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Obama and the "Yes-You-Can" terrorists

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President Obama’s speech, announcing his intent to reign in America’s global war on terror is playing out with a certain grisly irony here in England, a country reeling from the latest terrorist act.

The media here is filled with ghastly images of a man, clad in a jacket and woolen cap, glaring at the camera, a knife and meat cleaver in his bloody hand—just after he and his partner hacked to death and tried to behead a young British soldier in Woolwich in southeast London two days ago.

 What is particularly alarming is the similarity of these two newest terrorist murderers in the name of Islam to the two brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon last month, to the 23 year-old son of Algerian immigrants, who shot down seven people in France a little more than a year ago. 

In England, as in the earlier attacks in the U.S. and France, the terrorist killings provoked a wave of horror and outrage across the country. Islamic leaders denied such dastardly deeds had anything to do with the true faith. The murders were condemned as the totally senseless, cowardly act of unhinged killers, their minds deranged by radical Islamist claptrap.

“Britain will never buckle,” said Prime Minister David Cameron. “The terrorists will never win because they can never beat the values we hold dear.”

In fact, however, as one of the two killers in Woolwich talked to a horrified onlooker before the police arrived, in his own mind, at least, their actions were quite rational. They were in retaliation for Britain’s participation in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone.” the man with the meat cleaver said. “Your people will never be safe. The only reason we have done this is because Muslims are dying by British soldiers everyday. We must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I apologize that women had to witness this today but in our lands our women have to see the same.”

He went on, “So what if we want to live by the Sharia in Muslim lands? Why does that mean you must follow us and chase us and call us extremists, kill us?”

“Rather, your lot are extreme. You are the ones. When you drop a bomb, do you think it picks on a person? Or rather your bomb wipes out a whole family?’

The investigation in London is just getting underway, but there is no evidence that the two men of Nigerian parents were part of al-Qaeda or any sophisticated terrorist network. One of them had converted from Christianity to Islam, but they were what the British authorities call “self-starters,”a potentially far more dangerous threat to Britain and the West than al-Qaeda itself.

They were almost certainly swayed by radical Islamic clerics in England or via the Internet, such as the fiery English-language sermons delivered by Anwar al-Alwaki, an Al Qaeda preacher based in Yemen. An American citizen, he was killed in a drone strike in 2011. But the West’s dilemma is that his call for wannabe jihadis to launch whatever bloody attacks they can conjure, echoes on—as does the motto “Just Do It.”   

That’s also the story behind the bombings at the Boston Marathon, perpetrated by the two young Tsarnaev brothers, immigrants from the restless Muslim nation of  Chechnya. Here again, there is yet no evidence that they received any serious terrorist training or were acting as agents of any sophisticated network. Like the two men in Woolwich, they were freelancers--carrying out their own murderous schemes, inspired by nationalist cum religious sentiments, abetted by on-line instructions about bomb-making.

Their motives?  The surviving brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was determined to make them clear. As he lay bleeding from his wounds, hidden from the police inside a boat in the back yard of a Watertown, Ma., he wrote a message on the interior wall of the cabin.

The note said the bombings were in retaliation for U.S. military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, and called the Boston victims "collateral damage" in the same way innocent victims have been in the American-led wars. "When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims," Tsarnaev wrote.

Again, in March 2012, France was traumatized by the murderous outburst of another young Muslim in Toulouse.  Mohammed Merah, 23, first gunned down three French soldiers—one of them Muslim—then three days later he methodically shot four more people—a rabbi and three students at a nearby Jewish School.  

He attacked the military base, Merah later told police, because of France’s involvement in Afghanistan; and the Jewish school because “The Jews kill our brothers and sisters in Palestine.” He was also outraged, he said, by France’s ban of the full veil.

As in Woolwich and Boston, the immediate suspicion that Merah was somehow linked to al-Qaeda; but it turned out that it wasn’t. As I blogged at the time, Merah had been to Pakistan and Afghanistan, but there was no evidence that this former petty criminal was part of any serious terrorist network.

That being the case, how on earth can the authorities in the U.S. and Europe deal with the threat of such “Just-Do-It” jihadis?  

Since 2005, for instance, British security services have prevented more than a dozen terrorist plots on British soil, including a scheme to blow up airliners with liquid-based bombs, to targeting shopping centers and nightclubs with fertilizer-based explosives, to taking out the London stock exchange. But the two Woolwich killers slipped through.

This, despite the fact that, according to reports here, both of them had been on an MI-5 watch list. One had apparently been arrested while attempting to travel to Somalia to join a radical Islamic group.

But after that, what should the authorities have done? Hold him for life? Let him go but keep him under constant surveillance? With some 2.5 million people of Muslim descent in England? Many of them unemployed, alienated from their government and its tendency to follow the lead of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Middle East. How do you keep a handle on them all?

French authorities also singled out Mohammed Merah for special attention after his trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan. But Merah shared space on that watch-list with some 600 other radicals from right to left just in the Toulouse area alone. Don’t forget, there are more than five million people of Muslim descent in France, many of them also bitter, unemployed, poorly housed.

French authorities have also foiled terrorist plots over the past few years, but there is no way they could have predicted that a young man like Mohammed Merah, who first turned to Salafism in a French prison, would migrate from radical “attitude” into full-blown terrorism. Indeed, apparently before he set out to avenge his Moslem brothers for France’s military role in Afghanistan, Merah had earlier tried to enlist in the French army, presumably to go to Afghanistan to fight against Islamic radicals.

Thus, there are certainly other precipitating factors—apart from ideology alone--that transform young men and women into terrorists. The elder Tsarnaev brother in Boston, for instance, had been a promising amateur boxer. He was apparently radicalized when the people running the Golden Gloves championships restricted  admission to American citizens only. That decision meant the end to Tsarnaev’s boxing career and turned him towards religious extremism.

But, the only real common ground among the terrorist killers have been the statements they’ve issued themselves: Their bloody actions, they’ve all claimed, are retribution for the policies of the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East and Central Asia, the lurid pictures of collateral damage from Drone strikes, and the continued shame of Guantanamo. 

Ironically, all those actions were supposedly undertaken to make the U.S. and its allies safe from terrorism.

Will the apparent shift in America’s policy announced by President Obama change that fatal dynamic? It depends on whether or not he now backs up his high-flying rhetoric with concrete action.

Terrifying Lessons of the Boston Terrorists

 It wasn’t Al Qaeda, It was the Golden Gloves.

The investigation is still continuing into the motives and methods of the two Tsarnaev brothers, but it may well be that the most terrifying lesson of the Boston Marathon bombings is that what precipitated it were not exhortations of Al-Qaeda-linked militants; not the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan; not the carnage wreaked by America’s drones —though all that may have played a follow-up role--but a decision made by the folks who ran the U.S. Golden Gloves boxing competition in 2010. 

This is according to a must-read article in the New York Times.

What happened was that in 2010, the men running the boxing national Tournament of Champions changed the ground rules so that only American citizens could compete. The result was that several top amateur boxers were barred--among them, Tamerlan Anzorovich Tsarnaev, 23, a young man who had immigrated with his family from Kyrgyzstan a few years earlier and had just won his second consecutive title as the Golden Gloves heavyweight champion of New England.

According to the Times, that decision was a major blow for Tamerlan. Amateur boxing had become an intrinsic part of his identity in his new homeland—a sort of emotional underpinning. He had talked about wanting to represent the U.S. in the Olympics, and then turn pro.

According to the Times, who interviewed dozens of people and relatives who had known Tamerlan,  “His aspirations frustrated, he dropped out of boxing competition entirely, and his life veered in a completely different direction….”

His views on Islam became increasingly radical, as did his hostility to the U.S. and its actions in the Muslim world. Presumably, he also radicalized his younger brother.

But, again, all that occurred, said the Times, “only after his more secular dreams were dashed in 2010 and he was left adrift.”

On the other hand, an in-depth piece on the Tsarnaevs by the Washington Post , makes no mention at all of Tamerlan’s being barred from the Tournament of Champions. But it does chronicle in tragic detail the way in which the dream that had brought Tamerlan’s family to the United States in 2004, had slowly tarnished, until it all seemed to fall apart in 2010 and 2011—when his father, with cancer, divorced his mother, and moved back to Dagestan. 

Again-all this on the heels of Tamerlan’s being barred from the tournament of Champions.

Was that the precipitating factor that led to the tragedy in Boson?  We’ll never know for sure. But that convoluted and very human tale rings far truer than the facile clichés and pontifications of the so-called experts on terrorism who filled the media over the past couple of weeks.

  

It also brings home the ultimately impossible task of the 200,000 employees of the Department of Homeland Security, established after 9/11, with a budget of 50 billion dollars a year—dedicated to protecting Americans from exactly the kind of terrorist activity as occurred in Boston.

How do you provide one hundred percent protection to Americans when the decision by a Golden Gloves official can propel a young man towards violent jihad, much more effectively than a fatwa from Osama bin Laden himself?

(You may be interested in an earlier piece I did on the Boston Bombers: America the Blind.)

Boston & Cowardice & America the Blind

As I write this, we still don’t know who was responsible for the horrific bombing attack in Boston. Perhaps it will turn out to be the work of home grown rightwing nuts; perhaps it’s the act of foreign terrorists. But, whatever the source, what strikes me is the number of times the barbaric assault is being denounced as “cowardly”

As in Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis’s warning that “This cowardly act will not be taken in stride.”

Indeed, “Cowardly” is the epithet being used by political figures across the United States; it was used by an editorial writer in Kansas City Star and a spokesman for the United Maryland Muslim Council in Baltimore.

“Cowardly” is the term being used in messages of support from abroad, from the Prime Minister of India to the Prime Minister of Italy.

After all, what could be more cowardly than for some unknown, unseen, unannounced  killer to blow apart and maim innocent men women and children, without any risk to himself.   

But, if that be the definition of cowardice, what could be more cowardly, than the now cliché image of the button-down CIA officer agent driving to work in Las Vegas to assume his shift at the controls of a drone circling high over some dusty village on the other side of the world?

How different are the images produced by such attacks—shattered bodies, dismembered limbs, severed arteries, frantic aid givers and terrified survivors—how different from the moving images of the tragedy in Boston now being broadcast and rebroadcast on TV stations around the globe?

With those scenes in mind, I would ask you to read a portion of a blog on Drone Wars I posted a few weeks ago, citing the fact that over the past few years, U.S. drones have made mincemeat out of an estimated 3000 to 4000 people in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia.  At least 200 of them were children.

“The figures are very rough because no one--certainly not the U.S. government--is releasing an accurate count.  The London based Center for Investigative reporting, which attempts to track the drone strikes, has been able to identify by name only a few hundred of the actual victims. Who knows what their political affiliations really were? Or even less, what considerations—legal and otherwise—went into justifying their demise?

“It’s a terrifying situation.” Jennifer Gibson told me. She’s an American lawyer in London with Reprieve, an organization taking on the “drone war” issue. “There are villages in Pakistan,” she says “that have drones flying over them 24 hours a day. Sometimes they’ll stay for weeks. But my clients and people there have no way of knowing if they are being targeted. Or what kind of behavior is likely to get them killed.

“They don’t know if the person riding beside them in a car or walking with them in the marketplace may be a target. It’s terrorizing entire communities. Even after an attack, there is no acknowledging by the U.S. government, no response at all, absolutely no accountability. And the vast majority of casualties don’t even have names attached to them.”

“Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, summary or arbitrary executions, told a conference in Geneva that President Obama's attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, carried out by the CIA, would encourage other states to flout long-established human rights standards. He suggested that some strikes may even constitute “war crimes”.

“But, few Americans seem to carry about U.N. rapporteurs. It’s only when Americans are potential targets for those drones, that Congress and the media get stirred up.

“And they’re probably right. A recent poll taken by Farleigh Dickinson University’s Public Mind, found that by a two to one margin (48% to 24%) American voters say they think it’s illegal for the U.S. government to target its own citizens abroad with drone strikes.

“But, when it comes to using drones to carry out attacks abroad “on people and other targets deemed a threat to the U.S.” voters were in favor of a margin of six-to-one [75% to 13%].

(You may be interested in checking out another blog I wrote-“Drone Wars: The End of History?”)

Since I first posted  this blog, a reader, Jim Rissman has sent me the link to a brief news article about a drone strike in Pakistan on Sunday--day before the Boston attack:

A US drone strike killed four militants on Sunday in the Datta Khel tehsil of North Waziristan Agency.

A security official said the US drone fired two missiles at a compound in Manzar Khel area of Datta Khel, some 40 kilometres towards west of Miramshah, the headquarters of the agency.

Tribesmen recalled seeing six drones hovering in the air since the afternoon, spreading panic and fear in the area. One of the drones fired two missiles at around sunset, killing at least four militants.

The compound caught fire after the strike leaving all the bodies burnt.

The last drone strike occurred in the agency on March 22, when US drones targeting a vehicle in Datta Khel killed four militants.

A UN envoy last month said US drone attacks violate Pakistan’s sovereignty.

Mali: Mission Accomplished! Hollande’s Bush Moment:

Still No Crazy Glue in Sight

As Colin Powell famously warned George H.W. Bush on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, “if you break it, you own it.” 

France is not responsible for “breaking” Mali. The country was already a West African basket case long before the French intervention.

But France, which enraged many Americans by refusing to participate in the invasion of Iraq, now finds itself stuck with the results of their own intervention.  And there’s no crazy glue in sight.

That’s what I wrote a couple of months ago after President Francois Hollande dispatched French troops to Mali. 

The irony today is that not only is there no obvious solution to Mali’s plight, but Hollande himself is having enormous problems running his own deeply troubled country. 

Back in January Hollande’s aides hoped that a forceful intervention in Mali would give the lie to the charge that he was a feeble, indecisive leader.

But now, in mid April, with 4,600 French troops in Mali, the magazine L’Express is running an abject photo of Holland on the cover, over the humiliating headline: “M. FAIBLE.” (Mister WEAK). Similar devastatingly mocking jibes fill the media—from all sides of the political spectrum.

Indeed, with Hollande confronting a major domestic political crisis, after his Budget Minister-in charge of collecting taxes--admitted to having stashed money in secret bank accounts in Switzerland and Singapore, the president’s popularity is still plummeting (now about 20%).

It’s being driven ever lower by France’s abysmal economic situation,  mounting crime and racial tensions. With three of Hollande’s own ministers now publicly challenging the government’s economic program, the ineluctable conclusion is that no one’s really in charge.

Yet this is the same man who is supposedly leading the battle to save Mali from ruin.

When France intervened in January, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius vowed the action would be over in “a matter of weeks.”

Now in mid April, 4,600 French troops are still in the country, supported by about 6,000 soldiers from several African states. Led by the French, they’ve retaken most of the major population centers from the jihadists who had threatened to overrun the country. They’ve also pummeled rebel redoubts in the North, reportedly killing hundreds of radicals and destroying tons of equipment.

Yet the situation is still tense. Islamists who had faded into the villages and rugged mountains are still capable of deadly hit-and-run attacks. And the ethnic Tuaregs in the North, who began the rebellion, are still demanding autonomy or independence.

Hollande  is also out on a limb. Though he claimed he was acting to protect Europe from radical Islam spreading in Africa, he has received precious little support from his European allies. Nor—aside from some important intelligence and logistics support—has he received much real backing from the United States.  After Iraq and Afghanistan, no one is rushing to get involved in yet another quagmire.

Meanwhile the Mali adventure is costing France—whose budget is already in disarray-- close to three million Euros a day—probably much more. By this summer, the cost will probably have risen to at least half a billion Euros…and counting.  

Hollande’s predicament now is not that different from the one facing President Obama in Afghanistan: how to drastically decrease France’s involvement in Mali without making it look like France has cut and run, leaving an unseemly chaos in his wake.

The solution: France will turn over the mess in their former colony, as soon as possible, to a new “democratically-elected” Malian government.  

Thus it was that Hollande dispatched Foreign Minister Fabius to Bamako to lay down his dictat to the major political actors:  presidential and legislative elections were to be held by July.

The rebel Tuaregs were supposed to lay down their arms, though they still occupy Kidal and a part of Northern Mali; a French reaction force would stay in place to ensure that “the terrorists” didn’t come back.

We imagine the plans also include a kind of George W. Bush “Mission Accomplished” moment: A beaming Hollande attending the inauguration of Mali’s new leaders. He salutes the sacrifice of the heroic French and African troops, vows undying support for the future of France’s former colony--and continues to withdraw French troops.

By the end of 2013 only 1000 French troops will be left to work with a UN Peacekeeping Force from other mainly African countries.

That’s the deal. The problem, according to many observers, is that attempting to hold meaningful--never mind democratic-- elections by July is just a wishful figment of Hollande’s desperate imagination--a frail fig leaf for France.

Even if Mali were secure, the idea that it might be possible to organize a real campaign in a country twice the size of France, draw up lists of electors when at least 400,000 Malians from the north have fled south or to their African neighbors, is a chimera.

With no time for new political leaders or parties to organize and present themselves, the field is left to the same threadbare, corrupt politicians who presided over the country’s ruin and final collapse in 2012.

After that debacle, it turned out that what had once been trumpeted as a showcase for post-colonial government in Africa, was in fact a  “Potemkin” democracy—all façade, no substance.

Which will probably be the upshot of the elections scheduled for July (if they actually take place.)

The scenario after that: those 1,000 French troops, with 10,000 soldiers and police from the new U.N. force—many of them poorly equipped and trained—will somehow maintain order in Mali’s restive towns and cities and vast hinterlands, while the new government struggles to resolve the country’s huge problems, made even more desperate by the changing climate of the Sahel.   

Bottom line: fifty years after it became independent, Mali has still to rely on its former colonial ruler to keep the country intact.   

But after half a century, France, like the other once great powers, no longer has the appetite nor the resources to play a colonial role. Hollande, as we’ve noted, is having a hell of a time, just attempting to rule his own restive nation.

Nor for that matter does the United States have much in the way of state-building zeal these days. President Obama would much rather deal with terrorist threats through killer drones, than boots on the ground and massive aid programs.

Which means that imposing elections for July on Mali, though a flawed, cynical step, may be the only realistic way forward. It may at least get some kind of political process sputtering again. 

And France and the rest of the world will provide some aid, some investment, some military training—and Mali and its peoples will almost certainly endure decades more of political turbulence and strife.

Their desperate situation will be mirrored in the turmoil, which may also last for decades, of failing states across the region, from Tunis to Libya to Egypt to Syria.

After all, the reverberations of the French Revolution, which took place in 1789, are still being felt in France to this day. 

France: From Gloire to Desespoir

President Francois Hollande’s government is reeling from the latest scandal to jolt this country-the admission by Budget Minister, Jerome Cahuzac, after months of denying the charge, that he had secret offshore accounts. This newest affaire only adds to the strange brew of outrage and despair that has enveloped the citizens of what was once Europe’s greatest power.   

Nothing brings home more starkly France’s awful decline than a visit to the Basilica of Saint Denis in the northern suburbs of Paris. It is still considered one of the architectural marvels of Europe. Its vaulted domes, 13^th century nave, slender towering walls and luminous stained glass windows were models for the high Gothic style that that inspired the architects of Notre Dame in Paris and other great abbeys and temples to the Christian God throughout Europe. Inside are the tombs—though not always the remains--of most of the kings and queens of France over the past 1500 years. 

It’s a memorable sight. But there were precious few tourists there when I visited yesterday; and non apparent on the streets outside. 

Once you exit the cavernous, hushed Basilica you’re suddenly walking the main shopping streets of one of Paris’s most notorious urban slums, filled mainly with immigrants and the descendants of immigrants from the sprawling lands that France once ruled in Africa, not that many years ago.

Today, however, Saint Denis is more notorious for its crime and drug rate than its basilica. Probably 25% or more of the young people on these streets are unemployed. Saint Denis is also associated with gang violence, car burnings, housing complexes that even the police fear to enter, and a predominately Islamic population that feels increasingly estranged from the rest of France.

And Saint Denis is far from being an exception in France.

Despite President Hollande’s vow when he entered office to reduce unemployment, the number of jobless is still high—more than 10% and growing higher--throughout the country.

As is the crime rate, from petty street and auto thefts to apartment break-ins, assaults, and all-out gang warfare on the streets of Marseilles. The Interior Minister talks darkly of new violent mafia-like organizations in France, run by legal and illegal immigrants who have swarmed into the country from Eastern Europe in the past few years.

Despite President Hollande’s promise to revitalize French industry and block factory closures, factories continue to shut down. Others continue to lay off thousands of workers. The 35-hour workweek still reigns supreme.

Meanwhile, Hollande’s politically-driven drive to raise taxes on the wealthy, particularly a charge of 75% on those making more than one million Euros a year, has probably cost France far more than any such tax could ever bring in. The latest demented development is that the companies that pay those salaries will also have to pay the taxes. That includes France’s major football teams and millionaire stars.   

Hundreds of thousands of French—many of the best and the brightest--have fled abroad over the past few years, more than 400,000 to London alone. But a survey taken found most of them left not to so much to avoid French taxes, but to escape stifling French bureaucracy and regulations, and do something about the huge waste.

Every French government in recent history has promised to do something about that bureaucracy. None have succeeded in tackling the entrenched labor unions and special interests.

In fact, most French long ago gave up their claim to be a major power. They would happily settle for a good, secure government job, with decent schools, housing, a comfortable retirement and continued access to one of the world’s best medical systems.  They would settle in short for security, in their own land..

But that’s exactly what’s being threatened in an atmosphere of moral decay and crisis—of underlying rot.

Francois Hollande was elected eleven months ago to deal with all this-to bring an end to the frenetic bling-bling reign of Nicolas Sarkozy, to restore order, to return to a feeling of probity; to be, as he promised, “a normal president.” Instead, he's turned out to be weak, indecisive, uninspiring.

And now comes the affaire Cahuzac

Jerome Cahuzac, Francois Hollande’s Minister of the Budget, who had vowed to clean up France’s huge deficit, its finances, and go after tax dodgers. This past December a new investigative on-line journal Mediapart, reported that Cahuzac had an illegal bank account in Switzerland. Cahuzac solemnly swore to his colleagues in the National Assembly, swore to all who would listen, that the charge was false.

This week, however, he finally admitted that, yes, he had secret account in Switzerland, which he then moved to Singapore. The account totaled about 600,000 Euros. 

The French media immediately compared Cahuzac with Bill Clinton and the Lewinsky affair, Richard Nixon and Watergate.

Cahuzac’s humiliating admission is like blood in the water to the France’s political and media sharks. Before this scandal broke, the level of public approval for Hollande had plummeted to less than 30%. 

Today, it could only be lower. Now all sides are demanding to know how, if a small muck-raking journal could discover Cahuzac’s misdeeds, how is it that President Hollande—with all the investigative tools at his disposal--couldn’t have found out earlier.

Then today came further embarrassing news for Hollande. The revelation that the treasury of his last election campaign—the one that was waged to bring honesty etc. into government—the treasurer also had a couple of off-shore companies in the Cayman Islands.

There are increasing calls—even from within his own party--for him to completely reform his government, to strike out in some heroic new direction, to revive France’s faith in its future.

There’s no indication that Francois Hollande has either the stomach or the backbone for such a challenge. Nor that the French would willingly make the sacrifices necessary to retool and rebuild their nation.

They’re reluctant to even seriously discuss what’s needed.

Perhaps that’s because the problems they confront—like unemployment, economic growth, crime, racial strife, the survival of the Euro ----perhaps because those problems are so complex, the French—like other nations—find it much easier to obsess about other simpler issues—issues someone can have a real opinion about. Like..well, should a Muslim woman working in a government office be able to wear a veil?  Or, should France’s social security system pay for a homosexual couple to have a child using artificial insemination and a surrogate mother?

Yet all the while, France’s real problems keep growing.

This week for instance, the Canard Enchaine, reports that, according to a recent government study, the time-off taken for such things as “sickness” and “accidents at work” by the 57,000 people employed by the City of Paris, came to an average of 20 days—that is about one month—per employee. That’s in addition to the five weeks of holiday they get each year.

That represents a total of more than 1.15 million days of work—a cost of 160 million Euros per year.

Meanwhile, as part of a project to refurbish the Basilica of Saint Denis, its marvelous stained glass windows, which looked over the tombs of France’s greatest monarchs, were removed from the church, replaced by artificially colored panes, and sent off to be repaired by skilled French artisans. Ten years later, those windows, according to a guide I spoke with, are still locked away in their protective cases.

The authorities can’t find the money to restore them.

   

Me and my 25,000 Classmates

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A few weeks ago, I decided to apply to go back to college--to one of the 20 top liberal arts colleges in America. It turned out to be deceptively simple: No SAT exams, no mammoth tuition fees, no huge student loans, no nail-biting wait to see if I was admitted.  

I simply signed up and now I’m now taking a course at Wesleyan given by Michael Roth the President of the University, a brilliant, entertaining lecturer, an expert, among other things on the Enlightenment and
Modernist thought.

The current fees for tuition and housing at Wesleyan are about $60,000 a year. I’m taking this course for free.

Wesleyan is located in Middletown Connecticut. I’m taking the course in my home office in Paris. Professor Roth is not here on sabbatical. He’s on my computer screen. Whenever I want him.

The course is a product of a brave new world of education called MOOC, which stands for Massive On Line Courses. Massive indeed. I was one of more than 25,000 students across the globe, of all ages, all nationalities, all with different goals, who signed up to take this course which began last month.

This could be the beginning of an enormous revolution in education. Or maybe just a very glitzy but ultimately ineffectual technology.  Rather than write about it from the outside. I decided to sign up for a course myself.

I logged on to the site of Coursera, a startup founded just a year ago by two Stanford University professors, which now has more than three million students taking 320 university courses in 210 countries.

I scrolled through the catalogue of hundreds of on-line courses offered by professors from Stanford to Cal Tech to Duke to the University of Pennsylvania—Astronomy, Advanced Calculus, Marketing, Music, Art, Creative Writing, Computer Engineering.

One survey course given by Wesleyan University caught my fancy: “Modernism and Post Modernism”. 

We’d be covering the likes of Kant, Marx, Manet, Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, Virginia Wolfe, and so on. The last time I’d been confronted with such a challenging intellectual array was in college fifty years ago. To my shame, I’ve shied away from such reading ever since.

The course would be starting in a few days. It would run for fourteen weeks.

Signing up on line took about two minutes.

We’re now a little more than half way through the course, and it’s been great. I’m already recommending it to friends.  There’s nothing to lose but your own time.

This is the way it works: Ever Monday, Professor Roth uploads an hour’s video lecture to the course site, the lecture usually split into four 15 minute segments.  Whenever they choose, course members simply log on, download a segment, and watch it on their PC’s or laptops or IPads or whatever.

We’re not in the classroom with the professor, true. Many years ago, my father paid a pile so I could study at a top ivy-league university. I sat in cavernous lecture halls, often with hundreds of other students, listening to different Great Minds on the podium, scribbling notes as I tried to stay awake and keep up, jotting something down even if I wasn’t sure I understood it. I had precious little personal contact with those Great Minds.

I also take notes as Professor Roth talks. He’s on the screen just in front of me, most of the time, full-frame, dynamic, entertaining, comparing Emmanuel Kant with Jean Jacques Rousseau, reading poetry by Baudelaire, analyzing Sigmund Freud.  

But if I drift off or the telephone rings, and I need to review what he’s said--no problem. I put the professor on pause, go back a couple of minutes and play it again.

I also download written material—essays or articles or books by the figures we are covering that week. That material is also free.

True, most university courses usually break down into sections, giving students the chance to discuss what they’re studying face-to-face, directly with teaching assistants and each other.

There’s no such possibility with the kind of massive on line course I’m taking. Nor can we go personally to the professor at the end of class or during office hours to ask our penetrating questions.

On the other hand, there is an on-line discussion forum that any of us, from anywhere on the planet, can log on to and create a new “thread” related to the material we’re studying.

Some threads are predictably pedestrian. Others, more provocative. “What would Karl Marx have thought of the Arab Spring?”

The obvious interest and maturity of many such threads keeps me reading, thinking, and commenting myself. With some of my fellow students, a bond is already forming.  

Several threads were launched by students looking to hookup with others from their area to form their own study groups—from India, New York City, Seattle Bulgaria, Melbourne, Turkey, Iran. There are Spanish-speaking and Russian-speaking groups, but the most active is : “the Online, Older Study Group.”

What about exams or tests? There are 8 written assignments, limited to a maximum of 800 words, the subject given by Professor Roth at the beginning of the week; the essay due about five days later.

I do a lot of blogging, but I was surprised by how warily I approached the task of writing a cogent 800-word essay about such daunting figures as Darwin, Flaubert, or Nietzsche.

Because of the thousands of people taking the course, there is no way that Professor Roth and his two teaching assistants can grade the mountain of essays. Instead, we grade each other.

After submitting our own essay, I download the essays of three other students. i have no way of knowing who they are, but, furnished with instructions on how to evaluate them,  I proceed to pass judgment. I probably learn as much by agonizing over the essays of my peers as by writing my own assignments.  

I was also surprised by the tightening in my gut as I logged on to the site to find out what kind of marks my own essay received.

In a breathless blog, Coursera has just notified me that, though their company is less than a year old, students around the world have now signed up fro a “staggering 10 million courses.”

What Coursera doesn’t say, is that, though millions may sign up for free courses, millions also drop out before finishing. Of the 25,000 who signed up for the course I’m currently taking, probably only about 10% will finish.

Where is this phenomenon headed? If the courses are free, how can Coursera and the universities who are flooding into this market make money?

What’s in it for them? What’s really in it for the students? 

And how am I going to deal with the essay I’m supposed to write on Freud and Virginia Wolfe?

More on all that in my next blog.

An Arab dictator gases his own people. Then and Now

America's outrage over the use of chemical weapons by Arab dictators depends on which dictator did the gassing and when they did it.

For instance, the regime of Syrian tyrant Bashar Al-Assad is exchanging accusations with Syrian rebels over the use of chemical weapons in their increasingly deadly battle. Both sides cite, among other things, video footage that apparently shows attack survivors—soldiers and civilians--gasping for breath.  

So far, investigators say evidence of a chemical attack by either side is far from convincing. But proof that Assad was indeed using such weapons of mass destruction would represent a major turning point in the conflict. 

The Obama administration—which has long been reluctant to intervene directly—has warned the Syrian dictator that the use of  chemical weapons would “constitute a red line for the United States.”

Republican Senators John Mc Cain and Lindsey Graham are particularly outraged. Their feelings are understandable-right? How could any U.S. administration stand by as an Arab dictator gassed his own people?

President Ronald Reagan not only turned his back on such ruthless attacks, though they were substantiated by grisly video evidence, but continued to aid the tyrant who was ordering the savagery.   

The dictator in question was Saddam Hussein. That of course was before the invasion of Iraq ten years ago when the George W. Bush acted to topple the tyrant he compared to Hitler .

It was in the 1980’s when the U.S. secretly backed Saddam after he invaded Iran. (Along with Michel Despratx I did a TV documentary covering on this subject)

When word first broke in 1983 that Iraq was using mustard gas against Iranian troops, the Reagan administration (after a verbal tap on the wrist delivered by then Middle East envoy Donald Rumsfeld) studiously ignored the issue. Saddam, after all, was then the West’s de facto partner in a war against the feared fundamentalist regime of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini.

Saddam’s chemical weapons were provided largely by companies in Germany and France (these days, France is also outraged that Assad may be using chemical weapons).

For its part, the United States provided Saddam with –among many other things — vital satellite intelligence on Iranian troop positions.

U.S. support for Saddam increased in 1988 when Rick Francona, then an Air Force captain, was dispatched to Baghdad by the Defense Intelligence Agency. His mission: to provide precise targeting plans to the Iraqis to cripple a feared a new Iranian offensive. Shortly after arriving, Francona discovered that the Iraqis were now using even more deadly chemical weapons — nerve gas — against the Iranians. 

He informed his superiors in Washington.

The response, he said, was immediate. “We were told to cease all of our cooperation with the Iraqis until people in Washington were able to sort this out. There were a series of almost daily meetings on ‘How are we going to handle this, what are we going to do?’ Do we continue our relations with the Iraqis and make sure the Iranians do not win this war, or do we let the Iraqis fight this on their own without any U.S. assistance, and they’ll probably lose? So there are your options — neither one palatable.” Francona concluded, “The decision was made that we would restart our relationship with the Iraqis … We went back to Baghdad, and continued on as before. ”

This policy continued even after it was discovered that Saddam was using chemical weapons against his own people, the Kurds of Halabja.

Fourteen years later, in March 2003, attempting to justify the coming invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush repeatedly cited the Halabja atrocity. “Whole families died while trying to flee clouds of nerve and mustard agents descending from the sky,” he said. “The chemical attack on Halabja provided a glimpse of the crimes Saddam Hussein is willing to commit.”

 But President Bush never explained the assistance that the United States had given Saddam at the time.

When news first broke about the atrocity in 1988, the Reagan administration did its utmost to prevent condemnation of Saddam, fighting Congress’ attempt to impose restrictions on trade with Iraq.

President George W. Bush’s father was then vice president. Another key administration figure involved in the fight was Reagan’s national security advisor, Gen. Colin Powell.

A few years later, with their former ally in the Gulf now their targeted enemy, George W. Bush (assisted by Colin Powell) brushed this history of complicity with real weapons of mass destruction under the rug, while using nonexistent WMD as a reason for war.

Could the issue of chemical weapons propel the U.S. into yet another bloody Middle Eastern conflict?

[On the tenth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, you might be interested in checking out other chapters of the documentary I did with Michel Despratx of Canal + on America’s complicity with Saddam.]

Zero Dark Thirty: Hijacking history.

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What if a new film came out about 9/11, “based on a firsthand account of actual events,” that convincingly showed no Jews were in the World Trade Center that fateful morning. The fiery disaster, in fact, was a Zionist/CIA plot to justify launching “The War on Terror”?

Or what about another film “based on true historical events,” that Barack Obama is a closet Muslim, and the drive for gun control paves the way for a jihadist takeover of America?

Outrageous right?

What about a film leaving the impression that brutal methods of torture, though perhaps morally repugnant, led to the assassination of America’s number one enemy.

The first two claims, often backed up by amateurish photos, videos and ropey  documentation, have been bandied about for years on the Internet.

The film about torture, however, is a sophisticated production, turned out by the Sony Corporation and a talented director, writer and cast, backed up by reams of expensive research, nominated for five Oscars, and reaping hundreds of millions of dollars in box offices around the world.

The movie, of course, is Zero Dark Thirty (ZDT).

In a way, that film, and others like it, are hijacking our history. I’ll get back to that charge.

Some commentators like the Times’ Roger Cohen have praised ZDT “as a courageous work that is disturbing in the way that art should be.”

Indeed, as befits a work of art, much of the story-line in ZDT is unstated, diffuse. There are a lot of shadowy images, elliptical scenes, muttered exchanges. But it’s difficult to come away from the film without the perception that brutal torture, such as water boarding, played an important role in the CIA’s finding Usama Bin Laden’s personal courier, which in turn led them to the Al Qaeda leader himself.

The problem is, according to a lot of people who should know, that was not the case. The film has been roundly criticized from Human Rights Watch, to prominent American Senators, to a former agent in the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, for giving Americans the erroneous impression that torture played a key role in tracking down and killing Bin Laden.

In fact, when challenged on the film’s accuracy, director Kathryn Bigelow claims a kind of artistic license—as if her critics really don’t get what her craft is all about. “What’s important to remember is it’s a movie and not a documentary…It’s a dramatization of a 10-year manhunt compressed into two-and-a-half hours…There’s a lot of composite characters and it’s an interpretation.”

O.K., just an interpretation. But Bigelow and her publicists try to have it both ways.  The film’s trailer breathlessly invites us to “Witness the Biggest Manhunt in History.”

And, as the film begins, we are solemnly informed that it is “based on firsthand accounts of actual events.”

But, “It does not say that it is a factual, unembroidered recounting of those events.”

explains Roger Cohen, sounding less like the gimlet-eyed columnist and more like attorney for the defense.

To bolster his case, Cohen quotes Israeli novelist Amos Oz’s observation that “Facts at times become the dire enemies of truth.’ 

“Or, put another way,” Cohen explains, “while reality is the raw material journalism attempts to render with accuracy and fairness, it is the raw material that art must transform.”

In other words, directors like Kathryn Bigelow must be given the license to shape and change the facts if necessary, so that her audience can benefit from the film- maker’s memorable take on history.

That’s one argument.

But let’s go back to Amos Oz’s provocative statement that “facts at times become the dire enemies of truth.” 

Isn’t it equally true that lies and distortions presented under the guise of facts also become the dire enemies of truth?

Are we really supposed to believe that the intent of the people who made this film was not to have the audience believe, one hundred percent, that, “yeah, wow, this is exactly how it went down in Pakistan.”

So much money, time, and skill were spent creating believability--in the last half hour breathlessly following the second-by-second night-vision action of the Navy Seals as they closed in for the kill.

What we were witnessing was much more immediate and “real” than what Barack Obama must have been seen from the direct CIA feed to the Oval Office when the assassination of bin Laden took place thousands of miles away.

But such story-telling skill cannot erase the fact that the film was also a gross distortion of reality. One that could make a difference: There’s a national debate about torture going on. In fact, the T-word has become so sensitive that government officials 

and much of the media prefer the euphemism   “enhanced interrogation techniques” 

There is no way that a powerful film like Zero Dark Thirty does not become an important part of that debate: “I know torture works, Hell, it helped us get Bin Laden. I saw the movie.”

Indeed, at one part in the film, when CIA agents are discussing the fact that the new Obama administration had given a thumbs down to torture, you couldn’t help feeling that Obama’s edict was naïve, uninformed, and would only weaken the United States.

Of course, for thousands of years playwrights, from Sophocles to Shakespeare to  have done their own riffs on history. The difference is that with the increasing sophistication of the media, film makers have the ability to create the impression that what we are seeing is God-given truth.

So we swallow the lies and distortions along with the facts.

There’s just no way to tell the difference.

That point was driven home by a study done in 2009 by Andrew Butler, now at Duke, but then at the Department of Psychology of the Washington University of Saint Louis.

His researchers gave a group of about fifty students an accurate written account of an historical event to read. They also showed them an excerpt from a feature film about that same event, an excerpt that wrongly and blatantly contradicted the central fact of the printed text.

When they were later tested, 50% of the students recalled the misinformation portrayed in the film as being correct.

“This continued,” Butler reported “even when people were reminded of the potentially inaccurate nature of popular films right before viewing the film.” 

Another fascinating result: “the students were highly confident of the accuracy of the misinformation” sometimes even attributing the false information from the film to the accurate text they had read.

Even when students were told that specific facts in the film were wrong, when they were tested days later, some still felt that what the vivid version the film presented was the truth.

These days, playing to box-office needs, one of the most common film-making distortions is to give Americans credit for the courage and derring-do of others.

That’s the case of  Argo, which supposedly portrays the rescue of 6 American diplomats from Iran in 1979, by an intrepid CIA agent, who leads them out of Tehran disguised as members of a film production crew. The movie is like a recruiting ad for the CIA. Except for the fact that the idea for the escape, the false passports provided to the Americans, the reconnaissance of the Tehran airport etc. etc., came not from the real-life CIA character, but from plucky Canadian diplomats, led by their ambassador Ken Taylor.

Similarly in the Last Samurai (2003), America soldiers led by Tom Cruise save the day for Japan when they are brought in to train the Japanese Imperial army against a 19^th century uprising. Problem is, it was the French who trained them.

Again, in the film U-571 (2000), courageous American troops retrieve the Nazi Enigma code machine by boarding a German submarine in disguise. In fact it was the British who captured the Enigma and broke the code.

Then, there’s Oliver Stone’s JFK, which, mixing documentary footage with new film,  argued compellingly that a combination of sinister forces--the CIA, the Mafia, the Military industrial Complex--were behind Kennedy’s assassination.

When one “fact” after another in the film was demolished by experts, Stone retreated to “Hey, Guys …just my take on history.” His fraudulent account, however, became “truth” to tens of millions of Americans and audiences across the globe.

One of the worst exploiters of the “just-my-take-on-history genre” is Mel Gibson, whose blood-spattered portrayal of the American Revolution, “The Patriot” was judged so misleading, that the Smithsonian Institute , which had initially provided support, withdrew its backing and disowned any association.

But the problem is that, for the great majority of people on our planet, historical films “based on fact” are becoming our history books. Whether it be Mel Gibson or Daniel Day Lewis in Lincoln, or Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, taken together they substitute tedious print with a patchwork of spellbinding tales and dramatic images—a beguiling but often distorted or completely false vision of ourselves and our past.    

Should we care?

What can we do?

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