The New Criterion

Jan 06, 2009 03:57 PM

The Limits of Realism

by James Bowman

According to The Washington Post Barack Obama has "stunned the national intelligence community by selecting Clinton White House chief of staff Leon E. Panetta, a longtime Washington insider with little intelligence experience, to serve as the next head of the CIA." Though he is "widely regarded as a good manager who knows the government bureaucracy well," Mr Panetta does not inspire confidence in fellow Democratic Senators Jay Rockefeller and Dianne Feinstein, respectively the outgoing and incoming chairmen of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Ranking Republican Christopher Bond is also a skeptic, observing that "In a post-9/11 world, intelligence experience would seem to be a prerequisite for the job of CIA director." Not that anyone is likely to care very much about what he thinks.

But the Post points out that the President-elect has "had trouble filling the CIA slot in part because other candidates were perceived as tainted for having supported aspects of the Bush administration's interrogation and intelligence programs." According to The New York Times, the first pick for the job, John O. Brennan, "had to withdraw his name amid criticism over his alleged role in the formation of the agency’s detention and interrogation program after the Sept. 11 attacks." Another candidate, Democratic representative Jane Harman, formerly senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, "was considered but was ruled out due to her early support for Bush’s warrantless-search program" says Steve Benen in The Washington Monthly’s "Political Animal" blog.

In my essay, "The Mystification of Change" in the current issue of The New Criterion, I proposed that the surprising but widely-hailed "moderation" or "pragmatism" of Mr Obama’s early appointments were a concession made to reality by a man who had hitherto lived and moved and had his being exclusively in the unreal world of campaign rhetoric. Now we see the limits of such pragmatism. If reality involves adopting Bushite methods when it comes to what, for campaigning purposes, the left has been indiscriminately labeling "torture," then reality can go take a hike. Laura Rozen blogging on behalf of Foreign Policy magazine says that "a former senior CIA manager" characterized the appointment to her as follows: "The message is, ‘I don't want to hear anything out of the CIA. Make it go away. No scandals. Keep it quiet.’"

On the other hand, she goes on to quote Greg Treverton of the Rand Corporation as saying that "Panetta's experience as a former White House chief of staff might give him a unique understanding of the presidency and its needs for intelligence" — needs which have not hitherto been thought of as recondite to all but the most finely-tuned "understanding." Reading between the lines of this and similar comments, I think what they are really saying is that mastery of the bureaucracy and of bureaucratic in-fighting, such as Mr Panetta possesses, is of more importance to a DCI in our post-9/11 world than knowledge of our enemies and potential enemies. If so, this is a further ramification of the scandal I point to in my book, Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, which is that the CIA under President Bush has shown itself to be a rogue agency that has broken free from proper accountability to its political masters. This too, it seems, is a form of reality with which our new President is having to come to terms.

Dec 31, 2008 12:22 PM

Year End Epiphanies

by James Bowman

An interesting convergence of the journalistic social studies makes a fittingly inspirational meditation for this holiday season and conclusion to 2008. In Monday’s Washington Post we learned that a learned article in the January number of Pediatrics has found that "teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do." You can imagine with what self-satisfaction this was reported by the militantly secularist Post — a catalogue of whose b tises and bigotries when it comes to religious believers is available in today’s American Spectator online from my friend Quin Hillyer. "The study is the latest in a series," says the Post’s reporter, Rob Stein, "that have raised questions about programs that focus on encouraging abstinence until marriage, including those that specifically ask students to publicly declare their intention to remain virgins."

Although Mr Stein notes in passing that "proponents" of abstinence education have "dismissed the study as flawed and argued that programs that focus on abstinence go much further than simply asking youths to make a one-time promise to remain virgins," he obviously has little interest in exploring sympathetically — or at all — views contrary to what he sees as the now scientifically-approved one, let alone finding or elaborating on any of those putative "flaws" in the methodology or conclusions of the Pediatrics study. I wonder if, the day after his piece ran in the Post, his eye happened to fall on one by John Tierney in the Science section of The New York Times titled: "For Good Self-Control, Try Getting Religious About It." Mr Tierney is not himself a practising religious believer, but he keeps an open mind and looks at believers and their beliefs with sympathy. In the interests of full disclosure, I should also mention that he has also taken a sympathetic look at my book Honor, A History. Now he cites a study in the journal Psychological Bulletin by Michael McCullough and Brian Willoughby of the University of Miami who "have reviewed eight decades of research and concluded that religious belief and piety promote self-control."

Well, duh! Or so you might be tempted to think. But science rightly takes nothing for granted, so we believers might as well welcome one scientific paper — and that one a synthesis of several others — that seems to come down on our side. All the more so, too, in light of its larger finding that "researchers around the world have repeatedly found that devoutly religious people tend to do better in school, live longer, have more satisfying marriages and be generally happier." This bit of news also suggests what should be the response of those who believe in abstinence education to the Pediatrics study trumpeted by The Washington Post. For it is hardly surprising if abstinence education alone — that is, abstinence out of context, abstinence without any spiritual foundation providing a rationale as to why it is good for you — doesn’t produce socially desirable results. Telling kids that such results are what abstinence is supposed to produce understandably produces little in the way of self-control. Telling them that it is all part of a loving God’s intention for the good of their own immortal souls may be supposed to work a bit better.

The second of these two studies might also be seen as a confirmation of an anecdotal observation by Matthew Parris, an atheist of almost Hitchensian vehemence, in The Times of London last Saturday. "As an atheist," writes Mr Parris, "I truly believe Africa needs God."

I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good. I used to avoid this truth by applauding — as you can — the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It’s a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith. But this doesn’t fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

The point is not just that the faith of the missionaries changes lives for the better. It is that this faith is also necessary for the Africans themselves to "liberate" themselves from the darkness and corruption of tribal society.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted. And I’m afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

It’s a remarkable admission, coming from an unrepentant atheist, and ought to be required reading for the spiritual illiterates at the Post.

Dec 30, 2008 11:39 PM

Not quite right on Agee

by Michael Weiss

The New York Times Magazine devoted itself this past Sunday to short squibs about famous figures who died in 2008. Among the memorialized deceased was Philip Agee, the CIA agent turned tell-all memoirist, who in 1974 published a list of the spy bureau's active field agents and informants, thus compromising American security and very probably getting a good number of erstwhile comrades killed.  Agee's treason led to the passage in 1982 of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Rick Perelstein wrote the Agee entry in the Times Magazine, though I have a quibble over this citation:

The next time Agee showed up in the papers, it was 1974, and he was about to publish “Inside the Company: C.I.A. Diary,” very much against the wishes of his actual former employer — which was not the Olympics section. “I did not write this book for the K.G.B.,” Agee, who worked for a decade as a spook, announced. “I wrote it as a contribution to socialist revolution.”

How generous. Except that he did indeed try to sell American secrets to the K.G.B because the former archivist of the organization, Vasili Mitrokhin, explained in his book The Mitrokhin Archive that in 1973 Agee

approached the KGB residency in Mexico City and offered what the head of the FCD's Counter-Intelligence Directorate, Oleg Kalugin, called 'reams of information about CIA operations'.

Kalugin was skeptical of Agee's goods, however, and turned him down.

Agee then went to the Cubans [says Kalugin], who welcomed him with open arms...The Cubans shared Agee's information with us. But as I sat in my office in Moscow reading reports about the growing revelations coming from Agee, I cursed our officers for turning away such a prize.

Kalugin is now a well-sought lecturer on counterintelligence in the U.S. and a fierce critic of Vladimir Putin. He lives in Maryland. The turncoat who slipped through Kalugin's fingers died in Havana, a long-time guest of the Castro regime, in January.

Dec 28, 2008 10:27 PM

Stalin's American victims

by Michael Weiss

Tim Tzouliadis's The Forsaken tells of thousands of American socialists and Communists who moved to the Soviet Union in the thirties to find work and a workers' paradise. They were quickly disappointed. Adam Hothschild reviews the book in the London Times (TNC subscribers can read Stephen Schwarz's review from the September 2008 issue here):

From Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other Russians who have borne witness, we know about the midnight arrests, the interrogations and forced confessions, the trains hauling packed boxcars of emaciated prisoners to the labour camps scattered across the Arctic, Siberia, Kazakhstan and elsewhere. Tzouliadis traces the story of the Americans who got caught up in this madness through a wide range of letters and documents, and the published memoirs of two men who played on American baseball teams in Moscow in the mid-1930s, Victor Herman and Thomas Sgovio. Unlike many of their fellow players, whom they occasionally encountered in the gulag, they survived their imprisonment: Herman in central Russia and Sgovio in Kolyma. No one knows how many of the American immigrants were caught up by the Purge and perished either in execution cellars or in the camps, although one mass grave with more than 140 American bodies was found in 1997 near the Finnish border. Tzouliadis does not try to estimate the total American dead. My own guess would be that the figure is in the thousands; if we add victims among Britons and other Westerners living in USSR at the time, the total would be in the tens of thousands.

And it wasn't just Russia to whose siren call left-wing Yanks infatuated with proletarian dictatorship were inexorably drawn. In way, they commanded an odd respect; at least they put their money where their mouths were and picked up to go see socialism as it actually existed outside the cafes and salons of democratic cities. Bellow has a great set piece in his novella Mosby's Memoirs about a poor political innocent called Lustgarten, who moves to Yuglosavia hoping that Tito's alternative will be any alternative at all:

"They're asking interested people to come as guests to tour the country and see how they're building socialism. Oh, I know," he quickly said, anticipating standard doctrinal objection, "you don't build socialism in one country, but it's no longer the same situation.  And I really believe Tito may redeem Marxism by actually transforming the dictatorship of the proletariat. This brings me back to my first love--the radical movement. I was never meant to be an entrepreneur."

Bellow wastes no time in bringing down the other shoe. On the next page:

"To say that in September the Lustgarten who reappeared looked frightful. He had lost no less than fifty pounds. Sun-blackened, creased, in a filthy stained suit, his eyes infected. He said he had had diarrhea all summer.

"And what did they feed their foreign VIPs?"

And Lustgarten shyly bitter--the lean face and inflamed eyes materializing from a spiritual region very different from any heretofore associated with Lustgarten by Mosby--said, "It was just a chain gang. It was hard labor. I didn't understand the deal. I thought we were invited as I told you. But we turned out to be foreign volunteers-of-construction. A labor brigade. And up in the mountains. Never saw the Dalmatian coast. Hardly even shelter for the night. We slept on the ground and ate shit fried in rancid oil."

"Why didn't you run away?" asked Mosby.

"How? Where?"

"Back to Belgrade. To the American embassy at least?"

"How could I? I was a guest. Came at their expense. They held the return ticket."

Dec 26, 2008 07:29 PM

Exit Pinter

by Michael Weiss

I've had my disagreements with Johann Hari, but I've also had my agreements with him (on George Galloway and the rest of the gruesome galere of faux-cialists, Hari is extremely reliable). And his is the best cold water obituary on Harold Pinter I've yet read:

The tragedy of Pinter's politics is that he took a desirable political value - hatred of war, or distrust for his own government - and absolutizes it. It is good to hate war, but to take this so far that you will not resist Hitler and Stalin is absurd. It is good to oppose the crimes of your own government - but to take this so far that you end up serving on the Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic is bizarre.

When Serbian nationalism - stoked and stroked by Milosevic - began to ravage the Balkans in the 1990s, Pinter's response was simple and visceral: whatever the US and UK governments are for, I'm against. Blair and Clinton are condemning Milosevic? Right, sign me up for the defense. The Committee he sat on right up to Miolsevic's death - headed by Jared Israel, a friend of Milosevic - was not simply calling for the Serb to be given a fair trial, a demand all reasonable people supported. It called for Milosevic to be released on the grounds that he was not guilty. In fact, the website bragging Pinter's signature describes him as a "the strongest pillar of peace and stability in this region."

So when there was ethnic cleansing two days' drive from Auschwitz, Pinter's response was to defend the aggressor and attack the victims. While much of the left - good people like Peter Tatchell, Michael Foot and Susan Sontag - were calling for democratic countries to arm the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to defend the ethnic Albanians from racist murder, Pinter described the KLA as "a bandit organisation" that was "actually" responsible for the ethnic cleansing in the region. Watching the trial, Pinter said admiringly, "Milosevic is giving them a run for their money."

This is not to judge Pinter the playwright, only Pinter the activist (although it bears mention that his plays got worse and worse, too). We would be shit out of poets and novelists from the 20th-century if all we had to assess them on was their collusion with fascism, Stalinism or anti-Semitism. But the problem with departed writers is the obituarist's instinct to erase what damage they may have done in other areas, brokered on their literary celebrity. This is especially shameful when one considers that there is no necessary direct relationship between literary brilliance and political stupidity. Pinter imported Beckett to the London stage. Yes, well, Susan Sontag imported him to the blasted-out war zones of Sarajevo, and risked her life doing it.

Pinter's case is still useful, however, for diagnosing the upside-down world of what my friend Alan Johnson calls "post-leftism." This is the ideology of anti-ideology, of mere attitudes and prejudices and reflexes, most of which are reactionary in masquerade (one thinks of Chomsky's defense of Faurisson not merely on free speech grounds but on the substance of his Holocaust denial argument, or Naomi Klein's glorification of Muqtada al-Sadr). How comes it that a Thatcher voter, married to a titled woman who burnishes the reputation of Marie Anoinette, defends the slaughterer of Balkan Muslims as a "persecuted" anti-imperialist? And that an avowed foe of national interests, particularly when the nations in question are the United States and Great Britain, would then refer you to "Yugoslav law" in inveighing against the extradition and trial of an international criminal?

Where bickering Marxists once had a common lexicon, derived from common first principles, and could thus be scandalized for their fallacies of interpretation or their pig-ignorance, the post-leftist is wholly free to improvise and invent, using the glyphs he may still recognize from the ruins of Marxism. Like Milosz's Child of Europe, who

Let [his] words speak not through their meanings,
But through them against whom they are used,

he can be celebrated both by the hard left and the hard right, if for no other reason than his anatagonism of the vital center. And instead instead of being called out for his political autism and his acquiescence in atrocity, he will be awarded the Nobel Prize.