Marketing Our Democracy

In the
Constitution the Founding Fathers created an amazingly flexible charter, able
to accommodate the social, economic and technological changes of the next
couple centuries, yet one difficult enough to change that it has been largely
protected from the fleeting whims of society.
But something the convention delegates could not imagine, even standing
at the door to the Industrial Revolution, something that two hundred and fifty
years later has dramatically undermined our democracy is marketing.  Economic power is political power, and
history has amply demonstrated that any economically powerful group must gain
access to the political apparatus or revolution will result.  Traditionally that has meant that the
economic elite are in fact identical to the political elite, but modern
corporations and nations, particularly the democracies, have opened the door to
indirect access to and control of the political system.  Rather than actually occupying the seats of
power, wealth can simply manage those who do.

Bribing or
buying politicians, functionaries and princes has of course been around since
the birth of civilization, but it is marketing, itself little more than a
century old, that has institutionalized such corruption and carried it to
undreamed of levels in the industrial democracies.  Having money has always helped in attaining
political office, but when campaigning essentially comprised personal
appearances, speeches, debates and pamphlets, getting elected could be achieved
on a very tiny budget.  The geographic
growth of our country made electioneering more difficult and expensive,
especially for national office, but men of modest and even humble backgrounds
could still be viable candidates for state houses, Congress and even the White
House.  And party supporters could help
cover those train rides, rented halls and newspaper ads.

This began
to change dramatically with the development of radio and television and the
concomitant burgeoning of mass marketing.
Access to air time rapidly became the key to a successful campaign,
dwarfing even the character and competence of the candidate himself.  It became clear that you could market a
candidate as easily as you could market a detergent and that the approach was
essentially the same: hammer the voter over and over with a simple
message.  This has resulted in two very
pernicious developments, a continuing and staggering increase in the cost of
election and a continuing and often staggering decline in the quality of
candidates.

Foolish or
stupid candidates are certainly nothing new in American politics, but marketing
now makes it far easier for these people to get elected, which can only
encourage more intellectually unfit candidates.
A candidate can mostly avoid the personal exchange and debate that would
reveal ignorance and instead bombard the voter with slogans and images.  This situation is not helped by the
precipitous decline in American education, which exacerbates the inherent flaw
in democracy: that high school dropout with his pants around his knees has a
vote equal to yours.  Democracy rises and
falls with the educational level of the electorate, and we seem now to be
considering for office some very ignorant and consequently dangerous
individuals.

Having
stupid politicians is bad enough, but having politicians, stupid or otherwise,
who are essentially controlled by the economic powers in the society must be
ultimately fatal to the democracy.  And
this is the price of marketing.  The
incredible cost of a serious campaign, especially on the national level,
absolutely demands that the candidate be funded by others, by the corporations,
banks, unions, organized lobbies and wealthy individuals that constitute the
economic muscle in and increasingly, out of the country.  And their protests notwithstanding, these
donors all expect something in return, and the potential office-holder is
already compromised.  His protests also
notwithstanding, he has been bought.  This is all nothing less than legalized
corruption.

The two
major candidates in the 2008 Presidential election together spent a billion
dollars, most of it on air time.  The
average voter simply can not compete for political leverage in such a fiscal
environment.  All he can hope to buy with
his contribution is the election of his candidate, while the big donors are
buying influence over the candidate once he is elected, which influence
typically pulls the official away from what the voters were led to expect.  The so-called “soft” money
contributed to the party rather than an individual candidate follows the same
rules, the two major parties being concerned less with ideology than electing
their candidates.  Reelection, the
apparent goal of virtually every politician, means the collection of money does
not stop on election night, and the big money sources can thus continue to
pressure the office holder, who in turn gains an advantage as the incumbent,
since unlike the challenger he can offer action instead of promises.   With no term limits the office thus tends to
become a life-time job and the incumbent part of a very slowly changing
political oligarchy.  The American Senate
has become almost a mirror of the Roman Senate, whose members served for
life.  Indeed, during the 1980s there was
greater turnover in the Soviet Politbureau than in the American Senate.

These huge
amounts of money are also one of the reasons that two parties, the Republicans
and the Democrats, have managed to monopolize the political process and become
virtually extensions of our political structure.  Party organization has always provided an
edge in political activity, and now it provides an edge in what has become
perhaps the most important aspect of that political activity, raising
money.  Further, the constant need to
raise ever larger amounts of money has rapidly lengthened campaigning almost to
the eve of the previous election, which in turn fuels the need for money.

Campaign
finance laws have been a complete failure.
Politicians are hardly likely to be enthusiastic about limiting their
own access to funds, especially if their party is better at raising money, and
in any case limiting what an individual or even a corporation can donate
immediately runs afoul of the First Amendment.  Exclusive public funding of elections will
also have constitutional problems, and in any case would never be passed by
Congress.  Perhaps the solution may be
found in the joke that politicians should dress like NASCAR drivers, covered
with patches identifying their supporters: a candidate can receive any amount
of money from any source, even foreign governments, but it must all be
publicized on websites and in major newspapers.
Failure to do this would result in the immediate ejection of the
offender from the race.  If voters
nevertheless still elect candidates bearing suspicious financial strings, then
we deserve what we get.

With Friends Like These: America, Israel and Palestinian Statehood

For all his lofty sentiments of a year ago Barack Obama, like
every American President since Dwight Eisenhower, has caved in completely to Israel.  He may well feel for the Palestinians and he
certainly despises Benjamin Netanyahu, but like all the rest he wants to be
reelected, and the conventional wisdom says you will lose the Jewish vote if
you do not give unqualified support to Israel.
With American Jews, especially the
Reformed, losing faith in an increasingly right-wing Israel, that wisdom may no
longer be completely true, but American politicians will nevertheless continue
to pander to a state that more or less spits in our face.  A new twist is Christian Zionism, espoused by
evangelical politicians like Rick Perry, who are setting new standards in
channeling Tel Aviv.  Their support is of
course warmly welcomed by the Israeli government, even though their only
apparent interest in Jews is that they be converted or slaughtered on Judgment
Day.

Obama showed
his true colors when the US
vetoed the UN resolution condemning the Israeli separation wall, which
manifestly violates the international law that we have sworn to uphold.  The promised veto of the Palestinian bid for
UN recognized statehood, however, is perhaps a new high in American hypocrisy
regarding Palestine.  After repeatedly asserting his support for a
Palestinian state and after twenty years of failed peace negotiations he
intends to prevent a symbolic step in that direction, claiming this move will
only cause violence.  Knowing full well that
the current administration in Israel
has absolutely no intention of seriously negotiating and is in fact pumping a
steady stream of colonists into the West Bank, he
blithely claims that face-to-face negotiations are the only road to peace.  The self-serving deceit is breathtaking.

America
expresses “disappointment” at the settlements (the standard euphemism
for “colonies”), but has never taken any action whatsoever on the
issue, even when we are slapped in the face with them, as during the Vice
President’s visit to Israel.  As for the clear violations of accepted
international law, no American administration has dared even mention the topic,
and even the media, whether liberal or conservative, never refers to this
illegal behavior.  Americans of course
are highly suspicious of the United Nations and international agreements, which
are seen as dangerous to our sovereignty and restrictive of our freedom to do
whatever we please around the world.  The
irony – and demonstration of our cynicism and lack of principle -is that in the
wake of WW II we emphasized international conventions and created the UN, which
under American leadership then created the state of Israel,
an act legitimized by the supposed support of the international community.

Most of that
international community is now clearly fed up with Israel,
which continually ignores resolutions of the very body that established it and
is protected against any serious measures by the American veto in the Security
Council.  While railing against other countries
for human rights violations, the White House and Congress consistently ignore Israel’s
behavior in the Occupied Territories.  Our favorite ally has violated or continues
to violate approximately thirty articles of the Fourth Hague Convention, the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Charter, the Convention Against Torture and
the Fourth Geneva Convention, which we ourselves are violating by refusing to
take action against Israel
as we are required to do as a High Contracting Party.  Indeed, protected by the US,
Israeli has ignored or violated more UN resolutions than any other state in the
region, including Saddam Hussein’sIraq.

The most
egregious and basic infractions are those typically associated with the
totalitarian states of the twentieth century: annexation of land and planting
of settlements in territory gained through military conquest.  Yet Israel
apparently gets a pass because much of the occupied territory was once part of
ancient Israel,
obtained through conquest but also given them by their god.  Two millennia later this hardly justifies an
exemption from well-established norms of international behavior, but given the
importance of Israel in the emergence of Christianity, many Americans are
willing to accept this, despite the fact that this is a questionable precedent
for people who themselves live on land relatively recently seized from
others.

The Israelis
in fact at times seem to be emulating the acknowledged masters of international
bad behavior, the Nazis.  Granted, they are
not carrying out mass executions, but Israeli policy in the West
Bank seems strikingly like German plans for Poland,
Belarus and the
Ukraine:
creating fortified enclaves of colonists and reducing the local population to
an impoverished pool of laborers lacking any rights.  And the “freeing” of Gaza
has locked almost a half million Palestinians into what can only be called a
ghetto, albeit one of unprecedented size.
Domestically, even the most generous analysis can only describe the
twenty percent of the population who are not Jewish as economically and
socially disabled, right-wing Israelis seeing no contradiction in calling their
state both “Jewish” and “democratic.”  Foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, the
former bouncer from Moldava, has in fact publicly called for the expulsion of
all non-Jews; at least he is honest about it.

Israel
might simply be an historical oddity, a curious and ironic betrayal of
traditional Jewish liberalism were it not for the fact that virtually
unqualified American diplomatic, economic and military support has inextricably
bound our national reputation to that of this increasingly pariah state.  In return Israel
has treated us with contempt, spied on us, resold our weaponry and even
deliberately attacked us (the USS Liberty in 1967), confident the
incident would be covered up, which it was.
Our alliance with Israel
has become the kind of “passionate attachment” that George Washington
warned the country about in his Farewell Address, but given the leverage
the Zionist lobby has in our elections, that attachment is unlikely to
change.  Meanwhile, we suffer on the
international stage and the Palestinians just suffer.

Stuff from Way Back #4: Olympic Games

The
founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, summed up the ideal
of the games in a well-known statement: “The  important thing in the Olympic Games is not
to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the
triumph but the struggle.  The essential
thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.”  This is a fine sentiment, central to our
notions of amateur athletics, sportsmanship and the Olympics, but it in fact
has about as much to do with the Greeks and the original games as modern
timepieces and computer-designed equipment.

Very
few societies have valued individual athletic competition as much as the
Greeks, and the reason is easy to find: competition was at the heart of the polis
(“city-state”, plur. poleis) society.  Agōn, the need to struggle, to compete,
was far and away the strongest component of the Greek character and manifested
itself in every aspect of their life, from sporting events to drama contests to
constant political upheaval.  Even sex
was viewed as a competition, in which there was a male winner and a female
loser.

One
of the results of this irresistible urge to competition was the fragmentation
of Greece into hundreds of independent and narcissistic little political units, the
poleis, which warred endlessly with one another.  All life revolved around the highly
politicized polis community, which provided the Greek with his primary
identity.  You were an Athenian or a
Corinthian or a Theban, not a Greek, and you would willingly go to war and even
cooperate with foreign powers, like the Persians, to demonstrate the
superiority of your city.  Everything you
did reflected upon the city, which in turn meant that everything you did had a
political aspect.

Sport
was no exception to this, and the ancient Olympic games were consequently
highly politicized, probably more so than their modern successors.  Long before Berlin and Moscow and Washington, places like Epidauros and Chios and Argos had discovered the public relations value of athletic triumphs, and as
national heroes and political symbols, ancient Olympic victors fell short of
their twentieth century counterparts only in their lack of flags in which to
wrap themselves.  And as far as lionizing
our sports figures goes, how many mothers now pray to Wilma Rudolph or Greg
Louganis to cure a sick child?

The
ancient Olympians were also manifestly not the disinterested amateurs who
figured so prominently in the vision of de Coubertin, Avery Brundage and other
leaders of the modern movement.  By the
last quarter of the fifth century BC professionals were already dominating the
games, which were rapidly evolving into pure spectator sport.  These were men who devoted all their time to
athletic training, increasingly for a single event, either living off their
winnings or supported by an individual or even a city, which expected to reap
glory and gain from their victories.  In
fact, a common (and frequently derided) practice was for a city to employ
ringers, paying a successful athlete (and even granting him the jealously
guarded citizenship) to compete as one of their own and thus enhance its
“medal count.”

Even
before the emergence of these professionals, however, the Olympics fell
considerably short of de Coubertin’s dream of pure sport.  The competitors were indeed amateurs, but
hardly in it just for the thrill of competition: they expected serious material
gain from their victories.  Most contests
offered valuable prizes, and although the great festivals at Olympia, Nemea, Delphi and Isthmia provided only wreaths, those victors could expect
substantial material awards from their cities.
Since classical civilization failed to discover the key concept of
product endorsement, these awards came in the form of money, valuable goods,
tax breaks, public support and even political preferences, all of which
immediately calls to mind the “amateur” Olympians of the former East
Block countries, with their cars, apartments and special access to western
goods.

It
is also clear from the ancient evidence that Greek athletes were less inclined
to de Coubertin’s noble idea than to Coach Lombardi’s famous dictum:
“Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”  Greek society had little sympathy for life’s
losers or for those who tried their best and failed, and consequently while
winning meant honor, adulation and material reward, losing brought dishonor and
even public disgrace.  Consider the
epitaph of the athlete Agathos Daimon, buried at Olympia: “He died here, boxing in the stadium, having prayed to Zeus for
the crown or for death.  Aged 35.
Farewell.”

For
all the pressure to win, however, we know of remarkably few instances of
cheating in the thousand year history of the ancient games.  The major reason for this is undoubtedly the
fact that the Olympic games were first and foremost a religious festival, one
that honored Zeus, the chief god in the Greek pantheon.  Cheating thus meant not only the risk of
discovery and censure by a committee of officials, but also the certainty that
an angry Zeus would sooner or later be on your case.

In
practice the ancient Olympic games were clearly more like the modern variety
than all those who complain about politicization and commercialization realize.
True, the ancient games were not marketed like the modern ones, but that is
only because the classical world did not have a mass market economy.  If they had, I am convinced Greek businessmen
would have vied for the right to sell the official tunic or kylix or whatever
of the Olympics and would very likely have surpassed us in bad taste.

In
spirit, however, the Greek Olympics were equally clearly different from ours,
celebrating victory and gain rather than simple participation and effort.  They also lacked the universalism of the
modern games, being limited to able-bodied males (the Greeks would find our
Special Olympics an obscene joke) and until the Romans took over, Greeks.  The Greek games may have involved less hype
and hypocrisy, but the internationalism of the modern Olympics takes them a
step towards something greater than those quadrennial competitions held in Elis
some two millennia ago.

Were the Leftists Right? The Crisis of Capitalism

Presidential candidate Ron Paul recently stated that we
should eliminate, as a costly waste, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a
completely inane pronouncement that underscores the extremes to which the
libertarian and small government types are willing to go.  Libertarian ideas certainly resonate with
those of us who oppose the nanny state and government attempts to determine
citizen behavior, but there is a limit, especially regarding the economy.  Back in the eighties I met the Libertarian
presidential  candidate and suggested
that without government regulation the Seven Sisters (big oil) would control
the country within 48 hours.  His reply
was that the consumers would refuse to buy their product until they acted
reasonably, which struck me as naive to point of stupidity.  How do consumers go without oil or power or
food?

And now Republicans and Tea
Party types are adopting these extremist views, suggesting, it seems, that the
only legitimate functions of the federal government are fighting wars, keeping
close watch on the citizenry and prohibiting recreational drugs.  These people appear to inhabit a world where
poverty is always the result of personal failure and the market forces really
do work to solve all problems, where only good Christians are truly virtuous
and science is always suspect.  This is a
dream America,
one that has never existed, even in those halcyon days of the nineteenth
century when a (white Christian) man was a man and businessmen were free to
build America
unencumbered by silly government regulations.

With 312
million people and the largest economy on an increasingly interconnected planet
the United States
is a very complicated place, a social and economic structure of a complexity
that is seemingly beyond the intellectual capabilities of many on the
right.  This is no longer a nation of
small farmers and a predominantly white Protestant citizenry, and we have long
since moved beyond the village economy where the forces of supply and demand
operated more or less freely.  Yes, the
free marketplace has traditionally regulated itself, but in the long run
and with complete disregard for the welfare of the humans involved.  American growth in the nineteenth century was
spectacular, but it was paid for with the emergence of an economically
marginalized class of industrial workers and an endless cycle of boom and
bust.  And now the evolution of the
financial markets in the twenty-first century is threatening capitalism’s
ability to right itself even in the long run.

Unregulated
capitalism, whatever its touted dynamism, has historically produced a number of
effects deleterious to society as a whole.
First, and most obvious from American history since the Industrial
Revolution, there is the inevitable emergence of monopolistic practices, which
skew the marketplace and deprive the consumers of the basic benefits of
competition: lower prices and innovation.
This development is most dramatically displayed by the Robber Barons of
the nineteenth century, but despite more than a century of anti-trust
legislation the problem remains, particularly in the energy, banking and
information industries.

Second, and
plain to see around the planet, untrammeled capitalism has no regard for the
environment, no matter what industry public relations say.  There are of course those who feel that
economic growth justifies a little smog and the odd patch of scarred terrain,
but now in the twenty-first century the potential magnitude of such pollution
undercuts the growth excuse.  It is no
longer just a question of unsightly landscapes or a few people poisoned by
toxins in the earth or water; rather it is oil spills that injure the lives of
millions and destroy huge habitats and air pollution so serious that we are
actually affecting the climate and threatening a global catastrophe.

Finally, the
market place is dumb.  Even if supply
actually freely followed demand, which is unlikely on the large scale, the
market would be responding to the short-term desires of the consumer and the
typically short-term profit motives of the producer.  Such is generally conducive to neither the
most efficient use of resources nor the best long-term interests of the society.  An auto company would, for example, have
absolutely no reason to market a more efficient engine if consumers were
content with the current price of fuel, even if it was perfectly clear that
fuel was disappearing.  The market spurs
innovation for immediate profit not to solve future problems or for the
betterment of society.  It can in fact
injure the interests of society: if more money can be made by growing sugar
cane for ethanol instead of grain for food, concerns about hunger are not
likely to prevent the switch.  To put it
another way: the proper purpose of business is to make money, not to
demonstrate any regard for humanity.

The history
of deregulation in America
during the last 30 years would appear to underscore these concerns.  Deregulating the airlines has in fact
generated some lower prices, but has also sent the industry into such chaos
that airline companies come and go with depressing regularity and it is
increasingly unclear who actually owns the plane you are flying on.  Deregulating the savings and loan industry of
course led to a spectacular collapse and cost the taxpayers almost $90 billion.  When allowed to, states that chose to opt out
of regulating their power companies have seen the price of electricity rise and
service and reliability drop.  Check your
cable bill for the impact of “free competition” in that market.  The free market and human greed are a toxic
mix, less likely to create jobs, as the free marketeers  claim, and more likely to create misery.

All this,
however, pales before the threat of a non-regulated financial sector in the
twenty-first century, as the recent economic collapse makes very clear.  A relative handful of greedy men brought the
global economy to the brink and thereby threatened the lives of virtually
everyone on the planet.  Hedge funds and
private equity firms did not even exist when the banking industry was brought
under control in the 1930s, and their arcane workings have helped shield them
from government attention.  As late as
1985, when serious deregulation began, profits made by socially useless
financial institutions were at most 16% of the profits of all American
companies; they now constitute more than 40%.
These are not “job-creators,” to use the new Republican term
for the wealthy; they create absolutely nothing, essentially using the economy
as a giant casino.  For all that they
treated their workers like chattel, the Robber Barons actually produced goods
and services and helped build the country and economy.  The new lords of Wall Street do nothing but
injure the economy, all the while enriching themselves to a degree that would
impress even the Morgans and Rockefellers.

It should
now be perfectly clear to all but the densest conservatives that these masters
of financial manipulation and legerdemain with their arcane and opaque
instruments are far more serious a threat to our country than any group of
traditional terrorists.  Anybody can blow
up a building; blowing up a national economy, now that’s something.  Yet even in the wake of the collapse of 2008 nothing
effective has been done to bring these clever greedy people under control, and America’s
new flirtation with the extreme right and our fervent embrace of stupidity
fairly guarantees that nothing will be done.

The
realization that serious money can be made from economic downturns leads
inevitably – as it has – to the emergence of a coterie of
“businessmen” who have zero interest in the state of the economy,
because money can be made regardless of that state.  This is incredibly novel since traditional
industrialists and businessmen always preferred a prospering economy; you made
more money by selling more stuff and expanding your business.  If, on the other hand, you will make huge
profits through bond manipulation if the Greek economy completely tanks, you
will obviously hope for such an Hellenic bankruptcy, regardless of the economic
devastation that could result.  You in
fact will help bring it about: as the markets learn serious investors are
betting on Greek insolvency, Greek credit ratings will suffer further and
reluctance to extend more bailout money will grow.

But why stop
at hurting single countries when it is actually possible to hurt everyone on
earth?  The hedgers have discovered there
are huge profits to be made in playing with commodities on a global scale, and
one of those commodities is food.  This
is unbelievably pernicious.  A recent UN
study reveals that while speculation in food stocks has nothing to do with
actually producing and delivering goods, it does indeed impact the real world
by creating prices that have nothing at all to do with supply and demand.  And those artificial prices are inevitably
higher than real market forces would determine.
In a one year period running from 2010 to 2011 world food costs rose
39%, two critical commodities, grain and cooking oil/fats, rising by some 70%,
and virtually all this increase was due to trading in agricultural securities
rather than shortages.  There is plenty
of food in the world, yet millions are starving.  Some miniscule part of the problem is due to
inefficient distribution, but for the most part it is because prices are too
high, all because people who have nothing whatsoever to do with the food
industry are making billions manipulating it.

Confronted
with this global outrage, Alan Knuckman, one of the new stars of commodity
investment, replied: “The age of cheap food is over,” seemingly
oblivious to what that bald statement means to most of the people around the
globe.  Or perhaps he does: he added
“Most Americans eat too much, anyway.”  Well, there are in fact some Americans who do
not get enough to eat, but more important, there are several billion poor souls
around the world who must spend an average of three quarters of their income on
food.  For them the higher prices generated
by Knuckman and friends are not an inconvenience but a matter of life and
death.  And meanwhile this loathsome
creature is making millions, essentially by making life more miserable for
humanity.

These people
are hurting humanity in a way that sundry terrorists can only dream of, and
they have it in their power to bring the global economy to collapse.  Yet little is being done to protect us from
these predators, who make BP and Exxon Mobil look like socially responsible
companies.  The European Union and United
States are aware of the threat but finding
it difficult to produce regulations that are effective, especially since the
financial industry is globally interconnected and to a degree can dodge the
restrictions of any single country.  The US
has prohibited banks from engaging in dangerous speculation, but the
speculators simply left the banks for other venues.  A measure of the lack of progress: in the US
the “shadow banks,” as the hedge funds and private equity
institutions are known, hold $16 trillion in debt, while traditional commercial
banks hold only $13 trillion.  This is a
financial weapon of mass destruction just waiting to go off.

And while we
all wait helplessly for the next crisis, a novel question is now being debated,
at least in Europe:
Were the leftists right about capitalism after all?  With the economic failure of the Soviet
Union and the emergence of capitalist enterprise in China
collectivism as an economic system seemed to be finally and utterly discredited
and the free market economy triumphant, but now it seems that some of the
traditional cracks in the capitalist edifice are becoming fissures that could
bring the whole structure down.
Ironically, however, collapse of the system will not arise from oppression
of the working class by industrial magnates, as predicted, but from something
that Marx and Lenin could hardly have foreseen.
It will not be brigades of angry workers in the streets but clever young
men surrounded by computer screens in dark rooms.

 

9/11: Who Won?

A decade
after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 there have been no subsequent successful
operations in the US,
al-Qaida in Afghanistan-Pakistan has been decimated and the evil Grecian
Formula mastermind has been eliminated.
It would appear that we have won.
I wonder.

While
spectacular and horrific, in the cold and callous great scheme of things the
destruction wrought ten years ago was hardly a material blow to our country and
certainly did not threaten national security.
Terrorism is, literally, a bloody nuisance, and even a terrorist with a
nuclear weapon is a far less serious threat to America
than running trillion dollar deficits or tolerating an unregulated financial
sector.  The real damage of 9/11 was to
the American psyche, an unexpected blow to our self-confidence that produced a
level of national fear and anger not seen since Pearl Harbor.  And unlike the Norwegians, we allowed that
emotion, especially the fear, to undermine our principles, and in the end we
defeated ourselves.

The
immediate retaliation against Afghanistan
was certainly justified, but the decision to somehow guarantee our security by creating
a united and democratic Afghanistan,
a plainly impossible task, has been a catastrophe, contributing immensely to
our current fiscal woes.  Popular fear
and Congressional cowardice in the face of that fear then allowed the Executive
branch to launch an utterly unjustified and costly invasion of Iraq
that has brought us absolutely no benefit and has enhanced the position of Iran.  A fearful citizenry is always more inclined
to unquestioning acceptance of policy, and it is a rare government that does
not take advantage of this fact.

The result
of this emotional rush to judgment and absence of reasoned deliberation was two
very expensive wars (6000 American lives and $3 trillion – so far)  and the complete and rapid evaporation of the global
goodwill that followed upon that September day.
Our apparent carelessness with Arab lives and property, the frequent and
readily obvious employment of torture and humiliation and that still festering
wound to American principles, Guantanamo,
all conspired to tarnish our image around the world and eliminate what little
credibility we had in the Middle East after 30 years of
unqualified and self-destructive support of Israel.  Hellfire missiles and our hesitant
involvement in the Arab Spring certainly make our trumpeting of freedom and
democracy ring a bit hollow.

What we have
done to ourselves is the most serious outcome of 9/11.  When frightened, humans are easily convinced
to surrender freedoms in exchange for security or even the appearance of
security.  So cowed were we that a
Presidential press secretary could publicly state that “Americans need to
watch what they say,” and nary an eyebrow was raised (I think he was
talking about me).  And with all the independence
and resolve of a flock of sheep Congress passed the Patriot Act, the greatest
assault on our civil liberties since the McCarthy era.  They then erected perhaps the most towering
edifice of bureaucratic silliness ever, the Department of Homeland Security,
whose very name evokes images of authoritarian societies.

9/11 was of
course the mother lode for the military, whose budget nearly doubled in the
ensuing decade, though it is a bit unclear against whom we will be using those
attack submarines and advanced aircraft.
Our inclination to solve international problems with violence rather
than diplomacy, already robust, received a shot of steroids, and now even the
CIA, nominally an intelligence agency, has access to and the freedom to use
sophisticated military hardware like drones and missiles.  We now find ourselves in a strange world
where a missile that kills twenty Pakistani civilians is labeled a
“precision weapon,” while a home-made car bomb in Times Square is a
“weapon of mass destruction,” as if the identity of the shooter
determined the nature of the munition.

Though we
did much to shape it and as High Signatories are bound to defend it, our regard
for international law has become extremely ragged, especially in defense of Israel.  For the first time in our history we attacked
a country with absolutely no affirmable cause and now regularly and openly
violate the sovereignty of other nations, particularly Pakistan,
something our government at least tried to keep secret during the Vietnam war.  In the name of security, and with no little
arrogance, we routinely treat other nations in ways that would bring howls of
anger and indignation were we on the receiving end.  We regularly insist that nations heed the
resolutions of the UN Security Council, but promptly ignore them if they are
contrary to our interests; consider our record of vetoes of resolutions
critical of Israel.

Our very
Constitution is being threatened by this government-encouraged mania of fear
and the attendant xenophobia.  Apart from
serious issues concerning the policing powers allowed by the Patriot Act there
is also a threatening growth in the power and autonomy of some federal
entities, most notably the CIA.  Whether
or not death from above is effective (many innocents are killed), the notion
that anonymous individuals in the military and CIA have the authority to judge
who is a terrorist and execute him is a bit disturbing.  And it is now our intention to assassinate an
American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, if he can be found.  Perhaps this is the only way to deal with
this loathsome creature, but we nevertheless thereby place ourselves on a
frightening slippery slope of expediency over principle.

The 9/11
terrorists certainly demonstrated that fear can profoundly affect a society: a
frightened populace is inevitably more willing, even enthusiastic, to grant
government more authority, which will be eagerly accepted by any government,
whatever its nature.  All political entities seek to defend and increase their
powers, and the American Presidency is no exception, its vaguely defined
Constitutional powers constantly expanded and supplemented, especially since
World War II. And once granted,

power will not be easily relinquished; for all its promises the new
administration has kept intact the emergency arrangements of the last.  Power is power, whatever your ideological
stripe.

America
is still here, but it is not quite the same.
The terrorists destroyed two buildings and thousands of lives, but it is
we who changed our country, and not for the better.

Stuff from Way Back #3: Row, Row, Row Your Boat

Sardines in the tin

Many people have acquired much of their knowledge of history
from Hollywood, obviously a dubious
source.  This is especially true
regarding antiquity, an area of history generally poorly known and understood,
even by many historians, and apart from the Bible (another dubious source) the
movies have been the major font of information about the ancient world for
many.  Unfortunately, more often than not
that information is wrong.

Perhaps the
most pervasive historical myth promulgated by tinsel town is that of the galley
slave, Charlton Heston chained at his oar, rowing to the beat of a drum and the
crack of a whip in a Roman galley.  This
made for great cinema in
Ben Hur, but it is in fact complete nonsense.  Galley slaves were a feature of the Italian
and Turkish navies of the Renaissance era, but by then Mediterranean warship
architecture had changed greatly from antiquity and facilitated the use of
slaves.  The navies of Persia,
Greece, Rome and Carthage were rowed by free
men, who were paid for their efforts.

The primary
warship of the Greeks before the death of Alexander was the trireme, the
fastest significant human-powered vessel ever produced.  The trireme was tiny, more a racing scull
than a ship: 120 to 135 feet in length, 10 to 13 feet wide amidships (18 with
the outrigger) and a draught of only 3 to 4 feet.  Into this space were packed a crew of perhaps
a dozen sailors and 170 rowers, arranged in three banks in the hull.  With an underwater ram protruding from the
bows the trireme itself was the weapon, though those with less naval skill, like the Macedonians and the Romans, could use closing and boarding tactics instead of ramming. Cheap to build, the
vessel was fragile, unseaworthy, lacking in cargo space and expensive to
maintain. It was a precision instrument,
sacrificing everything for speed.

Such a
vessel can not be rowed by untrained slaves.
In the 1980s the Greeks and British built the first trireme since the Roman
Empire, the Olympias, and found that a crew of college
students (including some with sculling experience) needed to be trained for
weeks just to be able to row slowly in a straight line. With so many rowers in such a small space
coordination must be absolutely perfect or the oars, which come in three sizes
and enter the water at different angles, will be instantly fouled. To perform any maneuvers – turning sharply,
changing speeds, backing water – the crew must be very well trained, and that
training could clearly mean the difference between life and death in a
battle. And while being chained to the
ship is a great motivation to keep the ship afloat, the history of warfare has
constantly demonstrated that positive inducements are far better motivators
than fear.

Incidentally,
forget the guy pounding time with a drum.
That sort of low frequency sound is drowned out by the noise of the
oars, and the Olympias used whistles, which is what the sources
mention. In fact, forget everything
about the Ben Hur fleet. The
standard warship of the Roman Republic,
the quinquerime, was heavier, slightly broader and stood higher out of the
water, but this was still a far cry from the roomy vessel served by Judah
ben Hur. 300 rowers in three banks (some
oars had two men) filled the hull of the quinquereme, leaving room for a central
gangway but certainly none for some overseer to crack a whip. Further, during the Empire the standard vessels
were much smaller than a quinquereme, the major occupation of the imperial
fleet being pirate chasing.

Finally,
these are delicate vessels, certainly the smaller trireme. So light is the ship that a few men walking
about the deck could upset the trim enough that oars would miss the water or
strike too deeply, leading to immediate fouling. In fact, the Athenians manned the decks of
their triremes with javelineers who could throw from a seated position. The quinquereme provided a much more stable
platform for marines and even mounted ballistae (giant crossbows), but the
notion of a sea-borne catapult, as in Ben Hur, is still a stretch. Try hitting anything with a catapult mounted
on a lifeboat.

Rome and America: A Cautionary Tale

Until recently comparisons between the United
States and ancient Rome,
at least outside the classroom, have been mostly limited to conservative
Christians railing that the moral decay that destroyed Rome
will do the same to us.  No serious
historian of course believes that Roman power collapsed because of excessive
partying or a breakdown in family values, but is there any substance to the
increasingly frequent assertion that the Roman Empire
and America in
the post-Soviet world share an identity?
Does the expanding Pax Americana, enforced across the globe by military
might, recapitulate the Pax Romana of the Mediterranean two millennia ago?  Is the United
States truly the Rome
of the twenty-first century?

Well, yes
and no.  There are in fact very
compelling similarities between the two states, but there are also profound
differences, and to a great degree it depends upon precisely what is being
compared.  The answer is also complicated
by the fact that the history of post-regal Rome
falls into two very distinct parts: the Republic (c. 507-31 BC) and the Empire
(31 BC – fifth century AD).  Not only
does Rome’s political structure
change dramatically across this divide, from a constitutional oligarchy to a
frequently hereditary military dictatorship, but the nature of and motivations
behind her imperialism also evolve.  In
many ways there were actually two Roman Empires.

Most
Americans know Rome of the
Principate (the name given the Empire up to AD 235), the Rome
of emperors, Christians, Ben Hur and the Gladiator, but America
owes far more to the Republic, wherein lie the roots of our Constitution.  As educated gentlemen of the eighteenth
century, the Founding Fathers were steeped in classical history, and their
knowledge of the Roman Republic
and the Athenian democracy, together with their suspicion of the masses, led
them to the former as the better model for stable democratic government.  The Senate-centered government of the
Republic had after all functioned well for four centuries, accommodating
economic and social changes and taking Rome from a small power in central Italy
to mistress of the Mediterranean, while the fifth century democracy of Athens
had devolved into demagoguery and civil strife and brought about the collapse
of Athenian power in less than a century.
To be sure, our debt to the political traditions of England
is immense, but the Roman Republic
was never far from the minds of the framers of the Constitution.  Take a stroll through the Senate chamber in Washington:
on either side of the podium hangs a depiction of the fasces, the bundle
of rods and axes that symbolized Roman political authority (which must have
been at least a slight embarrassment when we were fighting fascistItaly).

The
constitution of the Roman Republic
was technically democratic, with ultimate power resting in two citizen
assemblies, but in practice the state was completely dominated by the Senate,
which for a variety of reasons was a more or less exclusive club of wealthy
landowners.  The Roman
Republic was governed by an open
but very slowly changing oligarchy of wealth, and it is difficult not to
characterize the government of the United States
in the same fashion.  The nature of that
wealth is of course very different, since unlike Rome we possess a
consumer-oriented capitalist economy, and a member of the American governing
class need not actually be a wealthy individual, though most are.  But given the immense cost of election to
federal office and the consequent influence of powerful economic interests,
wealth dominates our political system as surely as it did that of the Republic,
albeit less directly.

The Roman
character, at least in its idealized form, also influenced many of the Founding
Fathers, most notably Jefferson, who saw Cincinnatus as
the model citizen, the small freeholder who leaves his plow to defend his
country and then returns to his farm, rejecting any reward or glory, the
Minuteman of ancient Italy.  An almost overwhelming sense of duty or obligation,
forged through centuries of warfare, was the strongest element in the Roman
character, and completely unlike the Greeks, the Romans were the ultimate team
players, ready to sacrifice everything for the group.  The ruling elite, the Senatorial class, of
course competed for political power and advantage, but the real prize was dignitas,
a kind of prestige associated with serving the group, that is, Rome.  Dignitas was a real though non-legal
form of power, enhancing an individual’s political authority and influence in
the Senate and assemblies, but it was also an end in itself, the ultimate goal
of any Roman statesman until the decline of the Republic.

The citizen
armies of America recapitulate those of the Republic, and to some extent the
small farmers colonizing the expanding westward frontier and fighting the
native inhabitants reflect the spirit of Cincinnatus and the yeomanry that
formed the backbone of the Roman army into the second century BC.  But despite the vast tracts of land the
continent offered, the Cincinnatus model was ultimately incompatible with a
country on the threshold of industrial revolution, and America’s fighting
forces, even in periods of mass conscription, would increasingly be drawn from
the landless and the poor, as indeed were Rome’s during the late Republic and
Principate.  Further, while educated
colonials admired the patriotism and self-sacrifice of those “noble Romans”
they read about in Plutarch, their society placed far more emphasis on the
individual, a regard that the frontier experience apparently only
deepened.  Average Americans of the
twenty-first century may well be as inclined to the group as their Roman
counterparts, but unlike them we proclaim individualism a virtue and pay at
least lip service to the individual.

For all the
differences in the cultural and economic environment, however, the rise to
prominence of Rome and the United
States display striking similarities, at
least on the surface.  The Republic was
born out of the violent overthrow of the monarchy, and the early history of Rome
was filled with conflict, as the tiny city-state on the Tiber
River fought first for her life and
then for domination of the Italian peninsula, which by the middle of the third
century BC was controlled through a system of dependent alliances.  The allies were nominally independent states,
but Romanization of the peninsula and the grudging extension of the citizenship
(the allies finally revolted to get it) had created an essentially Roman Italy
by end of the first century BC.  Drawing
from the vast pool of Italian manpower, in the years from 264-188 BC the Romans
took on and defeated every major Mediterranean power, becoming the effective
mistress of the Mediterranean world.  At
this time Rome actually directly
ruled relatively little territory outside Italy
and Sicily, since the Senate
preferred to control areas through compliant client states rather than shoulder
the financial and military burden of immediate provincial rule.  The empire at this stage was hegemonic rather
than territorial, but in the sense that there was no longer any state that
could conceivably challenge her Rome
had become the sole superpower of the Middle
Sea.

During this
crucial period of expansion the major motive behind Rome’s
foreign policy was the question of Italian security, but by the second century
the desire for personal wealth and power had begun to seriously infect
Senatorial decision-making, resulting in a governing class increasingly
inclined towards furthering its own interests rather than those of the state.  This growing corruption of the Senatorial
class led to the Revolution, the century-long collapse of the Republic that
began in 133 BC when a Senate now interested chiefly in defending its power and
prerogatives resisted needed reform and soon employed state-sanctioned violence
to further its ends.  Political activity
became more and more extreme, foreign policy became little more than a
reflection of domestic politics, and ultimately the army was drawn into the
fray, leading to civil war and the rise of military dictators like Caesar and
Augustus, the first emperor.  Because of
the absence of any serious external threats, the empire and Roman power
survived this turmoil, but constitutional government did not.

Much of
this history has a hauntingly familiar ring to the American ear.  Our republic was born in the violent
rejection of a king, and constant low intensity conflict accompanied our
occupation of North America.  It is true of course that our conquest of
this continent was relatively peaceful when contrasted with the Roman capture
of Italy, and
until the emergence of nuclear weapons we did not, as did the Romans, face foes
who could seriously threaten our national existence.  Yet, for all the differences, especially in
intensity, violence is a shared theme in the forging and growth of both
nations, and an inclination to violence as a legitimate problem solving
mechanism seems embedded in our national character.  We may not permit gladiatorial contests or
proclaim war a good and ennobling activity, but in many areas of American
culture, from our tastes in entertainment to our love affair with guns, there
is almost a celebration of violence.
With their bloody spectacles and unabashed acceptance of martial glory
the Romans were perhaps just a bit more honest about it.

As they
expanded their authority over Italy
and out into the Mediterranean, the Romans developed the
notion that it was in fact their destiny to rule, that their national gods had
granted them this dominion in the days of the founder-hero Aeneas, centuries
before Rome even existed.  In similar fashion the American tide of
expansion, washing rapidly westward over Mexicans and Indians, was quickly seen
as a “manifest destiny,” granted us by our own national god.  In both instances success was seen as ample
evidence of the favor of heaven, and that material success and perceived divine
favor amplified an arrogance and sense of superiority already present in both
societies, though in the case of the Romans the racial element important to
white Protestant America was missing.  Less
pernicious perhaps than the race-connected attitude of Americans, Roman
arrogance was more equal opportunity, and contempt for other peoples was
essentially based on their not being Roman and thus the products of soft (e.g.,
Greeks) or barbarous (e.g., Gauls) societies.
During the Principate, when the imperial focus was more on the barbarian
lands of central and western Europe and Stoic ideas were affecting the ruling
elite, some idea of a civilizing mission emerged, but it never reached the
intensity of American paternalism towards the Indian tribes (and now the rest
of the planet) and was never government policy.

With the end
of the Revolution and the establishment of the autocracy or Principate the
nature of Roman imperialism changed.
While there would be the odd burst of aggressiveness, as under Trajan (AD
98-117), imperial policy became essentially defensive, guarding the frontiers
established under Augustus (27 BC – AD 14) and gradually transforming Rome’s
clients/allies into provinces directly ruled from Rome.  Until the empire began to come apart during
the Anarchy (AD 235-285) this policy was generally rational and based on
strategic interests, though domestic concerns sometimes intruded: Claudius’ (AD
41-54) invasion of Britain
in AD 43, for example, was mainly motivated by his need for a military
reputation.  And of course, since the
empire was governed by a generally hereditary autocracy, imperial affairs
occasionally suffered from interference by an incompetent (e.g., Commodus [AD 180-192])
or unbalanced (e.g., Caligula [AD 37-41]) head of state.  Further, though incredibly disciplined and
loyal to the state, at least until the Anarchy, the Roman military was not
always inclined to passively accept whatever loser might gain the imperial
purple, and on two occasions prior to the Anarchy – under Nero (AD 54-68) in AD
68 and again under Commodus in AD 193 – the army revolted and fought brief
civil wars, after which the troops returned to their camps and allegiance to
the state.  Actually, given the potential
political power of the legions, which were the ultimate basis of the autocracy,
it is amazing how quiet the army was over the two and a half centuries of
Principate.

Rome
could in fact occasionally indulge in bad government and even civil war without
serious risk of losing the empire because she was something of a superpower in
the Mediterranean-European world.  During
the Principate Rome faced only two real threats on her frontiers: the Germanic
barbarians beyond the Rhine-Danube frontier and the Parthian Empire (and its
successor after AD 226, the Sassanid Persian Empire), centered in Iraq.  Neither could come even close to challenging
Roman power, and both were no more than a nuisance, easily repulsed when they
took advantage of a lunatic emperor or a civil war to violate the imperial frontiers.  Further securing the empire was the fact that
until the Anarchy Rome did not overly need to concern itself with the revolt of
subject peoples.  With the exception of Judea
once Roman rule was established, it was generally accepted within a generation
or so, as the provincials realized the value of the Roman peace and other
benefits of the empire.  The Jews were
the exception because their monotheism and divine promise of a national state
prevented them from being easily assimilated into the Greco-Roman, polytheist
culture of the empire, as were the other provincials.

The Roman government did not consciously export its
culture, but Latin and Greco-Roman ideas nevertheless spread among the urban
populations of the empire, and the townsfolk at least came to think of
themselves as Romans, regardless of their ethnic backgrounds.  And as Roman culture and Romans streamed out
into the provinces, provincial influences and provincials flowed back to Rome.  The emperors Trajan and Hadrian (AD 117-138),
for example, were ultimately Iberian in their bloodlines, the thoroughly
Romanized products of the Spanish provinces.
In a very real sense the Roman Empire was a
multicultural melting pot, and in AD 212 the emperor Caracalla granted the
Roman citizenship to virtually every free male in the empire.  He did it for economic reasons and the
citizenship was by then politically meaningless, but the fact remains that a
Briton whose ancestors had painted themselves blue and killed invading legionaries
now possessed the same legal status as an Italian who could trace his roots
back to the birth of the Republic.  This
cosmopolitanism was one of the greatest triumphs of theRoman Empire.

It is tempting to compare the post-Soviet United
States to Rome
of the Principate.  Both enjoy the status
of a superpower, hassled but not seriously militarily challenged by their
neighbors (at least in the conventional sense – nuclear weapons have changed
the rules); one might even compare the Parthian Empire to Russia and China and
the lower intensity threat of the barbarian tribes to terrorists.  As Latin and Roman culture seeped out into
the empire, so also is English and American culture spreading about the globe,
and as provincials gradually appreciated the benefits of the Pax Romana,
so, we confidently expect, will the rest of humanity appreciate those of the Pax
Americana.  And like Rome,
America is so powerful,
possesses such a loyal military and has such an excellent bureaucratic
structure that it can periodically suffer an incompetent head of state without
losing the ball game.

Despite these points of contact, however,
twenty-first century America
is more aptly compared to Rome of
the Republic, especially its last century and a half of existence.  The empire was then primarily hegemonic,
relying, as do we, on clients and allies as the preferred mechanism for
exerting influence.  Further, for all
that American Presidents, especially a recent one, might occasionally remind us
of less attractive Roman emperors, the constitutional government of the
Republic is far more akin to our own than is the military based dictatorship of
the Principate.  The Senate-centered
oligarchy of wealth that dominated the Republic in fact has a great deal in
common with our own national political oligarchy, whose members are utterly
dependent upon and typically beholden to those interests that possess the
financial resources necessary to get elected.
Even more to the point, as Roman foreign policy became little more than
an extension of domestic affairs during the Revolution, so also is American
foreign policy, especially with the end of the Cold War and most especially in
the case of Israel, increasingly a reflection of domestic politics and personal
interests rather than of strategic concerns and the national interest.

The growing political ambition and self-centered
attitude of the Roman ruling elite led in the first century BC to civil war and
the emergence of autocratic government, but while our own governing class is no
less venal and preoccupied with retaining power, our republic seems unlikely to
collapse in the near future.  Unlike the
Romans we have a written constitution that is very difficult to circumvent in
any serious ways, and our military has traditionally held a strong aversion to
political involvement, at least as soldiers, if not as lobbyists.  The Constitution also provides for a
government of three independent branches, each in theory independent and able
to check the others from any abuse of power, while the Roman Senate had a four
hundred year tradition of completely dominating every aspect of the national
government, which fact led to an almost overnight collapse of political
stability when that authority was challenged during the Revolution.  Finally, the American people have the
constitutionally guaranteed power to change the entire governing elite ever few
years, whereas our Roman counterparts could not touch their Senate, whose
members held their positions for life.

On the other hand, because of the power of
incumbency and the passivity, growing ignorance and lack of interest of many
Americans, our elected national leaders (excepting the President and Vice
President) enjoy potentially unlimited terms of office and constitute almost as
much a permanent political oligarchy as did the Roman Senatorial class.  And that oligarchy, the American Congress,
has recently demonstrated a disturbing willingness to take measures of dubious
constitutionality and grant very broad war making authority to a single
individual, the President.  Americans
citizens, moreover, have demonstrated an equally disturbing willingness and
quickness to surrender civil liberties in the face of vaguely defined threats
and in return for security measures of questionable value and
effectiveness.  Every politician worth
his salt, be it Gaius Julius Caesar or George W. Bush, recognizes the domestic
political capital that can be squeezed from national security issues, even if,
as in the case of the Gauls and now Iraq, the threats need to some degree be
manufactured.  The American President may
not, like Caesar, be seeking a loyal military following, but he certainly knows
as well as the Roman dictator that war is a wonderful distraction from domestic
ills and that cheap gasoline, like cheap grain in the dying Republic, will keep
and buy political support.

Twenty-first century America
is certainly not ancient Rome, even
Rome of the Republic: for all the
imperial points of contact the economic, political and technological
differences are simply too great.  Yet,
while the ultimate fate of the Roman Empire should not
overly concern us, being the result of internal conditions that are utterly
alien to this society  – at least for the
foreseeable future – the fate of the Republic may well be instructive.  The Senatorial government functioned in many
ways similar to ours, and after a long run of success an increasingly
self-interested governing elite, more concerned with its own prerogatives than
the national interest, resisted needed reform and found itself less and less
able to deal with the country’s problems or even to maintain political and
social stability.  And in the end that
instability called forth the perhaps inevitable recourse to autocratic
government, and Roman liberty was traded away for security and the trappings of
imperial glory.  At least the Romans got
that: because of economic problems Americans have little security and imperial
glory went out with theBritish Empire.

Stuff from Way Back #2: P. Claudius Pulcher and the Chickens

In 264 BC the Romans occupied the strategic city of Messanaon Sicily,
triggering the First Punic War, the longest of their titanic struggles with Carthage.  This was Rome’s first venture outside the recently conquered Italian
peninsula, and it presented her with a prospect certainly daunting to a society
that lacked any naval tradition whatsoever: she now confronted the owner of the
largest and most skilled navy in the westernMediterranean.

By 261 BC the Senate realized it could not finally settle
affairs in Sicily without challenging Carthaginian control of the
sea.  Drawing upon Italian timber
resources and the shipbuilding skills of the Greek cities in the southern
peninsula, the Romans constructed within a year a fleet of perhaps 160
warships, most of them the new heavier quinqueremes.  Crews were meanwhile trained, and new
boarding tactics and equipment, more suitable to the less experienced Italian
sailors, were developed.  The Roman plan
was to negate the Carthaginian edge in maneuvering and ramming by using their
grappling and boarding techniques to turn the engagements into “land”
battles.

The plan worked.
In the first major naval encounter, the battle of Mylae in 260 BC, C.
Duilius handily defeated a Punic fleet of over a hundred, capturing or sinking
almost half the enemy ships.  In fact,
during the next five years the Romans won four more victories at sea, only to
suffer major losses to storms in 255 BC and 253 BC.  Boarding techniques could not compensate for
lack of skill when confronting the weather.

This was the situation when P. Claudius Pulcher, one of
the two consuls for 249 BC, took command of the Roman fleet blockading the fortress
of Lilybaeum on the west coast of the island.
Claudius immediately decided to improve the blockade by attempting to
surprise and destroy the smaller Carthaginian squadron stationed a short
distance to the north at Drepana.  The
consul was a headstrong man, perhaps thinking of the political rewards to be
gained from a decisive naval victory, but the plan made sense, particularly in
light of the reinforcements already sailing to join the fleet at Drepana.

But Claudius’ staff apparently appreciated the limits of
his naval skill, and unable to talk him out of the operation they informed him
at the last minute that the omens were negative.  The sacred chickens with the fleet would not
eat, a bad sign.  Claudius promptly
responded by having them thrown overboard, remarking “If they will not
eat, let them drink.”  He then
sailed north to Drepana, where he was soundly defeated by the Punic admiral
Adherbal, losing almost a hundred of his 120 vessels inRome’s single serious naval defeat of the war.

It is just possible that the story of the chickens is
apocryphal, invented later to account for Claudius’ disaster by attributing it
to an angry heaven.  But then again it
may well be true, in which case the message to all commanders is clear: ignore
the sacred chickens at your risk.

The Terrorist Nuisance

Sending more troops to Afghanistan
was madness.  Punishing the Taliban was
righteous, but in a fit of seeming ignorance and democratic hubris we
determined to erect not just a stable national government, but a democratic
one.  Any understanding of the history of
Afghanistan reveals
foreign nation building in that country to be an exercise in wasted lives and
treasure.

Afghanistan
is even less of a nation state than Iraq,
being essentially a collection of tribal areas, most notably Pushtunistan, and constitutes
a “country” by virtue only of the frontiers drawn by the surrounding
nations.  In the last two hundred years Kabul
has rarely ruled all Afghanistan
for very long and has only done so under a strong authoritarian leader who
could press alliances on tribal leaders.
Even then political stability was typically a thin veneer, ready to
collapse from infighting in the capital or challenges from the periphery.  And corruption and cronyism has for centuries
been a way of life for government officials at every level.

The Afghans are a hospitable people, but wary of foreigners, especially foreign soldiers, and the constant possibility of death from the air has only strengthened that wariness.  There may be a sort of crude democracy in the
villages, but the country has virtually no experience of democracy, and the
election and escapades of the Karzai government hardly inspire optimism.  And here we are in a seemingly endless and
very real war that seems to have less and less to do with terrorism.

Calling the
fight against international terrorism the “war” on terror was a major mistake.   In many
ways this does a disservice to our country and further confuses the meaning of
“war,” a term already abused by the “war on poverty” and the “war on drugs,”
two singular failures on the part of our government.  This is not to say that the military should
not be involved when necessary (such as dealing with the Taliban), but that the
struggle should be considered an operation against a criminal enterprise,
albeit on a large scale.  This is after
all not a war declared by Congress and thus like the Korean and Vietnamese
conflicts is more appropriately called a “police action.”

Terrorists
are certainly a threat to Americans, but they are not a direct threat to America.  Like the Germanic tribes during the height of
the Roman Empire they are a nuisance, and terrorist
organizations threaten the security of our country no more than a band of
Dacians marauding across the Danube threatened the
existence of the Empire.  They can
certainly destroy people and property, but they cannot in any way seriously
injure the country, as could China
or Russia or
our mismanagement of our economy.  Even
the casualties of the 9/11 attack, which simply could not happen again,
represent a relatively slow month on our nation’s highways, and while
terrorists with a nuclear weapon could devastate a city and perhaps slaughter
millions, they could not come as close to destroying the country as an
unregulated financial industry could.

Declaring,
at least unofficially, a war against terrorists can only enhance their status,
suggesting they have a position akin to that of a legitimate state, and creates
substantial problems with domestic and international law regarding the legal
position of captives.  The government can
argue, as it has, that because they are not the uniformed soldiers of an
established state, prisoners in this war are not protected by the Geneva
Conventions and other international covenants of which we are signatories, but
because this is considered a “war” and not an anti-criminal operation, neither
are they subject to the jurisdiction of American courts.  This results in prisoners of war in this
struggle being in a legal limbo, declared to be “enemy combatants” rather than
POWs yet like POWs being held for the duration of the conflict, which unlike a
declared war may have no end.

Most
pernicious, waging a “war” against terror allows the government, especially the
executive branch, to claim wartime powers, endangering civil liberties and he
freedom of the press.  Governments,
whatever their nature, constantly seek to expand their power, and a threat to
national security has traditionally provided a justification for such an
expansion, which in the case of the United States inevitably means a conflict
with our Constitution.  Proclaiming
terrorists a “threat to national security” and the struggle against them a
“war” allows the President to take up the mantle of Lincoln and Roosevelt and
claim emergency powers seemingly at odds with the Constitution.  Such claims are always dangerous to a free
society, but the Civil War and World War II, unlike the fight against
terrorism, were a threat to our nation.

Declaring a
“war” against terror has also facilitated an overly simplistic approach to
the problem.  The fact is that not all
terrorists are alike and many terrorist organizations have nothing to do with
the United States.  Chechens are fighting Russia
and Kashmiris fighting India
for independence, Palestinians are seeking to rid themselves of the Israelis
and Hezbollah guards south Lebanon.  Unlike Al Qaeda these particular terrorists
attack Americans only when the United States
interferes in their local areas of interest, as when Hezbollah attacked the
Marine barracks in Beirut.  Al Qaeda, once focused on the Saudi royal
family and Saddam Hussein, has declared a jihad against the United
States and directly attacked America
and other western states.  Lumping all
these groups together is counterproductive and blurs our focus in the struggle
against our real enemies, Al Qaeda and other Islamicist groups dedicated to the
destruction of the West.

Meanwhile,
the United States, ostensibly fighting against all terrorists and declaring
that anyone who harbors them is a terrorist, has backed itself into a
hypocritical corner.  We are providing a
haven for anti-Castro elements, who might legitimately be described as
terrorists, and we supported secular Somali warlords, who are as terrorist in
their tactics as the Islamicists they oppose.
Such of course undermines the already reeling moral credibility ofAmerica.

Like crime
in our country terrorism is a nuisance, though a more serious one, since
without even acting the terrorists cause us injury by enabling the government
to use fear to expand its power and threaten our civil liberties in the
interest of “national security.”
Fighting a “war” on terror also obscures the causes behind anti-American
terrorism and tends to smother diplomacy and other approaches to the problem,
favoring endless violence over more permanent solutions.  Killing terrorists is necessary, but getting
serious about the Palestinian problem and communicating with Iran,
which has the most pro-Western population in the Middle East,
would provide more lasting results in the struggle.

Unfortunately,
we appear to have a penchant for violence as an immediate solution to our
problems.  One need only compare the
Pentagon budget to that of the State Department.