May 2002

COLUMBIA

Political REVIEW Vol. I, No. 4

Spring 2002

THE PLAGIARISTS

Retracting the Prizes

By Amba Datta RADICAL RECONSTRUCTION

Redeveloping Ground Zero

By Rebecca Weber

The Anatomy of a Threat SADDAM, THE UNITED STATES, AND ISRAEL

By Adam B. Kushner

Punishing the Innocent

By David Gerrard

Tracking International Students

By Jaime Sneider

COLUMBIA

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Columbia Political Review

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Volume I, Number 4 — Spring 2002

TABLE OF CONTENTS Features

Positions & Partisans 4

Eviction: The Anti-Drug

JULIA FUMA

5

The Anti-Intellectuals

JAIME SNEIDER

6

Frustrating the War Effort

Words, Wit, & Wisdom

AMBA DATTA

ADAM B. KUSHNER

9

The Anatomy of a Threat: Israel in Saddam’s Crosshairs Saddam Hussein’s unshakable grasp on power is a threat to Israelis, Kurds, and Shiites. Soon, he will have nuclear capability, in addition to existing biological and chemical technologies. Worst of all, there’s no way to predict what he’ll do with his weapons, which destabilizes the entire region.

Andrew Lebwohl wonders why social action and political activism are so stigmatized today.

18 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS Adam B. Kushner talks with U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D—N.Y.).

Hope Glassberg reads turncoat and melodramatist David Brock.

Text, Lies, and Scholarship: Plagiarists and the Prizes They Won Doris Kearns Goodwin and Michael Bellisles, who have won approbation for their books, are both accused of academic dishonesty. Both hold awards given by Columbia University.

17 PERSONAL ESSAY

19 BOOK REVIEW

7

REBECCA 14 Redeveloping Ground Zero: Steady, but Slow WEBER

20 MUSIC REVIEW Ben Letzler knows what happens when senior Bush administration officials break into song.

In addition to the vast repairs, administrators at Ground Zero have to reconcile seemingly infinite competing interests. The faster they work, the happier businesses will be to return.

THE COLUMBIA POLITICAL REVIEW STAFF Editor-in-Chief: ADAM B. KUSHNER is a Columbia College junior majoring in ancient studies.

Publisher: JAIME SNEIDER is a Columbia College senior majoring in history.

Senior Editor: AMBA DATTA is a Columbia College junior majoring in history and concentrating in economics.

Layout and Design Editor: DANIEL WEINSTEIN is a Columbia College sophomore majoring in economics-political science.

Business Manager: ROB SALITERMAN is a Columbia College sophomore majoring in political science.

Staff Writer: BEN LETZLER is a Columbia College senior majoring in history and concentrating in mathematics.

REBECCA WEBER is a Columbia College first-year.

Contributors: JULIA FUMA is a Columbia College junior majoring in political science.

DAVID GERRARD is a Columbia College junior majoring in English and comparative literature.

HOPE GLASSBERG is a Columbia College sophomore majoring in political science.

ANDREW LEBWOHL is a Columbia College sophomore majoring in political science.

Cover Artist: HENRY YAO is a Columbia College senior majoring in mathematics.

Chief Illustrator: BETH MIHALICK a Barnard College sophomore majoring in architecture.

Illustrators: VICTORIA CONTE is a Columbia College junior majoring in political science.

KATIE O’SHEA is a Barnard College senior majoring in architecture.

Image Editor: SHAWN CHOY is a Columbia College junior majoring in economics-political science.

CPU General Manager: SAMIR ARORA is a Columbia College junior majoring in political science.

The Columbia Political Review is the magazine of the Columbia Political Union, a non-partisan student organization seeking to enhance involvement in the political process and to foster political discourse. The CPU does not endorse the ideas contained herein; their worth is for our readers to determine. The Review welcomes letters to the editor. They should be sent to cpureview@columbia.edu and should not exceed 400 words.

Letters for publication must include the author’s name, contact information, and Columbia affiliation. The Review reserves the right to edit content. The Review is paid for with a generous grant from the President’s and Provost’s Student Initiative Fund.

COLUMBIA

DAVID GERRARD

Political REVIEW

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Columbia Political Review

EVICTION: THE ANTI-DRUG

SPRING 2002

By David Gerrard

A recent Supreme Court ruling allows public housing administrators to evict tenants for drug use by any family member or guest.

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any Columbia students have smoked marijuana, and perhaps a few have faced legal charges for doing so, but it is unlikely any student’s parents have been thrown out of their home because of their child’s minor transgression. For those lower on the socioeconomic scale, however, this scenario and worse ones have taken place many times over the past several years, and now will continue to do so. On March 26, in The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) v. Rucker et. al., the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the so-called “one-strike” public housing law, which allows administrators to evict tenants if a tenant’s family member or guest is caught with drugs “on or near” the premises, even if the tenant does “not know, could not foresee, or could not control the behavior of other occupants of the unit.” The law was originally passed in 1988 under Ronald Reagan and was strengthened in 1996 when Bill Clinton, in a particularly craven moment, ordered HUD to enforce it more strictly.

Three cases of people evicted under this law came before the Supreme Court to challenge the law: William and Barbara Lee, whose grandsons were caught smoking marijuana in the parking lot of the Lees’ apartment; Pearlie Rucker, whose mentally disabled daughter was found with cocaine and a crack cocaine pipe three blocks from Rucker’s apartment; and perhaps worst of all, 78-yearold stroke victim Herman Walker, whose caregiver was found with cocaine multiple times in his apartment.

THE PROBLEM WITH THE law is not that it is unconstitutional; it is simply massively unfair. The Court itself is not necessarily wrong in this case. Rucker et. al. argued that the law did not intend to allow these evictions, but the language of the law clearly suggests that it did; the plaintiffs’ argument, as Chief Justice Rehnquist notes, is based on a clearly ungrammatical reading of the law (this is not to say that this argument is without merit; the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit sided with Rucker on it). A stronger argument is that the law is unconstitutional on the basis that it punishes people for acts they did not themselves commit, but as that court notes, eviction is not criminal punishment but rather a civil one.

William Rehnquist, who wrote the 8-0 opinion (Stephen Breyer recused himself because his brother was the trial judge), does not only argue for the clarity and constitutionality of the law, he argues that it was justly implemented. Several civil rights groups filed friend-of-the-court briefs arguing that the law will lead to increased homelessness. Rehnquist, and by extension all the justices who joined in the opinion, ignored these arguments. As The New York Times’ Linda Greenhouse noted, this is “a measure of the current court’s relative conservatism.”

Rehnquist makes two arguments in favor of the law, both of which are faulty. His first argument is that the law will act as a deterrent. It is unlikely that a law that punishes other people will deter those undeterred by all the other negative consequences aris-

ing from drug use. Certainly it could not have served as a deterrent to Walker’s caretaker, who stood to lose nothing personally beyond already existing penalties for using cocaine.

Rehnquist’s second argument is that the tenant’s inability to control drug use by those he allows into his home is a threat to the entire community. Rehnquist bases his support for Walker’s eviction on this assertion. (He makes a great deal of the fact that Walker’s caretaker was caught with cocaine three times. This is irrelevant, however, as the law would have allowed for Walker’s eviction after the first time).

Using Rehnquist’s logic, no infirm person should be allowed to live in public housing, as no such person can control whether his caretaker uses drugs only to a very limited degree (and certainly can’t before he has reason to know about the activity), and therefore whether the caretaker uses drugs is purely a matter of chance.

Because the law punishes people regardless of whether they could have been reasonably expected to know about the drug use, it can only foster a sense of powerlessness and paranoia among tenants, particularly the elderly. How were William and Barbara Lee to stop their grandsons from using marijuana, particularly outside their home? It is difficult to imagine what evicting such people accomplishes other than instilling a ubiquitous suspicion of family members. It is lucky that legislators who voted for this law do not live in public housing, as it is quite likely that one or two of them have children who have at one point used marijuana “on or near the premises” of their homes.

OF COURSE, THIS IS PRECISELY the point. The law has nothing to do with drugs and everything to do with class. In middle-class and upper-middle-class families, drug use is looked on as a disease that requires strong family support. These same middle-class families look on drug use by the poor, and particularly by poor black people, as a crime that requires action by the state. This is why possession of crack, which is used less frequently by whites than is cocaine, carries much stiffer penalties than possession of cocaine.

This unequal way of viewing drug use has already devastating consequences, as can be seen in the cases that came before the Supreme Court, and can only continue to do so. In families poor enough to live in public housing, parents or grandparents can no longer safely offer aid to those using drugs, and are forced to throw their loved ones out or risk being thrown out themselves. As the friend-of-the-court briefs argued, this will lead to increased homelessness. As Drug Policy Alliance notes in one such brief, HUD’s application of this law “severely undermines the policy goal of maintaining subsidized housing and preventing homelessness.”

Rehnquist cites as justification for the law the fact that administrators are not required to evict innocent tenants but are merely given the option of doing so, but granting housing administrators this arbitrary power actually shows the extent to which the law serves to scare and humiliate: armed with this unfair law, administrators have tenants at their mercy.

SPRING 2002

Columbia Political Review

THE ANTI-INTELLECTUALS

PAGE 5

By Julia Fuma

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni wants to stop students, activists, and protestors from thinking critically about their country.

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here are many arguments for why Americans should study their own history. Most of them are well known and have even become cliché. George Santayana’s quote is the best known: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But other arguments are that history gives us the feeling that we are not isolated in the moment but part of something larger; and we are building new knowledge and ideas from that of great minds. Columbia’s core, for instance, aims to provide “all Columbia students, regardless of their major or concentration, with wide-ranging perspectives on significant ideas and achievements in literature, philosophy, history, music, art, and science.”

One group that holds the study at the college level of American History and Western Culture dear to its heart is the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). For the past five years, its members have made it their goal to make western culture and history a requirement in all elite colleges. Although this is a perfectly fine goal, their method of achieving it has become suspect in recent months. In November, ACTA published a pamphlet called “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It.” The report uses poor methodology and close-minded definitions of the role of academics and patriotism to denounce academia and to promote its own longstanding goals. All this, accomplished with the righteousness that comes from invoking September 11.

The malice of the ACTA report stems not from its agenda, but from its approach to the issue. ACTA starts its report by accusing academia of lacking enough patriotism in the wake of September 11. Most of the report’s denunciation is directed against professors.

But of the 117 quotations meant to exemplify the anti-war mood on campus, most are not from professors. Many were made by students, or by panelists as part of teach-ins. Some of the quotes actually came from placards at rallies and included the usual activist jargon like “hate breeds hate” and “recycle plastic, not violence.”

Columbia made the list three times: 54) “I’m not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House.” —Professor of history, Columbia University 67) “[It is] ridiculous for us to go and kill more people because of what Bin Laden did.” —Student, Columbia University 103) “Contingent Predictions: … Bombing the presumed originator(s) of Tuesday’s attacks and forcing other countries to choose sides will therefore aggravate the very conditions American leaders will declare they are preventing. … If so, democracy (defined as relatively broad and equal citizenship, binding consultation of citizens, and protection from arbitrary actions by governmental agents) will decline across the world.” —Professor of social science, Columbia University The quotes were originally cited, and became a kind of hit list of those in academia not supporting the war on terrorism. A week later the names were removed, but the list remained. The list is a very shoddy way to do research. Many of the quotes consist of one

sentence taken out of a longer speech or article with no explanation of the larger argument. For example, quote #54 was written by Eric Foner, the Dewitt Clinton Professor of History. He said that this was the first sentence in a larger piece for the London Review of Books.

The piece later went on to support military action against those responsible for the September 11 attacks. “No one sentence can give you the whole picture,” he said in an interview.

And by extension, 117 disunited quotes taken from the many statements professors and students make everyday do not reflect the mood on college campuses. It would be possible to do thorough research by surveying students and professors and going through all the articles written by professors, both pro- and anti-war on terror to discover what the mood really is in academia. But ACTA did not do thorough research. Instead, it used scant evidence to label a certain group as the “bad guys.”

Even more disturbing is the way they phrased the accusation towards academia. They write, “while America’s elected officials from both parties and media commentators from across the spectrum condemned the attacks and followed the President in calling evil by its rightful name, many faculty demurred. Some refused to make judgments. Many invoked tolerance and diversity as antidotes to evil.” They expect academics to act no differently than politicians whose job it is to rouse the public. They seem to want academia to just be another forum for propaganda rather than a place where questions are examined and analyzed.

“Although [ACTA’s members] are alumni and trustees, they are fundamentally anti-intellectual. They just want courses that celebrate America and don’t think critically about the nature of the world,” Foner said.

But worse than their limits on the role of academia are the limits they place on what is acceptable after September 11.

Patriotism is a loaded word. Being called patriotic has positive connotations. A patriot loves America and belongs as part of the community, but being called unpatriotic is quite the opposite. If a person is not for America then he is against America. It is a word that symbolizes otherness, of not belonging. It lacks a precise definition. Foner used Paul Robsone’s definition of a patriot: “the person who is never satisfied with his country.” ACTA, on the other hand, defines patriotism as unquestionably accepting the status quo. By their definition, anyone daring to question the establishment is somehow evil. By calling the current academic establishment unpatriotic they can incite many and show the need to change it by adding classes on American History. They are stifling free speech.

Teaching american history and western culture in colleges may not be a bad idea, but criticizing professors because they did not react to September 11 with the same knee jerk as the rest of the country is horrible. To levy such an accusation, especially without complete research, is dangerous to free speech, and it undermines the very group, universities, that ACTA claims to be trying to improve.

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Columbia Political Review

SPRING 2002

FRUSTRATING THE WAR EFFORT

By Jaime Sneider

Fighting terrorism requires further regulation of student visas; refusal to cooperate with U.S. authorities shows reflexive short-sightedness.

I

f the Immigration and Naturalization Service were to track the 500,000 international students currently in the United States— particularly the 16,000 originating from terror-sponsoring countries like Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and Syria—it seems almost inevitable that some terrorist conspiracies would be exposed. After all, several of the hijackers, namely Hani Hanjour and Ahmed Alghamdi, penetrated United States borders with student visas, but were in violation of the conditions set forth by the time of the September 11 attacks.

Defending our nation means recognizing that terrorist operatives share many traits with legitimate students. The issue of student visas only came to the forefront of debate when it was reported that one of the participants in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing had been a student illegally remaining in the United States. Indeed, a number of the terrorists currently being detained in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba are alumni of American colleges.

The policy of the INS continues to follow the precarious pattern of waiting until after the perpetration of terrorist attacks to investigate and remedy possible transgressions of immigration law. In the last month, INS agents even suffered the embarrassment of having granted terrorist ringleaders Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi visas in a post-9/11 debacle. Whether due to its own wanton neglect or political bureaucracy, it is clearly a cause for concern that the INS currently lacks the ability to investigate foreign students expeditiously.

The notion that the United States is in a state of war is lost on many administrators, professors, and students at elite universities.

American academics champion without reservation the right of aliens to unrestrictedly participate in their chosen endeavors in the United States. These ardent defenders see their institutions as the providers of “sanctuary” from an American government they perceive as an oppressing force.

As part of the federal homeland defense effort, the Justice Department mailed letters to 5,000 Arab aliens requesting interviews. Those contacted only comprise men aged 18 to 33 who entered the country after January 2001 on non-immigrant student, business, or tourist visas. Though voluntary, the letter reads, “It is crucial that the investigation be broad based and thorough, and the interview is important to achieve that goal.”

Some schools have refused to aid FBI investigations into foreign-sourced terrorism. At the University of Michigan, for instance, a spokeswoman said, “since none of these individuals identified for questioning are suspected of or associated with criminal activity, we have decided that our public safety personnel will not participate in the interviews.” Clearly, however, the United States government is in a better position than officials from a University to assess procedures that would ensure the public’s safety.

The University of Michigan’s disparagement of cooperation with the FBI presumes that the Justice Department would irrationally divert resources from actual security needs in a time of national crisis. Moreover, it would indicate that the University believes the government would harass and intimidate innocent

people rather than seek out those involved in or aware of suspicious activities.

At Columbia University, students belonging to People for Peace (PFP) circulated a petition concerning the “unethical release of international student information.” They demanded that Columbia immediately “stop releasing the private information of international students in violation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.” FERPA, however, contains an emergency exception requiring educational institutions to disclose information when it is necessary to protect the health or safety of the student or other individuals.

The petition more remarkably insisted that Columbia “compensate students for any legal costs incurred due to the release of information.” But what if a student were discovered plotting terrorism against the United States, or for that matter, engaging in other illegal activity? And again, no word on the possibility that future attacks may be averted.

The PFP petition even complains, “Attorney General Ashcroft can now block re-entry of any non-citizens based upon their participation or connection with any groups that are designated as ‘terrorist organizations’ by the United States government thus effectively violating the First Amendment.” This reveals that many Columbia students lament the refusal of the Bush administration to provide international terrorists with the right to assemble in America. While this line of reasoning may baffle many constitutional lawyers, it apparently failed to puzzle any of the petitions dozens of signatories, which include several professors.

The possibility that foreign students might have useful information that they wish to divulge is never even considered by their alleged advocates. Though in a letter to students, Columbia University Provost Jonathan Cole dutifully notes various organizations that might provide legal assistance for students contacted by investigators, he never provides contact information for government agencies to which students might report suspicious activity.

It is worth mentioning that a small number of education groups have retreated from their opposition to the Student Exchange Visitor Information System, the proposed INS database of foreign students, in the months since September 11. The current lull in their grievances, however, should by no means be interpreted as acquiescence to a common national purpose. NAFSA: Association of International Educators, for instance, issued a press release on September 20 maintaining its past position that the INS database is “an unreasonable barrier to foreign students.”

Condescendingly, only then did the organization note, “we will no longer oppose the foreign student tracking system that is being implemented by the INS.” When academics have managed to subdue their genuine beliefs, it is only in recognition that after September 11, their views are all the more unpopular. However, they have not modified their contempt for American values and are determined to enact policies which would belittle our country’s ability to defend itself.

SPRING 2002

Columbia Political Review

Text, Lies, and Scholarship: AwardWinning Plagiarists

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BY AMBA DATTA

he won the Pulitzer Prize in history in Times, one of the books that Goodwin suppos1995. He won the Bancroft Prize in edly borrowed from. Since January, Goodwin 2001. But despite these prestigious has faced an ever-spiraling chain of questions tributes to their scholarship, historians concerning her reputation.

Doris Kearns Goodwin and Michael Bellesiles She has withdrawn indefinitely from her have had some serious accusations to contend regular guest appearances on PBS’s Newshour with recently. Charged with plagiarism and fab- with Jim Lehrer, colleges have rescinded speakrication respectively by journalists and fellow er engagements, and a vituperative editorial academics who have reviewed their work, both Goodwin and Bellesiles have faced review of their ethical stanBETH MIHALICK dards as historians.

In a coincidence that makes the questions about the two historians's scholarship relevant for the Columbia community, it appears that both Goodwin and Bellesiles are the recent recipients of awards from Barnard College and Columbia University.

Goodwin received Barnard’s medal of distinction in 2000; Bellesiles received the prestigious Bancroft Prize in American History and diplomacy awarded annually by Columbia in 2001. While there may be no need for Columbia and Barnard to jump unhesitatingly on the bandwagon in revoking the awards they have bestowed on Goodwin and Bellesiles, they do need to reconsider whether those awards are appropriate in light of the recent charges.

The Goodwin “scandal”—or so the media now describes any breaking Goodwin news—centers on wellknown historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s admission that she “borrowed from the Harvard Crimson called on her to freely” from another historian’s work in her resign from the University’s Board of 1987 book, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. Overseers. Goodwin was also relieved of her Goodwin admitted that she had cited material membership on this year’s Pulitzer prize comfrom a few authors’ works without footnoting— mittee, and the Pulitzer Board recently turned an implicit admission of plagiarism, whether down a request to review her Pulitzer prize winintentional or not. She subsequently also made ning book No Ordinary Time. She has reportedcomments revealing that her publisher Simon ly hired a public relations expert to help her saland Schuster had made an out-of-court copy- vage her reputation. She will also come out right settlement in 1989 with Lynne McTaggart, with an edited version of her book that footthe author of Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and notes the dozens of passages she plagiarized.

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WHAT IS DISTURBING ABOUT Goodwin’s conduct is that she has not specifically apologized for what she did—plagiarism. She has admitted to “borrowing freely,” but Goodwin did much more than borrow. McTaggart, who discovered that she was re-reading passages from her own book as she was writing a book review of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, described calling a copyright lawyer in an article for The New York Times last month. Wrote McTaggart, “It was the sheer volume of the appropriation— thousands of my exact or nearly exact words— that supported my copyright infringement claim.” As McTaggart points out in her piece, allegations of plagiarism are vague simply because there is no clear line for defining what constitutes appropriate usage of another’s work.

But if the use of an author’s language is so pervasive, as McTaggart alleges, it can be appropriately called plagiarism.

Goodwin says that her mistakes resulted from her habit of taking long hand notes and confusing other authors’ works with her original thoughts in the notes. Does she mean to imply that she copied entire sections of the book out in longhand?

“I wrote everything in longhand in those days,” Goodwin told Weekly Standard, “including the notes I took on secondary sources. When I wrote the passages in question, I did not have the McTaggart book in front of me.

Drawing on my notes, I did not realize that in some cases they constituted a close paraphrase of the original work.”

It’s almost certain that Goodwin’s mistakes were genuine ones and not deliberate. But her sloppy scholarship should be something that she admits in a forthright manner, especially for a respected historian who likely prides herself on her reputation as an academic and popular historian. “Borrowing freely” is still a circuitous way of describing plagiarism.

Despite Goodwin’s mistakes, Barnard College’s decision to award her with its Medal of Distinction is a decision that should not require review.

So far, the integrity of Goodwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book has remained mostly intact and her comments include none of the distastefully cavalier qualities of the plagiarist-historian Stephen Ambrose, who has shrugged off allegations of plagiarism. With the majority of her scholarship holding up, Goodwin is still a historian is worthy of approbation.

Barnard Provost Elizabeth Boylan said she was aware of the Goodwin case and noted, “Obviously there was no hint of these allega-

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tions of plagiarism or admissions of sloppy note-taking when we considered her for, and awarded her, a Medal.” But Boylan said that she did not consider a revocation of the Medal to be “appropriate at this time… That would be to prejudge an outcome, and the extent to which she [Goodwin] admits to and takes responsibility for her actions,” she said. The Medal has never before been rescinded.

SIMILARLY, THE BANCROFT PRIZE, according to History Department Chair Alan Brinkley and Vice Provost Stephen Rittenberg, has never been revoked since the prize was first awarded in 1948. What distinguishes the Barnard Medal from the Bancroft Prize is that the Bancroft recognizes a specific work that merits a mark of distinction.

For that reason, the controversy surrounding Michael Bellesiles’s book is worthy of closer examination.

Emory University historian Bellesiles’s book Arming America: the Origins of a National Gun Culture ignited passions on both sides of the gun-control debate with its central argument: that guns were not a necessary and central part of the lives of colonial Americans.

In Bellesiles’s own words, he argued, “While in the modern United States, guns are determinative; for early America, they served an often limited function.” His argument ran counter to what Second Amendment proponents had been arguing for years and Bellesiles received threatening e-mails and phone messages. In the aftermath of such politically charged criticism, it has become obvious that Bellesiles, himself a gun owner, never meant to arouse the kind of harassment that has forced him to change his address and phone number. Initially, Bellesiles took comfort in the praise he was receiving from academics and reviewers that made it clear he was on the brink of academic fame for his innovative thesis. Former president of the Organization of American Historians Michael Kammen named his book a “classic work.”

But last year, Bellesiles’s book also elicited a different kind of reaction based upon accusations of fabrication. Bellesiles, his critics contend, based part of his assertions on the small number of working guns in America upon faulty documentary evidence and research on probate records that contained serious errors.

In a forum in the January issue of the William and Mary Quarterly devoted to a series of essays on Bellesiles’s book, he admits to some errors of misinterpretation but backs the bulk of his research.

Part of Bellesiles’s argument rests on the fact that he has made—as he indicates in his book—a study of over 11,000 probate records from counties across the United States which are designed to show that Americans owned

Columbia Political Review

few working guns. Bellesiles claims in his piece in his own defense in the WMQ that his book contains only contains five paragraphs on probate records in the United States. But clearly the numbers that he draws from such research would back an argument for their relative non-use in colonial America. If what Bellesiles says about the nonessential quality of the probate records is true, then he doesn’t explain why he spent so long examining the over 11,000 records that he claims he did. Or why his response to his critics in the WMQ— written at the request of Emory University— essentially stands behind the research that itself does not withstand intense scrutiny.

Furthermore, as Randolph Roth’s essay in the Quarterly shows, Bellesiles’s errors are not limited to the probate record research. Roth offers evidence that Bellesiles was not qualified for the heavily quantitative project he undertook; Bellesiles may also have misinterpreted records of homicide rates and records of the number of guns owned by militia members.

“I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, but facts are facts.”

Bellesiles’s sloppiness is extraordinary.

He never kept a database to record his 10 years of research. He took notes on yellow legal pads—in pencil—only to have his records destroyed or rendered illegible in a flood of his office at Emory in May 2000. Bellesiles’s notetaking wasn’t very impressive either: ticks in pencil marked evidence from the probate records and numbers of guns. Furthermore, as Roth notes in the Quarterly, “it is impossible to know what went wrong in Bellesiles’s study, because he does not discuss his sample size or his sampling technique.”

Bellesiles’s inability to come up with a concrete story and methodology for his work has convinced some historians, such as Jerome Sternstein of CUNY, that he falsified and fabricated evidence, as Sternstein wrote in an article for the History News Network.

In fact, Bellesiles has altered his defense concerning his methodology.

He made the puzzling assertion, for instance, that he had studied records detailing gun ownership in San Francisco. Yet those records were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire in San Francisco. Bellesiles’s response to this new charge was characteristically inadequate; it is also a classic example of his propensity to change his story.

When historian James Lindgren levied the charge that Bellesiles’s San Francisco evidence had not existed for nearly 100 years, Bellesiles

SPRING 2002

responded on Emory’s website, saying, “I was not hallucinating when I read the San Francisco probate files. They are housed in the California History Center.” Bellesiles added that the center, which had recently switched locations, did not have a web site. There is, however, no California History Center, an understandable mistake because Bellesiles said on his webpage, owing to the flood, he had had to recall archive locations from memory. Then Bellesiles corrected his original surmise to say that he had seen the records at the Contra Costa Historical Society. The Society’s Director, Betty Maffei, told reporters that there were no records from San Francisco in the society’s archives. To this, Bellesiles responded on Emory’s website with an unwarranted and rather offensive remark questioning the library’s authority: “The staff appeared unaware they had probate materials in their collection.”

Not so. Bellesiles came to the society, copied the materials that he said he had used in his book as evidence for gun ownership in San Francisco, and gave it to reporters. The reporters sent it back to Maffei, reported the San Francisco Chronicle in March. Maffei said all the documents were from Contra Costa County residents, not from San Francisco residents.

“I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt,” Maffei told the Chronicle, “but facts are facts... Our reputation wasn’t at stake—his was. Maybe he thought no one would check a small history center. But he was just a rude young man.”

Apparently, Bellesiles was rude enough for the chair of Emory’s history department to send Maffei an apology for Bellesiles’s behavior.

But Bellesiles still asserts that this exchange is insignificant. He writes in a response to Sternstein’s article on the History News Network, “I have no problem correcting their provenance to Contra Costa, which strikes me as a minor detail since I do not even discuss them in my book.”

On the contrary, Bellesiles’s behavior over the San Francisco records is significant. It demonstrates the kind of sloppy scholarship and cavalier assumptions that characterize his work on a broader level and lead him to assume expertise over the archivists in charge of the records—all qualities unbecoming for a respectable academic at a prestigious university. Emory’s dean announced in February that the university would conduct a review of his research.

That examination of Bellesiles’s research and methods of scholarship should not stop with Emory. As the institution that awards the Bancroft Prize, Columbia should examine once

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Columbia Political Review

more whether Bellesiles’s book meets its own requirements for the prize. The Bancroft was described by the Record as “one of the most distinguished awards in the field of history [that] is presented annually to the authors of books of exceptional merit and distinction in the fields of American history and biography.”

The questions surrounding Bellesiles’s book are so overwhelming as to clearly warrant review.

Columbia’s Vice Provost Rittenberg said, “We have not as yet undertaken a formal review of the allegations that have been made against him. We could decide to do so in the future, depending on the changing state of opinion about his book within the discipline of history and the outcome of an investigation that is being conducted by his home university, Emory.”

But in a December New York Times article, a spokesman for Provost Jonathan Cole said “he had distributed copies of the documents detail-

ing Mr. Bellesiles’s mistakes to this year’s three Bancroft jurors and asked them to examine it.”

So although no formal review of Bellesiles’s work is taking place, it is clear that Columbia is—albeit not publicly—taking into account the criticisms of Bellesiles’s work.

What differentiates Goodwin’s case from Bellesiles’s is that the Barnard Medal of Distinction is given partially to honor a whole body of work and scholarly achievement. The Bancroft Prize, on the other hand, is given to one specific work of an author. The prize recognizes one work for its outstanding scholarship. In Bellesiles’s case, the volume of criticism that has been directed against him and the sloppy way in which he conducted his research in quantitative history merits a review if not a revocation of his prize.

There is an argument to be made that Columbia and Barnard need not stoop to the

The Anatomy of a Threat: Israel in Saddam’s Crosshairs

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BY ADAM B. KUSHNER

addam Hussein’s instructions to his officers are very clear. If he ever loses contact with the Republic Guard, push all the buttons. If Baghdad ever falls under siege, push all the buttons. If America ever moves to occupy Iraq’s Western desert where Saddam keeps his scuds, push all the buttons. The buttons on Saddam’s console fire biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction at Israel.

Since the Gulf War, when Saddam learned the hard way that he could never defeat the United States in an armed conflict, he has made one thing clear: if ever he finds his back against the wall in a threat to his government, Israel will get it. It’s one of Saddam’s strongest deterrents, though it’s not his only one. For such a crackpot, he is unusually well endowed with carrots and sticks to beat off Western democracies that might encroach on his regime.

Most importantly (because of how it destabilizes the entire region), he is a perennial threat to Israel. The scuds he keeps in Iraq’s western desert can travel only 600 kilometers, but that’s enough for Saddam to hit Tel Aviv like he did in

the Gulf War. This time, because he knows America and Israel would crush him in a retaliatory attack, he will attach dirty material—biological and chemical agents—to his missile warheads. Without a dirty warhead, he cannot make his limited resources pay off in a firststrike attack on Israel. And the way the media and the think tanks are talking, “this time” is not long in coming.

To complicate matters, however, Saddam wields other threats against those who would attack him. With conventional weapons, he could ignite oil fields in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. He could also withhold oil from the West by curtailing sales (as he tried this April), a move that would spike oil prices, destabilize the economy, and make America dip into its reserves within a matter of months.

Of course, that would mean ending the oilfor-food program—the only device that has kept sanctions from starving the Iraqi people— which, any place else in the world would motivate an overthrow of the government. But of the six coups d’état that have risen to topple Saddam since 1991, not a single one has suc-

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level of some of the critics of both Goodwin and Bellesiles, some of whom seem to have all the time in the world to explore every excruciating detail of both of these historians’ lives. And of course there is an element of victimization in the treatment that both Goodwin and Bellesiles have suffered in the media, which will likely drop the Goodwin story as soon as it becomes old. The Bellesiles story has endured simply because his story has changed so much; if Bellesiles had followed a clear methodology for his work, however flawed, and reported that historical process accurately when questions about Arming America first arose, his story would likely be fading—a testament to the public’s short-lived interest in any salacious gossip about tarnished reputation. But Bellesiles has dug himself ever deeper into a pit of his own making; if Columbia publicly announces a review of his award, as it should, it will be his own fault.

ceeded. Unfortunately for the Iraqi people, and especially the Kurdish and Shiite populations (the ruling regime is mostly Sunni), Saddam’s ability to locate and repress dissent is matched only by his ruthlessness in doing so.

Appetite for Destruction If history is any guide, the tyrant’s profession seems to attract depraved, brutal, and power-hungry opportunists, but few tyrants, if any, embody those qualifications as well as Saddam Hussein does. Political purges are standard fare in dictatorships like Saddam’s, where totalitarian ambitions often inform the dictator’s intolerance for criticism—just look at Stalin or Mao. In 1988, he launched chemical attacks against the Kurds in the Northern villages of Halabja and Goktapa, killing between 50,000 and 200,000 and affecting untold others with residual toxins in the drinking water. The remoteness of the Kurdish political threat (even now, despite Saddam’s atrocities, the separatist movement in Iraq is still fairly weak) illustrates how a dictator’s megalomania can endanger his own people.

But the rule by fear, as expatriot Kanan Makiya called it in his book Republic of Fear, doesn’t end with politicians and Kurds. In 1999, Iraqi soldiers in white biohazard suits surrounded the uppity Shiite city of Karbala and just stood there. Saddam sent a clear and simple signal. There was no attack, but the message was not lost on the Shiites. After that, no one thought political activism was worth the price the Kurds paid.

His willingness to sacrifice Iraqis is what makes Saddam so unusual. His designs on

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BETH MIHALICK

Israel are no secret. At the start of the Gulf War, facing hundreds of thousands of technologically superior American troops, Saddam told top generals “I see the gates of Jerusalem open before me.” He sees himself as a leader in a pan-Arab coalition, and there is no better way to lead that coalition than to liberate Palestine.

But as he knows, if he were to attack today, Israel would never show the same restraint it did during the Gulf War, when American and international powers pressured against a military response. If he strikes with weapons of mass destruction, anything could happen. Israel has long had nuclear capability, which, for now, Saddam lacks, but an Israeli response will probably be guided by the nature of an Iraqi attack.

“The chances of an Israeli response are almost 100 percent,” Kenneth Pollack, Director for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “The chances of an Israeli nuclear response, much lower. Their declaratory position is that they will not be the first party to introduce a nuclear weapon into the region.

“For them, it’s going to be a matter of how much damage Saddam does. If he delivers a biological agent that kills 50,000 Israelis, all

bets are off. If he delivers an agent that forms a little puddle in Tel Aviv and three people get sick, I think that the Israelis are going to likely respond at a much lower level,” Pollack said.

The Israelis, like the Americans, rely on a much more sophisticated military and intelligence system than the Iraqis do. They can mount a successful counterattack without having to rely on weapons of mass destruction like Saddam must. The Israelis killed their biological weapons program almost two decades ago, and even the possibility of a nuclear attack is unclear.

“Nuclear weapons,” Amatzia Baram, an Iraq expert at the University of Haifa, reminded me, “are made in order that you never use them; that’s a basic rule. Israelis don’t want to kill five million Baghdadis. First, the vast majority of them really are not to blame for anything. And second, [nuclear attacks] are just not done. It’s not nice.”

There are other ways to respond, he explained. “My guess is that Israel will opt for those parts of Baghdad—very small sections— where we know that the ruling elite live. We know exactly where they are. Another way is to go for the place where Saddam Hussein’s tribe resides. Those people whose children, whose

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sons are the missile officers—those who are in charge of the nonconventional warheads, we know who they are. We know where they live and where their families are,” Baram said.

“I think you can try and deter his men— not him—because they would like their families and tribes to live. But if Saddam is close to his death, he’ll take Iraq with him, with pleasure,” he said.

Israel’s detailed intelligence and precision technology are enough to deter Saddam from using weapons unprovoked, at least for now.

Looking at his murderous cruelty through the lens of his Israel policy illuminates something about his ruling philosophy. He is willing to pay the price of his subjects’ lives as long as they benefit him. The near-genocide in Iraqi Kurdistan and the political purges are justifiable because they preserve his regime, but an attack on Israel could conceivably loose his stranglehold on power, and in an effective counterattack, the inevitable loss of his most loyal supporters would undoubtedly weaken Saddam’s power.

As Pollack concluded, “I think Saddam would be delighted to sacrifice tons of Iraqis if it meant he could hang on to power.”

For these behaviors, the situation necessitates a closer look at Saddam and his relationship with his people. Because of the sophisticated nature of his police state, he does not need to appease his subjects—like other less authoritarian dictators must—to continue to rule. His power extends so far that he is substantially better at crushing dissent and keeping his subjects in check than his contemporaries are.

Killing Them Softly Making a calculus of his subjects’ deaths and suffering is a leitmotif in Saddam’s regime.

When the Gulf War ended, Saddam knew he could earn retribution from the United Nations if he hindered the weapons inspections, but that didn’t stop him. Eventually, he won sanctions so harsh that he made an otherwise political problem into a humanitarian debacle.

When America led the world market in cutting off Iraq after the Gulf War to punish Saddam for his antics, the Iraqis suffered horribly. Stories of drought, starvation, and general poverty permeated the Western press, and in a moment of innovation, Western diplomats found a way to address their plight: oil for food. With the new program, the world energy market could keep prices down without worrying about the Iraqi population. Oil-for-food meant business as usual without the pangs of conscience.

But when the oil started flowing out and the money started coming into the special U.N. coffers, Saddam found that the deal engineered by the West to circumvent his humanitarian

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abuses could not aid him in any way. The U.N. coffers offered no outlet for Saddam to sustain his own regime.

So he began siphoning off money. Today, he steals almost $2 billion annually from his own subjects, who are still living near poverty.

The cash meant for the enfeebled Iraqis has helped him ensure military loyalty, hunt and purge alleged dissidents, execute rebel insurgents, and keep the weapons industry booming.

In fact, weapons development has continued unabated since the Gulf War, and especially since 1998 when the United Nations gave up on inspections altogether. The team had met with unexpected success in Iraq, despite Saddam’s efforts to hide his weapons. There were so many administrative hacks desperate for the breath of air that might have resulted from Saddam’s overthrow that leaks opened in every corner of his regime until finally, Saddam had to freeze the team’s movement altogether.

There have been no inspections since then.

Now, four years later, named as the leading villain in the Axis of Evil, there is talk that Saddam will open Iraq for inspections again under pressure, but the consensus is that any inspections will be only nominal.

“As long as [Saddam] realizes that [inspectors] are not getting nearer to something sensitive, there will be no problem,” Baram said. “It will look really good. And it will be very embarrassing for the Americans, of course, but they’ll get what they want. The moment he realizes that they are getting dangerously close to what he doesn’t want them to get close to, he will obstruct,” which is exactly what happened four years ago.

“The United States has to consider two possibilities. One, that the inspectors will simply not find anything. Don’t forget that he had almost four years to hide everything. He knows how to hide it, and not too many people know things now, so you don’t have a huge reservoir of informers. It’s possible that they simply won’t get anywhere, and after six months they will have to report to the U.N. And they’ll say that they have found nothing and the Iraqis will call for a complete lifting of the embargo.”

“If the inspectors are successful in gathering information and finding sources that in the past they were able to find,” he said, “then he will obstruct. Then the test to the Bush administration will come, because he may obstruct in a very inconspicuous way. A few hours may be enough for him to evacuate a certain area. By the time the Americans say, ‘We are coming,’ he will say, ‘Oh, wait a minute, there’s an administrative miscommunication.’”

Proponents of containment argue that thus far—inspections or no inspections—the trade embargo has prevented any indecorous behavior on Saddam’s part. He has not launched an

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attack on any of his neighbors and he still does not have nuclear capacity. Containment, they say, is still a workable alternative.

But as Kenneth Pollack explained, the central cog in the containment system is faltering: the international trade sanctions have lost their international character because there’s money to be had in Iraqi oil.

“The French, the Russians, and the Chinese figured out four or five years ago that any inspection program that was independent and aggressive was one that was going to cross Iraq and get into problems with the Iraqis. It could therefore create the casus belli for an American military operation against Iraq,” he said.

“They don’t want to see us go to war with Saddam and they all have different reasons, the most important of which is the commercial one.

They all make much more money with Saddam than they expect with any successor… What [Saddam] does is twofold. First, he gives them favorable oil contracts. He will sell them oil at a greatly discounted rate, in many cases just for supporting his policy, but in almost every case because they pay him a certain percentage outside the oil-for-food program. As far as Saddam is concerned, all of the money that goes into the U.N. coffers is money that’s simply lost to him, so he has no particular interest in seeing a lot of money go there. So he sells oil at a greatly reduced rate.”

“I think Saddam would be delighted to sacrifice tons of Iraqis if it meant he could hang on to power.”

For three major patrons like France, Russia, and China, the profit margin is an enticing reason to disregard the embargo. But not only has the effectiveness of sanctions diminished dramatically, the U.N. is no longer successfully controlling the flow of money in Iraq, and therefore cannot check Saddam’s nuclear arms program.

“All of that is now breaking down,” Pollack said. “And I don’t have high confidence that we can keep nuclear weapons out of his hands for the foreseeable future. There’s a high likelihood that in the next five to 10 years, if the sanctions continue to erode, he will acquire [a nuclear weapon].”

In fact, Germany has monitored the development of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction with great scrutiny because it now fears some German businesses may have contributed to the buildup. August Hanning, the chief of Germany’s intelligence agency, recently told the New Yorker, “It is our estimate that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years.”

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Finding a Bigger Stick Between the threat to Israel, the attacks on his own subjects—many are loathe to call them citizens—and his support of terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas (he recently offered the families of Palestinian martyrs $25,000), Saddam Hussein is a natural destabilizer. The possibility that he might acquire a nuclear weapon is not exactly an attractive prospect for the world’s diplomats, particularly those invested in the Middle East.

This is where assessments of Saddam and his character become essential. For example, many American policy-makers say that only an irrational despot could show the degree of cruelty for his own people that Saddam has shown.

They are right that he is a despot, but wrong that he is irrational. Underestimating him could have devastating consequences.

Saddam is extremely adept at dealing with the matrix of political and diplomatic decisionmaking. If anything, his method of evaluating subjects should show just how coldly rational he is—he understands exactly when they are expendable and when they can be exploited to draw attention to himself, as he did after the embargo began.

The question, if Saddam is to arm himself with nuclear weapons, is what he will do with them. Here, it all comes back to Israel. Even if Saddam had a bomb, there would be limitations on what he could do with it. He certainly does not have the capability to deliver a nuclear warhead to the United States on a missile, though it is conceivable he would try to deliver it through a third party. Simply detonating a nuke on the oil fields of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, or an American military installation in the Middle East would be a low-yield use of a powerful and expensive weapon. The immediate use of an atomic bomb may not even be in Saddam’s designs.

“If he does acquire [a nuclear bomb], he will not suddenly pop it off, but he will feel emboldened,” Pollack said. “He will feel a freedom of action to pursue his foreign policy— which is to dominate the Gulf region—as he did in the past. The lesson he seems to have learned form the Gulf War as we understand it is not that it was a mistake to have attacked Kuwait, but that it was a mistake to have attacked Kuwait before he had a nuclear weapon.”

With a nuclear weapon, Saddam believes he will be able to deter U.S. intervention in the region. His consistent willingness to sacrifice his own subjects time and time again only verifies his resolve—look at the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, Iraqi Kurdistan in 1988, and the Gulf War. “Because he is mostly unconcerned with the fate of his civilian population,” Pollack said, “he may be willing to run risks that we or other countries would not be willing to run.

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We’re not going to take action that could result in the death of 10,000 citizens. But for him, 10,000 is a minor cost to pay for something.”

So although Saddam is a highly rational actor, he is still unpredictable, and his inexperience in the nuclear theater makes him prone to miscalculate the rules of deterrence, a thought that few relish. Perhaps most telling about his behavior is that nobody I talked to for this article thought that Saddam would be particularly concerned by the thought of mutually assured destruction. In other words, the possibility that a nuclear attack on Israel would mean a nuclear winter in Baghdad does not bother him at all.

The Rivers to the Sea A recent profile of Saddam by Mark Bowden in the Atlantic Monthly characterized Saddam as prey to his delusions

VICTORIA CONTE

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of grandeur. He wrote that despite overwhelming evidence that his actions would bring disaster on his people, he carried through on his policy, believing that he was divinely ordained for success.

The moment before the Gulf War when he told his generals he saw the gates of Jerusalem illustrates this point perfectly. As far as Saddam is concerned, the term “from the River to the Sea,” which is used to describe the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea that Israel inhabits, might as well say “from the Rivers to the Sea.” If he had his way, Iraq’s dominion would extend from the Tigris and Euphrates, which run through Iraq, to the Mediterranean, annexing Jordan—far too moderate an Arab power for his tastes—and Israel along the way.

Thankfully, Saddam is nowhere near able to execute that vision at the moment. Amatzia Baram, the Iraq expert at the University of Haifa, estimates that the extent of Iraqi power rests in the western desert, where Saddam has just over half a dozen missiles capable of reaching Israel. That’s why any attack on Israel will necessarily involve biological and chemical weapons.

“It doesn’t make any sense for him to send conventional missiles,” said Baram, “because he doesn’t have too many. So every payload has to be the most destructive. If he sends a few conventional missiles to Israel, nothing will happen. Israel doesn’t crumble with that. He would really like to get Israel to its knees, and to do that, he will use his nonconventional weapons.”

Baram also believes that Hussein could couple a missile attack with other methods of delivery. “Maybe he can tell a few of his air force officers, ‘Look, you go one way to Israel, fly very low, drop the bombs wher-

ever,

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and then you eject and stay as prisoners of war in Israel. I will look after your family. And if indeed you don’t do that, I’ll look after your family in a way you don’t like.’ That’s his style, and I think he has the arms available for that.”

But both Baram and Pollack think that any Iraqi air offensive would be defeated handily by Israel’s superior air force. So thus far, there has been little incentive and little promise of success enough for Saddam to attack Israel and start a war. But with the Pentagon developing plans for military action in Iraq, as reported last week in The New York Times, he will be looking for an excuse to fire. Until then, and as long as he does not feel cornered, his supreme confidence may stave off an attack— although prognosticating foreign policy based on a tyrant’s psychology has never been a reliable science.

“I don’t think he’s afraid,” Barry Rubin, director of the Center for Global Research in International Affairs, told me. “He’s very arrogant, and with reason. He says, ‘The Americans said they would get me in 1990, and I’m still here. I put down revolts, I threw out the inspectors, and I targeted George Bush for assassination. I’ve made all sorts of threats and I’m still here. The internal situation is under control, the Arabs say they support me, and the Europeans say that they’re not going to support the Americans. Why should I worry?’”

Stalemate Even if the United States had not initiated plans to topple Saddam Hussein, he would still be worthy of close scrutiny. After all, he kills his dissidents, stifles any semblance of democracy, and has the potential to wreak havoc on the entire Middle East by instigating a war from his western desert. It’s a defiantly elaborate equation that may yet be complicated by the addition of nuclear weapons. It’s the sort of situation that politicians call a quagmire.

There is obviously little reason to give Saddam any space. His unflagging weapons development indicates just how ready he is to abuse any elbow room America gives him.

Moreover, if America leaves him alone, it sends a message to the rest of the world that even the most vile anti-democrats can get away with murder if they can offer the United States a good deal.

In the March issue of Foreign Affairs, Kenneth Pollack called for a full-scale American invasion using 200,000-300,000 troops in the Persian Gulf. An invasion may be the only way to end Saddam’s reign, but it would definitely provoke a launch against Israel. If the United States Air Force could swoop in and take out the puny arsenal of missiles in the western desert, it

could dry up all of his leverage. Unfortunately, Americans don’t have the slightest idea where those missiles are. And if Saddam had American troops on Iraqi soil, the logistical problems he has faced with long-distance delivery would be mooted; it would be invitingly easy for him to drop weapons on American troops in his own backyard.

A diplomatic resolution is naturally the most appealing, but Saddam still won’t allow inspections, even if America turns up the diplomatic heat. Amatzia Baram proposed applying military pressure to make Saddam readmit the inspectors.

“Tell him, ‘Look, whenever you stop [the inspections], we attack you for a couple days and destroy everything in sight, including your wonderful palaces. We’ll punish you as much as we can, and then we’ll go back home and let you choose what to do. Within a week or so, if you allow [inspectors] back in, okay. If you stop them again, we attack you again.’ This means you’ll have to keep pounding at him in very short intervals until he really succumbs to your military pressures,” Baram said.

“Tell him, ‘Look, whenever you stop [the inspections], we attack you for a couple days.’”

But, as Baram conceded, that’s a risky move considering the cost America will have pay in international outrage. “You’ll still not be able to find his weapons of mass destruction.

My feeling is that it will have limited results, and you’ll be under international pressure to stop it,” Baram said. If there were to be military action, he said, it should force a regime change “quickly and elegantly.” But if Saddam feels he is being forced out power, he will let fly his missiles, as he has promised. Overthrow may be the most promising option, but the United States cannot accomplish it because it would mean disaster for the Middle East.

Although the status quo is unacceptable— Saddam cannot be permitted to gather nuclear technology—further sanctions are not. While they were coupled with inspections, Saddam’s power was nearly neutralized.

“The goal of sanctions,” Barry Rubin reminded me, “is to constrain the regime by denying it resources, alliances, and the ability to move forward on getting weapons of mass destruction. And that’s clearly worked in the case of Iraq. Of course, the development of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq was 95 percent done before sanctions. They already had the stuff, but we prevented them from having a delivery system, improving it, and we may have

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prevented them from properly maintaining it.

It’s fair to say that Iraq is three to five years away from nuclear weapons, but it was also three to five years away from nuclear weapons in 1990. They have not closed the gap. If sanctions are off, they will close the gap,” he said.

“The threat would occur if the sanctions ended,” he continued. “They would then have a massive inflow of money, which they could use to buy things. Then they would have a buildup and then within three to five years, you’d be facing a very serious and dangerous situation.

That’s why it’s important to struggle to maintain the sanctions and to limit their inflow of money.”

If sanctions are to succeed, the U.N. will have to crack down on countries that violate them.

Without enforcement, the sanctions are useless.

Unfortunately, there is a massive humanitarian toll in economic sanctions. The oil-forfood program may feed the Iraqis, but it has done little to alleviate the widespread poverty.

Under a less repressive regime, those conditions would nurture revolt, but against Saddam’s power, no uprising stands a chance.

The only tenable option given the consequences of a hands-off policy or an invasion is a renewal of real sanctions, but it must be joined with a commitment to the people of Iraq, who suffer horribly under the restrictive embargoes.

That commitment should manifest itself in support of an internal overthrow of Saddam. Since the Gulf War, the CIA has abandoned two coup attempts, which, with American backing, might have succeeded against the incumbent regime.

But the humanitarian debacle is not the only reason that renewed sanctions must be coupled with a dedication to regime change. As the last four years have shown, international adherence to sanctions is rapidly breaking down, and there is no way for the U.N. to enforce that its member countries obey as rigidly as they say they do. While America may be able to buttress international will temporarily, it will not be able to sustain it indefinitely.

A successful putsch in Iraq will require the technology and intelligence that only the CIA can provide. In the past, the United States has demonstrated that it is able, if not willing, to organize and back a coup. Now, the United States should line up a serious internal resistance—it should not be hard to motivate the Iraqis—and equip it to penetrate Saddam’s administration.

Of course, there are many dangers in a CIA-sponsored coup. The United States has not been very good about choosing its client insurgents in the last half century (in a worst-case scenario, Saddam’s successor could be even worse than he is), and the likelihood is slim that Iraq is ready for the immediate transition to democracy.

Furthermore, nobody knows how Saddam would react to a coup—he might launch everything in

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his arsenal to go out in a blaze of glory. Still, the odds are that Saddam would have enough faith in his own ability to suppress the coup. Once again, his supreme confidence could temper his reponse. Why would he ruin things for himself if he might still be in power in a year?

Even though the risks are great, there is no other option. Unfortunately, there is no obvious candidate that America might choose to succeed Saddam. The most vocal is Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, a group

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of expatriates who wear suits and ride limousines in London and Washington. But diplomats familiar with them view Chalabi and the INC as defunct and inept, and the United States will have to locate other possible contenders.

Although the situation seems like an unsolvable puzzle, Iraq will only descend into an increasingly intractable problem if Saddam is left to his own devices. And with his empowerment comes the danger to hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in the Middle

East—from the Israelis to his own citizens to the Kurds. The United States must take direct action in the next months to undermine Saddam’s regime from within. A more rigorous application of the sanctions and a CIA-sponsored coup seem like the only options in this potentially disasterous enigma. If the U.S. fails to exercise those options, it may have to follow through on its plans for an attack next year. If it does, it can count on a tremendous catastrophe, in which no button goes unpushed.

Redeveloping Ground Zero: Progress Is Steady but Slow

There is the Port Authority that owns the land.

There are some legal rights that Larry Silverstein [the developer with rights to the land] has. There is a governor of New York State and a mayor of New York City, so you have lots of ability to get input.”

According to the current timeline for redevelopment, the restoration of the six underground floors beneath the 16-acre site and the repair of vital utilities such as power will be the first obstacles to tackle after all of the debris has been cleared away. Beyond this immediate hurdle, however, the plan is fairly vague.

“There is a common misperception that we’ll be unveiling a master plan. The process is simply way too complex. Our goal is to seek as much public input as possible. The first phase is to develop guidelines and principles for general plans on the site,” Matthew Higgins, Vice President of Communications for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, explained to me.

Under pressure from city organizations, the LMDC decided at their most recent board meeting that they would accelerate their work and promised to announce their plan for redeveloping transportation and infrasctucture on December 1. Until then, a series of publications will be released every month or so detailing the various aspects of the redevelopment efforts.

The first publication, to be released in May, will describe the work that has been done already and highlight any pending problems. In June, the second report, regarding transportation, will be released. “[The transportation report] will contain a menu of various cost estimates. We are working with the port authority, the MTA…and various organizations to come up with items and present them to the public,” explains Higgins.

Transportation is crucial for several reasons.

Since the morning of September 11, no PATH trains from New Jersey have been running under ground zero due to the destruction of their sub-surface hub. Initial redevelopment efforts for the crippled system will focus on

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BY REBECCA WEBER

very day at Ground Zero more than 6,500 tickets are distributed for 30minute time slots at the public viewing platform. People flock to the site in droves and wait in long lines to glimpse the quickly disappearing remains of the Twin Towers—more than 80% of the debris has already been removed—and to remember the victims who lost their lives in the September 11 attacks. The site itself has become a memorial of sorts, with flags, letters, flowers, and other personal effects blanketing the fences surrounding the 16-acre area. As the debris-removal stage nears to a close, the question of what to build on and below Ground Zero—from subway stations to office towers to memorials— becomes increasingly critical.

“The removal of the debris is going dramatically ahead of schedule,” commented Governor Pataki in a recent press conference.

The “frozen zone”—the region surrounding the World Trade Center that has not returned to its pre-September 11 functionality—continues to shrink rapidly from its initial area of 14th Street and below.

Unfortunately for the displaced companies, the redevelopment process will not be nearly as expeditious as the debris removal. As soon as the remaining debris has been cleared away, the six floors beneath Ground Zero must be entirely reconstructed and utilities, such as water and power, must be reconnected. Only after the

completion of these stages will construction begin on the office tower itself. Building any skyscraper is a time-consuming endeavor—the completion of the World Trade Center itself took more than a decade—but given the sensitivity of this particular project the time frame will likely be even longer. The responsible individuals are proceeding with each stage carefully in order to ensure that the tower and memorial that replace the Twin Towers are truly exceptional. During the same press conference, Mayor Bloomberg confirmed the estimated length of the process.

Responding to the question of whether Lower Manhattan will be back to normal in five years, Mayor Bloomberg explained, “No. I think that within five years, you will have lots of construction going on.”

John C. Whitehead, the chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the joint city-state agency responsible for planning and coordinating the various aspects of redevelopment, has the unenviable position of incorporating the recommendations of numerous advisory committees, government officials, and property owners into a viable long-term plan for rebuilding. Some of the advisory committees include victims’ families, residents of Lower Manhattan, small and large businesses, transportation representatives, and tourism councils.

“There are a number of stakeholders here,” commented Mayor Bloomberg. “There is the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.

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rebuilding both the PATH train system and the destroyed subway stations, plus the accompanying underground retail and commercial space. “One of the most important things that has to get done is to reconnect the PATH tubes.

That’s going to take at least one-and-a-half years, maybe two,” explained Governor Pataki.

The transportation issue is tied to the plan to build a memorial on the site. “Transportation is so important because whatever form it takes, the memorial is bound to attract millions of people every year,” remarked Higgins. Many details need to be addressed before the type of memorial is determined. “First,” said Higgins, “we need to get a sense of what takes place underground.

Then there will be a design competition.”

Finally, another question that remains to be answered is the estimated cost of the redevelopment, and how much of that cost will be covered by the $21.37 billion in emergency aid donated by the federal government to New York. Of the total amount of aid, $1.8 billion will probably be allocated for the reconstruction and general improvement of the underground transportation system, which is expected to cost about $7 billion total. The Metropolitan Transit Authority hopes that the remainder of the funding for transportation repairs will come from insurance money. $2.75 billion will be spent on reimbursing the city and state for overtime pay and environmental cleanup. $167 million will go to repairing roads in the area, and $750 million is earmarked as grants to the LMDC for the reconstruction of phone and power infrastructure. $5 billion of the federal aid comes in the form of tax breaks, of which $1 billion will go towards building new residential and commercial structures in Lower Manhattan. Still, Higgins commented, it is “too early” to estimate even a ballpark figure for the total cost of redevelopment, and in particular, the cost of the office tower itself.

In the aftermath of September 11, companies previously occupying space in the World Trade Center have turned to a variety of alternative office space arrangements. Merrill Lynch, in particular, has received a great deal of publicity for its return to Lower Manhattan facilities. Since late October, the company has moved employees back in stages, culminating in a total of 8,500 personnel now working out of three locations near Ground Zero.

Cantor Fitzgerald, which lost 658 employees in the attacks and occupied 250,000 square feet of space on five floors of the World Trade Center, has been housing 110 workers in a temporary space in midtown lent by UBS Warburg.

Like many of the other displaced companies, Cantor Fitzgerald has also relocated several

Columbia Political Review

PAGE 15

KATIE O’SHEA

employees to New Jersey. In fact, 15-20% of the displaced companies found office space in New Jersey, though most signed only short-term leases. Very few agreed to long-term leases.

It is understandable that the rebuilding will take several years; no one expects a skyscraper to emerge from a gaping hole in a matter of months. Nonetheless, the considerable length of time for redevelopment will surely prove detrimental to New York City. If construction is going to take more than half a decade, displaced companies invested in short-term leases elsewhere, particularly in New Jersey, may not

readily relocate back to Manhattan as soon as the new building opens. By then, not only will these companies be reasonably settled in their “temporary” locations, but the public relations reasons for supporting New York City in its time of need will not be nearly as critical. It is hard to imagine that the groundswell of support throughout the country for New York will continue unabated for another five or more years.

The LMDC, the mayor, and the governor would be well advised to expedite the process further if they plan ever to re-entice the displaced companies back to Lower Manhattan.

PAGE 16

Columbia Political Review

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URH Check-Out Reminders The earlier you start, the easier Check-Out will be!

SPRING 2002

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Check-Out dates: Non-seniors - Saturday, May 18; Seniors: Thursday, May 23 Meet with your RA to complete your RCR. Begin throwing out trash and cleaning your room/suite.

Arrange with Lerner Mail Center to have your mail forwarded.

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Return optional RolmPhone equipment.

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Deposit your Express Check-Out envelope in the box in your building.

For more information, visit the URH website, www.columbia.edu/cu/reshalls.

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Fall 2002 Check-In is Thursday, August 29.

Good luck with exams!

(

Remember Al Gore, John McCain, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Reginald Jones, Bill Bradley, Ralph Nader, Shimon Peres, Tom Daschle, Paul Wellstone, Warren Buffet, Robert Rubin?

What should the CPU do next year?

Who and what will be next?

Senators, Comedians, Administration Officials, Journalists, the President, Activists...

YOU TELL US! Suggest speakers and events that you would like to see next year by sending an e-mail to cpu@columbia.edu.

SPRING 2002

Columbia Political Review

PAGE 17

PERSONAL ESSAY

BY ANDREW LEBWOHL

Activism Now and Then These are interesting times—we should engage them.

T

hus, the media breathes the name “Chandra” through its collective lips for what we can only hope is the last time.

The quiet publicity of Gary Condit’s defeat last month brought back vivid memories of my internship this past summer in another congressional office in the Capitol: Turning a corner to find multiple major news stations’ cameras focused on Condit’s office; The day I left for New York directly from work, and had to endure a day of joking inquiries as to whether I had Chandra stuffed in my suitcase. One particular memory stands out among all of them: sitting in my office the day a major tip was reported, surrounded by ecstatic staffers, but finding myself unable to summon the will to care.

And that really is the point. Chandra is one of the two names that no one will be able to give their children in years to come without showing a knowing smirk, but ultimately, the Condit scandal was without grander implications. It, like the other scandal that provided us with a newly taboo name and that fed the public libido, was the filler that kept us occupied between interesting times. Monica and Chandra kept us watching CNN in the absence of war, economic catastrophe, and radical change.

High school was difficult for a newly politically interested teenager in the late nineties. The Berlin Wall, Oslo, and Desert Storm were all behind us. The Internet was already in place. Roe v. Wade was securely established as the rule of law. The civil rights acts of the 1960s were finally starting to have their effects. The news activity of the day consisted of a series of scandals—Kelly Flynn, Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones—spectacle trials—O.J.—and a war in Serbia that was a fait acompli from the start. 2000 brought something more interesting—the election crisis—yet, again, the greater implications of the process were conservative; it proved that the country does not fall apart when the electoral system is put under pressure. Things were basically running smoothly.

Now, as the curse goes, we live in interesting times. As the host of a weekly news show for WKCR, I am continuously pushed to awareness of the fast pace of change in the world, and the amount of new developments every week that propose to alter the earthshattering events taking place around us. Yet these changes lack the rewarding progress that exemplified another exciting era, the sixties. And somehow, as we try to rally around September 11 as a new

cultural center, as Vietnam once was for our parents, the rewarding feeling of cooperation and unity shows signs of strain.

Vietnam, by virtue of the vastly different circumstances of that war, was a rallying point for a faction of the American public.

Admittedly, the unity produced by the anti-war movement had a different orientation simply because the movement itself was designed as a movement of protest, not support, as the case is today. Rather than display passive support for a cause, the anti-war movement demanded an active engagement with the inner demons of American society. It also gained momentum during a time when social activism was on the rise in general; the sixties was a decade that had all the elements of interesting times: the Vietnam War, a recession, and the sweeping societal change of the Civil Rights Movement.

That last one is the key difference. As we suddenly find ourselves living in interesting times, we need to engage the inner demons of American society the way our counterparts did two generations ago. We are all newly aware of what is going on, BETH MIHALICK because September 11 forced us to read the newspaper and watch CNN in numbers not seen since the Gulf War. Now, we might have the opportunity to use that newly found consciousness to make these interesting times productive.

I won’t try to suggest the new social cause that we all ought to rally around (though I have my own ideas about that, too), but I would point out that we have experienced a national trauma that, for a time, motivated the country to collectively seek an outlet for activist energy. The outlet suggested to us by President Bush, namely that we go out and spend money to stimulate the economy, lacks the wholesome sense of accomplishment that we might achieve by actually changing our behavior to orient ourselves toward some unselfish goal. Unfortunately, activism has been stigmatized as the domain of a marginalized, extreme-leftist group.

The entire world loses from this stigma. The extremism of the active left has repelled the sympathetic middle that might produce real results. Our mission now can only be to make an effort to overcome that stigma. It would be to the benefit of the active left to moderate their message. They would find many people who sympathize with their goals. And now, there is a will and a desire to come together and work toward those goals.

PAGE 18

Columbia Political Review

SPRING 2002

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS INTERVIEW BY ADAM B. KUSHNER

Questions for Jerrold Nadler Congressman Nadler (D—NY) wants rail freight for New York City.

K

ushner: You’ve long advocated enlarging New York City’s freight capacity by building a rail tunnel across the New York harbor. Why do we need that?

Nadler: Basically there are only two ways to approach New York by rail. One is to cross the rail bridge 140 miles North of here and come down the East-of-Hudson rail line. The problem with that is first of all that a 280-mile detour makes it impossible to do it economically. But second of all, that line is basically used for Amtrak and for Metro North, and there’s very little freight capability on that line. The other way is to come from New Jersey. Come up or come East or Northeast from wherever, and there you have to have a way of getting across the harbor.

Kushner: Why does it have to come across on rail?

Nadler: Forty percent of intercity freight goes by rail in the United States. Here, it’s only about 2.5%.

That pollutes our air—there’s tremendous air pollution from all the diesel trucks. It increases the cost of doing business. It congests our streets and roads, increases not only the cost of consumables that are brought in (it probably increases by a nickel or dime the cost of every grapefruit), but because of the congestion, it increases the cost of doing all kinds of business. The Port Authority was set up in 1921 specifically to build the tunnel. It never did.

Kushner: Why is it finally going to happen now?

Nadler: Because it has to.

Projections are that there’s going to be over the next 20 years a 40% increase by volume of freight coming into this region.

We cannot handle it. Our highways are congested already and we can’t build 40% more highways in the metropolitan region—it’s all paved already. Also, one 80,000-lb. truck does the same damage to a street with a water main underneath as 10,000 automobiles. And we have considerable track capacity that’s not used. A two-track tunnel with some other improvements on the system would be roughly $2.3 billion.

Kushner: That’s much cheaper than, say, Boston’s Big Dig. Nadler: Right, and the estimated economic return on an annual basis for the $2.3 billion investment is $420 million. With a port in Brooklyn, it goes to about $550 million a year. The benefit to cost ratio is 2.3:1, which is incredible; normally you say we should anything better than 1:1. And this will take a million tractor-trailers a year off city streets here, and in Jersey City, the New Jersey turnpike, and so forth.

Kushner: So it all comes down to two things: the economy and the environment.

Nadler: Well, there are really three reasons to do it. First, there

are the benefits of the rail freight, which I just went through. The second is the port—the port of New York and New Jersey. The shipping companies are following the airline companies and going into hub-and-feeder port systems. That means 10 years from now, a container will come on a big ship across the Atlantic to a hub port in Northern United States. We are in competition with Norfolk, VA, and Halifax to become the hub port. The Port Authority estimated that if we do not become the hub port, we will lose about 40% of our current 2.5 million [units of container] traffic and we’ll lose about 40% of our 230,000 port-related jobs. If we do become the hub port, Port Authority statistics say that over the next 40 years, we should go from 2.5 million [containers] to between 14 and 17 million, which is an incredible rate of growth.

Kushner: Isn’t New York a natural choice?

Nadler: We have certain natural economic advantages, which mean that if we get our act together, no one can compete with us to become the hub port. The major ones are, one, we’re at the center of the megalopolis. Norfolk is the Southern edge and Halifax is way up in the boonies.

Second, we have a 35 million person local market. Norfolk is a million or two, and Halifax has essentially no local market.

Last, we are located at the only sea-level route to the interior of the continent.

Anywhere else, you’ve got to climb mountains.

Kushner: Those are two reasons we need rail freight and a port. What’s the third?

Nadler: The threat to security. We must have more redundancy in our transportation system. Ninety-three percent of everything we consume in this region comes across the George Washington Bridge. About two weeks after the disasters of September 11, the FBI had reason to believe that some bad people might be bringing some bad stuff in a truck over that bridge. So they started inspecting the trucks. That was in the papers. What wasn’t in the papers was that for one full day, nothing—nothing—was delivered to New York City, Long Island, Westchester. When I realized that, I thought to myself, Holy Cow! If you’re a terrorist and you want to screw up the whole region, you don’t need a bomb. You make a couple phone calls and the FBI will do the job for you, stopping trucks. And that means they’ll have to have a Berlin airlift because we’ll starve. Literally. You shut down that bridge for more than three or four days and supermarket shelves will start emptying out. So we need to enlarge facilities to have redundancy—and not just in transportation. We can’t depend on one bridge or one power plant because God forbid something could happen and it would be a catastrophe.

SPRING 2002

Columbia Political Review

PAGE 19

BOOK REVIEW

BY HOPE GLASSBERG

The Real Seduction of David Brock The former conservateur reveals the vast right-wing conspiracy.

I

n the world of bipartisan politics, expressing even a well reasoned sympathy for the other side is like excommunicating oneself. At least that’s the world according to David Brock, the former American Spectator “investigative journalist” who made a name for himself championing the conservative cause and pillorying such liberal figureheads as Hillary Clinton and Anita Hill, whom he famously dubbed “a bit nutty and a bit slutty.”

Brock joins a long line of political turncoats: Whittaker Chambers, Norman Podhoretz, and the other “dancing David,” David Horowitz. What makes Brock’s saga unique, as he points out in his latest book, Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an ExConservative, is that unlike these men, he is not a liberal turned neoconservative; he is instead a neo-conservative turned liberal or at least turned unabashed conservative basher.

But for treading new ground, Brock seems to rely rather heavily on the kind of sensationalist diatribes that brought him to celebrity in the first place. Blinded by the Right may be more tame in title than Brock’s two previous books, The Real Anita Hill and The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, but it is still skewed by a partisan lens, albeit a lens focused in a different direction. Speaking of vision, the book’s title is a play on the religious phrase “blinded by the light.”

Accordingly, Brock sketches his transformation from bright-eyed, Bobby Kennedy loving liberal to mean-spirited, scandal mongering conservative and back again in spiritual, psychological, political terms—and what a wild ride it is.

Brock first offers insight into the oppressive culture of liberal activism on college campuses. He discusses his days as a student and journalist at UC Berkeley, a campus he terms “politically correct, sometimes stiflingly so.” He recalls an incident when U.N. ambassador Jeane Kirpatrick, who had been instrumental in engineering Ronald Reagan’s anti-communist policies in Nicaragua and El Salvador, was prevented from delivering a speech by a group of liberal activists. This fundamental hypocrisy—that “liberals were flatly and unapologetically advocating censorship of opinions they considered illegitimate and immoral”—led the young Brock to espouse conservative ideology and fashion himself into a “David against a liberal Goliath.”

Things take a turn for the worse however, as Brock’s narrative veers into a description of his youth. He alternately suggests that it is shame over his homosexuality, ambivalent feelings toward his conservative father, and insecurity about his possible Jewish ancestry (he is adopted) that led him to embrace conservatism. Brock continues to pepper the narrative with heavy-handed psychoanalysis throughout.

And while it is interesting and certainly humorous to know that Brock both worshipped and wanted to be conservative pundit Arianna Huffington, such Freudian quips are highly distracting.

Next the book delves into its real purpose: an exposé of the inner workings of the conservative movement. He reveals how he became a part of the Third Generation, a group of young, fiercely anti-communist neo-conservatives, and began writing for conservative publications the Washington Times and, later, the American Spectator.

Brock gained notoriety at the Spectator after penning a particu-

larly virulent piece against Anita Hill, who had accused then Supreme Court appointee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. Brock reveals that though he instinctively believed Hill’s story, his larger sense of loyalty to the conservative movement and a desire to belong (“I was trying to force the conservatives to love a faggot whether they liked it or not,” he writes) compelled him to distort facts and turn his invective into a full-length book: The Real Anita Hill. The book, while highly criticized for its bias, earned him accolades within the conservative movement and a full time position at the Spectator. Brock quickly set to work on yet another “character assassination” piece, but this time president Bill Clinton was the target.

In perhaps the most controversial part of the book, Brock details the intricacies of the “Arkansas Project,” an operation funded by the American Spectator to dig up dirt on the Clintons. In Arkansas, Brock met with a number of state troopers who claimed to have inside information on Bill Clinton’s various infidelities. While apprehensive about the veracity of the troopers’ stories (in fact, they later proved to be false), he was pressured to publish the so-called troopergate piece.

The piece generated a media maelstrom and one casualty was Brock’s privacy (he was publicly outed during the debacle). Brock says that this event highlighted hypocrisy within the movement; he says he still found acceptance among his conservative friends, even those who publicly denounced homosexuals. In fact it was only until he published The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, a more objective piece, that Brock claims to have felt any backlash from his conservative comrades. He was ostracized and, for the first time, the subject of “a mean spirited diatribe with every cultural prejudice from the Stone Age.” Finally, Brock broke with the conservative movement in publicly opposing Bill Clinton’s impeachment; he is an independent today, he tells us at the close of Blinded by the Right, and proud of it.

There are a number of problems with Brock’s book, not the least of which being its annoying fluctuation between melodramatic memoir and political polemic. But perhaps the largest problem with the book is that Brock cannot abandon his roots in scandal politics; he smears nearly every conservative he mentions in the book, even in passing. He almost gleefully reveals that his close friend, conservative pundit Laura Ingraham, had a troubled childhood and difficulties in her romantic life. Of arms manufacturer Peter Malatesta, he writes: “[Peter] had a surfeit of unhappiness and self-loathing that came rushing to the fore whenever he had downed the requisite amount of scotch.” These details are sensational and sell books, but are they essential to the book’s thesis? Most assuredly not, especially given that Brock spends a good deal of the book lamenting the fact that conservative pundits dragged politicians’ personal lives into the limelight.

In a March 29 New York Times column, Paul Krugman aptly called the book “distasteful but revelatory.” There are important lessons to be drawn from Brock’s book: the alienating nature of liberal activism on college campuses, the role of big money in the conservative movement, and the culture of scandal politics in Washington. But Brock is more media hog than idelogue; one would have to be blind not to recognize that Blinded by the Right is mired in muckraking.

PAGE 20

Columbia Political Review

SPRING 2002

MUSIC REVIEW

BY BEN LETZLER

Sing It, Sister The attorney general, whistling the day away.

A

fter a February 25 speech at a seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina, John Ashcroft became the first attorney general of the United States to sing a song before a national audience, and the highest ranking public servant to do so while in office.

(Ronald Reagan took the male lead, as Professor John Palmer, in 1952’s musical comedy She’s Working Her Way Through College, opposite Virginia Mayo.) The attorney general sang a tune of his own composing, “Let the Eagle Soar,” backed up by a tape player with an electronic piano and some drums.* The Attorney General’s vocalizing turn has only gotten major press attention from the very left-leaning Manchester Guardian. It is, however, a bipartisan national humiliation, at least comparable to the President’s “devaluation” vs. “deflation” gaffe in Japan.

That latter snafu caused temporary fluctuations in the yen on world currency markets, and only got written up in the right-leaning Financial Times. The present administration, inasmuch as it wants to prosecute a foreign policy, would do well to defend its intellectual credibility abroad. (Can the President distinguish between concepts, especially near-homonyms? Will the attorney general enforce the laws, or sing about them?) The bailiwick of the present piece, however, will be domestic: the attorney general’s song is banal and an unpatriotic blemish on the dignity of his office.

So as not to take anything out of context, let us look at the full lyrics: “Let the eagle soar / like she’s never soared before / from rocky coast / to golden shore / let the mighty eagle soar. / So with healing in her wings / as the land beneath her sings: / ‘Only God, no other kings,’ / let the mighty eagle soar. / This country’s far too young to die / Though she’s cried a bit for what we’ve put her through / she’s soared above the lifted lamp / that guards sweet freedom’s door / in the dews, the damps, the watchfires / of a nation torn by war / oh she’s far too young to die / you can see it in her eye / she’s not yet begun to fly / it’s time to let the mighty eagle soar [refrain].”

Ashcroft wrote the text and music in 1997, when meditating on the nation’s resilience against President Clinton’s marital woes. The revised version above adds new war-oriented material and omits a stanza (and a dangling participle) of moral struggle: “We’ve still got a lot of climbing to do, / And we can make it if we try. / Built by toils and struggles / God has led us through.”

To paraphrase Adorno, to rehash crappy songs as anthems to liberty after September 11 is barbaric. The idea of light music against terror is ghastly; to recycle, with perfect moral equivalency, a ditty about Bill Clinton’s lying and bad marriage into a song against terror is simply shlock-pop necrophilia. There are a host of problems with the attorney general’s words, from the mixed metaphors to the exhortation of the submission of the individual conscience to the guidance of an administration that, for all appearances, devotes its generous fund of free time to fooling around on synthesizers and electronic drum pads. One troubling point in Ashcroft’s “Eagle” lyrics easy to overlook is the quiet appearance of

the end of the world. In place of his old lines about personal and national self-improvement (“a lot of climbing to do”), Ashcroft inserts eschatology: America is “too young to die.” But we’re going to? Our lyricist thinks so: he is a lifelong member of the Assemblies of God. John Ashcroft is the first member of any Pentecostalist denomination to be a United States senator, and the first to be attorney general. His two anointments on the forehead with vegetable oil, first by his father and then again by Clarence Thomas, have prompted smirking coverage of the salving effect of Crisco on dry skin.

This is cheap shot stuff, the press at its most shallow. Giving proper respect to Ashcroft’s unusual approach to Christian ritual does not, however, mean allowing that just any theology is suited for public life. Ashcroft is a premillenarian Christian. He believes that Christ will come again before the Millennium, and only then usher in the reign of justice. One statement of this position is that government should not meliorate social problems, because it will only delay the conflicts and wars that presage the end. Reagan interior secretary James G. Watt, a previous White House premillenarian, was famously unconcerned about the environment, because it was nothing the returned Christ couldn’t fix.

Does Ashcroft welcome more terrorist strikes as signs of the Second Coming? Maybe not—though his uplifting song about 9/11, in an apocalyptic mood and a zippy tempo, suggests we should keep an eye on this one. But enough close reading: what is of primary importance is that the attorney general of the United States should not sing in an official capacity, ever. It suggests an ignorance of the responsibilities of the attorney generalship so total as to border on illiteracy.

This is not a moral judgment, except inasmuch as the attorney general has a moral duty to the American public to do his job and not dilly-dally. This is likewise the case with Ashcroft’s widely publicized order to have a bare-breasted nude marble of Justice covered up. For all the ungrateful squawking about prudishness and neoPuritanism (Puritanism built this country, after all), the issue is whether the attorney general should spend his time on the Department of Justice statuary.

And the President has infamously increased his daily exercise regimen since September 11. Not since Richard Simmons has a man been so well paid for working out. It is commonplace to accuse a presidential administration of lacking parental supervision. It is unique to the present one that, were they in grade school, they’d get held back a year for not getting their homework done. The attorney general and the president continue to display a crying need for basic time management skills.

If a journalist wanted to be hard-hitting on religion in public life, he or she might quiz President Bush to recite the Lord’s Prayer from memory. *At press time, the footage was available online at http://www.cnn.com /video/us/2002/02/25/ashcroft.sings.wbtv.med.html.