Obama--A Salubrious Cynicism Indeed

A couple of days ago I wrote that Obama probably does not have “the kind of arrogance that will make him prey to [the] sort of hubris” that makes him forget power in Washington is not so much held as derived from others. I added that I sensed “a salubrious cynicism in him.”
He wrought brilliantly to resurrect health care reform from the dead and get it through the House. Even those who don’t like him or the bill have to hand him that! Getting the bill passed required a masterpiece of political statesmanship.
George Bush demonstrated it when he got his tax cuts through; Reagan displayed it when he pushed Reaganomics through a Democratic Senate; Clinton flaunted it time after time with both Democratic and Republican Congresses. LBJ and Nixon both had the knack.
Now, for the first time in his presidency, Obama shows us that he, too, can run something—specifically, he can push a program hugely unpopular with large segments of the American population and the opposing party right into law. Give him credit.
Then, as soon as Congress folds its tents and sneaks out of town for its own version of Spring Break, Obama displays a wonderful version of Chicago ward boss politics. (Run against the King of England; get them to vote early, vote often.)
He slipped fifteen major appointments—that require Senate approval—through as “Recess appointments”. The rules say that if you use a recess appointment, the guy (or gal) can serve a year or more without being confirmed by anybody.
Whooosh, they’re in. I know I should be properly peeved as my fellow Republicans all profess to be, but I can’t help but grin a bit. Apparently wandering around Chicago as a community organizer, watching how politics is played in that grand old town, taught Obama something.
The Republicans used to procedural grounds to hold up these appoints for nearly eight months; that does smack of pure politics. (Then again, if they really didn’t like some of the people—and they did not—what other choice did they have against an overwhelming Democratic majority?) So everybody was playing politics—and Obama end played them.
Republicans went through the motions—John McCain pleaded with Obama not to use Recess Appointments—and Obama paid as much attention to them as he did during the 2008 campaign. Obama has been a bit rough on McCain lately, true enough.
During the bi-partisan summit on health care reform, he tartly reminded a pontificating McCain that “the election is over”. He just gave him another reminder last weekend. “The election is over; I make the Recess Appointments; you don’t.”
Obama looked like a patsy last year. He allowed the international community and BOTH parties in Congress to walk all over him. Last weekend he showed, finally, that he can be a political “son-of-a-bitch”.
Democrats—who are sweating fall re-election—can maybe start to smile just a bit and repeat the rest of the old adage, “but he’s OUR son-of-a-bitch.”
As a Republican I’m not necessarily pleased. As a detached observer of the American political scene, I’m grinning a bit.

Obama and the Usages of Power IV

Obama has won the Battle of Health Care Reform. His perceived ability to have exercised effective political power will create an aura—an illusion, if you will--of a politically savvy and powerful president. The hardest thing for him to do now will be to remember—as he did NOT in 2008/9—that much of this aura is a normal Washington illusion.
He must now act in a way to conserve that illusion. Conserving AND using the illusion of power is a bit like having one’s cake and eating it, too, I admit. It is part of the necessary and health destroying tight rope act of exercising power in Washington.
The Illusion of Power, as long as he can maintain it, will be the most important weapon in his political arsenal for as long as he holds office. The instant he allows it to fall apart, he will cease to be effective and the nation will be fundamentally leaderless—as it was under Bush in 2008 or under Hoover in 1932.
Let’s look a bit more at political illusion as it applies to the presidency. Sometimes it’s easier to see in matters of foreign policy so I’ll mostly talk about that. Domestic maneuverings are usually done more quietly and don’t make major headlines.
Look at the difference between Eisenhower and Kennedy during the late fifties and early sixties. Ike could afford to let our national defense deteriorate to a degree that might have been criminal under any other president. Pilots lacked fuel to practice flying, GIs were still carrying World War II weapons and the navy was floating boats from the 1930s and 40s.
How could he get away with it. Illusion. Smoke and mirrors. The Russians knew him. They remembered that with a nod of his head he could unemotionally sentence half-a-million German civilians to death in a single day’s raid.
He embodied the horror and destruction of total war. They occupied the ruins our bombers had left of the neighborhoods of Berlin. He scared them. He didn’t need to spend billions on new toys. Just the myth of Eisenhower was sufficient. Smoke and mirrors.
From 1958 on the Russians had wanted to build a wall across Berlin like the Iron Curtain across the rest of Germany. They didn’t dare. Kennedy took office with his green berets, all the new ships and planes for the armed services—and they built the wall during his first year.
Khrushchev summoned Kennedy to Vienna in June, 1961, took his measure, saw no illusion of power, and built his wall a month later. He tried to put missiles in Cuba. Finally Kennedy stood up—and nearly extinguished all life on this planet. Creating no illusions can be dangerously costly.
LBJ was the “Master of the Senate” in the 1950s. He lost all real power when he became Veep in 1961; but he had left enough of an imprint on Congress and such an illusion of being dangerous that he passed more social legislation in two years than almost any four or five previous presidents had in their entire combined terms.
One last illusion that we are living with today. THE INVINCIBLE AMERICAN AIRCRAFT CARRIER. It was, in 1945. We could launch a thousand carrier planes in a single strike. We owned the skies over Japan and occupied China.
If an American carrier shows up today in foreign waters, it inspires great trepidation in those who live adjacent to those waters. (An Arab leader pointing out at the Persian Gulf and screaming, “Do you think those carriers are there on vacation?’)
One lucky missile hit—and that illusion will be forever gone. We won’t just lose a ship, its 5,000 men and its eighty or ninety planes—we will lose three-quarters of a century of myth that has served and protected us well. Be careful where you send them. Stay at red alert—the way we didn’t in December, 1941.
One missile—and the illusion goes the way of the B-29 bomber.
Illusion of Power. It is the indispensible ingredient for successful politics and diplomacy. It is so easily and quickly broken and lost. Obama—in Afghanistan and Washington—must now walk a very, very careful (without seeming to be cautious) tight rope.
Let’s all wish him Good Luck.

Obama and the Usages of Power III

We’re talking about how much Obama showed us he has learned about the usage of power last week—when he got at least part of his health care reform through Congress after a year of abject failures. In earlier blogs I talked about how Obama’s biggest problem last year was believing his own press.
It’s hard to stay balanced when everyone from Vienna to Honolulu is cheering madly for you, calling you the culmination of the entire civil rights movement and proclaiming that the new millennium begins now with you.
Perhaps today he senses that power—whether it arrives from office, public adulation or military force—is essentially an illusion. And that nothing is easier to lose than the illusion of power—because it never had any reality in the first place.
On the other hand, nothing is more powerful, more frightening than illusory power because, unlike actual power, it has no limits in other people’s mind. It assumes a life of its own and seems more dangerous than a hundred hydrogen bombs.
Used properly and sparingly, it can accomplish more, prevent more problems and win more bloodless victories than all the armies of World War II. But you must have a monumentally acute sense of just how far you dare push it, how unreal, how unstable it truly is.
Let’s give a couple of practical examples. One has come and gone—poofed away in the wind. THE AMERICAN STRATEGIC BOMBER. The B-17, B-24, B-29, B-47, B-52. The world literally trembled at the mere thought of having such horror unleashed on it.
Everyone “knew” that the American bomber had won World War II. Photographs of German and Japanese cities in flames or covered with the puffs of exploding bombs, all falling in a deadly row, were seared into world consciousness.
Except that they—and unfortunately we—knew wrong. Bombers were frightening; they killed an awful lot of civilians—but they had a very limited impact on German and Japanese war making potential. All those photo-news shots of falling bombs were militarily an illusion.
(Caveat—we did cut German oil production to the point that German troops jumped off in the Battle of the Bulge (December, 1944—five months before it was all over) with only five days of fuel. They were expected to capture allied fuel dumps to resupply. People like Patton prevented that.)
But as long as the world THOUGHT that the American bomber was invincible—it was. Every so often in the 1950s and 60s, Russia’s fractious ally, the Chinese Communists (who had fought us to a draw in Korea) got feisty and threatened to take on the US again.
They kept calling us the “paper tiger”. Russia’s Khrushchev would publicly remind the Chinese that the American Strategic Air Command (SAC) had “nuclear teeth”, and ask the Chinese to shut up. But China knew something.
In Korea her troops had taken the brunt of World War II style mass bombing raids by B-29s and B-50s. They had endured terrible casualties. Enough, however, had survived to force the war to a stalemate. But the myth went on.
What was worse, we believed the myth. In Vietnam we destroyed it forever, like a shattered glass vase. We bombed and bombed and bombed. Our generals assured the White House that, just as they had defeated Germany and Japan, they would destroy the Viet Cong.
They killed lots and lots of human beings, true. But they only thing they destroyed with their own myth of invincibility. That was possibly the biggest loss we endured in Vietnam. Never again would a Russian leader publicly credit American bombers with mythological powers.
It can be expensive to shatter one’s own myth. We did it—by not recognizing that, at bottom, an illusion is an illusion is an illusion. It can protect you while it endures; when it falls apart, it can leave you terribly naked.
A bit more next time.

Obama and the Usages of Power II

Yesterday I talked about what Obama has learned about the nature and usage of power. I also talked about my own experience in learning that all political power is in some sense derivative—derived from someone or something outside of one’s own self and office.
Learn that, live and succeed. Forget it and someone will cut you off from behind before you ever know you’ve been hit. I don’t think Obama has the kind of arrogance that will make him prey to that sort of hubris. I sense a salubrious cynicism in him. No one in Washington ever achieves much without it. I think he may have that.
I question whether he will demonstrate the appetite for health breaking kind of work it requires to continue to exercise real control in Washington. He is, after all, a man for whom family is very important. The pursuit of political power will permit you to have no other gods before it; it is more jealous than the proverbial “bitch goddess of success”.
But he did what needed to be done to get his health care plan through Congress last week. That shows tremendous growth in aptitude over last year. Now we shall see if he knows some other things about power that I learned while watching, doing and meditating in Washington decades ago.
Briefly, my own tale. I allowed overweening ambition to propel me into a job in the Office of the White House before I was ready or capable. I had reached my then limit by rising to a job in the Office of the US Surgeon General that allowed me pretty effective access and, to a slight degree, control over the vast (international in scope) US Public Health Service.
People answered my phone calls; they had a car waiting for me at the airport, I had friends and allies. Where I needed to be feared, I was feared. The intensity of working more immediately for the President (my boss’s boss’s boss was Lyndon Johnson) was something I wasn’t ready to handle.
They chewed me up and spat me out. When they laid off or reassigned over half the staff or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1968, I was one of those called in and told to go away. (The Democrats did not need the stigma of being too pro-Civil Rights in that year’s election.) Perhaps foolishly—I was offered a higher pay grade in another agency—I resigned and left Washington.
My success—and my failure—had cost me a marriage, a career and a mental breakdown. Playing with political power is a bit like holding a 400 amp electrical cable in each hand and trying to attach them while they are live. It can fry you.
From my standpoint of having experienced both success and failure in wielding the Washington game—and years of meditation—I pass along the following thoughts on the nature of power. Obama will learn these things if he succeeds.
One) Power is a matter of propinquity. You have to BE there. After five o’clock, when the bottles of scotch come out, the feet are up on the desk and you talk (and LEARN) about what’s going on. You have to get off your chair and walk around, all day, late into the evening.
Talk even to failures—some will know someone who can help you. (My best sources of power came from people who had failed themselves, but still could place a helpful phone call.) Forget family, forget other activities. Be there, be there, be there.
Two) Power is persistence far more than it is the exertion of brute force!!! (Any insurance agent can tell you this.) It is the gentle pressure of the star fish rather than the bite of the shark. The latter will scare others into retaliating against you. Eventually that will get you.
Be friendly, be understanding of the other fellow’s problems, keep yourself in his memory banks, hang onto ALL phone numbers you are given—and call them now and then. Somebody, somewhere, is going to need something that can benefit you—and you want them to remember your name. Favorably.
Three) Power is mostly ILLUSION. This is the biggie. We’ll talk more about it next time.

Obama and the Usages of Power

It’s still too early to say whether or not Obama will grow to be a successful president—but he took a significant step in that direction last week. He put his nose to the political grindstone and made some of his health care initiative finally happen.
Whether he can articulate it or not, he’s learned some important lessons about the nature, usages and limitations of Power. A year ago he made the mistakes most people make when they think about power—that if you have a title like “president” all you have to do is stand there and “be” powerful.
Nope. Do that and Congress, Wall Street and the folks who decide where the next Olympics will be held will walk all over you. Throughout Obama’s first year in office, they walked at will. He discovered that the presidential seal and fifty cents will get you a phone call every time.
This is not really Obama’s fault. He has had no experience wielding power. A Senator, a community activist and a recent Harvard Law School graduate have no power to wield. There was no way he could have learned before last year.
First of all, to be effectively powerful—to make things happen—requires a voracious appetite for an appalling amount of desperately hard work and a stomach for unimaginable stress. I believe it can be safely said that most men who have served as CEO of, say, General Motors (or Exxon, Nescafe, General Electric—it doesn’t really matter) have done so without ever seriously affecting how or what was done at General Motors.
In other words, they’ve never ran General Motors. The same thing can be said of most presidents. They have served their four or eight year terms without ever having run the United States government—or having gotten a real idea of what’s going on in Washington.
Obama’s misfortune—and possible future good luck—is that he landed in Washington during one of those rare occasions when it was necessary for a president to 1)know what was going on, 2)make things happen, and 3)exert real and effective power.
Roosevelt did. Lincoln did. George W. Bush did. It is instructive to look at photos of these men taken on the day they assumed office and taken during their last year in the office. The job aged the life right out of some of them. It killed Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. It left people like Bush and Buchanan covered with opprobrium.
Most presidents, more than we like to think, have glided through their terms without having to go much beyond Cal Coolidge’s famed question (when he woke up from a nap), “Is the country still there?” It usually was and it survived them.
I’ve done a lot of thinking about the nature of power ever since I was a twenty-five year old kid in Washington with the equivalent civilian rank of first lieutenant or captain in the army. I would periodically step back and observe myself and be fascinated by a couple of things I saw around me.
I could call a multi-billion dollar federal agency like the CDC in Atlanta and make it hop, skip and jump. The man next to me, with the equivalent rank of a colonel or general couldn’t make it budge. Why? What was the difference?
For one thing, I possessed something that is true of almost anyone in Washington who can exercise any real power—I had DERIVATIVE power. I spoke in the name of someone who had power, in this case the Surgeon General of the United States. The other man did not.
I quickly realized that much of the Surgeon General’s power was also derivative—as was the power of his boss, the Secretary of HEW. ALL of us were working on derived power—not anything that was actually real. (Forget that, even for an instant, and you suffer a nasty political death.) So all power is actually merely derived. It isn’t really yours. Push beyond the limits of that derivation, and you fail.
I learned a few more things about power during that time—I’ll continue next time.

War and Myth XIII

The American public tends to reserve its most savage reprisals for politicians who tell it the truth. When candidate George Romney (Mitt’s dad) admitted in 1968 that the Pentagon had lied to him (“brainwashed” was the term he used), his run for the presidency was over.
When Carter spoke some hard truths about energy, he was reduced to an object of public derision. When Mondale pointed out some harsh economic truths in 1984, his candidacy sank without a bubble. George H.W. Bush called Reaganomics “Voodoo economics” and lost to Reagan in the 1980 primaries.
In 1990 he admitted his promise of no new taxes was insupportable and signed the increase that laid the foundation for the Clinton surpluses. Disabused and unforgiving Republican constituents abandoned him in droves in 1992. He lost.
A wise maxim for a political candidate in this country might be, “Never, never, never tell people the truth—they will kill you for it.” Instead we insist on living in a world enshrouded with myth.
One of the biggest we’ve insisted on living with over the past half century is the notion that we can have all manner of middle class subsidies—tax free interest on ever bigger houses, pennies to pay for Social Security, Medicare and, in extremis, Medicaid before dying.
Ever smaller tax rates—from 90% in the 1950s down to 36% today--and ever newer toll free high ways, bigger airports, and fancier new high schools with state of the art theatres, swimming pools, art rooms, free bussing and the newest technology.
And nobody needs to pay for it. Ever. Want to get killed at the polls? Tell the citizenry that either the schools have to reduce programs or taxes have to go UP. Or that they may have to start paying tolls on Michigan freeways. You can sneak it in—but don’t tell them.
We’ve gone into our wars the same way. Iraq wasn’t going to cost anything because rebuilding the nation would be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues. We were fighting in World War II to save democracy—not by any chance to settle some imperial scores.
(The cynical battle front G.I., when asked what HE was actually fighting for, typically answered, “ A piece of mom’s apple pie.” LBJ got briefly honest about why he thought he was in Vietnam and said bluntly, “They want what we got.” What happened to saving Vietnam from communism? LBJ’s public fantasy world fell apart before he even tried to run again in 1968.)
Today we’re being told we can have universal health care (something I believe in), but that it won’t cost us a dime—in fact it will SAVE us money. True, it doesn’t have to cost what this bill will make it cost, but it won’t cost LESS! But, again, try to tell people the truth about health care in this country—and you get wrathful tea parties like last summer’s—attended by people so blinded by their own mythology that they didn’t realize Medicare IS a government program!
(Remember the original Boston Tea Party occurred when the British cut rates on legal tea so far that it was cheaper to buy the legal stuff than the tea American smugglers were sneaking in. So the smugglers banded together and dumped the legal leaf over the side.)
Going to war—or fighting a crisis in the economy or the health care system—blinded by myth, lied to by politicians who tell us what we insist on hearing, isn’t a sound or sane way to make policy. It really isn’t. I suggest to the American voter that he stop yammering about lying politicos and develop within himself a tolerance for truth.
How about evaluating policy by whether or not it is real, whether or not it is honest (I didn’t say “nice” or that it will make the Susie’s of the world like us, I said honest and true)? How about evaluating a war or a policy in the same cold bloodedly rational way we should evaluate our investments—will they benefit us? Will they accomplish the mission? Can we afford them? Will we make enough back to justify the investment in blood, treasure and materiel?
The cataracts of myth merely make US blind; they don’t change the realities of the world we must deal with. Or the real costs. Or the likely consequences.
Applied reality will enable us to shift positions and alter our approaches more quickly as situations become clearer or changes occur. Investors who make big money—and hang on to it—hold to very, very few myths.
Nations that wish to succeed and survive need to be as wise—and as unswervingly honest.
Again, I didn’t say “nice” or “likeable” or “fanciful”.

Health Care--Alive Again

Let’s break into our discussion of American mythology with a comment on the passage of the Senate’s 2,000 page health care reform bill (which may contain a few myths itself). Pelosi got her five votes (possibly by denying the members any potty breaks).
That she got it at all is the real surprise. Back in December that looked about as likely as snow in July on the capital mall. I would have bet money that it was dead—and I am much too conservative a Hollander to be much of a betting man.
I prognosticated that it was dead. I was so sure. But Obama, Pelosi and the Democrats found as unlikely an ally as Churchill making a pact with the Bolsheviks—the American health insurance companies rode full tilt to the rescue of health care reform.
After spending millions of dollars and spreading amazing amounts of lies, half-truths and obfuscations to sink reform, in the end they pulled a bone headed stunt that brought it back to life. Who passed health care? The insurance companies!
Pelosi and Obama were given a gift that they could not have imagined. The health care industry decided to raise nearly everybody’s rates at the turn of the year. It happened all across America to millions of people—people with health insurance, people who vote.
I can’t speak for all of them—but I can tell you what happened to me. For years retired teachers in Michigan had had Blue Cross/Blue Shield as primary insurance, Medicare as secondary. Part D—pharmaceutical insurance was also covered by the Blues. They covered every drug I’ve ever been prescribed in whatever the form my physician wanted.
It was great insurance, and it wasn’t very expensive. In the fall, I began to read that the Blues were raising their rates. I didn’t think too much about it. On January 2nd, I went to my regular pharmacy to refill some of my normal prescriptions.
Holy Toledo!!! The co-pays had doubled, in some cases tripled. I left them at the counter and went home to make some calls. A couple of drugs were no longer available at any price. Who was this strange new company? (It has taken me weeks and hours to get it all figured out—not just money but time, hours of it!)
It seems that rates had gone so high that the teacher’s union felt the only thing it could do was switch us to another medical plan—Medicare primary; a different, inferior Blues plan secondary. Even though it’s inferior, the new plan still costs more than the old plan did last year.
This also meant I had to go to ALL of my physicians, blood labs, etc. etc. etc. and show them my new cards so they could get my new insurance right and not get rejected when they submitted a claim. I haven’t finished all of that yet.
I opted out of the union’s prescription drug provider and found one myself. The co-pays are less than that other plan but, unlike last year, I cannot get most of my drugs on a three-month, one co-pay basis, The same co-pay three times in a quarter is a significant increase over that co-pay once in a quarter.
All the way around, it costs me more. It costs millions of us more. I’ll lay you odds there are a whole lot of folks out there whose anti-health-care reform bill fervor cooled quite a bit this January. I can just see some of those tea party folks staring with dismay at their new rates and co-pays and suddenly losing steam in their opposition.
The Republicans in the House may call the Senate bill “Armageddon”, but the real Armageddon in health care reform was brought by some mind-bogglingly stupid insurance executives.
I’ll bet when they get alone by themselves even Obama and Pelosi can’t believe just how stupid those people were.
Of course, the additions to the bill still have to go back to the Senate where any Republican can add an amendment. Should Democrats be silly enough to let one pass, the whole business is back up in the air (and back to the House for another long weekend).
Let’s see if the Senate can avoid being as foolish as the health insurance industry. Well finish up War and Myth next time.

War and Myth XII

One huge American myth—that most of seem to believe with all of our being—is that we all have hundreds if not thousands of friends. (Check Face book.) Everybody’s a friend. If you met him once, last year, he’s a friend.
I very deliberately try to use the word “acquaintance”. I have very few friends. My neighbor and I have known and cooperated with each other for twenty years. We are just reaching the point where we might become actual friends.
But “everybody’s a “friend”—remains a fervently held myth among many, many Americans. It’s something they seem to NEED to believe. I remember substituting in one of the lower grades a few years ago. A little girl came up to me with tears streaming down her cheeks, “Susie says she does not like me!”
She obviously expected me to deal with Susie—make Susie like her. Most teachers would have pulled Susie aside and had a long, soulful discussion on the necessity of liking one another. I startled the little girl very much by saying something quite other.
“It is Susie’s democratic right not to like you. She doesn’t have to like anyone. You don’t have to like anyone. She may not hurt you. She may not say bad things about you or damage your property, but there is no reason why she must like you.”
She went back to her seat. (Fifteen minutes later she and Susie were chattering together like magpies.) She typifies much of what is and has been wrong with American foreign policy. We want to get our own way (completely understandable in a great power), and we go into paroxysms of self-recrimination if some nation says it doesn’t like us.
We view Britain’s Prime Minister Palmerston as a cynic because he made the sensible observation that “Great Powers have no friends, only interests”. But I doubt very much that he would have wept if “Susie” had told him she didn’t like him. He ran a very successful foreign policy.
It goes deep into the heart of American mythology to believe that we must be liked by everyone we meet—and that, ideally, we must like them.
Why?
This need to be liked reached the height of silliness in the last Presidential Election. We were actually judging our candidates on which one of them was better liked by the Susie’s of the world! Obama won a pot full of votes by appearing—as a CANDIDATE!!—with crowds of cheering Europeans. (Do they vote?)
(We saw what that was worth when he tried to move the Olympics to Chicago and when he tried to paste together an agreement in Copenhagen. His outreach to the Muslim world from Cairo didn’t amount to all that much, either. Susie has to respect—and even fear—you before she gets cooperative. Lord Palmerston understood that.)
A comedian has to worry whether audiences like him enough to laugh; a politician has to worry whether or not his constituents like him enough to keep him in office—but someone making foreign policy and deciding on peace and war should not have likeability as his highest priority.
As any salesman can tell you, once you’ve got the prospective buyer concerned over whether or not you like him—whether or not the buyer is concerned about the salesman’s good will and friendship, he’s GOT him. The poor chap can be manipulated by his own needs into buying almost anything. It’s an effective tool, playing on someone’s need to be liked.
Let’s let neither our friends nor our enemies play us like that. It’s nice if you do—it’s perfectly all right if you choose not to. We can live without Susie’s friendship when necessary. We don’t have, and we don’t need to have, a thousand friends. None of us do.

War and Myth XI

The world we remembered from before 1939 had just seemed so much safer and reliable. The French controlled those North African Berbers who used to send pirates after our ships. British ships kept Malay pirates at bay.
Africa and the Middle East gave no one any problems because various European Colonial Affairs offices kept things quiet there. Central Americans picked bananas peacefully and sent the receipts to either London or Washington. From Suez to Hanoi, the underbelly of Asia was safely in the reliable hands of people like the French, the British, the Dutch and even the Portuguese. No problems there to speak of.
We could and did make preachments about the evils of imperialism (ignoring our own) and watch breathlessly to see if the next hunger strike might really kill Gandhi (I’m old enough to recall his last one). But it was a quiet, safe neighborhood. You could walk down the street with minimal fear of getting mugged.
The planet got a lot rowdier when the imperialists went home. It was fashionable to say that we had somehow “lost” all those places—that the Communists were doing this all, with no serious help from the native populations, just to spite us.
Who lost China? Silly question. An indigenous group of Chinese Communists who allied themselves very momentarily with the Soviet Union won it. The strength of their appeal was that they were not seen to be allied with ANY of the former imperialist powers who had dabble in Chinese affairs and claimed zones of interest for over a century.
Memories of imperialism, memories of days when China stood alone as the technology giant whose goods were coveted all over the Asian, European, African land mass, unhappy memories of a weakened giant being bullied by half a dozen European powers all much smaller than she was—that’s what cost us China.
Throw into the mix the fact that China’s basically pro-Western “Democratic” government between 1911 and 1949 became hopelessly corrupt and ineffective and I can imagine no way we could possibly have hung on to China.
But the myth that we had lost it—that something illegitimate, something that didn’t really speak for China, had taken it away from us would haunt our policies for decades. We wouldn’t even recognize the fact that Mao’s government existed for over twenty years.
Experiences like we had in China, Indo-China (Vietnam/Cambodia /Laos), the southern Philippines, Cuba, Iran, Iraq (I’m talking the 1950s), or Egypt all worked to convince us that any revolutionary, anywhere—anyone who wanted economic, military or political independence for his nation was de facto a very bad person.
This assurance, rising out of the myth that we had lost all of these places, led to our belief that it was our mission to wage war against any uprising of any sort. This became a reflex. We were no longer capable of sitting down rationally and deciding: What are our true interests here? What’s best for the US in the long run?
(We came a horrible cropper in Vietnam when we failed to take into account that Ho Chi Minh LIKED America. He based his whole revolution on our Declaration of Independence. In any case, he hated China far more than he did us!
We had to bomb the living daylights out of him to make an enemy out of him. If we had played our hand more sanely, the worst that might have happened is that we would have had an Asian Tito to annoy and worry the Chinese. And no dead G.I.s.)
Myth is a dreadful thing to build a foreign policy on. Especially if you are trying to hold down the potentially bloodthirsty exuberance of a newly liberated planet.
A few more words on myth next.

War and Myth X

Another huge postwar myth is that somebody in Washington “lost” China. It was just one step further in the line of myths that began with the idea that Roosevelt deliberately attacked Japan to disable Russia’s main Pacific adversary.
Communism had as powerful a capacity to unsettle the “decent sort of folk” in the 20th Century as Democracy had had in the 19th. Both were seen as totally detrimental to the natural and Christian order of things; it was the firm conviction of most Western governments that, first Democracy and, later, Communism ought to be stamped out.
Democracy’s 19th Century champion was England; Russia took on that role for Communism in the 20th. It was a firm conviction that no rational citizenry chose Democracy—they were “lost” to it and needed to be rescued. Ditto for Communism in the 20th.
So, when France, Britain, Germany and Russia had all dropped out of the race to take over China, when we had militarily defeated Japan—our only remaining rival—it seemed incomprehensible to most Americans when, only four years after the war, China went Communist.
Somebody must have cheated. There was treason somewhere. This was a perfectly reasonable set of beliefs—if you were willing to blind yourself to a couple of realities. The first reality was something few Americans were willing to admit out loud until the last couple of decades—we had become a world empire.
That’s what “super power” is all about. To be super, a power most control the areas from which she gains her raw materials, to which she sells her own wares and the sea and land lanes by which these goods travel. That’s called an empire.
If Britain was an empire in 1900, we certainly have been one since 1945. (Actually our move to become one began long, long before that. It was, after all, Benjamin Franklin who predicted, “We shall be an empire of liberty, from sea to sea and pole to pole.”)
In the minds of every other nation on earth, our being an empire put us in the same class as England, France, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany and Japan—all empire builders. Take a look at a 1939 world map.
Those countries controlled everything on the planet except Russia, Eastern Europe, the US, Antarctica, Liberia, Afghanistan, Thailand and Iceland. (Latin America was still sort of divied up between Britain and the US. By 1945, US control would be pretty absolute there.)
By 1945 the European imperialists had been so badly knocked about by World War II that their grip was loosening on their imperial holdings all over the globe. All sorts of colonies just wanted to be free. Gandhi’s India, for one. Ho Chi Minh’s Indo-China for another. Nasser’s Egypt. Mossadegh’s iran, Kenya’s Mau Mau, Castro’s Cuba—the list could go on forever.
All colonies. (Yes, Cuba and Iran were colonies; let’s not kid ourselves.) If you wanted to start a revolution to make your country independent, you had two choices to go to for support. (Remember when we fought in 1776, 90% of our bullets came from a foreign power that hated England.)
There was the United States and there was the Soviet Union. The US had an instinctive rapport with its fellow imperialists (especially since they were no longer a threat to us). They were fellow Europeans; they were mostly anti-Communist (that designation covered a host of sins in our minds)—so very few would-be revolutionaries found comfort—or weapons—from us.
That left only one other place for a pro-independence minded revolutionary to turn—Russia. She was happy to destabilize any of our allies (and sometimes us) at the low risk and cost of a few boatloads of guns.
We didn’t “lose” China. China had long and bitter memories of European incursions—with a US flag always among the others. If we “lost” China, we probably did so in the 1800s. Let’s look some more myths next time.

War and Myth IX

We are looking at five major myths (or unrealities) that shaped American policy and perception of the World after World War II. The first is the notion that Russians, and Russians alone, cheated at and after Yalta—that we got hosed at the conference.
First of all let’s look at the differences in philosophy that guided the three Yalta participants (Britain’s Churchill, who headed a washed up empire and was essentially out of the picture; America’s Roosevelt and Russia’s Stalin). What matters is how the Americans and the Russians viewed the world.
The Americans came to Yalta in February, 1945, as capitalists. A capitalist understands a world in which 51 to 60% control of any corporate entity means TOTAL control. We saw the world as a corporation in which we held a majority interest.
The Russians conceded our majority interest without question. They just weren’t working from a capitalistic blue print. They thought more in terms (as did the British) of 18th and 19th Century diplomacy. Whoever holds 60% of the territory governs THAT 60%. The other party, who holds 40%, governs that much of the area.
See a problem? We felt, instinctively that we should control the planet—the way a majority interest controls ALL of General Motors or Exxon Oil. The Russians conceded the Americas, all of the Pacific rim except Siberia, Africa, most of the Middle East and much of Western Europe.
Those were under American control. However, Eastern Europe, where the Russians had large armies on the ground—and through which invaders had cost Russia tens of millions of dead in the 20th Century alone--was THEIRS.
We cried foul (it should ALL be ours); they thought we were mindbogglingly greedy.
While Stalin could be viciously evil and duplicitous, he was neither a fool nor insane. He was perfectly aware of our nuclear monopoly; he knew our homeland was untouched—and he knew how weak Russia was.
Had the US suffered losses comparable to Russia’s in WWII, everything east of the Mississippi would be burned flat. Shattered, destroyed, unusable. All of European Russia looked a lot like the down town blocks of Hiroshima—one vast fixer-upper.
Historically it takes Russia fifteen years to recover from a war. (Right on schedule, in 1960, a Russian missile reached up into the sky and clawed down an American U-2 spy plane; next year they dared build the Berlin Wall. By the end of the 60s, they could match our ability to deliver thermonuclear war heads on target.) Russia was in no shape to argue in 1945—except where she had the Red Army physically present.
She kept the Yalta terms in Greece (1947) by closing off supplies to Greek Communist insurgents—she had promised control of Greece to the West. She kept Yalta terms in China by being the last major power to withdraw support from the Kuomintang government on the mainland in 1949.
Russia had ceded China to us—our boy simply was too corrupt to hang on. Mao pretty much won on his own—the only help Russia gave him was to allow him to pick up guns from the defeated Japanese he’d been fighting for eight years. Russia kept her word.
But she kept Eastern Europe. (Asking her to give it up would have been the equivalent of asking the US to give up Manhattan Island, New Orleans and San Francisco Bay.) Good capitalists we, we never forgave her.
We even insisted that only by incompetence or treachery had Roosevelt allowed her to hang on to that one corner of the globe. This was a myth that became a bedrock of American foreign (and even domestic policy) for the next several decades.
The Soviets were far, far from being nice people—but there was no truth to the myth. Next time, the myth that somebody in Washington treacherously gave away China.

War and Myth VIII

Several myths came out of the post-war world. 1) That the Russians (alone) cheated at Yalta, 2) That somebody in Washington mislaid or lost China. 3) That Roosevelt was a closet Communist who conspired to defeat Russia’s primary Asian enemy, Japan. 4) That anybody, anywhere, who wanted his independence was an active Communist agent. 5) That the Russians had the means of dropping atomic bombs on us by the early 1950s.
To understand the thinking in the United States immediately after World War II, I use the following analogy. Imagine a human being, with fully developed mental and emotional capabilities who never was born—who somehow stayed right in the warm, snug, dark womb.
He’s fed by umbilical cord. There are soft walls to hold him up and to allow him to nap against. There are few loud noises and no glaring lights. He feels totally safe.
Suddenly, by Caesarian section, this totally unprepared creature is pitched into the outside world. There are blinding lights. He is surrounded by strange persons whose intentions he cannot know, of whose existence he never dreamt.
He must feed himself—somehow. There are no walls to hold him up when he tries to walk and trips. There is a cacophony of incomprehensible noise. People are saying things to him he cannot understand—insisting he wear strange new clothing … .
This is a very fair estimate of how the world of 1945, 46, 47 and on seemed to most Americans. Since the founding of Jamestown, we had lived in a womb made up of two vast oceans and the British Empire. We were safe, we were snug, we were totally protected—without realizing either that fact or being forced to accept the reality of a hostile world beyond.
Did someone wish to invade us (the “Holy Alliance” in the 1820s)? The British navy prevented it. (Not out of any real love for us—but because London profits were too great for England to permit Europe to regain her American colonies.)
Except for the brief exception of the Civil War, our 19th Century army consisted of a handful of cavalry regiments to fight Indians, a few harbor guards (what did Fort Sumter have in 1861? About 90 men?) and a Corps of Engineers to build piers and light houses.
As late as 1916, a French general could sneer at an American delegation, “We lose more men before breakfast (WWI) than you have in your entire army.” Even as Hitler rose to power, we could sit back and voice our opinions without fear of having to take action—because the British Navy stood between us and the Nazis.
In 1945, Britain was gone. NOTHING stood between us and any horror, any aggressor, any threat, any where on the planet. Call a cop? We were the world’s only remaining police force. Dazzling light, strange voices, threatening sounds—all at once.
(We wanted to disarm. We sent millions of troops back to factories and colleges. We expected the world to return to the status we had known since 1783. It didn’t happen. By 1948, we were drafting soldiers again; we faced a foreign threat armed with atomic bombs.)
Is it any wonder that the entire United States, government and all, had what can only be explained as a nervous collapse? Hiss, Huac, McCarthy…all symptoms of a functional breakdown in American society.
Somebody did this to us, right? Now came the long night of looking for a scapegoat—the ones who did it to us. It was these Communists, right?
And first of all, you gotta believe that Yalta was a rip off. Roosevelt was incompetent (maybe even a traitor). Us poor, innocent Americans taken to the cleaners by those shyster Russians.
Let’s look at that myth tomorrow.

War and Myth VII

The biggest myth about World War II is that the American fighting man won it, almost single handed. Europeans are, at best, bemused when they encounter American accounts of the war—that play up America’s role to the exclusion of everyone else.
The G.I. certainly quitted himself well on several fighting fronts. Individually he was as brave as any other allied or Axis soldier—but he simply didn’t do that much of the fighting. Death tolls tell the story. The British Empire lost over 600,000 military dead.
The French (who surrendered in 1940—but then went on fighting under General de Gaulle) took another 217,000 military fatalities. The Chinese lost up to four million dead. Poland—some of whose forces escaped the fall of Poland and went on fighting from Britain lost nearly a quarter of a million dead. The Russians lost an awesome ten million soldiers and another fifteen million civilians.
That’s a rounded figure of about fifteen million allied war dead. It doesn’t count the Yugoslav Serbs, who held down as many as forty German divisions (Ike faced sixty at D Day) and lost 450,000 dead plus another half million civilians rounded up by Muslim SS troops from Bosnia.
Nor are we including 60,000 dead troops from the Philippines, over 20,000 Dutch dead, thirty thousand-plus dead each from Greece and Czechoslovakia, and a host of other small nations, many overrun by the Axis, who went on fighting underground.
Against these millions upon millions of dead, American losses total around 416,000 dead—about the same number as the much smaller Island of Great Britain lost by itself. We didn’t get our factories and homes bombed; our land was untouched, and we came out of the war vastly richer and more powerful than we went into it. Our investment was minimal; our return huge.
Our factories won the war. We kept everybody ELSE fighting. We supplied everybody on earth who was willing to pick up a gun and shoot at Germans, Italians, Japanese and their allies. We sent food, we sent munitions and weapons, whatever was needed.
We took all the unemployed from the Depression and put them in uniform. We pulled share-croppers off the cotton fields and put them in war plants. We put millions of women to work building ships, planes, tanks, trucks, uniforms, boots, backpacks, rifles, ammunition and bombs.
We didn’t even get into the war until it had been going on over two years. The European war was well over three years old before we got our first armies into action. (We fought for two and a half years out of just under six years that the war lasted.) We didn’t have more troops facing the Axis than the British Empire had until a year before the war ended in Tokyo Bay.
Our biggest losses in Europe came from our strategic bombing, which we insisted on carrying out in broad daylight. (We made wonderful targets; the British and Germans bombed at night.) The effects of that bombing became another American myth.
It led us to assume we could defeat the Vietnamese with high level bombing attacks. Somebody in the Pentagon should have taken a second look at their own reports from World War II. The only two industries negatively impacted by our bombing raids were: oil refineries and railroads. Not surprising since both are right on top of the ground and the former, hit just once, tend to burn like the very fires of hell itself. (Vietnam has neither.)
The more we bombed, the more German war production went up. (Bombing was very effective against retail stores and restaurants. Germans put all the unemployed back to work in war factories—which were increasingly underground and hidden.)
We were also capable of killing as many as half-a-million women and children in a single raid, but this did not impact the German war effort. The Japanese had similar civilian casualty rates and were still prepared to inflict appalling American losses had we invaded.
The myths of 1) the effectiveness of bombing (the Germans learned better when bombing did not make the British surrender at Dunkirk in 1940), and 2) the American belief we had almost single-handedly won the war would impact our postwar thinking hugely—and dangerously.
Let’s look at some more post war myths next.

War and Myth VI

To most Americans on Sunday afternoon, December 7, 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor came totally out of the blue. We were suddenly, unexpectedly—and for no good reason—assaulted by an enemy that sank our Pacific Fleet.
(No one stopped to ask WHY the Pacific Fleet was anchored permanently in Hawaii rather than at its home base in California. When FDR went on the air over the PA system in Grand Central Station and they played the “Star Spangled Banner”, all the outraged commuters stood at attention as their trains rushed out of the station empty. [It is now illegal to play the National Anthem in that venue.]) No one asked, “How/why did this happen?”)
American Ambassador to Tokyo, Joseph Grew wasn’t shocked. He came home for a visit two years before and was horrified at American ignorance of what was going on in the Pacific—and the uninformed hostility of Americans toward Japan.
American officials in Washington weren’t shocked either. SURPRISED, yes. We never imagined a bunch of little yellow people would dare to strike at our majestic fleet—or that they had the capacity to build carriers that could sail that far.
Two weeks before the attack, American Secretary of State Cordell Hull was asked by another cabinet member how the negotiations with Japan were going. It’s no longer my job, he replied—it’s now in the hands of the Secretaries of War and Navy.
Tokyo had, by their lights, done its best to avoid war. America, the pro-de Gaulle French Empire, the Dutch government in exile (which controlled the oil in Indonesia), the entire British Empire and American controlled Latin America had all agreed to sell Japan NO raw materials. That was, effectively, the entire commodity producing planet—except for China.
New York had frozen Japan’s financial assets in American banks. The only materiel Japan could lay its hands on were domestically raised rice, wood, fish, water and rock. You can’t run a society much advanced beyond the Stone Age with those materials.
Japan had pleaded with us. The “god-emperor” had made the unprecedented offer to travel to America to negotiate a lifting of the embargo. We said NO. Not unless Japan pulled completely out of China—the last source of raw materials available to them anywhere on earth.
We had built our whole foreign policy—since the landing at Jamestown—on someday owning and controlling China ourselves. Now that Britain, France, Germany and Russia were no longer in the picture, we were outraged that the Japanese threatened to thwart us.
It was a good old fashioned imperialist struggle—the Empire of Japan vs the American Empire. The Japanese were well aware that we were building a huge new fleet to destroy them. They knew of our ambitions toward China. They also knew they had another year, year-and-half, to settle affairs with America before Japan ran out of fuel and our fleet was too big to hope to defeat.
They sent the Nomura delegation to Washington to negotiate a resolution BEFORE the end of 1941 (and the beginning of Typhoon season in the Pacific) or “things are going to happen automatically. We knew this. We knew that the Japanese fleet was at sea. We thought they’d go directly for Indonesian oil—and our fleet had been moved out to Pearl Harbor to strike them from behind.
We never imagined they’d be smart enough to hit us first and then move on to the oil. Roosevelt may have felt a good bit of a fool as, voice shaking, he began, “Yesterday, a Day that will live in Infamy … .”
And so the myth of America’s total innocence was created. Next time let’s look at the myths that grew out of the German War.

War and Myth V

When we talk about the 1920s, the Depression and World War II, we resolutely live in a land of almost total myth. We were on the make—our statesmen as much as any businessman. We had been quarreling over who would control the British Empire since the 1750s when Franklin wrote, “in one century, the center of English speaking power will be North America”.
Britain tried desperately to prevent this—at places like Bunker Hill and Saratoga. She lost. She tried to hang onto the Great Lakes after the Revolution; she lost again. She tried to keep us out of Oregon and Washington—she gave up and ceded them.
She tried to keep us out of Texas and Cuba; we told her we would take either or both whenever we were able (Monroe Doctrine). We did. She tied to limit our control over a Central American transcontinental canal. She failed. She finally conceded the Caribbean to us in 1903.
When France and Russia made an alliance—and Germany, Italy and Austria allied, all in the 1890s—England realized she could no longer govern the planet from a position of splendid isolation. She turned to allies. She began talking to France; she allied with Japan and, very much, she turned her eyes toward her feistiest commercial rival, the North American colossus.
(When Napoleon sold Louisiana to the US he predicted, “I have created a colossus on the North American continent that will one day bring England to her knees.” In World War II we carried out the prophecy.)
We waited until England (and France) were nearly on their knees (and Russia was destroyed) before coming in and rescuing England in 1917. England was tottering on the brink of bankruptcy; we were fabulously rich.
We allowed Britain to go on spending money she did not have, keeping the Muslims quiescent, preventing the slave trade in Africa, and holding the line against our most formidable planetary rival, the new Soviet Union. We stayed home, needed to spend almost nothing for defense, and concentrated on making money.
At Versailles (1919) and after we helped force central Europe into bankruptcy and near starvation. Our markets went up and up and up. We paid no attention while the supposedly democratic (and even Christian) new government of revolutionary China became more and more corrupt, turning even to the Nazis for training and support.
With withering contempt we thwarted every aspiration of the newly prominent Asiatic power, Japan. We forced her to sink a large part of her navy to keep at only 60% of our fleet. We denied her access to funds and raw materials. We forced England to end her treaty with her.
We were a bit like an obliviously drunken man staggering through a room full of delicate china, crystal and bric-a-brac. We refused to acknowledge our own strength—or the responsibility that came with it. We kept up the myth that we were just a little fellow (like the United States of the early 19th Century) and there was nothing we could do or were obligated to do about anyone else.
This lay at the core of American economic, political and military isolationism. We firmly refused to accept that we had become the biggest kid on the block—that whatever we did affected everyone else. We hid behind the British Empire as we always had done—pretending it had not become an empty shell that a single blast would completely blow away.
Finally the whole rest of the planet went into economic heart failure. This brought us down too—although we refused again to acknowledge a correlation. We ignored Hitler. We ignored Stalin. One thing we could not ignore—and we owe FDR for this.
He came out of that small group of East Coast Imperialist who saw clearly we were an Empire—and must act like one. He recognized that our historic interest in controlling China (going back before Jamestown) was at risk because of the new Japanese power.
In 1934, he began a ten year navel building program—a fleet that could and would crush Japan. At long last the American giant was stirring—but still not seeing clearly through the fog of myth. But at least it was stirring a bit.

War and Myth IV

Twentieth Century history, uniquely for Americans, is shrouded in myth. (Europeans and Asians tend to be more realistic.) Walk into an American Legion bar on a Saturday night and try to disabuse a former GI of his most precious myths—and you take your life in your hands.
However, working exclusively from myths is a lousy way to make foreign policy. We’ve done it for decades—and our track record is getting to be about as good as General Motor’s over the same period of time.
We’ve gone from absolute market dominance (in 1945—when we controlled over half the world’s resources and surface) to a point where militarily, politically and economically the prospect of future bankruptcy is no longer unthinkable.
Blinding ourselves with our own myths has been part of the reason. We began the century with the myth that we entered World War I to save democracy and end war. Phooey.
The ultimate reality of the first half of the Twentieth Century was summed up by German Chancellor von Bismarck in the 1880s. Britain and America, he said, speak the same language. Bitter as our rivalry with England always was, we fundamentally had the same interests. Two points:
In 1820, the British fleet defended us from the “Holy Alliance” (Spain, Russia, France and Prussia) who planned to invade us and destroy the democracy they regarded as a disease. In 1898, when we grabbed Manila Bay, the British navy swung into line and protected us from the German fleet that was on its way to take over the Philippines.
American and British mutual interests would dominate the entire Twentieth Century. After World War II, we stepped in and took over the Cold War Britain had been waging against Russia since 1815. Seamlessly—our troops for British troops, our ships for British ships. Look at the 19th Century lines; look at the 20th Century lines. Just a different uniform.
Let’s go back to World War I. We hold a lot of mini-myths about that war—the Germans did NOT sink the Lusitania, willy-nilly, just for the joy of killing American civilians. It was a British munitions ship with passengers loaded on top as human shields.
The German consulate published warnings in American papers that it would be fired upon as any other munitions ship. The British, on the other hand, worked feverishly to load the boat with American passengers for shock value. It worked. The myth goes on.
A relevant figure—by 1917, the Allies were in hock to us for over three billion dollars. That was serious money in those days, more than our whole national debt had been seven years earlier. If the Allies lost we were in big trouble.
The Central Powers (Germany, Austria and Turkey) only owed us thirty million. Figure out which we could afford to lose more. At the end of the war, we jumped in—sent two million men to Europe, launched the final offensive that broke the back of the exhausted German army, and “won” the war.
We did not save democracy; we did not end war. In fact, with our ignorant meddling at Versailles, we helped create all the conditions that led to the next big war. Who, us?
At the end we were the only uninjured modern economy in the world; everyone owed us money—and our horrifying mismanagement of our creditor status led to an international collapse of the planetary economy in the 1920s.
We are not taught to look at the Great Depression (and the rise of both Communism and Nazism) in that light. Nor are we taught to look at our relations with Japan outside of the realm of myth.
Next time let’s take a look at the myths surrounding the last “Good War”, World War II.

War and Myth III

I grew up as a history buff. When I was in middle school read such tomes as a British critique of “Stonewall Jackson and The American Civil War” as well as the official evaluation of American/British strategic bombing in World War II. All I saw were the waving flags, the power and the glory. In the mid-1960s as a young man, I saw something else.
Queen Elizabeth awarded the Beetles with the Order of The British Empire—a military decoration and a high honor. Outraged veterans of Dunkirk, El Alamein, Singapore, Tobruk, the Blitz, Burma, the North Atlantic and D-Day sent their medals back, horrified and disgusted that four unkempt singers could be given the same medal they risked life and limb to win.
I thought about this, hard. Why? What was the Queen thinking? How do you equate being crippled for life with singing, “Love Me, Do”? Then I realized something. From the point of view of a government—the Queen’s or anyone else’s-- the Beetles and the man who spent four years in a Japanese POW camp had accomplished the same thing.
During World War II, England was threatened with near total destruction—political, military and ECONOMIC. The man who lost a limb in Burma was fighting to prevent such a defeat—and such a bleak future.
Fifteen years after the war, the Empire had imploded, Britain’s economy was in shambles and her future looked nearly as bleak as it had twenty years before. The first export England developed that all the world wanted—that put the crown and the nation back on an economically successful track-- was the four moptops. They made huge amounts of money for the crown.
That, I realized, is the proper function of war. Soldiers serve fundamentally to make or salvage money for the “crown”. One who does it especially well deserves a medal. The Beetles made lots and lots of money for the “crown”—they did it especially well. They too deserved a decoration.
I began to rethink my entire view of war—its causes, its purposes, its consequences, its usages and its liabilities. I thought of the two kinds of wars. There is the first kind—the VOLUNTARY kind, the kind you actually have the option not to fight.
Every American war since the French and Indian War in 1754 has been of this variety. Honor, loss of face or assets, determination to hang on to what had or (as the Biblical book “James” puts it) a war fought because we wanted something we did not have, these were all reasons we fought.
But, at whatever cost in face, treasure or future prospect, we could in fact have walked away. The South would not have invaded us; we could have stopped Pearl Harbor by simply selling Japan the fuel it needed to keep factories running and people from freezing; they had no compelling wish to attack us.
If we hadn’t flown bombers over Germany and fired on German subs in mid-Atlantic Hitler would not have voluntarily declared war. Not immediately, at least. The Revolution was completely unnecessary—if all we were really after was more freedom. Before we allowed people to vote for Senators, Britain passed most of the reforms we demanded. And so forth, and so forth.
We chose the wars we entered—just as we chose to fight in Iraq. (We had greater necessity in Afghanistan, rather like the French in Algeria, but we bungled it so horribly.) I’m not saying we shouldn’t have. I like the consequences of living in a huge—and hugely profitable—American Empire.
I’m not talking about involuntary wars—like Poland invaded by Germany or Mexico invaded by the United States. These are sometimes true tragedies. You fight simply to survive, like Israel in an Arab sea—and the profitability of the war doesn’t figure in. But these are actually somewhat rare—certainly in American history they have been.
Let’s look honestly at our wars. We did what we did because we wanted to—and we could. We may have found ourselves on the side of the angels from time to time (be careful about claiming that—it’s safer simply to be honest).
Let’s not let our own myths leave us confused. We wind up lying to ourselves that way—and that is the most dangerous person to lie to!
Let’s take another look at myth tomorrow—about the “Good Wars” of the Twentieth Century

War and Myth II

Every school child in America accepts the myth that we fought the American Revolution to be free and untaxed. Well, we did fight it to be untaxed. Americans were absolutely outraged when England suggested that we contribute our share to pay for the armies and ships Britain sent to this continent to defend us against the French and their Indian allies.
We immediately turned to our old enemy, France (as the French very well knew we would), for help in not paying our taxes to England. (Poetic justice was served when we broke our treaty with France and left her, bankrupt and ripe for her own rather ghastly revolution, to fight England alone—while we made a separate peace on excellent terms.)
But taxes weren’t really the major issue. Certainly not for the New Englanders who basically started the whole thing. The completely non-mythological question was: who will control the Trade Routes To China? That question bedeviled Europeans ever since the Pope ran his Line of Demarcation across the hemisphere back in the 1490s.
The British tried to block us from the Pacific by turning the eastern Mississippi Valley over to Quebec in 1767. (That one act alone made war inevitable.) The Spanish could see it coming and began to settle Northern California with urgency the same decade.
But we fought. We got everybody who hated England to fight. France and Spain tried to invade England herself—only bad winds stopped them. Gibraltar was besieged for years. The League of Armed Neutrality made life miserable for England all over the globe—Holland, Prussia, Sweden and Russia. England quickly found herself up to her naval in alligators.
Finally the British quit—having lost another army to Washington and his French troops, artillery, and fleet (remember Lieutenant General, Commander in Chief of His Catholic Majesty’s Armed Forces in the New World?). They gave us most of what we wanted and backed out of the war.
(The one major war aim we failed to achieve was Canada. We had invaded in 1775—you can still see American cannon balls in old Quebec. We would invade again in 1812, but we would never succeed in getting it.)
But as soon as the British blockade of Boston harbor was lifted in 1783, the American ship, Star of India, set sail for China. By 1790, an American captain was plying the west coast of Spanish/British/Russian America identifying which ports we would need to control the Pacific. As we achieved our fiscal aims, we kept teaching the myths to our kids.
(We have the ports we identified today—San Diego and San Francisco , and Seattle (all obtained in the 1840s)—as a result of a successful war in which we stripped Mexico of half its territory and a near war with Britain that cost her half the Oregon territory. Two obviously victorious wars for us—when you think of all the resources in the territories involved and how much money having ports on the Pacific has made us, very victorious indeed.)
Those wars—the Revolution, 1812 (which got us everything we were promised in1783 but the British reneged on), the Mexican War and the dispute over Oregon were victorious wars or near wars indeed. Each made us money. Each is shrouded in myth.
Most of our 19th Century wars cost a relatively minimal investment in men, materiel and money—and won us almost immediately a substantial profit.
(In the Civil War we invested risked and lost much more. It was a unique war—issues of future growth and national policy failed to be settled any other way than with “blood and iron”. It caused real damage—but in the end we made more than it cost us. It too has to be rated as a won war.)
We have become so enamored of our own mythology—“No taxation without representation”, “free the impressed seamen”, “remember the Alamo”—in which pro-slavery Texans fought fiercely to overturn the Mexican constitution and make Texas a slave state—“Fifty-four forty or fight” and “His truth is Marching on”—that we have forgotten how to evaluate war in any rational way.
That has hurt us in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has made the question of whether or not we “won” in either case almost completely meaningless. Like the people who watched the value of their 401Ks plummet like a rock, we may well have to pay for that failure to see clearly.
More tomorrow on the myths that blinker us.

War and Myth I

People need to believe that wars are fought for some noble, even spiritual, cause. This is especially true if you are dealing with someone who has invested a son, a husband or some other relative or friend in the war in question.
The French with their wonderful, if somewhat cynical acuity, understood this perfectly when they created the Foreign Legion back in the 1840s. They were about to embark on a series of colonial wars in North Africa.
They had good and sufficient reason to do so—Algerian pirates, “Barbary pirates—named after the red bearded Muslim admiral who created them in the Sixteenth Century—had made shipping along the southern coast of France a misery for centuries.
Fleet units of several “Christian” nations had been stationed along North African shores for almost as long. We had a squadron there from 1800 to the 1840s ourselves. The French were finally ready to end it—and pick up any goodies lying around at the same time.
But the French knew that “colonial wars” (like Vietnam, Iraq, etc.) are a hard sell to the mothers of dead soldiers. It gets very messy when parents of maimed and wounded troops can vote. So the French created a foreign force with no mothers in France to grieve. Very, very smart.
American mothers are no different. During the Civil War, can you imagine how many American moms would have urged their sons to go down and fight to help New York bankers gain financial hegemony over the rest of the United States?
No, no, no, it would never work. So we created the mythology that we were fighting to free the slaves, a much more noble cause to die for. Problem: only a tiny percentage of northerners had ANY interest in that happening at all). When reality hit myth after the war, we backed out in a hurry and allowed southerners to impose Jim Crow laws that more accurately reflected what the nation felt.
But the myth worked for recruitment purposes.
It was more true that we were fighting to preserve the Union. After all, how could we compete with Britain and other industrialized nations if we split in two? But it still sounded better to sing, “As He died to make men holy let us die to make men free … .”
The Civil War made us money. Up until that war, we were basically a commodity producing economy—our biggest national source of income in 1860 was cotton. The war allowed industry and banking to develop. By the 1870s we were one of the largest industrial producers and exporters in the world—flooding European markets with admittedly shoddy goods.
(Both Japan and China would take a page out of that book in the Twentieth Century. Vietnam and Korea are coming on fast. At a dollar a day wages in the 1800s, we made ‘em cheap and dirty.)
So—we invested in the Civil War, and we WON it. The agricultural South and West would never have an effective veto over the economy again. At least if you’re from the industrialized part of the US, you won it.
But our history books prefer Julia War Howe’s version of events. It was all about “grapes of wrath”, “trampling”, and “terrible swift swords”—fighting to make men free. Certainly sounds better. But it flies in the face of a century of actual history.
Let’s look at a few more myths tomorrow.

Iraq, Afghanistan--Are We Winning?

Once again the question is upon us: when is a won war a lost war? When is a lost war a won war? Or when is a won war really a won war; when is a lost war really, really a lost war? They’re even trotting out the old “Mission Accomplished” banner that Bush had the Navy fly seven years ago when he proclaimed Iraq a won war.
Are we winning in Afghanistan? Are we winning in Iraq? Do you remember how people wanted to know if we won in Korea and Vietnam? What constitutes actually winning a war?
Let’s get something straight. Many of know the old saying, “War is diplomacy by other means”. That is partially true—certainly coming out with a diplomatic advantage goes some of the way toward deciding who a won and who lost.
But more importantly—war is an INVESTMENT like any other investment. You invest money, materiel, human lives—and you look for a return. You “win” by getting a decent to good return on your investment. Ghoulish sounding—but true.
Let’s go back over an instance in which the winners and losers are very clearly indicated—World War II. When the shooting stopped, British, French, Russian and American troops were all waving bottles of vodka, German beer and Saki, cheering madly, and the Germans and Japanese were standing around looking very dejected. Obviously the first four won, right?
Wrong. Let’s look at how it actually played out.
There was one big winner—the United States. For us the war was like walking into a casino, putting a dollar in the slot and finding ourselves up to our shoulders in money. We’ve lived off the proceeds of the Japanese, British, French, Belgium and Dutch empires ever since. Nobody in history ever won a war like we did in 1945.
There were two nations for whom the war was essentially a wash—Japan and Germany. In the end, they rebuilt their factories and are possibly better off today than they would have been if the war had never been fought. In the category of “winners”, they may come in a decent second to the United States.
There were two participants who really didn’t do all that well for several decades after the war and may or may not possibly be coming out of their economic funk today. Maybe. Russia and China.
Then come the major losers. Britain, France, Holland and Belgium. The biggest loser of all was, of course, Britain. Immediately after that comes France. They ruled most of the globe in 1939. Twenty years later they had about the international clout of Portugal or Rwanda. Their economies were far behind Japan’s or Germany’s.
Skip the flag waving and the cheering. Who really won is whoever got a decent return on the investment.

It’s all about the money. Just like your 401K. It’s about the money. If you made money, you won; if you lost money, you lost the war.
One of the reasons we lose sight of this reality is that—politically—you cannot say this to the people who go to the front to do the fighting and dying. So government propaganda—in all warring nations—has to obfuscate the actual causes and aims of the war.
Everybody’s national history books follow the national line on the war and reality gets lost. This is nice for the vets and the bereaved mothers—but it makes it all but impossible to take a dispassionate look at a prospective war (such as Iraq in early 2003) and weigh its pro’s and con’s as if it were any other investment. Which we should do.
Tomorrow let’s look at how we lose sight of reality when looking at the possibility of war.

Earthquakes, Logic and Science

Logic—and probably logic alone, no “scientific” evidence—might suggest that the earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and now Turkey may be related. After all it seems to make sense that a quake large enough to make the entire planet wobble and to cost us all an instant of time might be part of a general shake up of the tectonic plates that make up this globule of rock and earth.
But there’s no hard evidence, so, so far, no one is suggesting out loud that there might be a correlation. So what if the Nazca, South American, Caribbean, African and European plates all touch each other—show us the irrefutable evidence. Isn’t any. So it didn’t happen.
Einstein sensed the deficiencies of this approach. He once suggested that imagination (which logic can be part of) is more important than knowledge (which rises out of evidence and proof). But, then again, he died the subject of mockery and rejection by most of his scientific peers.
And he came up with his theories of relativity and the equivalence of matter and energy under the most primitive conditions—not in a scientific laboratory but as a bureaucrat sitting in an office reviewing patent applications. Lousy science to say the least.
Where was his proof? It took decades to finally prove that the Einsteinian universe he imagined in his mind actually existed. That’s not the way it’s supposed to happen.
Perhaps Einstein intuited that this is the way science OUGHT to be done. Imagine it first—working within the mind, mulling “what if’s”, scribbling on yellow sheets of paper—and finally come up with an entire theory that hangs together out of pure logic—no scientific proof.
When the logic is wrong—or misses something important—the empirical evidence will provide the necessary course correction. But we made a misstep, scientifically—two missteps, actually: one was about two thousand years ago; the other about two centuries ago.
Two men are at the root of our scientific methodology. Plato and Aristotle. Plato believed that scientific truth should be arrived at exclusively in the mind. Aristotle believed in arriving at it through experimentation.
Already in those days, back in ancient Athens 2300 years ago, the argument had begun. Aristotle left Athens and, for the next two millennium science was done Plato’s way, exclusively. Which left science a one-armed man. Mind only, no experimentation to back it up.
The problem was that, with no experimentation at all to back it up, logic can and does go astray. It took Galileo in approximately 1600 to reintroduce observation into science. Unfortunately he all too thoroughly discredited imaginative science.
The story may be apocryphal—but it illustrates what Galileo did for AND TO science. It had been argued for centuries—logically—that a heavier object would fall faster than a lighter object. He is said to have climbed the leaning Tower of Pisa and dropped two unequal cannon balls. They fell equally fast—upending centuries of scientific dogma, based purely on logic.
But Galileo had an effect he may not have intended. He rendered Einstein’s “imaginative, intuitive”, kind of science completely unacceptable in correct scientific society. To be merely logical, rational, Platonic is to incur the greatest modern curse: “unscientific”.
So we mustn’t use logic. What seems to possibly make sense must be proven by costly machinery found only in laboratories. Knowledge (proof) trumps imagination.
No one seems to know how to make them work together. Since Galileo—with the possible exception of Immanuel Kant—no one has really wanted to. Science is left like a man with one arm—he loses something by not having both.
No proper scientist would ever suggest a theory based on logic and/or imagination. Not since Einstein did. What might happen if the tectonic plates really started slipping all over the planet?

As Yoda Sees Politics, the Economy and War

The nation feels to me like the clutch is in. Do any of you remember the old stick shift cars—where you disengaged the engine from the wheels by putting in the clutch with your left foot? There was that moment when you felt like nothing was happening.
More frightening were the old propeller driven passenger aircraft. At about what seemed like 50 feet off the ground, the pilot changed the pitch of the propellers. In effect, he put the clutch in. It felt for a second like you were hanging motionless in mid air—until the propellers re-engaged and pulled the airship forward.
Each time that happened I’d remember all the headlines I’d read about planes that got “about 50 feet off the ground” and crashed. That was always the white knuckle moment for me in flying. (Jets never quite did that.)
That’s how Washington, Iraq, Afghanistan, the economy, health care reform, the currency problems in Europe, our relations with China (and nearly everyone else) all feel to me. The clutch seems to be in. It doesn’t feel like anything is moving in any definite way.
Perhaps Yoda from Star Wars put it best: “The future, clouded it is.” One article says the economy is showing lots of silver around the linings—the next says we can count on a wave of foreclosures this year and major unemployment for three more years.
Each cites its expert sources. One says we are winning in Afghanistan; the next suggests that the ancient Afghan will to wreak vengeance isn’t going to go away just because we send in more troops and make nice to some village elders.
A single kid with explosives in his underwear makes flying an almost unendurable experience for many Americans. We are warned that international terror is as real a danger today as it ever was in 2001. But when was the last plane actually brought down?
On health care, we are told Obama has found the magic bullet. He will use an old Republican trick of getting the bill passed under the Reconciliation Process where only 51 votes are needed—instead of the filibuster busting sixty.
How many Democrats are looking at the polls (measuring how Americans feel about this particular 2000 page monstrosity of a porked out reform bill) and allowing the urge to survive move them toward a negative vote? Or just an abstention?
Nobody’s counting publicly. Pelosi has a margin of five votes to play with—are they all still with her? What are the chances for success if Congress does what a lot of people are calling for and starts all over again, with something people can understand?
What’s really going on in Iraq? Last week’s “Newsweek” reran the picture of Bush on the carrier with the sign, “Mission Accomplished”. Is it, finally—after seven bitter years? Or is there another joker or two in the deck like there was in 2003?
The DOW seems to be content to jiggle around in the mid-10,000 point range. A little up, a little down, even a bit sideways. Somebody says, “Boo” and down she goes; somebody shouts, “Hurrah” and up she jumps. What’s real?
I’m just sitting in my seat—like in the old airplanes—waiting for the props to start pulling air again. Even the Olympics didn’t seem as much fun as they used to. Does anybody have a clear idea whether we’re headed up or down?
“The future, clouded it is.”

Customers--What's Loyalty Worth?

A couple of years ago Hewlett-Packard offered my college age son what seemed like a good deal. The warranty on his laptop was expiring (if you’ve EVER owned a laptop without a warranty, I’m sure you have cursed yourself for that oversight) and for the nominal fee of $250 they would sell him a warranty for two more years.
Trust me, on a laptop that’s a decent deal. So he sent in $250 of his limited funds and got the extended company warranty good through October, 2010. At least that’s what the paperwork in his hand says. A few days ago he was having trouble with his mouse pad and decided to invoke the warranty.
He called Hewlett-Packard. They denied all knowledge of such a warranty. Said it couldn’t possibly be. He brought out his credit card record showing that Hewlett-Packard accepted his money. They passed him on to someone else.
He went through the explanation again. He got passed on to someone else. This person passed him back to the first person—who passed him on to yet someone else. Each time he was put on hold for as much as ten or fifteen minutes before being passed on.
After three hours they gave him yet another number to call. It was dinner time and he gave up for the day. But he and his mother did check out a blog site on Hewlett-Packard. It seems a whole lot of people who bought similar extended warrantees from HP are having the same problems.
Interminable waits on hold, being passed back and forth, denial of all knowledge, a purported “supervisor” who obviously is not—and so forth.
Sometimes a problem with customer service is obviously—even on this end of the phone—a problem of too many people having been laid off, leaving survivors overwhelmed. (I’ve talked about the local grocery manager who transferred to a different department—“They doubled my product and cut my staff in half”.)
Sometimes a company is so frantic to save money that it appears to repent of its own foolishness in making promises (or selling warranties) that now, in more straitened circumstances, it has no plans to keep. So it ducks, dodges and weaves.
Hewlett-Packard makes an excellent machine. It sells, by far, the most computers of any company in the world. Perhaps they feel the quality of their product trumps any need for good customer relations—or even merely honest ones?
(General Motors thought that way once—when it had over 50% of the American market. Seemingly, Toyota has come to think that way in the past decade or so. My wife worked part time at a major retail chain a few years back. She recalls that the company attitude went from “Anything to make the customer happy” to “forget service—get them out of the door”. Associates who didn’t make that transition fast enough were penalized.)
I recall an elderly man I met years ago. During the Depression, when no building supplier in his right mind was giving contractors any credit, he offered credit to his good customers. He carried them for months, even for years. When I met him, decades after the Depression was over, he was a very rich man with a stable of loyal customers.
Just read a piece on Singapore Airlines. When carriers all over the world are charging you for luggage, cutting back on food, drinks and amenities, Singapore is not. Service remains full. Luxury remains luxury. They—in contrast to lot of other airlines, are doing nicely.
There is a passage in the Bible that says, “Do unto others as you wish they would do to you.” It will no doubt make you virtuous and well liked. It just might also make you rich.
Next time we look at computers, do you suppose we just might look at somebody else’s line? What about all those other bloggers out there—who can’t seem to locate anyone who knows anything about their extended warranties?

Jerusalem--Dwelling Place Of Peace

Jerusalem. The unending continues. Muslim kids took refuge in a Muslim holy site right above the Wailing Wall after pitching rocks at Jews praying at the wall. Israeli cops entered the site in search of the stone throwers and the disturbance became general.
And somehow we live in a fantasy world where the “peace process” can be restarted just like an automobile—just turn the key and push the gas pedal. Away we go; peace at last. Lasting peace. Thousands of years of hatred gone, just like that.
More likely that Chile or Haiti will be able to abort their next major earthquake. Just turn the key … . The pent up forces in Jerusalem are about as powerful as the pent up forces when one tectonic plate slides under another, gets stuck and jerks loose.
Reality in Jerusalem (and Israel and its neighbors) is about as cruel as it was on the American frontier—no peace between “cowboys and Indians” until one side was thoroughly defeated and driven off the range.
Same thing was true in western Europe at the end of the Roman period. Peace only came after the invading Germanic tribes whipped the Roman legions and settled down in Imperial territories. Some conflicts simply don’t lend themselves to a negotiated peace.
You can call a truce—some can last almost a century as the truce between Parthia and Rome that prevailed when Parthian Magi could find their way to Bethlehem into Roman space without a fight. But the war went on for six more centuries—didn’t stop until a third party (Islam) conquered both sides. Truces, as the French and British could tell you, looking back over their own history from 1066 to 1914, are only temporary.
The Great Wall of China is a monument to a war between herdsmen and farmers that simply would not end, century after century. Jerusalem—“dwelling place of peace”—is a similar monument. Arabs have been fighting over it for 1,300 years. Before that, Jews fought to get it, hang on to it or get it back, for a previous couple of thousand years.
It’s the City of David; it’s the city Saladin took back from the Crusaders; it’s the city Nebuchadnezzar burned down; it’s the city Pompey walked through, it’s the city where Christ died; it’s the city Allenby took back from the Muslims in 1917; it’s the city where Roman legions burned down Herod’s temple; it’s the city the Arab legion denied Israel in 1948—it’s the city of which Jews have spoken for thousands of years at Passover—“Next year, Jerusalem”.
It’s THE most sacred place to Jews and Christians; it’s the third most sacred to Muslims. The sacred component is what makes the struggle so intractable. Muslims have planted their third most sacred mosque smack on top of King Solomon’s temple site.
On this mountain, the Bible story tells us, Abraham was asked to sacrifice his own son, Isaac. That’s when the division occurred—about 4,000 years ago. Jews claim their descent through Isaac (who survived the near sacrifice); Arabs claim their descent through Abraham’s other son, Ishmael. Both claim God’s blessing came through THEIR ancestor.
The land around Jerusalem had turned into desert by the 1870s when Jews began to return to Israel to escape Russian pogroms. Arabs were happy to sell such worthless real estate to them. The refugees re-dug ancient wells and made the desert bloom.
Arabs wanted the revitalized land back—thus began the modern quarrel. Five Arab armies tried to exterminate Israel and its Jews in 1948. All five were defeated. The defeats went on—until Jews took back the ancient City of David in 1967.
To imagine that they will give it up for any price is to imagine that all earthquakes and tsunamis will cease. To imagine that Arabs will give it up for any price is to imagine that all hurricanes and tornadoes will cease. Either, like the cowboys and Indians, one side has to win with brutal decisiveness—or, like ancient Byzantium and Persia, some third party has to whips both.
It’ll be easier to make Congress work together or to make the Taliban our friends than to “restart the peace process” over Israel and Jerusalem. It might be more sensible to get out of the way and let them settle it—by themselves.