As our own country confronts the difficult issues involved in conducting war, it seems appropriate to recall the closing defense argument in one of the all-time great lawyer movies, Breaker Morant.
Confession and Avoidance
Reply
Category Archives: Politics – Foreign Policy
Hitchens lays the wood to an apologist for Islamic jihad
Christopher Hitchens at his best (H/T Reuben Moore).
Re-tracing Graham Greene’s journey across Mexico
In the first of a series of upcoming blog posts that will interest most Texans, The Atlantic‘s Graeme Wood addresses many of the difficult issues facing Mexico that have been a frequent topic on this blog. Wood is re-tracing the journey across Mexico of Graham Greene of The Lawless Roads fame seventy years ago:
Seventy years ago, Graham Greene crossed the US-Mexican border into a land blighted by violence, unrest, insurgency, and religious and counter-religious mayhem. If he came back today he would find a country riven by other forces, but in some ways just as chaotic, and just as worthy of the title he gave his account of the journey, The Lawless Roads.
The news out of Mexico is all bad. When I was a kid, my parents and I went across the border at Reynosa, Matamoros, and Tijuana to take awkwardly posed photos on the backs of burros, buy cheap Kahlúa, and eat frog-legs at Garcia’s. Now the drug war has re-ignited, the rules of engagement between police and crime syndicates have changed, and the environment has become more savage. The government of Felipe Calderon has challenged the narco-traffickers and has militarized the border. Garcia’s is still open, but tourists have vanished. College kids don’t head down here from South Padre so much, which is a good indicator of the downturn, because they are college students, and that Kahlúa was awfully cheap. There are serious questions of whether Mexico is becoming that scariest of things, a military state in only partial control — i.e., a Latin American Pakistan.
Only some of the drama is on the border. Greene’s trip through Mexico crossed the country on its long axis and reported how Mexicans were dealing with the effects of the Cristero War, its violent suppression of the Catholic church, and the armed discontent that suppression sparked. Over the next cycle of posts, I will steer my rented Mexican Ford (an inglorious chariot that feels like it would crumple like a soda can, if I were to give it a bear-hug) along Greene’s path, with deviations, to see whether that lawlessness is a permanent condition.
Crossing Heaven’s Border
Over the past decade, tens of thousands defectors have crossed the dangerous waters of the Tumen and Yalu Rivers into northeast China to escape from North Korea, the world’s last closed Communist state. In the hour-long documentary Crossing Heaven’s Border, Wide Angle tells the moving stories of a few of those defectors.
Pastor Chun Ki Won is the director of Durihana, a Christian missionary organization that helps North Korean defectors make the treacherous journey along the Asian underground railroad to safety in South Korea. In the six-minute interview below, Chun describes the ordeal that the defectors endure and the complex relationship that they have with Christianity. The Wide Angle website on Crossing Heaven’s Border is here.
The Defense of Freedom
There is no question that President Obama is confronted with a delicate diplomatic situation in regard to the ongoing political unrest in Iran. But it is ironic that the main issue that is bubbling over on the streets of Tehran is the same one that John Quincy Adams addressed in the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of the illegally imported slaves that is wonderfully portrayed in the Stephen Spielberg movie, Amistad. In a magnificent performance, Anthony Hopkins plays the elderly Adams defending the slaves before the Supreme Court. Enjoy.
Brothers at War
The trailer for the new documentary — particularly appropriate for the Memorial Day weekend — is below.
Thinking about Cheney’s remarks
Many Americans were repulsed by the methods former Vice-President Dick Cheney used to consolidate and exercise war powers in the Executive Branch during the administration of George W. Bush.
Unfortunately, that controversy clouds many people’s judgment on Cheney’s many noteworthy accomplishments during his 30-year career in public service. He has been an extraordinary public servant.
My sense is that Cheney based his aggressive exercise of war powers during the Bush Administration in large part on classified information regarding the risk of more attacks on U.S. citizens after the attacks of September 11, 2001, a point that Barton Gellman notes in his seminal but generally critical book on the Cheney vice-presidency, Angler: The Cheney Vice-Presidency (Penguin 2008).
Cheney’s public comments from earlier this week appear to be consistent with my impression regarding his assessment of the risk of further attacks.
Given that, when you have 25 minutes or so, take the time to watch the video below of Irwin Redlener’s recent TED lecture on how the nature of a nuclear attack threat on the United States has changed, but our generally deficient approach to preparing for one has not.
As Dick Cheney says, fighting those who would levy such an attack on the U.S. is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business.”
Here’s hoping that the Obama Administration is up to the task.
Oral history of the Bush White House
When you have a spare hour or so, check out this "Oral History of the Bush White House" by Cullen Murphy, Todd Purdum and Philippe Sands in the current issue of Vanity Fair.
The format of the article is a timeline recreating of the last eight years with participants’ observations on many of the major moments and a number of minor ones, which often end up being as instructive as the reactions to the major ones.
The entire article is a must-read, but the following observations of Kenneth Adelman, a member of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s advisory Defense Policy Board, will give you a flavor.
The context of Adelman’s comments are a confrontation that he had with the Defense Secretary several days after Rumsfeld had dismissed the significance of the breakdown of civil order in Iraq by publicly observing that "stuff happens":
So he says, It might be best if you got off the Defense Policy Board. You’re very negative. I said, I am negative, Don. You’re absolutely right. I’m not negative about our friendship. But I think your decisions have been abysmal when it really counted.
Start out with, you know, when you stood up there and said things—“Stuff happens.” I said, That’s your entry in Bartlett’s. The only thing people will remember about you is “Stuff happens.” I mean, how could you say that? “This is what free people do.” This is not what free people do. This is what barbarians do. And I said, Do you realize what the looting did to us? It legitimized the idea that liberation comes with chaos rather than with freedom and a better life. And it demystified the potency of American forces. Plus, destroying, what, 30 percent of the infrastructure.
I said, You have 140,000 troops there, and they didn’t do jack shit. I said, There was no order to stop the looting. And he says, There was an order. I said, Well, did you give the order? He says, I didn’t give the order, but someone around here gave the order. I said, Who gave the order?
So he takes out his yellow pad of paper and he writes down—he says, I’m going to tell you. I’ll get back to you and tell you. And I said, I’d like to know who gave the order, and write down the second question on your yellow pad there. Tell me why 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq disobeyed the order. Write that down, too.
And so that was not a successful conversation.
The Big Picture does Gaza
Reflections on Mumbai
Jonathan Ehrlich is a Vancouver businessman who was in one of the hotels that was attacked last week in Mumbai. Take a few minutes to listen to his harrowing story and to read the email (under the fold below) that he sent to his family members and friends during his trip home after the attack. A good example of the fighting spirit that is needed to win this battle.
And don’t miss this spot-on analysis of the Mumbai attacks by John Stewart and John Oliver: