From Greg Grandin, Kissinger’s Shadow: Douglas Brinkley: You called Henry Kissinger a genius, and you get a kind of twinkle whenever you mention Kissinger. What is it about Henry Kissinger that you found so— Alexander Haig: You don’t think there is something between us, I hope. Brinkley: I don’t know. Greg has the best footnotes.
In the early 1950s, Henry Kissinger edited the journal Confluence. Among the writers he published there was Hannah Arendt. Their editorial relationship was fraught. His edits were heavy; her resistance, strong. Here she responds to his attempted edits on August 14, 1953: I fear you will be disappointed to see from the galleys all sentences which you wrote were eliminated and quite a few of my own sentences re-instated….I realize that your editorial methods—re-writing to the point of writing your own sentences—are quite current….I happen to object to them on personal grounds and as a matter of principle. If we had given this matter a little more thought, you might have decided not to want this, or any of my manuscripts, which […]
Thomas Schelling at a meeting of 12 prominent Harvard professors with Henry Kissinger in May 1970, just after Nixon had announced the invasion (though not the secret bombing) of Cambodia: As we see it, there are two possibilities: Either, one, the President didn’t understand when he went into Cambodia that he was invading another country; or two, he did understand. We just don’t know which one is scarier. As Greg Grandin points out in Kissinger’s Shadow, from which I got this quote, Kissinger/Nixon’s justification for invading (and secretly bombing) Cambodia was to ferret out the “sanctuaries” that this neutral country was providing to the enemy in Vietnam. Today, that doctrine is widely accepted among America’s ruling and chattering classes: no “safe […]
Margaret Thatcher started with the Falklands and finished with the unions: We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands. We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty. Scott Walker started with the unions and wants to finish with the Islamic State: If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world. Foreign policy is domestic policy is foreign policy is domestic policy is…
Via Suresh Naidu comes this news about our second staunchest ally in the Middle East: Saudi Arabia is advertising for eight new executioners, recruiting extra staff to carry out an increasing number of death sentences, usually done by public beheading. No special qualifications are needed for the jobs whose main role is “executing a judgment of death” but also involve performing amputations on those convicted of lesser offences, the advert, posted on the civil service jobs portal, said. … A man beheaded on Sunday was the 85th person this year whose execution was recorded by the official Saudi Press Agency, compared to 88 in the whole of 2014, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW). Amnesty said there were at least […]
A reader from Australia sent me the following quote from Alexander Cockburn (somewhere past the 32 minute mark): Liberals sometimes say, “We want weapons that work.” No we don’t. We want weapons that don’t work. We should be in favour of Star Wars, it will never work…
Easily the funniest thing I’ve read all week. A military operation so vital to the interests of the United States, they forgot to name it. On “the late naming of Operation of Inherent Resolve“: Unlike their coalition partners, and unlike previous American combat operations, no name was initially given to the 2014 intervention against ISIL by the U.S. government. The decision to keep the conflict nameless drew considerable media criticism. U.S. Service members remain ineligible for Campaign Medals and other service decorations due to the continuing ambiguous nature of the continuing U.S. involvement in Iraq. On 15 October 2014, the United States Central Command announced that the U.S.-led air campaign against ISIL in Iraq and Syria was henceforth designated as […]
An interesting coda to the U. Mass. ban on Iranian students in engineering and the natural sciences that was later overturned… On Friday’s All Things Considered, Melissa Block interviewed US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, a former nuclear physicist at MIT, about the nuclear arms negotiations/deal with Iran. This exchange occurred: BLOCK: There is a really interesting confluence here because when you were starting teaching at MIT, the Iranian, now Iran’s top nuclear physicist, was then a graduate student at MIT. Do you think that had a bearing on the talks, the fact that you shared that history? I know you brought him some MIT swag when you went to Switzerland. MONIZ: (Laughter) That’s right. Well, because in the – in our second […]
My Salon column this morning on Joe Biden and the Jews has generated a lot of conversation, at Salon, on Crooked Timber, and on my Facebook page and others. I want to address here four objections to the column that have been made. 1. A few commenters have claimed that I completely misinterpreted Biden’s comment. Biden wasn’t saying, they claim, that American Jews have no guarantee of their safety save Israel but that Israeli Jews have no such guarantee. What’s more, I alone have come up with this far-fetched reading, ignoring for my own reasons—a desire for “clickbait,” one commenter said—the more obvious interpretation of Biden’s remarks. There’s a few problems with this claim. First, and most obviously, Biden’s remarks were first reported by […]
My new column at Salon on that crazy comment from Joe Biden that I talked about the other day. Only now I look a little further into it: A country that once offered itself as a haven to persecuted Jews across the world now tells its Jews that in the event of some terrible outbreak of anti-Semitism they should… what? Plan on boarding the next plane to Tel Aviv? It’s like some crazy fiction from Philip Roth, except that when Roth contemplated an exodus in “Operation Shylock,” it was to imagine the Jews fleeing Israel for Poland. … The reason no one has been ruffled by his statement, I suspect, has less to do with any special sensitivity to Jewish experience […]
Last September, Joseph Biden said the following to a group that included many leaders of Jewish organizations and Jewish officials in the Obama administration: I had the great pleasure of knowing every prime minister since Golda Meir, when I was a young man in the Senate, and I’ll never forget talking to her in her office with her assistant—a guy named Rabin—about the Six-Day War. The end of the meeting, we get up and walk out, the doors are open, and … the press is taking photos … She looked straight ahead and said, “Senator, don’t look so sad … Don’t worry. We Jews have a secret weapon.” I thought she was going to tell me something about a nuclear […]
From a recent press conference: State Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki: “As a matter of long-standing policy, the United States does not support political transitions by nonconstitutional means….” AP journalist Matt Lee: “Sorry. The U.S. has—whoa, whoa, whoa—the U.S. has a long-standing practice of not promoting—what did you say?…” Psaki: “Well, my point here, Matt, without getting into history—” Yes, let’s not get into history, shall we? h/t Junyoung Verónica Kim
We have Human Rights Watch. Why not Irony Watch? To wit: U.S. President Barack Obama issued an executive order on Monday declaring Venezuela a national security threat… … “We’ve seen many times that the Venezuelan government tries to distract from its own actions by blaming the United States or other members of the international community for events inside Venezuela,” [White House spokesman Josh] Earnest said in the statement.”
Of the war on terror, Christopher Hitchens once said: I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost. Now comes Bernard-Henri Lévy, who, when asked by Jon Lee Anderson why he supported the intervention in Libya, says: Why? I don’t know! Of course, it was human rights, for a massacre to be prevented, and blah blah blah… Never underestimate the murder men will commit, the mayhem they will make, just to escape their boredom. But every enthusiasm has a shelf life. Even imperialism.
From The Washington Post (h/t Marilyn Young): “It’s a childish story that keeps repeating in the West,” smiled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, in an interview with the BBC last week. He was dismissing allegations that his regime is attacking Syrian civilians with barrel bombs, crude devices packed with fuel and shrapnel that inflict brutal, indiscriminate damage. “I haven’t heard of the army using barrels, or maybe, cooking pots,” Assad said, and then repeated when pressed again: “They’re called bombs. We have bombs, missiles and bullets. There [are] no barrel bombs, we don’t have barrels.” If you think Assad doth protest too much, you’re probably right. The Post not only cites evidence supporting the claim of the Syrian regime’s “frequent use of barrel bombs in densely packed […]
Reading this post by David Cole—on Obama’s unauthorized war on ISIS—my mind drifts to the German political theorist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt famously defined the sovereign as “he who decides on the exception.” Long established and stable constitutional regimes presume and rest atop legal routines, social patterns, political order, normalcy: “For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist.” In such situations, political authority is constrained by a set of rules and its exercise of power is almost as predictable as the social order itself. But there are moments in the life (and death) of a society that exceed the boundaries of these laws and routines, moments, as Schmitt says, when “the power of real life breaks through […]
Readers of this blog will know—I hope—that I have a nearly physical revulsion toward all things imperial and militarist. But sometimes I have a reaction that points in the opposite direction. When terrible things happen to other people in other countries, and the cries for humanitarian intervention mount, I feel an emotional tug: We should do something to stop those terrible things! But then I think about someone who lives somewhere that doesn’t house a planetary armory. Does my doppelganger in Costa Rica or Lichtenstein feel that same tug? I don’t mean the natural human empathy for people who suffer; I mean that combination of guilt and duty that makes one feel like a shit, a bad person, for not […]
The economist Gary Becker has died. Kieran Healy has a great write-up on Foucault’s engagement with Becker; Kathy Geier has a very smart treatment of, among other things, feminist critiques of Becker’s theory of the family. And some more personal reminiscences of taking a class with Becker. Kathy mentions this article that Becker wrote in 1997 about the Chicago Boys who worked with the Pinochet regime. Becker’s conclusion about that episode? In retrospect, their willingness to work for a cruel dictator and start a different economic approach was one of the best things that happened to Chile. No real surprise there. Many free-marketeers, including Hayek, either defended the Pinochet regime or defended those who worked with it. But the Becker […]
Vo Nguyen Giap, the military leader of the Vietnamese resistance to French and American domination, has died. The Washington Post has a decent obituary, but this bit of language really caught my eye. Listen carefully to the different verbs that are used to describe the actions of the US versus those of the Vietnamese, post-Geneva Accords. At the Geneva Conference that followed the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam was divided into two countries: north and south. In the north, the Communist Party ruled under the leadership of Ho. With the French colonialists out of the picture, an ambitious land-reform program was undertaken, for which Gen. Giap would later apologize. “[W]e . . . executed too many honest people . . . and, seeing enemies […]
I feel about Henry Kissinger the way Edmund Burke felt about Warren Hastings: We charge this Offender with…nothing, that does not argue a total extinction of all moral principle; that does not manifest an inveterate blackness of heart, died in grain with malice, vitiated, corrupted, gangrened to the very core….We charge him with nothing, that he did not commit upon deliberation;…They were crimes, not against forms, but against those eternal laws of justice…. …We have brought before you the Chief of the tribe, the Head of the whole body of Eastern offenders; a Captain-general of iniquity, under whom all the fraud, all the peculation, all the tyranny, in India, are embodied, disciplined, arrayed, and paid. This is the person, my […]