Mighty Hunters, but Lousy Mothers

The New York Times

Neanderthal Women Joined Men in the Hunt
By NICHOLAS WADE

December 5, 2006

A new explanation for the demise of the Neanderthals, the stockily built human species that
occupied Europe until the arrival of modern humans 45,000 years ago, has been proposed by
two anthropologists at the University of Arizona.

Unlike modern humans, who had developed a versatile division of labor between men and
women, the entire Neanderthal population seems to have been engaged in a single main
occupation, the hunting of large game, the scientists, Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner, say in
an article posted online yesterday in Current Anthropology.

Because modern humans exploited the environment more efficiently, by having men hunt large
game and women gather small game and plant foods, their populations would have outgrown
those of the Neanderthals.

The Neanderthals endured for about 100,000 years, despite a punishing way of life. They
preyed on the large animals that flourished in Europe in the ice age like bison, deer, gazelles
and wild horses. But there is no evidence that they knew of bows and arrows. Instead, they
used stone-tipped spears.

Hunting large game at close range is perilous, and Neanderthal skeletons bear copious
fractures. Dr. Kuhn and Dr. Stiner argue that Neanderthal women and children took part in the
dangerous hunts, probably as beaters and blockers of exit routes.

Their argument, necessarily indirect, begins with the human hunter-gatherer societies, almost
all of which have a division of labor between the sexes.

At sites occupied by modern humans from 45,000 to 10,000 years ago, a period known as the
Upper Paleolithic, there is good evidence of different occupations, from small animal and bird
remains, as well as the bone awls and needles used to make clothes. It seems reasonable to
assume that these activities were divided between men and women, as is the case with modern
foraging peoples.

But Neanderthal sites include no bone needles, no small animal remains and no grinding
stones for preparing plant foods. So what did Neanderthal women do all day?

Their skeletons are so robustly built that it seems improbable that they just sat at home looking
after the children, the anthropologists write. More likely, they did the same as the men, with
the whole population engaged in bringing down large game.

The meat of large animals yields a rich payoff, but even the best hunters have unlucky days.
The modern humans of the Upper Paleolithic, with their division of labor and diversified food
sources, would have been better able to secure a continuous food supply. Nor were they putting
their reproductive core — women and children — at great risk.

David Pilbeam, a paleoanthropologist at Harvard, said the Arizona researchers’ article was
“very stimulating and thoughtful” and seemed to be the first to propose a mechanism for why
Neanderthal populations declined.

Dr. Stiner said the division of labor between the sexes was likely to have arisen in a tropical
environment. Indeed, it may have provided the demographic impetus for modern humans to
expand out of Africa, she said.

A rival hypothesis proposed by Richard Klein of Stanford University holds that some cognitive
advance like the perfection of language underlay the burst of innovative behavior shown by
Upper Paleolithic people and their predecessors in Africa.

Why did the Neanderthals fail to adapt when modern humans arrived on their doorstep?
Under Dr. Klein’s hypothesis, the reason is simply that they were cognitively less advanced.
Dr. Stiner said that in her view there was not time for them to change their culture. “Although
there may have been differences in neurological wiring,” she said, “I think another very
important key is the legacy of cultural institutions about social roles.” Is there a genetic basis to
the division of labor that emerged in the modern human lineage? “It’s equally compelling to
argue that most or all of this has a cultural basis,” Dr. Stiner said. “That’s where it’s very
difficult for people like us and Richard Klein to resolve the basis of our disagreement.”

Land for Peace?

Land for War

by

Abraham Berkowitz, John Bradford, and Tom Milstein

7/19/2006

“Land for Peace” is now acknowledged by everyone to have failed. This failure should
have been recognized long ago, but hope triumphed again and again over reality and
“the dream” persisted in clouding the consciousness of the Israeli people.
Israel has her definitive Arab-Islamic answer to “Land for Peace”: war, war to the
uttermost, not just against the Hovels of the Settlers on the West Bank (demonized as
the source of all Israel’s problems), but even against the Palace of Israel itself, “Green
Line” Israel, Israel inside its “proper borders.”

“Land for Peace” used to be Israel’s grand strategy. It has failed. It is time to try “Land
for War.” The “Land for War” strategy is predicated on the failure of its predecessor. If
the Arabs will not make peace with Israel in return for the ceding of land conquered in
1967 and the founding of a Palestinian state on that land, it is time for Israel to turn the
tables and adopt the opposite approach: instead of giving up land in return for (the hope
of) peace, Israel should announce a schedule of annexations of the land formerly slated
for withdrawal. This schedule should be shaped by the continuation of the terrorist War
on Israel. Step one – in response to the attacks already carried out– should be the
immediate annexation by the State of Israel of the territory lying between Jerusalem and
Ma'aleh Adumim. This annexation should be declared irrevocable. The schedule should
then lay out further steps and stages of irreversible annexation of territories conquered
in the Six-Day War, each in response to terrorist attacks against Israel, in whatever form
they take and wherever they occur. If the terrorism does not stop, Israel should commit
to continued implementation of the schedule until nothing is left to annex.

What the “Land for War” strategy does is to effectively put the terrorists in charge of the
Israel’s annexation program. It says to them, “Every time you attack Israel, you enlarge
the Jewish State, and you correspondingly diminish the Arab patrimony. It’s your
decision.”

This strategy will throw the Arab world into crisis, because while the Islamic extremists
of Hamas and Hizbollah don’t give a fig for the cause of Arab nationalism, the Middle
Eastern states which nurture and appease them do. Therefore “Land for War” will drive
a wedge between Arab nationalism and Islamic extremism. It will put the Islamists in
the role of gravediggers of the Palestinian state. It forces them to argue openly for the
supremacy of Islam over nationality. This is the great socio-political chasm of the Middle
East. A strategy which exploits this chasm is a strategy for victory rather than stalemate
and confusion.

Israel is bravely responding, as any self-respecting nation would, to the acts of
aggression perpetrated against her. But mere war, past a certain point, will only
perpetuate Israel’s no-win strategy. The time for a resolution of the Israel-Arab conflict
is at hand. Given the total failure of “Land for Peace” as a strategy, the necessary
political dimension of this war can only be supplied by “Land for War.” Neither the
Middle Eastern states nor the terrorist organizations which they harbor care about the
pain and suffering which Israel’ s military measures will inflict. In fact, these measures
by themselves have the effect of uniting nationalists and Islamic terrorists in a common
cause against the Jews. But the unfolding spectacle of Israeli annexation of Judea and
Samaria, step by inexorable and irreversible step, at a pace and to an extent dictated by
the terrorists themselves – that will have the opposite effect. It will devastate the anti-
Israel consensus in the Middle East and place the blame for Israel’s territorial
aggrandizement squarely on her supposed arch-enemies.

“Land for War” speaks to the Arabs in a language they understand: the language of lost
territory, the real and just price for starting and losing a war.

Abraham Berkowitz holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University in Political Science. He will be making
aliyah in August of this year.
John Bradford is an artist and teacher.
Tom Milstein is an Executive Director of a property management firm.
All currently reside in New York City.

Gedankenexperiment

Thought Experiment

By Tom A. Milstein

June 8, 2006

Einstein made fruitful use of a creative technique called the “thought experiment” (Gedankenexperiment),
by which he meant a purely intellectual experiment in physical science, impractical
to carry out empirically, but bound by logic and constrained by the rule that it not violate any
fundamental physical laws.

Let us carry out the following “thought experiment”:

Something happens to flood the world with large quantities of new oil. That “something” might
be, for example, the discovery of large oil fields in politically benign areas, or a new technology
permitting oil to be brought up from areas previously thought inaccessible. Neither of these two
possibilities is excluded by the laws of geology or engineering. Since we are conducting a
thought experiment, a “what-if” chain of reasoning, we are entitled to consider either as our
starting assumption, however unlikely in practice.

What scenario logically unfolds from such a development?

Today oil sells at about $70 per barrel. Whatever factors have determined this price, the injection
of large quantities of new supply into the world market would obviously imperil the existing
price structure. If the supply bulge were large enough, the price would plummet. How low it
might fall is a matter of conjecture. But if the example of other economic raw materials offers
any guide, oil would probably sell at its true cost of production, plus a reasonable profit – perhaps
about a dollar a barrel.

So the first consequence of our thought experiment is that the economic interest represented by
the difference between oil selling at $70 per barrel, and oil selling at around $1 per barrel, would
be adversely affected. How big an interest are we talking about? The word “cosmic” comes to
mind. After all, oil is the key commodity in the modern world. Virtually nothing can be produced
without it. It is truly the prerequisite, the sine qua non, of all the world’s business. Ipso
facto, bathing the world economy in virtually limitless cheap oil would thus have a revolutionary
impact on the structure of that economy. Not only would the interest represented by oil at $70
per barrel be disrupted, but new interests founded on the much lower cost of producing goods
would move to the foreground. Like all newly-empowered economic interests, they would carry
with them new political, cultural and technological values, more rooted in entrepreneurialism,
technological innovation, and the deployment rather than the amassing of capital. The historic
balance between banking capital and production capital would tilt in the latter’s favor.

But wait! We have left an important and inevitable element out of our thought experiment scenario.
It is not reasonable to suppose that an interest whose power and influence we have not
shrunk from calling “cosmic” would gracefully bow out of the political struggle and exit stage
right from the theater of economic history. On the contrary, we ought to expect a serious effort
to appeal the verdict of the market and reverse the laws of supply and demand. Such an effort
would be consistent with Newton’s third law: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
This reaction would constitute the second consequence of our thought experiment: the
effort by the enormous economic, political and cultural Establishment represented by oil at $70
a barrel to preserve its power and influence notwithstanding the collapse of its key asset’s price
(upon which our thought experiment is predicated).

Since we have excluded a priori by the terms of our thought experiment the possibility of maintaining
or restoring an elevated price of oil, what we need to consider – from the standpoint of
its former beneficiaries – are ways and means of preserving its effects even after its cause has
been (hypothetically) removed. For it is upon these effects – not the price of oil itself – that the
above-mentioned Establishment bases itself.

A vast increase in the supply of oil would exert a massively depressing effect on its price. This
price has obviously been a hugely limiting factor on the consumption of oil, and therefore a
hugely escalating factor on the cost of things produced with oil. The price of oil has created a
regime of scarcity around the world’s most important single commodity. But abundant oil
would destroy this regime of scarcity and overturn high-priced oil’s applecart. Could a regime of
scarcity be reimposed based on some other criteria than price? In other words, could scarcity,
having been overthrown at the supply end of the economic curve, be reinstituted at the demand
end, where oil is consumed? If so, a lot of applecart passengers would be mighty grateful.
Global Warming! Al Gore is only the most prominent of the many Cassandras who have recently
arisen to warn us that all respectable scientific opinion now agrees that we are destroying
our planet with our uncontrolled emissions of petroleum combustion byproducts. For these
folks abundant cheap oil would not be a blessing, but the apocalypse, leading to new ice ages,
oceanic inundations, famine, pestilence, giant hurricanes, together with, no doubt, epidemics of
baldness, impotence, and date rape.

Global Warming, about which all scientists now unanimously agree (except for some miscreants
who don’t), provides the perfect rationale for instituting an artificial regime of scarcity to replace
the economic regime imposed by high prices and short supplies. Not the economy, but Mother
Nature herself, so help us Wicca, demands that limits be imposed on oil consumption, in order
to save Gaia, our violated planet. How very convenient for Nature to come to the rescue of the
$70 a barrel crowd also! Once before She performed this service, through the pious auspices of
the good Rev. Thomas Malthus: 

The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce
subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the
human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They
are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work
themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics,
pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and
tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks
in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.
-- An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1789.

For Malthus, scarcity was dictated by the his iron law of population, which he insisted would
always increase geometrically, outstripping food supplies, which could only increase arithmetically.
Malthus proposed his ideas just as the English landed aristocracy was becoming aware of
the threat which the new industrial system of manufactures posed to its ascendancy. His pessimistic
and anti-human doctrine of food scarcity helped create the political atmosphere which
resulted in the passage of Britain’s Corn Laws, high tariffs on imported wheat and other foodstuffs
whose purpose was to subsidize the country’s inefficient feudal estates and thus artificially
perpetuate the Tory aristocracy’s corrupt dominion over England against the modernizing challenge
posed by the Manchester industrialists.

Today it is not food but energy which is alleged to be scarce. Whether it actually is or not is beyond
the scope of our thought experiment. But it is certainly heartening to know that the same
doctrine of scarcity which preserved the English aristocracy can be trotted out in the 21st century,
suitably regarbed in the trendy couture of ecology, to perform an equivalent function for
our own $70 a barrel aristocracy in the disastrous wake of an (hypothetical) oil price collapse.
The dogma of Global Warming is thus the third consequence of our thought experiment. It
stands ready to rationalize the imposition of Energy Consumption Controls, no matter what the
price of energy production, in the name of saving the planet from mankind’s swinish overconsumption.
Such controls would no doubt take the form of huge new taxes on energy consumption,
thereby creating a massive cash flow into the world’s various environmental protection
agencies, governmental and private. So aggrandized, these high-minded bureaucracies will acquire
the clout to perpetuate an artificial regime of scarcity forever – or at least for a long time –
even if technology and capitalism combine to discredit the doctrine of scarce energy supplies.
This brave new form of socialism, based on the expropriation and redistribution of scarcity,
should inscribe on its banner, “Arise, ye prisoners of abundance. You have been all, you shall be
naught!”

But our little thought experiment has produced a very peculiar result: whereas a crash in oil
prices is purely hypothetical, Global Warming is with us now. Nothing hypothetical about it.
Thanks to Al Gore, we even have that ultimate 21st century validation of its really real reality, a
movie – named, with 66% mendacity, An Inconvenient (sic) Truth (sic). What are we to make of
this strange emergence of a causeless consequence?

Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia

Nuclear Parity in the Middle East

By Tom A. Milstein

December 13, 2005

On Thursday, Dec. 15, the Iraqi people will once again vote in a free election, this time to choose their next government. This momentous event will empower the formerly disenfranchised and oppressed 60% of the Iraqi people who are Shi’a for the first time in their country’s modern history.

Elections are no less struggles for power than revolutions, coups, and wars. In all such struggles there are winners and losers. This time the losers will be the Sunni Moslems of Iraq, who traditionally have ruled the Shi’a with an iron fist. They will lose no matter whether they participate in the election or not, because either way, their dispossession as the ruling elite of Iraq will be confirmed. Needless to say, the Sunni are unhappy at this turn of events.

To appease them, various concessions and compromises have been made in both the Iraqi constitution and other areas of society, the new army, and the government. The sum total of this appeasement has come close to completely vitiating the representative and democratic character of the new republic, by granting this former ruling class minority privileges and powers normally considered incompatible with democratic principles.

Why have these concessions and compromises been made? The official explanation is to prevent a civil war from tearing Iraqi society apart. We shall see whether this tactic works, in the statistics of insurgent terrorist acts to be compiled in the post-election future. Certainly we can see that it has failed up to now, as 30,000 dead Iraqis mutely testify to, but perhaps the success of the election will usher in a new spirit of peaceful participation. One hopes so.

So far, the Iraqi Insurgency has largely been a Sunni affair, aimed at inflicting as much carnage as possible on the Shi’a population. In truth, the Shi’a have largely replaced the American military as the target of choice for terrorist attacks. Sunni violence against Shi’a, whether carried out by former Ba’athist secular cadres or Al Qaeda Islamofascists, has in fact become “the war within the war” in Iraq. The media likes to publicize the comparatively sparse instances of Shi’a violence against Sunni, whether carried out by militias or by Iraqi government agencies, in order to establish some sort of false equivalency. The fact is that the volume and sheer horror of the Sunni attacks on innocent Shi’a civilians, mosque worshippers, police and army trainees, and shoppers, far outweighs counterpart Shi’a atrocities.

The insurgent focus on blowing up Shi’a appears on the face of it a rather odd tactic, if the objective of the insurgency is to drive American forces out of Iraq. A true “national liberation front” strategy would seek to unite Sunni and Shi’a against the American occupation. Instead, the effect has been to place Iraq’s Shi’a under the somewhat half-hearted protection of the U.S. Army. Most Americans, and that includes American soldiers, sense no vital stake in the Sunni-Shi’a struggle. “Let ‘em go on killing each other off” would be a fair characterization of this attitude, particularly if it means less ordnance being expended against our troops. Nevertheless, given the President’s commitment to establishing a democratic government in Iraq, our Army has been tasked to prevent terror attacks and this means, in the current Iraq reality, protecting Shi’a against Sunni. Indeed, in the larger sense this mission ties in directly with the President’s aim of creating a legitimate, representative government in Baghdad, for the previous Sadaam government was simply the institutionalization of minority Sunni terror against the Shi’a majority.

Shi’a’s humiliating dependence on American protection against the Sunni minority is supposed to end with the creation of a representative government through free elections. The theory – or the hope – is that such a government will make it impossible for a Sadaam-style regime to ever return to Baghdad. But this theory begs the question of how such a government could have arisen in the first place, given the radical disproportion between Sunni and Shi’a numbers in the demography of Iraq. And this question needs to be asked, and answered, not drowned out in “Strategy for Victory” cheerleading rallies, or the President may well find himself returned to the same predicament in which he found himself after he prematurely declared “Mission accomplished” to the sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003.

The Sunni have a ready answer to this question. They regard, and treat, the Shi’a as an effeminate nation of slaves, lacking in the manly Islamic virtues, and therefore easy to oppress because they can’t or won’t defend themselves. This characterization is of course propaganda, designed like most such propaganda to hide the real dynamics of Sunni dominion over Iraq. Sunni Moslems were able to dominate the Shi’a of Iraq notwithstanding the latter’s numerical preponderance not because Shi’a are girly-boys, but because exterior factors came into play: Sadaam’s Sunni thugs were clients of Saudi Arabia, which provided the indispensable financial and political clout he needed to compensate for Sunni inferior numbers in Iraq. This relationship became quite clear during the Iraq-Iran War, when with America’s help, Iraq was essentially converted into a buffer state for Saudi Arabia to gas the Shi’a Revolution launched by the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran.

Things change. Sadaam decided that if he was destined to play Praetorian Guard for the Saudi Oil Patch, he might as well assume the landlord role as well, and, following his idol Hitler’s time-tested strategy, tried to bite off Kuwait as a dress rehearsal for later adventures against the Saudi degenerates whose bossy dominion he resented. George Bush Senior was not about to exchange the House of Saud, with whom he and his friends had maintained cozy and lucrative relations for generations, for the unknown of a hypothetical House of Sadaam. “Soddum” was duly expelled from Kuwait – but left in place in Baghdad to continue his buffer role against the Shi’a of Iraq and Iran. Better he than us, reasoned Bush 41.

Bush Sr.’s pusillanimity was duly noted by the Saudis, so things changed again – on 9/11/01. After all, if Sadaam could survive defeat in Kuwait, could not the cowardly Americans be relied upon to forgive and forget a direct strike on their homeland by the Saudis themselves? Would not the second-rate son show even more of the family appeasing spirit than the supposedly granite-like father (“This shall not stand!”), particularly if the attack were audacious, giving Americans a taste of their own “Shock and Awe” medicine? It was time for the Saudis to accomplish what Sadaam had tried and failed to achieve – a great turning of the tables. Saudi Arabia had hitherto managed the Oil Cartel as a client of America. Now America would have to learn how to become a junior partner of the Oil Cartel and its Islamic masters.

This is the inner meaning of 9/11. It was a daring adventure, but not a terribly risky one. Even if it failed – and it did, for George W. Bush turned out to be made of different stuff than his father – the example of Sadaam demonstrated that America would never bite the hand that fed it. The Saudis and their Cartel might have to undergo some difficult moments, but when the dust of 9/11 settled, America would try to restore the status quo ante World Trade Center. America’s economic stake in the Cartel could be trusted to outweigh all other considerations, and the House of Saud would emerge unscathed.

And this gets us back to Iraq. The “status quo ante World Trade Center” will never be restored, because it cannot be. If America leaves the Saudi Oil Cartel intact, there will be future 9/11’s. This is the diplomatic circle that cannot be squared. The enemy is not terror. The enemy is not Islam. The enemy is the financial and economic foundation of Islamic terror, the Saudi Oil Cartel. No one point of this triad can be defeated unless all three are attacked. This is the lesson Lincoln had to learn during our own Civil War, as he fought his way forward toward an understanding that it was the institution of Slavery, not the abstraction of “disunion,” or the geographic region of “the South,” that he had to defeat. It is the same type of understanding that awaits our President too, in Iraq. Merely establishing a representative government in Baghdad will not insure against its subversion by a return of Sunni domination, a new Sadaam, and a resulting rebirth of Arab-Islamic triumphalism absolutely guaranteed to produce more 9/11’s, unless something is done to permanently neutralize the Saudi role in Iraq.

Shall America then permanently occupy Iraq to prevent Saudi influence from bringing about this counterrevolution? Awkward and untenable. Instead, America needs to find a countervailing regional force able to balance Saudi influence in Iraq and provide the Shi’a with an exterior base of support equivalent to that provided by the Saudis to the Iraqi Sunnis. Such a force can only be supplied by Iran. And Iran would be more than willing to play this role, were it not for one inconvenient power reality in the Middle East: the Shi’a have no nuclear deterrent, while the Sunni do. Pakistan now possesses scores of nuclear bombs, and delivery systems capable of placing them in Teheran and all other Iran cities. And not just Pakistan. According to a little-noticed but highly credible report from Arnaud de Borchgrave, writing in the Oct. 22, 2003 Washington Times, “Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have concluded a secret agreement on ‘nuclear cooperation’ that will provide the Saudis with nuclear-weapons technology in exchange for cheap oil, according to a ranking Pakistani insider.” (http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031021-112804-8451r.htm )

It is this nuclear imbalance that explains Iran’s drive for nuclear parity, not any disinformational ambition to erase Israel from the map. And the worldwide uproar over Iran’s ambition seems designed more to preserve the Sunni nuclear monopoly rather than to deter Iranian extremism. How else to explain the awkward silence that envelopes the issue of Pakistan-Saudi nuclear weaponry? The Sunni Bomb effectively inhibits Iran from playing a balancing role in the Middle East, and particularly in Iraq, against Saudi Arabia. And in the absence of such a role, America willy-nilly ends up having to perform it instead.

No demand that Iran drop its quest for nuclear weapons is credible unless it is accompanied by the regional quid pro quo of disarming Pakistan and Saudi Arabia of similar weapons. In the absence of such an arrangement, the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran is a prerequisite to the success of George W. Bush’s Strategy for Victory in Iraq. For unless Iran is freed from the Pakistani-Saudi nuclear sword of Damocles that hangs over Teheran, it cannot rescue the Neoconservative program of a democratic self-government from the same humiliating debacle that overtook their identical program in South Vietnam over 30 years ago.

For these and other reasons, Israel will not attack Iran, American will not attack Iran, and Iran will someday announce to the world that it possesses a nuclear deterrent. The Bush Administration will outwardly denounce and inwardly exult. So will Israel. So should we all.

Iraq Exit Strategy

Goodbye, Vietnam Iraq

By Tom Milstein

11/20/05

To get out of Iraq, first we must first know why we are in Iraq.

We did not invade Iraq to find Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction.

We did not invade Iraq to establish democracy in the Middle East.

We invaded Iraq to deter Saudi Arabia and its client, Islamic Fascism, from staging more 9/11
attacks on the United States.

We invaded Iraq because Iraq shares a border with Saudi Arabia, and has a history of military
antagonism to the United States. We are in Iraq for much the same reason we remained in West
Germany during the Cold War: to establish a base of operations for the maintenance of
deterrence against a perceived threat to the security of the United States. The scope and scale of
the Saudi threat are of a different order than that of the Soviet. But the strategic principle is the
same.

Of course deterrence only works when it can be sustained. We sustained deterrence against the
Soviets not just by declaring the doctrine of “massive retaliation,” but also by maintaining a
stable and supportive base of operations in Western Europe. The Germans – as well as the
French, the British, and the rest of Western Europe – might detest their subordinate status to
the American superpower, but the prospect of Soviet domination was a sobering antidote to all
such “Yankee go home” emotions.

We have no such stable base of support in Iraq. The Middle East is not about to flower into civil
society, Enlightenment, and free enterprise – not even with a NeoCon Marshall Plan. The Middle
East is not Europe, and democracy is not a charismatic idea in the Middle East. Jihad is.

The invasion of Iraq has deterred further 9/11’s, but it has not succeeded in institutionalizing
itself the way America’s presence in Europe institutionalized itself through NATO, as a
permanent and legitimate form of deterrence called “containment.” We have for the time being
deterred Islamic Fascism from launching another attack on the U.S., by threatening the Saudi
border, but we have not truly contained the Saudi menace the way we successfully contained
Soviet menace to Europe in the Cold War, and the whole world can see why – we cannot
“NATO-ize” our mission.

Our achievement in Iraq therefore lacks credibility, durability, and legitimacy. Nor is it ever
likely to attain these things. The gap between what America represents and Islamic political
culture is too great.
America has a wolf by the ears in Iraq. We cannot let go without risking future 9/11’s, and we
cannot hold on in the face of declining support both domestically and internationally.
So a different means of sustaining deterrence must be found – a model not based on the
Eurocentric Cold War against the Soviets, but rather on the Sino-American rapprochement,
which split the Communist bloc and led the way forward from deterrence, through and beyond
containment, to eventual victory over Communist totalitarianism.

The Sino-American rapprochement also grew out of a failed war – the war in Vietnam. That war
too was rooted in noble, but contradictory, objectives. On the one hand, we wished to promote a
Western-oriented, democratic South Vietnam against the totalitarian depredations of the
Communist North. On the other, we sought to extend the deterrence and containment model
from Europe to Southeast Asia, establishing a balance of power against the threat of Communist
expansion into and throughout the region. Based on our European NATO model, we thought
that each of these aims depended on the other. But we found to our dismay that we could not
establish a regime in South Vietnam with enough democratic vitality to win effective support
either from its own people or the American people.

We therefore could not sustain our Vietnam intervention (just as we cannot sustain our current
deterrence mission in Iraq). And because it could not be sustained, our Vietnam-era policymakers
were led to consider what the consequences might be, both regionally and globally, of a
North Vietnamese Communist victory in the South.

Out of this consideration came the decision to realign international politics by pursuing
rapprochement with China, a policy which had been verboten for American policy-makers since
the Communist takeover of the mainland in 1949. Maoist China was conventionally perceived to
be the more ideologically radical and dangerous of the two rival Communist states, the more
anti-American and internally the more totalitarian. But it was also much the weaker of the two,
and our diplomatists calculated that China’s extremism was actually rooted in its isolated and
disadvantaged position internationally relative to its Soviet rival.

The truth of this calculation yielded a diplomacy whose success shocked the world and
effectively neutralized the negative geopolitical consequences of defeat in the Vietnamese War.
Indeed, the new US-China relationship brought real peace to Southeast Asia and ushered in an
amazing burst of economic and social development. On the political front, the end of the Cold
War and the downfall of the Soviet Union can be traced directly to this courageous initiative by
Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon.

The Middle Eastern equivalent to Nixon and Kissinger’s master stroke may already be underway.
American policy seems to be reaching out to the Shi’a branch of Islam in order to create a
majority government in Iraq that has real popular support. Such a government will by the force
of circumstance have strong ties to Iran, the world center of Shi’a Islam. So empowered, Iraq’s
new government will need correspondingly less support from the U.S. Further attempts by the Saudi-sponsored Al Qaeda-based insurgency to disrupt Iraq will become Iran’s problem, not
America’s.

America’s role in the Middle East can then recede from active military engagement to one of
managing the balance between Islam’s two great branches, just as in an earlier era it did
between the Chinese and Russian Communist states. The threat of future 9/11’s from the
Saudis can be countered by the deterrent prospect of a Shiite conquest of Mecca and Medina,
instead of requiring the U.S. Army on the Saudi border.

Wahabi-dominated Sunni Islam, instead of enjoying the luxury of being able to single-mindedly
indulge its passion against America and modernity, will find more pressing problems to occupy
its attention. Who knows? Perhaps out of this stalemate within Islam can come the Middle East
equivalent of Europe’s great compromise between the formerly warring Protestant and Catholic
princes – a second Treaty of Westphalia.

America’s exit strategy from Iraq needs to rooted in America’s exit strategy from Vietnam: pingpong
diplomacy leading to rapprochement with Mao’s China. Perhaps it already is.

Tony Siani, 10 Years After His Death

Why Did Tony Siani Die?
By Tom A. Milstein
New York City
Jan. 30, 2005

All of us who loved Tony know that his death was preceded by a long period of intense discouragement, verging on despair. During this time he became more and more bitter and hostile toward the world around him. And while it is true that he never allowed this bitterness to spill over onto his friends and associates and family, it is also true that he did become much more private and reclusive than he ever was before. Tony had always been an immensely gregarious and sociable individual; he maintained an incredibly wide circle of friends and acquaintances from very diverse backgrounds. He could as easily mingle with millionaires as with the proprietor of the corner hole-in-the-wall greasy spoon. But during this last period he withdrew, and sometimes it seemed that his last real connection to the outside world had been reduced to his TV set, where he loathed most of what he viewed.

Normally when a creative person undergoes this kind of an experience, it manifests itself in a sharp drop in artistic productivity. Not so with Tony. His artistic output remained prodigious, as it had always been, notwithstanding his “hermitage.” The content of his output changed rather markedly, that is true. The characteristic Siani style did evolve – in fact I would argue it did more than evolve, it dissolved and recrystallized – but it never flagged.

It was almost as though the two Sianis – man and artist – could no longer coexist. The artist was willing to go on, and knew how to go on, but the man simply couldn’t continue. Something happened to cause them to part company. And that something is what killed him – long before he was finished with his business as an artist, which is what makes his death so disheartening and poignant.

Today, on the 10th anniversary of Tony’s death, I want to offer some thoughts about what that “something” was. These are things I wanted to say at his funeral, but could not find the words – or rather, the words I did find seemed somehow inappropriate to that occasion. I hope that today, after so many days and even years have passed, I have found better words, and better circumstances in which to utter them.

I begin with a consideration of the forces that molded Tony as a young man. I can’t really consider his preceding life as a boy, because I didn’t know him then, even though we grew up in the same town and even went to the same high school, in Denver, Colorado. But we were separated by 4 years and so never met until college at the University of Colorado, where he had already established himself as a husband and father, as well as a working artist, when I met him. He had met and married Hatsie, and they had already had one child, Nora, and were expecting another, who became Jennie.

I doubt I ever would have met Tony had it not been for a curious campus organization known as the Young People’s Socialist League, or YPSL. Tony was an active member of this group, which was inspired by a campus sociology professor named Alex Garber, and had about 20 active members. I had arrived on campus as a freshmen, together with a high school friend of mine, both of us bearing a tentative commitment to another, rival left-wing organization called the Young Socialist Alliance, or YSA. The YSA was Trotskyist; the YPSL was democratic socialist.

YPSL was the youth organization of the Socialist Party USA. This venerable group, which had been around from the turn of the century, was at that time a coalition of two groups: the Norman Thomas socialists, who represented the Christian Social Gospel/Settlement House tradition in American Socialism, and the Schachtmanites, who were followers of Max Schachtman, who had split away from Leon Trotsky just before World War II, on the grounds that the Soviet Union under Stalinism had ceased to be a “worker’s state,” and had in fact become a new form of class society, every bit as evil as capitalism, which Shachtman called “bureaucratic collectivism.” Most but not all of the members of the YPSL chapter at Boulder were “Shachtmanites.” What held the two factions together was a shared commitment to the replacement of capitalism with socialism and a shared rejection of Communist totalitarianism.

It didn’t take my friend and I long to move from the YSA to the YPSL – about 4 months, as I recall. One of the major motivating factors, at least for me, was the difference in character between the members of the YSA and that of the YPSL. The former group had all the charm of the seedy underworld milieu depicted in certain David Mamet movies, or by Dostoievsky in Notes from the Underground or The Possessed. But the YPSLs, especially as typified by Tony Siani and his two close YPSL comrades, Penn Kemble and John Maxwell, were altogether fresher and more appealing, especially to an impressionable undergraduate looking for role models and life-choices.

Siani, Kemble and Maxwell were as different from each other as three people could be. They constantly fought over ideas. Each of them came from totally different backgrounds. Tony was a Staten Island Italo-American transplanted to Denver. Penn Kemble was the son of an old New England family whose father happened to be campus psychiatrist at a 7 Sisters Ivy League Women’s College (I can’t remember which one, but I think it was Vassar). John Maxwell was the son of New York gangster Dutch Schultz, but after his father was gunned down by the Mafia to prevent him from assassinating DA Tom Dewey, his mother sent him to be raised in a Roman Catholic monastery-orphanage in Canyon City, Colorado.

As I have said, these three men were quite different from one another, not only in background, but by upbringing and temperament. An ethnic American, deeply cherished by his mother and basking in the warmth and pathos of a typical Italo-American family; a cold but brilliant New England WASP, and an orphanage semi-sociopath who was the smartest man I’ve ever known (notwithstanding his proudly-boasted of IQ of 106): I don’t doubt that were it not for the message which Alex Garber brought to them, they would never have dreamed of befriending one another or of making common cause in an obscure political organization.

Maxwell had the most penetrating sociological mind I ever encountered. The socialist movement had a strong pacifist wing in those days, and it manifested itself in an anti-American, unilateral disarmament mentality that was always apologizing for Soviet motives in the Cold War. Since peace movements weren’t tolerated in Iron Curtain countries, the “objective” effect of the peace movement was to favor Communist world policy aims, and we made no bones about saying so. But John Maxwell went further – he did an original historical analysis of the roots of pacifism in Christian otherwordliness that extended the theories of Max Weber. It was devastating, far more than our political polemics, because it demonstrated that pacifism’s “counterproductive” consequences were in fact exactly what the pacifists intended.

Penn Kemble had been dubbed by Garber “our prince of pamphleteers,” a reference to George Bernard Shaw’s admiring characterization of Leon Trotsky. A masterful writer, Penn dreamed of a literary or cinema career and certainly had the talent for it. I’ll never forget a demolition he did on Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger’s nauseating prep-school narcissist, in those days very much in vogue on campuses.

But of the three, it was Tony who made the strongest impression on me, who influenced me in the deepest and most personal way. This impact came from two things. He was an incredibly warm and affectionate man who had a way of reaching out to people that both put them at ease – included them in the family, so to speak – and also inspired them to think outside the bounds of the “family,” to think in terms always of huge questions and cosmic issues. Of the three young men I’ve described to you, only Tony conveyed this sense of a common endeavor to ascend to the heights of cultural and political greatness. With Maxwell, one always had the rather chilling feeling that the issue was always power. Kemble fairly radiated the Yankee curse of invidious competitiveness. But Tony let you know that his train had plenty of spare seats in it and that it was all aboard who wanted to come aboard.

And where was this train going? That was the really odd thing! Tony wanted to take art back to the Renaissance. He wanted to make this journey not because he was a cultural reactionary – such attitudes would not have been tolerated in the YPSL – but because, after a brief fling with abstraction, he became convinced that the history of Western Art since the Renaissance had been a history of downward decline. He said over and over that artists since the Renaissance, no matter how great and profound their achievements, were all haunted by a huge inferiority complex, and rightfully so: that none of their work measured up to the incredible masterpieces of European Renaissance painting.

Now Tony Siani was not one to cohabit with an inferiority complex, cultural or any other kind. So for him the solution to this problem was to rejoin the figurative and narrative traditions in Western art and shepherd them back to the Renaissance – not as if post-Renaissance art had never happened, but as part of a grand project to capture the Renaissance tradition and transcend it. In other words, he wanted to create a new grand synthesis of Renaissance figure painting and the Modernist revolution into which the Renaissance tradition had brilliantly, but destructively, devolved, and launch painting anew.

Over 40 years ago, when I was a young and callow Gascon, that seemed like a good enough agenda to me. Coupled with the politics and intellectualism and radical glamour of my other two Musketeers, Maxwell and Kemble, I had no problems at all signing on as the D’Artignan – actually one of many – of the group.
But here I want to depersonalize this account and introduce some theory. These three diverse characters would never have been able to collaborate, nor would I have ever gravitated to them, had it not been for the role of Alex Garber and the particular doctrine of socialism and socialist strategy that he brought to Boulder. It was Garber’s teaching of the lore of socialism, the values of democratic socialism , and the lessons of 20th Century world and American politics for socialism, that made it possible for the entire phenomenon I have described above to exist. Garber presented us with a movement, a movement that had a history and even more important, as he presented it, a future. This future he called Realignment.

By laying the groundwork for orchestrating the diverse personalities described above (and many others besides) into a common cause, Garber made it rational for people with great talent, big egos, and giant aspirations to collaborate and cooperate. In other words, it wasn’t the charisma of Maxwell, Kemble, or even Siani that ultimately attracted me and others to this little group, it was the charisma of Socialism. Socialism made it possible for Maxwell, Kemble and Siani to fuse their appeal into one appeal. Thus one could join them without becoming their acolytes, their lackeys or their flunkies. What we all belonged to was bigger than any of us. The Socialist tradition had been doing that for young intellectuals for many years. But socialism as a tradition was winding down, sputtering out, by the 1960’s. Garber’s doctrine of Realignment made it possible to envision a rejuvenated socialism that might actually claw its way into the mainstream of American life.

What was this Realignment idea? It was simply a way of adjusting the traditional socialist program of radical economic and social transformation to the unique realities of American politics, or what socialists have traditionally referred to as “American exceptionalism,” the features peculiar to American history and American society, that had hitherto rendered the country remarkably immune to socialist politics.
Realignment abandoned the old doomed socialist endeavor to set up a third, labor-based political party in America, and instead called for activity in the more leftist of the two major parties, the Democrats, aimed at pushing it further to the left and thereby to polarize politics into a struggle between a GOP based on the rich and their allies, and a Democratic party composed of labor, liberals, and minorities. To bring this about, it capitalized on the catalytic role of the Civil Rights Movement in the American South. The victory of the Civil Rights Movement would drive the Southern Dixiecrats out of the Democratic party and thus shatter the Dixiecrat-GOP alliance that had been the real ruler of American politics since the Great Compromise of 1877. That in turn would have the effect of turning the Democratic Party into a replica of the great Social-Democratic parties of Europe. This Realignment idea came pretty close to succeeding. Schachtmanite socialists played key roles in the most critical areas of the Civil Rights Movement, helping to push the movement into an alliance with Labor and Minorities, counseling Martin Luther King away from the more unhealthy influences on him, steering organized labor into a strongly supportive role, and joining with the Democratic Party liberals to advance civil rights legislation aimed at overthrowing the remnants of Jim Crow, insuring voter rights, and marginalizing the Dixiecrat racists. It all culminated in the glorious March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom of 1962, a historic event we basically organized under the auspices of Max Schachtman’s close ally, Bayard Rustin.

Then it all fell apart. The Vietnam War erupted as a divisive issue and suddenly a chasm opened up within the coalition upon whose cohesiveness we had pinned our socialist hopes. I am not going to conduct a postmortem on the disastrous effects of this foreign policy issue on our domestic strategy. What’s important to realize is that the Realignment strategy disintegrated as a result, and with it went our hopes for socialism. This was the end of a great historic cause. The horrific series of defeats that began in the trenches of World War I, and then stumbled on into the Bolshevik adventure in Russia, the Hitlerite reaction in Germany, the apocalypse of World War II, and finally the East-West superpower conflict known as the Cold War, presented its final bill to a movement that was by this time without reserves of any kind. It is a testament to the intrinsic vitality of that movement that it took such a tremendous series of smashing blows to dispatch it. But dispatch it they did; the disintegration of the liberal-labor-minorities coalition in American politics may have been small potatoes compared to these mighty European events, but nevertheless it was the straw that broke a very wounded camel’s back.

With the collapse of realignment came the collapse of rationality on the Left in American politics. Out of the bowels of Ivy League there spewed forth the pseudo-leftism of the draft-dodging elite, hiding behind a Counterculture whose putrid effects are with us today. Into the vacuum left by the dissolution of New Deal and Social-Democratic values came the only other ethical system viable in the modern world, the ethics of commercial capitalism. It was this environment of crass commercialism “counterbalanced” by crass Counterculturalism that became our atmosphere. We breathe this toxic stew to this day, God help us.
The collapse of realignment meant the collapse of socialism. But the hope and dream of socialism was what fueled Tony Siani’s great enterprise! The socialist engine is what powered Siani’s neo-Renaissance locomotive. If socialism collapsed, then so also did Tony’s entire artistic program.

Socialism was a movement that rooted itself in materialism, not idealism. That means, among other things, that its own principal criteria of validity was success. If it could not be successful in America, and if it had been defeated in Europe, then it was a movement based on false premises and deserved its fate. This is a harsh judgment but one to which all socialists of integrity would subscribe. Therefore, enough! It’s over.

No one drew this fearful conclusion with more austere intensity than Tony Siani. He not only drew it in the political realm, he drew it in the artistic realm as well. I would like to prove these two contentions with two observations, and then conclude with a third.

When I was struggling with the implications of our defeat, and trying to come to theoretical grips with those implications, I hit upon an idea. The idea was so radical that at first I hesitated to share it with anyone. I knew that to do so would render me even more of a pariah than I already was. It was simply that Karl Marx’s anti-Semitism is what doomed his movement. I was not the first to take note of Marx’s anti-Semitism, and I was certainly not the first to blame socialism’s failure on Marx’s ideas. But I was the first to relate the two, and to show that Marx’s failure to anticipate the rise of Communist totalitarianism was a direct effect of his denigration of the Jewish people and of his own Jewish roots, that his inability to appreciate the role of Oriental Despotism in the world was part and parcel of his suppression of the Jewish world-historical role in his theory of socialism. When I did gain the courage to utter these ideas to a few friends and comrades, all I got in response was scorn and derision. Only my beloved Emily offered support. Emily and one other person – Tony Siani. I’ll never forget Tony’s response to my tentative exposition of this concept: “It’s the only explanation that makes sense.” I can’t tell you how much I need that encouragement. I owe this idea to the spiritual and intellectual influence of my wife. But I owe the courage it took to write it down and publicize it to the support of Tony Siani.

The other observation has to do with a radical change in Tony’s artistic style, a kind of explosive decomposition and recrystallization already referred to. It was during this period that Tony’s work began to lose its close affinity to Renaissance style and began to exhibit a much more austere, “Hebraic” flavor. I’m not speaking of his use of the Biblical narrative only. This was a trend that had already started in his work. I’m referring more to the painterly style he adopted to convey Biblical themes. Although his death deprived us of a chance to see where he would have taken this trend, how he would have cultivated it and what it would have flowered into, I do think it is fair to say that much of the grandeur and beauty we can now perceive in our friend John Bradford’s work can be glimpsed in embryo in Tony’s last works.

In other words, Tony Siani had grasped in artistic terms, and before I grasped it in political terms, that the train of art could not be rejuvenated in Renaissance Station. The true rejuvenation was pre-Christian and hence post-Christian. That’s as radical and shattering an idea for artists as Marx’s anti-Semitism is for socialists. But they are really the same idea working in parallel worlds.

Now I come to my third and last observation. It is a somber but noble one. I have already noted that whereas Tony the comrade and Tony the artist could draw the necessary conclusions from the fall of socialism, Tony the man could not. As a man, he was so invested in the beauty of the Renaissance, so dependent on the sensual and tactile pleasures of its shapes and forms, so thrilled by its sheer mastery of formal problems, and his personality was so shaped by the pride of Renaissance values and vitality, that he simply could not remake himself the way he remade his art. When he realized that this mighty city-state – the city-state of Renaissance art – would have to be abandoned, the way socialism itself would have to be abandoned, it broke his human heart. Not his artistic heart, mind you, and not his comradely heart, but his human heart.

And so he lost his life to art. Perhaps it will be vouchsafed to us to win it back for him.

Fire the Bodyguard, Part Three

Capitalism, the Indispensible System

America, the Indispensible Nation

“Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's Secretary of State, called America the ‘indispensable nation’ a decade ago.”

So writes the Wall Street Journal in its lead editorial on Oct. 10, 2009, commenting on the Nobel Peace Prize award to President Barack Obama (attached). The Journal reveled in the delicious irony of Madam Albright’s remark:

Mr. Obama sees the U.S. differently, as weaker than it was and the rest of the planet as stronger, and so he calls for a humbler America, at best a first among equals, working primarily through the U.N. The world's challenges, he emphasized yesterday, "can't be met by any one leader or any one nation." What this suggests to us—and to the Norwegians—is the end of what has been called "American exceptionalism." This is the view that U.S. values have universal application and should be promoted without apology, and defended with military force when necessary.

No doubt the former Secretary of State wishes she hadn’t uttered her memorable phrase, or at least that President Obama’s critics hadn’t pounced on it.

But the Journal misinterprets the Nobel Committee’s agenda. It is precisely because “American exceptionalism” has become the world’s rule that the prize was bestowed. Far from attacking American values, the Nobel Committee – and President Obama – reaffirmed them. In the Journal’s own words, “Mr. Obama sees the U.S. … as weaker than it was and the rest of the planet as stronger, and so he calls for a humbler America, at best a first among equals, working primarily through the U.N. The world's challenges, he emphasized yesterday, ‘can't be met by any one leader or any one nation’.”

“American exceptionalism” never had anything to do with America’s global power. In decrying the hegemonic presumption associated with being the world’s only superpower, both the Committee and the President actually repudiated the traditional European reliance on upholding powerful states in securing a peaceful and orderly world, through old-fashioned Realpolitik, balance-of-power calculations, and deterrence. Exceptionalism has always stood apart from that “Old World” realm, and counterposed to it the values associated with the American Enlightenment, the values of national self-determination, human rights, anti-imperialism and radical individualism. Exceptionalist doctrine crystallized in the 19^th Century era of American isolation from Europe’s “corruption” and “decadence” and its entangling games of power politics.

Covert European anti-Americanism undoubtedly contributed to the motives of the Nobel Committee, but the values which the Committee publically rewarded, and which President Obama acknowledged in his message of acceptance, were affirmations of precisely the exceptionalism that made America a unique nation, and as such were a fundamental rejection of what might be termed “European exceptionalism.”

The source of the confusion between the ideals of  “American exceptionalism” and the realities of American power lies in the old bipolar world which emerged as the de facto result of World War II. America was obliged to become a superpower by virtue of the fact that if it didn’t, the Soviet Union, by default, would have had the field to itself – unacceptable to everyone (except the Soviets), even the still quite anti-American Europeans. But now the confusion has different roots. The Soviets are defeated, but America remains – as the world’s only superpower!

America now finds itself in a position not unlike that of the world’s economic system, capitalism: hegemonic by virtue of having no substantial  opposition! And the putative opponents of both of these hegemonies end up strengthening them with their anti-establishment effusions. The proponents of American power seek to defend its superpower status by inventing surrogate after surrogate for the old Soviet menace, ranging from Saddam’s Iraq, to Iran, to North Korea, to Islamic terrorism, to rising Chinese economic power, to reborn Russian totalitarianism. You name it, there’s an expert who will forecast it. But the world, and Americans, grow jaded. So the enemies of American power retaliate by seeking to weaken American might. Of course to do so they must strengthen all the global Americanizing tendencies they so loathe.

America defeats her antagonists with the wall of indispensability: you can’t beat somebody with nobody. In other words, if you want to tear down America, you can only do it by Americanizing the world. And that’s where capitalism, the indispensible system, comes in.

Want to defeat America? You’ll have to beat her at her own game.