The Somerset Institute of Politics and International Studies

Bagging the Tea Party; The End is Near

2010-09-17T14:46:00.000-04:00

In the last few years, a new phenomenon has risen on the political landscape. Almost immediately, it became known as the “Tea Party Movement,” a reference to the well-known incident in Boston in 1773. American colonists, revolting against the imposition of British taxes, dumped an entire shipment of tea into the harbor. Since then, the name has been attached to any number of non-violent protests against what participants view as oppressive actions by the government.

In this case, the movement became populated by, at first, disaffected Republicans and libertarians who grew frustrated with the refusal of those they elected to hold firm to conservative principles. For a long time, these people were considered fringe elements by liberal Democrats and mainline Republicans as well. However within the last year, especially, the movement has grown in strength, numbers, and power resulting in what may be the most fundamental grass-roots political revolution in recent American history.

Ironically, the attempts by both parties to minimize the Tea Party have only served to strengthen and widen the movement’s popularity. If the results of the primary elections are any indication, the 2010 midterms look to be the first wave of political change that may sweep through the 2012 presidential election.

The left have disparaged the Tea Partiers, referring to them with the obscene double-entendre “Tea Baggers.” Described as Red Necks, ignorant and naïve, uneducated, racist and sexist, liberals have used just about every derogatory term in their vast inventory. Even the mainstream Republican Party has noticeably kept them at an arm’s length. But recently, a clearer picture of the Tea Party has begun to emerge. In listening to their rallies, reading their statements, and observing their membership, I have come up with what I think are the characteristics that define the movement and its membership.

1. Socially conservative. They are uniformly against abortion, some on religious grounds, others citing the unknown potential of any human being regardless of the circumstances of birth. For most, their religion, usually Christianity is a major part, if not the driving force in their lives. While they understand that there are people who need financial help, they believe that a responsible approach to life, making moral and ethical choices along the way, is preferable to being trained to be dependent on government handouts.

2. Politically conservative. They believe in small, limited government, responsible management of the budget, low taxes, a strong military, property rights, and marriage as a union between one man and one woman. Their approach to business is firmly laissez-faire, and feel that the natural forces of the marketplace are the best rules for business. They understand that success of any kind means hard work, long hours, and an expectation that failure will occur on the way. But failure is not an end in and of itself, but a platform for learning from mistakes.

3. They understand that the Democrat version of compromise consists of the phrase, “My way, or my way.” That past attempts to reach compromise has resulted in Republicans giving up far more than they receive. As a result, their candidates campaign with one overriding mandate: Stand Your Ground.

4. They also understand that what they term “The Main Stream Media” is uniformly hostile to conservatives and their views. They feel that the principles of their party have been twisted and de-contextualized into something resembling autocratism by reporters, anchors, and editors. They view the members of that elite as promoting liberalism instead of merely reporting it, failing to critically examine the actions of the left to the extent of minimally or even completely failing to report scandals of liberal Democrats while obsessing over even the most minor of misdeeds by Conservatives. The explosion in the popularity of Fox News is symptomatic of that belief.

Hounded by circumstance into a unique situation, rejecting liberalism/socialism, and their concerns actively dismissed by their own party, they have spontaneously organized, first at the local levels, and now into a national force to be reckoned with.

The recognition of the new reality has been slow in coming. Democrats, staring at the results of the fiscal policies of the President, the Speaker of the House, and the Senate Majority leader, are fleeing from those policies. Many candidates have turned down the offer of the Administration to have President Obama speak at their rallies. Republicans, finally realizing that the Tea Party is now firmly entrenched, is now beginning to reach out, hoping to avoid a civil war at the polls in November.

In a very real way, the appearance of the Tea Party mirrors the ideological shift within the Democrat party. Liberals took control of their party away from the Clintonian centrists and moved it decisively to the left. This shift took them away from the center and into the arms of those who 40 years earlier had been known as campus radicals. This tactic motivated voters, giving them the victory in 2006 that gave them control of both the House and the Senate, and the big prize, the White House in 2008, electing the first President of African-American heritage.

This model of success showed that in order for Conservatives to regain power, they, too had to move decisively away from the center and towards their conservative roots. In a sense, American politics is now dominated by two Parties of McCarthy; Eugene and Joe.

But the actions of both parties in their lunge to the left and to the right have opened up a cultural chasm in the middle, one that seems to widen on a daily basis. People, instead of debating intellectually, are now screaming at each other, completely consumed by their emotions. What was once the arena of ideas is now a pit of passion. Irrationality rules the day.

What will become of these developments? No one can say for sure. It could be that the political divide will reach a point of critical division, causing people on both sides to stop the rifting. Or, if no such rapprochement occurs, it may be that today marks the beginning of our eventual dissolution as a nation.

What the British failed to do; what the Germans, Japanese, and Soviets could not accomplish, the destruction of the United States will occur not at the tip of an enemy’s sword, but at our own hands.

Politics and the Palin Moment

2009-11-17T14:21:00.005-05:00

After spending several months off the political radar, former Alaska Governor and Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, has boomed to the forefront of American attention. Predictably, the response from the left and that portion of the media enamored thereof has been brutal. Throughout the ’08 campaign, and in the time afterwards, politicians, pundits, and political gadflies broke new ground in the viciousness of their attacks. However, with the release of Palin’s biographical tome “Going Rogue,” the attacks on her have reached a fever pitch, surpassing even the right’s attempted blowtorching of Hilary Clinton.

One wonders why she is so hated by the left. She is a successful woman, a wife, a mom, a governor who relished a 72% approval rating. She ran a successful administration, defeating the aims of old-line Republicans, and generated a BILLION-dollar surplus. It wasn’t until a mountain of ethics charges, relentlessly spewed by Democrat operatives (all of which were proven false) took up so much time that it made it impossible for her to do her job. Her resignation prompted charges of being a quitter. But it’s interesting to note that as soon as she resigned, the ethics charges ceased. This incident was not so much an indictment of Palin’s commitment as it was an example of the Gestapo-like glee of the Democrat attack machine.

Palin’s book tour, easily inferred to be a PR tactic to position herself as the GOP front-runner, has thus far revealed the fighter within, now freed from the jealous restrictions of the McCain leash-holders. Make no mistake. She has identified her enemies and she is on the attack.

To understand the impact of Sarah Palin on U.S. politics, one needs to review a bit of recent history.

The Democrats, stung by consistent losses, made a crucial strategic decision. For the mid-term campaign of 2006 and the White House run in 2008, the party swung hard left. The party, led by its powerful liberal-socialist cabal, returned to its leftist roots. Although they paid lip-service to the promises of centrism, their actions revealed the truth. In so doing, they opened the gap between them and the Republicans, presenting voters clear and uncompromising differences in the respective policies. Voters hate ambiguity. When the two parties were courting the center, there seemed to be a lot of confusion about who stood for what. The Democrat’s lunge to the left won for them control of the Congress and the White House.

Of course, they were aided by a succession of unconscionably stupid actions by Republicans. Elected to be fiscally responsible, they spent like drunken sailors. Rather than standing their conservative ground, they allowed themselves to be seduced by the siren song of compromise and bi-partisanship, only to later discover they had been lured into an indefensible position and pounced upon with all the pitiless fury of King Leonides and his Spartans.

Since then, the Democrats and their journalistic lapdogs have expended a lot of electrons and ink telling the Republicans that in order to save their party, they need to move to the center (i.e., the left). Some GOP members have complied, and with the ideological differences thus blurred once again, and with the Democrats controlling the discourse, Republicans lost votes because the conservative base of the party refused to go with them.

The Democrats know that if the Republicans move back to their ideological roots, conservatism, it will spell big trouble for them. Recent polls have shown that as much as 60% of Americans identify themselves as conservatives. The planks of low taxation, small government, ethics, strong defense, and fiscal responsibility still resonate with most Americans. And a candidate who can successfully articulate those powerful themes will gather those lost votes like a Dyson pulling dirt out of a carpet. Sarah Palin is that kind of candidate.

Her impact on the 2008 race was immediate and dramatic. So much so, that the McCain people, embarrassed by the response she was getting, compared to the tepid crowds that gathered for the Old Man, tried to jealously minimize her presence and influence, dictating to her constantly. Seemingly embarrassed by her clothes, they even allocated a rather significant sum of money to update her wardrobe, money she never took or spent.

Let’s be fair; the Democrats would like nothing more than the complete collapse of the Republican party (and for Limbaugh to have an aneurism, but that’s another subject). In the left’s relentless assault on this bespectacled moose-hunting soccer mom, there arises in my mind a pertinent question. If Palin is such a loser, as they say, if her candidacy would guarantee a Democrat victory…

Why aren’t they promoting her?

The answer is simple. The Democrats have no interest in promoting the interests of the right. Hence, their constant bleating only proves how dangerous they perceive her to be. Sarah Palin is not a bad candidate. In fact, she terrifies the left and their media, which is a big reason why Republicans should seriously consider the Governor to be the GOP candidate for 2012. A Palin campaign would swing the Republican Party decisively back to the right, to the familiar trappings of conservatism, where historically they’ve enjoyed the most success.

There are other fundamental shifts that need to occur. The Democrats and the press are no friends of conservatism; never have been, never will be. Bi-partisanship is a feckless pipe dream. The Democrat leaders who preached it incessantly during the Bush administration, have demonstrated their true colors by their systematic marginalization of congressional conservatives. Republicans need to shake off that particular fantasy and conduct an aggressive, hard-nosed campaign. The emergence of the Internet and alternative media, such as Fox News, does not now require a party to be slavishly devoted to appeasing the press corps. The major print organs and networks have embarrassed themselves, having been caught skewing the news, even speaking outright lies. They lack the authority they once had; the public no longer trusts them, as reflected by their steadily declining ratings and dwindling subscriber lists.

The Democrats limp into the 2010 mid-terms with a host of saddle sores. Among the most painful...

Their irresponsible flinging of our national wealth into the wind has crippled the economy and hurt the dollar so badly that even some drug traffickers now prefer to deal in Euros.

Messrs. Frank and Dodd assured us that there was nothing wrong with the leadership at Fannie and Freddie, only to see the worst housing cataclysm in history.

Their insistent imposition of a health care bill that few in D.C. have read, and nobody anywhere else wants, threatens to do irreparable damage to our ability to deliver quality health care.

We have a president that apologizes to the world, who bows to foreign leaders, who is so cluelessly narcissistic that he returned a bust of Churchill to the English and gave to the Queen an iPod of his speeches.

Unemployment has topped 10% and may eventually creep to Depression-era levels.

A growing number of American voters are becoming disillusioned, reflected by Obama’s dwindling approval numbers, and the party he leads has dug themselves a political hole that gets deeper by the hour.

Clearly, there is an opportunity here for the Republicans. However, it remains to be seen if they will be smart enough or tough enough to seize the moment, find their footing, and anchor themselves to the solid foundation of conservatism.

This moment in time, this “Palin Moment,” forms a crucial fork in the road. For the sake of their own survival, the GOP had better choose wisely.

The Death of America

2009-09-23T16:25:00.006-04:00

The sun sets on the American flag.
Photo by R. Couey

On September 11th, 2009, I was privileged to attend the annual commemoration ceremony at the temporary Flight 93 Memorial near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The distinguished speakers, including the keynoter, Colin Powell, were superb. The speeches were eloquent, extolling the courage and unity of the passengers and crew as they fought back against the hijackers.

The anniversary of the terror attacks on America is a meaningful day for me. Every September 11th, I mourn those who were lost. I pray for their families and friends.

And I renew my own very personal promise: I will never forget.

As I sat through the ceremony, however, I found that I was mourning something else, something unexpected.

Before 9/11, Americans had been embroiled in a series of political arguments. The level of vitriol from the networks to the back fence had risen to, what I felt, was a dangerous level. But on that day, as the shock gave way to horrible clarity, all that anger, all that hate, all that vitriol ended. For a few brief, priceless days, Americans stood together; shoulder to shoulder, arm in arm. We spoke with one voice.

We felt with one heart.

There were no Republicans, no Democrats, and no hyphens. We were all Americans.

That evening, members of congress gathered on the capitol steps in a show of unity. As they ended their joint statement, they spontaneously broke out in a chorus of “God Bless America.” At home in front of the television, I wept unashamedly.

It was a special moment in time. Unity reigned supreme. People who had been arguing violently, clasped hands and even embraced. Even among the most cynical, patriotism became fashionable, and across America, flags blossomed like flowers in springtime.

All too soon, however, the politically powerful began to use the attacks for ideological purposes. Within days, it seemed, the bright sunshine of a united nation dimmed once again. Now, a fearful darkness covers the land. The political differences which were once lines in the sand have become impossibly deep chasms. The political divide in this country is deeper than at any time since the Civil War.

Politics, once a contest of the intellect, has become solely an arena of emotion. Facts are meaningless; insults fly freely. People on both sides are paid millions to incite controversy. Anger has become a profitable business. And we the public slavishly flock to the sound of their voices

The United States of America was born of revolution and nurtured on debate. In fact the debate was necessary, as this experiment in democracy and liberty grew and matured. The principals upon which it was founded have been tested in war both outside our borders, and for five bloody, destructive years, within our own family.

But even in the worst times, there still remained that undercurrent of unity; that despite all else, we all still remained Americans.

Our differences now no longer just divide us. We are a people irretrievably polarized. We no longer listen; we simply scream at each other. Every night, we flock to the television and watch as politicians and pundits thunder away, red-faced and fanatical. Reinforced by the ravings of the Chris Matthews’, Keith Olbermans, Sean Hannitys, and Rush Limbaughs of our world, we carry their rantings into the streets, while, coldly calculating, they sit safe behind bunkers sandbagged with their millions, watching us do their bidding.

I have come to a terrible conclusion.

America is dying.

In the coming decades, this country will begin to fracture, and eventually cease to exist, replaced by a nation of Beiruts, where all live separately; warily; huddled behind walls of fear and hate

Whose fault is it? Everyone shares ample blame and responsibility, the government, and those of us who put them there. We The People made this choice. This is the path we chose to walk, a path paved by the cold stones of arrogance. We’ve sowed a field with seeds of hate. Now, we reap this bitterest of harvests.

235 years ago, Americans declared to the world that we were a nation. From a ragtag collection of colonies, we grew to the pinnacle of power and the heights of international benevolence. When human beings sought freedom from oppression, a place where their dreams could be realized, their destination of choice was the United States of America.

But our time in history is coming to a close. The page is being turned; this chapter is ending.

Gloriously united, we have stood.

Thoroughly divided, we now fall.

Boycott Illegal Drugs!!!

2009-08-14T16:27:00.001-04:00

Over the years, people attempting to change conditions they deem to be destructive have resorted to the practice known as the boycott. The term arises from the actions taken against a landowner named Boycott who ruthlessly evicted Irish landowners from their property.

The boycott is a selective act of refusing to use a product or service as a way of altering the public policy of the organization providing that product or service. The most historically successful and well known action was the boycott of the Birmingham, Alabama bus system following an incident in which a black woman, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat to a white man. The incident became the focal point for civil rights activists, including Dr. Martin Luther King, in their quest to secure equal rights for minorities. The action was successful. After nearly a year of nearly-empty busses, the bus company capitulated and removed its racially-motivated seating policies.

Other examples of successful boycotts include:
• companies that did business with South Africa during the days of apartheid
• retailers like Wal-Mart and Target for allegedly selling products manufactured in sweat shops
• tuna producers for failing to act to protect dolphins from getting entangled in their seining nets
• agricultural interests to stop the exploitation of immigrant labor in the United States.

All those actions and many, many others as well, were geared towards ending the misery of specific groups of humans and animals. Most were successful in their aims, since negative publicity can be a crippling influence for even the largest corporations.

Yet, there exists today, and for much of the last four decades, an ongoing source of human misery which has been largely ignored by boycotters.

In the last two years alone, some 10,000 people were murdered along the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexican border. The drug traffickers responsible for these deaths routinely smuggle immigrants across the southwest border into the United States, often using them to carry illicit drugs with them. Weekly, officers of the U.S. Border Patrol find the bodies of these exploited people in the desert after they were assaulted and left for dead, usually the victims of their transporters, called “coyotes.”

In the poor countries of the Caribbean, people in the poverty classes are exploited by traffickers, who contemptuously refer to them as “mules,” forcing them to ingest capsules containing drugs, then putting them on airline flights for the U.S. Once they arrive, they are met and taken to secure locations where the drugs are passed into the hands of the traffickers. Sometimes, the capsules rupture in the bellies of these couriers, resulting in an excruciatingly painful death.

In Colombia, where the bulk of the cocaine used in the United States is produced, peasants, desperate for work of any kind, work in jungle labs. They are, among other activities, forced to march barefoot through vats filled with coca leaves and acid, the first step in the production process for cocaine.

On the retail end, street gangs use violence to enforce their control of territories where they sell cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, and a host of diverted pharmaceutical drugs to willing customers enslaved by addiction, possibly the only time in history that humans have actually volunteered for slavery. Families are destroyed, communities are ravaged, an entire segment of American culture devastated by the effects of drugs and the trafficking of them. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, 570,000 people die each year from the effects of illicit drugs.

Yet, with all this human misery going on, nobody seems to care enough to do anything substantive to stop its source. All the proposed solutions seem to be geared towards the path of least resistance. One segment proposes increased funds for addiction treatment. What I’m told by professionals in that field, however, is that unless the user WANTS to quit, no amount of detox or treatment will cure the addiction. Relapse almost certainly follows.

Another opinion segment proposes legalization or decriminalization, and then taxing the substances, thereby killing the market and raising revenues for the government. There are several problems with this approach.

Alcohol, another addictive substance, was rendered legal with the repeal of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution. This was done largely in response to the explosion of gang violence in cities like Chicago when organized crime took over production and distribution of alcohol products. While legalization halted the gang violence, people have continued to die every year from the influence of alcohol. About half of all traffic deaths in the United States have been attributed to alcohol, some 15,000 to 25,000 each year since 1945. Some researchers estimate that as much as 75 percent of spouse and child abuse cases involve alcohol. Of non drug-related murders, alcohol was either the prime or contributing factor in 50 to 60 percent of cases.

The tax angle would prove to be moot, since there currently exists in this country a billion-dollar per year business smuggling both alcohol and cigarettes in order to evade taxation. The end of Prohibition did not solve violence. It merely replaced one form of violent death with several others. And this time, the victims were not gangsters, but innocents.

There are a host of reasons why people turn to drug abuse. You can boil them all down to three types of people: those who use drugs to avoid dealing with life, those who are seeking acceptance from groups perceived as “cool,” and those whose lives are so empty that they turn to drugs to try to gain some measure of personal fulfillment.

I could go on for several paragraphs on why life doesn’t fix itself, that each person has to develop the courage to face their particular problems with an eye towards fixing them, rather than giving in. I could also preach about the adventure of life and how with a little searching and hard work, anyone can find a path upon which they’ll find all the fulfillment they would want. I could also try to convince young kids that those people they think are so cool, are only exhibiting their own insecurities, weaknesses and lack of discipline, as well as self-inflicting their own personal doom. I could go on about all the above, but it would in the end prove to be a useless exercise. We all think we’re the most brilliant people on earth; so we cease to listen to anyone else.

Drug abuse is one of the ultimate acts of selfishness. When a person is seeking their chemically-induced high, they don’t care about anybody else’s misery. Not the people tortured and beheaded in Mexico, not the peasants in Colombia, not the incredible suffering in West Africa, made worse by the flow of drugs through that region, not the violent streets in this country. Users don’t care about how many died to deliver their drugs to them.

The only realistic way to end this cycle is to call attention to the human misery caused by this industry by boycotting marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine.

Why not?

Boycotting Wal-Mart and Target over sweat shops was cool. Boycotting non-dolphin-safe tuna felt good. Boycotting companies that benefitted from the fur trade and animal testing was so Hollywood. Boycotting South African gold was a high form of social consciousness. Boycotting all the companies doing business in Burma over human rights abuses was so right. You forced giant Mitsubishi to stop buying paper products made from rain forests. And how about all those companies that stopped using CFCs in their packaging materials? And the Burger King that was chased out of the West Bank? If you supported and/or took part in these actions, then you’re a hypocrite if you don’t think boycotting illegal drugs is a good idea as well.

Reducing demand would severely cut into the profits of these criminal enterprises, not only those south of the border, but those distributors and retailers working our streets. Turning our population away from these substances would reduce the impacts felt throughout our healthcare and social service systems. Many people, now mired in poverty, would find themselves eligible for good jobs, jobs that now require the applicant to pass a drug screen.

Most of all, turning away from drugs means turning towards hope. Barack Obama was swept into office on the cry of hope for all. But no one can embrace hope by continuing to embrace drugs. If you were serious about Obama, if you are serious about hope, if you really care about the future, then help take the power away from gangs and cartels.

Boycott the poisons they sell.

Rising From the Ashes

2008-11-07T11:50:00.004-05:00

“Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan.”
--Thomas Campbell, The Battle of the Baltic; as quoted by President Kennedy

In every war, after every hard-fought battle there is that period of mourning, blame, and recrimination, or as the Japanese so eloquently put it, “biting one’s navel.” In contemporary terms, we call it “the morning after.” For American conservatives, the early hours of November 5th found them, for the first time in 16 years, in a position to be virtually shut out of the political process. So flushed with victory was Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, that she was already promising to begin implementing the President-Elect’s policies as soon as congress returned in mid-November, two full months before his inauguration.

On the Republican side, the public recriminations were already starting. Sarah Palin became the target of John McCain’s handlers, blaming her for the defeat. For the Alaska Governor, it had been an uphill fight from day one. The systematic trashing of her and her family undertaken by the media and the blogosphere was both brutal and utterly unprecedented. Some may roll their eyes at that statement, but let’s face facts. If Geraldine Ferraro, the Democrat candidate for Vice President in 1984, had been subjected to this level of scorn and ridicule at the hands of the Fourth Estate, feminists would have had the heads of every guilty political pundit impaled on the point of a spear and paraded down 5th Avenue.

The fact is, this defeat was in the cards from the beginning. At the start of the primaries, the Republicans had three leading candidates. Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, and John McCain. Among the base, McCain was the least favorite. He was older than the other two, and had a history of giving in to Democrats. Romney and Thompson were candidates with solid conservative chops. Democrats and the media fawned over McCain, even suggesting that he run as a Democrat. That should have been a huge red flag right there. The media coverage was massively one-sided, as outlets such as the Washington Post are now sheepishly admitting. The interrogation of McCain and Palin was brutal and intended more towards tripping up the candidates rather than the elicitation of information that might actually have been useful by voters. In contrast, Obama was never asked the tough questions. So soft-handed was the media's treatment that in the days following the election, after a campaign that lasted the better part of two years, Tom Brokaw and Charlie Rose mused that they really did not know Obama's position on key foreign policy issues.

As the primaries got underway, stories from the front lines began to seep into the reportage. Throughout those early states, County Clerks and Voter Registrars were commenting how surprised they were at the large number of Democrats who were crossing over and voting Republican. It now appears that those voters may have manipulated the primary process, giving a boost to a candidate they felt could be defeated in November. In the context of modern political processes, primaries are no longer stand-alone events. The perception of momentum early defines the results of the later votes. By the time the primary season was half over, it was clear that McCain would be the eventual nominee.

John McCain, politics aside, is a hero in every sense of the word. He courageously served the United States in an unpopular war, and survived a brutal imprisonment at the hands of the North Vietnamese, whose attempts to use him for propaganda purposes failed. Upon his return to the U.S., he embarked on a political career that would eventually lead him to the U.S. Senate where he has served with distinction. He has made his reputation as a maverick, working against the Republican Party on more than one occasion. He is admirable in so many ways, but while he is a Republican, he is not a conservative. Because of that, his choice of a running mate, many felt, would have to pull the ticket back to the right, to keep the loyalty of the base.

Sarah Palin is a breath of fresh air. She is strong, outspoken, and utterly without fear. The principles that guide her are the same ones that defined the path of Reagan conservatism. Most of all, she was someone the base could relate to; a woman successful in politics, yet still committed to her family. She was married to a man’s man, a real Alaskan sourdough, who nevertheless, was so secure with himself that he never felt his masculinity was at risk with his woman in the spotlight. While a neophyte on the national stage, Sarah Palin still brought to the ticket a solid record of executive government experience, both as a mayor of a small town (and thus wired into the values and concerns of small town America) and the Governor of a state that stands on the physical frontiers, surrounded by foreign countries, and the driver of a state economy that regularly reports budget surpluses in the billions of dollars. She successfully balanced a fierce defense of the wilderness with the nation’s need for oil, and made sure that the proceeds of that oil found its way into the pockets of Alaskans. Yes, the state government actually pays people to live in Alaska.

The effect that Sarah Palin had on crowds could only be described as electric. Wherever she went, thousands gathered and cheered with a lusty enthusiasm that had been notably absent from the McCain events. I suppose it was inevitable that envy would have reared its divisive head among the members of McCain’s staff. After all, the running mate should never shine brighter than lead candidate.

And yet despite her obvious strengths, she was rejected by the media and the feminists. The media swarmed her home town of Wasila, Alaska and turned the place upside down looking for that smoking gun they could use to destroy her. The so-called "Trooper-gate" turned out to be nothing at all, as she was cleared of any wrongdoing on the day before the election, an event that was completely ignored by the media.

While the treatment by a biased media establishment might be understood, even expected, the abandonment of the National Organization for Women was both hypocritical and despicable. NOW is supposedly driven by the desire for women to have equal access to opportunities in business, culture, and government. Yet, conservative women who likewise pursue those same goals, are thrown to the wolves. Based on the resumes of women honored by the left, it seems that a woman needs to have grown up with an abusive father, survived an abusive marriage, had an abortion, and raised multiple children on welfare; a victim’s persona. But that is the mantra of the left. They cannot tolerate success in a person, unless their history matches the accepted curricula vitae. In the eyes of NOW, despite her successes, she didn’t possess the “qualifications” demanded by the feminists:

She had never been a victim.

Despite her impressive resume, she was criticized as someone without the necessary experience to be a national leader. And yet, those criticisms could have (and should have) been factually applied to both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

On this, the allegorical morning after, pundits on the left are hailing the end of an era; the death of Reagan conservatism.

Actually, no.

What the campaign of 2008 has taught Republicans is this:

Moderates can’t win.

John McCain ran as a Republican moderate, and had his head handed to him. Barack Obama, on the other hand, can only be truthfully identified as the most leftist candidate for president since Eugene V. Debs, and won a stunning victory. He was, of course, helped by the media allowing his party to escape responsibility for their complicit involvement in the economy’s collapse, ignoring the fact that the beginning of this downturn can be dated almost to the day in 2007 that the Democrats took over the majority in both houses of congress.

For conservatives, a fork in the road has been reached. Over the last eight years, we have been urged by our party leadership to move to the center; to be the party of compromise and accommodation; to shy away from the principles of conservatism that made Ronald Reagan a true uniter. Now, in the grey light of dawn, amid the still-smoking rubble of a blown campaign, that strategy stands revealed for what it was, the path to defeat.

This loss does not spell the death of conservatism. If anything, it stands as the point of rebirth. For the Republican Party to regain primacy, the grass roots members have to drag the party leadership, kicking and screaming if necessary, back to the right. Our approach might be guided thus:

1. The media has not been, is not now, nor will ever be our friends. We must end the attempts to placate those who, while hiding under the veil of the so-called “4th Estate,” have systematically twisted, or outright ignored our attempts to put our unfiltered message in front of the people. WE must take the responsibility to spread the word in the arena where it really counts; across the back fence, in the break room, and on the factory floor.

In every war is one battle that determines the outcome of that war. In this ideological conflagration, the upcoming fight over the Fairness Doctrine will be our Gettysburg; our Waterloo; our Guadalcanal. The leading candidate for the FCC Commissioner post essentially guarantees the imposition of the Fairness Doctrine.
On that field, the conservative movement will either live or die. Conservative talk radio has been our national voice, in the face of active suppression by the media, a tactic to which they now freely admit. If we lose, and that voice is taken from us, then we will have to carry the message, using the tools available to us; the Internet, phone, fax, and word-of-mouth.

2. The Democrats have been successful at spreading lies. We can fight those lies with the truth, but each one of us must learn those facts and the evidence supporting them and be ready to cite them at the drop of a hat. Those facts must be delivered in a calm and deliberate way, refusing to be drawn into the liberal trap of emotionalism. By the same token, when we hear of something outrageous that we might be inclined to believe, instead of running down the street, screaming at the top of our collective lungs, we must calmly and deliberately ascertain the facts, lest we end up embarrassed by a deliberately-planted piece of disinformation or an isolated act by one of the unhinged among us. We will depend on resources like Newsbusters.org to provide us with solid facts we can use, but we must also undertake our own research. In turn we must always be ready to utilize the most devastating counter-stroke in political debate: “Cite your evidence;” demanding clear proof of every position liberals take, and being ready to expose such “proof” with the actual truth.

3. No longer must our legislators engage in the losing tactic of “reaching across the aisle.” History has shown that we lose every time. Republicans surrender key initiatives, while the Democrats give up nothing of value. In recent history, the biggest difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats have always acted as if they were in power, even when they did not possess that power. Republicans must now stand like the veritable stone wall and refuse to surrender. As the Democrats have kept conservative judges from an up-or-down vote, so must our representatives now stand in the way of liberal nominees. Let the media call us obstructionist; in fact, wear that badge proudly. Wars are won not by soldiers who flee the field, but by those who stand their ground.

4. We must clear our legislatures of the RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) in the primaries and replace them with those who will hold the conservative line. Some of us, who are qualified and who possess the moral courage necessary, will need to step up and run, and the rest of us must support them. All of us need to step out of our collective comfort zones, if we have any hope of regaining control.

5. But most importantly, we, the grass roots members, must deliver a clear and uncompromising message to the leadership of the Republican Party, a message that defines both our independence and our unity; one that stands representative of the only path we can ever walk; a promise to ourselves and our future:

No. More. Moderates.

We have lost a big battle. But the war goes on. Let us take the field in strength and courage, and we can never be defeated. As Ferdinand Foch said, “Victory is a thing of the will.”

The Oil Emergency: Hard Times, Hard Choices

2008-05-27T16:41:00.002-04:00

Over the years, I’ve come to understand a fundamental truth. People’s political attitudes are formed in the events and experiences that make up the chronology of their lives. These days, the foundations of those attitudes are, more often than not, based on deeply held emotions rather than critically evaluated information. Thus, there is no longer a widely held consensus of right and wrong. Everything is filtered through the prism of each individual's personal experiences. What seems incontrovertible truth to one is complete nonsense to another. This reality is a big part of the reason why politics is a subject considered verboten in polite conversation.

Our political attitudes have become tightly interwoven with our sense of self-identity and esteem. Consequently, when someone disagrees with us, we feel defensive, which then triggers emotional responses. And when emotion, by its nature an irrational state, enters into a debate, all hope of a calm, rational discussion is lost. My high school debate teacher once said, “You can debate conclusions; you can debate positions; you can debate policy. But you cannot debate emotion. Emotion listens only to its own version of truth, and refuses to entertain anything else.”

For that reason, I’ve mostly avoided hot-button issues in my columns, knowing that no matter what the indisputable facts are, they will make no headway with those who are emotionally wedded to opposing views. But the debate on energy in general and gasoline in particular has become so fraught with irrationality, I decided, at no small risk, to wade in.

The world has changed drastically and rapidly over the last two decades, of that there can be no debate. From the geopolitical bipolar stability of the Cold War, we have morphed into an age where for the first time in human history, conflict does not require a state sponsor. Zealots distort religion in order to justify hate, murder, and the acquisition of power. The economy is becoming globalized; Europe has, at least on the surface, begun to discard centuries of conflict in favor of continental unity. Those and many other changes have rippled across the lives of everyone in this country, indeed, the world.

India and China have become the two largest economies on the planet. As a result, their consumption of energy has drastically increased. The glut of oil on world markets that helped depress prices in the 90’s exists no longer. This is a fundamental change which has introduced the law of scarcity into the oil market. The laws of supply and demand are immutable and unchangeable, so with the supply pinched, the price goes up. At present, the only immediate mitigating factor available to consumers is to cut back on demand, a difficult thing to do when driving is critical to our ability to earn a living. Small business is the largest single element of the U.S. economy and the ability of those small businesses to use their vehicles is crucial to their success, and even their survival. For the rest of us, our vehicles represent a fundamental freedom to go where we want, when we want without fear of consequence. Given our history and traditions, that's the hardest thing to surrender.

The response of government to this current crisis has been exasperatingly political and largely useless. The effort to switch to alternative fuels, mainly E85 ethanol, has seen the price of corn, as well as other grains, skyrocket. Hunger, some starvation, and violent food riots have erupted in the developing world.

Hydrogen fuel cells are a good answer, but critics moan that technology required upon which to base our economy is 50 years in the future. Personally, I doubt that time frame, since it’s spouted by those who oppose hydrogen. Besides, I never put anything beyond the reach of a truly motivated scientist. But that journey is just like any other. If you’re not actually traveling towards the destination, the distance never changes. If we don’t expend a major effort on hydrogen now, that goal will forever remain out of reach.

In the shorter term, we will have to face some unpleasant facts. When you tally up untapped reserves under the outer continental shelf, under North Dakota, Montana, and Colorado, and yes, under the one-tenth of one percent of the two million acres that make up the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, the U.S. has more oil reserves then the entire Middle East. Enviromental policy, driven mostly by the political stranglehold the radical environmentalists have over Democrats, has restricted our ability to drill for that oil. But, because that oil belongs to us, we would no longer be chained to the arrogant pricing policies of OPEC.

We also lack refining capacity. We haven’t built a new refinery in at least 30 years and those we do have are running at 95% to 98% capacity. One of the scarier scenarios is what could happen if Hizb’allah, HAMAS, or al-Qa’ida glommed onto that little fact and decided to drive truck bombs into a few of those refineries. If they could do enough damage to take three facilities off-line for three to six months, the resulting squeeze could cripple our economy, damage that might take a decade to repair.

Now, the Democrats in congress say they will sue Saudi Arabia for, in their words, “conspiring to limit the production of oil.” As the prescient talker Quinn pointed out, isn’t that precisely what the Democrats have done themselves?

It’s easy to point political fingers in these situations, and in this situation, most of those fingers are directed to the right. But, let’s look at some numbers.

In the first 6 years of the Bush administration, with the Republicans holding a nominal majority in congress, the average price of gas, according to the Department of Energy, rose from $1.51 per gallon to $2.21 per gallon. That’s an increase of 70 cents over 72 months, or less than one penny per gallon per month of increase. In 2006, Democrats campaigned for control of congress, promising among other things, to reduce the price of gasoline at the pumps. We took them at their word, giving them control. On their first day in office, January 21, 2007, the average price of gas was $2.21 per gallon. As of the day I write this, that price is $3.90 per gallon. That’s an increase of $1.69 per gallon over a period of 16 months, or an increase of more than 10 cents per gallon per month. And that’s after their solemn campaign promise to reduce those prices.

The Republicans have taken the lion’s share of the blame, but based on these numbers, which party has been better at controlling gas prices? The Democrats, at more than ten cents per month, or the Republicans at less than one penny per month?

There's another, far more sinister possibility. Politicians make their careers on problems. As long as one exists, then the politicians relevance is maintained. I wonder sometimes if anyone in Washington, both parties, are more interested in perpetuating problems, rather than crafting solutions. After all, if they solve these problems, wouldn't they then become irrelevant? What if there are people who are bent on inflicting critical damage to the economy for the sole purpose of winning an election?

I know I’m going to get a lot of flack for this. But, these are hard numbers, and hard facts. And these are hard times. If we’re going to survive, we have to make the hard choices. Now.

Public Schools: Drastic Action for Critical Times

2008-01-02T19:45:00.001-05:00

Picture from the Discovery Education website

Everybody seems to agree that there are major elements of our Public Schools that are largely broken. Many learned and experienced people have put forth their plans for repairing the system. With the hustle and bustle of the holidays behind us, and with time hanging heavily on my hands, I thought I’d chime in.

Time: When I look at research regarding unlawful behavior of children and adolescents, including drug abuse, the most common reason given for those self-destructive behaviors is boredom. Most public schools in the U.S. dismiss between 2:20 and 3:30 in the afternoon, a time driven historically by the need to have those kids available for farm chores. However,the time when children were required to toil on the farm or the family business after school are just about gone. The Census for Agriculture undertaken by the U.S. Department of Agriculture every five years has demonstrated a steady decline in the number of Americans who identify farming as their primary or secondary occupation. The 2002 report, the latest data available, reported that only 1.7% of the U.S. population was so engaged. Since most juvenile offenses occur between the end of school hours and bedtime, it would seem that American kids find themselves with empty hours and no constructive activities to fill them. In light of this, it would seem useful to extend the school hours to perhaps 5 p.m. and using that time for elective classes that kids would find fun, or at least interesting. Students who are struggling would probably benefit from extra tutoring during this time. Or, since childhood obesity has become such a hot-button issue, perhaps those extra hours would be better used in physical activity, such as intramural sports or classes in dance, anything to get them off the couch and away from the junk food. After sitting in class all day, they'd probably enjoy the exercise.

Classes with a point: Humans are individually unique. Everyone has their own strengths and interests which, if healthy, should be encouraged. In our society, we have people who want and need college, and others who can function just fine without it. Computer scientists and brain surgeons need university degrees. Automotive technicians and carpenters don’t. Yet all four professions are absolutely crucial to keep our economy functioning. People with mechanical skills who love working on mechanical things, shouldn’t be forced into a college-bound track if they don’t want it. What used to be called vocational education needs rejuvenation. It’s relevant and honorable, and needs to be taught in that spirit.

In the 12 years of my public school education, never once did we have successful people from the community come in to teach us the tools of successfully running a small business. Small businesses provide the lion’s share of jobs in our national economy and are the backbone and lifeblood of communities. That hard-won knowledge and expertise should be passed along with the hope of awakening the entreprenurial spirit, and also encouraging them to seek their own solutions. Make it fun, make it hands-on, make it relevant, and students will come in droves.

There should be far more classes teaching life skills. One of the issues confronting us is the minimum wage. This is an income level that was never intended to support a family. It was entry-level pay for non-skilled labor, or for new workers who were expected to grow in capability over time. Unfortnately, our schools seem to have fallen into the practice of shoving kids out the school doors and into the world with only subsistance-level skills. This has to be improved, so that an 18-year-old graduate is equipped with skills and knowledge that enables them to reach beyond the burger-flipper shelf-stocker jobs to the level of skilled jobs which pay a good wage, have good benefits, and most importantly, have a good future.

I remember in the prehistoric days of my high school education, administrators were concerned that no boys were signing up for the life skill class called “home economics.” In a stroke of pure genius, they repackaged the course under the title “Bachelor Living,” and suddenly found they had to beat the boys off with a stick. It wasn’t just learning how to cook, but also how to look for an apartment, interview for a job, craft and live by a budget, the dangers of credit, how to negotiate for the purchase of a car, how to wash clothes, how to clean house, all the survival skills that a young person needed to know in embarking on their independent lives. I see far too many young adults who lack those basic tools.

Human Relationships: At some point, boys and girls need to be taught to understand the basic elements of healthy human interaction. There is a difference between someone who loves and someone who only wants to control. Girls, especially need to be educated on how to recognize potential abusers before they become involved, and more importantly, how to get out of abusive relationships. They need to know that they can stand on their own two feet and don’t need a male in their lives to feel important and valued. (NOW should be hip-deep in this effort, but I digress…) Boys, especially, need to learn the value of respect and the recognition that girls are human and deserve to be treated with honor. I know that these things used to be taught in the home by committed parents, but from what I hear in the lyrics of popular music, apparently no one’s teaching these lessons anywhere.

Bullying has expanded beyond the bathrooms and hallways with the help of technology. IM, cellphone texting, email, and social websites have all been used as platforms for cruelty. Having been at one time the fat, pimply-faced kid with the thick glasses, I know how important it was to find sanctuary in my home. Now, the cruelty reaches within the sanctuary, giving the child a feeling that there is no safe place to go. In October, we saw how the pervasive nature of this activity led to a young girl’s suicide. We have seen that mass killings in schools have often been rooted in the perceived polarization and isolation of the killer by his classmates. This issue needs to be aggressively addressed. Every human, regardless of appearance or station in life is deserving of dignity and respect. We are universally horrified by violence; we should be equally horrified by the day to day verbal and physical abuse that has become a part of so many kids’ daily lives.

Uniforms: “Clothes make the person,” the saying goes and nowhere is this more apparent than among students. Clothes tend to separate kids into economic and social classes, and also, in the context of gangs, serve to define criminal activity as well. A uniform could be as elaborate as a coat and tie for boys and dresses for girls, or simply coveralls decorated with school patches, such as the comfortable, affordable, durable, and functional clothing worn by the Navy. The armed forces have known for centuries that uniformity in appearance helps to promote unity in the ranks. I think schools should overcome their institutional enmity towards the military and look seriously at this.

Parental involvement: As a culture, we have somehow slipped into the attitude that kids can function on auto-pilot and raise themselves. As a culture, we are in denial. Raising a child is a pro-active, hands-on, full-time task. In recent years, researchers have amply demonstrated that the adolescent brain is underdeveloped in those areas of behavior control and risk assessment. Therefore, parents need to hover over them constantly. A child is a minor, and therefore has no reasonable expectation of privacy in the home. Don't be afraid to snoop. Don't hesitate to ask pointed questions. Insist on meeting their friends. Check on them to make sure they've gone where they told you they went. Far too many parents have suffered through their children's funerals because they didn't do these things. Will they get mad? Sure. Will they hate you? Oh, yeah. But get them through this time successfully, and they will thank you for that effort, if not in words, certainly in their achievements.

For many, these ideas would seem to be drastic in nature. But the reality of life in America’s public schools demonstrates that these are dangerous times. Deluding ourselves into ignoring these signs has only exacerbated things. We’re on the verge of losing our kids. We should, therefore, lose our fear of drastic change.

Their future is, after all, our future as well.

The Separation of Church and State

2007-07-15T20:25:00.001-04:00

The birth of the United States was due, in large part, to the efforts of people fleeing religious persecution in Europe. Eventually, as the collection of settlements formed a government and became a nation, those early participants ensured, through the first amendment, that succeeding generations would be able to worship without the influence or intrusion of government. However, the increasingly diverse nature of the U.S. population has broadened the national religious perspective from the early European Protestantism to an array of some 1,200 recognized religious bodies ranging from the Judeo-Christian God to Egyptian cats. Today, we are confronted by the question of how much religion do we allow in government, and how much government do we allow in religion.

To Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and Mormons, the concept of "God" as a supreme spiritual being of immense power and infinite love is universally recognized. Indeed, this is the "God" that is usually referred to on our coinage and in our Pledge of Allegiance. This concept might have been viewed as proper and widely accepted 200 years ago. But today the question must be must be considered whether that particular devine being has any deistic precedence over the Islamic Allah, the Shinto ancestors, or the earth-based gods of Wiccans, Native Americans, or Native Hawaiians. While the remote possiblity exists that all these divine icons could be one in the same, humanity, trapped within the limited prespective of 3-dimensional mortality, is nevertheless incapable of defining a broadly acceptable definition of God.

For many years, a universal feature of public school life was the morning prayer, led by a teacher or principal. Since this prayer was directed to the universally accepted and understood "God," there seemed to be littel objection to this daily rite. beginning in the 1960's there was a growing attitude which rejected traditional standards of discipline and ethics, which included not only societal norms and mores, but religion as well. On into the 1970's religion began a steady recession from the cultural mainstream. People turned to other forms of expression in their desire to seek spiritual fulfillment. Also feeding this movement was a kind of simple-minded rationalization that if there was in fact a God, then why was there so much suffering and misery? In the 1980's the pendulum began a swing back to the right, as religious conservatives fought to regain lost ground. The societal battles which erupted then continue today, alhtough more for political than theological reasons.

Those who resist religion do so no longer on the basis of a lifestyle choice, but out of a growing contention that Judeo-Christianity was not the sole arbiter of human salvation.

The United States is a nation founded, by and large, by spiritual people seeking religious freedom. Their desires in thie regard permeate nearly all of the documents and writings generated during our early history. Throughout our history, struggles for freedom and justice have had at their core a strong belief in God. To ignore these facts in the study of history and politics is a mistake born out of ideological myopia. It is imperative, therefore, in the modern classroom, that students be introduced in a general way to the broad spectrum of religious belief. Indeed, a thorough understanding of conflicts in the modern post-9/11 world is incomplete without an examination of the differences between Islamics, Christians, and Jews. To understand conflicts in the Middle East, the Balkans, and Northern Ireland may be impossible without such comprehension.

I tend to be an accomodationist. I believe that any person should have the freedom to worship whatever they identify as their deity, provided the exercise of that freedom does not infringe on the rights of others. This includes a certain amount of tolerance toward the observance of celebrations which may not reflect the individual's beliefs, but nonetheless are deeply ingrained in the fabric of American culture. For example, the Christian's tolerance of pagan symbology during Halloween, or the Jew's tolerance of Christmas point to the reality that it is very possible for people of deep theological convictions can accept the beliefs of others without compromising their own. Of course, the followers of radical Islam have proven their abject refusal to tolerate any other beliefs save their own.

Many of us have entertained ourselves by playing the mental game known as "If I Ran the World," structuring an imaginary world based on our own unique perspective. In my pseudo-world, freedom of religion is paramount, so long as that exercise does not violate the rights of others not so inclined. Aggressive prosletyzing falls outside the realm of this kind of expression. If a child desires to pray over a school lunch before eating, I see no problem. Given my memories of cafeteria quisine, this might not be a bad idea in and of itself. Cetainly it is understood that as long as teachers give tests, there will be prayer in the public schools. I am a little less sure of the idea of allowing relgious displays on government property. I can conceive of a situation where the local governmental body, in an effort to represent all points of view, is forced to put up so many competing displays that the normal transaction of business is impeded. However, churches and homes provide ample opportunity for expression of this type so perhaps the county courthouse gets a very understandable pass on holiday displays.

The whole question of religious expression boils down to the very basic idea that the relationship with a supreme being, however identified, is a deeply personal one and should be respected by all. For humans trapped in the limits of a three-dimensional reality the final answer to the question "what is God?" can only be found on the far side of that black, impenetrable wall which we call "death."

How Ideal was the "Ideal State?"

2007-07-15T18:50:00.001-04:00

Throughout human history, philosophers witnessed the worst parts of man's inhumanity to man. In response, they strove to construct, at least in a theoretical sense, an outline for what was perceived at "the ideal state." One of the first of these efforts is embodied in Plato's epic work "The Republic."

This exercise, interestingly enough, grew out of a discussion centering on the nature of justice. Socrates and the elders quickly reached the realization that in order to properly define justice as it relates to the individual it was necessary to consider the larger question of the nature of the state's view of justice. The attitudes of the state shape the attitudes of its citizens, so in order to nail down what constitutes a just man, one must account for the state's definition of justice.

In our modern world, punishment for crime is meted out in accordance with the way the state's laws have been molded by culture. In Singapore, for example, theft is punished by caning; in Somalia, by the amputation of a hand; in America, by a stern lecture from an overburdened Judge and perhaps a few weeks in a climate-controlled corrections facility with satellite TV and three squares per day. In each of the above examples, the punishments reflect the respective culture's highly subjective view of justice.

Today, of course, we can take advantage of the long view not only of history, but through the images and impressions of other contemporary cultures through electronic eyes in order to properly contextualize these very basic questions. In contrast, the view of Classical Civilization was necessarily myopic, there being no GNN (Grecian News Network) to expand their limited view beyond the eastern Mediterranean.

The concept of Socrates' ideal state is essentially a layered design, beginning with four craftsmen and eventually becoming an aggressive army bent on territorial aggrandizement. In the beginning, however, he starts with four craftsment: farmer, carpenter, weaver, cobbler. In his view, this constitutes the basic human needs. Socrates also identifies two principles which become keystones of the ideal state. First of all, that every person has a separate and distinct group of talents, abilities, and characteristics, which he defines as "nature." This group is what determines the individual's vocational path. Secondly, it is more efficient if talented individuals perform their particular function for the whole society, rather than each individual attempting to do every task themselves. I find agreement in both.

Every human arrives in this life with a set of genetically-inspired specialties. Even coming from the same set of parents, each child has a different set of abilities, likes and dislikes, mirroring either parent, or another ancestor. Perhaps my own experience might illuminate this point. I have a daughter who consistantly earned low grades in math and always struggled with languages. My son, on the other hand, does calculus in his head and speaks Korean fluently. But while he has seemed less concerned for the feelings of those around him, my daughter demonstrates a high degree of compassion and empathy for others. These clear opposites, although coming from the same parents, clearly demonstrate the diverse concept of human nature. How they will utilize those talents and abilities is a product of nurture. Indeed, a big part of parenting is getting each child to recognize their own uniqueness and how to develop that into a productive path of life.

It is difficult, if not impossible to force a human into an activity or job for which they are manifestly unsuited. Even if they can somehow learn the tasks associated with the job, they will never be as qualitatively or quantitavely productive as someone who possesses the natural talent. Harry Connick, Jr. was a jazz virtuoso at age 8. Comedian Jack Benny spent decades practicing the violin and, by his own admission, barely acheived mediocre. Ambition and hard work can make up some ground, but generations of humans great and pedestrian, famous and anonymous has shown that whatever "it" is, it must be with you when you are born. In my experience, it is neither nature nor nurture alone, but a combination of the two which determines the ultimate path of a child.

It is this genetic specialization that segues naturally into Plato's second keystone. Division of labor is not only a good business practice, it is good common sense. If you want a task done correctly, you must go to the specialist in that field, the one with the talent and enthusiasm for accomplishing the job. People have come to me on occasion to write radio advertising. I enjoy the freedom of creative writing. I'm told that I'm good at it. But numbers befuddle me, so if these same people wanted me to do their taxes, then the IRS Enforcement Division would suddenly have more work than they could do. So along with millions of others, I've taken to heart the advice of Clint Eastwood's character Harry Calahagn: "A man's got to know his limitations."

Both of these concepts are sound for this day and age. The only change I might suggest is in the identification of the four craftsmen:

1. Engineer: Formulates ideas and provides a scheduled direction
2. Craftsman: Executes the Planners ideas into reality
3. Accounter: Allocates current resources for the Creator and identifies future available resources for the Planner
4. Teacher: Identifies and trains new engineers, craftsman, accounters, and teachers.

With these four, dynasties could be built.

In any perusal of historical writings, regardless of the subject, allowances mut be made for the environment in which the ideas were conceived. Acknowledging that fact, there are still elements of The Republic that modern readers find objectionable. First and foremost is the idea existing in Classical Civilization that slavery was somehow right and normal. Today we view that as reprehensible. Over the years, we have learned that every human life has an inherent value which must be treasured.

Also, Socrates' explanations of the four virtues are curiously incomplete when mirrored against modern civilization. He defines courage as "...knowing right from wrong and who the enemies are." Today, we view courage as not only knowing right from wrong, but standing up for or against those ethics. It is in the modern pragmatic context of actions speaking volumes which defines our concept of courage.

Temperance, "to be master of oneself," carries forward to our time in a general way. Today we find far more virtue in the discipline of self, rather than the Greek notion of controlling the lower classes.

Justice is defined as "...one man should practice one thing only, the thing to which his nature was best adapted" and also, "...doing one's own business, and not being a busybody..." This could be one of the difficulties in translating not only words, but concepts from one language to another. Our modern concept of justice is more far-reaching, perhaps finding a home under the phrase "Equal Justice Before the Law." To us, justice is more the equal application of laws and equal access to opportunity.

Socrates now defines wisdom as what remains after the first three virtues have been identified. He also mandates that wisdom is the exclusive province of the rulers. Today, we recognize wisdom as the hard-won and sometimes bitter fruit of a lifetime of experience and of equal value no matter what the station in life the source occupied.

Socrates' vision of the Ideal State may have been logical and right for the time a place of its formulation. However, when applied to the ever-shifting tapestry of modern civilization, it is useful only as an historical tool.

Fairness Is As Fairness Does

2007-07-06T12:15:00.002-04:00

Recently, the rumblings of support for the so-called “fairness doctrine” have begun to surface. The goal, according to the proponents, is to somehow legislate into existence some kind of counter to the 900-pound gorilla known as conservative talk radio. Air America was intended to be that agent of balance, but despite the infusion of millions of George Soros money and the Star Power of Al Franken, Air America has been unable to gain nationwide traction with listeners or advertisers. AAR has lost several stations and last October filed for bankruptcy.

Faced with this failure and the continuing strong growth of conservative talkers like Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, and Savage, progressives seem intent on legislating what the free market failed to deliver.

The Fairness Doctrine was adopted by the FCC in 1949 in a time when frequencies were limited and the Commission was being flooded by license requests for new stations. In 1949, media outlets were considered “public trustees,” instead of private businesses. As the Museum of Broadcast Communications explains, “…broadcasters should make sure they did not use their stations simply as advocates with a singular perspective. Rather, they must allow all points of view. That requirement was to be enforced by FCC mandate.” (http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/F/htmlF/fairnessdoct/fairnessdoct.htm)

The doctrine was swept away in the flood of federal deregulation instituted by President Ronald Reagan. Within a few years, it became apparent that the cries of conservatives who felt their point of view wasn’t fairly represented by what they termed “The Main Stream Media” were legitimate. Conservative talkers began cropping up, most notably Rush Limbaugh, and saw their market share and popularity explode. Now progressives want their slice of that lucrative pie.

Democrat political leaders have begun to campaign for such legislation with a growing fervor. As this movement begins to catch momentum, it is apparent that the supporters are moving forward in ignorance of the inexorable effects of the “law of unintended consequences.” Defined by Rob Norton of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/UnintendedConsequences.html) as “…actions of people—and especially of government—always have effects that are unanticipated or "unintended."

In this case, while supporters are convinced that this move will level the playing field, and perhaps eliminate these vexing influences, they are also ignorant of the other effects such a doctrine would impose.

National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System will be required to surrender 12 hours of their programming day to programs favorable to conservative issues.

Journalists will be required to identify both sides of a given issue in the lead paragraphs of their stories. Front page space will be halved, in order to ensure lawful reporting of both points of view.

In schools, conservatives could use the fairness doctrine to force equal-time discussions on matters such as intelligent design, and the sizeable amount of research identifying climate change as a natural effect of dynamic climate history, rather than blaming the whole thing on rich republicans.

College campuses would be required to allow conservative speakers in the same numbers as those espousing progressive points of view. And students would not be allowed to protest their presence.

Government research grants would have to be evenly distributed among researchers, meaning anthropogenic global warming advocates would be forced by law to share those monies with those individuals and groups performing contrary research. And the media would be forced by law to equally report the results of such research.

So you see, the imposition of a fairness doctrine works both ways. I think folks need to think long and hard about the real results of legislating a level playing field.

"Killing Rage"

2007-06-14T21:49:00.001-04:00

The late Eamon Collins

“KILLING RAGE” By Eamon Collins

“Killing Rage” vividly recounts the compelling personal journey of Eamon Collins through the violent morass of Northern Ireland politics; the evolution from committed Republican, to terrorist, to an activist for peace.

For most Americans, the dominant impression of the war in Northern Ireland would be a confused mélange of news video images, reports of exploded bombs, and dead women and children. With little exception, the violent tactics of the Irish Republican Army have met with universal condemnation. Even a basic understanding of the roots of the conflict and the reasons for its perpetuation would prove quite beyond the ability of most to recount. For the first time, however, the words and passion of Eamon Collins provide an honest, if chilling account of his involvement in the conflict as a member in various capacities of the Provisional Wing of the Irish Republican Army between 1978 and 1987.

The book opens abruptly and brutally with a detailed description of Collins’ first operation in December 1978, the killing of Major Ivan Toombs of the Ulster Defense Regiment (UDR). As Collins works to gather intelligence on his target he takes us through the process of dealing with a very human conflict:

“For me, the more I found out about him, the more admirable I found him. I liked him and felt that in other circumstances we might have been friends.” (Page 20)“...to strike at Toombs was to strike at an ancient colonial system of elites. Killing Toombs would also be a symbol of our dogged resistance to inequality and injustice...” (Page 23)“He was an idea, a force, not a person with a face. He had no humanity for me.” (Page 17)

This apparent moral conflict occurs repeatedly throughout the book in Collins’ continual debates with himself over the effectiveness of political violence. Collins also spends some time discussing the roots of the Irish conflict, which began as a growing dislike between the Protestant majority and his Catholic minority, which he characterizes as “... (The) Catholic underclass, marginalized, on the periphery of society, jobless, poorly educated, powerless and voiceless.” (Page 12)

Students of the American Civil Rights Movement might recognize some clear parallels between life as a Catholic in Northern Ireland and life as an African-American in this country. Indeed, Collins recounts several incidents during both his and his parent’s childhood of acts of discrimination and outright violence committed against Catholics by Protestant civilians, police, and military. As might be expected, this violence went largely unpunished. It was out of this atmosphere of hate that the Republican movement gained strength. Over time, however, it changed from just a civil rights movement to “...a very ultra-left kind of Marxism.” Collins continues,“I believed that the IRA could be turned into an organization which could take on the capitalist state and the agents of that state... I saw the struggle in internationalist terms: I believed Irish republicans should forge links with their brothers and sisters in Lebanon, in Germany, Italy, or Palestine, to help overthrow the forces who were retrenching capitalism in all the western democracies.” (Page 12)

Much of the book contains accounts of various IRA operations in which Collins was involved. While he still remained a committed soldier, he nevertheless began to see things that in his mind tarnished the image of the IRA warrior. He describes the killing of a man named Norman Hanna in January 1982 who had been wrongly identified as a member of the Ulster Defense Reserve by an IRA hit man who Collins had recruited. His remorse for this wrongful death is clear:

“That night for the first time, I could not be reassured by any grand or angry political scheme. Where were we going? Where was I going? I had never felt so empty. I remember touching my wife, kissing her hair and crying silently. I was crying for Hanna, perhaps for his wife and child, but also mostly for myself, for what I had become.” (Page 117)

Later on, Collins rationalizes the killing by recalling the thousands of Catholics who had died in the cause. He spends the subsequent 18 months struggling to suppress his compassion. Over time, he notes, “Each subsequent death mattered less to me than the previous one.” (Page 120) However, from this point Collins began to realize the abject amorality and violent banality of those with whom he was associated. His vision of helping to bring an end to injustice included participation by committed patriots. The reality was his involvement with men of violence, not political passion; in effect, stone killers. In September of 1983, he begins to have his first serious doubts:“...I began to ask myself not only whether I personally should continue to be a member of the IRA, but also whether the armed struggle itself was worth continuing. If all we had to offer was bumbling thuggishness, and if we could only attract the naive or the brutal, how could we appeal to the mass of Irish people in the late twentieth century?” (Page 176)

During this time, near the end of 1984, Collins had a brutal confrontation with Gerry Adams, the President of Sinn Fein, the fallout of which would shadow him the remainder of his time in the IRA. Collins saw Sinn Fein as leaving behind the constitutional nationalism that had fueled the Republican movement in favor of coalition-driven parliamentarianism. This was being done by the IRA in Belfast where “...the republican movement’s power was becoming concentrated among aspiring politicians who were stealthily moving towards a political compromise and abandonment of the armed struggle.” (Page 235) The result was a power struggle within the IRA. The combination of the loss of commitment from the Belfast IRA, the mere 13 per cent vote for Sinn Fein in the Irish elections, and his own disillusionment brought Collins to a penultimate moment of decision.

“It (the IRA) had not lost the war, but nor could it win an outright victory. So, the IRA’s struggle had become pointless. We had no right to take offensive action, and the Irish people had told the IRA in the recent elections that they had no mandate to continue the war in their name. In the last quarter of 1984, I was finished as an IRA man. I began to think that the republican movement’s shift towards political compromise was based on a more perceptive appraisal of reality...” (Pages 242-243)

It is perhaps part of human nature that, when faced with perceived injustice, the spirit cries out for action. Certainly, this was the case with Eamon Collins. At an early age, he learned at his mother’s knee the terrible cruelties inflicted on Catholics by the Protestants and the British government. He recalls, “My mother instilled in me the grievances of the vanquished.” (Page 36) Objectively, any observer when faced with the reality of Irish history would be hard-put not to find sympathy with the republican cause. One can even understand that the active failure of the law to define justice will inevitably lead to violence by the oppressed. Culturally, Americans are intimate with this concept. The overriding question, which lies between every paragraph in this book, is how much violence does it take to change things, and at what point does one admit when its usefulness is at an end?

The story of the Provisional IRA, as recounted by Collins, should be an object lesson for revolutionaries. While the initial motives for the war were pure (lifting the oppression of Catholics), over time the IRA seemed to fall in love with the act of violence itself while forgetting the reasons for it. Collins talks at length about this love of violence, even among those he recruited. This is evident in their discussions, which covered tactical matters but very little about their political motivations. In the end, it became violence merely for the sake of violence.

It is also important to note, again, the shift in ideology by the IRA. The Republican movement and the original Irish Republican Army grew out of the efforts of Catholics to protect their own from the violent depredations of Protestants, in short, to protect the Church. In the 1970’s the Provisional Wing of the IRA, or Provos, adopted a Marxist ideology. Marxism repudiates religion. Since from this point, the struggle became more about political ideology than about protecting Catholicism it’s fair to say that the original purpose for violent resistance became largely irrelevant, although still a source for powerful rhetoric. Marches and protests were more aimed at making martyrs out of IRA men killed by the opposition, than about equal rights for Catholics. Indeed, the confrontation between Collins and Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams occurred during a march honoring the death of a young IRA volunteer. Adams took actions to ensure that the protest remained peaceful. Collins, on the other hand, was convinced that forcing a violent confrontation would bring worldwide attention to their plight (Pages 223-224). The confrontation ended with Collins hurling a brutal, ferocious, and very public insult at Adams. Yet even with his strong passions, he was still able to look at the situation with a fair degree of pragmatism:

“Why was Adams trying to defuse situations which offered such potential? His behavior only made sense if the war was over. I think that it was at this funeral that I realized, with depressing clarity that the war was over. Adams was behaving in this way because he knew that this was true; he could see that there was no point in inflicting too much more unnecessary suffering on the people. Life, any life, was better than this, and yet we were continuing to embrace death recklessly. The war was over; the only problem was that no one could call it off.” (Page 225)

For anyone who lives and dies by the sword, the hardest act is to finally lay down that sword. I believe this was the struggle the Provos faced. To such people, compromise comes hard and the admission that the time for compromise (a revolutionary’s admission of defeat) is at hand must be extraordinarily difficult. For the defeat of a populist revolution is not only a military defeat, but also calls into question the entire ideological foundation for the movement itself. Some may have seen the recent peace of Northern Ireland as a victory for the IRA. From the perspective of Eamon Collins it was a stunning defeat for the Provos. The peace was reached as a result of Gerry Adams moving Sinn Fein away from violent nationalism to peaceful parliamentarianism. It was helped along by the apparent repudiation of the IRA’s violence by the voting public. And it was made real by the recognition the war was, in fact, over, and the Provos had lost.

Ironically, it was shortly after his conscious breaking with the IRA that Collins was arrested for his suspected involvement in the bombing of a Newry police station, which killed 9 police officers. His subsequent interrogation and confession (later retracted), imprisonment, trial, acquittal, and abandonment by the IRA left Eamon Collins adrift in the never-never land between two violent antagonists, trusted by none, hated by all. After his release from prison, Collins barely survived the explosion of a bomb planted in his car. Although the IRA never claimed responsibility for the attack, the man who planted the explosive was known to Collins. He had recruited the man. The IRA forced him into exile in July 1987, taking him away from his wife and children. Nevertheless, Collins turned to more peaceful pursuits, working through the Church with troubled youths in several cities in Northern Ireland while pursuing his education. As part of a research project, he sought out one of Republicanism’s most hated enemies, Gusty Spence of the Ulster Volunteer Force.

“I felt an overpowering sense of nausea. For an instant I could only see before me a deadly enemy of my people. Suddenly, I was filled with a killing rage, all the old anger coming back. I felt I ought to have been moving towards him holding a revolver, firing bullet after bullet into his body, instead of standing there waiting to be ushered into his presence. But the feeling passed and my rage subsided. I knew that murder was the logical outcome of that rage, and murder would not solve anything. In that moment, I realized how far I had traveled in my life. At times, he spoke with violence and aggression; and I could detect that same rage that had just overtaken me. I realized that he had not moved that far forward in his thinking since 1966, but he had moved, and I had moved, and that was important.” (Pages 368-369)

Herein lies the essential ingredient for the end of a civil conflict: Two influential people willing to move away from anger and violence. The future of Northern Ireland hangs on the willingness of such people to put the past permanently behind and concentrate on the future. The last sentence of the book expresses the wish of Eamon Collins:“The anger and hatred this place has seen may in time be forgotten, if not forgiven. I do not want much else more.” (Page 371)Tragically, this shift in the direction of his life did not protect the former IRA Man. Eamon Collins was found murdered near his home on the early morning of January 28, 1999. Although it is widely understood that this was the act of the IRA, the murder remains officially unsolved to this day. Only time will tell if his sacrifice was made in vain.

Killing Rage

By Eamon Collins
1999 by Granta Books, New York,
NYISBN 1-86207-047-4

Pearl Harbor: Conspiracy or Complacency?

2007-06-12T19:39:00.001-04:00

"Yesterday, December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy,
the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately
attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan”

With those evocative words, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt committed a deeply shocked and angry America to war with Japan. The surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, coupled with other assaults throughout the western Pacific united a bitterly divided government and galvanized the citizenry. Even with the newfound unity, many pointed questions were raised, not the least of which was “how could this happen?”

Today, over 65 years later it is even more difficult for present generations to comprehend how a military, a government, and a nation of free people could have been the victim of such a terrible surprise attack. It is that still pointed question that leaves some unsure whether the attack was facilitated by a numbing complacency on the part of America towards blatant Japanese aggression, or the result of a dark conspiracy originating within the highest levels of government to involve the United States in global war.

As with any disaster, the inevitable witch hunt to locate the person or persons responsible ensued with nine official investigations by the executive branch, the congress, and the military. In addition, historians have delved deeply into this subject publishing countless books, articles, and essays. It is safe to say that no other event in American history has been subjected to the level of scrutiny as the attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet even after six and a half decades, the search for the smoking gun - and the hand that held it - remains alive.

This paper will follow that search, looking for those elements that created the opportunity for Japan as well as look closely at the American participants and explore their culpability, if any in fact existed. This journey will also involve a look at the influence of the times. The world of 1941 was a vastly different one than today. And accordingly, the people who were the children of Wilson’s Fourteen Points and who later struggled with issues of basic survival during the Depression were shaped by that historical environment, as were the current generations shaped by the Cold War, Vietnam, and the loss of spirit engendered by prosperity. The process of intelligence collection, analysis, and dissemination will be examined in light of how the strong desire for secrecy kept vital information compartmented and isolated from decision-makers.

A breed of historians, known as “revisionists,” approach historical events from a different perspective. They utilize either new evidence or a fresh look at old facts, seeking to change, or revise, traditional accounts and conclusions. Unfortunately, sometimes this approach is tainted. A few revisionists use incomplete or non-contextual information in order to use historical events as a vehicle for a political or social agenda, or perhaps simply to focus on certain historical figures and “take them down a notch or two.” In attempting to revise traditional conclusions about Pearl Harbor revisionists have adopted a theory called “The Back Door Conspiracy.” The basic tenet of this belief is that Roosevelt, struggling to restore an economy still shaky after the Great Depression, sought to bring the United States into war with Japan and Germany. A wartime economy meant full employment and rapid full-scale development of America’s latent industrial potential. Also, Americans were at that time deeply divided over the issues of intervention in the rapidly expanding conflict in Europe (Prange At Dawn 16-17). An attack on any sovereign territory of the United States would have the effect of galvanizing the country against the outside threat and providing the President with an unprecedented national consensus (Prange At Dawn 840-842). However, a close look at Japan’s situation prior to 1941 clearly shows the road that Japan traveled to war had its beginnings long before Roosevelt’s administration.

UNDERSTANDING JAPANESE MOTIVATIONS
To fully appreciate the decision process that led to the attack, it is necessary to examine the factors that influenced the Japanese government.
Japan, an emerging military and economic power in the Far East, sought to ensure the steady flow of vital natural resources necessary for industrial expansion and economic growth. An island nation, Japan had very little in the way of natural resources. These were available in Southeast Asia, Malaysia, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, Manchuria, and the Celebes. It would have been hard for a comparatively resource-rich America to relate to Japan’s dilemma. It is perhaps a common failing of Americans to blindly measure the problems and accomplishments of othernations solely by our own yardstick. This failure to “walk a mile in another’s shoes” led to a complete miscalculation of Japan’s capabilities and intentions. Adding to this, the Japanesegovernment, although officially a constitutional monarchy, was under the control of aggressive members of the military. Many of them were veterans of Japan’s shocking victory over Czarist Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and as a result were, perhaps, feeling a little invincible, albeit with good cause. In the thousand years until World War II, the Japanese military had never known defeat at the hands of a foreign power.

The Japanese knew that if they embarked on any plan of conquest in the Pacific they would eventually run afoul of the United States. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who conceived the attack, wrote in 1940 to a friend, “The probability is great that the launching of our operation against The Netherlands Indies will lead to an early commencement of war with America…” (Prange At Dawn 11). Accordingly, the decision of the Japanese military was to deal the American forces a severe blow at the outset of hostilities, hopefully forcing a deal which would leave Japan the unchallenged masters of the Pacific.

Revisionists believe President Roosevelt, through his policies, dragged Japan, kicking and screaming, into conflict with the United States. However to really understand the tensions between the two nations, it is necessary to examine the erosion of relations between Japan and America.

Japanese enmity towards the west in general and the United States in particular, can be traced initially to the enactment of the Anti-Japanese Immigration Bill in California in 1913. While European immigrants streamed into the United States in record numbers, Japanese immigrants seeking the same opportunities were barred from entry. This move, blatantly racist in intent, deeply insulted the Japanese people.

Japan, however, did become nominal allies with the United States, Britain, and France in World War I, committing no troops and expending little of her resources, but gaining pieces of Imperial Germany’s colonial empire in the Pacific, islands the Allies would pay dearly to conquer. In the flurry of disarmament and the general global revulsion to war after the armistice was signed, naval limitation treaties imposed in 1922, 1928, and 1930 held Japan’s naval forces at a level inferior to Britain and the U.S, the infamous 5:5:3 ratio. That the two western powers had global economic interests versus Japan’s limited interests in the western Pacific was held to be irrelevant by Japan, who saw the treaties as a tool to suppress Japanese attempts at regional hegemony in a part of the world where European and American colonies still existed. This infuriated the Japanese. Captain Tameichi Hara, a famous naval officer, wrote, “Naval opinion in Japan regarded (the treaties) as a case of pure power Politics, which resulted in a terrible defeat for Japan.” (Hara 20)
In April 1928 Japanese troops were rushed from Japan and Korea to Manchuria to protect Japanese economic interests from Chinese troops. After the League of Nations accused Japan of
aggression in this incident, Japan responded by withdrawing from the League in 1933, simultaneously abrogating the Naval Limitation Treaties. The American foreign policy towards China, influenced by the paternal attitude of Americans towards the Asian giant, established an adversarial position. The passage of time only added bitterness to the discourse between the two governments. Captain Hara writes, "It was in this mental climate that Japan first came to consider the United States as a potential enemy." (Hara 20)

These events demonstrate that the seeds of conflict between Japan and America were sown early and deep, too early for the Roosevelt administration. In any study of this period, it is absolutely essential to recognized the historical context of the events leading up to December 7th. Japanese motives and American attitudes over the preceding two decades put the two governments on a collision course, a course that could have only one outcome.

READING THE MAIL
The bitterest pill to be swallowed in regards to Pearl Harbor concerns not the paucity of intelligence available, but the literal avalanche of information in the hands of American Intelligence prior to December 7th. U.S. Intellegence had been reading Japanese diplomatic codes since 1922 through a system code-named "Magic." As war drew closer in 1940-41, American cryptanalysts in Washington and Pearl Harbor were intercepting upwards of several hundred messages per day. Of course, there was no way of determining the relative importance of individual messages until the process of decoding and translating was complete. In the pre-war military, intelligence units were notoriously understaffed. The analysts were good, but swamped. The information was coming faster than it could be processed. Samuel Eliot Morison noted:

"Army and Navy Intelligence Officers in Washington were somewhat in the position of a woman with a sick child trying to take instructions from a doctor over the telephone while the neighbors are shouting contrary advice in her ears, children screaming, and trucks roaring by the house. The noise overwhelmed the message." (Morison 71)

The system of distribution for the decoded messages, devised for security, in fact did more to blunt their impact. Those who were on the list for access could only see what messages translators deemed as significant, and then only one at a time. No one was allowed to make notes or given the opportunity to analyze the direction the information was leading. As Morison puts it, "...nobody got anything but excerpts and driblets." (Morison 72) Ronald Lewin notes taht the most compelling intercepts were not decoded until after the attack, simply because they were deep down in the growing stacks of undecoded and untranslated intercepts. (Lewin 96) This had nothing to do with any conspiracy, only workload.

Among military personnel who handle classified information, there is a wry description of the classification levels as Confidential, Secret, Top Secret, and Shred Before Reading, The latter "classification" comes perilously close to describing how the Magic intercepts were handled. Those intercepts, like all intelligence data, form the individual pieces of a much large puzzle. Without a person or a team to assemble the pieces the larger picture remained undiscovered, despite the presence of all the pieces. It was a bitter lesson that should have been permanently seared into the memory of the entire Intelligence Community. The events of September 11, 2001 demonstrate that even the harshest of lessons can be unlearned, or forgotten.
The most controversial series of messages to come out of Magic were the “Winds” messages.
On November 19, 1941, Tokyo sent the following message to its overseas embassies:

REGARDING THE BROADCASTS OF A SPECIAL MESSAGE IN AN EMERGENCY.
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY (DANGER OF CUTTING OFF OUR DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS),
AND THE CUTTING OFF OF INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS, THE FOLLOWING WARNING WILL BE ADDED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAILY JAPANESE LANGUAGE SHORTWAVE NEWS BROADCAST.
(1) IN CASE OF JAPAN-U.S. RELATIONS IN DANGER:
EAST WIND RAIN
(2) JAPAN-U.S.S.R. RELATIONS:
NORTH WIND CLOUDY
(3) JAPAN-BRITISH RELATIONS:
WEST WIND CLEAR.
THE SIGNAL WILL BE GIVEN IN THE MIDDLE AND AT THE END AS A WEATHER FORECAST AND EACH SENTENCE WILL BE REPEATED TWICE. WHEN THIS IS HEARD,
PLEASE DESTROY ALL CODE PAPERS, ETC. THIS IS YET TO BE A COMPLETELY SECRET ARRANGEMENT.(Lewin 70; Prange At Dawn 360)

Revisionists, when examining the Magic intercepts, invariably fasten on this message as a definite indication that the Japanese fleet was on its way to Hawaii. Captain Lawrence Safford, head of the Navy cryptology organization, maintained that a “winds execute” had to have been intercepted on either December 3 or 4. Commander Alwyn D. Kramer, the head translator, at first agreed with Safford, but later retracted. A careful review of Safford’s testimony before the investigating commission headed by Chief Justice Roberts and the congressional committee under Carl Vinson reveals his statements regarding the receipt of a “winds execute” message as “There must have been one.” (Prange At Dawn 714, 596). He was also asked, “…was there ever received one single word, line, phrase, or sentence that would lead you to believe that Pearl Harbor was going to be struck?” To which Kramer firmly replied, “There never was, sir.” (Prange At Dawn 715)
The veracity of the alleged “winds execute” message is further obscured by the complete lack of evidence. No copy of the intercept has ever been found (Toland Infamy 138). Revisionists allege the message was destroyed (Toland Infamy 203); traditionalists maintain the message never existed in the first place. Neither side withstanding, it is difficult to say what difference the receipt of such a message would have made at Pearl Harbor. A careful analysis of the message content indicates only that Japanese-American relations were in danger. The situation as it existed in November 1941 was so critical as to make such an assertion superfluous, at best.

Even if one could read a threat of impending action into the “Winds” message, the focus of attention was on the Philippines and the Netherlands East Indies. Here, the preconceptions of those senior military commanders in Washington, whose responsibility it was to evaluate the threat, blocked the opportunity for real analysis of the data available and a full appreciation of the deteriorating situation. Those commanders, in particular Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, head of Naval War Plans, made the grievous error in deciding in advance what enemy intentions would be, rather than allowing the abundant information to guide conclusions. Admiral Stark, the Chief of Naval Operation, in the November 27th “war warning” told Admiral Kimmel in Hawaii to expect “…an aggressive move by Japan within the next few days…against either the Philippines, Thailand, Kra Peninsula, or possibly Borneo.” (Morison III 76; Prange December 7 4-5). This made sense in that it was common knowledge that Japan desperately needed access to raw materials, especially oil, in order to feed the hungry maw of industry and the military. In short, the “winds” message said nothing about Japanese intentions that would have forced a reassessment of American conclusions.

In Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, Roberta Wohlstetter, writing about the hazards of analysis commented:

“What these examples illustrate is rather the very human tendency to pay attention to the signals that support current expectations about enemy behavior.” (392)

This is a valid point. Nobody in Washington or Hawaii (or London, Paris, or Moscow for that matter) realistically expected that Japan would strike Hawaii. Despite the intelligence value of the intercepts, the focus of possible offensive moves remained in the western and southwestern Pacific, thousands of miles from Hawaiian waters. Hawaii was considered too far for the Japanese Navy to travel and beyond their ability to logistically support such an offensive. American decision-makers utterly failed to realize that Japan’s leaders and military already considered themselves to be at war. For anyone in that mind-set, the limits of calculated risk are considerably widened, as are the range of possible actions. This underestimation of the Japanese coupled with the overestimation of United States forces capacity to respond to an attack in Hawaii created a foggy miasma of complacency through which the blinding light of the situation’s true nature was utterly unable to penetrate.

The most valuable lesson that can be learned from the role of intelligence at Pearl Harbor is the absolute necessity of approaching information with an open mind, always being aware that the intentions of a potential enemy can be obscured by the analyst’s dogmatic preconceptions.

THE SMOKING GUN
In the sixty years since the Pearl Harbor disaster the search has persisted for the one person on whom the responsibility for the deaths and destruction can be levied. Most revisionists focus on President Roosevelt and his close circle of advisors, accusing them of deliberately withholding vital intelligence information from the Hawaii commanders, Admiral Kimmel and General Walter C. Short. (Toland 318) The Roberts board accused the two flag officers of “dereliction of duty,” the most onerous and shameful of charges that could be leveled at professional military officers, short of treason (Prange At Dawn 600-603). The Army and Navy investigative boards, while not excusing Short and Kimmel completely, nevertheless found fault with the ability of the command structure in Washington to promptly pass pertinent and vital information to the field commanders, which could have affected the readiness posture of the forces in Hawaii. (Prange 652-653) There are even allegations that Army Chief of Staff and future Secretary of State George C. Marshall deliberately falsified information in order to keep himself clear of suspicion (Toland Infamy 101). Yet, within all the allegations, charges and counter-charges remains the important question of how the United States government and military establishment with the assets and strength available to them could have been so completely surprised. The answer to this question lies neither in Washington or Pearl Harbor. To really identify this root cause, we must again examine the issue of historical context.

When the United States entered World War I, it was with a great deal of excitement and patriotic fervor. Politicians promised it would be “the war to end all wars,” otherwise it is doubtful that a reluctant public would have supported such a commitment. Once the war ended in 1918, there ensued over two decades of peace. In those years, Americans, feeling disconnected and insulated by the Atlantic from the troubles in Europe, tried as much a possible to draw into a shell of isolationism. This period was profoundly marked by a dizzying era of prosperity and frivolity, euphemistically called “The Roaring Twenties,” followed by the onset of the Great Depression and the agricultural disaster of the Dust Bowl. Faced with economic and
social challenges and issues of survival, Americans directed almost all their energies and attentions inward even more. When parents were daily faced with the very real possibility

that their children could go hungry and homeless, the aggressive affairs of Germany, Italy, and Japan seemed irrelevant at best. Growing and learning within this shell-like environment Americans were unable and unwilling to face a new set of troubles from outside. Even as the country began to rebound economically, Americans, both public and private, lulled themselves into a false sense of security, reassured by statements like this one which appeared in the Chicago Tribune on Navy Day, 1941: “She (Japan) cannot attack us. That is a military impossibility. Even our base at Hawaii is beyond the effective striking power of her Fleet. And what has Japan that we want? Nothing.” (Prange Verdict 4)

Attitudes of self-indulgence, misplaced confidence, and a stark unwillingness to assume leadership in a world that so desperately needed it was every bit as responsible for the surprise of the attack. In this respect, the blood of the dead stained the hands of all Americans.

It is hard for us today to understand such attitudes unless our historical context is considered.
In the decades after World War II, Americans, like all humans on this planet, lived under the threat of global destruction. Teetering on this precipice of nuclear war became our natural posture. We became jaded by conflict and inured to bloodshed. In his novel of nuclear war, Alas, Babylon, Pat Frank discussed the effect on children growing up in such an environment:

“All their lives, ever since they’ve known anything, they’ve lived under the shadow of war -- nuclear war. For them, the abnormal has become normal. All their lives they have heard nothing else, and they expect it; they’re conditioned. A child (of the past) would quickly go mad with fear in the world of today.” (Frank 85)

This became our world; children raised on violence and prosperity. For the children of the 30’s, their world was peace and poverty. Is it any wonder that between those generations there existed a gap of monumental misunderstanding?

The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 was, on the surface, a brilliant tactical stroke and a bitter defeat inflicted by an enemy previously perceived to be of almost cartoonlike ineptness. The outstanding lesson to be learned is that we cannot afford complacency. If the government and military of the pre-war days were possessed of unimaginative routine, then the people of a freely elected representational government are then partially responsible for not demanding a more alert posture. There is simply no substitute for a well informed and participating electorate.

America, a nation that actively hid from global power and responsibility, was drawn into conflict by two governments, Germany and Japan, who badly wanted both.

There was no conspiracy present in 1941. The allegations, however compelling, of collusion between the Roosevelt administration and the military commanders in Washington are unsupportable by any hard facts available anywhere. There was, however, a great deal of complacency present. In a democracy, the citizenry must take an active role and hold government’s allegorical feet to the fire, particularly on issues of national security. And as the tragic events of September 11th proved, if America tries to hide from the world, the world will still come looking for America.

In this, the 6th decade since the attack on Pearl Harbor, the world is still a dangerous place. The United States has been thrust by the events of history into the role of the sole remaining hegemon on the planet. Now, as then, this is not a responsibility Americans can avoid or deny. The world looks to America for leadership and justice. No reluctance, wishful thinking or false modesty on our part can to the slightest degree ameliorate that burden; For it is our burden whether we want it or not. America must remain awake, alert, and willing to entertain the darkest fears about potential foes. In conclusion, it is vital for us as a nation to consider the inherent lesson of Pearl Harbor. In the words of Thomas Jefferson:

“The price of Freedom is eternal vigilance.”

Works Cited
The Record of the United States Congress, December
8, 1941
Frank, Pat. Alas Babylon, 9th ed. New York: Bantam
1959
Hara, Tameichi. Japanese Destroyer Captain.
2nd ed. New York: Ballantine, 1961
Lewin, Ronald. The American Magic. 1st ed.
Middlesex: Penguin, 1982
Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Rising Sun in the Pacific.
20th ed. Vol. 3. History of United States Naval
Operations in World War II. New York: Atlantic
Little and Brown, 1948
----The Two Ocean War. 1st ed. New York: Atlantic
Little and Brown, 1963
Prange, Gordon W. Donald Goldstein, Katherine
Dillon, eds.
----At Dawn We Slept. 1st ed. New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1981
----December 7, 1941. 1st ed. New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1986
----Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History. 1st ed.
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986
Toland, John. Infamy: Pearl Harbor and its Aftermath.
1st ed. New York: Doubleday, 1982
Wohlstetter, Roberta. Pearl Harbor: Warning and
Decision. 5th ed. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1962

Economic Sanctions: Predicting Utility

2007-06-12T19:19:00.001-04:00

ECONOMIC SANCTIONS:

PREDICTING
UTILITY

The Challenge of Effective Foreign Policy

in a Monopolar World

By Ralph F. Couey

ABSTRACT

Can game theory be married with real-world cases to provide a predictive framework for economic sanctions? In this study, the theoretical work of Jonathan Eaton and Maxim Engers is applied to selected case studies from the data base of Gary Hufbauer, Jeffrey Schott, and Kimberly Ann Elliott. This application will demonstrate the utility of game theory in the real world and also provide the ability to predict the appropriateness and effectiveness of economic sanctions.

INTRODUCTION

Throughout human history governments have sought at various times to influence, or coerce, the policy directions of friends and foes alike. In cases where this diplomatic interaction has become hostile, states have resorted to force to settle disputes. In other cases, governments have used a superior economic position as a basis for imposing economic sanctions against other nations as an alternative to open warfare. With the improvements in the technology of warfare the ability of states to inflict increasing amounts of damage upon each other motivated governments to seek less destructive methods to settle disputes.

For most of the 20th century economic sanctions have been used as a leverage tool in disputes. Success in those cases has been mixed, at best. In recent years, as relative prosperity has become more widespread, and due to the fundamental shift from bipolar to monopolar global politics, the effectiveness of economic sanctions has declined. Despite their less than successful track record governments, particularly the United States and the United Nations, continue to resort to this ineffective tool in attempting to solve interstate disputes. To most governments, the resort to armed conflict is an anathema. Novelist John Ball wrote, “Nobody wants war; it’s an unmitigated horror. The only reason a sane nation involves itself in one is because the alternative is even less acceptable.” (Ball, 206) The imposition of economic sanctions has become the alternative of choice in international politics, one that requires a careful examination of costs versus benefits.

Hypothesis: Governments should weigh the cost of imposing economic sanctions against the gain realized by coercing a policy change in a target government.

In 1985, and again in 1995, Gary Hufbauer, Jeffrey Schott, and Kimberly Ann Elliott of the Institute of International Economics gathered what was the first large-scale study of economic sanctions. Initially looking at 116 cases, later expanding to 170, Hufbauer, Schott, and Elliott extensively researched incidences of the imposition of economic sanctions dating as far back as 432 A.D. This database has become the source of choice by which others have examined the problems associated with coercive diplomacy. However, despite the dozens of studies, there has not yet been formulated a proven method to be able to predict in advance the likely success or failure of waging trade warfare.

Jonathan Eaton and Maxim Engers proposed some analytic methods by which one might be able to predict outcomes, but they did not carry their proposal forward from the theoretical to the real. This study proposes to marry the theoretical analytics of Eaton and Engers with the real world of Hufbauer, Schott, and Elliott to settle the question of whether it is possible to accurately predict in advance of a particular situation the probable success or failure of economic sanctions.

REVIEW OF LITERATURE

The question of what precisely constitutes “success” has occupied the time of several political scientists, especially those who have taken issue with the wide interpretation employed by Hufbauer, et al. In their original study, Hufbauer, et al reported success in 40 of 115 cases, or about 34%. Although not an overwhelming number, it was nevertheless significant enough to influence an entire decade of foreign policy. The Pape study (1997) however, demonstrated that of the successes identified by Hufbauer, et al, only five were successful. Of the others, eighteen were settled by the direct or indirect use of force, in eight cases the target nation refused to change policy, and six cases, according to Pape, do not even qualify as economic sanctions. Pape concludes that the Hufbauer, et al study was fundamentally flawed.

Kimberly Ann Elliot, one of the co-authors of the Hufbauer, et al study, stoutly defends the conclusions criticized by Robert Pape (Elliot, K.A. 1997). She notes that Pape’s interpretations were far too narrow. She writes “...policy analysts - and certainly policymakers - who are looking for ways to strengthen sanctions and make them more effective are generally far more nuanced in their conclusions and more limited in their expectations of what sanctions can achieve.”(Elliott, 52) Although Pape cites their work as the "key evidence" supporting the perceived optimism that sanctions can achieve major foreign policy goals, Elliot maintains that Pape never cites Hufbauer’s, et al own interpretation of the evidence. Hufbauer, et al concluded that "although it is not true that sanctions 'never work,' they are of limited utility in achieving foreign policy goals that depend on compelling the target country to take actions it stoutly resists . . .. The success rate importantly depends on the type of policy or governmental change sought.” (Hufbauer, et al 216) They also found that the effectiveness of sanctions had declined sharply over time, with less than one in four sanctions having any success at all in the 1970s and 1980s and even fewer when the United States acted unilaterally.

Nevertheless, Elliot states the flip side of declining utility, that economic sanctions were a relatively effective tool of U.S. foreign policy in the early post-World War II era. Even with U.S. leverage reduced by a growing global economy and declining political hegemony, just over half of the episodes in which the United States took a leading role from 1945 to 1970 resulted in at least partial success.

Elliot also takes issue with Pape’s assertion that five successes are far too few to be optimistic about sanctions ever being effective. She complains that Pape defined sanctions so narrowly and set the bar for success so high that, indeed, few cases reach the threshold. Pape excludes cases where economic pressure is intended to complement military force, and he attributes policy success to economic sanctions only if it occurred in the absence of accompanying policies, such as military threats or covert action.

Elliot concludes that the greatest barrier to making economic sanctions an effective foreign policy tool is not inherent in modern political or economic systems; it derives from the lack of political will on the part of key leaders around the world.

Dashti-Gordon, Davis, and Radcliffe (1997) hypothesized that the probability of success depends on the cost to the target nation, extent of trade linkages, the stability of the target, the amount of time sanctions are in force, and whether financial sanctions are utilized. They also address Hufbauer, et al interpretation of success by relying only on the policy result to determine success. Dashti-Gordon et al conclude that the best way to assess the effect of sanctions is to understand the motive of the sender.

Drury’s analysis (1998) concludes that Hufbauer, et al overstated the importance of their variables and therefore questions are raised as to the accuracy of their recommendations. In fact, only four of the original findings are supported by Drury’s analysis. Therefore, he declares a necessity to carefully re-examine the Hufbauer et al study before actions are taken based on their conclusions. He suggests that future studies focus on reasons and conditions under which economic sanctions are applied.

Morgan and Schwebach (Morgan, et al 1997) propose a “sanction effectiveness theory” based on a spatial model of bargaining in international crises and then use the theory to develop a number of hypotheses that suggest when the use of economic sanctions should provide favorable policy outcomes. The model suggests that while sanctions will not work in many cases, they can have a slight effect if the costs of the sanctions are high enough relative to the values at stake.

Based on the spatial analysis, Morgan and Schwebach conclude that the effect of economic sanctions on dispute outcomes is negligible. Also, a lower proportion of cases end in compromise, which may indicate a use of economic sanctions as establishing points of negotiations rather than a demonstration of resolve. Sanctions are not a universal antidote to international disputes. They should be applied sparingly and they should be considered in light of the cost to the politically powerful in the target countries.

In Hendrickson (1994), the definition of acts usually identified with sanctions range from the withdrawal of military aid to steps that involve the active destabilization of the target government. Acts conventionally identified with "economic sanctions," in other words, occur on both sides of the concepts of international law. Rediscovering the separation between those distinctions is an important purpose of this essay. Perhaps the most striking feature of what Hendrickson calls the “democratist crusade” is its illegality under the traditional standards of international law, which forbids intervention in the internal affairs of states. Hendrickson lists the following supporting points:

First, the fact that these contradictory norms appear side by side in international legal documents.
Second, nowhere in the charters and declarations that ostensibly speak for all people are authorization given to employ either economic or military coercion to fulfill the rights proclaimed.
Third, there is a striking contrast between the purported near universal agreement on these norms and the lack of real consensus among existing nations and regimes. (Hendrickson, 20)

The author finds that the role of American leadership clearly seems to be crucial to the success or failure of sanctions. Normally, the consensus is achieved through American pressure, and it often happens that states swallow their real misgivings over the wisdom of U.S. action so as not to put at risk their relations with this country.

Drezner (1998) discusses how governments continue to implement economic sanctions despite the fact that there is little theoretical understanding of why or what determines success. Drezner develops a simple game-theoretical model of economic coercion to demonstrate that both senders and targets include expectations of future conflict as well as the short-term costs in their choices. Senders who anticipate numerous conflicts are more willing to initiate economic sanctions, even if costly. Senders that anticipate few conflicts will not threaten economic sanctions unless the costs are minimal to them and costly to the target. Target states that anticipate frequent conflict will make fewer concessions then if fewer conflicts were anticipated.

Drezner concludes that both sender and target governments will rationally calculate the respective costs to themselves before deciding to either impose sanctions or concede to them. Also, he suggests further studies to determine the impact of domestic factors and how governments choose their policy options.

Current research, while discussing the possibilities of predictive utility, has not wedded the predictive analytics of game theory with the realities of political interaction. This study will attempt to demonstrate that outcomes can be predicted using game theory, thereby providing sender governments a way to determine in advance the effectiveness of coercive diplomacy, and target governments the benefits or follies of balking.

METHODOLOGY

Hufbauer, et al describe incidences of economic sanctions as involving two parties:

“Sender:” The government applying the sanctions
“Target:” The government the Sender is attempting to coerce.

Occasionally, there are also other “players” such as allies of either party, or both, or organizations such as the United Nations, perhaps acting as mediators. However, to keep the ideas as clear and uncluttered as possible, the focus here will be solely on the two primary participants.

This study will utilize three situational concepts of Eaton and Engers:

I Imposing Hegemony

A sender seeking dominance over a number of potential targets, reasoning that successful application of sanctions with one target might convince others that resistance is futile.

II Stubborn Targets

Governments that assess that the costs of compliance are higher than the
costs of resistance. This forces the Sender’s hand in favor of punishment of the Target. This also requires the Sender to continually reassess the cost of continuing the actions in the face of the Targets’ balking.

III Pitbulls and Paper Tigers

Some governments repeatedly threaten sanctions but rarely follow through, or if they do, retract them when the Target shows resistance. This demonstrates to other targets that it is beneficial to stand up to the Sender, knowing retraction will likely follow. Other Senders are far more belligerent, following through on threatened sanctions and refusing to negotiate anything but total compliance.

Eaton and Engers provide a set of theoretical models forecasting each situation, which, even though not operationalized, are a solid framework for predictive analysis.

Eaton and Engers, for the purposes of these analytics, determine that the maximum cost to either sender or target is a value of 1. From that we construct this simple matrix:

Table 1
SENDER COST TARGET COST
Target Complies 0 1
Target Balks 1 0

For the sender, we identify the cost as Ps. For the target, Pt. Hufbauer, et al quantify the sender’s cost on a scale of 1-4, which we will alter to 0, .25, .50, .75, and 1.00 to keep the value synonymous with the maximum gain or loss of 1. The other element that requires definition is the discount factor, d. For that, we turn to Fudenberg and Tirole (p. 111) who refer to this as the “average discounted payoff.” This is interpreted as the percent of demands actually achieved through economic sanctions. An analysis of all 115 cases in the Hufbauer, et al database, determines that targets, which, for ease of computation will be rounded to 85%, met 84.37% of demands. In condition 1, “Imposing Hegemony,” for the sender to make punishment of the target worthwhile, sender’s cost must be less than the value in the following equation:

Ps <>

The sender controls the level of punishment of both the sender and the target Inserting the values, we find: .85 1-.85 = .56 Thus, if the sender’s punishment is greater than .56, than the imposition of sanctions will not be worthwhile since cost will be greater than possible gain. For condition 2, “Stubborn Targets,” a new variable is introduced, q. Eaton and Engers identify this value as “stubbornness” (Eaton and Engers, 411). For the purposes of this investigation, q will be valued as the amount of time in years the target resists, or balks, against the sanctions. Thus the expected returns must be higher (negative values and positive values treated equally):

(1-q) - qPs

For the sanctions to be worthwhile to the sender they must satisfy the stronger condition:

Ps < (1-q)ds 1- (1-q)ds

Under condition 3, “Pitbulls and Paper Tigers,” the target would accede after seeing one instance of punishment:

pPt > 1

For the target government to make the decision to balk, it must assess the resolve of the sender, here identified by the variable p. If the assumptions is made that the sender might threaten sanctions and not impose them, or if imposed sanctions will be either ameliorated to some degree or completely withdrawn if challenged, the target assumes that the sender is a Paper Tiger. If, on the other hand, the target perceives the sender as fully resolved to carry the coercive policy to the point of imposing sanctions and keeping them in place until the target concedes, the sender is a Pit Bull. The key to this perception is the sender’s immediate past history. The question posed is how often this government is challenged and what were the results? The value l refers to the type of sender based on it’s last interaction. Note here that Eaton and Engers acknowledge that there is often a difference between one’s perception and the situational reality. For both p and l the values will be 1.0 for a Pit Bull and 0.5 for a Paper Tiger. The amount of time between the imposition of punishment and the next instance when the Target feels balking is worthwhile is termed the “cycle of compliance” and is identified by the superscript t. (Eaton and Engers, 411).

The target then assesses the sender:

p = 1 + (2l - 1)t
2

From this basis, the target can now assess the risks of resistance before serious damage is done to its economy.

Data from following selected case studies in the Hufbauer, et al database will be operationalized and applied to the calculations. In this way, the outcome of the computations will be compared with the known historical results and the predictability will be proved.

REVIEW OF CASE STUDIES

To provide the most simplified inputs to the Eaton and Engers computations, six case studies from the Hufbauer, et al database have been selected. Three of them received a success score of 16, indicating significant success; the other three received scores of 1, indicating outright failure. Selecting cases from the extreme ends of the database spectrum should provide the Eaton and Engers framework ample opportunity to successfully “predict” the outcome that is already historically known.

Case 58-1
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics v. Finland

In April 1948, the Soviet Union and Finland concluded a Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance. Under the terms of this agreement, Finland was obligated to maintain friendly relations with the Soviet Union. Accordingly, Finnish President J. K. Paasikivi announced that Finland would “do nothing in conflict with the interests of the Soviet Union.” Finland therefore declined aid from the Marshall Plan.

In 1958, however, Finland moved to expand trade with Western Europe, causing a significant drop in Soviet imports. The Finnish mark was devalued by 39% and compulsory licensing requirements were removed on imports from the West. Then in July of that year, parliamentary elections led to the formation of a cabinet by a Social Democrat. Criticism in the Soviet press was immediate and harsh. In October, a political cartoon lampooning Nikita Khrushchev in a Finnish newspaper drew an official protest from the Soviet government. The Russians also requested that Finland block publication of the memoirs of an anti-Soviet Finnish Communist. The USSR then recalled their ambassador from Helsinki and delayed the signing of a fishing rights agreement for the Gulf of Finland. Discussions on ruble credit were suspended, as were talks on the lease of the Saimaaa Canal and planning for a power plant in the Soviet Union, which would have served Finland. Scientific, technical and trade meetings were postponed and Finnish imports were suspended. By winter of 1958 unemployment in Finland reached a record 100,000 and unemployment relief became the largest single line item in the Finnish budget.

On December 4, 1958, Social Democrat Prime Minister Fagerholm, now persona non grata with the Soviet Government resigned. President Kekkonen visited Leningrad and assured Khrushchev of Finland’s “good neighborliness” and agreed to purchase an additional 450,000 tons of Soviet petroleum. Trade negotiations, commerce, and normal relations resumed.

In this, the early years of the Cold War the Soviet Union, ever conscious of their borders, perceived that Finland was, through trade, moving into a closer relationship with the West. Anxious to protect what was for them a very necessary buffer state, the Soviets moved with dispatch to coerce Finland into returning to the fold. The effort was successful, even to the point of toppling a government. The relative cost to the Soviet Economy was minor, which bears out Eaton and Engers conclusion that success is “...more likely when the threatened measure costs the sender little relative to the gain from modifying the target’s behavior, while the damage to the target is large relative to his cost of complying with the senders will.” (Eaton and Engers, 409)

This incident would best be addressed by Section I of Eaton and Engers, entitled “Imposing Hegemony.” Eaton and Engers write, “We first must consider a sender seeking dominance over a bevy of potential targets. How she deals with one affects future relations with others.” (Eaton and Engers, 410) Clearly, it was in the best interests of the Soviet Union to demonstrate to other Eastern European states the risks inherent in moving too close in relations with the West.

For this case, Hufbauer, et al, assess that cost at .50, therefore making it less than the previously discussed value of .56, thereby making sanctions worthwhile. Likewise, the target can predict if balking would produce a cost to them greater than 1.0. Dividing the percent of cost to Finland’s GDP by the ratio of Finland’s GDP to that of the Soviet Union, we see:

Pt = 1.1
.58 = 1.89

Since the cost to Finland is 1.89, which is greater than the maximum cost 1.0, Finland must comply with Soviet demands.

Case 40-1
United States
v.
Empire of Japan

The enmity between Japan and the United States can be traced back to the passage of the Anti-Japanese Immigration Act near the turn of the 20th century. However, the seminal events that led directly to war occurred during the period April 1940 through December 7, 1941. Japan, having occupied Manchuria since 1931, in April 1940 bombed rail links between Indochina and China, which were being used by France to move munitions to China. In June, Japan demanded, and received assurances from the government of the Netherlands East Indies of continued shipments of oil. Japan, an island nation, had no oil of their own and was utterly dependent on imports. The U.S. Congress then passed the National Defense Act, giving President Roosevelt authority to control U.S. exports to Japan and Germany.

On the 17th of that month, France surrendered to Germany and, and acceding to Japanese demands, halted all military shipments from Indochina to China. On July 2nd, President Roosevelt licensed exports of various metals and equipment. On the 12th, Britain gave in to Japanese demands and closed overland transport routes from Burma and Hong Kong to China. Between the 18th and 20th of July, the United States, in cooperation with Great Britain, imposed a partial embargo on Japan, fearing a full embargo would precipitate Japanese moves against the East Indies.

In September, Japan asked the Netherlands East Indies to supply 3 million tons of oil annually for five years. The Dutch government stalled, and asked the United States not to embargo oil while the negotiations were in progress. Two weeks later, on the 24th, the Japanese Army moved some units into Indochina. Three days after that, the Tripartite Pact is concluded, linking Japan, Germany, and Italy into the Axis Powers.

In April 1941, the Japanese and the Soviet Union signed a neutrality pact. In June, talks between Japan and the Indies broke down, with Japan receiving less than half of the rubber and tin requested. Three days later, spurred by domestic scarcity, Roosevelt embargoed oil shipments from the U.S. east coast to Japan, while maintaining shipments to Britain. Then on July 26th, Roosevelt froze Japanese assets and limited Japan to pre-war limits on petroleum products. Britain followed by freezing Japanese assets and renouncing trade treaties. On the 28th the Netherlands East Indies limited all exports to Japan and embargoed exports of tin and rubber. Japan responded with a major movement of troops and warships into Indochina.

In August and September 1941, despite repeated Japanese requests, the U.S. refused to recognized Japanese hegemony over East Asia. Prime Minister Konoye was rebuffed twice in attempts to meet personally with Roosevelt. Konoye’s failure to win concessions from the United States and Great Britain led directly to the collapse of his government in October. He was replaced by General Hideki Tojo who then internally set a deadline by which the decision to go to war became irrevocable. Finally, on December 7, 1941, Japanese forces commenced a broad attack in the Pacific from Southeast Asia to Pearl Harbor, beginning World War II.

The initial goal of the United States was to limit Japanese aggression in China. The situation rapidly deteriorated into one in which the Roosevelt administration found itself trying to prevent the outbreak of war throughout the Western Pacific. Once the Japanese government had decided on a policy of aggression, there was apparently no measure the western allies could take that would have deterred that action, short of agreeing to conditions that were little better than surrender. Instead of being the lesson that was intended, the sanctions proved to be a challenge, one that Japan gladly accepted. Hufbauer, et al assessed this incident as a 1, an outright failure.

In reviewing Eaton and Engers, this situation fits the requirements of section II, entitled “Stubborn Targets.” Eaton and Engers note, “Sanctions deter only those targets for whom the punishment’s pain outweighs the benefits of balking.” (Eaton and Engers, 411) It also points out a fundamental weakness in any kind of diplomacy. If your opponent has made a positive decision to go to war, especially a society with a warrior tradition where martial feelings run high, it is unlikely that any external influence will deter that intended action.

The value .75 represents Hufbauer, et al’s assessment of Sender’s Punishment. Thus, for the imposition of economic sanctions to be worthwhile, the sender must calculate the maximum possible return:

(1- 40) - 40 x .75 = .69

Then calculate the maximum possible cost of the sanctions:

.75 < (1- 40).85 = 0.9 1- (1-40).85

Since the cost .9 exceeds the expected return .69, sanctions would not be worthwhile in this case. Likewise, for Japan, the strategy of resistance to sanctions is a good one.

Case 61-1 United States v. Ceylon In January 1961 Socialist Prime Minister Sirivamo Bandaranaike of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) introduced a bill to create the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation. The new enterprise actually consisted of expropriated assets of United States and British oil companies. The British and American governments filed diplomatic protests, warning that expropriation would deter private investment in Ceylon. Ceylon replied that the USSR would sell oil to them at 25 percent below market price.

From April through June, Ceylon Petroleum Corporation (CPC) expropriated approximately 20 percent of private company service stations and concluded a deal for favorable oil supplies from Soviet Bloc suppliers. In July, U.S. Ambassador Francis Willis warned that unless American oil companies were compensated, aid from Washington might be terminated. Accordingly, on August 1st, President Kennedy signed the Hickenlooper amendment, authored by Bourke Hickenlooper (R-IA), which barred aid to countries that expropriated U.S. property. However, not until January 1963 did the United States warn Ceylon of possible sanctions under Hickenlooper unless compensation talks moved forward.

Finally, in February David Bell, director of the U.S. Agency for International Development suspended aid to Ceylon, which responded by imposing a low ceiling price on imported oil, warning companies that failure to maintain supplies would result in complete nationalization. In January 1964, after the halt in petroleum shipments, Ceylon expropriated the remaining retail outlets. Ironically, CPC continued to purchase products from Esso, CALTEX, and Shell. By April of 1964, the Minister of Trade, Tl Bl Ilangaratne ordered the Ceylonese compensation tribunal to work quickly. The delay by the tribunal had cost Ceylon valuable aid. Then in March 1965, the Socialist Bandaranaike government fell to the conservative United National Party, which had used as its campaign theme a promise to settle the dispute within 24 hours.

The preliminary agreement was reached March 27, and the final agreement on June 23 provided a total of $11.6 million to the three oil companies.

Throughout United States history the interests of the nation’s companies have paralleled, or become the interests of the government. In this case, two of the three companies, Esso and CALTEX were American and the economic pressure brought to bear by the government brought induced a desperate situation for Ceylon, which ensured compliance with the demands.

Hufbauer, et al assessed this case as 16, a significant success. In Eaton and Engers, this situation fits the pattern of part III, “Pit Bulls and Paper Tigers,” with the United States playing a convincing pit bull. This situation takes the stubborn target case one step further. In this case, the observed pattern of the U.S. was as follows:

Table 2

Date of Sanctions Target Government Hufbauer, et al score

7/54 North Vietnam 1

11/56 U.K./ France 12

7/58 Laos 9

9/60 Dominican Republic 16

10/63 Cuba 1

The table has the U.S. imposing sanctions about every two years with mixed results including one outright success, two failures, and two others occupying a middle ground. Clearly, by observing this pattern, Ceylon might have perceived that challenging this particular hegemon might be worthwhile. The last chronological interaction prior to this case was United States v. Cuba, which because of the result, left the U.S. as a paper tiger and therefore vulnerable to balking, at least in the eyes of Ceylon. Another variable, superscript t, refers to the time between successful interactions, which, after analyzing the table, we will assign the number 4, representing the number of years between successful interactions. Inserting values previously discussed, we see:

p = 1 2

With Pt = 375 = 62.5 6

Hence, (.5)62.5 > 1
31.25 > 1

We can see here that the assumption of Paper Tiger status for the United States would be a serious mistake on the part of Ceylon by several orders of magnitude. Now, let us run this calculation again, now assuming a value of 1.0, the value of a Pit Bull:
p = 1

(1.0)62.5>1

62.5 > 1

In both situations Ceylon must comply regardless of the past record of the U.S. The disparity in resources and strength between the two countries is simply too great to overcome.

Case 48-3
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
v.
United States, United Kingdom, and Republic of France.

Within three years of the end of World War II, serious disputes had arisen between the Soviet Union and her former allies the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Republic of France. The dispute first centered on the occupied territories of the former Nazi Germany, particularly Berlin. Predictably, the imposition of a totalitarian state in the Soviet Zone of Occupation, known as East Berlin, caused a flood of emigration to the West. To slow the movement the Soviet Military Administration in Berlin imposed restrictions on Germans traveling from East Germany to NATO-held areas of Berlin on March 10, 1948. On March 30, the Soviets imposed rail and highway restrictions between those areas. The restrictions were progressively broadened to include freight routes, barge traffic on the Elbe River, and tighter travel restrictions, all in June 1948. Finally, on June 24, the Soviets imposed a complete blockade around Berlin. NATO responded with the famous “Berlin Airlift” which kept vital supplies flowing into the blockaded areas. The West then responded with a blockade it’s own, stopping all traffic and manufactured goods from it’s zones into the Soviet zone. Despite the Soviet efforts, the West German government was created in Bonn in May 1949 and Berlin, despite being geographically isolated from the west, refused to be folded into East Germany. The blockade was lifted by the Soviets on May 12 and the Berlin Airlift was terminated by September 30.
Hufbauer, et al assessed this case as a 1, an outright failure. This situation is best fitted in Eaton and Enger’s Section III, with the Soviets anticipating Paper Tigers in the west.

While the imposition of the original blockade around Berlin was intended to coerce the Allies into abandoning Berlin, the counter blockade inflicted far more cost on the Soviet Union since most of the manufactured goods and machinery in Russia came from the West through Berlin. In this case, roles were gradually reversed. The USSR was initially the sender, but became the target. The Allies, on the other hand, were initially the targets, but became the senders, and the victors.

As before, the first step should be an assessment of the sender’s immediate past. However, this was the Soviet Union’s first foray into sanctions imposition, so the West had little information other than the surety that the Soviet government would be more likely to react strongly to any outside attempts to limit the exercise of it’s policy.

Assuming this resulted in a perception of a pit bull,
pPt > 1
(1.0)0.1 > 1
0.4

(1.0)0.25 > 1
.25 > 1
Since 0.25 is most definitely not greater than 1, the West should see that even if sanctions are imposed by the Soviets, they could be resisted successfully. However, there is another side to the outcome of this case, since the counter-sanctions imposed by the West were far more successful. So by reversing roles, we see:

(1.0)0.4 > 1
0.1

(1.0)4 > 1
4 > 1
So, from the standpoint of the West not only are counter-sanctions advisable, but also can be and were highly successful.

Case 75-1
United States and Dominion of Canada
v
Republic of Korea

The mutual strategy of M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction) waged by the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War kept the nightmare of nuclear conflict alive for the entire world. Not only was there a very real fear of a catastrophic showdown between the two primary antagonists, but also the fear that states or groups with far less to lose, and therefore far less to risk, might obtain weapons for their own regional uses. Such was the case in 1974 when the Republic of Korea, commonly known as South Korea, attempted to obtain for itself a nuclear capability. In January 1974, the South Korean government approached France with questions about obtaining a nuclear reprocessing plant. Simultaneously, the Koreans negotiated the purchase of a heavy-water reactor from Canada. “Heavy Water” is a liquid containing lithium in water suspension and was, at that time, essential to the manufacture of weapons-grade materials.

In March 1975, the National Assembly ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which the government signed in 1968. However, in May the Korean government closed a deal with Canada on the 600-megawatt heavy water reactor. At about the same time a bill requesting approval of a $315 million loan for the R.O.K. from the U.S. Export-Import Bank was submitted to the U.S. Congress. In June, the South Korean government publicly disclosed its intention to buy the reprocessing plant from France. The United States knew that the possession of even the capability of weapons construction would seriously destabilize the fragile peace between North and South Korea as well as prompt the Soviet Union to provide a similar capability for the North, thereby increasing tensions between the Superpowers in an already volatile region of the world. Knowing this, the United States and Canada pressured South Korea not to go forward with the purchase of the plant by tightening the financing terms of nuclear transactions. The United States in particular threatened to block the purchase of reactors for peaceful purposes.
Then, on January 29, 1976, the U.S. government announced that the South Korean government had decided that the purchase of the reprocessing plant was not in its interests, remarking, “The United States made the strongest possible representation to the Korean and French governments.” (Hufbauer, et al 383) In an interview with the Washington Post on June 12, 1975, President Park Chung Hee stated, “If the United States withdraws their nuclear umbrella, we shall have to develop our own nuclear capacity to defend ourselves.” (Hufbauer, et al 374)

While the lever brought to bear on the Korean government only consisted of words, it was nonetheless effective in diverting the Koreans from embarking on a dangerous and destabilizing course of action. Accordingly, Hufbauer, et al rates this case as a 16, significant success. This situation fits Eaton and Enger’s part I, with the United States successfully imposing itself as the West’s Cold War hegemon.

As before, for the sender, Hufbauer, et al identifies the cost as Ps = .5, which falls within the permissible limit of .56 discussed previously. The U.S. and Canada can proceed with the sanctions, if necessary. For the target,
Pt = 87 = 12.79
6.8
Since this value is far in excess of the maximum allowed value of 1.0, South Korea must comply. In this case, the Korean government apparently read the cards correctly since the situation was resolved before sanctions were actually imposed.

Case 78-5
United States
v
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The United States has always championed the cause of human rights throughout the world despite some less than savory episodes in it’s own history. Throughout the Cold War a frequent target of the U.S.’s complaints was it’s ideological adversary, the Soviet Union.

From spring 1977 through summer 1978 Soviet dissidents Alksandr Ginzburg and Anatoly Shcharansky were arrested and charged with high treason. The United States, through Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, condemned the arrests and trials and responded by canceling a planned visit by a scientific and environmental protection delegation. President Carter denied that either man had been a spy for U.S. Intelligence and promised to “let the Soviets know of our displeasure.” (Hufbauer, et al 487) Ginzburg and Shcharansky were subsequently found guilty and sentenced to exile and several years in prison and labor camps. Shortly after the convictions were handed down the White House canceled the sale of a computer to the Soviet Press Agency Tass and announced that exports of oil technology to the USSR would require validated licenses, thus giving the Department of Commerce a case-by-case review and veto power over the exports. The Soviets responded by purchasing a similar computer from the French. However, on April 27, 1979, Ginzburg and four other dissidents were exchanged in New York for two convicted Soviet spies.

In January 1980, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Commerce Department suspended all outstanding validated licenses and new applications for the sale of oil and gas field technology. Finally in February 1986, Shcharansky and three westerners detained for allegedly spying were exchanged in Berlin for three Soviets imprisoned in West Germany. Shcharansky was released separately to avoid the implication that he was a part of the exchange. On January 15, 1987, Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldridge lifted the license controls “despite our dissatisfaction with Soviet human rights efforts” but that “it is no longer in our national interest” to maintain them unilaterally. (Hufbauer, et al 488) Hufbauer, et al assessed the result of this case as 1, outright failure. Eaton and Enger’s section II, stubborn targets, applies to this case.
We start by valuating q as the amount of time in years the target resists, or balks, against the sanctions, in this case 9. Ps is rated at .5. Thus the expected returns must be higher (negative values and positive values treated equally):

(1-q) - qPs

or,
(1- 9) - 9 x .50 = 12.5

Thus, for the imposition of economic sanctions to be worthwhile,

Ps < (1-q)ds 1- (1-q)ds 12.5 < (1-9).85 1- (1-9).85 12.5 < -.68 .78 12.5 <>

We can see that while the United States might have held the moral high ground, economic sanctions in this case would have been, and the imposition was, a waste of time and effort.

FINDINGS

In each of the six cases, data from the Hufbauer, et al database were operationalized and inserted into the Eaton and Engers equations. Each of the three conditions (Imposing Hegemony, Stubborn Targets, and Pitbulls/Paper Tigers) was tested twice and the results were very successful. In each case, the proposed solutions were proven (see table 3). It has been shown that it is possible to for a target to use a reliable method to successfully predict if economic sanctions would be effective in a given situation, and if a target’s resistance to sanctions could be survivable.

Table 3

Case Condition Must Prove Proof

USSR v. Finland

Imp. Hegemony

Ps <> 1.0 1.89 > 1.0

US v. Japan

Stubborn Target

Ps <>

US v. Ceylon

Pitbull/Paper Tiger

cost and perception of 31.25 > 1.0
sender > 1.0

USSR v. Allies

Pitbull/Paper Tiger

cost and perception of 0.25 > 1.0
sender > 1.0 (sanctions fail)

US/Can. v. ROK

Imp. Hegemony

Ps <> 1.0 12.79 > 1.0

US v. USSR

Stubborn Target

Ps <>

For each side to fully utilize this method it will be necessary to fully and coolly assess the costs to the respective economies absent the inflated rhetoric that so often accompanies these occasions. Failure to do so could embark the subject government on a path to disaster. It should be noted also that these are economic considerations only. Quantifying the political fallout, both domestic and international, is far more difficult. Those assessments are often far more instinctive and highly situational and lie beyond the scope of this project.

CONCLUSION

Game theory, if carefully applied, is relevant to real-world data. It is altogether possible to carefully assess the relative weaknesses and strengths of two economies and be able to judge the appropriateness of economic sanctions in a given situation. Given this information, governments can make informed, calculated decisions whether it is the sender or the target. As we have also seen, governments, which fail to take those dangers fully into account, court disaster with their nations fiscal health. The hypothesis previously stated, that governments should weigh the cost of imposing economic sanctions against the gain realized by coercing a policy change in a target government, has been proven by the data presented. It only remains for the respective governments to insure that when they reach for the weapon of economic sanctions, that there are sufficient economic bullets to complete the job.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

The knowledge of game theory applied to this study was admittedly rudimentary. It is suggested that others with more extensive knowledge and experience explore this subject with greater depth.

Even in the best light, economic sanctions are not the magic potion of diplomacy they are reputed to be. Governments need to have a reliable method of judging in advance if sanctions, or some other method might be more appropriate to the situation. The world continues to change and the perpetuation of stability and the ability to control instability in international politics will go a long way towards smoothing the road ahead. Eventually, there will have to be a more effective method of coercive diplomacy. The discovery of that method should be a top priority among specialists in the field of international economics and political science.

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