Before drifting off to sleep, I listen to the BBC on an old shortwave radio, which connects me to the world but annoys my wife, who prefers to sleep without hearing the static chimes of the World Service. Nevertheless, as happens in marriages, I persist. About a week ago I went to sleep with the news that the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had mailed to the U.S. President, George W. Bush, a 16-page letter, which was delivered in Farsi with what diplomats call a “free translation” (that was 18 pages). The American and Iranian presidents struck me as unlikely pen pals, and I approached Nod wondering what the Bush White House would make of a 16-page letter, in any language, let alone Farsi. But I did not lose sleep speculating.
Nor apparently did Ahmadinejad’s words interrupt much sleep at the White House, which by the time I awoke and had switched on the BBC (my wife hates that, too) had denounced the letter for being devoid of substance and sidestepping the confrontational issue of Iran’s nuclear armament ambitions. On one of her diplomatic package tours (“Travel to the ancient capitals of Europe and, from the comfort of our air-conditioned limousines, harangue the leaders of the European Union…”), Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dismissed the letter by saying it “isn’t addressing the issues we’re dealing with a concrete way.” So too did the apparently early-rising President Bush, who said: “It looks like it did not answer the main question that the world is asking, and that is, ‘When will you get rid of your nuclear program?’” Both the Secretary of State and the President reacted as if they had opened a solicitation from the Reader’s Digest (“You may have already won some atomic weapons…”) instead of a serious diplomatic cable.
Believing that the United States and Iran are headed toward the precipice of nuclear confrontation, I decided to spend more time with President Ahmadinejad’s letter than perhaps did the Bush administration. (Using the phrase “it looks like…” makes me think President Bush left the actual reading of the letter to his deputies.) Posted on the Web site of the French newspaper, Le Monde, the Internet version in English only runs to four densely printed pages. (Were the 16 pages in Farsi hand-written?) Moreover, the quality of the ‘free translation’ tells me that Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs may have purged anyone competent in writing grammatical English. The Iranian letter has some of the oddest punctuation and uses of capital letters this side of a high school German exam. Ahmadinejad’s preferred style is Joycean stream-of-consciousness as opposed to careful Bismarckian diplomacy. But on the larger questions as to why it was written or to whom it was addressed, neither the letter nor subsequent newspaper articles make clear.
One possibility that might explain this letter is that in a fit of either fatigue or inspiration, the Iranian president called in his secretary, dictated a 16-page monologue, and mailed it off before either the mullahs on the Supreme Revolutionary Council or the foreign minister had a chance to ask the president to “sleep on it” or “take another look at it in the morning.” Granted, most presidential letters are the work of vast bureaucracies, and thus they tend to read like UN resolutions. Hence it is somewhat refreshing that any president, especially that of Inquisitional Iran, should take it upon himself to fire off a letter that raises spiritual concerns. But as an instrument of statecraft, the letter only serves to reinforce the impression that Iran is in its 27th year of a hostage crisis in which the government holds its citizenry captive with a mixture of invectives and secret police.
Oddly, once the Bush administration had denounced the Iranian letter as lacking “substance” on the matter of nuclear disarmament, it was consigned, diplomatically anyway, to the circular file. I read a few accounts that equated the letter to the ravings of a lunatic. Even the New York Times account had the headline: “Iranian Letter: Using Religion to Lecture Bush.” Indeed, the essence of the letter is to ask President Bush how, as a Christian, he can explain the invasion of Iraq, support for Israel, prison torture, and an embargo of funds for the government dominated by Hamas. The letter ends with the conclusion that, as liberal democracies are riddled with violent contradictions, why doesn’t the U.S. president embrace theocracy as the true path to salvation, both electoral and eternal? Who knows, maybe the Iranians think President Bush has the potential to make it as a mullah?
* * *
As best as I can determine, the Iranian president’s letter is addressed to Islamic students, be they in Tehran or elsewhere in the Arab world. Ahmadinejad is best understood as a student radical (although he describes himself to Bush as “a teacher”). The points raised in the letter read like those you might find in a madrassa-newspaper editorial. Indeed the specter of student uprisings are a subtext in the letter, beginning with the opening sentence: “For sometime now I have been thinking,” Ahmadinejad writes, “how can one justify the undeniable contradictions that exist in the international arena——which are being constantly debated, specially in political forums and amongst university students.” Later he returns to this theme: “My students ask me how can these actions be reconciled with the values outlined at the beginning of this letter and duty to the tradition of Jesus Christ (Peace Be Upon Him), the Messenger of peace and forgiveness.” In many ways, the letter appears to be trying to convince the undergraduates at Oral Roberts University to make common cause with the Muslim Brotherhood.
As for the specific political points raised in the first part of the letter, many could well be lifted from the speech of a liberal Democratic U.S. senator. Ahmadinejad condemns the cost of the war in Iraq (“hundreds of billions of dollars”), extends sympathy to those detained in Guantanamo Bay (“No one knows if they are prisoners, POWs, accused or criminals…”), reminds his reader of secret prisons in Europe (“I do not correlate the abduction of a person…with the provisions of any judicial system…”), and despairs that the U.S. should have cut off aid to the Palestinians, on account of the Hamas election (“Unbelievingly, they have put the elected government [Hamas] under pressure and have advised it to recognize the Israeli regime, abandon the struggle and follow the programs of the previous government. If the current Palestinian government had run on the above platform, would the Palestinian people have voted for it?”). He mourns the victims of September 11th (“a horrendous incident”), but then extends this grief to excuse Iran’s nuclear preparations (“All governments have a duty to protect the lives, property and good standing of their citizens.”). He thinks the Western press shoddy for publishing the fiction about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (“This was repeated incessantly —for the public to, finally, believe — and the ground was set for an attack on Iraq”) and sounds like Senator Edward Kennedy when he describes how the Iraqi war is bleeding American resources (“Many thousands are homeless and unemployment is a huge problem”).
Until his election as president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ahmadinejad was mayor of Tehran, and no doubt he has delivered many stump speeches about the Great Satan. In this letter, as well, he sings the refrain of past US transgressions against Iran: the 1953 coup, the use of the American embassy to plot against the Khomeini revolution, support for Saddam in the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, the freezing of Iranian assets, and the shooting down of an Iran Air passenger plan. But all of these points could easily be found in an editorial in the “Nation” or “New Statesman”. Where the Iranian president retreats to his hard line is on the subject of Israel, which, in most of its public statements, Tehran refers to as the “Zionist regime.” Here it is called the “phenomenon of Israel” (“I think establishment of a new country with a new people, is a new phenomenon that is exclusive to our times”), a country that sprang from European war guilt. On other occasions, Ahmadinejad has vowed to “wipe Israel off the map” and joined the ignominious ranks of Holocaust deniers. (In Austria, the historian David Irving was sentenced to three years in jail for such opinions. Might the Austrians put Ahmadinejad on trial?) In this case, writing to the American President, he softens his rhetoric on the Holocaust (“Again let us assume that these events are true”) but then asks why the Middle East had to absorb a Jewish state so that Europe could expiate its war guilt—hinting that one reason it was moved to Palestine was because of continental anti-Semitism. He raises the construct of Israel as a colonial invention of Balfour’s Declaration but overlooks than many countries and borders in the Middle East—notably Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq—sprang from the same disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.
The Bush administration is correct in saying that the letter “isn’t addressing the issues that we’re dealing with in a concrete way.” In a few passages the letter makes allusions to atomic research (“Is not scientific R&D one of the basic rights of nations?”), and equates megatons with the rights of man. But mostly the nuclear references come in apocalyptic allusions (“The day will come when all humans will congregate before the court of the Almighty, so that their deeds are examined.”). But the reason the letter is dismissed as irrelevant to the nuclear standoff is because it does not end with a proposal for an international conference or mediation from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Instead the Iranian president delivers what, on paper anyway, reads like the script of a Baptist revival meeting (“The Almighty God sent His prophets with miracles and clear signs…And he sent the Book…because we must be answerable to our nations and all others….”). Classical political traditions are denounced (“Liberalism and Western style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today these two concepts have failed.”), and theocracy is proclaimed The Way (“…that is, monotheism, worship of God, justice, respect for the dignity of man, belief in the Last Day, we can overcome the present problems of the world…”). Hence the only proposal put on the table is whether the born-again George W. Bush wants to go door-to-door with Ahmadinejad to explain the missionary position (“Undoubtedly through faith in Good and the teachings of the prophets, the people will conquer their problems. My question for you is: Do you not want to join them?”) Little did Karl Rove know that when he was unbuckling the Bible belt for Bush-Cheney in the 2000 election, he would find so many converts among the Revolutionary Council in Iran.
* * *
It is useless for me to speculate whether Ahmadinejad wrote his soliloquy from a position of strength or weakness. I assume intelligence officers, better versed in Iranian politics than I am, can explain whether the Iranian president has expansionist dreams around the Middle East or whether the mullahs are rallying the faithful with a nuclear jihad as a way to keep oil profits from corrupting the society with iPods and tight-fitting jeans. In terms of political genealogy, my sense of the Iranian president is that he is a keeper of the Khomeini faith, someone who views confrontations with the West as a way impose fundamentalist doctrine on a nation, part of which anyway, would not mind spending weekends at the mall or trying out jet skis at the beach. But anyone interviewing Ahmadinejad for a job (“I see here that you spent some time with the Revolutionary Guards. Is that a non-profit?”) would note that his résumé is full of what personnel officers call blank spaces. And these lapses are not to cover up unemployment so much as odd jobs of violence.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the fourth of seven children, was born in Garmsar, a desert town outside Tehran. When he was a year old in 1957, his father, a blacksmith, moved the family to the capital, where, according to one account, the president grew up in “the rough neighborhoods of south Tehran, where a cocktail of poverty, frustration and xenophobia in the heydays of the Shah’s elitist regime provided fertile grounds for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.” In 1975, as opposition to the Iranian Shah was growing, he enrolled at Elm-o-Sanaat University, a technical and scientific college, although by all accounts Ahmadinejad majored in student unrest. He was a founder of the Islamic Students Association and then represented his university on what was called the Office for Strengthening Unity Between Universities and Theological Seminaries. That group later became known as the OSU, which, in turn, played an important role in the 1979 seizure of the US embassy and the American hostages.
By many accounts Ahmadinejad was among those who plotted the capture of the US diplomats, and he is associated, in some reports, as having advocated the takeover of the Soviet embassy in Tehran. He believed then and now that the US embassy was actively promoting counter-revolution against the Ayatollah. When he became president in 2005, several Americans, who had been held hostage in Tehran, claimed that Ahmadinejad had been among their captors. A photograph circulating on the Internet shows a hostage being led blindfold down a Tehran back street, and the speculation is that one of the captors leading his quarry is the current president. Ahmadinejad denies the allegation that he actually held American prisoners, and of late the US government has let the speculation drop. But in the 1980s Ahmadinejad was notorious as a member of the Revolutionary Guard Council with responsibilities in sections dealing with “internal security.” In that role, he purged professors and students on the familiar charges of revolutionary heresy, and he may even have done time as an executioner in Evin Prison, which by all accounts makes Abu Ghraib look like a pajama party. He may not have all the qualities of a latter-day Hitler—Iran has fewer territorial designs on its neighbors—but any leader with a CV of violent purges who threatens six million Israelis with nuclear extinction must be viewed as a man inclined toward Final Solutions.
According to one account of his life, admittedly circulated by the political opposition, “in 1986, Ahmadinejad became a senior officer in the Special Brigade of the Revolutionary Guards and was stationed in Ramazan Garrison near Kermanshah in western Iran. Ramazan Garrison was the headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards’ ‘extra-territorial operations’, a euphemism for terrorists attacks beyond Iran’s borders.” According to Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, he may have had connections to Imad Mughniyeh, “a terrorist who has been implicated in the deadly bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, in 1983.” Ahmadinejad may also have had a hand in the assassination of Iranian Kurdish leader Abdorrahman Qassemlou in Vienna in 1989. In the 1990s, while he claims to have been teaching, he was actually training a radical group of Islamic vigilantes to “revive the ideals and policies of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini.” Support from the Revolutionary Guards, in part, helped elect him mayor of Tehran in 2003, and backing from fundamentalist clerics, plus a divided electorate, gave him the presidency in 2005.
As president, it is hard to tell if his base constituency is strongest among the aging clerics who run Iran under the principles laid down by Ayatollah Khomeini or if he appeals to younger, more fanatical Islamic followers. By one account I read, the current divide in Iran is between “the clerical establishment and Mr. Ahmadinejad’s brand of revolutionary populism and superstition.” Clearly fabulism appeals to the president, who can be seen on an Internet video telling a cleric that “he had felt the hand of God entrancing world leaders as he delivered a speech to the UN General Assembly last September.” He places great faith in the return of the so-called “Hidden Imam,” who can be reached in the meantime by dropping messages down an empty well at the Jamkaran mosque—to which the new president gave $20 million in the early days of his administration. One historian writes that Ahmadinejad “preens that unpredictability is the private domain of the fanatical believer,” and that he is someone “who talks into empty wells and uses his powers of hypnosis to ensure his listeners cannot blink.”
Why then did Ahmadinejad write the letter? According to Wahied Wahdat-Hagh, an Iranian professor living in Germany: “Since the 1979 revolution it has become clear than Iranian policy has two faces: a pragmatic one and an apocalyptic one.” He believes that the “letter is intended for the entire Muslim world. Ahmadinejad wants to build an anti-Western coalition and Iran wants to present itself as the leading power in the Muslim world.” He concludes ominously: “Everything that wasn’t true in Iraq, is true in Iran.”
* * *
Another association between Iraq and Iran exists in the mind of the Bush administration, which sees in Tehran’s nuclear jingoism possible redemption for its failing polices in Iraq. This logic may sound like the philosophy of Alice’s Mad Hatter, but ‘if everything that wasn’t true in Iraq is true in Iran, then by going after the Iranians, you can make Iraq come true’. In other words, crush weapons of mass destruction in Iran, and you may get the benefit of the doubt in Iraq.
As described by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, the Bush administration sees one of its places in history defined by the looming confrontation with the Persians. Hersh writes: “A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was ‘absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb’ if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do ‘what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to,’ and ‘that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.’”
According to Hersh, should the current negotiations fail — Does anyone think they have even started? — the US is contemplating, among other more conventional options, using tactical nuclear weapons as a way to snuff out Iran’s nuclear capability. In Vietnam, villages were destroyed so they could be saved. In Iran, nuclear weapons may be used to halt the spread of nuclear weapons.
Hersh explains: “The elimination of Natanz [Iran’s uranium enrichment facility deep underground] would be a major setback for Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but the conventional weapons in the American arsenal could not insure the destruction of facilities under seventy-five feet of earth and rock, especially if they are reinforced with concrete.” He goes on: “The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons.” A former intelligence officer told Hersh: “Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap. ‘Decisive’ is the key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a tough decision. But we made it in Japan.”
At the same time that the Pentagon is war-gaming the elimination of Iran’s enrichment and bomb-making capabilities, the Bush administration is trying to position the confrontation with Ahmadinejad as a multilateral line in the sand. President Bush and his Secretary of State Rice have taken the matter to the members of the UN Security Council, with the hope that a united front of Germany, France, Britain, and maybe even Russia will stare down the mullahs over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. (Russia may be less inclined to play ball after Vice President Cheney lectured Vladimir Putin on the pursuits of happiness and urged the Kazakhs to bypass Russia when shipping its oil to world markets. Thanks, Dick.) More recently the EU, following an earlier Russian proposal, hinted that it would sell light-water reactors to Tehran, as a way to give Iran nuclear power but move it away from its own enrichment of uranium. But Ahmadinejad snapped back: “ They say they want to offer us incentives. We tell them: Keep the incentives as a gift to yourself. We have no hope of anything good from you.”
What is distressing in Hersh’s article is the conclusion that the war lobby in Washington, eager for a showdown with Iran, is a revival of the coalition that dragged the US into the Iraqi invasion. Hersh implies that the US government has its own revolutionary council, beyond the reach of constitutional restraints, as dead set on confrontation and the possible use of nuclear weapons as a similar group of clerics in Tehran. He writes: “Another European official told me that he was aware that many in Washington wanted action. ‘It’s always the same guys,’ he said, with a resigned shrug. ‘There’s a belief that diplomacy is doomed to fail. The timetable is short.’”
* * *
One thing we do know from the Ahmadinejad letter is that the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran is a gambler. He would like to leverage his position as a Council front man into a world leader seen as the equal of the US President. He is also willing to risk sanction and possible attack to stake a claim as the Middle East’s great Islamic voice, someone around whom both the Arab and Persian worlds can rally in their confrontation with the West. He may boast about being a “teacher” and invoke “my students,” or point out that Jesus is “repeatedly praised in the Koran,” but at another level his eye-for-an-eye faith is not above recognizing the street value of having a few hostages bound and gagged on his side of the negotiating table. In this case the list of once and future captives include Iranian progressives, the state of Israel, and perhaps anyone within the zip codes of a few dirty bombs.
Whether the Bush administration has any credibility to confront Ahmadinejad or the mullahs is another question. My sense is that having embroiled the US in an Iraqi civil war is hardly the precedent that will win friends or influence war votes in either the Congress or the Security Council. But that will not stop the administration from making the case, overtly or covertly, to “take out” Iran, especially if the rockets red glare can be color coordinated with the midterm elections.
The basis on which an Iranian blitzkrieg could be fought can be found in a recent column of Victor Davis Hanson, an historian and classicist and (without endorsing his positions here) someone I admire. He has written passionately about the need for classical education (I just bought his book: “Who Killed Homer?’), and not long ago he published an excellent history of the Peloponnesian war (“A War Like No Other”). More eloquently than you will ever hear from the Bush administration, Hanson sets forth the parameters of the American gambit in any strike against Iran: “Moreover who knows what a successful strike against Iranian nuclear facilities might portend? We rightly are warned of all the negatives — further Shiite madness in Iraq, an Iranian land invasion into Basra, dirty bombs going off in the U.S., smoking tankers in the Straits of Hormuz, Hezbollah on the move in Lebanon, etc.—but rarely of a less probable but still possible scenario: a humiliated Iran is defanged; the Arab world sighs relief, albeit in private; the Europeans chide us privately but pat us on the back privately; and Iranian dissidents are energized, while theocratic militarists, like the Argentine dictators, who were crushed in the Falklands War, lose face. Nothing is worse for the lunatic than when his cheap rhetoric earns abject humiliation for others.”
Even though Hanson is a noted historian, I must question his Argentinean analogy. For British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Falklands may have been a splendid little war (although the writer Jorge Luis Borges likened it to “two bald men fighting over a comb”). At the same time I think taking the measure of Iran and its faithful, who number in the millions, would be a lot harder than routing a company of Argentine conscripts from Goose Green in the Falklands.
The bigger problem of American diplomacy is that in recent years it has always been banking on the military quick fix: by bombing Belgrade, by sending the Marines to Somalia or Beirut, by lodging a few armored divisions in downtown Baghdad, by dropping cluster bombs on the Tora Bora. Maybe taking out the Natanz uranium enrichment facility with cruise missiles will humiliate the mullahs, drive Ahmadinejad from power, and restore the Shah’s family or some liberal democrat to power in Persepolis or Tehran. Somehow, however, I doubt it, and then the US can add Iran to the company of Iraq and Afghanistan, where it has taken up the white man’s burden to fight savage wars of peace—an odd standoff between cruise missiles and car bombs. Here it is worth recalling an observation of Winston Churchill, who had responsibility after World War I for the British mandates in the Middle East: “In Africa, the population is docile and the country is fruitful; in Mesopotamia the country is arid and the population is ferocious. A little money goes a long way in Africa and a lot of money goes a very little way in Arabia.”
To be fair to the Bush administration, I don’t think Ahmadinejad’s letter was the occasion to respond with its own 16-page chain letter and thus hope to get relations between the two countries on a better footing. Whatever its meaning, the Iranian letter did not suggest negotiation so much as pinpoint the co-ordinates of eternity—hardly what you want to hear from someone enriching uranium in underground bunkers or from someone who may reminisce about the glory days when he was holding the Great Satan’s diplomats as hostages. But I fear little can reconcile the gap between one nation, fanatically embracing theocracy and Armageddon, and another country threatening unilaterally, without even a resolution from its elected Congress, to respond with tactical nuclear weapons to the enrichment of uranium, something it has tolerated in the nearby states of Israel, Pakistan, India, and China? It would seem that between the United States and Iran, each has found the ideal enemy and, as Pogo noted, “it is us.”
Nor does it sound, from reading Hersh anyway, that diplomacy is much of an option. He writes: “A discouraged former I.A.E.A. official told me in late March that, at this point, ‘there’s nothing the Iranians could do that would result in a positive outcome. American diplomacy does not allow for it.’” Another source quoted in Hersh says the fundamentalists in Washington would be “unhappy if we found a [peaceful] solution. They are still banking on isolation and regime change.” The same might also be the great hope of the mullahs, although they would do well to recall Napoleon’s observation that “a letter not answered in two weeks answers itself.”
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Iranamok
Assuming that the Islamic Republic of Iran does not get blown off the nuclear map, my sense of recent events is that Tehran is the clear winner in the war on terrorism. Prior to September 11th, Iran had a revolutionary past, and an uncertain future. Students—presumably clamoring for blue jeans and mascara—were rioting against the Persian theocracy. On its borders it had enemies in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the Taliban’s Afghanistan, not to mention oil competition from another traditional foe, Azerbaijan. As always the United States was hostile, invoking economic sanctions, and the Russian fear of Islam’s dry wind blowing sparks across its former Central Asian republics had Moscow lined up against the mullahs. But then the enemies of our enemies were reincarnated as the coalition of the willing, and Iran found itself happily being pulled to regional predominance in the wake of the Great Satan’s post-9/11 crusades.
Beginning in November 2001, America stepped up to do the mullahs’ bidding. It pushed the Sunni-rooted Taliban out of Afghanistan, leaving large portions of that country in the control of warlords, some of whom are in the pay of Tehran. Next the US turned on Iraq, overthrew Hussein (who had fought a grisly 8-year war against Iran) and, as it dismantled the Iraqi military, announced that the battlefield objective was to bring democracy to the Sunni triangle. Jefferson had no such illusions when he dealt with Barbary’s pirates. But the administration of George W. Bush hoped the idea of a democratic Middle East would play well on sound-bite storyboards. Instead, in Iraq, as the US removed the minority Sunnis and Baathists from power, it positioned Baghdad either for a Shiite-dominated government (which would be friendlier with Iran) or civil war (also an Iranian interest). As if those gifts were not enough to the heirs of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni, the Bush administration went for an Iran trifecta when it used its swagger to evict the Syrian army from Lebanon—leaving that troubled country more at the mercy of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorists from whose ranks suicide bombers are routinely recruited. Thus in a few short years, Iran went from fearing a New Age or consumerist counterrevolution to its restoration as the regional great power in the Middle East—all thanks to the theocracy in Washington that, presumably, shares some of its fundamentalist values.
You would have thought that the ayatollahs might have shown some gratitude towards their American soldiers of fortune. After all, al-Qaida’s pretensions toward predominance in the Arab world had origins in the Sunni madrassas of Saudi Arabia, not the holy city of Qom. But rather than reward the Americans with some discounted crude oil or invite President Bush to spend New Year’s Eve in Persepolis, as the Shah would have done, the mullahs decided to follow up their victories by pushing ahead with plans to enrich uranium and possibly construct nuclear weapons. Seen from Tehran, the choice of atomic energy or a bomb was a no-lose proposition. As follows: once Iran had a nuclear capability, it would no longer fear an invasion from American-occupied Iraq. At the same time it could rally the Arab faithful around the idea of finally having the capacity to “wipe Israel off the map.” Yes, the UN could issue sanctions, and the air forces of either the US or Israel might take out some cooling towers or research laboratories. But those would be minor setbacks and, perversely, might confirm Iran’s status as the pre-eminent Middle Eastern power—once again capable of holding the West hostage. Bomb technology might also serve notice on domestic opponents of the mullahs, who in 2005 had banned more than a thousand candidates in regional and national elections and then backed the presidential candidacy of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who, to celebrate his victory, decided to win friends and influence allies by announcing the Holocaust a “myth.”
Obviously, like anyone who would rather not see Istafan turn into a nuclear Sarajevo, I would like to think the Bush administration is capable of “muddling through” this crisis (as was said of the incompetent Hapsburg government of Franz Joseph). But I am not optimistic. My sense is that the US government needs to the idea of a “Mad Fakir” in Tehran just as much the Iranian government needs to fill the streets with demonstrators rallying against the “Enemy of Islam.” Nor do I believe that this nuclear showdown will be easily halted before the brink. Each side has too much invested in its enemy.
* * *
Just a summary of American-Iran relations should not give anyone reason to hope that Washington has broken the da Vinci code to understanding Iran. Leaving aside 10,000 years of Persian history, let’s move the clock to 1953, when British and American intelligence agencies staged a coup against the possibly communist-influenced prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who had nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Returned to the throne in Iran was Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose father—a mid-ranking Iranian military officer—had seized power by a coup in 1925 and proclaimed himself “shah.” In the early 1950s, Iran was seen as a swing vote in the Cold War, and the Truman administration feared that Iran, and its oil, would become another satellite in orbit around the Soviet Union. But the memory of the coup has made the US an anathema to many Iranians.
Grateful to the Americans for his restoration from exile, the Shah recast the Persian Empire as a modern Western state. In exchange for serving the Americans security and petroleum interests in the region, he was given carte blanche to skim state profits and crack down on domestic opposition, which included those like the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini, who wanted Iran to became an Islamic state. Neither all the Shah’s SAVAK agents nor all the Shah’s men, however, could keep a lid on this dissident movement. In January 1979—a year after President and Mrs. Carter had spent New Year’s Eve in Tehran and called the Shah “an island of stability”—Pahlavi fled his country. Fearful of reprisal, Carter refused to grant his friend asylum, and the exiled leader wandered the world, as Henry Kissinger put it, like the Flying Dutchman, finding shelter in places like the Bahamas, Panama, and Egypt. When the Shah’s cancer worsened in October 1979, he was finally allowed into the United States for treatment. In response, militant students in Tehran stormed the American embassy—taking 66 hostages, 51 of whom they held from November 1979 to January 1981.
Carter froze Iran’s assets in the United States and cut off Iranian petroleum imports, but clearly those holding the American hostages were neither oil traders nor foreign investors. The nightly television news featured bound and gagged American diplomats, who became synonymous with Carter’s missing mojo. To recapture his mettle, the President then launched one of the oddest rescue missions in military history, in which a platoon of airborne forces, cruising the Iranian deserts in helicopters, were suppose to liberate the hostages, then held in various locations around a chaotic city of four million residents. Some of the helicopters crashed in a desert sandstorm, the mission was aborted, and the Iranians only released the hostages on the day Ronald Reagan was sworn in as the next president—giving rise to the suspicion that Reagan’s campaign had found the hostages as convenient a campaign symbol as did Ayatollah Khomeini.
In the years that followed, the Reagan administration may have thought that it could “do business” with the Imam, who clearly understood the politics of television as well as the Reagan ‘imagineers'. But the Ayatollah proved a spiritual heir to another Persian sect, the assassins of the 12th and 13th centuries, rather than another Middle Eastern potentate eager to jet ski in Cannes. Iran sought to export its Shiite fundamentalism around the Middle East. For example, it backed Hezbollah in the anarchic Lebanese civil war, hoping to secure some missile launch pads near the Israeli border. It may well have plotted the 1983 suicide bombing of the American barracks in Beirut that killed 240 marines. But by that point Iran was involved in trench warfare with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which enjoyed support, including the ingredients of chemical weapons, from such western powers as Germany, the UK and the US. (Remember when Reagan sent Donald Rumsfeld on bended knee to Saddam?) Essentially the American strategy in the Iran-Iraq war was to bleed two unpopular regimes, keep an eye out for Israel, and to maintain access to Persian Gulf oil. Iran, however, saw western trademarks on the incoming canisters of chemical weapons—one reason that today it continues to work so feverishly toward producing an atomic bomb.
Then in the mid-1980s the US decided to sell weaponry to the mullahs, touching off what came to be known as the Iran-Contra affair, something that suggested that Ronald Regan had never outgrown his fondness for vaudeville. In this triangular trade, hatched in the mind Lt. Colonel Oliver North—but backed by everyone in the Reagan administration not later found to be “out of the loop”—the Americans would sell Iran advanced guided missiles. Israel would act as the middleman, and the proceeds from the arms deals would be sent to the “contras,” forces opposed to the ruling Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The reason money for Central American freedom fighters was laundered through Iran is because Congress had outlawed aid to the contras. (A number of Reagan administration officials were later sentenced to jail for lying to Congress over the affair. Bush Senior, however, pardoned them. Bush Junior now has some of them back working in places like the state and defense departments.)
The high-water mark of this deadly burlesque came when Reagan’s National Security advisor, Robert C. “Bud” McFarlane, flew to Tehran on an Israeli chartered plane. To confirm his diplomatic bona fides, he had with him a Bible and a chocolate cake. The reason that the US was doing business at all with Tehran is that the weapon sales were ransom payments for American hostages held in Beirut. For a while these strange dealings prolonged the slaughter in the trenches between Iran and Iraq, and topped up the contras bank accounts. But then Iran realized that hostages were a freely convertible currency, and grabbed a few every time they grew low on ammunition. On November 13, 1986 President Reagan said: “There’s been no evidence of Iranian government complicity in acts of terrorism against the United States.” Three days later, his Secretary of State, George Shultz, said: “Iran has and continues to pursue a policy of terrorism.”
About the time that McFarlane and his cake were in Tehran, a US guided-missile cruiser, on station in the Persian Gulf (but largely there to protect shipments of Iraqi crude oil), shot down an Iran Air commercial flight, killing some 290 passengers. The USS Vincennes had confused the civilian Airbus for an attacking Iranian fighter, and launched its missiles. For that engagement, the Navy decorated the ship’s captain. Although it was never proved, as the trail of money and Semtex wove through places like Syria and Libya, it was always suspected that the Iranian government sponsored the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in revenge for the loss of its flight to Bandar-Abbas.
Ayatollah Khomeini died in 1989. At his public funeral, as the body was being carried through Tehran, frenzied mourners rioted and nearly managed to destroy the casket and pitch the dead Imam into the street. Some ten thousand people were injured. Subsequently, during the 1990s, it appeared as though the hard-line relations between Iran and the US might thaw, especially when so-called reformers occupied more positions of authority within the Iranian government. In the world of Apple computers and Nike sneakers, the Islamic Republic of Iran looked increasingly like Albania or North Korea, countries clothed behind veils of unreality. During the attacks against the Taliban in November 2001, Iran let American forces use certain port facilities. Then, two months later, in his 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush christened the “axis of evil,” and included Iran on the list, infuriating Tehran. A year later, not only were American armored forces patrolling the Iraq-Iran border, but also there was talk in the administration and in sympathetic think tanks about how “the road to Tehran lies through Baghdad.” So much for reconciliation.
Within the Bush administration, there are two schools of thought as regards the Islamic Republic of Iran: those who would open a dialogue with the mullahs (sometimes this is called “constructive engagement”) and those who would use the American presence in Iraq to launch either an invasion or a pre-emptive strike against the revolutionary council’s nuclear facilities. Recently, after an earthquake in Iran, President Bush sent aid to the victims, and spoke of the differences between the Iranian people and those running its government. According to an official quoted in the “New Yorker,” the goal of this kind of engagement is to “talk to them—but with the purpose of overthrowing them.” But more hard-liners, notably the circle around Vice-President Dick Cheney, see war with Iran over its nuclear capacity as inevitable. They imagine using lightening air strikes to “take out” Iran’s uranium enrichment program. As one strategist said: “it could all be done in a single night,” which sounds ominously like the refrain in August 1914, that the “troops would be home for Christmas.”
* * *
In recent weeks, while thinking about the coming Iranian-American confrontation over Iran’s nuclear capability, I searched the Internet for a clear statement from President Bush on how he views the Iranian situation. At the same time, I attended a speech in Geneva, Switzerland, given by the Iranian foreign minister on “Iran and the Nuclear Issue.” Having now listened to them both, I cling to my belief that this conflict will only end badly—in this sense: I fear that the Americans will first try to set the clock back to 1953 and attempt to overthrow the Iranian government, preferring, in the first stage, covert action to air strikes. But later, especially if the 2006 mid-term election looks to be going poorly for the Republicans, I could well imagine that Karl Rove might call the nation to general quarters over Iran’s looming nuclear arsenal.
From its side, I sense the Iranians feel their survival as an independent nation is linked to having nuclear weapons, which will give them the opportunity to menace Israel or to take hostages from a distance—and thus keep alive the dream of a theocratic Persian empire. Either way, the two countries seem incapable of rational dialogue.
Let’s hear about Iran, first and at length, from President Bush, who recently gave an Iraq set speech to Freedom House in Washington and then took questions from the audience. The point he is trying to make is that Iran needs to hear from many countries, not just the United States, that its pursuit of uranium enrichment, were it to lead toward a weapons capability, is viewed as dangerous and unacceptable. But from the transcript of the President’s response, what is most apparent is that his manner of thinking resembles that of some corrupted computer hard drive, broken into a series of partitions, none of which can connect and articulate a coherent position.
Here is what the President said, in answer to a question:
“THE PRESIDENT: The Iranian issue is more -- in dealing with Iran, we're dealing with more than just influence into the formation of [Iraq’s] national unity government. I happen to believe that ultimately the Iraqis will say, we want to have our own government. We want to be on our own feet. We've had a little problem with Iran in the past and, therefore, let us kind of manage our own affairs. No question right now we're concerned, however, about influencing the formation of the government, but also, obviously, we're deeply concerned about whether or not the Iranians have the wherewithal and/or the knowledge about building a nuclear weapon.
“My negotiation strategy on this issue is that I believe it is better for the Iranians to hear from more than one voice as to whether or not the world accepts them as a viable nation in the international affairs. And so we have asked Germany and France and Great Britain to take the lead, to send a clear message to the Iranian government.
“It's difficult to negotiate with non-transparent societies. It's easier for a non-transparent society to try to negotiate with countries in which there's a free press and a free political opposition and a place where people can express their opinions, because it sometimes causes people to play their cards publicly. In negotiating with non-transparent societies, it's important to keep your counsel.
“But I am pleased with the progress we have made on the diplomatic front. As you know, there are now talks of a presidential letter out of the United Nations, and my Secretary of State, working with Ambassador John Bolton, are constructing such a letter and trying to make sure that there is common consensus, particularly amongst the P5 plus Germany. As a matter of fact, Condi leaves I think today, if not tomorrow, for Europe to sit down with the P5 plus Germany to continue keeping people knitted up on our strategy. Obviously, there's some cross pressures to some members of the P5. There's a lot of politics in Europe -- which is a good thing, by the way, that people are questioning whether or not it's worth it to try to stop the Iranians from having a nuclear weapon. I just believe strongly it's worth it. Now is the time to deal with these problems before they become acute.
“I'm troubled by a non-transparent regime having a weapon which could be used to blackmail freedom-loving nations. I'm troubled by a president who has declared his intentions to destroy our ally Israel. And we need to take these admonitions and these threats very seriously in order to keep the peace.”
Not long after the President made these stream-of-unconscious remarks, Seymour Hersh reported in the “New Yorker” that US military planners had “not ruled out” using tactical nuclear weapons on various Iranian nuclear facilities. Under the administration’s Orwellian logic, this phrase does not mean the US had decided to use tactical nuclear weapons against Iranian reprocessing laboratories buried underground; only that it had not eliminated tactical nuclear weapons in the arsenal of any possible attack against Iran. But when it comes to confront Iran on the nuclear issue, the US will discover that it is more isolated than it thinks in the Middle East, and that the region’s system of alliances more resembles the anarchy of the Balkans in 1914 than the system of check and balances that lead to stability in Europe after the 1815 Congress of Vienna.
Here’s a brief update on who is friends with whom in the Middle East:
--The US has Britain and Israel as firm friends, and allies of convenience in Afghanistan and Pakistan—so long as the money keeps rolling in. In the oil states of the Persian Gulf, the US has suppliers, or customers, but not really allies.
--Russia, wary of American encroachments in Central Asia, has looked to expand its relations with Turkey, and renew those with Syria. Plus it would like to be the “honest broker” in solving the Iranian standoff, and thus capture that rich market for itself. Both Russia and Iran oppose American efforts to siphon Caspian Sea oil west through Georgia and Turkey.
--Turkey, which would like to be closer to the European Union, failed to support the American invasion of Iraq, fearing it could lead to an independent Kurdistan, which would threaten Turkey’s territorial integrity. In recent years, its ties with Israel have waned, as it seeks Syrian support on the Kurdish question and thus it has developed more ties with Russia and, by extension, Iran.
--India, fretful about all the American aid pouring into Pakistan, demanded, and received, commercial nuclear technology from the Bush administration, despite the fact that India has steadfastly refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement (NPT), a treaty that even Iran has signed. Presumably, the Americans let India have more nuclear genies, thinking some help may be required in a face-off between war-headed Iran and (in a worst case) a more fundamentalist regime in Pakistan.
--If Iraq dissolves into civil war, neither the Americans nor its coalition allies will know whom to support. Support the Shiite majority, and you help Iran. Help the Kurds achieve independence, and you start a war with Turkey. Restore the Sunnis or the Baathists, and you will have fought a war both to topple Saddam Hussein and then another to restore his followers to power.
--In Iran, the confrontation with the Great Satan continues to solidify the power of the mullahs, at a time when they could have been marginalized. Meanwhile, Iran is well positioned in Lebanon to press the campaign against Israel, has some Russian support (at least for its commercial nuclear intentions), has less to fear from Afghanistan, is well-positioned in southern (Shiite) Iraq, and now is coming to the table with nuclear cards.
* * *
The foreign minister of Iran is Dr. Manouchehr Mottaki, who addressed, in good English, the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. He appeared behind the lectern wearing a black suit and a high white collar, making me think I was listening to an Iranian Woodrow Wilson. To get to his position, he has risen through the ranks at the ministry of foreign affairs. I find his academic background odd, at least for someone hired by the revolutionary council to justify to the West Iran’s nuclear strategy. He received his undergraduate degree in Bangalore, India, and most of his academic writings have focused on Iran’s relations with Japan. Maybe he’s there to keep a big client happy? Often overlooked is the fact that Japan would have the most to lose if UN sanctions were voted against Iran. The Islamic Republic supplies 15 percent of Japan’s energy needs, and no one needs a reminder as to what happened the last time Japan’s oil trade was cut off.
In defending Iran’s nuclear option, Dr. Mottaki invited many atomic chickens, first hatched by the United States, to come home to roost. On the matter of national security, he invoked the specter of 9/11, to argue that all countries have the right of self-defense. He aligned Iran with “multi-lateralism” and the ideas of collective security, in contrast to the “unilateral” approach taken by the Bush administration in Iraq. He made the point that Iran has been a member of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) for 36 years but now asked: “Why can’t we enjoy the privileges of membership?” (It made the bomb sound like an American Express card.) He equated Iran with environmentalism: “Why can’t we have clean nuclear energy?” Of course, he attacked Israel: “the nuclear program of the Zionist regime and its nuclear weapons, which are outside the safeguard regime, are a threat against regional peace and security.” But the sophistry reached it height when Dr. Mottaki invoked the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, citing “…[Iran’s] inalienable right under international law to peaceful use of nuclear energy” and “a natural right of the Islamic Republic of Iran” for uranium enrichment. It reminded me of George Orwell’s observation that: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” In that sense, I suppose the Declaration of Independence justifies going nuclear.
Of course, Dr. Mottaki is a professional diplomat, not unlike the Japanese foreign minister who in 1936 walked out of the League of Nations rather than answer questions about his country’s invasion of Manchuria. But he preferred to score rhetorical points—“How can we trust a country that has already used atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?”—rather than explain how Iran has got as far with its nuclear program as it has. Several other countries, not unlike Iran in world politics—Brazil, South Korea, and Argentina—all undertook independent nuclear development, and each gave up before being able to process weapons grade plutonium or test-fire an accurate inter-continental ballistic missile. But no matter what it says in world forums, Iran is far down the road toward atomic independence, be it for clean energy or dirty bombs, although not for reasons that will ever appear in one of President Bush’s press conferences.
* * *
In order to understand how we are approaching the nuclear precipice with Iran, I would suggest reading a two-part series that appeared in “The Atlantic” in the last year. The author is William Langewiesche, and the first part is entitled “The Wrath of Khan.” It is a profile of a Pakistani atomic scientist, Dr. Abdu Quadeer Khan, who effectively stole nuclear technology from the West and coordinated Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons. The second essay has the title “The Point of No Return,” and it describes how Dr. Kahn, undoubtedly with the knowledge and support of the Pakistani government, sold turnkey nuclear programs to a variety of rogue states, including North Korea, Libya, and Iran. In one of the series’ more damning sentences, Langewiesche writes: “Though it would be politically inconvenient to admit this now, the United States was aware not only of Khan’s peddling of nuclear wares to Iran but also of the likely involvement of the army and the government of Pakistan.” He also concludes: “Indeed, Iran was Pakistan’s longest-standing customer.”
How it was possible for Pakistan, the American linchpin in the war on terror, to have sold nuclear technology to Iran makes compelling reading. Initially, Langewiesche writes, Kahn assisted the effort to build a Pakistani bomb out of fear and loathing for India: “He believed, as many Pakistanis still do, that India had never accepted the Subcontinent’s partition, and (as he told his friends) that Hindus were tricksters with hegemonic designs.” In the 1970s, India tested nuclear weapons not far from the border with Pakistan. By 1982, thanks to Kahn, Pakistan had the capacity to make weapons-grade uranium. By 1984, “it was producing enough fissionable material to build several bombs a year.” But once Kahn had developed a domestic nuclear capacity he needed missile technology for its delivery system, and that led him into business with North Korea, which traded information about its NoDang missile in exchange for some of Pakistan’s enrichment components. Later, either for money or the glory of fathering a “Muslim bomb,” Kahn started doing business with the likes of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Libya. Pakistan became the Wal-Mart of the atomic bomb: a place to go for do-it-yourselfers.
Why the US turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s atomic warehouse is a mystery of criminal negligence. During the 1980s, the US needed the support of Islamabad to fight its Afghan proxy war against the Russians. In the 1990s, it may also have tolerated a Pakistani bomb as a way to establish a balance of power on the Subcontinent; India had proven maddeningly non-aligned. After 9/11 the Bush administration bet all on finding Osama bin Laden, fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, and launching its invasion of Iraq. For those enterprises, Pakistan was an indispensable, if shaky ally, and by all accounts the US chose to ignore the signs that Dr. Kahn was wholesaling the country’s atomic secrets.
Langewiesche is most scathing about the Bush administration’s delay in releasing, until October 2002 (by which time Congress had authorized the invasion of Iraq), the intelligence information that Pakistan had supplied nuclear technology to North Korea. He continues: “The blundering of that fall defies belief: while dragging the United States into a disastrous war in the pursuit of phantom weapons programs in Iraq, the U.S. condoned the tangible actions of Pakistan—which…was delivering nuclear-weapons capabilities into the hands of America’s most significant enemies, including regimes with overt connections to Islamist terrorists.” When the news broke that Pakistan, via Khan, was running an atomic chop shop, the government in Islamabad quietly pensioned off the scientist, confined him to a form of house arrest, and continued to round of up the usual al-Qaida suspects. The US did not react. Clearly someone left the yellowcake out in the rain.
* * *
What will happen next in the nuclear showdown could well be the following: the US will push the European Union to take the lead in confronting Iran’s successful enrichment program, and there could be forms of so-called “smart sanctions” enforced against the Islamic Republic. In response, Iran will hole up in its nuclear bunkers, and then occasionally fire off some test ballistic missiles, to make the point that it has the capability to reach Tel Aviv or the West. More locally, it will increase the funding of subversion in southern Iraq, not to mention turning up the heat on Lebanese anarchy—both of which serve to undermine American interests in the Middle East.
From its side, the Bush administration will seize on the Iranian nuclear capability as the ideal midterm campaign issue, one both to justify the presence of American forces in Iraq and to make the electorate forget about Scooter Libby, the various deficits, and Jack Abramoff’s Indians. Rove is also a big believer in the permanent state of war. I doubt, however, the Bush-Cheney war lobby will mobilize against Iran before the election, for the simple reason that it is thought to be years, not months, away from having the bomb. But, facing ruinous budget figures brought on by the splendid little war in Baghdad, the administration will put its energies into covert operations against the mullahs. It will seem a cost-efficient front to open, and already the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State of Near Eastern Affairs has vastly increased the budget to besiege Tehran with what might be called Radio Free Iran. That Secretary also happens to be Elizabeth Cheney, Dr. Evil’s daughter.
* * *
In thinking about the coming crisis with Iran, I can’t help but be reminded of the Cuban Missile Crisis, those 13 days in October 1962, when the world perched on the nuclear brink. At the time I was 8 years old and watched with my parents on a black-and-white television as President John F. Kennedy announced that he was placing Cuba (it always sounded like “Cuber”) under quarantine. Even in the third grade, I was obsessed with what the teacher called “current events,” and every day I brought clippings to class to indicate where the American Navy was stationed and how long it would take the Russian missile ships to reach the blockade. I had enormous admiration, as well, for President Kennedy. I had seen him during the 1960 campaign and knew intimately the story of PT 109, which had seen service among the same Pacific islands where my own father’s infantry battles had taken place. But during the Missile Crisis, school children spent a lot of time under their desk or in the halls, hands covering our heads, drilling for deliverance.
What I learned later was the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had acted from weakness, rather than strength, in sending Russian missiles to Cuba. He had seen the gap widening between American and Soviet atomic capabilities, and figured a few inter-continental ballistic missiles off the Florida Keys might narrow the divide. He withdrew his missiles in exchange for guarantees that the US would not invade Cuba and for dismantling NATO missiles in Turkey. Could Iran’s supreme council be arming for the same reasons of weakness, fearful of American troops on their border and nuclear weapons held by Pakistan and Israel, both in America’s pocket?
The differences between the Cuban Missile crisis and today’s Iranian nuclear standoff are many, but perhaps most striking is the incongruous background of the respective leadership in the US and Iran from those, in 1962, who were running America and the Soviet Union. Kennedy had seen war among the bloody waters of the Solomon Islands, in some stretches known then and now as Iron Bottom Sound, for all the ships sunk at a cost of thousands of lives. Khrushchev had served in World War II as the commissar with Russian forces holding the desperate line at Stalingrad, where more than a million lives were lost between the German and Russian armies in a campaign that unfolded as the Americans were clinging to the beachhead at Guadalcanal. I sense that by 1962 both leaders had seen enough war to last them a lifetime.
In their place today, in the US and Iran, are men comfortable with the chants of religious fundamentalism, for whom Armageddon is more a promised land of redemption than a mine field to be avoided. The current Bush administration places great faith in a military in which few of them served while the mullahs, not to mention the country’s new president, owe their tenuous political legitimacy to the halcyon days when Iran held America hostage. Sadly, President George W. Bush may be “no Jack Kennedy.” My fear is that he will confront Iran much the way, after 9/11, he reduced the complicated history of Iraq and the Middle East to the simplistic plots of a Clint Eastwood movie (“We’re taking that fucker out.”). But this time he will be confronting an enemy of religious zealots for whom martyrdom—yours and theirs—is one of the recommended paths to salvation.
Beginning in November 2001, America stepped up to do the mullahs’ bidding. It pushed the Sunni-rooted Taliban out of Afghanistan, leaving large portions of that country in the control of warlords, some of whom are in the pay of Tehran. Next the US turned on Iraq, overthrew Hussein (who had fought a grisly 8-year war against Iran) and, as it dismantled the Iraqi military, announced that the battlefield objective was to bring democracy to the Sunni triangle. Jefferson had no such illusions when he dealt with Barbary’s pirates. But the administration of George W. Bush hoped the idea of a democratic Middle East would play well on sound-bite storyboards. Instead, in Iraq, as the US removed the minority Sunnis and Baathists from power, it positioned Baghdad either for a Shiite-dominated government (which would be friendlier with Iran) or civil war (also an Iranian interest). As if those gifts were not enough to the heirs of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni, the Bush administration went for an Iran trifecta when it used its swagger to evict the Syrian army from Lebanon—leaving that troubled country more at the mercy of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorists from whose ranks suicide bombers are routinely recruited. Thus in a few short years, Iran went from fearing a New Age or consumerist counterrevolution to its restoration as the regional great power in the Middle East—all thanks to the theocracy in Washington that, presumably, shares some of its fundamentalist values.
You would have thought that the ayatollahs might have shown some gratitude towards their American soldiers of fortune. After all, al-Qaida’s pretensions toward predominance in the Arab world had origins in the Sunni madrassas of Saudi Arabia, not the holy city of Qom. But rather than reward the Americans with some discounted crude oil or invite President Bush to spend New Year’s Eve in Persepolis, as the Shah would have done, the mullahs decided to follow up their victories by pushing ahead with plans to enrich uranium and possibly construct nuclear weapons. Seen from Tehran, the choice of atomic energy or a bomb was a no-lose proposition. As follows: once Iran had a nuclear capability, it would no longer fear an invasion from American-occupied Iraq. At the same time it could rally the Arab faithful around the idea of finally having the capacity to “wipe Israel off the map.” Yes, the UN could issue sanctions, and the air forces of either the US or Israel might take out some cooling towers or research laboratories. But those would be minor setbacks and, perversely, might confirm Iran’s status as the pre-eminent Middle Eastern power—once again capable of holding the West hostage. Bomb technology might also serve notice on domestic opponents of the mullahs, who in 2005 had banned more than a thousand candidates in regional and national elections and then backed the presidential candidacy of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who, to celebrate his victory, decided to win friends and influence allies by announcing the Holocaust a “myth.”
Obviously, like anyone who would rather not see Istafan turn into a nuclear Sarajevo, I would like to think the Bush administration is capable of “muddling through” this crisis (as was said of the incompetent Hapsburg government of Franz Joseph). But I am not optimistic. My sense is that the US government needs to the idea of a “Mad Fakir” in Tehran just as much the Iranian government needs to fill the streets with demonstrators rallying against the “Enemy of Islam.” Nor do I believe that this nuclear showdown will be easily halted before the brink. Each side has too much invested in its enemy.
* * *
Just a summary of American-Iran relations should not give anyone reason to hope that Washington has broken the da Vinci code to understanding Iran. Leaving aside 10,000 years of Persian history, let’s move the clock to 1953, when British and American intelligence agencies staged a coup against the possibly communist-influenced prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who had nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Returned to the throne in Iran was Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose father—a mid-ranking Iranian military officer—had seized power by a coup in 1925 and proclaimed himself “shah.” In the early 1950s, Iran was seen as a swing vote in the Cold War, and the Truman administration feared that Iran, and its oil, would become another satellite in orbit around the Soviet Union. But the memory of the coup has made the US an anathema to many Iranians.
Grateful to the Americans for his restoration from exile, the Shah recast the Persian Empire as a modern Western state. In exchange for serving the Americans security and petroleum interests in the region, he was given carte blanche to skim state profits and crack down on domestic opposition, which included those like the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini, who wanted Iran to became an Islamic state. Neither all the Shah’s SAVAK agents nor all the Shah’s men, however, could keep a lid on this dissident movement. In January 1979—a year after President and Mrs. Carter had spent New Year’s Eve in Tehran and called the Shah “an island of stability”—Pahlavi fled his country. Fearful of reprisal, Carter refused to grant his friend asylum, and the exiled leader wandered the world, as Henry Kissinger put it, like the Flying Dutchman, finding shelter in places like the Bahamas, Panama, and Egypt. When the Shah’s cancer worsened in October 1979, he was finally allowed into the United States for treatment. In response, militant students in Tehran stormed the American embassy—taking 66 hostages, 51 of whom they held from November 1979 to January 1981.
Carter froze Iran’s assets in the United States and cut off Iranian petroleum imports, but clearly those holding the American hostages were neither oil traders nor foreign investors. The nightly television news featured bound and gagged American diplomats, who became synonymous with Carter’s missing mojo. To recapture his mettle, the President then launched one of the oddest rescue missions in military history, in which a platoon of airborne forces, cruising the Iranian deserts in helicopters, were suppose to liberate the hostages, then held in various locations around a chaotic city of four million residents. Some of the helicopters crashed in a desert sandstorm, the mission was aborted, and the Iranians only released the hostages on the day Ronald Reagan was sworn in as the next president—giving rise to the suspicion that Reagan’s campaign had found the hostages as convenient a campaign symbol as did Ayatollah Khomeini.
In the years that followed, the Reagan administration may have thought that it could “do business” with the Imam, who clearly understood the politics of television as well as the Reagan ‘imagineers'. But the Ayatollah proved a spiritual heir to another Persian sect, the assassins of the 12th and 13th centuries, rather than another Middle Eastern potentate eager to jet ski in Cannes. Iran sought to export its Shiite fundamentalism around the Middle East. For example, it backed Hezbollah in the anarchic Lebanese civil war, hoping to secure some missile launch pads near the Israeli border. It may well have plotted the 1983 suicide bombing of the American barracks in Beirut that killed 240 marines. But by that point Iran was involved in trench warfare with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which enjoyed support, including the ingredients of chemical weapons, from such western powers as Germany, the UK and the US. (Remember when Reagan sent Donald Rumsfeld on bended knee to Saddam?) Essentially the American strategy in the Iran-Iraq war was to bleed two unpopular regimes, keep an eye out for Israel, and to maintain access to Persian Gulf oil. Iran, however, saw western trademarks on the incoming canisters of chemical weapons—one reason that today it continues to work so feverishly toward producing an atomic bomb.
Then in the mid-1980s the US decided to sell weaponry to the mullahs, touching off what came to be known as the Iran-Contra affair, something that suggested that Ronald Regan had never outgrown his fondness for vaudeville. In this triangular trade, hatched in the mind Lt. Colonel Oliver North—but backed by everyone in the Reagan administration not later found to be “out of the loop”—the Americans would sell Iran advanced guided missiles. Israel would act as the middleman, and the proceeds from the arms deals would be sent to the “contras,” forces opposed to the ruling Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The reason money for Central American freedom fighters was laundered through Iran is because Congress had outlawed aid to the contras. (A number of Reagan administration officials were later sentenced to jail for lying to Congress over the affair. Bush Senior, however, pardoned them. Bush Junior now has some of them back working in places like the state and defense departments.)
The high-water mark of this deadly burlesque came when Reagan’s National Security advisor, Robert C. “Bud” McFarlane, flew to Tehran on an Israeli chartered plane. To confirm his diplomatic bona fides, he had with him a Bible and a chocolate cake. The reason that the US was doing business at all with Tehran is that the weapon sales were ransom payments for American hostages held in Beirut. For a while these strange dealings prolonged the slaughter in the trenches between Iran and Iraq, and topped up the contras bank accounts. But then Iran realized that hostages were a freely convertible currency, and grabbed a few every time they grew low on ammunition. On November 13, 1986 President Reagan said: “There’s been no evidence of Iranian government complicity in acts of terrorism against the United States.” Three days later, his Secretary of State, George Shultz, said: “Iran has and continues to pursue a policy of terrorism.”
About the time that McFarlane and his cake were in Tehran, a US guided-missile cruiser, on station in the Persian Gulf (but largely there to protect shipments of Iraqi crude oil), shot down an Iran Air commercial flight, killing some 290 passengers. The USS Vincennes had confused the civilian Airbus for an attacking Iranian fighter, and launched its missiles. For that engagement, the Navy decorated the ship’s captain. Although it was never proved, as the trail of money and Semtex wove through places like Syria and Libya, it was always suspected that the Iranian government sponsored the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in revenge for the loss of its flight to Bandar-Abbas.
Ayatollah Khomeini died in 1989. At his public funeral, as the body was being carried through Tehran, frenzied mourners rioted and nearly managed to destroy the casket and pitch the dead Imam into the street. Some ten thousand people were injured. Subsequently, during the 1990s, it appeared as though the hard-line relations between Iran and the US might thaw, especially when so-called reformers occupied more positions of authority within the Iranian government. In the world of Apple computers and Nike sneakers, the Islamic Republic of Iran looked increasingly like Albania or North Korea, countries clothed behind veils of unreality. During the attacks against the Taliban in November 2001, Iran let American forces use certain port facilities. Then, two months later, in his 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush christened the “axis of evil,” and included Iran on the list, infuriating Tehran. A year later, not only were American armored forces patrolling the Iraq-Iran border, but also there was talk in the administration and in sympathetic think tanks about how “the road to Tehran lies through Baghdad.” So much for reconciliation.
Within the Bush administration, there are two schools of thought as regards the Islamic Republic of Iran: those who would open a dialogue with the mullahs (sometimes this is called “constructive engagement”) and those who would use the American presence in Iraq to launch either an invasion or a pre-emptive strike against the revolutionary council’s nuclear facilities. Recently, after an earthquake in Iran, President Bush sent aid to the victims, and spoke of the differences between the Iranian people and those running its government. According to an official quoted in the “New Yorker,” the goal of this kind of engagement is to “talk to them—but with the purpose of overthrowing them.” But more hard-liners, notably the circle around Vice-President Dick Cheney, see war with Iran over its nuclear capacity as inevitable. They imagine using lightening air strikes to “take out” Iran’s uranium enrichment program. As one strategist said: “it could all be done in a single night,” which sounds ominously like the refrain in August 1914, that the “troops would be home for Christmas.”
* * *
In recent weeks, while thinking about the coming Iranian-American confrontation over Iran’s nuclear capability, I searched the Internet for a clear statement from President Bush on how he views the Iranian situation. At the same time, I attended a speech in Geneva, Switzerland, given by the Iranian foreign minister on “Iran and the Nuclear Issue.” Having now listened to them both, I cling to my belief that this conflict will only end badly—in this sense: I fear that the Americans will first try to set the clock back to 1953 and attempt to overthrow the Iranian government, preferring, in the first stage, covert action to air strikes. But later, especially if the 2006 mid-term election looks to be going poorly for the Republicans, I could well imagine that Karl Rove might call the nation to general quarters over Iran’s looming nuclear arsenal.
From its side, I sense the Iranians feel their survival as an independent nation is linked to having nuclear weapons, which will give them the opportunity to menace Israel or to take hostages from a distance—and thus keep alive the dream of a theocratic Persian empire. Either way, the two countries seem incapable of rational dialogue.
Let’s hear about Iran, first and at length, from President Bush, who recently gave an Iraq set speech to Freedom House in Washington and then took questions from the audience. The point he is trying to make is that Iran needs to hear from many countries, not just the United States, that its pursuit of uranium enrichment, were it to lead toward a weapons capability, is viewed as dangerous and unacceptable. But from the transcript of the President’s response, what is most apparent is that his manner of thinking resembles that of some corrupted computer hard drive, broken into a series of partitions, none of which can connect and articulate a coherent position.
Here is what the President said, in answer to a question:
“THE PRESIDENT: The Iranian issue is more -- in dealing with Iran, we're dealing with more than just influence into the formation of [Iraq’s] national unity government. I happen to believe that ultimately the Iraqis will say, we want to have our own government. We want to be on our own feet. We've had a little problem with Iran in the past and, therefore, let us kind of manage our own affairs. No question right now we're concerned, however, about influencing the formation of the government, but also, obviously, we're deeply concerned about whether or not the Iranians have the wherewithal and/or the knowledge about building a nuclear weapon.
“My negotiation strategy on this issue is that I believe it is better for the Iranians to hear from more than one voice as to whether or not the world accepts them as a viable nation in the international affairs. And so we have asked Germany and France and Great Britain to take the lead, to send a clear message to the Iranian government.
“It's difficult to negotiate with non-transparent societies. It's easier for a non-transparent society to try to negotiate with countries in which there's a free press and a free political opposition and a place where people can express their opinions, because it sometimes causes people to play their cards publicly. In negotiating with non-transparent societies, it's important to keep your counsel.
“But I am pleased with the progress we have made on the diplomatic front. As you know, there are now talks of a presidential letter out of the United Nations, and my Secretary of State, working with Ambassador John Bolton, are constructing such a letter and trying to make sure that there is common consensus, particularly amongst the P5 plus Germany. As a matter of fact, Condi leaves I think today, if not tomorrow, for Europe to sit down with the P5 plus Germany to continue keeping people knitted up on our strategy. Obviously, there's some cross pressures to some members of the P5. There's a lot of politics in Europe -- which is a good thing, by the way, that people are questioning whether or not it's worth it to try to stop the Iranians from having a nuclear weapon. I just believe strongly it's worth it. Now is the time to deal with these problems before they become acute.
“I'm troubled by a non-transparent regime having a weapon which could be used to blackmail freedom-loving nations. I'm troubled by a president who has declared his intentions to destroy our ally Israel. And we need to take these admonitions and these threats very seriously in order to keep the peace.”
Not long after the President made these stream-of-unconscious remarks, Seymour Hersh reported in the “New Yorker” that US military planners had “not ruled out” using tactical nuclear weapons on various Iranian nuclear facilities. Under the administration’s Orwellian logic, this phrase does not mean the US had decided to use tactical nuclear weapons against Iranian reprocessing laboratories buried underground; only that it had not eliminated tactical nuclear weapons in the arsenal of any possible attack against Iran. But when it comes to confront Iran on the nuclear issue, the US will discover that it is more isolated than it thinks in the Middle East, and that the region’s system of alliances more resembles the anarchy of the Balkans in 1914 than the system of check and balances that lead to stability in Europe after the 1815 Congress of Vienna.
Here’s a brief update on who is friends with whom in the Middle East:
--The US has Britain and Israel as firm friends, and allies of convenience in Afghanistan and Pakistan—so long as the money keeps rolling in. In the oil states of the Persian Gulf, the US has suppliers, or customers, but not really allies.
--Russia, wary of American encroachments in Central Asia, has looked to expand its relations with Turkey, and renew those with Syria. Plus it would like to be the “honest broker” in solving the Iranian standoff, and thus capture that rich market for itself. Both Russia and Iran oppose American efforts to siphon Caspian Sea oil west through Georgia and Turkey.
--Turkey, which would like to be closer to the European Union, failed to support the American invasion of Iraq, fearing it could lead to an independent Kurdistan, which would threaten Turkey’s territorial integrity. In recent years, its ties with Israel have waned, as it seeks Syrian support on the Kurdish question and thus it has developed more ties with Russia and, by extension, Iran.
--India, fretful about all the American aid pouring into Pakistan, demanded, and received, commercial nuclear technology from the Bush administration, despite the fact that India has steadfastly refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement (NPT), a treaty that even Iran has signed. Presumably, the Americans let India have more nuclear genies, thinking some help may be required in a face-off between war-headed Iran and (in a worst case) a more fundamentalist regime in Pakistan.
--If Iraq dissolves into civil war, neither the Americans nor its coalition allies will know whom to support. Support the Shiite majority, and you help Iran. Help the Kurds achieve independence, and you start a war with Turkey. Restore the Sunnis or the Baathists, and you will have fought a war both to topple Saddam Hussein and then another to restore his followers to power.
--In Iran, the confrontation with the Great Satan continues to solidify the power of the mullahs, at a time when they could have been marginalized. Meanwhile, Iran is well positioned in Lebanon to press the campaign against Israel, has some Russian support (at least for its commercial nuclear intentions), has less to fear from Afghanistan, is well-positioned in southern (Shiite) Iraq, and now is coming to the table with nuclear cards.
* * *
The foreign minister of Iran is Dr. Manouchehr Mottaki, who addressed, in good English, the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. He appeared behind the lectern wearing a black suit and a high white collar, making me think I was listening to an Iranian Woodrow Wilson. To get to his position, he has risen through the ranks at the ministry of foreign affairs. I find his academic background odd, at least for someone hired by the revolutionary council to justify to the West Iran’s nuclear strategy. He received his undergraduate degree in Bangalore, India, and most of his academic writings have focused on Iran’s relations with Japan. Maybe he’s there to keep a big client happy? Often overlooked is the fact that Japan would have the most to lose if UN sanctions were voted against Iran. The Islamic Republic supplies 15 percent of Japan’s energy needs, and no one needs a reminder as to what happened the last time Japan’s oil trade was cut off.
In defending Iran’s nuclear option, Dr. Mottaki invited many atomic chickens, first hatched by the United States, to come home to roost. On the matter of national security, he invoked the specter of 9/11, to argue that all countries have the right of self-defense. He aligned Iran with “multi-lateralism” and the ideas of collective security, in contrast to the “unilateral” approach taken by the Bush administration in Iraq. He made the point that Iran has been a member of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) for 36 years but now asked: “Why can’t we enjoy the privileges of membership?” (It made the bomb sound like an American Express card.) He equated Iran with environmentalism: “Why can’t we have clean nuclear energy?” Of course, he attacked Israel: “the nuclear program of the Zionist regime and its nuclear weapons, which are outside the safeguard regime, are a threat against regional peace and security.” But the sophistry reached it height when Dr. Mottaki invoked the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, citing “…[Iran’s] inalienable right under international law to peaceful use of nuclear energy” and “a natural right of the Islamic Republic of Iran” for uranium enrichment. It reminded me of George Orwell’s observation that: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” In that sense, I suppose the Declaration of Independence justifies going nuclear.
Of course, Dr. Mottaki is a professional diplomat, not unlike the Japanese foreign minister who in 1936 walked out of the League of Nations rather than answer questions about his country’s invasion of Manchuria. But he preferred to score rhetorical points—“How can we trust a country that has already used atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?”—rather than explain how Iran has got as far with its nuclear program as it has. Several other countries, not unlike Iran in world politics—Brazil, South Korea, and Argentina—all undertook independent nuclear development, and each gave up before being able to process weapons grade plutonium or test-fire an accurate inter-continental ballistic missile. But no matter what it says in world forums, Iran is far down the road toward atomic independence, be it for clean energy or dirty bombs, although not for reasons that will ever appear in one of President Bush’s press conferences.
* * *
In order to understand how we are approaching the nuclear precipice with Iran, I would suggest reading a two-part series that appeared in “The Atlantic” in the last year. The author is William Langewiesche, and the first part is entitled “The Wrath of Khan.” It is a profile of a Pakistani atomic scientist, Dr. Abdu Quadeer Khan, who effectively stole nuclear technology from the West and coordinated Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons. The second essay has the title “The Point of No Return,” and it describes how Dr. Kahn, undoubtedly with the knowledge and support of the Pakistani government, sold turnkey nuclear programs to a variety of rogue states, including North Korea, Libya, and Iran. In one of the series’ more damning sentences, Langewiesche writes: “Though it would be politically inconvenient to admit this now, the United States was aware not only of Khan’s peddling of nuclear wares to Iran but also of the likely involvement of the army and the government of Pakistan.” He also concludes: “Indeed, Iran was Pakistan’s longest-standing customer.”
How it was possible for Pakistan, the American linchpin in the war on terror, to have sold nuclear technology to Iran makes compelling reading. Initially, Langewiesche writes, Kahn assisted the effort to build a Pakistani bomb out of fear and loathing for India: “He believed, as many Pakistanis still do, that India had never accepted the Subcontinent’s partition, and (as he told his friends) that Hindus were tricksters with hegemonic designs.” In the 1970s, India tested nuclear weapons not far from the border with Pakistan. By 1982, thanks to Kahn, Pakistan had the capacity to make weapons-grade uranium. By 1984, “it was producing enough fissionable material to build several bombs a year.” But once Kahn had developed a domestic nuclear capacity he needed missile technology for its delivery system, and that led him into business with North Korea, which traded information about its NoDang missile in exchange for some of Pakistan’s enrichment components. Later, either for money or the glory of fathering a “Muslim bomb,” Kahn started doing business with the likes of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Libya. Pakistan became the Wal-Mart of the atomic bomb: a place to go for do-it-yourselfers.
Why the US turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s atomic warehouse is a mystery of criminal negligence. During the 1980s, the US needed the support of Islamabad to fight its Afghan proxy war against the Russians. In the 1990s, it may also have tolerated a Pakistani bomb as a way to establish a balance of power on the Subcontinent; India had proven maddeningly non-aligned. After 9/11 the Bush administration bet all on finding Osama bin Laden, fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, and launching its invasion of Iraq. For those enterprises, Pakistan was an indispensable, if shaky ally, and by all accounts the US chose to ignore the signs that Dr. Kahn was wholesaling the country’s atomic secrets.
Langewiesche is most scathing about the Bush administration’s delay in releasing, until October 2002 (by which time Congress had authorized the invasion of Iraq), the intelligence information that Pakistan had supplied nuclear technology to North Korea. He continues: “The blundering of that fall defies belief: while dragging the United States into a disastrous war in the pursuit of phantom weapons programs in Iraq, the U.S. condoned the tangible actions of Pakistan—which…was delivering nuclear-weapons capabilities into the hands of America’s most significant enemies, including regimes with overt connections to Islamist terrorists.” When the news broke that Pakistan, via Khan, was running an atomic chop shop, the government in Islamabad quietly pensioned off the scientist, confined him to a form of house arrest, and continued to round of up the usual al-Qaida suspects. The US did not react. Clearly someone left the yellowcake out in the rain.
* * *
What will happen next in the nuclear showdown could well be the following: the US will push the European Union to take the lead in confronting Iran’s successful enrichment program, and there could be forms of so-called “smart sanctions” enforced against the Islamic Republic. In response, Iran will hole up in its nuclear bunkers, and then occasionally fire off some test ballistic missiles, to make the point that it has the capability to reach Tel Aviv or the West. More locally, it will increase the funding of subversion in southern Iraq, not to mention turning up the heat on Lebanese anarchy—both of which serve to undermine American interests in the Middle East.
From its side, the Bush administration will seize on the Iranian nuclear capability as the ideal midterm campaign issue, one both to justify the presence of American forces in Iraq and to make the electorate forget about Scooter Libby, the various deficits, and Jack Abramoff’s Indians. Rove is also a big believer in the permanent state of war. I doubt, however, the Bush-Cheney war lobby will mobilize against Iran before the election, for the simple reason that it is thought to be years, not months, away from having the bomb. But, facing ruinous budget figures brought on by the splendid little war in Baghdad, the administration will put its energies into covert operations against the mullahs. It will seem a cost-efficient front to open, and already the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State of Near Eastern Affairs has vastly increased the budget to besiege Tehran with what might be called Radio Free Iran. That Secretary also happens to be Elizabeth Cheney, Dr. Evil’s daughter.
* * *
In thinking about the coming crisis with Iran, I can’t help but be reminded of the Cuban Missile Crisis, those 13 days in October 1962, when the world perched on the nuclear brink. At the time I was 8 years old and watched with my parents on a black-and-white television as President John F. Kennedy announced that he was placing Cuba (it always sounded like “Cuber”) under quarantine. Even in the third grade, I was obsessed with what the teacher called “current events,” and every day I brought clippings to class to indicate where the American Navy was stationed and how long it would take the Russian missile ships to reach the blockade. I had enormous admiration, as well, for President Kennedy. I had seen him during the 1960 campaign and knew intimately the story of PT 109, which had seen service among the same Pacific islands where my own father’s infantry battles had taken place. But during the Missile Crisis, school children spent a lot of time under their desk or in the halls, hands covering our heads, drilling for deliverance.
What I learned later was the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had acted from weakness, rather than strength, in sending Russian missiles to Cuba. He had seen the gap widening between American and Soviet atomic capabilities, and figured a few inter-continental ballistic missiles off the Florida Keys might narrow the divide. He withdrew his missiles in exchange for guarantees that the US would not invade Cuba and for dismantling NATO missiles in Turkey. Could Iran’s supreme council be arming for the same reasons of weakness, fearful of American troops on their border and nuclear weapons held by Pakistan and Israel, both in America’s pocket?
The differences between the Cuban Missile crisis and today’s Iranian nuclear standoff are many, but perhaps most striking is the incongruous background of the respective leadership in the US and Iran from those, in 1962, who were running America and the Soviet Union. Kennedy had seen war among the bloody waters of the Solomon Islands, in some stretches known then and now as Iron Bottom Sound, for all the ships sunk at a cost of thousands of lives. Khrushchev had served in World War II as the commissar with Russian forces holding the desperate line at Stalingrad, where more than a million lives were lost between the German and Russian armies in a campaign that unfolded as the Americans were clinging to the beachhead at Guadalcanal. I sense that by 1962 both leaders had seen enough war to last them a lifetime.
In their place today, in the US and Iran, are men comfortable with the chants of religious fundamentalism, for whom Armageddon is more a promised land of redemption than a mine field to be avoided. The current Bush administration places great faith in a military in which few of them served while the mullahs, not to mention the country’s new president, owe their tenuous political legitimacy to the halcyon days when Iran held America hostage. Sadly, President George W. Bush may be “no Jack Kennedy.” My fear is that he will confront Iran much the way, after 9/11, he reduced the complicated history of Iraq and the Middle East to the simplistic plots of a Clint Eastwood movie (“We’re taking that fucker out.”). But this time he will be confronting an enemy of religious zealots for whom martyrdom—yours and theirs—is one of the recommended paths to salvation.
Thursday, March 30, 2006
America In-the-Money
Whenever I am in the United States, I find myself lingering in bookstores, what my friend Joseph Epstein calls “the intellectual equivalent of pool halls.” In Princeton, New Jersey, when visiting my parents, I like to stop at the college U Store, actually a co-operative, where my membership card shows a presumably erudite Bengal tiger. (To which eating club does he belong?) There I inspect the required reading for various courses, figuring what’s good for a Princeton undergraduate is good for me.
In New York City, I drift toward Borders at 57th and Park Avenue, which has a huge collection of military, American, and world history. How they can afford to carry inventory that includes histories of Turkmenistan is beyond me. I am grateful to replenish there the tanks of what I call “readable Roman histories”: that is, books about classical history where all the footnotes are not in Latin or Greek. If I have time and energy, I make a pass at the Strand, the Greenwich Village used book loft, where the shopping bags make claim to its 12 miles of books, most of which, I sometimes think, were written by Salman Rushdie. (A good friend of mine actually went to university with Rushdie, who enjoyed the same unpopularity, although for different reasons, on campus that he does in the Arab world. In fact, in a show of their affection, his classmates formed a Page Ten Club, open for all those who failed to get past page 10 in the Rushdie’s novels. The other 450 pages are on sale at The Strand.)
For all that I enjoy book browsing, I end up shopping for essentially the same books year after year. For the children I buy what in the trade is known as young adult fiction. Authors like Joan Aikin or Rosemary Sutcliffe come to mind. For my wife, I gather up the latest contemporary fiction, provided it is below the radar of Oprah’s Book Club and does not have an appendix of questions that can be discussed at reading groups (as in: “Is there any indication that Richard Parker, the main character in Life of Pi, ever attended Princeton University?).
For myself, I divide my purchases between biographies, European and American history, Yankeeography (accounts of the New York Yankees), battle memoirs, and classical fiction, although with novels I tend toward financial realism—Dreiser, Howells, and Balzac are among my standbys—as opposed to Latin American fabulism (when it comes to Pablo Neruda, include me out). But most of my reading is connected to specific places, and my dream gift would be an atlas that showed the best books—fiction or non-fiction—that could be read in various cities or countries. For example, in the last year I have loved reading “Rubicon” by Tom Holland in Italy, “Mary, Queen of Scots” in Edinburgh, and “The Beleaguered City” by Shelby Foote in Vicksburg, Mississippi. I would boast of some other highbrow reads, but then my wife might reveal that on my bedside table is an account of the 1986 Mets, entitled “The Bad Guys Won.”
* * *
One book that has eluded me for years is a readable economic history of the United States. I have lots of histories on my shelves that are unreadable, beginning with Charles A. Beard’s “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution” and including some old textbooks about the Second Bank of the United States and the Texas Railroad Commission. But in recent weeks I have read with great appreciation a new book by John Steele Gordon, “An Empire of Wealth: The Epic of American Economic Power.” Gordon writes a regular column, The Business of America, for “American Heritage” magazine. Even if in his column and books he celebrates the achievements of American businessmen, it would be wrong to dismiss him simply as an acolyte of capitalism—leaving aside that his last column sings the visionary praises of one John D. Rockefeller. (His point there was that since wells were drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859, doomsayers have been wringing their hands that we’re running out of oil.)
Published by HarperCollins and with an elegant book jacket from a Thomas Hart Benton painting, “Empire of Wealth” tells the narrative of the American economy from the Jamestown settlement to the Internet revolution, noting the many successes (such as the cotton gin and telegraph) and the occasional failures (Herbert Hoover is quoted: “The trouble with capitalism is capitalists. They’re too damn greedy.”). Gordon’s thesis is that in the great initial public offering that is American history, a genius for new products and markets (from mills to assembly lines and e-mail) has expanded the economic frontier. By contrast, in the novels of Theodore Drieser, the typical robber baron-protagonist corners a grain or trolley car market only to unravel in the arms of a chorus girl. In Gordon, however, pluck and luck usually win out over Warren Harding’s cronies or Daniel Drew’s “watered stock” (cattle readied for market with salt and then lots of water).
A pleasure of reading Gordon is that he writes with energy and precision, and he has a love of historical words and obscure facts. Thus in telling the epic of American economic power, he slips in numerous linguistic origins. For example: The word cowboy “was first applied to the black slaves who herded cattle in colonial Carolina.” Jefferson coins the word “dime” and popularizes the idea of “cents.” “Those who invested money in an enterprise were called adventurers, a word that is still echoed today in the term venture capitalist.” The word “dollar” comes from the German “Thal,” which means valley and gave its name to a productive Bohemian silver mine, which later issued much sought-after coins (‘thalers’ became dollars). “A Scottish engineer named John McAdam, in the early part of the of the nineteenth century, would perfect the technology of road building using layers of stone and gravel and give his name (slightly misspelled as macadam) to the process…” The term civil engineer evolves because until the 1750s most engineers worked for the military. The “right whale” was the one that “was easy to catch, and floated when dead.” James Gordon Bennett, founder of the New York Herald, first coined the word ‘leak’, in the 1830s, to describe “stories slipped to reporters by politicians for their own purposes.” Thomas Edison invented the world “hello.” The word “debugging” literally comes from the insects that got into the vacuum tubes of early computers and made them run poorly.
As recounted in Gordon, the story of American capitalism is a triumph of native invention. Colonists and pilgrims arrive in what one Puritan calls “a howling wilderness,” cultivate gardens full of corn, tobacco, and wheat, circulate currencies of convenience, establish banks and stock markets, mechanize farms and factories, lay railroad track, welcome immigrants, endure the odd panic or recession, grow rich on foreign wars, and finally bestride the world’s markets with iPods and Wal-Mart. Near the conclusion he writes: “The late 1990s in the United States were the greatest period of wealth creation in the history of the world.” But it is a period of economic growth that has antecedents, for example, in the railroad industry, which in 1830 had, nationwide, 23 miles of track and which, by 1860, had laid down 30,626 miles of rail.
* * *
If Gordon’s book were only an invitation to celebrate the Robber Barons’ Ball, it would not be worth plowing through its 419 pages. But where the argument becomes more subtle and provocative is in his perspective on the history of American money and banking. Because the US was founded in a new world without trade guilds or Venetian banks, its financial markets started nearly from scratch. Since the drafting of the constitution, the argument about monetary policy has defined many of the fissures in the country’s political and economic debate.
In the last almost two hundred and fifty years, the nation has failed to reach agreement on whether the success of American enterprise is a tribute to efficient, self-correcting markets, inventive genius, and hard work or whether the American economy is a succession of rigged markets, government bailouts, and inside trades. For example, the 1824 Supreme Court decision, “Gibbons v. Ogden,” is described as the “Emancipation Proclamation of American Commerce,” in that it freed interstate commerce from local, state-enforced monopolies. But the historian Charles Francis Adams, as quoted in Gordon, describes an earlier-day Enron, Crédit Mobilier, as follows: “The members are in Congress; they are trustees for the bondholders; they are directors; they are stockholders; they are contractors; in Washington they vote the subsidies, in New York they receive them, upon the plains they expend them, and in the ‘Crédit Mobilier’ they divide them.”
Many arguments about the nation’s concentration of wealth have been focused on whether the United States needed a national bank and a single currency. One reason no one liked the economic consequences of the Continental Congress or the Articles of Confederation is that financial markets were multi-ring circuses, giving rise to the phrase “not worth a continental,” to denote worthless paper currency. During the drafting of the Constitution and the George Washington presidency, Alexander Hamilton supported the creation of a quasi-national bank (although the government would only hold 20 % of the shares), and his redemption of near worthless revolutionary war bonds, at par, is an example either of early monetary prudence and the first step toward a sound national currency, or a scam worthy of the 1980s savings and loan bailouts or the taxpayer subsidies for Chrysler and Long-Term Capital Management. Opposed to the Federalist national bank were the Arcadian visions of Thomas Jefferson, who believed that “banks are more dangerous than standing armies,” and who saw the U.S. economy as a variation on a landscape painting—the province of yeomen and village markets, not bankers on bended knees to kings and princes.
Hamilton got his Bank of the United States, although it disappeared in 1811, and later Andrew Jackson shuttered the Second Bank of the United States. Nor did the U.S. get a true central bank until 1913, when the Woodrow Wilson administration created the Federal Reserve Bank and its regional branches. Gordon writes: “Thomas Jefferson, one of the most brilliant men ever to live, was psychologically unable to incorporate the need for a mechanism to regulate the emerging banking system or, indeed, banks at all, into his political philosophy.” For most of the nineteenth century, without an instrument either to regulate banks or the liquidity of the financial system, booms and busts were an inevitable part of the laissez-faire system. Gordon concludes that: “bank failure, thanks in large part to Thomas Jefferson and his political heirs, was to become as American as apple pie.”
During this period of frontier capitalism, banks were local affairs, closer, in today’s terms, to Web sites or supermarkets than branches of Bank of America. Gordon writes: “Still others were known as wildcat banks because their headquarters (the only place their notes could be redeemed for gold and silver) were located ‘out among the wildcats’ where they were, quite deliberately, hard to find.” In addition, it was the banking system, not the U.S. Treasury, that was responsible for the circulating currency. “In the 1850s,” Gordon describes, “there were more than seven thousand kinds of more or less valid banknotes in circulation and more than five thousand that were fraudulent or counterfeit.” Actually as early as 1690, the American colonies had created paper money. Warehouse receipts, indicating crops held in storage, functioned as early money. Bank drafts were cut in half, into quarters, and then eights (hence “pieces of eight”). Later goldsmiths floated vouchers that could be redeemed for gold. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Gordon recalls, “the number of paper money issues in circulation numbered in the thousands and created a monetary cacophony quite as bad as the colonial hodgepodge of bits of foreign coins, warehouse receipts, and provincial letters of credit.”
* * *
It took the Civil War for the United States to adopt a national currency. A run on confidence after the engagement at Fort Sumter sent American gold to vaults in London and Paris. President Lincoln had no choice but to detach the Northern economy from the gold standard. He noted wryly that “the bottom is out of the tub” as he watched the country’s gold reserves retreat as hastily as Union forces at Bull Run. In their place, he had Congress authorize the Treasury to issue paper money, so-called “greenbacks,” because, as Gordon writes, “they were printed in green ink on the reverse.” After that, legal tender was either greenbacks or the drafts of nationally chartered banks.
With the passage of the act creating the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913, Thomas Jefferson finally lost his argument with the moneychangers. Despite his faith in free enterprise, Gordon concludes that central banking alone is the greatest weapon to keep banks and currency sound, and the economy on an even keel. He believes Jefferson’s hostility to banks gave the nineteenth century endless cycles of boom and bust. At the same time, it was the US central bank, according to Gordon, that accelerated and locked in the 1930s Depression. He writes that “the Federal Reserve moved aggressively to defend the dollar and maintain the gold standard as foreign central banks and investors moved to repatriate gold. It was an utterly disastrous decision, perhaps the greatest of all the mistakes made in these years.”
By most accounts the Depression was the perfect storm of economic mismanagement. As the Fed raised interest rates to defend the US dollar, commercial banks, in turn, called in loans or foreclosed on mortgages. But deflation in the US market made it that much harder for farmers or other debtors to repay their loans. To make matters worse, President Hoover then asked Congress for a tax increase so that he could balance the budget. Congress dutifully went along with the request, and then raised the stakes in this game of incompetence by passing the Smoot-Hawley Act, which increased a variety of import tariffs. Higher interest rates, taxes, and tariffs choked economic development while the accompanying deflation left debtors unable to pay off their loans, thus collapsing more than 5000 banks. Gordon believes than opposition to centralized wealth froze the government’s ability to respond to the 1929 stock-market crash, and he cannot help but attribute some blame for the Depression to his favorite whipping boy, writing about Congress in 1931 that “the ghost of Thomas Jefferson was abroad in the its halls.”
In the glory days of American capital, when recession had threatened the American economy, wealthy industrialists, like J.P. Morgan, had stepped up to buy gold, securities, or collapsing railroads, and the panics had been averted or, at least, minimized. In the modern era the government has become the benevolent robber baron, and, in theory, Depressions are no longer possible because the Federal Reserve can pump enough liquidity into the system to keep banks solvent and consumers in credit. After the attacks of September 11th, which had followed the collapse of the technology stock bubble, a lingering US recession might have been among the damaged collateral, had the Fed not intervened. In the meantime, the US has run up unprecedented budget and trade deficits, at a time when the oil supply is tight and real estate is as expensive as Dutch tulips. But if I am reading Gordon correctly, he concurs with the Reagan administration in believing that “deficits don’t matter.”
* * *
Here’s one of the ironies of American economic history: that backing currency with gold, balancing the budget, running a trade surplus, avoiding wars, and letting the market sort out the good banks from the wildcats, is, in general, bad for the economy. The business of America flourishes in times of war (during WW I, GM’s stock climbed from 39 to 500), responds favorably to government subsidies (New York State financed the Erie Canal), lives well off the government’s easy money (during WW II, the national debt went from $43 billion to $296 billion), and doesn’t mind bank runs so long as the government is the lender of last resort (cf. the Reagan administration’s $200 billion bailout of the savings and loan industry). Native inventiveness and hard work certainly count for something, but there’s nothing like other people’s money, especially that of the government, to jump-start economic activity.
Aligned against these deficit-spending interests have been the likes of Thomas Jefferson (who opposed central banking), John Adams (who said: “Every dollar of a bank bill that is issued beyond the quantity of gold and silver in the vaults represents nothing and therefore is a cheat upon somebody”), Andrew Jackson (who devoted his presidency to paying off the national debt and getting rid of the Second Bank of the United States), and even the much maligned Herbert Hoover (who, in the teeth of the Depression, tried to balance the budget). Although these men had their differences politically, all of them associated moneyed interests with the European aristocracy that had been swept away in the American Revolution. Wealth was something found on farmland or in a producing factory, not deposited in banks or hedge funds, with those William Jennings Bryan, quoting Thomas Carlisle, called “the idle holders of idle capital.”
Woven into Gordon’s history is an excellent summary of American taxation. As he writes: “Governments have only three ways to raise money to pay their bills. They can tax, they can borrow, and they can print.” After Hamilton paid off the revolutionary war debt at par, the government relied mostly on import tariffs to fund its relatively moderate expenditures. Only during the Civil War did the government impose an income tax, which lapsed during the period of Reconstruction. It was not until the administration of Woodrow Wilson, and with the costs of World War I, that America got a federal income tax of more than 50 percent (in the Civil War it was 3 percent). FDR imposed a tax on inheritance and later introduced the idea of withholding a portion of everyone’s income. When tariffs were the source of government revenue, Gordon notes that the national debate was between “sections of the country.” New England mill owners wanted high tariffs on cloth. The South wanted low tariffs. “With income tax, the debate was now one between economic classes.”
Although Gordon has many kind words for the likes J.P. Morgan, Herbert Hoover, and John Jacob Astor (whose “only regret” on his death bed was not having bought all of Manhattan), I sense between the lines of “Empire of Wealth” a grudging appreciation for Keynesian economics. Jefferson and his oft-quoted ghosts preferred the economy divided among forty acre plots and mules. In opposition, Hamilton and the Federalists believed in central banking, an industrial class, and the occasional government bailout, beginning with those revolutionary-era bonds.
Applied to the modern era, the government of George W. Bush would seem to be living the Federalist dream. The trade deficit is close to $1 trillion. 25 % of all mortgages are valued at more than 80 % of the appraised worth of the financed properties. In the last six years the accumulated budget deficits have approached $2 trillion. Jefferson and Jackson should be turning in their graves. But clearly the joke is on fiscal probity, at least when it comes to a nation. For all the Bush administration’s war mobilizations and spendthrift habits, from 2002-2005, real GDP grew more than 3 % in 10 successive quarters. Alas, in this instance, the robber barons bailing out American markets were not the heirs of J.P. Morgan, but leveraged customers, delirious in the aisles of Home Depot, who have maxed out their home equity lines.
Gordon ends his book on September 11, 2001, with a quote from Cicero (“the sinews of war are infinite money”) and a saber-rattling conclusion: “The American economy at the dawn of the twenty-first century was more nearly capable of producing those sinews than any other economy the world has ever known.” In that sense, the United States should prevail in the war on terrorism as it did in the Cold War—by spending the enemy into submission. But when you look at the Battle of September 11th, the costs to the attackers were some Wal-Mart box cutters, 19 plane tickets and flight-school tuition in Florida. In response, the American government has spent more than $1 trillion on homeland security and foreign wars, not to mention posting runaway trade and budget deficits. For those amounts, the US is mired in Iraq, and the enemy can enlist suicide bombers from recruitment posters that run daily on global television. Which side is burying the other with the sinews of expenditure?
In New York City, I drift toward Borders at 57th and Park Avenue, which has a huge collection of military, American, and world history. How they can afford to carry inventory that includes histories of Turkmenistan is beyond me. I am grateful to replenish there the tanks of what I call “readable Roman histories”: that is, books about classical history where all the footnotes are not in Latin or Greek. If I have time and energy, I make a pass at the Strand, the Greenwich Village used book loft, where the shopping bags make claim to its 12 miles of books, most of which, I sometimes think, were written by Salman Rushdie. (A good friend of mine actually went to university with Rushdie, who enjoyed the same unpopularity, although for different reasons, on campus that he does in the Arab world. In fact, in a show of their affection, his classmates formed a Page Ten Club, open for all those who failed to get past page 10 in the Rushdie’s novels. The other 450 pages are on sale at The Strand.)
For all that I enjoy book browsing, I end up shopping for essentially the same books year after year. For the children I buy what in the trade is known as young adult fiction. Authors like Joan Aikin or Rosemary Sutcliffe come to mind. For my wife, I gather up the latest contemporary fiction, provided it is below the radar of Oprah’s Book Club and does not have an appendix of questions that can be discussed at reading groups (as in: “Is there any indication that Richard Parker, the main character in Life of Pi, ever attended Princeton University?).
For myself, I divide my purchases between biographies, European and American history, Yankeeography (accounts of the New York Yankees), battle memoirs, and classical fiction, although with novels I tend toward financial realism—Dreiser, Howells, and Balzac are among my standbys—as opposed to Latin American fabulism (when it comes to Pablo Neruda, include me out). But most of my reading is connected to specific places, and my dream gift would be an atlas that showed the best books—fiction or non-fiction—that could be read in various cities or countries. For example, in the last year I have loved reading “Rubicon” by Tom Holland in Italy, “Mary, Queen of Scots” in Edinburgh, and “The Beleaguered City” by Shelby Foote in Vicksburg, Mississippi. I would boast of some other highbrow reads, but then my wife might reveal that on my bedside table is an account of the 1986 Mets, entitled “The Bad Guys Won.”
* * *
One book that has eluded me for years is a readable economic history of the United States. I have lots of histories on my shelves that are unreadable, beginning with Charles A. Beard’s “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution” and including some old textbooks about the Second Bank of the United States and the Texas Railroad Commission. But in recent weeks I have read with great appreciation a new book by John Steele Gordon, “An Empire of Wealth: The Epic of American Economic Power.” Gordon writes a regular column, The Business of America, for “American Heritage” magazine. Even if in his column and books he celebrates the achievements of American businessmen, it would be wrong to dismiss him simply as an acolyte of capitalism—leaving aside that his last column sings the visionary praises of one John D. Rockefeller. (His point there was that since wells were drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859, doomsayers have been wringing their hands that we’re running out of oil.)
Published by HarperCollins and with an elegant book jacket from a Thomas Hart Benton painting, “Empire of Wealth” tells the narrative of the American economy from the Jamestown settlement to the Internet revolution, noting the many successes (such as the cotton gin and telegraph) and the occasional failures (Herbert Hoover is quoted: “The trouble with capitalism is capitalists. They’re too damn greedy.”). Gordon’s thesis is that in the great initial public offering that is American history, a genius for new products and markets (from mills to assembly lines and e-mail) has expanded the economic frontier. By contrast, in the novels of Theodore Drieser, the typical robber baron-protagonist corners a grain or trolley car market only to unravel in the arms of a chorus girl. In Gordon, however, pluck and luck usually win out over Warren Harding’s cronies or Daniel Drew’s “watered stock” (cattle readied for market with salt and then lots of water).
A pleasure of reading Gordon is that he writes with energy and precision, and he has a love of historical words and obscure facts. Thus in telling the epic of American economic power, he slips in numerous linguistic origins. For example: The word cowboy “was first applied to the black slaves who herded cattle in colonial Carolina.” Jefferson coins the word “dime” and popularizes the idea of “cents.” “Those who invested money in an enterprise were called adventurers, a word that is still echoed today in the term venture capitalist.” The word “dollar” comes from the German “Thal,” which means valley and gave its name to a productive Bohemian silver mine, which later issued much sought-after coins (‘thalers’ became dollars). “A Scottish engineer named John McAdam, in the early part of the of the nineteenth century, would perfect the technology of road building using layers of stone and gravel and give his name (slightly misspelled as macadam) to the process…” The term civil engineer evolves because until the 1750s most engineers worked for the military. The “right whale” was the one that “was easy to catch, and floated when dead.” James Gordon Bennett, founder of the New York Herald, first coined the word ‘leak’, in the 1830s, to describe “stories slipped to reporters by politicians for their own purposes.” Thomas Edison invented the world “hello.” The word “debugging” literally comes from the insects that got into the vacuum tubes of early computers and made them run poorly.
As recounted in Gordon, the story of American capitalism is a triumph of native invention. Colonists and pilgrims arrive in what one Puritan calls “a howling wilderness,” cultivate gardens full of corn, tobacco, and wheat, circulate currencies of convenience, establish banks and stock markets, mechanize farms and factories, lay railroad track, welcome immigrants, endure the odd panic or recession, grow rich on foreign wars, and finally bestride the world’s markets with iPods and Wal-Mart. Near the conclusion he writes: “The late 1990s in the United States were the greatest period of wealth creation in the history of the world.” But it is a period of economic growth that has antecedents, for example, in the railroad industry, which in 1830 had, nationwide, 23 miles of track and which, by 1860, had laid down 30,626 miles of rail.
* * *
If Gordon’s book were only an invitation to celebrate the Robber Barons’ Ball, it would not be worth plowing through its 419 pages. But where the argument becomes more subtle and provocative is in his perspective on the history of American money and banking. Because the US was founded in a new world without trade guilds or Venetian banks, its financial markets started nearly from scratch. Since the drafting of the constitution, the argument about monetary policy has defined many of the fissures in the country’s political and economic debate.
In the last almost two hundred and fifty years, the nation has failed to reach agreement on whether the success of American enterprise is a tribute to efficient, self-correcting markets, inventive genius, and hard work or whether the American economy is a succession of rigged markets, government bailouts, and inside trades. For example, the 1824 Supreme Court decision, “Gibbons v. Ogden,” is described as the “Emancipation Proclamation of American Commerce,” in that it freed interstate commerce from local, state-enforced monopolies. But the historian Charles Francis Adams, as quoted in Gordon, describes an earlier-day Enron, Crédit Mobilier, as follows: “The members are in Congress; they are trustees for the bondholders; they are directors; they are stockholders; they are contractors; in Washington they vote the subsidies, in New York they receive them, upon the plains they expend them, and in the ‘Crédit Mobilier’ they divide them.”
Many arguments about the nation’s concentration of wealth have been focused on whether the United States needed a national bank and a single currency. One reason no one liked the economic consequences of the Continental Congress or the Articles of Confederation is that financial markets were multi-ring circuses, giving rise to the phrase “not worth a continental,” to denote worthless paper currency. During the drafting of the Constitution and the George Washington presidency, Alexander Hamilton supported the creation of a quasi-national bank (although the government would only hold 20 % of the shares), and his redemption of near worthless revolutionary war bonds, at par, is an example either of early monetary prudence and the first step toward a sound national currency, or a scam worthy of the 1980s savings and loan bailouts or the taxpayer subsidies for Chrysler and Long-Term Capital Management. Opposed to the Federalist national bank were the Arcadian visions of Thomas Jefferson, who believed that “banks are more dangerous than standing armies,” and who saw the U.S. economy as a variation on a landscape painting—the province of yeomen and village markets, not bankers on bended knees to kings and princes.
Hamilton got his Bank of the United States, although it disappeared in 1811, and later Andrew Jackson shuttered the Second Bank of the United States. Nor did the U.S. get a true central bank until 1913, when the Woodrow Wilson administration created the Federal Reserve Bank and its regional branches. Gordon writes: “Thomas Jefferson, one of the most brilliant men ever to live, was psychologically unable to incorporate the need for a mechanism to regulate the emerging banking system or, indeed, banks at all, into his political philosophy.” For most of the nineteenth century, without an instrument either to regulate banks or the liquidity of the financial system, booms and busts were an inevitable part of the laissez-faire system. Gordon concludes that: “bank failure, thanks in large part to Thomas Jefferson and his political heirs, was to become as American as apple pie.”
During this period of frontier capitalism, banks were local affairs, closer, in today’s terms, to Web sites or supermarkets than branches of Bank of America. Gordon writes: “Still others were known as wildcat banks because their headquarters (the only place their notes could be redeemed for gold and silver) were located ‘out among the wildcats’ where they were, quite deliberately, hard to find.” In addition, it was the banking system, not the U.S. Treasury, that was responsible for the circulating currency. “In the 1850s,” Gordon describes, “there were more than seven thousand kinds of more or less valid banknotes in circulation and more than five thousand that were fraudulent or counterfeit.” Actually as early as 1690, the American colonies had created paper money. Warehouse receipts, indicating crops held in storage, functioned as early money. Bank drafts were cut in half, into quarters, and then eights (hence “pieces of eight”). Later goldsmiths floated vouchers that could be redeemed for gold. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Gordon recalls, “the number of paper money issues in circulation numbered in the thousands and created a monetary cacophony quite as bad as the colonial hodgepodge of bits of foreign coins, warehouse receipts, and provincial letters of credit.”
* * *
It took the Civil War for the United States to adopt a national currency. A run on confidence after the engagement at Fort Sumter sent American gold to vaults in London and Paris. President Lincoln had no choice but to detach the Northern economy from the gold standard. He noted wryly that “the bottom is out of the tub” as he watched the country’s gold reserves retreat as hastily as Union forces at Bull Run. In their place, he had Congress authorize the Treasury to issue paper money, so-called “greenbacks,” because, as Gordon writes, “they were printed in green ink on the reverse.” After that, legal tender was either greenbacks or the drafts of nationally chartered banks.
With the passage of the act creating the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913, Thomas Jefferson finally lost his argument with the moneychangers. Despite his faith in free enterprise, Gordon concludes that central banking alone is the greatest weapon to keep banks and currency sound, and the economy on an even keel. He believes Jefferson’s hostility to banks gave the nineteenth century endless cycles of boom and bust. At the same time, it was the US central bank, according to Gordon, that accelerated and locked in the 1930s Depression. He writes that “the Federal Reserve moved aggressively to defend the dollar and maintain the gold standard as foreign central banks and investors moved to repatriate gold. It was an utterly disastrous decision, perhaps the greatest of all the mistakes made in these years.”
By most accounts the Depression was the perfect storm of economic mismanagement. As the Fed raised interest rates to defend the US dollar, commercial banks, in turn, called in loans or foreclosed on mortgages. But deflation in the US market made it that much harder for farmers or other debtors to repay their loans. To make matters worse, President Hoover then asked Congress for a tax increase so that he could balance the budget. Congress dutifully went along with the request, and then raised the stakes in this game of incompetence by passing the Smoot-Hawley Act, which increased a variety of import tariffs. Higher interest rates, taxes, and tariffs choked economic development while the accompanying deflation left debtors unable to pay off their loans, thus collapsing more than 5000 banks. Gordon believes than opposition to centralized wealth froze the government’s ability to respond to the 1929 stock-market crash, and he cannot help but attribute some blame for the Depression to his favorite whipping boy, writing about Congress in 1931 that “the ghost of Thomas Jefferson was abroad in the its halls.”
In the glory days of American capital, when recession had threatened the American economy, wealthy industrialists, like J.P. Morgan, had stepped up to buy gold, securities, or collapsing railroads, and the panics had been averted or, at least, minimized. In the modern era the government has become the benevolent robber baron, and, in theory, Depressions are no longer possible because the Federal Reserve can pump enough liquidity into the system to keep banks solvent and consumers in credit. After the attacks of September 11th, which had followed the collapse of the technology stock bubble, a lingering US recession might have been among the damaged collateral, had the Fed not intervened. In the meantime, the US has run up unprecedented budget and trade deficits, at a time when the oil supply is tight and real estate is as expensive as Dutch tulips. But if I am reading Gordon correctly, he concurs with the Reagan administration in believing that “deficits don’t matter.”
* * *
Here’s one of the ironies of American economic history: that backing currency with gold, balancing the budget, running a trade surplus, avoiding wars, and letting the market sort out the good banks from the wildcats, is, in general, bad for the economy. The business of America flourishes in times of war (during WW I, GM’s stock climbed from 39 to 500), responds favorably to government subsidies (New York State financed the Erie Canal), lives well off the government’s easy money (during WW II, the national debt went from $43 billion to $296 billion), and doesn’t mind bank runs so long as the government is the lender of last resort (cf. the Reagan administration’s $200 billion bailout of the savings and loan industry). Native inventiveness and hard work certainly count for something, but there’s nothing like other people’s money, especially that of the government, to jump-start economic activity.
Aligned against these deficit-spending interests have been the likes of Thomas Jefferson (who opposed central banking), John Adams (who said: “Every dollar of a bank bill that is issued beyond the quantity of gold and silver in the vaults represents nothing and therefore is a cheat upon somebody”), Andrew Jackson (who devoted his presidency to paying off the national debt and getting rid of the Second Bank of the United States), and even the much maligned Herbert Hoover (who, in the teeth of the Depression, tried to balance the budget). Although these men had their differences politically, all of them associated moneyed interests with the European aristocracy that had been swept away in the American Revolution. Wealth was something found on farmland or in a producing factory, not deposited in banks or hedge funds, with those William Jennings Bryan, quoting Thomas Carlisle, called “the idle holders of idle capital.”
Woven into Gordon’s history is an excellent summary of American taxation. As he writes: “Governments have only three ways to raise money to pay their bills. They can tax, they can borrow, and they can print.” After Hamilton paid off the revolutionary war debt at par, the government relied mostly on import tariffs to fund its relatively moderate expenditures. Only during the Civil War did the government impose an income tax, which lapsed during the period of Reconstruction. It was not until the administration of Woodrow Wilson, and with the costs of World War I, that America got a federal income tax of more than 50 percent (in the Civil War it was 3 percent). FDR imposed a tax on inheritance and later introduced the idea of withholding a portion of everyone’s income. When tariffs were the source of government revenue, Gordon notes that the national debate was between “sections of the country.” New England mill owners wanted high tariffs on cloth. The South wanted low tariffs. “With income tax, the debate was now one between economic classes.”
Although Gordon has many kind words for the likes J.P. Morgan, Herbert Hoover, and John Jacob Astor (whose “only regret” on his death bed was not having bought all of Manhattan), I sense between the lines of “Empire of Wealth” a grudging appreciation for Keynesian economics. Jefferson and his oft-quoted ghosts preferred the economy divided among forty acre plots and mules. In opposition, Hamilton and the Federalists believed in central banking, an industrial class, and the occasional government bailout, beginning with those revolutionary-era bonds.
Applied to the modern era, the government of George W. Bush would seem to be living the Federalist dream. The trade deficit is close to $1 trillion. 25 % of all mortgages are valued at more than 80 % of the appraised worth of the financed properties. In the last six years the accumulated budget deficits have approached $2 trillion. Jefferson and Jackson should be turning in their graves. But clearly the joke is on fiscal probity, at least when it comes to a nation. For all the Bush administration’s war mobilizations and spendthrift habits, from 2002-2005, real GDP grew more than 3 % in 10 successive quarters. Alas, in this instance, the robber barons bailing out American markets were not the heirs of J.P. Morgan, but leveraged customers, delirious in the aisles of Home Depot, who have maxed out their home equity lines.
Gordon ends his book on September 11, 2001, with a quote from Cicero (“the sinews of war are infinite money”) and a saber-rattling conclusion: “The American economy at the dawn of the twenty-first century was more nearly capable of producing those sinews than any other economy the world has ever known.” In that sense, the United States should prevail in the war on terrorism as it did in the Cold War—by spending the enemy into submission. But when you look at the Battle of September 11th, the costs to the attackers were some Wal-Mart box cutters, 19 plane tickets and flight-school tuition in Florida. In response, the American government has spent more than $1 trillion on homeland security and foreign wars, not to mention posting runaway trade and budget deficits. For those amounts, the US is mired in Iraq, and the enemy can enlist suicide bombers from recruitment posters that run daily on global television. Which side is burying the other with the sinews of expenditure?
Monday, March 13, 2006
Branch Davidian Waco
Not long ago at Baylor University, I found it impossible to be in Waco, Texas and not to try to find the world of David Koresh that Attorney General Janet Reno had reduced to ashes. In another version of this history, it was Koresh himself who put his own parish to the torch. But the few people that I asked about the Branch Davidian house didn’t know exactly where it was located. It was only later that I met a professor of journalism, Sara Whelan, who was willing to track down its location. She had recently escaped from New Orleans to Waco, and thus she still had a newcomer’s curiosity. We stopped at an Interstate tourist office, and a few minutes later Professor Whelan proudly emerged from the building with pre-printed directions to “Mount Carmel,” the formal name of the building complex that, in April 1993, burned to the ground after officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, and Tobacco (ATF) moved in with tanks and nerve gas.
In trying to find the Double EE Rand Road on lonesome prairie, we made a few wrong turns and actually pulled into the driveway of the Double EE Ranch, which is as impressive as that of J.R. Ewing’s Southfork. A ranch hand corrected our mistake—we had turned left one road too early—and in a few moments we parked Whelan’s car on the edge of Mt. Carmel, in front of a makeshift museum that had a hand-painted sign offering tours of the grounds for $5. A few hundred yards into the property is a newly built white church. Between the road and its front door there are rows of freshly planted trees and small headstones, memorializing the names of the 81 Davidians who died in the1993 firefights. In effect, the Koresh church (although this is contested within the sect) still owns or controls the land, which is used partly for the congregation and partly as a parable on freedom of religion and government violence.
If, when I had stood in the drive of the Koresh estate, I had been asked to recount the events that had defined the first year of the Bill Clinton presidency, I would have said trigger-happy members of the FBI and ATF had attacked a rural commune—one that worshipped polygamy and guns as much as the second coming of Christ. I believed Attorney General Reno had used what is called “excessive force,” but I knew nothing about the cult’s leader, David Koresh, other than sensing that he and his followers had gotten their wish of having their judgment day coincide with a fiery conflagration. But mostly I would have been guessing, not having seen any of the siege on television, and never having read any histories of either Koresh or his followers. Nevertheless, standing in the Texas sunshine, I believed Mt. Carmel to be a variation on the themes of Jonestown, only this time the ATF had spiked the Kool Aid.
It was only several weeks later, after leaving Waco, that I managed to read several histories of the 1993 barn burning. In Waco itself, the local Barnes & Noble had no books on either Koresh or his demise. (The city would prefer more positive associations.) But from the Internet I purchased The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation by Dick J. Reavis, which from reading the promotional quotes I hoped might be free from the many conspiracy theories that this Armageddon has inspired. From Reavis, I was finally able to connect the grounds on which we parked Whelan’s car to the events of winter and spring, 1993. Alas, the museum promising $5 tours was closed, and the Mt. Carmel church doors were locked. Nor were any pilgrims on the road. Thus we had walked the grounds in eerie silence, as if on a movie set that had lost its audio feed or on a civil war battlefield where it was difficult to recall the exact circumstances in which Union soldiers had ambushed men, women and children it had deemed Rebels.
To give a bare minimum of the church’s background, it is necessary to start by saying that David Koresh was his adopted Biblical name, and that the leader of the Branch Davidians (not a name the group used to describe itself) was born Vernon Howell. He grew up in a broken Texan home, his mother having been 14 when he was born and his father absent from his life. Long before Howell drifted to Waco in 1980, the rural complex of wooden building had been associated with a schismatic group of Seventh-Day Adventists. Reavis calls them “perhaps renegade, but heirs nonetheless” of the “eight-million member Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) Church,” which, among others, can count among its early believers John Harvey Kellogg, the father of corn flakes. In 1942, a splinter group had renamed itself the “Davidian Seventh Day Adventist Association,” and it was from a lease in that name on Mt. Carmel lands that the press got the notion that Koresh’s followers should be known as “Branch Davidians.”
In fact, textual inspiration for the Koresh faithful came from the Seven Seals in the Book of Revelation, and those living at Mt. Carmel—a potluck of communal Europeans, Australians, and Americans—would have thought themselves nothing more exotic than students of the Bible, with emphasis on the Seven Seals. Although some of the men trained with firearms, it was not a gun cult, as you would find in rural Montana. Indeed, Reavis writes: “The people who had lived at Mt. Carmel were more akin to the Shakers and to the Onieda community—parts of today’s Americana—than to the members of the Charles Manson cult.” But if all they were doing out there on the Double EE Ranch Road was reading the Bible or baking communal bread, how did it come to pass that they found themselves under siege and then under attack from the combined arms of the FBI, the ATF, and the National Guard?
In reality, the G-men were attacking David Koresh more than they were laying waste to a rural congregation, near nothing and no one, 12 miles outside the city of Waco. Deserved or not, he had gained a reputation among local law-enforcement officials as a new-age preacher who was dredging up quotations from the New Testament to justify polygamy, dope dealing, and the stock-piling of assault rifles. In 1992 a UPS man had sounded the alarm after he spotted some hand grenades at the church.
Koresh had become a marked man. While thundering in his pulpit, he had found time to father 17 children, some with girls under the legal age of consent and others by women married to fellow Davidians. He had also amassed a formidable gun collection, notably from a co-religionist who made the rounds of the Texas gun shows. Although a man of the cloth—he told his flock that he was a third Christ, “a mortal embodying the spirit of God,”—Koresh enjoyed jamming with a communal rock band long into Texas summer nights. Had the Davidians not been armed, the encampment might well have seemed an out-take from Life of Brian. (Brian’s mother: “He’s not the Messiah. He’s a very naughty boy.”) In the makeshift cemetery in front of the rebuilt Mt. Carmel church is the wreckage of a Harley Davidson, a Koresh favorite when he wasn’t preaching about the “investigative Judgment of the dead.” One of his followers recalled: “David didn’t read anything but the Bible and Camaro magazines.”
In retrospect, had local police officials wanted either to question or arrest Koresh (although being a Messiah is not a crime in Texas or anywhere else), all they needed to do was pick him up on one of his frequent trips into Waco. The residents of Mt. Carmel may have had their own views on the Book of Revelation, not to mention their special take on marriage laws, but they did come and go from their compound. Instead the ATF cooked up one of those police raids that you see on television when it is airing “Real Tales from the Highway Patrol” or covering some narcotics bust.
At around 10 AM on February 28th, various law-enforcement officers, backed up by armed helicopters, tried to take Mt. Carmel by storm. Standing at the front door, Koresh was badly wounded in the initial assault. But in an amazing feat of arms (no matter which side of this story you believe), the Davidian militia fought off the ATF raiders, including the armed helicopters that had strafed the church buildings. 20 attackers were wounded, and four were killed. The Davidians suffered 6 killed. In a truce negotiated over the phone, the government withdrew from the property and laid down its siege lines, which isolated the compound for almost two months. Hence began the Texas standoff that attracted more than 1000 members of the world media, not to mention the FBI and U.S. army brass, including those in General Wesley Clark’s chain of command, who later would have supplied the assault armor.
On April 19th, under rules of engagement signed by Attorney General Reno, the government attacked again, this time using tanks to pierce the Mt. Carmel Center’s walls and to shoot canisters of CS nerve gas into the wooden compound. (As the tanks rolled forward, an FBI public address system blared: “This is not an assault. This is not an assault.”) Not reassured, the Davidians fought the mechanized agents, although this time the buildings caught fire and consumed all but nine of the 84 residents, including twenty-one children under age 16. From these ashes have come the conspiracy theories, many of which dwell on who started the fatal fire.
In the accounts of the US and state governments, Koresh devoured his own, as if fulfilling a prophesy in the Book of Revelation, rather than submit to the laws of civil society. Other histories, however, explain how CS nerve gas can become combustible, especially when shot by a tank into a wooden building. None of the nine Davidian survivors saw the fire start. But there is agreement that Koresh had the corridors at Mt. Carmel lined with hay, either as part of its primitive defense network or to feed the flames of judgment day. (During the standoff, Koresh told an FBI negotiator over the phone: "you're behind the Bradley [armored personnel carrier] we're here behind the walls of sheetrock.")
In weighing the evidence against Koresh, Reavis, who has been Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and who was an editor at Texas Monthly, disputes much official testimony. He quotes numerous witnesses to say that Koresh did not deal in drugs, and he cites the FBI, itself, to confirm that child abuse was not a variant at Mt. Carmel. Uncomfortably, he also reminds readers that “…there is no federal or Texas statute against stockpiling arms; anyone who can legally buy one weapon can legally buy a hundred, or even a thousand of them.” He describes Koresh the progenitor and Koresh the gunsmith as inhabiting legal worlds of his own construction, backed up by odd quotes from the Bible. (He once described Mt. Carmel’s extraterritorial status with a reference to Vatican City.) But the Waco story lays bare all sorts of troubling constitutional issues about freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, what constitutes a church, private property, and the uses of federal troops to enforce state laws. Is it Biblical or state law that should govern what goes on in the backseat of a Camaro?
As the church doors were locked and the museum was closed, there wasn’t much to see on the grounds of Mt. Carmel. Near the church are the burned remains of a bus and numerous headstones, as you would find on a battlefield. We lingered over the marker that reads: “In remembrance of all the men, women and children who were victimized and brutally slaughtered in the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building on April 19, 1995. We pray that they and their families find comfort and peace in Our Lord.”
Two years to the day after Mt. Carmel burned, Timothy McVeigh detonated his U-Haul explosives in anger over what he perceived as government-sponsored murder of the Davidians. During the initial siege at Waco, McVeigh had even tried to get close to Mt. Carmel and, while near the barricades, had passed out leaflets that read: “A Man With A Gun Is A Citizen, A Man Without A Gun Is A Subject.” But I still find it difficult to decode the symbolism of this monument, placed where it is. Is it just condemning all random violence or acts of terror? Does it imply indirect sympathy with McVeigh who believed that ATF officers were at work in the Alfred P. Murah Building in Oklahoma City? In a larger sense, all the monuments in front of the church, including those placed by the ATF, raise the difficult question about who are the victims at Waco: the dead government officers, the Davidian women and children, or the US Constitution?
Leaving Mt. Carmel, Professor Whelan and I stopped at the only other house on the road and chatted at length with a man who for years had been David Koresh’s next door neighbor. I never did learn his name, but during the siege the FBI had taken over his house—and only months later had paid him compensation. He now regretted that he had come to live across the street from a cult, and he told the story of how late one night, a family had escaped from Koresh’s heavy-handed control and asked the neighbor to drive them into town, which he did. The next morning, when an angry Koresh confronted him about hustling away these wayward sheep, the neighbor played it coolly dumb, saying: “But, David, I thought you had wanted me to take them into town.” His feeling was that Koresh, himself, had ignited the last fire, but he hardly believed the Davidians a threat to anyone but themselves. He and his wife had kept a polite distance from the commune, which often acted as though the Messiah had returned as Led Zeppelin. But the rock music annoyed the neighbors more than the guns or the Bible classes. (What house in Texas isn’t stockpiled with rifles and Bibles?) And the neighbor could well be the source of a quote in Reavis: “I’ll tell you what does bother me. This is a big fuss over nothing. These people have been here a long time and never bothered nobody.”
In trying to find the Double EE Rand Road on lonesome prairie, we made a few wrong turns and actually pulled into the driveway of the Double EE Ranch, which is as impressive as that of J.R. Ewing’s Southfork. A ranch hand corrected our mistake—we had turned left one road too early—and in a few moments we parked Whelan’s car on the edge of Mt. Carmel, in front of a makeshift museum that had a hand-painted sign offering tours of the grounds for $5. A few hundred yards into the property is a newly built white church. Between the road and its front door there are rows of freshly planted trees and small headstones, memorializing the names of the 81 Davidians who died in the1993 firefights. In effect, the Koresh church (although this is contested within the sect) still owns or controls the land, which is used partly for the congregation and partly as a parable on freedom of religion and government violence.
If, when I had stood in the drive of the Koresh estate, I had been asked to recount the events that had defined the first year of the Bill Clinton presidency, I would have said trigger-happy members of the FBI and ATF had attacked a rural commune—one that worshipped polygamy and guns as much as the second coming of Christ. I believed Attorney General Reno had used what is called “excessive force,” but I knew nothing about the cult’s leader, David Koresh, other than sensing that he and his followers had gotten their wish of having their judgment day coincide with a fiery conflagration. But mostly I would have been guessing, not having seen any of the siege on television, and never having read any histories of either Koresh or his followers. Nevertheless, standing in the Texas sunshine, I believed Mt. Carmel to be a variation on the themes of Jonestown, only this time the ATF had spiked the Kool Aid.
It was only several weeks later, after leaving Waco, that I managed to read several histories of the 1993 barn burning. In Waco itself, the local Barnes & Noble had no books on either Koresh or his demise. (The city would prefer more positive associations.) But from the Internet I purchased The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation by Dick J. Reavis, which from reading the promotional quotes I hoped might be free from the many conspiracy theories that this Armageddon has inspired. From Reavis, I was finally able to connect the grounds on which we parked Whelan’s car to the events of winter and spring, 1993. Alas, the museum promising $5 tours was closed, and the Mt. Carmel church doors were locked. Nor were any pilgrims on the road. Thus we had walked the grounds in eerie silence, as if on a movie set that had lost its audio feed or on a civil war battlefield where it was difficult to recall the exact circumstances in which Union soldiers had ambushed men, women and children it had deemed Rebels.
To give a bare minimum of the church’s background, it is necessary to start by saying that David Koresh was his adopted Biblical name, and that the leader of the Branch Davidians (not a name the group used to describe itself) was born Vernon Howell. He grew up in a broken Texan home, his mother having been 14 when he was born and his father absent from his life. Long before Howell drifted to Waco in 1980, the rural complex of wooden building had been associated with a schismatic group of Seventh-Day Adventists. Reavis calls them “perhaps renegade, but heirs nonetheless” of the “eight-million member Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) Church,” which, among others, can count among its early believers John Harvey Kellogg, the father of corn flakes. In 1942, a splinter group had renamed itself the “Davidian Seventh Day Adventist Association,” and it was from a lease in that name on Mt. Carmel lands that the press got the notion that Koresh’s followers should be known as “Branch Davidians.”
In fact, textual inspiration for the Koresh faithful came from the Seven Seals in the Book of Revelation, and those living at Mt. Carmel—a potluck of communal Europeans, Australians, and Americans—would have thought themselves nothing more exotic than students of the Bible, with emphasis on the Seven Seals. Although some of the men trained with firearms, it was not a gun cult, as you would find in rural Montana. Indeed, Reavis writes: “The people who had lived at Mt. Carmel were more akin to the Shakers and to the Onieda community—parts of today’s Americana—than to the members of the Charles Manson cult.” But if all they were doing out there on the Double EE Ranch Road was reading the Bible or baking communal bread, how did it come to pass that they found themselves under siege and then under attack from the combined arms of the FBI, the ATF, and the National Guard?
In reality, the G-men were attacking David Koresh more than they were laying waste to a rural congregation, near nothing and no one, 12 miles outside the city of Waco. Deserved or not, he had gained a reputation among local law-enforcement officials as a new-age preacher who was dredging up quotations from the New Testament to justify polygamy, dope dealing, and the stock-piling of assault rifles. In 1992 a UPS man had sounded the alarm after he spotted some hand grenades at the church.
Koresh had become a marked man. While thundering in his pulpit, he had found time to father 17 children, some with girls under the legal age of consent and others by women married to fellow Davidians. He had also amassed a formidable gun collection, notably from a co-religionist who made the rounds of the Texas gun shows. Although a man of the cloth—he told his flock that he was a third Christ, “a mortal embodying the spirit of God,”—Koresh enjoyed jamming with a communal rock band long into Texas summer nights. Had the Davidians not been armed, the encampment might well have seemed an out-take from Life of Brian. (Brian’s mother: “He’s not the Messiah. He’s a very naughty boy.”) In the makeshift cemetery in front of the rebuilt Mt. Carmel church is the wreckage of a Harley Davidson, a Koresh favorite when he wasn’t preaching about the “investigative Judgment of the dead.” One of his followers recalled: “David didn’t read anything but the Bible and Camaro magazines.”
In retrospect, had local police officials wanted either to question or arrest Koresh (although being a Messiah is not a crime in Texas or anywhere else), all they needed to do was pick him up on one of his frequent trips into Waco. The residents of Mt. Carmel may have had their own views on the Book of Revelation, not to mention their special take on marriage laws, but they did come and go from their compound. Instead the ATF cooked up one of those police raids that you see on television when it is airing “Real Tales from the Highway Patrol” or covering some narcotics bust.
At around 10 AM on February 28th, various law-enforcement officers, backed up by armed helicopters, tried to take Mt. Carmel by storm. Standing at the front door, Koresh was badly wounded in the initial assault. But in an amazing feat of arms (no matter which side of this story you believe), the Davidian militia fought off the ATF raiders, including the armed helicopters that had strafed the church buildings. 20 attackers were wounded, and four were killed. The Davidians suffered 6 killed. In a truce negotiated over the phone, the government withdrew from the property and laid down its siege lines, which isolated the compound for almost two months. Hence began the Texas standoff that attracted more than 1000 members of the world media, not to mention the FBI and U.S. army brass, including those in General Wesley Clark’s chain of command, who later would have supplied the assault armor.
On April 19th, under rules of engagement signed by Attorney General Reno, the government attacked again, this time using tanks to pierce the Mt. Carmel Center’s walls and to shoot canisters of CS nerve gas into the wooden compound. (As the tanks rolled forward, an FBI public address system blared: “This is not an assault. This is not an assault.”) Not reassured, the Davidians fought the mechanized agents, although this time the buildings caught fire and consumed all but nine of the 84 residents, including twenty-one children under age 16. From these ashes have come the conspiracy theories, many of which dwell on who started the fatal fire.
In the accounts of the US and state governments, Koresh devoured his own, as if fulfilling a prophesy in the Book of Revelation, rather than submit to the laws of civil society. Other histories, however, explain how CS nerve gas can become combustible, especially when shot by a tank into a wooden building. None of the nine Davidian survivors saw the fire start. But there is agreement that Koresh had the corridors at Mt. Carmel lined with hay, either as part of its primitive defense network or to feed the flames of judgment day. (During the standoff, Koresh told an FBI negotiator over the phone: "you're behind the Bradley [armored personnel carrier] we're here behind the walls of sheetrock.")
In weighing the evidence against Koresh, Reavis, who has been Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and who was an editor at Texas Monthly, disputes much official testimony. He quotes numerous witnesses to say that Koresh did not deal in drugs, and he cites the FBI, itself, to confirm that child abuse was not a variant at Mt. Carmel. Uncomfortably, he also reminds readers that “…there is no federal or Texas statute against stockpiling arms; anyone who can legally buy one weapon can legally buy a hundred, or even a thousand of them.” He describes Koresh the progenitor and Koresh the gunsmith as inhabiting legal worlds of his own construction, backed up by odd quotes from the Bible. (He once described Mt. Carmel’s extraterritorial status with a reference to Vatican City.) But the Waco story lays bare all sorts of troubling constitutional issues about freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, what constitutes a church, private property, and the uses of federal troops to enforce state laws. Is it Biblical or state law that should govern what goes on in the backseat of a Camaro?
As the church doors were locked and the museum was closed, there wasn’t much to see on the grounds of Mt. Carmel. Near the church are the burned remains of a bus and numerous headstones, as you would find on a battlefield. We lingered over the marker that reads: “In remembrance of all the men, women and children who were victimized and brutally slaughtered in the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building on April 19, 1995. We pray that they and their families find comfort and peace in Our Lord.”
Two years to the day after Mt. Carmel burned, Timothy McVeigh detonated his U-Haul explosives in anger over what he perceived as government-sponsored murder of the Davidians. During the initial siege at Waco, McVeigh had even tried to get close to Mt. Carmel and, while near the barricades, had passed out leaflets that read: “A Man With A Gun Is A Citizen, A Man Without A Gun Is A Subject.” But I still find it difficult to decode the symbolism of this monument, placed where it is. Is it just condemning all random violence or acts of terror? Does it imply indirect sympathy with McVeigh who believed that ATF officers were at work in the Alfred P. Murah Building in Oklahoma City? In a larger sense, all the monuments in front of the church, including those placed by the ATF, raise the difficult question about who are the victims at Waco: the dead government officers, the Davidian women and children, or the US Constitution?
Leaving Mt. Carmel, Professor Whelan and I stopped at the only other house on the road and chatted at length with a man who for years had been David Koresh’s next door neighbor. I never did learn his name, but during the siege the FBI had taken over his house—and only months later had paid him compensation. He now regretted that he had come to live across the street from a cult, and he told the story of how late one night, a family had escaped from Koresh’s heavy-handed control and asked the neighbor to drive them into town, which he did. The next morning, when an angry Koresh confronted him about hustling away these wayward sheep, the neighbor played it coolly dumb, saying: “But, David, I thought you had wanted me to take them into town.” His feeling was that Koresh, himself, had ignited the last fire, but he hardly believed the Davidians a threat to anyone but themselves. He and his wife had kept a polite distance from the commune, which often acted as though the Messiah had returned as Led Zeppelin. But the rock music annoyed the neighbors more than the guns or the Bible classes. (What house in Texas isn’t stockpiled with rifles and Bibles?) And the neighbor could well be the source of a quote in Reavis: “I’ll tell you what does bother me. This is a big fuss over nothing. These people have been here a long time and never bothered nobody.”
Sunday, March 05, 2006
Third-Party Time
I must say that I cannot get excited over the furor about whether a holding company from the United Arab Emirates will compromise the national security of the United States if it owns the shares of P & O—the Peninsula & Oriental Steam Navigation Company of yore—which, in turn, has interests in various East Coast ports. As I get the drift of this outrage du jour, the U.A.E. is feared to be in the murky shadows of Arab fundamentalism, if not an al-Qaida oasis. Thus the risk on the waterfront is that containers swinging ashore in Staten Island or Baltimore could be the primitive delivery system of a so-called dirty bomb, the kind of nuclear Molotov cocktail that everyone fears Osama bin Laden is brewing under his desk in the Tora Bora.
The reason I can’t get excited is that if you decide that Arab capital is seditious or un-American, what kind of loyalty oath is required of the Fortune 500, which is replete with shareholders from shores more hostile than those of the U.A.E’s Barbary capitalists? For example, a Saudi Arabian prince, for a while, controlled about 10 percent of Citibank. (Dubai had 2 of the 19 hijackers; Saudi had 16.) Interests in American ports, already, are spread among a number of international companies. On other fronts German conglomerates own most of the large American book publishers, not to mention defense contractor Chrysler. Or take, for example, the national debt, which is largely pawned to countries like Japan, South Korea, China, and Taiwan. Why get worked up about container facilities in Philadelphia (essentially parking lots for large boxes) but turn a blind eye to the fact that the American dream is carrying a large mortgage with Far East lenders that have had—how shall I put it—mixed historical relations with the United States.
At the same time I take the theatrics over terminal investments to be the first skirmishes in the 2008 presidential election, which thus far has lacked both candidates and emotion. Among those in the bully pulpit, railing against terror’s strategic plans, is Senator Hilary Clinton, who clearly is looking to hoist the Bush administration on its own petard of homeland security. With U.A.E. shareholders, the senator has a good, safe menace—a convenient scapegoat without a lot of votes in the precincts of Nassau County. It’s a free shot at international capitalism, which can be cast as a bloated monster, one of Thomas Nast’s trust caricatures, not to mention a feel-good story for the Longshoremen’s Union, who cannot want their stevedores unloading the cargoes of terrorism. Even better, anger at Dubai Ports World outflanks Karl Rove’s permanent state of emergency, in that it shows the Bush administration cutting the corners of favoritism by quickly and quietly approving the transaction, and thus putting the interests of fat cats above those of guard dogs.
The question of who owns the shares of P & O is an electoral sideshow, something that cannot easily translate into congressional hearings or the storyboards of political action committees. If the Democrats and Republicans have to campaign on who will do a better job witch hunting the share registries of American stock markets, my sense is that both of the major parties have run out of serious ideas. Indeed, I often think it remarkable that America has been able to hang on to its two-party system for as long as it has, given that the parties strike me as being distinctions without any differences.
Analyze this: while Senator Hilary Clinton tries to position herself as the Democratic nominee for the 2008 election, her former-president husband, in theory the leader of the Democratic opposition, has decided that he and his party’s image are best served if he plays the role of the Bush family’s best friend. On any given day, he and the presidents Bush can be seen giving comfort to hurricane or tsunami survivors, if they are not squeezing in a round of golf. What this tells me is that parties count for little in the game to govern America, which since the 1960s has been run by a series of interchangeable political oligarchies—ones that have names like Kennedy, Bush, Clinton, and Dole. Indeed since 1976, a Bush, Dole, or Clinton has been a candidate in every election. If we are to believe those handicapping the 2008 election, the chances are good that a Clinton or a Bush will again be on one of the tickets, assuming that they don’t dispense with democratic niceties and run the country with a triumvirate of Hilary Clinton, Jeb Bush, and Elizabeth Dole.
What do the major parties stand for? I wish I knew. In theory, and according to the received wisdom, Republicans favor big business, budget restraint, low taxes, free trade, and isolationist tendencies in foreign policy. Imagine someone like Robert Taft or Henry Cabot Lodge. In contrast, the Democrats are there for labor unions, federal programs, farm subsidies, environmental protection, social security, and the odd war to end all wars. Hubert Humphrey comes to mind. Then what explains the seemingly Republican administration of President Bill Clinton, who balanced the budget, busted unions, posted surpluses, threw bones around Wall Street, and restricted jingoism to bombs over Belgrade? By extension, the current Bush administration would appear to have cornered the same markets in deficit spending that so enticed Democratic President Lyndon Johnson to go abroad in search of monsters and, at home, to federalize everything from school lunches to oil depletion allowances.
In the higher echelons of government, I fear, America is a one-party state, at service only to maintain the privileges of power. Party politics remind me of post-republican Rome, after the death of Caesar, when Cato was called “a doomed man in a doomed state” and when Augustus managed “to break the old combinations of nobles and clients and organize all the citizens of Rome in a single ‘party’, or, more correctly, into a group of clients, united in loyalty to the ruler.” What else explains the current absence of a Democratic opposition, save for some anger against port shareholders or the odd denunciation of torture, at a time when the country is losing a colonial war abroad, and the national debt is $8.2 trillion, of which your family’s share is $131,000?
* * *
In the American past, whenever political parties have failed to offer the electorate choices on issues or government, third-party candidates have emerged. It happened in 1912, 1948, 1968, and 1992, although during many other elections through the 20th century third-party candidates both appeared on the ballots and in some cases may have altered the outcome of the election. Who does not, for example, believe that in 2000 Al Gore lost Florida, and thus the presidency, because of the presence on that confusing ballot of the consumerist, Ralph Nader?
As a joker in the American political deck, third parties lend drama and excitement to what can otherwise be as humdrum as choosing between a Buick and a Pontiac. They even have better names than Democrats and Republicans. Who wouldn’t want to be a member of a party called Whig, Mugwump, Anti-Masonic, Know-Nothing, Abolitionist, Free Soil, Greenback or Populist? But they never seem to get anywhere against the entrenched interests. Nevertheless, in recent weeks, I have spent considerable time reading and thinking about third parties—speculating that 2008 might be yet be another wild card election, decided by a candidate for a party that has yet to exist, but which could go by the name Abortionist, Second Amendment, Divine Inspiration, Flat Tax, Out of Iraq, Constitutional, or, to name my own cause, Anti-Astroturf.
Leaving aside 1860 and the accidental election of Abraham Lincoln, the mother of all third-party elections was 1912, a story recently retold in James Chace’s “1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs—The Election That Changed The Country.” Chace, who died last year, served as editor of “Foreign Affairs.” In 2004 he published his account of how Theodore Roosevelt, running on the Progressive line (nicknamed the Bull Moose Party), received 27 percent of the vote, thus effectively handing the presidency to Woodrow Wilson. In that election, President Taft, standing for re-election as the Republican, was consigned to 23 percent of the popular vote and 8 electoral votes—Vermont and Utah—as if maybe his only supporters were Mormons. The irony is that Roosevelt had picked Taft to succeed him in 1908, but Chace writes: “Theirs was a breach that would never be fully healed.” At his third-party nominating convention, Roosevelt proclaimed: “We are warring against bossism, against privilege social and industrial,” positions he defended on another occasion by saying: “If that is revolution, make the most of it.”
I disagree with Chace that the 1912 election “changed the country.” But it was colorful. Roosevelt, in addition to breaking with his protégé Taft, called Wilson “the apothecary’s clerk.” Debs, a socialist, ran for President while awaiting a Supreme Court decision on whether, in fact, he had violated the Espionage and Sedition Acts. Wilson dreamed of running as a populist and as a reformer, but, as another biographer wrote, the preacher “had a profound contempt for the Farmer’s Alliance, the Populists, greenbackers, bi-metallists, trades unionists, small office seekers, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, pensioners, strikers, armies of unemployed.” In fact, he owed his nomination to machine politicians. Chace breaks down the positions of the various candidates as follows: Roosevelt (“pragmatic nationalism”), Wilson (“self-righteous moralism”), Taft (“judicious conservatism”), and Debs (“socialist absolutism”). But he might well have quoted the McKinley power broker, Mark Hanna, who said, “all questions of government in a democracy are questions of money.” In 1912 the Democrats had the most money.
What’s interesting about the 1912 election is how skewed were the positions of the candidates, in relation to their party’s campaign buttons. Nominally one of the fathers of American conservatism, Teddy Roosevelt, according to Chace, “endorsed the graduated income and inheritance tax, a comprehensive workmen’s compensation act, prohibition of child labor, downward revision of the tariffs, and increased power for the Interstate Commerce Commission to supervise all corporations engaged in interstate business.” Labor agitator Debs spent as much time in prison as he did running for the presidency (he did both about five times). He was associated with radical socialism, although the man he most admired was Abraham Lincoln, for his “education, frugality, integrity, veracity, fidelity, diligence, sobriety, and charity.” Taft, a strict constitutional constructionist, was depicted as holding the moneybags of the party bosses, who instead were selling Saint Woodrow as if he were a patent medicine. Wilson won forty states and 435 electoral votes, and then spent the next four years assiduously incorporating the Bull Moose platform into Democratic sponsored legislation.
The eloquent American historian and Columbia University professor, Richard Hofstadter, observed that “third parties are like bees; once they have stung, they die.” Progressivism as a presidential party lasted a few more decades. But it never approached Teddy Roosevelt’s high water mark of 27 % of the popular vote, because by 1916 the Democrats had appropriated the third-party’s ideas. Wilson pushed through a federal income tax and various regulatory bodies. TR did try again in 1916 “to protect those who, under Mr. Wilson’s laissez-faire system, are trodden down in the ferocious scrambling rush of an unregulated and purely individualistic industrialism,” but during the 1916 campaign he was shot and by then, in any case, the Reverend Wilson was preaching from Teddy’s prayer book. He may even have fought the war to end all wars to get Roosevelt off his back.
* * *
In 1924, Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette got 17 % of the vote as a third-party candidate, although the Jazz Age preferred Calvin Coolidge (54 %) to either the Progressive senator or the Democratic corporate lawyer, John W. Davis, who himself only secured the Democratic nomination on the 103rd ballot. Coolidge beat both of them although he never left his house to campaign. (How could they tell?) But the evolution of the Progressive party confirms the thesis of political scientist, Ronald Rapoport, that the success of third parties depends on voters either “pushing” away from major parties or the “pull” or attractiveness of dissident candidate ideas. In that, they are almost the push-me, pull-you creations of that noted political thinker, Dr. Doolittle.
During the four presidential elections that gave victory to Franklin Roosevelt, third parties candidates were seen but not heard. Norman Thomas replaced Eugene V. Debs as the perpetual candidate on the Socialist line, and ran on every occasion between 1932 and 1944. But he never got more than one percent of the vote, in part because the major parties offered clear, divergent platforms. If you wanted to soak the rich, you voted for Roosevelt; if not, you went Republican. In 1948, leaving aside the grammatical tautology, there were two third-party candidates: Henry Wallace for the Progressives and Strom Thurmond under the States’ Rights banner (sometimes called Dixiecrats). But collectively those on the fringe only stirred regional, not national enthusiasm, winning less than 5 % of the vote, although the Thurmond breakaway candidacy was the beginning of the end for the Democrats in the Deep South.
One of Thurmond’s spiritual heirs was Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama, who in 1968 ran on the American Independent Party, along with General Curtis Lemay, who thought the war in Indochina could be won if North Vietnam was “bombed back into the Stone ages.” (It was already there.) Pushing the segregationist line, Wallace got almost 14 % of the vote and 46 electoral votes, although it is not clear whether Wallace, nominally a Democrat, denied Humphrey a majority or Nixon a landslide. But as Rapoport has written: “All successful third-party candidates follow Wallace’s strategy of emphasizing the absence of a 'real choice' between the two major parties.” In 1972, after Wallace was wounded in an assassination attempt, his party ran a space orbiter by the name of John G. Schmitz (of National Rifle Association, John Birch, and American Legion credentials), who said during the campaign that “if people think you get up early, you can sleep until 11 AM.” He also came up with the campaign slogan that “When you’re out of Schmitz, you’re out of gear,” a play on the beer jingle of Schlitz. But Schmitz, with 1 % of the vote, didn’t even carry Milwaukee or make it famous.
Technically, in 1980 Congressman John Anderson was not a third-party candidate, in that he ran as an independent, without party affiliation. He won 7 % of the vote, but caused bigger damage to President Jimmy Carter in that he exposed the missing mojo in the Democrat’s presidency. In 1984 and 1988, the choices between the major parties, and their candidates were distinct (“Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”), and thus no third-party candidates emerged. But that changed in 1992, when out of the thrilling days of yesteryear came that masked rider from the plains, H. Ross Perot, a Lone Ranger who, according to Rapoport and his co-author Walter Stone, changed the complexion of American politics more than any third-party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt.
* * *
Rapoport and Stone, respectively chairmen of the departments of political science at the College of William and Mary and the University of California at Davis, have recently published “Three’s a Crowd,” an account of the 1992 election and the subsequent Perot phenomenon. One of the surprising conclusions from the book, published by the University of Michigan Press, is that while Perot may well have cost Republican George Herbert Walker Bush his chance for re-election in 1992, his followers influenced the subsequent Republican revolution—beginning with the 1994 Contract with America and culminating after 2000 with victories for the White House, Senate and House of Representatives.
Two descriptions from the 1912 election could be applied to H. Ross Perot. In describing the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, Teddy Roosevelt once said: “I found him vain as a peacock.” And Hofstadter, in writing of the likes of Woodrow Wilson, spoke of “the ruthlessness of the pure in heart.” Despite his peacock looks and ruthless purity, in 1992 Perot got almost 20 million votes, 19 % of those cast, and denied Bill Clinton a popular majority. His nominating convention was, in effect, an appearance on the Larry King Show when he dared his supporters to get him on the ballots of all 50 states. Collectively 5.3 million citizens signed petitions for Perot, who then campaigned as a classic outsider—for deficit reduction, against immigration and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for term limits, and against government waste. But 1992 wasn’t a good year for the major parties. Despite earlier Gulf War popularity, President Bush the elder was laboring under a cratering economy while voters were having a hard time inhaling the nightlife of the Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton. As an aide said of his boss, Perot was someone there to “fix the damn problem.”
One reason that successful third parties “sting and die” is that one or both of the major parties make takeover bids of the insurgent ideas. Beginning in 1994, the Republicans courted Perot’s supporters and their issues, about which the Democrats were largely indifferent. But according to Rapoport and Stone, Perot’s faithful remain a loose but powerful cannon in American politics. When it rolled to the Republican decks, they won control of the Congress and finally the Presidency. Rapoport and Stone write that, after 1992, “the Republicans reached out to Perot and to the Perot constituency.” They conclude that: “By migrating to one of the major parties, Perot activists carried the potential to change that party’s stands on core Perot issues, such as reform, economic nationalism, and the federal budget.” Even though Perot himself polled only 8 % of the vote 1996 and by 2000 the Reform Party had become a joke—reduced to a scrum for federally-matched funding between the likes of Jesse “the Body” Ventura, Pat Buchanan, and Donald Trump—the bee’s pollen was already allowing the Republicans to flower.
Thinking he could tell me who might be elected the next president in 2008, I called Professor Rapoport at his William and Mary office, where he has worked since 1975. Other than having read his provocative book, I did not know him personally. But I do know and admire his parents, who have made The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Foundation a model of generosity for the causes of literacy and the disadvantaged—although their gift is not so much money but enthusiasm for individuals and ideals.
On the phone Ronald Rapoport compared the looming 2008 election with 1992, in that there is a burgeoning deficit, the aftermath of a Persian Gulf invasion, and little perceived difference between the major political parties. He still believes that the Perot constituency “remains distinctive,” an underground political current looking to vent its populist anger on one of the major parties. But the outcome of the 2006 mid-term election will give him a better idea if the conditions might be ripe, in 2008, for the emergence of a third-party candidacy. He emphasized that the “major parties have to create the opportunity for a third party.” He recalled a line from the book that “one of the ironies of the Perot movement was that it [nominally non-partisan] contributed to one of the greatest upsurges in partisan politics in American history.”
Rapoport speaks about political candidates, third parties, and presidential politics with insight and irony. He thinks the conditions could well be ripe for a third-party in 2008, with all its attendant threats to the established order. (Alexander Pope called political parties “the madness of many for the gain of a few.”) Rapoport speculated that if the 2008 election were between Hilary Clinton and John McCain, he could imagine the Perot bloc swinging toward the Arizona senator, who in 2000 gave his campaign bus the Perot sounding name, “Straight Talk Express.” Ironically, push me, pull-you Perotism might explain, after all, why Bill Clinton has become best friends with the Bushes. Is it to move Hilary’s image into the safe middle ground? Too bad for the Democrats that Perot doesn’t play golf.
The reason I can’t get excited is that if you decide that Arab capital is seditious or un-American, what kind of loyalty oath is required of the Fortune 500, which is replete with shareholders from shores more hostile than those of the U.A.E’s Barbary capitalists? For example, a Saudi Arabian prince, for a while, controlled about 10 percent of Citibank. (Dubai had 2 of the 19 hijackers; Saudi had 16.) Interests in American ports, already, are spread among a number of international companies. On other fronts German conglomerates own most of the large American book publishers, not to mention defense contractor Chrysler. Or take, for example, the national debt, which is largely pawned to countries like Japan, South Korea, China, and Taiwan. Why get worked up about container facilities in Philadelphia (essentially parking lots for large boxes) but turn a blind eye to the fact that the American dream is carrying a large mortgage with Far East lenders that have had—how shall I put it—mixed historical relations with the United States.
At the same time I take the theatrics over terminal investments to be the first skirmishes in the 2008 presidential election, which thus far has lacked both candidates and emotion. Among those in the bully pulpit, railing against terror’s strategic plans, is Senator Hilary Clinton, who clearly is looking to hoist the Bush administration on its own petard of homeland security. With U.A.E. shareholders, the senator has a good, safe menace—a convenient scapegoat without a lot of votes in the precincts of Nassau County. It’s a free shot at international capitalism, which can be cast as a bloated monster, one of Thomas Nast’s trust caricatures, not to mention a feel-good story for the Longshoremen’s Union, who cannot want their stevedores unloading the cargoes of terrorism. Even better, anger at Dubai Ports World outflanks Karl Rove’s permanent state of emergency, in that it shows the Bush administration cutting the corners of favoritism by quickly and quietly approving the transaction, and thus putting the interests of fat cats above those of guard dogs.
The question of who owns the shares of P & O is an electoral sideshow, something that cannot easily translate into congressional hearings or the storyboards of political action committees. If the Democrats and Republicans have to campaign on who will do a better job witch hunting the share registries of American stock markets, my sense is that both of the major parties have run out of serious ideas. Indeed, I often think it remarkable that America has been able to hang on to its two-party system for as long as it has, given that the parties strike me as being distinctions without any differences.
Analyze this: while Senator Hilary Clinton tries to position herself as the Democratic nominee for the 2008 election, her former-president husband, in theory the leader of the Democratic opposition, has decided that he and his party’s image are best served if he plays the role of the Bush family’s best friend. On any given day, he and the presidents Bush can be seen giving comfort to hurricane or tsunami survivors, if they are not squeezing in a round of golf. What this tells me is that parties count for little in the game to govern America, which since the 1960s has been run by a series of interchangeable political oligarchies—ones that have names like Kennedy, Bush, Clinton, and Dole. Indeed since 1976, a Bush, Dole, or Clinton has been a candidate in every election. If we are to believe those handicapping the 2008 election, the chances are good that a Clinton or a Bush will again be on one of the tickets, assuming that they don’t dispense with democratic niceties and run the country with a triumvirate of Hilary Clinton, Jeb Bush, and Elizabeth Dole.
What do the major parties stand for? I wish I knew. In theory, and according to the received wisdom, Republicans favor big business, budget restraint, low taxes, free trade, and isolationist tendencies in foreign policy. Imagine someone like Robert Taft or Henry Cabot Lodge. In contrast, the Democrats are there for labor unions, federal programs, farm subsidies, environmental protection, social security, and the odd war to end all wars. Hubert Humphrey comes to mind. Then what explains the seemingly Republican administration of President Bill Clinton, who balanced the budget, busted unions, posted surpluses, threw bones around Wall Street, and restricted jingoism to bombs over Belgrade? By extension, the current Bush administration would appear to have cornered the same markets in deficit spending that so enticed Democratic President Lyndon Johnson to go abroad in search of monsters and, at home, to federalize everything from school lunches to oil depletion allowances.
In the higher echelons of government, I fear, America is a one-party state, at service only to maintain the privileges of power. Party politics remind me of post-republican Rome, after the death of Caesar, when Cato was called “a doomed man in a doomed state” and when Augustus managed “to break the old combinations of nobles and clients and organize all the citizens of Rome in a single ‘party’, or, more correctly, into a group of clients, united in loyalty to the ruler.” What else explains the current absence of a Democratic opposition, save for some anger against port shareholders or the odd denunciation of torture, at a time when the country is losing a colonial war abroad, and the national debt is $8.2 trillion, of which your family’s share is $131,000?
* * *
In the American past, whenever political parties have failed to offer the electorate choices on issues or government, third-party candidates have emerged. It happened in 1912, 1948, 1968, and 1992, although during many other elections through the 20th century third-party candidates both appeared on the ballots and in some cases may have altered the outcome of the election. Who does not, for example, believe that in 2000 Al Gore lost Florida, and thus the presidency, because of the presence on that confusing ballot of the consumerist, Ralph Nader?
As a joker in the American political deck, third parties lend drama and excitement to what can otherwise be as humdrum as choosing between a Buick and a Pontiac. They even have better names than Democrats and Republicans. Who wouldn’t want to be a member of a party called Whig, Mugwump, Anti-Masonic, Know-Nothing, Abolitionist, Free Soil, Greenback or Populist? But they never seem to get anywhere against the entrenched interests. Nevertheless, in recent weeks, I have spent considerable time reading and thinking about third parties—speculating that 2008 might be yet be another wild card election, decided by a candidate for a party that has yet to exist, but which could go by the name Abortionist, Second Amendment, Divine Inspiration, Flat Tax, Out of Iraq, Constitutional, or, to name my own cause, Anti-Astroturf.
Leaving aside 1860 and the accidental election of Abraham Lincoln, the mother of all third-party elections was 1912, a story recently retold in James Chace’s “1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs—The Election That Changed The Country.” Chace, who died last year, served as editor of “Foreign Affairs.” In 2004 he published his account of how Theodore Roosevelt, running on the Progressive line (nicknamed the Bull Moose Party), received 27 percent of the vote, thus effectively handing the presidency to Woodrow Wilson. In that election, President Taft, standing for re-election as the Republican, was consigned to 23 percent of the popular vote and 8 electoral votes—Vermont and Utah—as if maybe his only supporters were Mormons. The irony is that Roosevelt had picked Taft to succeed him in 1908, but Chace writes: “Theirs was a breach that would never be fully healed.” At his third-party nominating convention, Roosevelt proclaimed: “We are warring against bossism, against privilege social and industrial,” positions he defended on another occasion by saying: “If that is revolution, make the most of it.”
I disagree with Chace that the 1912 election “changed the country.” But it was colorful. Roosevelt, in addition to breaking with his protégé Taft, called Wilson “the apothecary’s clerk.” Debs, a socialist, ran for President while awaiting a Supreme Court decision on whether, in fact, he had violated the Espionage and Sedition Acts. Wilson dreamed of running as a populist and as a reformer, but, as another biographer wrote, the preacher “had a profound contempt for the Farmer’s Alliance, the Populists, greenbackers, bi-metallists, trades unionists, small office seekers, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, pensioners, strikers, armies of unemployed.” In fact, he owed his nomination to machine politicians. Chace breaks down the positions of the various candidates as follows: Roosevelt (“pragmatic nationalism”), Wilson (“self-righteous moralism”), Taft (“judicious conservatism”), and Debs (“socialist absolutism”). But he might well have quoted the McKinley power broker, Mark Hanna, who said, “all questions of government in a democracy are questions of money.” In 1912 the Democrats had the most money.
What’s interesting about the 1912 election is how skewed were the positions of the candidates, in relation to their party’s campaign buttons. Nominally one of the fathers of American conservatism, Teddy Roosevelt, according to Chace, “endorsed the graduated income and inheritance tax, a comprehensive workmen’s compensation act, prohibition of child labor, downward revision of the tariffs, and increased power for the Interstate Commerce Commission to supervise all corporations engaged in interstate business.” Labor agitator Debs spent as much time in prison as he did running for the presidency (he did both about five times). He was associated with radical socialism, although the man he most admired was Abraham Lincoln, for his “education, frugality, integrity, veracity, fidelity, diligence, sobriety, and charity.” Taft, a strict constitutional constructionist, was depicted as holding the moneybags of the party bosses, who instead were selling Saint Woodrow as if he were a patent medicine. Wilson won forty states and 435 electoral votes, and then spent the next four years assiduously incorporating the Bull Moose platform into Democratic sponsored legislation.
The eloquent American historian and Columbia University professor, Richard Hofstadter, observed that “third parties are like bees; once they have stung, they die.” Progressivism as a presidential party lasted a few more decades. But it never approached Teddy Roosevelt’s high water mark of 27 % of the popular vote, because by 1916 the Democrats had appropriated the third-party’s ideas. Wilson pushed through a federal income tax and various regulatory bodies. TR did try again in 1916 “to protect those who, under Mr. Wilson’s laissez-faire system, are trodden down in the ferocious scrambling rush of an unregulated and purely individualistic industrialism,” but during the 1916 campaign he was shot and by then, in any case, the Reverend Wilson was preaching from Teddy’s prayer book. He may even have fought the war to end all wars to get Roosevelt off his back.
* * *
In 1924, Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette got 17 % of the vote as a third-party candidate, although the Jazz Age preferred Calvin Coolidge (54 %) to either the Progressive senator or the Democratic corporate lawyer, John W. Davis, who himself only secured the Democratic nomination on the 103rd ballot. Coolidge beat both of them although he never left his house to campaign. (How could they tell?) But the evolution of the Progressive party confirms the thesis of political scientist, Ronald Rapoport, that the success of third parties depends on voters either “pushing” away from major parties or the “pull” or attractiveness of dissident candidate ideas. In that, they are almost the push-me, pull-you creations of that noted political thinker, Dr. Doolittle.
During the four presidential elections that gave victory to Franklin Roosevelt, third parties candidates were seen but not heard. Norman Thomas replaced Eugene V. Debs as the perpetual candidate on the Socialist line, and ran on every occasion between 1932 and 1944. But he never got more than one percent of the vote, in part because the major parties offered clear, divergent platforms. If you wanted to soak the rich, you voted for Roosevelt; if not, you went Republican. In 1948, leaving aside the grammatical tautology, there were two third-party candidates: Henry Wallace for the Progressives and Strom Thurmond under the States’ Rights banner (sometimes called Dixiecrats). But collectively those on the fringe only stirred regional, not national enthusiasm, winning less than 5 % of the vote, although the Thurmond breakaway candidacy was the beginning of the end for the Democrats in the Deep South.
One of Thurmond’s spiritual heirs was Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama, who in 1968 ran on the American Independent Party, along with General Curtis Lemay, who thought the war in Indochina could be won if North Vietnam was “bombed back into the Stone ages.” (It was already there.) Pushing the segregationist line, Wallace got almost 14 % of the vote and 46 electoral votes, although it is not clear whether Wallace, nominally a Democrat, denied Humphrey a majority or Nixon a landslide. But as Rapoport has written: “All successful third-party candidates follow Wallace’s strategy of emphasizing the absence of a 'real choice' between the two major parties.” In 1972, after Wallace was wounded in an assassination attempt, his party ran a space orbiter by the name of John G. Schmitz (of National Rifle Association, John Birch, and American Legion credentials), who said during the campaign that “if people think you get up early, you can sleep until 11 AM.” He also came up with the campaign slogan that “When you’re out of Schmitz, you’re out of gear,” a play on the beer jingle of Schlitz. But Schmitz, with 1 % of the vote, didn’t even carry Milwaukee or make it famous.
Technically, in 1980 Congressman John Anderson was not a third-party candidate, in that he ran as an independent, without party affiliation. He won 7 % of the vote, but caused bigger damage to President Jimmy Carter in that he exposed the missing mojo in the Democrat’s presidency. In 1984 and 1988, the choices between the major parties, and their candidates were distinct (“Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”), and thus no third-party candidates emerged. But that changed in 1992, when out of the thrilling days of yesteryear came that masked rider from the plains, H. Ross Perot, a Lone Ranger who, according to Rapoport and his co-author Walter Stone, changed the complexion of American politics more than any third-party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt.
* * *
Rapoport and Stone, respectively chairmen of the departments of political science at the College of William and Mary and the University of California at Davis, have recently published “Three’s a Crowd,” an account of the 1992 election and the subsequent Perot phenomenon. One of the surprising conclusions from the book, published by the University of Michigan Press, is that while Perot may well have cost Republican George Herbert Walker Bush his chance for re-election in 1992, his followers influenced the subsequent Republican revolution—beginning with the 1994 Contract with America and culminating after 2000 with victories for the White House, Senate and House of Representatives.
Two descriptions from the 1912 election could be applied to H. Ross Perot. In describing the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, Teddy Roosevelt once said: “I found him vain as a peacock.” And Hofstadter, in writing of the likes of Woodrow Wilson, spoke of “the ruthlessness of the pure in heart.” Despite his peacock looks and ruthless purity, in 1992 Perot got almost 20 million votes, 19 % of those cast, and denied Bill Clinton a popular majority. His nominating convention was, in effect, an appearance on the Larry King Show when he dared his supporters to get him on the ballots of all 50 states. Collectively 5.3 million citizens signed petitions for Perot, who then campaigned as a classic outsider—for deficit reduction, against immigration and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for term limits, and against government waste. But 1992 wasn’t a good year for the major parties. Despite earlier Gulf War popularity, President Bush the elder was laboring under a cratering economy while voters were having a hard time inhaling the nightlife of the Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton. As an aide said of his boss, Perot was someone there to “fix the damn problem.”
One reason that successful third parties “sting and die” is that one or both of the major parties make takeover bids of the insurgent ideas. Beginning in 1994, the Republicans courted Perot’s supporters and their issues, about which the Democrats were largely indifferent. But according to Rapoport and Stone, Perot’s faithful remain a loose but powerful cannon in American politics. When it rolled to the Republican decks, they won control of the Congress and finally the Presidency. Rapoport and Stone write that, after 1992, “the Republicans reached out to Perot and to the Perot constituency.” They conclude that: “By migrating to one of the major parties, Perot activists carried the potential to change that party’s stands on core Perot issues, such as reform, economic nationalism, and the federal budget.” Even though Perot himself polled only 8 % of the vote 1996 and by 2000 the Reform Party had become a joke—reduced to a scrum for federally-matched funding between the likes of Jesse “the Body” Ventura, Pat Buchanan, and Donald Trump—the bee’s pollen was already allowing the Republicans to flower.
Thinking he could tell me who might be elected the next president in 2008, I called Professor Rapoport at his William and Mary office, where he has worked since 1975. Other than having read his provocative book, I did not know him personally. But I do know and admire his parents, who have made The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Foundation a model of generosity for the causes of literacy and the disadvantaged—although their gift is not so much money but enthusiasm for individuals and ideals.
On the phone Ronald Rapoport compared the looming 2008 election with 1992, in that there is a burgeoning deficit, the aftermath of a Persian Gulf invasion, and little perceived difference between the major political parties. He still believes that the Perot constituency “remains distinctive,” an underground political current looking to vent its populist anger on one of the major parties. But the outcome of the 2006 mid-term election will give him a better idea if the conditions might be ripe, in 2008, for the emergence of a third-party candidacy. He emphasized that the “major parties have to create the opportunity for a third party.” He recalled a line from the book that “one of the ironies of the Perot movement was that it [nominally non-partisan] contributed to one of the greatest upsurges in partisan politics in American history.”
Rapoport speaks about political candidates, third parties, and presidential politics with insight and irony. He thinks the conditions could well be ripe for a third-party in 2008, with all its attendant threats to the established order. (Alexander Pope called political parties “the madness of many for the gain of a few.”) Rapoport speculated that if the 2008 election were between Hilary Clinton and John McCain, he could imagine the Perot bloc swinging toward the Arizona senator, who in 2000 gave his campaign bus the Perot sounding name, “Straight Talk Express.” Ironically, push me, pull-you Perotism might explain, after all, why Bill Clinton has become best friends with the Bushes. Is it to move Hilary’s image into the safe middle ground? Too bad for the Democrats that Perot doesn’t play golf.
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