Andrew Sullivan takes down Maureen Dowd:
Obama’s political style is useless, apart from becoming the first black president, saving the US from another Great Depression, succeeding at getting universal healthcare, rescuing the American auto industry, presiding over a civil rights revolution, ending two failed wars, avoiding two doomed others (against Syria and Iran), bringing the deficit down while growing the economy, focusing the executive branch on climate change, and killing bin Laden.”
This is a list of non-fiction books and articles which have greatly influenced me – making me see the world differently or act in it differently. They are listed chronologically according to when I first encountered them.
The Mail and Guardian newspaper of South Africa has compiled a list of prominent Zimbabwean politicians who have died in car accidents, here. Of course, there are other ways to die, as Rex Nhongo found.
Only the other day, I was reporting on revolutionary communists in the Rhodesia of the late 1950s. One of those alleged revolutionaries, a founder of a non-racial co-operative farm and of rural health clinics, Molly Clutton-Brock, has just died aged 101. Her obituary is here. Her late husband, Guy, is the only white Zimbabwean buried at Heroes’ Acre national cemetery, outside Harare.
A description of former Australian PM Julia Gillard’s parliamentary and office management style, by former staffer Nicholas Reece:
Gillard is one of the best close-quarters politicians the Federal Parliament has ever seen.
As prime minister, she ran a disciplined, professional office that operated in much the same way as a well-run law firm – a product of her early career at Slater & Gordon.
Cabinet process was strictly upheld and the massive flow of administrative and policy paperwork that moves between government departments, the prime minister’s office and the prime minister’s desk was dealt with efficiently.
There was courtesy shown to staff, MPs, public servants and stakeholders – every person entitled to a view was given a chance to express it before a decision was made.
Gillard would diligently work her way through the detail of an issue and then patiently execute an agreed plan to tackle it.
She was generous with her time and did not rush people in the way busy leaders often do. She was never rude and never raised her voice, unless for humorous purposes.
She had a quick mind and could master a brief at lightning speed. She was a masterful parliamentary tactician and a brilliant analyst of the day’s events and the politics of the Labor caucus. She was a genuinely affectionate person and had a quick wit that could be deployed to lift the spirits of those around her.
At her instigation, birthdays were the subject of office celebration. This would involve Gillard turning up for cake and delivering a very personal speech to even the most junior staff.
Significantly for a national leader, Gillard had no major personality defects. She is probably the most normal, down-to-earth person to have served as prime minister of Australia in the modern era.
In a crisis, she was supremely calm. While others wilted, Gillard had a resilience that allowed her to keep stepping up to the plate.
She was good at remembering people’s names, knowing their story, understanding their motivations and being able to see a situation from another’s perspective.
These were attributes that were very well suited to the fraught circumstances of the 43rd Parliament.
In the negotiations with the crossbench MPs to form government, Gillard easily outmanoeuvred Tony Abbott. She better understood the independents’ motivations – she focused on the detail of how the relationship between government and the crossbenches would work and committed to serving the full term.
The achievements include: the national broadband network, putting a price on carbon, education reform, children’s dental care and the national disability insurance scheme.
In federal-state relations, there was the negotiation of health reform with the conservative premiers and in foreign affairs there was a strengthening of relations with our major partners, particularly China and the US.
Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that Gillard was well-liked, even loved, among her staff, the public service and most of her caucus.”
British MP, Rory Stewart, has spoken in Parliament of our failure to deeply understand the cultures of the foreign countries we invade, with the consequence that invasion efforts are doomed not to succeed. His view relates to an argument he has put before, about the failure of contemporary international aid organizations and personnel to reckon deeply with the cultures of their host countries, in a manner profoundly worse than that of 19th-century colonial administrators. Colonial administrators may have typically been racist and exploitative, but at least they cared for – and sought to understand – the cultures and languages of the countries they administered, and were prepared to devote their working lives to those countries.
Video here and Hansard Transcript here. (Note that in his speech, Stewart refers to Gordon Brown by name, but the Hansard reporter has recorded this as, “the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown)“.)
Australian journalist Anne Summers writing about just-deposed (and unjustly-deposed) Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s legacy (original here):
On the day Julia Gillard’s signature policy revolution, the Gonski reforms, became law, her prime ministership was defamed and denigrated, characterised as being littered with errors. Those who tore her down gave her no credit for any of her accomplishments as our country’s leader. Not for the 532 pieces of legislation that, by Wednesday night, had passed both houses of Parliament this sitting. Remember, this was a hung Parliament where every piece of legislation needed to be painstakingly negotiated.
Julia Gillard told me recently (in an interview that will be published this weekend in my digital magazine Anne Summers Reports) that because of the minority Parliament, ”It’s more inclusive on the one hand and that’s not a bad thing, but it can be slower and can distort the process a little bit.”
By far the hardest but the most worthwhile piece of legislation to be passed, Gillard said, was the carbon price, which she is confident will endure.
Yet when Kevin Rudd spoke after his shameful coup on Wednesday night and praised ”Julia” for being ”a remarkable reformer”, he did not mention a single one of her prime ministerial accomplishments. Not the carbon price. Not the NDIS. Not the Murray-Darling agreement. Not the Gonski reforms. And certainly not her historic agreement with the new Chinese leadership that ensures an unprecedented annual leadership dialogue between our two countries, something that Rudd while he was prime minister was unable to bring off. No, Rudd did not mention any of these things.
”In Julia’s case let me say this, if it were not for Julia we would not have the Fair Work Act,” he said. ”If it were not for Julia, we would not have a national scheme which ensures that the literacy and numeracy performance of Australian schools is tested regularly and that interventions occur to lift those students who are doing poorly.”
All things she accomplished while she was deputy prime minister. And, the subtext was, while he – the man mocking her by outfitting himself in a blue tie for the coup – was prime minister.
Expect Julia Gillard’s record of reform to be swiftly excised from the political memory of the Labor Party. It started on Wednesday night and will continue apace.”
In the words of a former high-level Rudd adviser who penned a personal, unpublished account of his time in the Rudd government, the way Rudd operated was ”a powerful warning for future governments … The Rudd government was never and could never have been a functional government because of the man who ran it.” This adviser was in a trusted position; he was intimate with the running and functioning of Rudd’s cabinet and at the centre of much of its day-to-day mayhem.Once deposed, Rudd’s toxic ambition appears to have been either to return to the leadership, or to destroy both the government that had dumped him and the woman who had replaced him. In this pursuit he was abetted by political journalists who became pawns in his comeback play, channelling the Chinese whispers of his spruikers and giving credibility and substance to exaggerated claims about the pretender’s level of support within the parliamentary party for a comeback.
Privately, there had always been deep unease among his colleagues about Rudd — his overpowering personal ambition, his ruthless use of people and power blocs to get the leader’s job, his lack of strong policy focus and his uneven temperament.
The oft-quoted fable that his crash in the opinion polls was the reason for his removal is hotly disputed by those central to Rudd’s fate. Anybody who had an ear to the ground in Canberra at the time knew Rudd was in a bad way; that he’d been unravelling since the disaster of the December 2009 climate change summit in Copenhagen; that his office, his department and the wider bureaucracy were paralysed by a prime minister who could not make the big decisions, but who sweated the minutiae of irrelevant tasks and board appointments; that he was so obsessed with polling numbers and day-to-day politics that months into 2010, with an eye to the election, he was designing ever more extravagant and untenable policies that would provide him with the quick fixes of media limelight he appeared to need.”
POSTSCRIPT 2 (Added 2013-06-30):
And here is Independent MP Robert Oakeshott’s moving Parliamentary tribute to Julia Gillard and her prime ministership. Gillard met with the Independent and Green MPs each week during Parliamentary sittings to discuss and co-ordinate policy, so Oakeshott is speaking from direct personal experience.
Surfing idly, I came across this statement:
In 1958 Arthur Lewis married Gladys and moved to Rhodesia. Their first appointment to St. Faith’s Mission in Rusape proved to be something of a nightmare. While the mission had once been very successful, social work and the attached farm had come to take over and the Gospel work was side-lined. Rev. Lewis soon discovered that the farm was also used as a front for a communist revolutionary movement. After much hard work and a determined struggle, Arthur Lewis was able to re-establish the Church and Mission as a dynamic Christian enterprise. Amidst all the trauma of St. Faith’s Mission, their first child, Margaret Faith was born.” (Source here.)
Wait a minute! Communist revolutionaries in Rhodesia in 1958? The first armed incursion in what became the Second Chimurenga took place in 1967 (and was undertaken by South Africans with the ANC, members of MK, and not Zimbabweans), and the war of liberation only took off from the early 1970s. In 1958, neither ZANU nor ZAPU had yet been formed. Of course, Doris Lessing and her then husband Gottfried Lessing, and their left-wing Royal Air Force friends in the Southern Rhodesia Communist Party may have counted as communist revolutionaries in the mid 1940s – although they only ever talked – but they had had little impact and were by then long gone from Rhodesia.
After a moment or two, I realized that there was a clue in the location: St Faith’s, Rusape. This was the site of a very famous multi-racial co-operative farm founded by Guy and Molly Clutton-Brock in 1950. In 1957, the Clutton-Brocks and their colleagues on the farm were instrumental in founding a non-racial political movement, the Southern Rhodesian African National Congress (SRANC), which like its South African counterpart (itself founded as long ago as 1912!) called for majority rule. The SRANC was successful in convincing the then Southern Rhodesian Prime Minister, Garfield Todd, of the justice of their case, but he could not persuade his own party or his (mostly white) parliamentary colleagues. He was dumped, and the new PM banned the SRANC in 1959.
At no point was anyone a communist revolutionary, unless you happen to believe that running a multi-racial commercial enterprise is communist. But, of course, many white Rhodesians did!
POSTSCRIPT (2013-07-03): Molly Clutton-Brock died shortly after this post.
Czechoslovakians have reason to resent their betrayal by Britain and France at Munich in 1938. They were betrayed again, by the same nations, when Hitler’s invasion in March 1939 was not immediately resisted by the western allies. Reading a fine new book by Igor Lukes, it seems these betrayals continued through the post-war period. Here were three:
Prague was liberated by the Red Army in May 1945. It could easily have been liberated by US forces, which were closer than Soviet troops, but allied forces were stayed. Against the advice of the US State Department and the British Government, General Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, declined to liberate Prague, halting allied troops in Pilsen, western Bohemia. Stalin, who had threatened dark consequences if allied forces advanced first on Prague, found that bellicosity achieved desired ends, a lesson the Soviets would take to heart.
Prior to Yalta, FDR had appointed Laurence Steinhardt (1892-1950) as ambassador to Czechoslovakia. Steinhardt took months to arrive in Prague, and spent enourmous time out of the country: From January 1947 to February 1948, he was away from his post some 200 days (Lukes 2013, page 182). Most of this time, and even for much of the time he was in Prague, he was busy with his corporate law practice in New York, a business he continued all the time he was employed to represent the USA. He also ignored many conflicts of interest as people and companies with Czech or Slovak connections used his paid legal counsel while he was Ambassador (!) to seek compensation or redress for various policy actions of the Nazi-era and post-war governments. Steinhardt was rich and socially well connected, and mixed exclusively in similar circles on his apparently rare visits to Prague. Despite having a good analytical mind, and despite knowing Stalinism well at first hand (having earlier been US ambassador to the USSR), he was singularly ill-informed about events on the ground in Czechoslovakia. He was consistently and persistently optimistic in his reports back to Washington about the prospects for democracy against the ruthless thugs of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (Komunistická strana Ceskoslovenska, KSC), and their Soviet masters.
The US mission to Prague included intelligence-gathering agents and groups of various stripes, some of whom were employed by the US Military Mission. These groups were apparently infiltrated by Czech and Soviet double agents. (Some, of course, may have been triple agents – really, at heart, working for the US – but likely not all were.) They were also spied on by all manner of local employees, contacts and passers-by. Whether or not the US civilian or military employees were working for the other side, most were incompetent and negligent to the point of malfeasance. As just one of many tragic examples, the key building occupied by the Military Mission had no late-night access, except through a police-station next door. Late visitors to the mission were thus readily monitored by the Czech secret police, the StB. Lukes’ book reads, at times, like farce – OSS and CIA meet the Keystone Cops.
Even after the boost given to the KSC by the presence of the Red Army in Prague in 1945, the coup in February 1948 that took Czechoslovakia from a semi-free country to a police state was not ever inevitable. The malfeasance and incompetence of US military and embassy officials helped make it so.
Notes:
Not everyone in the KSC was craven or a thug; the party also included some heroes.
The photo shows Milada Horáková (1901-1950), brave Czech politician and social democrat, imprisoned by the Nazis and then again by the Communists. After a show-trial alleging treason, she was executed by Gottwald’s regime on 27 June 1950. Now in the Czech Republic, this date is an official day of commemoration for the Victims of Communism.
Reference:
Igor Lukes [2012]: On the Edge of the Cold War: American Diplomats and Spies in Postwar Prague. New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press.
I have been arguing against the ideas of wunderkind economist Jeffrey Sachs since his ruthless shock therapy advice in Latin America a quarter-century ago. Now he has written some JFK hagiography which contains both errors of fact and interpretation. We read:
Worse still, tensions intensified in the months between JFK’s election victory in November 1960 and his assumption of office on 20 January 1961. A long-awaited Khrushchev-Eisenhower summit failed when a CIA spy-plane was shot down in Soviet airspace just weeks before the scheduled meeting. This was par for the course: no agency did more damage more consistently to the cause of peace than the malign and bungling CIA. But Eisenhower compounded the CIA’s damage by brazenly denying the spy mission, only to have the Soviets produce both the plane’s wreckage and the captured US pilot for a global audience.
Kennedy came into office in 1961 hoping to reach a series of arms-control treaties with the Soviet Union, specifically a ban on nuclear arms testing to be followed by a nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Yet as an initially inexperienced leader, JFK drifted with events instead of leading them. The CIA reprised its spy plane bungling in a far larger and more dangerous debacle, by staging an invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles. When the attempt immediately collapsed on the beach of the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy repeated Eisenhower’s blunder by brazenly (and ridiculously) lying to Khrushchev about the US role in the attempted invasion.”
Although planning for the Bay of Pigs operation began before Kennedy became President, he had had plently of time to cancel it. Moreover, the White House – and he, JFK!, himself personally – interfered in its planning right up to the actual event. Indeed, the specific site in Cuba of the invasion was changed – at JFK’s order, and despite CIA’s great reluctance – just 4 days before the scheduled date. Afterwards, JFK knew that he was the one ultimately responsible for its failure – responsible not merely in a hierarchical or legal sense, but actually, morally and operationally, responsible, and to his credit he took public responsibility for the operation. He did still later sack the leadership of CIA, though, since somebody needed to be punished for his failure. But his hagiographers and those who wish to attack CIA continue to put all the blame on “CIA bungling”, while the anti-Kennedy right usually blame the failure of the operation on Kennedy’s repeated refusal to provide USAF air cover for the invaders as they fought on the beach.
The chief problem of the Bay of Pigs, as I have remarked before (here and here), was not poor planning or ineffective operations or betrayal by JFK, but was existential: the operation’s aim was to convince the Castro regime that Cuba was being invaded by the full overhwelming might of the USA military and to thus scare them into running away, without actual US forces invading anything. To have used actual US military forces (including USAF airplanes) would have risked the operation escalating into a major conflagration with the USSR, Cuba’s supporters. A similar bluffing game had worked for CIA in Guatamela in 1954, but Fidel Castro was made of sterner stuff than Jacobo Arbenz, and he called the US’s bluff. To say the failure was merely due to “bungling” by CIA betrays both a lack of knowledge of the facts of the operation, and a lack of understanding of its Cold War context, when small events in far-away places often had global ramifications.
And the shooting-down of the U2 spy plane? Another bungle? “no agency did more damage more consistently to the cause of peace than the malign and bungling CIA”? I’ve not done a survey of the activities US Government agencies in the Cold War period, so I could not possibly argue that there were not other US government agencies with worse records of damage to peace than that of CIA. However, I’m sure Sachs hasn’t done a survey either, so I will take this statement as exaggerated for rhetorical effect. But even excluding the comparison, did CIA’s activies consistently damage the cause of peace? In a war, it is vital for each side to understand the enemy’s plans and intentions. This is even more so in a cold war, when much offensive and defensive activity may be undertaken indirectly or through proxies or be part of some long-term game of influence. For the West, spy agencies such as CIA played the major part in understanding the enemy’s motivating beliefs and their plans and intentions. (The same role was played by KGB and its sister agencies for the Eastern bloc.) The U2 plane shot down was part of a long-term, high-altitude espionage program that provided the West with valuable information about Soviet activities not otherwise obtainable. U2 spy planes run by CIA, for instance, first told the US Government in September and October 1962 that there were Soviet long-range missiles being installed in Cuba.
Again, to ignore or overlook this function betrays a lack of understanding of the nature of the Cold War context, when knowledge about the enemy and their actual, true, beliefs and intentions was hard to come by – for both sides. Arguably, no agencies did more to advance the cause of peace, and to prevent the Cold War escalating into a hot one, than CIA and KGB.