Connexion
The days of free and cheap riding are numbered.
The wailing is getting louder across Europe. Elites in Brussels and national capitals are clutching their pearls as they view American opinion polls. Their U.S. friends, the usual Masters of the Universe who dominate political and economic affairs, are reacting similarly.
Although the presidential election is more than six long months away and much can happen before November 5, they all are sharing nightmares featuring Donald Trump. Such is the consequence of spending the last eight decades treating Europe’s protection as America’s responsibility.
Europeans are only slowly waking up to reality. For instance, the British historian and journalist Max Hastings observed, “Some of us have repeatedly asserted that without America the Ukrainians could become toast. That proposition looks like it is being tested.” He didn’t blame America. Rather, he admitted that “there is also a realization that the United States has tired, probably forever, of leading and largely funding the defense of Europe.”
Then he criticized Europeans for lagging despite their professed fears of Russian aggression. He wrote “The Germans have discovered a €25 billion shortfall in their defense spending plan, overlaid on national economic stagnation. President Macron is shipping 100 howitzers, but these cannot make good his earlier refusal to back Ukraine.” That’s not all; leading states such as Italy and Spain still can’t be bothered.
Hastings was even tougher on his own nation, citing the ugly truth about its disappointing efforts: “Though successive British prime ministers have professed to embrace Ukraine, which is essentially our proxy in facing down Russian aggression, they have done almost nothing to sustain the supply of munitions, once the army’s cupboard was emptied.”
Indeed, he added, “since the end of the Cold War it has been the all-party fashion to treat defense not as a vital element in our polity but as an optional extra to the main business of government.” He targeted the Conservative Party, the home of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher: “Since 2010 the Tories have refused to make the necessary defense spending commitments.”
Also credit Hastings for admitting that the Europeans were warned about Russia’s likely response to NATO expansion: “It was recklessly insouciant to take no steps to prepare ourselves, both morally and militarily, to fight if the Russians responded with force.” He called for Europeans to step up: “Europe must send Kyiv yesterday every gun and shell it can purchase—we cannot manufacture the hardware ourselves in real time.”
Finally, and most important, he acknowledged that the continent’s residents must work hard to protect themselves: “If we wish to avoid having to fight another big war we must create a credible military deterrent in which nuclear weapons are the least relevant, though still necessary, component. Even granted the will, which is problematic, Europe requires a decade of enhanced spending to make itself remotely capable of self-defense, in the absence of the U.S.”
Still, the situation is a bit less dire than Hastings suggests. He overestimates the danger facing Europe. Although Russia’s Vladimir Putin is ruthless, the latter has shown little interest in conquest during his quarter century in power. Indeed, he began his presidency friendly to the U.S. and Europe; he was the first foreign leader to call George W. Bush after 9/11 and gave an accommodating address to the German Bundestag shortly thereafter.
Moreover, Putin’s much-cited remark about the Soviet collapse did not suggest recreating the Russian empire, as commonly claimed. He declared,
Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself.
Individual savings were depreciated, and old ideals destroyed. Many institutions were disbanded or reformed carelessly. Terrorist intervention and the Khasavyurt capitulation that followed damaged the country’s integrity. Oligarchic groups—possessing absolute control over information channels—served exclusively their own corporate interests. Mass poverty began to be seen as the norm. And all this was happening against the backdrop of a dramatic economic downturn, unstable finances, and the paralysis of the social sphere.
Far from backing the return of the Soviet Communist Party, he contended that “the time that our young democracy…was precisely the period when the significant developments took place in Russia. Our society was generating not only the energy of self-preservation, but also the will for a new and free life.” His discussion of how “to find our own path in order to build a democratic, free and just society and state” looks ironic in retrospect, but nothing in the speech suggested reconstituting the USSR.
Of course, his attitude hardened over time, but for obvious reasons reflected in his famous talk at the 2007 Munich Security Conference. He highlighted what faithless and dishonest allied officials subsequently sought to deny, Moscow’s displeasure over NATO expansion and Washington’s aggressive military policy. U.S. presidents, secretaries of defense, and secretaries of state knew that they were recklessly crossing a red line for Putin and most of Russia’s top political leadership. For instance, in 2008 intelligence officer Fiona Hill, more recently with the Trump NSC, and U.S. Ambassador to Russia William Burns, currently CIA Director, warned the George W. Bush administration that NATO expansion was likely to spark a violent response.
Two years ago, Putin made the decision for war, for which he bears ultimate responsibility. Yet he is no Hitler. Russia has not found Ukraine easy to conquer. It would be difficult for Moscow to swallow its victim whole. Moreover, Putin acted out his explicit threats, not the West’s imagined fears. Never has Putin or the rest of the leadership shown interest in conquering the Baltic States, let alone more of Europe. The question would be, To what end? Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was criminal, but he did so for reasons known in the West for decades. What would he gain from attempting to overrun the rest of Europe? When asked by Tucker Carlson if he might invade Poland, Putin replied, “Only in one case, if Poland attacks Russia. Why? Because we have no interest in Poland, Latvia, or anywhere else. Why would we do that? We simply don’t have any interest.”
Of course, Europeans should not trust Putin with their continent’s peace and stability. However, they—not America—should make their security their priority.
An important issue raised by Hastings is whether Europe should develop a continental nuclear deterrent. The U.S. promised to use nukes to defend Europe during the Cold War and the Soviets never tested American resolve. Whether or not the continent was worth the risk to the U.S. then, it is not now. Observed the Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov: “Would an American president, especially a re-elected Donald Trump, be willing to risk nuclear war for Helsinki, Tallinn or Warsaw? And if not, could Europe’s own two nuclear powers—France and, to a lesser extent, the UK—provide enough deterrence of their own?”
Both Paris and London have nukes, but their forces are national and independent. Germans have begun to debate contributing to a European arsenal or developing their own. Even the Poles might be on board with a Eurobomb. Friendly proliferation has obvious drawbacks but may be the best practicable option. Today Russia relies on nuclear parity to make up for conventional inferiority compared to America. Europe could do the same vis-à-vis Moscow.
Nevertheless, as the Europeans move ahead, they also should seek a future in which they will be safer and more prosperous, which means reaching an understanding with Russia over a new security structure. Although European officials routinely demonize Putin, they share responsibility with him for the war. Fighting Moscow to the last Ukrainian is not the best means to establish long-term stability and peace.
Kiev’s determination to battle on is understandable and, indeed, courageous, but Ukrainians should remember that the allies have consistently played them false. NATO made a commitment in 2008 that no European government and no subsequent US administration was prepared to keep. For 14 years, every alliance member along with the Brussels bureaucracy lied to Kiev, falsely insisting that they looked forward to Ukraine joining the alliance. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin continued the deception when he visited Kiev in late 2021 in the lead-up to Russia’s invasion. At the same time, the Biden administration refused to negotiate with Moscow when a commitment not to include Ukraine might have kept the peace.
Shortly after Russia’s invasion Washington and London apparently discouraged Kiev from negotiating with Moscow over the same issue, when the conflict might have been ended with relatively modest casualties and destruction. Moreover, NATO members continued to promise alliance membership to Kiev; at last July’s NATO summit Austin said that he had “no doubt” Ukraine would join. Yet the allies steadfastly refuse to enter the war when their support is most needed.
A couple weeks ago Secretary of State Antony Blinken reassured Kiev, “We’re also here at NATO to talk about the summit that’s upcoming in the summer in Washington, celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Alliance. Ukraine will become a member of NATO. Our purpose of the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership and to create a clear pathway for Ukraine moving forward.”
But no one expects a formal commitment this year or next; realistically, Kiev shouldn’t expect one this decade or next. Ultimately Ukrainians will have to make their own deal with Russia. And that will turn out better if done sooner rather than later.
It is Europe’s turn. Observed Hastings: “If Putin or China’s President Xi today demands: ‘How many divisions has Britain?’—or, for that matter, Europe—the truthful answer deserves the scorn it must inspire in both tyrants.” Europeans should act like grownups and take over responsibility for their own defense.
The post Europe is Starting to Wake Up to Needing Defense—Including a Nuclear Deterrent appeared first on The American Conservative.
A reflection on Norman Lear, Archie Bunker, and All in the Family.
The recent death at the age of 101 of Norman Lear, creator of All in the Family and its improbable folk hero, Archie Bunker, set me to musing (always a dangerous thing) over Archie’s voting history and the dirty tricks that politics plays on us all.
I doubt if anyone under the age of 60 grasps the impact of All in the Family when it debuted on CBS in 1971. This wasn’t Punky Brewster or Manimal. Archie Bunker was a malaprop-tripping, outer-borough (Queens), blue-collar union-man paterfamilias given to bigoted asides and (thanks to actor Carroll O’Connor) perfectly timed double-takes. Whatever Lear’s satiric intentions, Archie became a beloved character during the show’s heyday, before it descended into stupid laugh-track moralizing.
Norman Lear was a thoughtful pro-free speech liberal Democrat, a species rarer than goldfish-swallowers on today’s campuses. Even as a left-sympathizing kid I scorned Archie’s liberal son-in-law and sparring partner, played by Rob Reiner, as a self-righteous ingrate, and my guess is that Lear wanted it that way.
Yet Lear cheated, too. The wistful line in the All in the Family theme song—“Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again”—warbled off-key by Archie and his long-suffering wife Edith, is dishonest even by sitcom standards. The archetypal Archie would have been a pedigreed FDR Democrat. His supposed Protestantism was also ridiculous: Archie—with a different forename—would’ve been Catholic.
Surely he cast his first votes for FDR in 1944 and Truman in 1948 over the prig (and Kitty Carlisle’s boytoy) Thomas E. Dewey, the little man on the wedding cake. Archie (without the Hollywood makeover) liked Ike but voted rotely for egghead Adlai Stevenson in ’52 and ’56. He was JFK all the way in 1960 before facing his first ballot-box temptation: jumping the fence for anti-Civil Rights Act Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964. But…Social Security. Archie was no entitlement-reform wonk, so he pulled the lever, with misgivings, for LBJ.
In 1968 Archie could’ve gone any of three ways. (And here let me recommend Luke Nichter’s perceptive account of that race, The Year that Broke Politics.) George Wallace’s denunciation of “pointy-headed intellectuals” who can’t park their bicycles straight was the summit of Bunker’s hill, but his defense of segregation was its nadir. In any event, Wallace’s Southernness would’ve been too strange.
Hubert Humphrey’s full-throated endorsement of civil rights would’ve irritated Archie, but the Hump was for whatever the big unions were for—including the manufacture if not necessarily use of weapons of mass destruction—so after a moment’s hesitation in the voting booth Archie chose HHH against Nixon. The Minnesota motormouth would be his last Democrat.
(Thinking on this sent me back to Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, a formative reading experience for the teenaged me. The Aspen assassin wrote, “Any political party that can’t cough up anything better than a treacherous brain-damaged old vulture like Hubert Humphrey deserves every beating it gets. They don’t hardly make ‘em like Hubert any more—but just to be on the safe side, he should be castrated anyway.” It’d be pretty easy to update that passage for 2024.)
In 1972 Archie Bunker, over the Hump, flipped to the GOP for good, turned off by George McGovern—or, rather, the caricatured misrepresentation (abetted by the Democratic candidate’s obnoxious celebrity supporters) of the true patriot McGovern as an acid-dropping, welfare-dispensing commie.
Carroll O’Connor was no more Archie Bunker than Charlton Heston was Moses. In a 1972 Democratic primary race containing two genuine if mottled populists—Oklahoma senator Fred Harris on the “left” and George Wallace on the “right”—the actor stumped for the silk-stocking Republican turned Democrat John Lindsay, whose limousine liberalism would’ve reduced Archie to paroxysmal sputtering.
Long after the laughter has died, the last joke is on Archie—the real one, not the Hoover-voting Protestant. The Bunkeresque tough-talking white Democratic mayors of the 1950s and ‘60s collaborated in the destruction of their cities and the neighborhoods that gave them life via urban renewal and the Interstate Highway System. At the national level, the Trumans and Johnsons that Archie supported shipped working-class boys into the abattoirs of Korea and Vietnam while militarizing the economy.
Archie turned coat just as the Republicans were taking up the mantle of world policeman from Vietnam-spooked Democrats and as the GOP’s stolid but solid Main Street faction was being bulldozed by Wall Street.
If only the Archie Bunkers had voted for Herbert Hoover—who once said that what America needs is a great poem—and George McGovern, who requested, sensibly and sincerely, that America come home in the spirit of peace and community. I’ll bet Norman Lear would’ve loved that country.
The post Sitcom King Lear appeared first on The American Conservative.
Saddam Hussein was a cruel, evil man, but that is hardly how he is remembered.
The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq, Steve Coll, Penguin Press, 576 pages
Saddam Hussein was the first person I saw die on television. It was December 30, 2006. CNN pointedly chose not to show the actual moment of execution, but some other station must have because I remember with great clarity the grainy video of the hanging, filmed surreptitiously on an Iraqi cell phone. I was in fourth grade, and what impressed me most was not the rope nor the scaffold nor the loud crack when the dictator’s neck broke, but Saddam’s face in the moments beforehand. It bore more than a look of defiance. I would call it melancholy, with a touch of the smug. It was as if Saddam believed that through this inglorious death he would become, permanently, the martyr in whose image he had always drawn himself.
Saddam was forever prophesying about his place in history, and those last few minutes with his executioners were no exception. On the way to the scaffold he argued about his legacy, and when the rope was put around his neck he taunted his captors. “Do you consider this bravery?” he asked. Someone in the crowd below shouted, “Go to hell!” and Saddam fired back, “The hell that is Iraq?” The shouting increased in its intensity, and Saddam defended himself. “I have saved you from destitution and misery and destroyed your enemies, the Persians and Americans,” he said, and soon began to recite the Shahada. Halfway through his second profession, the trapdoor beneath his feet swung open, and moments later he was dead. To the end, he had maintained belief in his personal myth. For Saddam, it was not what actually happened to him that was significant, but what he thought had happened.
In the 15 years or so leading up to that moment, personal myth was one of Saddam’s only comforts. American troops had humiliated him in 1991 on that long highway out of Kuwait. Worse, American camera crews had filmed the whole affair for the world’s entertainment. The leaders of all the richest nations had denounced him and isolated his regime. They had imposed crippling economic sanctions on his country. And soon officious Swedish diplomats from the United Nations had begun hounding his scientists, demanding a full accounting of Saddam’s secret nuclear weapons program, even after the scientists told the inspectors repeatedly, and, after a fashion, truthfully, that the nuclear weapons program never existed…we destroyed it! It didn’t help that Saddam faced his troubles alone. His half-brothers were ne’er-do-well sycophants; his sons spoiled wastoids; and his right-hand man, Hussein Kamel, whom Saddam had been grooming to succeed him, was in actuality a traitor, a monster to whom the harshest justice must be applied. The aging dictator looked out of his twilit window and saw nothing but ruin; only within the palace of his mind could he still rule the kingdom of his longing.
About this time, in the mid-1990s, Saddam turned to literature. He had always been a great reader, of course, and as a young man attempting to prove himself among older Ba’ath revolutionaries, he had developed a Jay Gatsby–like regimen of self-education. He read novels, international newspapers, political philosophy—anything he could get his hands on. He counted The Old Man and the Sea and Hemingway’s work more generally among his favorite books, in large part because he identified personally with Papa. And Saddam wasn’t hesitant to advertise his self-cultivated literary prowess. His longtime advisor and deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, recalled how when he first met Saddam at a 1963 Ba’ath conference in Syria that the young man consciously presented as someone who “worked on improving himself” and “read a lot.” But it was only when Saddam entered his 60s and began to think seriously, as old men do, of his own death, that he himself began to write. Soon a novel began to form in his mind.
This was Saddam’s creative process: He woke up every day at about 5:00 a.m. and dressed in clothing that had been laid out for him by a valet. He then drank his tea and armed himself with a small pistol and a handful of cigars to carry him through the long afternoons. (He limited himself to four Cubans per diem.) When it was a writing day, he holed himself up in one of his many palaces—far away from the affairs of state—and, to paraphrase the words of his hero, sat at his desk and bled. Saddam always wrote longhand. On a good day he would produce fifty pages of elegantly inscribed Arabic script; on most days he could only manage ten. His sentences were long and tangled, like something out of the novels of William Gaddis or Thomas Pynchon. Saddam would frequently begin with a straightforward declarative phrase, slash through the middle of the sentence with a parenthetical digression, and then conclude with a wry comment, a bitter observation—always something unexpected.
His copy editors suspected that the dictator simply did not know how to write. “Even when he tackled simple ideas, he couldn’t help himself and used a complex style,” said one of Saddam’s aides who worked in his press office. “He would get lost in parenthetical phrases.” But Saddam insisted that his choices were intentional; they were “his own personal touch.” When the copy editors sent him marked-up drafts correcting his grammar and syntax—and wondering aloud what to do with the mess of Arabic proverbs and Koranic verses interjected into his story—Saddam rejected most of their changes. Style was his province. His editors were just there to type his manuscript and run fact checks on historical dates, name spellings, and the like.
In any case, this is how Saddam produced his first novel, Zabiba and the King, an allegorical tale which was released in 2000 to rave reviews in Baghdad. The dictator chose to publish the book anonymously (its cover advertises it only as “by its author”), but everyone knew he had written it. Zabiba quickly became a bestseller (it is estimated that more than a million copies were distributed throughout Iraq). Saddam’s foreign office ordered that the book be handed out to members of visiting foreign delegations. It was adapted into a twenty-part miniseries for Iraqi television and a musical at the Iraqi National Theater, whose premiere Saddam attended.
Obviously Zabiba owes much of its success to the fact that a brutal regime forced it to become successful, but the novel does have its points of interest. It tells the story of a medieval pagan king (Saddam) ruling Tikrit (Saddam’s hometown), who falls in love with Zabiba, a beautiful and wise peasant woman (the Iraqi people). Although the king is powerful, he fears his queen and courtiers; he knows there are plots against his life everywhere in his palace. Zabiba alone gives him good counsel and dares to tell him the truth about the evil lurking in his midst. She suffers for her candor. Her husband (the United States), jealous of the favor the king shows to her, brutally rapes her in a forest, “like a wild animal in the attack of desire.” Meanwhile, the other lords (the coalition forces in the Gulf War) rebel against the king and attempt to depose him.
But all ends well. Zabiba rushes to the rescue and leads the people to the defense of the king. Before going into battle, she declares her love for him, divorces her husband, and becomes the king’s lawful wife. Then she dies a glorious death. The book ends with a long post-mortem citizens’ assembly meeting, in which characters representing Saddam’s enemies—the United States, Israel, various Iraqi resistance leaders—are punished for their disloyalty. The king, too, dies, the death of a martyr. Yet Saddam spends little time glorifying him. His comment on the king’s passing, the most memorable line in the whole novel, is a fatalistic sigh: “Every day, there were fewer and fewer kings.”
For years, Saddam-watchers at the CIA assumed that there was no way that the dictator could have actually written Zabiba himself; he must have employed a ghostwriter. Too much of it reads like a real novel—even if a rather clumsy one—and Zabiba seems almost too well-rounded to have come from such a crude mind. But in this, as in many of its other assumptions about Saddam, the CIA was wrong. So writes Steve Coll in The Achilles Trap, which details for the first time the entire history of Saddam Hussein and his regime’s relationship with the American intelligence community, from its covert actions with the Reagan administration in the Iran-Iraq War to its demise at the hands of George W. Bush’s invasion forces in 2003.
Coll focuses primarily on the history of the faulty information passed around about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, but The Achilles Trap doubles as a surprisingly sympathetic study of a man who, as his powers slipped away, spent the last decade of his life jerry-rigging monuments of his own magnificence. Coll draws much of his material from extensive interviews with retired American intelligence officers and former members of Saddam’s bureaucracy, as well as from a previously unavailable archive of audio tapes from Saddam’s own state offices. What emerges is a portrait of Saddam as an eccentric in the mold of G.K. Chesterton—if Chesterton were bloodthirsty, paranoid, and power-mad—a man driven ultimately by deep reverence for the sense that hides beneath nonsense.
Saddam almost always spoke in paradoxes, but most frequently when he discoursed on foreign policy. Throughout the whole Iran–Iraq War, he suspected that, although the CIA was passing him intelligence about Iranian tank movements, the United States, Israel, and Iran were nevertheless involved in a recondite conspiracy against him. On its face, this was an insane belief—two of those countries were bitter enemies, at least on paper—but when the Iran–Contra affair became an international scandal in 1987, Saddam declared he had been vindicated. “Zionism is taking the Iranians by the hand and introducing them to each party, one by one, channel by channel,” he shouted during a cabinet meeting. “I mean, Zionism—come on, comrades—do I have to repeat that every time?”
This claim was not, strictly speaking, true. But there was something undeniable about the attractiveness of the proposition. Israel did sell arms to Iran and, as it happened, the CIA also facilitated weapons transfers to the Iranian army. But there was no coordination, no grand plan—only the contradictory movements of little powers within great powers, each pursuing its own ends. Saddam’s genius, the unique ability that both made and unmade him, was a refusal to see the world like that. For him everything was connected; there was always unity beneath chaos. “It was a pattern that would recur between Washington and Baghdad,” Coll writes. “What many Americans understood as staggering incompetence in their nation’s foreign policy, Saddam interpreted as manipulative genius.”
This same attitude guided Saddam’s justification for his plans to develop nukes. In 1990, for instance, he explained to Bob Dole and a delegation of other American senators that, under the principles of nuclear deterrence, Arab nations should have the right “to possess any weapon that their enemy possesses.” He was referring to Israel. “Iraq does not possess atomic bombs,” Saddam continued. “If we did, we would announce that, to preserve peace and to prevent Israel from using their atomic bombs.” Over the years, Saddam repeated those words many times, though after the Gulf War, no one believed he really was interested in deterrence. Besides, when had Israel ever threatened to nuke him? Do the principles of nuclear deterrence even apply among regional powers? It all sounded too crazy to be true. But I suspect that in some weird way, Saddam meant exactly what he said.
So firmly did Saddam believe in the underlying unity of the world that after enduring years of unrelenting UN inspections, he began to wonder if maybe Iraq did secretly possess WMDs after all. Why else would the Swedes keep badgering him? “Do you have any programs going on that I don’t know about?” he asked his deputy prime minister in 1998. “Absolutely not,” the minister replied, thinking this was a loyalty test—and only later realizing that the dictator was in earnest. Not long after, another one of Saddam’s aides approached him with the same question. “Do we have WMD?” he asked. “Don’t you know?” Saddam replied. “No!” the minister yelped. “No,” Saddam said. And when Saddam announced to his generals on the eve of the Iraq War that Iraq definitely did not possess nuclear weapons, many were surprised. They had always assumed that his constant questions about the subject implied some radiant secret, hidden from all eyes but his own.
Saddam did, however, occasionally refer to his “secret weapon” in the months leading up to Bush’s invasion. This weapon was something that he seemed to believe was far more powerful than any nuclear bomb. “Resist one week and after that I will take over,” he told his ministers at their last cabinet meeting. And, gathering his generals, he instructed them “to hold the coalition for eight days.” Then he promised to swoop in with a secret force of untold power.
That force turned out to be a book, another novel. Since the success of Zabiba, Saddam had written two works of fiction, The Fortified Castle and Men and the City, but neither had caused quite the same stir. It was only as the United States turned its big black eye on Baghdad that inspiration struck once again. Saddam began pulling all-nighters, simultaneously sketching out his war plan and scribbling away at his new novel. Every morning his editors received fresh installments of the manuscript, which, it must be admitted, were looked over with perhaps a little too much haste. But there was no time for stylistic quibbling. Two days before the American bombing began, Saddam retreated to a villa in a suburb of Baghdad and banged out the rest of his book. It was rushed to the presses—even as the invasion began—and the regime managed to print about forty thousand copies.
I happen to have one of these copies on hand—borrowed from a university library—and I have been working though it with bemusement. A Farewell to Arms it is not. The book, so far as I know, has never been published in English, and it is difficult to find even in Arabic. It is known under varying titles, among them Begone, Demons; Get Out, You Damned One!; and Devil’s Dance. Like Zabiba, it is an allegorical historical novel, set somewhere in the outposts of the Roman empire. It tells the story of the three grandsons of Ibrahim: Ezekiel, Youssef, and Mahmoud, each of whom represents the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims, respectively. It is a moral tale, and the morals are deadeningly predictable. The Jews are perfidious; the Christians feckless; only the Muslims possess any degree of integrity.
There is one scene, however, that is quite striking. It is the novel’s conclusion. Ezekiel, in an alliance with the Romans (the United States), has built two towers in which he stores his ill-gotten riches. The Arabs in a self-sacrificial act burn the towers, destroying them utterly, a calamity that prompts Ezekiel to throw dust in his face and wail in anguish. Saddam treats the destruction of the towers as an event ordained by God, a sign of great victories to come. From far away, the smoldering ruins can be seen by all. Birds descend from heaven, and the common people weep for joy. Allahu Akbar, God is great, Saddam concludes.
Begone, Demons was intended to instill courage in the Iraqi people, to inspire them to resist the invading forces to the bitter end. Everyone knew that Bush was using 9/11 to invade Iraq, and with the novel, Saddam attempted to flip the script on him, to use 9/11 to repulse Bush. He saw himself as a sort of warrior poet, leading an insurgency not with the power of his weapons, but by the strength of his words. From the underground, he published several poems and recorded many exhortations much in the same spirit of Begone, Demons. And, even as the Ba’ath regime collapsed and Saddam’s comrades surrendered, the dictator persisted in his fervor. He was living his personal myth, right up until the moment when American forces dragged him out of a shallow hole in December 2003. Just before they found him, Saddam had been hard at work on a new novel.
Prison seemed to confirm Saddam’s belief in his own myth. Finally, he knew with certainty that he would not die in his bed; he would not leave this world an old man beset by the cares of domestic life. He would be executed, and, like all of the heroes of his novels, die a martyr’s death for the only cause more noble than himself: his image of himself. A strange calm settled within the dictator. He laughed with his jailors. He wrote more poetry and smoked cigars with his nurse. When the CIA came to interview him, he fooled around with his interrogators, answering their questions with questions and often speaking in parables. One of his handlers remembers Saddam as remarkably lucid, free from any signs of “anxiety, confusion, paranoia, or delusion.” At times, “he even displayed a self-deprecating sense of humor.”
Nearly twenty years after his death, which, probably to Saddam’s satisfaction, was watched by millions of people worldwide, it is hard to escape the suspicion that in some crazy, backward way, Saddam was right about himself. Indeed, his personal myth has long outlived him and become embellished to the point of absurdity. Saddam Hussein was a cruel, evil man—it is said that he once fed one of his adversaries to a Doberman Pinscher for sport—but that is hardly how he is remembered today. Rather, he is remembered as a stabilizing force in the Middle East, a prudent moderate in comparison to those who followed. His death was not quite a martyrdom, but there are those who say it was something near to it. Jacques Chirac, one of the few Western politicians to understand Saddam, spoke rightly when he advised in the run-up to the invasion for the United States to leave the dictator alone. Ultimately, he said, Saddam would only use antagonism to his advantage. “The way Saddam thinks is the best way to regain control of the people is to pretend to be a martyr,” Chirac predicted. Perhaps the secret weapon worked after all. Even now, the martyr’s myth lives on, dazzling so many who cast a glance toward Saddam.
The post Saddam’s Secret Weapon appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: President Trump was right: We should not automatically protect an ally actively courting a nuclear showdown.
One cannot name names, but I recently had some conversations in private with some northwestern European officials, and, more than at Trump or Biden, they are livid at their Baltic counterparts.
And for good reason, one might add. Never in recent memory have there been more hawkish and reckless protectorates. So much so that it appears to be almost a natural law that the smaller a protectorate located in close proximity of a peer rival, the greater the hysterical lunacy of its political leaders.
Consider the recent statements. “Just as Czechoslovakia did not satisfy Hitler, Ukraine would not satisfy Putin,” Lithuania’s President Gitanas Nauseda recently said, adding that Putin can only be stopped with force.
Not to be outdone, the president of Latvia, Edgars Rinkevics, tweeted his support for President Macron: “We should not draw red lines for ourselves, we must draw red lines for Russia and we should not be afraid to enforce them. Ukraine must win, Russia must be defeated. Russia delenda est!”
Remember when someone wrote how Finland’s addition would finally allow the U.S. to quit providing for continental Europe? Here’s the Finnish foreign minister refusing to “rule out” Western troops in Ukraine. Kaja Kallas, the prime minister of Estonia, echoed the sentiment.
Why do we listen to these lunatics and treat them as our equals within NATO? Why are we to take people seriously when they claim they want to give a country with 6,000 nuclear weapons the Carthage treatment? The total combined population of the three Baltic states and Finland is under 12 million people. What do you mean “we,” kemosabe?
Of course the main culprit of this sudden flare up is France. Emmanuel Macron—sensing that Germany is weak as a leader of EU, seeing the British Tories facing an electoral massacre, and himself facing a tough election at home—has suddenly changed his tune and is trying to form a bloc within a bloc, aligning France with the Baltic states. The Americans, the British, and the Germans rightly understand how reckless it is, and are opposed to it. POLITICO reported that “France’s top NATO partners, including the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, [had] to clarify that they would not be sending troops.”
But that is France being France, a historic great power with nuclear weapons, trying to take advantage of the European vacuum. Macron’s rhetoric dubbing Russia an existential threat is just that: rhetoric. There is no way Macron believes what he says, and it is purely to make a power play for EU leadership, to be the primus inter pares within Europe against Britain, and especially Germany. Granted, that rhetoric itself is reckless. On the other hand, the motivation for the Baltics are entirely different, as I have written.
There is a simple way to stop this nonsense. The president of the U.S. and his NSC have so far specified their refusal to send troops to Ukraine under any circumstances, outside of NATO being under direct attack. This situation demands they go a little further. If any Baltic country decides to go to war with Russia, alongside France, they are free to do so. Any retaliatory attack on their home-soil or military assets in the high seas, however disproportionate, will not automatically invoke Article 5 of NATO.
And that should be made explicitly clear to both the West and East Europeans. NATO is a defensive alliance. Once you’re in the club, you’re in it. But if you open the doors and try to punch someone outside, only to expect the other club members to go and defend you, then apologies, but you’re on your own. Clubs have walls. You can stay safe inside, on the condition that you don’t pick a fight outside the club.
President Trump was correct. We should not defend anyone who is cavalier about collective security and seeks a nuclear confrontation. Given that the president’s ethical obligations are primarily towards defending his people and keeping them safe, that includes minimizing the chances of a nuclear conflict. Time for the protectorates to internalize that. If they want to drag America to war, or initiate a nuclear conflict, they will be treated as enemies of the American people.
The post The U.S. May Need to Maneuver Around NATO Article 5 appeared first on The American Conservative.
In 1949, during his first campaign for Parliament, Enoch Powell made an argument that he would develop throughout the rest of his career: A nuclear deterrent does not close the possibility of conventional war involving one or more nuclear belligerents. He expressed this theory about “the nuclear assumption” most fully in a 1966 floor speech, in which he quoted B. L. Hart: “The nuclear weapon is a deterrent to nuclear war, but not to war.”
Iran and Pakistan’s casual violations of one another’s territorial sovereignty this week—lobbing missiles willy-nilly at “militants” who each alleges are hiding within the other country’s borders—shows that a nuclear deterrent (namely, Pakistan’s) doesn’t seem to make much of a difference in the aggressive relations between near-peer powers. (Something to consider seriously vis-a-vis China.) Dare we say, Powell, vindicated again?
The post What If Nuclear Deterrence Is Fake? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Christopher Nolan is the foremost cinematic proponent of the Great Man Theory of history.
What causes tragedy? Common wisdom dictates choices. Choices have consequences. Nemesis follows Hubris. The ancients, however, argued that fate is a much stronger determinant.
Sometimes humans do not have a choice. The great war was destined in Mahabharata. Paris was cursed, regardless of his particular choice among three of those who had power over his fate. Penelope was doomed to sit and wait for Odysseus in the prime of her youth, purely because her fate was entwined with that of a hero whose choices would have epoch-defining consequences. Those who truly have power over your fate are often not merciful.
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a cinematic tragedy of a scale that we have not seen in a while, and will perhaps not again in a long time.
Oppenheimer is based on the book American Prometheus; the Promethean theme of attempting to imitate the gods at a formidable and unrecognized cost is eloquently showcased throughout the movie. It traces the backstory of the “father of the atomic bomb,” J. Robert Oppenheimer, and presents his personal haunting at the time of his supreme triumph, and the seeds of subsequent tragedy.
The book depicts our protagonist as borderline neurotic and somewhat sexually awkward in his formative years, although his womanizing was notorious even by the standards of those days. The movie avoids most of that for the sake of plot. The cerebral Oppenheimer finds himself out of place at stuffy Cambridge, the ever-present ritualistic social conformity of a dying empire that might be familiar to comparativists and historians. But he is in Europe, so he meets Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Already a rising star and a legend in his own mind, Oppenheimer wants to bring the “new science” back to the new world—to help man conquer nature and unleash the power of the gods.
Back in America, his research is punctuated by his tormenting affair with a young communist and psychiatrist, Jean Tatlock, played by Florence Pugh. Tatlock, haunted by her own demons, took her own life at the height of the Second World War and the Manhattan Project. “You think the rules don’t apply to the Golden Boy?” a broken and depressed Tatlock asks Oppenheimer a year before her demise after he says he needs to be disconnected from her, due to his duty to the nation (and to his wife and family).
“You drop in and out of my life,” she says. “That’s power.” History often forgets the muses of great men. Lord Nelson died a hero. Emma Hamilton died a heavily indebted alcoholic, drinking laudanum. There is never a blue plaque for every inspiration.
The story follows Oppenheimer’s recruitment by Leslie Groves—a laconic Matt Damon—to lead an all-star secretive project. Hitler was already ahead in pursuit of the ultimate weapon, but Hitler and Heisenberg had one significant disadvantage. European conformity coupled with Aryan supremacy and antisemitism led to the continent’s greatest brains moving to America. Oppenheimer, Fermi, Feynman, and Teller design the “gadget” under the fathomless and hyperventilating score by Ludwig Göransson. Oppenheimer named the project “Trinity,” an allusion to both three-headed Brahma and to the memory of the then-deceased Jean Tatlock, who introduced Oppenheimer to the 16th-century metaphysical poems of John Donne.
Nolan is the foremost cinematic proponent of the Great Man Theory of history, a master depictor of tortured souls who are better than their fellow men, the agonists of history, heroes who are doomed to suffer for a higher calling.
“The bigger the star, the more violent its demise,” says Oppenheimer, played in by a gaunt Cillian Murphy with a bemused and stoic half-smile in his greatest performance to date. Fate eventually caught up with Oppenheimer. Despite not acting on behalf of any hostile foreign state, his Platonic “global government” sympathies and communist associates—including his formerly card-carrying wife, Kitty—made him an enemy of the state.
The result was a show-trial, and the demise of the age of larger-than-life great men and the dawn of the age of bureaucracy. In Socratic irony, Lewis Strauss (a superlative Robert Downey Junior) sets the trap to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance. “Amateurs chase the sun and get burned. Power stays in the shadows,” he muses. An ethos that has only gotten more powerful in our unaccountable imperial bureaucracy.
Interestingly, another great man of history was close to Oppenheimer during those days. George Kennan, who similarly suffered a fall from grace, watching his theory of “containment” completely co-opted by the mindless swarm bureaucracy, became close to Oppenheimer. Kennan and Oppenheimer exchanged letters and were colleagues at Princeton; they shared similar realist aims of co-existence and global equilibrium.
In one of the most interesting quotes, Edward Teller tells Oppenheimer, “You see beyond the world we live in. There is a price to pay for that.”
Oppenheimer was by no means a moral force or a saint. But modern history is rarely made by ascetics. It is made by tortured, haunted, detached, amoral men, who are often the cause of untold suffering to their loved ones. They are despised by simpletons but pave the path to painful progress of the species. There is always a price to pay.
Greatness is inevitably entwined with tragedy.
The post Oppenheimer and the Roots of Tragedy appeared first on The American Conservative.
Lateo.net - Flux RSS en pagaille (pour en ajouter : @ moi) 