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Politics and law from a British perspective (hence Politics LAW BloG): ''People who like this sort of thing...'' as the Great Man said
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Saturday, November 30, 2002
The Silent Senator of Mr Smith Goes To WashingtonHattie Caraway was the first woman elected; the first woman elected in a general election; the first woman elected to two full terms, in the US Senate. The only previous female US Senator was the 87 year old Rebecca Latimer Felton of Georgia - who served two days! Caraway, thankfully, is eminently searchable - and there is a fair amount on her online, as for example, this. The first thing that interested me was the name of her husband (whose Senate seat she assumed) - Thaddeus, name of the arch-abolitionist and scourge of the South - and son of the 18th century to boot! - Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania! Germane to the film is her connection with the Louisiana Kingfish, Huey Long. Appointed by Arkansas Governor Harvey Parnell to fill the seat on her husband's death, she had the temerity and gall to decide to run for re-election in November 1932. Long (by then, himself a US Senator) rallied round with support in person, and she won. Long was, perhaps, the closest that the US came to a totalitarian leader in the 1930s. If he'd survived, he'd no doubt have fought Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination and lost in 1936. But, in 1940, there would be the third term question - and, it's conceivable that a cleaned-up, house-trained Long might have been in a position to take the nomination. (I'd like to see the math on that, though!) Jefferson Smith, in the film, is that Long (minus a whole bunch of brain-cells!): Buchman has to see him fail. But, with Caraway, what I have yet to get any handle on is why she, of umpteen senatorial widows in one-party states, should have been given the seat; and then, chosen to stick out for retaining the seat given her by way of courtesy. There is some stuff published (her journals, for instance) - but she's not been given the attention I'd have expected with such a striking female first. (The name game continues with her political demise - losing the 1944 primary to one William Fulbright, Jim Crow liberal and latterly scourge of Johnson and Nixon over Vietnam. It was a good time for famous senatorial ousters: in 1946, in Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy winkled out Robert LaFollette, Jr - son of the 1924 third party presidential contender, for whom Burton K Wheeler was running mate; in 1952, JKF did the same to Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr in Massachusetts....) | Like the rest, she exemplifies the Sidney Buchman thesis: US politics is dirty and cheap (and expensive!), but it's much better than the pure, totalitarian version on offer on the European continent. She's a sentimentalist - all that blubbing when Smith is at the end of his filibuster! - and all the worse for it. She's selectively ignorant (and out of character) in her surprise at Boss Taylor's mobilisation of the media against Smith. But she doesn't lose sight of the fact that Smith is a tool in her schemes; and, very much so, the scheme is what's important. Hence her jubilation at the (deliberately ragged) end of the movie. Yet we know- and she knows - that her scheme could never work. The absurd mock-suicide of the old Senator (Claude Rains) underlines the unreality. How many Senators were elected fair and square, without machines or poll taxes or CIO or corporations fixing the results? As Maine goes, so goes Vermont! In real life, Smith would be on the funny farm before he could say 'Mr President'! The impression given is that secretary is about as high as a woman could aspire to in the US Senate. (In the bill-writing scene, Arthur mention the difficulty of discussing a new bill between 96 men.But, as I mentioned on Friday, Hattie Caraway sat as Senator for Arkansas throughout 1939. Known as Silent Hattie (a moniker pinched, no doubt, from Calvin Coolidge) for her lack of floor contributions, she was there, nevertheless. The fact that the Arthur character ignores her is, no doubt, another one of Buchman's jokes! And she's definitely worth at least a nice, fat footnote..... | The Fallen Hero(ine) of Mr Smith Goes To Washington - and her sistersIt's nicely paradoxical: in Hollywood 1939 worldview, a woman in the Senate could be vicious, cynical, and abusive - and still come out on top (kinda) - though of the lowly rank of secretary. Yet today - I doubt very much whether the marketing people would allow such an un-touchy-feely, unredeemed, unepiphanised female lead in any Hollywood film. This, needless to say, is not the received view of the Jean Arthur character. From what I've read, she's actually supposed to believe the hooey - worse, to be converted to such belief by the simpering simpleton Jefferson Smith! I'm no feminist, but that's too much, even for me! Arthur was, of course, always there to be pulled off the shelf to play the shopgirl/secretary type, cynical but susceptible to the right man. From Frank Capra, she gets two rehearsal pieces for Clarissa Saunders: in Mr Deeds Goes To Town, she plays the hard-boiled hack who plays Gary Cooper for a sucker before falling for him. It's ultimately a very disappointing film (I'll come back to it, by and by) - and she does nothing to help it. And then You Can't Take It With You, another bad miss (and writer Robert Riskin's last chance for Capra), where Arthur starts out promisingly, but gets dragged down into the sentimental quagmire. But, from her first scene in Mr Smith, she's clear as a bell and about as hard. It's as if she senses the genuine article after so much phoney stuff, and goes for broke. Essential are the three Petrine betrayals: she sets up Smith with the pack of journos, knowing he'll be portrayed as a hick; she fails to tell Smith that his boys' camp is on the site of the crooked dam (and what the reaction is going to be to his introducing his bill); and she leads him into the filibuster, knowing it could never be effective. Why? She's not evil from birth, I think; she's just fatally warped by immersion in the political game. Sexually, first of all. The film doesn't say - but the bill-writing scene with Smith (and others) clearly show this girl's been round the block a few times. I like to think she accommodated a Senator to save her doctor father with a manager's job in the WPA when he went bust; I don't think she refuses the Irish soak journo because she's holding out for Mr Right! | Friday, November 29, 2002
Brazilian Indians want their remains back - Kennewick 2?This seems a rather trickier issue than Kennewick (last discussed here. Blood samples obtained by anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and geneticist James Neel from the Yanomami (amongst other tribes) in the 1960s and 1970s were used for research on radiation, and passed to the Human Genome Project. They are apparently now property of the US Government. [The information trail started (for me, that is!) with the Discriminations blog, with a link to a piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only!). The site provides gratis just this paragraph. A little nosing around produces this, rather more explanatory, piece.] Amongst a number of points (eg, the scientists' lack of care about diseases they brought with them) is the salient role that blood and mortuary taboos play in their ritual life. Apparently, The Yanomami destroy everything that belonged to a deceased person; they cremate the body and the relatives never mention his or her name again. Which, of course, raises the question why they parted with all these samples in the first place. (Even if, as they say, they thought they would be used for research into diseases like malaria.) Perhaps the Kennewick experience has made me over-cynical (if that's possible!) about such claims, and the tendency of the non-indigenous (politicians, especially) to accept them at face value. But I can't help smelling a rat. (Or, perhaps, a coypu....) A good deal more to come on this, I suspect. [The samples issue aside, the recent history of the Yanomami has been a miserable one, according to this report - of US anthropologists!] | Home of MOUT training - in memory of Somalia deadIf some proponents of regime change in Iraq give the impression of taking the mechanics a tad casually, the same could not (thankfully) be said for the US military. The Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, LA (mentioned in this article in yesterday's piece) has at its heart Shughart-Gordon Village, the urban battleground over which MOUT exercises are 'fought'. This 'village' is named after Mst Sgt Gary Gordon and Sgt Randall Shughart, whose actions during the ill-fated action of the US Rangers in Mogadishu on October 3 1993 won them the Medal of Honor. The award was posthumous. Details of the Center and its activities here and here. (Another source of useful MOUT material that I've just come across is the Urban Operations Journal site.) | Women US Senators - rare birds indeedPondering a piece on women and the Senate in 1939 in the little series inspired by Mr Smith Goes To Washington, I naturally light on the fascinating character of Hattie Caraway (of whom more later). Suffice for the (late) moment my modest surprise to learn that third female US Senator to serve two complete terms retired as late as 1997! (Nancy Landon Kassebaum, that is [some relation of Alf Landon, surely?]; Caraway was the first, Margaret Chase Smith the second.) Something like a third of the roster of female Senators were first elected in the 1990s or later - a slightly out of date list here. | Thursday, November 28, 2002
Court challenge to Blair's Iraq policy - updateThe court action being mounted by the (UK) Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament will (according to a contributor to this evening's Channel 5 News) come before a judge tomorrow for a decision whether a substantive hearing will be granted. The CND site includes a copy (800KB file!) of the Government lawyer's response to the CND challenge. Rather as I suggested, the defence set out is that the issue of HMG's compliance with international law obligations is not generally justiciable before a UK court; and that there is no obligation on HMG to provide reasons for its actions in relation to Iraq. As well as the Abbasi case, the lawyer's letter cites the recent House of Lords decision in R v Lyons on the first question [1]. CND got a flurry of publicity in the UK media around the filing of the papers with the court earlier today. But I've seen nothing to revise my view (could still be a rabbit in the CND hat!) that, on the merits, the case ought peremptorily to be rejected, and a substantive hearing denied. Judicial nullification ought perhaps not wholly to be discounted - it's just possible that the Government might even welcome a full hearing, for the chance it would give to pulverise the CND case with proper ceremony.....
| US Army bazooka question againSome further particulars from Capt Heinrichs: that the M-72 (which is no longer used by either the US or Canadian forces) performed excellently in urban operations - it was able to penetrate three feet of concrete or six feet of sandbags. (It's still made in Norway, of all places!) And the US Army (as opposed to Special Forces and Marines as previously discussed) currently has at its disposal the M 136 AT4 light anti-armour weapon, firing an 84mm warhead (further details here). The AT4 apparently penetrates more than 14 inches of armour; but I could see nothing in the documentation referring to its performance in penetrating masonry. I suspect I'll be coming back to the question by and by.... | Of course, as the TechCentralStation article says, the Iraqis will be besieged, cut off from supplies, regularly bombarded with precision munitions. But, just somehow, I reckon that they've worked this out for themselves! They - and I think we'll be talking mainly about the seven divisions of the Republican Guard and four brigades of the Special Republican Guard (vide the Anthony Cordesman paper) - will have put their men and best equipment in or near mosques, schools, hospitals, blocks of flats; will have laid in an Aladdin's Cave of victuals (for military consumption only, of course!); will have promiscuously mined and booby-trapped without thought of generations of children to come; will have (in the case of Baghdad) the Tigris river for water; etc, etc. What the TCS article does not suggest is that the Iraqi forces will be lacking any of the natural advantages that MOUT gives to defenders. And, to match the vast US technological superiority, the Iraqis will be exploiting to the maximum asymmetries irrelevant to, for example, the defenders of Stalingrad or Berlin during World War 2. And, in all sorts of ways, time will be on the side of the Iraqis. All in all, a chilling piece of War Party insouciance. | Could US really win Iraq war without serious urban warfare?I've previously discussed (most recently here and here) the practical necessity for Iraqi forces to concentrate in cities, and fight an asymmetric MOUT campaign, attempting to minimise their own casualties, and at the same time maximising the civilian casualties (aka collateral damage) of US/allied operations, and thus producing a time-winning, waters-muddying Mutla Ridge PR effect. I'd somehow managed to overlook this piece, which suggests that, though MOUT are every bit as nasty and difficult as I've said, US forces would be able to avoid them, and still win. Now, as I've mentioned once or a dozen times, I'm no expert in this area. But this does seem to be an overly sanguine analysis. A sample: Cities....lack the fundamental requirements necessary for effective defense. Cities may provide many places that can be converted into effective firing positions. But they lack other important things, such as clear fields of fire, or easily interlocking zones of defense. Visibility is limited, making it difficult to obtain a clear picture of enemy positions or movements. All true, no doubt; but these are points that apply to any MOUT. Yet, as this article exemplifies, MOUT, in general, is something that the US military apparently takes very seriously - with a specialist training centre in existence, and plans for no fewer than 80 MOUT sites in all by 2009. (My understanding is that, if you were ranking in descending order of magnitude the areas in which the US military had an edge over the rest, right now, MOUT would be relatively low down on the list!) | Wednesday, November 27, 2002
No, what Bush needs is a route that is
The assumption in, for example, the legal opinions got by CND and Peacerights is that the UN Charter is controlling. Bush's strategy may be to deny that argument. Now, I've never pretended to be an expert on this; but there seem to be one or two avenues worth exploring. In particular, the precedent of the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo. There, there was no Security Council endorsement of military action - and, subsequently, a good deal of effort was put into showing the action was lawful despite that fact. Obviously, there are many differences between Kosovo and Iraq; but it is certainly true that international law is more than the UN Charter. There is customary law as well [2]. And the Kosovo apologists sought to say that, if the Charter didn't cover the action, customary law did [3]. And there is a recent article in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy by Prof Michael Glennon (mentioned by Instapundit) which concludes that, on account of its generally having been ignored, the [UN] Charter's use-of-force regime has all but collapsed. Bush found the lawyers to get the courts to throw him the election - don't think he hasn't got mouthpieces a-plenty working on this little problem.....
The assumption in, for example, the legal opinions got by CND and Peacerights is that the UN Charter is controlling. Bush's strategy may be to deny that argument. Now, I've never pretended to be an expert on this; but there seem to be one or two avenues worth exploring. In particular, the precedent of the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo. There, there was no Security Council endorsement of military action - and, subsequently, a good deal of effort was put into showing the action was lawful despite that fact. Obviously, there are many differences between Kosovo and Iraq; but it is certainly true that international law is more than the UN Charter. There is customary law as well [2]. And the Kosovo apologists sought to say that, if the Charter didn't cover the action, customary law did [3]. And there is a recent article in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy by Prof Michael Glennon (mentioned by Instapundit) which concludes that, on account of its generally having been ignored, the [UN] Charter's use-of-force regime has all but collapsed. Bush found the lawyers to get the courts to throw him the election - don't think he hasn't got mouthpieces a-plenty working on this little problem.....
| Bush and the UN - an elegant way out to war?There's no doubt the voices urging Bush against the UN route had a point: once he submitted the Iraq problem to UN Security Council scrutiny, he would have to play the international law game with particular finesse. Thus, Bad Cop Rumsfeld has waved around the issue of firing on Coalition aircraft in the No Fly Zones as unacceptable - and a White House spokesman gone as far as mentioning the key phrase material breach in connection therewith. But the Adminstration is sitting on its hands for the moment, watching developments, rather than leaping up with a claim to the Security Council (knowing that the UK, importantly, does not construe para 8 of UNSCR 1441 as applying to NFZ patrols) [1]. But, clearly, that's just a holding position. How is the Adminstration to get its war (assuming that, when the time comes, it still wants one)? Today's Guardian gives a useful run-through of the various possible outturns. It suggests that, most likely, Saddam will play Uriah Heep, and the inspectors will find nothing. So what does Bush do then? He could just say that the inspection option had seemed a good idea at the time, but now it was back to Plan A. Trouble is, he got such a boost to his international reputation as a statesman (starting from a pretty low base!) from taking the UN route that he'd be reluctant to surrender the legitimacy. He could argue the material breach point in the Security Council, based on the accumulated acts and omissions of the Iraqis during the inspection. He might assume a Chinese abstention, buy Russia off with a pile of gelt, and rely on Chirac not wanting to stand alone. But that's messy, will take time (how long did SCR 1441 take to agree?), and lies outside the Administration's control. | Tuesday, November 26, 2002
University of Tennessee blackface incident overUT have passed on a Quizotic tilt at the First Amendment, and decided to drop disciplinary charges arising from the incident (last discussed here). (UT's version of events here.) The Kappa Sigma chapter at UT-Knoxville remains suspended - the 1st Amendment is no help with that. [Link via Volokh] | The other comparison, of course, is with the cops' Mutt and Jeff routine. The UN resolution saga was a typical example (with Tony Blair joining Powell on the sweet reason team). The Rumsfeld/Cheney faction go in hard, rubbishing the very idea of a UN role at the very time that Powell is pushing the line that the inspectors must go back. And then Bush - supposedly firmly in the hardliners' camp - stands up before the General Assembly, and turns out to have been a UN man all along! His sternest critics (those in friendly governments, at least) were forced to acknowledge Bush as statesmanlike, going the extra mile, etc, etc. But the UN was well off the critical path: it was no skin off Bush's nose to have inspectors in in November, when his forces would only be ready to invade in February! He could pull on the mantle of Woodrow Wilson, without costing his war preparations a day's delay. Fact is, it's a logical extension of the separation of powers: national cohesion achieved by moving forward at the pace of the slowest. Bush shot his bolt when it came to Congressional restraint (perhaps anticipating bad mid-term election results). But, in a way, it's even better for him now, since the folks who would be holding him back just happen to serve at his pleasure! The pyrotechnics of his warring Cabinet give him cover, if not misdirection, for any decision he wants to make. Even a decision to abort the war for the 2002/3 fighting season, and let the inspectors inspect properly. | Subordinates at war - Bush plays FDR gameThe only problem with the old saying Truth is the first casualty of war is its premiss.... One of the games the Adminstration has been playing - most particularly in the context of preparations for war in Iraq - is the battle of the subordinates. As witness last Sunday's New York Times, the story is something of a hardy perennial for journos. Even as the Adminstration was being formed, two foreign policy camps - hawks and doves were being established in the public imagination. Cheney and Rumsfeld in the first camp, Powell in the second. Conflict between these camps is not accidental but engineered into the system. The views of each camp are plausible - and may, indeed, be genuinely held by those concerned. But, it seems to me, the system is a fabrication, deliberately designed to provide cover for the President in whatever he decides. The system is not new - it is that employed by Franklin Roosevelt as US President. (The mutual loathing of Harry Hopkins and Harold Ickes was something of a byword, for instance.) FDR's purpose was, I suspect, not (or not wholly!) narcissistic, to see courtiers squabble over the place closest to him; but rather to give him cover - and to demonstrate to the various sections of the Democratic Party that their views were represented at the highest level. So, the system would have us believe, Bush is getting the widest range of advice on the matter most vital to the nation (the LBJ/Vietnam MO is a natural antithesis); he's not a puppet of either side; he's the Chief Executive, making the final decision from a genuine range of options; and - most importantly - he has cover for changing his mind at any point. In baseball terms, such a change is like moving from a 9-10 to an 11-10 game - it's given the ring of truth by the competing advice he's being bombarded with (supposedly). As far as Bush is concerned, the FDR method works at two additional levels:
| US Army bazooka question - CorrectionMy informant, Capt Heinrichs, is a member of the Canadian forces. A salutary reminder against jumping to conclusions! | UK Commons - war opposition divided and ruled againThe debate - on a motion based on UN Security Council Resolution 1441 [1] - duly took place. And the parliamentary forces sceptical about, or opposed to, the war on the terms currently offered by Blair/Bush were duly routed. The problem seems to have been that the amendment called from the sceptics was one proposed by the Liberal Democrats (the third party in the UK Parliament); and Labour sceptics/opponents were unwilling, on sectarian grounds, to support a Liberal amendment. By such mind-blowing onanistic stupidity are wars let through on the nod! My guess would be that, given a free vote (UK legislators have a constitutional excuse for being supine that their US counterparts do not have!), there would be a clear majority in favour of a resolution that war should only be undertaken with express Security Council authorisation. Conservative sceptics are kept in check by the more Catholic than the Pope attitude of their leader. Labour sceptics are as fussy eaters as koalas when it comes to the fuel for their rebellion! In the event, the amendment called [2] related only to a Commons vote being given in the event of UK participation in military action. Pretty feeble; but not feeble enough to pass! So far, I've just skimmed Foreign Secretary Jack Straw's speech, and I'm sure there's goodness there to extract. For instance, he confirmed that there had yet been no callup of reserves. In the critical path analysis, such a callup is crucial, given that medical support for the military is now overwhelmingly provided by doctors in the reserves. And Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon indicated that the Challenger 2 tank (2002's Tommy Cooker) will be desertified (next, they'll be talking about beer being pubified!) in time for the war. More to come here, I suspect.
| Monday, November 25, 2002
US Army bazooka question - clarification from a military sourceA reader from the US military [CORRECTION] has kindly put me wise to one or things arising from my earlier piece. The key allegation in the USA Today article, you'll recall, was that US forces were .....missing one inexpensive, potentially critical armament: an assault weapon that could quickly blow holes in buildings during the gritty, block-to-block warfare that could occur in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. It ain't necessarily so.... In fact, a range of weapons are in use by US forces with ammunition designed to blow holes in buildings. The MAAWS, produced by Bofors, aka the 84mm Carl Gustav, in use for 40 years (!) by Canadian forces. According to this (1998-vintage?) page, however, the weapon is only available to the Rangers and the Navy Seals. The Marines use the SMAW [1] for the purpose. (In 1995, they apparently had 1,364 launchers in stock.) Again, the weapon is just for Marines use [2]. Historically, the bazooka was designed as an anti-armour weapon - use as an assault weapon was secondary. The same goes for the M-72. Conclusion: it's incorrect to say that US forces don't have specialist weapons systems available to do the hole-busting job. But these systems are (mostly? entirely?) confined, it seems, to the Special Forces and the Marines. And, in urban warfare in Iraq, a large amount of the fighting will be done (presumably) by infantry units. There are some indications online - judge reliability for yourselves! - of disquiet elsewhere in the US military about this state of affairs. This guy from the 101st Airborne, for instance, wanting to be issued with Carl Gustavs. And this piece suggests a tradition in the US military of relying in infantry combat on rifle and machine-gun fire at the expense of rockets. Clearly, I'm on a vertical learning-curve! But it does seem that there is a genuine problem here. To which I shall return, as more information comes to hand.
| War: new UK poll shows 50:50 split between pros and antis; UN role vitalAccording to the latest poll, the split (pro/anti/don't know) is 39/40/21. Unfortunately, only one question is asked [1]. In particular (and in contrast to the US polling that I've seen) no extra questions are asked to cover issues like the breadth of the offensive alliance or prior UN approval. The main recent movement is from don't knows to pros, following (post hoc, propter hoc?) the passing of UN Security Council Resolution 1441. Compare this with the Gallup US numbers of a fortnight ago [2] - on the basic invasion question, US opinion divides 59/35 in favour. On the UN question [3], Gallup shows 31% favouring invasion regardless of UN authorisation, 40% only with, and 24% against invasion altogether. The importance (on both sides of the pond) of a UN imprimatur is clear from the figures. No wonder the Adminstration is working the material breach and implied authority arguments to death!
| Sunday, November 24, 2002
Caro's Master of the Senate - clarification/correction/retractionAround ten days ago, I dashed off a piece on my new bedtime reading, the third volume of Robert Caro's autobiography of Lyndon Johnson. In the (so often fatal) quest for a striking envoi, I cast doubt on the book as a work of scholarship - based on a couple of dyspeptic pieces I'd dredged up online. Having subsequently been called on the remark - and having failed, despite a deal of searching, to trace the pieces concerned - I'm happy to strike it (metaphorically speaking) from the record. (Not that Caro needs worry about my opinion - he's just picked up a prize for the book!) In fact, the book (sez me!) is turning out nicely, to judge from the first half: the detail (though perhaps taken to excess) is generally an easy read (especially for a political book!) and essential for the reader to put himself in the bizarro world of the mid-century Senate. The only real problem I'm having is with Johnson personally - one expects to feel repulsion in contact (actual or vicarious) with a politician. But with Johnson, the politician - and the repulsion - are truly Texas-sized! But, so far, Caro (and the compulsive nature of the history he has to relate) have got me holding my nose and ploughing on regardless. I suspect it may turn out to be one of my favourite books on American politics (current champion is a slowly disintegrating first (1952) edition of Samuel Lubell's Future of American Politics - which is thankfully so much shorter!). Still 500+ pages of the Caro to go, though..... | Has Harvard President nobbled Google over affair with professor?Idly searching as one does, I entered Google just now with the names of the pair alleged earlier this week by the Harvard Crimson to be 'dating': (President) Lawrence Summers and (boss of undergraduate English) Elisa New. I was surprised see that only three items were returned - a couple being Harvard admin stuff, the third being my piece from Friday, based on the Crimson article. How could this matter have gone uncommented on online? As gossip, if not for its implications for the running of Harvard. And how come, if my piece is there, the Crimson piece is not: according to the Google page, the Crimson site has been spidered since the article was put up. Now, I'm loath to think conspiracy; Egypt's favourite Protocols, antics on the Grassy Knoll, UN taking over the White House: stuff for the birds. But Google has certainly a history of being leant on - though usually with DCMA artillery, rather than to protect reputations (search on Google here [1] for a (no doubt, incomplete) list). Naturally, I went to the original Crimson page - to find it in perfect working order. Perhaps Summers found it too embarrassing (or futile) to try to hush up in house a story well known on campus. The evidence of dirty dealings is certainly the opposite of cogent right now. But being the only guy in the world on electronic record [2] as commenting on the story is an unwonted - not to say, lonely - experience! Liable to spook a person......
| Nigeria: the next big war?Nigeria is notoriously a white man's graveyard. Though vastly outnumbering in population the white-journo-friendly South Africa, it traditionally gets much less news coverage in the West. The Miss World riots have given media a peg to hang Nigeria on the brink? stories, but, no doubt, the attention will be fleeting. A useful piece here sketches in some background: but it's a situation that really warrants monitoring that, Iraq oblige, it's not getting. (As witness the fact that my last piece on Nigeria was back in August!) | Mr Smith Goes To Washington - the Montana connectionA movie I've mentioned before once or twice - but which, as a source of information (OK, trivia - mostly) and a trigger for an interest in American political history, just keeps on giving. The Sidney Buchman script offers a treasure-hunt of circumstantial details and allusions for the connoisseur. Take Montana, for instance. Jefferson Smith's home state is never specified in the movie, of course. But it's out West, and a two day train journey from DC (a change of trains obligatory at (from memory) Chicago or St Louis in 1939). And the book (treatment, more like) on which the movie is based is entitled The Gentleman from Montana (though, in the movie, no Senator during debate is referred to by his state, for obvious reasons!). Whereas some states were controlled by machines - often, as with New York, by a combination of big city Democrats and upstate Republicans - Montana was notoriously a company state. And the company in question was Anaconda Copper. (The company has eight pages (starting on p166) in the Montana chapter of John Gunther's essential Inside USA (1947) - on which a good deal of my knowledge of America of the period is derived (for better or worse!)). Anaconda's corrupt control of state politics was no less secure than that of the fictional boss of Smith's state, though the boss seems closer to Hague or Pendergast (there is a strong Missouri connection that I'll come back to). Montana also had Senator Burton K Wheeler - of the LaFollette Western liberal/isolationist stripe (though LaFollette's running mate in the 1924 Presidential elections, he always ran for the US Senate as a Democrat) - whose relationship with Anaconda (by Gunther's account) was hard to fathom. (Certainly, Gunther doesn't make him the puppet of Anaconda, as Smith's colleague is the puppet of the movie's Boss.) A colourful online bio of Wheeler is here. (He died only in 1975). A final Montana connection comes in the person of Harry Carey, Jr - who plays the Vice President who (fantastically) takes the chair at most Senate sessions we see in the movie. Apparently, Carey once (around 1900) toured in a production of his own play, Montana, and made himself $250,000 in the process! | Saturday, November 23, 2002
US forces deployments as sluggish as UKA piece by historian John Keegan that I've held back for a few days in the hope of finding some corroborative detail. However.... The first few paragraphs are either tedious or tendentious. Then he gets to the bull point: So far, [Bush] has positioned almost none of the necessary force at all, at least none of the force that requires time to move. What there is, more or less in theatre, is: .....several hundred military aircraft on airfields in Turkey, the Gulf states, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and aboard aircraft carriers. The warships of two task groups are at sea in Arabian waters. The heavy equipment necessary to deploy one armoured division has been unloaded in Kuwait. There are several thousand marines off shore and one airborne brigade in Afghanistan. And, as he points out, that's nowhere enough for an invasion. To ask the King's Row question, Where's the rest of it? No American division has left Germany or the United States. Both home-based marine divisions are still in America. So are the airborne and air assault divisions, together with the home-based armoured division and two mechanized divisions. He puts at 1-2 months the lead time to move one of these divisions into theatre. Allied to this is the question of the call-up of reserves. The way US military manpower is currently structured, requirements for large numbers of reservists (the DOD quoted as suggesting up to 200,000) will be triggered by any Iraq invasion. The National Guard and Reserve together represent 47% of the total US military headcount. Yet, according to this no mobilization plan is in place for a possible war with Iraq and [the DOD offered] no idea of how many people might be involved (The callup for an Iraq invasion would come on top of several post 9/11 callups (details to the end of November 2001 here) with around 50,000 still on military duty in consequence.) Does this sound like an Administration bent on ousting Saddam before April? | For want of a bazooka....the war may have to be postponed?As previously discussed, the likely Iraqi strategy in the event of invasion will be to hole up in the cities and shelter behind civilian flesh and masonry. The US response would have to be some combination of siege and assault - MOUT - for which troops have been training - and for which there are useful manuals helpfully placed online by the DOD itself (and linked here). But somehow, with all this training and expertise - and a procurement budget the envy of armies around the planet - someone forgot to commission a weapon with which soldiers could blow holes in the sides of buildings. What, you may ask, happened to the bazooka, that war film stalwart? Phased out during the Vietnam War - for no reason specified in the article. The IDF has something that will do the trick, apparently; and so do the French. But not Uncle Sam's boys. Why do the US brass drop this minor bombshell now, of all times? (It doesn't sound like a piece of investigative journalism!) Well, apparently the Stryker armoured vehicle can be fitted with a 105mm cannon that would do the job; only the Stryker will not see service till May 2003. Are the brass sending a message to the pols to delay the start of hostilities? Not to get anyone's hopes up, but.... | Friday, November 22, 2002
After Paulin fiasco, a 're-education camp' at Harvard English DepartmentIf you thought that the entertainment value of Tom Paulin's on-off-on invitation was over - think again! The cause of the nonsense was, it seems, a lack of coordination and suitable procedures. But the Department's Director of Undergraduate Studies, Professor Elisa New, prescribes a remedy of -
The Crimson quotes one student's response to the forum:
As opposed to Wolof, does she mean? It gets better. The good professor, it seems, is, schedules permitting, currently being boffed by no less a personage than Harvard President Lawrence Summers. And the forum idea is being attributed by some to her bedmate. Has the man learnt nothing from the experiences of his former boss with liaisons with work subordinates? Not according to this colleague of New's: Certainly there are some professors who think that she’s a mouthpiece for the president. Further comment clearly superfluous..... | Virtual child pornography - House and Senate bills now deadThe House adjourned a short while ago (breaking news, we got it!) with HR 4623 already defunct and S 2520 still held at the desk. Unless some alternative bill was sneaked across from the Senate without me realising (and how likely is that....), the Great Legislative Revenge for Ashcroft v Free Speech Coalition, masterminded (and I use the term loosely) by the A-G himself, has turned to dust. Roll on the 108th Congress, I say.... | British military travails - relevance to Iraq?In the past few days I've been banging on about the difficulties the UK's armed forces will face in putting together the substantial contribution that they are expected to make (working back from here). Some may be wondering at the relevance of such matters to the campaign to scupper Bush's war plans. This is how I see it: On the question whether to attack Saddam, the official opposition in both the US and UK has folded its tents and slunk away. Unofficial opposition has yet to have any noticeable effect on policy in either country. In particular, it has failed to turn the consistent poll majorities in both countries for no war without allies and UN authorisation into an effective political force. Military chiefs and bureaucrats, though, have expressed doubts (unattributed, of course!). And, a couple of days ago, the top UK military commander, Sir Michael Boyce, went on the record to express his extremely concerned views on the proposed UK deployment. The US doesn't need the UK for military reasons: with notorious equipment and training failures, and general concerns on interoperability, the UK contingent would be a military minus. It's for political cover they need British troops - and something more than just a couple of hundred SAS and Paras. Boyce is (I believe) the first real chink in the armour - the first senior in-post dissenter. He's not going to disobey his political masters flat-out: but he's bound to be a rallying-point within the military for opposition to a large deployment to Iraq. The currently comatose Conservative opposition are viscerally inclined to support the Services, and Boyce's intervention may kick them into action. And Labour backbench MPs (beyond the usual left-wing troublemakers) may find technical military problems a more congenial pretext for opposition to the Great Leader than a clash of principles! There is a debate in the House of Commons next Monday (November 25), and Blair will win the vote then. But, the longer the fire service dispute drags on - no sign of a settlement - the better the chance that a big UK deployment will be delayed beyond the 2002/3 fighting season. Leaving Bush to go it alone, or not at all: straw for opposition forces in the US to make bricks with. | Thursday, November 21, 2002
Stanford also argued expressive association: but Dale seems clearly to have changed the law in this area. A private college defending its speech code can now argue that banning all that nasty, horrid speech is a vehicle for its message of diversity - though, as the paper suggests (bottom p27), colleges may pretend their codes aren't suppressing speech, which itself dilutes the message that the 1st Amendment expressive association right is claimed to be protecting! That said, state laws like the Leonard Law could, on the basis of Dale, be struck down on First Amendment grounds. State Constitutions, such as that of Massachusetts [4], providing broad guarantees of free speech, may well, presumably, have to yield in the same circumstances. That's as far as I've got with the question so far - though, given its topicality, I'm sure I'll be coming back to it. If nothing else, the speech code controversy illustrates the fallacy of the popular belief that the First Amendment guarantees free speech!
| Private universities and the First AmendmentAt the end of the latest piece on the Tom Paulin/Harvard saga, I said I'd return to the question of private universities and the First Amendment. The question is also made current by the proposed imposition of a speech code by Harvard Law School. My lay, transatlantic, understanding of the situation (based to goodly extent on this paper by David Bernstein) is this: In terms, the Amendment only applies to Federal action (Congress shall make no law....) [1]. But, in common with other provisions of the Bill of Rights, the US Supreme Court has gradually extended the ambit of the 1st Amendment via the operation of the 14th Amendment. However, the 14th Amendment can only operate where there is state action: purely private action is outside its scope. So, in principle, a private university's restrictions on speech are immune from 1st Amendment challenge [2]. However, in the past, speech codes have been assailed under state law: some states' constitutions have broad free speech clauses, and California has the so-called Leonard Law, purporting to impose 1st Amendment strictures on private educational institutions. The Stanford University speech code was struck down in state court in 1995 [3] using the Leonard Law, which was held not to infringe Stanford's own 1st Amendment rights. It's argued in the Bernstein paper (p22ff) that private colleges now have a further shot in their locker to defend their speech codes, courtesy of the US Supreme Court's decision in Boy Scouts of America v Dale: their 1st Amendment rights as expressive associations. Dale (to put it simply) upheld the Scouts' right to expel a homosexual adult volunteer from its ranks on the basis that his presence diluted the Scouts' (1st Amendment-protected) anti-homosexuality message. | Blair's twinned strategic failures: fire brigades and IraqThe outline of a thought that might or might not be worth developing.... At the moment, Tony Blair is facing two interlocking challenges: defeating the fire brigade union in its 40% wage claim; and helping Bush bring Saddam to heel, with or without war. On the first, he seems already to have made clear strategic blunders, compared with Margaret Thatcher's handling of the miners' strike of 1984-5 (memories open to factual correction!). Thatcher prepared her ground thoroughly; refused Scargill's offer of battle in 1982, because she wasn't ready; built up the reserves of coal at power stations sky high; infiltrated the miners' union; prepared the police to deal 'vigorously' with picketing/rioting; took steps to keep the miners on the (extremely productive) Nottinghamshire coalfield at work, and to keep the overmen (supervisors) sweet. With the firemen, Blair seems to have done no preparation at all: to provide fire cover for the periodic strikes the union has called (an 8 day strike starts tomorrow), he has barely-trained troops using antiquated fire-engines (Green Goddesses); both the military (Sir Michael Boyce yesterday) and now the police are refusing to cross picket lines; no equivalent of the Notts miners to break the strike; and a PR campaign that the firemen are winning hands down! And this is the same team which is planning to risk (it seems) an equally underprepared and underequipped 20-25,000 strong British force in the attack on Iraq! The worse the fire service strike is handled, the longer 19,000 troops are tied up providing cover; and, as a result, the more acute the overstretch of the armed forces as a whole in assembling Blair's Gulf army. Failures on the first front compound the difficulties faced in the second. No wonder the mild-mannered Boyce quietly threw a wobbly yesterday! | Can UK courts stop Blair attacking Iraq?Since yesterday's piece, I've now had a chance to read through the legal opinion provided to UK CND by one Rabinder Singh, QC on the legality of a UK attack on Iraq. The state of play is roughly this:
Both opinions are, I think, well worth reading for the layman (like me!), for the benefit of the orderly exposition of events, references to supporting caselaw and journal articles, and so on. There is (it seems to me, at least) a good deal of substance for proponents of the no more resolutions needed school to refute. But - and this is the key point - at all times, Singh is talking about the position in international law. At no stage does he consider whether Tony Blair or HMG could be injuncted by a UK court from pursuing an attack on Iraq. (No doubt, as I suggested in my earlier piece, because he was deliberately not asked the question!) There is nothing in either opinion that would contradict the quote in yesterday's piece that a decision by HMG to make war is not justiciable in an English (or Scottish) court. As I understand it, permission of the court would have to be obtained to bring a case at all; I can see no justification for the court giving CND (or whomever else) permission to bring a case to injunct Blair not to attack Saddam. But that's a layman talking - I will bow before superior knowledge to the contrary with pleasure and alacrity! | UK race hate laws abused againA very strange case: that the police should grub brownie-points with the race relations industry - that the anti-hunting mob should want to blacken the name of a pro-hunting man - that's understandable. But a lot more here than meets the eye, I suspect..... [Link via Instapundit] | Wednesday, November 20, 2002
Virtual child porn bill update (?)Since talking on Saturday about the Senate bill on virtual child pornography (S 2520), I see from Thomas that the bill (now with the House) has been held at the desk. I have yet to find an explanation of the implications: in the Senate, according to this scarcely authoritative-looking piece, HATD is a good thing for a bill: if it's not allocated to a committee, there's no struggle to get it reported out again! Is it the same for the House? Nothing in the House Rules, that I could see; on the house.gov site, only this: The bill is ....held at the Speaker's desk for possible amendment following action on a companion House bill. The companion House bill in this case (HR 4623) is root-and-branch different - does the fact that S2520 is HATD mean the House bill's sponsors are going to agree to the Senate bill? Or that they'll oppose it tooth and nail? Autodidacticism is not a bowl of cherries..... UPDATE The Senate has now adjourned (nobody tells me anything!) - so, presumably, the House can either take S 2520 or leave it. | Top UK Military Man detonates Messines Ridge mine under Blair's war plansIt is a two-shot to savour. UK Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon squirming next to Chief of Defence Staff Rear Admiral Sir Michael Boyce as he makes clear to the assembled journos the Forces' unpreparedness and unhappiness over the UK committment to the upcoming Iraq War (transcript of press conference here): I am extremely concerned for two reasons: first I am concerned on if you like the military effectiveness of our Armed Forces; and secondly I am concerned at the impact on our individuals who are helping out in the fire-fighting situation.may not be the the Gettysburg Address - and the delivery was mumbled and almost diffident. But UK brass hats seldom give press briefings; and more rarely still confess to concerns about military effectiveness in the face of their political masters, especially in the run-up to war. The real-life equivalent would be something of a no-holds-barred bollocking for the hapless Hoon. At the very least, the professionals are setting up a monumental told you so for when things go wrong. At best, they'll secure the sort of minimalist UK presence in any Iraq war, as discussed here and here. The risk is that Boyce's words will harden the resolve of the firemen to extend their strikes (tying up 19,000 troops operating as cover) - which is (from the war perspective) good if it dissuades Blair from sending an armoured brigade (with logistics, medics, etc 20,000-25,000 men); bad if he decides to go full steam ahead regardless of the firemen. (The fact that Boyce's intervention happened on the day Bush called for allied commitments to the war is also presumably not a coincidence!) This is one clear difference between the current war and the much-analogised Vietnam experience - then, the Joint Chiefs kept their mouths shut as Lyndon Johnson lied his way to a big combat commitment: now, the Alec Guinness-like Boyce has spoken out...... UPDATE This article from October 5 shows that Blair had fair warning of the services' concerns. | War of the Worlds scare due to channel-changersNot exactly breaking news. And it's something I've blogged parenthetically before. But Julian Sanchez over at Julian's Lounge (Britons of a certain age may find Round the Horne vibes hard to suppress!) has squarely raised the question - and my small parcel of expertise (ha ha!) on the subject is irrepressible. Julian says It occured to me that one reason that a modern equivalent couldn't have that effect -- aside from our greater familiarity with the story-that-claims-not-to-be -- is that we're compulsive channel (and browser) clickers. Up to a point Lord Copper. My information comes from The People's Almanac 2 (page 44ff) - a sort of spiritual dead-wood ancestor of the net. It's all worth reading. But here's the gist. The frightfully refined CBS audience of a million or so settle down at 8.00 pm on October 30 1938 to the strains of Tchaikowsky's 1st Piano Concerto to listen to a play. It was clear for prompt arrivers that, for all the tricks of verisimilitude, that was all it was. The Great Unwashed were over on the other channel (NBC - Blue or Red?) listening to the antics of a block of wood manipulated by Murphy Brown's Dad (Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy) on The Chase and Sanborn Hour. Come 8.12 pm, Charlie went back in his box, and a commercial for the sponsor's coffee started. Charlie's fans flicked their dials in their millions - and what did they find? The 'reporter' is next to the Martian ship, and there are scraping sounds coming from within. The top comes off and the 'reporter' says 'Someone's crawling out of the hollow top'. Remember the famous Herb Morrison recording - the Hindenburg coming down on May 6 1937 at Lakehurst in the very same state (New Jersey) as the Martians had chosen to set down? That was the ambience. The plebs panicked, and the rest is history. But, I'd say, they were tricked not because they weren't wise to up-to-date media methods but because they were. (Remember, Morrison's was intended to be just a colour piece onto disc - it wasn't set up as the live reportage it now sounds like. And the Kaltenborn/Shirer foreign stuff was pretty new in 1938, so far as I can remember.) A lack of proper cynicism, certainly - but then, in 1938, novelty was still its own reward, perhaps. | UK 'Anti-war' case a non-starter, more's the pityJust before people get too excited about the prospect of the English courts stymie-ing Tony Blair's war plans..... The opinion obtained by CND from learned counsel at Mrs Tony Blair's chambers is here. I haven't had a chance to read it through - but its conclusions (para 2) are merely
What it does not conclude (because, I'm sure, the guy was carefully not asked the question) is that legal action could be taken by CND or others to get the English courts to stop Blair aiding such an attack. In the jargon, the issue is not justiciable. Coincidentally, we have a recent decision of the English Court of Appeal in the Abbasi case (a UK national and Guantanamo detainee who tried to force the UK government to take action on his behalf). In the opinion (para 85), the Court quotes an earlier judgement:
A similar rule applies in the US, I believe, and something of the sort obtains in both civil and common law systems around the world. I'm no expert, though. Perhaps Mrs Blair's colleague has found a way through. If he has, so far as I can see, he's very sensibly keeping shtum! | British Army: Bush's crumbling fig-leaf?Could grave and persistent problems with equipment seriously limit British Army participation in an Iraq invasion? I look at the question here. UPDATE More expert minds arrive at a similar 'conclusion', via a different route. | Tom Paulin: Harvard flip-flop on invitation to speak
Right out of the blue, the welcome mat is relaid for poet and ranter Tom Paulin (the Ulster left's answer to the Reverend Ian Paisley).
(Catch up with the saga here.) No sooner has the Columbia student newspaper caught up with the original banning order than the English Department at Harvard reversed itself, and the Morris Gray Lecture was back on with Paulin at the podium. According to the Harvard student rag, the original banning decision was taken without a meeting of the department - when a meeting was held (yesterday), the vote for the reinstatement of Paulin was unanimous (with two abstentions). (Harvard President Lawrence Summers - who gave his notorious antisemitic in intent speech barely a few weeks ago - was, according to the Crimson, 'horrified' at the original invitation to Paulin. Can't wait for his reaction to the reinstatement!) According to the first Columbia Spectator piece, another college (Burlington) had just decide to cancel a Paulin appearance - the Harvard rethink will no doubt stop the rot. What still remains unexplained is the lack of reaction to Paulin's presence by Jewish students at Columbia. The reactions quoted in the Spectator seem muted compared to the Harvard furore. On this key point, Paulinwatch remains on standby! [Legal note - more than once, reference is made to the First Amendment in connection with the Paulin invitation. Yet Harvard, being a private university, is not subject to the First Amendment (because what it does is not state action, and therefore the Fourteenth Amendment doesn't apply). It's a topic that I'll come back to.] | Tuesday, November 19, 2002
British Army: Bush's crumbling fig-leaf?Could grave and persistent problems with equipment seriously limit British Army participation in an Iraq invasion? I look at the question here. UPDATE More expert minds than mine arrive at a similar 'conclusion', via a different route. | Kennewick Man: scientist speaks out for mumbo-jumboNo movement on the case itself. But a piquant example of what would, I suppose, be a sort of regulatory capture if one could rely on scientists being as a rule in favour of science. During the course of a meeting (of, it seems, a committee set up under the wretched NAGPRA), one James Nason, a UW professor and curator of Pacific and American ethnology at the Burke Museumis quoted as saying “If America has a religion, it is probably science. Why should this be a priority over any other belief system?” Some while ago, I mentioned the grip creationism had taken on the suburban sophisticates of Cobb County, GA. Now the bones of what may or may not have been the original inhabitants of North America seem to have worked a similar mojo on the good professor. Relativism gone mad: equal rights for those who don't believe in gravity! Clarence Darrow must be spinning in his grave... | Monday, November 18, 2002
Iraqi weather: Adminstration speaking with forked tongue (again!)One of the overriding imperatives behind the US desire for hurry-up from Hans Blix and his boys is the hell-on-earth that fighting in the Iraqi would be for US and allied troops. It's a total idée fixe in the public imagination. And it's a load of hooey, according to the Boston Globe, quoting Anthony Cordesman, amongst others. Sure, fighting in the summer would be more difficult than in the winter for our boys. But (and here beware unspoken racial stereotyping) it will be no picnic for Saddam's men either. US forces would still keep their edge. (Those chemical warfare suits aren't nearly as heavy as those of 1991, for one thing, apparently. And Iraqi CW and BW delivery systems pose at most a localised threat.) Sadly, the article seems fixated on the idea that the Iraqis will choose the suicidal method of desert fighting, rather than the much saner idea (invoking considerations of asymmetrical warfare) of holing up in Baghdad. And does not take into account that the weather is an additional reason why US forces would do as much fighting as possible at night. [There is pitiably little online about Iraqi weather - that I've managed to find, at least. No annual temperature charts, rainfall - basic information. Not that I'm suggesting a conspiracy, of course!] | Sunday, November 17, 2002
Paulinwatch: nothing to report in the Big Apple(New readers start here.) Sherlock Holmes's dog (the one that didn't bark) has nothing on Ulster poet and loudmouth Tom Paulin. Having been outed - literally as well as metaphorically - by the good people at Harvard, it could surely only be a matter of time before his day job at Columbia University was put on the line. But, so far as I can tell, nada. No demonstrations, no enquiries, no boycotts - it's as if Cambridge, MA was in a different dimension. Nothing in the student paper, no mention of Paulin in the New York Times or NY Post. There must be something here I'm missing. But I'm in no hurry...... | US war plans - liberal journos just can't hold back the boyish enthusiasmA few days ago, in a piece on last weekend's war strategy articles in the New York Times and Washington Post, I remarked how journalists not (I strongly suspect) of the Perle Tendency seemed easily seduced by talk of the mechanics of war. (A similar effect to that on bystanders of a military band marching in a narrow street, the martial music bypassing intellect and working on emotions alone.) Well, now the London Observer is at it. (Sister paper to the much-loathed (in War Party circles) Guardian, and as far from bellicose as mainstream media gets, in the UK, at least.) Sweeping generalisations abound, little or no use of the five Ws (over breakfast? - all those horrid Arabic names, darling! - and nasty weapons, too). Instead of vivisecting the Adminstration line on strategy, it pats it on the head. The article has the grace to state that the repeated leaks of war plans by American and British defence sources are part of a concerted strategy to put pressure on Saddam.- disinformation at best, that is. But this admission does not reflect the naivety of the rest of article. Is it lack of confidence in military affairs that explains the journos' reticence? Or a reluctance to appear unpatriotic? | Saturday, November 16, 2002
Senate sends virtual child porn bill to HouseOn Thursday, the US Senate in lame-duck session passed S 2520, its answer to the decision of the Supreme Court in Ashcroft v Free Speech Coalition, and yesterday, sent it over to the House. As I mentioned before, the House, in high dudgeon, had worked up a bill of its own (HR 4623), which more or less repeated the provisions struck down in the Ashcroft case; and - by many, including the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee! - was given little chance of avoiding the fate of the earlier act. (Meanwhile, the House bill has yet to - and, no doubt, now will not - be reported out by that Committee.) I'm not clear whether the sponsors of HR 4623 would be happy to pass the modest Senate bill; or would want to attempt to fight their corner this session in conference (sounds like fun, but surely there won't be time); or would prefer to let S 2520 die, and come back to the next Congress with another chance at legislating the full terms of HR 4623 on a clean sheet of paper. I'll be keeping an eye on what happens..... | Friday, November 15, 2002
Kristol's UN Trap - how tricky?This morning, I had a piece on the textual oddities of Security Council Resolution 1441. Then I find that Bill Kristol, no less, is crying 'Woe!' and generally getting exercised on account of the self-same resolution. From commentary on such a mouthwatering prospect, I found it impossible to desist. | Resolution 1441 puzzlesOne or two features of the Resolution have me puzzled (just one or two, you ask?!) With the Resolution the product of thousands of man-hours of top diplomatic brainpower, the puzzles themselves seem worthy of the application of a little brainpower. I attempt (operating at a distinctly lower wattage!) to untangle some of the threads here, with links to draft texts, etc. | Thursday, November 14, 2002
Tom Paulin: banned from Harvard, OK at ColumbiaAnother triumph for campus free speech: the poet and ranter banned from speaking at Harvard in response to what seems to have been an orchestrated campaign by the local branch of the Jewish lobby. Yet, almost thrown away is the information that his current job (moonlighting from Oxford) is with Columbia University. Which, last time I looked, was located in the heartland of the Jewish lobby, New York City. How did that happen? Where were the protests? Nothing on the man in the archives of the student rag - where surely there should be sheafs of angry correspondence and editorials! Something strange here... | Wednesday, November 13, 2002
RSS now available!To whom it may concern, an RSS 0.92 link is now sitting in the column to your left. Seems to work - hopefully, the sign of more technophobia rollback to come! | New York Times and Washington Post back in Tonkin Gulf routine?'Returning as promised to last weekend's articles that I first mentioned yesterday, I now have a longer piece up on the substance of the articles in both papers. | Caro's LBJ a drag on bloggingThe return to blogging activity has been somewhat sluggish owing to time diverted to reading Robert Caro's book on Lyndon Johnson's Senate years (modestly entitled Master of the Senate). Something of a gallimaufry - and all the better for it. Having tried and failed a couple of times to get into Advise and Consent, it's much easier (I found) with a roster of players whose names (if nothing else) one is familiar with. And there's a generous truckload of circumstantial detail wherever it might conceivably be necessary. (I reckon it probably takes about as long to read as a season of The West Wing takes to view: only the sanctimony quotient is so much lower - and, from LBJ, the lies are so much more interesting!) Two nuggets from the first couple of hundred pages:
As a work of scholarship, the book no doubt leaves a lot to be desired. As a riveting read and source of fascinating facts - not so much. UPDATE | Tuesday, November 12, 2002
New York Times cribbed its war strategy piece?Having been out of electronic circulation for the last few days, I'm late in coming to the brace of articles in Sunday's Times and WaPo in which the Pentagon kindly gave the gist of its plans to defeat Saddam. The substance is not without interest, and I'll come back to that. But one preliminary matter is puzzling me: why the Times article is passed off as written by the paper (ie, a NYT byline followed by This article was reported and written by David E. Sanger, Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker)when it is clearly, in large part, cribbed from the AP article of Robert Burns (described as Military Writer). Now, of course, agency copy exists to suffer vivisection for the greater good of the news outlets who buy it in. But this is evidently supposed to be an important article - 1700 words, with no fewer than three journos credited as its authors - and a reader might justifiably feel cheated (if scarcely surprised to be so) to learn it was essentially a cut-and-paste job on an external writer's work. Slightly surprised, too, that Howard Kurtz's piece today mentions the Times article without noting this peculiarity. | Friday, November 08, 2002
| General Massu deadConcentrating on warfare to come, I had completely overlooked the death a few days ago of an iconic warrior of the past, General Jacques Massu. Massu, 'victor' of the Battle of Algiers in 1957, was a symbol of the second of two unwinnable wars waged by France in the first two decades after World War 2: a loyal soldier who (in comparison with his colleagues, at least) kept his distance from politics, and did the nasty job he was given. Algeria - a war well worthy of study even now - was France's Vietnam raised to the power of several: following immediately on the débâcle in Indo-China in 1954, the Algerian War laid bare the fragility of French political institutions; the (nominally European) settlers' (pieds noirs) stranglehold leading to the military coup of 1958, and the return of General de Gaulle. De Gaulle sustained himself during a period of virtual personal rule in which he drained the pied noir abscess (his supreme deception Je vous ai compris a coup of which Machiavelli himself would be proud), put down military rebellions and left Algeria to the natives. Latterly, there's been a great deal of futile, anachronistic hand-wringing on the methods used by the French in fighting the war in Algeria (most notably in the Aussaresses case. Even Massu, at rather a late date, recanted his use of torture: Massu avoue qu'avec le recul la torture ne lui paraît "pas indispensable en temps de guerre" et qu'on pourrait "très bien s'en passer." The fault, however, lay not in choosing to use torture - or even in deciding to fight the war in the first place. Rather, it was that the institutions of the French Fourth Republic should have produced governments that were incapable of resisting pied noir pressure, which made a resolution short of war inconceivable. Amazingly, it is only 40 years since the end of the Algerian War, and the truly fresh constitutional start for France under de Gaulle. (Massu's assistance during the 1968 disturbances kept the train on the track.) The shallow roots of the current French political system - and the extent to which it owes its existence to generals like de Gaulle and Massu - may usefully be borne in mind when criticism of others comes from Paris (as so often it does). | Ashcroft and Porn - where's the beef?The safely conservative Attorney-General John Ashcroft being attacked on his record in prosecuting obscenity? Strange but true. I examine here the recent history of the Justice Department and obscenity: the lax regime of Janet Reno; the high initial expectations of a vigorously wielded new Missouri broom; and the performance so far. | Rabbi Sacks kow-tow continuesHugo's Revenge? Whatever, the degradation of British Orthodox Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks only gets more embarrassing. If there was a Pu Yi Award, he'd be a shoo-in. | In Texas, comic-books can land you in jailNever underestimate the reach of the obscenity laws! I recount here the sorry tale of Dallas store manager Jesus Castillo and the manga he sold that got him a six month jail sentence. | Thursday, November 07, 2002
US strategy defects - by a War supporterI've mentioned before the paper by Anthony Cordesman assessing Iraqi warfighting capabilities and the likely course of the impending war. This paper seems to be the only extensive analysis available online. Cordesman has followed up with a shorter, discursive paper on US strategy in general, and on the Iraq question in particular, which I discuss here. | Wednesday, November 06, 2002
Tennesse U Blackface Mystery - UpdateHaving speculated in my earlier piece on the motives of UT Vice President Loren Crabtree in issuing a cringing circular on the matter, while idly surfing I find the following (dated October 29) on the UTK newspaper site: The University of Tennessee Board of Trustees has reestablished the Knoxville chancellor position after a three-year absence. Crabtree's circular is dated November 1. Less conspiracy than coincidence, I dare say. | Tennessee U Blackface Mystery DeepensUnabashed by the pasting they've received in the blogosphere (notably over at the Volokh Conspiracy [1]), the Powers That Be at the University of Tennessee were yesterday stoutly defending their position on the Knoxville Six (as presumably the trans-racial impersonators will soon be known). A couple of things occur to me, straight off the bat:
So far as I can see, to date the politics of this case aren't making much sense!
| Tuesday, November 05, 2002
Stand Down - a union of bloggers against the WarI'm delighted to be associated with the community of bloggers now resident for the duration at nowarblog.org: a group united (I suspect) in nothing except a fervent wish to see the present dash for war brought to a shuddering halt, the sooner the better. In this one spot, willing and able to put aside other differences in order to subject the utterances and actions of those promoting the war to sober reflection, earnest fact-checking and probing questioning. It's the blogosphere equivalent of precisely the sort of anti-war coalition whose absence in the real world I've bemoaned before. (So, am I annoyed with myself for not having thought of it first? You bet your sweet bippy!) A vanguard, one hopes, that will stir those who have the power to organise an opposition coalition in the afore-mentioned real world of sufficient size to impress the guys who need impressing, to get off their arses and do so. Meanwhile, we bloggers blog. From each according to his means..... | Iraq: more sense on the 'Munich analogy'A useful autopsy from retired University of North Carolina history professor Gerhard Weinberg of this DOA read-across (previously anatomised). He challenges not so much the read-across itself as the shamelessly skewed interpretation of the facts of 1938 used by the War Party in a vain attempt to make it fly. A key factor relevant both in 1938 and today, though, is the state of public opinion in the putative belligerent powers: then, there was overwhelming support in Britain and France (and the US, too) for the Munich settlement; now, in both Britain and the US, there have been consistent substantial minorities against war against Iraq, and 2:1 majorities against war without UN sanction (a sort of proxy for unease). From memory (there is no record online, that I can see, of the polling evidence, though Gallup was operating in the UK, at least, in 1938), opinion in the UK flip-flopped following the German occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, just as did the stance of the French and British governments to Hitler. Chamberlain gave the Polish guarantee for the purpose of triggering a war at the next act of German aggression, and in the knowledge that public opinion was behind him. The contrast with 2002 and Iraq is telling. A lesson that genuinely can be taken from Munich is that a democracy cannot safely go to war without the wholehearted support of a large majority of its people (a necessary condition of success, though not a sufficient one, as Vietnam showed). The Pariah of the War Party knew that: pity the lesson seems to be lost on the current US Administration. | Monday, November 04, 2002
Lame duck sessions past and futureA canter through the recent lowlights of this gift from the Founding Fathers: expectations for the upcoming session are therefore barely off the floor. First Amendment watchers will be interested in whether, by some miracle, some legislative riposte to the Supreme Court's decision in Ashcroft v Free Speech Coalition can be squeezed out in the time available. To the outsider, prospects don't look good, given that the House and Senate are apparently at odds over the scope for regulation the 1st Amendment now permits. But that may well be wishful thinking, of course. | free website counter 
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