February 2008 – Resurrected blog entries

6 February 2008

3 from James Carroll

Filed under: Political, Zen — wizzard @ 2:03 pm

Every few weeks I catch up on Jame Carroll’s excellent editorials and feel compelled to share them. See 3 of his most recent just below.

JFK’s torch for Obama

Filed under: Political, Zen, WAR! — wizzard @ 2:01 pm

By James Carroll February 4, 2008 WHEN SENATOR Edward M. Kennedy and members of his family endorsed Barack Obama in Washington last week, the real meaning of that torch-passing was defined by where it occurred.

John F. Kennedy is remembered as having given an important speech at American University, and that was noted. JFK’s future orientation, his rhetorical flair, his knack for drawing out the young, his own youthfulness – these were the highlighted points of connection between John Kennedy and Barack Obama. But the content of the 1963 speech suggests what really is at stake when a 21st century presidential candidate steps into the aura of the slain president. At American University John Kennedy laid out an urgent vision for this country. He did not live to advance that vision, and it remains unrealized to this day.

The most telling fact about the commencement address Kennedy delivered on June 10, 1963, is that Kennedy wrote it in secret. A small circle of trusted aides contributed to the text, but Kennedy kept the national security establishment in the dark about his intentions, which is surprising, given his subject. He came “to this time and place,” he said, “to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived – yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.”

In those days, the language of peace was used by idealists, not realists – but it was exactly that dichotomy that Kennedy targeted. “Too many think peace is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief.” Indeed, Kennedy’s speech was an end-run around his national security experts, a direct appeal to the broad public, an attempt to break the iron grip of Cold War militarism that imprisoned the White House and the State Department, as much as the Pentagon. Kennedy had been preparing the speech ever since he had stared into the abyss of nuclear war the previous October, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He knew that, but for his own lonely opposition to the nation’s most “realistic” defense leaders, the nuclear holocaust would have happened. “I speak of peace because of the new face of war.”

Awareness of the new face of war defined Kennedy’s wisdom. His speech, addressed as much to the Soviet people as to the American, was a breakthrough. Gone were demonizing paranoia and saber rattling. Instead, he honored the virtue of the Soviet people, and suggested that the Cold War standoff was as much his nation’s fault as theirs. “We are both caught up in a vicious cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counterweapons.” Beyond rhetoric, he offered concrete steps to improve the situation, from something as specific as a new “hot line” communication system to something as ambitious as new structures of international law. He pleaded, especially, for a time-out in the arms race.

Nikita Khrushchev ordered Kennedy’s speech rebroadcast throughout the Soviet Union, the first time an American president’s voice was heard by average people there. It worked. Six weeks later, Moscow and Washington agreed to the long-sought Partial Test Ban Treaty, the beginning of the arms control regime that, eventually, enabled the Cold War to end nonviolently.

But Kennedy’s vision, in fact, went unfulfilled. Arms control did not stop the arms race from 25 more years of irrational escalation. Washington’s national security establishment tightened its grip on politics, economy, and culture – so much so that when the Cold War ended, America maintained its Cold War stance, even through Bill Clinton’s administration. This happened because our leaders, together with the American people, grew complacent about the dangers of the nuclear arsenal on which US power still rests. We lost change-the-world urgency that so seized Kennedy only months before he died.

To rekindle the flame of the American University speech would be to restore a preference of negotiation over confrontation, to build self-criticism into policy making, and to affirm the utter realism of idealistic hope. Ted Kennedy sees the possibility in Barack Obama of the realization of his brother’s greatest vision.

That vision, conceived negatively, boils down to this: If humans do not change the way we resolve international conflicts, the planet is ultimately doomed to nuclear devastation. The abolition of all nuclear weapons, starting with our own, must be at the top of the new president’s agenda.

Conceived positively, the American University vision means that humans are poised, by necessity, for a great leap into a new and better world. Yes, we can.

James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.

Our one-way trip to disaster

Filed under: Political, Zen, WAR! — wizzard @ 2:00 pm

By James Carroll January 28, 2008

YOU AND everyone you love are riding on a large bus. The bus driver, unskilled and careless, drives too fast, ignores traffic signals, and barrels off the road occasionally. Because the bus is huge, other vehicles swerve to get out of its way, with cars crashing repeatedly. But your driver just keeps going, leaving carnage in his wake. Naturally, you are terrified – but your reactions are irrelevant.

Finally, the bus itself crashes, killing many. Miraculously, you and your loved ones climb out of the wreckage. A second bus is standing by, and you gratefully scramble aboard. The engine starts up, but then the bus lurches dangerously onto the road, going too fast. Only then do you see that this new bus has the same driver, and he has learned nothing. Welcome to the United States of America. And welcome to the annual State of the Union address.

Every year, the nation looks up from the wreckage, only to see that the same unskilled and careless driver is still at the wheel, bombing along. Each January, he explains himself. You already know what he will say. His one admirable quality is that, over the years, he has always said exactly what to expect. A review of the Bush speeches has an “I told you so” quality, going back to the start. That raises the question, Why have you repeatedly been surprised?

It was, after all, in his 2002 State of the Union address that President Bush defined the purpose to which he has been dedicated ever since. “Evil” was his constant point of reference, and he claimed the mantle of one who would end it. America’s enemies were an “axis of evil,” while America’s friend was God, who, Bush told us, was “near.”

In such a cosmic moral struggle, normal standards of restraint did not apply. That you could not imagine yet the wreckage of law and decency – torture, wiretapping, concentration camps, treaty betrayals – that would follow from this course does not detract from your obligation to acknowledge that it was openly set by Bush’s first statement of purpose. Your bus was being driven by St. George, the dragon slayer. And why should mere rules of the road apply to him?

In 2003, the State of the Union address was, in effect, a declaration of war against Saddam Hussein. Bush could not have been more direct in stating his intentions, asserting absolutely that Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction were a present danger.

Bush promised that Secretary of State Colin Powell would immediately go before the United Nations to prove it. (To Bush’s credit, the 2003 speech also unveiled the “Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief,” his administration’s one positive accomplishment.) When Bush drove the United States into full-blown Middle East war two months later, he was only following the plan he had already laid out.

In 2004, Afghanistan was a smoldering ruin, and Iraq was under the bus. Yet Bush declared victory right and left. “The boys and girls of Afghanistan are back in school,” he said. As for Iraq, we were only dealing with “a remnant of violent Saddam supporters.” He was still saying that Hussein had had weapons of mass destruction.

In the 2006 State of the Union address, Bush repeated that “we will never surrender to evil,” but now he was explicitly associating it with what he called “radical Islam.” This careless labeling took the bus into the mine field of religious war.

What is most notable about the 2006 speech, however, is that New Orleans, still reeling from Hurricane Katrina, barely appeared in it. That the United States of America has abandoned that great city and its people to this day – surely to rank as the Bush administration’s most notable act of domestic policy – should have been no surprise to anyone who heard him then.

Last year’s State of the Union address was historic. Because of the antiwar mandate of the November elections, and the cover offered him by the consensus around the Baker-Hamilton commission, Bush had a golden opportunity to change the disastrous war course he had set.

Instead, with the so-called surge, he gunned it.

“This is not the fight we entered in Iraq,” he said, “but it’s the fight we’re in.”

That’s like the driver saying, “This is not the road I thought it was,” as he leaps to safety just as the bus goes off the cliff. We are a nation in free fall. The final insult is that, one more time, the driver gets to lecture us.

James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.

Islamofascism’s ill political wind

Filed under: Political, Zen, WAR! — wizzard @ 1:58 pm

By James Carroll

January 21, 2008

THE UNFOLDING presidential elections are laying bare what the real dangers are in the new American condition. They come not from our political divisiveness, economic uncertainty or military insecurity – but from our religious character as a people, which, in this case, is not positive. Religious intolerance marks one candidate debate after another – a sweeping denigration of Islam. And it is going to backfire.

The code word “Islamofascism” has become a staple of rhetoric. It braces the talk not only of pundits, but of all the major Republican candidates – from the tough guy at one end, Rudy Giuliani, who lambastes Democrats for not using the word or its equivalent, to the “nice” candidate at the other end, Mike Huckabee, who defines Islamofascism as “the greatest threat this country [has] ever faced.”

The pairing of “Islam” and “fascism” has no parallel in characterizations of extremisms tied to other religions, although the defining movements of fascism were linked to Catholicism – indirectly under Benito Mussolini in Italy, explicitly under Francisco Franco in Spain. Protestant and Catholic terrorists in Northern Ireland, both deserving the label “fascist,” never had their religions prefixed to that word. Nor have Hindu extremists in India, nor Buddhist extremists in Sri Lanka.

In contrast to the way militant zealotries of other religions have been perceived, there is a broad conviction, especially among many conservative American Christians, that the inner logic of Islam and fascism go together. Political candidates appeal to those Christians by defining the ambition of Islamofascists in language that makes prior threats from, say, Hitler or Stalin seem benign. The point is that there is a deep religious prejudice at work, and when politicians adopt its code, they make it worse.

The Democrats gain little by shaping their rhetoric to appeal to the Republicans’ conservative religious base, but a readiness to denigrate Islam shows up on their side, too. In last week’s debate, moderator Brian Williams put to Barack Obama a question about Internet rumors that claim he is a Muslim. The tone of the question suggested that Obama was being accused of something heinous. He replied with a simple affirmation that he is a Christian. He did not then ask, “And what would be wrong if I were a Muslim?” Had he done so, it seems clear, he would have cost himself votes in the present climate.

The present climate is my subject. In recent years, the public realm has been invaded by a certain kind of narrow Christian enthusiasm, made up partly of triumphalistic self-aggrandizement (exclusive salvation), and partly of the impulse to denigrate other religions, especially Islam. This phenomenon has been centered in, but not limited to, evangelical fundamentalism. The United States cannot have a constructive foreign policy in religiously enflamed regions like the Middle East, northern Africa or South Asia if the American presence in such conflicts is itself religiously enflaming.

Thus, how could the United States advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process if its government upholds, however implicitly, the Christian Zionist dream of a God-sponsored Jewish state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean? Where is the two-state solution then? How, for that matter, is the traditional American commitment to the Jewishness of Israel advanced if the Christian Zionist vision of ultimate Jewish conversion to Jesus is achieved?

The issue is larger. The intellectual and moral paralysis of all major candidates from both parties on the subject of the war in Iraq is mainly a result of their religion-sponsored imprisonment in the Islamofascism paradigm, whether they use the word or not. By emphasizing that the goal of Muslim terrorists is to wage what John McCain calls a “transcendent” war against “us,” candidates miss the most important fact about the conflicts in Iraq and throughout the Muslim world – that militant Muslim zealots are primarily at war with their own people, most of whom they regard as decadent apostates.

As Muslim scholar Reza Aslan observes, Osama bin Laden’s attack on the World Trade Center was more aimed at generating a war of purification within the house of Islam than a war of conquest against “the far enemy” in the West. That strategy worked, sparking exactly the belligerent reaction he wanted, because America’s uninformed, religious prejudice toward Islam was predictable. What Bin Laden could not have imagined was that he would find like-minded partners-in-conflict coming to power in Washington, advancing his religious war, every bit as sure of God’s sponsorship as he.

James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.

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