London-based independent journalist
Gwynne Dyer writes in the Salt Lake Tribune that since the 17th century, the world has seen massive wars involving all its great powers approximately every 50 years.
The bad news is that world wars are not just a 20th century phenomenon. They are a consistent feature of modern history, recurring on average about every 50 years since the 17th century. They didn't have atomic bombs in the 17th century, or even machine-guns, so the killing was much less efficient than it is nowadays. But if by "world war" you mean a war in which all the great powers of the time got involved, in two giant alliances, and fought it out for years all over the world until one side caved in, then there have been about six of the things.
More on this below, followed by more pithy pundits, including:
Dyer's brief history lesson, continued:
The Thirty Years War, 1618-1648: all the great powers involved, many millions of dead, famine and cannibalism in Germany by the end. The War of the Spanish Succession, 1702-1714: all the great powers involved, fighting on every continent, maybe a million dead. The Seven Years War, 1756-63: all the great powers involved, Britain gets Canada and India, probably not even a million dead. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1792-1814: all the great powers involved, Napoleon invades Egypt and Britain conquers Argentina (briefly) and South Africa, 4 million dead.
There is a pattern here. The death toll isn't as high as the 20th century, because smoothbore muskets were a really inefficient way of killing people, but the politics of the alliances looks very familiar. Some countries switch sides, but it's the same great powers fighting in much the same places, war after war after war. Including the two that we call the First World War (1914-18) and the Second World War (1939-45).
Dyer's point is that if we have survived 60 years since the end of the last such conflict, we must largely credit the "experiment" of the United Nations as an alternative mechanism for resolving international conflict. Her commentary is a not-too-subtle dig at Bush and Bolton:
[The UN's] enemies generally promise security through military strength, and they can often deliver on their promises in the short term. But in the long run, if we don't break the cycle, then the great powers will slide back into war again as they have so many times in the past, and next time hundreds of millions will die.
Point well taken. But there is a problem in the UN, and with European attitudes about conflict and peace overall. After the devastating world wars of the last century, no one can blame them for shorning militarism. But the UN should be about collective security, not about hiding our heads in the sand while genocidal demons bearing human form run amok in places like Cambodia, the Balkans, Rwanda, and currently, the Sudan.
But in the end, Dyer is right; the UN is still our best hope, even if it is rank with corruption and slow to rally members to the right cause. The alternative, unilateral militarism as prescribed by neocons, is a short-term pill leading to a very malignant cancer.
Where have all the slogans gone?
The Chicago Trib's Steve Chapman anguishes over the dearth of good political campaign slogans, both here and in the United Kingdom:
You would not expect a nation as rich in the English language as Britain to ever lack for words. But lately, political observers have detected an urgent shortage of verbs--manifesting itself in such Labor Party campaign slogans as "Britain forward not back" and "Your family better off."
Critics complained that the construction made it impossible to decode the meaning. Lynne Truss, author of the unlikely best seller on punctuation "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" wondered what the Laborites were getting at: "Your family is better off? Your family will be better off? Your family isn't better off? Your family will never be better off?" Campaign slogans shouldn't leave the listener so much room for mistaken, and possibly mischievous, interpretation.
American presidential campaign slogans have had a way of coming back to haunt history:
In the 20th Century, some candidates came up with slogans that would be long remembered, though not always for the right reasons. Woodrow Wilson had "He kept us out of war" in 1916, before doing the opposite in 1917. During Herbert Hoover's 1928 campaign, Republicans promised "a chicken in every pot," which turned out to be very poor prophecy. Lyndon Johnson's "All the way with LBJ," by contrast, could have been a forecast of his policy in Vietnam.
Sometime over the next couple of decades, coming up with a pitch that would fit on a bumper sticker went out of fashion. Maybe the turning point was in 1964, with Barry Goldwater's "In your heart, you know he's right." Why? Because it spawned a devastating retort: "In your guts, you know he's nuts."
More damage to this art form followed in 1968, when the Republican nominee used "Nixon's the one." By 1974, when he resigned in disgrace, no one had to ask, "The one what?"
Where is the outrage?
Leonard Pitts writes in the Detroit Free Press about a Florida town that suffered a two-day barrage of indiscriminate shooting--presumably from a drug gang. Local police, as well as the Miami area media, did nothing other than take reports, until it was too late for one child.
Then, 5-year-old Melanise Malone was shot in the head. Now everybody's on it.
Melanise was killed after her mother decided to make a break for it. When police responded to yet another call Wednesday before 1 a.m., she gathered her three children into a van and drove off, a police cruiser nearby.
They had gone only a short distance when a spray of bullets peppered the vehicle and Melanise was killed.
I am outraged by her death. But I am also outraged that I cannot imagine the story unfolding this way in other parts of town. Cannot envision some gang of punks holding tonier-than-thou Coral Gables hostage and police just taking reports. Cannot picture tourist-mecca Miami Beach being turned into Beirut Lite and it going unnoticed by the Miami Herald, "Local 10" and "Seven on Your Side."
A serious drug problem
Paul Krugman continues his series on reforming health care in America. Today he looks at the scandalous 2003 Medicare Bill:
The new Medicare law subsidizes private health plans, which have repeatedly failed to deliver promised cost savings. It creates an unnecessary layer of middlemen by requiring that the drug benefit be administered by private insurers. The biggest giveaway is to Big Pharma: the law specifically prohibits Medicare from using its purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices.
Outside the United States, almost every government bargains over drug prices. And it works: the Congressional Budget Office says that foreign drug prices are 35 to 55 percent below U.S. levels. Even within the United States, Veterans Affairs is able to negotiate discounts of 50 percent or more, far larger than those the Medicare actuary expects the elderly to receive under the new plan.
For a defense to the claim that the prohibition on price negotiations is just to enable drug companies to innovate, Krugman refers us to Marcia Angell's The Truth About the Drug Companies" (reviewed in detail by your's truly, last February), which shows how little these drug companies spend on genuine research.
The current rules underlying the prescription drug business are protected by crass and open corruption:
Billy Tauzin, who shepherded the drug bill through when he was a member of Congress, now heads the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the all-powerful industry lobby group, for an estimated $2 million a year. In his new job, he's making novel arguments against allowing Americans to buy cheaper drugs from Canada: Al Qaeda, he suggests, might use fake Viagra tablets to get anthrax into this country.
Meanwhile, Thomas Scully, the former Medicare administrator - who threatened to fire Medicare's chief actuary if he gave Congress the real numbers on the drug bill's cost - was granted a special waiver from the ethics rules. This allowed him to negotiate for a future health industry lobbying job at the very same time he was pushing the drug bill.
What to do then, PK? Krugman poses this "suggestion" to President Bush:
One way to prove that he's really sincere about addressing long-run fiscal problems, that his calls for benefit cuts aren't just part of an ideological agenda, would be to put Social Security aside for a while and fix his own Medicare program.
Oh, never mind.
Nonetheless, someone will eventually have to take on the health care special interests. Who might do that? I'll write about that in the next installment of this series.
I can't wait.
The Ballad of Lynndie England
Richard Cohen gives us an more indepth look at the best known face of Abu Ghraib abuse:
There is no end to the sadness of Lynndie England. There is no excusing what she did, but explaining is a different matter. She is that rare genuine article, the cliche, the stereotype that turns out upon investigation to be true. She lived with her family in a trailer in West Virginia. She's only a high school graduate. She married when she was 19 -- on a lark, she told her friends, and then for only two years.
She joined the Army Reserve not, as the flag-wavers would like it, for patriotic reasons but for college money (she wanted to be a meteorologist and chase storms). She had an affair or something with Graner in Iraq and has a baby by him. He apparently encouraged her to abuse prisoners. He also married another woman.
Not quite headline news, here. But then Cohen puts England on the couch, a dangerous thing for a pundit, not unlike a Senator retired from heart surgery making neurological diagnoses by edited videotape. But to his credit, Cohen probes with dignity and sympathy, if not forgiveness: (the following snip is longer than I'd prefer, but I don't think it can be trimmed without losing the complete sense of it)
A psychologist from her home area testified that England had been a blue baby, born also with a malformation of the tongue that gave her a speech impediment. Apparently, she often chose not to talk at all. She had a learning disability as well. And you can see -- can't you? -- what no one will testify to: She's homely -- and that matters for a woman in America. She posed for pornographic pictures with Graner. The discipline of the Army apparently meant she no longer had to have any herself. This is why fascism can be so (sexually) exciting.
In 1995 Bernhard Schlink, a German law professor and novelist, published "The Reader'' -- a powerful and erotic tale of a relationship between a teenage boy and the illiterate woman he reads to. The two have an affair, and it is only years later that the man discovers his former lover was a guard at Auschwitz. It was a job she fell into, something she could do and not have to reveal that she could not read. She was a victim, pathetic, but she was also a beast. To understand is not necessarily to forgive. In the end, she could not even forgive herself.
It is the same with Lynndie England. She is the sort of woman who gets used by others, most often men. Powerless everywhere in life except on her end of the leash, she just had to come night after night to the section of Abu Ghraib where Graner held sway. She was admonished for this -- her real work was suffering -- but Graner drew her. She knew that what she was doing was wrong -- "I could have said no,'' she told the military court. "I knew it was wrong.'' But in all likelihood, only theoretically could she have said no. Some women always say yes.
How sad, how ironic, that this wee woman should have become the personification of supposed American arrogance. Like all those convicted for the abuses of Abu Ghraib, she is one of America's little people -- not an officer, not even regular Army, but one of a collection of nobodies just trying to get somewhere better. Lynndie England was one of them, and she is suffering for that -- officially for abusing prisoners, actually for being a loser. Whatever the outcome of her trial, the sentence will be life.
Today's cartoon
From Jeff Parker, Florida Today: