RUTHFULLY YOURS

Sometimes calling the five-sided Pentagon the “puzzle palace” makes perfect sense. Though the name purports to describe the maze of hallways that traverses the Department of Defense, on occasion the tag explains the state of military decision-making.

The Defense Department has its own year in review, which is all happy-face.

Here is mine–six examples from the last twelve months that make one wonder if those providing for the common defense are using common sense.

#6. Arming the “moderate” Syrian opposition. This has looked like a Keystone Kops short from day one. The Defense Department estimated training about 60 fighters at a cost of about $10 million per fighter. In October, the Pentagon announced it was suspending the program. “I was not satisfied with the early efforts,” declared Defense Secretary Ash Carter in what might rank as the understatement of the year. Since everything was going so well, Obama signed a bill in November authorizing $800 million for training rebels next year.

#5. Crash diet in Afghanistan. Remember all those ads on how to lose weight without diet or exercise? That’s what US defense policy sounds like some times, particularly in Afghanistan where the administration has shorted the size of the force again and again and promised everything would be cool. In October, the president reversed his decision to the troop levels to zero by the end of the year. But while something is better than nothing, the brutal facts are that the future of the country is now in jeopardy. There are even new al Qaeda training camps popping-up in the country.

#4. Death on the Homefront. In July, five US service members were killed in a terrorist attack on recruiting station in Tennessee. While the deaths themselves were tragic enough, the incident raised legitimate questions over whether the US military was taking appropriate measures to protect the force at home, including permitting service members to bring personal firearms to work and be armed on duty.

Berlin’s vast correspondence is a true monument to European, Jewish and liberal civilisation

With the publication of Affirming: Letters, 1975-1997 (Chatto & Windus, £40), Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle bring to a triumphant conclusion one of the most remarkable literary projects of our time. Isaiah Berlin’s selected correspondence runs to four volumes, covers nearly 3,000 pages and amounts to more than one million words. Even its recipients number well into the hundreds. These include men and women of all ages, many nationalities and a surprising range of occupations. There may be no dustmen amongst them, but nor are they confined to the conventionally respectable. Perhaps as a result, Berlin’s Letters also constitute an epistolary oeuvre alternatively deadly serious and playfully frivolous, often nobly inspired, occasionally just a little bit disreputable.

The cumulative effect is amusing, compelling and illuminating. By his own evaluation, Berlin’s natural medium was “chatting — plauderei”. Writing letters was a simple extension of that pleasure. Yet he eventually found both the time and energy to express profoundly significant observations about the Russian Revolution and its undoing, the Nazi nightmare and the Holocaust, the foundation of Israel and the creation of the modern Middle East, even the Cold War and the dynamics of decolonisation through this otherwise informal medium. Students of 20th-century politics, scarcely less than scholars in intellectual history and of political philosophy, will find much of lasting value to ponder in these pages for years to come.

The Obama administration is happily barreling toward the Iran nuclear deal’s Implementation Day, with Secretary of State John Kerry today hailing Tehran for fulfilling terms of “what was truly one of our most important accomplishments of 2015.”

Implementation Day will come when the International Atomic Energy Agency “verifies that Iran has completed all of these nuclear commitments, which increase Iran’s breakout time to obtain enough nuclear material for a weapon to one year, up from less than 90 days before the JCPOA.”

Before Christmas, parties to the agreement including Iran were predicting that Implementation Day could come in January.

Kerry said “one of the most significant steps Iran has taken toward fulfilling its commitments occurred today, when a ship departed Iran for Russia carrying over 25,000 pounds of low-enriched uranium materials.”

“The shipment today more than triples our previous 2-3 month breakout timeline for Iran to acquire enough weapons grade uranium for one weapon, and is an important piece of the technical equation that ensures an eventual breakout time of at least one year by Implementation Day,” he said.

On Thursday night as the ball drops in Times Square, millions of Americans watching on TV will join the revelers in Manhattan to celebrate the new year. For other Americans, alas, the arrival of Jan. 1 will mark only the beginning of another year behind Iranian bars.

It’s long past time to bring these men home.

At last year’s White House welcome for Bowe Bergdahl—the soldier who walked away from his combat post in Afghanistan and will soon be tried for desertion and misbehavior before the enemy—President Obama did manage to refer to other Americans “unjustly detained abroad” who also “deserve to be reunited with their families.”

So what has happened since? Last summer, scarcely a year after that Rose Garden ceremony, Secretary of State John Kerry announced a nuclear deal with Tehran. The agreement puts the Iranians on a path to a bomb and releases billions of dollars that had been frozen by sanctions. But no American walked free. When asked on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” about these prisoners, Mr. Kerry answered this way:

The fee for screenwriter for The Revenant must be the highest ever paid if you count the actual number of words in the script – for the overlong mid-section, the film is virtually silent. Alejandro Inarritu, the recent Oscar winner for Birdman, has fashioned a tedious survival epic out of difficult circumstances, harsh injuries and heavy breathing. The plot can be summarized in two sentences: Mountain guide leading fur trappers is repeatedly mauled by a huge bear, is left to die, survives that, starvation, a tempestuous body skim down some rapids, along with a Thelma and Louise soar off a cliff on horseback, landing in a tree, then falling to the ground. Despite all of the above plus the trauma of seeing his only son killed, he lives to trek across the snowy wilderness, eat raw buffalo meat. carve a protective bed out of a horse carcass, listen to the spirit of his dead Indian wife, attack the man who murdered his son and ultimately recognize that only God can exact revenge. Most of this becomes predictable as soon as we see Leonardo de Caprio stir from his comatose state and realize that this movie is more superman cartoon than biography. Even though there was a man whose life provided the inspiration for this film, he’s less a realized individual than an avatar of legendary mountain men. We know he’s better than most because he married an Indian woman and loves his half-breed son; also, because he leaves the ultimate job of executioner to someone else in a burst of spiritual awareness.

Two Muslim Presidents. Two speeches celebrating the anniversary of Prophet Muhammad’s birth. Two very different messages.
Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, on two different occasions ((Dec. 22 and Dec. 24) iterated his call for “changes in approach” that would bring Islam peaceful coexistence of all races, religions and doctrines. He stated: “No one should define someone by their appearance or religion.”

Sisi insisted Muslims should acknowledge that times have changed and, therefore, Islam has to be modernized.
He called again upon the religious scholars at al-Azhar, the highest institute of Sunni Islamic learning, urging them, “Refute the malicious ideas and warped interpretation. Dispel the perplexity of minds and hesitation of hearts. Change all this into an established faith that tolerance does not contradict with religion and that accepting the other does not oppose faith and that the best of people is the most who benefits them all, not benefits Muslims only.”

A surge of confusion

After the February 2006 Sunni bombing of the Samarra Golden Mosque, the US proved unable to hold back the tide of Shia retaliation. The UN estimated that, during 2006 alone, Shia death squads had slaughtered some 34,000 Sunni, many with exemplary cruelty.

Iraq’s Sunni leaders, awakened to the reality that far from cowing the Shia while punishing the Americans they were now in danger of their very lives. They offered to stop killing Americans if the Americans could stop the Shia from killing them. The US government set about doing that. This was “the surge.”
Ruins of Samarra Mosque

Ruins of Samarra Golden Mosque

Note well, however, that the US had offered the Sunni a similar deal in 2004. At that time, the Sunni still thought that they could beat both the Americans and the Shia. By 2006, they were begging for their lives.

But the US government, far from driving a hard bargain, chose to see their request for something approaching an alliance against the Shia as the “awakening” of the Sunni populations’ inner “moderation” and rushed to empower its leaders with money and weapons.

The US choice to neglect the massive fact that fear of the Shia had led the Sunni to stop fighting Americans fit all too well with the US foreign policy establishment’s perennial, ignorant, practice of categorizing foreigners as “moderates” or “extremists” (aka. good guys and bad guys). That practice eliminates the bother of learning what foreigners actually have in mind.

Reality vs. romance

On Jan. 1, 2015, Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah al Sisi told Sunni Islam’s leading scholars gathered at Cairo’s Al Azhar University, its leading temple of knowledge, that they had been leading Islam on a course disastrous for itself and leading to war with the rest of the world.

He said : “ You, imams, are responsible before Allah … that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years … is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world … Is it possible that 1.6 billion [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants – that is 7 billion — so that they themselves may live? Impossible! … I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution.”
The Disney version

The Disney version

That is reality. It is also reality that no such revolution is in the works, in part because the West continues to deal with the Sunni world by trying to appease it, romance it, seduce it.

Imagine the predicament of an Islamic scholar at Al Azhar who agrees with al Sisi: what could he say to Saudi or Qatari royals, or to the citizens Mosul or Raqqa — never mind to young people besotted with blood and enjoying their slaves that might cause them to turn against Daesh/ISIS?

Robert Holub’s topic arises from an historical accident: the triumph of the Nazis in the early 1930s meant all competing German readings of Nietzsche (then the preeminent figure in German culture) were suppressed and he was enlisted in the service of National Socialism, which has tainted him ever since with anti-semitism. In one respect, Holub is admirably clear: “[T]here is no question that [Nietzsche] was unequivocally antagnostic toward what he understood as anti-Semitism and anti-Semites” (125; cf. xiv, 208). Yet, Holub argues, Nietzsche is still guilty of “Judeophobia,” that is, of displaying a “negative bias towards Jews and Judaism” (xiv; cf. 209). Curiously, the book tries to make the case largely through letters and unpublished material—as well as a good deal of innuendo and speculation—rather than systematic engagement with Nietzsche’s actual philosophical work, until the final chapter. We consider, below, the evidence adduced and the sometimes astonishing inferences Holub draws from it.

In an illuminating first chapter, Holub documents the different receptions of Nietzsche prior to the Nazi era, noting that leftists were attracted to Nietzsche because of his “rather vivid expressions of contempt toward the institutions of middle-class society, which they also rejected” (3). As Nietzsche’s fame grew, those on the German right faced the dilemma that “his many deprecatory statements about Germans and Germany” made it “problematic” to appropriate his stature for their cause (8). Early German commentators, like Adolf Bartles, even acknowledge “that Nietzsche is no anti-semite” (8). The crucial interpreter for Nazi purposes, however, was Alfred Baeumler, who argued in the 1930s that “Nietzsche’s anti-German remarks must be understood in the context of Bismarck’s rule” (13) and that the praise Nietzsche lavishes on the Jews must be understood “rhetorically…as a foil to the Germans in order to goad them to greatness” (13). In other words, even though Nietzsche hated German militarism and nationalism, it was only Bismarck’s version; and even though he lavished praise on Jews, it was only to inspire good Germans to do better. Backed by the Nazi state, in which Baeumler served as principal Nazi liason to the universities, these tortured hermeneutics prevailed and sullied Nietzsche’s reputation.

The Hateful Eight, billed as “the 8th film by Quentin Tarantino”, has opened in selected cities in 70mm format. I’d thought by this stage that some new young hungry film critics would have emerged who’d like to make their names by having a go at the aging enfant terrible. But, judging from the reviews, that does not seem to be the case. On the other hand, I gather there’s some sort of boycott being mounted by those offended by Tarantino’s recent remarks re black men who get shot by cops. It would be, as they say, ironic were the director to be damaged by a political stance he took off-screen, since as James Wood wrote in The Guardian two decades ago:

Tarantino represents the final triumph of postmodernism, which is to empty the artwork of all content, thus avoiding its capacity to do anything except helplessly represent our agonies… Only in this age could a writer as talented as Tarantino produce artworks so vacuous, so entirely stripped of any politics, metaphysics, or moral interest.

James Wood made his observation with regard to Pulp Fiction, but it has held up pretty reliably over the years. “Pulp fiction” used to mean a lurid style of American serial writing so-called because of the cheap quality of paper used. But I would imagine today that far more people recognize it as the name of a famous Tarantino movie than the genre he was riffing off. As a helpful dictionary entry at the start of the movie reminds us, “pulp” has two meanings: aside from the fiction style, it’s also a “soft, moist, shapeless mass of matter”. Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, a trio of gangster storylines told in mashed-up chronology, is not pulp in the first sense: writers at, say, The Black Mask (the hardboiled crime magazine, whose name Tarantino intended to borrow for his movie’s title) favored heightened, pacey prose, tense plotting, surprise twists, cliffhanger endings. Quentin Tarantino inclines more towards that second definition: a soft, moist, shapeless mass of matter, its constituent parts smoothly mixed and puréed until the whole is as consistent as a light, fluffy scrambled egg — or, as French cinéastes would say, a scrambled oeuvre. Most fiction is a question of weighting : this moment of high drama is more important than that moment of domestic banality. But, once Tarantino’s pulped it, it all comes out the same: tense trigger-cocked stand-offs or long, querulous conversations about what’s in a five-dollar milk shake. In 1994 the latter sequences passed instantly into the language as the acme of cool.