Saturday, October 03, 2009
Friday, October 02, 2009
Obama's French Lesson
"President Obama, I support the Americans' outstretched hand. But what did the international community gain from these offers of dialogue? Nothing." -- French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Sept. 24
WASHINGTON -- When France chides you for appeasement, you know you're scraping bottom. Just how low we've sunk was demonstrated by the Obama administration's satisfaction when Russia's president said of Iran, after meeting President Obama at the U.N., that "sanctions are seldom productive, but they are sometimes inevitable."
You see? The Obama magic. Engagement works. Russia is on board. Except that, as The Washington Post inconveniently pointed out, President Dmitry Medvedev said the same thing a week earlier, and the real power in Russia, Vladimir Putin, had changed not at all in his opposition to additional sanctions. And just to make things clear, when Iran then brazenly test-fired offensive missiles, Russia reacted by declaring that this newest provocation did not warrant the imposition of tougher sanctions.
Do the tally. In return for selling out Poland and the Czech Republic by unilaterally abrogating a missile-defense security arrangement that Russia had demanded be abrogated, we get from Russia ... what? An oblique hint, of possible support, for unspecified sanctions, grudgingly offered and of dubious authority -- and, in any case, leading nowhere because the Chinese have remained resolute against any Security Council sanctions.
Confusing ends and means, the Obama administration strives mightily for shows of allied unity, good feeling and pious concern about Iran's nuclear program -- whereas the real objective is stopping that program. This feel-good posturing is worse than useless, because all the time spent achieving gestures is precious time granted Iran to finish its race to acquire the bomb.
Don't take it from me. Take it from Sarkozy, who could not conceal his astonishment at Obama's naivete. On Sept. 24, Obama ostentatiously presided over the Security Council. With 14 heads of state (or government) at the table, with an American president at the chair for the first time ever, with every news camera in the world trained on the meeting, it would garner unprecedented worldwide attention.
Unknown to the world, Obama had in his pocket explosive revelations about an illegal uranium enrichment facility that the Iranians had been hiding near Qom. The French and the British were urging him to use this most dramatic of settings to stun the world with the revelation and to call for immediate action.
Obama refused. Not only did he say nothing about it, but, reports Le Monde, Sarkozy was forced to scrap the Qom section of his speech. Obama held the news until a day later -- in Pittsburgh. I've got nothing against Pittsburgh (site of the G-20 summit), but a stacked-with-world-leaders Security Council chamber, it is not.
Why forgo the opportunity? Because Obama wanted the Security Council meeting to be about his own dream of a nuclear-free world. The president, reports The New York Times citing "White House officials," did not want to "dilute" his disarmament resolution "by diverting to Iran."
Diversion? It's the most serious security issue in the world. A diversion from what? From a worthless U.N. disarmament resolution?
Yes. And from Obama's star turn as planetary visionary: "The administration told the French," reports The Wall Street Journal, "that it didn't want to 'spoil the image of success' for Mr. Obama's debut at the U.N."
Image? Success? Sarkozy could hardly contain himself. At the council table, with Obama at the chair, he reminded Obama that "we live in a real world, not a virtual world."
He explained: "President Obama has even said, 'I dream of a world without (nuclear weapons).' Yet before our very eyes, two countries are currently doing the exact opposite."
Sarkozy's unspoken words? "And yet, sacre bleu, he's sitting on Qom!"
At the time, we had no idea what Sarkozy was fuming about. Now we do. Although he could hardly have been surprised by Obama's fecklessness. After all, just a day earlier in addressing the General Assembly, Obama actually said, "No one nation can ... dominate another nation." That adolescent mindlessness was followed with the declaration that "alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War" in fact "make no sense in an interconnected world." NATO, our alliances with Japan and South Korea, our umbrella over Taiwan, are senseless? What do our allies think when they hear such nonsense?
Bismarck is said to have said: "There is a providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children, and the United States of America." Bismarck never saw Obama at the U.N. Sarkozy did.
Thursday, October 01, 2009
We've Been Talking to Iran for 30 Years
The Obama administration's talks with Iran—set to take place tomorrow in Geneva—are accompanied by an almost universally accepted misconception: that previous American administrations refused to negotiate with Iranian leaders. The truth, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said last October at the National Defense University, is that "every administration since 1979 has reached out to the Iranians in one way or another and all have failed."
After the fall of the shah in February 1979, the Carter administration attempted to establish good relations with the revolutionary regime. We offered aid, arms and understanding. The Iranians demanded that the United States honor all arms deals with the shah, remain silent about human-rights abuses carried out by the new regime, and hand over Iranian "criminals" who had taken refuge in America. The talks ended with the seizure of the American Embassy in November.
President Jimmy Carter announces that the U.S. will seek economic sanctions against Iran, Dec. 21, 1979. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance looks on.
The Reagan administration—driven by a desire to gain the release of the American hostages—famously sought a modus vivendi with Iran in the midst of the Iran-Iraq War during the mid-1980s. To that end, the U.S. sold weapons to Iran and provided military intelligence about Iraqi forces. High-level American officials such as Robert McFarlane met secretly with Iranian government representatives to discuss the future of the relationship. This effort ended when the Iran-Contra scandal erupted in late 1986.
The Clinton administration lifted sanctions that had been imposed by Messrs. Carter and Reagan. During the 1990s, Iranians (including the national wrestling team) entered the U.S. for the first time since the '70s. The U.S. also hosted Iranian cultural events and unfroze Iranian bank accounts. President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright publicly apologized to Iran for purported past sins, including the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh's government by the CIA and British intelligence in August 1953. But it all came to nothing when Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei proclaimed that we were their enemies in March 1999.
Most recently, the administration of George W. Bush—invariably and falsely described as being totally unwilling to talk to the mullahs—negotiated extensively with Tehran. There were scores of publicly reported meetings, and at least one very secret series of negotiations. These negotiations have rarely been described in the American press, even though they are the subject of a BBC documentary titled "Iran and the West."
At the urging of British Foreign Minister Jack Straw, the U.S. negotiated extensively with Ali Larijani, then-secretary of Iran's National Security Council. By September 2006, an agreement had seemingly been reached. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Nicholas Burns, her top Middle East aide, flew to New York to await the promised arrival of an Iranian delegation, for whom some 300 visas had been issued over the preceding weekend. Mr. Larijani was supposed to announce the suspension of Iranian nuclear enrichment. In exchange, we would lift sanctions. But Mr. Larijani and his delegation never arrived, as the BBC documentary reported.
Negotiations have always been accompanied by sanctions. But neither has produced any change in Iranian behavior.
Until the end of 2006—and despite appeals for international support, notably from Mr. Clinton—sanctions were almost exclusively imposed by the U.S. alone. Mr. Carter issued an executive order forbidding the sale of anything to Tehran except food and medical supplies. Mr. Reagan banned the importation of virtually all Iranian goods and services in October 1987. Mr. Clinton issued an executive order in March 1995 prohibiting any American involvement with petroleum development. The following May he issued an additional order tightening those sanctions. Five years later, Secretary of State Albright eased some of the sanctions by allowing Americans to buy and import carpets and some food products, such as dried fruits, nuts and caviar.
Mr. Bush took spare parts for commercial aircraft off the embargo list in the fall of 2006. On the other hand, in 2008 he revoked authorization of so-called U-turn transfers, making it illegal for any American bank to process transactions involving Iran—even if non-Iranian banks were at each end.
Throughout this period, our allies advocated for further diplomacy instead of sanctions. But beginning in late 2006, the United Nations started passing sanctions of its own. In December of that year, the Security Council blocked the import or export of "sensitive nuclear material and equipment" and called on member states to freeze the assets of anyone involved with Iran's nuclear program.
In 2007, the Security Council banned all arms exports from Iran, froze Iranian assets, and restricted the travel of anyone involved in the Iranian nuclear program. The following year, it called for investigations of Iranian banks, and authorized member countries to start searching planes and ships coming or going from or to Iran. All to no avail.
Thirty years of negotiations and sanctions have failed to end the Iranian nuclear program and its war against the West. Why should anyone think they will work now? A change in Iran requires a change in government. Common sense and moral vision suggest we should support the courageous opposition movement, whose leaders have promised to end support for terrorism and provide total transparency regarding the nuclear program.
Mr. Ledeen, a scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, is the author, most recently, of "Accomplice to Evil: Iran and the War Against the West," out next month from St. Martin's Press.
The Limits of Reinvention: If you think the U.S. was hated for being strong, wait until you see how it’s despised for being weak.
It’s like the heady days of Paris, 2005. This week, the French ruling clique is having a go at America, pouring vintage disdain on American puissance — and finding that power woefully misapplied.
This was all supposed to change under Pres. Barack Obama, the first U.S. president in history to take a global lap just to say he’s sorry for his country’s behavior. His plan was to reinvent America’s image in the world. He became an overnight sensation in Paris, delighting les médiacrates with his easy dismissal of French president Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni. Months later, in France, the only person more popular with the press than Roman Polanski is Barack Obama.
But that may soon change — as it has already at the Elysée, and, for that matter, in government offices in Berlin and in Brussels and in the eastern capitals. In those places, Barack Obama, the man who practically invented reinvention, is himself being reinvented as an ugly American. Not because he’s seen as loud and aggressive, but because he’s seen as weak.
The events that have transpired since Obama took office nine months ago have been watched with widening eyes in Europe, and what they’re seeing isn’t what they had in mind when they too asked for “change.”
First, his attempt to reinvent the global banking system while pouring nearly a trillion dollars into mostly unproductive government swamps was seen by those who ought to know as nothing more than a series of simple political bribes. The Europeans — save only Britain — ridiculed the plan, stuck to their own solutions, and proved themselves right.
Then came a big wave of limpnesses — the inability to deal with North Korea; surrendering to Russia on the missile shield, leaving our eastern European allies to twist in the wind; even the mishandled melodrama in Honduras — all suggested something other than shock-and-awe. Meanwhile, his reinvention of state-run health care isn’t impressing Europeans very much, that’s for sure.
Even events that Obama may have had little to do with — the release of the Lockerbie terrorist, for example — have added to the growing perception that America is even weaker than its dollar. There’s a growing sense that, like its dollar, America as the global superpower must be doomed to be replaced by something more resilient, more realistic, more durable. Something stronger.
The latest example: At his U.N. debut last week, Obama shocked the Europeans — and especially Sarkozy — by responding to the Iranian nuclear crisis not with fair firmness, but with platitudes about arms control, the reinvention of disarmament, and achieving peace in his term.
The story-behind-the-story was an important one, and it’s been nearly overlooked. Sarkozy, who had been pressing for a forceful warning to the Iranians, had to tone down his own response. Instead, he simply pointed out that Iran had made threats that ought to be taken seriously by America and the world, but that clearly wasn’t happening. He mocked Obama by telling Le Monde’s diplomatic correspondent that the American president wasn’t living in the real world — a “virtual world,” he called it.
The story was picked up by the Wall Street Journal. That piece was then echoed by Nile Gardiner in the Daily Telegraph. Both thought it was appalling that the president of France should be telling the president of the U.S.A. how to stand up straight. As the Journal put it, “We thought we’d never see the day when the President of France shows more resolve than America’s Commander in Chief for confronting one of the gravest challenges to global security. But here we are.”
At the moment, then, this is all just an excursion in irony. The current campaign in Afghanistan seems doomed to fail, not just because of an unwillingness to commit the manpower and resources necessary to do the work — call that “pragmatic weakness,” if you will — but because NATO itself is falling prey to Obama’s “reinvention” craze. Here’s an L. A. Times headline sure to terrify every serious European leader: “Obama: New NATO coming, shape and strategy TBD.”
But reinvention has its limits, and so far Obama has found every one. The Europeans rightly fear that the president of the United States is a man who would set out to reinvent the electric light — then leave us all holding candles. But singing “Kumbaya.”
A less-than-forceful America has serious implications for Europe. If Obama is willing to throw the Poles to Putin, what does that mean for the rest of Europe? Just the idea of defending themselves is enough to bankrupt most European states. A strong America may have been unpopular. That’s the price a nation pays for its superpower status, and even when the Left was at its most successful in demonizing the U.S., they could never quite diminish the hopeful respect for American ideals that always lurked nearby.
But Obama may have found a way to reinvent America as something in his own image, even if more loathsome: a weak nation shrinking from the responsibilities of strength. A weak America is a prize that Yank-bashers have been dreaming about for 50 years, because that’s an America that, perhaps rightly, will be truly and forever despised.
— Denis Boyles teaches at The Brouzils Seminars in France. His most recent book is Superior, Nebraska.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
U2 Live From Outer Space: The New Issue of Rolling Stone
Photograph by Sam Jones; Digital imaging and logo
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
The Law and More with Laurence Silberman
Burned by Obama - Wall St. execs feel betrayed
What a difference a year makes. They won't admit it in public -- but in private conversations, the top guys on Wall Street are feeling burned.
The guy who seemed like such a steady voice -- vowing to curb runaway spending and restoring order to the banking system and the economy as a whole -- is instead so driven to achieve his big-government policy goals that he and his policy people are ignoring their own economic advisers on the severe economic costs that his agenda will cause.
I'm told that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and chief economic adviser Lawrence Summers have both complained to senior Wall Street execs that they have almost no say in major policy decisions. Obama economic counselor Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman, is barely consulted at all on just about anything -- not even issues involving the banking system, of which he is among the world's leading authorities.
At most, the economic people and their staffs get asked to do cost analyses of Obama's initiatives for the White House political people -- who then ignore their advice.
It's almost the opposite approach, the Wall Street crowd complains, from the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, whose main first-term achieve- ment -- deficit reduction -- was crafted by his chief economic adviser, Robert Rubin.
Like Obama, Clinton and Rubin promised to raise taxes on the "rich," and they did. But Clinton didn't raise taxes to embark on a wild-eyed redistribution of wealth and massive programs. In the early Clinton years, Rubin convinced the president that he needed to avoid the grim consequences of runaway spending -- and after the Republicans took Congress in '94, it was no longer an option.
Of course, the Clinton tax hikes came at a cost -- before the tech boom ignited the economy in 1995, growth was mediocre at best. But government spending remained under control, and lower interest rates followed, as did an economic recovery.
Obama, according to Wall Street people who regularly deal with his economic and budget officials, is acting as if he has a blank check to do what he wants, while ignoring the longterm costs of his policies.
As one CEO of a major financial firm told me: "The economic guys say that when they explain the costs of programs, the policy guys simply thank them for their time and then ignore what they say."
In other words, the economic people feel that they have almost no say in this administration's policy decisions.
Wall Street should have seen it coming. Obama was among the most liberal politicians in the country, despite his campaign rhetoric -- and his record in Illinois and the Senate showed it. He has spoken glowingly over the years of the need to redistribute wealth, a measure that always leads to taxes on small businesses, the economy's main economic engine.
The execs who had such hopes for the president are now wondering fearfully just how radical he really is.
It's almost comical watching the Street's top players squirm when they hear "class warfare" rhetoric coming from the White House, and it forces them to act in ways they'd never imagined. In addition to recently giving phony speeches about the sins of large compensation packages that they had no problem taking just a few years ago, many Wall Street CEOs are so terrified of being outed as greedy capitalists that they no longer use the corporate credit cards to charge business lunches at their favorite New York restaurants.
The funniest story I've heard lately came from a former Wall Street executive and longtime Democrat who anxiously recounted a recent conversation with Obama.
The executive said he told the president that he's at a disadvantage because he's relatively inexperienced in economic matters during a time of economic crisis. "That's why I have Valerie," came Obama's reply.
"Valerie" is senior adviser Valerie Jarrett -- a Chicago real-estate attorney and one of Obama's closest friends, who has deep ties to the Windy City's Democratic political machine.
Now you know why Wall Street is so nervous.
CNBC on-air editor Charles Gasparino's new book about the Wall Street meltdown, "The Sell out," is due out Nov. 3.
The Neocons Make a Comeback because Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il and Vladimir Putin never went away.
My answer was that the neocons are back because Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il and Vladimir Putin never went away. A star may have shone in the east the day Barack Obama became president. But these three kings, at least, have yet to proffer the usual gifts of gold and incense and myrrh.
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Associated Press
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Vladimir Putin
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Instead, the presents have been of a different kind. North Korea claims to be in the final stages of building a uranium enrichment facility—its second route to an atomic bomb. Iran, again caught cheating on its Nonproliferation Treaty obligations, has responded by wagging a finger at the U.S. and firing a round of missiles. Syria continues to aid and abet jihadists operating in Iraq. NATO countries have generally refused to send more troops to Afghanistan, and are all the more reluctant to do so now that the administration is itself wavering on the war.
As for Russia, its ambassador to the U.N. last week bellyached that the U.S. "continues to be a rather difficult negotiating partner"—and that was after Mr. Obama cancelled the missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic. Thus does the politics of concession meet with the logic of contempt.
All this must, at some level, come as a surprise to an administration so deeply in love with itself. "I am well aware of the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world," Mr. Obama told the U.N.'s General Assembly last week with his usual modesty. He added that those expectations were "rooted in hope—the hope that real change is possible, and the hope that America will be a leader in bringing about such change."
Yet what sounds like "hope" in, say, Toronto or Barcelona tends to come across as fecklessness in Warsaw and Jerusalem. In Moscow and Tehran, it reads like credulity—and an opportunity to exploit the U.S. at a moment of economic weakness and political self-infatuation.
For those much-scorned neocons, none of this comes as a surprise. Neoconservatives generally take the view that the internal character of a regime usually predicts the nature of its foreign policy. Governments that are answerable to their own people and accountable to a rule of law tend to respect the rights of their neighbors, honor their treaty commitments, and abide by the international rules of the road. By contrast, regimes that prey on their own citizens are likely to prey on their neighbors as well. Their word is the opposite of their bond.
That's why neocons have no faith in any deals or "grand bargains" the U.S. might sign with North Korea or Iran over their nuclear programs: Cheating is in the DNA of both regimes, and the record is there to prove it. Nor do neocons put much stock in the notion that there's a "reset" button with the Kremlin. Russia is the quintessential spoiler state, seeking its advantage in America's troubles at home and abroad. Ditto for Syria, which has perfected the art of taking credit for solving problems of its own creation.
Where neocons do put their faith is in American power, not just military or economic power but also as an instrument of moral and political suasion. Disarmament? The last dictator to relinquish his nuclear program voluntarily was Libya's Moammar Gadhafi, who did so immediately following Saddam Hussein's capture. Democratization? Contrary to current conventional wisdom, democracy is often imposed, or at least facilitated, by U.S. pressure—in the Philippines, in the Balkans and, yes, in Iraq. Human rights? Anwar Ibrahim, the beleaguered Malaysian opposition leader, told me last week that "the only country that can stand up" to abusive regimes is the United States. "If they know the administration is taking a soft stance [on human rights], they will go on a rampage."
None of this is to say that neoconservatism represents some kind of infallible doctrine—or that it's even a doctrine. Neocons have erred in overestimating the U.S. public's willingness to engage in long struggles on behalf of other people. They have erred also in overestimating the willingness of other people to fight for themselves, or for their freedom.
But as the pendulum has swung to a U.S. foreign policy based on little more than the personal attractions of the president, it's little wonder that the world is casting about for an alternative. And a view of the world that understands that American power still furnishes the margin between freedom and tyranny, and between prosperity and chaos, is starting to look better all the time. Even in France.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
Iran: The great US intelligence fraud
Fortunately, we are advised that they are not.
In November 2007, US intelligence agencies wrote a National Intelligence Estimate concluding, “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” The intelligence community appears to be sticking by its judgment, which means — cue the sighs of relief — that the Qom facility may be only a strange curiosity.
Apparently, the Iranian regime is an obscurantist theocracy with an unquenchable taste for conducting massive experiments in advanced physics. In secret. In heavily defended facilities.
The 2007 NIE had a very circumscribed definition of a weapons program, but it included “covert conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work.” Exactly what Qom is for. What do the Iranians have to do to convince US intelligence they have a weapons program?
Iran has been very lucky in its watchdogs. The 2007 NIE, which stands exposed as about as worthless as then-CIA Director George Tenet’s prewar talk of a “slam-dunk” on Iraq’s WMD, crushed any thought of the politically weakened Bush administration moving against Iran. And the punch-pulling International Atomic Energy Agency has been suppressing damaging material, concerned more with forestalling a conflict over Iran’s nuclear program than forestalling the program itself.
If the mullahs have a sense of humor, they must enjoy the farcical aspect of their showdown with the hapless “international community.” Immediately after President Obama & Co. scolded them over the Qom facility, they test-launched short- and medium-range missiles in an in-your-face military exercise named The Great Prophet IV. The Iranians want to become a nuclear power on the Pyongyang Plan, featuring lots of bluster and lies coupled with interminable negotiations and negotiations over negotiations.
The Qom facility is less a surprise than more confirmation of standard Iranian procedure. In 2002, the Iranians were caught with an undeclared enrichment facility at Natanz. A few years later, they were caught trying to figure out how to get a warhead onto a Shahab missile.
Each revelation brings its international tsk-tsking, as Iran’s program marches on.
In a painfully wishful sentiment, |Obama says that gaining a nuclear weapon is not in the Iranians’ interest. But Tehran isn’t so foolish. With a nuke, it knows it will have a deterrent against us; a means to destroy Israel, and an instant boost to its influence and prestige in the region.
The Iranians consider the world order to be deeply unjust, foisted on everyone else by the Jews and the West, using the lie of the Holocaust for leverage. Iranian power is to be the instrument of this order’s reformation. The regime would have to be thoroughly irrational — even on its own apocalyptic terms — to want to give up the prospect of a weapon merely to avoid tougher sanctions that may never arrive.
The notion that a bomb isn’t in the Iranians’ interest feeds the fantasy that they can be coaxed out of it by dialogue. If only they could understand our good intentions, if only we hash out a mutually agreeable accommodation, then they will realize their true interest is in eschewing proliferation. This attitude is about as clear-eyed as the 2007 NIE.
The Europeans have been embroiled in negotiations with the Iranians for years, pleading with them to abide by repeated UN resolutions urging them to suspend their uranium enrichment. The Iranians have kept going since 2006. Tellingly, they had indeed suspended enrichment back in 2003, after the Europeans told them they risked courting the same fate as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Through the haze of delusion over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, that’s a stark lesson in the persuasive power of fear. But why would anyone who isn’t an American insurance executive or a highly compensated banker be scared of Barack Obama?
Monday, September 28, 2009
Barack Obama, College Administrator. Is the commander-in-chief really president of the University of America?
Obama went to Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard without much of a break, taught at the University of Chicago, and then surrounded himself with academics, first in his stint at community organizing and then when he went into politics. It shows. In his limited experience, those who went to Yale or Harvard are special people, and the Ivy League environment has been replicated in the culture of the White House.
Note how baffled the administration is by sinking polls, tea parties, town halls, and, in general, “them” — the vast middle class, which, as we learned during the campaign, clings to guns and Bibles, and which has now been written off as blinkered, racist, and xenophobic. The earlier characterization of rural Pennsylvania has been expanded to include all of Middle America.
For many in the academic community who have not worked with their hands, run businesses, or ventured far off campus, Middle America is an exotic place inhabited by aborigines who bowl, don’t eat arugula, and need to be reminded to inflate their tires. They are an emotional lot, of some value on campus for their ability to “fix” broken things like pipes and windows, but otherwise wisely ignored. Professor Chu, Obama’s energy secretary, summed up the sense of academic disdain that permeates this administration with his recent sniffing about the childish polloi: “The American people . . . just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act.” Earlier, remember, Dr. Chu had scoffed from his perch that California farms were environmentally unsound and would soon disappear altogether, “We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.”
It is the role of the university, from a proper distance, to help them, by making sophisticated, selfless decisions on healthcare and the environment that the unwashed cannot grasp are really in their own interest — deluded as they are by Wal-Mart consumerism, Elmer Gantry evangelicalism, and Sarah Palin momism. The tragic burden of an academic is to help the oppressed, but blind, majority.
In the world of the university, a Van Jones — fake name, fake accent, fake underclass pedigree, fake almost everything — is a dime a dozen. Ward Churchill fabricated everything from his degree to his ancestry, and was given tenure, high pay, and awards for his beads, buckskin, and Native American–like locks. The “authentic” outbursts of Van Jones about white polluters and white mass-murderers are standard campus fare. In universities, such over-the-top rhetoric and pseudo-Marxist histrionics are simply career moves, used to scare timid academics and win release time, faculty-adjudicated grants, or exemption from normal tenure scrutiny. Skip Gates’s fussy little theatrical fit at a Middle American was not his first and will not be his last.
Obama did not vet Jones before hiring him because he saw nothing unusual (much less offensive) about him, in the way that Bill Ayers likewise was typical, not an aberration, on a campus. Just as there are few conservatives, so too there are felt to be few who should be considered radicals in universities. Instead everyone is considered properly left, and even fringe expressions are considered normal calibrations within a shared spectrum. The proper question is not “Why are there so many extremists in the administration?” but rather “What’s so extreme?”
Some people are surprised that the administration is hardly transparent and, in fact, downright intolerant of dissent. Critics are slurred as racists and Nazis — usually without the fingerprints of those who orchestrated the smear campaign from higher up. The NEA seems to want to dish out federal money to “artists” on the basis of liberal obsequiousness. The president tells the nation that his wonderful programs are met with distortion and right-wing lies, and that the time for talking is over — no more partisan, divisive bickering in endless debate.
That reluctance to engage in truly diverse argumentation again reveals the influence of the academic world on Team Obama. We can have an Eric Holder–type “conversation” (a good campusese word), but only if held on the basis of the attorney general’s one-way notion of racial redress.
On most campuses, referenda in the academic senate (“votes of conscience”) on gay marriage or the war in Iraq are as lopsided as Saddam’s old plebiscites. Speech codes curb free expression. Groupthink is the norm. Dissent on tenure decisions, questioning of diversity, or skepticism about the devolution in the definition of sexual harassment — all that can be met with defamation. The wolf cry of “racist” is a standard careerist gambit. Given the exalted liberal ends, why quibble over the means?
Some wonder where Obama got the idea that constant exposure results in persuasion. But that too comes from the talk-is-everything mindset of a university president. Faculties are swamped with memos from deans, provosts, and presidents, reiterating their own “commitment to diversity,” reminding how they would not “tolerate hate speech,” and in general blathering about the “campus community.” University administrators instruct faculty on everything from getting a flu shot, to covering up when coughing, to how to make a syllabus and avoid incorrect words.
Usually the frequency of such communiqués spikes when administrators are looking for a job elsewhere and want to establish a fresh paper trail so that their potential new employers can be reminded of their ongoing progressive credentials.
Obama has simply emulated the worldview and style of a college administrator. So he thinks that reframing the same old empty banalities with new rhetorical flourishes and signs of fresh commitment and empathy will automatically result in new faculty converts. There is no there there in healthcare reform, but opponents can be either bullied, shamed, or mesmerized into thinking there is.
Czars are a university favorite. Among the frequent topics of the daily university executive communiqués are the formulaic “My team now includes . . . ,” “I have just appointed . . . ,” “Under my direction . . . ” (that first-person overload is, of course, another Obama characteristic), followed by announcement of a new “special” appointment: “special assistant to the president for diversity,” “acting assistant provost for community affairs and external relations,” “associate dean for curriculum enhancement and development.”
Most of these tasks are either unnecessary or amply covered by existing faculty, department chairs, and deans. Czars, however, proliferated on campuses for fairly obvious reasons. First, they are spotlights illuminating the university administration’s commitment to a particular fashionable cause by the showy creation of a high-profile, highly remunerative new job. When loud protests meet the university’s inability to create a new department or fund a trendy but costly special program, administrators often take their loudest critics and make them czars — satisfying the “base” without substantial policy changes.
Second, czars are a way to circumvent the usual workings of the university, especially faculty committees in which there is an outside chance of some marginalized conservative voting against putting “Race, Class, and Gender in the Latina Cinema” into the general-education curriculum.
Special assistants for and associates of something or other are not vetted. Czars create an alternative university administration that can create special billets, hire adjuncts (with de facto security), and obtain budgeting without faculty oversight. The special assistant or associate rarely is hired through a normal search process open to the campus community, but rather is simply selected and promoted by administrative fiat.
One of the most disturbing characteristics of the new administration is a particular sort of whining or petulance. Dissatisfaction arises over even favorable press coverage — as we saw last weekend, when Obama serially trashed the obsequious media that he had hogged all day.
Feelings of being underappreciated by the public for all one’s self-sacrificial efforts are common university traits. We’ve seen in the past a certain love/hate relationship of Professor Obama with wealthy people — at first a Tony Rezko, but now refined and evolved much higher to those on Wall Street that the administration in schizophrenic fashion both damns and worships.
Michelle Obama during the campaign summed up best her husband’s wounded-fawn sense of sacrifice when she said, “Barack is one of the smartest people you will ever encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing called politics.”
Academic culture also promotes this idea that highly educated professionals deigned to give up their best years for arduous academic work and chose to be above the messy rat race. Although supposedly far better educated, smarter (or rather the “smartest”), and more morally sound than lawyers, CEOs, and doctors, academics gripe that they, unfairly, are far worse paid. And they lack the status that should accrue to those who teach the nation’s youth, correct their papers, and labor over lesson plans. Obama reminded us ad nauseam of all the lucre he passed up on Wall Street in order to return to the noble pursuit of organizing and teaching in Chicago.
In short, campus people have had the bar raised on themselves at every avenue. Suggest to an academic that university pay is not bad for ninth months’ work, often consisting of an actual six to nine hours a week in class, and you will be considered guilty of heresy if not defamation.
University administrators worship private money, and then among themselves scoff at the capitalism that created it. Campus elites, looking at a benefactor, are fascinated how someone — no brighter than they are — made so much money, even as they are repelled by a system that allows those other than themselves to have pulled it off. No wonder that Obama seems enchanted by a Warren Buffett, even as he trashes the very landscape that created Berkshire Hathaway’s riches. No president has raised more money from Wall Street or has given it more protection from accountability — while at the same time demagoguing it as selfish and greedy.
Many of the former Professor Obama’s problems so far hinge on his administration’s inability to judge public opinion, its own self-righteous sense of self, its non-stop sermonizing, and its suspicion of sincere dissent. In other words, the United States is now a campus, we are the students, and Obama is our university president.
There Are Only Two Choices Left on Iran
Pressure, be it gentle or severe, will not erase that nuclear program. The choices are now what they ever were: an American or an Israeli strike, which would probably cause a substantial war, or living in a world with Iranian nuclear weapons, which may also result in war, perhaps nuclear, over a longer period of time.
Understandably, the U.S. government has hoped for a middle course of sanctions, negotiations and bargaining that would remove the problem without the ugly consequences. This is self-delusion. Yes, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy stood side by side with President Barack Obama in Pittsburgh and talked sternly about lines in the sand; and yes, Russian President Dimitry Medvedev hinted that some kind of sanctions might, conceivably, be needed. They said the same things to, and with, President George W. Bush.
Though you would not know it to listen to Sunday talk shows, a large sanctions effort against Iran has been underway for some time. It has not worked to curb Tehran's nuclear appetite, and it will not. Sooner or later the administration, whose main diplomatic initiatives thus far have been a program of apologies and a few sharp kicks to small allies' shins, will have to recognize that fact.
The Iranian regime wants nuclear weapons and has invested vast sums to get both the devices and the means to deliver them. The Russians and Chinese have made soothing murmurs of disapproval but have repeatedly made it clear that they will not go along with measures that would cripple the Iranian economy (and deprive them of markets). German and Swiss businessmen will happily sell Iran whatever goods their not very exacting governments will permit, and our terrified Arab allies have nothing like the military capability to match their own understandable fears. So let's be serious about the choice, because we have less than a year to make it.
An Israeli strike may set back the Iranian program by some short period of time. What the Israelis can do is unclear: They play their tactical cards close to their vest, and they would take different approaches, and accept different risks, than the U.S. Air Force would. No surprise there, given that they believe, with reason, that the looming issues are existential.
But even if they achieved temporary success, it would be just that, because the Iranian program is very different from the Iraqi Osirak reactor that the Israelis nailed so precisely in 1981. It is far more dispersed and protected, and is based on thousands of centrifuges rather than a single nuclear reactor. Moreover, the chances are that it would evoke outrage throughout the Middle East (although Arab governments would privately rejoice at the event), and probably provoke an Iranian reaction that could involve a very large war as the Israelis are attacked by, and retaliate against, Iran's proxies in the Levant and throughout the world.
An American attack would be more effective, but it would take longer and probably lead to real warfare in the Persian Gulf, disrupting oil supplies and producing global responses. More to the point, it is difficult to believe that the Obama administration has the stomach for war. Its appalling public case of nerves over the war in Afghanistan—a "war of necessity," as of only a few months ago—is indicative of its true temper. And if President Obama does not have the courage to accept hazards and ugly surprises, and if he cannot bring himself to deploy his rhetorical skills to the mobilization of opinion at home and abroad, he should not start a shooting war, even if the Iranians are already waging one against us.
That leaves living with an Iranian bomb. But this too has enormous hazards. It will engender—it has already quietly engendered—a nuclear arms race in the region. It will embolden the Iranian regime to make much more lethal mischief than it has even now. In a region that respects strength, it will enhance, not diminish, Iranian prestige. And it may yield the first nuclear attack since 1945 some time down the road.
At the heart of the problem is not simply the nuclear program. It is the Iranian regime, a regime that has, since 1979, relentlessly waged war against the U.S. and its allies. From Buenos Aires to Herat, from Beirut to Cairo, from Baghdad to, now, Caracas, Iranian agents have done their best to disrupt and kill. Iran is militarily weak, but it is masterful at subversive war, and at the kind of high-tech guerrilla, roadside-bomb and rocket fight that Hezbollah conducted in 2006. American military cemeteries contain the bodies of hundreds, maybe thousands, of American servicemen and servicewomen slain by Iranian technology, Iranian tactics, and in some cases, Iranian operatives.
The brutality without is more than matched by the brutality within—the rape, torture and summary execution of civilians by the tens of thousands, down, quite literally, to the present day. This is a corrupt, fanatical, ruthless and unprincipled regime—unpopular, to be sure, but willing to do whatever it takes to stay in power. With such a regime, no real negotiation, based on understandings of mutual interest and respect for undertakings is possible.
It is, therefore, in the American interest to break with past policy and actively seek the overthrow of the Islamic Republic. Not by invasion, which this administration would not contemplate and could not execute, but through every instrument of U.S. power, soft more than hard. And if, as is most likely, President Obama presides over the emergence of a nuclear Iran, he had best prepare for storms that will make the squawks of protest against his health-care plans look like the merest showers on a sunny day.
Mr. Cohen teaches at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. He served as counselor of the State Department from 2007 to 2009.
With Obama, Too Much Nuance, Not Enough Power
"It is my deeply held belief," Barack Obama told the United Nations General Assembly, that "in the year 2009 -- more than at any point in human history -- the interests of nations and peoples are shared."
That is, of course, the year Obama became president, and he wasn't shy about referring in his second paragraph to "the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world," though he assured us they "are not about me."
Before Obama's speech, I wrote that he seems "stuck in a time warp in which the United States is the bad guy." Not any more, he seemed to say in his U.N. speech. He has ordered the closing of Guantanamo. He has prohibited the use of torture. He is "responsibly ending" the war in Iraq (no triumphalist talk of victory). He is promising substantial reductions in U.S. nuclear weapons. He has invested $80 billion in clean energy. The U.S.
has joined the United Nations' Human Rights Council.
All of which is a way of saying that nasty George W. Bush is no longer around with all his self-righteous swagger, and that with (as Obama did not fail to note) the first African-American installed in the White House, America is now on the same page with the rest of the world.
Much of the speech seemed to be an exercise in what Sigmund Freud called "projection," assuming that others think the way you do. Obama spoke as if the mullahs of Iran, the Kim Jong Il clan of North Korea, Vladimir Putin and his gang of oligarchs, and the rulers of China had the same gripes against the Bush administration as Obama and the liberal Democrats in Congress. Hey, if we just close Gitmo, they'll realize that we're all in sympathy now.
In that spirit, Obama at the General Assembly on Wednesday and while chairing the Security Council on Thursday tread warily on the issue of Iran's nuclear weapons program. "This is not about singling out individual nations," he said Wednesday, before stating that if Iran and North Korea "ignore international standards," they "must be held" -- in unspecified ways -- "accountable." The next day, the Security Council approved a resolution on the subject that did not name either country.
Yet on Friday, information became public that suggested that Obama's comments on Iran were an example not of Freudian projection but of what psychologists call "cognitive dissonance," refusing to process facts that conflict with deeply held beliefs. The information was that Iran has been operating a second uranium enrichment facility near the holy city of Qom and that it had so informed the International Atomic Energy Agency earlier in the week.
In response, Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy held a press conference Friday morning before the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh denouncing the Iranians. "Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow," Obama said. "International law is not an empty promise."
But the Qom facility was not news to Obama. Western intelligence has long known about it, and Obama was briefed on it as president-elect. Even so, there was a sharp contrast between his wary references to Iran on Wednesday and Thursday, and his sharp criticism on Friday. There were probably good reasons -- protecting intelligence sources? -- for not disclosing the information before this week. But shouldn't the president's rhetoric on Wednesday and Thursday have reflected all that he knew?
Obama has based his policy toward Iran on the hope that its leaders would see the problem as he does -- projection -- and was apparently discounting contrary evidence like the Qom facility -- cognitive dissonance. Perhaps he views himself as, in the words of the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder, "the first president of the nuclear age who grew up with a nuanced view of American power."
Unfortunately, it is clear that even in the year 2009 the interests of nations and peoples are not as unanimously shared as Obama proclaimed Wednesday. Our diplomats and those of five other nations are scheduled to meet with an Iranian counterpart in Geneva on Oct. 1, but the Iranians have indicated they don't want to discuss nuclear weapons issues.
At a press briefing before the G-20 conference, Brown and Sarkozy threatened Iran with stringent international sanctions; congressional Democrats -- Sen. Evan Bayh and House Foreign Affairs Chairman Howard Berman -- and Sen. Joe Lieberman are pressing for tougher sanctions, too. Is the time over for nuance, projection and cognitive dissonance?
The Life of Conservatism
Sam Tanenhaus has just published a short book entitled The Death of Conservatism. Tanenhaus, who is the editor of both the New York Times Book Review and the paper’s Week in Review section, is a very intelligent man and a very good -writer; the author of a splendid biography of -Whittaker Chambers, he has been working on a similar volume about William F. Buckley Jr. for a decade or more. His new work, which is an outgrowth of an article he published earlier this year in the New Republic, assumes a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone as it engages in a rhetorical autopsy of the American conservative moment.
American conservatism is dead, Tanenhaus reports, because it lost its connection with its own essential modesty; its proper role was to act as a counter to “liberal overreach,” of which there was plenty in the 1960s and 1970s. Once it sought to advance policies of its own, and attempted to devise a philosophical justification for those new policies, it was done for.
Given that Tanenhaus locates the seeds of conservatism’s demise in an article written by Irving -Kristol in the year 1975, in which Kristol purportedly abandoned “realism” for “revanchism,” one might wonder whether Barack Obama and his followers might themselves wish to secure a few such seeds. After all, they did grow into hardy perennials whose central presence in American political and intellectual life cast a grand shadow for more than three decades.
It is worth recalling that, between the publication of Kristol’s supposedly suicidal article and the publication of The Death of Conservatism, the conservative party’s presidential candidates resided in the White House for 20 years, with the liberal party occupying the Oval Office for only 12, and then owing to candidates who ran to the Right. Only in 2008 did an unapologetic and unrestrained liberal secure his four-year lease, a mere 40 years after the ignominious departure of the last unapologetic and unrestrained liberal, Lyndon Johnson.
Tanenhaus likes his American conservatism pessimistic and cosmopolitan, world-weary and laden with a sense of its own fundamental incapacity to prevent liberalism’s ultimate triumph. A self-confident American conservatism is, by his definition, not properly conservative at all. In some sense, he is right. If one takes the term literally, conservatism is inherently defensive, in that it seeks to forestall change. Tanenhaus approvingly quotes Garry Wills, the leftist who began his career working for Buckley, as saying, “The right wing in America is stuck with the paradox of holding a philosophy of ‘conserving’ an actual order it does not want to conserve.”
This is a clever formulation on Wills’s part, but a factitious one. For what American conservatives refused to accept, and properly so, was that the liberalism of the 1960s and afterward had become the established “order.” The key insight of American conservatism in the 1970s was that the “order” liberals sought to impose on the United States—internationally, economically, socially, and culturally—was a rejection of the American promise rather than a fulfillment of it, and so it had to be challenged, argued against, and overcome.
In the same fashion, for Tanenhaus and others, the resounding victory of Barack Obama in November 2008 seemed to be the final stake in the heart of the political tendency they had come to detest so much during the years of George W. Bush. In their eyes, the previous decade had been a time of wild right-wing overreach, and at last the nation had decided it had had enough. Tanenhaus uses the example of William F. Buckley Jr. and Buckley’s confused response to the war in Iraq as his prime evidence that conservatism met its maker last year—for if the man who all but willed the modern conservative movement into existence could not make sense of the most important act of a conservative Republican presidency, how could anyone else?
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Certainly American conservatism is in a parlous condition, and certainly it is in that condition in part due to overreach. By 2005 the Right was suffering from an all-too-predictable arrogance born of the false assurance that a few successful election cycles were the harbingers of a transformed -future—rather than what a few election cycles of success actually suggest, which is that there will be an energetic counterassault by the losers and a reaction by the electorate to the false -arrogance of the winners.
Still, American conservatism is no more dead than liberalism was in 1981, when Ronald Reagan ascended to the presidency, and the corpse is no colder than Bill Clinton’s was when the Republican Revolution of 1994 brought the fiery backbenchers of the Right into the red-hot center. For just as Karl Rove’s notion of a permanent Republican majority was a prime case of the wish being father to the thought, so is Tanenhaus’s conviction that a full-throated, unapologetic, even aggressive conservatism has met its end.
It probably would have remained in critical condition this year, what with the rapturous and ongoing Obama honeymoon and the fact that Democrats -secured a 60-seat filibuster-proof majority in the Senate in June. But it was jolted back to life the way political and ideological tendencies usually are: by the actions of its opposite number.
The hyperactive onrush of spendthrift legislation, the enthusiasm for a direct government role in the automobile industry, the assertion of central authority in Washington over the compensation levels of executives in the financial industry, and finally, a mad dash into health-care nationalization before a genuine national debate over the specifics could take place—all these efforts to revive and renew the self-same Great Society liberalism that first gave nascent American conservatism its purchase brought about its early awakening from the trauma it suffered last November.
The response of liberals and Democrats, who are shocked and surprised by the return of a serious opposition, is to argue that the crowds showing up to confront their members of Congress about the various health-care proposals yet to cohere in a single bill are illusory (a ginned-up phenomenon bought and paid for by corporatists) or evil (note the use of words like thugs, jackboots, mobs, Nazis).
I remember these sorts of dismissals from earlier in the decade. They were exactly the sort that gave comfort to the Right when the Left was building up a head of steam in the run-up to the Iraq war, in the months that followed the deposition of the Saddam Hussein regime, and then throughout the election year of 2004. The Right’s refusal to see the rise of leftist populism for what it was—a leading indicator of the resurgence of political passion on the opposing side and the harbinger of the triumphant returns in 2006 and 2008—was another sign of the self-congratulatory arrogance that helped lead to its downfall.
The thing is, no downfall is permanent in a democracy. Politics is not static, though at any given moment it may appear to be. This is the great analytical fallacy to which pundits and thinkers fall prey. Actions matter. Ideas matter. Decisions have consequences. People are not paying attention in real time, the way pundits do, but they do get a sense of things over time, and there is more unease about Obama than anyone might have predicted.
Conservatism appeared dead when Tanenhaus published his article in February, but The Death of Conservatism is coming out at a time when Obama has descended from the Olympian heights to the mortal level, capable of causing himself unnecessary injury (as when he accused a cop of “acting stupidly” for the sin of arresting a friend of his) and proving unable to make a clear argument for his most ambitious political program.
As the rueful author of a 2006 book entitled Can She Be Stopped?: Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States Unless..., I have more than a little sympathy for Tanenhaus’s titular predicament. My book was published at a time when conservative tomes were dying on the vine and anti-Bush literature sold like hotcakes. As I write these words, Tanenhaus’s own New York Times Book Review features anti-Obama screeds in the #1, #2, and #4 positions on its nonfiction bestseller list. There isn’t a single pro-Obama or anti-conservative volume anywhere in the top 35. That doesn’t mean Obama will fail in his quest to secure major health-care legislation, or that the Democrats will meet with calamity at the ballot box in 2010. But it does mean the fight is on, and the arguments have only just begun.
But Didn’t He Deceive Us?
The Obama spinners would tell you how canny and clever their man was–concealing that Iranian secret nuclear site and now using it to, well, set a new deadline, I guess. But he’s darn tough, that Obama. Marty Peretz calls foul, reminding us that Obama concealed the Iranian plans from the public and our allies:
Which, of course, means that the whole public discussion was conducted under the shadow of half-truth and misleading assurances. We had little reason to expect the truth from the Bushies. But we were promised a real change by the successors. In the end the truth came out because Iran sent an enigmatic little missive to the International Atomic Energy Agency admitting it had been constructing another nuclear facility.
Were the put-downs by U.S. intelligence of Israel’s urgency about Iran’s atomic accomplishments not distortions? I believe so. The only top security person who was honest in public was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen. I believe that Israel was “canny” but didn’t make public all that it knew simply out of deference, first, to President Bush, latterly to President Obama. . . .
So what is going to happen with Washington’s highly vaunted engagement with Tehran? How much kicking around will the president take?
Not very much from the mainstream media and the Left blogosphere. Funny how, in good faith, George W. Bush acted on the best available U.S. intelligence estimates concerning Iraq (estimates shared by every other Western power and his Democratic critics) in defense of American security, while Obama plainly concealed the risk to American security posed by Iran, presumably so he could continue doing nothing for as long as possible about the Iranian nuclear threat.
Something is very, very wrong. But you’d never know it from the Obama sycophants for whom no justification for Obama’s egregious irresponsibility and timidity is too far-fetched.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
How Can You Stand Next To The Truth And Not See It? - U2 at Giants Stadium
"We've got a spaceship," Bono said in reference to the massive staging above his head in the center of the stadium, "but we're not going anywhere without you."
He didn't just invite the audience on his otherworldly journey, he also invited Someone Else: at the end of the first song, "Breathe", he closed his eyes and knelt slightly. With one hand holding the microphone and the other palm-toward-heaven, he pleaded, "Spirit breathe."
And like the cool September breeze that gently graced the stadium throughout the show, the Spirit did indeed descend, to transport us to another place.
Several songs into the set, the band performed "Magnificent":
I was bornMy friend Phil was standing next to me. While Bono worshiped using the above lyrics, Phil turned to me and said, "How can people not know what he's singing about?!" I agreed completely.
I was born to sing for you
I didn't have a choice but to lift you up
And sing whatever song you wanted me to
I give you back my voice
From the womb my first cry, it was a joyful noise
Only love, only love can leave such a mark
But only love, only love can heal such a scar
Justified till we die, you and I will magnify
The Magnificent‚ Magnificent
The next song was Elevation. It's a song that fits the "spaceship" theme: "You make me feel like I could fly, so high, El - eh - vay - shun!" And to make the point even more obvious, Bono looked at the crowd and said, "It's my prayer for you." And at this point in the church service--I mean, concert--I started to think about a question that the band sings in a lyric on the new album:
Every beauty needs to go out with an idiotPerhaps I'm wrong, and there was no single person in the crowd of 84,000 who didn't "see it" like I was seeing it. Perhaps everyone in the place understood that the spaceship was a cathedral, that the lead singer was a priest, and that the setlist was a liturgy, designed specifically to facilitate an encounter with the God of the Universe.
How can you stand next to the truth and not see it?
It couldn't have been more clear than at the end of "One", when Bono sang:
Can You hear us coming Lord?When this portion ended, he led us in an a cappella--84,000 strong--version of the hymn "Amazing Grace", which blended into "Where the Streets Have No Name". "Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found; was blind but now I see... I want to run, I want to hide. I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside. I want to reach out and touch the flame, where the streets have no name."
Can You hear us call?
Feel us knocking
We're knocking at Your door!
At this point in the evening, Bono was no longer explaining his intention to have us meet God, or to take us away in his spaceship. No, at this point, we were already gone.
We held our arms aloft, reaching out to the touch that flame. And for a second I still wondered if someone could be in that place, standing next to the Truth but not seeing it. But when the next song started I decided to let Bono's question be asked of me, instead of those around me. Was I the idiot going out with Beauty? Was I the one standing next to the Truth but not seeing it?
My answer came in the next song, "Ultraviolet", one of my all-time favorites. I interpret the song to be in reference to Psalm 119:105, "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path." God as an ultraviolet light: we can't see it but it illuminates nonetheless. For this song, Bono dressed in a suit of lights. A rope hung from heaven (where the spaceship was now flying) above him, and it too was lit up like John chapter 1. As he hung from the microphone/rope like a drowning man clinging to a lifeline, he sang,Sometimes I feel like I don't knowI used to think the chorus "baby, baby, baby‚ light my way" was a plea to some carnal lover. But now I realize that the "baby" is the Christ child, and his enduring love is my only lifeline. "I'm in the black, can't see or be seen. Baby baby baby, light my way." How many times in my life have I gone on thinking I am strong enough? I am capable enough? How many times have I not reached out for that rope of illumination and clung to it, as if my life depended on it? So many times, the Truth is right there, and I don't see it.
Sometimes I feel like checking out.
I wanna get it wrong
Can't always be strong
But Love, it won't be long.
The concert ended in surrender. (Where else could it end?) The liturgy was sung:
I've been in every black holeAnd this is when I stopped noticing the people around me (judging their ability to "see it" or not) and simply focused on my own encounter with Jesus, my own surrendering to him.
At the altar of the dark star
My body's now a begging bowl
That's begging to get back, begging to get back
To my heart
To the rhythm of my soul
To the rhythm of my unconsciousness
To the rhythm that yearns
To be released from control
At the moment of surrender
Of vision over visibility
I did not notice the passers-by
And they did not notice me
Saturday, September 26, 2009
U2: coming for the music or the message?
But no band – and no band leader – embodies this ideal more today than U2 and Bono. The band supports the efforts of Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and the Chernobyl Children’s Project. Bono has used his fame to put considerable pressure on countries to reduce the burden of debt on developing countries and to draw attention to the fight against AIDS in Africa with his RED project.
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| Evan Agostini / AP |
| Lead singer Bono of the rock band U2 performs with the band during their 360 world tour stop at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, NJ on Thursday. |
U2 was the first big band to play in Sarajevo after the Bosnian war, launched an effort to put thousands of musical instruments back in the hands of New Orleans artists after Katrina, and have been very vocal in their support of Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
Many of their songs over the years have drawn on socio-political events for inspiration – from the fighting in Northern Ireland to the civil war in El Salvador.
The band’s latest world tour, in support of their most recent album, "No Line on the Horizon," has drawn praise from critics. The tour’s latest stop, at Giants Stadium in New Jersey, sold out for its two nights. With 84,000 attendees per night, that’s more over 160,000 to rally to the cause(s) in just two nights. (According to U2's Web site, they broke every record for attendence in the stadium - breaking the record previously set by Pope John Paul II in 1995.) Do the math for the rest of the tour, and you begin to understand the extent of the band’s reach, and that of others with similar followings.
But what’s the real draw, the music or the message?
For Kevin Sheridan, 37, an advertising salesman from Malverne, N.Y. the two go hand in hand. "I tend to like those (musicians) with a message. Usually the music is better, because it comes from the heart." Sheridan drew the line when it comes to Hollywood, however. "These artists write their own music, which reflects their views, and you know going in where they stand. But I don’t want to be preached to by someone just because they’ve starred in a movie."
Blair Thill, 22, of Little Silver, New Jersey, said Bono’s activism was part of what attracted her to the band to begin with. His involvement in the fight to eliminate AIDS in Africa even inspired her to do a fundraising bake sale during high school in support of the cause. But, she said, "I would venture to say most people are going to this concert for the music, not a social cause."
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| John Baiata, NBC News |
| Images of Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi during a song dedicated to her. |
Dori Kenyon, 38, a representative for Amnesty International manning one of several booths outside the venue, did not entirely agree. "You get all types. Some people are here because they [U2] have been around for 30 years, and they love the music…There are others who are here because they believe in what we’re doing, and Bono supports that."
Kenyon had made the drive from Lancaster, Pennsylvania with her son because she said, "We have a responsibility to everyone around the globe." She was collecting signatures in support of three causes – a bill guaranteeing maternal health benefits for women in the U.S., a petition urging U.S. lawmakers to deliver a plan that fulfills "the human right to health care," and another urging the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and all other "prisoners of conscience" in Myanmar.
Suu Kyi was in the spotlight on this night almost as often as the band members.
The group’s Web site encouraged fans attending the show to download and print a mask of her face, and to wear it during their performance of "Walk On," a song written for her. Her image was beamed over the giant video screens above the set as Bono talked about her lengthy detention and fight for freedom.
Her plight was probably news to most in attendance. Not a single fan I spoke to beforehand had even heard of her, and no one visible in the crowd had donned the mask of her image.
Yet all eyes were on Bono as he spoke, and as he sang, in part:
"You could have flown away
A singing bird in an open cage
Who will only fly, only fly for freedom"
South African Bishop Desmond Tutu’s video message to the crowd, which preceded the encores, received a raucous cheer. Tutu reminded the crowd that they were "the same people" who protested for civil rights in America, against apartheid in South Africa and the troubles in Northern Ireland.
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| John Baiata, NBC News |
| A video message from Bishop Desmond Tutu preceded the encores. |
A few minutes later we were reminded that contributions from Americans to the "ONE" campaign had helped deliver life-saving drugs to 34 million African schoolchildren, along with a couple of other encouraging statistics.
When the concert was over, those in attendance began to file out, talking excitedly about what they’d just witnessed. And while none I heard were talking about Aung San Suu Kyi, they’d all been given a primer as part of the price of admission.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
U2 manager delighted to bring stage show full circle
NASHVILLE (Billboard) - As U2 wraps the 2009 dates of its groundbreaking 360 world stadium tour, the band is expected to gross about $300 million and sell about 3 million tickets to fewer than 50 shows.
Rather than a high-end ticket price, the big numbers are more about a unique staging concept that boosts configurations at stadiums, and fans know that U2 is again pushing the production envelope. The tour is in support of the band's latest album, "No Line on the Horizon," and if it isn't scaling the sales heights of previous sets -- since its March release, "Line" has sold 991,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan -- the band's manager, Paul McGuinness, credits that more to overall market conditions than a decline in the act's popularity.
Though sometimes outspoken about industry issues -- his 2008 MIDEM keynote excoriating the industry for its lackluster response to digital distribution still resonates -- McGuinness is anything but riled as he sits in an office backstage at Chicago's Soldier Field just before U2 went onstage. "What do I possibly have to be pissed off about?" he wonders. Both pragmatist and gambler, McGuinness guides the career of what has become arguably the biggest band in the world, and it has been a banner year for the group he has represented since the start of its career.
Much like the band he represents, McGuinness continually focuses on breaking new ground, and he's constantly looking for new ideas. The 360 tour is U2's first under a new 10-year Live Nation multiple-rights deal. While he doesn't claim to have all the answers, McGuinness is open to new horizons, as evidenced by "the claw," the massive staging concept that makes U2's 360 tour truly an all-encompassing experience.
Billboard: How did the European leg feel to you on this run of the 360 tour?
Paul McGuinness: Incredible. We played to staggering numbers. We've broken records in every building we play because the effect of this production economically is to increase the capacity by about 20 percent routinely. For instance, in Berlin at Olympic Stadium, we held the record already jointly with the Rolling Stones at 70,000. This time I think we put in 90,000. Every building we play we will break whatever record there is there.
Billboard: So you feel good about the live part of U2's business?
McGuinness: Absolutely, because in a way there's a memory in the audience. They've always known that when you come to a U2 show -- even when we were doing theaters -- we would do as much production as we could afford. Once we got into arenas, we loved it -- we always played in the round in the arenas -- so this seems natural to be in the round in the stadiums.
The engineering problems are enormous and costly. We had to find a way for it to be aesthetic and figure out a way of doing video. That cylindrical screen we have -- that didn't exist, we had to get somebody to invent that. We had to design this four-legged thing (the claw) -- and build three of them.
Billboard: How long will it take to get into the black?
McGuinness: When do we hit the break-even point? We haven't hit it yet. But we will sometime between now and the end of this leg.
Billboard: So next year is gravy?
McGuinness: Not exactly gravy, because whether we're playing or not, the overhead is about $750,000 daily. That's just to have the crew on payroll, to rent the trucks, all that. There's about 200 trucks. Each stage is 37 trucks, so you're up to nearly 120 there. And then the universal production is another 50-odd trucks, and there are merchandise trucks and catering trucks.
Billboard: Why do that when you can go out and set up a stage and still play stadiums and be in the black before you reach these shores?
McGuinness: Well, we have been trying to find a way of doing 360 for years. This was not something we decided to do recently -- we just couldn't find a way of doing it. The engineering to build a temporary structure capable of bearing the weight that this carries, hundreds of tons, nobody had come up with a way of doing that. (Set designer) Willie Williams and (architect) Mark Fisher had been teasing at it for years.
The other thing that has come such a long way is the LED technology -- those little guys -- we started the use of them for the industry with the PopMart tour (in 1997), and they weren't completely reliable in those days. We had a lot of technical trouble with that. The kind of modern production style really can be traced back to ZooTV (in 1992), which was a groundbreaking production. Building this cylindrical screen was only made possible by the trellis on which it's mounted, which was invented by this guy named Chuck Hoberman.
The coming together of those LED skills, the engineering skills, the imagination of the band, Mark Fisher, years of talking about this and years of seeing occasionally somebody performing in the round in a structure that would take a week or two to build and a week to dismantle. You couldn't truck it, you certainly couldn't take it up and down in a couple of days. This had to be transportable -- and it is, and it's a beautiful, beautiful thing.
Billboard: The fans seem to get it that you're bringing them something they've never seen before.
McGuinness: Each one of these shows there are 10,000 $30 tickets -- so even though the gross is expanded by the increase in the capacity, we see what's happening in the marketplace, people don't have much money. And so worldwide we came to the decision to have really low-priced tickets. We have some expensive tickets, but our expensive tickets are $250; they're not as expensive as the Rolling Stones' or Madonna's most expensive tickets. I think it's a very fair pricing. The scaling of this tour has worked everywhere we've played.
Billboard: Any comment on the state of the music industry right now?
McGuinness: I don't have a recipe for the solution to the woes of the record companies and the recorded side of the music business. It's very, very important, it must be supported. And there are an awful lot of people and an awful lot of industries and individuals -- the telcos, the (Internet service providers), the device manufacturers -- that have enjoyed an absolute bonanza since music went online. And I just think they should feel more responsible out of a sense of fairness to the community of creative people who make that music, which is now in so many cases completely free. Times change, mechanisms for distributing music change. I would like to see a greater recognition of the obligations the tech side of the business have to the writers and musicians.
I've nothing against big companies. Big companies are there to be infiltrated, they want to be infiltrated, they want you to come in and tell them how to do it, what to do. I've never found a big corporation hostile to anything we wanted to do. Similarly with Live Nation -- our relationship is very close indeed. This is our fourth tour with Arthur (Fogel, global music chairman for Live Nation). The first tour we produced and he promoted. The second one he produced and promoted, because that was better. And as (Live Nation) developed their plan to take Live Nation out of Clear Channel I was absolutely behind that, and I'm totally behind the plan to merge Ticketmaster and Live Nation. I think it's very good for the industry.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Sunday, September 20, 2009
In Obama we trust ...less each day
As President Obama described his new policy on missile defense against Iran in Europe, I felt reassured when he promised that scrapping the Bush plan would actually strengthen America’s security.
Then I quickly remembered Obama also promised his health care overhaul wouldn’t add a dime to the deficit.
Yikes. Run for your life.
The moment captured for me what is the greatest mystery about our young president. Why does he continue to squander the public trust he worked so hard to build and that he will need for the many battles to come?
The central problem is his relentless push for health legislation the public doesn’t want. The harder he pushes — five TV interviews are scheduled for today — the more the country resists.
One result is a shocking trust deficit, as reflected in a recent Quinnipiac survey. By a whopping 68 – 26 percent margin, voters in Connecticut reported they don’t believe Obama when he says the health care plan will not add to the deficit. The findings mirror national ones reported in July.
Imagine that — an American president is not believed on his signature claim by nearly 7 in 10 people. Yet he insists, without evidence, he is right and they are wrong.
A president can go broke fighting public trust. As it stands, Obama will soon be like the little boy who called wolf too often.
Surely he knows how that story ends, so why continue on this destructive course?
That’s the mystery.