Mosque push back

Excellent pieces in The New York Times today by Frank Rich, Nicholas Kristoff and Maureen Dowd (I stopped reading her a few years ago, but she wrote three great pieces this week and is writing like an adult again) on the proposed Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero.

Rich in particular points out that lost in this stupid debate over the proposed Muslim YMCA (or YuMMA if it's for Muslims*) is how demonizing Islam really hurts our fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.  Newt Gingrich's statements alone will make an excellent Al Qaeda recruitment video.  And nothing would please Osama bin Laden more than to see a moderate and open minded iman lose this fight to build the cultural center in the land of free.

To say nothing of the fact that two mosques already exist near Ground Zero, as does a strip club. 

This has been a sordid and sad week for our Republic.  I've already blogged on the 'Obama is a Muslim poll.' My initial take was it loudly demonstrated the stupidity of 1 in 5 Americans.  But I want to fine tune that assessment; I think that poll - and the right wing hysteria over the proposed cultural center - primarily underscores how ideological many Americans are in the age of Fox News and the media/internet echo chamber.

There are way too many Americans who do not care about the facts, whose ideology makes it impossible for them to think straight. There are myriad causes for that. Right wingers see a black guy with a name like Obama and assume he's a Muslim/socialist/fill in blank. Many baby boomers and ex-hippies think 'feel' is more important that facts. So a boomer like George W. Bush invades Iraq despite there being no proof of weapons of mass destruction because he 'feels' that an enemy like Saddam Hussein MUST have some.  

And of course his fellow boomer, Bill Clinton, chose 'feel' over facts quite a bit in his personal life.

I think the anti-Islamic Community Center folks will trigger a backlash. Being mean, to put it simply, may resonate in the short term but makes you look bigoted and un-American in the long term. That's been true with supporters of slavery, Jim Crow, anti-Catholic and anti-immigrants groups, etc. etc. The arc of American history almost always - eventually - bends towards justice and the expansion of personal freedoms.

How ironic that a party currently dominated by ideologues who want less government are so determined to restrict a groups religious freedom?  Or so strongly opposes the right to everyone to get married.

But I also like the fact that Obama is back on message and calling for tolerance.  The courage of his convictions, and our American values, should win out in the case of the Ground Zero Islamic center.

And if the President needs more inspiration he should look to the Prime Minister of Turkey.  Yes, Turkey.

Last Sunday, the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew was allowed to celebrate the Dormition of the Theotokos (the falling asleep in the Lord of the Virgin Mary) in the formerly Greek city of Trabzon (in the Pontic region of modern Turkey).  As it is here in the world's greatest nation/democracy, right-wing nationalists attacked Turkey's Prime Minister Tayip Erdogan for allowing the Patriarch to a) leave Constantinople and b) hold the service in a former Orthodox monastary.

For an interesting take on this story check out this column in the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet.

Erdogan's response is equally apt for New York and Turkey: “Whoever believes in his ideas does not fear freedom of ideas."  The Prime Minister added that critics of allowing the ceremony "create a climate of fear to provoke unrest."  

That's what ideologues do, and hopefully they will not get away with it here in the land of the free and the land of brave.

* for the record, yumma is made with pine nuts NOT chick peas).

Accountability

Lots of things to mull over regarding accountability in today's Sunday papers, both in Greece and here in the US.


Regarding Greece, accountability has never been a virtue at least in modern times.  Ancient Athens did hold folks accountable. Every year they would vote on among other things who they wanted to expel from the city.  Names were written on a broken piece of pottery - that's what 'ostracism' means, broken pottery - and who ever got the most votes had to leave Athens.


But in modern Greece accountability is very weak.  After the doomed invasion of central Asia Minor after World War I - Greece was given northwestern Asia Minor including Smyrna in recognition of ethnic Greek majorities there and for being on the winning side of that war, but overdid it by invading central Turkey and getting their butts kicked and expelled, with many civilians massacred - members of the military were held accountable but not the royalist rulers who ordered the invasion.


After the Nazi's withdrew from Greece at the end of World War II, the collaborators who governed the nation were never prosecuted or even fired.  The Greek resistance was led by the left, including many Communists.  The collaborators who worked with the Nazi's told the Brits and Americans who entered the newly liberated Greece that they should be kept in place to fight the Communists.  The US and UK said okay, and a civil war took place when the left (resistance) and right (collaborators) could not work out a political agreement.


I think Greece is the only country in Nazi-occupied Europe that did not prosecute or at least disqualify from running for office Greek quislings.


That legacy is alive in well in Greece, and you see it in everything from the comical way Greeks park on the side walk, knowing that they can't get towed (the streets are too narrow) and there are no consequences for not paying a ticket. 


And there are serious problems for the state when thousands if not millions of Greeks fail to pay income taxes. The low payment of income taxes - some estimate that 40 percent of Greeks do not file income tax returns - severely hurts a country famously trying to solve a serious economic crisis and pay their bills, obligations and fund their generous pensions.


That lack of accountability and the belief that not everyone is playing by the rules is one reason Greeks are so cynical about their own nation, and why Greece is in serious financial trouble.


Here in the US we face some similar issues with Wall Street. Frank Rich talked about the need for more accountability for Wall Street and the Fed today in the NY Times.  In his column Rich does not relate the problems with both to Hellenism, but he does point out that guys like Alan Greenspan sound very Greek: none of this is my fault!


One reason accountability is important is to get history right.  If no one is held accountable for their actions the bad guys will try to spin their way out of the blame, witness what Greenspan and Robert Rubin told investigators last week.


And look at Virginia declaring April 'Confederate History Month' without talking about slavery.  The apologists for the Civil War keep talking about states rights instead of slavery - or the more elemental fact that the south did not want to be part of the US, the nation of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. They chose to defend and fight for slavery and reject the two greatest documents and ideals ever put to paper, the ideals that define the United States.


But even if slavery never existed, does it make sense to celebrate taking up arms against the American flag and Constitution?  No matter what you were defending, doing that makes you one thing, a traitor.  Why does Virginia (and other states like South Carolina) want to celebrate that?


During Reconstruction the U.S. did hold ex-Confederates accountable; Jefferson Davis for instance was arrested and served two years in prison.  He and other former Confederates where prohibited from running for office or joining the US military.  After 12 years Reconstruction ended (in part to settle the deadlocked presidential election of 1876).  Once Reconstruction ended - and US troops left - the south quickly moved to enact Jim Crow laws and disenfranchise ex-slaves.  Public sentiment in the north was indifferent, so they got away with it.  The U.S. government just gave up on Reconstruction, so I guess in addition to accountability you need persistence.

Looking to 2010

Looking ahead to 2010, past the college basketball national championship (but you should still vote in the poll) and the debut of Steven Strasburg, to the mid-term elections I think things will eventually turn out well for President Obama and the nation.


This non-sports blog was prompted by yesterday's Frank Rich column, The Missing Link from Killeen to Kabul.  The column was about the double standard conservatives apply to the war on terror and how the United States relates to Muslims, both in the U.S. and in south Asia and the Middle East.  On one hand conservatives see the killings at Ft. Hood as proof that we can never work with or help Muslims.  On the other, they say they want more troops in Afghanistan, but those troops would be deployed to work with and help Muslims.


So which one is it? If conservatives think working with Muslims is hopeless, they should support pulling out all of troops - from both Iraq and Afghanistan (and I assume from Bosnia, where I think we still have troops, and Egypt, too).


But Rich's column reminded me of John McNamara's book "In Retrospective."  I remember reading that book on the beach in Cape Hatteras one summer and feeling equal parts sympathy and disgust for McNamara as he tried to deflect the blame for Vietnam.


However, Rich's column did not prompt me to blog about the parallel's between Afghanistan and Vietnam, though there are some obvious ones: long meandering wars initially supported by a public that eventually elects a president who pledges to end it - though in fairness that would make Obama Nixon even though Obama pledged to get us out of Iraq NOT Afghanistan; in order to win, we end up pushing the war into a neighboring country, Cambodia/Pakistan, with terrible consequences.  


For a number of reasons let's hope none of THAT happens, especially to nuclear-armed Pakistan, a country with a moderate and modern Muslim majority.


Of course, the big difference is that Vietnam wanted to be modern, and post-war integrated itself into the world economy so fast that the country is now full of factories cranking out sneakers for Nike and linens for Crate and Barrel.  Whereas many Afghans think the west is out to destroy Islam and therefore want nothing to do with us or any other infidels (silly Taliban; the only infidels are folks who root against the Tar Heels!  Had to get the Heels in here somewhere).


Anyway, back to McNamara's book.  One thing he noted, an item I have repeated ever since, is that politics is physics: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  In "In Retrospective" McNamara claims that around 1967 LBJ and the administration had concluded that the Vietnam War was unwinnable, and that we should start to pull our troops out and reduce the aerial bombing of North Vietnam.  


But when the President floated this idea with members of Congress, hawks like John Stennis and others on the Armed Services committee teamed up with members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to resist.  They pushed back even though they did not have a plan to win the war.  They did not want to stop fighting it - Stennis wanted to escalate the bombings, which the US did after Nixon was elected in 1968 - even though we were not winning the war.  


The Johnson Administration was afraid Congressional hawks would call a peaceful retreat from Vietnam a defeat, America's first lost war. The President did not have the stomach for that political fight, did not withdraw our troops, and the war went on for another 5 years.   


I'm certainly not eloquent enough to blog about how tragic Johnson's decision to continue the war - even though his team of advisors knew we were losing - was.   But remember that half the names on the Vietnam Memorial, half of the 56,000 dead Americans, happened AFTER 1968.  As John Kerry asked in 1971, "how do you ask a man to be the last one to die for a mistake?"


I hope President Obama has the political courage to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan.  There will be a fierce reaction from hawks like Cheney, Beck and others.  But it is the right thing to do.  We've been mired in Afghanistan for eight years, with almost nothing to show for it.  I agree with Vice President Biden, who has proposed drastically drawing down troop levels but actively pursuing the Taliban and other terrorists there using Special Forces, the CIA, etc.  


Pulling our troops out would also force the Afghans to fix their politics - something the South Vietnamese never did. 


Finally, pulling out is good politics.  The public is way ahead of Washington on this one, and I think the unease about Obama is coming as much from the NPR left as it is from the loony right.  I'm confident that the Obama folks will remember that, and nothing helps an elected official remember like an election.  


So do not be surprised if the President announces drastic troop reductions for both Iraq and Afghanistan next summer, a summer than may end up putting a punctuation mark on two good years for the Obama Administration. Health care will likely pass in December 2009, a green jobs/climate bill in the spring, and hopefully after six months of economic growth folks will start hiring enough to put a meaningful dent in the unemployment rate (Carolina and Hellenic Blue's business plan, for instance, calls for expansion in the summer 2010 so dust off your resumes!).


Doing the right thing in Afghanistan and Iraq a few months before the mid-year elections may be cynical but it is still the right thing to do, and what a democracy should do.