Its an American tradition to ‘meddle’ in Iran. Recall Kermit Roosevelt? The particulars here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_Roosevelt_Jr.

And his book Countercoup, a political self-apologetic.

Former senior adviser to the Obama administration and Council on Foreign Relations Iran expert, Ray Takeyh,^[16] writing in 2014, states that “Contrary to Roosevelt’s account [in Countercoup], the documentary record reveals that the Eisenhower administration was hardly in control and was in fact surprised by the way events played out.”^[17] William Blum wrote that Roosevelt provided no evidence for his claim that a Communist takeover in Iran was imminent, but rather “mere assertions of the thesis which are stated over and over”.^[18] Abbas Milani wrote that “Roosevelt’s memoir inflated his own and, in turn, America’s centrality to the coup. He tells the story with the relish of a John le Carré knock-off. … Eisenhower, for one, considered reports like this to be the stuff of ‘dime novels.'”^[19]

After Bush The Younger’s declaration of the War On Terror and an invasion and subjugation of Iraq, and the mendacious incompetence of Viceroy Paul Bremer, what need the reader think of the latest chapter in this murderous political melodrama?

Headline: Iran’s top military leader Soleimani killed in US air strike

Sub-headline: World powers call for restraint after killing fuels fear of fresh conflict in Middle East

https://www.ft.com/content/4e8f9fbc-2dcf-11ea-bc77-65e4aa615551

Beside the usual cliche mongering, three quotations captured my attention:

US officials in the region said they were braced for Iranian retaliation across the Middle East. “It’s one of the most consequential assassinations in the Middle East in years and will have violent and first order implications primarily for the US, Iran and Israel,” said Aaron David Miller, a former state department official at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“The so-called shadow war will intensify with terror and additional assassinations,” he added. Mr Miller said there was a risk of full-blown war between the three countries.

Aaron David Miller is a stolid member of America’s Foreign Policy Technocracy : whose mendacity, and record of continuous failure, allied to bogus claims to that expertise can  be born out, by the exercise of the weakest of empirical tests.

Next, in order of appearance, is the certifiably comic political figure of Joe Biden:

Joe Biden said the president had thrown “dynamite into a tinderbox” with the assassination. Mr Biden, who is leading the Democratic nomination race to challenge Mr Trump in the November presidential election, criticised the air strike as a “hugely escalatory move in an already dangerous region.”

Last to be quoted is former CIA analyst Helima Croft , now an employee of a global investment bank:  https://www.rbccm.com/en/

Helima Croft, a former CIA analyst who heads up commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, said that the strikes increased risks for US oil companies such as ExxonMobil and Chevron that are active in Iraq, should Iran retaliate.

“But it is not just Iraq,” she said. “Iranians have the ability to target Americans anywhere where their proxy groups operate.”

The central concern for this newspaper is always economic , or more accurately stated  the protection of profit over people.

Political Observer

Headline: Steven Pinker: what can we expect from the 2020s?

Sub-headline: Look beyond the gloom of the daily headlines and the case for progress is still strong

Dr. Pangloss’ essay  presents many compelling aperçus :

On Human Nature as Determined :

And our species evolved for advantages in the struggle to reproduce, not for happiness or wisdom.

On thinking about the future: 

The first step in thinking about the future is to reconcile human progress with human nature.

On Journalism: 

But this progress is invisible to most people because they don’t get their understanding of the world from numbers; they get it from headlines. Journalism by its very nature conceals progress, because it presents sudden events rather than gradual trends.

On Un-Reason:

It’s true that the parent ideal of reason is under assault by fundamentalism, fake news and conspiracy theories, as it always has been.

These just a sample of the Dr.’s pronouncements early in his long essay. The reader can only wonder at The Dr.’s choice of a publication to spread his good news, or should we call it a Gospel, on ineluctable human progress? Did he miss Mr. Rachman’s December 23, 2019 essay on the persistence of human anarchy ?

Headline: 2019: the year of street protest

Sub-headline: Mass demonstrations around the globe show no sign of fizzling out

https://www.ft.com/content/9f7e94c4-2563-11ea-9a4f-963f0ec7e134

Or the fact that a General Strike in France that began on December 5, 2019 is ignored by this newspaper, except to report on possible travel delays?

Headline:December strikes in Paris: travel disruptions to look out for

Sub-headline: Protests at pension reforms have disrupted rail and air links, plus national and international services

https://www.ft.com/content/53644d0c-16ab-11ea-9ee4-11f260415385

This paragraph demonstrates that the Dr. is suffering from an advanced case of political/economic myopia. Those ‘regulated markets’ were victim to the ascendant Neo-Liberal Swindle!

These gifts were amplified by ideas and institutions advocated during the Enlightenment and entrenched after the second world war: reason, science, liberal democracy, declarations of rights, a free press, regulated markets, institutions of international co-operation.

The Dr. betrays his particular form of apologetics for the political present , an admixture of fatalism and cynicism, masked as optimism, in this paragraph.

…

But — as the sustainable goalkeepers emphasise — “progress is possible, but it is not inevitable”. Poverty, disease and conflict are natural, not unnatural, parts of the human condition, and only the concerted application of reason, science and humanism can push back against their creep.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/e448f4ae-224e-11ea-92da-f0c92e957a96

 

There is nothing more that the editors of The Financial Times fears, than the comments of its regular readership!

‘Comments on this artice have been disabled and will reopen on Monday’

Political Observer

Mr. Sullivan’s Anti-Trump hysteria seems to reach many denouements, here is part of his December 20, 2019 essay:

Headline: What We Know About Trump Going Into 2020

…

The two core lessons of the past few years are therefore: (1) Trumpism has a real base of support in the country with needs that must be addressed, and (2) Donald Trump is incapable of doing it and is such an unstable, malignant, destructive narcissist that he threatens our entire system of government. The reason this impeachment feels so awful is that it requires removing a figure to whom so many are so deeply bonded because he was the first politician to hear them in decades. It feels to them like impeachment is another insult from the political elite, added to the injury of the 21st century. They take it personally, which is why their emotions have flooded their brains. And this is understandable.

But when you think of what might have been and reflect on what has happened, it is crystal clear that this impeachment is not about the Trump agenda or a more coherent version of it. It is about the character of one man: his decision to forgo any outreach, poison domestic politics, marinate it in deranged invective, betray his followers by enriching the plutocracy, destroy the dignity of the office of president, and turn his position into a means of self-enrichment. It’s about the personal abuse of public office: using the presidency’s powers to blackmail a foreign entity into interfering in a domestic election on his behalf, turning the Department of Justice into an instrument of personal vengeance and political defense, openly obstructing investigations into his own campaign, and treating the grave matter of impeachment as a “hoax” while barring any testimony from his own people.

…

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/andrew-sullivan-what-we-know-about-trump-going-into-2020.html

The editorial about Trump in Christianity Today: 

…

Character matters. This has always been a conservative principle but one that, like so many others, has been tossed aside in the convulsions of a cult. And it is Trump’s character alone that has brought us to this point. That’s why the editorial in the Evangelical journal Christianity Today is so clarifying. Finally — finally — an Evangelical outlet telling the truth in simple language:

…

And J.K. Rowling:

…

This is how J.K. Rowling tweeted her support of Forstater’s freedom of speech: “Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?”

…

Both play their parts in Mr. Sullivan’s rambling polemic, although he attempts to segue from subject to subject,  it always reads ‘as if’ it were just an extended rant. The most primitive part of his ‘thinking process’ wedded to his rhetorical skill.

On to Mr. Stephens, of December 26, 2019:

Headline: What Will It Take to Beat Donald Trump?

Sub-headline: It’s not what the progressive left is talking about.

…

Second, the progressive left’s values seem increasingly hostile to mainstream ones, as suggested by the titanic row over J.K. Rowling’s recent tweet defending a woman who was fired over her outspoken views on transgenderism. Third, the more the left rages about Trump and predicts nothing but catastrophe and conspiracy from him, the more out of touch it seems when the catastrophes don’t happen and the conspiracy theories come up short.

…

The most obvious point is not to promise a wrenching overhaul of the economy when it shows no signs of needing such an overhaul. There are plenty of serious long-term risks to our prosperity, including a declining birthrate, national debt north of $23 trillion, the erosion of the global free-trade consensus, threats to the political independence of the Federal Reserve, and the popularization of preposterous economic notions such as Modern Monetary Theory.

…

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/26/opinion/trump-2020.html

Mr. Stephens’ essay may not be a perfect match with Mr. Sullivan’s polemic, but the ‘attack’ on J.K. Rowling’s ‘defense of women’, and the perpetual political menace of ‘The Left’ , are two key points, to that proffered political moralizing propinquity. Recognizing that Stephens expands that list,  demonstrating the he is a more sophisticated moral/political/economic scold! I’ve rendered these portions of this run-on sentence in bold type. The reader must be impressed with Mr. Stephens’ mastery of such complex, indeed vexing questions, that he presents as ‘There are plenty of serious long-term risks to our prosperity… ! Where might he place the Climate Crisis ? Or is this a creation of malcontents,now led by a child Greta Thunberg? These ‘risks’ are framed in economic terms. So might the reader look upon Trump as the only political threat to us? Or are ‘the self-styled saints’ who are perusing the Impeachment an equal threat ‘to our prosperity’?

Political Observer

The new anger

Headline: 2019 in review: protest and populism in Latin America

Sub-headline: Scandals, autocracy and anger at inequality stir unrest across the continent

https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2019/12/25/2019-in-review-protest-and-populism-in-latin-america?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/2019inreviewprotestandpopulisminlatinamericathenewanger

Under the rubric of ‘The new anger’ needs further explication provided by the headline and sub-headline of this ‘News Story’. The use of the lower case in this framing as ‘The new anger’ softens what looks like hysteria.  The causes this reader might offer for this ‘protest & populism’ are American Imperialism & its NGO’s subversion of the indigenous Reformers, on the Left,  by way of the Neo-Liberal cudgel. E.g. Macri’s utter failure & de Kirchner’s political rehabilitation provide an object lesson?  Note that Macri defaulted first, using the euphemism of payment delay, on the Argentine debt according to The Financial Times December 20.2019:

Headline:Argentina delays payments on $9bn in dollar-denominated debt

Sub-headline: New government asks bondholders to show ‘good faith’ amid wider restructuring talks

…

The last payment delay was announced by the previous government of Mauricio Macri, shortly after a primary vote result that signalled he would lose his bid for re-election in October’s national election, which sent the peso reeling and increased the cost of insuring against a debt default.

The announcement came as little surprise to investors, given Argentina’s record on debt repayment and the central bank’s dwindling stock of foreign reserves, used in the battle to control high inflation and a weak currency.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/d18ab022-235d-11ea-b8a1-584213ee7b2b

Should the reader take Argentina as a paradigmatic case of  Neo-Liberalism’s failure. An object lesson on how the IMF operates in that that ‘forgotten continent’?  Not to forget that the Posh Boys & Girls @TheEconomist are a reliable source for Capitalist Apologetics, heavily garnished with the pretense of something resembling prescience?

Old Socialist

Headline: 2019: the year of street protest

Sub-headline: Mass demonstrations around the globe show no sign of fizzling out

Call this an Opinion Writer’s jejune pastiche of History, that comes to this lackluster conclusion:

Above all, as the last 12 months have demonstrated, social unrest is now repeatedly breaking out in unexpected places, for unanticipated reasons.

Its ‘as if’ , Mr. Rachman’s hallowed ‘Post War Liberal Order’ and its various iterations, positive and negative,  can’t protect ‘us’ from the dangers of an inherent human anarchy?  This, an extemporizing on the themes of Herbert Spencer? Or, have I gone to far in providing an explanatory frame, for the intellectual sloth, that is the stock and trade of this Opinion Writer?

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/9f7e94c4-2563-11ea-9a4f-963f0ec7e134

The New Cold Warriors @NYT can’t help themselves! With the ‘Impeachment’ on hold, under the direction of Schiff/Nadler , the best political duo since the Ev and Charley Show, and ‘I haven’t got the votes in the Senate’ Pelosi-I’m sorry I’ve wandered a bit!

Putin now enjoys the status once enjoyed by Stalin, as an all powerful, indeed ubiquitous force for evil: its all part of an exhumation of the 21 inch black & white World of 1952 , with a new cast of characters, who can’t leave the temptation of McCarthyism alone. Its an America Tradition. Its in the spirit of Cotton Mater and his use of ‘Spectral Evidence’ in the Salem Witch Trials. Please note how this photo and headline dominates the Front Page!

Old Socialist

Before you gather the family around the T.V. to watch ‘Its a Wonderful Life’ with your mugs of Cocoa and that Tree all lit up, Ozzie and Harriet style: (Don’t pretend you don’t know who they are!) be sure to read Niall Ferguson’s contribution to Holiday Cheer at The Times.
Well! Its a burlesque of that Dickens classic ‘A Christmas Carol’ re-imagined, or just dragooned, into an American political context. Niall’s literary ambitions are sometimes subject to its maladroit exercise, to the chagrin of his readers.

Merry Christmas,

Myra Breckenridge

Headline:Israeli Jews are ‘equivalent of Seminoles deciding to take over Florida’ and Palestinians are the cowboys — Jeffrey Goldberg reemerges

While I was reading portions of Goldberg’s comments I was reminded of the column’s of David Brooks , in which the political territory looks very familiar, yet refracted through the Brooks lens it is rendered alien, in greater or lesser degree. Perhaps the rhetorical strategy is to create an exploitable  historical/political vertigo?
As a non-Jew I do not understand this obsession-call it a form of ancestor worship. As a self-identified Queer/Atheist my sense of alienation is advanced, to say the least.
I am currently reading ‘Liberalism: A Counter -History’ by Domenico Losurdo: my fascination with the hero’s of the Enlightenment, by way of Isaiah Berlin’s ‘The Age of Enlightenment: The 18th Century Philosophers’ ,dates from my early twenties.
My ‘faith’ in this collection of thinkers is being slowly eroded, by the ugly facts of ‘Liberalism’s’ complicity in slavery, indentured servitude, genocide against native peoples, work-houses etc.
For anyone to present Jewish Suffering and the hard work of being an ‘actual Jew’, in the corrupting Age of the Internet,  as the sine qua non of self-apologetics for the oppression/murder of not just Palestinians, but Africans, Jewish and Non-Jewish, and the Bedouins put on ‘Reservations’ requires more argumentative acrobatics.

Mr. Goldberg reminds me of ‘New Historian’ Benny Morris on Mondoweiss :

Headline:Israeli historian Benny Morris doubles down on his advocacy for ethnic cleansing

Israeli historian Benny Morris doubles down on his advocacy for ethnic cleansing

And Hannah Arendt :

Headline: Arendt: Born in conflict, Israel will degenerate into Sparta, and American Jews will need to back away

Arendt: Born in conflict, Israel will degenerate into Sparta, and American Jews will need to back away

Queer Atheist

Israeli Jews are ‘equivalent of Seminoles deciding to take over Florida’ and Palestinians are the cowboys — Jeffrey Goldberg reemerges

Headline: Robert Harris: ‘Johnson must fancy himself as Caesar’

Sub-headline: The novelist on Cicero’s lessons for Brexit Britain, Labour’s future — and how to write a bestseller a year

Reading Frederick Studemann’s interview with Robert Harris is a literary amalgam of quotes from Mr. Harris, wedded to workmanlike scene setting, and a running commentary by Mr. Studemann. It is both a pleasure to read, an evokes a world of Posh Boy privilege, in Harris’s case it was that of ability and good fortune. Mr. Harris describes himself  as “left liberal”. New Labour is/was Neo-Liberal, so the very notion of his self-ascription is what? mere political fancy, or worse?

On Boris’ victory:

“Every triumph has to be paid for,” he says, with a nod to his research on classical Rome. Johnson will now have to deliver. “Politics is just relentless . . . nothing ever ends. You get Brexit and then there’ll be an NHS winter crisis.”

On Labour’s political future:

“in quite a strong place in 2024 because the Tories won’t have their two great advantages — ‘get Brexit done’ and Jeremy Corbyn”…

Mr.  Studemann offers this-it can’t be called an interpolation, but is simply a part of Financial Times’ political ideology:

…
The difficulty will be getting the right new leader and reorientating the party, not easy with the hard left that now controls Labour and seems not actually that interested in winning elections.

…

Harris on his ‘evolution’ from the Working Class to a member of the ‘metropolitan media elite’

“It’s pretty distant,” he says. He left home at 18 to go to Cambridge and later joined the BBC and has ever since been “a fully paid-up member of the metropolitan media elite”.

Harris on Brexit/Remain political impasse:

… “In a way, what Remain people like me really wanted was a confirmatory vote. We just wanted for people to say, ‘Yes, we’ve looked at this, and this is what we want’,”
“might finally bring that postwar reckoning that we’ve never had about our status in the world”. …
“but we’ve traded a lot on past glories, some of which have fed into Brexit”.

On the political power of Roman demagogues:

…
“demagogues who are themselves very wealthy, powerful aristocrats, directing the anger of the population against the elite, against the Senate and Cicero, for their own political advantage”.*

Harris offer this evaluation of Johnson, via Mr. S,

…
“He’s, let’s say, flexible in his approach. I don’t think he is guided.”

…

This is self-explanatory:

…
“One of the things that I did learn from writing the Cicero books is the obvious one: that in every great victory lie the seeds of subsequent defeat.”
…

Harris opines on Decline, as viewed from his place of residence:

 …
“Around here there were lots of big Roman villas. They were palaces really, but nobody knew how to work them once the Romans left.”
…“fascinates and haunts” him is that “one day the buildings of the City of London will topple and they won’t take long to decay, the roads will be grass and then trees and forests and then there will just be strange concrete blocks left around”.

Smartphones as indicative of the rise of  a’Technology’ divorced from human reality:

…
“It’s losing that tactile sense of being able in the end to make a shelter, cook a meal, not get something from delivery.”
…

Harris on his relation to Technology, cars:

…
“Good God, no. I can’t even mend a bicycle puncture,” he retorts. “I’m the original dreamy boy in his bedroom from the age of eight writing stories.”
…

Harris describes his life outside London’s metropolitan media elite:

“It’s been a great thing for me, not living in London, not going to launch parties, not being in all of that circuit. Just working quietly. Nobody reads reviews out here, nobody cares. That’s great.” His wife calls him a “sociable hermit”.

Harris on being a Writer of the 19th Century tradition

…
“It’s a profession, a job,” he says. “There’s a terrible preciousness about writing. I think that if you write, you’ve just got to get on and write.”
…

On the V2 rockets of WWII:

… 

“I just find it extraordinary to think that one European country is occupying another, firing ballistic missiles at the capital city of another — within living memory.”
…

Harris on the Brexit  novel he would like to read by a Northern Leaver:

…

“writing against the prevailing liberal cultural authors”.

…

Harris on the Roman Republic:

…
“Look at the republic in Rome: Cicero, Cato, Caesar, Pompey — huge figures and what was the result?”
…“That was a system obsessed with politics and with geniuses in the senate and the result was a catastrophe.” Rome endured, but “the republic itself had gone. It became a kind of gangster empire.”

…

Harris on his children leaving home:

“It’s quite a shock when they move out,” he counsels, adding that it is something not written about enough. “It’s quite depressing because it’s a chapter close. You know that, let’s face it, the biggest chapter of your life has just come to an end . . . if it’s a novel, you’re now getting fewer pages.”

https://www.ft.com/content/7eae7f68-20ed-11ea-b8a1-584213ee7b2b

I have read Mr. Harris’ ‘Fatherland’, and found it good, but it does not compare with Phillip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels, March Violets, The Pale Criminal and A German Requiem.  ‘Pompeii’ was an enjoyable entertainment: both Graham Greene and Eric Ambler were the masters of that particular literary genre, played out within the world of crime, and espionage.  ‘The Ghost’ simply lost my interest. I read and enjoyed all three Arturo Perez-Reverte’s  novels ‘The Club Dumas’, ‘The Flanders Panel’ and ‘The Fencing Master’ each was published in the 1990’s, and were contemporaneous with Mr. Harris’ publications.

American Writer

*For a corrective to the ‘Cult of Cicero’ see Chapter 6 ‘Ethnic Personae’ of Ann Vasaly’s ‘Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory’ Its first sentence is instructive.

To paraphrase a cynical maxim of our own day , no Roman orator ever came to grief overestimating his audiences prejudices toward ethnic minorities.

Prof. Vasaly also provides a footnote that provides further information on the ethnic prejudices of Romans: ‘Romans and Aliens’ by J.P.V.D. Balsdon chapters 3, The Roman Outlook, 1. The Greeks and chapter 4‘The Roman Outlook’ 2. Other Peoples

Headline: The Democrats are badly in need of a messiah

Sub-headline: Few of the candidates show signs of winning the hearts of a party that likes to fall in love

Where to begin on this thick slice of political Velveeta? This paragraph caught my attention:

Mr Sanders shares with Ms Warren a penchant for radical promises. Each may indirectly have been damaged by the scale of Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour party’s defeat in last week’s British election. The Democratic party’s moneyed wing now has a champion in Michael Bloomberg, who is the ninth richest person in the world, according to Forbes. But his upside is capped by a lack of charisma. Should the field still be fragmented on “super-Tuesday” in early March, when half the US states hold a primary, Mr Bloomberg’s record election spending may be enough to bring about a brokered convention — the party’s first in decades.

The very idea that Sanders and Warren may be ‘indirectly damaged by the scale of Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour party’s defeat in last week’s British election.’ is the purest projection of Luce’s political preoccupations!

And then ‘Stop and Frisk’ Mike, you could call him Charter School Mike, or Anti-Teachers Union Mike,  pick your sobriquet! ‘Lack of charisma’ was one of the characteristics that fueled Ross Perot’s 1992 Third Party campaign. Mr. Luce was twenty four at the time of Perot’s political ascendancy. Never the less, when has the Financial Times and its hirelings found a Plutocrat an unacceptable ‘messiah’? what can this religious framing device contribute to an understanding of a political contest? Mere pretentious widow dressing?

As a regular reader of this newspaper I can’t help recalling this newspaper’s celebration of Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘Listening Tour’ before his fall from grace. To engage in the most vulgar kind of scientism, it is part of this newspaper’s political/economic DNA. 

Old Socialist  

https://www.ft.com/content/fd7ad5f8-2174-11ea-92da-f0c92e957a96