Gore Vidal and Revisionism

In Vidal's American history, it was the United States, not the Soviet Union, that launched and then prolonged the Cold War

by Jeff Riggenbach

One of the forces involved in the recent heating up of the perennial American-history wars was the brilliant critical and popular success, during the 1970s and early 1980s, of the first three books in Gore Vidal's six-volume[1]"American Chronicle" series of historical novels about the United States. Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), and Lincoln(1984) were enormous successes. They proved beyond any doubt that the public would not rise up in indignation and smite any author who dared to question the motives and the wisdom of even the most venerated American presidents. They proved that there was, in fact, a substantial market for just such skepticism about the glorious American past.

Partisans of the America-as-pure-and-virtuous-beacon-of-liberty-prosperity-and-peace mythology attacked Vidal's novels, of course, but Vidal made it quite clear in a couple of detailed replies to his critics (first published in the New York Review of Books) that he knew at least as much about the history of the periods he depicted in his novels as any of them did — PhD's and members of the professoriate though they might be.

Gore Vidal was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and was educated in expensive private schools in and around Washington DC. He grew up around politics. His father was a high ranking official in the Franklin Roosevelt administration, the director of the Bureau of Air Commerce, the agency known today as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). His maternal grandfather, who lived in the Vidal family home, was the venerable, sightless US senator Thomas Pryor Gore (D-Oklahoma), and Vidal recalls the daily ritual of being sent with car and driver to pick up my grandfather at the Capitol and bring him home. In those casual days [ca. 1935–1937], there were few guards at the Capitol — and, again, ["Washington was a small town where"] everyone knew everyone else. I would wander on to the floor of the Senate, sit on my grandfather's desk if he wasn't ready to go, experiment with the snuff that was ritually allotted each senator; then I would lead him off the floor.[2]

We are all Statist now

Unintended Consequences of Well-Intended Policies

by Lacy Hunt

In the early 1960s, when JFK was in the White House and William McChesney Martin was Fed chairman, Keynesian economics was in full bloom. One of its major tenets is the Phillips Curve, which posits a stable inverse relationship between the rate of inflation and the unemployment rate. Yale professor James Tobin and others argued that the social outcome could be improved by a more activist monetary and fiscal policy. Specifically, they contended that the unemployment rate could be lowered while only resulting in slightly higher inflation.

The argument posited the notion that economic policymakers had sufficient knowledge to intervene or fine-tune the economy with tools like those of a surgeon. Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Carter (two Democrats and one Republican) followed this policy. At one point, President Nixon made the famous statement that "We are all Keynesians now." Moreover, as the White House led, the Fed chairmen of the era – Martin, Burns, and Miller – generally acquiesced.

To judge the effectiveness of this policy, an objective standard is needed. Arthur M. Okun, Yale colleague of Tobin, developed such a standard, which he called the Misery Index – the sum of the inflation and unemployment rates.

Under the activist, Phillips Curve-based policy, some reduction in unemployment was temporarily achieved. However, inflation accelerated much more than was anticipated, and the net result was higher unemployment and faster inflation, an outcome not at all contemplated by the Phillips Curve. The Misery Index surged from an average of 6.7% in the 1950s, to 7.3% in the 1960s, to 13.6% in the 1970s, with peak rates above 20% in the early 1980s.

Many US households suffered. Wages of lower-paying positions failed to keep up with inflation, and when higher unemployment resulted, many of those people lost their jobs. Those on the high end had far more resources that enabled them to protect their investments and earned income, so the income/wealth divide worsened. A half-century later, the United States has never regained the prosperity of the 1950s.

Cocaine Cowboys Know Best Places to Bank

Too-big-to-fail isn’t merely an economic problem 

By Jonathan Weil

To grow up in South Florida during the 1970s and 1980s, as I did, wasn’t your typical American childhood experience. Back then the area was known as the most dangerous place in the country.

Carnage from the drug wars filled the local news long before “Miami Vice” became a hit TV show. By elementary school, my friends and I knew some of the lingo. A Colombian necktie wasn’t a piece of clothing, but a gruesome execution method. When I was 7 years old my barber was murdered in his shop, apparently over a drug deal.

It had been a long time since I thought much about those days. By chance I recently came across a fabulous documentary, “Cocaine Cowboys,” by Miami filmmaker Billy Corben. Then last month a Senate panel held a hearing on the U.K. bank HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA) and its ties to drug lords, money laundering, al- Qaeda and rogue nations such as Iran and North Korea.

Here’s a bank with $2.7 trillion of assets that flouted U.S. laws for a decade, according to the July 17 report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. HSBC turned a blind eye to organized crime, Mexican drug cartels and overseas terrorism financiers, and gave them access to the U.S. banking system. HSBC’s main U.S. regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, for years tolerated its violations of anti-money laundering laws.

For this, HSBC and the OCC apologized. Justice Department fines are likely. It’s an outrage HSBC hasn’t had its U.S. banking licenses revoked, assuming the Senate panel’s report is accurate -- and there’s no reason to believe it isn’t.

Try This

Let’s try out a novel idea: Banks that help drug cartels launder money and give cover to those tied to terrorism should be put out of business. Is that really so hard for everyone to agree on? Free markets have worked in the U.S. because we have the rule of law. It’s why so many investors from other countries want to do business here. When contracts are breached, courts can be accessed to enforce them. When individuals or companies commit crimes, they’re supposed to be prosecuted and punished.

The Election, the Presidency, and Foreign Policy

Presidents make history, but not on their own terms

By George Friedman

The American presidency is designed to disappoint. Each candidate must promise things that are beyond his power to deliver. No candidate could expect to be elected by emphasizing how little power the office actually has and how voters should therefore expect little from him. So candidates promise great, transformative programs. What the winner actually can deliver depends upon what other institutions, nations and reality will allow him. Though the gap between promises and realities destroys immodest candidates, from the founding fathers' point of view, it protects the republic. They distrusted government in general and the office of the president in particular.

Congress, the Supreme Court and the Federal Reserve Board all circumscribe the president's power over domestic life. This and the authority of the states greatly limit the president's power, just as the country's founders intended. To achieve anything substantial, the president must create a coalition of political interests to shape decision-making in other branches of the government. Yet at the same time -- and this is the main paradox of American political culture -- the presidency is seen as a decisive institution and the person holding that office is seen as being of overriding importance.

Constraints in the Foreign Policy Arena

The president has somewhat more authority in foreign policy, but only marginally so. He is trapped by public opinion, congressional intrusion, and above all, by the realities of geopolitics. Thus, while during his 2000 presidential campaign George W. Bush argued vehemently against nation-building, once in office, he did just that (with precisely the consequences he had warned of on the campaign trail). And regardless of how he modeled his foreign policy during his first campaign, the 9/11 attacks defined his presidency.

Similarly, Barack Obama campaigned on a promise to redefine America's relationship with both Europe and the Islamic world. Neither happened. It has been widely and properly noted how little Obama's foreign policy in action has differed from George W. Bush's. It was not that Obama didn't intend to have a different foreign policy, but simply that what the president wants and what actually happens are very different things.

Street-Sign Statism

Born to be Wild?

By Mark Steyn

I've spent the last few weeks tootling round various parts of Britain and Europe, and, as always, it takes me a couple of days to acclimatize to local driving norms. I quickly appreciate being on a country lane and able to see the country, as opposed to admiring rural America's unending procession of bend signs, pedestrian-approaching signs, stop signs, stop-sign-ahead signs, stop-sign-ahead-signs-ahead signs, pedestrian-approaching-a-stop-sign signs, designated-scenic-view-ahead signs, parking-restrictions-at-the-designated-scenic-view signs, etc. It takes me a little longer to get used to the idea that I'm free to pass other cars pretty much whenever I want to, as opposed to settling in behind Granny for the rest of the day as the unbroken yellow lines stretch lazily down broad, straight, empty rural blacktop, across the horizon and into infinity. Want to pass on a blind bend in beautiful County Down or the Dordogne? Hey, it's your call. Your judgment. Fancy that.

Italian tanks may have five gears for reverse and only one for forward, but in a Fiat the size of your cupholder it's a different story. The French may plant trees on the Champs-élysées because the Germans like to march in the shade, but they'll still pass you at 120 on the Grande Corniche. When you've done your last surrender-monkey crack, that cloud in your windshield is a dinged deux chevaux leaving your fully loaded SUV for dust. Continentals would never for a moment tolerate the restrictive driving conditions of the United States, and they don't understand why Americans do. Mon dieu, is not America the land of the car chase?

Gitcha motor running

Head out on the highway

Looking for adventure . . .

America, the Law-crazed

The zeal for legislating has turned us all into criminals of one type or another

By John Stossel 

Over the past few decades, America has locked up more and more people. Our prison population has tripled. Now we jail a higher percentage of people than even the most repressive countries: China locks up 121 out of every 100,000 people; Russia 511. In America? 730.

"Never in the civilized world have so many been locked up for so little," The Economist says.

Yet we keep adding more laws and longer jail terms.

Lavrentiy Beria, head of Joseph Stalin's secret police in the old Soviet Union, supposedly said, "Show me the man, and I'll show you the crime." Stalin executed anyone he considered a threat, and it didn't take much to be considered a threat. Beria could always find some law the targeted person had broken. That's easy to do when there are tons of vague laws on the books. Stalin "legally" executed nearly a million people that way.

I'm not saying that America is like Stalin's Russia, but consider the federal laws we have. The rules that bind us now total more than 160,000 pages. The Congressional Research Service said it was unable to count the number of crimes on the books. Yet last week the feds added or proposed another thousand pages. States and cities have thousands more. Have you read them all? Have our "representatives" read them all? You know the answer.

Sports Socialism

Why London Is Yawning Over the Olympics

By Shikha Dalmia

On the eve of the 30th Summer Olympics, the most striking thing about this city was the complete lack of street buzz. In contrast to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when all of China was mobilized for the games, there was no discernible excitement in the air.

Commercial establishments are not planting new flowers or scrubbing old buildings to impress foreign guests. There are no giant screens in public squares hyping the extravaganza. Streets aren’t lined with posters of British athletes. Among the few signs that something is afoot—besides roving armed troops—are tacky plastic runners wrapped around park fences depicting stick figures in various sporting poses (a decoration more worthy of a high school prom than an international event). Many Londoners I’ve spoken to—taxi drivers, dry cleaners, residents—consider the whole thing a “bloody nuisance” that they are planning to observe from some other European city far from the traffic snarls and the madding crowds.

No doubt the many snafus in the run-up to the games have dampened public enthusiasm. But the bigger reason Londoners are so unmoved is that the era of nationalistic fervor whipped up through mega-projects is over in the West. The West, quite simply, may have outgrown these games.

The London Olympics, like every Olympics before them, are hopelessly over-budget. The city has already blown its original $4 billion budget target four times over on obligatory new stadiums and athlete villages. Meanwhile, G4S, the firm that was awarded the security contract for the games, failed to deliver enough personnel, forcing the military to be called in. British authorities have also perched surface-to-air missiles on rooftops of private apartment buildings, scaring the living bejeezus out of residents. As if that weren’t enough, a scheme to award tickets via lottery went horribly wrong when overburdened websites crashed, leaving people who had paid thousands of dollars up front hanging for weeks before finding out if they were among the lucky winners.

Hyper Mario And Germany On Verge Of All Out Warfare

Oh, and don't call him Super Mario any more

By Tyler Durden

Back in March we wrote "Mario Draghi Is Becoming Germany's Most Hated Man" for one reason: a few months after the former Goldman appartchik was sworn in to replace Trichet with promises he would not "print" Draghi did just that in a covert way via $1.3 trillion in LTROs, that immediately hit the economy and sent inflation across Europe soaring. We said that: "Slowly but surely the realization is dawning on Germany that while it was sleeping, perfectly confused by lies spoken in a soothing Italian accent that the ECB will not print, not only did Draghi reflate the ECB's balance sheet by an unprecedented amount in a very short time, in the process not only sending Brent in Euros to all time highs (wink, wink, inflation, as today's European CPI confirmed coming in at 2.7% or higher than estimated) but also putting the BUBA in jeopardy with nearly half a trillion in Eurosystem"receivables" which it will most likely never collect."

Israel catches Turkey in two minds

The Plot Thickens 

By M K Bhadrakumar 

The crisis in Syria has prompted the Israeli leadership to make a strong pitch for repairing the ties with Turkey. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally took the initiative. 

The Israeli leader's move most certainly enjoys American backing, while Netanyahu also felt emboldened by his consolidation within Israel's ruling coalition to press ahead with the initiative. But the clincher would have been that Turkey is a manifestly divided house with regard to the policies to be pursued over the Syrian crisis. The ball is now on the Turkish side of the court. 

On Monday, Netanyahu met in his office an eight-member team of senior Turkish journalists in a high-profile attempt to break the ice between Israel and Turkey. This is the first such meeting since the incident in May 2010 involving the killing of nine Turks by Israeli commandos who tried to stop the Turkish ship Mavi Marmarafrom breaking the Gaza blockade, which pushed the ties between the two countries into a free-fall. 

Turkey expelled Israel's ambassador when Tel Aviv refused to meet its demands, which included an official apology for the incident, compensation for the families of the victims and an end to the Gaza blockade. Ankara also froze all military and security cooperation with Israel and filed criminal charges against the chiefs of the Israeli armed forces. 

Washington tried in vain to cool down tempers while Turkish and Israeli diplomats negotiated behind the scenes to reach a mutually acceptable formula. But Israeli hardliners including Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman refused to countenance an apology or to allow Ankara a say in the blockade of Gaza. 

Doctors for Socialized Medicine

Government-guaranteed insurance is the equivalent of a public school

 

BY MICHAEL J HURD 

This is perhaps my favorite line from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged with regard to doctors who support, or tolerate, socialized medicine:

“Let them discover, in the operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it—and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t.”

Don’t you want doctors who have initiative, confidence and self-esteem?

If it doesn’t matter, then what qualities are you planning to rely on when it comes time to cure your disease, or perhaps even save your life?

If you were in the middle of a natural disaster, you’d gravitate towards a leader with confidence, initiative and rationality (unless you were such a leader yourself). You wouldn’t gravitate towards someone who seems to think, “Well, whatever you do to me, I don’t care.”

A medical problem, especially a serious one, constitutes a crisis. It’s no less a crisis than a natural disaster, at least so far as you and your loved ones are concerned. Medical professionals are your leaders.

They need more than training and competence, although these are crucial.

Just as crucial is the fact that they’re left alone to think, rather than beholden to some incomprehensible government formula developed by a national health board at the Department of Health and Human Services in Rockville, MD.

Welcome to the Kurdish Spring

Follow the oil 

By Pepe Escobar 

Turkish foreign policy, codified by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, used to be known in shorthand as "zero problems with our neighbors". When Turkey started calling for regime change in Syria, it turned into "a major problem with one of our neighbors" (even tough Davutoglu himself admitted on the record the policy change failed).

Now, in yet another twist, it's becoming "all sorts of problems with two of our neighbors". Enter - inevitably - Ankara's ultimate taboo; the Kurdish question. 

Ankara used to routinely chase and bomb Kurdish PKK guerrillas crossing from Anatolia to Iraqi Kurdistan. Now it may be positioning itself to do the same in Syrian Kurdistan.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan came out all guns blazing on Turkish TV; "We will not allow a terrorist group to establish camps in northern Syria and threaten Turkey." 

He was referring to the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Party (PYD) - affiliated with the PKK; after a quiet deal with the Assad regime in Damascus, the PYD is now in control of key areas in northeast Syria. 

So Ankara may provide logistics to tens of thousands of Syria's NATO "rebels" - which include plenty of hardcore Sunni Arab "insurgents" formerly known as terrorists; but as long as Syrian Kurds - which are part of the Syrian opposition - demonstrate some independence, they immediately revert to being considered "terrorists". 

It's all conditioned by Ankara's immediate nightmare; the prospect of a semiautonomous Syrian Kurdistan very closely linked to Iraqi Kurdistan. 

This Swedish report [1] contains arguably the best breakdown of the hyper-fragmented Syrian opposition. The "rebels" are dominated by the exile-heavy Syrian National Council (SNC) and its Hydra-style militias, the over 100 gangs that compose the Not Exactly Free Syrian Army (FSA). 

India’s Socialist Mortmain

Why would we want the government to take over our health care system?

By Jeff Harding

[Kameswara Rao, head of the power and utilities practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers India,] said Indian policy makers didn’t anticipate how quickly electricity demand would rise in the past few years as economic growth has expanded the ranks of the middle class and created more consumers of power-hungry modern appliances like air-conditioners. He said state transmission utilities badly need investment and skilled manpower to cope with grid problems and provide protections against massive outages.

The above statement is the key to India’s energy problems.

One may ask why that is.

It is clear that India is still hobbled by the dead hand of Nehru and Gandhi, the socialist leaders of the one-party state that dominated India for more than 50 years. They took the model developed by the Soviets and embarked on years of 5-year plans that kept India in the economic dark age.

While the country’s new leaders profess a dedication to free market-based reforms, they are far, far away from releasing the potential of its people. India’s vast bureaucracy still exists, frustrating development or, at times conniving with crony capitalists. The reason that India’s policy makers didn’t anticipate demand is because bureaucrats never do. The reason that there isn’t sufficient capital is because there is not enough capital in India to tax away and built infrastructure. Those who have capital would be loathe to waste it by investing in a government run enterprise.

Holy war in Syria and the course of history

The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk 

By Dmitry Shlapentokh

Washington is clearly displeased with the intransigence of both Beijing and Moscow on dealing with the Syrian crisis and their unwillingness to justify a direct US strike against President Bashar al-Assad with the full authorization of the United Nations. The US representatives to the UN have described vividly the brutality of the Assad regime as an appeal to the moral fiber of the international community and in particular, of course, China and Russia.

The governments of both of those countries are unconvinced, and for a variety of reasons. One is that the moral indignation of Washington hardly stands the test of history. Washington was a good friend of Josef Stalin, Augusto Pinochet and the Shah of Iran. It has demonstrated that it had no prejudice when it comes to dealing with pressing geopolitical programs. It can deal with dictators on both the right and the left. It also has done nothing during genocidal slaughters, from the Jewish Holocaust to the Rwanda massacres.

At the same time, it would not be logical to assume that Washington has no foreign friends in its Syrian venture. One that seems an unlikely ally is Kavkaz Center, the major Internet vehicle of jihadis from the Russian North Caucasus. Recently, Moscow intensified its efforts against the website, but Kavkaz Center successfully dodges the Kremlin efforts and continues to function as a weblog. Its contributors praise the Syrian opposition as kindred souls and implicitly praise their efforts to get rid of the Assad regime. 

This is not an isolated occurrence. Iraqi authorities have informed the world that a steady stream of jihadis has been moving into Syria to join the fight against Assad. They have not just praised US pressure on Assad but actually encouraged direct military involvement of the US in Syrian affairs and, implicitly, direct confrontation with Iran. Indeed, confrontation with Iran would most likely be the end result of such a conflict. But while encouraging its direct involvement, these jihadis are hardly friends of the US. 

The Bipartisan War on Individual Liberty

Politicians on the both left and right want to restrict your freedom

A. Barton Hinkle 

The good people at Gallup perform a valuable public service by keeping track of what Americans consider the nation's most important problem. Five years ago, it was Iraq. Last summer, the economy weighed most heavily on the public mind. It still does this summer.

Or at least that is the view of the average men and women in the street. To their betters, however, the real problem facing the nation is something far different: Americans enjoy entirely too much freedom.

You can see this in the various proposals, which are legion, to take that freedom away. Late last month, there was a collective sigh of relief from the collectivist intelligentsia when the Supreme Court said Congress could force people to buy a consumer product. But within days, a writer for The Atlantic noted with a mixture of horror and dismay that the United States is "the only advanced country without a national vacation policy." He ginned up a handy infographic to illustrate the point.

Most Americans don't use all the vacation time they have now, but evidently federal mandates are needed nonetheless: The infographic quickly became a must-post item on approximately half the blogs in America. So did another infographic showing that the U.S. stands alone among advanced countries in the number of weeks of paid maternity leave it forces employers to provide (none).

We are all supposed to feel terrible about such marked contrasts, even though being unique implies nothing by itself. The U.S. also is the only nation in the world to apply an exclusionary rule. That rule says improperly obtained evidence cannot be used against a criminal defendant. In other advanced countries, a wrongful search can still nail you. America's way is better.

Free Trade

The Only International Economic Policy That a Country Needs 

John Bright

By Patrick Barron

The international economic scene is dominated by state interventions at all levels. Daily we read of disputes over exchange-rate manipulation, protectionist tariffs followed by retaliatory tariffs, highly regulated free-trade blocs that erect trade barriers to nonbloc nations, bilateral trade agreements, and more. For instance, Great Britain is a member of the European Union (EU) but not of the European Monetary Union (EMU), meaning that it abides by all the regulations and pays all the assessments to remain a member of the EU in order to trade freely with the other members of the 27-country EU. But it does not use the common currency, the euro, which is used by only 17 of the EU members. British industry chafes at the many seemingly meaningless and bizarre regulations that raise the cost of British goods just so Britain can trade freely within the EU. Some regulations are so onerous that some British manufactures will be put out of business. The pro-EU faction in Britain, such as the leadership of the three main parties — the Conservatives, Labour, and the Liberal Democrats — recognizes the damage but proposes to lobby for special exemptions on a case-by-case basis. The anti-EU faction, led by the United Kingdom Independent Party (UKIP), wants Britain out of the EU entirely, arguing that the cost of membership is too great and that the loss of sovereignty is unconstitutional. The same debate can be seen within every EU nation to some degree.

By now everyone is aware of the euro debt crisis — that is, that many members of the EMU are massively in debt. Lower borrowing costs and the ability of members to monetize their debts through the European Central Bank (ECB) by way of their captive national central banks created incentives that proved too powerful for governments to resist, so they embarked on profligate spending programs at the governmental level and enjoyed, briefly, a property boom that has come crashing down. Their way out of this mess is unclear. Some economists propose raising taxes and cutting programs, commonly called "austerity." Others have called for these countries to leave the EMU, reinstate their own national currencies, and devalue against the euro, supposedly to restore "competitiveness." Others have called for outright default on their euro-denominated debt.

Where’s Mel Gibson When You Need Him?

California: The Road Warrior Is Here

By Victor Davis Hanson 

George Miller’s 1981 post-apocalyptic film The Road Warrior ^[1] envisioned an impoverished world of the future. Tribal groups fought over what remained of a destroyed Western world of law, technology, and mass production. Survival went to the fittest — or at least those who could best scrounge together the artifacts of a long gone society somewhat resembling the present West.

In the case of the Australian film, the culprit for the detribalization of the Outback was some sort of global war or perhaps nuclear holocaust that had destroyed the social fabric. Survivors were left with a memory of modern appetites but without the ability to reproduce the means to satisfy them:  in short, a sort of Procopius’s description of Gothic Italy circa AD 540.

Our Version

Sometimes, and in some places, in California I think we have nearly descended into Miller’s dark vision — especially the juxtaposition of occasional high technology with premodern notions of law and security. The state deficit is at $16 billion. Stockton went bankrupt; Fresno is rumored to be next ^[2]. Unemployment stays over 10% and in the Central Valley is more like 15%. Seven out of the last eleven new Californians went on Medicaid, which is about broke. A third of the nation’s welfare recipients are in California. In many areas, 40% of Central Valley high school students do not graduate — and do not work, if the latest crisis in finding $10 an hour agricultural workers is any indication. And so on.

Our culprit out here was not the Bomb (and remember, Hiroshima looks a lot better today ^[3] than does Detroit, despite the inverse in 1945). The condition is instead brought on by a perfect storm of events that have shred the veneer of sophisticated civilization. Add up the causes. One was the destruction of the California rural middle class. Manufacturing jobs, small family farms, and new businesses disappeared due to globalization, high taxes, and new regulations. A pyramidal society followed of a few absentee land barons and corporate grandees, and a mass of those on entitlements or working for government or employed at low-skilled service jobs. The guy with a viable 60 acres of almonds ceased to exist.

The rise and fall of Turkey's Erdogan

In the final analysis, only Israel can resolve Erdogan's dilemma

By M K Bhadrakumar 

Israel's emergence from the woodwork can signal only one thing: the Syrian crisis is moving towards the decisive phase. The lights have been switched on in the operation theatre and the carving of Syria is beginning. What is going to follow won't be a pretty sight at all since the patient is not under anesthesia, and the chief surgeon prefers to lead from behind while sidekicks do the dirty job. 

So far, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have done the maximum they could to destabilize Syria and remove the regime headed by President Bashar al-Assad. But Bashar is still holding out. Israeli expertise is now needed to complete the unfinished business. 

Someone is needed to plunge a sharp knife deep into Bashar's back. Jordan's king can't do the job; he measures up only to Bashar's knees. The Saudi and Qatari sheikhs with their ponderous, flabby body are not used to physical activity; the North Atlantic Treaty Organization prefers to be left alone, having burnt its fingers in Libya with a bloody operation that borders on war crime. That leaves Turkey.

In principle, Turkey has the muscle power, but intervention in Syria is fraught with risks and one of the enduring legacies of Kemal Ataturk is that Turkey avoids taking risks. Besides, Turkey's military is not quite in top form. 

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is also unable to carry the majority opinion within Turkey in favor of a war in Syria, and he is navigating a tricky path himself, trying to amend his country's constitution and make himself a real sultan - as if French President Francois Hollande were to combine the jobs of Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault and Socialist Party chief Martine Aubry. 

Obviously, Erdogan can't risk his career. Besides, there are imponderables - a potential backlash from the Alawite minority within Turkey (which resents the surge of Salafism under Erdogan's watch) and the perennial danger of walking into a trap set up by militant Kurds. 

The New American Radicals

Lessons from another era

The populists who scapegoat intellectuals and trash civil liberties are Jacobins, not conservatives

By PETER VIERECK

During the Jacobin Revolution of 1793, in those quaint days when the lower classes still thought of themselves as the lower classes, it was for upper-class sympathies and for notreading “subversive leftist literature” that aristocrats got in trouble.

Note the reversal in America. Here the lower classes seem to be the upper classes–they have automobiles, lace curtains, and votes. Here, in consequence, it is for alleged lower-class sympathies–for “leftist” sympathies–that the aristocrats are purged by the lower class.

In reality those lower-class sympathies are microscopic in most of that social register (Lodge, Bohlen, Acheson, Stevenson, and Harvard presidents) which McCarthy is trying to purge; even so leftist sympathies are the pretext given for the purge. Why is it necessary to allege those lower-class sympathies as pretext? Why the pretext in the first place? Because in America the suddenly enthroned lower classes cannot prove to themselves psychologically that they are now upper-class unless they can indict for pro-proletariat subversion those whom they know in their hearts to be America’s real intellectual and social aristocracy.

On Milton Friedman's 100th Birthday

He's Needed More Than Ever

By THOMAS SOWELL

If Milton Friedman were alive today — and there was never a time when he was more needed — he would be 100 years old. He was born on July 31, 1912. But Professor Friedman's death at age 94 deprived the nation of one of those rare thinkers who had both genius and common sense.

Most people would not be able to understand the complex economic analysis that won him a Nobel Prize, but people with no knowledge of economics had no trouble understanding his popular books like "Free to Choose" or the TV series of the same name.

In being able to express himself at both the highest level of his profession and also at a level that the average person could readily understand, Milton Friedman was like the economist whose theories and persona were most different from his own — John Maynard Keynes.

Like many, if not most, people who became prominent as opponents of the left, Professor Friedman began on the left. Decades later, looking back at a statement of his own from his early years, he said: "The most striking feature of this statement is how thoroughly Keynesian it is."

Shame Is Going the Way of the Dinosaur

How Times Have Changed

by Walter E. Williams

Having been born in 1936 has allowed me to witness both societal progress and retrogression. High on the list of things made better in our society are the great gains in civil liberties and economic opportunities, especially for racial minorities and women. People who are now deemed poor have a level of material wealth that would have been a pipe dream to yesteryear's poor. But despite the fact that today's Americans have achieved an unprecedented level of prosperity, we have become spiritually and morally impoverished compared with our ancestors.

Years ago, spending beyond one's means was considered a character defect. Today not only do people spend beyond their means but also there are companies that advertise on radio and TV to eliminate or reduce your credit card and mortgage debt. Students saddled with college loans have called for student loan forgiveness. Yesterday's Americans would have viewed it as morally corrupt and reprehensible to accumulate debt and then seek to avoid paying it. It's nothing less than theft. What's worse is there's little condemnation of it by the rest of us.

Earlier this year, as a result of a budget crunch, the Philadelphia School District had to lay off 91 school police officers. During the 1940s and '50s, I attended Philadelphia schools in poor neighborhoods. The only time we saw a policeman in school was during an assembly period when we had to listen to a boring lecture about safety. Because teacher assaults are tolerated – 4,000 over the past five years in Philadelphia – school police are needed. Prior to the '60s, few students would have thought of talking back to a teacher, and no one would have cursed, much less assaulted, a teacher.