Category Archives: History

History, Security

Historians rate the US presidents

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I’ve been writing too many comments again on Schneier’s blog lately, so I thought I’d post a few interesting things here instead. This article from the History News Network caught my attention with some interesting insights into the risks from various Presidents and how they stack up from a historian’s point-of-view:

The George W. Bush presidency is the worst since:
In terms of economic damage, Reagan.
In terms of imperialism, T Roosevelt.
In terms of dishonesty in government, Nixon.
In terms of affable incompetence, Harding.
In terms of corruption, Grant.
In terms of general lassitude and cluelessness, Coolidge.
In terms of personal dishonesty, Clinton.
In terms of religious arrogance, Wilson.

And then there are the oft-cited Bush quotes that give another perspective on how some might use his own words to conclude he may be worse than so many of his predecessors:

“You don’t get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier.”
— From Paul Begala’s “Is Our Children Learning?”, Governing Magazine July, 1998

“If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.”
— CNN.com, December 18, 2000

“A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there’s no question about it.”
— Business Week, July 30, 2001

History

Judge upholds intelligence in schools, strikes down school board liars

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The BBC reports that a Judge in Pennsylvania has questioned the integrity of ID proponents and struck down their attempt to inject creationism into science curriculums at school:

Judge Jones said he had determined that ID was not science and “cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents”.

Citizens had been “poorly served” by members of the school board who voted for the ID policy, he said.

“It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID policy,” he said.

“We find that the secular purposes claimed by the board amount to a pretext for the board’s real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom.”

Religious extremists misrepresenting their true objectives? Impossible. My favorite comment from the BBC peanut gallery is from someone who claims to be from the US:

U.S. school students are falling behind their peers in developed countries in science and mathematics. Therefore, U.S. schools need to intelligently redesign their science curriculums not teach intelligent design as science.

Well said!

History

The Silent Majority circa 2005?

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The “national security versus the public’s right to know” debate is nothing new to the US, but Bush appears to have lost serious amounts of credibility as key members of the House and Senate openly compare his faith-based requests for secrecy to Johnson’s worst decisions during the Vietnam War. For example Rep Murtha was just on the morning news yesterday and he was asked whether he believes the Bush administration’s assessment of the road ahead. Murtha retorted “Why should I trust him?” He went on to say that he remembers President Johnson’s announcement that he would not let the US pull out of Vietnam as things were about to get better. Murtha said the result was that more than 38,000 soldiers lost their lives before the US could admit that Johnson’s strategy was flawed from the start.

That brought to mind Nixon’s “Silent Majority” speech, which had a very different take on the situation (the beginning of the end rather than the end of the beginning). What Nixon lacked in domestic smarts he more than made up for in international relations, and yet he rarely gets mentioned outside of Watergate, which probably means either that the US still has a very long way to go in Iraq or maybe just that the “N” word is considered off-limits:

The other two factors on which we will base our withdrawal decisions are the level of enemy activity and the progress of the training programs of the South Vietnamese forces. And I am glad to be able to report tonight progress on both of these fronts has been greater than we anticipated when we started the program in June for withdrawal. As a result, our timetable for withdrawal is more optimistic now than when we made our first estimates in June. Now, this clearly demonstrates why it is not wise to be frozen in on a fixed timetable.

We must retain the flexibility to base each withdrawal decision on the situation as it is at that time rather than on estimates that are no longer valid.

Along with this optimistic estimate, I must-in all candor-leave one note of caution.

If the level of enemy activity significantly increases we might have to adjust our timetable accordingly.

History, Poetry

Pinter on US foreign policy

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Harold Pinter gave a spirited Nobel Lecture on December 12th:

Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States’ actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.

Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America’s favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as ‘low intensity conflict’. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued ­ or beaten to death ­ the same thing ­ and your own friends,
the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.

And that’s just the warmup before he gets to a review of modern events:

The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading – as a last resort – all other justifications having failed to justify themselves – as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.

So from there he makes a helpful suggestion:

I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man’s man.

‘God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden’s God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam’s God was bad, except he didn’t have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don’t chop people’s heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don’t you forget it.’

He also presents a poem by Pablo Neruda as a window into the ravages of war.