Tag: politics

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you

~ Michael A. Innes

Context is everything. As Maya Jasanoff, the Harvard historian, asks, in lyrical terms: “If a writer harbored bias, shall we never speak his name? Or when he wrote with insight, might we read him all the same?” The questions appear in her review in The New Republic, of Christopher Benfey‘s If:  The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years. Benfey, a literary scholar, has sought to explain Kipling and “If” in the context of his decade-long American sojourn between 1889 and 1899.  Kipling’s famous poem is worth this kind of study because of its contemporary prominence. As Benfey’s back cover blurb frames it, in slightly limp terms:

… in recent decades Kipling’s reputation has suffered a strange eclipse. Though his body of work still looms large, and his monumental poem “If—” is quoted and referenced by politicians, athletes, and ordinary readers alike, his unabashed imperialist views have come under increased scrutiny.

That’s putting it mildly.  Jasanoff’s review caught my eye because I happen to teach (and completed a PhD) at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London – a storied institution with its own colonial roots where today the intellectual activism surrounding Britain’s imperial past is a recurring and prominent (if not necessarily consistent or constant) feature of campus life. I also study the use of history and language in political decisions and processes, especially among foreign policy and national security elites, where the lessons of Munich, Korea and Vietnam are routinely invoked to help shape public discourse.

Jasanoff opens with a description of the University of Manchester’s tin-eared attempt in 2018 to publicly celebrate Kipling’s poem, and the student population’s delightfully creative rebuff of the move. Figures like Kipling, and their works, had their day; their contributions, even presented in context,  are now powerfully symbolic political devices, especially at a time when public discussion of decolonizing academia plays such an important part in debates around the content of higher education and equitable acccess to it.

For Benfey and Jasanoff, Kipling’s exposure to crass and brash American ways add a layer of meaning to how Kipling and his imperialism should be understood in their own context.  Benfey’s book, Jasanoff’s review of it, and my comments here, point to context as something that can be eliptically frustrating, a mobius strip of a tautology, endlessly looping back on itself to remind us of  historical details made newly relevant. Benfey, the literary scholar, stalking Kipling. Historian Jasanoff, stalking Benfey. Me, the student of politics, stalking all three.

It’s almost impossible to read any of this, today, without thinking in presentist terms of the unapologetic expressions of bloated (and possibly symbiotic) boorishness that have been emanating from Westminster and Washington.  Benfey’s book includes a listing of Vietnam-era references to “If”. Meanwhile, I’m reminded of the niche interest in Kipling that flared up only a decade ago, as policymakers and soldiers tried to make sense of what they were doing in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2010, for example, one new war veteran framed his memoir of military life and deadly battles in terms of  “the unforgiving minute“, a phrase lifted straight out of “If“. Others talked and wrote about “arithmetic on the frontier” – another Kipling poem – as they tried to come up with “metrics of success” in Afghanistan – another shade of Vietnam. Maybe context isn’t everything. But it is everywhere.

 

 

An area, call it what you will, of safety

~ Michael A. Innes

Colleagues at Arab Digest have just published an interesting commentary on “Boundaries in the Arab world and their remarkable durability.” It’s not publicly available, but I do hope they’ll release it as a sample for general readers. The piece, authored by Chatham House’s Greg Shapland, ex of the Foreign Office, alludes to one of those issue-areas that bridges the grounded, practical, concrete world of international law, and the often fuzzy realm of historical understanding, collective identity and memory, and  perception and misperception in international politics. My own research looks closely at the political uses of terminology in framing diplomatic disputes and armed conflicts around international and sub-state boundaries, so Greg’s piece resonates quite closely. I don’t have anything substantive to add to it, except to flag a related New York Times commentary, published in the immediate aftermath of the first Gulf War. Not long after the conclusion of US and Allied combat operations, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater commented on the plight of Kurdish refugees in Iraq, displaced as a direct consequence of the fighting and long-standing patterns of ethnic persecution. The Washington officialese surrounding territorial management of the issue was typical of such efforts. It was sufficiently surreal and vaporous to attract the attention of the late, inimitable William Safire. He had this to say on the official “dancetalk” surrounding “enclavery zones”, in the 21 April 1991 entry of On Language, his widely-read New York Times column:

FIRST OF ALL, IT’S pronounced EN-clave in English, not ON-clave; if you insist on pronouncing the first syllable in the French way, you should go with a French final syllable, CLAHV. I’d stick to ENclave, just as I lick an ENvelope; only when we use whole French words should we adopt ennui ‘s on-WEE or en route ‘s on ROUTE. The word, most often applied in diplomacy in recent years to suggestions for Palestinian Arab areas within the disputed territories of the West Bank, was thrust upon the world by the need to protect Kurdish refugees from the vengeance of Saddam Hussein. The British Prime Minister, John Major, was the first to call for enclaves within Iraq for the fearful Kurds. But the Bush spokesmen resisted the word: “The Administration backed away from the idea of setting up a Kurdish ‘enclave,’ ” wrote Patrick E. Tyler in The New York Times, “that might later be used as a claim to statehood by Iraq’s Kurdish minority.” Promptly, European leaders started talking more fuzzily about protection zone and safety zone. President Bush’s press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, said, “The problem was that nobody wants a demarcation that says this is a permanent area or new country… We need an area, call it what you will, of safety.” With no official using a term to describe the place, reporters used “informal safe haven” in their stories; “safe haven” was part of the headline in The Times. Although safe haven is redundant, the words have been linked so long as to become an idiom. Subsequently, sanctuary was evoked, as well as buffer zone. Nobody used mandate, applied by John Maynard Keynes in 1919 to territory assigned to the League of Nations, because that would be too “official.” And nobody (except the Kurds, a distinct people with a thousand-year-old culture) would use Kurdistan because that would imply a separate state. What, then, was this area – inside Iraq, on the Turkish and Iranian borders above the 36th parallel – to be called? Not yet decided. For the time being, it’s “the area” or the “safe-haven territory,” the name kept fuzzy because the nations protecting the refugees do not want to clarify (or complicate) matters by giving an area an identity and national life of its own with a name. The synonymy: enclave is moving toward a meaning of “permanent, delimited area” from its origin in the French verb enclaver, “to enclose.” Sanctuary implies inviolability due to sacredness; when applied to a place rather than an idea, it now often pertains to wildlife, not human beings. Asylum is a state of shelter from persecution, but not a particular area. Haven, from the Old English “harbor,” with a connotation of “refuge” dating to 1200, has the advantage of meaning both a place and a status of protection, with a diplomatically useful overlay of impermanence. Refuge is a 14th-century noun from the Latin refugere, “to flee from,” and the 1908 buffer zone comes from buff, “to sound like a soft body when struck.” Zone is an area usually characterized as a band or a strip. Broadest of all: area, leading to “area, call it what you will, of safety.”

Reference: William Safire, “Dancetalk; Enclavery Zone,” New York Times (28 April 1991). URL: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/28/magazine/on-language-dancetalk.html

The Common Vote

~ Michael A. Innes

Recent events in Columbia and Hungary have precipitated new analysis of a recurring problem – the benefits and hazards of popular referenda. I grew up in one country where referenda were gifts that just wouldn’t stop giving. I later worked in several countries where similar problems resulted in the extremes of war. I now live in yet another which, in the relatively short time I’ve been here, has held two separate referenda of its own. The joke among friends is that I’m suspect zero – the index case from whence these things spring, bringing them with me wherever I go. From a professional standpoint, I like that there are enough cases to compare, contrast and learn – especially about what it means for the quality of democracy, political leadership, and mechanisms of governance.

In Foreign Policy – on The Dangers of Giving the Common Man a Say:

In general, the use of referendums is characteristic of times of upheaval — periods when the elites are uncertain of their support. Referendums were held in the wake of the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, World War II, and the fall of communism. They followed the re-establishment of democracies in Greece in 1974 and Spain in 1976.

The problem is that, in times of upheaval, these plebiscites are as likely to backfire as to help politicians get their way, or consolidate support. That was true for Napoleon I, Charles de Gaulle, David Cameron — and now it is true for President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia and Victor Orban of Hungary. In the Colombian referendum,  voters were asked to endorse a peace plan between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the government, and declined. In the Hungarian case, the government asked voters to reject the European Union’s plan for redistributing refugees across the EU; they did, but failed to turn out in sufficient numbers to render the vote valid.

And from the Eurasia Group, which gets into Letting the People Speak?:

Populist VOTES are backfiring on the very leaders who set them

The collapse of Colombia’s peace deal with the FARC over the weekend is just the latest instance of a head of state staking their reputation on a popular vote and having it backfire, big time. Think back to Brexit last summer, where British Prime Minister David Cameron put his political career on the line by promising to resign if Britons voted to leave the European Union. And then what happened? Britons voted ‘leave’ and David Cameron…left.

Missiles of Outrage and Anger

~ Michael A. Innes ~ Leave a comment

In the early pages of his memoir Known and Unknown, Donald Rumsfeld described boyhood memories of an America struggling to come to grips with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. One of those recollections was of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s reassuring voice, its “formal, almost aristocratic tone” cutting across the airwaves. “Outlining the indictment against the Japanese Empire, he spoke slowly and deliberately,” Rumsfeld wrote. “Every syllable was carefully enunciated, as if the words themselves were missiles of outrage and anger. That gave him a singular quality as America heard for the first time the words that have now become so familiar to history: ‘Yesterday, December 7, 1941 – a date which will live in infamy…’.”*

Rumsfeld’s biographers have noted his preoccupation with Pearl Harbor. As Secretary of Defense, he repeatedly summoned the ghosts of that day in his efforts to promote US defense preparedness and ruthlessly assess the intelligence community’s performance. We don’t have to take Rumsfeld’s word for it, either, or that of his biographers. There’s a thick public record of the things he’s said, written, authorized and championed. His public output makes for a good baseline for understanding what he said, to whom it was said, and what it meant for the policy processes of the time. But the public record is only part of the picture.  Investigative journalism like James Mann’s Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (Viking Penguin 2004), helps to fill in the gaps with much needed detail on closed door discussions and private deliberations.

Researchers take their chances when they look to memoirs for accurate information about historical events. The New Yorker writer George Packer, in a hydrochloric 2010 review of another political memoir, George W. Bush’s Decision Points, made the somewhat obvious but nonetheless key point that “Every memoir is a tissue of omission and evasion; memoirs by public figures are especially unreliable.” The second Bush White House generated what must be a record number of tell-alls and insider accounts. Even speechwriters got in on the act, publicly staking claims to the carefully enunciated syllables and missiles of outrage and anger that are supposed to be exclusively Presidential, not claimable intellectual property.

I’ve been using memoirs to help reconstruct some of the things that were said and done before and after 9/11. I approach most of them with a degree of cynicism and distrust of authorial motive. Two of them, Rumsfeld’s Known and Unknown and Douglas Feith’s War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, stand out, for the simple reason that both books enable readers to critically evaluate the claims their authors make.  They do this by providing access to declassified papers and documents – the original source materials that, one assumes, corroborate what Rumsfeld and Feith were trying to convey in their respective accounts. Needless to say these will have been carefully selected, so it’s up to the reader to consider both source and context when reviewing the primary sources.

Both books came equipped with supporting websites stocked with digitized documents. Feith’s, at http://www.waranddecision.com/,  appears to have died of neglect at some point in early 2014. Some of those documents are reproduced in the pages of War and Decision, and readers can still get a sense of what the website contained if they know how to retrieve cached material on the web. Rumsfeld’s sources are in an entirely different category. The “Rumsfeld Papers”, at http://papers.rumsfeld.com/, contain thousands of digitized document spanning his entire career in government service, and more besides. In a video posted on the website, Rumsfeld speaks directly to visitors and encourages them to make up their own minds.

As an exercise in digital history, the Rumsfeld Papers website is superb. As an artefact of Rumsfeld’s time in governement, the collection is remarkably transparent. It’s an ironic oddity that won’t be lost on those who remember Rumsfeld’s caustic style or the level of effort he put into bureaucratic turf wars and “controlling the narrative”.  That irony is recursive, too. I’ve found the Rumsfeld Papers less useful as a window into Rumsfeld’s  thinking or that of the people around him – there’s that cynicism again – but quite good as narrative nuts and bolts. Some of the sources in the Rumsfeld Papers – the infamous “snowflakes” come to mind – are as invidual documents often sparsely detailed, and only provide new insights on an aggregate basis. But there are some real gems that provide a glimpse into the stuff of internal discussions and behind-the-scenes bureaucratic labors, and they make it possible to trace the paths of ideas as they worked their way through the policy process.

*Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (Sentinel, 2011), p. 39.

The Military-Evangelical Complex

~ Michael A. Innes ~ Leave a comment

Noted at Juan Cole’s Informed Comment, as item 4 in a list of Top 10 Counterterrorism Scandals 2010:

George W. Bush claimed that he had misspoken when he called his ‘war on terror’ a ‘crusade.’ But it turns out that the Michigan company that makes rifle sights for the US military inscribes them with Bible verses. The capture of the US Air Force Academy by Christian fundamentalists is worrisome enough, but a Military-Evangelical Complex is truly frightening.

What to say? One more in a litany – pardon the term – of similar cases. I want to write something about prepubescent states that pretend to maturity and adulthood…