WHY INDEPENDENCE WAS NECESSARY

By William Urban

Too often we think the Revolution was about taxes. In reality it was because Americans refused to be reduced to second class subjects. In 2007 Anthony Scotti, Jr, wrote a powerful short book, “Brutal Virtue, the Myth and Reality of Banastre Tarleton.” The name Tarleton probably means little to readers in Illinois, but few citizens of South Carolina would fail to recognize it.

Movie-goers of 2000 might have seen The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson, in which the hero tried to remain neutral in the American Revolution, but was inevitably drawn into the conflict by Tarleton’s misdeeds. This reflected Scotti’s argument that Tarleton was no worse than anyone else in this part of the war, but patriotic propagandists used him to illustrate why Americans had to join the fight.

Another movie, Sweet Liberty (1986), made a additional point. A comedy written and directed by Alan Alda (who also had the lead role except when being upstaged by Michael Caine and Michelle Pfeiffer), the story centered on a small-college historian who had written a scholarly study of Tarleton’s meeting with Mrs. Mary Slocomb, and who was frustrated by the director’s efforts to turn that into a love story. When Tarleton came to her farm to burn it, he asked where her husband was and whether he was a rebel. She retorted, “He is in the army of his country, and fighting against our invaders, and therefore not a rebel.”

Every observer of the colonial scene agreed that South Carolina and Georgia were more loyalist than the other colonies. This was partly because the plantation owners with numerous slaves and the commercial class selling tobacco, rice and indigo saw themselves much like the English nobility and merchant capitalists. However, without British armed assistance, the loyalists could not challenge patriot control of politics.

This changed when Cornwallis was sent to Charles Towne (as it was known then) with 14,000 redcoats and Hessians; after a long siege he forced General Benjamin Lincoln to surrender the city and his 5,000 men. It was the greatest defeat the Americans had suffered yet — the loss of an entire army.

Cornwallis set out to occupy the rest of the colony, but he found it difficult to locate guerilla forces such as those of the Swamp Fox, Francis Marion. His answer to this problem was to recruit loyalists for a mixed light cavalry and mounted infantry body that he called the British Legion; he named as commander the brightest cavalry officer in the army, young Banastre Tarleton.

The British Legion became famed (or infamous) for its long, swift marches and deadly attacks. It would fall on patriot forces at dawn, slaughtering the sleepy men, or charge unsteady units so suddenly that the men would fly for their lives. Not that many got away. No man on foot can outrun a horse. He would demand that enemy forces surrender, and if they did not, his men would kill everyone they caught. This became known as “Tarleton’s Quarter.”

The green uniforms that the British Legion wore are a symbol of pride, but also of what was wrong with British policy. Britons chose to believe that all Americans were dirty, lazy and cowardly. Therefore, they were not worthy of holding government posts or being allowed to buy a commission in the army. They were not even allowed to wear red coats.

A far-sighted government would have made George Washington into a professional officer and rich Americans into aristocrats. But no, the government saw Americans as the equivalent of the Irish and the South Asian Indians, that is, as a lower class of human being. When Americans complained that taxation policies and changing the royal charters were reducing them to slaves (something they knew something about), more than a few Britons thought that would be a good thing.

Benjamin Franklin had gone to London as a lobbyist for the government of the Pennsylvania Colony. World-renowned scientist, philosopher and humorist, honored by British universities, he was nevertheless repeatedly humiliated by the government ministers. Before he returned to America he wrote a satirical tract, “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One.”

It was no accident that the founders of Monmouth College, South Carolina Presbyterians, were solid patriots. (The college hymn starts “Loyal to God and Native Land.”) Later they concluded that freedom should not depend on a person’s color or sex. Unable to remain in the Slavocracy that South Carolina had become, they moved to Western Illinois and put down roots in all the towns and villages round about. Their Monmouth College admitted women from the beginning, accepted the first Black student who applied, and the first Asian.

That is what the 4th of July meant.

Galesburg Register-Mail (July 3, 2014).

CARNAL CURIOSITY

By William Urban

Carnal Curiosity is the 29th Stone Barrington novel by Stuart Woods. Published only a few months ago, it is right up to date with politics. Kate Lee, the wife of the second-term president, has decided to run for the Democratic Party nomination. Stone Barrington is all in favor. Stone only watches MSNBC but somehow knows that Fox News is evil incarnate, and it would be a disaster if some low-down, hypocritical, super-rich Republican got into office. He is certain that Fox News will be looking for some way to implicate Kate Lee in some CIA scandal, though while she was director there nothing of that nature ever happened — Stone Barrington had been there to help resolve crises that the government couldn’t. Being a private individual, he was not limited by pesky laws such as keeping track of his emails and expenses and the stray bodies lying about. Of course, he always stays within the law, but anyone with good friends can make that a flexible restriction.

Stone Barrington can afford this sort of thing because he and his friends are rich in a modest sort of way — ritzy apartments, elegant country homes, private jets, and meals at the best restaurants — and they earn their money in ways that Democrats approve, by inheritance and by working for big law firms. Besides, we know that he is good at heart and that is what counts in modern America, as well as being a crack shot, excellent at personal combat and never being at a loss in an emergency. Readers of these novels will understand that this is a fantasy existence, much like James Bond, but with more class, and since Stone knows that Fox News will treat Kate Lee roughly if he isn’t there to protect her, he can’t ignore politics. Actually, she can take care of herself, but Stone brings out something in women….
In short, Stone is a very interesting character, one that many readers would like to be if they could afford the Viagra.

Stone is a typical upper-class liberal in so many ways. That is, while in art “less is more” (another of his hobbies), in his version of sex “more is better”— a lot more, a lot better. We are used to the Elliot Spitzers, the Al Gores, the John Edwards, the Lyndon Johnsons and F. Lee Baileys, but Stone is in the JFK class. He might not quite come up to Wilt Chamberlin’s clamed 20,000 women (2.3 each day since puberty), but Wilt had a fur-covered water bed and was a Republican. You’d never know there is an Anthony Weiner loose in New York City from reading the Stone Barrington novels, but if the husband of Hillary’s closest friend had been an unmarried Republican, you’d have known it. Wilt isn’t mentioned either, but that might reflect the general shortage of Blacks in Stone’s social circles.

There is usually a murder in these novels, but it has to fight its way up through the sheets to get into the narrative. The victim is usually one of Stone’s latest flames. Like a moth to the fire, they flutter up and are burned to death. Otherwise, Stone’s sex life would be less spontaneous and varied.

When the gossip columns suggest that he is having affair with the First Lady (and presidential candidate) Kate Lee, Stone is incredulous. Did they think that he seduced every woman he met?

One has to ask what Stone has to be curious about in the area of carnality. Maybe he wonders if there isn’t a woman somewhere who isn’t eager to jump into bed with a man she just met. Say, him. Perhaps he’d heard of this preposterous attitude on MSNBC, but one guesses that he picked it up in some witty conversation at an exclusive restaurant such women couldn’t afford. It doesn’t matter. Such creatures don’t appear in this novel.

I do remember a college dinner twenty years ago with F. Lee Bailey, where he told us how being a Defense :Lawyer is much like being a fighter pilot, and how he was so irresistible to women that he could sleep with any one he wanted. He cast, as I remember, a meaningful glance around the table. I guess he didn’t particularly want any of those present, but nobody spoke up to say, “Not with me!” He flew his own helicopter to the football field and spoke to an audience that overfilled the auditorium. In short, he was a lot like Stone Barrington, but without the class.

There is one hint of morality in this novel. There is a strong Democratic candidate in the field, but while he would make a far better president than either of the Republicans seeking the nomination, he can’t be trusted not to embarrass the party. And there is the moral: it’s not whether anything a politician does is right or wrong, but whether it helps or harms the Democratic Party.

At about this point in the novel a real crime story emerges. I won’t give the details away, but it allows Stone to use his contacts with legal firms, the police and the federal government to help resolve the situation. It becomes a pretty good story, with strong over-the-top criminal characters who want to make a fortune robbing rich Democrats at society events.

In short, most readers will enjoy the tale — I listened on audio book from the Warren County Library. The soft porn shows up a bit too often, but that seems to be part of the Stone Barrington charm. This also shows that the proverb that the rich are different is true. That is why stories about the rich and famous make better reading than tales about middle-class men and women trying to make an honest living and without any energy left for a Stone Barrington adventure.

It might have been a better story without the political propaganda, but Stuart Woods is rich enough to indulge himself. Who cares if the country is being ever more divided? This isn’t talk radio.

And what happened to Kate Lee? Even Stuart Woods almost forgot her. However, I am sure that another novel will appear in the fall, just in time to remind voters that Kate Lee is in a presidential race. 2014, 2016 — the difference is poetic license

Review Atlas (June 26, 2014), 4.

HRC

By William Urban

When I first saw this biography of Hillary Rodman Clinton in the Warren County Library audio-book section, my eyes saw HRH, a title reserved for Queen Elizabeth. After listening to the first chapter, a eulogy of the former first lady that would be appropriate to a Lifetime Oscar award or canonization, I thought my mistake was probably shared by the authors, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. That was incorrect.

The subtitle of this 2014 book, “State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton”, does not appear on the cover, but it accurately reflects the inside-story, melodramatic narrative of the 2008 campaign and her years as Secretary of State. Allen and Parnes both covered the White House, he for Bloomberg News, she for The Hill; they are, therefore, both policy “wonks” writing for news junkies.

Hillary Clinton apparently knew them or knew their type, so this is a strictly unauthorized biography, with no input or assistance from her. I’m sure that she and her many loyal workers — LOYAL is the most important word in HRC’s vocabulary — must have been stunned by the first chapter. Praise practically gushed from the pages.

The shiv wasn’t stuck in until chapter two.

Let’s say that Allen and Parnes are unlikely to be invited to share HRC’s face time. According to people they cite, she never forgets a slight, and she rarely forgives. Time is a valuable commodity and she won’t waste it on anyone on her enemies list. Oh, yes, she made a list appropriate to Santa Claus and was very disappointed in 2008 when he wasn’t able to hand out presents to those who had been nice. Coal she had.

Her defeat by Barack Obama was completely unexpected by most experts and certainly by HRC herself, and that was one reason it happened. She had expected to walk right into the Convention and claim the prize and, therefore, had not taken his candidacy seriously; moreover; she had not mended fences with those who had been offended by the Clintons’ arrogance, people whose numbers seem to have been legion. Another mistake was being too loyal to long-time staffers who were not up to their jobs. She resolved to never make that mistake again.

A major fault of our authors, perhaps to see if we are still awake, is to quickly cite anonymous sources who contradict whatever the previous insider had just said. For example, after extorting significant concessions from Barack Obama in return for agreeing to become Secretary of State, she devised a “smart diplomacy” approach that would correct Bush’s alleged mistakes; then she appointed smart and experienced men to handle the most difficult problems, so that she could concentrate on reaching out to neglected areas of the world. That is, she was picked to travel around like a rock star, making sure that everyone knows that America cares. In short, she’s in charge. We are then told about the problems that the Obama people created, and why nothing that went wrong was her fault.

Insiders found it hard to think of any new policy that went right, so they mentioned her setting a new tone, but there is no doubt that she believed in what she was doing; moreover, every one of her subordinates believed in those new policies or quickly wished they had. Those kicked out seem to have talked with Allen and Parnes — after getting a promise that their identities would not be revealed.

Contradictions abound. Hillary was the only one who pushed relentlessly to kill Osama bin Laden, but it didn’t matter, because Obama made the courageous decision. People hated her, even feared her, but came to love her. She had numerous ideas that took people away from their usual tasks, but these innovations made “smart power” more effective. Her interventions helped the Arab Spring along the various roads to democracy; any failures were the fault of the Arabs. It was, all in all, a record she is proud of.

Bill was proud of her, too, but it was frustrating that people saw him as the real power in the family. So she cut him out of decisions — he learned about the bin Laden raid from a reporter.

What she wanted was a signature policy success of her own, a Marshall Plan or Opening to China. The Arab Spring was supposed to be that, but especially the overthrow of Gadhafi. Plans were underway for her to visit Benghazi when the demonstration/attack occurred. Her supporters told Allen and Parnes that she was on top of the crisis from the beginning, that she worked long hours, that she talked with everyone, and that any problems were someone else’s fault. I was beginning to wonder if the attack had occurred at all. Even the famous words, “What difference at this point does it make?” were uttered by an aide shortly before she testified; apparently they stuck in her mind. Anyway, the whole affair is just Republican grandstanding. Maybe, but more recent testimony suggests that the famous talking points were indeed efforts to put off blame for the ambassador’s death until after the election in two weeks, and the White House was involved as much as the Department of State.

Without Libya to point to, Hillary supporters called attention to her work in Burma, but that didn’t pass the laugh test. Perhaps her behind-the-scenes support of the Affordable Care Act is what we should remember. She had nothing to do with that legislation (she had tried national medical care once, with lamentable results) or the implementation, but she said that getting health care passed was worth risking every other part of the president’s agenda.

Her lack of achievements may be irrelevant. She was hired to be a rock star, to travel around and dazzle the world’s leaders. She did that well. Maybe “smart power” will become more obviously present in the future. Maybe developments show that past failures did, in fact, lay the foundation for eventual successes. History has a way of confounding our current assessments and predictions. Look at Iraq today.

What it is safe to say is that Hillary will be a political force in 2016. She is dogged, hard-working, demanding, unforgiving. No Democrat who thinks of challenging her should underestimate her ambition, her vindictiveness, and her massive campaign war chest.

Similarly, no enemy of America should want her to be president.

Review Atlas (June 19, 2014), 4.

DECISION POINTS II

By William Urban

George W. Bush’s memoir is typical of presidential memoirs, being part a reflection on the events of recent years, partly to persuade historians to think better of what he was trying to do, and partly to raise some pocket change. The latter point is interesting — he was paid less than Bill Clinton for his memoirs, but Decision Points sold better.

This success came as a surprise to those who still liked him in 2010 as well as to those who hated him. Reviewers generally liked the book, even those who had disliked the man’s policies; many remarked on his lack of rancor (he expressed dislike of only a few people, very prominently Chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder of Germany) and his engaging anecdotes. Those who disliked him are way out on the Left, now busy accusing President Obama of not having lived up to his promises of Hope and Change. It’s hard to imagine pleasing those folks short of applying a North Korean solution to America and perhaps the entire world. That is, no guns, no Bibles, no troublesome Constitution. Jail for some, and diets for all. No TV except MSNBC and Al Jazeera. Maybe not even that.

As noted above, George Bush wasted no time fretting about his enemies. They were everywhere, they were vicious, and they were supported by much of the media. Attorney General Holder seems to have forgotten about this when he complained that no president has ever been abused like Barack Obama has been. Bush mentions the accusations of being an alcoholic and taking drugs (“when I was young and stupid, I was young and stupid”). The criticisms would probably have been even meaner if his predecessor had not said that he didn’t inhale and his successor had not been in the Choom Gang in high school.

One major difference between the last three presidents is that Bush had a solid family life, with great love and respect all around. Barbara Bush was the center of family life — outspoken, supporting, and funny. Still, she did not push her son to adopt the religious beliefs that come across so forcefully in this memoir. His religion is often forgotten by critics who see him as the representative of wealth and power, unless it is just more proof of his stupidity. However that might be, he is clearly a child of Midland, Texas, out on the western plains. He went on to attend elite eastern schools, but he never lost his drawl or his cowboy walk. He read constantly — and not just coloring books. (after all, he married a librarian) and he was good company, both before and after he quit drinking,

He relied on Laura for a steadying hand. Mrs Kerry once said that Laura never had a job she knew of, after she grew up, but George Bush does not comment on that or the accusations that Laura was a Stepford wife — that is, she a robot programmed to be the perfect help-mate, but having no soul or independent thoughts or interests.

He is very generous to the people he worked with, defending those who were criticized by the press and the Democrats, and even praising many Democrats. Harry Reid is the great exception. He does not call Reid a snake, but a West Texas boy has strong feelings about creatures which lie in the reeds, waiting for a rabbit to come by.

It’s best, therefore, not to be a rabbit. It bothered Bush that for years critics said that he was merely a tool of other, more capable politicians. Consequently, he goes out of his way to describe episodes where he disagreed with his supposed puppet-masters. This was nowhere clearer than on the surge in Iraq. The Democrats wanted a pull out — Biden wanted to divide the country into three parts, Reid declared the war was lost — and Republicans were not much better. The military was frustrated, many senior generals recommending a withdrawal. But Bush took time to think, to consult and to read. From articles by junior officers he concluded that the policy of withdrawing combat troops so quickly had been a mistake, but that just sending them back to do the same job over again would be an even greater error. What he needed a whole new military strategy. Instead of trying to lessen the “footprint” that could be seen as an occupation, the additional troops would be placed right in Iraqi towns and villages, working with Iraqi forces and offering protection. Despite Democrat predictions of a disaster, the surge worked.

There is no lack of books detailing the inner workings of the administration. Bob Woodward was given free range of the White House to produce his books. Bush could have said that this was one of his major mistakes. I see it as a tendency to think well of people whom he should have mistrusted, much as happened with his first meetings with Vladimir Putin.

He was similarly surprised several times, not having been informed by his staff, the party leaders and especially not by his vice-president, all of whom were supposed to alert him to potential problems. He does not dwell on this, which is a weakness of the book. He is just too much a nice guy, one who did not like to criticize people and who trusted them too much.

He could have read more newspapers, but since the media had decided he was improperly elected and besides that was an idiot, it might have driven him to drink. He agonized over the war casualties, but he knew what would happen if he ignored Osama bin Laden’s attack or Saddam Hussein’s threats.

This book will probably not change many opinions. Presidential memoirs don’t do that. But this one is at least small enough to read quickly, and it is organized in a way that allows readers to concentrate on what is most interesting.

Opinions about George W. Bush are changing except among those who cannot forget the 2000 election and those who now think Barack Obama is a war criminal). One sign of this reassessment is the email going around of a smiling George Bush with the caption, “Miss Me Yet?”’

Review Atlas (June 12, 2014), 4.

D-DAY AFTER SEVENTY YEARS

By William Urban

It was a lifetime ago, and most of the men who landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944, are gone now. They knew that there was no guarantee of success; the landing might even be called off again because of bad weather, as it had been the day before. They were aboard the greatest naval armada ever assembled, but not everyone could land at once, and there was no port to make debarkation easy and swift. If the Germans had been able to throw back the first units, those following on would have been massacred.

The movie to watch is Saving Private Ryan, which was denied the Oscar, I believe, due to two of Hollywood’s great obsessions: anti-war activism and pro-feminism. The prize went to the soft-porn production Shakespeare in Love. The Longest Day has much to recommend it, too. Many of the actors were veterans of the war and the documentary format switched back and forth from the Allied to the German side. It is in black and white, which was not unusual in 1962, color being reserved for comedies. D-Day was no comedy.

Patton gives important background. Those who saw the movie — which means a lot of people — will remember that he was yanked out of Sicily after slapping a soldier hospitalized for combat fatigue. Eisenhower, however, did not send Patton home, but put him in command of a dummy army poised to land at the Pas de Calais, the shortest distance from England to France. The Germans, especially Hitler, could not believe that Eisenhower wouldn’t put his best general in command of the invasion. That mistaken belief pinned down major German units for several days while the American, Canadian and British forces fought their way inland.
After Jackie and I visited Normandy a few days after the 50the anniversary, I wrote a column for the Review Atlas:

“My memories of World War II are… from hearing stories, and the rest from the movies…. I remember giving my nickel or dime each week in 1945 to buy a war stamp; I have a vague memory of a huge crowd, perhaps a lot of noise, and my mother pointing her finger and saying, “that’s Eisenhower!”

‘The stories made a much greater impression. I learned the reality of rationing from my mother telling and retelling how [a] relative came to visit, put… sugar into his coffee, didn’t stir it, then left without drinking it all. My grandparents and my great-aunts and uncles… had an inexhaustible supply of anecdotes far pre-dating the war, but it was the contrast of the poverty of the Great Depression and the economic boom of the war which seemed to come up most often. Veterans Day and Memorial Day were the central holidays in my small Kansas town. The war was not something distant, in a different era, on a different planet; it was the central event in the life of every adult I knew.

“The war was also the central event… I studied in graduate school. Americans had gone to war for the second time in this century, becoming involved rather reluctantly, but they had struck down Fascism, Nazism, and rampant racist nationalism…. (W)e were trying to decide what lesson we were supposed to have learned from these two wars. Both political parties had committed themselves to stopping aggressive “isms” before they became a threat to our national survival, but neither had been enthusiastic about the war in Korea. In effect, the debate over Vietnam was framed while I was in junior high; in those same years the atomic bomb made almost everybody realize that Hiroshima was as an important a lesson of the war as was Munich….

“For many years I’ve taught a World War Two class at the College. Most of the time the class filled the room…a remarkable phenomenon for a generation which seems even less interested in history than previous ones (no group of eighteen-year-olds has ever come to college enthusiastic about “that old stuff”). I’ve tried to get the students to hear veterans talk by having faculty and staff — people they saw every day — tell about their wartime experiences. Woody Ball told about his front-line infantry service in North Africa, Italy, and France; Harris Hauge about being a young radioman on a landing craft vessel under Kamikaze attack; Carl Warner about driving a jeep across France into Germany as point man for Patton; Milt Bowman having his aircraft carrier sunk underneath him; Mary Crow describing life at Monmouth College and factory work. Others shared their stories, too, often for the first time; and reliving their experiences always moved the tellers as much as it did the listeners.

“In all wars, at all times, those who lived through the stress, the fear, the loneliness, the privation, the companionship, the exhilaration, have found it difficult or impossible to tell about it immediately. How can civilians understand the comradeship, the friendships one finds in military service? But it is true. Just as college life binds individuals together closer than higher school, because you live and eat together and share more intimately the joys and vicissitudes of life, military life creates even closer and stronger bonds — you literally face the possibility of death or dismemberment together, and you learn to rely upon one another to an extent often not even shared with a spouse. How do you talk about this when you go home? How do you describe to your children the combination of fatalism, grace, and heroism that characterize each wartime generation?

“The passage of years, however, gives one a perspective about one’s part in the war, just as it diminishes the opportunities to tell anyone about it. Then one day, fifty years later, somebody asks what it was like. When the vet goes to the cedar chest, gets out the letters, diary, photos, and decorations, the stories start pouring out. For my father-in-law, it was seeing a television program about B-29s, then spotting his plane taking off from Guam on its way to Japan.”

A visit to the Normandy cemetery is unforgettable. Go if you can. Take your children and grandchildren. The memory will last forever.

Review Atlas (June 5, 2014), 4.

DECISION POINTS I

By William Urban

The title of George W. Bush’s memoirs tell much about the contents. Instead of rambling on about second grade teachers and such, he read a number of autobiographies and chose a format that concentrated on key moments in his presidency. This allowed him to pick and choose the subjects to write about, thereby avoiding altogether matters such as whether Clinton staffers had torn all the W letters out of the computer keyboards, a petty insult that he told his staffers to ignore. There were many such exasperating moments, but they did not bother him until the last years of his presidency. That’s politics, he said, get used to it.
And yes, he can read. He had a contest with Karl Rove to see who read the most, counting pages and contents, not just titles. I’m sure, too, that he wrote this book himself, though probably with some help in digging out old speeches. U.S. Grant was his model. That was a good choice. Grant, too, went from very popular to being universally criticized, then to being admired again. In Grant’s case, the historians waited until the slaughter of the Great War to call him the Butcher; in contrast, Dan Rather readily believed falsified military service records to call Bush a draft dodger.
He had hoped to be the first president not to veto a bill, an ambition he does not mention here, but one he held to for five years. But after the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress, they delighted in sending him bills that he had veto; the bills made sense to the more energized wing of the party, but the rest of the Democrats went along just to annoy the president. This frustrated him greatly, since he passionately believed that the parties should work together for the good of the country — as they had done for educational reform and changes to Medicare — but later it was nothing but “Bush lied, people died.”
He spent one chapter on the Iraq war, which at the time of his writing (2010) he thought was entirely justified because it had resulted in a democratic Iraq, with Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds working together. When he left office Iraq was essentially at peace, there was hope for an agreement for stationing some American troops as trainers and a ready response force, and so forth. All that vanished in the next year, and it will be a long time before historians can get past their political biases to judge fairly the ups and downs of American policy there. Even now, Bush speaking of the “liberation” of Iraq makes sense only to those who remember what Saddam Hussein was like and why everyone considered him dangerous.
I listened to Bush’s memoir on an audio book from the Warren County Library. It was never dull. The reader caught Bush’s accent and cadence right down to mispronouncing names. He also caught Bush’s passion about religion, about legislation and his frustration with foreign leaders and Congress.
Bush truly believed that investing Social Security contributions in stocks and bonds would be good for most retirees, especially for Blacks, who would be able to pass along that money on to their children. As it was, with an average shorter life-span, Blacks were collecting less from traditional Social Security than they would have from an investment. But he couldn’t even get Republicans on board. There was too much suspicion of Wall Street.
His last chapter was on the Housing Boom and Collapse. He hadn’t seen it coming. Nor had anyone else. Nor did anyone have a suggestion for how to deal with it painlessly. TARP — buying up the bad loans and bailing out companies — was distasteful, but so was the prospect of paralyzing the banking industry. Everybody depended on banks. He couldn’t let them collapse.
Similarly, everyone who read the intelligence reports on Saddam Hussein concluded that he had to go. In 1998 Bill Clinton got congressional approval to remove him; in 2003 Hillary Clinton and John Kerry were persuaded (“I voted for the war before I voted against it.”) that only war would get rid of him; and all the western intelligence agencies agreed that Saddam Hussein had not gotten rid of his chemical weapons and that he was supporting terrorists all across the Middle East.
For a decade now liberal orthodoxy has all but declared Bush a war criminal. This was nowhere more obvious that in the Norwegian committee that awarded Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize for nothing more than not being George W Bush. No, that’s an exaggeration. He promised to do everything differently, and he has lived up to that.
Now this is clearly changing. In a recent article in the New York Review of Books Bush comes across as a principled, independent leader who was not the puppet of Dick Cheney. The NYRB! Not so long ago even its reviews of poetry would end with denunciations of George W Bush.
Other evidence is the disenchantment with President Obama having continued some unpopular Bush policies — Guantanamo, NSA surveillance, drones — and having expanded others. The stock market is soaring, benefiting the top 1% greatly (and those of us with retirement accounts), interest rates are low, benefiting those who want to borrow (but not those of us with bank accounts), and Bush remains out of the spotlight, not calling attention to himself in visiting veterans hospitals.

Al Gore has also vanished from political events, showing up only at Environmental Conferences. He, too, had gotten the Nobel Prize partly for not being George W Bush, partly for a disaster horror film, but no Democrat wants to share a podium with him. No one under thirty knows what “Tipper was right” means.
As a result, those under thirty should understand that this book does not describe your parents’ George W. Bush. As 9/11 fades from our memory and the Arab Spring turns into Winter, even the consensus on Afghanistan and Iraq is changing. This is inevitable. As time passes, our understanding the past and our appreciation of the personalities changes. Keeping up with this seems impossible until all at once we say about the revised history, “that seems right.”
We are not at that point yet, but the public no longer believes claims by the Obama administration that its problems are the legacy of George W. Bush.

Review-Atlas (May 29, 2014), 4.

NO HIGHER HONOR

By William Urban

A couple weeks ago I mentioned Condoleezza Rice’s account of her years as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State for George W. Bush, 2000-2008. Her remarks on the people and problems she dealt with are especially illuminating in view of the current troubles of John Kerry, who took office just as American foreign policy was falling apart.

It was close to that bad in Rice’s last year. There was an uprising in Iraq — the Shiites had been beaten back earlier, but they were still murdering Sunnis in Baghdad; the Sunnis had effectively taken the western half of the country and had begun murdering Shiites in Baghdad. The Iranians were processing uranium for an atomic bomb. The Palestinians were attacking Israelis at every opportunity and the Israelis were striking back. North Korea had just exploded an atomic bomb and had tested a long-range missile. Vladimir Putin was beginning to test American resolve. And our European allies had concluded that the world would be safer if Americans just went home (except not quite yet, as they’d explain every time a step was taken in that direction).

The surge that turned Iraq from a defeat to a victory was no easy decision. Congress, then controlled by Democrats, wanted an immediate pull-out. Harry Reid pronounced the war lost. Our allies concurred. And so did some high-ranking military officials, and many in the diplomatic corps..

Bush sent in the troops anyway and approved a new policy designed by General Petraeus. The basic thought was to have boots on the ground, first to defeat the insurgents, then to protect civilians. There was a new emphasis on working with Iraqis, most importantly with the Sunni tribal sheiks who were fed up with al Qaida arrogance and abuse. The level of violence fell steadily until by the time Bush left office the most important task remaining was to sign a status of forces agreement that would define the working arrangement and protect American servicemen from arbitrary arrest and punishment.

Well, the Obama administration didn’t get that done, but much of the fault lay with the Iraqis. Rice was very frustrated with their leaders, and with the Saudis and Iranians who encouraged the civil unrest. Not only were these men difficult to deal with, but some would not talk to a woman, not even one who was America’s Secretary of State. She used some blunt words to bring some of them around.

Others she won over with stories of growing up in the South, and how she understood what Arab women and children were going through.

The North Koreans, in contrast, could not even be talked to. She used the term “hermit kingdom” to describe the nation whose leaders were totally ignorant of the outside world. But here, at least, there some allies agreed as to what had to be done. (Not, alas, the Russians and Chinese.) The Clinton policy of shipping grain in return for promises to think about eliminating nuclear weapons and inter-continental missiles was over. George W. Bush installed an anti-missile system in Alaska and aboard some naval vessels. American liberals howled, the North Koreans pouted, and Europeans thought this was another sign of American cowboy politics.

Shortly afterward, when the Iranians developed a missile that could reach Western Europe, Bush put a similar system in Poland and the Czech Republic that might be able to shoot down a handful of missiles. Vladimir Putin proclaimed this a threat to his 1000+ intercontinental missiles, but Bush pointed out that this was hardly the case. Not long afterward, Barack Obama withdrew the anti-missile system as a gesture of friendship toward Russia and Iran; he did not dismantle the Alaskan site, which may explain why the North Korean leader recently called Obama “a wicked black monkey.”

Rice had some success in developing a system of sanctions on the Iranians. But here too the Russians and Chinese refused to cooperate. As a result, it was left to Barack Obama to push through a more effective program — one that he abandoned just as it showed signs of effectiveness, in return for Iranian promises to slow down the enrichment of nuclear materials.

She had moments that she enjoyed. Working with Tony Blair was always a joy. Angela Merkel was friendly, too — quite a contrast to her two-faced predecessor, Gerhard Schroeder, who after losing the election quickly took a job with the Russian oil and gas conglomerate that today can cut off European energy instantly.

Her golf game improved, thanks to coaching by Tiger Woods, then at the height of his popularity, but she had almost no time to practice. She occasionally played the piano at formal events, which always astounded heads of states. The king of Saudi Arabia presented her with an ornate hijab, a beautiful outfit, but she had to bite her lip not to say that she associated it with the exclusion of Muslim women from the male worlds of business and politics. She did not wear it because she was the American Secretary of State and she thought it appropriate to dress in the American fashion. (She did love to wear red gowns and dance late into the night — that is, 1 AM. She had to get up the next day and work. Her job was twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.)

I suppose in a few years we’ll have a memoir by the Black woman who is Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor. Since her last name is Rice, too, we’ll have to refer to them as Condi and Susan. Condi’s the one who didn’t say that a video was responsible for Benghazi; Susan’s the one who is not fluent in Russian.

The basic problems have not changed except to become more complex and more violent. Rice worried that she had too little time to deal with problems that needed her attention — South America, for example — and Africa (where George Bush was wildly popular for his campaigns against disease.) Barack Obama tried to deal with this problem by assigning prominent diplomats to the most critical areas, giving them so much authority that they were widely called czars. That is why Hillary Clinton failed to achieve much as Secretary of State. She didn’t have a chance.

As for Rice, when she was a girl in segregated Birmingham, she had never imagined ever holding such an office. This was reflected in the title of her book, No Higher Honor.

Review Atlas (May 22, 2014), 4.

BABY, IT’S HOT OUTSIDE

By William Urban

President Obama has announced that Climate Change is the greatest problem facing our nation and the world. Not many people here or over there agree — we have problems here and out there that are immediately important, and therefore grab our attention, but who can disagree with a president who has had such splendid successes with the economy, foreign policy and health care? He’s on a roll and his time in office is running out.

Worse for him, fewer and fewer Americans are buying the Global Warming argument that underlies the panic. Partly this is because fewer people trust the UN, many mistrust this administration, and some don’t even trust moderate Republicans.

Religions and political movements prosper best when they have an inspiring leader. In 2008 this was Barack Obama, but Hope and Change did not tell us much about his environmental agenda. Even four years later we still didn’t appreciate how deeply committed he was to closing down coal and oil. It was like his whispered comment to President Medvedev of Russia, “Tell Vladimir I can be more flexible after the election.” The economic impact of his plans is only now becoming apparent. Rhetoric was always his strongest point, but good speeches will not power the air-conditioner or the electric car that will eventually supplant the hybrids that has not yet replaced the conventional automobile.

How is Climate Change a religion? First of all, it is a belief system that stands independently of facts. If the recorded temperatures remain flat in spite of ever higher CO2 levels, it must be because the heat is hiding somewhere. If Michael Mann’s hockey stick was historically inaccurate, it still demonstrated a higher truth; if Mann would not share his data with other scientists, that was to prevent them from using his research to undermine his thesis that temperatures would soar, and soar quickly. If Michael Mann’s emails demonstrated that he tried to suppress dissenting ideas, then criticism should be directed at the hacker who broke into his system.

College and university scientists remind students that science is based on concepts that are continually tested and retested. That is, a theory is a theory, and scientists are constantly challenging whatever we believe at the moment. A case in point in the recent contention that fats are not bad for you. That is, our bodies need protein, carbohydrates and fats, but only carbs will add to that tire around our middles. The gluten-free movement had already stumbled onto this, but without the statistical proof. Now it looks as though you can enjoy that hamburger as much as you want, as long as you don’t eat the bun.

Will this theory last long? Not if recent experience is any model. But more important than the health benefits is the public concluding that scientists don’t know any more about what they are talking about than they do.

This isn’t true, of course, but anyone who remembers the actors portraying doctors smoking and recommending one cigarette over the others will recall that back then scientists were the next thing to God. Higher, perhaps, even, if He even existed. (There are still quite a few folks who think Ph.D should be spelled Go.D.)

The religion of Climate Change has a philosophy that anyone familiar with St. Augustine or Calvin will recognize, which is that humans are basically no damn good. Human beings will mess up everything — themselves, their societies, their environment — and even the best intentions and best efforts will be ineffective in achieving salvation. The UN report on Climate Change confirms this. Even if we stop polluting right now, the temperature will continue to rise, and nothing we do can turn it around.

We might slow it a bit in years to come, but the fact that the US has been working on pollution for decades is ignored. US output of CO2 has fallen recently and is now back at 1992 levels. That is according to Mother Jones magazine, a publication hardly in the pocket of the Koch brothers who are blamed for all of America’s ills, but especially coal mining.

Predestination, one of the central pillars of Calvin’s theology, never prevented his followers from trying to do God’s work. We see this in their tireless efforts to abolish slavery, to promote women’s rights, to eliminate slums and reduce poverty, and by passing strong laws, to stop smoking, drug use and alcohol abuse. Calvinists strongly endorsed education, which is why when local Presbyterians founded Monmouth College, they insisted that it offer a first-class educational program. They were also tolerant (the first Black applicant was admitted, the first Asian applicant, the first Roman Catholic, and presumably the first atheist) and discussions about scientific truths were encouraged. Back in the nineteenth century President J.B. McMichael announced that he saw no conflict between evolution and religion, thus avoiding the nasty debates that tore many colleges and universities into angry factions.

In contrast to this open-mindedness, those who believe in Climate Change insist that the warming trend is “settled science” and call skeptics “deniers.” This is truly the triumph of belief over the scientific method.

Will it be hot this summer? Probably. I remember last August as blistering, while. June was pretty nice. But that was just my bad memory. The State Climatologist reports; August was dry, but normal temperatures; September was very hot and dry. That confirms that I, like everyone else, tend to remember facts that reinforce my beliefs, not those which undermine them. For the year 2013, in spite of a warm January, Illinois was five degrees cooler than 2012, and had more rainfall.

None of this will discourage Climate Change enthusiasts from saying that human beings have been evil and that we deserve what we will get.

Climate change is occurring, of course. In the 1830s and 1840s Louis Agassiz demonstrated that the earth had experienced an Ice Age. This ran against the Bible, but Christians came to accept it. Today Climate Change is a religion for atheists. Is that an improvement?

Review Atlas (May 15, 2014), 4.

THE BUDGET AS AN ATM

By William Urban

It is amazing: Republicans complained for years that President Obama did not present a budget — as the Constitution requires. Then this year they were unhappy because the president’s budget read like a campaign speech; it was, in fact, a wish list of progressive dreams., much as the State of the Union address has become.
We expected the Republican-dominated House to reject it, but not by 413-2! Not even Democrats wanted to run for re-election on this budget. Why did the president send this up? It makes even his foreign policy seen coherent.
I have to think of this kind of budget as an ATM without a withdrawal limit. You know, you just punch in a number and the money pours out. But when I think of this, I remember Barack Obama’s 2011 interview with NBC,: “There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers.” That is, “when you go to a bank you use the ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller. Or you go to the airport and you use a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.” What he was trying to say was that when technology speeds up production or service, people lose their jobs.
The name for this attitude in Luddite, which reflects the 18th century English weavers who destroyed machines that were producing more and better cloth at much less cost than when could do. Consumers everywhere benefited, but the workers blamed the bosses. Even then making money was evil.
Losing jobs is hard, yes, but I remember when telephone operators used to plug in calls, and long distance meant multiple telephone operators plugging in the connections. This wasn’t always bad. I remember calling my former roommate in Texas, and when he didn’t pick up, the operator suggested asking the person in the next apartment where he was. Eventually, we found him.
That was nice, but I think few people actually want to go back to that. It’s so much easier to pick up the cell phone and leave a message, or, if we are able to do what the NSA does, just check the GPS of the phone and see where it is located. Parents can do this now, I understand, and stray dogs can be quickly found.
As for the ATM, I really like the little machines, especially when travelling. I don’t even have to present a photo ID, which I do when cashing a check in some distant community. It’s easier than voting.
There must be a moral in here somewhere. Maybe, if we only allowed the federal government or Springfield to spend money only during working hours six days a week, we’d cut the deficit? Fat chance of that in Illinois, where the legislature recently failed once again to do anything more with the deficit than paper over the pension programs. And now there is a rush to pay for the Chicago pensions before the Republicans get enough votes to block a give-away bill or even elect a governor with a veto. Even Dick Durbin is nervous about re-election, he says, though I tend to believe in the theory that the candidate with the shortest name usually wins, or, often, the tallest candidate.
John Ransom recently wrote a little ditty about our problem:
Oh, the irony.
We voted for Hope and Change.
And we got Illinois.
It happens every time.
Some of this Illinois deficit is union-driven. Not all, of course, but Peter Seller’s award-winning 1959 film, I’m All Right, Jack, comes to mind here As does the rest of the statement — I’ve Got Mine. In the movie neither the employers nor the unions came out looking good, but with the British government having imposed a socialist system on the country, with the unions getting pretty much what they wanted, the unions got the blame for the economic stagnation that eventually brought Maggie Thatcher to power. Britain has prospered ever since. And the ATM machine is by far the best way to convert dollars to pounds, and the traveller does not even have to carry cash or travellers’ checks with him.
I love the ATM when I visit Britain, but I wish that my withdrawal limit was not determined by the amount of money in my local bank account. I have a limit designed to prevent unauthorized use of card — if it was stolen — so that my account cannot be easily drained. But in real life politics none of this is necessary. No government would ever spend recklessly, would it? And everyone is honest. Isn’t that so?
Illinois is a marvelous state, despite the recent poll that suggests half the population would like to move away. We recently read that social security payments were still going to deceased people. That came as a surprise. We knew that the dead could vote, but not that they could continue to receive their retirement benefits.

Review Atlas (May 8, 2014), 4.

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.