RUTHFULLY YOURS

Arthur H. Vandenberg (1884-1951) was a respected Republican Senator from Michigan from 1928 to 1951. In 1945 he was the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Harry Truman, formerly a Democratic Senator from Missouri, became Vice President of the United States when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to a fourth term in 1944.

In the Prologue to his original and meticulously researched book, “Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg and the Partnership That Created the Free World,” author Lawrence J. Haas describes the world to which they awoke on April 12, 1945 – the day that FDR died.

World War 11 was approaching its end in Europe as U.S. and Soviet armies swept towards victory. The Nazi regime was collapsing, and in its wake were 40 million dead; millions of displaced survivors; and devastation, starvation, disease, homelessness, and dislocation for those who survived.

Furthermore, the Soviets and their puppet Communist allies throughout Eastern Europe were exploiting the chaos in the hopes of expanding the Soviet empire across Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

The accidental President, who was never Roosevelt’s top choice for Vice President to begin with, and Arthur Vandenberg, who had been an isolationist and harsh critic of Roosevelt, his New Deal, and his tilt toward Great Britain before the war, formed an unlikely partnership to forge a revolutionary new American foreign policy in response to the new challenges.

As Lawrence Haas writes:

“Under their leadership from the spring of 1945 to the summer of 1949, the United States would spearhead the birth of a United Nations…; pledge through the Truman Doctrine to defend freedom from Communist threat virtually anywhere in the world; rescue Western Europe’s economy from the devastation of war through the Marshall Plan, and commit itself through the North Atlantic Treaty (which established NATO) to defend Western Europe if the Soviets attacked.”

Their collaboration started with a simple message to a beleaguered Harry Truman in his earliest days on the job. Despite his misgivings, Vandenberg, a prominent and forceful Senator, wrote to the new President: “Good luck and God bless you. Let me help you whenever I can. America marches on.”

On January 27, 2016, the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, downplayed the unique genocidal targeting of Jews in the Holocaust by equating all of the victims of the Nazis. In the words of the statement, which only mentions Jews once: “Groups of women, men and children – Jews, Roma, Slavs, disabled people, political dissidents and others – were singled out as enemies, and deemed somehow less than human.”

The statement claims that the lesson of the Holocaust is “the need to continue to combat racism and religious or ethnic intolerance in every form,” but the High Commissioner had nothing to say about the specific religious intolerance which caused the death of 6 million Jews – antisemitism.

It’s almost two weeks since the release of “13 Hours,” the movie about the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans. In the modern news cycle, that’s time enough for the importance of this movie to be buried by news of the blizzard from which the East Coast is now digging out. But I found this movie so good that I went to see it twice.

Both times, I came away wondering the same thing. What, precisely, was President Obama doing during the hours — all those many hours — in which the Americans in Benghazi, abandoned by their leaders in Washington, fought for their lives?

What was Obama doing, amid the comforts and command centers of the White House, while State Department officer Sean Smith and Ambassador Chris Stevens were choking on the smoke of a diesel-fueled inferno at the poorly secured U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi? What was Obama doing during the hours in which the assault targeted the CIA annex near the compound? What was he doing when al Qaeda-linked terrorists fired mortars at the Americans defending the annex, killing former SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods?

Benghazi in that season was six hours ahead of Washington. The attacks began about 9:45 P.M. in Benghazi, and went on intermittently all night, with the deadly mortar assault coming at about 5:15 A.M. It took another five hours, and then some, before the last of the survivors, assembled at the airport, along with the bodies of the four dead Americans, were flown out of Benghazi — not by American forces, but aboard a Libyan C-130 military cargo plane. Thus the roughly 13 hours referred to in the title of the movie, from approximately 9:45 PM on the evening of Sept. 11, until about 10:30 A.M on the morning of Sept. 12.

One of the most interesting recent articles in the New York Times is a report by Mark Mazetti and Matt Apuzzo describing how a large part of the administration’s Middle Eastern foreign policy is paid for by the Saudis.

When President Obama secretly authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to begin arming Syria’s embattled rebels in 2013, the spy agency knew it would have a willing partner to help pay for the covert operation. It was the same partner the C.I.A. has relied on for decades for money and discretion in far-off conflicts: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Since then, the C.I.A. and its Saudi counterpart have maintained an unusual arrangement for the rebel-training mission, which the Americans have code-named Timber Sycamore. Under the deal, current and former administration officials said, the Saudis contribute both weapons and large sums of money, and the C.I.A takes the lead in training the rebels on AK-47 assault rifles and tank-destroying missiles.

“From the moment the C.I.A. operation was started, Saudi money supported it,” the article continues. Not surprisingly the Saudis are calling a lot of the shots. “The long intelligence relationship helps explain why the United States has been reluctant to openly criticize Saudi Arabia for its human rights abuses, its treatment of women and its support for the extreme strain of Islam, Wahhabism, that has inspired many of the very terrorist groups the United States is fighting.”

The payment arrangements may also explain why the best of the West’s Syrian rebels are affiliated with al-Qaeda. “Anonymous U.S. officials now tell the media that CIA-backed rebels have begun to experience unprecedented successes … Yet these gains reveal a darker side to the CIA-backed groups’ victories … reports from the battlefield demonstrate that CIA-backed groups collaborated with Jaysh al-Fateh, an Islamist coalition in which Jabhat al-Nusra—al Qaeda’s official Syrian affiliate—is a leading player.”

The Obama administration is talking tough about terror, and its focus is revealing. President Obama’s State of the Union address proclaimed that terrorists

pose a direct threat to our people, because in today’s world, even a handful of terrorists . . . can do a lot of damage. They use the Internet to poison the minds of individuals inside our country. Their actions undermine and destabilize our allies. We have to take them out.

Only a few days earlier, an NSC spokesman noted that “the horrific attacks in Paris and San Bernardino this winter underscored the need” to prevent “violent extremists” from radicalizing and mobilizing recruits at home and abroad. Stopping terror’s spread, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes proclaims, requires taking away terrorists’ safe havens and their control of “major swaths of territory and population centers.”

The California and Paris attacks rightly spurred Western anger and action to staunch the radicalization that kills innocents. Yet in these same months there were dozens of other terror attacks that also merit anger and appropriate response.

Starting last October, Palestinians launched a new wave of daily terror against Israelis. We have seen the videos: Palestinians wielding kitchen knives stab unsuspecting Israelis from behind; Palestinian drivers crush Israelis awaiting buses. Israeli women, men over 70, and an Israeli pushing a baby carriage are among the score of dead. Just last week, a pregnant Israeli woman was stabbed, and a mother of six killed in her home. Taken together, Israeli deaths in this period exceed proportionally those suffered in Paris.

A sad but common bond ties Israeli dead to their Parisian and San Bernardino counterparts: Their killers were inspired, applauded, and rewarded by those holding power in sanctuary states. In the Islamic State, black-clad spokesmen publicly behead Westerners. In Palestinian territories, authorities encourage mayhem more subtly, but clearly enough for those they influence.

On January 16, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) announced that Iran had satisfied the conditions necessary to achieve a lifting of most international sanctions under its nuclear deal with the Obama administration. In exchange for reducing its number of operational uranium-enrichment centrifuges, sending most of its enriched uranium out of the country, and removing the core of a plutonium-producing heavy-water reactor, Iran received approximately $150 billion in sanctions relief, and the United States returned $400 million in Iranian funds it seized in 1979, plus $1.3 billion in interest. The same day, Iran released five Americans it had held prisoner in exchange for the release of seven Iranian criminals held by the United States.

The White House and its supporters did victory laps, arguing that Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal and its willingness to swap prisoners had proven the wisdom of the president’s Iran policy. But there are many reasons to believe that these developments, far from strengthening American national security, are actually dangerous wins for Iran.

Before all else, it should be noted that American officials had to relax certain requirements of the deal so Iran could receive sanctions relief in the first place. Language barring the testing of ballistic missiles was removed from the agreement’s text and buried in the annex to a UN Security Council resolution. The U.S. also dropped a stipulation that Iran resolve questions about its past nuclear activities, choosing to address those questions in a secret side deal between the IAEA and Iran. As a result, even though Iran conducted two ballistic-missile tests last fall and did not fully cooperate with an IAEA investigation into its nuclear history, the IAEA was able to certify that Tehran met the Implementation Day requirements to have sanctions lifted because these issues had been dropped from the agreement.

I turned off “Billions” a minute after its opening scene of a bound, chained and muffled Paul Giamatti engaged in some S & M sex. My beef is not with what consenting adults do to each other in the game of arousal – it’s that since I don’t consider victimless perversions any of my business, I similarly choose not to watch or be implicated in them. I subsequently heard that the episode which involved burning and urination turned out to be between husband and wife. Instead of softening my reaction, this reinforced my resistance to being a voyeur of other people’s masochistic fantasies. Though the creators of Billions beg the issue of pushing boundaries between porn and regular tv by making the participants a happily married couple, the viewer is the one being exploited. This belief was sustained after watching the second episode of Billions in which all the characters – male and female – sprinkle their dialogue with heavy doses of language similar to the gangsters on The Sopranos.

Just as men have been convinced by fashion to sport the unshaved, grizzled look for the past few years, writers have succumbed to the notion that it enhances the macho quality of their highly educated characters to hyphenate all their words with the F word. So we have the US attorney and of his female associate speaking the same way that uneducated and inarticulate characters do. There are no longer distinctions in language that would normally signify differences in class, education, gender and profession. Watching Billions, I thought of the difference between programming for PBS and for cable channels and the duplicity of pretending that what is being shown on Showtime is simply a reflection of reality. In the name of nostalgie de la boue, there is a conscious effort to degrade the more educated proponents of lawful society so that their behavior becomes no different from the criminal element. In some ways, this is the reverse of what David Chase did in The Sopranos where murderous criminals lived upper-class lifestyles – decorating their Mcmansions, consulting psychiatrists and concerning themselves with getting their children into Ivy League schools. This was a clever way of appealing to the target audience that would pay for a premium cable channel and remain interested in the affairs of organized crime.

Before World War I, Edgar Speyer headed the London branch of the German-based Speyer banking conglomerate. Among other things, he was a great lover of music. His mansion on Grosvenor Square was a cynosure for composers— Debussy, Elgar, Richard Strauss, Schoenberg—all of whom availed themselves of the luxuries of the house, playing or conducting their work in private performances. “We live even more elegantly than kings and emperors,” Grieg wrote, referring to the mansion’s suite of rooms for visitors.

Not all of Edgar Speyer’s interests were so ethereal. The British Speyer branch was a key source of railroad finance, and Edgar himself was best known for creating—in partnership with Charles Yerkes, a Chicago entrepreneur—the London tube system, with its innovative “deep-tube” design. Edgar persisted in expanding the system despite its precarious finances and for many years functioned as its chief executive.

Although Edgar Speyer was a baronet and a member of the king’s Privy Council, he would become a target of the McCarthy-style attacks that were directed at Germans in England during World War I. The attacks grew to such an intensity—Speyer was accused of signaling to German submarines—that he resigned his official positions, over the protests of the king and prime minister. He soon liquidated the British branch of the firm and joined his elder brother, James, in New York. James was then running the Speyers’ branch in America, but it too would succumb before the next war broke out. It is this arc of centuries-long success and sudden diminishment that George W. Liebmann describes in “The Fall of the House of Speyer,” a solid work of financial and social history. They don’t make bankers like this anymore.

When our putative entry into presidential politics Bloomberg was the mayor of New York, he actually had to apologize for the terrible response to the blizzard of 2010. His reputation is built on competence? While major thoroughfares seemed at least passable, especially in Manhattan, streets across vast stretches of the city remained untouched, leaving tens of thousands of residents unable to get to jobs and many facing long waits for ambulances and other emergency services.

New York Struggles as Blizzard’s Impact Chastens Bloomberg

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/29/nyregion/29weather.html?_r=0

Mayor Bloomberg apologizes for snow screw-ups during blizzard of 2010, defends sanitation department….while Manhattan, where the mayor resides, was efficiently cleaned up, the other boroughs were a disgrace. “After being buried under an avalanche of complaints from constituents, political critics and even allies, Hizzoner finally admitted the storm was not well-handled.”

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/mayor-bloomberg-apologizes-snow-screw-ups-blizzard-2010-defends-sanitation-department-article-1.469561

Western culture is deservedly exceptional. No other tradition has given the individual such security, freedom, and prosperity.

The Athens-Jerusalem mixture of Christian humility (and guilt) and the classical Socratic introspection combined in the West to make it a particularly self-reflective and self-critical society, in a way completely untrue of other traditions.

Unprecedented Western leisure and affluence also have given Europeans and Americans a margin of error, in the sense of the material ability to indulge in ethical critique of themselves without existential danger.

But self-proclaimed moralists also developed habits of ethical nitpicking. Here I do not just mean the more recognizable jingoism so common in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Instead, today progressive global strutting showcases how magnanimous Westerners are and how they can afford to remain disengaged and nonjudgmental.

If in the 1880s Victorians could dress up conquered and dethroned Zulu King Cetshwayo in British tweed and parade him around the liberal parlors of London, today we can psychoanalyze why thugs and murderers abroad are mostly misguided, and thus without Western guidance and empathy understandably become nihilist.

Such liberal self-moralizing is never termed chauvinistic or culturally arrogant, because its practitioners are so often liberals who want all others to become as liberal as themselves. Nonetheless, many of our current tensions in the world result from our enemies’ dislike of our smug sense of moral superiority.

Lecturing Egypt to respect a “largely secular” Muslim Brotherhood’s electoral win means that the U.S. is safely distant when one-election/one-time Islamists dismantle the process that brought them to power and seek an Islamic state.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, as a champion of Western rationalism and British fair play, was convinced that he could persuade Adolf Hitler to play by Europe’s post-Versailles Marquess of Queensberry Rules. The more Hitler violated the Versailles accords, rearmed, militarized the Rhineland, gobbled up Austria and dismembered Czechoslovakia, the more Chamberlain redoubled his efforts to convince Hitler of Europe’s shared interest in peace and friendly relations instead of a Neanderthal return to Verdun and the Somme.