RUTHFULLY YOURS

In his study of the Roman historian Sallust (86-35 B.C.), Ronald Syme writes that “historians are selective, dramatic, impressionistic.” Later in the same work he notes that “systems and doctrines decay or ossify, whereas poetry and drama live on, also style and narrative.” These words apply to Syme himself, a man generally considered the greatest modern historian of Rome. Syme wrote biographies of Sallust and Tacitus and much else, but his reputation rests on “The Roman Revolution.” Published in 1939 when the specter of fascism clouded Europe, it was soon recognized as the magnificent book it is.

Syme (1903-1989) was a New Zealander who studied at and settled in Oxford. His specialty was prosopography, or the study of collective biographies to find common characteristics of historical social classes or groups. This was invaluable for “The Roman Revolution,” which is a compelling account of the decline of the Roman oligarchy in favor of a principate, or monarchy, quietly but implacably put in place by Augustus, the first of the Roman emperors. If historians had Rolodexes, none could be more complete than Syme’s on the Romans in the last years of the Republic. “In any age in the history of the Roman Republic,” he notes, “about twenty or thirty men, drawn from a dozen dominant families, hold a monopoly of office and power.” An intramural, nearly incestuous, affair was Roman political life; consider alone Servilia, “Cato’s half-sister, Brutus’s mother, Caesar’s mistress.”

A man who sees beneath every surface, demolishing all pretenses, Syme, early in his great book, writes: “The Roman constitution was a screen and a sham.” Of the idealism of the Republic, he notes: “Liberty and law are high-sounding words. They will often be rendered, on a cool estimate, as privilege and vested interest.” No cooler estimator existed than Syme. “The career of Pompeius,” he writes, “opened in fraud and violence. It was prosecuted, in war and peace, through illegality and treachery.”

Once the Triumvirs—Julius Caesar, Pompeius, Lepidus—were in ascendance, the Roman Republic’s day was done. “From a triumvirate it was but a short step to a dictatorship,” Syme writes. Julius Caesar, who emerged as dictator, before his assassination adopted Octavianus, whom Syme regularly refers to as “Caesar’s heir.” Octavianus would subsequently become Augustus, who, after his victories over Caesar’s assassins and later Marcus Antonius, ruled for 40 years. Augustus, Syme writes, possessed “an inborn and Roman distrust of theory, and an acute sense of the difference between words and facts.”

Syme was a master of the brief character sketch, not infrequently followed by a sharp observation. The mixture of good and evil in the same people fascinated him. CONTINUE AT SITE

Secretary of State John Kerry toured the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and Museum in Japan this week, a month before he and President Obama will meet foreign ministers at the G-7 Summit in that country. Reuters reported that he witnessed “haunting displays [of] photographs of badly burned victims, the tattered and stained clothes they wore, and statues depicting them with flesh melting from their limbs.”

“It is a stunning display. It is a gut-wrenching display,” explained Kerry. “It is a reminder of the depth of the obligation every one of us in public life carries . . . to create and pursue a world free from nuclear weapons.” Iran would exempt itself, of course.

But is this really the lesson of Hiroshima — that those in public life have an obligation to do away with nuclear weapons? A lot of people might argue that the existence of those weapons has saved lives from broader world conflicts and conventional warfare. That includes ending World War II sooner.

Last week, the Washington Post dutifully reported: “In Hiroshima, Kerry won’t apologize for atomic bombs dropped on Japan.” Technically, he didn’t. What we witnessed was one of the administration’s inverted non-apology apologies.

There’s a lot of speculation Obama will visit Hiroshima during the summit and offer some sort of apology. (If we’re to believe WikiLeaks, U.S. officials have been wrestling with the idea of having Obama apologize for the Hiroshima attacks for a while now.)

Doing so would comport well with his history, and it would not be a great leap for Obama. Having a high-ranking American official visit the museum already lends credibility to the Japanese notion that the U.S. bombing was gratuitous. On top of that, Kerry blames nuclear weapons — rather than Japan’s fanaticism and nihilism — for Hiroshima.

A spokesman for U.S. operations in Afghanistan said the ISIS threat there seems to be under control for now, but al-Qaeda has struck up an unsettling “increased relationship” with the Taliban.

There are six groups recognized as foreign terrorist organizations operating out of Afghanistan today, Brig. Gen. Charles Cleveland, deputy chief of staff for communications for Resolute Support Mission, told reporters today via teleconference from Kabul.

The U.S. military “continues to have a mission to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda, and so we do have the authority to target any al-Qaeda member,” Cleveland noted. The authority for U.S. forces to begin targeting ISIS fighters in Afghanistan was added in January.

ISIS refers to the area as their Khorasan Province and has been trying to poach fighters from the Taliban ranks.

Seventy to 80 percent of counterterrorism strikes in Afghanistan this year have targeted ISIS, Cleveland said.

“About three months or so ago, we thought that Daesh was probably in about six to eight districts. Today, we think they’re probably in about two to three districts,” he said.

“And I always hesitate to really kind of give a specific number like that because as soon as I say three districts, somebody pops up someplace else and now they’re in four or five. But at the end of the day, we think that we have significantly decreased the footprint that they have in Afghanistan.”

We’re witnessing a strange spectacle in U.S. foreign policy, one with no obvious precedent: President Barack Obama is trying desperately to protect his cherished nuclear deal with Iran, making one concession after another in response to Iran’s post-deal demands to ensure that Tehran doesn’t walk away from it.

Thus despite the terms to which U.S.-led global negotiators and Iran supposedly agreed in July, the deal is less a firm agreement than a continuing drama with one storyline: Tehran demands a concession, the administration proposes a response, Iran-watchers in Congress and elsewhere voice concerns and U.S. officials offer a middle ground to satisfy Tehran without igniting a revolt in Washington.

But the concessions – the most recent of which involve Iran’s ballistic missiles program and its access to the U.S. financial system – are not just rewriting the previous consensus among government officials, diplomats, nuclear experts and Iran-watchers in the United States, Europe and the Middle East over how the deal would work. They’re also serving to expand Iran’s military capability, strengthen its economy and leave U.S. allies in the region feeling more abandoned.

Washington’s post-deal maneuvering should not surprise us, for it mirrors the pre-deal negotiations during which the administration discarded several of its pledges to Congress and the public on key fronts – e.g., to secure “anywhere, anytime” inspections of suspected Iranian military-related nuclear sites, to include Iran’s ballistic missiles program in a final agreement and to prevent it from ever achieving nuclear weaponry.

Today most Americans would be surprised to learn that the original ghettos were inhabited by Jews.
That is the experience Mitchell Duneier relates in his new bookGhetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea, when it comes to teaching his own students at Princeton about the history of the ghetto. For the last 70 years, Duneier shows, the word “ghetto” has for Americans become exclusively associated with poor black neighborhoods, especially in big cities like New York and Chicago. Few people know that, for centuries before America even existed, Jews in many European cities were legally confined to walled neighborhoods known as ghettos. (“Ghetto” is the Italian word for “foundry”; the first Jewish enclave in Venice was located on the same island as a foundry, and the word came to refer to the neighborhood by extension.)

When it comes to understanding the black American ghetto, can we learn anything from the history of the European Jewish ghetto? It is a tricky question, which Duneier addresses carefully, since it seems to invite comparisons about who was more victimized and more resilient. Yet as he tells the story of the evolution of American thinking about the black ghetto—primarily through the lens of successive generations of academic sociologists, from Gunnar Myrdal to William Julius Wilson—the Jewish ghetto refuses to disappear. It haunts the subject like a ghost, raising questions that continue to define the way sociologists think about ghettos today.

Matters are complicated by the fact that, during the Holocaust, the word “ghetto” took on a very different freight than the one it had traditionally carried. Ghettos like the ones in Venice or Frankfurt were poor, isolated neighborhoods subject to discrimination and surveillance; but they were places where Jews lived and where their culture and civilization sometimes thrived. These ghettos had almost all disappeared by the 20th century, as European countries abolished official discrimination against Jews. It was the Nazis who brought the word back into common use when they created their own Jewish ghettos in occupied cities like Warsaw and Vilna. But the Nazi ghettos were not places for Jews to live; they were places for Jews to die of starvation and disease, or to await death in the gas chambers. The Warsaw Ghetto, in other words, had little in common with the Venice Ghetto except the name. As Duneier writes, “The Nazi ghetto was something entirely new.”

Welcome to a preview of Civic Affairs, the 17th Cyrus Skeen detective novel, set in San Francisco in late May, 1929. The novel will be published in late April, and will be available on Kindle and as a print book. Enjoy.

Chapter 1: The Bum’s Rush

“My wife and I have come to request an unusual action to be taken by you, which, frankly, we hope you regard is in the realm of civic duty, Mr. Skeen.” The man paused, waiting to hear some response from Skeen. “We hope you are amenable to the idea, and respond with the utmost civility, courtesy and responsibility.”

Jubal Pickett sat in an armchair in front of Cyrus Skeen’s desk. Next to him sat his wife, Lucinda Pickett. The Pickets had arrived in his office a few minutes ago, without having called for an appointment. He did not know who they were and did not know what they wanted.

Skeen asked, his brow darkening in an ominous frown, “Who are you again? And what is it you want?”

Jubal Pickett was about half a foot shorter than Skeen. His oiled black hair was parted precisely in the middle. He was thin, as was his face, with a smidgen of a moustache crowning thin lips. Skeen observed that the man, whom he estimated to be in his forties, had that constant, pinched look around his eyes and nostrils as though everything he ever encountered was sour, displeased him, and probably caused him upset stomachs. Skeen had the wild thought that Mr. Jubal Pickett took castor oil with his coffee, regularly. His voice registered perhaps a tad above countertenor. He wore a plain gray suit, a vest, and a black bowtie. A gray derby was hooked over one knee.

His wife, Lucinda, was a prim, shriveled, almost emaciated woman with a prune face that reminded him of Olga Quarre, a creature he had met in April on a case. He guessed she was in her forties, as well, but it was hard to determine her age. She wore a Quakerish bonnet and a lacy, high neck collar that that did not quite encase her scrawny neck. She wore a bland brown jacket, an ankle-length brown skirt, and brown, old fashioned women’s shoes that were shin-high and which had to be laced up through a dozen eyelets. One claw-like hand was wrapped around the handle of an umbrella; the other held a shapeless cloth bag that was probably her purse. It had not rained in the city for days, and was not raining now. Some people carried umbrellas regardless of the weather.

On Monday, US Secretary of State John Kerry visited Hiroshima. While there meeting with this G-7 counterparts, Kerry strongly hinted that his visit was a precursor to a visit to the site of the first nuclear bombing by President Barack Obama next month.

The irony of course is that for all his professed commitment to ridding the world of nuclear weapons, Obama is responsible for drastically increasing the chance of nuclear war. Indeed, Obama’s own actions lend easily to the conclusion that he wishes to do penance for America’s decision to attack Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs, (and so end World War II with far fewer dead than a land invasion of Japan would have required), by enabling America’s enemies to target the US and its allies with nuclear weapons.

Obama views his nuclear deal with Iran – the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – as his greatest foreign policy achievement.

Unfortunately for his legacy building and for global security, for the past several weeks news stories have made clear that critics of Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran – who claimed that far from preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, the deal would enable Iran to develop them in broad daylight, and encourage Iran to step up its support for terror and regional aggression – were entirely correct.

All of the warnings sounded by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and other leaders have been borne out. All of the warnings sounded by the leaders of the Persian Gulf kingdoms were correct.

Every major commitment Obama made to Congress and to US allies in the wake of the deal have been shown in retrospect to have been false.

Obama told Congress that while the deal did require the US to drop its nuclear sanctions against Iran, the non-nuclear sanctions would remain in place. In recent weeks, media reports have made clear that the administration’s commitment to maintain non-nuclear sanctions on Iran has collapsed.

Donald Trump recently ignited another controversy when he mused that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was obsolete. He hinted that it might no longer be worth the huge American investment.

In typical Trump style, he hit a nerve, but he then offered few details about the consequences of either staying in or leaving NATO.

NATO is certainly no longer aimed at keeping a huge Soviet land army out of democratic Western Europe, as was envisioned in 1949.

The alliance has been unwisely expanded from its original twelve-nation membership to include 28 countries, absorbing many of the old communist Warsaw Pact nations and some former Soviet republics. NATO may have meant well to offer security to these vulnerable new alliance members. Yet it is hard to imagine Belgians and Italians dying on the battlefield to keep Russian president Vladimir Putin’s forces out of Lithuania or Estonia.

Today’s NATO pledges to many of its newer participants are about as believable as British and French rhetorical guarantees in August 1939 to protect a far-away Poland from its Nazi and Soviet neighbors.

No NATO member during the 40-year Cold War invoked Article Four of the treaty, requiring consultation of the entire alliance by a supposedly threatened member. Turkey has called for it four times since 2003.

The idea that Western Europe, beset with radical Islamic terrorism and unchecked migrations from the war-torn Middle East, would pledge its military support to the agendas and feuds of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasingly Islamist and non-democratic regime is pure fantasy.

Few NATO members meet the alliance’s goal of investing 2 percent of gross domestic product in defense spending. Instead, socialist Europe expects the United States to carry most of NATO’s fiscal and military burdens.

Russian SU-24 bombers flew over the American destroyer Donald Cook at an altitude of less than 30 feet in what was described as a “simulated attack.” The Daniel Cook was in international waters at the time.

“This was more aggressive than anything we’ve seen in some time,” said a defense official. And it wasn’t the only aggressive move against our Navy by the Russians in recent days.

Military Times:

The maneuver was one of several aggressive moves by Russian aircraft on Monday and Tuesday.

Shortly after leaving the Polish port of Gdynia, near Gdansk, on Monday, the Donald Cook at was sea in international waters conducting flight operations with a Polish helicopter, part of routine joint training exercises with the NATO ally.

During those flight operations, a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 combat aircraft appeared and conducted about 20 overflights, coming within 1,000 yards of the ship at an altitude of about 100 feet, the defense official said. In response, the commander of the Donald Cook suspended flight operations.

On Tuesday, the Donald Cook was underway in the Baltic Sea when a Russian helicopter — a Ka-27 Helix — made seven overflights and appeared to be taking photographs of the U.S. Navy ship, the defense official said.

Shortly after the helicopter left the area, an Su-24 began making “very low” overflights with a “simulated attack profile,” the defense official said. The aircraft made a total of 11 passes.

The ship’s commander repeatedly tried to make radio contact with the Russian aircraft but received no response, the defense official said.

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee declared that the greatest intel failure after the biggest terror attack on home soil actually has to do with the Kremlin.

“The biggest intelligence failure that we have had since 9/11 has been the inability to predict the leadership plans and intentions of the Putin regime in Russia,” Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) told CNN.

“And so I can understand why, for — after the Georgian invasion, you know, maybe we thought some diplomacy might work. But, clearly, after the invasion of Crimea, that should have been a red line, and we immediately should have moved quickly in to bolster our NATO allies,” he said.

“But instead we continued to negotiate with the Russians, we continued to talk to the Russians, and then they invaded Eastern Ukraine. We missed that. And then we completely missed entirely when they put a new base, a new base with aircraft into the Mediterranean, into Syria. We just missed it. We were blind.”

Furthermore, the chairman charged, the intelligence community “has continued to get this wrong.”

“And, look, I think it’s all of us are to blame, right? And I think the White House is to blame. I think Congress is to blame. I think many of our allies are to blame, because we misjudged Putin for many, many years,” he added.

On Islamic terrorism, Nunes stressed that a recent House Homeland Security Committee report noting 5,000 Europeans have traveled to fight with ISIS and more than 1,000 have returned to the continent only covers those terrorists authorities know about.