Recent Reading

 Some selected books from recent months:

I learned about The Trigger by Tim Butcher while listening to the Rest is History podcast on the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the spark that ignited the first World War in 1914.  Butcher was a correspondent in Bosnia during the Bosnian War of 1992-5.  In the trigger revisits Bosnia in 2012, going to the isolated village where the assassin Gavrilo Princip was born and raised.  He mostly walks as he retraces Princip's footsteps to Sarajevo, where he went to school, and then on to Belgrade in Serbia and his return journey to the fateful rendezvous with Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.  Along the way, Butcher discovers some previously unknown documentation on Princip.  But this book is more than about 1914.  Butcher draws the common threads between Princip's motivation for the shooting and what he witnessed in the 1990s, along with reflecting on the scars still visible on the land and in the people when he returned in 2012.  Butcher is a terrific writer, very perceptive and thoughtful.  Highly recommended.

In a August post I referenced TG Otte's July Crisis, also discovered listening to the Rest is History, covering the period from the assassination to the outbreak of the war.  A detailed blow by blow account, a bit drier than Butcher's book but good reading about appalling events in which some duplicitous diplomats deserve blame for the tragic outcome.  My description of those weeks from the earlier post:

The period from the morning of June 28 to July 31 leaves one with the same feeling as watching a "by the numbers" horror movie where find yourself thinking "don't open that door!", "don't go in that room!!", and "splitting up is a really bad strategy!!!", yet the characters proceed to go ahead, nonetheless.

Twilight at Monticello by Allen Pell Crawford covers Thomas Jefferson's 17 year retirement beginning in 1809 when he left the presidency.  Fascinating reading of what seems like a time of much sadness for Jefferson.  A famous figure, deluged by letters and visitors, but seeing Monticello in continuing financial distress, with quarrels breaking out within his family, failing to address slavery at the most personal level (unlike George Washington), and plagued by increasingly poor health.

The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government by Fergus Bordwich is the first book I've read about the inner workings of the House, Senate, and Executive Branch from 1789-91.  As the title says, they were inventing everything, making it up as they went along, guided by the often vague language of the Constitution.  The first problem was how hard it was to get the new representatives and senators to even show up, as it took weeks after the the official start of the government to reach a quorum.  The Supreme Court held its opening session and then disbanded for months because it had no cases to hear.  And Washington felt his way into his new role.  Lots of depth to the research and I learned quite a lot.

Moving ahead to the Second World War, we have The Washington War: FDR's Inner Circle and the Politics of Power That Won World War II by James Lacey.   This was an uneven book; the best parts on the little known White House and sub-cabinet officers who had to mobilize America's industrial base to produce the staggering amount of armaments to win the war and the bureaucratic infighting along the way.  Other parts are a rehash of military and high policy issues that I was already familiar with.  A mixed verdict but worth it for the best parts.

The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, The Cold War, and the World on the Brink by William Inboden is a masterpiece.  The book focuses exclusively on Reagan's foreign policy.  Inboden grew up with a generally unfavorable view of Reagan which he revised after doing the research for the book.  Reagan was at his best with his large strategic view and his adherence to it, throughout his administration.  He did win the Cold War with a very different view of it than his predecessors.  His assessment of the Soviet Union's financial stability proved more accurate than that of the intelligence and academic communities.(1) Although portrayed as dunce by the media and Democrats, he actually did read his briefing books (unlike some other presidents), while also horrifying a large number of conservatives when they realized he wanted to abolish nuclear weapons and began making deals with Gorbachev, over whom he'd attained psychological dominance.

The book is not a hagiography, going into the president's failures in Lebanon and in Iran-Contra, and pointing out that while a superb strategist and mobilizer of public opinion through his eloquence, he was a terrible day to day manager which created its own set of problems.  The book also conveys what it was like to make decisions given the enormous pressures and uncertainties faced by those in the administration.  Whether the decisions proved good or bad we understand how they looked to those making them at the time.  A big book but worth the investment of time to understand how the world changed so dramatically in his administration.

I was disappointed in the most recent installments of two of my favorite fiction series; The Waiting by Michael Connelly and Martin Walker's A Grave In The Woods.  I've always enjoyed the setting, Dordogne, and the characters in Walker's series on Bruno, a local police chief and the charming cast of characters revolving around him, but the plots have gotten increasingly outlandish and the writing sloppier.  I will continue to read the books because of my past enjoyment but would only recommend the first ten to new readers.  Connelly is a better writer than Walker and his Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller novels are great reads, well plotted and compellingly written.  But Bosch has gotten older, retired, and only appears as a bit player in his new novel which centers on LAPD's Renee Ballard, who is just not as interesting a character as Bosch or Haller.

Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History by Nellie Bowles is the tale of a journey.  A journalist of the progressive persuasion, she joined the New York Times.  She eventually left the Times for two reasons.  She started dating Bari Weiss, another progressive working as an editor at the Times.  Because Weiss believed in platforming views that occasionally dissented from progressive thought she came under constant assault from her fellow journalists.  Bowles recounts being out to dinner with her editor and colleagues, when the editor, in all seriousness, questioned why Nellie was dating Bari, saying of her, "She's a Nazi. She's a fucking Nazi.", to which all her colleagues eagerly agreed.

The other reason was what she saw in her reporting.  In her words:

When I started this, I was a little angry.  After I wrote some of these chapters, I quit the paper. . . . I traveled to Portland's late-night Antifa rallies and spent days in the no-cop autonomous zones of Seattle and Minneapolis, looking for utopia.  I looked at the attempts to atone for our collective sins, visiting homeless encampments run by BMW-driving socialists and taking courses led by America's leading anti-racist educators, who happen to be mostly middle=aged white women.  When the revolution made a turn from race to gender, I followed it, exploring why so many children were being born into the wrong bodies, their genders so far from their flesh. 

The book is best suited for readers who don't know already know the truth about the stories Bowles covered.  Since I already did, I found of most interest the earliest sections which recount the inside working of the New York Times, another of our once-great institutions that has self-destructed.

The good news is that after Weiss was expelled as a heretic from the Times, and Bowles resigned, they started a new social media company, The Free Press, which is thriving, both as journalism and financially because it turned out there was a mass audience for journalism not designed to push predetermined narratives.

The Morning After ends with on a cautionary note, writing that the first phase of the revolution was ending as she finished her book:

Black Lives Matter was in disgrace.  All the autonomous zones had shuttered.  The police were re-funded.  The Tavistock pediatric gender clinic in England where children would be assessed and begin their transitions?  That's shutting down.  

But did the quieter streets mean it was done? Hardly.  The ideas became the operating principle of big business, the tech company handbook, the head of HR, the statement you have to write to get a job in a university.(2)  The movement fell apart because of how fully it succeeded.  It didn't need to announce itself so loudly anymore.  We didn't need to notice it anymore.  . . .  There are a thousand tiny changes we've just grown accustomed to.

On my Kindle awaiting reading:

Chasing Bright Medusas, a biography of Willa Cather, of whom I became a fan after recently reading Death Comes for the Archbishop and My Antonia.

Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco.  I anticipate a challenging read.  Hope it is worth the effort.

The Line of Splendor by Salina Baker.  A historical novel about Nathanael Greene, the outstanding and little known Revolutionary War general who saved the South from the British.

The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution by Timothy Tacket.  How a bunch of mild-mannered reformers ended up chopping off heads, including their own.

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(1) Ah, if only we could have had some brave bureaucratic soul like Alexander Vindman become a whistle blower to Congress, denouncing the President for defying "the consensus" of the foreign policy establishment. 

(2) And these ideas became the top domestic priority of the Biden administration, implemented through two Executive Order, embedding them throughout the federal government and even looking ahead to require that any AI used by the government must embed within the racial and general biases of this ideology.

The Truth

Bill Clinton speaking in Michigan last night about the Israel-Palestinian peace offer on the table at the end of his administration; an offer the Israelis agreed to and the Palestinians rejected.  As a reminder, the pro-Hamas demonstrators in the United States reject the idea of a two state solution.  They are not demonstrating for peace.

What Clinton says is not new news.  We were aware at the time of the terms of the offer and were shocked when Arafat turned it down.  It's good though to see Clinton willing to speak the truth all these years later.

Not mentioned in his remarks was his, and the rest of the American delegation's, shock when Arafat informed them there was never a Jewish temple in Jerusalem and that was just a made up claim by the Jews.  The truth is the opposite; it is the Muslim claim of Mohammad's visit to the Temple Mount that is a myth; an excuse for a occupying colonial military cult to demonstrate its supremacy over the Christians and Jews who preceded them by building the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque; however, it is a myth Jews have been willing to accept if it would bring peace.

When the Oslo Peace Accords were announced in 1994 I thought it a worthwhile risk for Israel to take.  I was wrong.  Readmitting Arafat and the PLO to the West Bank was a terrible mistake and it was a mistake to agree to an Accord that was all process with no clear substantive mutual understandings of end point parameters by the parties.

The Second Intifada, launched by Arafat after walking away from the deal, also destroyed the Israeli peace movement, as it became clear that there was no fundamental agreement between Palestinian and Jews about how to make peace and many Israeli participants felt betrayed.

Listen to the audio.  There is a mistake at the end of the text where Clinton actually says "Judea and Samaria".

Bill Clinton On the Palestinians:

“And the only time Yasser Arafat didn't tell me the truth was when he promised me he was gonna accept the peace deal that we had worked out, which would have given the Palestinians a state on 96% of the West Bank and 4% of Israel, and they got… pic.twitter.com/kQZrqdU3zW

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) October 31, 2024

In retrospect the last time this country had a decent domestic policy at the federal level was from 1994 to 1998 when Clinton was president with a Republican Congress.  They worked together and were on the verge of possibly even bigger things on getting this country on a long-term path to financial stability when the combination of Bill's personal lack of discipline and the most idiotic and self-defeating political choices by the GOP ended it all. 

I Know A Place

 . . . and I'll take you there.

I'll Take You There was a massive hit for The Staple Singers in 1972.  Led by Roebuck "Pops" Staples on vocals and guitar, his three daughters, Mavis, Yvonne, and Cleotha, on vocals, and son Pervis on keyboards.  Mavis would go on to have a long and successful solo career and also sang with Bob Dylan and The Band.  She's 85 now. 

Enjoying Friends

"Let us greedily enjoy our friends, because we do not know how long this privilege will be ours."

- Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, First Century AD

via Laudator Temporis Acti, also the source of the quote on this blog's masthead, "The Value of Useless Knowledge"

The Losers

Along with facing disaster whichever candidate wins next week, we also face the prospect that one of them will lose.  Do not expect the loser and their supporters to accept their fate with grace.

Should Trump lose he will roll out the 2020 Stop The Steal Playbook.(1)  He will never accept any result when he loses.  Remember, he didn't just say he won in 2020, he claimed he won in a landslide.  Even when he wins, Trump makes outrageous claims; in 2016 he said that the result in California, a state he lost by 4 million votes, was rigged and he would have carried the state in an honest election.

He will once again rile up his hardcore supporters.  Trump will have no strategy, no long-term plan; he just loves stirring stuff up and seeing that his supporters still love him.  What happens next, since he is not the incumbent this time around, is hard to predict, but it will be ugly, and likely punctuated with violence, whatever form it takes.  Expect to see attempts to get state legislatures refuse to certify electors, although I think the changes to the electoral college Congressional vote counting process made since 2021 make federal obstruction less likely.  I see no sign that Trump will fade from the scene unless he is physically and/or mentally disabled, thus delaying the emergence of whatever will come as the next generation of GOP leaders (if there is still to be a GOP).

On the other side it is not a person who is of concern - it's Democrats.  Harris is a nothing and if she loses her political career is ended.  Other than recriminations in the immediate wake of the defeat she'll be a soon forgotten figure.  However, the Democrats and their institutional supporters in the government, academia, media, the foundations & NGOs, and the corporate world will be mobilized; it'll be 2016 on steroids and an amplification of what had been planned in 2020 if Trump won.  The goal will be to disrupt and impede any attempt to restore normality if Trump wins.

In 2016 Democrats worked themselves into hysteria over Trump, somehow convincing themselves that a gullible and easily manipulated figure, with little interest in the details of policy, and with erratic behavior and occasionally outrageous rhetoric, was actually a Nazi who kept a copy of Mein Kampf by his bed (yes, I heard this from people), prepared to become a dictator, and unleash his brown shirt legions on America.  Somehow Trump forgot to do all that during his administration but in 2025 he'll supposedly get around to it. 

After his election in 2016, the Democrats and their allies in the media and in the government conspired to continue and elevate the Russia collusion hoax.  And, breaking with more than two centuries of precedent, the Senate Democrats routinely obstructed the approval process for even noncontroversial nominees for federal jobs in order to prevent the administration from functioning.  If Trump had won in 2020 the Democratic plan was to bring the mobs out into the street across American cities and do even more than during his first administration to prevent The Donald from exercising his constitutional powers.  This year, Democrats and their allies have been whipped up into a hysterical frenzy far surpassing that of 2016 and 2020.  I expect that if Trump wins in 2024, we will see protests, violence, obstruction way beyond that of 2016 along with the federal bureaucracy sabotaging the administration of a democratically elected president.

Good times are not coming.

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(1) I live in Maricopa County, Arizona, ground zero for one of the key alleged steals.  Trump narrowly won the county in 2016, narrowly losing it in 2020.  I read all of the allegations regarding the steal, the documents from the "forensic audit" by the Cyber Ninjas, the county's response, as well as learning a bit about Arizona election laws.  The steal claims here were junk; laughably idiotic.

Failed Concepts

Worthwhile reading from Mosiac, an essay by Shany Mor, "The Failed Concepts That Brought Israel to October 7", an essay I find myself mostly in agreement with.  Mor does not look at the tactical intelligence and military failures leading up to, and occurring on, that day, instead focusing on the longer-term strategies and the politics resulting in that tragic day.  He describes four failures:

The first is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's failure to have a longer-term strategy combined with his delusions about Hamas.

The second "the ideology of right-wing religious settler Zionism" and the policy distortions imposed by it.

Third is the blindness of the "peace processors", primarily in the Western foreign policy establishments who have refused to face into the realities of the Middle East.

Finally there is the way "the international community, UNRWA, and sundry human-rights organizations at every step have acted as a force multiplier for Hamas and Hizballah". 

Here's an excerpt from each part of the essay, though you should read the entire piece to get the complexity of the argument Mor makes. 

Netanyahu

The basic contours of Israel’s position vis-à-vis Hamas, Gaza, the Palestinians, and the Arab world on October 6 are a catalog of Netanyahu’s wishes, fears, hopes, illusions, and procrastinatory temptations.

Netanyahu isn’t just stricken by decisional paralysis or lazy procrastination. He came into power believing the time wasn’t right, and at each decision node since, he has discovered new reasons why the time just isn’t right. He keeps poking his head out and seeing no parking ticket on the state’s windshield, so he goes back in and promises to keep checking. True on the West Bank, and true on the issue he rode back into power on in 2009: the need to confront the Iranian nuclear program. For years he was mocked for his indecision by experts in Israel and abroad whose prognostications often invoked the image of a “tsunami” of one kind or another that was about to wash over Israel due to Bibi’s negligence.

As for messaging, Netanyahu’s career has been a continuous exercise in public diplomacy, his polished English employed to impress not so much foreign audiences as the domestic Israeli one. His skill (real or imagined) at making Israel’s case—at the UN, the U.S. Congress, and elsewhere—came to substitute for actual strategic thinking. And, as with skepticism and deferral, experience kept teaching him the wrong lessons—until disaster struck.

The religious settler movement:

The long march of the West Bank settler movement has been a generational project that has resulted in what might best be termed state capture.

To discuss the West Bank settler movement and its impact on policy in terms of state capture is to imply two things. First, that the policy priorities of the movement do not represent those of the majority of the Israeli public or any reasonable aggregation of diverse interests and desires. Second, that the result is to distort the state’s policies in a way that are inimical to its actual strategic interests but to the benefit of the particular interest that has effected the capture.

When I speak of the “settler movement” of “right-wing religious settler” ideology, I am not talking about the motives of all the Israelis who chose to make their lives beyond the Green Line. . .

The Palestinians’ defeat in the second intifada, and the tectonic shifts in Arab politics after the failed Arab Spring, opened before Israel genuine diplomatic opportunities. These have already resulted in the Abraham Accords. But to exploit these opportunities fully, Israel needed leaders dedicated to the pursuit of the state’s strategic interests. It has been years, maybe decades, since Israel had a leadership that was able to set aside the settler movement’s special pleas and pursue those interests rationally. By the time the far-right swept into power on the coattails of Netanyahu’s return in 2022, these were no longer even special pleas. The call was coming from inside the house.

In short, Israel lulled itself into complacency on the Gaza front not just because of an overabundance of confidence in its deterrence and not just because of its prime minister’s vices, but because both of these were nurtured by, and reinforced, a comprehensive ideological worldview that places the West Bank settler enterprise above the state’s considered interests.

Mor notes that, on October 7, there were 32 IDF combat battalions deployed in the West Bank, many in response to turmoil created by the religious settlers, while only two battalions were deployed along the Gaza Strip.

The peace processors:

. . . the peace-processor concept of mediation ignores all the conventional rules of negotiating and diplomacy, not to mention common sense, and hasn’t changed despite the fact that it has failed consistently.

The most exemplary instantiation of this failure is the string of diplomatic initiatives following the failure of Camp David and the eruption of the second intifada. In all of them, whether at Taba or Geneva, whether by informal negotiators or international mediators, whether in talks or UN Security Council resolutions, the Palestinians are offered better terms than what they have rejected and the Israelis worse terms than what they previously agreed to. The implication is that previous initiatives failed and violence erupted because the Palestinians just weren’t given enough.

Imagining this method in any other kind of conflict shows just how perverse it is. Offering better terms to the side that rejected a previous compromise, resorted to violence in the hopes of securing for itself a better outcome, and was defeated in the war it initiated incentivizes all the worst behavior of all sides. The losing side has no incentive to agree, because losing again only improves its position. The winning side has no incentive to agree, but the status quo of conflict gives it a better position than the proposed compromise.

 On the international community:

None of Gaza’s population would qualify as refugees under the UN’s official definition: “A refugee is someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war, or violence.” Those who fled one part of Palestine during the 1947–9 war for another are considered internally displaced persons (“someone who has been forced to flee their home but never crossed an international border”). . . . Arabs who fled from Palestine into Lebanon would certainly count as refugees under the standard UN definitions, but not their descendants. Many others fled to Jordan or to places that Jordan would occupy, but as they quickly became Jordanian citizens, they would, by standard legal definitions, be considered “rehabilitated” and no longer refugees.

Gaza, though, has no refugees. Not the tiny handful of people still alive who lived in what is now Israel before 1948, and certainly not their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. The idea that a Palestinian living in Palestinian territory under a Palestinian government is somehow a refugee from Palestine is a deadly contrivance, the work of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

The constitutions of Hizballah in southern Lebanon, Fatah in the West Bank, and Hamas in Gaza can be best described as anti-sovereign governance, and, for all the variation among them, they are all the creation of the international community and its unique approach to the Arab conflict with Israel. These constitutions are anti-sovereign in two senses, an internal one and an external. Internally, they exercise stable political and military power without full sovereignty and without any of the responsibilities that come with full sovereignty. And externally, the ideological basis of their entire political project is the denial of sovereignty to the Jewish state they live next to.

Avocado deterrence was the rule with Hizballah in Lebanon after 2006 just as it was the rule with Arafat and Hamas in the West Bank in the 1990s and 2000s. And nowhere was the avocado principle more dearly held to than in Gaza. Hamas rockets were something Israel needed to learn to tolerate or even accept that it deserved. The incendiary bombs, carried by balloons, which burned so much productive Israeli farmland during the five years before the October 7 attack were far too small a provocation to warrant an Israeli response. Attempts by Hamas militants to breach the fence in 2018 were best understood as a protest against the Palestinians’ righteous victimhood and not a security threat (as October 7 clearly showed them to be) to the Israeli communities just outside the Strip. Any Israeli preventive action against the growing arsenal of rockets and tunnels was, as it was always asserted, an overreaction to an exaggerated threat.

When wars did break out in 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021, the consensus suddenly shifted. Now any action Israel might take to eliminate the threat was too costly and impractical. Hamas was too embedded in the territory, its rockets too numerous, and any invasion would result in too many casualties.

The problem is, given the truth of the above analysis, what is to be done next?

Theoretically I still support a two-state solution but, as a practical matter, that is not going to occur in the foreseeable future because it is abundantly clear that Palestinian public opinion much prefers not having a state if the price of its creation results in the continued existence of a Jewish state alongside it.

Disbanding UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) is an essential first step towards any type of eventual settlement but that is not going to happen with a United Nations dominated by dictators, oligarchs, and authoritarians.  Even the next best solution, permanently stopping UNRWA's funding by the U.S. and other Western nations seems like it will not happen.  As of 2022, 85.5% of UNRWA funding came from the U.S. (29.4%), Europe, and Japan.  We are paying to perpetuate the problem and impede its solution, but generations of US and European diplomats refuse to recognize the obvious.

Beyond that, who knows?