Barack Obama

I should have sent President Obama a present for his fiftieth birthday last week, but I didn’t. A lot of things should be but aren’t. Obama should have been an ideal chief of state to reverse the previous twenty years’ self-destructive policies, but he wasn’t. He should have kept a few promises—not to the banks and military contractors, but to the voters. He should have kept the one about ending torture, but he didn’t. He should have kept the implied promise to the middle and working classes to restore their relative earning power to what it was before Ronald Reagan trickled their dollars up to fatten the oligarchy. He didn’t do that, either.

Now, a confession. Mea maxima culpa. I voted for him. Yet I am neither disappointed nor disillusioned. My expectations were low (although not as low as Obama has gone). My vote’s sole purpose was to send the party of Bush and Cheney into the wilderness for four years. To a libertarian left-winger like me, no administration was more venal than theirs. None had shown such contempt for the Bill of Rights, for due process, and for the guarantee of equality inherent in the Declaration of Independence. How could anyone vote for a party whose leaders plundered the US and Iraqi treasuries to benefit corporations in which they had vested interests? Alas, voting Democrat was not much better.

Before celebrating his birthday on August 4 in DC, Obama flew off to Chicago for another birthday party. The city is his adopted home, where he learned politics in the Cook County Democratic machine. Chicago has been a one-party fiefdom since Tony Cermak beat the last Republican mayor in 1931. One-party rule in Chicago has lasted longer than it did in the old Soviet Union. The high rollers gave him a birthday bash that cost them up to $35,800  per coiffed head. In the Washington Times, T. J. O’Hara wrote that was “a 17.7% increase year-over-year” on Obama’s 49th and estimated the “take” at $3.65 million. Not bad for a man of the people.

New Mayor Rahm Emanuel, fresh from his disastrous tenure as White House Chief of Staff, was there. Former supporters Tony Rezko and Rod Blagojevich couldn’t make it. Obama airbrushed them from his curriculum vitae, just as he’d done with Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, and Rashid Khalidi (scholar and Obama’s ex-Chicago neighbor, whose only offense was to be a Palestinian). My greatest disappointment was that the woman selected to do the slinky “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” à la Marilyn Monroe was Jennifer Hudson and not, in shimmering sequins, Hillary Clinton. You can’t have everything.

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If I had sent a present, it would have been Shelby Steele’s A Bound Man. I bought it in a secondhand bookshop because of the subtitle: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win. Published late in 2007, it was out less than a year before Obama won. It seemed one of the most inapt subtitles of all time, as if Hannibal had written a book about his Italian campaign and called it How I Conquered Rome. Though I bought it for a joke, I read it with fascination. The “can’t win” had nothing to do with the election. It concerned a more fundamental defeat: Obama is so compromised that he cannot know himself.

Steele has much in common with Obama. Both are American-born of African and European descent. Both went to the best schools and universities. Both understand the masks that African-Americans have worn to survive among a dominant white majority. Both are intelligent, intellectual, and successful. The resemblance ends there. Steele has more integrity, at least from my reading of his book. He also has more insights into Obama’s character than Obama revealed in his well-written coming-of-age memoir, Dreams From My Father. Steele explains why many whites, like me, voted for Obama: “So you don’t vote for Obama merely because of his policy positions on health care and school subsidies; he is an opportunity to vote for American redemption.” Well, there is much to redeem, but not so much that I would elect Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, or Colin Powell.

There are two Obamas: one who cuddles up to his financial backers, the other who fawns on the poor voter. He is the man with a poor mistress and a rich wife. He promises the mistress he’s leaving the wife, and he keeps the wife in the dark about the mistress so he can keep her money rolling in. Fine for him, not great for the family (i.e., the country).

“He is decidedly not a conviction politician,” Steele wrote. “His supporters do not look to him to do something; they look to him to represent something.” The synthesis he represented, of black and white American dreams in one person, holds power. Yet he does nothing with it. The ship of state cruises toward the whirlpool as it did under Bush and Cheney, only with a master salesman rather than a babbling buffoon at the helm. He talks the talk but does the Wall Street Walk.

If Obama rather than Lyndon Johnson had been president from 1963 to 1969, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts would have waited years while the White House discussed with the Dixiecrats and other racists in Congress a bipartisan approach to the “Negro problem.” In the Middle East, Obama is famous for telling a BBC reporter before his Cairo speech of 2009 that Hosni Mubarak, now on trial for corruption and murder, was “a force for stability and good.” Obama’s commitment to Palestinian statehood, one of many rhetorical flourishes, means he will veto it at the UN next month. The president who promised peace has prolonged the Bush policy of treating Pakistan as a free-fire zone, and he has yet to close a base in Iraq or Afghanistan.

John McCain, despite coming from the same party as Bush and Cheney, could have done better. Next time, I’m not voting. The Republicans are putting up clowns, and the Democrats are stuck with Obama. Does anyone remember his inaugural commitment to “remake America”? He kept the promise. America is remade all right. It’s broke.

Try to see it from the other guy’s point of view. He may be wrong. He may be, at least partly, right. Today, I am trying hard to see life from the point of view of an Israeli settler in the occupied West Bank. I have known a few, including one named Benzion Gruber, whom I liked. Benzi Gruber was the kind of man you would want beside you in a fight. It was not because he was a good fighter, which I suspect he was, but because he wouldn’t desert you.

Benzi was a colonel in the armored corps. Many of the men under his command told me he went out of his way to support them. More than one remembered sitting in a bunker somewhere in the West Bank, cold and in the dead of night. To make matters worse, it was their birthday. Suddenly, out of the dark, they would see Jeep lights approaching. Out of the door came little lights from birthday candles on cakes hand-delivered by Benzi Gruber.

Benzi, whom I have not seen in about eight years, lived in a settlement on land expropriated from its Palestinian owners. He had decent and intelligent children, and his family was hospitable when I had dinner at the house. It happened to be January 23, 2002, when I turned fifty-one. I’m not sure who told Benzi, but he came into the house with a birthday cake that had five candles plus one. I try to see the world through Benzi’s eyes.

When I covered southern Africa in the late 1970s, I tried as well to see Rhodesia from the white settlers’ point of view. They had a lot to lose, although they had stolen the country from its inhabitants, enacted laws to exclude blacks from the most fertile land, kept the indigenous population from power, and went to war to prevent granting the vote to the majority. When I look at the crimes committed now by Robert Mugabe—and they are many—I recall that rule by violence was also paramount to Cecil Rhodes’s conquest of Mashonaland and Matabeleland in the late 19th century. Mugabe has continued the system, mistreating not only the whites but also most of the country’s blacks. Ian Smith and his white followers, however much they wanted their white society to survive as they knew it, were wrong. Their war to prevent democracy was not merely immoral. It was self-destructive. In making military and police force the sole arbiter of disputes, they insured democracy would be stillborn.

My fear for Benzi Gruber, his family, and the other 300,000 settlers in the West Bank is that they are destroying a country that I know they love. They may be afraid of withdrawing from the West Bank. Some have a biblical attachment to the land, and others are taking advantage of government subsidies and tax breaks they would not enjoy in Israel proper. To preserve the settlements, they insist that the pre-1967 borders are indefensible. Ephraim Sneh, a former deputy defense minister and retired general, put that lie to bed in a recent New York Times Op-Ed that said a “security package would make the 1967 lines defensible.” In other words, two states—an independent Israel and an independent Palestine—are safer than one.

The Arab League decided last week to present the United Nations General Assembly with a resolution that the US and Israel have long been dreading: for UN recognition of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza, and east Jerusalem. Both the US and Israel would be wrong, in law and in their own interests, to oppose Palestinian statehood this September. UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of 1947 called for two states in the British Mandate of Palestine. The Arabs made the mistake of opposing partition. Most Jewish leaders embraced it. Remember, they embraced a resolution that called for two states, not one. That resolution became Israel’s birth certificate when, on May 15, 1948, it declared statehood. For the Palestinians today to call for their own state means not only that they accept partition, but that they accept Israel’s birth certificate—its “right to exist.” Israel and the US should embrace world recognition of Palestinian statehood and thus the Palestinian state’s acceptance of Israel.

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The resolution will create problems for Benzi Gruber and his fellow settlers, whose houses will be within another country. Israeli insistence on the idea that its forces are occupying “disputed territories” must vanish, because the land will not be disputed in the world’s eyes. It will be a country called Palestine, whose independence the world will be as obliged to protect as it did the borders of Kuwait when Iraq invaded it in 1990. That same world must also accept UN Resolution 181’s first state, Israel.

Last Friday, a couple thousand Israelis and Palestinians marched from the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem’s old city to Sheikh Jarrah, an Arab neighborhood where settlers have been taking over houses.

Their banners said, “Marching to Independence.”

One Israeli told the Washington Post, “The struggle for Palestinian independence is also a struggle for freedom for Israelis.” His statement was no exaggeration, particularly in light of last week’s Knesset law that made it a crime for anyone to call for boycotting the settlements. Amnesty International’s deputy director for the Mideast and North Africa, Philip Luther, said, “Despite proponents’ claims to the contrary, this law is a blatant attempt to stifle peaceful dissent and campaigning by attacking the right to freedom of expression, which all governments must uphold.”

Preserving and expanding settlements requires legislation and behavior that no democratic state can impose while remaining democratic. Holding onto a country called Palestine in defiance of the world and of international law will increase demands outside Israel for the kind of boycotts Israelis themselves will be prohibited from supporting.

As much as I try to see it from Benzi Gruber’s point of view, I suspect that for him to live in Israel and in healthy relations with the Palestinians next door is safer and better than relying on his tanks to keep the Palestinians down. Many people are leaving Israel itself—not in protest, but out of weariness with international isolation, repressive legislation, and the waste of tax money on settlements and armed forces to protect them. Half a million Israelis have the insurance policy of American passports, with another quarter-million applications in the pipeline. Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz that Germany—“of all places”—granted 100,000 passports to Israeli Jews. In one year alone, 650,000 Israelis left the country.

For Israel to survive as a democracy, it should heed the wise words that Giuseppe di Lampedusa put in the mouth of his Prince of Salina in The Leopard. Advising his fellow Sicilians to vote for unification with Italy, he reminded them, “Things will have to change in order that they remain the same.”

Syed Saleem Shahzad

The first email came on May 31 from London’s Pluto Press, saying that one of their authors was missing and believed to be imprisoned. The author was forty-year-old journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad, whose reporting on Pakistan and Afghanistan was famously reliable and probing. As editor of Asia Despatch and Pakistan Bureau Chief of Hong Kong’s Asia Times Online, he had broken many important stories about the two wars raging in his region: the public conflict between the US and the Taliban and the covert struggle pitting the US against its ostensible Pakistani allies. The Taliban once kidnapped him in Afghanistan and then allowed him access to their cadres as a guest.

Author Nir Rosen has said: “When Syed Saleem Shahzad talks, I listen. He is the most fearless and reliable journalist covering Pakistan and Afghanistan, and that’s why his work is read even in the halls of the Pentagon.” Shahzad should have belonged to what Graham Greene called the “non-torturable” class. Theoretically, he was immune to harassment by Pakistani government apparatchiks. But clearly he wasn’t. “According to Human Rights Watch,” Asia Times announced, “Shahzad is being held for questioning in relation to an article in the Asia Times suggesting complicity between Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Navy.” The Asia Times article alleged that the Pakistani Navy conspired with al-Qaeda to attack one of Pakistan’s own naval air facilities near Karachi. Someone seemed angry that the story got out. When Shahzad disappeared, it seemed the intelligence services had kidnapped him to torture him into revealing his sources. Their methods of discovery would not stand scrutiny in a court of law. Shahzad’s friends, whom he had already told about intelligence-service threats to his life, were justifiably worried.

Pluto Press was in the process of publishing Shahzad’s new book, Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban: Beyond bin Laden and 9/11, destined to annoy many people in and out of Pakistan. Following Osama bin Laden’s assassination, it exposed Pakistani officialdom’s misdeeds at a time when its relations with Washington were especially precarious. The book includes interviews with key Taliban and al-Qaeda players who discuss their ideology, operations, and strategy. It exposed some of Pakistan’s links to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and it demonstrated the Taliban’s reliance on indirect American funding. Shahzad had reported in 2003 on his conversation with a Taliban official who told him that American officers “distribute dollars to the tribal chiefs, local administrators and other concerned people for welfare projects….Not every penny, but most goes into Taliban projects to refuel their struggle.” This, combined with Patrick Cockburn’s excellent reports in London’s Independent on America’s extortion payments to the Taliban, depicted a war in which the US was effectively funding both sides.

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When I received Pluto’s email, I forwarded it to friends and organizations that espouse the cause of our colleagues in trouble: the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, and London’s Frontline Club. I expected a campaign of petitions to the Pakistani government demanding his immediate release, as well as appeals from Hillary Clinton and others on his behalf.

Unfortunately, it was too late.

Another email from Pluto arrived later that day stating he’d been found dead in Pakistan:

Further to this morning’s email. It is my sad duty to announce that Pluto author and international journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad, author of Inside Al-Qaeda: Beyond bin Laden and 9/11, has been found dead in suspicious circumstances, two days after he went missing and three days after writing an article on possible complicity between Al Qaeda and elements of the Pakistani Navy.

They found his badly tortured corpse beside a canal about eighty miles from Islamabad. Rather than allow a pathologist to conduct an autopsy, the police arranged for a speedy burial. (Shahzad’s body was later exhumed for a post-mortem examination.) Press clubs in Pakistan’s larger cities have staged protests against the government over their colleague’s murder. Journalist and author Mohammed Hanif asked on Twitter: “Any journalist here who doesn’t believe that it’s our intelligence agencies?” So far, the answer has been no.

The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that more journalists have been killed in Pakistan in the last year than in any other country. Spokesman Bob Dietz said that in Pakistan, “people who kill journalists are not brought to justice.” It may take internal and international pressure to change that, and anger in Washington may help.

Reports quickly indicated that the White House and State Department were not buying the ISI’s denials of involvement in his murder. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said he believed Pakistan’s government had “sanctioned” Shahzad’s murder.

Buy Shahzad’s book, not only to help support the wife and three children whom he leaves behind, but also to learn. It tells us what the Pakistani government, whose corruption and brutality Shahzad died to expose, does not want us to know. Finding out is the least we can do.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn

They say no money was paid and no prisoners were exchanged. I’m not talking about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, but about the two French hostages released in Afghanistan while Strauss-Kahn’s alleged rape victim’s credibility was disintegrating.

The Taliban had captured television correspondent Hervé Ghesquiere and cameraman Stéphane Taponier of television channel France 3 in December 2009. Since then, life-size photos of the two hostages have adorned almost every city hall in France. The public took the two fearless journalists to their hearts and demanded the government do something for them.

Although France officially denies it made a deal with the Taliban, it appears the government did something to get the men out. Hostage Ghesquiere said he doubted the kidnappers let him go in return “for chocolates.” The Taliban spokesman, who calls himself Zabiullah Mujahid, announced, “France was forced to accept the conditions put forward by the Islamic Emirate.” According to much of the French media, those conditions included the release of Taliban fighters in French custody. What we had here, Dolores, was an old-fashioned hostage exchange. (Do you think France let some American drug dealers out of La Santé in exchange for Strauss-Kahn?)

As lucky as the two French journalists were to obtain their liberty after eighteen miserable months, their timing could not have been worse. Normally, parades would have welcomed them to the land of the living. After all, we in France, even down here in Provence, know their faces from thousands of posters and have been yearning for their ordeal to end. They should have been front-page news. Yet they vanished. If you were searching for their story, you might find it between the crosswords and the classifieds.

Why? Page One became the domain of a man whom the French are now treating like a prisoner of conscience. Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s liberation trumped that of two journalists the country had been fretting over for a year and half. Our local paper, La Provence, pasted his picture in full color beside his wife with the headline, “L’incroyable coup de theatre.” Under the headline “DSK, le nouveau big bang,” the paper devoted a double-page spread to his victimization and probable comeback. Not since Nelson Mandela left Robben Island has a country so joyfully welcomed a politician coming out of custody.

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He was up, he was down, and now he’s up again. Like an inflatable punching dummy, Strauss-Kahn keeps bouncing back. Two months ago, he was on top of the world. He headed the globe’s most important financial institution, the International Monetary Fund. Polls rated him as the Socialist Party’s best candidate to defeat incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy for president next year. What more could a man want? Well, hotel maids, apparently. The New York police deprived him of his livelihood as IMF head, nearly eliminated him from serious contention for the French presidency, and cost him around $250,000 a month to keep to his bail terms. (They may also have caused him a few sticky conversations with his wife, who among other inconveniences reportedly picked up his costs.)

But suddenly the cops discover that their star witness won’t stand up to scrutiny before a jury. So they ease his bail conditions and give every indication they are going to drop the case against him when it comes before the court on July 18. He’s had a tough time, paraded in shackles before the press and briefly confined to The Tombs and Rikers Island. He can be thankful, though, that he wasn’t among almost one hundred CIA detainees whose torture allegations the Justice Department decided not to examine a day before the cops shared with The New York Times their doubts about the character of his Guinean accuser. If times have been bad for Strauss-Kahn, they are worse for the American justice system.

Here in France, meanwhile, the chattering classes are predicting a DSK resurrection. Socialist Party apparatchiks are behaving like petty mafiosi learning that the Godfather they thought they had buried is back. His revival is forcing them to regroup to make it possible for him to return in triumph. Surprisingly, he is still their strongest contender to defeat Sarkozy and the National Front leader Marine Le Pen. The deadline for declaring candidacy in the newly minted party primaries is July 13, which is well before the cops are likely to return DSK’s passport. When he descends from the clouds to touch French soil like de Gaulle in 1944, he may reclaim the crown that was surely his before he had his unfortunate hotel-room encounter. (There is no doubt there was some kind of encounter, as Clinton-like stains on the maid’s clothes attest.) Because the primary system the socialists have introduced has no legal force, DSK will have the option of declaring he was robbed and demand a party conference to make him their candidate. Many socialists are telling the press they would applaud his victory.

Will we see Strauss-Kahn, yesterday’s mug and jailbird, in the Élysée Palace? If I were a bookie, I’d put it at about three to one. With his arrest record, though, the State Department might not give him a visa to visit the Obamas in Washington. The White House maids can be thankful for that much.

Barack Obama

Obama is pulling American troops out of Afghanistan. Or at least he says he is. He also said that American forces in Iraq are no longer there. Officially, the Iraq war is over, at least if you ignore the fighting. So where are the 45,000 soldiers based in Iraq if not in, well, Iraq?

According to a Brookings Institution report from late May, they’re in…Iraq.

Will the administration pull a similar act of verbal prestidigitation to keep troops in Afghanistan, given that they are the only barrier between Hamid Karzai’s unpopular government and the Taliban? If you read the press, Obama is heading for the exit:

USA Today, June 22:
“President Obama heralded the beginning of the end of the nation’s 10-year war in Afghanistan on Wednesday….”

New York Times headline, June 23:
“Obama Will Speed Military Pullout From Afghan War”

The Obama plan for Afghanistan, which may succumb to delays similar to the Iraqi pullout, calls for 33,000 soldiers to depart by September next year with the rest withdrawn at the end of 2014. If you believe that will happen on schedule, send me a check for $100 and I’ll sell you a new Rolls-Royce.

Only a few antiwar groups and media critics have pointed out the obvious: Since he became president, the Nobel Peace Prize winner has tripled the number of US troops in Afghanistan. From 34,000 soldiers in theater when he assumed office, he raised the total to 100,000 by 2010. Last year was also the one in which the cost of Afghan combat rose above that in Iraq.

Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting pointed out that with 100,000 troops and another 100,000 security contractors (whom Karzai is seeking to expel) in Afghanistan, “it’s hard to read a phased pullout of 30,000 out of 200,000 over the course of an entire year as a ‘rapid’ withdrawal.” This excludes 80,000 to 90,000 support troops in nearby countries. Yet if the media prove willing to describe such a mild pullback as a “withdrawal,” American voters may accept that the war in Afghanistan, like that in Iraq, is over. It won’t matter that the locals go on killing one another and American troops stand by to intervene when necessary.

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Obama knows how to defuse antiwar sentiment. When pundits advised Lyndon Johnson to declare victory and leave Vietnam, LBJ didn’t listen and became too unpopular to stand for a second full term in 1968. Obama is taking the advice that LBJ ignored, but with a twist: He is declaring both victory and withdrawal without achieving either.

“Now, last night,” Obama told soldiers at Fort Drum, New York, the day after his June 22 policy announcement, “I gave a speech in which I said that we had turned a corner where we can begin to bring back some of our troops.” He did not say where and how that corner was turned, but the Obama Corner may be as elusive as Vietnam’s “light at the end of the tunnel.” No one who has spent time recently in Afghanistan believes for a moment that the Taliban is weaker or operates in a smaller territory than it did a year ago.

So it goes in Iraq and Afghanistan. What about Libya? Our humanitarian interventionists, who maintain as Hillary Clinton did that the war in Afghanistan is about building schools, are ignoring legal advice that the War Powers Act requires the president to seek Congressional approval for further engagement. The UN resolution empowered NATO to protect civilians; but France, Britain, and the US have gone one giant leap further and are now trying to force a regime change in Tripoli. Civilians are dying in greater numbers, and Gaddafi is holding out. Does that mean the US and its allies will go deeper into Libya, as they did in Afghanistan, until things are exactly as they want them? How long will that take, and how much will it cost? America’s mayors, who just voted a resolution calling for a withdrawal of money spent on foreign wars and diverted to their crumbling cities, would like to know the answer.

Barack Obama

What’s going on with Barack “Open Government” Obama? His Justice Department has prosecuted more people for exposing government secrets than all the presidents from George “I cannot tell a lie” Washington to George “I cannot tell the truth” Bush combined. Compared to his predecessors’ three prosecutions in more than two centuries, Obama has added five in less than two-and-a-half years. Can it be that our “hopey-changey” president has more to hide?

The president’s latest attempt to put a civil servant behind bars for speaking to a journalist is a weak case at best. Stephen J. Kim worked for the Defense and State Departments on North Korean issues. After someone introduced him to Fox News reporter James Rosen, Kim let slip a CIA analysis of North Korea’s likely reaction to a United Nations resolution condemning its nuclear weapons and missile tests. The CIA correctly concluded that North Korea would tell the UN to go to hell and then conduct more tests. Was there anything controversial or life-threatening in leaking a rare assessment in which the CIA could take pride? The North Korea assessment contrasts with the CIA’s failure to predict 1956’s Hungarian revolution, 1989’s fall of communism in Eastern Europe, and 2003’s Iraqi popular reaction to the American invasion. Hey, they’re bound to get it right once in a while.

The leak’s triviality did not stop Obama’s bloodhounds from tracking down Mr. Kim and seeking to send him away for fifteen years under the Espionage Act of 1917. Kim, who immigrated to the US from South Korea when he was eight, is now awaiting trial for allegedly betraying a country he clearly loves. Not even the failure of the Obama Justice Department’s most recent case, against Thomas A. Drake of the National Security Agency, has reduced its enthusiasm for going after Mr. Kim and others who expose what the government wants to keep hidden. Drake’s alleged crime was to share with Siobhan Gorman, a Baltimore Sun reporter now at The Wall Street Journal, classified information about NSA surveillance. Prosecutors sought a thirty-five-year sentence but eventually Drake pled down to a misdemeanor. Meanwhile, Bradley Manning still faces a court-martial on charges of passing documents to WikiLeaks.

Obama’s people appear to be looking for hard men and women to plug the leaks. Step forward, Lisa O. Monaco, recent Obama Justice appointee. At her Senate confirmation hearing, Ms. Monaco said that “it would be my priority to continue the aggressive pursuit of these investigations.” She appeared pleased with the administration’s record of nearly “twice as many prosecutions” than in the rest of American history. Bet on her quick confirmation, after which she’ll be watching us all to make sure no one tells anyone else anything.

Does no one care that this is the most closed-up American government since, well, since ever? You’d think that those who profess to support both governmental transparency and journalists’ right to publish classified data would raise hell, at least until the government acknowledged the difference between spying for Israel and exposing government malfeasance to the electorate. Under this administration, you would be wrong.

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Step forward, America’s leading guardians of free speech and open government. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Project on Government Oversight, George Washington University’s National Security Archive, OpenTheGovernment.org, and OMB Watch banded together in March to batter down 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue’s doors and highlight this very issue. And they got in. Did they hand the president a petition demanding protection for the kind of whistleblowers Obama promised to support during his candidacy? Well, no.

These august institutions whose raison d’être is public access to government’s inner workings penetrated Obama’s sanctum sanctorum last March to tell him—wait for it—to keep up the good work. There was no demand that he rethink his prosecutions of Manning, Drake, Kim, or anyone else. There was no plea for him to keep his campaign promise to open the White House visitor logs. There was not even a request for him to end the arrests, of which there are more than 2,600 to date, of anti-war protestors.

The liberal guardians of our right to know were cleverer than that. Anyone can complain about secret government and the state hiding its crimes from public scrutiny. They outsmarted their critics by marching boldly into Obama’s lair, past his armed henchmen, and confronting a president whose record on governmental transparency would be the envy of the old Kremlin to hand him their “transparency award.” The best part is that the public and press were not permitted to witness the ceremony. How is that for open government?

As with giving the Nobel Peace Prize to a president waging two wars simultaneously, awarding the “transparency” prize to history’s most opaque president is, in the words of its sponsors, “aspirational.” They theoretically aspired, as if awarding the Order of Decency to Pablo Escobar, to influence the recipient to change his ways. Why not a banquet to honor former Congressman Weiner with a “World’s Greatest New Husband” award? Or a bequest for “Respect for Human Life” to Ayman al-Zawahiri?

Let’s give a Nobel for medicine to Obama in the hope he finds a cure for cancer. And an Oscar for Best Actor to inspire him to star in a film as a truthful president. Here’s an aspiration: why not a Darwin Award for…you know what they’re for.

What the hell is wrong with these five groups or, for that matter, the Nobel Committee? Obama is determinedly pursuing two wars and dozens of whistleblowers. Organizations that should be defending the peace and the electorate’s right to know are instead rewarding him for violating principles they exist to promote. Obama can conceal torture and death squads, and he can pretend he is obeying the Constitution and the War Powers Act when he decides on his own to commit American forces in Libya. But do we really expect groups such as the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to indulge a politician who has convened grand juries to force journalists to reveal their sources?

In an open letter published in the Guardian on June 14, Daniel Ellsberg, former Justice and State Department officials, and many others urged the donors to rescind Obama’s transparency award. You can sign their petition HERE.

The Briterati, as I call Britain’s media pontificators on matters spiritual and temporal, are in a spin over reports that parents no longer read to their children and that the state is failing to protect the wee ’uns from pornography. It is good to drop in on Britain from time to time, if only to observe moral guardians’ ephemeral preoccupations in the columns of newspapers that fewer and fewer people bother to read.

Last time I was here, columnists were obsessing over who would design Kate Middleton’s wedding dress. All that is forgotten as the press ferrets out other tidbits to digest and regurgitate.

This week, it’s the kids. A study by the National Literacy Trust claimed that 25 percent of twelve-year-olds could not spell, that one in six Londoners cannot read without difficulty, and that most London employers have trouble finding literate employees. Apparently, only two-thirds of families with children keep books at home. Almost all of them, though, have computer games. This is not a happy picture for a country where the printing press made Milton and Dickens available to the masses.

The Evening Standard weighed in with a campaign to encourage parents to read to their children, something that it believes few of them do anymore. The paper also called for volunteers to read to children whose parents lack the inclination, ability, or time to do it themselves. Even Camilla, the future queen, took up the call. Ideally, Mom or Dad should put the kids to bed while telling stories or reading Beatrix Potter or Tintin. If they don’t, the volunteers plan to pick up the slack. How long this will last or whether it will increase literacy is anyone’s guess.

Regarding children’s access to pornography, the columnists have suggested remedies that fall short of interfering with Rupert Murdoch’s satellite channels’ habit of offering hardcore samplers for free without asking for proof of age. Short of bringing the police into the house, I’m not sure how you can stop it. When I was about nine, we used to sneak looks at naturist magazines in bookshops. Young autodidacts will explore all that their elders want to keep to themselves. So let the elders read to them and ask the cops to put a wall between youngsters and whatever Murdoch puts on his porn channels.

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The real place to help children is not the living-room sofa, with its omnipresent television, nor the bedroom with a conscientious parent reading Harry (rather than Beatrix) Potter aloud. It is the dining room. Civilization begins at the dinner table. Here is where we learn the rudiments of good behavior. Observation tells us which knives and forks to use and not to throw food on the floor. We learn as well the ingredients that go into a decent lunch or dinner, about nutrition and taste, what goes with what, and what to avoid. We learn how to drink wine to accompany food rather than to get blasted. We come to understand the art of conversation, when to speak, when to listen, when to assent, and when to argue.

At the table, we consume and we give back. To do that, we have to arrive having read and thought about books to discuss. We need to understand what is happening in the world enough to speak up. When someone mentions the latest production of a Pinter play, we learn that as civilized creatures we should find out about it ourselves for the next conversation. At the dinner table, we receive and share knowledge, opinion, banter, gossip, jokes, and affection. We test our ideas against those of others. We challenge our elders. They challenge us. We learn to come armed with something in our heads before we fill our stomachs.

The sadness for children in the English-speaking world is that most of them no longer have lunch or dinner with their families. Statistics vary wildly, depending on who has done the research. But most indications are that American and British families are eating dinner together less and less. Many of those who do have dinner together do so before a television, barely noticing that young Timmy is drooling into his just-unfrozen pizza or little Sally is eating her macaroni with her fingers.

Read to your kids as often as you can. It’s better than downing a beer in front of the television. Try to shield them from elephantine organs pumping away at shaved pudenda. But go the extra mile. Sit down at the table and talk to them as equals. Let them help with the cooking, as no youngster loses from knowing how to prepare good food, where the food comes from, and what it costs. Make them part of civilization and not isolated, disaffected sociopaths seeking companionship in artificial friendships within their computers’ illusory worlds. Let them grow into people able to hold their own in conversation anywhere, willing to debate their supposed betters and unafraid to tell employers, politicians, and experts when they are wrong. In short, let them be human.

As the blessed Oscar Wilde said, “The man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world.”

Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney declared his intention last week to seek the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 2012. Between now and next summer’s convention, he’ll trip along the Yellow Brick Road that he must imagine will lead him to the White House. That means fifteen months of making promises no one expects him to keep, chomping on fried chicken in Alabama and dim sum in San Francisco, coining empty slogans, pandering to people he would never invite to dinner, kissing a few thousand drooling babies, and, if he is astute, keeping his hands off the posteriors of the free labor that flocks to his colors.

Yes, ma’am, it’s election time in America. It’s the longest season of the quadrennial calendar, and Mitt will tack on an extra three months if he takes the nomination. The going rate for the full campaign must be about $50 million a month. Those with access to the hundreds of millions it takes for advertising to fool the voters are either up and running or making it clear they’re about to be: Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann, and someone from Utah named Jon Huntsman. I assume no Democrat will be brave or foolhardy enough to challenge Obama.

Republican primary and caucus voters will be asked by all of the candidates to trust them to overthrow the last guy for whose banter we fell. This is what Americans call democracy, and it is no recipe for putting the most qualified, public-spirited, and honest people into office. It instead guarantees chicanery, mediocrity, and larceny.

Why does Mitt Romney excite us less for 2012 than Harold Stassen, who sought the Republican nomination eight times without coming close, did in 1964? At the ’64 convention at the Cow Palace near San Francisco, I remember delegates sporting jocular lapel buttons that said, “Stop Stassen.” Perhaps Mitt will achieve similar status if he persists every four years in his quixotic quest to make himself leader of the free world. A few people talk about Jeb Bush, as if two Bushes in the White House had not already created a surplus. I’ll leave Sarah Palin to Tina Fey, and most of the others couldn’t run a gas station. If Obama fell under a bus, the Democrats wouldn’t field a much better roster. American democracy is competing with the dollar for loss of value.

The 2012 Republican nomination derby, with its lame horses and crooked jockeys, will drag on for the next fifteen months of ennui, deception, and occasional scandals. The crown won’t go to anyone who cannot or will not pay the entry fee. It debars those who will not guarantee their financial backers rich rewards and bailouts from the public purse or soften up the public with promises of chickens in every pot. Thus, the voter is offered only those with the morals of US Congressmen or Colombian drug dealers. And I’m being unkind to the Colombians. Does it matter that the finest thoroughbreds are never in this particular race?

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It’s some time since I read Plato’s Dialogues, but I recall Socrates saying that it was possible to judge a candidate’s worthiness for office by the determination with which he resisted it. The wisest thing William Tecumseh Sherman ever said was, “I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected.” If he had not been the butcher of Georgia and murderer of America’s indigenous population, that statement alone should have qualified him. Instead, the Republicans that year (1884) nominated the great statesman James Blaine. Remember him? He lost to Grover Cleveland.

America’s commercial form of democracy was endorsed by a Supreme Court decision last year that assured big capital’s right to choose our nominees. The 5-4 verdict in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission does for the republic what the Dred Scott decision achieved for the Union. This system of funding candidates does not allow good people to come forward. It encourages the opposite. It enables politicians who agree to anything to get into office—whether through appointing unethical financiers to oversee the economy; granting government contracts to companies whose corrupt practices and shoddy products would send their managers to the penitentiary in a sane society; guaranteeing AIPAC twenty-four-hour access to the Oval Room and billions of dollars for Israeli settlers to do to the Palestinians what Sherman did to the Indians; and paying the taxpayers’ annual tribute in gold to weapons-makers. Candidates agree to do all this harm merely to put their names at the bottom of that illustrious list of placemen that includes Millard Fillmore, Warren G. Harding, and Bill Clinton.

Corruption and mediocrity, as Tocqueville noted, always lurked within popular democracy. Placating the mob was unlikely to achieve excellence. Plato batted around the contradiction between popular government and good government, coming down—as both Karl Popper and I. F. Stone wrote—hard against democracy. As most people forget, the word “democracy” derives from two words whose Greek origins mean “mob” and “rule.”

No one was more aware of this than British parliamentarian and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, who helped extend the franchise to the very mob to whom he refused to pander. As a Whig Member of Parliament, he fought hard for the Reform Law of 1832 that opened the way to universal male suffrage. The electors of Leeds then asked him to represent them in the next elections. He wrote to one of them in August 1832:

The practice of begging for votes is, as it seems to me, absurd, pernicious, and altogether at variance with the true principles of representative government….The practice of canvassing is quite reasonable under a system in which men are sent to Parliament to serve themselves. It is the height of absurdity under a system under which men are sent to Parliament to serve the public. While we had only a mock representation, it was natural enough that this practice should be carried to a great extent. I trust it will soon perish with the abuses from which it sprung.

Alas, the practices of sending men to Parliament, as well as the House of Representatives and the Senate, to serve themselves and their financial benefactors did not perish. If such practices do not vanish soon, democracy will.

The other night at the Hotel George V, the American Library in Paris held a fundraising dinner of the city’s American grandees. Dotted among the plutocrats were various publishers, journalists, and writers such as Lily Tuck, Diane Johnson, Alan Riding, Dinaw Mengestu, Jack Lamar, and Elaine Sciolino. Scott Turow delivered the after-dinner speech. His theme was, “Will there be books in the future?” I should have gone straight to the bar before he started.

Turow is both a lawyer and a best-selling novelist of crime thrillers such as Presumed Innocent. He’s also the president of the Authors Guild. At the George V, although his Chicago accent was weary from the transatlantic flight, the feisty barrister packed some hard punches. “Any honest assessment of the future must recognize that writing books for a living may well disappear as a profession,” he said, “and with it, for many of the same reasons, libraries as we know them now.” Writers and libraries, and by implication bookshops and publishers, were “endangered species.” This was not the uplifting message we wanted after our gazpacho, braised duck, and Burgundian wines.

Literature, as music did when Napster came along, is waging a life-or-death war with online piracy. Turow admitted that e-books save publishers money on printing, storing, and shipping printed texts. E-books, however, are vulnerable to theft that robs authors and publishers. “The average eighteen-year-old computer geek,” Turow said, “can buy one copy of a book from Amazon, Barnesandnoble.com, or Google and remove the encryption and get it posted online. Of course, the pirate sites are far more sophisticated. Under the Digital Copyright Millennium Act, there is a device for shutting down these pirate sites, though it’s really just a game of Whac-A-Mole because they spring up under a different name.” Turow said that New York’s Macmillan publishing house sends 4,000 takedown notices to brigand sites every month. (Another publisher, John Wiley & Sons, pays three full-time staff to ferret out the pirates and bring them to book. In 2009, Wiley was demanding that 5,000 illegal e-versions of its titles be removed from the Internet per month.)

For the benefit of those suffering, as I do, from economic dyscalculia, Turow explained how Amazon is putting scribblers and publishers on the breadline. Amazon, which introduced the first effective e-reader, paid publishers fifty percent of a book’s cover price to sell it in an e-edition. Using a hypothetical cover price of $30, Turow continued:

So they were paying publishers, let’s say, $15. They then turned around and sold the readers the e-book version for $10. So they lost $5 on every sale. And nobody believed Amazon was engaged in an effort to subsidize publishers. It was of course an effort to drive out any competing e-reader.…And they were well on their way to monopolizing the market. And once that happened, publishers were not going to be getting $15 for what Amazon was going to be selling for $10.

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Not satisfied with crippling book publishers, Amazon is taking on the magazines with the Kindle Single. “Amazon is commissioning writers to write thirty or forty pages for them,” Turow warned. “The author gets seventy percent of the proceeds, Amazon thirty percent. It’s a better deal than any author is going to get writing for an American magazine. But see what happens to the magazine business if this catches on.” And see what Amazon pays when it is the only employer of freelance talent left. Add to that the Googlization of libraries without authors’ permission and the ease with which anyone can read portions of books via Google without paying anyone anything.

Turow predicted the demise of publishers, which meant that “there won’t be advances for writers and books won’t be written and read.” For those of us who make a living from the written word as publishers, writers, or booksellers, this was a bitter after-dinner potion. It was time for a drink, and nothing short of hemlock seemed right.

In Paris shortly after Turow gave us the bad news, President Nicolas Sarkozy staged his eG8 forum in advance of the G8 summit at Deauville. In a way, the Tuileries Internet conference of media moguls from Google’s Eric Schmidt to Rupert Murdoch was the real summit, after which Deauville was a supper of leftovers for the servants. The moguls, even those who’ve facilitated the theft of intellectual property, issued a statement calling for “respect for privacy and intellectual property…cybersecurity, and protection from crime….”

Putting the principles into practice may be difficult, especially in countries such as Russia and China where kleptomania is regarded as a necessary survival condition rather than a mental aberration. Eric Schmidt rushed to defend Internet giants such as his corporation from state interference, saying, “Before we decide there is a regulatory solution, let’s ask if there’s a technological solution.”

He is asking a question he should be answering. The monopolization of the Internet, and thus of electronic publishing, is a condition for which he is part of the cause rather than the way out. In societies that value their written, visual, and musical cultures, the law must protect the creators. The Internet thieves who put our books up for free downloading should be treated just like the shoplifters they are. Those who advertise on sites that sell or give away stolen goods are accomplices in criminal activity and should suffer the penalty. Guarding the Internet against theft, as against the sexual exploitation of children, is no more a violation of freedom of expression than policing the streets against muggers and murderers is a bar to free behavior.

Despite the thieves and the Internet monopolies, writing and publishing may survive. After all, when the pill and the sexual revolution saw most women giving away their favors, the hookers didn’t give up. From the evidence along the Rue Saint-Denis, the bar of the Plaza Athénée, and the alleys of Pigalle, they are thriving.

In the meantime, don’t post this article on your site without paying Takimag.com.

Most versions of the Saint George legend tell us that when the great Christian slew the dragon, he went home. Task accomplished, deed done, dragon’s blood dry on his lance, and king’s daughter rescued, George rushed to the family hearth in Lydda, Palestine, to savor his triumph. Washington’s dragon slayers, fresh from their kill in Abbottabad, should consider his example. They chased the hoary-headed bin Laden from Kabul, hunted him in Tora Bora’s caves, sought him in Waziristan, and pursued his trail from the Hindu Kush to the Punjab Plain. Ten years, billions of dollars, and thousands of lives later, they found him in a rundown house and put a (silver, to be safe?) bullet into his head.

They took the bloody corpse away, inspected it, verified its provenance, and sent it down to Davy Jones’s Locker lest any followers entomb it as the shrine of a new cult. Osama bin Laden is definitely gone, dead, deceased, defunct, no mas en casa. Like Monty Python’s parrot, “’E’s kicked the bucket, ’e’s shuffled off ’is mortal coil, run down the curtain, and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible.” He is gone and ain’t comin’ back. So why are American forces prolonging their tour in Afghanistan? The Bush Administration called the 2001 invasion Operation Enduring Freedom, but Obama is making it Operation Enduring Operation.

If the United States wanted an excuse to depart from a land where it has waged a Sisyphean battle for ten years, Osama bin Laden’s execution has provided it. The US has seen around 1,500 of its own soldiers killed, another 11,000 wounded, and more than that suffering mental breakdowns. US troops have inflicted uncounted numbers of casualties on the natives—both the rebellious types with weapons and those who happened to attend a wedding that was hit by rockets. The taxpayer is losing about $6.7 billion a month in what began as the hunt for Osama. Now that they’ve achieved the original goal, is anyone in Washington bidding farewell to the Hindu Kush? Alas, Washington gives every impression that it’s seeking excuses to stay.

Why would anyone want another ten years of killing and maiming?  The Veterans Administration hospitals (not to mention Afghanistan’s rural clinics) have enough with which to cope. Can the US taxpayer afford another few hundred billion dollars on a country that has never failed to expel every foreign army that ventured into its impoverished mountains and valleys? The United States, like the British and the Soviets before, will leave Afghanistan one day. How about today? Delay adds only to the cost without changing the outcome.

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“I believe the decisions that the president will make for the next stage of the Afghanistan campaign will be among the most important of his presidency, so it is important that we take our time to do all we can to get this right,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said two years ago. What will his successor say two years from now?

All options are, as in Gates’s 2009 review, on an increasingly rickety table—all, that is, except immediate withdrawal. President Obama and his soon-to-be CIA director, General David Petraeus, are considering reducing troop numbers to what they were before the last surge. By removing some of the targets for Taliban attacks, that should reduce the US casualties. However, it would not reduce them as much as if they all left. Without American troops, though, the Karzai government would fall. So what? Will you send your son or daughter to die for Hamid Karzai and his Gucci coat? With Karzai gone, the Taliban would take over—up to a point. They would dominate in the Pashtun areas from which they came and where they dominate anyway. The old Northern Alliance forces would hold their regions and opium fields as they did before the US swept them into Kabul. Those Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Hazaras are unlikely to cede territory to the Pashtuns. If Karzai and his brother escape with their lives and fortunes, Kabul would remain a nominal capital with no more sway in most of the country than it has now. All that the US can ask is that no faction provides bases and support to a post-Osama al-Qaeda, a desire it can enforce from bases over the border using special operations and economic leverage.

Why don’t the Army and Marine Corps make a case, as many of their veterans have (notably in Veterans for Common Sense), for a withdrawal that would save them lives, money, and prestige while allowing them to concentrate on their constitutional duty to defend the republic?

For the answer, I turn to another great George. George Sanders may not have been a saint, but he was Hollywood’s English gentleman cad par excellence. Known to a generation as the sibilant voice of Shere Khan in Disney’s 1967 version of The Jungle Book, Sanders played the leader of the Philistines in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1949 classic Samson and Delilah. To his oft-demoralized military commander, Henry Wilcoxon, the great Sanders says, “Like all soldiers, when you fail by the sword, you ask for more swords.”

T.E. Lawrence

This is not a good time to be running the Middle East desk at the State Department. If you happen to be him or her, take my advice: Do nothing. Especially in Syria. Let all the think tanks and lobbyists submit their recommendations. Ask the CIA for the usual analysis. Tell the Israelis, which you would anyway, that you’ll put their suggestions at the top of the pile. Stack that pile high, then burn it. If you stick your hand into this particular tar baby, you will never get out.

Think back to when this mess began, which was a long time before young Mohamed Bouazizi burned himself to death in Tunisia. It was about the time the British and the French decided to save the Arabs from the Ottoman Empire’s oppression. They convinced a few Arabs, who would have remained loyal to their sultan if they had not lost out in one power struggle or another, to overthrow their oppressor. This was only a couple of generations after Britain and France protected the Turks’ empire from encroachment by that other evil empire—the Russian one—in the Crimea. By 1917, when the Turk was looking vulnerable, the time came to rescue his subjects from harsh treatment that the Anglo-French entente had not noticed for a couple of centuries. Soon after the Turks were driven out, the Iraqis were fighting for their lives against the British and the Syrians risked their all to expel the French. Both failed until the Second World War made the maintenance of Levantine and Mesopotamian protectorates too expensive.

Liberation from outside is as dangerous a game as revolution. With neither can the outcome be predicted. The Poles were liberated from the Nazis in 1945, only to find themselves under the Red Army. Many Iraqis wanted to depose Saddam Hussein in 2003, but the American Army turned out to be a blunt instrument that made their lives more hellish than Saddam had. I remember when Palestinians in the West Bank complained about Jordanian rule. I suspect that having since 1967 been occupied by Israel’s army and displaced by Israel’s settlers, they would give anything to have the Jordanians back. So before Uncle Sam rides to the rescue in Syria, give it some thought.

There are two people whose analysis of matters Syrian I respect. Both are British journalists and scholars who have lived in the region, speak Arabic, and are at least seventy-five. One is David Hirst, formerly of the Guardian. The other is Patrick Seale, who used to write for the Observer. Seale’s 1965 The Struggle for Syria is the starting point for any serious understanding of the country’s politics. His 1988 Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East tells all you need to know about Syria since Assad père became president in 1970. Hirst’s The Gun and the Olive Branch renders most other histories of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict irrelevant, and his recent Beware of Small States  brings the drama up to date by doing the impossible: explaining Lebanon.

Hirst wrote on March 22 in the Guardian that protestors in Dera’a, the southern border town where the anti-regime demonstrations began, burned down the office of a cell-phone company owned by the president’s cousin, Rami Makhlouf, and the local headquarters of the Ba’ath Party. The party and the company represent monopoly—one economic, the other political. Many Syrians believe that their lives would be better if they could share in the economy and the government. Those who control both monopolies refuse to share wealth and power, so the contest is on. Hirst writes:

Never would the army and police leaderships abandon the political leadership as they did in Egypt and Tunisia. For them all, so incestuously linked, overthrow is simply not an option.

Civil war, however, is an option.

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Seale divides Syria into the regime’s defenders and opponents. Defenders include the

Alawi-led army and security services…the Sunni merchants of Damascus…[and] several thousand of the new affluent bourgeoisie….To these different groups should be added those Syrians of all classes who, having observed the slaughter and destruction across the borders in Lebanon and Iraq, prefer to opt for stability and security, even at the cost of harsh repression and a lack of political freedom.

Among the opponents are

The young working-class poor, who protest in the street because they see no possibility of a better life…the new middle class poor—that is to say, educated or semi-educated young people who, on graduation, find that there are no jobs for them….Intellectuals…small businessmen whose ability to make money has been blocked by the corrupt and greedy men at the top….And then there are the Islamists.

Syria is a complex and diverse society in which outside do-gooders risk destroying all they claim to support.

There may well be interference already, as there is no indication that the Obama Administration has shut down the Bush-era program to finance and promote Syrian exile oppositionists. A Reuters report, published in the Guardian on March 11, indicated that someone was preparing the ground for an armed insurrection in Syria.

The first victims of a war in Syria will be the religious minorities. These include the Alawites and the Christians, who comprise about ten percent of the population and have prospered under the Assad regime. The government, despite the Ottoman-era practice of defining citizens by religious sect, is explicitly secular. Gregory III Laham, the Melkite Catholic Patriarch of Antioch, in an interview with Asia Today, praised young Muslim demonstrators in Damascus, Aleppo, and Homs who “offered to protect churches, providing security cordons around the buildings to prevent criminal acts.” He nonetheless fears the “criminals and even fundamentalist Muslims who cry for jihad. This is why we fear that giving way to violence will only lead to chaos.”

As in Iraq, chaos would mean the mass emigration of the Christian communities who have lived there for two millennia. Syria, following the American invasion of Iraq with its concomitant anarchy and sectarian conflict, took in over a million Iraqi refugees, including more than 300,000 Christians. Where would they and Syria’s indigenous Christians find refuge? Do Washington’s holy warriors want them to leave and for Syria to be as purely Sunni as its favorite Mideast statelet, Saudi Arabia?

The Syrians would be wise not to make their ancestors’ mistake of accepting military help from foreigners who have never done them any good. If the West wants parliamentary democracy in Syria, why did the CIA and Britain’s MI6 support the 1949 military coup that destroyed it in the first place? America’s would-be Lawrences of Arabia who believe they can liberate the Syrians would do well to remember that this rebellion began in Dera’a. It was in Dera’a that Lawrence himself was captured and tortured. He wrote that “in Dera’a that night the citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost.”

The US is doing enough harm in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya without burying itself in the Syrian tar as well. As the old French saying goes, it is urgent to do nothing.

Tim Hetherington

When journalists die in some foreign field, they die for you. Without them, your knowledge of the world in which you live would come from government spokesmen, corporate flacks, and pundits who don’t leave their television studios or think tanks. Two frontline photographers, Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, have just been killed in Libya. Hetherington was forty and Hondros forty-one. Both were first-class journalists who went by sea from Benghazi to the frontlines in Misrata. After another of the endless skirmishes between Colonel Gaddafi’s army and the rebels, a rocket-propelled grenade exploded in their midst. It killed both men and severely wounded their colleagues Guy Martin and Michael Christopher Brown.

The Oxford-educated Hetherington had a brilliant career, now cut lamentably short. His film on Afghanistan, Restrepo, earned an Oscar nomination last year and the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Festival. He won the World Press Photo of the Year Award for 2007 and had also taken a prize named for another photographer killed in the line of duty, the Rory Peck Award.

Hondros, who worked in Kosovo and Afghanistan among other wars, was responsible for a startling series of photographs of a family that failed to stop abruptly at an American checkpoint in Iraq. US soldiers shot the parents dead and wounded one of their five children in the backseat. The armchair warriors would say it’s an everyday occurrence in war, as if that provided absolution. Hondros explained later:

Almost every soldier in Iraq has been involved in some sort of incident like that or another, I would say. Their attitude about it was grim, but it wasn’t the end of their world. It was, “Well, kind of wished they’d stopped. We fired warning shots. Damn, I don’t know why the hell they didn’t stop. What’re you doing later, you want to play Nintendo? Okay.” Just a day’s work for them.

Such testimony makes it all the more difficult to believe that sending in the Marines will solve all problems everywhere.

Photographers and the people who record the news on film or video cameras take more hits in conflict than mere scribes such as myself, who enjoy the luxury (or the excuse) of staying a little back from the fighting in order to observe it better. The photographer and camera operator must go to the coalface to record the sights and sounds of combat and make warfare’s impact visible. The toll of fallen photographers lengthens each month. None of those I have known or worked with could be called “war junkies.” Their vocation was to bring home the bloodshed so blithely endorsed by people in the imperial centers without whose weapons and financing most wars could not take place. One of the finest photojournalists of the twentieth century, the proud Welsh patriot Philip Jones Griffiths, once criticized some of his colleagues for making profits out of America’s war in Vietnam. They countered by asking him what he was doing in Vietnam, from where he produced one of the best books to come out of that conflict, Vietnam, Inc. He answered, and I paraphrase from memory, “I was gathering evidence for the next Nuremberg Trials.”

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With brave documentarians as our witnesses, we cannot plead, as so many at Nuremberg and subsequent war-crimes trials did, that we did not know what was going on. We know full well what happened in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia largely thanks to them and the whistleblowers who helped them. We know also what is happening in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya due to their efforts and the risks they take. Without them, the official history would tell our children that these were righteous wars, nobly fought and honorably pursued. Actually, the official histories usually teach just that. But the eyewitness accounts, the photographs, and the other visual and aural records of the conflicts provide the basis for more thorough histories. These are the accounts that all of us should read when we leave school and begin our real education.

About twenty years ago, Peter Jennings, then ABC News’ anchorman with endless war experience of his own, presided at the unveiling by the Overseas Press Club in New York of a tablet on which were inscribed the names of journalists killed in the line of duty. After the ceremony, I remember Peter lingering for hours speaking to the spouses, children, and parents of the people whose lives and careers he had been praising. To them, it was hard to justify the choice to face danger head-on. Peter would never have been reduced to platitudes such as “Their deaths were worth it” or “Those are the risks we all take.” Rather than justification, he offered sympathy. This took place before the ranks of slain journalists grew exponentially in the Balkan Wars and the past generation’s many other conflicts. The Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that 861 journalists have been killed for their work since 1992.

Phillip Knightley entitled his great history of war correspondents The First Casualty based on the statement, alternately attributed to Aeschylus and Senator Hiram Johnson, that the first casualty of war is truth. Thanks to people such as Daniel Pearl, whose young life was taken by fanatics, and David Blundy, murdered by a sniper in El Salvador in 1989, the truth occasionally breaks free of propaganda and orthodoxy. It is partly to honor them that I have commissioned a book from Phillip Knightley that collects the year’s best war reporting in one volume, which Charles Glass Books will publish annually. (Please email your 2011 entries to me, and I will pass them along to Phillip.)

The Guardian’s obituary of Tim Hetherington commented:

He died with them: an explosion on the town’s mortally dangerous Tripoli highway – the frontline in the battle between forces loyal to the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and the rebels trying to unseat him – killed him and his friend, the US photographer Chris Hondros. At least eight other civilians were killed in fighting that day, a fact Hetherington would have been at pains to ensure was not forgotten.

That speaks well of Tim Hetherington and other people like him who are trying to tell you that the wars you pay for and believe in are not all you imagine them to be.