THE ANGUISH OF PERPETUAL WAR

by H. N. Burdett

When American liberals went ballistic over President Obama's decision to prolong rather than abruptly shut down United States presence in West Asia, their opposition to preemptive war blocked common sense.

Whether one agreed with George W. Bush's constantly changing rationale for the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan or deemed them as the sheer lunacy of a son obsessed with completing his father's unfinished business, precipitous withdrawal from the region would guarantee the worst possible outcome -- one featuring hitherto unseen carnage and the triumphal return of the Taliban.

Whenever American troops leave that beleaguered region, there is no assurance that the Taliban or a fundamentalist equivalent will not flood back into Afghanistan, or that a despotic heir to Saddam Hussein will not emerge in Iraq.

If the loss of thousands of young men and women Bush and Obama have sent halfway around the world to defend and promote freedom and democracy is to have any meaning, perhaps we owe it to the memory of this lost treasure to exert a final effort to show that they did not die in vain. Those who contend that it is insanity to even consider the risk of compounding a hideous mistake make the valid case that the senseless bloodshed must end, that allowing it to continue is patently unacceptable.

President Obama has sent the nation's most successful warrior, Gen. David H. Petraeus, to replace the disgraced Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal as the head of our military operations in Afghanistan. Still, the odds are not in our favor.

The U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan is not the issue and it is not scheduled to change. Gen. McChrystal was cashiered for insolence, not incompetence. One might pause to reflect on how some of our nation's great generals -- from Ulysses S. Grant to George S. Patton -- might have fared had the equivalent of a Rolling Stone reporter been present when they and their staffs were letting off steam.

Petraeus doubtless has the political skills McChrystal lacked, though the latter is said to have gotten along swimmingly with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, which perhaps had more than a little to do with their both feeling a longer U.S. presence in that country is required.

Karzai is reportedly making his own deal with the Taliban, which has the earmarks of his willingness to become their puppet just as he is now that of the Americans. What choice does the duly elected but thoroughly corrupt leader of the land "where empires come to die" really have?

If Obama holds to his July 2011 timetable to begin the U.S. troop withdrawal, Karzai's options are reduced to effecting detente with his enemies under their nefarious terms, or returning to exile.

Meanwhile, Petraeus has said the test of strategic leaders is in their ability to perform three enormous tasks: "get big ideas right," "communicate the big ideas throughout the organization" and "proper execution of big ideas."

With the cooperation of American diplomats, the Obama administration and Karzai, the general may well be able to carry out the first two tasks in his new post. The third -- "proper execution" -- is the unknown quantity.

Petraeus is wise enough to understand that conditions in Afghanistan today are not the same as they were in Iraq when he launched his celebrated game-changing surge. For starters, it is foolhardy to even begin to compare the two neighboring countries. Iraq, prior to the invasion by the U.S. and its allies, was among the more secular states in the region; Afghanistan is one of the more fundamentalist.

The "big idea" Petraeus's leadership must "get right" is to convert Afghanistan into, at very least, something far less than a haven where terrorists may train and establish headquarters, and, at best, a democratic nation. As unlikely as the latter proposition may seem, rank-and-file Afghans, exhausted from 30 years of war, may yet embrace it.

For all of his corruption and questionable leadership ability, Karzai is likely correct when he postulates that it will require 10-15 years to complete the change the United States and presumably much of the rest of the world would like to see happen in Afghanistan.

There is also a growing body of opinion that the current problem with the U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan is that the American people hardly notice that we are fighting a perpetual war there. This may be at least partially attributable to the distractions of an imploded economy and nearly one of every 10 employable Americans unable to obtain a job. It may have even more to do with a level of detachment resulting from the war being fought by a standing army of professionals rather than citizen soldiers conscripted to fight it.

The bottom line is that the war in West Asia is not receiving the serious attention, much less adequate support, of the American people.

As it became painfully evident in the McChrystal affair, the military has been known to assume moral superiority during protracted wars. This is unlikely to change much under Petraeus. It would be more surprising if disrespect for civilian authorities were not widespread among U.S. military forces today. The problem may not be so much with the generals, their staffs and the fighting men and women they command, as it is with the situation in which their political leaders have placed them.

Former U.S. Army colonel, Vietnam veteran and Pentagon intellectual, Andrew J. Bacevich, now a history and international relations professor at Boston University, is among the few experts looking beyond Afghanistan. He provides us with the following two options for the future and the dismal consequence for failing to choose one or the other:

"The responsibility facing the American people is clear. They need to reclaim ownership of their army. They need to give their soldiers respite, by insisting that Washington abandon its de facto policy of perpetual war. Or, alternatively, the United States should become a nation truly 'at war' with all that implies in terms of civic obligation, fiscal policies and domestic priorities. Should the people choose neither course -- and thereby subject their troops to continuing abuse -- the damge to the army and to American democracy will be severe."

# # #

THE GENERAL'S GAMBIT

by H. N. Burdett

There is no conceivable way that Gen. Stanley McChrystal committed a gaffe.

He knew exactly what he was doing when he gave a writer on assignment with Rolling Stone magazine access to himself and his staff. He was fully aware that President Obama would order him to explain his behavior and that his position as top commander in Afghanistan would be at stake. He also knew that the story would dominate the headlines, even pushing aside the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and Congressional efforts to regulate Wall Street. It was beyond the shadow of a doubt a calculated risk.

With his career on the line, McChrystal, who has taken pride in his brashness at least since his West Point days when he was a century man (having chalked up more than 100 demerits), rolled the dice and bet the President wouldn't fire him.

After all, Obama had given him almost everything he asked for to assure the success of his counterinsurgency, namely the 20,000 troops to effect the surge the general feels is critical to his regime change scheme.

What the President has not given McChrystal is the rescission of his pledge to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan by July 2011. The general and his staff don't feel this is adequate time to accomplish their mission. Obama administration officials are turning a deaf ear to their arguments, reminding the general that the President was elected to end the war. McChrystal and his staff also want to end the war, but with a victory -- regime change in Afghanistan -- only first the timetable must be scrapped.

Though a timetable for removing U.S. armed presence from that perpetually beleagured country served the political purpose of the tipping point that won the 2008 election for the junior U.S. senator from Illinois, it is not supported by a scintilla of logic.

It does not require the military insight of Carl von Clausewitz to figure out that announcing to your enemy the date when you intend to stop fighting is not such a great idea. Is there anyone who really doubts that the Taliban will be back fighting desperately for control of Afghanistan within days if not hours after American troops leave?

Somehow Bush the Younger sold the preemptive invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan as necessary to prevent the United States and their allies from having to fight Al Qaeda on our home turf. It was as though there would be landing barges in New York, Philadelphia and Boston harbors with Bin Laden's troops pouring out, armed to the teeth, and more of them parachuting into Miami and Atlanta. None of this was the kind of military capability to which Bin Laden has access, or perhaps even wants. Al Qaeda seems perfectly content perpetrating random acts of terrorism.

Though most of the so-called Coalition of the Willing bailed out of West Asia, Bush's salesmanship was sufficient to win re-election to the presidency. Barack Obama, despite his vow to disengage our troops from that incredible misadventure as soon as possible, apparently bought into the Bush administration's faulty premise. Since the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, there have been no major acts of terrorism within the confines of the continental United States. Not that the bad guys haven't tried -- most recently, of course, in Times Square. Our much maligned homeland security capabilities combined with great dollops of good luck have kept us safe.

Meanwhile, the war has dragged on longer than our involvement in Vietnam, which tore the country apart more than any other event since the Civil War. Besides being obviously unwinnable, the preemptive war in West Asia, considering the long and slow recovery from the implosion of the global economy, is clearly unaffordable. Yet it continues. Gen. McChrystal is among a distinct minority who still seems to believe the war can be won and Afghanistan can be converted into a democracy. He appears determined to drive home that point one way or another.

But, as the Rolling Stone article makes clear, the general deplores decorum and diplomacy. If he's unable to buy more time from Obama, McChrystal may try to find a way to take his case to the American people. The nation, however, is weary of this war, which has bogged down to a stalemate. An expensive stalemate that voraciously gobbles down millions of dollars at a time of barely perceivable recovery from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The general may have to resort to showcasing his macho persona. Rather than convince the public that we need a foothold for democracy in West Asia to quench our thirst for oil, he may have to sell himself. Americans love nothing more than a macho hero. In McChrystal, they would have a reasonable facsimile of the second coming of General Patton or John Wayne. He's genuinely tough as nails and outspoken, tough enough to badmouth the Vice President in front of a magazine reporter; no one should bet against him trying to speak his mind to the country's ultimate power figure.

It has been reported that when Obama, who had never served in the military, had his first meeting with the nation's top brass he was intimidated by all those uniforms, ribbons and medals. Indeed this is the reason given for his moving the war to Afghanistan rather than bringing the troops home and restructuring the hunt for Bin Laden and dissolution of Al Qaeda as the international police action it should have been from the beginning.

While it is true enough that President Obama inherited a veritable plethora of unmitigated crises from the previous administation -- from the wreckage of the economy, to energy dependence on foreign oil, to near double-digit unemployment -- the so-called 'war on terrorism' was the issue that got the most attention, along with the resolve for disengagement. It was, after all, supposed to be a slam dunk. Practically in the blink of an eye, the mission was to be accomplished, as the cartoonish leader of the free world announced nine years ago.

Though Abraham Lincoln was frustrated with Gen. George McClellan, who commanded the Union army from a perpetually defensive posture, he declined demands to replace him because he simply had no one better. Finally Lincoln ordered McClellan to stand down, turning his post over to Ulysses S. Grant, who justified the President's confidence by moving aggressively to win the Civil War. When Harry Truman finally had had enough of Gen. Douglas MacArthur's arrogance and insolence, he replaced him with Matthew Ridgway, who had instilled morale and a fighting spirit into the U.S. Eighth Army in Korea which MacArthur insisted was demoralized and weary. McChrystal is risking his career and perhaps his place in history on his wager that Obama has no Grant or Ridgway waiting in the wings.

When MacArthur, a household name who had defeated Japan in World War II, took it upon himself to announce, in defiance of President Truman, his intention to expand the Korean conflict into mainland China, the President relieved him of his command. Truman later said he regarded that decision as among the most important of his presidency and that his biggest mistake in the White House was not having done it months earlier.

Those who agreed with the decision heralded it as an act of great courage, considering the enormous esteem MacArthur had earned as perhaps the most famous contemporary American warrior. "Courage didn't have anything to do with it," Truman said. " General MacArthur was insubordinate and I fired him. That's all there was to it."

Looking back upon it years later, Truman wrote, "If there is one basic element in our Constitution, it is civilian control of the military. If I allowed him to defy the civil authorities in this manner, I myself would be violating my oath to uphold and defend the Constitution."

Both Gen. McChrystal and President Obama might do well to reflect upon those words.

WHEN TRAGEDY OFFERS OPPORTUNITY

By H. N. Burdett

My friend of some 40 years -- let's call him Ted -- sides with the Palestinians in their every confrontation with the Israelis these days. So it's hardly a surprise to find him absolutely livid about the nine people killed by Israeli commandos who recently boarded a Turkish ship attempting to run Israel's blockade of Gaza.

Ted is emphatically not anti-Semitic. He has solid progressive credentials. There's no one I'd more want fighting at my side in the trenches on issues ranging from civil rights to environmental sanity.

Yet he has something akin to a blind spot when it comes to Middle East politics. It is a blind spot I understand. But first a few words about my own blind spot leading to near knee-jerk support of Israel.

My father and mother emigrated from Russia and Lithuania respectively during the first decade of the twentieth century. Economic opportunity certainly had a role in their abandonment of their respective homelands. But there were other reasons.

Not unlike many if not most young Jewish men in czarist Russia, my father was determined to avoid military conscription which he described as "a life sentence -- once you were in it, you were in it forever." Furthermore, to discourage desertion, he told me, pains were taken to post soldiers as distant from their home villages as possible.

A cousin from my father's village I first met when I was a teenager supplied me with a detail that my father had until then never bothered to share about his earlier life. As a very young man, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Russian revolutionary leader Alexander Kerensky, who following the 1917 revolution, some eight years after my father arrived in the United States, served as provisional prime minister prior to Lenin's election.

My father recalled that he was initially attracted to Kerensky based on the then young lawyer's brilliant defense of political prisoners in the czar's courts, and, later, because of his vision to recreate Russia in the image of America. Glowing letters from relatives in the United States caused Kerensky's promise to resonate with my father. But, as more and more Jews were conscripted into the Russian army, my father would not be around for the revolution in his homeland

Meanwhile, my mother, then only nine years old, accompanied her aunt and uncle to America to escape the more and more frequent pogroms in Lithuania in which Jewish villages were routinely pillaged, Jewish men routinely beaten or slaughtered and Jewish women and girls routinely raped.

Interminable persecution and brutalization was the plight of Eastern European Jews well before the rise of Hitler. After my father and mother emigrated to the United States, the families they left behind, other than his brother and two sisters he was able, after years of hard work, to bring to the U.S., were wiped out in the World War II Nazi Holocaust.

Though I've never been a supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu -- the attack on the Free Gaza flotilla was precisely the sort of tragedy I feared when he was elected -- I am generally supportive of Israel.

Arguments over whether Israel even has a right to exist I find to be in the same category with those concerning the legitimacy of the United States. The major difference, it seems to me, is less a matter of morality than duration -- one, rightly and wrongly, has been around more than 230 years, the other a little more than 60.

Hamas, the Palestinian fundamentalist organization which has controlled the Gaza Strip since the 2006 legislative elections, has never accepted the Jewish state. They have called for a hudna or truce with Israel, based on the Prophet Mohammed's similar respite with Jews some 1,400 years ago. Hamas's entrenched refusal to fully accept Israel is construed by Israelis to mean that when the Palestinians gain sufficient strength their intention is to overtake Israel.

While Hamas operates mosques, schools, clinics and social programs, its military wing has carried out numerous terrorist acts, including suicide bombings and rocket attacks. Hamas opposed the 1993 accord between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Authority and its charter dating back to 1988 continues to call for replacement of Israel and the Palestinian Territories with an Islamic Palestinian state.

Mahmoud Al-Zahar, a co-founder of Hamas, said following the April 2006 elections, that he dreamed of "hanging a huge map of the world on the wall at my Gaza home which does not show Israel. . .there is no place for the state of Israel in this land."

In my travels over the years, I've visited Turkey twice. I clearly remember a huge banner strung across a main thoroughfare in Istanbul in 1992, proclaiming 500 years of Turkish and Jewish friendship. I recall wondering how many other countries could make a similar claim, much less a predominately Islamic country.

If any country needs every friend it can get, it is Israel. But the commando raid on the Turkish ship has seriously strained relations between the two countries. World opinion, mostly favoring Israel since 1948 when it was reborn as a nation, today favors Palestinians more than it does Israel .

The raid on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara has engendered a reevaluation of the country's relationship with Israel. Ironically, the fact that Turkey is an Islamic country with a long-term reputation of friendship with Israel would seem to make it an ideal honest broker in negotiations leading to a two-state solution to the region's most vexing problem.

Liberals are preternaturally disposed to supporting the oppressed and dispossessed. When they see Palestinians in displaced persons' camps, they instinctively know what side they are on.

My friend Ted sees video footage of Israeli tanks rolling over Palestinian shelters in the refugee camps where there are women and children, contrasts it with home-made rockets from the Palestinian territories landing harmlessly in fields inside of Israel.

What Ted and many liberals see is Palestinians in ghettoes at the mercy of Jews, and they wonder how this is different from Nazi oppression of Jews sixty-five to seventy years ago. We do not hear Israeli hard-liners calling for mass extermination of Palestinians; in fact, when considering fundamentalist organizations like Hamas, it is just the opposite. But fundamentalist Arabs and reactionary Israelis are motivated by the same emotion: boundless, unswerving distrust.

My only visit to Israel was more than 40 years ago. As a secular Jew, proud of my heritage, I am both wary and weary of the intolerance organized religion, for all of its well-intentioned advocacy of peace, goodwill and harmony, almost invariably fosters.

I came away from that one trip to Israel with the hope that the Jewish state would one day set a positive example for the entire Middle East -- not because it had a surfeit of bullets and bombs, but that the Jewish experience in the diaspora, so much of its population having lived among people of different religious, ethnic and political backgrounds, might serve as a beacon for showing the way toward regional if not global peace. It bode well that Jews, wherever they have lived, have demonstrated leadership in the arts, sciences and culture disproportionate to their numbers. But four decades later that hope remains on tenuous hold.

Meanwhile, Palestinian frustration over being subjected to generations of refugee status is more than understandable; so too is the liberal identification with the suppressed. This time Israel appears to be the aggressor, if for no other reason than it is the Israelis wearing the boots and the uniforms and who are supported by an arsenal of sophisticated weaponry. And the stateless Palestinians are cast as freedom fighters. If one picture is worth a thousand words, what is the worth of one video of a family's home crushed by a tank?

Nor is the retribution ideology of both the Torah and the Quran helpful in the effort to bring about peace. Both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King observed that an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.

History is not without precedence in which hardline leaders have succeeded in advancing a progressive agenda where more moderate ones might not have. There is strong doubt that had liberal Hubert Humphrey won the 1968 United States presidential election, he could have achieved U.S. recognition of the People's Republic of China that came about through the unlikely Nixon-Kissinger diplomacy.

Is it too much to hope that Netanyahu can lead his country to the two-state solution -- the only possibility, fraught with risk though it may be, for creating an environment conducive to peace and prosperity. "From this nettle danger, we pluck this flower safety," Shakespeare wrote. The time for lip service to a Palestinian state has long passed.

It should be evident to Israel that the blockade strengthens rather than weakens Hamas, and that it has now jeopardized more than five centuries of friendship with an Islamic nation. Moreover, the only result that can possibly come from the blockade is not a bridge to a more harmonious future but a treadmill of dismal stagnation.

Israel's continuing blockade of Gaza ensures the status quo. But what nation in a similar position would risk the mass importation of arms to a country controlled by an organization whose founder wants it to vanish from his map? There is an opportunity for the United Nations to repair its own diminished image as a peacekeeping force by assuming security responsibilities and ensuring against weapons pouring into Gaza to be used against Israel.

Considering their long, heartbreaking history of bitterness, animosity and violence, it is long overdue for Arabs and Jews to live side by side, not as suspicious and fearful neighbors but as the brothers they were always meant to be. The risks of the two-state solution may be immense, but no greater than those of the the perpetual standoff that serves only to compound mutual resentment and hostility, and which has proved nothing other than that it is unworkable, untenable and unjustifiable.

# # #

# # #

THE END OF OBAMA'S HONEYMOON

by H. N. Burdett

Pressed to come up with a specific day when President Obama's honeymoon ended with the liberal chattering class, Sunday, May 30, might do as well as any.

On that day, it appeared that the New York Times's triumvirate of left-of-center opinionators -- Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd and Thomas L. Friedman -- had huddled and determined it was time to spit out the mouthpieces, remove the gloves and go after the decider-in-chief tooth and nail.

More to the point, they obviously had had it up to there with what seemed to be the president channeling his inept predecessor with inexplicable inaction regarding BP's inability to plug the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil leak.

The headline over Rich's weekly essay -- "Obama's Katrina? Maybe Worse" -- minced no words in setting the tone for the hymnal that was rendered in three-part op-ed harmony.

Rich recalled that one glaring difference between then and now was that George W. Bush was in his second term when Hurricane Katrina pounded the gulf region relentlessly; the country was more or less prepared for his bungling having already “witnessed two-plus years of his mismanagement of the Iraq war.” He added that W's "laissez-fair response to the hurricane was also consistent with his political DNA as a small-government conservative in thrall of big business.

Lest his readers become fidgety about the audacity of comparing Obama and Bush, Rich reaffirmed his awareness that the two are cut from very different cloth. "Whatever Obama's failings," he writes, "he is infinitely more competent at coping with catastrophe than his predecessor."

With sardonic delight, the column goes on to revisit the horrific late summer of 2005and Bush's emulation of Nero fiddling while Rome was ablaze.By contrast, Rich concludes that the Obama administration was, at least, "engaged with the oil spill from the start" and that "it's still not clear what the president might have done to make a definitive, as opposed to a cosmetic difference in plugging the hole."

Running out of steam after admitting that he hadn't the foggiest idea of what he wanted the president to do other than something, the essay resorted to criticizing as "at least three weeks overdue" the press conference Obama held three days earlier. The president used that occasion to announce the government's response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion and its relationship with BP.

Rich concluded that Obama is "stuck between a rock and a Tea Party" and that his "credibility as a champion of reformed, competent government is held hostage by video footage from the gulf."

Meanwhile, Maureen Dowd typically delights in taking power to task without suggesting, nor even offering a bare hint about what it should be doing that it is not.

She righteously thunders: "For five weeks, it looked as though Obama considered the gushing that became the worst oil spill in U.S. history, a distraction, like a fire alarm going off in the middle of a law seminar he was teaching." An especially nice line for those who enjoy confusing metaphor for substance. Dorothy Parker once said the difference between wit and wisecracking is that the former "has truth in it," while the latter is "simply calisthenics with words." If there were an Olympic medal for those calisthenics, Dowd would be a serious contender.

Dowd took the occasion to scold Obama "and top aides who believe in his divinity" for dismissing "complaints of his aloofness as Washington white noise. He treats the press as a nuisance rather than examining his inability to encapsulate America's feelings." The press seldom embarrasses itself more than when it whines about how it is mistreated by those it routinely skewers. No one bothered to inform Maureen that adversarial relationships -- such as that between the press and politicians -- are two-way streets. The press seems to understand this even less than do politicians.

Dowd closes her column by offering Obama truly bizarre advice. The president, she says, should offer Bill Clinton, who "would certainly know how to gush at a gusher gone haywire," a "cameo" role as "Feeler in Chief" because "the post is open." Her haughtily supercilious reference is to the inability of the "aloof" Obama to publicly display his compassion, which, incidentally, has never been known to plug an oil leak.

I hardly ever read a Maureen Dowd column without shedding a tear of longing for her sisters-in-arms, Mary McGrory and Molly Ivins, may they rest in peace, and thanking the heavens above and each and every star therein for Rachel Maddow.

So it was left to Tom Friedman to once again fill the role of the newspaper’s most consistent, if not only, op-ed page grownup.

He wisely pointed out that the oil leak is not the president’s fault, that it is BP’s responsibility and, moreover, that firm has “the best access to the best technology to plug it.”

But Friedman stressed that Obama has yet to tackle his most important job, which is to exploit the opportunity “to change our national conversation on energy.“ In this line alone, Friedman shows why, though he sometimes may be out-written by his op-ed colleagues, he is seldom out-thought.

"Obama realists” keep telling the president that the Democrats in Congress are suffering from “legislative fatigue” after casting a hard vote for health care, he says, and “they don’t want to be asked to cast a supposedly hard vote for a price on carbon -- the essential first step in getting off oil." Actually lawmakers who feel that way should waste no time seeking employment elsewhere.

Friedman reminds us, as though we need to be, that “the GOP today is so cynical, so bought and paid for by Big Oil, that only a couple of Republican senators would have the courage and vision to vote for a price on carbon. So Democrats would be out there alone.” Score another bulls-eye for Tom. Friedman concludes: ”As you would say, Mr. President, this is your time, this is your moment. Seize it. A disaster is an inexcusable thing to waste.”
　
Just two days later, a front page off-lead article in The Washington Post announced that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, Jr. had been dispatched to the Gulf Coast to meet with federal and state prosecutors. His mission, according to the Post's Joel Achenbach and Jerry Markon, was to determine whether the environmental calamity "might become the subject of a criminal investigation." When power responds to constructive criticism, it is nearly as beautiful as a Beethoven sonata and far more rare.

MOTHER NATURE'S LAST LAUGH DIMS CLAMOR FOR OFFSHORE DRILLING

By H. N. Burdett

Human ingenuity and modern technology, astounding as they are, can never hope to do anything more than play catch-up with the fearsome bitch goddess, Mother Nature, who routinely plays with a deck full of trump cards.

The familiar din of the "Drill, Baby, Drill" chorus that once greeted on cue the public appearances of that prime wholesaler of right wing red meat, Sarah Palin, has faded into what her faithful followers might wish to become the faintest of memories.

Nor is the prodigious power of nature recently evident solely in the massive Gulf of Mexico oil leak, though that in itself should be reason enough to lower to a whisper the mindless clamor for plowing the ocean's depths for black gold.

It may seem much longer ago, but it was only in April that volcanic ash rising into the atmosphere grounded airliners throughout northern Europe. Despite the inconvenience to countless air travellers, this was relatively tame stuff compared with the Gulf of Mexico disaster. Still, it provided impressive evidence of Mother Nature's propensity for orchestrating paralyzing mischief at her capricious whim and will.

The BP Deepwater Horizon rig explosion has made the grounding of those planes quite literally yesterday's news. The latest estimates are that the flow of oil will amount to 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day.

Today's Tea Partiers don their tricorns, flip back the pages and misread American history to support their ongoing crusade for downsizing government and lowering taxes. By adopting that same revolutionary spirit, anti-drilling advocates, written off as knee-jerk upstarts and alarmist quacks, courtesy of the tireless oil company publicity machines, could recast themselves as Paul Reveres of the environment -- only with far more justification for their claim.

The shrillness of the drilling dunces succeeded in all but drowning out the strongest legitimate argument against seeking oil at the bottom of the sea: we know next to nothing about that into which we are drilling. Scientists have far more knowledge about Mars and Venus than they do about the ocean's depths, an annoying fact easily brushed aside by politicians eager for campaign petro-bucks and their constituents with voracious appetites for more and cheaper oil.

In a 2005 presentation reprinted in a publication of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists, David Eyton, then BP's vice president for Gulf of Mexico deepwater development who now heads up the company's research and technology component, expressed confidence in the firm's risk management capabilities. He felt that BP had the expertise and the technology to overcome nature's daunting obstacles to offshore drilling.

At the same time, Eyton did indeed emphasize the need for utmost caution in risk management with this telling observation: "We find ourselves designing floating systems for 10,000 feet of water depth before the lessons of working in 6,000 feet have been fully identified."

When it comes to the quest for more and less expensive energy, lessons are too often learned the hard way. It has been relatively recent, when the need for a reasonable mix of various energy sources seemed the logical path for the future, that the development of nuclear power has returned to the national conversation. The hue and cry for nuclear power plants has been on a three-decade hiatus.

But the nuclear energy cheerleaders, once as loud and witless as the drill-happy pawns of Big Oil's highly efficient propaganda machines, were effectively silenced by a nuclear reactor accident 31 years ago in Dauphin County, on the Susquehanna River near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

On March 28, 1979, there was a partial core meltdown in a pressurized water reactor at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station. Investigations determined human factors were at fault, from the flawed industrial design of the reactor control system's user interface to deficiencies in the training of the operators of the equipment.

The Three-Mile Island accident had a severe impact on the global development of nuclear power. In all but two years between 1963 and 1979, the number of reactors increased. But reactors under construction declined every year for the 18 years following the accident. Between 1980 and 1984, a total of 51 American nuclear reactors were canceled.

While the impact of the radiation released as a result of the Three Mile Island accident was heatedly disputed, the TMI plant operator and its insurers paid at least $82 million in publicly documented compensation to residents for "losing business revenue, evacuation expense and health claims." According to anti-nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman, hundreds of out-of-court settlements were reached with alleged victims of the fallout and a total of $15 million was paid to parents of children with birth defects born within close proximity to the plant.

Last week, President Obama announced at his press conference a six-month moratorium on drilling permits, all but daring Republican offshore oil advocates to turn the matter into a midterm election campaign issue. Obama further suspended exploratory drilling off the coasts of both Virginia and Sarah Palin's home state of Alaska, as well as 33 wells under way in the Gulf of Mexico.

If BP can plug the Deepwater Horizon leak and manage a miraculously thorough cleanup, American addiction to oil combined with rational concerns about our dependence on foreign oil may well shorten memories of the Gulf of Mexico environmental tragedy. With the ever willing assistance of Big Oil's propaganda apparatus, the cacaphonous fervor for offshore drilling will resound and once more trump common sense. But Mother Nature has a richly deserved reputation for having the final word and the last derisive laugh. Always.

# # #

THE QUINTESSENTIAL PRAGMATIST

by H. N. Burdett

I'll Never Forget It: Memoirs of a Political Accident from East Baltimore. Marvin Mandel with Jeremy Lott. The Maryland Public Policy Institute, 2010.

Baschert is Yiddish for a concept that literally translates as "destined" or "inevitable" and it can be positive or negative. There is no one to whom baschert is more applicable than Maryland's first and only Jewish governor, Marvin Mandel, the subject of this collection of anecdotes -- some amusing, some disarmingly wise, a few even poignant -- that will have to serve as his biography while a work of greater depth, detail and gravitas begs to be written. But when some Hopkins or University of Maryland scholar undertakes that formidable and worthwhile challenge, this slim volume in Mandel's own unequivocal words will be an invaluable source.

Mandel clearly has no qualms about describing himself as a "political accident" and actually relishes recounting how he stumbled into, rather than gloriously ascended to, progressively higher offices in a political career spanning nearly three decades.

It all began when, following his discharge from the army in the wake of World War II, Mandel began practicing law in Baltimore. He was approached by a city councilman about running for one of the then three seats on the Fifth Legislative District Democratic State Central Committee. Assured that the job was like being on a corporate board of directors "where you don't have to do anything," with classic Mandelian deadpan and a touch of Groucho Marxian syntax, he replied: "Okay, if I don't have to do anything, I'll do it."

He was subsequently elected to the committee, which basically functions to recommend to the governor individuals to fill vacancies left by elected Democratic officeholders should they occur in the district. Two years later such a vacancy occurred. But there was a problem. Mandel's two fellow committee members were beholden to rival political bosses, each of whom had his own candidate for the coveted open seat in the Maryland House of Delegates.

The decision was now Mandel's to make. But not wanting to antagonize either of the political leaders, he abstained. And he continued to abstain until an editorial in the Baltimore Sun took him to task for ill serving the Fifth District by denying it full representation in the General Assembly.

The committee called a meeting to settle the matter once and for all. Consequently, Mandel made his first ever visit to Annapolis: to take the oath of office as the newest member of the Fifth District's delegation to the lower chamber of the state legislature.
Soon afterward, Mandel's baschert kicked in again. The Speaker of the House named him to the powerful House of Delegates Ways and Means Committee, which holds hearings and evaluates each bill requiring an expenditure of state funds, then reports them favorably or unfavorably to the full House of Delegates.

In due time, Mandel joined a coup to depose the chairman of this major committee. The coup failed and Mandel's punishment was his removal from the panel. He told me later that the committee to which he was then assigned had not met in something like three years. It was then that the accidental delegate from East Baltimore set into motion his lifelong political credo of not getting angry but getting even.

Each bill introduced by the Ways and Means chairman promptly had an amendment attached, courtesy of Mandel. Amendments require a bill to be held over for 24 hours. On the next day, the chairman's bill would have another amendment to be considered. The chairman got the message and invited Mandel to rejoin his committee. Mandel humbly accepted.

When the committee chairman was elected Speaker of the House, Mandel succeeded him as chairman of Ways and Means, which, of course, could not have happened had he not resorted to his endless amendments ploy during his exile.

A succeeding house speaker was indicted by a grand jury in connection with information he had allegedly withheld regarding savings and loan companies he represented that had become the targets of an investigation. Governor J. Millard Tawes had someone in mind to serve as the new speaker. But House Judiciary Chairman Thomas Hunter Lowe called the governor's attention to a parliamentary rule mandating that a speakership vacancy be filled by the Ways and Means chairman. Mandel's baschert had shifted into overdrive.

On January 7, 1969, Mandel was the beneficiary of the crowning baschert of his political career. On that day, Ted Agnew, Maryland's hands-down most notorious political accident, resigned the governorship to assume his duties as Vice President of the United States under Richard Nixon. At that time, the Maryland Constitution had no provision for a lieutenant governor to succeed a governor who had resigned or was incapacitated. The document instead decreed that the new governor was to be elected by a joint session of the Maryland General Assembly. The legislature proceeded to do what would have been highly improbable had there been a statewide election: the lawmakers overwhelmingly elected Marvin Mandel Governor of Maryland.

To be sure, Mandel's extraordinary political journey had its share of negative baschert. There was his bizarre decision to announce by press release that he was seeking a divorce from Barbara Oberfeld Mandel, whom he had married when he was 21 years old and was the mother of their two children. The release was issued on an Independence Day weekend, perhaps suggesting Mandel's penchant for irony. Barbara proved that she, too, knew a thing or two about getting even rather than angry by refusing to move out of the governor's mansion. It was the governor who sought lodgings elsewhere. Though the new living arrangements of the state's first couple might have violated the state constitution, Maryland's attorney general had no stomach for pressing the issue.

And there was the matter of Mandel's indictment, followed by Maryland's trial of the century, his conviction and sentencing to a federal lockup in Florida -- all stemming from the "crime" of "mail fraud and racketeering," which the Supreme Court of the United States later ruled did not exist. Mandel is quietly adamant that most of the public outside of the legal community may not comprehend that there is a clear distinction between a pardon and a commutation of a sentence. President Reagan commuted Mandel's sentence; he did not pardon the former governor. "By accepting (a pardon), you are admitting you have broken the law, which I did not do," Mandel writes. "That's why Gerald Ford always insisted that by pardoning Nixon, he was passing judgment."

In sum, when Mandel adds up his lifetime score of positive baschert and subtracts the negatives, despite the torment and anguish associated with the latter, over breakfast in an Annapolis bagel emporium, the 90-year-old former governor tells me, "I've had a good life."

When the definitive biography is finally written, it will show that the kid from East Baltimore -- so shy that he delivered his bar mitzvah speech from halfway up the stairs inside of his family's Oakmont Avenue home, then immediately ran to his room rather than face the celebrants downstairs -- spearheaded the transition of a state long dominated by its rural outreaches into perhaps the most progressive political entity below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Future state historians may find themselves bewildered by how much was achieved by this quiet, confident politician's politician who emphatically was not cast from the mold of such legendary progressives as Teddy Roosevelt and Fighting Bob LaFollette. Mandel had more in common with the title character in Woody Allen's film, Zelig, who always just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Moreover, Mandel eschewed ideology and seemed to believe first and foremost in two precepts: that politics is the art of the possible, and in his own ability to see that the possible happened.

By taking salient parts from the failed draft Maryland Constitution, crafted in 1967 by some of the best minds in the state, Mandel led the effort to overhaul a creaky state government into a streamlined modern paradigm. Though he is East Baltimore to the core, he did it with his strongest support coming from the state's rural bastion of conservatism, Maryland's Eastern Shore.

Marvin Mandel will be remembered by those who served with and under him in the legislature and as governor, as well as the press that covered him, for getting things done; he was the quintessential pragmatist. In today's climate, when straying from the party line is viewed as heresy, when camaraderie, cooperation and compromise have been replaced by the politics of polarization, there are many worse things to be called.

# # #

OPEN LETTER TO AMERICAN VOTERS: REALITY CHECK AMID TURBULENCE

by H. N. Burdett

The Obama administration is catching flak from the left and the right simultaneously on pretty much any issue one can blindly yank out of the fedora, yet it just keeps putting its head down and charging forward.

From the right, the remarkably disciplined contingents of Republicans in both Houses of Congress have made the dubious strategic choice to be counted against whatever the administration wants by threatening filibusters, tacking on crippling amendments, or merely voting in lockstep opposition.

From the left, there is seething resentment that the administration time and again gives away too much in failed attempts to court bipartisanship and winds up getting nothing at all in return.

Most progressives feel they could have carved out a better deal on health insurance, forgetting, of course, that more than 20 votes by conservative Democrats -- enough to make the difference between winning and losing the bill -- were at stake.

In other words, what was widely viewed as the administration's capitulation to Republicans with no quid pro quo, was actually capitulation to right wing congressional Democrats who fretted along with their conservative brethren across the aisle about a shift to socialized medicine.

The health insurance bill recently enacted by Congress is, in fact, a shining example of the existing and increasing politics of polarization in Washington that can be expected to inevitably spill over to states and cities.

To those of us who have watched for decades with dismay and disdain the feints, the parries, the false starts and the ultimate failure after failure of health insurance to move beyond Square One, the mere existence of this law is nothing short of a minor miracle.

Certainly the bill President Obama signed is not the legislation many of us would have preferred. There are legitimate questions concerning whether it is reform at all, rather than a restructuring of the health care insurance industry, which it indeed more closely resembles. But those who contend that it would have been better had we stood pat and done nothing are plain and simply wrong.

Some 32 million Americans who did not have at least minimal health insurance must acquire it, or pay a fine, and this is certainly Change with a capital 'C'. And if it is still found unaffordable, the federal government will pick up the tab.

The courts will have to determine the constitutionality of requiring people to purchase health insurance from a private carrier and whether or not the much cited "precedent" of requiring automobile insurance constitutes a valid basis for comparison. A glaring difference is that one can opt out of the latter by simply not driving, but the alternative for opting out of health insurance is clearly unacceptable, if not horrendously extreme.

There is doubt, however, concerning how vigorously private insurance companies might want to contest the constitutionality of the law, considering how preoccupied they will be by writing all of those federal government-guaranteed new bare bone health policies.

But the bigger picture is that the United States has finally been dragged kicking and screaming into conformity with all other industrialized nations, which do indeed have health insurance for all of their citizens.

Single payer government health insurance would have been more in line with the so-called more developed world. But when the health insurance industry was invited to participate in writing the bill, the red flag went up that single payer was out of the window. The last has not been heard about single payer health insurance in the United States; it is destined to fly right back into the window, the only question being how soon.

In capitalism -- how can we phrase this delicately? -- money talks. And the United States has advanced, or at least stretched, capitalism to its optimum, some would say beyond its limits. Here money not only talks, it dominates the conversation.

Despite the credit card industry making a mockery of what was once the crime of usury, despite the despicable criminality perpetrated by the Milkens and Madoffs, despite the necessity to bail out our nation's once thriving, impossible-to-be surpassed automobile industry and the bailout one-by-one of our most revered financial institutions, American capitalism survives and there was never any real question that it would.

Once upon a time in the wild and woolly west, bandits could gallop into town on horseback and rob a bank by waving a pistol in the frightened face of a teller. During prohibition, gangsters backed up their heists of bootleg whiskey supported by tommy guns. But the take on the best days of the desperadoes of Dodge City and Capone's gang in Chicago was mere chump change compared to the hauls of their contemporary counterparts in their three-piece suits who don't need six-shooters or automatic weapons, though Ivy League MBAs are sometimes useful.

The recent Wall Street implosion, which saw financial houses and car manufacturers sink into the morass of their own poor judgment and insatiable appetite for ever more obscene accumulations of unearned wealth was not as much a failure of capitalism as it was a failure of its gatekeepers.

Legislation is now required to impose strict rules and regulations on the way once-revered financial institutions conduct their business and the provisos must be backed by serious enforcement to ensure that they toe the line.

There are those who will insist that capitalism can only work when it has no constraints whatsoever, that the market must be completely, totally unfettered for it to seek its own level.

The problem with this thinking is that it runs counter to the very genius of the Founding Fathers who saw this country as one governed by the rule of law.

The more devious capitalists comprehended the problem and proceeded to wrap themselves in the flag, hiring the best politicians, preachers, publicists and promoters that money could buy to convince the public that anything-goes capitalism is as American as apple pie. Therefore, anyone suggesting that capitalism must be reined in and abide by rules and regulations along with the rest of society can be expected to be called socialists or communists by those who have been brainwashed so thoroughly that they often enough campaign and vote against their own best interests.

Jefferson's admonition regarding the price of liberty applies as well to what is needed to save Wall Street from itself: eternal vigilance.

# # #