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Marty Peretz posting in the Spine introduces a WSJ op-ed.
Josef Joffe is the editor-publisher of Die Zeit who knows the United States very well, and he knows the world well, too. That is, without sentimentality or hyperbole. His eyes are among the most incisive lenses on international affairs that I know, and they look out for the destiny of just societies. Real ones, not imagined ones.
He and I knew each other at Harvard, and have seen each other off and on over the decades. I think I’ve read all his books, and his last one, Ãœberpower: The Imperial Temptation of America had much to say about the distress of the United States in its relations to friends, adversaries and enemies.
Being conscious of this strain, Joffe knows the cost of faltering in the Middle East, of faltering in Iraq. Maybe there are few options left in Iraq. But then we should know the costs, the terrible costs. He lays these out in a piece, actually a dazzling piece, in the Wall Street Journal. …
Here’s that piece by Josef Joffe.
In contrast to President Bush’s dark comparison between Iraq and the bloody aftermath of the Vietnam War last week, there is another, comforting version of the Vietnam analogy that’s gained currency among policy makers and pundits. It goes something like this:
After that last helicopter took off from the U.S. embassy in Saigon 32 years ago, the nasty strategic consequences then predicted did not in fact materialize. The “dominoes” did not fall, the Russians and Chinese did not take over, and America remained No. 1 in Southeast Asia and in the world.
But alas, cut-and-run from Iraq will not have the same serendipitous aftermath, because Iraq is not at all like Vietnam.
Unlike Iraq, Vietnam was a peripheral arena of the Cold War. Strategic resources like oil were not at stake, and neither were bases (OK, Moscow obtained access to Da Nang and Cam Ranh Bay for a while). In the global hierarchy of power, Vietnam was a pawn, not a pillar, and the decisive battle lines at the time were drawn in Europe, not in Southeast Asia.
The Middle East, by contrast, was always the “elephant path of history,” as Israel’s fabled defense minister, Moshe Dayan, put it. Legions of conquerors have marched up and down the Levant, and from Alexander’s Macedonia all the way to India. Other prominent visitors were Julius Caesar, Napoleon and the German Wehrmacht.
This is not just ancient history. Today, the Greater Middle East is a cauldron even Macbeth’s witches would be terrified to touch. The world’s worst political and religious pathologies combine with oil and gas, terrorism and nuclear ambitions.
In short, unlike yesterday’s Vietnam, the Greater Middle East (including Turkey) is the central strategic arena of the 21st century, as Europe was in the 20th. This is where three continents — Europe, Asia, and Africa — are joined. So let’s take a moment to think about what would happen once that last Blackhawk took off from Baghdad International. …
John Fund with a couple of posts.
The Captain posts on Harry Reid, Mugabe, Fred Thompson, and the general uselessness of the debates.
In WSJ we learn the CEO of Cypress Semiconductors went back to college as a trustee. A salutorian who graduated from Dartmouth with degrees in chemistry and physics ran for a seat reserved for alums. How’s that working out?
… Mr. Rodgers founded Cypress in 1982, and now, a lifetime later in the hypercompetitive semiconductor business, it is an industry leader. Mr. Rodgers, for his part, has reached that phase where success purchases new opportunities.
Some men of his means and achievement buy a yacht, or turn to philanthropic work, or join other corporate boards. Mr. Rodgers went back to school: He became a trustee of his alma mater, Dartmouth College–and not a recumbent one. He has now served for three years; and though he notes some positives, overall, Mr. Rodgers says, “It’s been a horrible experience. I’m a respected person here in Silicon Valley. Nobody calls me names. Nobody demeans me in board meetings. That’s not the way I’m treated at Dartmouth. The behavior has been pretty shabby.” …
… “They attack things that don’t matter because they can’t attack you for what you stand for–quality of education. . . . The attacks become ad hominem. . . . We get called the problem. The fact is that we’re a response to the problem.”
In Mr. Rodgers’s judgment, the increasingly political denigration–the “rancor,” he calls it–has seriously impinged on his effectiveness as a trustee, and on the effectiveness of the board in general. “Before I ever went to my first board meeting,” he says, “I did what any decent manager in Silicon Valley does–management by walking around. You actually go and talk to people and ask how they’re doing and what they need to get their jobs done.”
He noted trends: over-enrollment, wait lists and an increased percentage of classes taught by visiting or non-tenure-track faculty. He concluded that many departments–economics, government, psychology and brain sciences, in particular–were “suffering from a shortage of teaching.”
“It’s a simple problem,” Mr. Rodgers says. “You hire more professors.” His effort to get an objective grip on the problem would be comic were it not so unfathomable. “I’ve had to scrounge to get data,” he says, the administration not being forthcoming. “My best sources of data come from faculty members and students.” …
WSJ with an editorial on college governance issues.
… In 1891, Dartmouth agreed to a pact that instituted a novel scheme of democratic governance. Alumni–the school’s financial underwriters–won the right to elect half of its non-administrative or ex officio trustees, who oversee the school and hire and fire its president. (The remaining seats are filled by appointment and typically go to big donors.)
The candidates for elected trusteeships have traditionally been vetted by a small committee, ensuring quiescence. Over the last four years, however, no fewer than four reform-minded candidates won seats on the board using a provision allowing nomination by petition. They include Silicon Valley CEO T.J. Rodgers and Virginia law professor Stephen Smith, who have raised the profile of such issues as academic standards, bureaucratic bloat and free speech.
Their presence has proven to be a tremendous offense to Dartmouth’s inner circles. Like administrators at most universities, these academic elites expect only money–not opinion and oversight–from their alumni donors. A year ago, the administration worked with a small committee of alumni to alter the petition process to make it less likely that outsiders could win. They lost in a rout in an alumni referendum.
But rather than accept that rebuke and seek some common ground, the school’s president, James Wright, and his trustee allies now seem prepared to overhaul the school’s governance more or less by fiat. …
The Economist with interesting obit of a Stalin era survivor.
HAD he been born in Iowa, Tikhon Khrennikov might have enjoyed a modest fame. Early discovery as a talented pianist; studies in composition, perhaps at the Juilliard School; schmoozing with Hollywood actors and directors, who would have appreciated his amiable character and his ear for a good tune. Irving Berlin and George Gershwin might have been his friends; he might have been remembered, like them, for hummable classics.
But Mr Khrennikov was born, one of ten children, into a horse-trading family in provincial Yelets, four years before the Russian revolution; and he died 16 years after the Soviet Union became Russia again. Over this period he was presented with moral choices and political demands which, as a musician, he should have been spared. He was not—like Sergei Prokofiev or Dmitri Shostakovich—a great composer. But he was the chief composer.
As secretary of the composers’ union, a title he received from Joseph Stalin in 1948 and kept until the USSR disintegrated, in 1991, Mr Khrennikov had enormous powers. But he had never sought them. He had come to Moscow to be a musician, and seemed likely to succeed: not so much with classical pieces, though his first symphony was conducted by the flamboyant and popularising Leopold Stokowski, but with scores for theatre and film.
Concurring Opinions is wondering when the NY Times will issue a correction acknowledging its problem understanding what are constitutional rights.