didn’t ask if it was the right thing to do politically or not, nor did my father… and now, in the last few months… suddenly there have been some who have argued, suddenly asked questions, even cases of refusing an order. “What good will it do? Do you want to send us to our deaths?” they asked. It’s not nice to admit, in the last few months amidst a wave of funerals and thirty mortars a day, a situation was created in which it’s simply been difficult to function with the soldiers. You don’t conduct a war this way.102

In May 2000, the IDF withdrew from Lebanon hastily and in disarray, quickly leading to the collapse of the South Lebanese Army and enabling Hezbollah to take up positions along the border. The message sent to Israel’s enemies was a clear one, and was eloquently expressed by Hezbollah’s secretary-general, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah: “Israel, which has both nuclear power and the strongest air force in the region,” he said, “is weaker than a spider’s web.”103

What emerges most clearly from the cases of failure on the part of the French in Algeria, the Americans in Vietnam, and the Israelis in southern Lebanon is very much the flip side of what we already have seen with respect to Northern Ireland, Gaza, and Chechnya: That in all these cases, it was not the citizenry which lacked the patience and resolve required to support their government and military through a protracted conflict. Rather, in all these cases, it was democratic leaders who first despaired of being able to win; once they decided to abandon the fight, public opinion quickly followed their lead.

The prevalence in recent history of small wars waged between terrorist or guerilla forces and sovereign nations requires a different kind of strategic thinking. The new age of warfare not only requires changes in tactics on the battlefield, but a change in how we understand the sources and politics of conflict. The realist paradigm, based on the idea of war as “politics by other means,” as Clausewitz put it, may no longer really obtain. Armed organizations go to war on behalf of religious beliefs and moral ambitions that are at odds with traditional notions of politics or the best interests of their constituencies. However, democratic nations are capable of being inspired by similar passions, and they, too, are capable of mustering vast resources of courage and stamina in the face of a vicious enemy. It is wrong to suppose that the advantages of tenacity and willpower fall only to the militarily weak side, struggling for independence or fighting against a major power.104

In certain respects, this state of affairs is a result of the operational successes of guerilla warfare and terrorism. Mao Zedong said that one of the principles of guerilla warfare is to strike at the enemy but to stop before he becomes incensed. In other words, an overly destructive attack is liable to trigger devastating retaliation.105 The harder the terrorists hit, the more the leaders of victim nations abandon circumspect political rationality in favor of military action, and complex political substantiations give way to unsubtle slogans such as “the Global War on Terror,”106 “World War IV,”107 and “the axis of evil.” In the speech U.S. President George W. Bush made on the night of September 11, 2001, he was not in need of sophisticated explanations of the kind that were perhaps in the minds of Lyndon Johnson and his advisers. He used the simple and unsophisticated language of life and death:

Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack.… These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat. But they have failed…. Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America… we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. And no one will keep that light from shining.… We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them… we stand together to win the war against terrorism.”108

There is not a single word here of realpolitik, no mention of constraints, interests, or any attempt to discuss the fine points of terrorism or whether it is possible to defeat it. And precisely because of its simplicity, such language is successful. Even though a conventional terror attack cannot defeat a tank division, Osama Bin Laden, Yasser Arafat, and whoever blew up the apartment block in Moscow in 1999 succeeded in convincing the citizens of the nations they attacked that a war of survival was at hand. In the end, terrorism’s success in making itself such a profound influencing factor has also been its greatest failure.

This is not surprising. Numerous historic examples bring into question the supposition that it is possible to break the enemy’s will by waging a slow war against its citizens. To take an extreme example, during World War II the German and Japanese peoples never reached a real breaking point, despite the colossal destruction visited on them, for example, by the firebombing of Japanese towns, the maelstrom in Hamburg in 1943, and the bombing of Dresden.109 No underground movements sprang up and no popular movements were formed to resist the government. German citizens whose homes had been destroyed still sought to pay their taxes, and until the end of the war, more than 90 percent of Japanese factory workers were still coming to their jobs every day.110

The behavior of democracies is slightly more complicated, but ultimately not materially different. The examples of Algeria, Vietnam, and Lebanon, and the counter-examples of Northern Ireland, Gaza, and Chechnya, paint a clear picture of the strengths and weaknesses of democratic societies: On the one hand, the public’s endurance is much greater than the conventional wisdom; and on the other, in order to break such a country through a war of attrition, all that is necessary is to influence a small and concentrated group–that is, its leadership. If the leadership decides that the war is not worth the cost or the trouble, the public will probably follow it.

But if both political leaders and public opinion are convinced of the rightness and necessity of war, it is extremely difficult to withstand the wrath of a democratic country. The staying power of such countries does not depend on the damage they suffer in human lives and property. Their power lies in what defines their very existence–their belief in democratic values and their wish to protect them. If a democratic society believes in the rightness and necessity of its struggle, and if its leadership can provide a simple and clear answer to the question, “What are we fighting for?” the public will be willing to bear any burden required of them, including casualties, political and military fiascoes, and the economic burdens of war. And this, in the end, is the most important conclusion to be drawn: At the most critical junctures of its history, the citizenry is not the weakest link in a democratic country, but its greatest resource.

The answer is 350,000 soldiers. What's the question?

2006-05-03T20:19:00.000-04:00

The Clinton era was a period in which the military was downsized substantially, achieving a peace dividend that allowed Clinton to raise non-defense spending and cut taxes while reducing the budget deficit. The trade-off was civilian control of the military - whenever the generals did not want to carry out a mission that Clinton requested, they would raise the force requirements to astronomical levels. Rumsfeld came into office determined to re-assert civilian control over the military and put an end to this obstructionism. Mackubin Thomas Owens believes that this may have led to fewer forces being deployed during the invasion of Iraq than was wise. At the same time, he points that the generals were themselves a little too enamored of quick "exit strategies" and were unprepared to pacify Iraq in the aftermath of conventional hostilities:

SECRETARY OF DEFENSE DONALD RUMSFELD has taken a serious beating recently. His critics, including several retired Army and Marine Corps generals, have accused him, in essence, of being personally responsible for perceived failures in Iraq. His critics charge that he ignored military advice and insisted on a plan for Iraq that employed too small of a force, that he failed to adapt to new circumstances once things began to go wrong, that he failed to foresee the insurgency that now rages, and that he ignored the need to prepare for post-conflict stability operations.

The first thing to realize is that disagreements between civilians and soldiers about the conduct of a war are not uncommon in American history. But the critics' charges against Rumsfeld are based on two false premises: (1) in general--that the military, is always right when it comes to military affairs; and (2) in particular, that the things Rumsfeld got wrong in Iraq, the military got right.

The historical record illustrates that the judgment of soldiers is not always on the money. Abraham Lincoln constantly prodded George McClellan to take the offensive in Virginia in 1862; McClellan just as constantly whined about insufficient forces. Despite the image of civil-military comity during World War II, there were many differences between Franklin Roosevelt and his military advisers. George Marshall, the greatest soldier-statesman since Washington, opposed arms shipments to Great Britain in 1940 and argued for a cross-channel invasion before the United States was ready. History has vindicated both Lincoln and Roosevelt.

Many are inclined to blame American defeat in Vietnam on civilians. But the U.S. operational approach in Vietnam was the creature of the uniformed military. The conventional wisdom today is that the operational strategy of General William Westmoreland emphasizing attrition of the Peoples' Army of Vietnam (PAVN) forces in a "war of the big battalions"--sweeps through remote jungle areas in an effort to fix and destroy the enemy with superior fire power--was counterproductive. By the time Westmoreland's successor could adopt a more fruitful approach, it was too late.

During the planning for Operation Desert Storm in late 1990 and early 1991, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of U.S. Central Command presented a plan calling for a frontal assault against Iraqi positions in southern Kuwait followed by a drive toward Kuwait City. The problem was that this plan was unlikely to achieve the foremost military objective of the ground war: the destruction of the three divisions of Saddam's Republican Guard. The civilian leadership rejected the early war plan presented by CENTCOM and ordered a return to the drawing board. The revised plan was far more imaginative and effective.

WHILE RUMSFELD made some critical mistakes, it is clear that no one did better than when it came to predicting what would transpire. Did Rumsfeld foresee the insurgency and the shift from conventional to guerilla war? No, but neither did his critics in the uniformed services.

Last year, Tom Ricks of the Washington Post publicized a study by Maj. Isaiah Wilson III, who served as an official historian of the Iraq campaign and later as a war planner in Iraq. Wilson charged that Army commanders had failed to grasp the strategic situation in Iraq and were still pursuing a flawed approach. "Plainly stated, the 'western coalition' failed, and continues to fail, to see Operation Iraqi Freedom in its fullness. . . . Reluctance in even defining the situation . . . is perhaps the most telling indicator of a collective cognitive dissidence on part of the U.S. Army to recognize a war of rebellion, a people's war, even when they were fighting it."

How about the charge that Rumsfeld's Pentagon has shortchanged the troops in Iraq, by failing to provide them with armored humvees? A review of Army budget submissions makes it clear that the service's priority, as is usually the case with the uniformed services, was to acquire "big ticket" items. It was only after the insurgency and the IED threat became apparent that the Army began to push for supplemental spending to "up-armor" the utility vehicles.

It is true that Rumsfeld downplayed the need to prepare for post-conflict stability operations, but in this he was merely ratifying the preferences of the uniformed military. When it comes to post-conflict stability operations, the real villain is the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, a set of principles long internalized by the U.S. military that emphasizes the requirement for an "exit strategy." But if generals are thinking about an exit strategy they are not thinking about "war termination"--how to convert military success into political success. This cultural aversion to conducting stability operations is reflected by the fact that operational planning for Operation Iraqi Freedom took 18 months while planning for postwar stabilization began half-heartedly only a couple of months before the invasion.

IN RETROSPECT, it is easy to criticize Rumsfeld for pushing the CENTCOM commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, to develop a plan based on a smaller force than the one called for in earlier plans--as well as for his interference with the Time-Phased Force and Deployment List (TPFDL) that lays out the schedule of forces deploying to a theater of war. But hindsight is always 20-20, permitting us to judge another's actions on the basis of what we know now, not what we knew then. Thus the consequences of the chosen path--to attack earlier with a smaller force--are visible to us in retrospect while the very real risks associated with an alternative option--e.g. take the time to build up a larger force, perhaps losing the opportunity to achieve surprise--remain provisional.

The debate over the size of the invasion force must also be understood in the context of civil-military relations. The fact is that Rumsfeld believed that civilian control of the military had eroded during the Clinton administration. If the Army didn't want to do something--as in the Balkans in the 1990s--it would simply overstate the force requirements: "The answer is 350,000 soldiers. What's the question?"

Accordingly, Rumsfeld was inclined to interpret the Army's call for a larger force to invade Iraq as just one more example of what he perceived as foot dragging. In retrospect, Rumsfeld's decision not to deploy the 1st Cavalry Division was a mistake, but again he had come to believe that the TPFDL, like the "two major theater war" planning metric, had become little more than a bureaucratic tool that the services used to protect their shares of the defense budget.

Retrospective criticism is easy. Rumsfeld's detractors would be much more credible if they could point to an instance in which their ability to discern the future was substantially superior to that of the man they have attacked.

You may not be interested in immigration, but immigration is interested in you

2006-05-03T20:06:00.000-04:00

Peter Brimelow on how large-scale illegal (and legal) immigration are negatively affecting native-born Americans:

(It’s hard to see you out there!) Thank you, Jonathan [Justle], thank you, Ladies and Gentlemen. And I want to particularly thank the people at Vanderbilt who organized this. Everybody talks a lot about diversity. But actually it’s surprisingly rare to have an immigration reform point of view presented at a university. I guess the administration is concerned about protecting you!

As you see from my accent, I’m an immigrant here myself. I came here in 1970, when I had to fight dinosaurs and so on to get to Stanford. Maybe that’s what’s responsible for my political views. Nevertheless, my accent is still terrible, according to my children, so if any of you have any trouble understanding me, please raise a fiery cross or some other cultural symbol—this is the South, after all!—and I will redouble my efforts to assimilate acoustically. [laughter]

Now, my topic today is disappearing borders. One of the things about journalists is—and I’m a financial journalist—is that they write what they’re told to. They also write to length, so we will get out of here within in an hour. [laughter].

To show you how assimilated I am, I’m going to quote a poet that no one in England has ever heard of: Robert Frost. Is Anita here? I know she’s a Robert Frost fan, but that’s how it is, isn’t it, Anita [Anita Aboagye-Agyeman, the Vanderbilt senior assigned to meet me at Nashville airport]? [Laughter] Anita was educated in Ghana, so she knows that the British don’t know Robert Frost.

The poem is Mending Wall and I’m sure you all know it. Wall, borders, what’s the difference?

It starts with a famous line:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall

and Frost discusses how he goes out into his farm, north of Boston in New England, to inspect the stone fence that lies between his land and his neighbor’s land. His neighbor, who walks with him, insists upon repairing the fence, even when it’s in an area where there’s no reason to repair it—it’s going through woods or something—the neighbor says: " Good fences make good neighbors".

Frost’s thought about this, which has been much anthologized, is:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.

In other words, Frost proposing a Politically Correct wall.

It’s a famous passage, and really says a lot about Frost’s profound liberalism. Maybe that’s why he was invited to recite a poem at President Kennedy’s Inaugural.

It’s less known—in fact, people who don’t actually read the poem often don’t realize—that the neighbor is completely unconvinced by this. He continues to say, in fact, Frost ends the poem,

He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

That’s the end of the poem.

And it’s an interesting thought: do good fences (and good borders) make good neighbors?

And I’ll be giving my answer at the end of this talk!

Well, here I am an immigrant. How can an immigrant dare pontificate about immigration?

One answer: if you don’t like being told what to do by immigrants, you really have to worry about current immigration policy. Because we’re going to get to the point pretty soon where immigrants are going to be enormously influential in American politics. In fact, the nature of the immigration that’s coming in right now is such that it is rapidly eliminating Kevin Phillips’ "Republican Majority" and transforming traditional Republican states, like first of all California, and fairly soon Texas.

However, I’ll try to answer this question. Here’s a country that’s being transformed against its will, as far as we can tell from public opinion polls, in a way that’s unprecedented in the history of the world, to no particular economic advantage—and you’re not supposed to talk about it! I mean, how could I resist?

That’s why I started writing about immigration in the early 1990s and why I wrote my immigration book, Alien Nation in 1995.

In some ways, being an immigrant makes it easier to talk about immigration. For one thing, we’re always being told that immigrants do dirty jobs that Americans don’t want to do. And here I am. [laughter].

For another thing—immigration is a new issue. Americans are constantly being told that they’re a nation of immigrants. Of course, all nations are nations of immigrants. There’s no known case where people grew out of the ground. The only question is the speed with which the nation was put together.

But it’s not true in another sense as well in the U.S. If you look at American history, and I charted it in Alien Nation, immigration is highly discontinuous. There have been long periods of time when there has been no immigration at all, stretching all the way back into the Colonial period. And those pauses are central to the process of assimilation.

The longest pause was after the Revolution, from about 1790 to the 1830s or 1840s. In New England, which is where I now live, there was absolutely no immigration from the early 1600s to this point in the 1840s when the Irish started to arrive. But New England and America in general grew enormously in that period—through natural increase.

And the second biggest pause, I should stipulate, is after the cutoff that occurred in the 1920s. Through the middle of the 20th century, there was a 40-50 year period when there was essentially no immigration at all.

And that’s had a very peculiar political effect. You know, generally, people don’t have new ideas after they’re 21. It’s probably too late for some of you here! You can see this in academic life. It’s not true that one school of economics refutes another school of economics. What happens is the old guys die off, and they’re replaced by new professors coming up who have different ideas. Well the same applies in political debate.

The current generation of politicians and pundits grew up during a period when there was very little immigration. It was triggered finally by the 1965 Immigration Act, which was part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and it didn’t really start until about 1970. So a lot of these people came to maturity when there was just no immigration at all. And they just haven’t gotten the message.

But most immigrants are fairly skeptical about immigration. They came through the process, you see, and they don’t have the romantic ideas about it that American intellectuals do. Having been through the process and seen how perverse it is, they actually know something about it.

So as an immigrant I have a comparative advantage in this debate!

Now, let’s talk about "disappearing borders."

You often hear people say that we’re moving toward a "borderless world." But this is only true in the First World. When I wrote Alien Nation, I went to the trouble of calling up a lot of the countries that send immigrants to the U.S. I called the Japanese Consulate in New York and asked the official, how could I go about immigrating to Japan? And we have a quote, we taped him. He expressed complete surprise and astonishment. He said: "Why do you want to immigrate to Japan?" He said there might be three people a year who become Japanese, and even they don’t stay long, they try to immigrate somewhere else, like the U.S.

Well, of course, the Japanese reluctance to accept immigrants is quite well known. And they’re not about to change it.

My favorite was India.. When we called them up, the first official we got said, "Are you of Indian origin?" When we said no, he said "Submit your question in writing to the Embassy" and then he hung up!

The second official said "Are you of Indian origin?" and when we asked if it was important, he said yes, and he transferred the call. We finally got to a third official who said "Since you are not of Indian origin"—now remember, he meant race here, we’d already specified we were American citizens—"since you’re not of Indian origin, it’s a very difficult and complex process to immigrate to India. Among other things, it will require obtaining clearances from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Home Affairs. This is a very long process."

In other words, India is running a Brown India program—sort of like the old White Australia policy. And they have probably very good reasons for that. There a quite enough communal problems right now in India, without introducing other divergent elements.

Perhaps one of the most surprising countries where the borders are not "disappearing" despite fashionable belief is Mexico. It’s the largest contributor of both legal and illegal immigration to the U.S. and it’s in the process now of persuading President Bush to open the borders even further.

When we talked to the Mexican official, he said:

"Unless you’re hired by a Mexican company, a Mexican company has obtained a temporary work permit, or you are a retiree over the age of 65 who can prove financial self-sufficiency, you must get a six-month tourist visa, and apply in person to the Ministry of the Interior in Mexico City."

In person!

"If your visa expires before the process is complete, you must get a new visa and begin again."

This is a country which sends two to three hundred thousand legal and illegal immigrants to the U.S. every year.

There is no concept of reciprocity, that they should allow Americans to immigrate there because they immigrate here—even though, of course, the economic opportunities for educated Americans in Mexico would be very high.

That’s the universal thing about the Third World—nobody allows immigration. And there have been several episodes of mass deportation there.

The other day, the Malaysians tried an amnesty for their illegal immigrants from Indonesia. The Malaysian definition of amnesty is very interesting. It means you get to go home without being punished.

And what they mean by punishment is caning. They beat people with a cane if they find them there illegally.

So it really is only in the First World that this idea of "disappearing borders" obtains.

Well, we all know that diversity is strength. So maybe they know something that we don’t know.

Very quickly, let me just summarize the actual facts about the immigration situation. I’ll make three points:

The first point: immigration right now into the U.S. is a very big deal by historic standards.

The Census Bureau says that without immigration, the American population would stabilize somewhere at its current range, right around three hundred million people, because Americans of all races are bringing down their family size to replacement levels. But it’s not going to stabilize, because the American government is second-guessing people on population size through immigration policy, through legal immigration and through not enforcing the laws against illegal immigration.

Because of that, the American population is going to four hundred million, maybe even higher in 2050. And over a third of those people, maybe one hundred and thirty million, will be post-1965 immigrants and their descendants.

There has never been a situation in American history where immigration has had that kind of demographic impact. There has been nothing like it, it’s unique.

The second point: we’re looking at a government policy here. Immigrants are not growing out of the ground. They’re coming because the government either deliberately lets them in, or chooses to turn a blind eye to them coming in illegally. Above all, immigration right now is determined by the 1965 Act, which was passed, as I say, as one of the Great Society reforms.

Government policy is determinative as far as the level of immigration; as far as the skill level of immigrants, which are much lower than they have been historically—this is the first time that on average, immigrants are less skilled than Americans coming in—and, of course, as far as the racial and ethnic composition are concerned.

Because what the 1965 Act did was, it cut off immigration from Europe pretty well, and favored the Third World. Just a handful of countries in the Third World—not all of them. For example, it’s something like about a third of all Jamaicans born in the world live in the U.S. now. Several other smaller countries have shipped substantial numbers of their population to the U.S.

The third point: there’s no economic advantage to this policy at all.

I’m a financial journalist. When I came to look at the technical literature on the economics of immigration in the early 1990s, I was amazed to find that the consensus among labor economists—the consensus—was that the great inflow triggered by the 1965 Act and the simultaneous breakdown of the southern border, which was then something like twenty million people, is not beneficial in aggregate to native-born Americans. It brings no aggregate gain to the native-born Americans. It does increase GDP, but that is virtually all captured by the immigrants themselves in their wages. And that’s the consensus among economists. And it has been for more than ten years.

Since Alien Nation came out, I’m happy to say, my reading of the consensus has been confirmed by the National Research Council’s report, The New Americans, which said the same thing: essentially no benefit to native-born Americans in aggregate; actually a significant loss, because of costs of the welfare state, schools and emergency room health care, that sort of thing, which are very substantial.

The NRC ran a microstudy for California. It found that for every native-born family in California, the immigrant presence in 1996 was costing them something like $1,000 a year. Every native-born family in the state of California is subsidizing the immigrant presence by about $1,000 a year. Essentially, Americans are subsidizing their own displacement.

And this is the paradox created by the existence of the welfare state. And that’s exactly why Milton Friedman, the Nobel economics laureate, says that it’s impossible to have mass immigration and the welfare state together. We’ve had mass immigration in the past in the U.S. And we’ve had a welfare state, since the 1930s. But we’ve never seen them both together. It doesn’t work. It totally alters the incentive structure for immigration.

You might ask yourself, why is it that you can have something like 10 percent of the workforce foreign born and yet you still don’t see any great benefit to the native born. The answer to this is that labor is only a minor part of the factors of production. Even labor and capital together are quite small. There is substantial technical literature on economic growth, and it shows that what drives it is technology. Not increases in labor or increase in capital.

And you see this in Japan of course. The Japanese are world experts in the use of robots. They have robots that bathe people—if you’re an invalid you get stuffed in a robot, a machine that bathes you. Now in California we see the opposite, its economy is moving in a labor-intensive direction in the last 20 years. They’ve started growing strawberries and things like that which need, actually need, stoop labor. They get that stoop labor in the form of illegal immigration. And they don’t pay the full cost of it because the full cost of emergency room healthcare and so on falls on the taxpayer.

However, and this is very important caveat, although there is no aggregate benefit for Americans, immigration does have an enormous impact on the native-born community in the form of the redistribution of income, fundamentally because it reduces wages. It’s transferring income from labor to capital in the U.S., from native-born suppliers of labor to native-born owners of capital. And by no small amount—2-3 percent of GDP every year.

And that explains the class nature of this debate. Although immigration is not beneficial in aggregate to Americans, it is beneficial to people who run factories and farms and things like that. They like it, and so they lobby for it. And, in a common phenomenon in political science, when you have a small organized group that benefits a lot from something, it can overwhelm the disorganized majority that is disadvantaged from it only slightly.

That explains the class nature of this debate, it’s essentially a raid, from an economic standpoint, it’s a raid by the owners of capital on the working class, essentially.

I’ve been involved the American conservative movement for more that 30 years. I worked for John Ashbrook—Ashbrook, not Ashcroft!—against Richard Nixon in 1972. But I have to say this is a very unedifying spectacle, what’s happening here—what the Republicans I’ve supported for so long are doing here.

Let me say a bit more about this impact on wage levels. You know, to paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in immigration, but immigration is interested in you!

About two years ago, George Borjas. who is the leading economist on immigration—he’s a Cuban immigrant who teaches at the Kennedy school at Harvard—he published a paper which for the first time showed substantial impact on wage levels, not simply of the unskilled, but also of college-educated Americans. It appeared, for those of you who are interested, in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in the Fall of 2003. [The Labor Demand Curve Is Downward Sloping]

Borjas showed that immigration from 1980 to 2000 had reduced the wages of the average native-born worker by about 3 percent. But the effects varied dramatically according to age and to skill levels. The worst, of course, was for native-born high-school dropouts. Their wages were reduced by about 9 percent. But even for college graduates, wages were reduced by about 5 percent. The impact was greatest for college graduates with about 10 years experience, i.e. the ones who are raising young families. But even new college graduates’ wages are reduced by about 5% a year. [Vdare.com note: Peter Brimelow was speaking from memory. In fact, it's 3.5 percent, according to Ed Rubenstein.]

This is a substantial cost that’s being imposed on American workers, for no overall benefit. I’m not saying, of course, that immigration is of no value. I think a limited amount of skilled immigration could be justified. I mean look at me, I’m well worth having, I’m sure you agree. [laughter!]

But it’s a luxury, not a necessity. And what you’re going to see, if this trend continues, is that America is going to become Brazil. There are going to be a small number of very wealthy people living in gated communities and a very large number of very poor people sort of scuffling around out there in the dirt. And the one is going to have to be protected from the other.

And this is a profound shift in the American way of life.

If you think about [Frederick Jackson] Turner’s Frontier Thesis, the idea that abundant free land was responsible for American democracy and American political culture—well, the frontier’s closed. Things are heading in an opposite direction now. We may see the Frontier Thesis go into reverse—America’s democratic culture may be destroyed by government-imported inequality and scarcity.

Well, why did all this happen? Well one reason is, it’s just an accident. When the 1965 Act was put through, it was supposed to be a symbolic measure, a gesture to the "non-discriminatory" spirit of the Civil Rights Era. Very explicit assurances were given, for example by Teddy Kennedy, who was actually the floor manager in the Senate, that levels of immigration would not increase, that a particular country would not dominate the flow, and that the ethnic balance would not be shifted and all that kind of thing, all of which have proved to be untrue. So, you know, an accident is a possibility.

Another possibility is the sheer power of the special interests, by which on the hand I mean business—and on the other hand government, which is often overlooked. The government bureaucracy likes to have clients. So does the quasi-government—one of the curious things about current policy is the activity of the refugee agencies, which are in the business of getting refugees into the country, claiming government money for them, and then dumping them on the welfare system. And they’re very good at it.

And the third special interest, of course, is ethnic. Obviously, many of the immigrants themselves want to have more of their own people come in because their political leaders think that will increase their power base. And there are other groups as well, for example the importation of Soviet Jews through the Refugee Act.

I think in the end, and this applies to all of the First World, what we’re looking at here is what I call "Hitler’s Revenge". I think that the intellectual elites and the political elites of the First World were so affected by the Second World War, were so traumatized by the struggle against Nazism, that they sort of went overboard in the opposite direction. They became convinced that any kind of ethnic identity at all was unacceptable. And so they are literally in the process of dissolving their own nations, because they can’t stand the guilt of stopping legal and illegal immigration at the border.

I also favor the explanation of stupidity. I think that’s a good explanation for a lot of things in human affairs. I worked at one stage for the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page. The great editor of the Wall Street Journal, Bob Bartley, once said to me—we were having a dispute about immigration and I wanted to know why they wouldn’t let me respond to their attack on my immigration book—and eventually he said to me, you know, all of this nonsense, nothing can be done about it, the destiny of Europe has already been settled in North Africa.

What he meant that illegal immigration from North Africa was going to overwhelm Europe in the near future.

I was surprised by this because it’s obviously a simple matter to stop North Africans from coming in, I mean, what are they going to do—swim? They can be stopped all right. It’s just a question of whether you’ve got the will or not.

So I said "That’s a poor lookout for the nation-state." And Bartley replied, "I think the nation-state is finished. I think Kenicho Ohmae has got the right idea." Ohmae was a Japanese who was advancing the idea that you were going to see a movement to economic regions that would be governed transnationally rather than through traditional means.

Well, needless to say, I was amazed by this. I knew that Bob’s readership were predominantly conservative Republican who were patriots, nationalists. And that they would be astonished to find that the editor of the Wall Street Journal that they read faithfully everyday believed that the nation-state was finished. I mean, you can see the headlines in one of the Journal’s A-head stories, you know "Editor of Journal Revealed as One-Worlder—Consternation Among Readers—Is Pope Catholic?"

And the thing is, I just don’t see how it would work. You didn’t get to ask Bartley questions like that—he’s dead now, unfortunately—but he wasn’t the kind of boss who encouraged questions and argument.

But, for example, you need borders to stop disease. Even at the time of Ellis Island, about one percent of immigrants were sent back because they were found to have disease. Now, there are all kinds of extraordinary diseases brewing out there in the Third World because of these huge mega-cities that are developing there. But we have really no way of stopping them spreading anymore. We have close to 2-3 million illegal border crossings every year. How are those people being screened for disease? They’re not.

For that matter, actually, there’s no real disease screening for legal immigrants either.

So I just don’t see how this "borderless world" is going to work.

And I don’t see why it’s necessary. I mean, two hundred years ago, when Catherine the Great wanted to have better farming in Russia, she had to bring German farmers in, because the Russian peasants were illiterate and there was no other way of getting the information in.

But now there are telephones! There are fax machines! We can convey economic information, technological information, without actually having to move people around.

So immigration is not necessary. In fact, I would say that exactly the opposite is true. I think that, to the extent that you get free trade in the world, all kinds of small countries can survive, because they don’t have to be vertically integrated. But that’s a technical argument; we’ll perhaps get into that later.

That’s really the ultimate question about the "borderless world"—will it work?

You know, it is true that the U.S. is a nation of immigrants that was put together very quickly—whereas other nations of immigrants, such as Britain, were put together over a thousand years. But the danger of this is that it can be undone equally quickly. It can fall apart, it can become chaotic, it’s like the Tower of Babel, it could collapse into a thousand warring tongues.

I think the truth about the nation state is that it’s actually a relatively recent development in human history. Many of the great ones that we’re aware of, like Italy and Germany, were only really created in the 19 century. They’re a product of modernity and democracy.

You see, if you have a mass educated population, and mass literacy, it absolutely matters what language they function in. Similarly, if you have a voting population, if people to actually vote about how their lives are going to be run, the question arises: what community are they in? Are the Irish in Ireland, where they were in the majority, or are they part of Britain, where they’re outvoted? So the definition of the community become necessary, it becomes critical.

That’s why we see that with freedom, some of these huge syncretic "nations"—like the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, where they actually did try to develop a purely political definition of nationality apart from ethnicity and language—have broken up.

You know, I keep talking about economics. There’s an economist called Garret Hardin who wrote a famous essay called The Tragedy of the Commons. (Have any of you ever heard of The Tragedy of the Commons? Good, good!) It’s really an essay about what happened to the common lands in Europe, why were they overgrazed. They were overgrazed, and eventually they were seized by landlords and broken up and moved into private hands.

The answer is, of course, that when you have common land like that, nobody has an incentive to preserve it. Everybody has an incentive to maximize their own short-term consumption, even though it contributes to long-term degradation of the entire resource.

Hardin himself was a socialist and thought that the government should just have come in to control the commons. But there is another answer—in fact, the answer which has emerged—which is property rights. If you have clearly defined property rights, then it really matters who is grazing on whose land and each property owner has every incentive to preserve his own land and maximize his utility and so on.

I would argue that borders are as essential to free societies as property rights are to free economies. You don’t get functioning free economies without property rights. That’s why for example, there was an early version of the Industrial Revolution in the Netherlands in the late medieval period, but it collapsed basically because inventors couldn’t be sure that they could keep the fruits of their labors.

It was only when you had a firm law of property, as they did in Britain, that the Industrial Revolution was able to get underway.

I think it was only when we have clear borders, and when we have a clear definition of what a citizen is and what his rights and responsibilities are, that we’re going to maintain a civil society, an open society, a liberal democracy.

In other words, you’ll be surprised to know, I think that Robert Frost’s neighbor was right to say "Good fences make good neighbors".

I’m going to conclude with one of my favorite quotations from Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn of course, won the Nobel Prize when he was in the Soviet Union, he wasn’t allowed out to receive it, and then shortly after that he was expelled. The speech had to be read for him.

But there’s a wonderful passage in it in which he said—it was a digression from his main theme—he said

"The disappearance of nations would impoverish us no less than if all men became alike with one nature and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colors and bears within itself a special facet of God’s design."

Now that’s a remarkable statement for somebody who was brought up as a Marxist in that other would-be Universal Nation, the Soviet Union.

It seems to me that the U.S., as it had evolved by 1965, did reflect a special facet of God’s design. That special facet depends upon borders to protect it. And I would like to know why the government has decided no longer to defend them.

Like diners jostling around a bowl of food

2006-05-01T02:55:00.000-04:00

A fellow historian takes a look at Bernard Lewis's storied career as the premier living scholar on history of the Near East, and the sense of thwarted universal empire that drives men like Bin Laden:

Bernard Lewis came to the New World in the nick of time. Fate--or, more appropriately, history--decreed his American journey and the direction it would take. The historian, who will turn 90 in a handful of days, had come to Princeton from London, at the age of 58, in 1974, to do the work of Orientalism which had gained him scholarly renown. But there would be no academic seclusion for him in the years after. The lands of Islam whose languages and cultures he knew with such intimacy would soon be set ablaze. And his adopted country, the bearer of the imperial mantle shed by his own Britannia, would in time make an honored place for him, and all but anoint him its guide into those burning grounds of the Islamic world. He would become the oracle of this new age of the Americans in the lands of the Arab and Islamic worlds.

In the normal course of things, America is not a country given to excessive deference to historians and to the claims of history, for the past is truly a foreign country here. But the past quarter century was no normal time, and Mr. Lewis no typical historian. He knew and worked the archives, it is true; and he mastered the languages of "the East," standing at the peak of his academic guild. But there is more to him than that: He is, through and through, a man of public affairs. He saw the coming of a war, a great civilizational struggle, and was to show no timidity about the facts of this war. "I'll teach you differences," Kent says to Lear. And Mr. Lewis has been teaching us differences. He knew Islam's splendor and its periods of enlightenment; he had celebrated the "dignity and meaning" it gave to "drab impoverished lives." He would not hesitate, then, to look into--and to name--the darkness and the rage that have overcome so many of its adherents in recent times.

We anoint sages when we need them; at times we let them say, on our behalf, the sorts of things we know and intuit but don't say, the sorts of things we glimpse through the darkness but don't fully see. It was thus in the time of the great illusion, in the lost decade of the 1990s, when history had presumably "ended," that Bernard Lewis had come forth to tell us, in a seminal essay, "The Roots of Muslim Rage" (September 1990), that our luck had run out, that an old struggle between "Christendom" and Islam was gathering force. (Note the name given the Western world; it is vintage Lewis, this naming of worlds and drawing of borders--and differences.) It was the time of commerce and globalism; the "modernists" had the run of the decade, and a historian's dark premonitions about a thwarted civilization wishing to avenge the slights and wounds of centuries would not carry the day. Mr. Lewis was the voice of conservatives, a brooding pessimist, in the time of a sublime faith in things new and untried. It was he, in that 1990 article, who gave us the notion of a "clash of civilizations" that Samuel Huntington would popularize, with due attribution to Bernard Lewis.

The rage of Islam was no mystery to Mr. Lewis. To no great surprise, it issued out of his respect for the Muslim logic of things. For 14 centuries, he wrote, Islam and Christendom had feuded and fought across a bloody and shifting frontier, their enmity a "series of attacks and counterattacks, jihads and crusades, conquests and reconquests." For nearly a millennium, Islam had the upper hand. The new faith conquered Syria, Palestine, Egypt and North Africa--old Christian lands, it should be recalled. It struck into Europe, established dominions in Sicily, Spain, Portugal and in parts of France. Before the tide turned, there had been panic in Europe that Christendom was doomed. In a series of letters written from Constantinople between 1555 and 1560, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, imperial ambassador to the court of Suleyman the Magnificent, anguished over Europe's fate; he was sure that the Turks were about to "fly at our throats, supported by the might of the whole East." Europe, he worried, was squandering its wealth, "seeking the Indies and the Antipodes across vast fields of ocean, in search of gold."

But Busbecq, we know, had it wrong. The threat of Islam was turned back. The wealth brought back from the New World helped turn the terms of trade against Islam. Europe's confidence soared. The great turning point came in 1683, when a Turkish siege of Vienna ended in failure and defeat. With the Turks on the run, the terms of engagement between Europe and Islam were transformed. Russia overthrew the Tatar yoke; there was the Reconquista in the Iberian Peninsula. Instead of winning every war, Mr. Lewis observes, the Muslims were losing every war. Britain, France, the Netherlands and Russia all soon spilled into Islamic lands. "Europe and her daughters" now disposed of the fate of Muslim domains. Americans and Europeans may regard this new arrangement of power as natural. But Mr. Lewis has been relentless in his admonition that Muslims were under no obligation to accept the new order of things.

A pain afflicts modern Islam--the loss of power. And Mr. Lewis has a keen sense of the Muslim redeemers and would-be avengers who promise to alter Islam's place in the world. This pain, the historian tells us, derives from Islam's early success, from the very triumph of the prophet Muhammad. Moses was not allowed to enter the promised land; he had led his people through wilderness. Jesus had been crucified. But Muhammad had prevailed and had governed. The faith he would bequeath his followers would forever insist on the oneness of religion and politics. Where Christians are enjoined in their scripture to "render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things which are God's," no such demarcation would be drawn in the theory and practice of Islam.

It was vintage Lewis--reading the sources, in this case a marginal Arabic newspaper published out of London, Al-Quds Al-Arabi, in February of 1998--to come across a declaration of war on the United States by a self-designated holy warrior he had "never heard of," Osama bin Laden. In one of those essays that reveal the historian's eye for things that matter, "A License to Kill," Mr. Lewis would render into sublime English prose the declaration of bin Laden and would give it its exegesis. The historian might have never heard of bin Laden, but the terrorist from Arabia practically walks out of the pages of Mr. Lewis's own histories. Consider this passage from the Arabian plotter: "Since God laid down the Arabian Peninsula, created its desert, and surrounded it with seas, no calamity has ever befallen it like these crusader hosts that have spread in it like locusts, eating its fruits and destroying its verdure; and this at a time when the nations contend against Muslims like diners jostling around a bowl of food. . . . By God's leave, we call on every Muslim who believes in God and hopes for reward to obey God's command to kill the Americans and plunder their possessions whenever he finds them and whenever he can."

Three years later, the furies of bin Laden, and the cadence and content of his language--straight out of the annals of older wars of faith--would remake our world. There would come Mr. Lewis's way now waves of people willing to believe. They would read into his works the bewildering ways and furies of preachers and plotters and foot soldiers hurling themselves against the order of the West. Timing was cruel--and exquisite. The historian's book "What Went Wrong?" was already in galleys by 9/11. He had not written it for the storm. He had all but anticipated what was to come. This diagnosis of Islam's malady would become a best seller. In a different setting, Mr. Lewis had written of history's power. "Make no mistake, those who are unwilling to confront the past will be unable to understand the present and unfit to face the future." We were witnessing an epic jumbling of past and present. It was no fault of this historian that we had placed our bet on the death of the past.

Mr. Lewis has lived a long and engaged life, caught up in the great issues of war and diplomacy--and may he be with us as far as the eye can see, as long as life and good health permit. Some of his detractors, with an excessive belief in his talismans, have attributed to the historian all sorts of large historical deeds. For some, he is the godfather of the accommodation of years past between Turkey and Israel. For others, he inspired the Iraq war, transmitting to Vice President Dick Cheney his faith in the Iraq campaign as the spearhead of an effort to reform the Arab world. (It will, of course, help confirm this view that Mr. Cheney is set to speak to a conference today, hosted by the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia, in honor of Mr. Lewis.) In more recent writings on the historian, George W. Bush's "diplomacy of freedom" in Arab-Muslim lands is laid at Mr. Lewis's doorstep. The president was seen, in one account, with a marked-up copy of a Lewis article. We have come to a great irony: the conservative Orientalist holding out democratic hope for Iraq and its Arab neighbors, while his liberal critics assert the built-in authoritarianism of the Arab political tradition.

For Bernard Lewis, there is something now of the closing of a circle. As a young man, he had been on His Majesty's service during the Second World War, working for British intelligence between 1940 and 1945. The young medievalist had been pressed into modern government work, and that experience had given him his taste for contemporary political affairs. This new war is something of a return to his beginnings. For an immensely gregarious man of unfailing wit and personal optimism, a darkness runs through his view of the future of the Western democracies. "In 1940, we knew who we were, we knew who the enemy was, we knew the dangers and the issues," he told me when I pressed him for a reading of the struggle against Islamic radicalism. "In our island, we knew we would prevail, that the Americans would be drawn into the fight. It is different today. We don't know who we are, we don't know the issues, and we still do not understand the nature of the enemy."

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which once translated one of Mr. Lewis's books into Arabic, said that his book was "the work of a candid friend or an honest enemy." Either way, the Brotherhood said, it was the work of "someone who disdains falsification." And this, to me and to his countless readers, runs to the core of this historian's craft--the aversion to falsification. He has been, always, a man of his own civilization and convictions--a fact that accounts for the deep reservoirs of reverence felt for him in many Muslim and Arab lands. In the American academy, he may be swimming against the currents of postmodernism and postcolonial history; he has given up his membership in the Middle East Studies Association, of which he had been a founding member. But countless Arab and Iranian and Turkish readers recognize their tormented civilization in what he has written. They know that he has not come to the material of their history driven by bad faith, or by a desire for dominion. They take him at his word, a man of the Anglo-Saxon world, convinced that the ways of the West today carry with them the hopes of other civilizations. In one of his many splendid books, "Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Age of Discovery," he gave voice to both his fears and to his faith. "It may be that Western culture will indeed go: The lack of conviction of many of those who should be its defenders and the passionate intensity of its accusers may well join to complete its destruction. But if it does go, the men and women of all the continents will thereby be impoverished and endangered."

Edward Gibbon once called the historian's "I" the "most disgusting of pronouns." In the main we see very little of that pronoun in Mr. Lewis's work. But in the academy he belongs to the ages. He is the peer, and inheritor, of the great Western scholars of Islam--the Hungarian Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921), the Dutchman Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936), the Frenchman Louis Massignon (1883-1962), the British Thomas Arnold (1864-1930), and Mr. Lewis's own teacher, Sir Hamilton Gibb (1895-1971). Mr. Lewis took to the East to understand his own world, because, as he tells us, Western civilization "did not spring like Aphrodite from the sea foam." He wanted to get to the mainsprings of Western civilization.

I shall set aside the ban on that "most disgusting of pronouns." I came to know Bernard Lewis the year he made his passage to America, on the Princeton campus. I was then at the beginning of my academic career, justifiably obscure and anxious. Mr. Lewis was one of the academic gods. I approached him with awe. But his grace was our bridge. I was of the old world he studied; he was keen to know the name of my ancestral village in southern Lebanon. I told him it was an obscure place without history, and gave him its name. He offered me an invitation to examine his archives, and said that he had the land deeds of that remote hamlet. It has been like this with Bernard Lewis: We travel by the light of his work. He weaves for us a web between past and present, and he can pick out, over distant horizons, storms sure to reach us before long.