An unbelievable verdict

I spent nearly half a century in the newspaper business, and met -- and on a few occasions worked with -- crooks and various other sorts of criminals. But they were few. Fewer, I believe, than in most other lines of work.

That may be only participant bias but newspapers are different from other businesses in that you get rewarded, in esteem, by pointing out publicly the lapses of your competitors; or even your colleagues.

Nevertheless, the newspaper business also has a long and storied history of criminality, mostly on the business side. Herbert Bayard Swope was one of the famous American editors of the 20th century. He ended up a multimillionaire and not just by selling papers one at a time for 3 cents each.

Which is all to lead up to a long piece in the Guardian by Nick Davies reviewing the trial in England of Murdoch's minions. Only one was convicted.

I do not for one minute believe the others were not also guilty. Davies sets out the reasons, which are completely persuasive:

The hacking case against Brooks and Coulson was based on a platform of inference. How could they not have known about the beehive of offending around them, the crown asked. How could they not have known about Mulcaire’s speciality when he was one of only two outside contributors with a full-time contract and was being paid more than any reporter, at one point more even than the news editor? How could they not have known the origin of all those stories whose accuracy they had to test? How could they have been ignorant when a humble sports writer described Mulcaire, a former footballer, as “part of our special investigations team” in a story published by the News of the World when Brooks was editor? Brooks and Coulson insisted they had known nothing of Mulcaire’s criminality. They had not even heard his name until he was arrested in August 2006, they told the jury.

The rightwingers have run a campaign for over a generation -- it didn't start with Spiro Agnew but it heated up to a new level  then -- to besmirch the newspaper business and the honestly of reporters. It turns out that, by far, the most guilty are the rightwing component of the business. Go figure.

The trouble with Russia . . .

. . . is that it's full of Russians.

Further evidence comes in this story from Bloomberg News, which recounts the slide into the economic abyss under Vladimir Putin, whose 15-year reign at the top of the heap puts him within striking distance, as for as longevity goes, with those other misgoverners of Russia, Nicholas II and Joe Stalin.

Putin, however, does not have the excuse of having to deal with a devastating invasion by Germans.

The Bloomberg look centers on finances and ignores agriculture, which has been the fundamental problem for the Russian economy since forever, and certainly since Nicholas ascended his throne. It was the failure of agriculture not the rumblings of Reagan that brought down communism. The attempt by the United States to turn Russia toward capitalism by, for example, modernizing its stock market, was a complete failure. The US did make some ineffectual efforts to advise the Russians on improving their farming -- that's a sector where US advice was more likely to be worthwhile than financial markets, where no one would have been well-advised to follow the lead of the Reaganites.

It is not clear to me whether the Russians rejected the American advice on farming or just ignored it in favor of mining gold and oil.

It is obvious what first steps Russia needed to take to get its agriculture on a paying basis -- provide all-weather farm-to-market roads. This would have multiplied the efficiency of farms, which continue to lose much of their output after the harvest; would have stimulated the general economy, New Deal style; would have added to the national infrastructure assets; would have provided an outlet for the economic aspirations of the non-Russian minorities; and would not have been threatening to other nations.

In short, it would have pushed Russia in the opposite direction from the one it actually took.

Comeback

About a month ago, I was certain this bougainvillea was dead. It had dropped every leaf and was just a bundle of sticks. The only reason I didn't cut it down was that I wasn't eager to wade into all those thorns.

I was even more certain that it had died because the other bouganvilleas in the neighborhood, although they had dropped some leaves during the winter, had not dropped them all; and they were already opening new buds last month; and this plant had never dropped all its leaves in the 10 years or so since I planted it.

Maybe we cannot fool Mother Nature, but she can sure fool me.

Game over

From this morning's New York Times:

Sunni militants have gained control of a major Iraqi border post with Syria and several nearby towns, the Iraqi government said Sunday, trying to cast a positive light on what it and Western officials described as a worrisome development by saying Iraqi troops had made a “tactical decision” to withdraw from the locations.

The Iraqi prime minister’s top military spokesman, Gen. Qassim Atta, in his briefing Sunday, said that Iraqi Army troops had left the Al Qaim border post, and the towns of Rawaa and Ana, but that the units were joining the battle elsewhere.

 If estimates are correct, the ISIS forces amounted to about 2 regiments, and 3 regiments make a division.

At the first of this month, the Iraqi national army listed a strength of 14 divisions. 4 ran away the moment ISIS attacked, leaving 10 less whoever has run away in the last few days.

On paper, the Iraq army is still 10 times bigger than ISIS, and that's not counting whatever police forces that are supposed to be in the service of the state.

What happened was that the army bugged out again. The Maliki government is toast, and its only strategy is to lie and pretend as long as it can in hopes of finding some really, really stupid and evil Americans who will ride in to rescue its worthless hide.

Dozens are queuing up for the role of stupid-beyond-belief Americans, like Ryan Crocker, John Bolton, the tag team of Dick and Liz Cheney and, not least, the Republican standard bearer in 2008 (the period during which, we are now being told, our 2003 policy was "bearing fruit"), John McCain.

ISIS frightens Liz and Dick Cheney

In one of the silliest remarks to gain currency in American pop culture, Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American life. There are if you are a rightwing Republican failure.

UPDATE

 Bloomberg News has a hard-hitting interview with an Iraqi deserter.

 “Our morale collapsed and we lost the motivation to fight,” the 25-year-old Sunni Muslim said in a phone interview last week from the Kurdish-controlled part of northern Iraq, which he says he reached after hiking for hours with tears pouring down his face. “If there’s a strong Iraqi army, why didn’t it come for Mosul, and how come more areas have fallen? There is no more hope in the army.”

An outsider's view:

 “For long-term stability, you absolutely need an apolitical, professional army,” Austin Long, who teaches at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs in New York and specializes in Iraq, said by phone. “There just seems to be no prospect right now for that happening. Maliki’s response to this crisis has been to turn to the Shiites even more so than he has before.”

And the head incompetent of the incompetents in the US Army, which bugged out when it could no longer stand the heat, said:

 General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked in a June 18 Senate hearing why the Iraq army, which the U.S. spent $25 billion to train and equip, had performed so badly against ISIL. He pointed to a lack of army leaders “supported by a central government that is working on behalf of all the people.” Dempsey said the Iraqi army “has not broken down entirely on sectarian lines, but it could.”

 

Free advice and worth the cost

So President Obama is going to send Special Forces advisers to the Iraq  national army. What are they going to advise them to do, not run away?

The problem is not that the army doesn't know how to fight -- it may or it may not -- but that it has no reason to fight.

Didn't we learn anything in Vietnam? Obviously not.

UPDATE, June 22

Since America has 5,000 people in the Baghdad embassy, which is considerably over the estimated strength of the ISIS battle force that is routing the Iraq national army, it occurs to me that maybe the problem of the Iraq government is too much American advice already.

We know what happens

Book Review 327: My Life in France

MY LIFE IN FRANCE, by Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme. 352 pages. Anchor paperback, $15

Maybe I am wrong, but I do not think I would fall in love with Paris, and Julia Child’s love letter from there (assembled at the end of her long life) does not make me think I would, either. While not as charming as Elliot Paul’s “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” once Child gets rolling, and she unmasks her feelings about some people she had to deal with (especially her father), “my Life in France” does attain charm.

But it sure doesn’t make Paris sound attractive, and neither did Paul’s despite its passion and charm. The classism turns me off -- not hers, the French people’s.

The main narrative concerns how she was taught classical French bourgeoise cooking, and then both Americanized and regularized it. She calls her approach “scientific,” and in some ways it was. She also was a prodigious worker.

From this the cookbook “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” emerged as a natural entrepreneurial offshoot of the cooking school she and her friends established, although the school cannot have been much of a business proposition itself.

It is interesting, if you like cookbooks, to compare Child’s progress with that of Irma Rombauer to “The Joy of Cooking” (told by Anne Mendelson in “Stand Facing the Stove,” which despite its inexplicable title is an excellent history of  classical American bourgeoise cooking and essential to understanding both the difficulties and the achievement of Child).

But “My Life in Paris” is also the first-person love story of Paul and Julia Child. Paul does not come through as vibrantly as Julia.

It is also, and very much by the way, an insight into the politics of the ‘40s, ‘50s and early ‘60s by an aware liberal (where the conflict with her pa came in). Some of her throwaway lines are devastating, such as the fact that toward the end of their time in Indochina, the French were losing as many officers as were being commissioned out of St. Cyr and the other academies.

Child does not mention -- it would be bizarre if she had -- that by 1968 the Americans were running out of officers, too.

But everything links up, in cooking and in war.

“My Life in France” was assembled by Chlid and her nephew, using interviews supplemented by papers from her files, but it reads well, and as the book progresses, better and better, an unusual accomplishment for such an approach. Julia Child died as the final stages of composition were being completed.

Return of the Rubber-type Army

Ready to die for what?

Some things don’t change very much. Every few years, the foreign despots the United States bankrolls get in trouble, and the rightwingers assert that with just a little push, they can be propped back up. No real cost to us.

So the downfall of Maliki in Iraq is following a well-known script, which it is convenient to call the “Return of the Rubber-type Army.”

The phenomenon goes back to 1919, when President Wilson was tricked into believing that 100,000 fierce Russian fighters who could not wait to restore the tsar were ready to eliminate the Bolsheviks. All they required was money (of course!) and the stiffening of a  few soldiers from the Arsenal of Democracy.

So Wilson sent a regiment of Michiganders to Murmansk. The 100,000 tsarist patriots did not show up, and before the Americans were withdrawn they had suffered some of the highest casualty rates of any American troops ever.

The truth was that no one who had a choice was going to choose to die so that Nicholas could accumulate more pretty enamel Easter eggs.

This story has been played out again and again, at the Bay of Pigs, in South Vietnam, in China, in Iran and lately in Syria and Iraq.

But the classic statement of the rightwing fantasy of farmers dying to die for them was made by A.J. Liebling in his “Wayward Press” column in the New Yorker in April 1951.

The United States was interested in having the North Korean and Chinese Communists driven out of Korea, though not so interested that it wanted to pay the blood-price itself. That was a job for poor farmers, preferably brown ones.

The rightwingers, like soon-to-be Speaker of the House Joseph Martin, wanted to “unleash Chiang Kai-shek,” who, conveniently had an idle army holed up on Formosa, whence they had fled after being trounced by the Chicoms in 1948. What would be more desirable than to ship them to Korea, where they would fight for the democracy they had not felt like fighting for in their homeland?

The truth was, in China these men had (for the most part) thought that what they were being asked to die for was landlordism and oppression of people like themselves, and they had voted by running away. It was the closest the Kuomintang ever came to democracy.

But that was not the point made by Liebling. He was concerned about the phony claims of the size of this army. He used an old gag from the printer’s trade about rubber type, which could be stretched or squeezed to fit whatever task was at hand. In this case, he ridiculed the varying claims about the size of the Chinese army available, which ranged from 450,000 to nearly 1,000,000, with several other estimates in between.

If the United States were ever to support a democratic regime led by more or less honest patriots, there no doubt would be a reservoir of patriotic men and women ready to die with our support. But seldom has the United States ever done so. The outstanding exception was under Franklin Roosevelt, where we supported patriots, not all of them democrats by any means, but who were at least not being asked to die so that the rich could get richer.

Instead, we have almost always backed murderous kleptocrats like Mobutu and Mubarek. We can go further than that. While both Democratic and Republican administrations have put their muscle behind these criminals, those have been the only kinds of local leaders that rightwingers have supported.

If I have overlooked any counterexample, I am sure someone will easily correct me.

Now, the notional Iraq army is throwing away its weapons and going back to the farm, just like the tsar’s soldiers in 1917. If reports can be believed (and maybe they can), the still-intact formations in Baghdad are wearing mufti under their uniforms so they can desert as soon as they have the chance.

This is not Barack Obama’s doing. When Incurious George invaded in 2003, he had made no plans for a successor government. It was supposed to arise from the ashes spontaneously.

To the extent that any preparations were made at all, Incurious George wanted the Iraqis to be led by Chalabi, a Sunni grifter with no political base who had not lived in Iraq for a generation. Small wonder that the majority Shia distrusted American bona fides and when they got their man, Maliki, inserted into the money pipeline from Washington, they made a point of showing their independence of American colonialism by running an old-style Arab despotism.

Something very similar is going on in Afghanistan, and it is hardly likely that the notional national army of that fake state will last much longer.

American rightwingers, most prominently John McCain, who has been closely involved in three wars, all of them lost, want to repeat the Rubber-type Army approach. There not only is no chance it will work from here on out, there was never any chance it could have worked, given the corruption and stupidity of the Bush policy.