The Cherry Orchard

The Cherry Orchard has been quiet lately, mainly because I’ve been occupied with an emergency technical redesign of my other blog. I’m still paying attention over here, though, and you better believe I’ll be back in full force to cover the 2008 Presidential Election. If you’re wondering where I stand on that right now, well, nothing much has changed. I support Hillary Clinton. I support Barack Obama. I support John Edwards. I want a change in leadership and an end to the military mania that has been so harmful to this nation since 2001.

I’ve lately been reading Tim Weiner’s award-winning new book Legacy of Ashes: This History of the CIA. This book presents a single powerful thesis: from its beginnings in Harry Truman’s post-war administration, America’s Central Intelligence Agency has been riven by a split between proponents of two opposing visions of the CIA’s role: those who favor a passive, espionage-minded spy agency and those who favor covert action over information. The latter has predominated, from the 1940’s straight through to today.

The essential question is: should the CIA report what other governments are doing, or change what other governments are doing? Should it gather news, or should it make news? The CIA was successful at making news in Iran in 1953 and Chile in 1973, but the long-term effects of America’s bold programs to manipulate foreign governments are worrisome. Most worrisome of all — and this is a point that Tim Weiner pounds home repeatedly in this angry book — is the fact that while engaging in disruptive covert actions in every corner of the world, the CIA has clearly neglected the espionage side of national security. According to this book, we have far fewer high-functioning clandestine agents around the world than one concerned with the USA’s security would hope. We are laughably understaffed with operatives capable of reading foreign languages. We have been constantly undermined by double agents.

The commitment to covert action over knowledge seems to resonate with America’s cultural and political image, especially as expressed by Presidential candidates today. We are pragmatic, we are fearless, we “bring the war to them”, and our every move is above reproach because “we are America”. Unfortunately, this deeply ingrained approach to global politics has left Americans feeling more and more insecure in a world riven by nationalist, religious and ethnic hatred. Tim Weiner’s book is not about partisan politics — he expresses deep contempt for Bill Clinton and George W. Bush (both of them best suited for domestic politics, both with terrible track records in foreign policy) and has the most regard for worldly-minded Presidents like Dwight D. Eisenhower and George H. W. Bush.

The book does reflect upon each American citizen’s idea of what our place in the world is, and one can only pray that our national culture will become more worldly, more considerate of international concerns, more multi-lingual, more respectful to foreign religions and alternative economic practices, and less isolated, less chauvinistic, less solipsistic. If we had put more effort into understanding and infiltrating the various societies around the world (rather than trying to manipulate these societies through imperious and unilateral policies), we would never have been caught looking on September 11, 2001.

Well, that didn’t last long. I had barely finished praising our unfortunate President for risking the ire of China by meeting with the Dalai Lama when he went and did something stupid again. In a televised press conference yesterday, President Bush glibly improvised a line suggesting that “World War 3″ may soon erupt between the USA, Israel and Iran if Iran doesn’t stop its nuclear weapons program.

What a dangerous moron we have elected as President.

I don’t praise the Bush/Cheney administration often in these pages, but I am glad to hear of a meeting that signals a positive new change in USA foreign policy. For the first time in decades, there has been a high-level meeting of US ambassadors and Iranian ambassadors over the future of Iraq.

Some may question why I want my country to begin an open dialogue with a hostile nation that is escalating the world’s nuclear arms race as well as spreading deeply offensive lies about the history of Germany’s genocidal campaign against Jews during World War II. Well, no matter how offensive another nation, organization or person is, I believe the best policy is to keep an open dialogue with that nation, organization or person. Talking doesn’t hurt. And even if the lies flow on all sides, some truths might sneak out as well.

I watched coverage of today’s talks on both CNN (which welcomed the development) and Fox News (which presented one commentator saying that we should not honor Iran with a high-level meeting since they are clearly working to destabilize Iraq). Another commentator correctly pointed out that it is the USA-led coalition in Iraq that Iran is trying to destabilize, not “Iraq” itself — their goal in Iraq is clearly to support a Shiite-dominated government that offers fewer concessions to the Sunni majority than the coalition government offers. It’s a fact that they are arming our enemies. But we should not make the mistake of believing Iran is motivated by a love of “chaos” or violence. Iran’s policy is entirely pragmatic and, for their interests, sensible. Iran is a Shiite nation, and they back Iraq’s Shiite majority for obvious reasons.

Let the talks begin. I hope there is a follow-up session soon, and I’ll be sure to cover it here when there is.

Here’s a big scoop: the political phenomenon known as Islamic fundamentalism has nothing to do with religion.

You heard me right — nothing at all. Islamic fundamentalism is a radical political movement that aims to topple governments and redistribute wealth, and if we want to understand the conflicts in the Middle East better we need to take a serious look at what really motivates believers in this cause. Hint: it’s not about virgins in the afterlife. It is about power, territory and money.

Radical political movements occur when the fault lines between the “haves” and “have-nots” in any society grow too vast, and when large segments of a population feel disenfranchised and abused by their leaders. Let’s take a look at some examples from history:

• The French Revolution

In 1789, hungry mobs began rioting in Paris, spurred on by intellectuals and progressive politicians in their midst. The “enlightened” new government famously killed King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, but in fact their real target was the entire French upper class, which was garroted over the course of several bloody years. More than anything else, the French Revolution amounted to a violent attempt at redistribution of wealth, power and influence.

• The Russian Revolution

In 1917, dissenting political parties representing masses of disgruntled Russian citizens finally completed their overthrow of the corrupt Tsarist government. Even more so than the French Revolution (which the Russian intellegentsia had always studied, admired and sought to emulate), the Russian Revolution quickly devolved into state-sponsored violence on a mass scale, as vast numbers of the previous “upper class” were killed or imprisoned. Economic theory and pro/anti-communist propaganda aside, the Russian Revolution amounted to a violent redistribution of wealth, power and influence.

• The Iranian Revolution

In 1979, protests by groups of dissenting religious and secular Iranians reached such fervor that the Shah and his entourage fled the country to save their lives, eventually allowing the Ayatollah Khomeini to emerge as the new supreme leader. The ascent of Ayatollah Khomeini was the first major victory of a new phenomenon known as Islamic fundamentalism. A difficult societal transition followed, and the new Islamic government had to fight many internal battles with various population groups that felt disenfranchised by the new government, including the former upper class. Like the other revolutions above. the Iranian Revolution amounted to a violent redistribution of wealth, power and influence.

I know there are many different ways to look at the kaleidoscopic horror show known as war. But we should always look for the simplest explanations, as a medieval philosopher named William of Occam taught us. His formulation, known as Occam’s Razor, states that the simplest answer to any question is usually the correct one. The simplest explanation for the current strife all over the Middle East is that the populations of various Arab countries wish to overthrow their own governments.

A close look at Osama bin Laden’s career as a terrorist, for instance, shows that his primary enemy is actually not the United States of America and not Israel but rather the kingdom that rules the land of his birth, Saudi Arabia.

In Iraq, unbeknownst to the U. S. Department of Defense which figured this out only too late, Saddam Hussein’s long dictatorship was deeply grounded in Iraq’s historic “caste” system. Saddam is a Sunni, a representative of Iraq’s privileged minority class, and a powerful proportion of the Sunni population favored Saddam’s dictatorship because they feared the alternative: an uprising of the nation’s under-priviliged Shiite majority. This is the fault line George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld foolishly tripped over when they took down the guy at the top.

I find that the mathematics of current Middle East politics work out very easily if I use just two variables: greed and suffering. Conflicts happen either because people are greedy, or because people are suffering. Islamic fundamentalism is no different in kind from Bolshevik Marxism, or Robospierrian Jacobinism. I don’t see how anything would be much different in the Middle East if the populations were romantic panthiests, like the French radicals, or austere athiests, like the Russian insurgents, instead of Muslims. It’s not about Allah, despite all the hype we constantly hear by hysterical and shallow political analysts in the USA. Just apply Occam’s Razor, just look for the immediate causes, and a lot of bullshit falls away.

The next time somebody hits you with that familiar nonsense about “Muslims are devoted to taking over the whole planet and making us all wear burkas”, or “Jews will never share Jerusalem” or any of this other mythical crap, just look them in the eye and remind them that the simplest answers are the best ones. The wars in the Middle East are about power and wealth, and that’s all they’ve ever been about.

More on this in my next post!

I planned to review the second day of debate at the United Nations General Assembly this morning. Unfortunately, the UN.org website is still a technical mess, and I can’t get to the texts of most of the speeches. There is no excuse for this, and the volume of web traffic to UN.org can’t possibly justify the poor performance. If YouTube.com can serve millions of LonelyGirl15 webviews to the world with barely a glitch, certainly the United Nations web servers should be able to deliver the text of a few dozen speeches each day without crashing to their knees.

But my review of day two will have to wait, even as day three commences with speeches by Boris Tadic of Serbia, Uribe Velez of Colombia, Emile Lahoud of Lebanon, Emilio Guebuza of Mozambique, Branko Crvenkovski of Macedonia, Stephen Harper of Canada, Jose Socrates of Portugal, Valdas Adamkus of Lithuania, Miyegombo Enkhbold of Mongolia, Solomon Berewa of Sierra Leone, Ban Ki-Moon of South Korea (who is often mentioned as a possible successor to outgoing United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan), Sergey Lavrov of Russia, Alexander Downer of Australia, Ursula Plassnik of Austria, Miguel Angel Moratinos Cuyabe of Spain, Ahmed Aboul Gheit of Egypt, Aichatou Mindaoudou of Niger and Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine (who gets, like Israel yesterday, the terrible closer spot at the end of another long, long day of speeches).

I wish I could comment on Hugo Chavez’s speech, which made big news when the Venezuelan leader suggested that George W. Bush was the devil and that the UN’s podium still smelled like sulfur after his appearance the day before. But I haven’t been able to read the full text of his speech, so instead I’d like to follow up on Tuesday’s speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a dynamic and wily speaker who is leaving many moderate and reasonable people stunned and speechless with his inflammatory remarks about Jewish history and the Holocaust.

I hate being stunned and speechless, personally, but my natural emotional reaction to Ahmadinejad’s words leaves me grasping for words, and I’m not sure where to even begin refuting his points. Well, let’s leave some other avenues aside and start right here:

Mr. Ahmadinejad, you have every right to re-examine the myths of history, and you are certainly correct that the European genocide of the Jews that took place during World War II has been overly mythologized. No part of human history can be considered taboo; every stone must be turned over, and every “certainty” is fair game for re-examination. Nobody should stand against the honest pursuit of historical fact, even when one fears (as in this case) that political motivations are underlying the pursuit.

BUT, Mr. Ahmadinejad, you go too far when you suggest that the history of the Jewish holocaust stands as the justification for the current existence of the nation of Israel. As I’ve said here before and I will certainly say again: Israel’s right to exist is based only on the fact that there are human beings living there now. They were born there, they are citizens of no other country, and this is the only home they have.

A new study of the history of the Holocaust may turn up some surprising facts and conclusions (though it won’t find that the genocide was a fraud). But even if it turns out that all of World War II was staged with actors and filmed in a studio in Burbank, the fact remains that millions of Jews have been born in the nation of Israel, and that “the Zionist entity” is their home.

It’s about living human beings, Mr. Ahmadinejad. There are living human beings in Israel and living human beings in Palestine. History happened yesterday. What do you have to offer us for tomorrow?

Despite a weekend of worldwide protests and the ongoing flow of weak, ambivalent press releases about the situation in Sudan, it’s very difficult to discern what’s going on at all from news sources around the world.

I have been trying for days to write an informative article about the Sudan situation, and after much reading I am still mystified. Why is the African Union peacekeeping force leaving on September 30, and why is the United Nations waiting for the Sudanese government — the force, apparently, that hundreds of thousands of refugees need protection from — to give them permission to take the African Union’s place? Wikipedia’s not much help, and neither is the New York Times, which regularly devotes only a moderate amount of space to this growing crisis.

Despite the famous ineffectiveness of the United Nations, their email press releases have been more enlightening than other sources, and one cannot fault Security General Kofi Annan for failing to yell loudly enough. One can, however, fault various governments, media outlets and organizations around the world for not picking up the call.

Those who remember the Nazi holocaust used to repeat the phrase “Never again”, and I remember a time in my life when I was naive enough to take comfort in that thought. The problem is, never again always seems to start after the holocaust is over. I read Philip Gourevitch’s history of Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families and gained a crystal-clear understanding of how that disaster was allowed to happen in 1994. Similarly, it’s easy in retrospect to look back and comprehend the incredible massacres carried out by Pol Pot in Cambodia. But what do we do when the head of the United Nations tells the world “it’s happening again, right now” — and you look for a way to help and find none? It cannot be that we must wait for the atrocities to lapse into past tense before we can wrap our brains around them.

It’s happening again. Everybody knows it, and nobody knows how to help. Over in Iran, where the government pretends to care about humanitarian crises whenever Israel is to blame, a major conference is being planned to examine whether or not the Jewish Holocaust of the 20th Century was a fraud. The past is a comfortable place to dwell. Is anybody out there concerned with the present?

I’m not giving up on my wish to become knowledgable about the situation in Sudan, but I need to find better sources of information so I can hopefully say something better than “it’s bad” sometime soon.

British author and social critic Martin Amis recently wrote a book called The War Against Cliche; it’s a pretty good book, and it’s a great title. As an author of fiction and poetry trying to turn my head towards the controversial topics of the day, I can relate to the title. When I write about world events I often feel myself fighting the war against cliche, and sometimes losing it.

What’s a writer to do? I am filled with disgust and anger towards a few world leaders whose decisions and statements seem too banal for tragedy and too predictable for comedy. I want to write about this, but I can come up with nothing to say that hasn’t been said before. But if I don’t write what I feel, I find myself unable to write anything at all. My anger is a clot, a clump.

So, let’s dive in. I have two subjects today, two influential global leaders who claim to be each other’s philosophical opposites: one is a religious fundamentalist and populist politician who embraces military solutions to human problems, whereas the other is a religious fundamentalist and populist politican who embraces military solutions to human problems. I’m speaking of George W. Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The Bush administration has begun a new public relations initiative aimed at keeping Republican seats in the US Senate and Congress during the November midterm elections. Their speechwriters have now put the phrase “Islamic fascism” into regular rotation, and Vice-President Dick Cheney recently delivered a speech comparing the anti-war movement in the USA to the appeasement of Hitler before World War II.

As many before me have already said, the Bush administration does not have the credibility to make comparisons like this pass any type of inspection. The horrific results of the war in Iraq, begun in March 2003, betray a more obvious truth: this war was hastily planned and badly executed. The good citizens of the USA know that their current leadership is frighteningly incompetent, and many of us dread the damage that may be done in this administration’s remaining two years. As far as I’m concerned, Bush and Cheney are already lame ducks, and I earnestly plead that they cease delivering speeches. They have already insulted America’s honor with their reckless foreign policy; I beg that they stop insulting our intelligence.

The administration of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is no less reckless. Cartoonists and comedians in the USA like to portray the earnest fanatic as a clown, a madman, but in fact he is a career politician with over twenty-five years of experience in Iranian politics. It’s all too easy to laugh him off when he convenes a panel of academics to study whether or not the genocide of six million Jews in mid-20th Century Europe is a myth. We know that the Holocaust was all too real, as were other holocausts of modern times from Russia to China to Cambodia to Rwanda to Bosnia to Darfur. How shall I react to a politician like this? Ahmadinejad is all over the news: he is famously beginning a program of nuclear enrichment, he has declared that Israel has no right to exist, he has called for a purge of liberal intellectuals from Iranian universities. I believe Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a familar character from history. I don’t intend to bore my poor readers by beating this subject to death, but I do plan to use this site to watch his activities in the future.

Cliches? Yeah, I’ve got nothing but cliches to offer today. I hate when the world seems simplistic, but I’ve got to call the shots like I see them.