The NYT's excellent articles (Part I and Part 2) about Hillary Clinton's role in the Libya disaster after getting rid of Qaddafi, omit the role of French philosopher Bernard Henri Levy in creating the mess, examined in this France 24 article. The NYT articles talk about how the Europeans, particularly the French and British promised to take the lead in Libya, and even to go ahead there without the US, but it does not look at the role played by Levy in getting the French government to play such a leading role.
Levy clearly saw this intervention as benefiting Israel, but whether he convinced Israel or whether Israel convinced him is not clear to me. The fact that an Arab Muslim country has fallen into civil war or anarchy probably benefits Israel, although the fact that Libya has increasingly become a base for ISIS operations probably does not.
Tuesday, March 01, 2016
Thursday, February 25, 2016
Westward Expansion as Safety Net
Everybody makes big deal of diversity in US. It is an accident of history. Unlike Europe, which has been settled for
millennia, America was virtually empty when it was discovered by Columbus in
1492. The Indians were hunter-gatherers
who had created only a few cities or towns in North America, mostly in the Southwest,
although they had created grander ones in Central and South America. In North America there was relatively little
resistance to the westward expansion of Europeans across the continent. There was never much threat from Indians
against European-built cities after the first hundred years or so. As the Indians were driven westward, the war
against them moved westward to protect the settlers as they moved in.
The westward expansion essentially created free land for
those who were will to claim it and fight for it. This became the social and economic safety
net for Europeans who could not make it on the more civilized east coast. If you couldn’t make it in Boston or
Charleston, you could set out for Indiana or Alabama, and eventually Kansas,
Texas, or California. Life was hard, but
it was possible to get out of the oppressive slums in the east coast cities
where immigrants first arrived. Today,
if you are stuck in a slum, there is no wild West to go to. Three is no more free land, although people
like Cliven Bundy claim that there should be.
As a result, it is harder for people trapped in slums to get out.
Another mass migration that took place later was the
movement of blacks from the deep South, where they had lived since slavery, to
the industrial north, where low skilled jobs with good pay were available,
particularly in the car industry in Detroit.
These jobs became the security safety net for struggling poor people in
the South.
When the Great Depression hit, however, the geographic
safety net had largely disappeared.
There was no golden region of the country to which people could flee for
a better life. It was only then, under
FDR, that the government moved in to provide its own safety net in the form of
the CCC, WPA, TVA, Social Security and other government programs. These programs became necessary because by
1930, the formerly empty United States had filled up with people.
Prior to this there had been few restraints on immigration, because
people saw it as positive to make use of empty land by farming, ranching,
mining or manufacturing. During this
open immigration period, most of the immigrants came from Europe, mainly from
western and northern Europe. Thus it was
not surprising when prejudice grew up against immigrants from Ireland and Italy
by settlers of English and northern European extraction, for example. The descendants brought some of their old-country
hostilities with them. Irish-English
animosities were alive and well in Boston and Belfast well into the 1990s.
The idea that the United States has always been a land
welcoming any immigrants from anywhere is largely fiction. Blacks arrived as slaves. The Chinese were discriminated against for
years, as were southern Europeans. Even
immigrants like the Germans and Poles, largely went west to more open places
like Michigan and Minnesota, finding the already crowded east coast somewhat
hostile to them.
Friday, February 19, 2016
Apple Opposes FBI for Commercial Reasons
The Guardian reported that the FBI responded to Apple’s refusal to help it break into the San Bernardino terrorist’s phone by accusing Apple of using the case for financial and commercial benefit. The article said:
The FBI accused Apple of prioritizing its public relations strategy over a terrorism investigation on Friday in a significant escalation of this week’s war between the tech company and the law enforcement agency.
The accusation, made in a court filing demanding Apple comply with an order to unlock an iPhone belonging to the San Bernardino terrorists, represents a nadir in the relationship between two opponents that previously extended each other public respect.
“Apple’s current refusal to comply with the Court’s Order, despite the technical feasibility of doing so, instead appears to be based on its concern for its business model and public brand marketing strategy,” Justice Department attorneys wrote in the Friday filing.http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/20/business/justice-department-calls-apples-refusal-to-unlock-iphone-a-marketing-strategy.html?emc=edit_na_20160219&nlid=56573240&ref=cta
Wednesday, February 17, 2016
Kashkari on Bank Break Up
I am pleased with Kashkari's remarks reported in the WSJ, reinforcing my earlier remarks that the big banks need to be broken up.
Friday, February 12, 2016
Bank Problems
I am concerned about declining confidence in the US banking
sector. Recently CNBC and Bloomberg have
been discussing problems at the German bank Deutsche Bank. More disturbing for Americans, declining
stock prices for big American banks indicate a lack of confidence in the whole
industry. Dodd-Frank was supposed to protect us from bank failures, but today
Sen. Elizabeth Warren grilled Fed Chair Janet Yellen at length about problems
with “living wills” for banks that fail.
I am concerned that American banks are still too big to
fail, and that Dodd-Frank has failed to keep them from engaging in risky
activities that could create a global financial catastrophe. Dodd-Frank and the Volker rule have failed to
fill the gap created by President Clinton’s elimination of Glass-Steagall.
I would like to see Glass-Steagall re-enacted. At a minimum we need to make big banks
smaller and rein in their riskier trading activities. I am alarmed to see the stock market
illustrate Wall Street’s lack of confidence in its own big banks like JP
Morgan-Chase and Goldman Sachs.
Related to this is, I believe, is the issue of income
inequality. There has been talk of lack
of liquidity surrounding the current unsettled bank environment. One problem with consolidating all the
nation’s wealth in a few hands is that the few hundred families who control
that wealth may all decide at once to do the same thing, e.g., sell bonds. If they all act at once, there will be no one
to buy bonds, for example. Prices would
plunge, and we would be back in another financial crisis. To some extent this is what happened in the
1929 market crash, when like today, much wealth was held by a few extremely
wealthy people. The aggregation of
wealth means that markets become smaller, controlled by a few people. and more
susceptible to volatility. As markets
become dominated by a few players, the country becomes less capitalistic and
more oligopolistic. This is what
happened to Russia under Yeltsin. I hate
to see America following the Russian model.
Keep the Draft
As one of the last people subject to the draft during the
Vietnam War. I am writing to support the continued existence of the Selective
Service System in case we need a military draft sometime in the future. I actually volunteered after being classified
1-A and passing the physical, rather than wait a month or two to be
drafted.
I am very disappointed that military service has become such
a contemptible, dishonorable profession in the United States. I came home from Vietnam to scorn for being a
veteran. Today, people praise veterans,
but in my opinion, it is usually because the people heaping the praise are not
willing to serve themselves. They think,
“If I tell this fool what a great job he is doing, then I won’t have to do
it.” When it comes to something more
expensive than praise, like giving veterans jobs or health benefits, the
country is less fulsome.
The military likes having an all-volunteer force, but I
think we need people who would not ordinarily serve in the military. We need people from Harvard and Stanford who
look at the world differently from the ordinary pool of recruits, who are
mostly poor and less well educated.
Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan hated the military so much when she
was dean of the Harvard Law School that she prohibited military recruiting
there. The military needs a diversity of
personalities, perspectives and talents, just like any other large
organization. This lack of intellectual
diversity has hampered the military ever since Vietnam, when despite the draft,
rich, smart, well-educated people generally did not serve. That may be one reason we lost the wars in
Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. We sent
our trailer-park trash to fight and we got trashy results.
I realize that the proposal by Congressmen Coffman and Polis
to abolish the draft is motivated by the recent call to include women in the
draft. I have no objection to including
women in the draft, but I do oppose the recent decision to include women in all
fighting units of the military, including the Army infantry and the
Marines. I think the problems with rape
and other sex offenses in our universities illustrate the problems of putting
young men and women with raging hormones together in situations where there are
frequent romantic temptations. I was in
the artillery, where living conditions are better than in the infantry, but
everyone slept together in one bunker, used the same latrine, etc. Living conditions are probably manageable in
rear echelon environments, where women could certainly serve, but I think
forcing men and women to live together in combat situations is just asking for
trouble in terms of sexual contact. In
any case, there are certainly military jobs for which America could draft
women.
I believe that the draft would strengthen the military by
bringing in new blood, although the military leadership probably is not
enthusiastic about the challenges to it that would emerge from a better quality
of recruits.
Tuesday, February 09, 2016
World War I Memorial
I was struck by the fact that the announcement of the new Washington
memorial for World War I veterans, and the exposé of high administrative
costs for the Wounded
Warrior Project came out at almost the same time. It’s interesting that the Vietnam War was the
first American war in which veterans were widely reviled and hated, not
counting the Civil War, which was a special case. Other small wars were not widely supported,
perhaps the Mexican War or the Spanish-American War, but there was not
widespread contempt for the men who participated in them. Teddy Roosevelt came out of the Spanish American
War a hero, like John McCain came out a hero of the Vietnam War, unlike most of
his fellow servicemen. Similarly, there
were some heroes of the Mexican-American War, like Zachery Taylor. About the only heroes Vietnam produced were
POWs. General Westmoreland is usually
considered a failure. It was a case
where the common soldiers won almost every battle, but the generals and the
politicians lost the war. So, in order
to honor the common soldiers who died, the nation created a Vietnam Memorial to
offset to some extent the general disrepute in which the soldiers were
held.
For previous wars there was no need to build a memorial,
because those who fought were generally held in high regard. There were many local memorials in small
cities and towns, because everyone knew someone who had served. Soldiers came from ordinary people’s homes,
their relatives, their neighbors. They
often came from good families, and those who returned often went on to take
leadership roles in their communities.
The reverse was true for Vietnam, people from good families refused to
fight, and veterans who returned often found themselves treated like
outcasts. Homeless Vietnam veterans
became a common sight in most cities.
Now, people who grew up in the shadow of the Vietnam era
have little idea what national service is like.
There was a burst of patriotism after 9/11, but it was squandered in a
pointless war in Iraq that had nothing to do with 9/11. After an initial rush to join the military
after 9/11, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan began to be ignored or
disrespected like their Vietnam predecessors.
Nevertheless, people who don’t want to fight themselves want someone to
fight for them. So, they tell the
veterans how much they love and respect them, when their actual attitude is, “I’m
glad they went so that I didn’t have to.”
They tend to see veterans as people who can’t get a real job and have no
choice but to join the military. We have
an all-volunteer military, but one that does not include many of the country’s
best people.
It’s the people who don’t remember when serving in the
military was a well-respected calling who now want to build memorials. The men who fought in World War I and II did
not think that they needed memorials.
They thought that their service was their memorial, and that their
sacrifices lived in the hearts and minds of their friends and relatives. But that remembrance has died out, and average
people today think World War I and II veterans were as worthless as the
veterans of Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan.
Today many people think they have to build memorials so that poor, stupid
people like me will still go off to war when the country wants to fight a
war. It’s all about themselves, not
about the veterans. At least
superficially, it is a better welcome home now than during Vietnam. But is it reasonable that people today care
more about the veterans who fought in World War I than America did 100 years
ago? And is it reasonable that people
today care more about World War II veterans than their loved ones did fifty
years ago? No, if anything, the
memorials are a penance for not caring.
Thursday, January 21, 2016
Dangers of Global Wealth Inequality
A Credit
Swisse Report says that the top 0.7% of the world’s population, those with
net wealth of $1 million or more, about 34 million people, own 45% of all
global wealth. It says there are 123,800
Ultra High Net Worth individuals worldwide who have a net worth of more than
$50 million. Fortune
summarized the report.
The
Guardian says that there are 199,235 Ultra High Net Worth individuals,
whose combined net worth is around $27.7 trillion, about 40% of the world’s
GDP.
This increasing concentration of wealth may have
implications for financial liquidity. To
be liquid, markets need buyers and sellers, and this means there needs to be
some diversity. You need people who are
looking for different things from their investments. As you narrow the group making investments,
you narrow their interests. At some
point you might end up with a small group of people who all want to sell. The people who would in the past have
been buyers, now would not have enough resources
to buy the huge amounts the superrich want to sell. The result might be a violent dive in the
price of the assests in disfavor, whether they are stocks, bonds, or real
estate. The same would be true if all
the superrich wanted to buy some particular asset. The result would be at best increasing
volatility, and at worst market crashes.
These crashes might have less effect on the superrich than on ordinary
people, because the superrich would probably be diversified. For example, a big loss in their real estate
investments would be cushioned by their investments in the stock and bond
markets, or the art market, etc. However,
for ordinary people a big loss in the value of their home might be devastating,
because they would not have other big, valuable assets to cushion the loss of
their home value.
This is more or less what happened in the 2008 subprime
mortgage crisis.
The other side of that crisis was what happened to the
banks. A few banks then and now were
humongous, dominating the market for complicated financial instruments, like
bonds made up of home mortgages. Having
only a few huge banks is like having a small group of superrich people, the
chances of some event affecting all of the players becomes larger as the group
of players becomes smaller. Dodd-Frank
and the Volker Rule were supposed to help remedy this, but so appears to have
done little, despite (or because of) the loud protests of the big banks against
any restrictions.
Thursday, January 14, 2016
Obama's State of the Union
I think Obama has done a good job as President compared to
many of his predecessors, especially George W. Bush, one of the worst
Presidents in modern history. Bush and Cheney
slept while New York City and Washington were attacked. Then they retaliated against the wrong
country. They created Guantanamo,
America’s version of the Soviet gulags, located in another country, because it
was such a horrible thing that we didn’t want it in the continental US, just as
Hitler did not want Auschwitz within the borders of Germany. Under Bush and Cheney, America descended into
a moral abyss. It fell to the level of
the terrorists who attacked it. Obama
has not done anything nearly as bad as that.
ObamaCare was not a complete success. Single-payer Medicare would have been
preferable to the messy, hybrid, expensive system we got from the process, but
it is better than nothing, which is what we had before. He has not gotten rid of Guantanamo, but at
least he says he wants to and will try to do so before the end of his
term.
His supposed admission that his one big failure was not
restoring a civil dialogue between the Republicans and Democrats, is not really
an acknowledgement of failure, it is just a nice sounding, back-handed way of
saying, “I still can’t get along with those Republicans; they are just as nasty
as ever.” It was more an insult than an
admission of failure.
On the plus side, however, he tried to get us out of failed
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He did not
entirely succeed in this, in large part because he inherited a horribly flawed
situation from the previous administration.
Bush started the destabilization of the Middle East, but Obama may have
abetted it by his encouragement of the Arab Spring’s desire to throw out all
the old leadership of the Middle East.
Bush removed the foundation of Middle East stability, and Obama pushed
over the unstable structure Bush left behind.
I believe that Obama has done the right thing regarding
Syria by not getting us deeper into that civil war. The Syrian destruction of most of its
chemical weapons was a plus for the conflict.
We would probably be hearing many more gruesome stories about chemical
attacks, surpassing the stories of starvation and mutilation resulting from
more conventional warfare. Syria only
presents a multitude of bad choices for the US, from want to do about Assad, to
what rebel groups to support. There is
no one who can replace Assad and end the war, and there is no rebel group who
will be able to put an end to the civil war militarily, without massive help
and massive casualties on the side of whoever helps them. The Republicans are anxious to see Americans
die in Syria; I am not.
On the economy, Obama has so far been pretty much a
success. He has restored employment, and
under him the economy and the stock market have soared, compared with the great
recession that Bush left for him. He
still has a year left for the economy to crater, but the gains under his
Presidency have been so enormous, that even a moderate drop would still leave
his administration with a very positive result.
He has been more willing to take on entrenched business and financial
interests, but under his Presidency, consolidation of big business and banks
has continued, and although he talks a good game against income inequality, it
has increased on his watch. Nevertheless,
things are much better than under Bush, and what he has done is vastly superior
to what the nay-saying Republicans have advocated.
On foreign policy, the Republicans chafe at his
unwillingness to kill everybody in sight, calling that weakness. But I believe that it shows strength. People may be more willing to challenge the
US because they do not fear that Obama will nuke them for a small provocation,
but they also see him as someone with whom they can negotiate. His Iran nuclear deal is far superior to a
war with Iran. He showed strength in
resisting Republican and Israeli screams for Iranian blood, based on some sort
of extreme racial, religious and ethnic hatred.
In the long run, Obama’s approach is more likely to prevent a nuclear arms
race or war in the Middle East than a
military attack.
Reestablishing relations with Cuba was another positive
step. One reason I retired and left the
Foreign Service was because of the Helms-Burton sanctions on Cuba. An Italian complained to me that his daughter
could not get a visa to visit Disneyworld because he worked for the Italian
phone company and they had some kind a connection to Cuba. It was too much like the German refusal to issue
a visa to a Jewish child in order to prevent its mother from leaving Italy in
one of the “Winds of War” books. I don’t
approve of punishing children for the sins of their parents. The US bitterness and retaliation against
Cuba has gone on too long. It was time
to end it; it was time years ago, but Obama finally did it.
I am not a fan of free immigration. I issued visas for a tour in Sao Paulo,
Brazil, and felt bad every time I denied a visa, knowing that a Mexican could
just walk across the border if he or she were denied a visa, but that it was
not so easy for a Brazilian to do so. Everyone
looked the other way at illegal immigration for years. Business benefitted because it kept salaries
low, and liberals looked the other way because they wanted to see poor
foreigners help themselves by coming to America. Our immigration laws have been like Prohibition
– strict laws on the books that are ignored in everyday life. The law should be changed so that it can and
will be enforced, whatever it turns our to be, strict or liberal. Meanwhile, I don’t think there is much of a
problem denying anyone who is a foreigner a visa for any reason; non-citizen,
non-residents outside the US have no Constitutional protections, and keeping
out anyone that poses even the least risk to the country is legal; we only need
to decide what level that “least risk” should be.
Monday, January 11, 2016
Jewish Financiers
There is so much talk in financial circles about the Federal Reserve raising interest rates that it has piqued my interest in the role of Jews in the US. There have been only Jewish chairmen of the Fed since Paul Volker in the Carter administration. Prior to Volker there had been only one Jewish Fed chairman, who held the post at the height of the great depression.
My concern is that the Jewish dominated Fed has helped Jewish bankers, financiers, and businessmen in a preferential manner. This may not have been the result of some great scheme or cabal, like that envisioned by Henry Ford, but simply the result of a convergence of interests, formed at dinners, social occasions and business meetings among Jews over the years. The results of this convergence of interests may not have been illegal insider trading, but they may have disproportionately benefited Jews over other parts of American society. It was a form of insider trading that was too vague and amorphous to be illegal, but one that affected how trillions of dollars were invested.
Jews have been involved in financial businesses since before America was a country, and they have been active in financial circles since before the founding of the country. But they did not play the huge role that they do today until after World War II. The Holocaust drove many wealthy Jews out of Europe to America, where they resumed the financial activities in which they had excelled in Europe. Today Jews not only play a dominant role in the Fed, but in most financial activities, particularly on Wall Street.
Most wealthy financiers would not win any prizes for being great humanitarians. They tend to be greedy, selfish, and often dishonest. If they don't break the law, they go right up to the legal limit, and today they pay lobbyists to change the laws to let them do what they want to do. Most of them leave a lot of their riches to charitable and cultural foundations as they approach death to try to atone for the evil they did in amassing their fortunes. But that doesn't make the evil they did while amassing their fortunes any less evil. The Protestant Rockefellers, Carneigies, Astors, Vanderbilts, Hearsts and their cohorts all fall into this same category, along with many present day Jews and Gentiles. However, this cohort contains considerably more Jews in the top 1% than their 2% of the population would represent. Jews represent nearly half of the richest of the rich in America.
Jews believe they are smarter at doing business and manipulating markets than other people, so that if business and the markets are very complicated, Jews are likely to win and do better than their Gentile competition. Thus, if interest rates are either very high or very low, Jews are likely to do better. Many Gentiles would be happy just putting their savings into insured savings accounts and earning some interest, but if interest rates are less than one percent, that is not an option. When rates are high, you have to be very clever about borrowing, or have money in hand, so that you don't have to borrow, again favoring many Jews. Thus, Jews have disproportionately benefitted from the global financial turmoil, and from the complicated financial instruments and transactions that have been developed in recent years.
NYT article on rich not paying taxes.
As described in an article in The New York Times on Wednesday, tax rates on America’s 400 wealthiest taxpayers fell sharply from the late 1990s through 2012, when their average effective income tax rate fell to 16.7 percent from 26.4 percent. Of the few names specifically mentioned in the article, most were Jews, including Loeb, Simons, and Soros.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/business/economy/for-the-wealthiest-private-tax-system-saves-them-billions.html?_r=0
Tax rates rose for wealthy last year
Data released by the I.R.S. on Wednesday shows that tax rates on the income of America’s 400 wealthiest taxpayers rose sharply to 22.9 percent in 2013, erasing a majority of the last two decades’ decline in their effective tax rate, although 22.9% is still less than the old 26.4%. They are all much lower than the maximum 39.6% tax rate which you would expect the wealthiest people to pay, even accounting for the lower tax rate they would pay on the first few thousand dollars they earn.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/upshot/thanks-obama-highest-earners-tax-rates-rose-sharply-in-2013.html
My concern is that the Jewish dominated Fed has helped Jewish bankers, financiers, and businessmen in a preferential manner. This may not have been the result of some great scheme or cabal, like that envisioned by Henry Ford, but simply the result of a convergence of interests, formed at dinners, social occasions and business meetings among Jews over the years. The results of this convergence of interests may not have been illegal insider trading, but they may have disproportionately benefited Jews over other parts of American society. It was a form of insider trading that was too vague and amorphous to be illegal, but one that affected how trillions of dollars were invested.
Jews have been involved in financial businesses since before America was a country, and they have been active in financial circles since before the founding of the country. But they did not play the huge role that they do today until after World War II. The Holocaust drove many wealthy Jews out of Europe to America, where they resumed the financial activities in which they had excelled in Europe. Today Jews not only play a dominant role in the Fed, but in most financial activities, particularly on Wall Street.
Most wealthy financiers would not win any prizes for being great humanitarians. They tend to be greedy, selfish, and often dishonest. If they don't break the law, they go right up to the legal limit, and today they pay lobbyists to change the laws to let them do what they want to do. Most of them leave a lot of their riches to charitable and cultural foundations as they approach death to try to atone for the evil they did in amassing their fortunes. But that doesn't make the evil they did while amassing their fortunes any less evil. The Protestant Rockefellers, Carneigies, Astors, Vanderbilts, Hearsts and their cohorts all fall into this same category, along with many present day Jews and Gentiles. However, this cohort contains considerably more Jews in the top 1% than their 2% of the population would represent. Jews represent nearly half of the richest of the rich in America.
Jews believe they are smarter at doing business and manipulating markets than other people, so that if business and the markets are very complicated, Jews are likely to win and do better than their Gentile competition. Thus, if interest rates are either very high or very low, Jews are likely to do better. Many Gentiles would be happy just putting their savings into insured savings accounts and earning some interest, but if interest rates are less than one percent, that is not an option. When rates are high, you have to be very clever about borrowing, or have money in hand, so that you don't have to borrow, again favoring many Jews. Thus, Jews have disproportionately benefitted from the global financial turmoil, and from the complicated financial instruments and transactions that have been developed in recent years.
NYT article on rich not paying taxes.
As described in an article in The New York Times on Wednesday, tax rates on America’s 400 wealthiest taxpayers fell sharply from the late 1990s through 2012, when their average effective income tax rate fell to 16.7 percent from 26.4 percent. Of the few names specifically mentioned in the article, most were Jews, including Loeb, Simons, and Soros.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/business/economy/for-the-wealthiest-private-tax-system-saves-them-billions.html?_r=0
Tax rates rose for wealthy last year
Data released by the I.R.S. on Wednesday shows that tax rates on the income of America’s 400 wealthiest taxpayers rose sharply to 22.9 percent in 2013, erasing a majority of the last two decades’ decline in their effective tax rate, although 22.9% is still less than the old 26.4%. They are all much lower than the maximum 39.6% tax rate which you would expect the wealthiest people to pay, even accounting for the lower tax rate they would pay on the first few thousand dollars they earn.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/upshot/thanks-obama-highest-earners-tax-rates-rose-sharply-in-2013.html
Monday, January 04, 2016
Recent MTCR News Items
Since I worked on the creation of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) back in the 1980s, I'm interested to see that it is still going. Here are some recent news articles about it collected by Google Alert. Most of them deal with India.
No Decision Yet on India's MTCR Membership Application
When MTCR jolted the efforts of Indian scientists
Read more at: http://www.oneindia.com/india/in-his-last-book-dr-kalam-writes-how-challenges-triggered-innovation-1900132.html
Italy Blocks Indian Application to MTCR
Hunter Renews Call for UAV Sales to Jordan
Read more at: http://www.oneindia.com/india/in-his-last-book-dr-kalam-writes-how-challenges-triggered-innovation-1900132.html
Italy Blocks Indian Application to MTCR
Hunter Renews Call for UAV Sales to Jordan
Turkey and the Kurds
On CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Anne Marie Slaughter picked the
Turkey-Kurd issue as one of the most important for 2016, and I agree with
her. We have become increasingly dependent
on the Kurds in the most volatile parts of the Middle East in which we are
involved – Syria, Iraq, and Iran – and now the conflict is boiling over into
Turkey.
Turkey used to be a reliable ally, a secular Muslim country
with a competent government. Now it is
becoming increasingly sectarian, and the government is becoming increasingly problematic. One of the main issues for the government is
the irredentism of the Kurds in Turkey, who want to form a greater Kurdistan
with their Kurdish brothers in Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Years ago, Turkey got the West to agree to
characterize the Kurdish rebels in Turkey as terrorists. So, while the US is primarily worried about
ISIS terrorists, the Turks are mainly worried about the Kurdish
terrorists. When we ask the Turks for cooperation
against terrorists, we are thinking, “Let’s go kill some ISIS rebels,” and the
Turks are thinking, “Let’s go kill some Kurdish rebels.” Meanwhile the US is supporting the Kurds in
Iraq and Syria, who have been the main line of defense against ISIS.
Turkey sees the Kurds as a threat to its very existence; the
Kurds would cut off a chunk of Turkey and incorporate it into greater
Kurdistan. Where does the US come
down? On the side of the Kurds who are
fighting with us in Iraq, or with the Turks who have been NATO allies for many
years.
If we lose Turkey as a NATO ally, we face big problems in
central Europe. Turkey controls the
Bosporus. Without access to the Black
Sea, we have real problems confronting Russia’s recent take over of Crimea, as
well access in general to that part of the world. I would think the US Navy would really want
Turkey on our side. In addition Turkish
air bases give American air power better access to that unstable part of the
world. We would miss them.
But if we don’t support the Kurds, what happens in Iraq and
Syria? We have to balance our interests
there against our interests in other parts of the world, including Russia and
Ukraine. Plus, we have to worry about
where Turkey is going. Is Erdogan a
passing phase for Turkey, or does he represent a long-term turn toward a less
Western, more Muslim state? We don’t
want our opposition to push Turkey away toward a more religious Muslim
orientation.
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
Regime Change and Assassination Nation
This Wall
Street Journal article discusses the intraparty dispute that has broker out
within both the Republican and Democratic parties over the role of “regime
change” in US foreign policy. Against
regime change are Republicans Donald Trump, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, joined by
Democrat Bernie Sanders. Hillary Clinton
is for regime change, since she oversaw it in Egypt and Libya, although she
says she argued for more gradual change in Egypt but was overruled by others in
the Obama administration. Her
interventionism is echoed by Marco Rubio.
I am disappointed that the US has become “assassination
nation,” beginning perhaps after World War II when the CIA was formed. But it was relatively rare until the Bush and
Obama administrations. Bush just liked
killing Muslims, mainly in Iraq and Afghanistan. With drones Obama now can kill anybody
anywhere, and he often does.
Assassination by drone is probably better than the old fashioned way
which often involved many collateral casualties, even in the case of bin
Laden.
For me, however, it goes against the standard set by leading
men in the old Western movies, who did not shoot their enemies in the
back. Attacking individuals secretly
from the sky seems cowardly, even if it may be good for American security. You can argue that terrorists have no right
to any kind of fair treatment, but when the US abandons fairness and justice,
it sets a bad example for the rest of the world.
Tuesday, December 08, 2015
Trump on Visas
As a one-time visa officer, I am appalled at the misinformation about visas.
First, President Obama said the wife of the San Bernardino shooting couple had come to the US under a visa waiver program, when she had come under at fiancée K-1 visa. That was probably just bad staff work, but for a major address, there should have been better fact checking. Apparently, the State Department has said it will review the K-1 visa program, although a miniscule number of K visas are issued compared to temporary visas and even other types of immigrant visas. It is just trying to make Obama look less stupid that he did Sunday night. State will also review issuance procedures for other types of visas that are more relevant than fiancée visas.
The main problem with all visas is the lack of good intelligence about who is a problem and who is not. The CIA and FBI can’t know what every person in the world harbors in his heart. The only absolutely safe thing to do would be to stop issuing any visas and stop allowing any foreigners to enter the US. There are probably a significant number of Americans who would support such a proposition, despite its disastrous effect on the US economy and the US reputation in the world. But it would not be prohibited by the Constitution. No foreigner has a Constitutional right to enter the US. American citizens do have such a right, but they don’t need a visa, just a passport.
Trump’s proposal stops short of an across the board visa denial and would deny visas only to Muslims for a limited time, until as he said, “we can figure out what is going on.” There has been outrage among various people, many of whom should know better, saying this is unconstitutional because it discriminates against a religion. There is no Constitutional protection for visa applicants. By their reasoning, if we denied a visa to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, he would be entitled to appeal the visa denial all the way to the US Supreme Court. That is ridiculous. I know Joe Scarborough likes to go the mosque to pray, but he should not be so generous to ISIS terrorists.
Donald Trump’s proposal may not be the best solution to the terrorist threat, but it’s not illegal, and over the years, the US has had many very discriminatory visa programs. When I was issuing visas, the big concern was the Communist threat; so, we denied visas to Communists. That doesn’t mean that we were engaged in some McCarthy-ite campaign against Americans who had some vague Communist connection. We just didn’t what people who might foment some kind of trouble once they entered the United States on a visa. Americans in America have Constitutional protection of free speech, but a Communist living in Moscow does not, although Joe Scarborough thinks he should have. Joe thinks he has a right to come to America and work to overthrow the US government. Or that a foreign Muslim has a Constitutional right to come to America and kill people, because he is innocent until proven guilty under the Fifth Amendment. I don’t agree. American citizens are protected by the Fifth Amendment; al-Baghdadi is not.
First, President Obama said the wife of the San Bernardino shooting couple had come to the US under a visa waiver program, when she had come under at fiancée K-1 visa. That was probably just bad staff work, but for a major address, there should have been better fact checking. Apparently, the State Department has said it will review the K-1 visa program, although a miniscule number of K visas are issued compared to temporary visas and even other types of immigrant visas. It is just trying to make Obama look less stupid that he did Sunday night. State will also review issuance procedures for other types of visas that are more relevant than fiancée visas.
The main problem with all visas is the lack of good intelligence about who is a problem and who is not. The CIA and FBI can’t know what every person in the world harbors in his heart. The only absolutely safe thing to do would be to stop issuing any visas and stop allowing any foreigners to enter the US. There are probably a significant number of Americans who would support such a proposition, despite its disastrous effect on the US economy and the US reputation in the world. But it would not be prohibited by the Constitution. No foreigner has a Constitutional right to enter the US. American citizens do have such a right, but they don’t need a visa, just a passport.
Trump’s proposal stops short of an across the board visa denial and would deny visas only to Muslims for a limited time, until as he said, “we can figure out what is going on.” There has been outrage among various people, many of whom should know better, saying this is unconstitutional because it discriminates against a religion. There is no Constitutional protection for visa applicants. By their reasoning, if we denied a visa to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, he would be entitled to appeal the visa denial all the way to the US Supreme Court. That is ridiculous. I know Joe Scarborough likes to go the mosque to pray, but he should not be so generous to ISIS terrorists.
Donald Trump’s proposal may not be the best solution to the terrorist threat, but it’s not illegal, and over the years, the US has had many very discriminatory visa programs. When I was issuing visas, the big concern was the Communist threat; so, we denied visas to Communists. That doesn’t mean that we were engaged in some McCarthy-ite campaign against Americans who had some vague Communist connection. We just didn’t what people who might foment some kind of trouble once they entered the United States on a visa. Americans in America have Constitutional protection of free speech, but a Communist living in Moscow does not, although Joe Scarborough thinks he should have. Joe thinks he has a right to come to America and work to overthrow the US government. Or that a foreign Muslim has a Constitutional right to come to America and kill people, because he is innocent until proven guilty under the Fifth Amendment. I don’t agree. American citizens are protected by the Fifth Amendment; al-Baghdadi is not.
Friday, December 04, 2015
Star Wars and Me
I was pleasantly surprised to find myself quoted in one of
the latest “Moments
in Diplomatic History” published online by the Association for Diplomatic
Studies and Training (ADST).
While working in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA)
during the Reagan Administration my main responsibility was to work on space
arms control issues. About halfway
through my assignment, President Reagan announced the Strategic Defense
Initiative (SDI) called “Star Wars.” As
you can see from the ADST article, the announcement came as a surprise to
almost everyone in the foreign affairs and defense community of the
government. It was at least partly
inspired by private conversations between Reagan and physicist Edward Teller,
the father of the hydrogen bomb.
One of my jobs at ACDA was to write an “Arms Control Impact
Statement” on space arms control. Reagan’s
Star Wars announcement threw a monkey wrench into that statement, since it
proposed violating at least two arms control agreements, the Anti-ballistic
Missile Treaty and the Treaty on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. What made it even worse was that the
statement had to be approved by the Defense Department, which meant Richard Perle, who was
Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy.
Perle was opposed to almost any arms control agreement. I have long believed the urban myth that at
Reykjavik, after Reagan and Gorbachev had agreed to mutually eliminate all land-based
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBNs), Perle kept Reagan up all night
talking him into rejecting the deal the next day. This ADST note sheds some light on that
issue, which may be mildly favorable to Perle.
It says that in return for eliminating all these missiles, Gorbachev
wanted Reagan to drop the SDI program, and Reagan was unwilling to do that,
because he liked the SDI program so much.
However, the article also says that after the tentative Reagan-Gorbachev
agreement, Richard Perle and General Robert Linhard hauled Reagan into a
bathroom and told him “it was an impractical thing to do, especially at a time
when the Administration was trying to convince Congress to fund a new
generation of land-based missiles, the MX.”
So, maybe there is some truth to the urban myth about Perle.
In any case, Perle was going to make it very difficult to
say anything bad about the arms control implications of the SDI. I think that after a number of tries to get
Defense Department clearance, the statement was so watered down that it hardly
said anything.
While I was working on this issue at ACDA, I attended the
only National Security Council meeting that I ever attended. It was on SDI, and I went as the back bench
support for the main ACDA representative.
I don’t remember exactly what was discussed, but I think NSC deputy
Robert McFarlane chaired the meeting, and one of the main speakers was General
James Abrahamson, who was famous for being the officer who oversaw the F-16
development program for the Pentagon, one of the most successful aircraft ever
developed. People hoped he could do the
same thing for SDI, but even he couldn’t do it.
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Veneration of Veterans
I thought this
op-ed in the Washington Post was right on the money. A lot of this current veneration of veterans
is just for show, to make the people who express it feel better, not to help
the veterans. Most businesses that make
a show of hiring veterans do it as publicity to win customers, rather than as a
service to veterans. Colorado claims to
be veteran friendly, but seeing what is happening with the VA hospital here,
Senators Gardner and Bennet and Governor Hickenlooper would hardly be less
supportive of veterans than if they went around and punched each veteran in the
nose.
Here’s my comment on the Washington Post op-ed by Will
Bardenwerper:
If you have to choose between the homecoming for Iran &
Afghanistan vets of sham love and support and the homecoming for Vietnam vets
of hostility, I would choose the former.
But you can't expect too much.
The 1946 movie "The Best Years of Our Lives" illustrated the
shallowness of public support for even veterans of much venerated World War
II. If you choose to fight for your
country, that probably has to be reward enough.
Others should be nice, but you probably have to content yourself with
believing that virtue is its own reward.
Perhaps Vietnam vets (like me) can take some solace in the fact that Vietnam has
become a functioning member of the community of nations while Iraq has become a
snake pit of anti-American hatred and hostility.
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Turkey and the Kurds
The US has to decide what course to take regarding Turkey as
the recent suicide attacks illustrate the growing instability of the
country. The main issue facing Turkey is
how to handle the Kurds, both the ethnic minority inside Turkey, and their Kurdish
brethren in Syria, Iraq and Iran. Turkey
has for years declared the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) a terrorist group, and
the US and NATO have also listed it as a terrorist group. Currently, however, the Kurds in Iraq and
Syria are America’s best allies in fighting ISIS. Can the US support the Kurds in those
countries while acquiescing in Turkey’s opposition to them in Turkey, and
probably across the border, too? The
Turkish air force has been suspected of striking the Kurds while it was
supposedly supporting US efforts against ISIS in Syria.
If it were not for Turkey, the US could support the creation
of a greater Kurdistan consisting of the Kurdish parts of Syria and Iraq. We would probably be happy if the Kurds tried
to annex part of Iran, if we could avoid getting involved. However, we are involved in Turkey, which is
a NATO member. Turkey would not be happy
giving up a significant amount of its territory to a greater Kurdistan.
Adding to the problem for the US is the decline of the
Turkish government. It has become more
religious, and President Erdogan has become more authoritarian, producing
unhappiness among the Turkish people.
His party no longer holds a political majority, and the country is
facing new elections as he tries to get a majority. Thus, Turkey faces internal instability and
destabilizing pressure from outside. The
US cannot easily abandon Turkey, a longtime NATO ally, especially when we need
Turkey’s support in the battle against ISIS just across the border.
The US could lean
heavily on the Kurds in Syria and Iraq to reign in their brothers in
Turkey. We could offer more and more
military support, if they keep the Kurds in Turkey from making trouble. We could even wink and imply that if they
behave today, we might look the other way if they try to form a greater
Kurdistan later. Meanwhile, we should
work with the Turkish government to calm the situation there, to tone down its
campaign against the Turkish Kurds. But
Erdogan probably sees the Kurds as the greatest threat to his power, and the
recent suicide bombings, with whispers of Turkish government complicity,
illustrate the problems with that course of action.
Friday, October 09, 2015
Kunduz Hospital Bombing
The shelling or bombing of the Doctors without Borders
hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, reminds me of my time in an artillery battery
in Vietnam. In general we only fired at
targets that had been precleared by someone in our chain of command, or we
fired for forward observers who were engaged with the enemy. In a few cases, working with our quad-50
machine gun crew, we would have to seek clearance to fire at someone who we
thought was sneaking around our perimeter, just in case it was a South
Vietnamese unit wandering around.
We had a number of no-fire areas marked on our maps and
charts, indicating the locations of towns and bases. I don’t think we ever fired into one of these
no-fire zones. It would have required
all kinds of special clearances.
From the discussion it sounds as if the question in Kunduz
is whether the Afghan or US forces were taking fire from the hospital. Even if they were taking fire from the
hospital, would that warrant calling in an air strike on it? In Vietnam there was supposedly a pretty
rigorous process for clearing a fire mission on a target that was not engaged
in actual combat. American liaison
officers checked with Vietnamese contacts about whether there were any
civilians or friendly troops in the area.
The situation would have been complicated in Kunduz because
the city had been friendly until the Taliban takeover. The entire city would have been a no-fire
area, and there would have been to reason to fire into it. With the Taliban attack, the whole city would
still be considered a no-fire area because there would be civilians
everywhere. However, if friendly troops
were taking heavy fire, there would have been a debate about whether it was
necessary to accept “collateral damage” in order to neutralize the enemy. It would seem that a decision of that nature
should have been made pretty high up.
Doctors without Borders claims that no one was firing from
the hospital. In that case, there seems
no justification for attacking it.
However, if they are wrong and there was firing, then maybe there was
justification, but Doctors without Borders legitimately would want to know who
decided that they were expendable. I
guess that is what the military review will try to determine. I am inclined to give our troops the benefit
of the doubt in the fog of war, but screw-up do happen.
In Vietnam one night someone came up on our radio channel
asking if we were firing at certain coordinates. We were not, but we could hear him asking
other batteries if they were firing there.
Finally one battery answered and said that they had just finished a “battery
three-by-three” on that target. The
stranger on the net said that it was a small town, which was now
destroyed. A “battery three-by-three”
means that an entire artillery battery, probably four large or six small guns,
fired nine volleys in the shape of a box around the target. Obviously something went wrong in the
clearance process for that fire mission.
Thursday, October 08, 2015
Attempts to Sell Radioactive Materials to Terrorists
The
reports that someone in Moldova was going to see radioactive material to
terrorists to make a dirty bomb is not to alarming. Offers such as this happen frequently in the
criminal underworld. Radioactive
materials, such as cesium are fairly available in small quantities from sources
such as old hospital radiation therapy machines. In Brazil about 30 years ago, such a machine
was broken open in a junkyard by curious workers who ended up polluting and
poisoning a good part of the city of Goiania.
When I was in Poland, there were frequent rumors of people with
radioactive materials in Ukraine or Moldova who were willing to sell. In most
of these cases the sellers had very little material, and probably had access to
little more, usually just mishandled medical or scientific samples.
Here are some examples of earlier cases.
Wednesday, September 30, 2015
Bad Memories of a Government Shutdown
It looks like we will avoid a government shutdown tomorrow,
but one still hangs over us before the end of the year.
The 1990s government shutdown broke faith with the American
people, and particularly with me as a government employee, and I have not
forgiven the Republicans for bringing it on, although the Democrats were not
guiltless. Nevertheless, as a result of
the shutdown, I am disposed never again to vote for a Republican, unless he is
clearly the best qualified of the candidates in any election, local or
nation.
As a Foreign Service officer, I was sent to the American
Embassy in Warsaw, Poland, to administer a science cooperation agreement, the
Maria Sklodowska Curie Fund, that was signed before I arrived, but that was to
run for a total of five years, which would have been for four years after I
arrived for my three year assignment in Warsaw.
It should have spanned my whole tour of duty. When I arrived the fund for the agreement,
which was financed by matching grants from the US and Poland, had about $4
million in the bank. My predecessor had
spent very little of it on cooperative projects. Most of the money that had been spent had gone
for meetings of administrators in the US and Warsaw. I undertook to spend almost all of the money
we had in the bank by funding projects, which we did.
After we had funded our first round of projects, the
Republicans cut off the next year’s funding.
Although there was an international agreement obligating both sides to
contribute for five years, the US invoked an escape clause that had been
inserted for the Poles, in case they ran into a financial crisis following the
fall of the Communist government there.
It said that either side could fail to fund the agreement if it was
impossible. The US declared that it did
not have the money to fund the agreement, which had been about $2 million in
previous years. Clearly the US
government had $2 million that it could have contributed, but the Republicans
would not.
The Polish equivalent of an assistant secretary of State who
was in charge of all Western Hemisphere affairs called me in periodically to
berate me, on behalf of the US government for not honestly fulfilling the terms
of a promise we had made in writing to the Polish government. As someone who was brought up to be honest
and pay his bills, I was embarrassed and humiliated to be the recipient of
these demarches. I told him that if he
really wanted to change things, he should raise the matter with the Ambassador,
or have his Ambassador in Washington raise it with the Secretary of State, but
at that time, Poland main foreign policy objective was membership in NATO. Poland was not yet a member, and was
unwilling to do anything that might jeopardize its chances of becoming a
member. So, he complained to me, but
would not raise the issue with higher officials, whom he needed to support his NATO
application. While I understood that I
was not personally responsible, I was ashamed of my country, and I can still
remember squirming in his office while he accused the US of dishonesty. I inwardly agreed with him, but never
admitted it to him or to anyone else in Poland.
I adhered to the instructions I received from Washington.
Meanwhile, I was working on another project funding
environmental projects in Poland. An
agreement on Polish debt said that instead of paying part of the debt it owed
to the US, the Poland could pay a small part to fund environmental projects in
Poland. I was the US representative and
sponsor of a Polish environmental NGO called the Ekofundusz, or Ecofund. This was a small group of about 20 people who
identified, funded and administered environmental projects around Poland. The leaders were former senior Polish
environmental officials, including a former Minister of Environment, who were
on the outs because they had supported Solidarity’s overthrow of the Communist government. After the initial change, many of the old
Communists were back in government while I was there, including the current
Minister of Environment. The Ecofund
served as sort of a Brookings Institution or American Enterprise Institute, giving
a job and an opportunity to keep working on their issues to these
anti-Communist leaders while they were out of power.
It had taken me much of my first two years in Poland to get
the legal and financial provisions in place for the Ecofund to stand on its
own. About the time that the Congress
was refusing to fund the Maria Sklodowska Curie Fund, I got the pieces in place
to authorize the Polish treasury to pay part of its US debt to the Ecofund,
setting up the Ecofund for ten or more years of funding.
Because there was no more money for the Maria Sklodowska
Curie Fund, and the Ecofund was set up to get its future funding from the
Polish government, the Ambassador said that he was going to recommend
abolishing my position. I was
disappointed, because in addition to working on science and environment
funding, I also worked on nuclear non-proliferation issues, but because of the
division of labor in the embassy, and because my predecessor had not been
interested in these issues, non-proliferation issues usually went automatically
to the political section. Sometimes I
did not even get the cables from Washington about those issues. For some reason, the one issue that
automatically came to me was the Nuclear Suppliers Group. Because of this, I formed a relationship with
the Polish special ambassador for non-proliferation issues, Ambassador
Strulak. He became the rapporteur for
the five year review conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty while I was in
Poland.
Another embarrassing moment involved Ambassador
Strulak. He often visited the US and met
with many American non-proliferation officials.
Although I had spent many of my Washington assignments dealing with the
Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), it was an issue that seldom came to
my attention at the embassy in Warsaw, because the cables and the action
automatically went to the political section.
On one of my visits to Amb. Strulak to talk about Nuclear Supplier Group
issues, he told me that during his last visit to Washington, he had been
inquiring about the MTCR. He told me
that Poland wanted to join, but that the US had blocked their membership. He said he had asked the experts in
Washington who understood the issue, and my name frequently came up. It was the first I had heard about the
matter. When I inquired about it after Amb. Strulak
had told me about it, it turned out that President Clinton had personally
decided to blackball Poland. I
understood the reason. The MTCR had
initially been set up as a somewhat informal arrangement among friendly
nations, thus the administrative structure was relatively relaxed. But it had begun to grow by leaps and bounds,
making the informal structure difficult to work with. Thus, the US wanted to put a more structured
leadership in place before expanding the MTCR even further. Although I understood, I was deeply disappointed
that what was to some extent my baby had offended Poland while I was in Poland,
and I had been completely cut out of the discussion.
While I was stewing because my job would be eliminated with
the end of the Maria Sklodowska Curie Fund, and I was being cut out of non-proliferation
policy issues, I got a call from Washington asking if I would be willing to go
to Rome to take on the Science Office there in a few weeks. Rome was about to take on the rotating
presidency of the European Union, and the current science officer in Rome was
leaving or had already left. I agreed to
go, rather than just sort of hang around in Warsaw, but in retrospect, I should
have looked further into the offer, which at the time seemed too good to be
true. I later found out that the man I
was replacing was a political appointee, a “schedule-C” who had been with the
Ambassador to Italy Bartholomew for the maximum allowed eight years, and the
State Department had not allowed him to convert over to become a career Foreign
Service officer. Thus, he had been forced
to leave, and when I arrived in Rome, I discovered that various people in the
embassy, probably notably including the Ambassador, were not happy about
it. But I didn’t know that while I was
in Warsaw.
Rome wanted me to come right away, but the first annual
meeting of the Ecofund under their arrangement with the Polish treasury was about
to take place in a few weeks. I said
that I could not leave until after the meeting, because I wanted to make sure
that everything was in place for the Ecofund’s future existence. It turned out that the date I was to leave
was exactly the date of the government shutdown. Preparing to move to Rome, my wife and I had
packed everything. Big things had been
shipped to Rome, and our car was packed with clothes and two dogs, planning to
drive to Rome as soon as the embassy closed for the day. In the afternoon I was saying my farewells,
and I was in the Defense Attaché’s office, when I got a call from my assistant
who said I had an urgent call from Rome.
When I came down to take it, the caller said that I should not leave
Rome because the government had been shut down.
After all the disappointments I had been through, it was the last
straw. I usually tend to follow orders,
but this seemed too much. My wife and I
had no place to live in Warsaw; we had already moved out of our house. We had already shipped our belongings to
Rome. It seemed to me that the US
government had abandoned its troops in the field. Its word was no good, either in promises to
foreign governments or to its own Foreign Service officers.
The only comparison I can come up with goes back to my days
in the Army in Vietnam. My artillery
battery was stationed at Fire Base Barbara on a mountaintop near the Laotian
border just a few miles south of the DMZ with North Korea. We received an intelligence report that enemy
troops were massing at the bottom of our mountain and were about to
attack. Our main defense was a group of
old air defense artillery duster guns, twin 40-mm cannons that had been used
against planes, but now were used against troops on the ground. Because the duster crews were often stationed
in dangerous places, they had a reputation for not being too disciplined and
not playing by the Army rules. We got a
call from out battalion headquarters saying they heard that our dusters were
low on gas, and we should not lend them any because it was too hard for our battalion
to supply us out on the Laotian border. We
were not going to keep the dusters from firing at the enemy just because our battalion
did not want to resupply us. But I was
not happy that headquarters apparently thought it was better for us to die to
save gas than for them to have to resupply us a week or two early. There is a history of expendable troops in
war, and if you have to sacrifice your life, so be it, but it you don’t HAVE to
sacrifice your life, you shouldn’t do it just to save the US government a few
bucks. The fact that my life was not
worth a 55 gallon drum of gasoline, or a continuing resolution to keep the
government open until a long-term agreement could be reached, was too
much.
It turned out that the deputy chief of mission, the embassy
number two, was an old friend from my assignment in Brazil. He said to go ahead and leave Warsaw and come
to Rome, and he would work out the bureaucratic details. So we went, but I had pretty much lost faith
in the US government for not keeping its word, and in the Republican Party in
particular for abandoning me in the field.
I was mad with the government when I left Rome for trying to strand me
in Warsaw, and apparently Rome was mad with the government for firing my
predecessor in Rome and sending me instead.
It did not make for a happy assignment.
I decided after a while that I would stay for as long as Rome held the
presidency of the EU, but then I would retire from the Foreign Service. I did not feel welcome in Rome, and I had
lost respect for the American Government.
It was sad for me as a Vietnam veteran and a Foreign Service officer
with more than twenty years of experience.
In any case, as the US faces the potential of another
government shutdown, whether now or in December, it brings back a lot of bad
memories, and a huge contempt for the Republican Party. It claims to be the party for a strong
American defense, but I see it as the party that abandoned me in the
field. I keep trying to remind myself
that as much as I dislike the party, there may be some good individuals in it,
but I have a hard time finding any.
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