U.S. Bully Warfare; Booming Military Stocks; Estate Tax Nonsense; Winter's Gifts
February was a nice, quiet month for exchanging unwanted Christmas presents, including duplicate books. Several old friends of mine published desirable tomes last year, and I gave copies of their works to every other friend I could think of. One favorite was Sir John Mortimer's memoirs, in which he details reaching an age when he can no longer put on his own socks. I gave this to my younger women friends so that they can sympathize with my own galloping decrepitude.
Another was Lucinda Lambton's Old New World. In a witty text, accompanied by splendid photographs, she praises those secret enclaves of America that preserve bits of old Europe long since destroyed by global vandalism in the countries of origin. Old-fashioned Americans are, I feel, like the refugee monks on the western islands of Scotland who, during the Dark Ages, saved our cultural heritage.
Finally, there was John Julius Norwich's Still More Christmas Crackers, a compendium of curiosa and an essential conversational prop when faced with a boring neighbor at dinner. It tempts me toward larceny as I shamelessly quote extracts without giving attribution.
One discovery, this time my very own, came from a newspaper serialization of a book about Callas and Onassis. The gushing author relates how the diva, on learning of her lover's departure with Mrs. Kennedy, was so upset that "she forgot the E-flat in the Mad Scene of Lucia." Now that is really getting upset!
Which brings me sneakily to the subject of grand opera. A recent production of Tristan got me sexually confused. The mythical Isolde arrived, as always, by boat, but this time the sailors wore smart little club blazers. Now, I can be as kinky as the next guy, but when I hear the evocative notes of the "Liebestod" it is not an image of the New York Yacht Club that floats into my mind.
Another curious production here was Verdi's Nabucco. I don't care if musicologists tell me that the famous chorus from the Babylonian captivity is vulgar and that the composer did not intend the theme to symbolize the oppression of Northern Italy during the Austrian occupation. I blubber when I think of the Milan crowds who followed Verdi's coffin through the streets and spontaneously broke into that chorus. At the lakeside production of Nabucco during the Bregenz Festival the lights suddenly swerved to reveal the huge chorus dressed in the Buchenwald pajamas. The emotional shock was such that I was unable to speak a word after the performance. There are some evenings like that. Many years ago I went to a benefit for the widow of Dylan Thomas, the great poet and greater drunk. Many of the most famous names of the London stage recited his poems, but all of them were upstaged when, just before the curtain, Dylan's own voice, from a recording, was heard reading "And Death Shall Have No Dominion."
Harold Pinter's 70th birthday was celebrated with a superb performance of his first success, The Caretaker, featuring Michael Gambon, and with a ghastly production of his adaptation of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Pinter's script is an intelligent and sensitive effort at reducing a seven-volume novel into three hours on stage. Proust spent his life in love with the pre-First World War French aristocracy only to discover how shallow they were in the end. The no-doubt politically motivated direction and casting portrays the Guermantes as being so vulgar that no one could ever have idolized them. Not even Stalin would have wanted the character in The Cherry Orchard to be portrayed like that. When Alan Bennett was asked by the BBC whether there was anything he would like to add to an earlier Pinter commemorative program, he answered, quietly as always, "What about a two-minute silence?" There are no Pinteresque pauses in this Proust, just egalitarian poppycock and political malice quite unworthy of the National Theatre. A Hollywoodian travesty.
Some of the most stimulating and instructive entertainment available in London is the lecture series, "The Last Word," organized by Louisa Lane-Fox and sponsored by The Daily Telegraph?historians, philosophers and scientists who are not only the leading scholars in their field, but the best performers on the podium. A recent revelation was Karen Armstrong, a former nun, and her choice for the lecture was fundamentalism. I remembered how an earlier lecturer, Jonathan Miller, physician, writer, wit and opera director, had told me that I was mentally defective because I believed in God. Miller, who is by way of being a hero of mine, believes that the notes in music, which we both love, are just the product of a cocktail of chemicals and electric currents in the composer's brain. To me, they often seem proof of the transcendental and, in the strictest sense of the word, of the divine. I am afraid that I find that aggressive atheism is as obnoxious and intolerant as any of the other forms of religious fundamentalism.
Many foreign actors have starred on the London stage in recent years. Kevin Spacey in The Iceman Cometh, Cate Blanchett in Plenty, Juliette Binoche, Klaus Maria Brandauer and Liam Neeson. But the greatest experience was Jessica Lange in Long Day's Journey. In an otherwise undistinguished production of this great play she broke my heart with her portrayal of a loving, beautiful woman hopelessly addicted.
At the Ditchley Park conference during World War II, Winston Churchill called for a "balance of virtue" in Europe rather than a balance of power. Soon after that, with Germany about to collapse in February 1945, with East and West Germany already occupied by the Allied armies and the Russians, he mercilessly ordered an air bombardment of Dresden?the Venice of the North?which was packed with old men, women and children. To paraphrase an old Winnie speech, some virtue. There were no factories, no army depots, no communication centers, nothing but cathedrals, museums and monuments in Dresden, but 135,000 civilians had to be incinerated in one night alone because of an Englishman's pathological hatred of the Germans.
I once asked Churchill's grandson and namesake, an old friend of mine, about Dresden. "Now look here, old boy," he answered rather aggressively?but always smiling, like the English tend to do when they're about to lift your wallet?"what about your Germans, they weren't exactly nice guys, were they?" Young Winston missed the point. Hitler may not have been the most compassionate of men, but Churchill was the one wearing the white hat. He was supposed to fight clean. Or was it perhaps normal that Churchill had anthrax bacteria cultivated specifically to drop over German territory? Again, very late in the war.
I suppose megalomaniac criminals like Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Pol Pot never spared a single thought for the millions and millions of people who were murdered as they strove to achieve world revolution and world domination. But Churchill? Air Marshal Arthur ("Bomber") Harris, who devised the system of bombing civilian targets, is regarded in some circles?and not just in Germany?as little better than a mass murderer. During World War II the major protagonists used bombing in very different ways. The "nicest," ironically, were the Luftwaffe, which preferred tactical bombing in conjunction with ground forces (Blitzkrieg). The Americans were almost as "nice." The U.S. Army Air Corps believed in strategic bombing, but condemned terror attacks on unarmed civilians, opting instead for the precision bombing of military and industrial targets.
Not so the Brits. They were convinced that wars could be won only by eroding enemy morale?which meant attacking the civilian population. (Let us not also forget that our British cousins were the first to use concentration camps, against Afrikaners during the Boer War.)
Let's face it. Bombers, when deployed strategically, are fundamentally a terror weapon. The trouble is that bombing has never destroyed civilian morale in any meaningful way; if anything it unites the victims against their enemies. Some 600,000 unarmed German civilians died from bombing alone, but the German troops continued to gallantly fight until the very bitter end.
The opposite side of the argument was that the Germans had it coming to them, and that they could have surrendered to stop the bombing. That's a foolish argument. A civilian did not exactly have a choice in Germany back then. And then there is the ludicrous Daniel Goldhagen theory that all Germans were "willing executioners" and deserved everything they got. Which brings me to the point I wish to make:
America's most enduring contribution to history is that, unlike other great powers, it did not routinely use force to impose its will. (Okay, a little bit in Cuba, and a little bit in Mexico, and a little bit in the Philippines, and what's an Indian or two...) But suddenly, with the coming to power of the Draft Dodger, the cruise missile and strategic bombing became Uncle Sam's favorite diplomatic maneuver. We know that tiny Central American countries have gone to war over a soccer match, but launching missiles to divert opinion over a blowjob is 100 times more ridiculous.
The Balkans are still suffering terribly from NATO's bombing, an act that was as immoral as it was opportunistic on the part of the preening war criminal Madeleine Albright and her gang. (She needed a legacy.) It was reported in September 1999 that levels of radiation in Macedonia had increased 800 percent, and last year mothers in Bosnia were giving birth to children with leukemia. Both the Clinton and Blair gangs at first refused to acknowledge that depleted uranium-tipped rounds were used, but?as everyone knows?the last time Clinton and Blair told the truth was very, very long ago, when they were still in diapers, if then.
The sole purpose and justification for using depleted uranium in weapons is that shells are capable of penetrating heavily armored tanks. Some 31,000 such rounds were fired from NATO aircraft in Kosovo; the total number of Yugoslav tank losses was 13. Which means that the huge majority of rounds either missed or were fired indiscriminately.
Dresden lives. The politicians who order such shootings do not have the slightest interest in military realities, just tv coverage in the nightly news. The long-term contamination of the region is not their concern. Last week my colleague Scott McConnell sure got it right. (When was the last time he got it wrong?) World domination through force of arms isn't supposed to be the American way. George Bush was right to fight for Kuwait. Clinton was wrong to murder hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children through sanctions. Playing the biggest boy on the block will see Uncle Sam end up the way of the Russian bear.
President Bush needs to reshape sanctions on Iraq. Colin Powell, a decent man, understands the limitations of bombing. Saddam Hussein is probably more popular today than he was 10 years ago. There must be another way, and the new regime in Washington has to see this before it's too late.
Scarcely a day goes by in Britain without an attack being unleashed on the aristocracy. They haven't enjoyed any real power since the passing of the Parliament Act in 1911, but that hasn't stopped Tony Blair's government from targeting them as part of its effort to paint itself as a crusading force against the bastions of privilege.
This campaign received support from an unlikely quarter recently when The Sun, Britain's largest-selling daily newspaper, waged a bitter assault on the Duke of Westminster. His crime, in the eyes of The Sun's editorial writer, was to make a bid for the Millennium Dome that Blair's Government has put up for sale.
"The nation's biggest landowning aristo?second only to the Royal Family?could end up getting the Dome on the cheap," thundered the tabloid. "The old order appears to be alive and well and still enjoying first-class travel on the gravy train, thank you very much. Control of the land in this country, by people like Gerald Cavendish, 6th Duke of Westminster, has held back wealth creation for centuries."
This seemed like an odd sentiment to be expressed by a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch. According to Forbes, the swashbuckling billionaire is worth $11 billion, making him the 16th-richest man in America. That's considerably richer than the Duke of Westminster, who's worth a paltry £3.75 billion.
The Sun's sentiments were echoed in the full-page advertisement opposing President Bush's plan to abolish the estate tax that appeared in The New York Times on Feb. 18. "We have come closer to a true meritocracy than anywhere else around the world," argued Warren Buffett, who signed the ad. "Without the estate tax, you in effect will have an aristocracy of wealth, which means you pass down the ability to command the resources of the nation based on heredity rather than merit." He went on to compare this iniquitous state of affairs with "choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the eldest sons of the gold-medal winners in the 2000 Olympics."
Now, it's true that there's a conflict between the principle of meritocracy and the unfettered transfer of assets from one generation to the next; provided you allow people to leave their wealth to their children, some people will always start out in life with an unfair advantage. But if, as Warren Buffett seems to believe, the principle of meritocracy ought to take priority over people's right to pass on their money as they see fit, why not confiscate all people's assets on their death? For those leaving more than $3 million, why stop at 55 percent? Even with the estate tax, you have an "aristocracy of wealth" in America. If that's really such a terrible thing, isn't it time the "death tax" was increased to 100 percent?
Something like this happened in the UK in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when death duties were increased to 75 percent for those leaving more than £1 million. According to David Cannadine, author of The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, this did irreparable harm to the landed gentry.
You don't have to be a defender of the aristocracy to oppose the estate tax. In Anarchy, State and Utopia, Robert Nozick puts forward a powerful libertarian case against taxation of any kind. In essence, his argument is that if a person acquires an asset in a fair and just manner, i.e., without violating anyone else's rights, then it's his to do with what he wants. Any attempt to take it away by force, whether by another individual or the state, is tantamount to theft.
Even if you accept that some minimal form of taxation is justified, that doesn't mean you're committed to endorsing the estate tax. As things stand at the moment, the rich are being taxed twice over, once during their lifetimes and again on their deaths. Why should a certain section of the population be taxed twice while the rest pay only once?
To confiscate 55 percent of a rich person's assets on his death in the interests of preserving America's meritocratic character?Buffett's argument in favor of the estate tax?is an example of sacrificing freedom to fairness. We only have to extend Buffett's argument into the realm of sport to see how ludicrous it is. Buffett seems to think it's "fairer" to select members of the 2020 Olympic team by conventional methods than by choosing the eldest sons of last year's gold-medal winners. But why should this be so? Gifted athletes no more "deserve" their natural abilities than the children of successful parents deserve their privileges. Such advantages are distributed in a way that's completely arbitrary from a moral point of view. So why is it "fairer" to reward these genetic supermen than the sons of former gold medalists?
The only way to ensure that those seeking membership in America's future Olympic teams compete with each other on a level playing field would be to insist that all Americans born from this day forward have exactly the same genetic makeup. That's plainly ridiculous, yet it follows logically from Buffett's argument. The fact is, it's never right to sacrifice freedom to fairness, whether by imposing a "death tax" on the rich, or by interfering with people's genes.
"Defense and aerospace stocks ended on a high note, climbing amid a broad market slump as 24 U.S. and British warplanes struck Iraqi military targets using various long-range, precision-guided weapons." Thus a cheerful Reuters story on the day of our most recent bombing of Baghdad.
The exuberance was almost certainly not misplaced. Earlier that week President Bush had gone to Ft. Stewart, GA, and declared to the soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division, "When we send you into harm's way, we owe you a clear mission, with clear goals." Moreover, he told the cheering GIs, "many in our military have been overdeployed and underpaid." It seemed like a reprise of candidate Bush's promises to reassess America's military commitments, particularly in the Balkans.
The very next day, however, Bush struck a very different tone. At Norfolk Naval Air Station in Virginia, in front of a gathering of NATO bigwigs, he trotted out standard NATO bluster and made clear that change in U.S. foreign policy is not in the cards: "[T]he purpose of NATO remains permanent. As we have seen in the Balkans, together, united, we can detour the designs of aggression, and spare the continent from the effects of ethnic hatreds." NATO had waged aggressive war in the Balkans. Yet, according to Bush, it was NATO that had thwarted aggression.
The President went on to describe what the military of the future would look like: "On land, our heavy forces will be lighter, our light forces will be more lethal. In the air, we will be able to strike across the world with pinpoint accuracy, using both aircraft and unmanned systems. On the oceans, we will connect information and weapons in new ways, maximizing our ability to project power over land? All of this requires great effort and new spending."
None of Bush's formulations sounds remotely defensive. Moreover, he is promising "new spending" on the military, even as administration officials are repeating that no further money is to be thrown at the Pentagon until Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has completed his review of spending priorities. No money, that is, except for that extra $2.6 billion for research and development into new weapons. No money, that is, except for that extra $5.7 billion in pay raises and improved healthcare for soldiers. And that's not counting the $19 billion increase Clinton had proposed for fiscal 2002. This is all taking place at a time when even if every power in the world were to unite in an anti-American alliance, they still would be unable to pose a threat to the United States.
Two days before the attack on the outskirts of Baghdad, Secretary of State Colin Powell met with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and the ambassadors of the Permanent Members of the UN Security Council. Following the meeting, Powell declared that as long as Iraq was willing to comply with UN resolutions, it could "become a progressive member of the world community again." No insistence on Saddam Hussein's removal from power; no mention of the mortal threat U.S. fighter planes were supposedly facing from Iraqi air defenses. Powell even suggested that he only wanted sanctions that did "not hurt the Iraqi people? We have sympathy for the people of Iraq. We have sympathy for the children of Iraq." The diplomats came away from the meeting pleased that the United States was seriously contemplating a change of policy.
Here is another instance of dissimulation: Today, there is a very nasty little war going on in the Presevo Valley in Southern Serbia. The area lies within a three-mile buffer zone established by NATO when it marched into Kosovo in June 1999. The Kosovo Liberation Army, now renamed the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac (after the three main towns in the area), is seeking to take over the area and attach it to what it assumes will soon be an independent Kosovo. The U.S. government professes to be incapable of stemming the flow of arms and personnel, even though they are crossing the border into Serbia from the U.S. zone of occupation in Kosovo. The administration ritually denounces the violence and calls for dialogue. Yet, according to a recent BBC report, the United States is being less than sincere in its condemnations: "The BBC's Nik Gowing?has been shown evidence by foreign diplomatic sources that the guerrillas now have several hundred fighters in the 5km-deep military exclusion zone. The sources said that certain NATO-led K-For forces were not preventing the guerrillas [from] taking mortars and other weapons into the exclusion zone." In other words, NATO?and that means the United States?runs this war in Serbia even as its officials shed crocodile tears every time a bus filled with Serbs is blown to smithereens. Most hilarious of all is the suggestion that someone in Washington had forgotten to let the "special forces" know that there had been a change of regime in Belgrade. Perhaps the memo got lost in the mail.
But back to those defense and aerospace stocks. The stocks of Lockheed Martin are booming, as are those of Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. The defense industries had been having a rough time recently. They were passionate advocates of NATO enlargement, seeing prospective members as lucrative markets for their products. But things did not work out as they had hoped. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic simply did not have the resources to make vast purchases. The three countries are now resorting to leasing old equipment. Lockheed Martin has also been a determined advocate of U.S. military intervention in Colombia. Congress, however, is unlikely to expand the scale of U.S. commitment. But happy days are here again! There is a bipartisan consensus to lavish enormous funds on costly and pointless military programs.