Pfaff calls it

David Seaton's News Links
Readers of this blog will know that my favorite commentator on politics and world affairs is William Pfaff. I find his mixture of long experience, wide culture, analytic acuteness, and intuitive perception quite unique. He is always showing me the correct path to take in focusing on world affairs.

Pfaff has just written a piece which articulates something that I have felt, and stumblingly expressed, for several years, to wit: that the United States, to the extent that it has been deformed and conditioned by the Cold War, to that extent, is the USA damaged and in decline.

In this analysis, at the heart of all America's present troubles lies in the damage that the cold war did to the United States: its economy, its institutions ,or if you prefer, even its soul.

I highly recommend reading the entire article, but here is a short excerpt from Pfaff's piece:

The nuclear physicist Leo Szilard once remarked that the fall of the Soviet system would eventually lead to the fall of the American system. He said that in a two-element structure the interrelationship and interdependence are such that the one cannot survive without the other. This comment has been relayed by a friend, and as Szilard has passed to his reward I am in no position to explain his meaning, but it is possible to restate it in political terms, and we are seeing the result in finance and in war. I think that Szilard was implying what a very intelligent opponent of the United States also said when the cold war ended. Georgi Arbatov, former head of the U.S.A. and Canada Institute of the Soviet Union, said to an American interlocutor: we are about to do something truly terrible to you. We are going to deprive you of your enemy. Without the enemy, the machinery of power begins to race, with nothing to resist it; megalomania sets in. The end of the cold war coincided with the beginning in the United States of globalized finance, launched under the Clinton administration. It operated with ever more dazzling and daring gambles in which the constraints and tension of the cold war were replaced by the psychology of greed and excess. The economic crisis that has now overtaken the United States can be interpreted as the logical result of a financial system that had reached the point where there was no limit to what you could take out of it even when you were incapable of understanding the transactions taking place. Less apparent to most people but just as real are the signs of an impending crash of an American military system in which, since the end of the cold war, Pentagon dysfunction has metastasized so uncontrollably as to scandalize both the man who was Defense Secretary when the so-called war on terror began, and the current Secretary, Robert M. Gates, the man now in charge as that war mutates into the “Long War.”(...) The speech he gave last Monday [September 29] to the National Defense University in Washington accused the Pentagon bureaucracy of obsession with high-technology weaponry to defeat enemies the United States does not (yet) have, using hypermodern weapons yet to be invented. He accused it of “idealized, triumphalist and ethnocentric notions of future conflict that aspire to upend the immutable principles of war.” He said that during four decades, the trend-line of Pentagon procurement has been towards lower numbers and higher technology, towards weapons systems “that have been ever more baroque, ever more costly, taking longer to build, and fielded in ever dwindling quantities.” There could not be a better description of a bureaucracy in decadence. Just as the same adjective must be applied to a financial system for multiplying the apparent value of fundamentally worthless securities. (It was Alan Greenspan who said that American finance had symbolically passed through the sound-barrier of the known financial system, and now was in an entirely new dimension. So it had, as we see now.)

If this analysis is correct, and I for one think it is, then there is either going to be some sort of Soviet style collapse or, more probably, a decades long decline into greater and greater poverty and irrelevance.

Till the rubble is finally cleared away, all we are going to experience is ongoing degradation, decadence and humiliation. This presidential election won't change a jot or tittle of it: it is an election, not perestroika.

The near future should be especially unpleasant is could be a crash course in what the years to come may hold.

I have been searching for a metaphor to express what the next few weeks are going to seem like, as the economy continues to deteriorate, the presidential race gets low-down and slimy dirty and who knows what else hits the fan.

It came to me that this was going to be like going through a car wash tunnel with the car windows rolled down.

When you go through a car wash tunnel, you sit warm and dry in your car while only a few inches from your face huge rotating brushes dash and dart and rub a dub and pound, and torrents of scalding, soapy water spew and spatter as your car moves relentlessly down the belt. Exciting to be so close and yet to be only a spectator.

With the windows down... no fun

The media in my metaphor would be the car windows, what a certain moose dresser calls a "filter" and the tunnel would be reality itself... hot water, industrial strength detergent and no turning back. DS

William Pfaff: The Coup d'Etat against Bush

David Seaton's News Links
I can't think of a more important topic than this. This is not the rant of some blogger in pajamas. William Pfaff is one of the most respected political commentators writing today in the English language.

Careful readers will notice a thick forest of nuances in everything he says here. DS

William Pfaff: The Coup d'Etat against Bush
Abstract: The conspicuous irrelevance of George W. Bush’s tour of the Middle East to any of the real forces and interests of the region, as well as the spooky irrelevance of nearly everything he said there about the alleged menace of Iran, Israel-Palestine peace, his fancied notions of Iraq’s democratic development, and even about oil prices and the American economy, embarrassed his Arab hosts as well as the American officials and press accompanying him. The tour – his farewell to the Middle East? -- lent weight to the judgement many abroad have already reached, that he no longer governs the United States, and indeed does not even understand its present foreign relationships. It is widely felt that what amounts to a coup d’etat has taken place in the United States, removing George Bush, without his even recognizing this (or at least admitting that it has occurred) from control over the principal issues of war and peace. This coup has taken the form of what amounts to a mutiny of the professional foreign policy services of the U.S. government, acquiesced in by the new Secretary of Defense, the service chiefs, and Director of Central Intelligence Bush has himself appointed.(...) The pathetic and pusillanimous refusal of recent American Congresses – and we are not simply speaking about the Congress now in office, but of practically every Congress since the beginning of the cold war – to fulfill their constitutional responsibilities with respect to the declaration and financing of wars, has now generated its own rebuke from within the executive branch of government. Leaders in the executive branch are unwilling to act on presidential orders that do not carry with them the constitutionally mandated authority of the representative branch of government.(...) I am perhaps taking a romantic and unjustified view of what has happened. I hope not. I believe that only grave malfeasance in government and unconstitutional conduct justify an executive ‘coup d’etat’ – however ‘postmodern’ the form that it assumes, and however elevated its motives. However I would suggest that the present election campaign demonstrates that powerful forces in the Washington political and foreign policy communities, reinforced by financial and industrial interests, are committed to suppressing all challenge to policies that already have altered the political character of the United States. The American form of government itself needs to be defended. READ IT ALL

The Palestinian Question of William Pfaff

David Seaton's News Links
In a sense I make my living reading the newspapers and for me the world's best columnist on international affairs is an "American in Paris" named William Pfaff. His byline has appeared in the Paris Trib for many years with occasional appearances in such prestigious venues as The New York Review of Books.

He is the columnist's columnist. He has had an enormous influence on me and my work and I would describe him as the "anti-Thomas Friedman".

He has just written about the best thing that I have read recently about the situation Israel finds itself today. He has boiled the most complex of problems down to the simplest of questions. Guru jai, jai, Guru maharaj!

The emphasis and color are strictly my own. DS

William Pfaff; A Question for Israelis
Abstract: The question is this: suppose that Israel is given all that its government seems to want. No Palestinian state, Israel continues colonization, annexing more of the Palestinian territories, or even all of them. What then? What will happen to the Palestinians in the years ahead? What would the land of Israel, and what now are the Palestinian territories, look like in 50 years?(...) The question is what is to be done now. Forming a new state for the Palestinians is the solution that is being attempted. This why Condoleezza Rice has made seven visits to Israel this year. She wishes to bring the parties to a meeting in Annapolis, Maryland, next month, to advance the creation of such a state. It is hard to expect much to result from this initiative, since Israel gives no evidence of wishing to see progress in the matter. The government’s announcement of still another seizure of Palestinian land in Jerusalem a few days before Secretary Rice’s arrival seemed a deliberate slap in her face.

One must ask the Israeli government the following question. Suppose, as is probable, that no American administration, now or later, puts any obstacle in the way of whatever you want to do. Suppose there were no effective international pressures on you to stop colonization and land seizures. Suppose that no Palestinian state is created. What are you going to do about the Palestinians?(...)

American opinion is shifting. The Walt-Mearsheimer book had had an effect. The deliberate Israeli sinking of the USS Liberty in 1967 has been taken up again in the mainstream press. War in Iraq and the possibility of attack on Iran has increased popular concern about Israeli influence on American policy. Israeli human rights groups have denounced the treatment of the Palestinians, and recently have accused the Israeli authorities of trying to force Palestinians needing emergency medical help in Israeli hospitals to collaborate with Israel’s security services as a condition for treatment.

How long can this continue, even as a purely practical problem of physical control of a hostile population? The Palestinian population continues to grow more rapidly than Israel’s, and the average age grow younger, producing cohorts of young people who are politically radicalized, ready to turn again to violence to be free of these conditions of life. There are certain to be new Palestinian uprisings.

In international law, Israel is responsible for these people. What methods of permanent control does it envisage? There are some in Israel who hope their misery will force the Palestinians to abandon the territories. But to go where? In what conditions, and under what compulsion?

(...) I am not asking this for polemical purposes. I am asking a practical question. What is Israel going to do with these people? The problem exists, and however convenient to ignore today, it will have to answered. READ IT ALL

Iraq: a crime unpunished, a death star born

"There is no alternative to getting out. Simply getting out as rapidly and efficiently as possible" - William Pfaff

David Seaton's News Links
I'm having trouble working up any enthusiasm for the "electable" Democrats running for president... Not one of them talks frankly about the criminal responsibility of destroying Iraq and setting the Middle East ablaze. Is everything supposed to go on as if nothing had happened? Is this to be treated as simply well intentioned incompetence and the page turned?

In fact, self-examination and accountability are essential if the United States is not to become a political black hole or death star. Germany had the great good fortune to be denazified by foreigners, but the USA is going to have to do it all by itself. DS

William Pfaff: Ending One War, Launching Another
Abstract: President George W. Bush’s reinforcement of American forces, announced at the start of the year in the guise of a final “surge” to “victory,” has merely displaced the sectarian attacks from one place to another, while doing nothing to solve the crisis that is destroying the Iraqi nation: inspiring sectarian murder on a huge scale, and sending its elites -- and others – into exile, or more likely, eventually, to refugee camps. If this goes on, when we Americans leave, there will be no Iraq, in any meaningful sense. We will have murdered the Iraqi nation, as nation (-- “to save it”). There is no alternative to getting out. Simply getting out as rapidly and efficiently as possible, with as much political help (or otherwise) as can be found from other governments in the region, who have an interest in containing the crisis. But getting out. No bases or troops left in Iraq. No new bases nearby. Hands off Iraq’s oil. Is that possible? Personally, I doubt it. It goes entirely against the interventionist mind-set and globalist strategy convictions that have dominated Washington for the last four decades. But without this, the region is left ablaze. Even the congressional opposition, which wants to get out of this war, proposes a beginning in October, a finish a year or so on, debating departure as if a perpetuated American presence of some kind is necessary to whatever solution may actually exist. If we leave now, or leave completely, there will be chaos! There is chaos now. The crucial factor in precipitating this terrible situation was the American invasion, and the principal factor in its continuation is the continued American presence in that country. When we leave, what follows will be the Iraqis’ responsibility. For any solution to be possible the United States must leave. For any solution to be possible the United States must leave. This certainly may be followed by intensified violence in the immediate term, but no long-term resolution of the civil struggle is imaginable with American forces still there. They haplessly stand by, witnesses to the conflagration George Bush and his colleagues have loosed. Democrats as well as Republicans in Congress cling to the belief that the American intervention was well-intentioned, and therefore American good intentions could still be a positive force in the country. READ IT ALL

William Pfaff on the The Baker-Hamilton Report

David Seaton's News Links

Anyone who reads me regularly knows my weakness for William Pfaff. Here in a few words, while analyzing the Baker-Hamilton report, he asks all the main questions. 1.) How did this fool ever get elected president in the first place? 2.) How to prevent something like that ever happening again? And finally, 3.) Will it ever be possible to clean up his stinking mess? Chapeaux cher maître! DS
Abstract: The domestic political motivation behind Congressional appointment of this independent commission was to find a door through which the United States could leave Iraq with the national eagle’s feathers’ intact. It reflects concern for how to handle the domestic political consequences of the Iraq failure. In this its success is uncertain. The initial evidence is that George W. Bush will react with hostility to this stinging attack on the foolhardiness, arrogance, and as yet unknown eventual costs of his adventure. It may change little in his conduct of the war. The intellectual poverty that lay behind administration policy was evident from the start, in the political and strategic naiveté of the neo-conservative project, which treated war on Iraq as if it were a videogame. Donald Rumsfeld’s final “recommendations” to the president as he resigned were of stupefying emptiness: a rats’ nest of jottings: do this, try that, see if that might work. This was supposed to be an intellectually serious executive and analyst, like Robert S. McNamara? But the president himself has proven to be no more than a college fraternity prankster pretending to be president: “I Am the Decider.” How do Americans get people like this in high office? The present system, or is it a lucrative industry?, of selecting and electing presidents has to end. The essential step is to ban paid political advertising.(...) The report’s insistence on the centrality of the Palestinian question, its proposal for neutral international experts to advise the Iraqi government, and its emphasis on reintegration of Ba’ath party members and Arab nationalists, and on national and regional reconciliation as well, are a fitting conclusion to a report that honors its authors, but may have come too late, or worse, have no serious effect on administration policy. READ IT ALL

Bush: The Cowboy Cornered

David Seaton's News Links

Although born in Connecticut and a failure in the awlbidness (oil business), George W. Bush likes to think of himself as West Texas oilman(awlmayhen). In this disguise his answer to being cornered, broke and friendless, staring utter failure in the face, may be the classic posture of a West Texas oilman: to shoot the works, go for broke, double or nothing. Unless removed from office, this wannabe "cowboy" is still the Commander in Chief of the largest air force and the largest navy in the history of the world and before being a laughing stock, a neocon whipping boy and having his daddy crying in public, (real cowboy's daddy's don't cry in public) he may decide for the "quick draw" and to go out in a blaze of glory. We are looking at one mean SOB and the world's most dangerous man. His answer may very wll be an all out aerial and naval bombardment of Iran. Anybody who thinks Bush will let James Baker lead him away quietly could be terribly mistaken. Below is another wonderful analysis by my hero, William Pfaff, the anti-Thomas Friedman. DS
Iran as Carthage - William Pfaff
Abstract: At the end of November more than a hundred officials and specialists concerned with security in the Middle East were invited to Athens to “solve the security puzzle in the eastern Mediterranean and the broader Middle East,” a challenge which needless to say they failed.(...) Again the profound depth was revealed of the chasm that exists between official American and Israeli perceptions and interests on the one hand, and on the other those of what more than ever seems all the rest of mankind. On the final morning of general discussion, with all subjects on the table, the Israeli delegates, mainly from government or quasi-official institutes, devoted themselves to describing the threat Iraq allegedly poses to the region, and eventually to all of international society. This argument was repeated by the official Americans present, who included the U.S. ambassador in Israel, Richard Jones.(...) This emphasis in Athens on a supposed future Iranian nuclear menace was not surprising, since it has been the main international theme pressed by Israel and the Bush administration ever since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president of Iran. It has provided a distraction while the American military position in Iraq steadily worsened, and popular support at home shrank for George W. Bush’s war policy. To those of us who still recall traces of their high school history, these officials recalled Cato the Elder, the puritan who hated Carthaginian ways and intoned to the Roman Senate at every opportunity Delenda est Carthago! -- meaning Carthage must be destroyed -- thereby helping bring on the Third Punic War in which Carthage was destroyed. The current version is that Iran must be destroyed. And who knows, Israel or the United States may destroy it before all this is over. The striking thing in Athens, on this occasion, was the total lack of concern displayed for Iran’s threat, real or imaginary, by virtually everyone else in the conference room. The general discussion proceeded on formulating an initiative to stop the fighting between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza, and on the bleak future of Israeli-Palestinian relations, neither seeming a subject of Israeli or American interest. The warnings about Iran were greeted with audience indifference and trips to get coffee. No one even bothered to argue. A recently published Israeli assessment of American opinion, written by a former intelligence official now with a think-tank in the United States, said the same thing about American public attitudes. He told his readers in Israel that the American public today is obsessed with Iraq. It wants a not-wholly-disastrous way to get out. It has no interest whatever in Iran. It feels no threat from Iran. If President Bush were to initiate military action against Iran, the report said, he would be impeached. I can’t speak for the truth of the last comment as I am not currently in the United States. But it certainly seems true that American and Israeli officials, and journalists, for that matter, are whipping a dead horse when they go on and on about Iran. To promote another war of choice in the Near East seems madness to ordinary Americans -- not to speak of ordinary, or official, Europeans. READ IT ALL

Virtual America/Virtual Iraq - William Pfaff - The Observer

David Seaton's News Links

For those people like William Pfaff, who have a clear strategic vision and well tuned ethical framework, Iraq is like a nightmare from an Ingmar Bergman film where they try to warn the autistic and the frivolous of the error of their ways, only to find blank faces staring back at them. DS

Abstract: In America, it's as though Bush, his inner cabinet, and the neocons have been playing a video game, with fictional characters and victims, virtual death and torture. Now the disc has suddenly finished, and it's time to shut down the player. This is not just a figure of speech. American policy has been running on images rather than evidence of real nations and people doing things for real human motives. It has been populated by abstractions: Global Terrorist Conspiracies, Rogue Nations, Fanatics Who Hate Our Freedoms, Generations of Terrorism and The Global Menace of Al-Qaeda. The US, where actual people live, has been turned into an abstraction: the Sole Superpower, which everyone in the world knows is a Righteous Nation, the Mars (in the neocon Robert Kagan's formulation) defending the fragile Venus which is Europe, the Straussian (Leo Strauss, the University of Chicago philosopher) Realist unflinchingly battling in a Hobbesian universe to protect Kantian Europeans, with their illusions of global parliaments and peace, from nameless horrors.(...) Is this Orwellian? Or is it just demagogy, politicians' lies, White House spin, journalistic laziness, formulations conceived to sell books? Or could it be cynical manipulation by apprentice dictators, energy industry and weapons-maker magnates, closet fascists? It is not Orwellian in that the neocon ideologues, George Bush and Tony Blair, certainly believe all this. They are not being manipulated. It is not Orwellian because the creators of this cartoon-like conceptual world have themselves become actors in the virtual universe their ideas and actions have made. They have left reality behind - or they simply ignore it, as they did in invading Iraq. We have passed from 1984 to 2006, into a post-Orwellian condition in which Big Brother has become a part of his creation. He is now imposing it on others by acting as though it were real, at whatever expense to others. READ IT ALL