Category: US politics

Senator Chuck Hagel to “retire”

The New York Times web site is reporting that Senator Chuck Hagel, R-Nebraska, will not run for re-election to the Senate, nor for the White House.
We’ve written about Senator Hagel here before, in general admiring his status as a rare Republican foreign policy maverick, a clear-thinker with the credentials, the experience, and most importantly, the nerve to stand up to the neconservative infiltration and takeover of the Republican Party.
Hagel was anti-war on Iraq, when being anti-Iraq war wasn’t cool…. in either party. As a decorated Vietnam veteran, Hagel early on warned of Vietnam ghosts in Iraq.
Yet Hagel has been a creature of the US Senate, and in that political role, he’s often bent with the wind, (such as on the habeas corpus for detainees issue) perhaps in hopes of living to fry bigger political fish. That earned him the back-handed compliment from one Nebraska blogger:

“He’s Chuck Hagel, folks – the thinking man’s unthinking Republican. And, you almost have to like him; you just can’t count on him.”

I think that’s too harsh, but I find myself disappointed that he apparently hasn’t found a viable way to run for national office next year.
So what’s behind Hagel’s decision not to run for anything next year – at least not at this time?

1. Was it his disgust with his own Republican Party? I’ve seen reports that neoconservatives were raising mountains of out-of-state cash for a nasty challenge to Hagel in the upcoming Republican primary.
2. Was it a sense that the Republican Party stands on the threshold of being crushed next year in the US Senate? That prospect, perhaps ironically, increases with Hagel withdrawing. If fellow veteran Bob Kerry indeed returns to Nebraska, the Democrats might well add Hagel’s seat to their Senate winnings next year. (They could also take John Warner’s seat here in Virginia, provided they can find another “maverick” like Jim Webb.)
3. If that indeed is his assessment, might Hagel be calculating that it’s more prudent for him to sit this slaughter out, and be available as the elder “realist” statesman to help with a Republican reconstruction by 2012?
4. Or is Hagel “thinking” yet again — that there might still be a chance for re-surfacing on a serious third party ticket for the White House next year? Perhaps Sam Waterston’s “Unity08” might yet persuade him. Or maybe New York’s Mayor Bloomberg might draft him — as David Broder recently suggested.

In my opinion, the Republican Party is in crisis mode, even as it refuses to admit it. It has strayed dangerously far from its own grand heritage as the Party of Lincoln, “TR,” “IKE,” and even “the Gipper.” Worse, it has abandoned all too many fundamental American values.
With most of the Republican Presidential candidates, including Fred Thompson, now running hawkishly to the right of Dick Cheney, Chuck Hagel could take a huge chunk of disaffected “Eisenhower Republicans” with him, wherever and whenever he goes. I sense many anti-war-party Democrats also admire and might support Hagel, should the Democratic candidates self-destruct in kow-towing to the neocon returnees into their ranks. Ah, wishful thinking?
Hagel’s formal announcement on Monday should be interesting. I’m counting on him not to go quietly.

This just in! ‘Century’ mysteriously loses 93 years!

Sometimes, it seems hard to remember that 1997 was only ten years ago. It feels as if such a lot has happened since then! Indeed, sometimes it feels that all of world history is going through a big time-warp these days, a great celestial laundry machine that’s tumbling us all over each other with increasing rapidity.
It was in 1997 that Bill Kristol and a bunch of his uber-militaristic and neocon allies in US politics established their ‘Project for a New American Century‘. Check out the names of those who signed its founding declaration, at the bottom of this web-page. There they all are: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, a smarter member of the Bush clan than George W., Elliott Abrams, Scooter Libby, Zal Khalilzad, Paul Wolfowitz, Steve Rosen, etc etc…
Within less than four years of signing that, those men– okay, not including Jeb Bush, but instead, his more pliable brother– were catapulted onto the very apex of the US power machine. As of 2001 they had an unprecedented opportunity to bring into being their goal of a “New American Century.”
They over-reached, didn’t they.
That “exemplary” (shock! awe!) invasion of Iraq was their fatal over-reach.
Without that over-reach, but with smart stewarding of the US’s many assets in global politics, US domination of the world system could most likely have continued with little effective challenge for a further few decades– though almost certainly not for a full ten of them.
I’ve been reading the fascinating representation that Michael Pillsbury published in this 2000 book, of the views that Chinese strategic thinkers expressed in the late 1990s on relations among the world’s leading powers. Pillsbury wrote that one respected senior Chinese analyst, Yang Dazhou, wrote in 1997 that he foresaw the US as maintaining its superpower status “for at least three decades”– though this view was challenged by other senior analysts, who saw US decline as more inevitable and more rapid than portrayed by Yang.
(Can anyone refer me to good writing in English on the more recent assessments of global power balances produced by Chinese analysts?)
… Actually, I wish I could find out more about that term for a “superpower” in Chinese, as attributed to Yang there. For my part, I don’t foresee the US becoming “just one more ordinary power” in the world any time soon… But I do believe that the status of being the world’s unique “Uberpower“, that Josef Joffe rightly attributed to the US in the post-Cold War era, is the one that is right now– thanks in great part to the PNACers’ bloody and destructive over-reach in Iraq– coming to an end.
What will replace it? Well, we are evidently at a very important historic juncture. The invasion of Iraq has been a horrendous, cataclysmic tragedy for nearly all the people of that country (and for a relatively small number of American families.) But the course of events there also has the capacity to teach everyone in the world– and most particularly the US citizenry– a few important lessons:

    1. Military power, however technically hyper-advanced, can never be relied on as sufficient, on its own, to assure the achievement of strategic goals. Other elements of power including diplomatic/political smarts and international legitimacy, are equally or even more important.
    2. Thank goodness that, in the re-ordering of inter-national power balances that will certainly follow the US debacle in Iraq, we already do have two rules-based and generally well-trusted mechanisms of international coordination to help the people of the world navigate their way through these changes. These are (a) the UN, and its norms and institutions, and (b) the world economic system, ditto. If we didn’t have these two broad and already tested systems of international coordination in place, then imagine how damaging and violent the jostling among the world’s big powers could be during the transition into which the world’s peoples are now entering!
    3. The limitations on the utility of military force, as revealed most sharply in Iraq, are a helpfully instructive footnote to the more general situation that has existed since 1945 (or at least, since 1949), namely that in the era of nuclear weapons war among the great powers has become unthinkable. (This relates to #2 above, too.) True, Iraq was not at any point a “great” power. But what we have seen there is that war by a great power against even an already long-weakened medium power has proven counter-productive for the great (“Uber!”) power in question. Therefore, possession of great military power is revealed as not such an important component of “national” power as it has generally until now been thought to be…

And thus, while the US political class has been spending just about all its time, and vast amounts of our national budget, futzing around trying to figure out what to do about the actually unwinnable (and only barely salvageable) US situation in Iraq, the “soft power” that our country was once able to project around with great confidence around the world has eroded almost completely, and the Japanese, Chinese, Brits have become major props of our national debt…
As of June 30, 2007 Japan held $612.3 billion of our national debt, China $405.1 billion, and the UK $190.1 billion. The total amount of the US debt held by the public– that is, not by other US government trust funds, like the Social Security trust Fund– at that point was $4,943 billion. So China, for example, was holding 8.2% of that…
This past couple of weeks I’ve been doing some intriguing reading of Realist writers– Joffe, Brzezinski, Kishore Mahbubani– and some hard thinking on these issues, too. I have maintained for a few years now that there is no real contradiction between well-informed and principled Realist thinking on international affairs, and being a Quaker pacifist. I’d be happy to explain this more sometime, but don’t have time to now. My main point here, though, is to note that the whole wrenchingly ghastly experience of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq really does underline the fact that, in the globally interconnected and still informed-by-Hiroshima world of the 21st century, raw military power as such has far, far less utility than might have been thought earlier.
Yes, we still have to explain some of these things a lot more effectively to members of our political elite here, in both the big political parties– as well as to members of the MSM commentatoriat.
But at the very least, surely everyone can see that the destructive, arrogantly unilateralist uber-militarism that was the hallmark of the PNACers who captured our government in 2001 has failed?
Hallelujah.

US congress about to increase ‘Subsidies of Mass Destruction’?

H’mmm, I’ve recently been writing about the numbers of people killed by Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction back in the 1980s. I guess it was around 25,000 people at the time– though many of the 100,000 Iranians contaminated by the Iraqi CW suffered mightily over the years that followed (and until today.)
The number of women, men, and children who die quite avoidable deaths in low-income countries every few months because of the completely unfair (and under WTO rules, most probably actually illegal) subsidies that the US and other rich countries give to their agricultural producers is almost certainly higher than that.
Therefore I think we ought to get used to calling them Subsidies of Mass Destruction (SMD’s.)
And right now, the US Congress is considering provisions in the 2007-2012 Farm Bill that are set not just to keep the US’s agricultural subsidies in place, but also to increase them. The House of Representatives passed its version of the five-year Farm Bill on July 27. This PDF info sheet from the House Ag Committee tells us “proudly” that the bill preserves and increases subsidies paid on 25 different commodities, including those two “Kings” of the traditional US plantation/slavery system, cotton and rice, which still are “Kings” in this Farm Bill.
Oh, also, shock, horror. This bill is going to put a “hard cap” on the income of anyone who’s eligible for getting the subsidies. It’s as low (irony alert) as one million dollars per person…
So you can really see that these subsidies are not really about “preserving the small American family farmer”, at all. They’re about massive taxpayer handouts to Big Agribusiness.
Oxfam has done a lot of solid research over the past few years into how the US cotton subsidies destroy the livelihoods of miliions of farmers in low-income countries around the world.
For example, this press release from September 2002. It said:

    US subsidies to cotton producers are contributing to mass poverty in some of the world’s poorest countries, according to a report published today by the international development agency Oxfam.
    Government support to the 25,000 domestic cotton producers in the US totals $3.9 billion annually, more than three times the US foreign assistance to Africa’s 500 million people.
    “The US is the world’s strongest proponent of free trade, but when poor cotton farmers in Mali try to trade on the world market, they must compete against massively subsidized American cotton,” says Phil Twyford. “This makes a mockery of the idea of a level playing field. The rules are rigged against the poor.”
    American cotton subsidies are highly targeted to benefit the largest farming operations. The largest 10 per cent of American cotton agro-businesses received three-quarters of the total subsidies.
    The Government of Brazil is launching a complaint with the World Trade Organization, claiming that US cotton support constitutes an unfair trade practice.
    More than 10 million people in Central and West Africa depend directly on cotton. It is a major source of revenue for countries such as Mali, Burkina Faso and Benin. The amount of money America spends on cotton is more than the entire GDP of Burkina Faso, where 2 million people depend on cotton and half of who live below the poverty line.
    Oxfam says that Africa is losing $300 million a year, based on estimates from the International Cotton Advisory Council, and that the withdrawal of US subsidies would raise the world price of cotton by 11 cents a pound.
    World cotton prices have sunk to as low now as any time since the Great Depression. The US subsidies are pushing prices even further into collapse…

Well, in March 2005 the Brazilians did win the “case” against the US cotton subsidies that they’d lodged with the WTO’s Dispute Resolution Mechanism… Do you think that put an end to the US cotton subsidies??
Short answer: No.
Today, I found a handful of great online resources about the nature of the US cotton subsidies, and the industry that has grown up around them.
First of all, I found this totally awesome online database, that’s produced by an outfit called the Environmental Working Group. The EWG’s doughty researchers used FOIA applications to the US Dept of Agriculture to free up some much-needed public information about the structure of the subsidies. That page there shows you how strongly receipt of the subsidies was concentrated into a few hands in 2005. If you noodle around that database a little bit you can find out all kinds of information about the recipients of the subsidies, too.
On this page, fairly low down, I found out that in 2005, cotton subsidies totaled $3.3 billion. Ah, and here is the cotton page itself. More great figures there.
But here was one of my greatest online finds of today: A brilliantly researched and written investigative piece about the whole cotton subsidy phenomenon written by CNN-Money reporter G. Pascal Zachary in December 2005.
His whole article is well worth reading by anyone interested in this whole crazy/lethal enterprise of US cotton subsidies.
Here are my highlights:

Continue reading “US congress about to increase ‘Subsidies of Mass Destruction’?”

Meet the Evangelical Zionists

This is a brilliant short video by Max Blumenthal, shot during the recent big meeting held in Washington DC by a big Evangelical organization called Christians United for Israel (CUFI).
Blumenthal, who’s Jewish, goes to the conference in the role of naive reporter. He gets some great footage of an interview with recently disgraced GOP Speaker of the House of Representatives Tom DeLay, and of him (MB) questioning CUFI head “Pastor” John Hagee about whether he really thinks– as written in one of his books– that the Jews have only themselves to blame for all the times they’ve been persecuted.
The “vox pop” discussions with CUFI members in the hotel lobby are really revealing… Also, the extremely scary parts where you see a large roomful of people swaying and dancing– one even doing a cheerleading-type hop– with Israeli and US flags clasped to their breasts… And we see two uniformed soldiers, one in US camo and the other in Israeli camo and a prayer shawl, come up to the front and salute each other. Religion, ecstasy, and militarism all tied up together in one big package.
I believe that use of a US forces uniform in such a context is actually illegal?
And yes, the vox pop people do talk a bit about how “the Muslims” are “the enemy.”
Then– Joe Lieberman!! I had read some of the disturbingly fawning remarks he made there about Hagee, before. But to see him make them on the video… Well, I am almost speechless.
I think it’s been the case for a while now that the Christian Zionists– who have very, very long roots in this country– have been a stronger base of support for Israel here than the Jewish-American Zionists. And of course, given that the beliefs of many of these Evangelical Zionists are that at the time of “Armageddon” all the Jews will either become converted to Christianity or get consumed by fire, there are many Jewish Americans who are still fairly wary about the Evangelicals’ strong support for Israel.
The game plan for these Evangelicals (as also laid out lovingly in their extremely well-selling though in practice almost unreadable novels about “the End Time”) is that first, the Jewish people all need to be “ingathered” into Israel, and then soon after there will be “Armageddon” and the “Second Coming.” And along the way there, there’ll be great fighting against “Babylon” (or Baghdad) and perhaps even some nuclear war…
But it’s all– from these people’s very scary point of view– in a good cause.
I want to note that I know that not all Evangelical Christians in the US are like these ones. I have a number of Evangelical friends who are deeply committed to social-justice causes including to the pursuit of just peace between Palestinians and Israelis. However, sadly, so far it seems to be the well-organized Christian Zionists among them who seem much stronger than the other lot.
Meanwhile, huge kudos to Max Blumenthal and his videographer Thomas Shomaker for making this great and informative little piece of live-reporting video. (Did I tell you they got kicked out of the conference toward the end of the movie. I wonder what they missed? No matter. What they got was excellent.)

Sam Waterston: Commencent Address for America

Actor Sam Waterston, known to the nation as Jack McCoy on the long running TV series Law & Order, recently delivered one of the best commencement speeches anywhere — at Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson, on July 4th, as part of the annual ceremony for new citizens.
With wit, history, and splendid twists of phrase, Waterston earned what may have been the only standing ovation in 25 years of Monticello Independence Day speeches.
You can read the full text here, or listen to an audio podcast here.

(Technical note: Visitors presently need to click on the “streaming audio” link on the right, as the mp3 version on the “left” mysteriously cuts off 4 sentences from the end…. I’m hoping Monticello may yet place the full 22 minute streaming video of this speech on its web too.)

The entire speech is worth the effort to read/hear/view in full. Savor it. With one of the most recognizable voices in all of America (his past roles include Abraham Lincoln and yes, Thomas Jefferson), “old guy” Waterston breathes new life into the art of citizenship. He alerts citizens, new and old, that citizenship in a democracy requires not mere passive “pursuit of happiness” but “active interference” in how our politicians protect our “lives and liberty.”
Waterston puts “the participation back into ‘participatory democracy’.”
Rejecting the misplaced hope that “America is the all-time greatest self-correcting nation” or that ordinary citizen mistakes will “gum up” the magical functioning of our government, Waterston instead cites Jefferson’s ultimate faith in the people:

“The evils flowing from the duperies of the people [— that is, the ignorant errors of folks like you and me —] are less injurious than those from the egoism of their agents [ — that is, the arrogant errors of those who speak and act for us].”

Rather than relying on agents, lobbyists, or any opinion dictator:

“America has been marvelously able to correct its course in the past because the founding idea — of individual freedom expressed through direct representation — has stirred its citizens to participate, and interfere. Information from the people makes the government smarter. Insufficient information from us makes it dumber….
In our country, things are ‘normal’ only when your voices are clearly heard. The old model of our citizenly relation to politics was of a group of people under a tree, taking turns on the stump all day, discussing the issues of the time. The old model was the town meeting where every citizen can have their say. Old citizens like me hope that between you and the Internet the old model will get a new lease on life.”

I especially appreciate Waterston’s rebuke of the God-like status being given to mind-numbing public opinion polls:

“We can’t let ourselves become mere units of statistical analysis. It appears to be so, that if you ask any 1000 Americans their views on anything, you’ll have a pretty good idea what all Americans think. You might almost conclude that individuals didn’t matter at all anymore.

Yet individuals can prove the opposite, that we’re potentially more than the “mere grain of sand in a vast statistical ocean.”

“Men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master,” as Jefferson predicted. But will we, by our silence, indifference, or inaction, give the trust away, cede it to the wealthy, present it to the entrenched, hand it off to the government, entrust it to any process or procedure that excludes our voices? It could happen.”

Waterston then spins his own quote for the ages:

“As graduating citizens, you will know how the government is set up: the justly familiar separation of powers, the well-known system of checks and balances, and the famous three branches of government: the executive branch, the judicial branch, and the legislative branch.
If these are the branches, what is the tree? Do not think it’s the government.
We are the tree from which the government springs and spreads into its three branches. Every citizen is part of the root system, part of the trunk, no mere twig or leaf. Help our government never to forget it.”

The conclusion then follows for the new citizens at Monticello and for us all:

“So it turns out citizenship isn’t just a great privilege and opportunity, though it is all that, it’s also a job. I’m sorry to be the one to bring you this news, so late in the process. But don’t worry, it’s a great job. Everything that happens within this country politically, and everywhere in the world its influence is felt, falls within its province. It’s a job with a lot of scope. You’ll never be able to complain again about being bored at work. As we multiply our individual voices, we multiply the chances for our country’s success.”

Schumer, Israel, etc.

A great post from Steve Clemons on Friday. While giving general praise to the position that Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is currently articulating, Clemons also writes this:

    Every time I get an email from Senator Schumer, I am reminded of his support of John Bolton’s confirmation in the 2nd push the administration made on Bolton during the Israel-Lebanon conflagration. Several — yes more than three — U.S. Senators told me personally that Schumer was telling them “a vote against Bolton is a vote against Israel.”

    It is that kind of false choice thinking that undermines American prestige and moral credibility. So yes, Republicans are vulnerable on this war — but the kind of giddy notes that Schumer is sending out neglect his own role in empowering this crowd.

Clemons’ own comment on this tidbit focuses on what he calls the “historical amnesia” currently being displayed by Schumer (and other leading Democrats.) But he makes no comment on the assumption embedded in the argument attributed to Schumer that the (claimed) interests of a foreign country, Israel, should outweigh any other concerns his fellow senators might have had about Bolton.
We could also, certainly, go back and look at the role that the claimed interests of that same foreign country played back in 2002 in persuading so many senators and House members to allow the administration to proceed full-bore with its plan to invade Iraq… or the role that those same interests play today in the argumentation of those urging an attack against Iran.
Why do so many US senators and representatives still seem simply to assume that placing Israel’s (claimed, but perhaps not actual) interests so high in their priority list is the wise thing for our country– and them– to do? Especially now that we can palpably see that the Iraq war and the appointment of John Bolton as UN ambassador, to mention just two notable recent results of that thinking, led to such chains of disasters for the interests of the US citizenry…
Maybe it’s time for these US pols to engage in a much deeper discussion with people representing all strands of Israeli thinking, including the country’s many thoughtful advocates of peace and coexistence– rather than taking into account only the shrill warnings of the most extreme of the Israeli militarists, which is what seems to have happened until now.

Jefferson & the Reign of Witches

Kudos to the Baltimore Sun for its July 4th editorial. Contrary to the keen imagination of another former “Jefferson Fellow” now at Oxford, I (Scott), as far as I know, had nothing to do with the Sun editorial. :-}
The Baltimore editorial begins with the reference to Thomas Jefferson’s First Inaugural. (Yes, this is the same Jefferson address I invoked here at jwn last November 2nd, in challenging Senator George Allen’s claim to being a “Jeffersonian”). In the Sun’s version,

In his first presidential inaugural address in 1801, he (Jefferson) ticked off a long list of essential principles of government, featuring highlights of the Bill of Rights, and called preservation of the government “in its whole constitutional vigor” the “anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad.” These principles “should be the creed of our political faith,” he said. “Should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty and safety.”

The editorial credits Jefferson for having been “prophetic” about how the US government has (yet again) committed “a long train of abuses” (as Jefferson once wrote about another George III) against our constitutional liberties, in “moments… of alarm.”
If I had written the editorial, I’d have pointedly noted how for Jefferson, “freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected” were among the principles that:

“form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith.”

Through his long public life, Jefferson had extensive first hand experiences with the challenges of protecting such principles in perceived times of national emergency, including the treatment of prisoners of war. As I noted last November, Jefferson would have been particularly horrified by our present cavalier disregard of habeas corpus protections, given that he:

affirmed that habeas corpus applied to both citizen and alien alike, and.. argued against suspending it even in times of war or rebellion. In a 1788 letter to James Madison, Jefferson warned that the want of habeas corpus “will do evil…” and that suspensions thereof can become “habitual” and the “minds of the nation almost prepared to live under its constant suspension.”

In similar vein, the Sun editorial closes with an all too appropriate warning:

“Public outrage at the discovery of such clandestine abuses has typically resulted in the sort of corrective action Jefferson recommended. Such a process may be under way soon again as Congress and the courts begin to apply some restraints on an administration that as much as or more than any other has considered itself above the law. There’s little time to waste before Americans become so accustomed to their lost liberty that the loss becomes acceptable.“

Harpers Magazine on July 4th featured a related, and also all-too-relevant Jefferson quotation about our present “Reign of Witches.” As Scott Horton notes, Jefferson was writing in 1798 to a friend on his hope that the Federalists had “overplayed their hand” with the Alien & Sedition Acts (an early version of today’s Patriot Act). Yet Jefferson nonetheless was concerned that he could be arrested if his letter was publicized, given how paranoid the country had become then (as now).

“A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt… And if we feel their power just sufficiently to hoop us together, it will be the happiest situation in which we can exist. If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.”

Helena here has repeatedly expressed her optimism that the tide in Washington has turned…; may the reign of the neocon warlocks soon pass over.

Just what did “The Declaration” Declare?

Here in the United States, it’s July 4th, a day we commemorate with fireworks, cook-outs, concerts, and speeches. So what exactly is it that we celebrate?
Nominally, today marks the 231st anniversary of revolutionary America formally declaring its separation from Great Britain. The primary author of the famous document was, of course, Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson’s Monticello home, here in Charlottesville, has become a living educational memorial to Jefferson. I recently was honored to be a “Jefferson Fellow” at the adjoining Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, (ICJS) where scholars, in part, explore the ongoing legacy of Jefferson for our world today.
Despite the ready association of Jefferson with today’s date, do we understand what the core purpose of Jefferson’s Declaration was?
Easy, right? If so, and at the risk of turning this into NPR’s “wait, wait,… don’t tell me” quiz show, then let’s try this question: how did America’s famous Declaration begin? Was it:

a. “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,…”
b. “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness…”
c. ” When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station….”
d. “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.”
e. “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness…”

————————–
If you the reader are like the vast majority of Americans, you will be inclined to answer “b,” but sorry, that is the Declaration’s second paragraph, not the first.

Answer “e” is also incorrect; that’s the opening to the 1945 Vietnamese Declaration (among dozens of Declarations in world history that emulated America’s in one form or another.)
Answer “d” also is incorrect, as this is Article 1 from the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man.
With answer “a” of course being the preamble to the 1789 US Constitution, then you surely knew the answer to be “c.”

Lest we get too confident in our history IQ, how many of us can readily recall just what the 1776 American Declaration… well… “declared?”
Even if you had a solid American history education, don’t feel too bad if you’re a bit confused by the question. Assuming you went to an American school that still taught “civics” in some form, your lessons on “The Declaration” likely included much contemplation of the meaning, the “codes,” of Jefferson’s second paragraph. Just what fundamental “truths” did the new American nation “hold” to be “self-evident?” And what about all that seeming hypocrisy regarding all persons (“men”) being created equal, even as so many of them were then in tolerated bondage?
Until quite recently, very little in the vast scholarship on Jefferson and the Declaration addresses the “simple” question of just what was the Declaration’s purpose? The curious state of such learned discourse is neatly illustrated in a short 1999 text, edited by Joseph Ellis and entitled, “What Did the Declaration Declare?” This book provides splendid examples of the great scholarly debates over the last half of the 20th Century about how the Declaration was written, about the merits or exaggerations in the list of grievances against George III, and just which intellectual current influenced Thomas Jefferson’s writing of the Declaration’s second paragraph. Was it John Locke? Or was it the Scottish Enlightenment? Or was it some Saxon mythology that only Jefferson could fathom?
Whatever Jefferson’s intellectual parentage, Abraham Lincoln’s 1859 tribute to Jefferson’s “second paragraph” still nicely sidesteps such inquiry:

“All honor to Jefferson… who had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Yet from Lincoln to the present, few scholars or pundits have provided much substantive comment about the Declaration’s first sentence, which in full reads:

“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

Parenthetically, my own work focuses on just what Jefferson and his colleagues meant by a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” (I have much to publish on this rarely-considered clause, and yes, it has a rather compelling contemporary ring…. Imagine — American leaders once caring about world opinion.)
I am pleased though to acknowledge that the two-century-old intellectual logjam blocking inquiry into the Declaration’s first sentence has been nicely broken by Harvard’s David Armitage, an historian and “English School” international relations scholar.
In a brilliant 2002 William & Mary Quarterly article and in a slender new book, entitled “The Declaration of Independence: A Global History,” Armitage contends directly that the fundamental purpose of the American Declaration was to…
(drum roll…. turn the page…. whoosh, poof, boom, zing, crackle,sizzle…, bang!….)

Continue reading “Just what did “The Declaration” Declare?”

Republicans mutinying over Iraq

I have always argued that– regardless of one’s own party-political proclivities– the movement to end the United States’ disastrous occupation of Iraq and restore reason and sustainability to a national security stance that since 9/11 has been hijacked by the militaristic unilateralists known as neocons must be, and rightfully is, a broadly non-partisan effort; and also, indeed, that there are many (paleo-con?) Republicans who have all along been making a good contribution to this movement.
I have also noted here previously that the grassroots pressure will be or become particularly strong on Republican candidates for elective office to distance themselves from the neocon cabal that has been surrounding President Bush.
So it was really excellent, Tuesday morning, to hear news of the important speech that Sen. Richard Lugar made in the Senate Monday evening. In it, he noted the unreality of much of the discussion ongoing in Washington about whether the “Iraqi” government and armed forces are capable of reaching made-in-Washington “benchmarks”. He also, even more significantly, called on the President to change course from the current adherence to a “surge” strategy that Lugar said had little chance of success, and to start planning now to

    downsize the U.S. military’s role in Iraq and place much more emphasis on diplomatic and economic options.

For those unfamiliar with his record, I should note that Lugar is an extremely well-respected voice on foreign affairs. He was the co-author in 1991 of the “Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program”, a program to work with the authorities, managers, and scientists in Russia and other former-Soviet countries to find ways to safely dismantle nuclear weapons as called for in previous disarmament agreements, and to convert the institutions once devoted to development and production of WMDs into institutions with other more useful missions in the post-Cold War era.
(That expertise should come in handy once we all start planning how to convert the US’s current huge military industries into something more useful for humanity.)
Anyway, Lugar is also the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, having previously been the Chair of the Committee when the Republicans controlled Congress.
On Tuesday, he followed up his Monday speech by sending a shortened version of it to be published in the WaPo. In addition, his Monday speech prompted the writing of this important news report in Wednesday’s WaPo, which noted the following:

    Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, sent a letter to Bush yesterday urging the president to develop “a comprehensive plan for our country’s gradual military disengagement” from Iraq. “I am also concerned that we are running out of time,” he wrote.
    Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, praised Lugar’s statement as “an important and sincere contribution” to the Iraq debate.
    Republican skepticism has grown steadily, if subtly, since the Senate began debating the war in February. One lawmaker who has changed his tone is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.). Earlier this year, McConnell helped block from a vote even a nonbinding resolution opposing the troop increase. Now, he views a change in course as a given. “I anticipate that we’ll probably be going in a different direction in some way in Iraq” in September, McConnell told reporters earlier this month. “And it’ll be interesting to see what the administration chooses to do.”
    Indeed, Republican leaders on Capitol Hill had been hoping to stave off further defections until after a report on military and political conditions in Iraq is delivered by Army Gen. David H. Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker in September. However, some in the GOP fear that the White House is stalling, hoping to delay any shift in U.S. strategy until the fall. A major test will come next month, when the Senate considers a series of withdrawal-related amendments to the defense authorization bill — and Republicans such as Lugar and Voinovich will have to officially break ranks or not.
    White House spokesman Tony Snow said yesterday that Bush hopes “members of the House and Senate will give the Baghdad security plan a chance to unfold.”
    Lugar consulted with McConnell before delivering his speech, but not with the White House, according to Lugar spokesman Andy Fisher.

And yesterday, AP’s Anne Flaherty wrote the following:

    A majority of senators believe troops should start coming home within the next few months. A new House investigation concluded this week that the Iraqis have little control over an ailing security force. And House Republicans are calling to revive the independent Iraq Study Group to give the nation options.
    While the White House thought they had until September to deal with political fallout on the unpopular war, officials may have forgotten another critical date: the upcoming 2008 elections.
    “This is an important moment if we are still to have a bipartisan policy to deal with Iraq,” Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., said in an interview Wednesday.
    If Congress and the White House wait until September to change course in Iraq, Lugar said “It’ll be further advanced in the election cycle. It makes it more difficult for people to cooperate. … If you ask if I have some anxiety about 2008, I do.”

In his Monday speech, Lugar was quite explicit about the link between decisionmaking on the failed policy in Iraq and the demands of the US’s already-heating-up campaign for the 2008 elections.
For now, the Bushites are just urging everyone to give the surge more of a chance to succeed, and to wait at least until the point in September when the military chief in Iraq, Gen. Petraeus, and the ambassador, Ryan Crocker, come back in person to report to the two houses of Congress on how it has gone as of then.
Petraeus, of course, is well known as a lead author of the Army and Marines’ recently updated counter-insurgency (COIN) manual. In there, one of the things he warns about is the erosion of political support for (foreign) COIN operations, from the public back at home. Dan Froomkin noted on Tuesday that Petraeus already, in the lead-up to an earlier election (Fall 2004) played an important role trying to paint the rosy kind of picture of the situation in Iraq that could help Bush’s re-election chances in that election.
Petraeus wrote then:

    I see tangible progress. Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt from the ground up. The institutions that oversee them are being reestablished from the top down. And Iraqi leaders are stepping forward, leading their country and their security forces courageously. . . . There are reasons for optimism.

If he comes to Congress this September– three years and around 2,500 dead US soldiers later– and says something very similar, we should all certainly hope that the Senators and Representatives would call him on the inaccuracy of that earlier evaluation, and ask him why we should be expected to believe a “rosy” scenario from him this time round!
I have a lot more I’d like to say about the Lugar speech. I really do welcome this sign that a solid realist wing is starting to re-emerge within the Republican party. There is actually very little difference between the general position that Lugar adopts and that adopted by the leading Democratic candidates for president. Crucially, all these people talk about things like “the need to re-establish effective US leadership in the Middle East and the world” and “the need to ‘re-set’ [i.e. increase the size of] the US military.”
My own evaluation is that the diminution in US power brought about by Bush’s reckless and quite evidently failed attempt at imperial-style power projection in Iraq means it is too late (and fairly unhelpful) to think that US policy can be successfully reconstructed in these still quasi-hegemonic terms. I wish Lugar, Clinton, Obama, and all the rest of them would speak more forthrightly about the need for the US to build a new, more solid relationship with the rest of the world that is not based on questionable assumptions about US “leadership”, but rather, on commitment to human equality and human values…
But the position that Lugar has expressed so far is already a good start. And it portends some interesting times in the Republican Party over the weeks and months ahead.