In  Stephen Kinzer’s recent book “Reset: Iran, Turkey and America’s Future,” the author, writing as a regional expert in Middle East  history and politics, has attempted to formulate a new pathway for reconciliation in the Middle East, one that advocates a lasting peace and insures prosperity for the region, by reducing the tensions through recruiting two new players in the peace process that heretofore have not been inserted as major partners for a settlement. This new vision for peace, includes the participation of  Turkey and Iran as major players, two countries that would probably not be on the top of the list drawn up by most Americans. We are still locked in a mode in which we think negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel can lead to a magical formula for peace, but only if thousands of clauses and sub-agreements get adopted as conditions for talks or preconditions for peace. But Kinzer argues that until all the major players in the region are included, such negotiations are all destined to fail. He argues that a negotiation strategy between two partners only is completely naive and that the United States needs to more maturely step up to the plate and insist on a peaceful solution involving all those in the region, because the stakes are too high for the economies of the world to continue taking oil in exchange for arming every country to the teeth, in order to protect the national interests of each new nation that comes to the area looking for black gold. Furthermore, Kinzer argues that bringing in Iran and Turkey will make the peace process easier, though the United States will have to deal with Iran more effectively than what we have done to date, and a big step forward for that objective could be achieved if the U.S. stopped behaving like an emotional child towards Iran and finally recognized the fact that Iran is a major player, not a minor leaguer, and that our invasion of Iraq helped to make it that way. Are you listening Dick Cheney?

Continued conflict in the Middle East increasingly risks the danger of evoking a wider conflict between any number of countries that are increasingly competitive with one another in hopes of establishing oil contracts in the new cutthroat game of searching for scarce new oil and gas leases, as China, India, Japan, South Korea and many other countries have become and will continue to insist on being players in the region. The history of the United States in viewing Persian Gulf oil as something that it owns, sparked in part by the “Carter policy,” and preceded by FDR’s secret agreement with Saudi Arabia, forged in 1945, to provide their protection in exchange for rights to the Saudi oil fields–all that history seems to be the policy mantra that we are moving forward with, which cannot help but evoke serious conflicts in the future: not that the region needs any new ones. It wasn’t just 9/11 that changed things for us, it was the emergence of a new world-wide panic that we are headed for “global peak oil.”

Kinzer has written several books about the Middle East. One of my favorites is “All the Shah’s Men: an American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror,” published in 2003 that explains how the CIA, at the request of the British Government, overthrew the democratically-elected Prime Minister, Mossadegh, in 1953 because he had nationalized what was then known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil company (today’s BP); the United States replaced him with the Shah (Mohammad Reza, the son of Reza Pahlavi), who in turn, was overthrown in the 1979 coup that led to the Islamic cleric Khomeini as Iran’s new leader.   The success the CIA had in overthrowing Mossadegh, served as the U.S. template for eliminating other democratic governments in favor of installing autocratic despots, especially in South American countries, beginning with Guatemala in 1954. The point of all this CIA intrigue was supposedly based on an assault against communism, but every American should know by now that it was really all about securing a favorable climate for American corporate interests. The Truman administration refused to act on the British outrage (Truman apparently admired Mossadegh), of the nationalized oil company, as they demanded return and control of Iranian oil. In fact, they had an embargo against Iran.   But, a few years later, during the Eisenhower years, when the CIA and the Secretary of State positions were occupied by  Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles (each of whom favored American corporate interests over the sanctity of internal nationalist movements), they agreed to help the British re-establish their control of Iranian oil. According to Kinzer, we are still paying the price for what we did in overthrowing Moassadegh in 1953. When the Iranians revolted against the Shah, the Mossadegh story was the first one they mentioned to their American captives. Americans didn’t find out about the CIA overthrow until 2000, when the New York Times got hold of a secret CIA document and published the details of the story.

In his book “Reset,” Kinzer takes us through the early 20th century history of Turkey, the first democratic Muslim state and Iran, a more troubled country, but one with deep democratic instincts, as we all witnessed by the turmoil that took place following last year’s presidential election. In the 1920s, both Turkey and Iran generated leadership who were committed to advancing their countries through a pathway of secular modernity. In the case of Turkey, it was Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, made famous by his military success at Galipoli,  who led Turkey from its planned destruction and occupation by the victors of WW I, through a decisive military victory over the Greek army,  followed by the consolidation of modern Turkey into a secular state. For Iran, the new leader to emerge was Reza Pahlavi who wanted to help modernize Iran through the formation of a secular state, using the Turkish model he admired. However, Reza had to settle for a new monarchy in which he was crowned king, as the 132 year old Qajar dynasty was abolished. The difference between the two countries was that Mustafa Kemal was successful in unseating the power of the clerics in Turkey, whereas Reza had to accommodate the religious leaders, which remains today as one of the fundamental differences between the two countries. But, as Kinzer points out, we need to form relationships with large countries that are committed to peace and democratic reforms. Turkey is already there and could be the first Muslim c0untry admitted to the European Union. They also have good relationships with Israel and they have gained experience in their diplomatic dealings with neighboring countries. Iran right now is a conflicted state, but one that cannot be ignored as a major player in any peace settlement for the region. Kinzer suggests that it may not be possible to deal with Iran right now, but our hardline attitude towards the country only insures that hardliners within Iran will have the advantage of leadership, much like how our attitude towards the Soviets during the Cold War extended the lifespan of their dictatorship; we surely prolonged the life of the Soviet Communist state through our obsessive confrontational policies.

Now is the time to recognize that the primary result of our invasion of Iraq was to strengthen the hand of Iran, who has become a far more important player in the region in the post-Iraq invasion world; our actions served to push Shiites in Iraq into leadership positions, and they have established friendly relationships with Iran. That’s as it should be and there’s no getting around it.  That train left the station the moment we entered Iraq and declared war on the Bathists. Today, we continually tell ourselves that our main fear is that Iran may be enriching Uranium on its way to building nuclear weapons. But there is very little evidence supporting that view and Iran is a signatory of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which,  neither Israel nor India has signed.  In reality, what we are worried about with Iran is having a hostile country that is too close to our prized partner in oil production–Saudi Arabia. We had relied on the Shah of Iran, whom we armed to the teeth with American weapons, to serve as our surrogate army in the Middle East. But with the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, something that dumbfounded our State Department,  together with the humiliation we endured when our embassy workers were kept hostage for more than a year, Iran quickly converted from friend to foe and ever since we have reacted like an emotional child to Iran, insuring that they in turn react emotionally towards us. Bush calling Iran a member of the “axis of evil” was hardly realistic or knowledgeable about our mutual history. But any realist can see that no peace settlement in the Middle East is possible without the inclusion of Iran as a major player and we have to recognize that our best partner for approaching the peace process is  Turkey. So we should be doing everything we can to facilitate Iran’s conversion to a more cooperative partner, and engaging Turkey as a full partner, not a messenger boy.

Few Americans are aware that Iran has been very cooperative with America in the post-9/11 era. Iran is a bitter enemy of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In the months following 9/11,  Iran and American officials met constantly. At the request of the U.S., Iran expelled hundreds of foreigners within its borders that the U.S. believed were connected to the Taliban or al-Qaeda.  Iran connected the U.S. to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan,  which we engaged to fight a proxy war in that country. In early 2003, after Bush’s silly “axis of evil” speech,  Iran tried to approach the United States in a cooperative mode. They proposed comprehensive talks and laid out an agenda in which the United States would end its “hostile behavior” towards Iran, lift the economic sanctions, guarantee Iran access to peaceful nuclear technology and recognize its legitimate security interests. In exchange, Iran offered to do the two things demanded of them by the U.S.: full transparency in its nuclear program and the elimination of any material support for militant groups in the Middle East, specifically referring to Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. This was the most forward-looking proposal that the U.S. had received from Iran in a quarter century and quite astonishingly (maybe not so surprising when you think about the American actors on the stage at the time), Bush turned the offer down because he and his cohorts wanted to destroy Iran not compromise with it. It is is simply mind-boggling to think that GWB would  turn down the Iranian offer for negotiations on the very issues we claimed were important to us, and all of this took place after he had given his axis of evil speech. It is sometimes hard to know whether the destructive hard line attitudes that prevent reproach between the two countries belong to the U.S. or Iran. Perhaps a little of both. But if our objective is that of establishing peace rather than dominance, we must recognize that Iran cannot be left out of the equation. I haven’t done justice to Kinzer’s book “Reset,” but it’s a fascinating read and brings a whole new perspective to the  equation table that we will need before we have a legitimate and just fix for the Middle East. One of the problems we face in confronting issues of the Middle East is that of basic competency and judgment on the part of our State Department. Kinzer talks about the acute need for sage officials among our diplomatic corps, and stresses a time when we did have a better, more informed State, which had a more longitudinal view of the world. As he talks about the need for more cultural knowledge of Iran, he quotes Nassir Ghaemi who is knowledgeable about both countries. Ghaemi points out that i) Americans are willing to compromise principle for results; Iranians are willing to sacrifice results to principle; ii) Americans worship the future, Iranians the past; iii) Americans value forthrightness and simplicity while Iranians prefer complexity and iv) Americans have imbibed science while Iranians have done the same with literature. Yet, despite these cultural differences, Americans and Iranians have far more in common and it is this larger, common set of values that should bring Iran and America into a much closer alignment, particularly when thinking about the gravity of the issues that must be solved if more serious conflict is to be avoided.

RFM

Peak Oil Production and Imports in U.S.

In response to CNOOC’s offer for UNOCAL, the Republicans, ever anxious to demonstrate why the free market system doesn’t apply to essential commodities, moved to prevent the sale by attaching an amendment to the Energy Policy Act on July 26, 2005, calling for a four-month review of China’s energy policies. This effectively killed CNOOC’s chances for acquiring UNOCAL, as another bid for the company from Chevron was coming up. The Chinese saw the writing on the wall and withdrew their offer, but remained in hot pursuit of oil contracts throughout the far reaches of the globe.

The unsolicited offer from the Chinese to purchase UNOCAL brought chills to the American spine about energy policies and raised new questions about whether the United States had the right policies in place to secure its own energy future. If China was looking for oil in America’s backyard, maybe that’s because there isn’t any more oil in all the other backyards? That was a question for which Americans wanted an answer. Or maybe not.  One of the problems that traditional oil companies face is the rising tide of nationalism in oil company ownership.  Thirteen of the top fifteen oil producing and reserve holding companies are nationally owned, including Saudi Aramco, National Iranian Oil, Iraq National Oil, Kuwat Petroleum, Abu Dhabi National Oil, Pertoleos de Venezuela S.A., National Oil Corp of Libya and the  Nigerian National Petroleum. The top eight companies in terms of oil reserves are all nationally owned.  The only international oil companies in the top fifteen include Lukoil (Russia) and Chevron (USA).  Many have argued that with nationalization of such an essential economic commodity as oil, those companies that remain private will increasingly operate at a disadvantage, as nationalized companies form relationships between governments that enhance shared oil reserves but also go deeper to promote trade and solve other issues to enhance the arrangement. International oil companies, like Shell, Chevron and BP can’t negotiate such holistic deals. Thus, Saudi Arabia is increasingly selling oil to China.

The urgent state of Americans over oil reserves was a driving force for the new gas and oil drilling leases that the Obama administration announced earlier this year, many of which are now on hold because of the Gulf spill, though I doubt this action will last for very long–there’s too much American panic. A state of  urgency  has now reached every oil and gas producing organization around the globe, as countries and companies try to enter into new relationships to secure oil and gas reserves as far into the future as possible.  It appears that no stone will be too sacred in our global thirst for oil and gas. While we move sluggishly to think and talk about getting off the oil habit by becoming more self-sufficient in energy, and moving away from fossil fuels, the rest of the world is buying up as much of the reserve oil supply as new energies are unleashed to discover more. But, while drilling more, they are finding less. The United States could reach a permanent new oil crisis before any transition in energy dependency takes place. That fear will haunt every administration beginning with the current one. Suddenly, a new world order is taking shape out there, one based, not on the size and extent of one’s economy or military, but instead derived from the sense of national security that a country can bestow on its citizens by guaranteeing energy capacity well into the future. Right now that future seems to be measured in twenty year increments. So alarmed was the Bush administration over the future of oil in the American gunsights, that in January 2008, Bush met with the Saudi king Abudllah during a swing through the Middle East and and pleaded on behalf of the beleaguered American public for increased production to ease the price of gasoline. Normally that would be a role for an oil company executive, but those days are over. We are now talking about the future of our national economy.

The global need for energy promises to expand in a major way within the next twenty years, primarily because of the huge growth anticipated by the expansion of the Chinese and Indian economies. China’s energy demands were at 68.6 quadrillion BTUs in 2006, amounting to 15.6% of the world’s energy consumption. But in 2030, the Chinese energy projection is for 145.4 quadrillion BTUs and 20.1% of the world’s oil consumption.  In the next 20 years, China will have to add the equivalent of what Europeans currently consume if they are to meet this expectation. Projections for India are almost  equally  expansive, though less overall: in 2006 India energy consumption was at 17.1 quadrillion BTUs and in 2030, they are projected to need 31.9 quadrillion BTUs or about 4.5% of the world’s energy. Right now things look best for China. They have a lot of hard currency on hand and can afford to pay top $ for energy contracts. In the meantime, America is bogged down in wars that we cannot possibly win and we suddenly appear to be very disadvantaged in many cases when competing with nationalized oil companies.

The major unanswered question about our oil future is this: Obama recently used the BP Gulf oil spill to sound a clarion call for national action to get out from underneath the heal of oil companies, begin to diversify our energy sources and move away from fossil fuels. It seems simple enough: diversify our economy by expanding it into the production of renewable forms of energy and conservation and, as an added benefit, save the planet. But, if you were sitting in the White House and you had a choice to remove subsidies from oil companies, or better yet, begin to charge oil companies and gas consumers a tax to support this energy transition, would you do it,  given the new form of panic that seems to have set in by the CNOOC offer for UNOCAL and the ongoing BP Gulf oil spill? It will take a considerable and risky amount of political capital to make the sensible choice, because one oil shortage later and your ticket to Mount Rushmore, if you think that’s where you were headed, would be suddenly exchanged for a ticket to Palookaville.

Note added: the quantitative numbers on energy consumption and projections were taken from Michael T. Klare’s book “Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: the New Geopolitics of Energy.”

RFM

Al Franken

If you watched any part of the Elena Kagan Senate judiciary hearings for her nomination to the Supreme Court, you might have recognized that someone stole the show. It was not Kagan herself, though she had some good moments and, as a future Supreme Court Judge, one can anticipate that she will make an excellent foil against ideologues on the court, who want to rule from their gut, such as Antonin Scalia.  Kagan knows the law and she’s firm enough in her convictions through scholarly experience that we hope she won’t back down to decisionary arguments that arise directly from the intestinal wall.  Nevertheless, her placement on the Supreme Court will still preserve the current  5 to 4 decision-making balance, as the court will still be able to march the country to the very edge of a corporatist state. But the star of last week’s judicial hearings was Minnesota’s junior Senator Al Franken, the newest member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Although he was probing the opinions of Kagan herself on legal issues, his message was really directed to his fellow Republican members on the Judiciary, whose favorite theme was whether Kagan would be an “activist judge” and if so they would argue, she would be an undesirable new member of the court.

But during Franken’s questioning, he established how, in many cases, the Roberts court had exceeded  the normal judiciary philosophy and and in doing so was effectively making new law from the bench. The court that the Republicans wanted to defend was in fact the most activist court in decades, sort of like the pro-slavery Supreme Court of the 1850s.  Franken showed deep knowledge of case law in the examples he cited and he always structured his arguments in such a way that he was supporting the average person when confronted by legal obstacles, or unfair practices.  Franken did most of the talking and appeared to frustrate Kagan, as she was given little room to express herself except that she mostly agreed with Franken’s assertions, at least on principle issues. Franken’s probing left little doubt that the Roberts court, through their many, sometimes shocking decisions, is effectively the right arm of our march to a corporatist state and he gave very concrete, important examples of how this was being achieved and how prior laws, such as labor laws, were being undermined or ignored by the Roberts Court. A C-Span video is available where you can see Franken’s remarks on labor laws and mandatory arbitration and how the court has dismissed previous congressional labor laws which bestowed an employees right to sue his/her employer with new rules that replace that right with mandatory arbitration clauses embedded in the labor contract. This trend has been aided by recent decisions of the Roberts court. You can watch a section of Franken’s interview with Kagan here, though you have to go into the video by about 1:32 to see the Franken section.

Before Franken’s turn at the microphone in the Kagan hearing, several Republican Senators had used Kagan’s appearance to slam Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first black judge appointed to the Supreme Court. Kagan was formerly a law clerk with Marshall and had given glowing evaluations of him as a Supreme Court judge. Many Republicans have racism in their genome, but make sure their race card gets played out through deflected attacks, such as those on a deceased Supreme Court judge.  Franken defended Marshall very eloquently and pointed out how his decision-making process and his rulings and opinions made him one of the great Supreme Court  justices of all time, primarily because his decisions were not aimed at improving the fairness under the law only for blacks, but for all people against whom discrimination had been given the sanctuary of law.  Franken’s probing of the law, with Kagan as background,  provided stark relief from the simple-minded nature that Supreme Court Justice nominee hearings have been in recent years: he cited case law and even footnote numbers to demonstrate what justices had decided in several famous cases that seemed to go against the grain of common sense or prior established law. Franken stood in stark contrast to all other Senators, who must have been embarrassed to see a non-lawyer out-doing them on matters of judicial philosophy and details of important case law.  He single-handedly raised the bar for future Supreme Court nominee interrogations and hearings. It is doubtful that the Republicans would even try to defend the Roberts court decisions in these many areas, as they have chosen obfuscation over clarity.  Franken’s views are unabashedly progressive and he doesn’t try to hide them–he is staunchly committed to the law as it exists to protect the average citizen or including those workers who are no longer getting a “fair shake” under the law, especially when standing before the current iteration of the Supreme Court. His views include the old fashioned idea that corporations exist to serve the public, not the other way around. Once we get back to that point of view, we should be able to pronounce our society as healthy once again.

Ever since the two term Senator from Minnesota, Paul Wellstone, was tragically killed in an airplane crash during his campaign  for re-election in 2002, something has been missing from the Senate. During his short two-term Senate career, Wellstone had a clear voice in which he articulated the case against going to war with Iraq in 1991 and in 2002 and spoke out forcefully for the average citizen in such areas as increased support from our healthcare system for viewing and treating  psychiatric illnesses as valid health problems. Although Ted Kennedy was also articulate and passionate on many matters, particularly health care, Wellstone’s focus made him standout as a special protector of the poor and dispossessed.    He was passionately sincere and a populist supporter of a progressive legislative agenda. He reproduced Robert Kennedy’s trip into Appalachia to demonstrate than malnourishment among the poor in that region was just as bad as when Kennedy had visited there some forty years earlier.

When Wellstone spoke, the entire senate listened and he became identified as the conscience of the Senate. His oratorical capacity to articulate his point of view was almost obligatory listening for all Senators, from both sides of the isle, even though many felt the same way they had felt about Hubert Humphrey many years earlier–that he talked too much. However, Wellstone’s absence since 2002 has reduced the Senate to a much more contentious, confrontational and highly polarized body that had, at one time,  seemed far more focused and sensitive when Wellstone’s voice was among them. Many liberal Senators, such has Harkin of Iowa,  were shocked and wept openly when Wellstone died; no one has quite replaced him.  Although the DFL (Democratic-Farm-Labor) party in Minnesota tried to quickly insert Walter Mondale to oppose Norm Coleman in the closing days of the 2002 Minnesota Senate campaign, immediately after Wellstone’s death, voters were disgusted at the apparent attempt to turn Wellstone’s public eulogy into a political event promoting Mondale’s candidacy (Franken, who attended the event, pointed out in his book (see below) that painting the Wellstone memorial service as a political event was right-wing propaganda and those that promoted this idea (Peggy Noonan as one example) were not even in attendance). Propaganda or no, Wellstone’s Senate seat was filled by Republican Norm Coleman, former mayor of St. Paul and former Democrat, who would prove to be a right-wing apologist for GW Bush up and down the political spectrum.  This transition between Wellstone and Coleman in the span of a single Senate seat was an excursion in political philosophy and independence that was shocking in its operation and disgusting to see as a resident of Minnesota. Six years later, comedian Al Franken, a most unlikely candidate, won the DFL’s endorsement and the Democratic primary to run against Coleman, who was seeking his second term. Though one of the closest elections in Minnesota history, Franken was eventually declared the winner, after a massive, complex recount of the vote. The delay imposed by the long vote recount and court actions surrounding the election, meant that Franken’s appointment to the Senate was delayed and that he couldn’t enter in a timely fashion with the incoming congressional class from the 2008 election results. He was sworn in as U.S. Senator on July 7, 2009. He had been officially  declared the winner of the Minnesota Senate election by 312 votes.

When Franken joined the Senate, he was given the standard treatment for a junior Senator, but did manage to get a spot as the lowest ranking Senator on the Judiciary committee. However, no one knew what to make of him as a Senator. He had been a famous comedian on Saturday Night Live. He had migrated to have his own syndicated radio show, Air America and had written five best-selling books, one of which seemed to frame his evolving political personality in his 2003 book “Lies and the lying liars who tell them: a Fair and Balanced Look at the Right,” in which he took on the main right-wing pundits, such as O’Reilly, Hannity and Colmes, Paul Gigot, the editorial section of the Wall Street Journal and many others. This was not just a simple pundit’s book; it was one aided by a group of Harvard students who helped chase down articles, such that the book included references as if it was a book of scholarship and research, containing  notes for each chapter in the back of the book. Despite the title, the book was a “cut above.” It served to help Franken establish a kind of demarcation line between himself and those he criticized and made fun of.  He was sued by Fox News for his use of “Fair and Balanced” which they claimed was a registered trademark of the O’Reilly show. A federal judge dismissed the suit saying that it was without merit. In the meantime, very slowly, but with deliberate intent, Franken began speaking out about how the court system had violated judicial restraints by making recent landmark decisions which exceeded their authority under our constitution.

I had expected that when Wellstone died, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin would assume the leadership role for the progressive movement in the Senate and become the movement’s principal leader.  But, for reasons unclear to me, Feingold has been muffled, more so since Obama was elected. It now seems increasingly clear that the leadership role for progressive arguments and political philosophy will fall into the hands of someone other than Feingold, perhaps Al Franken. Franken is ambitious, very smart, with a good sense of humor and a person who strikes a little bit of fear in the hearts of every other Republican Senator who feels that they might become the target of one of Franken’s jokes. Given the nature of political reporting these days, a timely  joke or label from Franken about a Republican Senator might have the sticking power of super glue. The modern press, robbed of creativity of its own as a self-inflicted scarring wound,  loves to latch on to little phrases and descriptions so they don’t actually have to write about news, rather than cite quips.  Franken still has a long way to go before we can pronounce him the “Lion of the Senate,” but his comfort zone for this kind of leadership is rapidly growing as he gains experience and grows in reputation. It is quite amazing to me that no one in the mainstream media detected the separation that Franken established between himself and all other Senators on the Judiciary committee during the Kagan hearings. To me this separation was self-evident and full of substance. Those committee meetings will never be the same–their discourse has been irreversibly elevated.  Franken has not qiute finished a full year as a junior Senator, but there is no doubt that his voice will be heard more often as he has quickly become the most fascinating of all members of the Senate. To attach trivial descriptions to members of the Republican opposition, ones that will stick with the press is all that will be required for the press to begin talking about them as if their arguments and actions are indeed trivial.

RFM

As befitting a militarist society, especially after deciding to rule the world after WW II, we typically allow our generals to get their way in times of conflict and they are very experienced and skilled in how to game the system to achieve  their objectives. After all, most military officers in command positions are careerists–they are in it for the long haul, whereas with Presidents, it’s two terms at best, and then you’re out. Furthermore, the military is like a one party system that favors the most confrontational approach to our conflicts and in some areas, like the Air Force, is becoming a fundamentalist Christian organization, working through the right hand of God.  Our military leaders have learned to play our Presidents like a fiddle and they always have the upper hand: cross them or diminish their requests and you run the risk of endangering our troops that are already on the ground, or you are in danger of a complete meltdown of your presidency.  Lyndon Johnson was paranoid over losing Vietnam and going down in history as the first President to surrender a country to communism (who was responsible for Cuba?).  As a result, until the time when his Presidential aspirations were destroyed, Johnson  never said “no” to General William Westmoreland during the major part of his tenure over the Vietnam War; he allowed a massive troop infusion which reached a peak during his Presidency of 535,000 American soldiers on the ground.Vietnam was America’s biggest disaster if only for the fact that it was derived out of our ideology over communism and failed to see the nationalistic fervor of Ho Chi Minh.

But the contrast to the image given to us by the news media can be gleamed from a Newsweek excerpt from Jonathan Alter’s new book “The Promise: President Obama, Year One,” which appeared in May of this year as “Secrets From Inside the Obama War Room” [the following is largely based on Alter's article]. We all remember that when Obama ran as a candidate, he referred to the Iraq war as the “wrong war” and Afghanistan as the “good war.” After all that was the war against those who had actually attacked us on 9/11. As Alter points out, when Obama was first formulating his new strategy for Afghanistan, he pronounced that he didn’t want to continue with the same policies that had produced an apparent quagmire and helped to make Afghanistan into a “narco state.” Obama had become acutely aware that during both the Vietnam and Iraq wars, there had never been any key meetings by policy makers where all the issues and assumptions were laid out on the table and discussed–both wars had escalated by incrementalism. OBama was determined not to let that happen over Afghanistan, especially since he demanded that a new strategy needed to be implemented. Obama basically said that for the past eight years, the military under GW Bush got everything they asked for and it was time to put some brakes on this process and view the conflict through a different set of spectacles. As Obama began to press for the kinds of meetings in which all issues could be discussed, he had the first of 10 “AFPAK” meetings on September 13, 2009. He raised the concern that the war in Afghanistan was soon going to be longer than the war in Vietnam (11 years) and would be the longest military conflict in American history. He was well aware of the fact that whatever policy he pursued, unless it was rapid removal of all troops, the war in Afghanistan would become Obama’s war and he ran the risk of having that war not only determine his Presidency, but perhaps, as it did to Lydon Johnson’s, destroying it in the process.

But, the military knew how to get their way and they began to engage in  gamesmanship. As the AFPAK meetings evolved, the Pentagon began to leak reports in order to force Obama into adopting their strategy, which included a large troop surge and a strategy of counterinsurgency, with virtually no end in sight.  In particular, an early  report by McChrystal on the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan (before he was in charge) was leaked to reporter Bob Woodward of the Washington Post before Obama had a chance to see his recommendations. As Alter points out in his Newsweek article, “the military ran PR circles around the neophytes in the Obama White House.”

One idea for a new policy in Afghanistan was favored by Vice President Biden, who supported the strategy of the increased use of drones and restriction of military actions to those of pursuing Al Qaeda. At a speech in London in early October, McChrystal was asked if he favored a drone war focused on Al Qaeda and replied “The short, glib answer is no.” In other words, it appeared that McChrystal was prepared to defy the President, should Obama side with Biden’s suggestion–a clear act of insubordination and an unmistakable challenge to  civilian control over the military (something in fact that happens on a regular basis, particularly for military hardware procurements).  Obama and his advisers finally got the message–they interpreted McChrystal’s remarks as those of a naive spokesperson who was actually speaking for Joint Chief of Staff Michael Mullen and General David Petraeus, who were trying to box Obama in before he had decided on a policy in Afghanistan. Petraeus appeared to have both military and political power projections and has been considered as Presidential material for  a run for the Presidency as a Republican candidate in 2012, something he has denied.

In response to McChrystal’s London speech (October 2009), Obama decided that he needed to show the military brass who was in charge. Gates and Mullen were summoned to a National Security Council, where Obama told them that he was extremely unhappy with the Pentagon’s conduct and said that [From Alter's article]  “the leaks and positioning in advance of a decision were disrespectful of the process and damaging to the men and women in uniform and to the country.” Obama insisted that he be informed “here and now if the Pentagon would be on board with any presidential decision and could faithfully implement it.” As far back as anyone could remember, the military had never been spoken to like that and it grabbed everyone’s attention. No single President since Harry Truman had ever challenged the military as directly as Obama did that day. Mullen was “chagrined” after the meeting and claims to have always supported civilian control over the military. He and Gates pledged the kind of support and commitment that Obama demanded of them and told Obama that their conduct would change. A few days later Gates would say in a speech, “it was imperative that generals provide their advice candidly but privately.” At that point, the Pentagon stopped trying to sell McChrystal’s own plan for Afghanistan and agreed to support the President’s strategy. In the November AFPAK meeting, Obama called Petraeus on his bluff–and asked directly whether he could deliver in Afghanistan what he did in Iraq, using a counterinsurgency strategy coupled to a surge in troop numbers. His answer was affirmative. Obama agreed to a troop build-up, but only if the surge could be ramped up and then down on a much shorter time frame: the military was suggesting many years of commitment for the entire process to unfold–basically an unlimited extension of the war.  Obama demanded that the process be shortened so that by 2011, one could begin to bring troops home if it didn’t work or, alternatively,  if it was hugely successful. The key to the success of this strategy was to turn over retaken territory to the Afghans. The President’s instructions to McChrystal were clear–”don’t take territory unless you can immediately turn it over to the Afghans.”  Biden asked Obama [Alter's article] “if the new policy of beginning a significant troop withdrawal by 2011 was a direct presidential order that couldn’t be countermanded by the military. Obama said yes.” Obama had learned how to deal with the military. He would thereafter close each meeting by saying “and that’s my order.”

In a private White House meeting, Obama pressed Petraeus harder by asking if he could really deliver a meaningful result in 18 months and Petraeus answered “yes.” He reassured Obama that the army could train the Afghan National Army to assume the responsibility for the war in that time. Obama got all of the military leaders, including Gates, Mullen and Petraeus to sign on board for the new policy. In this way, Obama managed to turn the tables on the Pentagon. If the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated in the next 18 months, then it would be proof that the military’s insistence on more troops could not get the job done and their policy of counterinsurgency with a “surge” of troops would be a failure. No one then could say Obama had not given the military what they wanted, except that it was not going to be on their timetable. Had Biden been President at that time, he probably would have fired Gates and Mullen and forced Petraeus into a position of obscurity. When Obama spoke to McChrystal by teleconference when he first assumed command in Afghanistan,  he could not have been clearer in his instructions according to Alter: “Do not occupy what you cannot transfer.” McChrystal got the message.

This finally brings us to McChrystal’s interview in the Rolling Stone, the event that brought about his firing. By openly admitting that the battle for Marja was all but lost or interminably delayed, McChrystal was conveying that the counterinsurgency he had signed onto in 2009 was horribly naive and perhaps could never succeed. His own troops were angered by the approach; they were denied access to fighting a war, rather than handing out peanut butter.  It is not clear whether McChrystal was on a drunken spree with writer Michael Hastings or whether he was sober enough to understand that his remarks would undoubtedly relieve him of responsibility for carrying out a policy that he knew could never succeed, certainly not in the time frame that he believed could be accomplished when he signed on.  Now, fittingly, the conduct for the war in Afghanistan is in Petraeus’ hands, perhaps where it should have been all along. Petraeus knows too well that his strategy for the war cannot succeed–he knows that better than anyone. One can only wonder why we allow the surge in Iraq to be called a success, when in reality it was the conversion of Sunnis to get rid of Al Qaeda that initiated the reduction in violence.

Petraeus has positioned himself in such a way that the failure of the policy in Afghanistan will fall squarely on his shoulders, even though Republicans will argue otherwise.  In the meantime, more troops are needlessly dying and more roadside bombs are exploding. The countryside in Afghanistan is very divided about the American presence and there seems to be little support from Afghan president Hamid Karzai, though he pleaded with Obama not to fire McChrystal. But, McChrystal is merely a willing dupe or a pawn in a much larger game, about which he was and probably still is, very naive. The handbook for counterinsurgency was written by Petraeus, not McChyrstial. The best outcome for the Americans will be to wind down our military presence and eventually disappear, as every invader has done when they tried to confront and occupy the region known to us as Afghanistan. We are spending billions of dollars on the fifth poorest country in the world and our drones seem to be committing us to new enemies rather than first getting rid of the old ones.  While it is surely a lost war, by sticking to his timetable and putting the emphasis on another failed projection for success by our military leaders, much as they did when we were in Vietnam, Obama can prevent Afghanistan from destroying his presidency and might even have the troop commitment seriously winding down by the time he runs for re-election. No matter what the outcome, Obama has revealed himself as a shrewd, open but firm leader who is confidently in charge of our military, very much unlike his predecessor. That much we can be grateful for and in the end, that may be the best part of his Presidency. In Vietnam, we lost a war and did so in the battlefield. In Iraq and probably in Afghanistan, we are teaching ourselves how to re-tool defeat and shape it into something we call victory. It’s a grand illusion all over again.

RFM

Climatologists used to think that changes in the weather would only take place over hundreds if not thousands of years, because the atmosphere was perceived to be a large, gigantic carbon sink. But that has all changed and the contemporary view favors the potential for dramatic changes in climate that can take place  over decades or even in less time.  The delicate balance that we have taken for granted throughout the centuries of human history, has been significantly altered by our behavior, which has cumulatively started to change our environment, beginning with the industrial revolution. But those early, seemingly innocuous beginnings, are projected to reach peak levels of greenhouse gases during this century and eventually these new levels are projected to have a far more dramatic impact on our weather, even compared to the trends we have witnessed over the last few decades. Climatologists are confident that dramatic changes will begin to accelerate as the planet continues to warm and carbon dioxide levels continue to rise.   One must keep in mind that if our planet Earth had no means of losing heat from the Sun, but only absorbing it, like a perfect black body, the Earth would eventually, perhaps over millions of years or longer, become as hot as the Sun. In contrast however the Earth without an atmosphere loses sufficient heat through infrared radiation that, if that were the only thermal factor operating, would leave our planet at temperatures well below freezing. It is the atmosphere that keeps absorbing and reflecting infrared radiation that is responsible for keeping our planet warm and, atmospheric carbon dioxide, though a small constituent of our atmosphere, has always played a major role in regulating our global climate.  Thus, the mean planetary temperature is created through the process of losing some heat through the atmosphere, while retaining some through heat capture and reflection; this dual process has served as the delicate balance by which we have faded into and out of warming and cooling cycles, including several ice-ages in our long geological history. While the causes of these past temperature fluctuations are still a matter of investigation and debate, scientists are in strong agreement that the carbon dioxide problem we face will dramatically change our weather, especially if we do nothing to control our carbon emissions.

The only way we can project our climate future is through computer models and base those models as rigorously as we can on data that we acquire through geological and other scientific disciplines. Today’s computer models are fairly sophisticated and have been gaining in precision and predictability as computer capabilities and measurement constraints have been slowly added to the modeling strategy. There is no other way. We are building these “General Circulation Models” and improving on them to make better predictions about our planetary future.  Initially, models and early studies tried to focus on why the Earth went through the dramatic temperature fluctuations that included several ice-age periods. Was this a normal cycling of the atmosphere and if so, why and how did our  weather change so drastically? But as the measurements and models got more sophisticated, climatologists, in collaboration with many other branches of science, including the biological and oceanic sciences, began to focus on a new problem, one that was increasingly created by man. This problem turned out to be not just an issue of greenhouse gases warming the Earth and the oceans, but also rising sea water levels that, in the near future, could threaten coastal cities and generate other, more dangerous possibilities created by alterations in the ocean currents that provide significant warm weather to Europe for example. In the latter case, models have demonstrated that that the Atlantic current that warms Europe, in which warm water travels north on the surface, as cold Arctic water travels in the opposite direction at deeper levels, could disappear in a relative heartbeat if the salinity of Arctic water goes down, as it might if significant melting in the region occurred. In an age of global warming, it seems counter-intuitive that Europe could get much colder, especially in the winter. But, not everyone is opposed to global climate change. Many Russians for example feel they would welcome a few degrees added to their winter. Then too excessive carbon dioxide can help support additional plant growth, but even this effect can turn negative if accompanied by excessive plant decay.

It was in 1938  that Stewart Callendar, standing in front of the Royal Meteorological Society in London,  first suggested that the planet was gradually warming and that the principal culprit was humans burning fossil fuels and adding tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Few other scientists accepted Callendar’s idea at the time, simply because it seemed irrational that the atmosphere was so delicate and limited that it couldn’t absorb the results of burning fossil fuels without a blip on the radar screen. Was planet Earth really that small? Earlier work by British scientist John Tyndall had determined that the main gases in the atmosphere, including nitrogen and oxygen, are transparent to infrared radiation, but “coal gas” was opaque to infrared rays, caused mostly by its high carbon dioxide content. In this way, atmospheric carbon dioxide became known as a “greenhouse gas.”

No teaching tool is quite like history for learning about the sea changes that shape politics and attitudes and the evolution of ideas, both scientific and otherwise. An excellent book that traces the history of global climate change is Spencer R. Weart’s “The Discovery of Global Warming“ Harvard Press, 2008. Weart has also created a site where a hypertext presentation and a summary of global climate change history and facts can be sorted out as a kind of short cut for reading the book.

From my perspective, the salient features of this story begin with the realization that scientists studying the global climate in the late 1970s had started to converge on the idea that Callendar was right: we faced a serious problem in the future with man-made greenhouse gases, the most important of which was carbon dioxide. But scientists alone cannot force changes in public policy and without some divine interference, scientists generally have a hard time getting attention to their concerns, unless there is a major catastrophe that requires their input for understanding (we can see the public beginning to turn to scientists for explanations as an aid in understanding the impact of the on-going BP Gulf oil spill).

In 1979, the influential National Academy of Sciences issued a report that gave increased visibility to the global warming concept by suggesting that doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide would bring an increase in global temperature of 1.5-4.5 degrees Centigrade (2.7-8.1 degrees Fahrenheit), an alarming increase that could raise serious concerns about the safety of our planetary future. Unfortunately, in the U.S., just as scientific studies of the global climate were gaining momentum, the election of Ronald Reagan brought about a backlash and helped generate the Republican skepticism on global warming that is still with us (or them) today. About the time that Reagan was elected President, Greenland ice core studies revealed that drastic temperature changes had taken place in our history within the span of a century, suggesting that our climate is not an ultrastable, unmodifiable system at all, but may have a tendency to favor rapid shifts in average global temperature, depending on multiple kinds of feedback systems, not all of which were then identified (and still aren’t). Other alarming studies showed that carbon dioxide was not the only greenhouse gas we had to worry about, as methane and other trace gases might also make a significant contribution, and had to be included in the models to avoid their predictive failure. Antarctic ice cores also revealed that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels went up and down together through past ice ages, which led scientists to conclude that our global atmosphere is highly dynamic and very modifiable–sort of like some  synapses in our brains.

1988 was an important year in the history of global climate study. It was an unusually hot year for the United States.  I remember that summer very well, as it was the year we moved from St. Louis to Minneapolis during heat spells that were uncharacteristic for the region and caused many well-established, older trees to die out. That was also the year in which U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was assembled, which, for the first time, formed a union between scientists and government representatives, whose function was to integrate scientific knowledge and help formulate public policy development to reduce greenhouse gases. The IPCC is the committee that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. The first report of the IPCC was made in 1990, in which the committee concluded that the planet had been warming in the recent past and future warming seemed likely. By 1995, the second report issued by the IPCC warned that serious warming would be likely in the coming century. Given that it was organized under the auspices of the United Nations, it is axiomatic that the Republican Party would be opposed to any information coming out of that committee. Fortunately, Al Gore formed an important relationship with the committee and helped to amplify their concerns with his popular documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The hottest year on record, that of  1998, was associated with a “Super El Nino” which caused weather disasters and unrelenting heat. By the end of the 20th century, sophisticated computer models had been able to simulate global ice age climate changes and gain substantial credibility for their future climate projections. The third IPCC report in 2001 indicated that future global warming would bring the hottest period of the planet since the last ice age and may be attended with “severe surprises.” By then, the entire scientific community had agreed that greenhouse gases would likely be a serious problem and that the global reach of human societies needed to get busy to correct the excessive use of fossil fuels. A serious response was required of the major industrialized countries, but the U.S. has balked from entering into serious agreements, such as the Kyoto protocol.  This was followed by numerous observations on collapsing ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland that might cause sea levels to rise faster with far less predictably than previously thought. In many ways, it was beginning to look like we were facing a climate emergency.

The fourth IPCC report was issued in 2007 and argued that the cost of reducing emissions from fossil fuels would be offset by the benefits and savings of doing nothing to curb the further accumulation of greenhouse gases. In that year the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 382 ppm and the mean global temperature for a five year average was 14.5 degrees Centigrade (58 degrees Fahrenheit), the warmest in hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Some have argued that we are in a relative cooling period since 1998 because of reduced sunspot activity, but it’s unclear whether such activity  unambiguously affects our climate: if it does, then we are in for a sudden increase in global heating when sunspot activity resumes.

Global Climate Parameters vs IPCC projections

The main problem with the IPCC reports is that they take the arguments and data from scientists and water them down, for more palatable public consumption, hoping the issue appears less alarmist by making the issue less stressful, which in turn makes the issue seem less significant. Some scientists who serve on the IPCC have published papers challenging the overly conservative nature of the IPCC reports; the political arm of the IPCC gets the last word on the tone of the warnings and the details of the projections. One such objection to the IPCC reports was published by Rahmstorf et al, in Science, 2007 (volume 316, p 709–available to the public without a subscription to Science). The graph on the left was taken from the Rahmstorf et al paper (published on line); in the top section, the monthly carbon dioxide data measured from Mauna Loa Hawaii (blue) is compared to the IPCC projection (dashed line; note that the yearly levels of carbon dioxide fluctuate because of the annual change in vegetation and hence carbon dioxide absorption, largely in the northern hemisphere). The middle portion shows annual global mean land and ocean surface temperatures combined from two different sources (red and blue) together with their trends. The bottom panel shows the most discrepancy in the sea-level measurements based on tide gauges (annual, red) and from satellite altimeter (blue) data. When compared to the dashed line and gray range representing IPCC projections, it is primarily the sea-levels that show the greatest discrepancies between measurements and projections. That in short is the main worry.

At the present time, most of the expansion of the oceans has been attributed to thermal expansion, since the ocean is warmer, with an added dash of mountain glacier melting. To date, melting ice from the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland ice masses have added little to sea-level changes, but that picture could change dramatically in the coming decades. It is the sea-level discrepancy between measurements and the more conservative IPCC projections that stimulated Rahmstorf et al to publish a brief note in Science that brought more attention and focus on the politics of global climate projections within a body that is supposedly dedicated to a more complete and objective analysis.

We are now at a point in our understanding of the threat to global climate change, imposed by burning fossil fuels, that more science is not required. Yes, we will continue to refine our models, but by being forewarned, we should be forearmed and, as a global society, we should be sufficiently knowledgeable to act with a little long-term planning, as if we are facing a global emergency. We must recognize that our small blue planet, its oceans AND ITS CLIMATE are linked inseparably at the hip and that all three are being degraded by human activities. Ocean levels will rise and threaten coastal cities. The decrease in ocean salinity and pH could wipe out coral reefs, change the food chain in ways we cannot possibly comprehend and alter ocean currents which can dramatically change our weather.  Water resources will become more scarce in some regions and more abundant in others. If one removes natural vegetation, it will have an impact on the regional weather. Remove the trees in a region and you will have less rain; remove the plants and expose the soil and you invite desertification in some areas through more moisture evaporation imposed by the elevated temperatures. Additional moisture in the air will bring more floods and storms, but not in all regions. Some regions of the world may simply become unlivable, especially those where the climate is already dry and hot.  The Southwest region of the United States faces additional constraints on water and annual rainfall and regions of Africa are likely to become increasingly dry and more inhospitable. The global society in which we live, now numbering about 6 billion people are far more than the planet can tolerate if each society aspires to be like the us, as we continue to go about our business with an unlimited appetite for fossil fuels and forest depletion.   If anything, the rate of ice melting from the polar ice caps has been underestimated and modelers are madly revising their computer simulations to account for more dramatic events, such as entire ice shelves dropping into the ocean. It is probably asking too much for a model to accurately tell us where and when giant fluctuations in ocean levels are likely to originate.

I think that Obama’s nation-wide address this past week was about right, despite its downplay in the press. We need to interpret the catastrophic Gulf oil spill to 1) recognize that giant oil companies are completely indifferent to the environment and are acting solely through a profit motive (no surprise here and let’s give Obama credit for establishing the $20 billion BP compensation fund and the elimination of the annual BP dividend to stockholders–this was using the bully pulpit with great aplomb and a sensible outcome) and 2) if we had started on a more conservative use of fossil fuels, with an objective of reducing levels of carbon dioxide emissions just ten years ago, when GW Bush came into office, at a time when the need felt more acute, we would not need the oil that is gushing out of a giant hole a mile beneath the surface of the Gulf.  So, if we start immediately on the same quest, the next ocean oil gusher, whether in the Gulf of Mexico or the Arctic seas, will never occur, because that oil will not be required. Surely, with the Gulf oil spill, we are witnessing a source of oil that might be better left under the ocean floor. We should work towards the end of leaving some oil in the ground.

As Obama has pleaded with us to change our orientation about the use of fossil fuels, its an open question whether we will view this catastrophic Gulf oil spill to finally act and reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. There are several things we could do to give ourselves a dramatic boost in reducing our fossil fuel habit. Energy conservation and the development of fossil fuel alternatives is currently at a very primitive stage of development and needs dramatic new funding to alter its present course. One thing we must do is learn how to tax oil usage, eliminate subsidies to oil companies and come up with accurate accounts of what the true cost of oil is today, when you consider that a good part of our military is devoted to protecting our sources of oil, and in the process our military uses huge quantities of oil to run our ships and planes.  So, Mr. Obama, help us arrive at a figure for the cost of gasoline at the pump, computed by adding up the cost of subsidies, correction for the cheap bargain-basement oil leases, add the cost of military protection of the sea lanes and our occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and the then give us the future cost of gasoline, imposed by the expense of relocating major coastal cities to higher ground as a result of sea changes that are at present unknowable, but certainly on the way. Add to that the cost of this single Gulf oil spill and then try to calculate the financial impact it has had on the entire Gulf economy and the availability of Gulf seafood for the entire nation.  I don’t myself have this number at the moment, but it should not be difficult to estimate with ballpark numbers and would have been a powerful additive to Obama’s national speech on energy, especially if approached honestly and with full and complete disclosure.  We should all be concerned about this number and have a national discussion on what it means and how it should be used to motivate changes in our future.

The barn door has closed on avoiding global climate warming–it’s here today. But, there is still time to alter the slope or the rate of these changes and that should be a matter of concern for all of humanity, rich and poor,  but most critically, it should deeply concern the citizens of the United States of America, as we are the biggest offender and historically the most insensitive nation in facing what should be a moral imperative. If we do not act with intelligence and dedication to this task, we can be certain that the rest of the world will go along with our own indifference on the subject. Never before has a single issue of global significance rested so squarely on the shoulders of the worst offender in the history of humanity. We are not only in a position to act, but we need to change our habits and consumption of fossil fuel so that we discourage the rest of the world from trying to emulate our fossil fuel gluttony. The globe cannot afford to have China grow up to look just as modern and fuel-consuming as the United States, but that is just where we are headed. Beijing adds 1000 cars a day to an already heavily congested street and highway layout. In 2030, not so far away, China will need and use the equivalent of Europe’s entire energy consumption. They will achieve this by investing $3.7trillion in energy over the next twenty-five years. The Global energy supply has never looked as small as it does today. Should the condition of global “peak” oil confront us, as it has in several countries, including the United States, then expansion of the kind that China is planning will be virtually impossible.

RFM

Explorer I

It is a bit tiresome to see the horrible news coming out about the Gulf oil spill, only to be accentuated by the incessant emphasis on whether or not this event will be Obama’s Katrina or the defining moment of his Presidency. We hear this a lot, particularly on stations like CNN (I never go to Fox, but I assume they have already pinned the entire Gulf oil spill on Obama, since he toils daily as the Antichrist, or if not, then certainly he is working as one of his primary agents). Now, I don’t remember CNN ever suggesting that Katrina would be the defining moment of GW’s presidency, do you? It seems to me that, at best, that was an after thought. These charges against Obama are absurd of course unless they’re repeated 10,000 times in the news media, then, by the definitions given to us through modernity, the assertion automatically gets placed in the “truth file.” Let’s put this issue in a very fresh and simple way: we don’t have a government agency that drills for oil as we might if oil was a nationalized industry–which it is in some countries. Because of this, we are at the mercy of the international oil companies themselves–it’s part of our free market economy, and,  just as credit default swaps and sub-prime mortgages brought down our economy, so too does the U.S. government give sway to the oil giants to do what they want in exploring for the black gold of our economy.  The government merely hands out permits to drill within U.S. territorial lands and waters and apparently has done a very sloppy if not corrupt job, giving the oil companies what they want, whenever they wanted it. Oil companies are currently allowed to write their own environmental impact studies, usually copied from a prior one, which is how seals and walruses got into the Gulf environmental studies application from BP, despite the fact there are no seals or walruses in the Gulf. This level of incompetence on the part of our government is clearly the result of the hollowing out of Federal functions and regulatory oversight over the years by Republicans from Reagan to GW Bush, with a few Democrat participants, acting like Republicans, thrown in for good measure: it is part of the “kill the beast” program of Republican cowboys.  GW Bush and Cheney (remember Cheney’s his famous meeting with oil and energy executives, where the energy future of the United States was laid out, but never made public. That was the official inauguration of “drill baby drill,” plus launching the idea to replace Middle East despots, such as Saddam Hussein, with regimes favorable to our ever-expanding demand for oil. That’s why it’s very unlikely that we will ever get out of Iraq, unless of course the Chinese manage to get all the oil contracts).

With the competency of the Federal government under daily challenge over the Gulf oil spill, I couldn’t help but think back to a day and a time when government agencies worked very effectively and how we all admired the skill and dedication of its workers, including technicians, engineers, scientists and even a few administrators. Take for example how this oil spill is being handled, with BP having virtually no fall-back technique once the most unlikely methods failed and now compare that to how we formed and executed our space program and successfully brought back the astronauts aboard Apollo 13, when it was announced: “Houston, we have a problem.”   NASA, the government agency that developed our space program (the comparative equivalent of having a nationalized oil system),  and sent men to the moon in 1969, was originally formed as a direct result of “Sputnik.” The year that Sputnik was launched by the Russians in 1957, the Army and Navy had separate missile development programs, each trying to develop their own space-orbiting vehicles (this was the International Geophysical Year, 1957-58). NASA was put together in 1958, through the National Aeronautics and Space Act in order to circumvent what was viewed as a failure by our military to match the ingenious Russian success (Sputnik I was followed a month later by Sputnik II). Never mind that when the Russians launched Sputnik I, which lacked an instrumentation recorder and could not record any scientific information (though it had scientific instrumentation aboard) and never mind too, that a few months after Sputnik, Americans launched Explorer I into space (January 1958, which did have recording instrumentation and discovered the first  Van Allen Radiation belt) and never mind as well that once Explorer I was launched, Americans never lost their lead in the science of space exploration, only in the public relations war that ensnared our space exploration policies and put scientific research on hold, in favor of the PR victory of putting a man on the moon before the Russians did. It was nevertheless  an admirable technological achievement, but in the process it led to the overly costly commitment of using manned space exploration, rather than robotic control which would emphasize science and minimize costs. But we all cheered at seeing an American flag put on the moon and undoubtedly, many Americans got drunk that night.

Apollo 13 was the third lunar mission, launched on April 11, 1970. During the flight to the moon, an electrical fault caused an explosion and loss of electrical power to the service module. The crew was successful in shutting down the command module and using the lunar module as a lifeboat to return safely to earth. This was achieved by acts of serial and parallel competence on the part of the well-trained astronauts and the ingenious group of engineers and scientists centered in Houston. A hit movie was made of this remarkable success story and Americans marveled at how well its new government agency worked and appreciated the competency of those who ran it. I was in the military (Navy) during the early development of the space program and got to see some of the first-hand, relevant issues related to the early days of NASA’s growth. In fact, my own electrophysiological setup in the Navy Medical Research Laboratory in Pensacola Florida, that I embellished while doing research in the Navy, benefited indirectly from the space program which set super new standards for making electrical connections and wiring harnesses more reliable. The standards for everything from transistor heat tolerances and resistance to the vibration for wire and panel connections, were dramatically improved and almost everything had a backup. Special tools were designed to apply proper pressure when making electrical connections and unique panels were made to support quick changes in electrical connectivity. Astronauts trained in unique, environmentally constrained surrounds, including underwater space simulations. When one of those implementations failed, as it did on Apollo 13, sufficient ingenuity, and the reliably of the remaining circuits, brought the astronauts back to Earth with a safe landing. We don’t have anything comparable to NASA involved in oversight responsibility for deep sea oil drilling. We have placed our environment on the back burner, while oil exploration  consumes and dictates our policies, irrespective of the risks we are taking with the our fragile ocean ecosystems. No one knows the impact this will have on the ecosystem of the Gulf, but we can see already the economic devastation this is causing the tourism and the fishing industries in the region. Remember that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was going to be a target for oil drilling under GW Bush, until environmentalists successfully defeated the measure, all to the screaming outrage of Republicans like Tom Delay and President GW Bush.

The admiration we all felt about the performance of NASA after the first few Apollo trips to the moon, and the rescue of the Apollo 13 crew, did not last all that long. Major objections about the size of the NASA’s budget in the face of other, pressing national needs led to budgetary reductions and forced NASA to cancel the remaining Apollo missions to the moon. After Apollo, doubts about the future of NASA, the size of their budget and the nature of their mission began to erode and confuse the agency. Nevertheless, the unmanned flights made by Voyager  explored planets and gave us scientifically valuable information about space and our planetary surrounds. In contrast, manned space exploration was carried out with the Space Shuttle program and NASA experienced their own retrospective “Gulf oil disaster” when, in January 1986,  the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated within seconds after takeoff, killing all seven astronauts aboard. The cause of this accident reflected the refusal of NASA managers to listen to their field engineers who warned them that critical O-rings were not designed to tolerate the low temperatures encountered on the January launch date. In retrospect, the Challenger disaster represents a reversal of how NASA was put together. During the buildup of NASA, it was the engineers who made the critical decisions, but for the Challenger disaster, engineering input was disregarded by management. Another disaster occurred in February 2003, when the Space Shuttle Columbia“ disintegrated on re-entry, killing all seven astronauts on board. In this case, damage to the shuttle had been encountered during the launch, when a small piece of insulation tore loose from the shuttle and damaged the thermal protection system necessary to insure against excessive heat build-up during re-entry. If you want to read further about our space program, a book I recommend is “Vodoo Science: the Road From Foolishness to Fraud” by Robert L. Park

Without doubt, the greatest scientific achievement of NASA was when the Space Shuttle launched the Hubble telescope in 1990. Unfortunately the main mirror used for focusing was improperly ground and was not fixed until another Shuttle repaired the problem in 1993. Once properly running, the Hubble telescope provided many of the most remarkable photographs and scientific data ever achieved in space. Since then, the Hubble has been repaired by astronauts several times, the last one taking place in 2009. The Hubble is expected to function until 2014, at which time it is scheduled for replacement. Stunning images of space, taken by the Hubble telescope, can be viewed at a variety of sites, including that of NASA.

The meteoric rise and slow decline of NASA’s public image was punctuated by many significant achievements, including the recent repair of the Hubble telescope, which is now giving better images of space than we ever had before. But the problems that NASA has experienced began from its inception, when the political choice was made by President Kennedy in  choosing manned flight over unmanned space exploration. Inserting manned space exploration into the Cold War, as we did in response to Sputnik, put science on the back burner (as we do so often), and allowed political decisions to dominate NASA’s early mission objectives. We gained almost nothing of any scientific value by putting a man on the moon, though NASA did generate significant improvements in the technology of heat-tolerance, ceramics and we got Teflon out of the deal.  But in doing so, we distorted and confused the mission future of NASA, whose major scientific achievement was the launching and repair of the Hubble telescope. Nevertheless, if you contrast the successful rescue of the crew of Apollo 13 and compare that achievement with the crude strategies that BP is applying to the Gulf oil spill, one sees that executives are in charge of decision-making in the Gulf and they are already jockeying to reduce company liability and limit the public exposure of seeing oil impregnated birds and turtles. No, our government is not in charge of fixing this leak. We gave that option away from the get-go when we turned loose our free market economy and, in the Gulf oil spill, we are seeing just one example of the rewards for allowing this kind of unchecked freedom to generate huge profits, while doing nothing for improving our renewable energy future. The other night, I heard on the PBS Jim Lehrer report, a venture capitalist forewarn the future of America’s energy strategy. At a time when everyone agrees that we must develop sources and technology of renewable energy, as if we are in an emergency to save our planet and reduce our oil dependency, America has only four members of the top 30 companies in the business of renewable energy! That’s what the Gulf oil spill represents to me–the free market economy of oil exploration done at the expense of letting the rest of the world generate the new jobs that need to be created for renewable energy. Will we pay the Chinese to build solar panels (already they are the largest manufacturer of solar panels and have hired American engineers and scientists to assist them in making better panels), or will be build them ourselves and will we continue to be the innovators of science related to energy production and planetary safety? Today, the future does not look bright for American emergence into world leadership for alternative energy.

RFM

In the aftermath of  WW II, Anglo Iranian Oil had assumed the dominant position in Iran’s oil production and had constructed a huge refinery at Abadan.  Ironically, the seeds of nationalism had been sewn by Americans, both by the speeches of FDR and the fact that Americans who were present in Iran at that time, were mostly doctors and aid people, such that America’s image at that moment, in the early 1950s,  was one of a prosperous, do-good country, unlike anything Iranians had come to expect, based on their experience with the British (British colonialism in Iran meant that they did not train Iranians on how to make things work, like their giant refinery in Abadan. So when the British were forced out of Iran when the company was first nationalized by Mossadegh, they were able to shut down the refinery, further alienating Iranians).  Another source of outrage by Iranians against Anglo Iranian Oil came in 1950, when the Arab American Oil company, operating in Saudi Arabia, had agreed, under threat of nationalization, to share the profits with the Saudis on a 50/50 basis. The British however, were adamantly against such an agreement with the Iranians.

To understand BP and its tortured history with Iran, you might want to read Steven Kinzer’s book All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, which tells the unfortunate history of Iran’s march to Democracy and how America, by supporting the demands of Anglo Iranian Oil (BP), betrayed democracy and sided with oil and profiteering, with a little anti-communist rhetoric thrown in to confuse the issue.  Kinzer was recently interviewed on Democracy Now where he summarizes this well-known history. Toppling Mossadegh in turn led to the Iranian hostage crisis under Carter, the election of Ronald Reagan (perhaps with the aid of the  “October Surprise”) and the theocratic dictatorship that exists in Iran today. Kinzer extends his analysis to include the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the rise of the Taliban and the American sponsorship of Iraq in their war against Iran (for whom we supplied intelligence and the helicopters that Saddam used to gas the Kurds). That single act of toppling Iran’s Democracy through a CIA coup, seems to pervasively wind its way through much of our history, including the events of 9/11.  New York Times writer James Risen also has a good piece available on this period in history, when the CIA turned to the dark side and permanently transformed what had been a good relationship between the democratically-elected Prime Minister (Mossadegh), the Iranian people and the American presence in Iran. The NYT also has a general website on the overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian government by the CIA serving British interests, where you can stroll through different sections of the unfortunate American participation. The American model developed in Iran, would serve for countless other, future CIA strategies to overthrow uncooperative or democratically elected governments, especially those in South America.

When Eisenhower was elected, we caste our lot with Anglo Iranian Oil and British interests. At the Times site, you can see the pictures of the players in this drama by scanning over the images to get their names. After the coup that deposed Mossadegh, we installed the Shah, whose torture and suppressive techniques administered through his SAVAK organization eventually led to the revolution in 1979 and the fractionated relationship we have with Iran today–a festering wound we refuse to allow to heal.

If we could go back and reverse one single step in the development of our policies in the Middle East, deposing Mossadegh and stamping out Democracy in Iran would get my vote as the one event we got completely wrong (not that we did very much right, as we continuously sided with oil interests against the rising tides of nationalism). We initiated the CIA coup that overthrew Mossadegh solely because Churchill requested it (by all accounts, Mossadegh was an exceptional leader, perhaps the best and brightest of the good men in the Middle East in those years–he was well-educated and committed to representative government; he was Man of the Year for Time Magazine in 1951 and hugely popular with the people of Iran; if he had a flaw, it was his inflexibility in dealing with BP) . Churchill was unable to get Truman to eliminate Mossadegh and preserve the interests of BP. However, once Eisenhower was elected, he agreed (largely because his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, wanted international companies to have unfettered access to the countries they operated in and he could always find communists even when there weren’t any); Dulles sent in the CIA, under the leadership of Kermit Roosevelt, who pulled the trigger and deposed Mossadegh. Today, we do not have a problem identifying our own nationalism: indeed, if anything, we seem to wallow in it, but we find it almost impossible to adequately recognize the nationalism of people  from other countries, particularly if we need something from that country. Somehow, we manage to convince the world that we are the only ones entitled to nationalism: everyone else’s nationalism has to get out of the way.  With us nationalism is  viral. Nevertheless, with the Shah installed in power after the coup against Mossadegh, Anglo Iranian Oil could not resume its previous position. There was too much national distrust of the oil company, which eventually changed its name to British Petroleum and initially had a 40% hold on the new oil consortium named the National Iranian Oil Company.

A question you’re all dying to ask is surely this: is the current Gulf oil spill somehow related to our meddling in the internal affairs of Iran in 1953? Preposterous? Maybe, but then again maybe not.  Was the toppling of Mossadegh, carried out through the CIA to protect the interests of BP, the non-verbal license for BP to acquire its swashbuckling attitude that allows the company to ignore safety issues and acquire a sense of swagger with confidence that brought them through the twentieth century into the twenty first and into the Gulf of Mexico, where they are now responsible for what could be the most environmentally destructive accident since the industrial revolution began? The most recent estimates suggest that the amount of oil being added to the Gulf is between 25,000 and 70,00 barrels or more a day, or roughly an Exxon-Valdez oil spill every few days. If we had allowed Mossadegh to nationalize Anglo Iranian Oil (BP), would we have a giant catastrophe spewing forth in the Gulf a mile beneath the surface of the water?  BP is the fourth largest corporation in the world and the largest in Britain. My own thinking is that if you can manipulate two powerful governments to do your bidding, as the British and Americans did to save BP from nationalization, then you, as a company are more likely to emerge from that experience with an unparalleled sense of corporate swagger that encourages disregard for the rules and laws passed by either of those governments, especially the two that you just outwitted. This might be one reason why BP is America’s largest oil supplier. If you’re a BP cowboy, after Mossadegh’s topple, you can keep your boots and spurs on as you walk down main street! The long threads of this interconnectedness seem too tempting to avoid sewing them into whole cloth, such that there is at least a tilt towards corporate arrogance. Or is it the fact that we just finished eight years of a presidency that encouraged and indeed insisted on oil company arrogance for now and into the future?  Maybe it’s not such a stretch to the imagination to see these connections and then wonder what kind of oil companies we are going to need if we ever get off of our dependence on black gold? It does not seem like BP is the model for the kind of oil company we need in the future. Indeed, it would have been so much better if we had allowed Mossadegh to stay and BP to go. After all nationalizing oil companies should help remove the two edged sword between cutting costs by reducing emphasis on safety standards and ruining the environment. The BP Gulf oil spill could be the tip of a new iceberg, as plans have been laid out to drill far deeper wells into the Gulf, as the technology for drilling advances, while the technology for protecting the environment doesn’t exist.

RFM

The American press, which normally gives a green light for our national  misadventures abroad, but particularly the New York Times, found itself trying to defend against Chomsky’s analysis about bias of coverage over a brutal war that would have made us look bad, except for the fact that the invasion of East Timor in the 1970s received virtually no attention from the press, with a few rare but notable exceptions. Chomsky knew this, because he counted up the number of newspaper citations and compared it directly with the coverage for the better known atrocities in Cambodia (a right-wing (East Timor)  vs left-wing (Cambodia) government–that distinction also played a major role).  He claims to have learned more about East Timor by reading British and Canadian articles as virtually nothing appeared in the American newsprint or in television coverage. The conflict Chomsky referred to as one left out of media attention, was that of the East Timor invasion by Indonesia in 1975, which we supported, as we looked the other way when mass genocide against the indigenous people of the region was carried out by the invading army, using American made military hardware. Chomsky compares press coverage of East Timor with that of Cambodia under Pol Pot, who came to power after we invaded the country and deposed Prince Sihanouk. When Pol Pot took over, his objective was to install  a harsh, left wing government, which he implemented through policies of dislocation and genocide in what became known as the “killing fields” of Cambodia. Why asks Chomsky, did East Timor get nearly zero coverage from the NYT, while Cambodia got a lot, when both events were associated with mass genocide and were equally indefensible? Chomsky’s critics have always been waiting for him to make some sort of blunder and then pounce on what appears to be a self-inflicted mortal wound, only to discover that Chomsky’s mistake was usually one of misinterpretation on their part,  rather than his lack of consistency or a failure of his encyclopedic knowledge of events and reporting. I don’t think anyone is better at that than Chomsky.

A good example of one interesting case in the documentary took place when a French professor, Faurisson, claimed the holocaust was a hoax; he was put on trial by the French government and found guilty of distorting history. You may remebmer this case. Chomsky, as well as many other academics throughout the world, signed a petition in support of Faurisson’s right to make his statement, without passing judgment on the statement per se. Chomsky’s many detractors seized on this as an opportunity to caste him as an anti-Semite, though he himself is Jewish and was brought up within a strong, liberal Jewish tradition in New York. The documentary showed the numerous engagements he went through to establish the academically defensible point that a person should be free to advocate their position and leave it to the evidence presented to determine whether a rational case was established by the assertion. On other occasions, Chomsky went on to thoroughly destroy the argument that the holocaust did not take place and eventually seemed to win the day over those who thought they had finally caught him in an indefensible position. But as he said, “I defended his right to say it, not what he said.” He then accused the French Government of putting themselves into a Stalinist-like state by making a legal decision about which history was correct and which was not (holocaust or no holocaust) . So he touched on just about everyone. The presence and actions of Vichy France during WW II have made the French very sensitive to this issue, since they participated in the persecution of Jews and helped ship 70,000 French Jews to the “East” as part of the final solution; only about 3% of them ever returned.

Quite predictably, I found myself deeply resonating with Chomsky as he was portrayed, while I was at the same time a bit astonished to see how many of his ideas don’t or didn’t penetrate with sufficient clarity to most people, at least those with whom he interacted on the video clips. Because of Chomsky’s dogged persistence and his unfailing attention to detail (with some lapses), I think we have a much better appreciation of him during the last decade or so and then too, the militaristic nature of our country, thanks to GW Bush, has been much more thoroughly exposed and perhaps revealed as a nation-state, more loathsome to at least some sensible Americans, than one might ever have imagined. At least we better understand Chomsky’s views and his critique on social issues and war. His positions on issues are hardly radical: he believes that a just society should take care of everyone and stay out of conflicts that unnecessarily kill people. He argues that WW II was justified, but nothing since has risen to the threshold requiring military action. Throughout his career as an activist, Chomsky has always harbored a special dislike for governments as well as a particularly strong dislike for our government and our support of vicious,  right-wing governments, who will do the bidding of Corporate America, such as those we helped  establish and prop up throughout South America after WW II, right up to the present day.

Chomsky  is a prodigious writer who gave up a successful academic career as a linguist to pursue the social and political ideology for which he is better known. Yet, eighteen years after the documentary was made, one can see what was missing from Chomsky’s arguments, something for which we have a much better appreciation today, as a result of accumulated studies of the brain, which impact on our views of human brain function and how political bias gets established therein. This new level of understanding, though hardly complete, has come about through contemporary studies in neuroscience as well as the encroachments from molecular biology and brain imaging studies using the methods of fMRI, PET (positron emission tomography) and MEG (magneto encephalography). These insights have established a more solid foundation for further speculation about brain function, bias and the failures of our frontal lobes to be given rational access to our experiences. As humans, we have an enormous capacity for learning and creativity. Chomsky’s “manufacturing consent” needs a redux. Here’s what one might add for a new version of the documentary.

Chomsky was a leader in pointing out that language is not the act of creating utterances on a blank sheet of auditory neurons, but is in fact, a reflection of genetic programming within the brain, which makes a human baby very different from that of an infant chimpanzee for example, or for that matter, any other primate.  At two months of age, a human infant begins to babble language sounds and perfects them through listening to humans around him/her, a process that reflects a voracious appetite for expressing and receiving language, fed by the energy of their pre-programmed neural circuits, highly tuned for language acquisition. Even children who are born deaf, utter language sounds, though their babbling eventually subsides due to the lack of auditory feedback. Different languages have enough similarities such that phonetic rules are learned and the native language is spoken well before our children go to school. Some languages are phonetically easier to master than others and Italian children for example can speak their language two years before children raised in English-speaking families. Eventually humans have a storage capacity of 50,000 to 100,000 words!

“Manufacturing consent” as Chomsky and co-author  Herman point out, paints a picture, not of a conspiracy theory in which some committee in the New York Times editorial office or a government agency meets to shield us from the reality of our atrocities abroad. Rather, the process of bias reflects an entrainment which loads our mental dice, so that when called upon to roll a winner, we mostly get snake eyes!  We tend to look the other way when information flows into our brains that runs counter to the grain of our private national image, as we focus and emphasize instead the affairs that enhance the internal image we  project about ourselves and the views we have adopted that are supposed to guide our international behavior. It runs against our many mental programs to imagine we are out there in the real world somewhere murdering innocent people, or at least facilitating such behavior. We are capable of a search mode that runs beneath the conscious, declarative mode of verbalized behavior. It also helps, that, in the case of newspapers like the New York Times, the paper does better in terms of advertising and their subscription rate when they rock the boat only intermittently or not at all. But, in attempting to describe this reality bias, Chomsky moves from the genetic code of language, where he is obviously very much at home, to a behavioral interpretation, as if we suddenly switched from Chomsky as the genetic linguist to Skinner as the behaviorist, using a slate of blank neurons for encoding. But brain studies have suggested another kind of genetic code for brain wiring and function, maybe several, though each of these additional coding modes is far more difficult to trace when compared to the development of our linguistic apparatus. There may well be many different  language mechanisms for which humans are “primed” for intense learning as part of our adaptive pre-programmed brain structure. Our motor control, sensory integration and emotional make-up may all reflect programmatic coding to start us out on the road to success as an evolutionary wonder!

Humans are born early and mature late. A chimpanzee reaches young adult stage at about 7 years after birth, whereas humans stretch that out to at least 12 years and our brains are still growing and maturing even during our late teen years. There is evidence that brain mechanisms involving the amygdala for example, which helps us avoid dangerous circumstances, may not fully kick-in until the mid-twenties, leading to the irrational behavior, for example, of Olympic competitors achieving sub-orbital heights on a snow board! What adult would do such things?

With the growth of our brain, we stretch the developmental period out, the purpose of which is to enhance our capacity as great, natural learners, full of curiosity and eager to figure out how things work, before full cultural responsibility comes to rest on our shoulders. Anthropologists like to express the problem of prolonged maturity to the limits imposed by our big brains, which  need to go through the birth canal early, because the imposing physical constraints, thus rendering us more dependent at birth and slower on the uptake, when compared to other primates. Our prolonged developmental period was almost surely related to our survival, particularly as the African continent of our origins became less of a tree-filled jungle and more like the Africa of today, during which time, we came out of the trees and, as bipeds, began to compete with other carnivores for food and sometimes as well, we became the target of their predatory behavior. There is fossil evidence to suggest that humans were confronted with new environmental challenges which served as the stimulus for brain growth and enhanced our brain resources for improved adaptability. One issues seems well established: when our ancestor first stood up and walked as humanoids, their brain size was initially small; it was only later that hominid brain size showed rapid growth and development. Whatever advantages we gained by walking upright, it was not the stimulus of bipedalism that began the development of our larger brain size–that came later.

Phineas Gage Head Wound

The main feature of the human brain that we can appreciate today, compared with those of apes and our distant ancestors of several million years ago,  is the growth of the brain in general, but more especially the growth of our frontal lobes. It is this region of our brain that seems to house much of our social skills, personalities and the capacity for long-term planning. These complex functions of our frontal lobes first came to our attention through Phineas Gage, who, in 1848, had a tamping rod explode through his orbit and destroy much of his frontal lobes, reducing his capacity to deal with abstract issues and suffering from a dramatic change in personality. When you read the description of Phineas Gage and his post-accident behavioral changes, you have the feeling that you are reading about contemporary Republicans/teabaggers. Naturally, the Republican brain is quite different from that of normal humans with respect to our frontal lobes. But, we briefly digressed.

As one example of our brain/behavioral repertoire, just thinking about moving our finger let’s say, instead of actually moving them,  switches the prominent activity center of our brain, as determine by fMRI studies, from the precentral gyrus (where motor commands originate) to a more frontal lobe location (supplementary motor area (SMA)), which is one site where planning our motor actions take place, just as the better known Broca’s area of the left frontal lobe serves as the motor planning region for vocalizing language.

Our capacity to rapidly develop language is likely to be only one of many genetic programs that we have embedded within the millions of neural circuits residing in our cerebral cortex, all derived from the process of natural selection, whose original function was that of optimizing our chances for survival. And, it isn’t all just cerebral cortex: lying within the cerebral hemispheres underneath the cortex, the basal ganglia get massive input from the cortex and feed back through cortical projections; the cerebellum receives at least two loops of impulses, one of which precedes our movements, while the second loop modifies our movements once they are being executed. New imaging data suggests that even the cerebellum, once considered to be a strictly motor organ (where much of our motor-based non-declarative memories are formed) may be involved in cognitive functions as well. This story is far from over, as it represents an increasingly expanded view of human cognitive brain functions.

Most of the coding mechanisms in our brains, those outside of language, such as our social interactions, either depend on or are facilitated by language acquisition. So it is natural to ask how long spoken language has been within the hominid ancestral clans? Well, the brain doesn’t leave a fossil record, so one has to rely on other kinds of evidence, like skull size and depressions in the skill to derive the composition of the brain and guesstimate the presence or absence of language. All of this leaves great uncertainty and doubt. Some have speculated that language mechanisms have been with us for perhaps several million years, although, as we know from our social history, the written forms of language have been with us for only 4,000 years or so. If true, it implies that language is an innate, pre-programmed component of our brain structure, while the capacity to recognize written words is a very recent acquisition, too recent to have found an evolutionary niche in our brain structures and programed genetics. Nevertheless, the fact that our visual memory system seems to have created a visual “letterbox” where knowledge of written words is housed, implies that we had to crowd out some other cortical function in order to have knowledge of the written word. As many as 17% of us cannot read normally and fall into the diagnostic category of dyslexia.

In the last few years, enthusiasm has developed over a single gene that some feel might represent a unique gene  for expressive language. The FOXP2 gene was discovered in a group of individuals with an inherited incapacity to develop language and was eventually discovered in the Neanderthal genome to have the exact same form as the normal human. This gene appears to differ in several important ways from the equivalent in other primates. Many took this to mean that Neanderthals used language. Part of the FOXP2 gene appears to generate a transcription factor that controls other genes, but it is still unclear from the studies carried out so far if the FOXP2 gene can serve as the gene for language. Many of the large group that suffered language deficiency with a point mutation in the FOXP2 gene also had low intelligence, which itself can cause language deficiencies. So, at the moment, the scientific community is properly divided on the subject of this gene and how much it has to do with language. Is FOXP2 the the master or merely another slave of speech and language acquisition? We will be hearing a lot more about this gene in the future.

The brain of course is a highly plastic organ and, once we are born, our brains go to work constructing themselves according to the experiences to which we are exposed. This goes on throughout the day and probably takes place during our sleep, as recent studies are beginning to show that sleep is a form of re-practicing what was learned the previous day. Though our retina appears to be a hard-wired structure, the visual cortex behind it is not. The plasticity of the cortex can change connections according to the visual experiences of the individual. As I sometimes have said to my students, we spend the first thirty years of our lives constructing a brain we can live with and the next thirty years trying to figure out the brain we constructed. Some never get it right. During the early growth period of our lives, the acquisition of culture has the same kinds of driving mechanisms we see for language. We intensely absorb the cultural and social elements around us and the behavior and ideas of those with whom we come in contact, as we try to sort out and stamp out our cultural phenotype. Just as surely as a French child growing up in a French family learns to speak French, a child growing up in a teabaggers environment, with both parents speaking cultural teabaggereeze, will become a teabagger child.

But the frontal lobes of our brains are always exercising another one of the programmatic options, that of longitudinal evaluation and it is during this period, long after we started school, that the opportunity exists, by sharing information with and through others, that the teabagger children have an opportunity to unteabag themselves. Sometimes this happens through a “Eureka” moment from a memorable teacher and sometimes it occurs when taking a college course. For many of my friends growing up in Salt Lake City Utah and coming from a Mormon background, it was the early interactions with others who had question marks about the validity of Mormon doctrine and the recognition that a demarcation line existed–a line in the sand so to speak. The heart of Mormonism demanded that everyone had to accept things that the church said were true. And, mostly this worked. But, for a few, myself included, we opted, perhaps unconsciously,  for the alternative brain mechanism I refer to as “the frontal lobe longitudinal program option,” which planted little seeds of doubt about the story that was too fantastic to neatly fit into an acceptable belief program–it couldn’t fit into the frontal lobe compartments when such knowledge would then be nominated for long-term memory and reflexive cortical behavior. Compounding this early nugget of uncomfortable disbelief, was the attitude that we didn’t want to believe something that wasn’t true. Suppose for example, you were told that the grizzly bears that have been attacking farmers and killing sheep, sleep in nearby caves and are incapacitated during sleep, such that they can easily be approached and killed. If you were asked to join the party that was going to eliminate the grizzlies one night, you would want to know whether the story was absolutely true and you would certainly want to talk to someone who had been on such a killing trip and even then you might and should be wary, as your very survival would be at stake. If you declined to join the grizzly party and later discovered many were killed by an angry awakened grizzly during the night, it would make survival sense for you to avoid seeking additional knowledge from the group. So too with the Mormons.

Once the seeds of doubt get planted, the analytical programs of our minds begin to reshape our neural circuits, replacing older connections with new ones as the older cultural values get pushed out of the way in favor of the new intellect. It is highly stimulating to our brains to feel we have arrived at this new conclusion all by ourselves, even though it never happens on solo flights alone. But once a transition in brain thinking begins to take place, our physical brain is transformed: new synapses are added and older connections are pruned away. Thus, to some extent, we get to rebuild our brains! The seemingly subtle commitment that we make, when we decide we don’t want to believe something unless it’s true, unless there is some evidence we can verify, that is the first fatal step of demanding that religion convert itself into a science, where it cannot survive and voila! The link is broken. The requirement of “truth” and “proof” brings on a burden of evidence that no religion can meet, not the least of which is the Mormon church, because it is relatively new and a lot of information is available on its origins and deeds. Verifiability with Mormonism is a far easier task than it would be for Catholicism. All religions fall apart once the demand for evidence becomes an essential element for continued subscription to the belief system. I was always impressed that those of us who escaped Mormonism in Salt Lake City, all went on to graduate training or advanced professional degrees and had successful careers in a variety of academic and non-academic pursuits. Yet the Mormons we left behind, those that didn’t exercise their “frontal lobe filibuster toolbox”, remained as those who would accept without failure the teachings of the church, including the absurd ones that the book of Mormon was anything other than a nineteenth century fairy tale. Thus, rather early in my life, I resisted a form of brain development that was best served by the absence of a frontal lobe engagement, which committed the lives of non-doubting Mormons to a kind of self-imposed celibacy against the use of the frontal lobes, at least that’s the metaphorical explanation. Most Mormons are Republicans and the state of Utah overwhelmingly votes Republican, with the few Democrats that get elected also voting along the same conservative party line, at least at the national level.

Our developmental period of brain growth and maturation readily follows from another genetic code we see in the human brain–the need to be creative, social animals, coupled to our thirst for understanding how things work. This is also a gift of our greatly expanded frontal lobes, that have new connections now being described by fMRI, MEG and PET scanning images of the human brain during different kinds of cognitive processing. Whether these techniques can ever decipher the nature and substrate of our consciousness and higher mental capacities remains as a future aspiration. But, we know a little more today than we did ten years ago.

So, what Chomsky should say in the redux  version of his documentary is that the New York Times didn’t publish much on East Timor, while publishing a lot on Pol Pot and the Cambodian atrocities, because, though they were smart and well educated, the editors  didn’t understand that they were the prisoners of their many languages of the brain and had yet to go through a full frontal lobe review of their inconsistent behavior. The non-declarative memory, that parks itself somewhere within the brain, perhaps the cortex and in some cases, for some skills, in the cerebellum, represents a force that encourages decisions like the elimination of East Timor news from the pages of the New York Times. It’s the braining, not the training that eliminated East Timor!

But, while we’re at it, let’s not forget the biggest distortion in U.S. history ever perpetrated by an American President. That happened right after 9/11, when Bush said, referring to the attack,  “the terrorists hate our freedoms.” And that immediately established a political constituency of millions of Americans, including the swift boaters and the teabaggers,  who still believe that Bush identified with clarity the motivating factor of the 9/11 terrorists. To reaffirm this position, Cheney later spoke at the American Enterprise Institute where he said the terrorists hate “all the things that make us a force for good in the world — for liberty, for human rights, for the rational, peaceful resolution of differences” (what was he smoking?). As we all know, the self-confessed mastermind of 9/11, khalid sheikh mohammed, the person who probably also beheaded reporter Daniel Pearl, emphasized throughout his incarceration, that he planned 9/11 and other attempts to murder and harm Americans and Israelis, solely because of the way that the U.S. and Israel have treated the Palestinians and occupied their lands.  Bush’s statement makes no sense unless you appreciate the intelligence from which the statement came, whereas khalid sheikh mohammed’s statement will not earn him any relief from trial or outcome, so he has nothing to personally gain by making such a statement, which is  also widely corroborated by what the other plotters and planners have said all along. To swallow Bush and Cheney’s  assertion, you must suffer from severe frontal lobe atrophy and be denied the possibility of ever exercising your “frontal lobe longitudinal program option.”

[Note added: while there are many deficiencies in each of the main brain imaging methods in use today, none of which leads to an unambiguous determination of brain activity or provides us with a simple interpretation of brain function, the confluence of these methods has led to an entirely new culture of science on human brain function in which the efforts of psychologists (cognitive neuroscientists), neuroscientists, physiologists and imaging physicists are collaborating with the belief that their measurements are providing us with new revelations about brain function. Whether this new effort is taking us down the path to greater clarity about human brain function remains to be seen, but one can no longer ignore the fact that this group of scientists, using these methods, are making a significant contribution to clearing up the excessive number of houses on the market. It's a growth industry. One of the best books on this subject, though it is very focused on language and reading is "Reading in the Brain" by Stanislas Dehaene. In this book Dehaene discusses the current state of knowledge available to us from these imaging methods, at least as it applies to the subject at hand. I strongly recommend the book if you are looking for something on the modern view of language and brain function revealed by imaging methods.]

RFM

Lux’s book traces the history of the progressive changes that have made our country advance its basic concepts of freedom, democracy and equality, including the huge anti-slavery movement and civil war of the 1860s, a war that was brought about by the failure to democratize our Federal government when the constitution was first written in 1787.  While the road to achieve these basic principles was bumpy and uncertain, it was entirely driven by the progressives of the eighteenth,  nineteenth and twentieth centuries. None of the great historical achievements, including civil rights of the 1960s, was done without controversy and challenge, and every step of the way, these movements were opposed by the conservatives. Even today, Southern Republicans would vote for a restoration of white-supremacy laws if they could get away with it (it would be hidden in arguments about state’s rights). The Progressive Revolution (PR) identifies the major progressive periods in our history and emphasizes the fact that it is punctuated with spurts of progress, followed by retractions and failures; most of our heroes along the way also had flaws in one way or another that made them less than perfect leaders. LBJ with civil rights vs the Vietnam War for example.  And the progressive advancements, while largely and most recently championed by the Democratic party, at times owed their origins and success to Republicans, such as Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. The uniting theme of the PR is that of democracy, or ruling by direct majority, with an emphasis on the development of the country as an interdependent community. Conservatism on the other hand, that brand that is still with us today, favors representative democracy, rather than direct democracy. The conservatives dominated the constitutional convention and gave us the electoral college because they didn’t trust a direct popular voting option, something that has plagued the country ever since. The electoral college is the system that makes people living in Utah for example, feel that their Democratic vote is meaningless, as the state always votes for the Republicans and their platform. But, a popular election would eliminate that limitation and give every citizen a sense that their vote could have an impact. The conservatives are the traditional party of racism, statism  and corporatism of our past, present and future. And yes, you would have to throw in the party of corruption, where the evidence abounds that conservatives, right down to the era of GWB, brought corruption to a new high with no-bid contracts in Iraq given to friends of Bush and Cheney, and incompetents put into positions of importance in our government, with Katrina and FEMA leader Brown as one glaring example, but there are many others, including government suppression of science.

Lux’s book begins with an appropriate quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The two parties which divide the state, the party of conservativism and that of innovatioin are very old, and have disputed the world ever since it was made. Now one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight renews itself as if for the first time, under new names and hot personalities.” Lux emphasizes that the Founding Fathers did not create a country out of whole cloth. They were inspired by the Greeks, Romans and the Magna Carta. What made the American revolution unique was that it began with a single idea and threw off the shackles of colonialism, which forced them to invent their own government and do so on the fly. The great liberals identified by Lux are segregated along the timeline of progressivism and include, at the beginning, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. Without Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published in 1776, Lux argues that Thomas Jefferson could never have written the Declaration of Independence, a far more “democratic” document than the Constitution that followed many years later.  It was Paine, a British citizen by birth, who inspired ordinary citizens to think about the possibility of climbing out from underneath British colonial rule and establishing a new country in which every citizen would enjoy freedom, equality and opportunity. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence was a liberating document, but due to his absence in Philadelphia, when the Constitutional debate was underway, a much more conservative document came about that was mired in fear of the public and written to preserve slavery as an official government  institution. But, even in his absence, Jefferson’s influence helped pass the Bill of Rights to insure a level of individual freedoms that were opposed by the conservatives of the day.

Following the progressive inspiration of Jefferson and Paine, and going through Andrew Jackson, who helped advance progressive economics (but did many other not so great things–like his actions against the Cherokee Indians and the “trail of tears”) we have to jump to Abraham Lincoln and what Lux describes as the “Radical Republicans”, who freed the slaves, established Land Grant Colleges and introduced the Constitutional amendments (13th-15th) that gave emancipation, defined citizenship and the right to vote as a Federal guarantee; these amendments removed these rights from state control. For a while, the conservatives who garnered dominance after Lincoln’s assassination, ignored these amendments and it was not until the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s that these guarantees were more firmly in place. Yet, voting corruption by the Republicans continues to this day. The Republican party of the post-civil war period of reconstruction switched to become the party of big business, the party that we know today. From then on, Republicans were strictly for business interests and wealth accumulation for the few. Republicans of today are only interested in establishing an economic oligarchy, something like what exists in Russia today. In the process of this less than lofty pursuit, Republican administrations have produced the biggest scandals in history, with governments riddled by corruption, deceit and secrecy; the two largest financial scandals since the Great Depression were the Savings and Loan scandal under Reagan and the current crisis generated by GWB.

Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican progressive who took on the robber barons  that emerged in the late nineteenth century and curbed their abusive labor practices, their violation of food safety practices and their complete ignorance and rape of the environment. His work in establishing the national park system, improvements in food safety (inspired by Upton Sinclair’s book “The Jungle“), the elimination of child labor and the curtailment of corporate trusts were milestones of achievement and set a new tone to the Federal Government and its responsibilities to society.  Lux points out that while we give the political leaders of these progressive periods credit for their initiatives, it is always the provocative citizens of the country that ignite and sustain these movements by dogged persistence and creative argument. Thus for example, it was Sierra Club founder John Muir who was instrumental in stimulating Teddy Roosevelt to form the National Park system and intellectuals such as John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen helped formulate the principles leading to progressive social and economic changes. The woman’s suffrage movement was instrumental in gaining the vote for women and in reinforcing the idea that democracy was for everyone. Teddy Roosevelt was followed in the progressive tradition by Woodrow Wilson, who, though he too advocated better conditions for the working class, nevertheless needlessly dragged the country into a costly and draining World War I (not named as such of course until after WW II; until then, this was “The Great War”).

But, the Empire struck back and contraction in the early 20th century began to peel away support for the common prosperity, as democracy and economic fairness gave way to Republicans whose objective was the creation of wealth for the few through the traditional mechanisms of corporate greed, speculation and corruption, which ultimately led to the predictable financial collapse known as the Great Depression. Until GWB was elected President in 2000, our biggest dummy of a President was probably Warren Harding, whose corrupt government led to arguably the biggest government scandal in history known as the “Teapot Dome Scandal.”  But, in traditional progressive fashion, it was a liberal Democrat that saved the country from a complete collapse. FDR was  elected during the depression and helped the country to begin the slow process of recovery, through the “New Deal” by stabilizing the banks, providing relief for the unemployed, stimulating the economy directly and establishing regulatory agencies that helped stabilize our economic system and avoid serious economic declines until the Republicans re-worked their magic again with the Savings and Loan crisis under Ronald Reagan and our current economic collapse under GWB. By the way, the Republicans are always trying to minimize the impact of the depression methods used during the New Deal by insisting that it was WW II that pulled the country out of its depression, not the actions of FDR. But according to Lux, when FDR came into office in 1933,  unemployment stood at 24.9 percent and went down every year but one in the period before WW II, ending at 10% at the start of the war in 1941.  The serious economic downturns we have had in this country, and there were many of them in the 19th century, were given to us by the expertise of conservative administrations that favored business interests over the needs of ordinary citizens.  FDR changed the country for good with the introduction of improved labor practices, Social Security, unemployment, jobs programs and most important of all, he provided a national sense that the government was doing something about a terrible depression. Perhaps no President in history did more to bring economic prosperity more broadly to the middle class while reducing the level of poverty in the country. The GI bill established a new, educated middle class, such that by the 1960s, the economy was working better for most people than it ever had before. The legislation under LBJ established improvements in civil rights and race relations, and pushed through two other landmark legislative actions in  Medicare and Medicaid. Tragically, it was the disaster of the Vietnam war and the rise of Republicans, inspired by Barry Goldwater that cultivated the South, leading to Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and the grip on national politics that the Republican Party has enjoyed for most of the latter part of the 20th century and well into this one. Because of this, no new sweeping progressive legislation has been passed since the days of LBJ. And, we have slipped backwards by relaxing environmental controls and the clean air and clean water acts. Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” played a dramatic role in shifting national attention to environmental issues and the eventual elimination the pesticide DDT, which, among other benefits, saved birds of prey from extinction, something of very little concern to conservatives. Lux also gives great credit to the feminist movement and cites Betty Friedan’s book “The Feminine Mystique” as a galvanizing force for focusing  public attention onto the gender inequities embedded in our constitution and reflected in our political history.

For most conservatives, Ronald Reagan is the gold standard of the modern Republican President. Here’s what a gold standard Republican looks like: he kicked off his political campaign in Philadelphia Mississippi in 1980,  the town where the three civil rights workers were murdered fifteen years earlier. Reagan’s message to the white supremacists was clear: I am one of you. What did Ronnie do? Well one thing he did was to bring supply side economics to the country, as he attempted to demonstrate the famous Laffer curve effect in which too much taxation was impeding economic growth and an immediate large tax cut would actually stimulate the economy and lead to near instantaneous new revenues.  But Reagan’s tax cuts did nothing of the sort. They pushed the country into huge deficits, sharply escalated interest rates and brought us a very profound and deep recession.  Reagan’s tax cut was distributed such that low-income Americans received 16 percent of the dollar savings, while the top earners received 84 percent. Reagan turned us from the biggest creditor nation in the world to the biggest debtor nation in the world. Reagan weakened the unions which further eroded middle class income levels and he shredded public safety nets. I lived in St. Louis at the time and was told by one of my physician friends that Reagan’s cuts in healthcare programs for the inner cities would result in a rise in the infant  mortality rate because of reduced prenatal care and that’s exactly what happened. I watched the numbers grow each year. Reagan’s ideology was that of a Social Darwinist. He would have voted to stay with the British in 1776. He slashed Social Security Disability Insurance and school lunch programs. He was a free marketeer from the get go and didn’t hesitate to plunder the country into clandestine wars that were illegal under US law.  When he was first elected, he took down a portrait of Jefferson from his office and replaced it with one of Calvin Coolidge. This seemed like an odd choice on the intellectual and importance scales, but Reagan made the change to remind everyone and himself that he wanted to return the country to a simpler time, when business had a free reign and he began to shut down the vestiges of the New Deal. Carter had started deregulation with the airlines, but Reagan would pursue deregulation with a vengeance. We are still stuck with many judges appointed in the Reagan era that hold firmly to deregulation and free market principles as an ideology.

Imagine meeting a conservative friend for lunch at a cafe in Boston in 1776. You convey your enthusiasm for Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” and talk about your new found vision for a country free from British rule, one in which opportunities would be available to all citizens of the country, while freeing the new nation from burdensome taxes and harsh, arbitrary  rules. As soon as you say goodbye to your friend, he marches straight to the British Magistrate’s office and reports you as a suspicious revolutionary. You are promptly arrested and either publicly flogged, imprisoned or hanged, depending on the degree to which the magistrate considers your potential for revolutionary zeal. In one very real way, the Republican party of today is an alien organization in America. They are the party that stood with the British in the revolutionary war, the party of slavery, states rights, Jim Crow, Jesse Helms and they are the party of the most dangerous terrorist organization in the history of the country–the Klu-Klux-Klan. Seeking bipartisan solutions with this party will only serve to weaken the Democratic bills and further disenchant the American public. Obama and the Democrats need to wake up to the new mood of receptivity that the country is in right now for dramatic, progressive change. Going down the bipartisan route is a sure way to lose their votes and diminish their enthusiasm.

While I don’t agree with everything that Lux expresses in his book, he gives us a nice time line description of the major events that shaped our history. I think Lux is naive about the evil threat from communism that we faced with the Soviet Union immediately after WW II. He wants to give Truman credit for facing down the threat of communism. I think of Truman as a fool for exaggerating the threat of communism and siding with the hardliners. Lux  seems not to understand that it was Truman and the hard liners around him that started the Cold War, aided and stimulated by militarists in the government at the time who were only there because of WW II. The Soviets were in fact demobilizing after WW II, not preparing for global hegemony. And, the American Communist Party that our government went after, largely because of the cross-dresser J. Edgar Hoover’s paranoia, and that of the House and Senate members he persuaded, was largely a joke–no one could tolerate the militancy of the party, which, at its peak probably had no more than a few tens of thousands of members; many of them had joined the party to give aid to the Spanish Government in the 1930s, since our own government refused to offer assistance, at a time when Germany and Italy were provided horrendous military assistance and direct participation to ensure a Franco victory.

If you consider yourself a progressive or liberal, you will enjoy Lux’s book. It’s a short read, only 224 pages and, if you have those stripes, it’s one of those books you can’t put down. This book should make you more enthusiastic for the overdue changes we need to make in order to overcome what, at the moment, seems like a confused, weird, self-destructive country.

RFM

The day after the NPR airing appeared,  FAIR posted an alert that expressed outrage at the segment and emphasized how, when William Buckley died in 2008, NPR aired no less than six segments, all of which featured glowing tributes to him, despite the fact that he accomplished little of intellectual significance. So, the argument goes, if NPR arranged things so that Buckley received only positive eulogies from his friends and admirers, why should Zinn be given the bipolar treatment? The FAIR article evoked many responses that were quickly posted and led to a general expression of outrage by his friends, colleagues, liberals and progressives: in other words, most of the good people left in the country were pissed.
Now perhaps it was the light weight intellectual timbre of Buckley that didn’t prompt NPR to “balance” the eulogies with at least one mud-slinger who could offer some balance to Buckley’s glossy veneer finish, as Horowitz attempted for  Zinn (apparently encouraged by Keyes).  In Buckley’s case, one could easily mount a juggernaut of offensive slurs about his sordid, right-wing history (I have commented previously on some of Buckley’s background, especially as it relates to turning the right-wing from its anti-war conservativism/libertarianism at the close of  WW II,  to the party of bombs-away, dominated by the neocons of today. That would have made for a much richer and more accurate account of Buckley’s life, even without the slurs.  Buckley also worked for the FBI as a student spy at Yale and later for the CIA, at which time his boss was the mysterious Howard Hunt). While Buckley is forgettable, Zinn is not: he will live on as a cultural icon, elevating for all time, our awareness of the history of those who suffered the genocidal actions of the discoverers and developers of the new world. The list of those who perished because they were obstacles in the creation of the American empire reaches into the many millions.

There are many conservative historians who, unlike Horowitz,  have legitimate academic pedigrees, and do not regard Howard Zinn as a serious historian. Arthur Schlesinger Jr commented that Zinn was a “polemicist, not a historian,”  and the British historian Paul Johnson recently described Zinn as a poor historian during his 3 hour C-Span series which aired on 2/7/2010. The fault line between these two views of history, the pro and anti-Zinn views, happens to be whether you are concerned with the history of the winners or that of those who perished and, in some cases, ceased to exist along the way. One is a purely pragmatic, presumably objective form of history (which it is not)  and the other tries to inject a moral and behavioral tone or the lack thereof into the motives of those we still celebrate, such as  Christopher Columbus. As a historian, Johnson is concerned with the behavior of America as a great empire, the world’s only superpower. He is an American Enterprise fellow who would identify with Henry Kissinger’s remarks, when he responded to a question about why we invaded Iraq, by saying “Afghanistan wasn’t big enough.” In other words, the empire demands a high price for those that transgress against it and the empire needs to be properly fed in such a way that the world will see the heavy toll that must be extracted whenever a violation of our global  hegemony takes place.  Iraq committed no act of aggression against America, but she paid a heavy price, one we extracted from the country and its citizens for the “transgressions” against us that were never committed (historian Johnson remains in favor of our invasion of Iraq–it’s what great empires do). But, as a result of that war, the “empire” was badly depleted of resources, sent spinning into deep debt and has yet to learn the true cost of the war, which may ultimately be in the several  $ trillion level.

Of equal importance is whether the “empire” gained anything by our invasion of Iraq. While we plotted different strategies on the military side during our long occupation,  we kept one eye on Iraqi oil, with perhaps the second largest oil reserves in the world. Yet, while bogged down with the military side of our invasion, the Chinese quietly came in and now look as though they might get a good share of the oil contracts, together with mining arrangements that make the neocon strategy seem completely senseless if not downright stupid. The deplorable cost in lives and our destruction of a functional, literate society cannot be viewed as a good outcome, even by the measure of a hegemonic empire,  so we deny the true numbers of Iraqi deaths and place doubts on those that attempt to do accurate assessment of the damage and death toll of our wars (Bush called the Lancet data “flawed”).  Some on the right have said that there are no innocents in Iraq!  If our invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam are the sensible things that world powers do, what constitutes a failed state and is it possible that we are already there or asymptotically approaching that point? It is high time we ask the question that William Pfaff recently posed:  “Has it been a terrible, and by now all but irreversible, error for the United States to have built a system of a thousand or more military bases and stations girdling the world? Does it provoke war, rather than providing security?” What’s your best guess?

To my knowledge, the criticisms that are leveled against Howard Zinn’s interpretation of history, by emphasizing what happened to the other side, those whom our ancestors trampled on, and the policies which keep those same attitudes in play today, don’t challenge Zinn’s facts or his basic scholarship. He certainly qualifies as a polemicist because he does oppose the traditional history of the American empire, but through his book, with sales of more than a million, has he established a view that one can take without the charge of polemicy? But anyone who reminds us of those we eliminated on the way to the creation of our “empire” are, by some accounts, studying the wrong side of history.

Those who scorn Howard Zinn’s  “A People’s History of the United States” are Social Darwinists who are content with the view that societies succeed or fail through the same mechanisms that govern individual species, in which the strong survive and the weak fade from view. But that view is firmly ignorant of the more recent concept of Sociobiology advanced by E.O. Wilson in which the success and survival future of the individual is acquired through their supportive role which helps to guarantee the survival of the larger social unit, the clan or in the clan of today, modern civilization. Which society will be ultimately better equipped to face the threats that are increasingly apparent in the form of global climate change? Successful reductions in atmospheric carbon dioxide will require the cooperation of virtually all countries. If America exported its high carbon footprint to the rest of the world, the planet would face almost certain doom from carbon dioxide intoxication that could reach irreversible atmospheric concentrations and permanently change the globe to a planet that could not support the 9 billion human inhabitants expected as our steady state population. Perhaps our military is already preparing for this possibility. Will the United States face the global threats of decreased oil as a member of a cooperative global effort or will we use our vast military resources to insure our energy future? Isn’t that what we have been trying to do in the Middle East, without much to show for it? Howard Zinn would have suggested that an expression of concern and support for those with whom we must share planetary space is the better, moral strategy and would generate a new history for America that Americans won’t have to dodge, as they do for our history of the last two hundred fifty years. Howard Zinn’s history of the American People is now being taught in many public and private schools throughout the country. Perhaps the straight line pathway to a demilitarized America, one better prepared to deal with our planetary future, goes through the Howard Zinns and not through the Henry Kissingers of our future.

RFM