Nato chief tells US to stop attacking European allies

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/6244032/Nato-chief-tells-US-to-stop-attacking-European-allies.html

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the new Secretary-General of Nato, has accused America of talking down European countries' commitment to Afghanistan.

In his first speech since taking the job, he said all 28 members of the transatlantic alliance were spending their "blood and treasure" on a mission of critical importance.

At the same time, the former Danish prime minister urged European nations to "be more flexible" and loosen the caveats that often prevent them getting involved in hostile action.

He said Europe must also provide more manpower and more funds for training the police and army in order to begin a credible transition to Afghan-dominated leadership of security.

"I am concerned about the doubts I hear in the United States these days about Nato," said Mr Rasmussen in his first speech in Washington since taking office two months ago.

Acknowledging years of American frustration, he added: "Some look at the operation in Afghanistan and wonder if Europeans have the will to fight, some wonder if the Europeans have the capability to fight, others think the days of strong transatlantic bonds are a relic of the past.

"Many Americans are losing sight of what Nato is and how much it does in the interests of American security and international security. I am not sure it gets a much visibility in the US as it deserves."

Pointing to the 9,000 additional non-US troops who have joined the Afghan effort in the past 18 months, he said: "Talking down the European and Canadian contributions – as some in the United States do on occasion – can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The allies are not running from the fight as much as the conventional wisdom says."

Mr Rasmussen also delivered his dual message – that Nato must do more but Americans need to show Europeans more appreciation – to President Barack Obama at the White House.

Their discussion came at a critical juncture, with the US administration deep in debate about what course to follow in Afghanistan after receiving a grim progress report and a demand for 40,000 more troops from Gen Stanley McChrystal, the senior commander in the field.

Mr Rasmussen is thought to support a ramping up of the mission and was expected to tell the president that Nato was committed to the fight in Afghanistan and that unity within the alliance was essential.

The Dane pleased his high-powered audience of White House aides, senators and diplomats at the Atlantic Council with a firm commitment that Nato would stay in Afghanistan "for as long as it takes to succeed".

"That's not something you hear from a lot of European leaders," said Kurt Volker, a former US ambassador to Nato.

Mr Rasmussen said he supported Gen McChrystal's analysis that a "more comprehensive approach" was required, based more on protecting the Afghan population and less on military victories.

Though he was not prepared to comment on the commander's request for extra forces, he added: "We are all going to have to invest more in training and equipping [the Afghan army], because they are not ready now. It is a very simple calculation: we have to do more now, if we want to be able to do less later."

However, back in Sweden, an informal meeting of European defence ministers expressed reluctance to send a significant number of reinforcements.

"If you look at Europe, I don't hear any voices saying we have an additional five or ten thousand soldiers to send to Afghanistan," said Soren Gade, the Danish defence minister and a former colleague of Mr Rasmussen.

Gore Vidal: ‘We’ll have a dictatorship soon in the US’

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article6854221.ece

A conversation with Gore Vidal unfolds at his pace. He answers questions imperiously, occasionally playfully, with a piercing, lethal dryness. He is 83 and in a wheelchair (a result of hypothermia suffered in the war, his left knee is made of titanium). But he can walk (“Of course I can”) and after a recent performance of Mother Courage at London’s National Theatre he stood to deliver an anti-war speech to the audience.

How was his friend Fiona Shaw in the title role? “Very good.” Where did they meet? Silence. The US? “Well, it wasn’t Russia.” What’s he writing at the moment? “It’s a little boring to talk about. Most writers seem to do little else but talk about themselves and their work, in majestic terms.” He means self-glorifying? “You’ve stumbled on the phrase,” he says, regally enough. “Continue to use it.”

Vidal is sitting in the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair, where he has been coming to stay for 60 years. He is wearing a brown suit jacket, brown jumper, tracksuit bottoms; his white hair twirled into a Tintin-esque quiff and with his hooded eyes, delicate yet craggy features and arch expression, he looks like Quentin Crisp, but accessorised with a low, lugubrious growl rather than camp lisp.

He points to an apartment opposite the hotel where Churchill stayed during the Second World War, as Downing Street was “getting hammered by the Nazis. The crowds would cheer him from the street, he knew great PR.” In a flash, this memory reminds you of the swathe of history Vidal has experienced with great intimacy: he was friends with JFK, fought in the war, his father Gene, an Olympic decathlete and aeronautics teacher, founded TWA among other airlines and had a relationship with Amelia Earhart. (Vidal first flew and landed a plane when he was 10.) He was a screenwriter for MGM in the dying days of the studio system, toyed with being a politician, he has written 24 novels and is hailed as one of the world’s greatest essayists.

He has crossed every boundary, I say. “Crashed many barriers,” he corrects me.

Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he reveals, he regrets his change of heart. How’s Obama doing? “Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.” America should leave Afghanistan, he says. “We’ve failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it.” The “War on Terror” was “made up”, Vidal says. “The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction’. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He’d be cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you’re both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination.”

His voice strengthens. “One thing I have hated all my life are LIARS [he says that with bristling anger] and I live in a nation of them. It was not always the case. I don’t demand honour, that can be lies too. I don’t say there was a golden age, but there was an age of general intelligence. We had a watchdog, the media.” The media is too supine? “Would that it was. They’re busy preparing us for an Iranian war.” He retains some optimism about Obama “because he doesn’t lie. We know the fool from Arizona [as he calls John McCain] is a liar. We never got the real story of how McCain crashed his plane [in 1967 near Hanoi, North Vietnam] and was held captive.”

Vidal originally became pro-Obama because he grew up in “a black city” (meaning Washington), as well as being impressed by Obama’s intelligence. “But he believes the generals. Even Bush knew the way to win a general was to give him another star. Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”

Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. “He f***ed it up. I don’t know how because the country wanted it. We’ll never see it happen.” As for his wider vision: “Maybe he doesn’t have one, not to imply he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there’s a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. ‘I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it’. That’s what Obama needs — a bit of Lincoln’s chill.” Has he met Obama? “No,” he says quietly, “I’ve had my time with presidents.” Vidal raises his fingers to signify a gun and mutters: “Bang bang.” He is referring to the possibility of Obama being assassinated. “Just a mysterious lone gunman lurking in the shadows of the capital,” he says in a wry, dreamy way.

Vidal now believes, as he did originally, Clinton would be the better president. “Hillary knows more about the world and what to do with the generals. History has proven when the girls get involved, they’re good at it. Elizabeth I knew Raleigh would be a good man to give a ship to.”The Republicans will win the next election, Vidal believes; though for him there is little difference between the parties. “Remember the coup d’etat of 2000 when the Supreme Court fixed the selection, not election, of the stupidest man in the country, Mr Bush.”

Vidal says forcefully that he wished he’d never moved back to the US to live in Hollywood, from his clifftop home in Ravello, Italy, in 2000. His partner of 53 years, Howard Austen, who died in 2003, collated a lifetime’s-span of pictures of Vidal, for a new book out this autumn, Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History’s Glare (an oddly clunky title). The cover shows what a beautiful young man Vidal was, although his stare is as hawkish as it is today.

He observes presidential office-holders balefully. “The only one I knew well was Kennedy, but he didn’t impress me as a good president. It’s like asking, ‘What do I think of my brother?’ It’s complicated. I’d known him all my life and I liked him to the end, but he wrecked his chances with the Bay of Pigs and Suez crises, and because everyone was so keen to elect Bobby once Jack had gone, lies started to be told about him — that he was the greatest and the King of Camelot.”

Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. “Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they’d say ‘They live well but they’re all alcoholics’. In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefited us many times over.” Instead, America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”

Vidal adds menacingly: “Don’t ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren’t any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I’m never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it.”

While materially comfortable, Vidal’s was not a happy childhood. Of his actress and socialite mother Nina, he says: “Give her a glass of vodka and she was as tame as could be. Growing up is going to be difficult if the one person you hate is your mother. I felt trapped. I was close to my grandparents and my father was a saint.” His parents’ many remarriages means that even today he hasn’t met all his step-siblings.

He wrote his first novel, Williwaw, at 19. In 1948, he was blacklisted by the media after writing The City and the Pillar, one of the earliest novels to deal graphically with homosexual desire. “You’ll be amazed to know it is still going strong,” he says. The “JT” it is dedicated to is James “Jimmy” Trimble, Vidal’s first love and, he once said, the love of his life. “That was a slight exaggeration. I said it because there wasn’t any other. In the new book there are wonderful pictures of him from our schooldays. He was a great athlete.” Here his voice softens, and he looks emotional, briefly. “We were both abandoned in our dormitory at St Alban’s [boarding school]. He was killed at the Battle of Iwo Jima [in 1945] because of bad G2 [intelligence].”

Vidal says Trimble’s death didn’t affect him. “No, I was in danger of dying too. A dead man can’t grieve a dead man.” Has love been important to him? “Don’t make the error that schoolteacher idiots make by thinking that gay men’s relationships are like heterosexual ones. They’re not.” He “wouldn’t begin to comment” on how they are different.

In 1956 he was hired by MGM, collaborated on the screenplay for Ben Hur and continued to write novels, most notoriously Myra Breckenridge about a transsexual. It is his satires, essays and memoirs — Live From Golgotha, Palimpsest and most recently, Point to Point Navigation — which have fully rounded our vision of this thorny contrarian, whose originality springs simply, and naturally, from having deliberately unfixed allegiances and an enduring belief in an American republic and railing sadness at how that ideal has been corrupted.

Vidal became a supportive correspondent of Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killing 168 people. The huge loss of life, indeed McVeigh’s act of mass murder, goes unmentioned by Vidal. “He was a true patriot, a Constitution man,” Vidal claims. “And I was torn, my grandfather [the Democrat Senator Thomas Gore] had bought Oklahoma into the Union.” McVeigh claimed he had done it as a protest against tyrannical government. The writer Edmund White took the correspondence as the basis for a play, Terre Haute (the jail McVeigh was incarcerated in before he was executed in 2001), imagining an encounter between the bomber and Vidal charged with desire.

“He’s a filthy, low writer,” Vidal says of White. “He likes to attack his betters, which means he has a big field to go after.” Had he wanted to meet McVeigh? “I am not in the business of meeting people,” Vidal says. “That play implies I am madly in love with McVeigh. I looked at his [White’s] writing and all he writes about is being a fag and how it’s the greatest thing on Earth. He thinks I’m another queen and I’m not. I’m more interested in the Constitution and McVeigh than the loving tryst he saw. It was vulgar fag-ism.”

Vidal says that he hates labels and has said he believes in homosexual acts rather than homosexual people. He claims his relationship with Austen was platonic (though they reputedly met at a legendary New York bath-house). He was once quoted as saying that he’d had sex with a 1,000 men by the time he was 25. It must have been a little strange for Austen, Vidal’s life companion, to source those pictures of Trimble, his first, perhaps only, love.

Vidal puts on a scornful, campy voice. “People ask [of he and Austen], ‘How did you live together so long?’ The only rule was no sex. They can’t believe that. That was when I realised I was dealing with a public too stupid by half. They can’t tell the difference between ‘The Sun rose in the East’ and ‘The Sun is made of yeast’.” Was sex important to Vidal? “It must have been yes.”

He is single now. “I’m not into partnerships,” he says dismissively. I don’t even know what it means.” He “couldn’t care less” about gay marriage. “Does anyone care what Americans think? They’re the worst-educated people in the First World. They don’t have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which good advertisers know how to provoke.” You could have been the first gay president, I say. “No, I would have married and had nine children,” he replies quickly and seriously. “I don’t believe in these exclusive terms.”

Impaired mobility doesn’t bother him — he “rose like a miracle” on stage at the National — and he doesn’t dwell on mortality either. “Either you accept there is such a thing or you’re so dumb that you can’t grasp it.” Is he in good health? “No, of course not. I’m diabetic. It’s odd, I’ve never been fat and I don’t like candy, which most Americans are hooked on.”

There is a trace of thwarted ambition about him. “I would have liked to have been president, but I never had the money. I was a friend of the throne. The only time I envied Jack was when Joe [Kennedy, JFK’s father] was buying him his Senate seat, then the presidency. He didn’t know how lucky he was. Here’s a story I’ve never told. In 1960, after he had spent so much on the presidential campaign, Joe took all nine children to Palm Beach to lecture them. He was really angry. He said, ‘All you read about the Kennedy fortune is untrue. It’s non-existent. We’ve spent so much getting Jack elected and not one of you is living within your income’. They all sat there, shame-faced. Jack was whistling. He used to tap his teeth: they were big teeth, like a xylophone. Joe turned to Jack and he says, ‘Mr President, what’s the solution?’ Jack said, ‘The solution is simple. You all gotta work harder’.” Vidal guffaws heartily.

Hollywood living proved less fun. “If there was a social whirl, you can be sure I would not be part of it.” He does a fabulous impression of Katharine Hepburn complaining about playing the matriarch in Suddenly Last Summer, which he wrote. “I hate this script,” he recalls Hepburn saying . “I’m far too healthy a person to know people like this.” Vidal snorts. “She had Parkinson’s. She shook like a leper in the wind.”

I ask what he wants to do next. “My usual answer to ‘What am I proudest of?’ is my novels, but really I am most proud that, despite enormous temptation, I have never killed anybody and you don’t know how tempted I have been.”

That wasn’t my question, I say. “Well, given that I’m proudest that I haven’t killed anybody, I might be saving something up for someone.” A perfect line: we both laugh.

Is he happy? “What a question,” he sighs and then smiles mischievously. “I’ll respond with a quote from Aeschylus: ‘Call no man happy till he is dead’.”

The Polanski Uproar

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/the-polanski-uproar/

The recent arrest of Roman Polanski, the film director who fled to France from the United States in 1978 on the eve of sentencing for having sex with a 13-year-old girl, has caused an international ruckus. The French culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand, and the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, both issued statements of support for Mr. Polanski. But many others in France have expressed outrage at that support and said he should face justice for the crime.

While it’s clear that the film industry forgave Mr. Polanski long ago, should society separate the work of artists from the artists themselves, despite evidence of reprehensible or even criminal behavior?

• Jay Parini, writer
• Mark Anthony Neal, professor, African American studies
• Geraldine A. Ferraro lawyer
• Damon Lindelof, TV executive producer
• Mark Bauerlein, professor of English
• Charlie Finch, art critic
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic

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Flawed Human Beings

Jay Parini, a poet and novelist, teaches literature at Middlebury College. His most recent novel, “The Last Station,” about the final year in Tolstoy’s life, has just been made into a film starring Paul Giamatti, James McAvoy, Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer.

Can one really separate the art from the man or woman who creates that art? The answer is yes, definitely.

There are many examples in history — too many — of great artists who were terribly flawed human beings, behaving very badly and hurting those around them. If anything, audiences easily make this distinction. Nobody looks at a Picasso painting in a museum and says, “I should not take this work seriously because Picasso cheated on his many wives and was abusive to his son.”

I suspect that, in a culture that rewards celebrity for its own sake, Mr. Polanski will never do serious time behind bars.

Being an artist has absolutely nothing — nothing — to do with one’s personal behavior. Wonderful human beings can be dreadful poets, painters, filmmakers, musicians. They usually are. The reverse is equally true: hideous people can make great art. Wagner is a case in point. He was a magnificent composer, but his personal failings — including a huge streak of anti-semitism — were reprehensible. His vileness as a man has no bearing on his greatness as a composer. It’s just another subject.

Needless to say, all human beings are flawed. But in some cases the flaws actually lead to legal jeopardy, and this seems to be the case with Roman Polanski. He did something horrible: having sex with a 13-year-old girl. That he should get away with such a thing is in itself immoral. If he were an ordinary working stiff, he’d long ago have paid his dues to society.

Read more…

On the other hand, the legal system in this country has so many loopholes and glitches that one has to admit Mr. Polanski has a point, if not many points, in refusing to resubmit himself to the vagaries of American justice. We punish criminal behavior in inequitable ways, often sending people to jail for ridiculously long stretches when what is really required is sustained psychological treatment and support.

From what I’ve read, the judge in the Polanksi case was about to go back on a plea bargain agreement. Harboring a huge mistrust of authority that owed something to his sad background as a Jew in war-torn Europe, Mr. Polanski had powerful survival instincts at work when he fled to France.

Perhaps an American judge could make a decision in this case with the director in absentia. If he is deemed criminally liable, he should be brought back to the U.S. to face whatever punishment is required — the lapse of decades should not matter here. But I suspect that, in a culture that often rewards celebrity for its own sake, Mr. Polanski will never do serious time behind bars.

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Criminal or Genius

Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of black popular culture at Duke University, is the author of several books including “New Black Man.”

Roman Polanski is not the first artist to “ask” us to consider their genius in light of charges of criminality. Indeed figures ranging from Phil Spector to Miles Davis, Chris Brown, R. Kelly, Woody Allen, and the late Michael Jackson have forced us to separate their artistry from criminal accusations and less than savory public and private behavior.

In the quiet moments after the controversy passes, it’s the art that asks for our consideration.

All too often we are willing to give artists the benefit of the doubt, when their art adheres to some innocuous standard of value or when they’ve constructed consumable images that suggest a nostalgia for a citizenry that we have never been. Thus the “druggie” jazz singer or rap star will never get the same benefits as the critically acclaimed auteur or musical iconoclast, where, it goes without saying, the issues of class, race, ethnicity, gender and our sense of celebrity often color our sense of empathy.

After the spectacle of the moment though, when we feel most compelled to takes sides and to erect sinners and saints, we are left with quiet moments of our consciousness — and that’s when the art asks for our consideration.

Read more…

Even as Polanski’s “Tess” and “The Pianist,” or in another example, Davis’s “Sketches in Spain” and “Kind of Blue,” stand in stark contrast to the bad behavior associated with both men, we have little choice but to take the art at its word. It is the art that really matters. Let the art stand for itself and these men stand in judgment and never the twain shall meet.

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Hollywood Hypocrisy

Geraldine A. Ferraro, a lawyer and a former member of Congress, was the Democratic vice presidential candidate in 1984.

“A male is guilty of rape in the second degree when, being eighteen years old or more, he engages in sexual intercourse with a female less than fifteen years old. Rape in the second degree is a class D felony.”

That is the current law in New York. When I was prosecuting these cases in Queens in the 70’s the law required that the child be less than 14. The legislature tightened it. But there is no doubt that California had the same protections for children when Polanski was prosecuted in California for having intercourse with a 13-year-old girl. It still does.

Why has no one from the movie business, no one who supposedly stands up for the rights of women and girls, spoken up in support of finally bringing this man to justice?

This is the definition of statutory rape. Notice, it doesn’t talk about force and it doesn’t talk about consent. Neither are needed. The statute is meant to protect children. A 13-year-old can’t consent to intercourse with a man over 18, and certainly not with a man in his 30’s.

Polanski was convicted of a serious crime in the 70’s. He chose to abscond to France and because he had money and connections, has lived a charmed life, unhindered by his obligations to society. The message is, rich guys can get away with anything … or wait — is it only rich guys with friends in Hollywood? The statute of limitations for rape does not toll simply because 31 years has passed. And victims cannot “forgive” the rapist. The criminal justice system is meant to protect all of us.

Read more…

As for France getting all exercised about California moving forward (and the prosecutors there haven’t just let this go for 31 years), who are the French officials to criticize us as a nation and tell us how to deal with our criminals? Too bad for Bernie Madoff that he wasn’t as smart as Polanski. He would have taken his wife, brother, nephew, sons and their families and a billion or two and gone to France to help their economy. Then when the Ponzi scheme was exposed, the French would have, if consistent, refused extradition. He could have stayed for the rest of his life in luxury. Just imagine.

And what really defies explanation are the actions of the Directors Association and actors, like Harrison Ford. Did they remain buddies over the years with a convicted rapist who had fled the jurisdiction because they condoned his rape of the child or because they approved of his actions of absconding and beating the system? Did they do so because this was not such an unusual situation in Hollywood at the time and may still exist today?

What was particularly outrageous was the woman speaking on behalf of the Directors Association who said: “It happened so long ago.” Really. Suppose it happened today. Would she feel differently? Suppose it had been murder and not rape that happened 31 years ago? Would she be saying “It happened so long ago”?

For me, one of the biggest disappointments of this episode is that no one from Hollywood, no one from that movie business, no one who supposedly stands up for the rights of women and girls has opened his or her mouth in support of the prosecutors who are doing their job and attempting to bring this man finally to justice. As for France, I would hope that President Sarkozy would call in his ministers and tell them to butt out of our business.

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‘Subversive’ Artists

Damon Lindelof is the co-creator and executive producer of “Lost.”

I traveled to Paris recently with my wife and had the pleasure of spending an entire day at the Louvre. Both of us thought it would be a good idea to rent those headsets that provide you with a walking tour of the museum — a behind the scenes look at the works of art. And here’s what struck me:

Man oh man, what a load of perverts!

Lots of artists are ’subversive,’ but that doesn’t mean their art shouldn’t hang in the Louvre.

I don’t want to name names, but it seemed artist after artist had engaged in what today we might call “inappropriate sexual relationships.” Sometimes with brothers or sisters … and yes, even children. There was underage drinking, implications of abuse and other things the calm feminine voice emanating through my headphones would simply deem as “subversive.” All I could do was shake my head and think that these people were incredibly lucky there was no Googling going on during the Renaissance.

But the art still hangs on the walls. It is still beautiful. It is still eternal. Because 200 years from now, when my descendants watch a Holo-Ultra-Virtua-Blu-Ray version of “Annie Hall,” they will have no idea that Woody Allen married his own daughter. And even if they did?

That movie still rocks.

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Rogues and Moral Push-Back

Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University and the author of “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.”

Way back in 1574, as Elizabethan theater was becoming a sensation, the Common Council of London issued a lurid description of its effects:

. . . inordinate haunting of great multitudes of people, especially youth, to plays, interludes, namely occasion of frays and quarrels, evil practices of incontinency in great inns having chambers and secret places adjoining to their open stages and galleries, inveigling and alluring of maids, especially of orphans and good citizens’ children under age . . .

That’s one impact of drama. Performing artists feed and water the passions, Plato famously complained, and the more they do it, the more popular they are. Can we expect performers to divide their personal lives from their professional labor so cleanly? Of course not, and so audiences lower the bar of an artist’s morality.

The moral scruples that constrain bad behavior work against the artistry needed to describe Satan corrupting Eve.

The imagination needed to create a Macbeth, Medea, or, in the case of Roman Polanski, Mrs. Mulwray and Noah Cross, is too energetic to shut down once the pen is put away and the camera is turned off. The moral scruples that constrain bad behavior work precisely against the artistry needed to describe Satan corrupting Eve and to portray a rebel without a cause.

People understand that, and so they judge the sins of artists and writers more lightly, perhaps taking a vicarious pleasure in them. Only when the artist goes too far does a moral push-back arise. It’s a delicate compromise, ever-shifting as general social standards evolve.

Read more…

With actors and filmmakers enjoying more celebrity and honor than ever before — Puritan England cast them as rogues and vagabonds in need of whipping — we might forget that both sides have their validity, the creative, disturbing impulses of talented folks and the restraining norms of civil society. But they remain sanative only together, curbing each other’s excesses.

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Notoriety Trumps Art

Charlie Finch is a senior art critic of Artnet.com.

Artists do not get a moral pass. Their crimes and sins run along a separate track from their art. If you look at Erza Pound or Richard Wagner, for example, the discussion of their art is never divorced from their anti-Semitism. For them to get a pass, the issue of their offenses will have to completely disappear. Roman Polanski is now probably better known for having sex with a teenager than for his work. This proves that notoriety trumps all, even art.

The artist must deal with the specific accusations against him in his body of work.

Socrates laid down a moral marker for all subsequent artistic moralists when he drank his hemlock. To absolve oneself of one’s sins, the artist must poison himself artistically. That is, the artist must deal with the specific accusations against him in his body of work. In the case of Wagner or Pound, this certainly was not the case. It remains to be seen if Mr. Polanski, at age 76, with an attractive young actress wife, will revisit his alleged obsession with under-aged women in his work.

One exception might be the artistic embellishment of excess in the manner of Marquis de Sade, Casanova and Celine. Yet the general consensus concerning their work is that their lack of moral boundary reduces their artistic greatness. Thus, it’s impossible for an artist to fully escape the moral consequence of his work.

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The Consequences of Fame

Jonathan Rosenbaum, a former film critic for The Chicago Reader, is the author of the forthcoming “Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia” and writes at jonathanrosenbaum.com.

I’m not at all in favor of giving artists free passes when it comes to their personal morality. But in the case of Roman Polanski, anyone who’s bothered to follow the history of his case in any detail is likely to conclude that (a) he’s already paid a great deal for his crime, (b) the interests of journalism and the entertainment industry in this matter usually have a lot more to do with puritanical hysteria and exploitation than any impartial pursuit of justice.

It’s his fame that fuels this event and discussion, not the specifics of a case more than 30 years old.

Considering the many crooks who continue to go unpunished (including Wall Street tycoons, prominent politicians, war profiteers, torturers of innocent people, and racist hatemongers) — most of whom continue to be rewarded and validated by the same press and the same self-righteous “moralists” who are now calling for Polanski’s head — it seems hypocritical to express so much outrage and bloodlust against Polanski at this point.

This would be true even if he weren’t famous — although it’s also true that if he weren’t famous, he wouldn’t have been arrested in Switzerland in the first place, so this is a sword that cuts two ways. It’s his fame that fuels this event and discussion, not the specifics or the morality of what he may or may not have done some 30-odd years ago.

Free Roman Polanski? Case shows US-France cultural divide

http://features.csmonitor.com/globalnews/2009/09/29/free-roman-polanski-case-shows-us-france-cultural-divide/

French elites lobby to "Free Polanski." American and French students pick sides in a French debate over the rape case.

By Robert Marquand | Staff writer 09.29.09

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PARIS – In Europe, the detention of director Roman Polanski in a Swiss jail on a 31-year-old US warrant is unfolding as a transatlantic cultural and legal clash.

In France, and in influential circles across Europe, the main position might be described as “Free Polanski!” But among ordinary Europeans, there’s an emerging outrage over what is seen as the elite classes defense of a man who fled justice.

The detention and possible extradition of the director of “Chinatown” and “The Pianist” – for fleeing the US in 1978 after pleading guilty to sexually assaulting a 13-year old – has stoked animosities here about a perceived American petit bourgeoisie mentality. It also plays into a French cultural sensibility about “the artist” as a creature deserving special status and refuge.

Indeed, it is a case of crime and non-punishment worthy of a film script of aesthetic if not moral tension: An aged, Oscar-winning world celebrity who has lived three decades as a fugitive – and his now-middle age victim forgives him – is backed by the soft power of Hollywood. On the other side, California prosecutors, applying the letter of the law and doggedly chasing a man who admitted to “unlawful sex with a minor,” have a case that is now laced with suspicion of legal tampering and judicial impropriety.

Polanski holds French and Polish passports. France and the US have an extradition treaty. But French citizens, like Israelis, are not extradited except under extraordinary circumstances, according to a US Embassy sources – enabling him to live in France.

Polanski’s Saturday arrest in Zurich, Switzerland, has brought a Monday roar of European official outrage and incomprehension. French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner described Polanski’s detention, en route to receive a film award, as “sinister.” Cultural minister Frederic Mitterrand said, “Just as there is an America that is generous and that we like, so there is an America that is frightening, and that is the America that has just revealed its face.”

The deputy editor of the French daily L’Express opined that US and Swiss authorities cut a deal for leniency on reporting Swiss bank shelters. Dominique Paille, spokesman for French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s party, said: “The US is always portrayed as a great democracy and a role model…. Today we discover there is no limit on crimes and misdemeanors in that country…. Remission for good behavior does not exist.”

“France sanctifies writers and artists,” argues Paris intellectual Karim Emile Bitar.“From statements by French government officials and from Polanski’s numerous supporters in the cultural industry, there is an obvious underlying assumption: that talent and artistic genius should allow someone to get a free pass and be above the law,” says Bitar.

French vs. American students
On Monday, at an international business school in Normandy, American and French students debated the case. The French entirely took Polanski’s side, and the Americans, with one exception, countered.

French students described the case as “Polanski Gate,” a “blatant case of puritanism,” and that “time has passed,” according to a professor who witnessed the debate.

American students said the French did not want to hear that Polanski drugged and had sex with a 13-year old girl when he was 44, cared little for the girl’s suffering, and were exhibiting “Pavlovian anti-Americanism.”

Unofficial French opinions
Still, by Tuesday that French official position was taking some legal and cultural fire – aimed mainly at French elites. The website Le Point reported that 97 percent of comments opposed the French official position. Readers criticized the “hordes from Boulevard St. Germain,” a popular celebrity-intellectual area, and “the politico-bobo-cultural elite” who backed Polanski “with pompous sentences that defy common sense and the rule of law.”

Other websites report similar comments, swinging well against Polanski.

Former student leader and current Green party member of parliament Daniel Cohn-Bendit criticized the authorities, telling French radio: “This is a judicial problem and I think that a culture minister, even if his name is Mitterrand, should say: ‘I need to know the details of the case’… This is the toughest story, because there was a rape on a 13-year-old girl. She said herself: ‘I didn’t file a complaint’ and also said ‘I got a lot of money.’”

The girl, now a married mother of three in Hawaii, has said that years ago she sued Polanski and settled the case out of court for an undisclosed amount of money. In January, she asked a California judge to dismiss the criminal case, and has said several times that she wishes the media coverage would stop.

Former legal columnist at Le Monde, Luc Rosenzweig, writes: “The mobilization in Polanski’s favor is impressive: both states of which he is a citizen, Poland and France, are expressing all the more outrage since they have no chance of stopping the judicial process. Hollywood, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Prenzlauer Berg and other urban sanctuaries of culture and good taste are on the verge of insurrection and claim the immediate release of the author of the Pianist.”

However, he adds: “From a strictly judicial point of view, Roman Polanski’s arrest at the Zurich airport is perfectly in accordance with the judicial conventions between Bern and Washington. A rape of a minor – of which Roman Polanski stands accused – does not have a statute of limitation in Swiss or American law.”

World Agenda: France's ire over Roman Polanski triggers old Gallic reflexes

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/world_agenda/article6853784.ece

If you dipped into France over the past couple of days you might have assumed that a champion of humanity had fallen victim to persecution by an unsavoury regime, perhaps Iran or North Korea. Film stars and celebrity thinkers have been busy with President Sarkozy's rightwing Government condemning a flagrant act of injustice. The object of the all-party ire, however, is not some oppressive regime, but the United States of America.

In obtaining the arrest in Switzerland of Roman Polanski, the film-maker, the Los Angeles Dictrict Attorney has hit the jackpot. The facts — flight from justice in 1977 after pleading guilty to sex with a 13-year-old girl — have become secondary because the Polanski affair triggers a series of Gallic reflexes. It tweaks France's view of itself as world standard-bearer on human rights and Mecca of artistic freedom. It also stirs France's sense of mission as a counter-balance to the excesses of the United States.

Mr Polanski falls into a special category in this department because, though originally Polish and a French passport holder, he is one of a list of Hollywood types who are more revered in France than in the USA. Woody Allen and the late Charles Chaplin are other cases. Illustrating the point, Le Monde, the daily of the elite, compared Mr Polanski's arrest to the way Chaplin was hounded out of America as a suspected communist in 1952.

By having Mr Polanski snatched on a visit to a Swiss festival in his honour, the United States played to the dark side of the love-hate feelings that France holds for it. Listen to the reaction from Frédéric Mitterrand, the Minister of Culture. Mr Polanski's arrest was "absolutely horrifying", he said. "In the same way that there is a generous America that we like, there is also an America that frightens us and that one has just shown its face."

Mr Mitterrand was appointed to his post by President Sarkozy only three months ago after a lifetime as a television presenter and film buff, but those are still astonishing words from a senior Cabinet minister about a court case in an allied country.

His logic was echoed today by Libération, the leftwing daily. "Polanski was a choice target for a deepest America where puritanism sometimes bends the sense of equitable justice," it said.

Mr Mitterrand said that it made no sense to "throw Mr Polanski to the lions over ancient history". That argument — that the 1977 sex offence should be overlooked because of the passing of time and Mr Polanski's high achievement — is shared across the Paris elite.

Here is Bernard Kouchner, the Foreign Minister, who is also esteemed in the Left Bank. "This affair is frankly a bit sinister. Here is a man of such talent, recognised worldwide, recognised especially in the country where he was arrested. This is not nice at all," he said. President Sarkozy was more measured in his support for Mr Polanski, but he is certainly under pressure from Carla Bruni, his wife and a five-star member of luvvy elite.

After two days of outcry from the elite, the pendulum has begun swinging back. A few commentators are pointing out that the sexual abuse of children is involved and that Mr Polanski is a fugitive from justice, his genius notwithstanding. The case was put today by Dany Cohn-Bendit, popular figurehead of the Green party and leader of the 1968 Paris student revolt.

Mr Polanski was charged with a sex crime, he pointed out. "This is a problem for justice and I find that a minister of culture, even if his name is Mitterrand, should say: 'I will wait to see the files'."

Littwin: Why the outrage over Polanski's arrest?

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_13449329

By Mike Littwin
Denver Post Columnist

Posted: 09/30/2009 01:00:00 AM MDT

We've been told for years that it was Hollywood and France we should be outraged aboutand now, it turns out, it's Hollywood and France that we're outraged about.

The thing is, this time we actually should be.

Let's be honest. Your outrage about Roman Polanski is only marginally to do with Polanski himself or even his long-ago crime.

I mean, he's been on the very public and five-star-luxury lam for 31 years, and I'm guessing that most of us — over those 31 long years — haven't given Polanski's status two minutes of thought, even when he was winning an Oscar.

The real outrage is with Polanski's Hollywood friends, assorted apologists and, of course, certain parts of France.

The real outrage is that anyone — see: above — would be outraged that Polanski was arrested in Switzerland or that Los Angeles officials want to bring him back to justice.

Woody Allen (not exactly the best character reference in this instance) and Martin Scorsese are among the directors who have signed a petition calling for his release. Debra Winger has issued a statement. L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein compares his story to Jean Valjean's in "Les Miserables." Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum blogs that his arrest is "outrageous."

A French minister goes further and calls it "sinister," although apparently many people in France are outraged that the minister is outraged, meaning you may not want to break out the freedom fries just yet. Of course, Polanski was born in France, ran to France, lives in Paris and calls French fries "pommes frites."

OK, there are his defenders. And then there are the rest of us, who say, uh, yeah, but he raped a 13-year-old child. The 13-year-old child was at a Hollywood photo shoot, and, according to the grand jury testimony, was plied with alcohol and Quaaludes as she climbed into a hot tub. The testimony from the victim is that Polan ski forced her to have sex.

Polanski thought he had a deal when he pleaded guilty to having had "unlawful sex with a minor" — a deal that would have let him go after 42 days of time served — only to hear word that the judge was going to put him away instead.

And so he ran. And for 31 years, he ran in, let's say, comfort — and then was arrested, to everyone's shock, at a film festival.

You can write your own moral. He's a brilliant director, who gave us "Chinatown" and "Rosemary's Baby." But if there's anything to be learned, it's that you trust the art and not the artist.

And yet, Whoopi Goldberg — an artist, I guess — goes on "The View" and pleads Polanski's case, saying that whatever happened that long- ago night, she's sure it wasn't "rape- rape."

Here's Whoopi's testimony: "He pled guilty to having sex with a minor, and he went to jail, and when they let him out (on bail, pending sentencing), he said: 'You know what, this guy's going to give me 100 years in jail. I'm not staying.' And that's why he left.

"So that's why I wanted to be really clear because I want to know exactly what I'm talking about."

And here's what I'm talking about: Sex with a 13-year-old when you're in your mid-40s — and sex that was likely forced — is not rape-rape, it's rape-rape-rape-rape-rape.

Polanski's victim, we hear, wants the case put to rest. And who can blame her? But as Washington Post columnist Gene Robinson put it, it's not the 45-year-old woman's feelings we're protecting but the 13-year- old girl's. She said in her testimony back then that she was too afraid to fight back.

There have been questions raised about the judge in the Polanski case. There are questions about judicial impropriety. These are questions that could have been settled judicially, particularly when you're a Roman Polanski and you have access to lawyers who attract big Hollywood retainers. Instead, he ran.

Not that it's a simple matter to know what to do when ghosts reappear or, for that matter, the difference between vengeance and justice. And it's true, certainly, that Polanski has ghosts aplenty. His mother died in the Holocaust. He survived a Polish ghetto. His wife, Sharon Tate, was killed in the Manson murders.

You can make the argument that it makes little sense for California, all these years later, to spend the time and money to go after Polanski. What's the point of being outraged now? Polanski is 76 years old and not likely to be a threat to anyone.

The answer comes from Polanski himself. The movie is "Chinatown," one of my all-time favorites, the great '70s noir classic he directed.

I won't give away too much of the plot — you should rent it, if you haven't seen it — but the movie closes with the only justice being a rich man's justice.

Jack Nicholson, who plays the private eye Jake Gittes, walks away downcast at movie's end. His friend tells him, "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

And so it was. But that doesn't mean it always has to be.

Mike Littwin writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-5428 or mlittwin@denverpost.com.

Obama's Too-Big-to-Fail Plan Is Too Dumb to Pass

http://www.aei.org/article/101075

Obama's Too-Big-to-Fail Plan Is Too Dumb to Pass

By Kevin A. Hassett | Bloomberg.com
Monday, September 28, 2009

The administration's financial reform proposal is back in the news after Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's testimony on Capitol Hill last week. A closer look at Geithner's proposal and the perspective of Barney Fran's amended plan reveals how inept Obama's economic policy has become.

White House Photo/Pete Souza

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's appearance in Congress last week to explain how President Barack Obama would overhaul financial regulation elicited the most striking sign yet that the wheels have come off the administration's economic-policy team.

The White House had proposed, and Geithner was ready to defend, such a radical expansion of government power that even Barney Frank, the ultra-liberal congressman from Massachusetts, felt compelled to object that it went too far.

When Barney Frank thinks that you are too liberal, you better check your medications.

The Obama plan for financial reform, outlined by Geithner at the Sept. 23 hearing, contained two main components.

It would create a new government body, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA), which would "write rules, oversee compliance and address violations by non-bank providers, as well as banking institutions." This agency would have to enforce its rules and would, according to the Obama design, be able to go after any firm that offers credit to consumers.

When Barney Frank thinks that you are too liberal, you better check your medications.

So if Sam Malone at the "Cheers" bar offers to run a tab for you, Geithner is on the case. Or if the furniture store on Main Street offers to let you have a couch without making a payment for a few months, Geithner is on the case. If a National Football League team lets customers pay for their season tickets on an installment plan, well, you get the picture.

Frank's Rollback

Such an unprecedented expansion of the reach of government was too much for Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. In a letter to his colleagues a day before Geithner's testimony, Frank proposed rolling back much of Obama's planned intrusiveness.

"Merchants, retailers and other non-financial businesses will be excluded from the regulation and oversight of CFPA," Frank wrote. "That means that merchants and retailers can continue to give their customers tabs and layaway plans without becoming subject to a new layer of regulation. Also, doctors and other businesses that bill their customers after a service is provided, including telephone, cable, and internet providers, will be excluded."

It is extraordinary that the president's original proposal was so broad that it elicited such a response from a member of his own party.

Obama's Democratic friends in Congress were less negative about the second part of his proposal, which would enact new regulations for firms that pose a systemic risk for the U.S. economy. That part has even less merit than the first.

Most observers agree that a key problem facing financial regulators is the emergence of firms that are "too big to fail." Such firms have an implicit guarantee from the U.S. government that encourages them to take big risks. Uncle Sam has them covered on the downside.

"It's Too Big"

The problem has a simple solution that has been elucidated well by my colleague Allan Meltzer, who recently said, "If a bank is too big to fail, it's too big." Government regulators should seek policies that encourage the emergence of a market that consists of many smaller firms.

A less palatable alternative would be to identify firms that are too big to fail and expose them to more oversight. This approach has significant drawbacks.

Once there is a public list of firms that are too big to fail, they will have an enormous competitive advantage. Since government is backstopping them, they will be able to borrow at lower interest rates, just as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have for years. Also, regulators will inevitably be unable to regulate these supersized firms well enough to stave off a future disaster.

In his testimony, Geithner leaned toward this extra-regulation approach, and in a truly bizarre fashion.

Hold More Capital

First, he reiterated the administration's plan to crack down on too-big-to-fail firms: "We will impose tough rules on our largest, most leveraged and most interconnected firms. We will require these firms to hold more capital to protect the system in the event of the firm's failure."

He then reassured lawmakers that government would have "no fixed list" of firms that wouldn't be permitted to fail.

But the promised harsher capital requirements would make it clear to the market which firms have been deemed too big to fail. And what's to stop firms from announcing to everyone that they have such a designation? Will the Treasury Department remain silent if a bank falsely claims membership in that club?

Just as implausibly, Geithner said firms deemed systematically important will have "no guarantee of extraordinary governmental assistance in the event of financial distress." In other words, they could be allowed to fail.

Hogwash. The administration's designation would be seen, correctly, as a promise of a safety net.

President Obama chose to begin the health-care debate without producing an explicit proposal of his own. Now we know why.

Kevin A. Hassett is a senior fellow and the director of economic policy studies at AEI.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574442561260582286.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Iran Has No Right to Nuclear Technology

Accepting Iran's "right" to nuclear power is a recipe for disaster.

By MATTHIAS KüNTZEL

The international community has treated the recent disclosure of another secret uranium enrichment facility in Iran the way it has treated Tehran's previous violations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—with calls for yet more "dialogue." The continued pursuit of fruitless diplomacy at tomorrow's talks between Iran and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany is based on an incorrect understanding of international law, one that was spearheaded by the Europeans and is now unfortunately shared by the U.S. president.

"Any nation—including Iran—should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power," Barack Obama declared in his famous Cairo speech, "if it complies with its responsibilities under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty."

The problem is that Iran is bound by its own constitution to violate the treaty, which is why insisting that the NPT still confers any rights on Iran is not only politically absurd but also wrong from a purely legal point of view.

The treaty was signed by Iran in 1968 under the rule of Shah Mohammed Reza. It aims, as outlined in its preamble, at "further easing of international tension and the strengthening of trust between states." Its purpose is thus to stabilize the international system. The Islamic Republic, though, wants to abolish this "Satanic" secular world order and replace it with a Sharia-based system of Islamic rule. "The struggle will continue," promised Ayatollah Khomeini, "until the calls 'There Is No God but God' and 'Muhammad Is the Messenger of God' are echoed all over the world." The atom program is part of this revolutionary quest. "Iran's nuclearization," President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told his supporters, "is the beginning of a very great change in the world." It would "be placed at the service of those who are determined to confront the bullying powers and aggressors."

The opposition to the treaty's lofty intentions is not just politically affirmed but legally enshrined. Iran is probably the only country in the world that has declared comprehensive armament against "Allah's enemies" to be a constitutional requirement. In Article 151 of the Islamic Republic's constitution, Koran verse 8/60 is cited as a binding precept for government policy: "Make ready for them all you can of armed forces and of horses tethered, that thereby you may dismay the enemy of Allah and your enemy, and others beside them whom you know not." To Western ears, this recourse to 7th-century scripture may seem quaint. But the mullahs are serious. Their idea of interpreting the Koran for the modern world is to replace "horses tethered" with "nuclear installations."

An Islamist state like Iran can by definition not be considered a bona fide signatory to the NPT. The mullahs, although opposed to the treaty's overall purpose, never withdrew from the NPT to take advantage of the privileges the document grants its signatories.

View Full Image

David Gothard

It is often assumed that the NPT actually blocks access to the bomb. In reality, the opportunities afforded to aspiring nuclear-weapons makers are enormous. Article IV of the treaty enables signatories to produce all components necessary for a bomb under U.N supervision, as long as they do not combine these components into nuclear explosives. The significance of this loophole was explained in April 2007 by Hossein Shariatmadari, a confidante of Iran's "Supreme Leader" Ali Khamenei: "A country that has attained the knowledge and technology of uranium enrichment is only one step away from producing nuclear weapons. This [additional] step is not a scientific or a technical step, but a matter of political decision."

Article X of the NPT further expands this loophole. A signatory state that, following President Obama's wishes, "complies with its responsibilities under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty" could accumulate the most important components of a nuclear weapon under cover of the NPT, and then legally withdraw from the treaty by simply citing "extraordinary events."

That's why President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, ignoring the faded Iranian signature on the NPT, denied the mullahs the right to any form of nuclear energy. On October 21, 2003, however, came a "very important turning point," as Hossein Mousavian, a high-ranking Iranian nuclear negotiator, described it. That was the day the foreign ministers of Great Britain, France and Germany—Jack Straw, Dominique de Villepin and Joschka Fischer—traveled to Tehran, despite major reservations on the part of the Bush Administration, to "recognize the right of Iran to enjoy peaceful use of nuclear energy in accordance with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty," as the text of a declaration agreed by Iran and the three foreign ministers states.

At that time, it was already known that Tehran had violated the NPT's monitoring regime for over 18 years by building secret nuclear facilities. Nevertheless, the paradoxical course of events continued: The more Tehran violated the NPT, the more generous the concessions by Europe, and later the U.S.—always using the treaty as justification. In his Cairo speech, Barack Obama also officially recognized Iran's alleged right to nuclear energy. Even after the existence of a second uranium enrichment facility was revealed last week, President Obama's tone remained conciliatory: "It is time for Iran to act immediately to restore the confidence of the international community by fulfilling its international obligations."

As long as Iran is ruled by Khomenei's doctrine, however, this confidence can never exist. Tomorrow's talks will only encourage Tehran to continue feigning "trustworthiness." The refusal to acknowledge this reality could lead to a dangerous compromise—one that would allow Iranian uranium enrichment as long as Tehran permits U.N. monitoring.

This would be a recipe for disaster. Allowing a theocratic regime dreaming of religious war to obtain nuclear weapons is a threat to humanity. It can neither be defused by the NPT provisions nor by continuing piecemeal sanctions. Short of a military strike, the only alternative is to make full use of Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter. In order to confront threats to peace, it suggests in article 41 the "complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations." The time for "dialogue as usual" is over.

Mr. Küntzel is author of "The Germans and Iran: The Past and Present of a Fateful Friendship," forthcoming in German in October 2009 with Wolf Jobst Siedler Jr. Belinda Cooper translated this article from the German.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574438831789972954.html#printMode

• OPINION: GLOBAL VIEW
• SEPTEMBER 28, 2009, 7:58 P.M. ET

The Neocons Make a Comeback

Neocons are back because Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il and Vladimir Putin never went away.

• By BRET STEPHENS

The other day I was asked by a writer for a mainstream French newspaper to say something about the "return" of the neoconservatives. His thesis seemed to be that the shambles of Barack Obama's foreign policy had, after only nine months, made what was thought to be the most discredited wing of an ostensibly brain-dead conservative movement relevant again. And France—no longer straining at the sight of Michelle Obama shopping in Paris's 6th arrondissement—is taking notice.

My answer was that the neocons are back because Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il and Vladimir Putin never went away. A star may have shone in the east the day Barack Obama became president. But these three kings, at least, have yet to proffer the usual gifts of gold and incense and myrrh.

View Full Image

Associated Press

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Vladimir Putin

Instead, the presents have been of a different kind. North Korea claims to be in the final stages of building a uranium enrichment facility—its second route to an atomic bomb. Iran, again caught cheating on its Nonproliferation Treaty obligations, has responded by wagging a finger at the U.S. and firing a round of missiles. Syria continues to aid and abet jihadists operating in Iraq. NATO countries have generally refused to send more troops to Afghanistan, and are all the more reluctant to do so now that the administration is itself wavering on the war.

As for Russia, its ambassador to the U.N. last week bellyached that the U.S. "continues to be a rather difficult negotiating partner"—and that was after Mr. Obama cancelled the missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic. Thus does the politics of concession meet with the logic of contempt.

All this must, at some level, come as a surprise to an administration so deeply in love with itself. "I am well aware of the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world," Mr. Obama told the U.N.'s General Assembly last week with his usual modesty. He added that those expectations were "rooted in hope—the hope that real change is possible, and the hope that America will be a leader in bringing about such change."

Yet what sounds like "hope" in, say, Toronto or Barcelona tends to come across as fecklessness in Warsaw and Jerusalem. In Moscow and Tehran, it reads like credulity—and an opportunity to exploit the U.S. at a moment of economic weakness and political self-infatuation.

For those much-scorned neocons, none of this comes as a surprise. Neoconservatives generally take the view that the internal character of a regime usually predicts the nature of its foreign policy. Governments that are answerable to their own people and accountable to a rule of law tend to respect the rights of their neighbors, honor their treaty commitments, and abide by the international rules of the road. By contrast, regimes that prey on their own citizens are likely to prey on their neighbors as well. Their word is the opposite of their bond.

That's why neocons have no faith in any deals or "grand bargains" the U.S. might sign with North Korea or Iran over their nuclear programs: Cheating is in the DNA of both regimes, and the record is there to prove it. Nor do neocons put much stock in the notion that there's a "reset" button with the Kremlin. Russia is the quintessential spoiler state, seeking its advantage in America's troubles at home and abroad. Ditto for Syria, which has perfected the art of taking credit for solving problems of its own creation.

Where neocons do put their faith is in American power, not just military or economic power but also as an instrument of moral and political suasion. Disarmament? The last dictator to relinquish his nuclear program voluntarily was Libya's Moammar Gadhafi, who did so immediately following Saddam Hussein's capture. Democratization? Contrary to current conventional wisdom, democracy is often imposed, or at least facilitated, by U.S. pressure—in the Philippines, in the Balkans and, yes, in Iraq. Human rights? Anwar Ibrahim, the beleaguered Malaysian opposition leader, told me last week that "the only country that can stand up" to abusive regimes is the United States. "If they know the administration is taking a soft stance [on human rights], they will go on a rampage."

None of this is to say that neoconservatism represents some kind of infallible doctrine—or that it's even a doctrine. Neocons have erred in overestimating the U.S. public's willingness to engage in long struggles on behalf of other people. They have erred also in overestimating the willingness of other people to fight for themselves, or for their freedom.

But as the pendulum has swung to a U.S. foreign policy based on little more than the personal attractions of the president, it's little wonder that the world is casting about for an alternative. And a view of the world that understands that American power still furnishes the margin between freedom and tyranny, and between prosperity and chaos, is starting to look better all the time. Even in France.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com

Obama's Dick Cheney Moment

By Benjamin Wittes

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

President Obama's decision not to go to Congress for help in establishing reasonable standards for the continued detention of Guantanamo detainees is a failure of leadership in the project of putting American law on a sound basis for a long-term confrontation with terrorism. It is bad for the country, for national security and for civil liberties. It represents a virtually wholesale adoption of the failed policies of his predecessor -- who, with equal obtuseness, refused to root American detention practices in clear law approved by the legislature and similarly failed to learn from repeated Supreme Court rebukes to this unilateral approach. It violates Obama's much-noted statement this spring that he would "work with Congress to develop an appropriate legal regime so that our efforts are consistent with our values and our Constitution." And it delegates a profound and difficult policymaking exercise to the judiciary and, ultimately, to a single man on the Supreme Court.

The only point in Obama's defense is that few political actors have given him reason to think he would have responsible partners if he did the right thing. Human rights and civil liberties activists are so keen to avoid legitimizing detention in legislation that they have treated as a victory the president's decision to adopt the very policy they have spent the past eight years denouncing.

Congress is not looking statesmanlike either. Republicans have been too busy making political hay out of Obama's sputtering closure of Guantanamo to act as constructive participants in this important legislative project. Democrats, always afraid of their shadows on national security issues, have hidden behind civil liberties platitudes that most do not really believe. Members across the spectrum have acted boldly only when it comes to making sure that no Guantanamo detainees end up in their districts.

But it is Obama who is president, and presidents go to war with the Congress and civil society they have, not the Congress and civil society they wish they had.

Obama's decision will have several major consequences, all of them bad.

First, while it will not stop detentions, it will ensure that the ground rules for those detentions remain murky, ever-shifting and unclear to agencies that have to conduct operations in the field. This uncertainty will encumber operations and create perverse incentives for both targeted killings and for detentions by allied proxy forces that don't have to go through eight years of litigation to neutralize a suspected enemy fighter.

Second, it leaves in place a system of judicial review of Guantanamo detentions that ill-serves detainees and government alike. The current system of making policy and reviewing detentions through habeas corpus litigation serves the government badly because the standards are unstable and evidence collected one day for intelligence purposes proves useless in justifying detentions years later when the rules shift, judges grow less comfortable and that material suddenly has to serve as evidence in court. It serves detainees badly because review has been painfully slow and detainees in habeas get only one bite at the apple. If a detainee loses his habeas case, that's it. By contrast, most proposals for long-term detention laws involve regular review and ongoing oversight, giving many more opportunities for error correction and for detainees to convince authorities that they no longer pose a danger that requires their incarceration.

Third, the failure to go to Congress to write the rules means that the rules for detention will be written by judges. So far, the judges who have heard habeas cases have disagreed about a great many central issues -- many of which the Supreme Court will ultimately have to resolve. The high court, which has not a single national security expert, may end up making good policy or bad. But because the Supreme Court is ideologically split on these issues, it seems likely that its swing justice, Anthony Kennedy, will play a disproportionate role in writing the rules of the road. Is it really better to hand this complex policy problem over to the whim of a single unelected detention czar in robes than to ask the legislature to decide when America is going to detain alleged terrorists, under what rules and with what rights?

There exists perhaps no area of national policy in which President Obama entered office with greater opportunity to create a new politics than the law of counterterrorism. Many conservatives understood that President Bush's executive-power approach had not succeeded in sustaining robust presidential power to confront the enemy. Many liberals, conversely, understood that the left's dream of a pure law enforcement model for defeating al-Qaeda was a fantasy. Obama ran on a platform of "change," and this was an area where constructive change required, first and foremost, presidential leadership.

We may never know what would have happened had Obama been willing to divert some portion of his prestige from health care to the creation of a political coalition for strong counterterrorism measures rooted in statutory powers debated and passed by the people's representatives.

How very curious, though, that so much of American political culture finds it more comfortable for him to get in touch with his inner Dick Cheney than to try.

Benjamin Wittes, a former Post editorial writer, is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a member of the Hoover Institution's Task Force on National Security and the Law.

Gross Domestic Happiness? Why the French want to redefine economic growth.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204488304574429432935433474.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

By BRIAN DOMITROVIC

French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently said he wanted the nations of the world to stop using GDP, or gross domestic product, as the main measure of their economic performance. He wants them instead to work up another metric that takes into account not only economic production but such things as environmental quality and even time not spent in traffic—a sort of gross national satisfaction index.

France has excellent reason to suppress GDP statistics. Since 1982, among developed nations, France has been a clear laggard in GDP growth. In the quarter century following 1982, France's GDP growth rate was a mere 2.1% per year in comparison to the U.S.'s 3.3%. Thus the U.S. grew at more than a 50% premium to France per year during that span. When the quarter century elapsed, Americans were one-third richer than the French.

France also lagged Britain, which over the 25-year period grew at 2.8% per year. Germany matched the French rate of 2.1%, but it had a good reason. A few years in, it had to absorb the post-communist economic basket case that was East Germany. About the only thing France can say about its GDP performance since 1982 is that it beat Italy's, which came in at a measly 1.8% per year.

France's poor GDP showing over this period was in stark contrast to the 1950s and 1960s, when it had long stretches of GDP growth at 6% per year. By the early 1980s, its GDP per capita was nearly that of the U.S. In other words, France achieved prosperity equal to what was enjoyed in America and then lost it.

There is a clear reason the inflection point was 1982. At that time, France chose not to participate in an international wave and transform its economy with a free-market revolution. In the early 1980s, Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the U.S. shed governmental regulations on the economy, cut taxes, committed to not manipulating their currencies, and encouraged global trade. Their economies boomed, as did the economies of countries that followed their lead, such as South Korea and Taiwan.

In contrast, countries of "old Europe" such as France and Italy that were content to stand pat with an overregulated private sector and tax rates well above 50% were left in the dust. In 2003, as the Iraq war got going, France complained that the U.S. was the world's "hyperpower." Yet France itself was partly responsible for this fate. Had France committed to achieving high GDP growth via free-market incentives as the U.S. had in the 1980s and 1990s, it would have been appreciably richer in the 21st century, and thus a greater force in international power politics.

If Mr. Sarkozy's statisticians ever come up with their new economic index, they should be sure it includes leisure time—because that is one thing the French economy excels at producing. In 2004, the year he won the Nobel Prize, economist Edward Prescott asked, in the title of a journal article, "Why Do Americans Work So Much More Than Europeans?" The answer, he found, was tax rates.

Tax rates had fallen so much in the U.S. by that year that the American workforce couldn't wait to get on the job—or start a business—because you got to keep so much of what you earned. In contrast, high and progressive French taxes left over from the 1970s lured people away from work, especially as they started doing well. So people came to take seven-hour days and six-week vacations, as well as not show any particular interest in striking out on their own in a work-intensive small business.

The oldest and most pathetic trick in the book when you lose a contest is to try to move the goal posts. GDP statistics of the past quarter century have shamed France but flattered the U.S., Britain and East Asia. Mr. Sarkozy's gambit to paper over this real difference will be lucky to find any takers.

Mr. Domitrovic teaches at Sam Houston State University. He is author of "Econoclasts: The Rebels Who Sparked the Supply-Side Revolution and Restored American Prosperity," just out from ISI Books.

Why Iran's missile tests may not play well in Tehran

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0929/p06s01-wome.html

The show of force ahead of nuclear talks is a well-tested strategy. But only 1 in 10 Iranians support nuclear weapons, and many question the government's legitimacy after June elections.

By Tara Mahtafar | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

from the September 28, 2009 edition

Washington - Amid increasing international support for tougher sanctions on Iran, the Islamic republic launched its longest-range missiles in a show of force ahead of nuclear talks scheduled for Oct. 1 in Geneva.

Iranian state media heralded the successful launch of a new generation of Shahab-3 and Sajjil ballistic missiles, which are capable of reaching Israel, US bases in the Middle East, and southeastern Europe. The launches added to media buzz generated by Tehran's revelation last week that it had been covertly constructing a second uranium enrichment facility. But there are signs that playing the traditional nuclear trump card to rally nationalist fervor may backfire for the regime, whose legitimacy many Iranians have challenged in the wake of June elections.

"Whenever foreign pressure on Iran rises, the hard-liners respond by testing missiles – a threat specifically leveled at Israel," says a political analyst in Tehran with reformist sympathies who asked to remain anonymous for fear of government reprisal.

But based on what callers on BBC Persian programs, bloggers, and people on the street are saying, he believes that approach has become "threadbare" in the eyes of the Iranian public. "The legitimacy of the entire regime is under question for a large swath of Iranians. Many now consider the nuclear program a core propaganda element of Ahmadinejad's administration, trumpeted as an inviolable national interest to divert attention from the political and economic failures of the Iranian government."

A survey released Sept. 25 confirms the analyst's assessment that many Iranians do not support the pursuit of nuclear weapons, although that was also true prior to the election.

The poll, conducted between Aug. 27 and Sept. 10 by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland found that two-thirds of Iranians favored precluding the development of nuclear weapons in exchange for the lifting of sanctions against Iran. Half of of those polled were willing to halt enrichment activities altogether.

While Iranian views of their government and its foreign policy may have changed, their attitudes toward nuclear weapons have remained largely stable over the past 18 months. A separate PIPA poll from early 2008 and republished just ahead of the June elections found that more than 70 percent of Iranians across the political spectrum – conservatives included – opposed their development.

'We will respond in a crushing manner'

The missile program is run under the auspices of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, a parallel army established in 1979 to preserve the Islamic revolution's ideals. Under President Ahmadinejad, the Corps has gained substantial influence in security and business affairs. (Read a full Monitor briefing on the Revolutionary Guard here.)

After Monday's missile launch, the commander of the Revolutionary Guard Air Force issued an implicit threat to Israel and other players in the region with the missiles' 1,200-mile range.

"All targets within the region will be within range of these missiles," said Gen. Hossein Salami, the commander. Referring to the defense capabilities of the Guard, he added, "We will respond to any military action in a crushing manner."

'Teeth and claws' approach likely to backfire

The show of force comes three days ahead of key talks with major world powers over Iran's disputed nuclear program, slated to open Thursday in Geneva, and less than a week after Tehran revealed it has been constructing a covert second uranium enrichment facility.

At the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, Western powers warned Iran it must open up the new site – located on a military base near the city of Qom, roughly 100 miles southwest of the capital – to international inspectors or face harsher sanctions.

Kayhan, a hard-liner daily whose editor-in-chief is appointed by Iran's Supreme Leader, led its Sunday paper with the headline, "Nuclear plant in Qom [is] a trump card for the October talks."

But such a display of "teeth and claws" is likely to backfire, says the Tehran analyst. "It only serves to strengthen the resolve of the world powers to press for heavier sanctions. Many Iranians feel that the government is not acting to preserve national interests."

How Hedge Funds Got It Right on Risk

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/24/AR2009092404187.html

A New Model for Banks?

How Hedge Funds Got It Right on Risk

By David Ignatius

Friday, September 25, 2009

LONDON -- When you think about future financial stability, ask yourself this contrarian question: Why is it that the nefarious hedge funds, supposedly the bad boys of the financial world, came through last year's crisis in relatively good shape?

It was widely predicted that these funds, which invest huge pools of capital for their wealthy clients, would have a crackup like that of the regulated banks. Some did go under, but the general catastrophe never happened. Why? The answer partly is that the hedge funds still had to live by the old capitalist rules: There was no lender of last resort to bail them out. So these unregulated managers turned out to be more cautious than the regulated ones.

There's a perverse lesson here, which has been noted by some of the finance ministers and central bankers who gathered for this week's Group of 20 meeting in Pittsburgh. If you want better behavior from bankers, then make their financial incentives more like those in the hedge fund world -- where managers have "skin in the game" and their net worth is tied to their long-term performance.

Hedge fund managers make too much money relative to their social utility. I wish their rewards were a bit closer to those of, say, schoolteachers. But at least the unregulated traders have to live in a profit-and-loss system. They are "regulated," in effect, by their investors. If they screw up, they don't get to join Citibank and Bank of America in the queue for a taxpayer bailout.

"The system we have created for big banks is a travesty," says one European central banker who has been active in the G-20 debates. "You can mismanage your business, and if it goes wrong, society pays the bill. We need to find a way where bankers know they can fail."

To examine why the hedge fund industry didn't blow up last year, let's look at some numbers gathered by a group called HedgeFund Intelligence. They show that U.S.-based funds suffered an average loss of 12.7 percent in 2008. That's a sharp hit, but it's nothing like the 38.5 percent decline for the Standard & Poor's 500. Losses for banks were much higher still.

Some hedge funds got pounded, to be sure, because they made bad bets or because investors decided to pull out their money. Nearly 500 funds disappeared last year, according to HedgeFund Intelligence, but that's out of a universe of roughly 7,000.

The salvation of the hedge fund industry was that its existential crisis came 10 years earlier, with the 1998 implosion of Long-Term Capital Management. After that fund went down, the hedge funds' lenders got nervous and tightened their standards. As a result, in the past decade the supposedly go-go hedge funds were actually less leveraged than many banks.

To see how the borrowing mania hit banking, look at confidential numbers for big Swiss banks, once renowned for their caution. Debt ratios at the two largest banks rose in the past dozen years from 90 percent to 97 percent -- meaning that they had 97 Swiss francs of borrowed money for every three francs of capital. In the banks' trading accounts, the use of borrowed money was even greater. One study calculated that by 2006, the traders at big Swiss banks were borrowing 400 times their capital -- which was about 100 times as high as the leverage ratio of a typical hedge fund.

In Pittsburgh, the G-20 nations are beginning the process of putting the financial house back in order. My worry is that the politicians will put too much faith in regulatory supervision -- which demonstrably didn't do the job in the run-up to the 2008 crash. The best restraint is old-fashioned market discipline, in which financial traders know that they, personally, will lose a ton of money if they take risky bets that don't pan out.

Make the financial industry pay for its mistakes. That's the idea behind the best of the Obama administration's reform proposals: If banks issue securities backed by mortgages, say, then require them to hold some of that paper so that they will bear some of the losses. When banks devise compensation schemes for their top executives, urge their boards to adopt the hedge fund practice of "claw-back" payments so that one year's big gains will be reduced by the next year's big losses. The underlying idea, says one White House official, is to "fight short-termism."

Socialism for rich bankers is such an outrage. Profit and loss -- what a concept!

davidignatius@washpost.com