William PFAFF

The War between Civilizations

Wed, 22 May 2013 15:30:00 CEST

Paris, May 22, 2012 Great power rivalries created the conditions in which the First World War became possible, but the war itself was set off by an isolated and intrinsically unimportant act of terrorism by a Serbian nationalist. All that followed was driven by nationalism in the warring countries, except in Russia and the United States from 1917 on -- both of which became victims of the illusions of internationalism.

The Second World War had nationalist sources deriving from the horrors of 1914-1918 in Europe, and the economic crisis that followed, as well as economic and commercial sources in the Far East, but it was deliberately launched by Nazi Germany for reasons of racial ideology and national ambition.

When that war was over in 1945, the geopolitical outcome was the bi-polar great power political and ideological rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States, ended in 1991 by collapse of the Soviet system. The victory, as often has happened in the past, proved an illusory one -- inspiring notions of global political and military domination, otherwise known as hubris.

The war that was supposed to follow the Cold War, according to the late Samuel Huntington, was to be a war between civilizations, with Islam and China improbably allied against what Huntington called Western Civilization, by which he meant the United States. His was a simple projection of a past that he had personally lived through. He thought wars between nations, followed by wars between ideologies, would logically end in a third and even greater struggle between religions and cultures.

Today a retrospective view of this forecast would likely say there was something in it. The bombs that ended the Boston Marathon in April were planted by young Muslims who had come to the United States as immigrants, rejected America as a civilization, and attacked it, leaving behind a message of religious war.

The European Union Crisis

Thu, 16 May 2013 18:00:00 CEST

Paris, May 15, 2013 It is not simply the Eurozone, composed of the 17 European states that have the euro as currency, that is threatened by the dramatic economic discrepancies that now exist among its individual members, as well as the large gap that exists between the indebtedness of the southern members of the zone and the German-led bloc of northern countries. Now it is the European Union itself that is in danger, mainly but not entirely because of the economic crisis inherited from Wall Street abuses. The EU has contributed to its own misfortunes.

A new Europe-wide report by correspondents of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro reveals mounting disillusionment with the European Union itself among the voters of its member states. These are confirmed by the results of an American Pew organization study issued May 14.

Britain has made the most news about possible withdrawal from the union since the countrys most recent local elections gave the United Kingdom Independence Party nearly as high a popular vote as the ruling Conservative Party, led by Prime Minister David Cameron. The Ukip won an unprecedented 23% of the total vote. There was an immediate rise in demand among Conservative Party members for a referendum on quitting the EU which the Ukip promises.

Conservative support for the prime minister on the EU issue is crumbling at the edges. David Cameron has also promised a referendum -- but wants first to renegotiate the terms of British EU membership (a non-British observer would add if he can).

Renegotiating with Britain has few fans among the leaders of the other EU states, nor in the Brussels Commission. But having Britain quit the EU is a scary prospect, since while London has been a nuisance ever since the late Margaret Thatchers demands that Britain get back the investment the British have made in the Union, it nonetheless is one of the four major European powers and economies, and with France is one of only two European states that are (relatively) heavyweight military and diplomatic powers. Without Britain the EU would be seriously weakened.

A Challenge to the Church

Mon, 13 May 2013 13:20:00 CEST

NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS,
MAY 9-22, 2013

Why Priests: A Failed Tradition
by Garry Wills
Viking, 302p.

Garry Willss latest book on Catholicism coincides with a crisis in the church that has been developing since Pius IX (17921878) set the course of Peters barque against the winds of Enlightenment and revolution. Driven from Rome by the rioting of 1848, the pope returned under the protection of Napoleon III and retreated to the Vatican, refusing to recognize the new Italian kingdom (recognition did not come until the Lateran Treaty in 1929, signed by Pius XI and Mussolini).
From his self-imposed prison Pius IX issued his sweeping condemnation of modernism in 1864 with the encyclical Quanta Cura, including The Syllabus of Errors,1 which remained an embarrassment to many if not most of the churchs scholarly and intellectual members for the next ninety-eight years, until John XXIIIs Second Vatican Council. Donald Attwaters authoritative and orthodox A Catholic Dictionary (Nihil Obstat plus Imprimatur!), first published in 1931, cautiously concludes its article on the Syllabus and Pius IXs subsequent self-declared infallibility when speaking ex cathedra with the worlds bishops (a doctrine opposed by Cardinal Newman, Lord Acton, Baron von Hügel, and other prominent Catholic intellectuals of the period) by saying of the Syllabus, it is not certain that every proposition is condemned infallibly and therefore irreformably. (With such equivocations did Catholics live before John XXIII.)
Wills has been a critic before of his church, into which he was born in 1934 (half-born into it, so to speak, as his mother was Irish Catholicand a southerner, from Georgia). His father, whose own parents were an agnostic and a Christian Scientist, did eventually become a Catholic, but he was not one while Wills was young. By Willss own account the greater influences on him were his mothers family and the Catholic grade school in Adrian, Michigan, where he was raised (the school was taught by an extraordinary community of Dominican nuns), and the Jesuit boarding school he attended in Wisconsin, both of exceptional quality. (At the time, Catholic primary and secondary educationdisciplined instruction in grammar and rhetoric in primary school, with much memorization, and introduction to the classics in high schoolwas in the Midwest at least generally superior to public schools.)

The American Urge to Intervene in Syria

Thu, 9 May 2013 14:20:00 CEST

Paris, May 8, 2013 --The present debate in the United States over making policy for a Middle East that has been profoundly changed by the events of the past three years unhappily echoes past policies that failed. They were intended to promote democracy, and usually took the form of military intervention.

The most important current argument is over intervention in the Syrian civil war. But to what American purpose? As always, democracy-promotion, Washington says. Is this either politically or militarily feasible in Syria today? What contribution does intervention make to the question most on Americans minds today: what relevance has this to Americas domestic terrorist threat?

The civil war in Syria was originally an uprising against abuses by the predominantly Alawite government of President Bashar el-Assad, a family and sectarian dictatorship which has enjoyed support in the past of secular groups as well as Christians and Muslim minorities. The opposition, Syrian in origin, now includes Muslim Brothers and other Jihadists, fighting the established government of a largely Sunni population, although supported by Shia Iran, and currently by Russia and China. An American intervention would align Washington with groups which elsewhere it opposes. The logic of this is not apparent.

The Syrian war already offers signs of engaging groups in Lebanon, drawing the unfortunate Lebanese towards a conflict where they have nothing to gain. Israel envisages the possibility of getting at Iran by way of its Syrian ally. Again, enlargement of the war serves no visible American interest, which is restored stability in the region.

The undeclared war between Iran and its client, the Hezbollah organization, and Israel, motivated by Irans contention (via its departing president) that Israel has no place in the Middle East, having been created as the result of an attempted genocide of the Jewish people by Nazi Germany, and therefore a European problem that should be settled in Europe and not at the expense of an Arab people. This, of course, is purely a propaganda provocation, although true enough.

Is "More Europe" the Answer?

Wed, 1 May 2013 17:40:00 CEST

Paris, May 1, 2013 - Germanys Chancellor Angela Merkel has consistently said that the answer to Europes problems is more political integration, and this is a view held elsewhere among those trying to find a way out of the conundrum which economic crisis has presented to the European Union.

The president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, told the Financial Times last weekend that he harbors hope for this elusive more union in the more aggressive role the parliament has recently assumed in the Unions affairs, as in recently voting a legal limit on European bankers bonuses and in scrutinizing the European Union budget, which it has threatened to reject.

There will be pan-European parties and party alliances running candidates in next years parliamentary elections. These elections in the past have seemed rather pallid affairs with declining participation. They attract relatively little attention in the major countries (at least) and voting usually is overwhelmingly influenced, indirectly if not directly, by local rather than pan-European issues and personalities. The parliaments work also tends to be ignored, except on big issues crossing national lines (like the bonus ban), because there is no popularly-read pan-European press, and while everyone has an opinion about Europe relatively few quite know what goes on in Brussels.

The European Commissions presidency, currently held by José Manuel Barroso, will also be up for election next year as a new term begins, and Martin Schulz is widely thought a candidate. He believes that the elections to renew parliament and president may provide an opportunity to rescue the EU, currently endangered by conflict over economic issues and remedies, with a split between the German-led hard-line debt-expunging northern states and the beleaguered French, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese and other southerners. France actually is in-between, and potentially the pivotal actor in the present crisis, but currently has a split Socialist party and, until now, an indecisive president who has squandered his political resources on a gay marriage and adoption law that deeply divides the country.

The Drumbeat of Half-baked Theories

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 15:40:00 CEST

Paris, April 24, 2013 The blood runs cold when one fully appreciates how vulnerable official policymakers and the Western policy community are to slogans and to magical thinking. The Reinhart-Rogoff case is the latest, and certainly will not be the last, in which the credulity and carelessness of experts wreak havoc among ordinary people -- in this case, ordinary people by the millions.

The Reinhart-Rogoff error was initially rumor but in the past week has become a scandal. Professors Carmen Reinhart and the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Ken Rogoff, presented in 2010 a research paper which seemed to demonstrate that in a crisis of the kind which the western world is experiencing, when the debt of a country goes above 90% of the countrys gross domestic product, economic growth falls precipitously, or may even regress.

Ah ha!, the economic and governmental policy community in the U.S. and Europe cried! Heres just what we need! The method to end the debt crisis responsible for the great slump! All we have to do is to starve all the indebted societies, cut government services, eliminate workers, and soon investor confidence will be restored and the crisis will end in a way that vindicates currently dominant economic theory, validates the Chicago School and Reaganism and Thatcherism, and shows the world that economic science always has the answer.

Nobody seems to have checked the Reinhart-Rogoff paper, since it was what governments, politicians and academic economists wanted to hear. The Republican partys star economist, Paul Ryan, and Olli Rehn, European Commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, both cited it to support their austerity policies, providing the justification for slashing infrastructure and social spending in the US, Western Europe and elsewhere.

Time to Abandon the Euro?

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 16:30:00 CEST

Paris, April 17, 2013 When the proposal was initially made for a common European currency, it seemed to this writer a good idea with the flaw that it wouldnt work. Although inexpert in economics (being a product of the age of arithmetic), the idea struck me as a product of the false analogy with the United States common in Europe at that time.

If New York, Dallas and Dubuque could have a single dollar currency, why couldnt Paris, Frankfurt and Milan? Europe already had or was completing the single European market, free of tariff barriers. Why not a single currency for the single market? A great many enthusiastic supporters of European unification seemed to think that all that was needed was to give it a name and design, and print it up.

Thanks to the imaginative former French President, Valéry Giscard dEstaing, a fine history-redolent name already had been proposed for the mechanism that could lead to the single currency, the Ecu, which meant European currency union, and happily was also a French proper name, given during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to a series of small gold or silver French coins.

When the time to create the currency itself finally arrived, the chauvinists of other European Union countries balked at the French name, and the currency was drearily named the euro (not even capitalized) and bore exceedingly boring drawings of bridges and viaducts. (Every Euro-zone country had a bridge or viaduct, so each could say that it was its own that was pictured.)

The complaint that I (among others) made from the beginning was that
European countries were not American states. They were sovereign political entities. Each had its own characteristic economy, resources, products, markets and its own national deficits and surpluses. Vitally important was the fact that each had its own currency, and these currencies were not interchangeable, and moreover, were not constant in value. You had to take them to a bank or exchange counter and buy their current equivalence in another currency.

But EU enthusiasts said Californians did not have to change their dollars when they drove to Nevada. It would be the same in Europe. At this point the American had to explain about the American Civil War, in which there was the largest number of war-related casualties of all American wars, and the purpose of the war was to terminate the sovereignty claim made until then by the slave-holding Southern states. The result was a single sovereign federal United States, with a single currency, and eventually a single budget that prevailed nationally.

The only reply to this that the Americans European interlocutors could make was that Europe had already experienced more than its share of wars. The European Union was meant to put an end to that unfortunate European practice.

The practice in recent times was that chiefly of the Germans. The France of Bourbons, Napoleon, and the Third Republic ceded leadership in precipitating wars to Hohenzollern and then Nazi Germany.

During those same recent times, the United States interested itself in Europe and its wars, and as a result constituted for itself a new role as a European power as THE European power, as the late American diplomat Richard Holbrooke made plain to the West Europeans when he was U.S. Ambassador to Germany in the 1990s, reinforcing the dominant role Americans had played ever since the European unification movement began in 1951. It is a role now ending.

Of Drones and Dishonor.

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 14:30:00 CEST

Paris, April 10, 2013 War is war and murder is murder. The law draws the distinction. The American armed drone is a weapons system of war, not of policemen and even if it were a police weapon (as it may one fears -- become in the future), the United States Department of Defense and the CIA are not police forces, nor has the United States a commission to police the world of its radicals, dijadhists, and religious fanatics, although for too many years it has acted as if it did.

Nor is the United States constitutionally at war. President George W. Bush declared war on terror after the 9/11 attacks, which was legally meaningless, and the Congress responded with a joint resolution authorizing the president to use all necessary and appropriate force against those responsible for the 9/11 attacks. That still was not a declaration of war, but was interpreted by the U.S. government, the UN Security Council, NATO and most major nations to represent a legally legitimate position of self-defense although it obviously was not self-defense but a matter of legitimate retaliation.

However the people currently being killed by the United States armed drones had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, even if they undoubtedly approved, or now approve, of those attacks, considering them legitimate acts of Arab retaliation against American complicity in Israels military annexation and occupation of territories legally belonging to Palestinians, and Washingtons earlier enforcement of devastating civilian sanctions on Iraq and the presence of United States military forces in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in proximity to Muslim sacred sites.

Therefore it is reasonable and necessary to say that the drone attacks are the continuation of an undefined state of conflict between the U.S. government and Muslim individuals and groups hostile to the United States and to certain of its Arab allies, and who aim mainly to establish radical Muslim religious governments in various Islamic states. However since 2001 none of these groups has managed to succeed in committing acts of war against the United States itself, and others have plotted attacks that failed or were thwarted. What the Islamists do with and to their own countries is their affair.

Paradox and Contradiction in World Affairs

Wed, 3 Apr 2013 18:30:00 CEST

Paris, April 2, 2013 It is, I suppose, too discouraging to face the fact that in international affairs (and indeed in national affairs; but that is another subject) paradox and contradiction rule the world. Policymakers and politicians consistently get what they dont want.

Wars of aggrandizement end up failing to produce the expected gains their geographical aims, or projected seizure and control of foreign resources, or augmentation of their power (whether soft or hard).

A reason for such national leaders failures is unwillingness or inability to admit (often even to themselves) their real motives. Nations certainly do not admit these to the international audience. I am not talking about refusal to admit that an attack on another country is motivated by the wish to seize its oil or uranium or rare earths. I mean the secret or suppressed or sometimes even subconscious motives of governments.

Wars of defense more often than not are motivated by illusion or fantasies that disguise real or sublimated aggression. Many wars are the product of entangled motives that include such aggressive ambitions and fears -- often unwarranted, but deliberately exaggerated for aggressive reasons and propaganda.

The United States provides one convenient, indeed irresistible, current case of self-deception. The war being promoted in the United States against Iran is (or would be) a war of aggression disguised by -- but also to -- the leaders themselves, as a preventive war necessitated by threat, as if an Iran in possession of nuclear weapons would perform so suicidal an act as to attack the United States, or more to the point, Israel.

A Remembrance

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 17:40:00 CET

Paris, March 26, 2013 -- Ten years ago, on this date, invading American troops were moving through stifling dust storms towards Baghdad from Basra, Iraqs second-largest city, which British forces were fighting to secure.

Baghdads outskirts were reached on April 3, and the Baghdad airport taken on April 9. The George W. Bush adventure to create what Washingtons neo-conservatives called the New Middle East was well launched. Today it has proven a fiasco, all the lives wasted.

American troops have been ordered out of Iraq by the American-sponsored Nuri Kamal al-Maliki government, and Iraq experiences grave sectarian and ethnic conflict.

The new American secretary of state, John Kerry, has just been in Baghdad to demand that Iraq cease allowing Iranian aircraft to use the countrys air space to supply Syrian troops fighting the civil uprising in their country. According to The New York Times, after a spirited discussion between the Iraqi prime minister and Mr. Kerry, there was no sign that the Iraqis would alter their position.

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama was in Israel, where he reiterated to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Americas unhesitating support for Israel in any war with Iran. More lives to be wasted.

There is no sign anywhere of a New Middle East. There are only intimations of more American-supported war to come, likely to involve Iran, Iraq, Syria, or Lebanon as well as continued war, in and after 2014, in Afghanistan.

The article below was originally distributed ten years ago. I repeat it here as a meditation, originally concerning the professional troops committed to the Iraq invasion, but now in homage to all those killed on all sides in Iraq, all of them innocent or inadvertent sacrifices by nations, religions, and the pride of the powerful, to that insatiable Moloch, History.