The Cherry Orchard

This week brought encouraging news for Americans eager to end our military commitment in Iraq. Two Republican senators who have previously supported the Bush position, Richard Lugar of Indiana and George Voinovich of Ohio, have bravely spoken up in favor of a more realistic future strategy. With mainstream Republican support for the Bush position fading, the USA’s inevitable withdrawal will be hastened. The big debate is drawing to a close — in fact, it’s all over but the spinning. So what will happen in Iraq once coalition forces step away?

Nobody knows how events will unfold, but one result seems highly likely: Maliki’s central government will dissolve — perhaps quickly, perhaps slowly and painfully — and a Shi’a-dominated government will prevail in the majority of the country. But the Sunni and Kurd strongholds are too well-entrenched and well-organized to yield, so Iraq will exist for the near future as three nations.

Is this a good or desirable outcome? Well, not really, but since peaceful happy coexistence doesn’t seem to be gaining ground, it’s better than the alternative (subjugation and military oppression of the minority by the majority, or, as in the Saddam days, subjugation and military oppression of the majority by the minority). Here’s the Middle East for the foreseeable future: two Palestines and three Iraqs. Since the Middle East’s national boundaries are largely artificial lines drawn by imperial fiat after the fall of the Ottoman empire anyway, it’s hard to say how offensive or destabilizing this de-nationalizing will feel to the people of these lands. I really don’t know.

But I’m glad these Republican senators are delivering their sane messages to confused Americans eager for any type of future direction. It’s the right step forward.

I don’t usually read Harper’s Magazine (though I usually mean to) but I was attracted to the June cover, which asks the question “How to Repair Eight Years of Sabotage, Bungling and Neglect?” under a photo of a smiling George W. Bush.

Since I tend to walk down the street pondering the exact same question these days, I picked up this magazine and was pleased to find a broad and well-considered set of essays on this question, including the following topics by the following authors: The Constitution by David Cole, The Courts by Dahlia Lithwick, The Environment by Bill McKibben, The Marketplace of Ideas by Jack Hitt and The Military by Edward Luttwak. Being generally a foreign policy minded kind of guy, I was most interested in Anne Marie Slaughter’s suggestions on Diplomacy.

How are we going to handle diplomacy after the failure known as George W. Bush waves his last goodbye? It’s a question every 2008 presidential candidate should be able to answer, for one thing, and voters are going to demand something more than the candy-coated sugar language most of the candidates have been delivering on this topic. In her Harper’s article Slaughter wisely sticks to specific instructions: close Guantanamo, get serious about nuclear disarmament, join the International Criminal Court, get serious about the United Nations, and get serious about fighting global warming.

I think these are all important suggestions, though I’d add one more and put it at the very top of the list: renounce torture as an intelligence-gathering technique (that is to say, renounce torture).

I’m less impressed with Earl Shorris on The National Character. Where Slaughter’s prescriptions are based on the existence of concrete objects (Gitmo, the United Nations), Shorris puts too much faith into the meanings of terms like “virtue”, “evil”, “courage”, “fear”. He quotes Immanuel Kant, but he needs to be doused with a bucket of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who would have reminded him that all of these words are ultimately chimeral entities, and really aren’t likely to serve any useful purposes in any discussions, debates or exchanges of ideas, because they are too easily co-opted by alternative meanings or willful misinterpretations.

But Harper’s has put together a good essay series overall, and I’m glad it hammers home the point that those of us who really can’t stand the sight of George W. Bush anymore aren’t necessarily obsessive Bush-haters, and are really not motivated by emotion or anger when we talk about him incessantly. The problem is rather that we feel a desperate need to begin recovering from George W. Bush … and it doesn’t help that this walking disaster is still in office. In other words, it really isn’t about George W. Bush at all. It’s about how the hell we’re going to clean up the mess this moron made, and how we’re going to save our great country once he’s gone.

So Mike Bloomberg, the mayor of my city, has ended his affiliation with the Republican Party and may run for President as an independent. This is an interesting proposition, and since I’ve been aware of Mike Bloomberg (as a businessman more than as a politician) for over a decade and a half, I’ve got some thoughts (and a bit of newsworthy gossip) to offer.

In 1992 I was the youthful Manager of Software Development for a start-up financial database company, Loan Pricing Corporation, based in New York. We specialized in information systems for the banking industry, and our role model was a vastly successful company called Bloomberg, which had managed to sell cute little television sets with dedicated live financial news and pricing feeds to every stockbroker on Wall Street. Mike Bloomberg’s name frequently came up in meetings, because we yearned to replicate his success, and occasionally these references would take on a reverential “What Would Bloomberg Do?” tone.

My company also did business with Bloomberg (we were one of their countless data sources) and I remember a curious story making the rounds about Mike Bloomberg’s surprising insensitivity towards women in the workplace. My friend Steve, an economist and journalist, attended a meeting with Mike at the Bloomberg offices and came back wide-eyed. In the middle of the meeting, an attractive secretary walked in with refreshments, and after she left Bloomberg held up the conversation to watch her walk away with a salacious grin on his face. He then made a remark that, Steve said, caused everybody in the room — both men and women — to feel extremely uncomfortable. Others at my company who had worked with Bloomberg concurred with Steve — apparently this was a routine he was famous for, and it made everybody uncomfortable, but that was Mike. Our role model was a sexist slob.

This certainly gave me a bad first impression of Mike Bloomberg, and years later when he ran for mayor of New York City I wondered if these stories would surface and cause him problems. He broke no law, of course, but he did offer a disappointing key to his personality that might cause voters and journalists to doubt his judgement. I was surprised that no such stories ever surfaced, and I have to assume that this brash entrepeneur has matured and is no longer behaving in public like Michael Scott in “The Office”. And that’s all I’m going to say about this story, because I’ve come to have a slightly better opinion of Bloomberg, who has been my major for the last six years.

It’s not his politics but, ironically, his plain-speaking and modest personality that I’ve come to feel better about. New York City mayors tend to be loud publicity-seekers — Rudy Giuliani, Ed Koch and John Lindsay come to mind — but Mike Bloomberg’s public appearances since becoming mayor have shown him to be mild, sensible and humane. He seems to seek the middle ground on most issues and never leaps towards the types of broad-stroke politics that define his predecessors. He also gets points for speaking at my daughter Liz’s Forest Hills High School graduation a few years ago — as a good Democrat, I sat on my hands when others clapped, but I have to admit his speech was refreshingly humble and appropriate to the occasion.

Clearly the man has grown up a lot — haven’t we all? — but the fact that I’ve come to not dislike his public persona doesn’t mean I agree with his politics. Until this week I’ve had no idea where he stands on the conduct of American foreign policy in the Middle East, for instance, and some Google searches have only shown that he is against a withdrawal timetable for Iraq (which doesn’t impress me much) and that he dislikes our administration’s “go-it-alone” approach to foreign policy (that brings him closer to my heart).

I’m a long, long way from supporting Mike Bloomberg for President — in fact, I’m quite sure I’d never support him for President– but my instincts and initial impressions tell me he’s more clued-in than most Republican candidates, and I like it that he avoids the stink of cloying “America Is So Great We Can Do No Wrong” chauvinism that seems to infect so many in his former party.

I don’t think Mike Bloomberg will be our next president and I don’t think I want him to be. But I’d take him over the frenetic Rudy Giuliani in a minute, and over the slick flip-flopper Mitt Romney in two minutes. I’m sticking with the Dems for 2008, but the opposition just added an interesting surprise player who may shake things up. I’m all for that.

Here’s an amazing fact: according to every USA television news show I watched yesterday, including ABC World News Tonight with Charles Gibson, Nightline, The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News and yes, even my favorite, Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, there is nothing much going on in the Gaza Strip at all. No story. No coverage.

I caught a few moments of video footage from Gaza, finally, on Fox’s Hannity and Colmes, where they used the video as an opportunity to deliver some dumb cliches about Hamas as an irrational “death cult” that supports the use of pregnant women as suicide bombers. I guess the “right to life” angle is what got the story some TV time on Fox, which is more than it’s getting anywhere else.

I don’t even have a theory as to why this big story is being ignored on TV (thankfully, my local newspaper the New York Times is doing a better job). I don’t see that this disinterest serves any political agenda. Maybe the only explanation is an existential one. When real news happens — events that are shocking and upsetting, like a military takeover by a fundamentalist political organization in a massively overpopulated and depressed region of a horribly war-town part of the world — our journalistic community is stunned into silence. I’m guessing they’ll start reporting this news by Wednesday of next week or so, at which point they can begin using the safe past tense instead of the scary present tense.

I wish I had something useful or intelligent to say about the Hamas rout in the civil war that erupted so quickly in Gaza. Because I continue to believe (against all public opinion on all sides, apparently) that a humane peace settlement between Israel and Palestine is both possible and necessary, this is obviously a major setback for the moderate position. Here are some wide-ranging links:

Sabbah’s Blog

Jewlicious

Darwinian Conservatism

Statesman Journal (including photo gallery)

Heathlander

From Occupied Palestine

What do I think? I think life must be pretty hellish over there, for one thing. And I think Israel and Palestine are a long, long way from the beginnings of a peace settlement. And I also think — I know — that eventually peace will prevail in the Holy Lands. But not anytime soon.

I’m back, after an early summer avalanche of work commitments that forced me into the blogger’s equivalent of triage.

As always, when I don’t post about the daily developments in my country and in the world here, it’s not because I have nothing to say but because I have too much to say (and, sometimes, not enough time to think). Let’s see, what’s been happening in our favorite region, the Middle East, since my last post:

– Violent anarchy abounds in the Gaza Strip, and the descriptions seem to indicate a near collapse into civil war.

– For a few days it looked like another all-out summer war between Israel and its neighbors was breaking out. I’m glad these sparks have subsided, though it’s hard to feel glad about anything at all that’s going on in the Holy Lands.

– USA/coalition military leaders have informed the government of Iraq that they are failing to meet the designated “benchmarks” for legislative action that the American home front considers essential if we are to continue to provide troops. Every news report I’ve read about this meeting fails to clarify the obvious truth here, which is that the elected Maliki government’s failure to establish control represents not a failure of execution but a failure of will. A realistic appraisal of the future of Iraq seems to point to eventual Shiite domination, and Shiite/Sunni tensions clearly trump all other concerns for Iraqi government leaders. In other words, Iraq’s elected leaders do not seem to believe the center will hold, and everything else we are seeing is a manifestation of this fact. It’s pointless for American analysts and commentators to describe this situation as a failure when in fact the lack of concerted leadership in Baghdad appears to be a tactic.

That’s a way-too-quick summary, so mainly I want to say that “I’m back” and will try to write more clearly next time. The “Gonzales Watch” is certainly coming back as well.