StephenKMackSD's Blog

Political Cynic’s thought experiment.

If Bret Stephens had appeared in ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’, book by Laura Z. Hobson, screen play by Moss Heart, and an uncredited revision by Elia Kazan, he would have appeared as one of a collection of bigots , both Jewish and Gentile, that made this political melodrama so compelling to watch. Kazan after his movie ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ in 1945, and before his being a ‘Friendly Witness’ ,was a Broadway and Hollywood Golden Boy.

How does this factor into Mr. Stephen’s latest broadside against Joe Biden? Should we look to the phalanx of Neo-Cons, who were the ‘masterminds’ of the Afghan Crime? Stephens is a moral/political conformist , so his position might just be viewed as self-evident? Not to speak of the parade of political conformists who fell into line! Another way of thinking about Stephens’ not too carefully considered hysterical polemic, is his addiction to maladroitly realized political melodrama, in his interventions. At the very least Hobson, Heart, Kazan were competent, even rational writers and dramaturges.

The opening paragraphs of his essay are revelatory:

Headline: An Ethically Challenged Presidency

There should be little doubt that President Biden was not being truthful when, days after the Taliban’s victory, he told ABC News that his senior military advisers had not urged him to keep some 2,500 troops in Afghanistan. The president’s claim was flatly contradicted last week in sworn testimony from Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr., the head of U.S. Central Command.

During the generals’ testimony, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, sought to defend her boss by pointing to a line in Biden’s interview in which he appeared to suggest that the military’s advice “was split.”

Another whopper. What split? As The Times’s Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt and David Sanger reported in April, right after Lloyd Austin was sworn in as secretary of defense in January, he and his top generals “were in lock step in recommending that about 3,000 to 4,500 troops stay in Afghanistan.” Asked whether there were top military advisers who argued otherwise, Psaki evaded the question.

Biden’s dissembling, regarding the worst-executed major foreign policy decision in years, would be a scandal in any presidency. It’s worse coming from the man who campaigned for office by insisting that he stood “for honor and telling the truth.”

…

Is the reader, in the rhetorical thrall of the Stephens polemic, well within the elastic parameters of ‘Treason’ ?

The remainder the Stephens essay reports on the undeniable facts of the Biden ménage’s political corruption.

A pressing question presents itself, that seems outside Stephens’ grasp, when in History has a President lied?

Political Cynic

Political Observer scoffs!

Here are the opening paragraphs of Mr. Caldwell’s funeral oration for the Enlightened Merkel Rule:

The drubbing inflicted on Germany’s Christian Democratic Union in the country’s recent elections is a sign that, alongside Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 16-year stint in power, something larger is coming to an end.

Aside from NATO, the Christian Democratic Union is the most venerable postwar political institution in continental Europe. It has led Germany, usually in coalition, for all but 20 years of the country’s post-Nazi political history. Focused on economic growth, Christian traditions, anti-Communism and maintenance of the Atlantic alliance, the party was a guarantee to Germany’s allies that Europe’s largest, richest country would be stable and dependable. With the measly 24 percent of the vote that Ms. Merkel’s successor, Armin Laschet, managed to win, the C.D.U. can no longer play that role. A pillar of the European order has collapsed.

The C.D.U.’s decline has been underway since at least the turn of the century. While Ms. Merkel managed to disguise it, she showed little aptitude for reversing it. In the five elections since 2005, when she took power, her party’s vote share fell in all but one.

Perhaps not every country needs a “people’s party” of the center-right. Big gainers in this election included Greens worried about climate change and Free Democrats worried about supply chains — two preoccupations that didn’t exist at the time of the C.D.U.’s founding. But there has always been more at stake for the party than an up-to-date servicing to voter preferences. In light of Germany’s Nazi past, it fell to the C.D.U. to play a moderating role — to speak to the patriotic longings of ordinary Germans in a way that would dissuade them from drifting to the political fringes.

This role was almost constitutional. Half a century ago, Franz Josef Strauss, leader of the C.D.U.’s Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, justified his own rock-ribbed conservatism by saying it came with a guarantee that “no legitimate political party” could exist to his party’s right. Many felt they could trust Mr. Strauss to police the country’s rightmost ideological boundary.

Only if someone had been asleep, could this essay by Jillian Tett, from the Financial Times of January 16, 2015 have been ignored:

Headline: A debt to history?

Sub-headline: To some, Germany faces a moral duty to help Greece, given the aid that it has previously enjoyed

As the crucial election looms in Greece later this month, newspapers have been full of pictures of demonstrations (or riots) in Athens. But there is another image hovering in my mind: an elegant dining hall on the shores of Lake Lucerne in Switzerland.

Last summer I found myself in that spot for a conference, having dinner with a collection of central bank governors. It was a gracious, majestic affair, peppered with high-minded conversation. And as coffee was served, in bone-china crockery (of course), Benjamin Friedman, the esteemed economic historian, stood up to give an after-dinner address.

The mandarins settled comfortably into their chairs, expecting a soothing intellectual discourse on esoteric monetary policy. But Friedman lobbed a grenade.

“We meet at an unsettled time in the economic and political trajectory of many parts of the world, Europe certainly included,” he began in a strikingly flat monotone (I quote from the version of his speech that is now posted online, since I wasn’t allowed to take notes then.) Carefully, he explained that he intended to read his speech from a script, verbatim, to ensure that he got every single word correct. Uneasily, the audience sat up.

For a couple of minutes Friedman then offered a brief review of western financial history, highlighting the unprecedented nature of Europe’s single currency experiment, and offering a description of sovereign and local government defaults in the 20th century. Then, with an edge to his voice, Friedman pointed out that one of the great beneficiaries of debt forgiveness throughout the last century was Germany: on multiple occasions (1924, 1929, 1932 and 1953), the western allies had restructured German debt.

So why couldn’t Germany do the same for others? “There is ample precedent within Europe for both debt relief and debt restructuring . . . There is no economic ground for Germany to be the only European country in modern times to be granted official debt relief on a massive scale and certainly no moral ground either.

“The supposed ability of today’s most heavily indebted European countries to reduce their obligations over time, even in relation to the scale of their economies, is likely yet another fiction,” he continued, warning of political unrest if this situation continued.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0

A valuable link to Prof. Benjamin Friedman essay:

Click to access friedman.pdf

Some sample paragraphs, from the closing of Mr. Caldwell’s essay, proves that it isn’t just Germans who resort to the exercise of a History Made to Measure!

…

Certainly some traditional German conservatives deplore Ms. Merkel’s legacy. But there was one sense in which she was mostly in continuity with her predecessors — her resistance to utopianism. Germany’s society, economy and (since Covid-19) health care system have lately performed more efficiently than those of its neighbors. The great achievement of Ms. Merkel was to understand that in the global economy, efficiency is often a synonym for vulnerability. Like a lot of its best machinery, Germany is both high-functioning and delicate.

…

Overindulging a country’s virtues can be as dangerous as overindulging its vices. More than her predecessors Ms. Merkel ran the risk of exposing Germany to instability — in her case, to an American-style class conflict between the beneficiaries and the outcasts of the global economy. She avoided the worst. But she had some close calls, and the shrinking of Germany’s great, stabilizing bourgeois party is bound to reduce her successors’ room for error.

Political Observer

Old Socialist offers some selected paragraphs.

Note the collection of Topic Sentences, carefully brought to vivid life by our Adrift Thatcherite …

On Inter-connectedness :

The past two years have taught us a brutal lesson in how interconnected the modern world is: when a pangolin in Wuhan sneezes, we all catch something rather more serious than a cold. But the aftershocks are making the case clearer still. What is being referred to in Downing Street as the “Effing crisis” — the shortage of energy, food and fuel — is the inevitable outcome of switching off much of the world economy for almost a year.

The Yellow Peril in its most soft-peddled iteration, allied to a scolding about the World Economy, that had no choice but to recognize the Pandemic Reality as ineluctable!

On Supply Chains:

As the engine judders back into life, demand is surging — hence rising inflation — but supply channels are still choked or diverted. For example, when the Covid crisis hit, everyone cancelled orders for semiconductors. When the economy recovered, they all reordered at once. But you can’t pump out a year’s worth of chips in a few months. So now you can’t buy a new car for love or money.

The Supply Cain malfunction makes the argument for a revitalized indigenous manufacturing sector, as a question of survival.

On beyond the government’s control:

One of the dirty secrets of Westminster is quite how many things are entirely beyond the government’s control. For example, if the inflation we are seeing turns out to be permanent rather than transitory, it is alarmingly difficult to see what we could do. The traditional response would be to raise interest rates. But since the financial crisis, the West has signed a devil’s bargain to keep interest rates at or near zero — another huge economic factor that is largely out of ministers’ hands.

Inflation is the enemy of any possible attempt to ameliorate the Pandemic’s economic consequences, on the welfare of its citizens? The Neo-Liberal Swindle sees the Free Market, as the only valuable form of ‘knowledge’– its sine qua non.

On ‘Evergrande’

Which brings us back to Evergrande. After Xi Jinping’s decision to tighten lending rules, the company found itself attempting to pay down more than £200 billion in debt. As it slowly goes bankrupt, it is sending tremors through the financial system. Yet at the same time the end of the Chinese property boom may help break the fever in the commodity markets, with prices for iron ore in particular slumping. So Evergrande may end up hitting British growth— or saving us from the spectre of inflation.

Chinese Capital doesn’t just stumble …

On Surfing these global waves

Surfing these global waves is a tricky task for any government, especially post pandemic. But it is a particular challenge in the wake of the Brexit vote and the totemic promise to take back control.

Again, the lesson of The Pandemic demonstrates the necessity of the Nation State as the guardian of the welfare of its citizens! No matter how retrograde it appears to that Globalist Cadre.

On Immigration

Consider the issue of migration. With the end of free movement, we have moved to a points-based system for new arrivals. But what to do about those crossing the Channel in defiance of the rules?

Well, we can toughen enforcement or bribe the French to build camps on their side of the water. We can reduce the appeal of coming here by quashing any talk of amnesties or giving illegal arrivals the right to work. We could quietly relax checks on lorries to nudge migrants into taking a less dangerous route across. But ultimately there is no plan a home secretary can announce in the House of Commons that will halt the global flow of migrants or stop Britain, by virtue of its very success, being an attractive destination.

The ‘mass migration’ is due to:

Headline: At Least 37 Million People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror

Sub-headline: A new report calculates the number of people who fled because of wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.

At least 37 million people have been displaced as a direct result of the wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, according to a new report from Brown University’s Costs of War project. That figure exceeds those displaced by conflict since 1900, the authors say, with the exception of World War II.

The findings were published on Tuesday, weeks before the United States enters its 20th year of fighting the war on terror, which began with the invasion of Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001; yet, the report says it is the first time the number of people displaced by U.S. military involvement during this period has been calculated. The findings come at a time when the United States and other Western countries have become increasingly opposed to welcoming refugees, as anti-migrant fears bolster favor for closed-border policies.

The report accounts for the number of people, mostly civilians, displaced in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya and Syria, where fighting has been the most significant, and says the figure is a conservative estimate — the real number may range from 48 million to 59 million. The calculation does not include the millions of other people who have been displaced in countries with smaller U.S. counterterrorism operations, according to the report, including those in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali and Niger.

Let me end my collection of quotations from Our Thatcherite with his version of political comedy:

Faced with empty petrol tanks, or a Christmas shortage of pigs in blankets, ministers may end up offering emergency visas to lorry drivers and butchers. But when the bakers and candlestick-makers come knocking, the government’s message is that they should do more to attract UK staff. As one insider puts it, “businesses have been drunk on cheap labour for decades”, and it’s time to sober up.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/they-couldnt-stop-this-effing-crisis-so-how-will-ministers-persuade-voters-they-can-fix-it-d63zblfr8

Old Socialist

P.S. Be sure to read Mr. Colvile’s essay at Politico Europe:

https://www.politico.eu/author/robert-colvile/

Political Observer comments on the ‘political transcendentalist’.

This newspaper employs one of the most interesting writers and political commentators, of the political present, in Janan Ganesh! I read many different publications on the internet, I spend my days reading! Conduct an interview with Mr. Ganesh, one of the real talents, to emerge from the Neo-Liberal Age gone bust! I will never agree with Mr. Ganesh’s politics, no matter how engagingly framed!

Define respectable bourgeois, jejune political chatter: The New York Times!

What  ‘we’ get in this interview from a New York Times regular contributor is the warmed-over political hysterics, of Mr. Thomas Chatterton Williams and its ensuing victimology melodrama:

In July 2020, Williams was one of the organisers of “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate”, an open letter signed by 152 scholars and writers, published in Harper’s magazine. It warned of an “intolerant climate that has set in on all sides” across cultural institutions and a “vogue for public shaming and ostracism”, and stressed the need “to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences”.

Although its authors were careful to not use the phrase “cancel culture”, it was obvious this was the letter’s target, and it provoked a backlash from the progressive left, who argued that such a culture does not exist — or at least is nothing new — and who criticised the choice of signatories, such as JK Rowling, who has been accused of being “anti-trans”.

“I lost a couple of people that I had been very good to on an interpersonal level because of the Harper’s letter — people who unfollowed me and blocked me with no explanation. They actually know me. That’s crazy,” says Williams, clearly upset by this. “The details of what’s right or wrong don’t matter, it’s that ‘you’re not with us’. I never thought ideas or writing were about signalling allegiance.”

…

https://www.ft.com/content/1bf6a540-0a7c-427f-9eea-b756acb81813

What appeals to the Financial Times is that Mr. Williams made ‘enemies’ of both ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, he is a ‘political transcendentalist’ :

“I never thought ideas or writing were about signalling allegiance.”

This last quote is an astoundingly naïve assertion for a cosmopolitan, engaged in the endeavor of political/cultural commentary!

Political Observer

******************************

 Replying to Tench

On the question of ‘“I never thought ideas or writing were about signalling allegiance.” : I have four books on my desk. ‘Rorty and his critics’ published by Blackwell, ‘Statecraft as Soulcraft’ by George F. Will, published by Touchstone, ‘Homo Juridicus’ by Alain Supiot published by Verso. ‘Kant : Biography’ by Manfred Kuehn published by Cambridge University Press: Call all these ‘signalling allegiance’. Kant, in The Critique of Pure Reason: ‘Our age is the genuine age of criticism, to which everything must submit.’, pages 100/101 of the Cambridge Edition.

Mr. Chatterton knows were he is and where he is going, and he knows all about self-promotion. His special knowledge of these bad political actors enables him rebuff them, even though they possess a power, to shame the writer of Harry Potter, and commit other political felonies of bad etiquette. Chatterton lacks the ingrained paranoia of Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, his self-conception of being a Cosmopolitan does not allow that political exercise.

As for :

‘that Jemima Kelly didn’t warm to Thomas Chatterton Williams, despite having much sympathy for the substance of his political and intellectual stance on these issues. She can write with great warmth (look up her interview with David Spiegelhalter) and that’s absent here.’

Or:

Yes, Janan Ganesh is always fun, but though I often find myself agreeing with his observations I do sometimes feel he’s a bit too by his own cleverness. Did you ever catch him writing movingly, or with palpable warmth?

Its almost ‘as if’ the Television/Radio Psychologist, armed with Neo-Freudian Kitsch hadn’t utterly disappeared!

Thank you for your comment,

StephenKMackSD

Philosophical Apprentice, on the political toxin of ‘History Made to Measure’.

The reader has to recognize that Martin Wolf , by linking to Kagan and Frum’s essays, of the two of the most notorious Neo-Cons, signals the complete rehabilitation of these political actors, it is now an accomplished fact! Back into the fold has its advantages, like enjoying the benefits of bourgeois political respectability, wedded to an exploitable intellectual viability.

Neo-Con Mr. Kagan will never recognize the power of brevity, in his 5,568 episodic political melodrama. Noting, that the Strussians are practitioners of a weapon for sowing political discord, by exhausting the readers patience and blunting her critical facility, in the interest of a corrupt politics. The reader need only turn her attention to Anne Applebaum’s republished essay, of August 31, of 2021, to view, in situ, the Straussian Method: this is a 7,896 word monstrosity.

Headline: The New Puritans

Sub-headline: Social codes are changing, in many ways for the better. But for those whose behavior doesn’t adapt fast enough to the new norms, judgment can be swift—and merciless

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/new-puritans-mob-justice-canceled/619818/

Not mentioned by any of these writers is the publication in 1973 of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s ‘The Imperial Presidency’! Here is an excerpt from a 1980 essay by Louis W. Koenig:

Among the innumerable books published about the American presidency in the nearly two centuries of the office’s existence, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s Imperial Presidency holds a unique place.’ Published in 1973, the book’s title remains part of the American political lexicon. Mention presidency in a word association test administered to any number of politicians, civil servants, academics, and others tolerably informed about the office, and the likelihood is that the word imperial will figure prominently in the results. Adding to the book’s impact are Schlesinger’s previous writings and service in a presidential administration, a record in sharp contrast to the theme of his book. His earlier works were laudatory chronicles of the presidencies of Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Kennedy, which, with his service in the latter’s presidency, were encouraging to other writers, especially in the 1960s, in building their cases for an activist presidency. The Imperial Presidency is a 180-degree turnaround from this previous record. Writing in 1973, when the unpopularity of the Vietnam war was reaching a crescendo and Richard Nixon’s abuses of power were surfacing and straining the credence of shocked citizens, Schlesinger’s contention that presidential power had attained a state of extreme aggrandizement seemed justified and aptly timed. In an extended analysis, he argued that Watergate and the Vietnam war were not isolated aberrations but the long-building climaxes of rampant presidential power that had been set in the direction of abuse soon after the office commenced its operations in 1789. The rock on which the imperial presidency rests is the phenomenon of presidential wars, launched simply by the chief executive’s fiat. Innumerable small-scale hostilities were initiated in the nineteenth century; more elaborate conflicts were waged by Tyler, Polk, and above all Lincoln in the Civil War. In the twentieth century such wars were conducted on the scale of the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. The spreading use of executive agreements and ever broadening executive privilege were other ingredients that made foreign policy the principal arena of the imperial presidency. Particularly since World War II, according to Schlesinger, “the image of the President acting by himself in foreign affairs, imposing his own sense of reality and necessity on a waiting government and people became the new orthodoxy.” In domestic affairs, the rise of social programs, such as the New Deal and the Great Society, and the expansion of a national economy dominated by interstate business and amenable to control through national regulation, enlarged the imperial presidency’s domain.

…

Click to access koenigimperialpres.pdf

The ‘as if’ of all three of these writers is that the ‘historical somehow’ of Trump had no historical precursors: in the ever growing power of the president, ripe for abuse by the political villainy of Trump.

The value of History Made to Measure , as practiced by Wolf, Kagan and Frum, is the subtraction of bothersome detail, like Schlesinger’s historical intervention, is not just rendered moot, but is subject to an ideological erasure.

Philosophical Apprentice

The ignominy of being compared to Jimmy Carter, and Mr. Luce self-serving myopia, regarding Reagan’s back door deal with the Iranians : topped off with an Oxbridger’s pastiche of a Psychoanalysis of President Biden, and Doom Saying. Maybe not Freud, but Jungian Jordan Peterson?  

As Biden addressed the nation, it was hard to escape the conclusion that he was not master of his brief. The president, whose life has been repeatedly marred by personal tragedy, teared up when he spoke of the sense of loss that the families of the dead US servicemen would feel. He mentioned his son, Beau, a former US army officer who served in Iraq and died of brain cancer in 2015. “You get the feeling like you’re being sucked into a black hole in the middle of your chest; there’s no way out,” Biden said of the grief that will hit the families of the dead. The poignancy was enhanced by the fact that Biden might have been speaking about what it is like to be in his job at this moment. The political black hole beckons.

The reader confronts the concluding paragraphs as if written by a Neo-Conservative! A mediocre comic performance!

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/29e1342b-adba-46d5-abba-8c471dc9a8fb

After this stinging indictment, of the feckless Joe Biden, as presented by Mr. Luce:  

Headline: Biden’s Afghanistan fiasco: ‘We look like a deer caught in headlights’

sub-headline: The chaotic scenes in Kabul are unlikely to derail his domestic agenda but undermine his promise to restore competence

https://www.ft.com/content/c6e012d4-fe69-4579-a1b0-997c1a1e1bc9

Mr. Luce begins his latest essay with these paragraphs:

No, the western alliance is not about to break up. And America is not about to drift off into some isolationist reverie. Afghanistan is too peripheral to trigger such a dramatic shift. But the chaotic nature of America’s withdrawal, and the slight felt by most of its allies, have put an abrupt end to President Joe Biden’s international honeymoon. It has also left the world — and much of Washington — in confusion. What does Biden mean by “America is back”? To which America is he referring?

The answer is not obvious. Biden’s Afghan pullout fulfilled one promise, to get out of “forever wars”, and broke another, to restore the primacy of America’s alliances. The second promise was what sharply differentiated Biden from Donald Trump. Biden supposedly values allies. Europe’s chagrin is that Biden could have fulfilled both vows if he had closely consulted with them on his Afghan exit. He chose not to. The fact that Nato was there at America’s behest rubbed salt into the wound. The 9/11 attacks marked the only time Nato has invoked its Article V mutual defence clause — following an assault on America, not Europe.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/33b1644c-256f-4880-822f-b2bcfd70f551

To offer a cliché as one door closes, another opens :

Headline: Harris rebukes China in major speech on Indo-Pacific relations

Sub-headline: “Beijing’s actions continue to undermine the rules-based order and threaten the sovereignty of nations.”

SINGAPORE — Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a sharp rebuke to China for its incursions in the South China Sea, warning its actions there amount to “coercion” and “intimidation” and affirming that the U.S. will support its allies in the region against Beijing’s advances.

“We know that Beijing continues to coerce, to intimidate and to make claims to the vast majority of the South China Sea,” she said in a major foreign policy speech Tuesday in Singapore in which she laid out the Biden administration’s vision for the Indo-Pacific. “Beijing’s actions continue to undermine the rules-based order and threaten the sovereignty of nations.”

…

Harris’ remarks also come during a critical moment for the United States as the Biden administration seeks to further solidify its pivot towards Asia while America’s decades-long focus on the Middle East comes to a messy end with the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Harris’ remarks echoed and expanded upon remarks she delivered at the U.S. Naval Academy graduation in June, where she described a world that is “interconnected,” “interdependent” and “fragile.”

…

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/24/kamala-harris-china-singapore-pacific-506675

As the Neo-Conservative fiascos of Afghanistan and Iraq almost closes, the Biden/Harris New Cold Warriors, offer a newish Theatre of Conflict: the Chinese sphere of influence. How many fronts will this iteration embrace, and the return of perennial enemies? Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Peru etc., The bloated Pentagon Budget, and the mad dreams of American Technocrats, and their hero Samuel P. Huntington, will never let go of their hegemonic ambitions!

Philosophical Apprentice

Edward Luce addresses the reader :

Headline: Biden’s Afghanistan fiasco: ‘We look like a deer caught in headlights’

Sub-headline: The chaotic scenes in Kabul are unlikely to derail his domestic agenda but undermine his promise to restore competence

Not since Major General William Elphinstone’s retreating British army was picked off in 1842, has a foreign occupier left Afghanistan under such a cloud. It took three years after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 for its Kabul ally to submit to mujahideen forces. It was two years after the US military’s exit from Vietnam before Saigon fell to the communists in 1975. On Monday Kabul folded to the Taliban almost three weeks before the official day of America’s departure.

“We look like a deer caught in the headlights,” says Mathew Burrows, a former senior CIA officer now at the Atlantic Council. “It is one more chink gone in the American empire.”

https://www.ft.com/content/c6e012d4-fe69-4579-a1b0-997c1a1e1bc9

Further selections:

…

But as the president on whose watch the concluding fiasco took place, Joe Biden’s name will be indelibly linked to it. The question is whether he can extract any foreign policy gains in what one analyst described as Biden’s “Ides of August”. Since he was partly elected on a promise to restore competence to the White House, there is also concern that the fall of Kabul will wound Biden’s ability to push through his domestic agenda.

…

“It will be hard to separate Biden’s strategic decision to leave Afghanistan, which may ultimately prove to be right, with the hasty and sloppy and panicked way in which it has been executed,” says Steve Biegun, former US deputy secretary of state. “This comes as something of a body blow to Biden’s ‘America is back’ message. Everyone thought he was going to be different to Trump.”

…

“It defies belief that this withdrawal was imposed by the military,” says a former senior Pentagon official. “The US military was following civilian orders.” The official adds that it was also misleading to blame what has happened on intelligence failure. “The intelligence agencies gave a range of forecasts, including the worst,” he says.

…

The bigger impact on Biden’s role is likely to be felt with America’s allies and adversaries. Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign affairs chief, told the European parliament that the departure was “a catastrophe for the Afghan people, for western values and credibility and for the developing of international relations”. Armin Laschet, Germany’s possible successor to Angela Merkel after September’s general election, described it as “Nato’s biggest debacle since its founding”. Even the reliably Atlanticist British failed to conceal their disappointment with an America that had failed to keep them abreast of the details of its pullout.

…

“If Biden’s withdrawal shows that America is becoming less messianic and will focus more on looking after its people at home, then this decision will be a good one for America and China,” says Eric Li, a Shanghai-based political scientist and venture capitalist, who is a frequent defender of China’s stance to western audiences. “That is what China will be hoping for.”

…

“The joke was that in 1989 the ISI defeated the Soviets with American help,” says Sarah Chayes, an Afghan expert who was a senior Pentagon adviser. “Now the ISI has defeated the United States with American help.”

…

Ben Shapiro in full hysterical cry, complete with arched brows, and the usual staccato delivery. There is no transcript, of this not quite 24 minute rant, framed by the Islamophobic ‘8th Century Barbarians’. An Orthodox Jew who lives in a former Confederate State, he is no Harry Golden!

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/7QfovktOL_E?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Niall Ferguson in The Economist:

Headline: Niall Ferguson on why the end of America’s empire won’t be peaceful

Sub-headline: As it leaves Afghanistan in chaos, America’s decline mirrors Britain’s a century ago. It may also invite wider conflict, warns a historian

“THE MULTITUDES remained plunged in ignorance… and their leaders, seeking their votes, did not dare to undeceive them.” So wrote Winston Churchill of the victors of the first world war in “The Gathering Storm.” He bitterly recalled a “refusal to face unpleasant facts, desire for popularity and electoral success irrespective of the vital interests of the state.” American readers watching their government’s ignominious departure from Afghanistan, and listening to President Joe Biden’s strained effort to justify the unholy mess he has made, may find at least some of Churchill’s critique of interwar Britain uncomfortably familiar.

…

How inauspicious that Ferguson should begin his essay with Winston Churchill, in full hyperbolic rhetorical finery ! The reader has access to David Reynolds ‘In Command of History’ , of 2005 ,that argues that Churchill wrote, and re-wrote, the History of WWII, without apology. Or Richard Toye’s ‘Churchill’s Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made’ of 2010. Churchill as committed, vociferous Imperialist, not forgetting a career defined by political opportunism. Ferguson is a fellow traveler of Churchill’s, in ultra-respectable Oxbridger drag!

Here is a link to a review of Ferguson’s ‘Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire.’ from the New York Times of July 25, 2004 By John Lewis Gaddis:

…

At 384 pages, ”Colossus” is one of Ferguson’s smaller books; but it is his most ambitious effort yet to connect historical analysis with what is happening in the world today. His thesis is simply stated: the United States is an empire, however much Americans might deny that fact; its record of accomplishment in this capacity is not very good; and it should learn from the experiences of earlier empires, notably that of Britain.

Both ”Colossus” and Ferguson’s previous book ”Empire” proceed from a controversial assumption for which he makes no apologies: it is that empires have as often been a force for progress as a source of oppression. Their history, he reminds us, goes back much farther than does that of the modern state — that fact alone provides reason to question politically correct claims that we live in a postimperial age. Nor should we want to, Ferguson argues, because empires are a time-tested method for imposing order and securing justice, qualities sadly lacking in the post-cold-war world. ”What is required,” he writes, ”is an agency capable of intervening . . . to contain epidemics, depose tyrants, end local wars and eradicate terrorist organizations.” The United Nations has long since demonstrated its inability to perform this task. That leaves only the United States, together with such coalitions of the willing as it can assemble.

That Americans have the power to run such a ”liberal empire” Ferguson does not doubt: they have been doing something like this for decades. They have, however, been ”surprisingly inept” in their interventions, which are ”often short-lived and their results ephemeral.” This has happened, he complains, because they ”lack the imperial cast of mind.” Americans fail to train their youth to manage their empire. They resist annexation, preferring ”that foreigners . . . Americanize themselves without the need for formal rule.” They are more into consumption than conquest: ”They would rather build shopping malls than nations. They crave for themselves protracted old age and dread, even for other Americans who have volunteered for military service, untimely death in battle.”

At nearly 3200 words Mr. Ferguson’s essay is a crowded field of Historical Players: Britain, in its various rhetorical permutations, takes three large paragraphs. A comparison between America and Britain takes up six more paragraphs. Then notorious Neo-Liberal Larry Summers enters predicting ‘inflationary dangers’. Austerity is the lingua franca of Neo-Liberals, even in the face of the 2008 Economic Collapse, and the Obama ill-fated Simpson-Bowles, named ‘The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform’! Churchill, Hitler, Mussolini, Imperial Japan, Fiji, Gambia, Guiana, Vancouver – the Ferguson Juggernaut is just gathering speed as the readers patience ebbs!

Luckily? for the reader she comes to a section titled ‘Power is Relative’, two paragraphs begin this part of the essay:

A relative decline compared with other countries is another point of resemblance. According to estimates by the economic historian Angus Maddison, the British economy by the 1930s had been overtaken in terms of output by not only America’s (as early as 1872), but also Germany’s (in 1898 and again, after the disastrous years of war, hyperinflation and slump, in 1935) and the Soviet Union (in 1930). True, the British Empire as a whole had a bigger economy than the United Kingdom, especially if the Dominions are included—perhaps twice as large. But the American economy was even larger and remained more than double the size of Britain’s, despite the more severe impact of the Great Depression in the United States.

America today has a similar problem of relative decline in economic output. On the basis of purchasing-power parity, which allows for the lower prices of many Chinese domestic goods, the GDP of China caught up with that of America in 2014. On a current-dollar basis, the American economy is still bigger, but the gap is projected to narrow. This year China’s current-dollar GDP will be around 75% of America’s. By 2026 it will be 89%.

Ferguson’s ‘idee fixe’ on China takes up the next two paragraphs, except that China become part of a carefully muddled historical analogy, if it even qualifies for that rhetorical status!

Beijing, Taiwan, Neville Chamberlain, Czechoslovakia,1938 as “a quarrel in a far away country, between people of whom we know nothing”.

I had printed copies of these essays, so as to more easily engage with their arguments , yet this essay has almost reached the length of Mr. Ferguson’s essay. Here is the point of arrival, for this essays, swimming in historical/political/economic garnish, with the help of political fabulist Winston Churchill!

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The acquisition of such extensive global responsibilities was not easy. But it is a delusion to believe that shedding them will be easier. This is the lesson of British history to which Americans need to pay more heed. President Joe Biden’s ill-advised decision for a “final withdrawal” from Afghanistan was just the latest signal by an American president that the country wants to reduce its overseas commitments. Barack Obama began the process by exiting Iraq too hastily and announcing in 2013 that “America is not the world’s policeman.” Donald Trump’s “America First” doctrine was just a populist version of the same impulse: he too itched to get out of Afghanistan and to substitute tariffs for counterinsurgency.

The problem, as this month’s debacle in Afghanistan perfectly illustrates, is that the retreat from global dominance is rarely a peaceful process. However you phrase it, announcing you are giving up on your longest war is an admission of defeat, and not only in the eyes of the Taliban. China, which shares a short stretch of its vast land border with Afghanistan, is also closely watching. So is Russia, with zloradstvo—Russian for Schadenfreude. It was no mere coincidence that Russia intervened militarily in both Ukraine and Syria just months after Obama’s renunciation of global policing. Mr Biden’s belief (expressed to Richard Holbrooke in 2010) that one could exit Afghanistan as Richard Nixon exited Vietnam and “get away with it” is bad history: America’s humiliation in Indochina did have consequences. It emboldened the Soviet Union and its allies to make trouble elsewhere—in southern and eastern Africa, in Central America and in Afghanistan, which it invaded in 1979. Reenacting the fall of Saigon in Kabul will have comparable adverse effects.

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2021/08/20/niall-ferguson-on-why-the-end-of-americas-empire-wont-be-peaceful  

What have these three propagandists missed?

Headline: At Least 37 Million People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror

Sub-headline: A new report calculates the number of people who fled because of wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.

At least 37 million people have been displaced as a direct result of the wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, according to a new report from Brown University’s Costs of War project. That figure exceeds those displaced by conflict since 1900, the authors say, with the exception of World War II.

The findings were published on Tuesday, weeks before the United States enters its 20th year of fighting the war on terror, which began with the invasion of Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001; yet, the report says it is the first time the number of people displaced by U.S. military involvement during this period has been calculated. The findings come at a time when the United States and other Western countries have become increasingly opposed to welcoming refugees, as anti-migrant fears bolster favor for closed-border policies.

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Political Observer

The first paragraph of his essay is cinematic in its sweep of images, and evocation of emotions:

The bookends of our two-decade entanglement in Afghanistan are two men falling from the sky. The first, on September 11, 2001, happened in Manhattan, as a figure facing imminent immolation in a skyscraper chose to jump instead. The second we witnessed this week, as another young human body, losing what grip he had on an airplane taking off from Kabul airport, tumbled through the sky for the last moments of his life. Their deaths were both a function of one thing: resurgent theocratic barbarism. And today, they can be seen as punctuating its resilience. 

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/two-men-falling?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo1MzQ5NjEsInBvc3RfaWQiOjQwMTAzNjEzLCJfIjoiTFlyeU8iLCJpYXQiOjE2Mjk0OTI2OTksImV4cCI6MTYyOTQ5NjI5OSwiaXNzIjoicHViLTYxMzcxIiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.eUJNIWNRAxiUSVhez6kRIbh64D3s0Q844GYLMLriU-c

 

His essay then appropriates the frame of the 21 inch black and white world of 1952.

Everyone who has ever tried this Sisyphean task has failed. We lost the war long ago, and had conceded defeat already. Despite extraordinary sacrifices by Americans and Afghans and Brits and others, a viable, stable, less-awful alternative to Taliban rule existed only so long as it was kept on life support by the West — and not a day longer.

Andy then resorts to a History Made to Measure, the standard trope for the pundit class. While respecting his framing, as vital to his political moralizing. But not content, he sharpens the melodrama:

Our swift victory in the winter of 2001/2 soon became a circle of pointlessness, with al Qaeda underground, Bin Laden in Pakistan, and a Western-designed “government” wallowing in a fathomless pit of corruption. We should have left then, instead of flattering George W Bush’s utopian “nation-building”. Obama should have done the deed in his first term, but he figured he couldn’t end two wars at once, and tried to turn the Afghan project into a moral calling, as he drone-killed thousands. He caved — against Biden’s advice — to the blandishments of the top brass and the piety of the Blob. Trump should have done it — as he promised — but Trump couldn’t even build a wall. And real battle and conflict — along with real accountability that executing withdrawal would have demanded? Trump ran away from all of that for four years.

Has the reader lost her patience with Andy’s Moral Melodrama stretched taught? I’ll just quote some of the more telling portions of Andy’s screed:

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We can flagellate ourselves over this — and the futility of it all seems heartbreakingly obvious in retrospect — but it was not ignoble. Two difficult things can be true at the same time. Lives were saved, minds were opened a little, women breathed freer air for a while, bodies were less frequently bludgeoned by torture and barbarism, and souls were less stricken with constant dread.

…

But we also know that countless Afghans, exhausted by the incompetence and kleptocracy of their own government, unmoved by Western liberalism, had, over the last year, swiftly made deals with the winning party as it swept through all the provincial capitals.

…

Of course, we should have gotten our people out before the Taliban’s imminent victory — all the Americans and every single Afghan who helped us. That we didn’t is horrifying. To contemplate this betrayal is to shudder. 

…

But there is something about the unreal huffing and puffing this week from the left-media, the neocon holdouts and the opportunistic Republicans that seems far too cheap and easy. It’s as if they have learned nothing — nothing — from the 21st Century.

…

Bill Kristol — I kid you not — actually wrote another article condemning the withdrawal, quoting Churchill and Munich! How dead can a brain be?

…

I have tired of Andy’s political moralizing! I’ll just move to Andy’s quotation from The Economist:

Sitting on a dusty rug beside their lorries at the edge of Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second city, a group of middle-aged drivers explain the difference between the Taliban and the government. Both groups take money from drivers on the road, says Muhammad Akram, leaning forward in a black kurta; both are violent. But when the Taliban stop him at a checkpoint, they write him a receipt. Waving a fistful of green papers, he explains how they ensure he won’t be charged twice: after he pays one group of Talibs, his receipt gets him through subsequent stops. Government soldiers, in contrast, rob him over and over. When he drives from Herat, a city near the Iranian border, to Kandahar, Mr Akram says, he will pay the Taliban once. Government soldiers he will pay at least 30 times.

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https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/05/18/why-afghanistans-government-is-losing-the-war-with-the-taliban

The fact that Andy used to be a fellow Neo-Con, and published this 138 page mea culpa about his support for the Iraq War :

,https://sullydish.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/andrew-sullivan-i-was-wrong.pdf

Should this present essay. lead the reader to consider exactly what Andy’s motive is for writing this essay? Still, there are 477 words left of Andy’s essay, yet to be read. One of the cornerstones of Straussian rhetorical practice, is to exhaust the readers patience, thereby dulling her ability to understand an argument, if such an argument presents itself to a critical reader’s attention!

Queer Atheist

While reading Katrina Manson essay I was thinking: where are the Neo-Cons who advocated and ‘sold’ the war in Afghanistan, to the American Public, as politically, morally necessary? Recall David Brooks’ ‘The Collapse of The Dream Palaces’ dreck?
David Brooks of July 18 , 2021 :

Headline: David Brooks: The American identity crisis

For most of the past century, human dignity had a friend — the United States of America. We are a deeply flawed and error-prone nation, like any other, but America helped defeat fascism and communism and helped set the context for European peace, Asian prosperity and the spread of democracy.

Then came Iraq and Afghanistan, and America lost faith in itself and its global role — like a pitcher who has been shelled and no longer has confidence in his own stuff. On the left, many now reject the idea that America can be or is a global champion of democracy, and they find phrases like “the indispensable nation” or the “last best hope of the earth” ridiculous.

On the right the wall-building caucus has given up on the idea that the rest of the world is even worth engaging.

Many people around the world have always resisted America’s self-appointed role as democracy’s champion. But they have also been rightly appalled when America sits back and allows genocide to engulf places like Rwanda or allows dangerous regimes to threaten the world order.

The Afghans are the latest witnesses to this reality. The American bungles in Afghanistan have been well documented. We’ve spent trillions of dollars and lost thousands of our people. But the two-decade strategy of taking the fight to the terrorists, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, has meant that global terrorism is no longer seen as a major concern in daily American life. Over the past few years, a small force of American troops has helped prevent some of the worst people on earth from taking over a nation of more than 38 million — with relatively few American casualties. In 1999, no Afghan girls attended secondary school. Within four years, 6% were enrolled, and as of 2017 the figure had climbed to nearly 40%.

…

https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/Op-Ed/2021/07/19/David-Brooks-The-American-identity-crisis/stories/202107190006

Here is Bill Kristol of June 19, 2021 on twitter :

Neither of these men have any kind of military experience, yet ‘we’ must defer to what? not anything like military experience! They both make a ‘moral argument’ that is about American Exceptionalism. Even though Brooks casts it in Pop Psychology terms. as an ‘Identity Crisis’.

With this shopworn chatter from both these Neo-Cons, what ‘we’ have is death, devastation and human suffering on grand scale. Allied to dismal apologetics that fails to even recognize, not just complete failure, but an utter contemp for human life!

Headline: At Least 37 Million People Have Been Displaced by America’s War on Terror

Sub-headline: A new report calculates the number of people who fled because of wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.

At least 37 million people have been displaced as a direct result of the wars fought by the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, according to a new report from Brown University’s Costs of War project. That figure exceeds those displaced by conflict since 1900, the authors say, with the exception of World War II.

The findings were published on Tuesday, weeks before the United States enters its 20th year of fighting the war on terror, which began with the invasion of Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001; yet, the report says it is the first time the number of people displaced by U.S. military involvement during this period has been calculated. The findings come at a time when the United States and other Western countries have become increasingly opposed to welcoming refugees, as anti-migrant fears bolster favor for closed-border policies.

The report accounts for the number of people, mostly civilians, displaced in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya and Syria, where fighting has been the most significant, and says the figure is a conservative estimate — the real number may range from 48 million to 59 million. The calculation does not include the millions of other people who have been displaced in countries with smaller U.S. counterterrorism operations, according to the report, including those in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali and Niger.

…

Old Socialist