Global Paradigms

Reading all the nasty reviews of V for Vendetta you would think that it's a movie about Osama bin Ladin produced by the communist propagandist Willi Münzenberg and directed by Hitler's favorite film-maker Leni Riefenstahl (if she only had left for Hollywood in the early 1930's, she would have been the recipient of several Oscars). Normonson (John Podhoretz)bashes it in the Weekly Standard "an Atlas Shrugged for leftist lunatics." The more intelligent Stephen Hunter complains in the Washington Post that it's not as good as George Orwell's "1984" in terms of "evoking dyspotia" but then expresses his revulsion over the movie's "tasteless celebration of explosive devices taking down famous London landmarks, which invites us to cheer as another step" against the fascistic regime depicted in "Vendetta." And then there is David Denby in the New Yorker whose reviews I usually find very instructive who really hates t...

The NR issue that WF Buckley missed Yeah... I guess that time flies when you're also having bad time. Very soon GWII could end up being longer than WWII. To mark the anniversary I decided to re-examine the comments I made during an adress before the Middle East Council in Washington on January 2003 a few weeks before the start of the war Following the end of the first Gulf War and the Madrid Peace Conference, there were high expectations in Washington that a new American-led order would be established in the Middle East. The Madrid Peace Conference and the ensuing Oslo peace process were supposed to lay the foundations for a New Middle East: Peace between Israel and a Palestinian state. And the integration of the region into the global economy. Ten years later and it's the same old Middle East. There is a President Bush. There is an Assad. (He does surf the Internet. So perhaps globalization did have some effect.) The ayatollahs are still around. And so are the Hashemittes. And...

My commentary on the Dubai/ports controversy and what it means (a chllenge to globalization by the rising forces of nationalism), which originally appeared in the Singapore Business Times was posted today in antiwar.com : March 17, 2006 Saying Good Bye to Dubai; Bidding Adieu to Globalization? by Leon Hadar Philip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History (Alfred A. Knopf) received a few glowing reviews when it was published in early 2002 but did not get much attention beyond the confines of think-tanks and academia. Perhaps the book was too heavy for the broader readership (well, with more than 1,000 pages, it certainly was) and it is quite possible that in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, not a lot of people were interested in reading a Big Picture analysis on the future of globalization. But, in fact, the scenarios about the prospects of globalization drawn up by Bobbitt were – and are – very relevan...

It's an intellectual bombshell. John Mearsheimer and Stephan Walt, two respected realist political scientists launch a frontal attack on the Israel Lobby in the recent issue of The London Review of Books . It's a very comprehensive and intelligent critique of AIPAC and the influence it exerts on U.S. policy in the Middle East: The Israel Lobby John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume th...

Is it possible that Cheney and his aide John Hannah are reading out loud the first sentence -- "The Dick Cheney era of foreign policy is over" -- in Look Who's Running the World Now which was published in The Washington Post over the weekend? In the article, one of Washington's leading brown nosers, David J. Rothkopf, asserts that "Cheney's influence has waned in the White House" since President Bush no longer depends on the vice president as he did in the days after Sept. 11, 2001, when Bush was still learning national security on the job and the nation was in crisis. The president today is better schooled [?] , more experienced and more confident. Second, Rumsfeld, who is Cheney's staunchest supporter after the president and whose vacation home is just a few steps away from Cheney's on Maryland's Eastern Shore, has lost a lot of his clout. No longer the center of attention, as he was during the offensives in Afghanistan and Iraq, Rumsfeld...

Chronicles magazine has made parts of its March 2006 available online. You can read there (and here) my commentary on Israeli politics in the post-Sharon era: American Proscenium Goodbye, Greater Israel; Hello . . . What? by Leon T. Hadar My name and title (“global-political and economic-affairs analyst”) appears on a few rolodexes on the desks of the young ladies, a.k.a. “schedulers,” who are in search of pundits—that is, pompous think tankers and retired foreign-policy types who are willing “to do Iraq” or “to do Iran” (in Washington lingo) or some other international crisis. So it was not surprising that, when Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon “remained seriously dead” (as comedian Chevy Chase used to open his fictional “news” segments on Saturday Night Live to report on Generalissimo Franco’s very, very long death watch), I received hysterical phone calls from panic-stricken schedulers asking whether I would be able to “do Sharon” and to discuss whether the world-as-we-know-it wo...

Physical education for neocons A neocon in high-school A friend emailed me an invitation to this: You are cordially invited to a book forum co-hosted by Hudson Institute and The Independent Women’s Forum for MANLINESS (Yale University Press, 2006) HARVEY C. MANSFIELD JR. William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government, Harvard University Wednesday, March 15, 2006 3:45 P.M. Registration 4:00 P.M. Remarks by Author 5:00 P.M. Reception Why do men need to feel important? It’s their manliness. But is manliness obsolete? Is it even a virtue? This book invites—no, demands—a response from its readers. This is the first comprehensive study of manliness, a quality both bad and good, mostly male, often intolerant, irrational, and ambitious. Our “gender-neutral society” does not like it but cannot get rid of it. Drawing from science, literature, and philosophy, Mansfield examines the layers of manliness, from vulgar aggression, to assertive manliness, to manliness as virtue, and to philosophical m...

Once upon a time there lived a prince... ... seen recently at the Safeway checkout line Another Golden Oldie. Exactly a year ago I published an article, "Operation Iranian Freedom? Same director, similar script. We’re beginning to think we’ve seen this movie before …" in The American Conservative . It focused on the plans by the Bush Administration to provide financial and logistical support for Iranian "freedom fighters" as part of a strategy of "regime change" in Teheran. The article also included a moving recounting of a historic encounter at the Safeway checkout line between one of these U.S.-backed "freedom fighters," His Imperial Majesty, Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, and yours truly: After living in the nation’s capital for several years I can tell you that it’s not a big deal to find yourself in the same room with some of the city’s power players. Just get the Boys Choir of Bentonville, Arkansas to confirm ...

My review of William Pfaff's The Bullet's Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia was published last year in The American Conservative but hasn't been available online. Apparently these guys have made that happen. Thanks! And since I think that the book is worth reading, I'm posting the review here: When we recall the very violent 20th century that spanned from the start of the Great War to the end of the Cold War—the short 20th century, as British historian Erica Hobsbawm dubbed it—the names that come to mind are those of the leading monsters who masterminded the mass murders of that era (Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tsetung) and the buffoons (Hermann Goring, Nikita Khrushchev), serial killers (Heinrich Himmler), and rapists (Lavrenty Beria) who played supporting roles. We sit through this long horror movie, which opens with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 and ends with the scene of the collapsing Berlin Wall in 1989, and we feel a ...

In case you've missed my most recent Deep Thoughts Wasted Chances and Dire Portents Post-9/11 U.S. policies have messed up the Middle East – with worse to come and my historical analogies ("Not unlike the aftermath of WWI, which brought about the collapse of great empires, including that of the Ottomans in the Middle East, the dramatic changes we are witnessing now will probably help produce much instability in the coming years").

Christopher Orlet (who runs the The Existential Journalist ponders in a very interesting piece in The American Spectator whether the neocon "dream" is dead: These are hard days for the neocons. [not sure about that. sugar daddies continue to fund weekly standard and company; neocons still hired as op-ed writers by elite newspapers and show-up on television news shows] There are defections left and right (well, mostly right). [am not sure about this "right" and "left" thing; I always associated social engineering on a global scale with the left] Those who remain on board seem as wobbly as Kate Moss after an all-night coke binge. [cool metaphors and analogies invlving Paris Hilton or Survivor demonstrate that you're not a stuffy analyst but are in touch with the popular culture.I do that all the time] Last month Francis Fukuyama -- always an irresolute neocon [always irresolute? really?] -- formally severed all ties:[ a day that would live in infam...

And it's not the moustache.... Very interesting "realist" critique by diplomatic historian Walter LaFeber (thanks to C.F.) of The Flawed Rice Doctrine of ‘Transformational Diplomacy’ and American Global Policy . Here are some highlights: In her January 18, 2006 speech at Georgetown University, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice attracted attention by arguing that U.S. foreign policy would henceforth be shaped by a “transformational diplomacy . . . rooted in partnership, not paternalism.” Her address was taken by some observers to mean that the neoconservative policy assumptions which have condemned the United States to the tragedy in Iraq and elsewhere were being replaced by a realist perspective taking American policy back to the more constructive days of the partnerships George Marshall and Dean Acheson (whom she singled out for praise in her question-and-answer session), formed with Western Europe and Japan. These partnerships aimed to institutionalize both the rebuil...

Matt Barganier desconstructs Andrew Sullivan's mea sorta culpa on Iraq in Time magazine (Sullivan seen above in a thoughtful pose on Bill Maher's "Real Time"). There have been many of those in recent weeks (including by WFB and Fukuyama ). In an commentary published last year, Oops! I helped start a War which was about one of the earlier apologizing-war-aplogists, I pointed out to the contrast between the way the losers who operate in the market (including financial analysts) are punished and the reality in which the losers in the political game (including foreign policy analysts) rarely get punished: Imagine: for a few years you were investing the money you had saved for your daughter's college education in one of those moderately conservative plans that provided some increase in the value of the investment without exposing it to major risks. But then your financial planner – let's call him Ken P. – got in touch with you and came up with a really great ide...

Thanks to Matt Barganier for emailing to me more interesting stuff about BHL , the West's best dressed Public Intellectual. Doug Irleand quotes in the article two French journalists who describe BHL the following: A philosopher who’s never taught the subject in any university, a journalist who creates a cocktail mingling the true, the possible, and the totally false, a patch-work filmmaker, a writer without a real literary oeuvre, he is the icon of a media-driven society in which simple appearance weighs more than the substance of things. BHL is thus first and foremost a great communicator, the PR man of the only product he really knows how to sell: himself. According to Ireland: BHL changes his political allegiances like one of his shirts. A courtier of Francois Mitterrand, BHL supported his presidency by helping create SOS Racism, ostensibly a civil rights group for young Franco-Arabs and blacks. Une Imposture Francaise, however, reveals that the group was only a media-driven vot...

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Martha Kessler, a retired CIA analyst published a review of my book in the new issue of Middle East Policy Journal. Sorry, no url available; so I justed pasted it here. MIDDLE EAST POLICY, VOL. XIII, NO. 1, SPRING 2006 © 2006, The Authors Journal Compilation © 2006, Middle East Policy Council BOOK REVIEWS Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East, by Leon Hadar. New York:Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 180 pages. $24.95, hardcover. Martha Kessler, analyst, Central Intelligence Agency (ret.) Leon Hadar’s stated purpose for this book is to stimulate a long-overdue debate in this country over U.S. policy in the Middle East. He does not spend too much time second guessing past decisions with “what if” analysis, but when he does, his command of the history of U.S. engagement in the Middle East is impressive and used adroitly throughout his criticism. What he does throughout the book is to deconstruct the underlying assumptions and inaccurate understandings upon which U.S. policies have been ba...