Today’s collapse of peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians came as no surprise to anyone who has been watching.

EASTER IN THE MIDDLE EAST

By William Urban

There hasn’t been a “normal” Easter in Jerusalem in time out of mind. Perhaps there were good years during the British Mandate, 1922-1948, but even then the Jewish-Arab dispute was flaring into violence. The basic problem is that Jews want a homeland and Arabs want the Jews to go away. There isn’t much room for a compromise there.
Nevertheless, John Kerry keeps trying to persuade them to agree to something, anything. He is like the Energizer Bunny, wobbling forward and banging his drum, but not getting anywhere. Meanwhile, everyone in the neighborhood is worried about larger issues than the ones he believes the Palestinians and Israelis can compromise on. Worse, not even all Palestinians and all Israelis can agree on what they want.
The Arab Spring came to Egypt and went. For a year Hamas, the hard line party running Gaza, had significant help from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, but no longer. Now the Egyptian military is in charge. It sees Hamas as an enemy. Moreover, because President Obama had committed America to support the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt is now closer to Russia than to the United States. The Muslim Brotherhood had their chance to govern effectively and blew it, so now their leaders and hundreds of members have been given a mass trial and condemned to death; and in the countryside guerilla bands and protestors keep the army too busy to stop attacks on Israel from Gaza and the Sinai peninsula. Also, Egypt is now closer to Russia than to the United States.
Saudi Arabia seems to be in panic mode. Earlier the king had encouraged Saudis to join the fight in Syria, but when the Syrian resistance became dominated by al Qaida, he ordered all the volunteers to come home. Many stayed. Also, the situation in Iraq is spinning out of control, with the Sunnis ever more dominated by al Qaida and the Shiites getting cozy with Iran. That is a lose-lose situation for the Saudis.
The king is also worried about the Iranian nuclear program. Once he could count on the United States, but now he has seen that Obama’s red lines are literally written in sand, and the winds of change are blowing them away.
The Saudis want atomic bombs to balance the ones the Iranians will have. Since they have no nuclear program, they may try to buy one from Pakistan or North Korea or get a new ally (perhaps even Israel). They are supporting the new government in Egypt, which is similarly worried about Iranian bombs.
Syria is a mess, but one that looks ever more promising for the Assad regime. The opposition is splitting up, with al Qaida Central denouncing al Qaida in Iraq (now called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) for attacking the approved al-Qaeda faction. Moreover, the intervention of Hezbollah fighters and Iranian instructors has improved Assad’s fighting ability at the same time that people formerly hostile to the dictator have concluded that his enemies are even worse than he is. Meanwhile, poison gas has been used again, and nobody can agree on who used it. Obama, who not so long ago almost took America to war there, now has too many problems to revisit this one. Assad must still go, but not right away.
The Turkish government, which was once eager to see Assad toppled, now has troubles of its own and there is little popular support for intervention. Dominating Syria for four hundred years was quite enough.
Lebanon is almost as much a mess as Syria, but without fighting between regular armies. Christians and Sunnis do not want to see an Assad victory, but they have no military forces that could take on Hezbollah. Jordan is swamped by Syrian refugees who have added to the unhappy Palestinians that have been there for decades. That isn’t good.
Whenever law and order collapses, the criminals rush out. That is the case almost everywhere now. Not too long ago there were many Christian Arabs, but no longer. Not even in Bethlehem. In fact, everywhere in the Middle East Christians are fleeing as quickly as possible. Life in America, even in Sweden, is better than being murdered or kidnapped.
This brings us to Israel, which controls what used to be called the Holy Land. Israel itself is a prosperous democracy; the West Bank is not. Jewish Israelis (about 80% of the population) worry about a deluge of rockets from Lebanon and Gaza, Iranian threats to destroy the country, and their apparent abandonment by the Obama administration. John Kerry having a Jewish Czech grandfather and second cousins who were gassed by the Nazis helps as little as Madeleine Albright discovering that three of her Jewish Czech grandparents also died in the Holocaust.
Israel will not risk its survival on American promises. Mossad (the Israeli intelligence service) has assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists and used cyber warfare to destroy some uranium processors, but now that the sanctions have been lifted, they are resigned to an Iranian announcement that they have both the bomb and the rockets to deliver it. The Obama administration will do everything it can to prevent the Israelis from taking the reactors out as they did once in Iraq and later in Syria
Consequently, Israel is developing a missile defense system, cooperating with the US in ways that benefit both countries, but it is a small country — Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza would fit easily into Lake Michigan. (All would enjoy having some of its water.) The army is small but good. How good? Moshe Dayan, who led the Israeli Defense Forces to victory in 1956, said that he did not know — they had only fought Arabs.
The Arabs today are very different. They are better educated, more nationalistic, more motivated by religion, and more experienced. But they are also more interested in their own nations or in jihad than in the Palestinians. In fact, nobody seems to be paying attention to the Palestinians except university professors and leftist demonstrators. Even the Palestinians can’t get their act together. Elections haven’t been held in years, corruption is rampant, and the economies are stagnant or declining even more.
The future is uncertain, but one can easily imagine the situation getting worse. American leadership is needed, but what the Middle East gets is more leading from behind. Except for John Kerry. If he can make peace anywhere, he will have earned a Nobel Prize.

Review Atlas (April 17, 2014), 4.

WYATT EARP’S GUNS

By William Urban

On April 17 two guns, one a shotgun, the other a revolver supposedly worn by Wyatt Earp at the famed gunfight at the OK Corral, will sell at auction in Arizona. What should be an exciting event has so far been a bit of a yawner, and it’s worth reflecting why.
One reason, perhaps, is that pubic interest has changed. Back in the 1950s, when the TV show first appeared, the character played by Hugh O’Brien was exactly what the public was looking for — a handsome, courageous, moral man with no interest beyond protecting the public. This had little resemblance to the real Wyatt Earp, but neither did parts of the book on which it was based, Stuart Lake’s Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal. However, audiences were accustomed to film biographies that “improved” the story line of the lives of the people supposedly portrayed, and many Americans had been yearning for a law and order person who would be a model for American police forces.
Second, we now know much more about the real Wyatt Earp. There is no universally accepted view of what the gunfight was about, but it certainly wasn’t a showdown between good and evil. The cowboys weren’t saints, but today nobody portrays them as they had been seen in the Fifties. Wyatt and his brothers, too, are more complicated people, neither too good for this world nor too bad to have a place in it. Modern movies take a more sophisticated (or cynical) view of the events in Tombstone in late October of 1881, and portray more sex, violence and dusty clothes.
Third, the owner of the weapons has fallen far in the esteem of those who know Earp lore. Glenn Boyer’s first books were well received and are even today widely cited. But when people began asking what his sources for particular statements were, he was first evasive, implying that his reputation was beyond question, then he said that it was based on a manuscript by Wyatt’s contemporary, Ted Ten Eyck. When pressed, he finally admitted that he had made up the manuscript from sources here and there. His object, he said, was to trap “scholars” who were stealing his words without attribution.
I can understand his frustration. We have a regional radio personality who reads out marvelous stories without telling where he gets the material. I have recognized entire paragraphs of my articles without a word being changed. (Apparently I am a better writer than he is.) However, I know that complaining will have no impact and I’m really not hurt; moreover, I doubt that he is paid much, if anything. So I shut up and pay my PBS contribution like any good citizen who listens to NPR news, and I keep quiet about NPR’s liberal slant — I figure that folks smart enough to listen to public radio are also smart enough to tell hard news from soft propaganda.
Still, Boyer left a sufficient doubt about his honesty to make every intelligent reader of his books wonder what portion of his publications is good scholarship, what is made-up, and what is an elaborate practical joke. There is no doubt that he collected everything he could lay his hands on. For the authenticity we have to rely on his word. This is not always easy. For example, the serial number on the revolver has been filed off, making it impossible to date the weapon. (At least it isn’t the fictional Ned Buntline revolver from the television series.)
I had one phone conversation with Glenn Boyer. That was many years ago, shortly after I had discovered that Wyatt’s grandfather (Stuart Lake called him a judge, which was a stretch for a justice of the peace), his father, and his uncle had earned a rather nice income by buying up IOUs at a discount, then summoning the debtor to the grandfather’s justice of the peace court and requiring him to pay the debt and court costs as well. Then I learned from the land records that Wyatt’s father had returned to Monmouth from 1856 to 1859, a fact that Wyatt had never mentioned to his biographers and that local newsmen and county historians had forgotten about as well.
Boyer called up, presumably to ask about my sources, but it soon became clear that he wanted to tell me that he was the only person who knew anything about Wyatt Earp. I had first used the land records in the Recorder’s Office. Later I spent many hours in the storage area in the courthouse tower, working in winter temperatures below zero and summer temperatures above 100. At first the documents were all in file cabinets, so that all I had to do was systematically go through the court cases involving his grandfather; later, after the tower was determined to be overloaded, the weight was reduced by putting all the documents into large cardboard boxes and discarding the heavy metal file cabinets. After that I could get the heavy boxes down using a step ladder, but the contents were no longer in order.
From my experiences there and in the archives at WIU, where the tax records and bound newspapers were stored, I learned to tell students that a historian needs patience, luck, old clothing, and a strong back. I also emphasized the need to be polite and considerate of the needs of the courthouse personnel, who in Monmouth were super to work with; in other states and larger cities, I found out that was not always the case.
So when Boyer told me that he had lots of documents like those I had found, I was skeptical about his having slipped into Monmouth without anyone knowing it, found the records and photographed the pages I had used (this was pre-Xerox). Any stranger asking about Wyatt Earp without Ralph Eckley hearing of it strains the imagination. Ditto for Boyer having new information and not telling anyone about it.
The experts on the Tombstone discussion board generally share my skepticism for anything Boyer touched. My respect for their detailed knowledge is considerable — they have effectively memorized everything about the gunfight episode, and few would agree with the Tucson newspaper’s headline calling Wyatt a gunslinger.
This is of minimum interest to most Earp historians, of course. They still like the shoot-em-up stuff. The public does, too. Which is why some idiot will probably pay a lot of money for a weapon that Wyatt Earp may have owned, or could have owned, or at least looks like one he had handled.

Review Atlas (April 10, 2014), 4.

CHECHNYA, GEORGIA AND UKRAINE

By William Urban

Chechnya is where the Boston Marathon bombers came from; Georgia is the tiny mountainous state in the Caucasus region, lying between Russia and Turkey; Ukraine is on the fertile steppe south of Russia, the name meaning “over the border.” None have had a happy history, but oil politics and Vladimir Putin’s desire to restore Russia to great power status have led to Russian invasions. George W. Bush took seriously the 2008 Russian attack that overthrew the pro-American government in Georgia, but he was too busy trying to defend his Iraq policy from Democratic party attacks to do more than fly Georgian troops back from Iraq and to provide some equipment.

Within months Sen McCain was ridiculed for saying that Putin would first subdue Georgia, then Ukraine; and Tina Fey was making fun of Sarah Palin, pretending that she had said she could see Russia from her back yard. It was cool then to think that Russia was a normal country, and Secretary of State Clinton pushing the Reset Button (translated.as “overcharged”) symbolized a new relationship with the former USSR. The incorrect translation wasn’t her fault because, unlike Condoleezza Rice, she had never studied Russian. According to the New York Times, Hillary Clinton speaks no foreign language; and while Barack Obama remembers a bit of Indonesian from the time he attended school there, he says that foreign languages aren’t his thing.

Putin didn’t really care. He was fluent in German from his years as a KGB agent in East Berlin — ground zero of the Cold War. He knew how power operates, and he didn’t think much of the community organizer who had somehow become the leader of the free world. There may be been a bit of racism involved, too — that’s an unfortunate part of Russian culture — but basically he just despises amateurs.

At first President Obama thought that his charm offensive was working, but it wasn’t long before Putin’s body language showed how much he disdained his American counterpart. More recently, Putin has mocked him.

Putin wants to rebuild the Russian empire. Perhaps not that of Joseph Stalin, but certainly that of Nicholas II. His first strike was at Chechnya, which provoked little international furor. Chechen terrorists had struck at schools, hospitals and a large theater, and until recently was believed to have blown up apartment buildings. (Now it seems that the State Security forces — formerly the KGB — did so to justify the invasion that flattened the capital of Chechnya.)

Then it was Georgia’s turn. Unlike Iraq, Georgia did not have an insane dictator known for attempting to seize his neighbors’ oil resources, who repeatedly announced his determination to destroy Israel (and fired missiles there during the Gulf War), who used poison gas on opponents and buried others in mass graves, who bribed UN and European officials to evade the UN embargo and used the money to buy weapons and build palaces while leaving his people without proper medicines, who ignored UN inspectors so long and so blatantly that in 2003 everyone (except an obscure member of the Illinois legislature now in the Oval Office) believed that he had programs in place to develop more of these weapons. Even Saddam Hussein’s own generals believed that he had poison gas, and in 2009 550 tons of yellow cake uranium were transported from Iraq to Canada for storage. Georgia’s president liked America and wanted to emulate the customs that made us free and wealthy.

In short, there was no comparison of Georgia and Iraq, not even in the elections. In Georgia the president won 52% of the vote, while Saddam Hussein got a 99.9% approval shortly before being overthrown. Putin took advantage of traditional ethnic rivalries to send Russian troops “to restore order” and to protect the 48% who had not voted for the winner. This was the model for the Crimean crisis this year

Putin hadn’t expected to need to use force against Ukraine. In 2004 he had manipulated the presidential election to put Viktor Yanukovych in power. The public took to the street in what was called the Orange Revolution, and a pro-western president took charge. In 2014 Yanukovych, having won a contested election, reversed policy to move away from the European Union and to align his nation economically and politically with Russia. Once again the people flooded into the streets and drove him out of the country.

There had been massive government corruption and incompetence in Ukraine for over two decades now, but it was worse under Yanukovych. The current government has opened his palatial country home to tourists and school groups to demonstrate how brazenly he had ripped the system off.
Putin saw nothing wrong with this. After all, he took power by enriching a group of super-rich “oligarchs” who greatly resemble the tsarist nobles overthrown by the Social Democrats in March of 1917. (Lenin overthrew the new Russian Republic in November of that year.)

What should President Obama do now? Russia’s weak spot is the economy. If the price of oil goes below $110 a barrel, Putin is in trouble. For five years now Obama has been trying to keep oil prices high so that subsided wind and solar power might become competitive. Five years ago most of the world’s trouble spots were under control; now we can hardly count them. Five years ago the US was still a military superpower; now the Navy is taking cruisers out of service, cutting personnel, cancelling construction projects.

Putin has been watching. That is what is does well — after all, he was a career spy, trained in the hard politics of the communist era. Putin is also an opportunist — he can see how badly everything is going for the Obama administration.

Fortunately, Obama does not have to deal with the Soviet Union. There is no ideological pressure to spread Communism. All Putin wants, we hope, is to gather in the lost territories — Ukraine, Belarus (no problem there, since it’s run by a pro-Russian dictator), Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (all NATO members) — and to dominate Europe. Certainly he wants to keep Cuba and Venezuela in his camp, Syria, too, and now perhaps Egypt also.

Putin has long term problems — a declining birthrate, alcoholism, crime, economic stagnation and ultra-nationalist nuts on his right — but if he can restore Russian pride and self-confidence, he might be able to turn those around.

Obama is giving him as much help as he can. Awkwardly, he doesn’t seem to know that he is doing it.

Review Atlas (April 3, 2014), 4.