RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

A reader sent me some interesting data on the actual track record of blacks in the Best Actor category of the Academy Awards. He writes:

The black population in the US is about 13%.

So, apparently according to Spike Lee et al, blacks must be given 13% of awards.

In the last nine years black actors won once which was 11% of the Best Actor awards.

In the last eleven years black actors won twice which was 18% of the Best Actor awards.

In the last fourteen years black actors won three times which was 21% of the Best Actor awards.

2013 – 20% of the nominees were black
2012 – 20%
2009 – 20%
2006 – 20%
2004 – 20%
2001 – 20%
1999 – 20%

In the last four years there have been 20 nominees for Best Actor. Two were black. Ten percent.

In his delightful book “The Fortunes of Permanence-Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia” Roger Kimball has a chapter “Rereading John Buchan. He writes” Buchan, who described himself as “high- low brow” was author of a spy thriller “Greenmantle” in 1916 which describes a German effort to manipulate a radical Islamist group in Turkey. Kimball quotes a protagonist in the book: “Islam is a fighting creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other.”

There’s more. Kimball mines this from another character in the book. “There is a great stirring in Islam, something moving on the face of the waters….Those religious revivals come in cycles, and one is due about now. And they are quite clear about the details. A seer has arisen of the blood of the Prophet, who will restore the Khalifate to its old glories and Islam to its old purity.”

Goodness gracious! Islamophobia in 1916!

In his delightful book “The Fortunes of Permanence-Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia” Roger Kimball has a chapter “Rereading John Buchan. He writes” Buchan, who described himself as “high- low brow” was author of a spy thriller “Greenmantle” in 1916 which describes a German effort to manipulate a radical Islamist group in Turkey. Kimball quotes a protagonist in the book: “Islam is a fighting creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other.”

There’s more. Kimball mines this from another character in the book. “There is a great stirring in Islam, something moving on the face of the waters….Those religious revivals come in cycles, and one is due about now. And they are quite clear about the details. A seer has arisen of the blood of the Prophet, who will restore the Khalifate to its old glories and Islam to its old purity.”

Goodness gracious! Islamophobia in 1916! rsk

Before Jack Higgins, Ian Fleming, Frederick Forsyth, Wilbur Smith and all the other authors who have made the wrongly accused rogue male their hero, there was John Buchan’s urbane and gentlemanly Richard Hannay, still the most endearing of the lot
A century after publication, John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps remains the quintessential spy thriller. There is no need to rediscover this novel, since it has never gone away. No work of fiction published during the Edwardian period is more widely available in bookstores in as many mass-market and scholarly editions. The presence of The Thirty-Nine Steps in popular culture has spread even further—the book’s title has a life of its own.

It is one of the first adult adventure novels I can remember reading, part of an early teenage thriller binge that included Jack Higgins, Ian Fleming, Frederick Forsyth and Wilbur Smith, and a phase followed by a lasting engagement with the likes of Eric Ambler, Joseph Conrad and John le Carré.

The writing career of John Buchan, who died in 1940, predates all of the other authors I have just mentioned except Conrad. The Thirty-Nine Steps is the forerunner to countless subsequent spy thrillers and action movies where a lone hero is pitted against the forces of darkness, which is the scenario used by virtually all of them.

The Thirty-Nine Steps has spawned four feature-film adaptations, the first and best-known of which was directed by Alfred Hitchcock and released in 1935. The novel has also been adapted many times for radio, most notably for broadcast by Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre in 1938. In recent years a comic stage version based on the Hitchcock film has been performed in many countries throughout the world, including South Korea, Russia, Israel, Poland and Australia, as well as enjoying a long run on the London stage that, at the time of writing, continues.