Oh look, someone sensible...
Illinois Governor Spares Death Row Inmates
Sat January 11, 2003 05:38 PM ET
By Emily Kaiser
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Denouncing the death penalty system as broken, the governor of Illinois commuted the sentences of all the state's death row inmates on Saturday, granting clemency to more than 150 people in a dramatic move likely to fuel the national debate about capital punishment.
Gov. George Ryan -- a Republican who leaves office Monday after one term -- reduced the prisoners' sentences to a maximum of life in prison without parole. Three will receive shorter sentences, meaning they could some day be released.
"How many more cases of wrongful convictions have to occur before we can all agree that this system in Illinois is broken?" Ryan told a cheering audience at Northwestern University Law School that included several wrongfully convicted former death row inmates.
"I realize that my decision will draw ridicule, scorn and anger from many who oppose this decision," he said, acknowledging the feelings of relatives of crime victims, many of whom fought clemency. "I'm going to sleep well tonight, knowing that I made the right decision," he said.
The move follows an examination of the state's capital punishment system ordered nearly three years ago after investigations found 13 prisoners on death row were innocent.
There are 156 inmates on death row, and another person has been sentenced to death but is not yet in state custody.
Ryan said he was a staunch supporter of the death penalty when he took office four years ago, but began to change his mind after watching a wrongfully convicted man walk free -- only 48 hours before he was scheduled to be executed.
In a speech quoting Abraham Lincoln and Mahatma Gandhi, Ryan called fixing the death penalty "one of the great civil rights struggles of our time" and lashed out at the state legislature for failing to pass reforms.
Democrat Rod Blagojevich, who takes over as governor on Monday, criticized Ryan's decision. "A blanket anything is usually wrong," he said. "There is no one-size-fits-all approach. We're talking about people who committed murder."
FOUR PARDONED
On Friday Ryan pardoned four men convicted of murder, saying confessions were tortured out of them by Chicago police. One of the four used a paper clip to scratch professions of innocence on a bench in an interrogation room even as he was being forced to admit to a crime he did not commit, Ryan said.
Leroy Orange, one of the four men pardoned, told CNN he was very grateful to Ryan, and looked forward to "having a positive influence" on his children and grandchildren after 19 years in prison. He was convicted of fatal stabbings in 1984.
Ryan's review prompted new questions about capital punishment in other states, but none has gone as far as Illinois in reexamining the issue.
Sen. Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, called for a national review of the death penalty and a moratorium on executions.
Illinois is one of 38 states with death penalty laws. The federal government also has reinstated the death penalty.
Human rights group Amnesty International USA said Ryan's actions may empower other states to end capital punishment.
"Gov. Ryan has set an important precedent for elected officials who question the fairness of the death penalty but fear political repercussions," executive director William Schulz said in a statement.
A commission Ryan created to review the Illinois system found the poor were at a disadvantage, too many crimes drew the death penalty and police abuse and jailhouse informants too often played a role in capital convictions.
While opinion polls indicate most Americans still favor capital punishment, support has been eroding and the American Bar Association has called for a national moratorium.
The United States is the only Western democracy in which the death penalty is still used. The punishment has been abolished by its closest neighbors and allies, who routinely denounce the practice in the United States.
From 1976 when capital punishment was reinstated through the end of 2002 there have been 820 U.S. executions, 71 of them last year. There are nearly 3,700 men and women under death sentence in the United States currently.
11.1.03
Imperial Science
By Eugene Goodheart
Edward O. Wilson is a world-renowned Harvard biologist and founder of sociobiology. In his long career, he has written about everything from the social lives of ants to the planet’s fragile network of organisms, which he calls "biodiversity." In his eloquent memoir, Naturalist (1994), Wilson showed himself capable of an intense lyricism that many readers associate more with poets than with scientists. But if his arguments on behalf of biodiversity have earned him plaudits from the environmental and cultural left, his views on human behavior and heredity have stirred controversy. Insisting that culture and behavior are largely products of evolutionary development, he grants genetic inheritance enormous weight. To the social constructionists who inhabit large segments of the academy, such views are not only outlandish, but they also are downright dangerous. They summon the specter of biological racism and eugenics that inhabited the halls of Western science and medicine for a good portion of the last century.
In 1998 Wilson provoked controversy with the publication of Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. In this book, he argued that although the various disciplines of learning at first appear fragmented, they can ultimately be integrated–if one knows how to look at them properly. In short, Wilson made a claim for a unified field theory of knowledge. He pointed out, for example, that ethics require no prior grounding in metaphysics, but rather can be described as an extension of the cooperative behavior that so often occurs between organisms. By this and other illustrations, Wilson's theory presumed biology to be the science that explains all other sciences and disciplines. It made biology emperor.
1.
Consilience can be viewed as the latest salvo in a culture war that began in the romantic period, a war between science and poetry that has not yet abated. Wilson's precursors are C. P. Snow and Thomas Huxley. In his Rede lecture, "The Two Cultures" (1959), Snow castigated literary intellectuals for their ignorance of the fundamental laws of science. For his part, Huxley, in "Science and Culture" (1881), championed the cause of science at the expense of studying the ancient classics. Snow's principal literary antagonists were F. R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling. Huxley's major opponent was Matthew Arnold, whose notion of "the best that has been known and thought in the world" remained long on the study of literature and short on scientific inquiry.
How did the antagonism between science and poetry arise? Any explanation must begin with the decline of traditional religious authority in post-Enlightenment Europe. Arnold's formulation in "The Study of Poetry" (1880) is memorable: "There is not a creed which is not shaken, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialized in the fact, the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it." Arnold thought poetry would take the place of religion, whose doctrines were under assault from rational-scientific investigation. "The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. . . . Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry" (emphasis added).
Arnold expresses the romantic claim for the spiritual authority of the poetic imagination that Blake and Wordsworth initiated. The rival contender for authority is the science of Newton and Locke, which Blake disparagingly characterized as "natural religion." For Blake, modern science is not simply a description of things as they are, but a reduction of the world to its material aspect, and therefore a debasement of it. According to Blake, the senses alone cannot provide adequate access to the truths of the world. Only the imagination can realize those truths.
In our time, poetry is a private religion for the few. Even its great modern exponent, T. S. Eliot, chastised those who presumed to conflate poetry with religion. James Joyce knew by the time he wrote Ulysses that Stephen Dedalus's high-flying ambition to re-create the conscience of his race was aesthetic hubris. Modern champions of science, however, increasingly emboldened by its triumphs, particularly in biology, have no such qualms about claiming the ground once occupied by religion. For Wilson, science is the via media to saving the planet from ecological extinction. He shares with Snow the Enlightenment belief that salvation will come from the triumph of the scientific method. He regards the humanities and the social sciences in their present incarnation as largely irrelevant mystifications of their subject matter. "Philosophy, the contemplation of the unknown, is a shrinking dominion," Wilson writes in Consilience. "We have the common goal of turning as much philosophy as possible into science."
According to Wilson, philosophy has become obsolete in its understanding of mental activity and should yield its claim to wisdom about mind to the cognitive and neuroscientists. From Descartes to Kant, philosophers’ reflections proceed from introspection and draw us away from the actual operations of the brain, which is essentially "a machine assembled not to understand itself, but to survive."
Why self-understanding and survival are mutually exclusive is not clear by any means. But Wilson goes on to insist that religion, too, must yield its authority to science: "Could Holy Writ be just the first literate attempt to explain the universe and make ourselves significant within it? Perhaps science is a continuation on new and better-tested ground to attain the same end. If so, then in that sense science is religion liberated and writ large." Perhaps–if religion is considered merely an attempt to understand the causal workings of the material universe. The fact that religion might have anything to do with the pursuit of spiritual fulfillment does not enter Wilson's imagination.
2.
On Wilson's view, even literary theory becomes the domain of science. Literary theorists must give way to evolutionary psychologists who have formulated the rules that will explain the emergence of genius and creative achievement. "Human nature," Wilson writes, is the set of "epigenetic rules, the hereditary regularities of mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction as opposed to another and thus connect the genes to culture." At a Brandeis University seminar devoted to the subject of consilience, a participant asked Wilson whether knowledge of the genetic rules that govern art–assuming they exist–would be of value to a creative artist. Wilson answered yes. When someone suggested that knowledge of the rules and their application could just as easily prove obstacles to creative originality, Wilson's reply was telling. As evidence for a rule-bound view of the creative imagination, he cited the formulas that guide scriptwriting for film and television.
The social sciences predictably receive severe criticism for their failure to root their work in the natural sciences, in particularly in biology. Wilson’s model for the unity of science is the hierarchy that exists in the natural sciences, in which disciplines are reducible to one another. He provides this example:
To make any progress [researchers] must meditate on the networks of cause and effect across adjacent levels of organization–from subatomic particles to atoms, say, or organisms to species–and they must think on the hidden design and forces of the networks of causation. Quantum physics thus blends into chemical physics, which explains atomic bonding and chemical reactions, which form the foundation of molecular biology, which demystifies cell biology.
Wilson thinks of himself as a friend of all disciplines, despite that their ways must be corrected by science. His fellow sociobiologist Richard Dawkins puts the imperial case for his discipline even more forcefully. In his best-selling book, The Selfish Gene (1976), Dawkins asserts, "we no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there meaning to life? What are we for? What is man? After posing the last of these questions, the eminent zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: 'The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 [the publication date of Darwin's Origin of Species] are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely.'"
In the endnote to the paperback edition, Dawkins responds to those who have taken offense at Simpson's quotation by rubbing it in–without making an argument:
I agree that, when you first read it, it sounds terribly philistine and gauche and intolerant, a bit like Henry Ford's 'History is more or less bunk.' But, religious answers apart (I am familiar with them; save your stamp), when you are actually challenged to think of pre-Darwinian answers to the questions 'What is man?' 'Is there a meaning to life?' 'What are we for?', can you, as a matter of fact, think of any that are not now worthless except for their (considerable) historic interest? There is such a thing as being just plain wrong, and that is what, before 1859, all answers to those questions were.
If Dawkins had contented himself with the claim that Darwin had made worthless other answers to the questions, Where do we come from? and, How have we evolved? (empirical questions), he would have offended only creationists. But anyone of the most elementary intellectual sophistication knows that questions about meaning and purpose are of another order–and continue to be the legitimate concern of literature and philosophy. They are not simply reducible to knowledge about our genetic structure.
Could our knowledge of genetic structure affect our understanding of ethical matters such as human meaning and purpose? Perhaps, though the sociobiological argument from the evidence so far, namely that our genes are selfish and determinative of our character and behavior, is controversial even within its own discipline. Biologists Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin oppose the sociobiologists’ genetic reductionism because of their failure to give an adequate account of the interaction between biological and cultural factors. Genetic reductionism is also banal when translated into ethical terms, for it amounts to little more than an assertion that people need to learn to control their destructive selfish impulses. Does knowledge of our genetic structure, however complete, make the worthless speculations of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Montaigne, and Rousseau? The question doesn't deserve an answer. Dawkins distinguishes his scientism from "religious answers," though of course his own commitment to science has all the features of a faith. Wilson, in effect, admits this when he speaks of science as "religion liberated and writ large." In its overreaching, sociobiology is what Blake would call "a natural religion."
3.
In tracing Wilson’s thought back to Snow and Huxley, I need to make the important qualification that Huxley was never guilty of this kind of intellectual hubris. Unlike Wilson, he would not have conflated a question about origins with a question about the value and meaning of human life. In his essay "Evolution and Ethics" (1893), he contrasts "the cosmic process" and "the ethical process." He writes, "since law and morals are restraints upon the struggle for existence between men in society, the ethical process is in opposition to the principle of the cosmic process, and tends to the suppression of the qualities best suited for success in that struggle." Which is not say that a knowledge of the cosmic process is irrelevant to our thinking about ethical matters, but that ethics cannot be reduced to biology. "Evolution and Ethics" was an answer to the social Darwinism of Huxley's contemporary Herbert Spencer, who believed that evolution contained the desired ethical model for human conduct. It could be an answer as well to our contemporary sociobiologists.
Yet sociobiology is not alone in its imperial ambition for science. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, another national bestseller, distinguished scientist Jared Diamond provides what he considers a scientific history of the past thirteen thousand years. In his "history of everything," he aims for " ultimate explanations." Whereas Wilson approaches evolution from the point of view of genetics, Diamond approaches his subject from the point of view of geography. What both share is the belief that the complexity of life can be reduced to scientific explanation. Diamond sets himself the task of explaining why certain societies have triumphed at the expense of others. Why, for instance, has Europe surpassed Africa and Asia in technological and industrial progress? According to him, the "ultimate explanation" lies in the relative fertility of land and the availability of animals that can be domesticated. Effective food production frees people for a variety of other activities, for example, crafts. Diamond has done impressive work in addressing the question of why different continents demonstrate such different historical trajectories. Much of his detailed exposition regarding food production, animal domestication, and migration is persuasive. But in his truncated view of history, various factors such as culture, ideology, irrational behavior, luck, and great individuals play a negligible role.
In the final chapter of his book, titled "History As a Science," he dismisses the work of practicing historians in the crudest terms: "Most historians do not think of themselves as scientists and receive little training in acknowledged sciences and their methodologies." True enough. But does it follow from that deficiency that their sense of history is "nothing more than a mass of detail" or that "history is just one damn fact after another" or that it "is more or less bunk"? Do these characterizations apply to Thucydides or Tacitus or Gibbon, or, for that matter, to any contemporary practicing academic or nonacademic historian?
Narrative history is hardly a mass of details, or just one damn fact after another. Accomplished historians carefully select their facts on the basis of what can be considered significant and what will contribute to the intelligibility, coherence, and persuasiveness of the story told, and they interpret these facts. Diamond has no appreciation of history as a literary art. If we were to take his characterization of nonscientific history as evidence of the empirical understanding in which he takes pride, we would have reason to suspect his authority elsewhere. In defending ultimate explanation, he argues that he is dealing with history on a large timescale rather than a smaller one in which proximate causes operate. But scale is not simply a matter of time; it may also be a matter of the moment's magnitude. Napoleon's presence on the scene in postrevolutionary France was of immense significance to subsequent world history–as was Hitler's rise in Germany between the two world wars.
The nonscientific humanist view is that history, like literature, invites a series of interpretations that might share common ground, but may also differ from and be in conflict with one another. And the nonscientific historian–like the nonscientific literary critic–embraces the variety of interpretation as enriching our understanding of the subject. Nonscientific historians make objective claims for their views, but the conflicts among them cannot be scientifically adjudicated. Variety and conflict do not preclude the possibility of objectivity and common ground among interpreters, but they do preclude singular explanation.
Consider, for example, Diamond’s attempt to explain why China "lost its huge early lead to Europe," given its "undoubted advantages: a rise of food production nearly as early as in the Fertile Crescent; ecological diversity from North to South China and from the coast to the Tibetan plateau, giving rise to a diverse set of crops, animals and technology." Diamond explains it as "a typical aberration of local politics that could happen anywhere in the world: a power struggle between two factions at the Chinese court (the eunuchs and their opponents)." The eunuchs favored the "sending and captaining of fleets," their opponents, prevailing in the power struggle, "dismantled the shipyards . . . and forbade oceangoing shipping." Politics, not geography, is the decisive factor here, though Diamond does not acknowledge that this troubles his thesis in any way. And although he persuasively shows the geographical conditions that constrain choice, he conflates constraint with inevitability. Scientific explanation, dedicated to the finding of cause and effect, looks for the inevitable patterns of existence; historical understanding, based on belief in human freedom, imagines the possibility of alternative outcomes in the past.
It may be that reductionism has an important role to play within the sciences, though it is a contested view, certainly in its imperial manifestation, as I have indicated in my reference to Gould's and Lewontin's critiques of sociobiology. When, however, reductionism is extended to the humanities and the social sciences, it displays a singular lack of understanding and tact. Reductionism takes several forms. In the humanities, literary works are often reduced to ideological motives that have to do with gender, class, or race. While it is one thing to acknowledge, interpret, and evaluate these factors’ significance in a work of literature, it is quite another to reduce the work to its supposed ideological message. In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Prospero may refer to his daughter as "his foot" in a flash of resentment when she begs him not to treat her beloved Ferdinand too harshly, and his treatment of Caliban appears to be that of the colonial oppressor. But an exclusive and obsessive focus on Prospero as a Eurocentric imperial man, Miranda as protofeminist consciousness, and Caliban as the voice of postcolonial oppression displaces focus from the deep affection and concern father and daughter have for each other and from the play's realism about human relationships at the time. What we have instead in various reductionist readings is a kind of retrospective moralizing about the play based on contemporary standards of justice and decency. What suffers in the process is our perception of the literary achievement.
4.
I have alluded to Wilson's adversaries within his own discipline. Sociobiology has another adversary in the radical skepticism of postmodernism, which denies the natural sciences, as it does to other discourses, any claim to objective knowledge, despite the amazing progress sciences have made in, for example, our understanding of the genetic makeup of living creatures. (I place "our" in quotation marks because we delegate scientific understanding and conviction to scientists. Our faith or trust in them–these modern-day Prosperos, if you will–is based in part on the evidence of the technology and medical advances that have come out of science.) One is not required to defend the scientism of Wilson and Diamond to affirm the scientists’ claims for the objectivity of their discoveries. It is, of course, true that scientific claims are always provisional and can be superseded by new knowledge. But there are claims that have been consolidated and not superseded, and those claims that have been superseded can be placed on a curve of progress to a better understanding of phenomena. My purpose here, however, is not to defend science–for it needs no defending–but rather to reflect on the opposition between two isms: scientism and radical postmodernism. Both are, in my view, detrimental to the cause of science and of the humanities.
For Wilson, scientism–he calls it the Enlightenment–and postmodern epistemology would appear to be the either/or of theoretical debate in the academy. "Postmodernism is the ultimate polar antithesis to the Enlightenment. The difference between the two extremes can be explained as follows: Enlightenment thinkers believe we can know everything, and radical postmodernists believe we can know nothing." One theory aims for the unity of knowledge, the finding of ultimate explanations for everything; the opposing theory aims for a radical skepticism about the possibility of any certain knowledge. What they have in common is that both theories are grand theories–radical postmodernists would bridle at the attribution–with the ambition to account for everything. They are reductionist and therefore interdisciplinary in a bad sense, for they display an insufficient respect for the integrity and autonomy of the disciplines. Both theories are dogmatic and therefore incapable of that mixture of confidence and epistemological modesty that says, "This we can know, this we may yet know, this remains in the realm of mystery, subject to a variety of speculation and interpretation that cannot be resolved to certain knowledge."
Huxley had his adversary in Arnold, Snow in Leavis and Trilling. In both episodes, the adversaries of the proponents of science as the master discipline were the defenders of literary enterprise as a distinct and separate activity. Huxley does not deny the separate integrity of literature; nor does he conflate ethics and evolution. Even Snow, who complains about the politics of writers and literary intellectuals, and wishes they would serve the interests of a benign science devoted to alleviating human misery, assumes a distinction between literature and science. However, the case of Wilson and his postmodern adversaries is different. Wilson acknowledges the difference between literature and science, but not between the study of science and the study of literature. The project of Wilson and his supporters is to subsume all the disciplines under the aegis of the biological sciences, specifically, genetics. For Wilson, literature as well as literary theory can be understood according to the genetic rules that determine human life.
However, his postmodern adversaries in the humanities, unlike the adversaries of Huxley and Snow, do not defend the literary enterprise against scientific imperialism. They do respond to the hubristic version of Enlightenment belief that everything can be known with an equally hubristic dogmatic skepticism that all knowledge is uncertain. But they do not defend literature, because they extend to literary production the same kind of skepticism that they apply to the sciences–or else they reduce literature to ideology. It is, of course, an irony of radical skepticism that it flaunts its own certainties. The trajectory that I have been describing from romanticism to the present moment reflects a weakening of advocacy of the cause of the humanities.
In a time like the present when the interdisciplinary is the rage, one should be aware of how it can become a vehicle of reductionism, the impoverishing translation of one field into another. Political theory becomes the scientific study of statistics, history of geography, literature of ideology, religion of a scientific understanding of our origins. Too often, the desire for the interdisciplinary is a symptom of a loss of confidence in the integrity of one's own discipline. Unless it is based on mutual respect among disciplines and a sense of its own limits, interdisciplinary work becomes vacuous.
Scientific theory may not necessarily converge with the arts. It may be that each discipline has its own imperatives, which may or may not cross or converge with another discipline. And in the end, the prospect of disciplines going off in various directions or conflicting with one another, unconstrained by the demand for consilience, may bring greater intellectual rewards than the opposite and illusory prospect so tantalizing to Wilson: the unity of all knowledge.
From The Common Review Volume 1, Number 4
By Eugene Goodheart
Edward O. Wilson is a world-renowned Harvard biologist and founder of sociobiology. In his long career, he has written about everything from the social lives of ants to the planet’s fragile network of organisms, which he calls "biodiversity." In his eloquent memoir, Naturalist (1994), Wilson showed himself capable of an intense lyricism that many readers associate more with poets than with scientists. But if his arguments on behalf of biodiversity have earned him plaudits from the environmental and cultural left, his views on human behavior and heredity have stirred controversy. Insisting that culture and behavior are largely products of evolutionary development, he grants genetic inheritance enormous weight. To the social constructionists who inhabit large segments of the academy, such views are not only outlandish, but they also are downright dangerous. They summon the specter of biological racism and eugenics that inhabited the halls of Western science and medicine for a good portion of the last century.
In 1998 Wilson provoked controversy with the publication of Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. In this book, he argued that although the various disciplines of learning at first appear fragmented, they can ultimately be integrated–if one knows how to look at them properly. In short, Wilson made a claim for a unified field theory of knowledge. He pointed out, for example, that ethics require no prior grounding in metaphysics, but rather can be described as an extension of the cooperative behavior that so often occurs between organisms. By this and other illustrations, Wilson's theory presumed biology to be the science that explains all other sciences and disciplines. It made biology emperor.
1.
Consilience can be viewed as the latest salvo in a culture war that began in the romantic period, a war between science and poetry that has not yet abated. Wilson's precursors are C. P. Snow and Thomas Huxley. In his Rede lecture, "The Two Cultures" (1959), Snow castigated literary intellectuals for their ignorance of the fundamental laws of science. For his part, Huxley, in "Science and Culture" (1881), championed the cause of science at the expense of studying the ancient classics. Snow's principal literary antagonists were F. R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling. Huxley's major opponent was Matthew Arnold, whose notion of "the best that has been known and thought in the world" remained long on the study of literature and short on scientific inquiry.
How did the antagonism between science and poetry arise? Any explanation must begin with the decline of traditional religious authority in post-Enlightenment Europe. Arnold's formulation in "The Study of Poetry" (1880) is memorable: "There is not a creed which is not shaken, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialized in the fact, the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it." Arnold thought poetry would take the place of religion, whose doctrines were under assault from rational-scientific investigation. "The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. . . . Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry" (emphasis added).
Arnold expresses the romantic claim for the spiritual authority of the poetic imagination that Blake and Wordsworth initiated. The rival contender for authority is the science of Newton and Locke, which Blake disparagingly characterized as "natural religion." For Blake, modern science is not simply a description of things as they are, but a reduction of the world to its material aspect, and therefore a debasement of it. According to Blake, the senses alone cannot provide adequate access to the truths of the world. Only the imagination can realize those truths.
In our time, poetry is a private religion for the few. Even its great modern exponent, T. S. Eliot, chastised those who presumed to conflate poetry with religion. James Joyce knew by the time he wrote Ulysses that Stephen Dedalus's high-flying ambition to re-create the conscience of his race was aesthetic hubris. Modern champions of science, however, increasingly emboldened by its triumphs, particularly in biology, have no such qualms about claiming the ground once occupied by religion. For Wilson, science is the via media to saving the planet from ecological extinction. He shares with Snow the Enlightenment belief that salvation will come from the triumph of the scientific method. He regards the humanities and the social sciences in their present incarnation as largely irrelevant mystifications of their subject matter. "Philosophy, the contemplation of the unknown, is a shrinking dominion," Wilson writes in Consilience. "We have the common goal of turning as much philosophy as possible into science."
According to Wilson, philosophy has become obsolete in its understanding of mental activity and should yield its claim to wisdom about mind to the cognitive and neuroscientists. From Descartes to Kant, philosophers’ reflections proceed from introspection and draw us away from the actual operations of the brain, which is essentially "a machine assembled not to understand itself, but to survive."
Why self-understanding and survival are mutually exclusive is not clear by any means. But Wilson goes on to insist that religion, too, must yield its authority to science: "Could Holy Writ be just the first literate attempt to explain the universe and make ourselves significant within it? Perhaps science is a continuation on new and better-tested ground to attain the same end. If so, then in that sense science is religion liberated and writ large." Perhaps–if religion is considered merely an attempt to understand the causal workings of the material universe. The fact that religion might have anything to do with the pursuit of spiritual fulfillment does not enter Wilson's imagination.
2.
On Wilson's view, even literary theory becomes the domain of science. Literary theorists must give way to evolutionary psychologists who have formulated the rules that will explain the emergence of genius and creative achievement. "Human nature," Wilson writes, is the set of "epigenetic rules, the hereditary regularities of mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction as opposed to another and thus connect the genes to culture." At a Brandeis University seminar devoted to the subject of consilience, a participant asked Wilson whether knowledge of the genetic rules that govern art–assuming they exist–would be of value to a creative artist. Wilson answered yes. When someone suggested that knowledge of the rules and their application could just as easily prove obstacles to creative originality, Wilson's reply was telling. As evidence for a rule-bound view of the creative imagination, he cited the formulas that guide scriptwriting for film and television.
The social sciences predictably receive severe criticism for their failure to root their work in the natural sciences, in particularly in biology. Wilson’s model for the unity of science is the hierarchy that exists in the natural sciences, in which disciplines are reducible to one another. He provides this example:
To make any progress [researchers] must meditate on the networks of cause and effect across adjacent levels of organization–from subatomic particles to atoms, say, or organisms to species–and they must think on the hidden design and forces of the networks of causation. Quantum physics thus blends into chemical physics, which explains atomic bonding and chemical reactions, which form the foundation of molecular biology, which demystifies cell biology.
Wilson thinks of himself as a friend of all disciplines, despite that their ways must be corrected by science. His fellow sociobiologist Richard Dawkins puts the imperial case for his discipline even more forcefully. In his best-selling book, The Selfish Gene (1976), Dawkins asserts, "we no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there meaning to life? What are we for? What is man? After posing the last of these questions, the eminent zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: 'The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 [the publication date of Darwin's Origin of Species] are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely.'"
In the endnote to the paperback edition, Dawkins responds to those who have taken offense at Simpson's quotation by rubbing it in–without making an argument:
I agree that, when you first read it, it sounds terribly philistine and gauche and intolerant, a bit like Henry Ford's 'History is more or less bunk.' But, religious answers apart (I am familiar with them; save your stamp), when you are actually challenged to think of pre-Darwinian answers to the questions 'What is man?' 'Is there a meaning to life?' 'What are we for?', can you, as a matter of fact, think of any that are not now worthless except for their (considerable) historic interest? There is such a thing as being just plain wrong, and that is what, before 1859, all answers to those questions were.
If Dawkins had contented himself with the claim that Darwin had made worthless other answers to the questions, Where do we come from? and, How have we evolved? (empirical questions), he would have offended only creationists. But anyone of the most elementary intellectual sophistication knows that questions about meaning and purpose are of another order–and continue to be the legitimate concern of literature and philosophy. They are not simply reducible to knowledge about our genetic structure.
Could our knowledge of genetic structure affect our understanding of ethical matters such as human meaning and purpose? Perhaps, though the sociobiological argument from the evidence so far, namely that our genes are selfish and determinative of our character and behavior, is controversial even within its own discipline. Biologists Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin oppose the sociobiologists’ genetic reductionism because of their failure to give an adequate account of the interaction between biological and cultural factors. Genetic reductionism is also banal when translated into ethical terms, for it amounts to little more than an assertion that people need to learn to control their destructive selfish impulses. Does knowledge of our genetic structure, however complete, make the worthless speculations of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Montaigne, and Rousseau? The question doesn't deserve an answer. Dawkins distinguishes his scientism from "religious answers," though of course his own commitment to science has all the features of a faith. Wilson, in effect, admits this when he speaks of science as "religion liberated and writ large." In its overreaching, sociobiology is what Blake would call "a natural religion."
3.
In tracing Wilson’s thought back to Snow and Huxley, I need to make the important qualification that Huxley was never guilty of this kind of intellectual hubris. Unlike Wilson, he would not have conflated a question about origins with a question about the value and meaning of human life. In his essay "Evolution and Ethics" (1893), he contrasts "the cosmic process" and "the ethical process." He writes, "since law and morals are restraints upon the struggle for existence between men in society, the ethical process is in opposition to the principle of the cosmic process, and tends to the suppression of the qualities best suited for success in that struggle." Which is not say that a knowledge of the cosmic process is irrelevant to our thinking about ethical matters, but that ethics cannot be reduced to biology. "Evolution and Ethics" was an answer to the social Darwinism of Huxley's contemporary Herbert Spencer, who believed that evolution contained the desired ethical model for human conduct. It could be an answer as well to our contemporary sociobiologists.
Yet sociobiology is not alone in its imperial ambition for science. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, another national bestseller, distinguished scientist Jared Diamond provides what he considers a scientific history of the past thirteen thousand years. In his "history of everything," he aims for " ultimate explanations." Whereas Wilson approaches evolution from the point of view of genetics, Diamond approaches his subject from the point of view of geography. What both share is the belief that the complexity of life can be reduced to scientific explanation. Diamond sets himself the task of explaining why certain societies have triumphed at the expense of others. Why, for instance, has Europe surpassed Africa and Asia in technological and industrial progress? According to him, the "ultimate explanation" lies in the relative fertility of land and the availability of animals that can be domesticated. Effective food production frees people for a variety of other activities, for example, crafts. Diamond has done impressive work in addressing the question of why different continents demonstrate such different historical trajectories. Much of his detailed exposition regarding food production, animal domestication, and migration is persuasive. But in his truncated view of history, various factors such as culture, ideology, irrational behavior, luck, and great individuals play a negligible role.
In the final chapter of his book, titled "History As a Science," he dismisses the work of practicing historians in the crudest terms: "Most historians do not think of themselves as scientists and receive little training in acknowledged sciences and their methodologies." True enough. But does it follow from that deficiency that their sense of history is "nothing more than a mass of detail" or that "history is just one damn fact after another" or that it "is more or less bunk"? Do these characterizations apply to Thucydides or Tacitus or Gibbon, or, for that matter, to any contemporary practicing academic or nonacademic historian?
Narrative history is hardly a mass of details, or just one damn fact after another. Accomplished historians carefully select their facts on the basis of what can be considered significant and what will contribute to the intelligibility, coherence, and persuasiveness of the story told, and they interpret these facts. Diamond has no appreciation of history as a literary art. If we were to take his characterization of nonscientific history as evidence of the empirical understanding in which he takes pride, we would have reason to suspect his authority elsewhere. In defending ultimate explanation, he argues that he is dealing with history on a large timescale rather than a smaller one in which proximate causes operate. But scale is not simply a matter of time; it may also be a matter of the moment's magnitude. Napoleon's presence on the scene in postrevolutionary France was of immense significance to subsequent world history–as was Hitler's rise in Germany between the two world wars.
The nonscientific humanist view is that history, like literature, invites a series of interpretations that might share common ground, but may also differ from and be in conflict with one another. And the nonscientific historian–like the nonscientific literary critic–embraces the variety of interpretation as enriching our understanding of the subject. Nonscientific historians make objective claims for their views, but the conflicts among them cannot be scientifically adjudicated. Variety and conflict do not preclude the possibility of objectivity and common ground among interpreters, but they do preclude singular explanation.
Consider, for example, Diamond’s attempt to explain why China "lost its huge early lead to Europe," given its "undoubted advantages: a rise of food production nearly as early as in the Fertile Crescent; ecological diversity from North to South China and from the coast to the Tibetan plateau, giving rise to a diverse set of crops, animals and technology." Diamond explains it as "a typical aberration of local politics that could happen anywhere in the world: a power struggle between two factions at the Chinese court (the eunuchs and their opponents)." The eunuchs favored the "sending and captaining of fleets," their opponents, prevailing in the power struggle, "dismantled the shipyards . . . and forbade oceangoing shipping." Politics, not geography, is the decisive factor here, though Diamond does not acknowledge that this troubles his thesis in any way. And although he persuasively shows the geographical conditions that constrain choice, he conflates constraint with inevitability. Scientific explanation, dedicated to the finding of cause and effect, looks for the inevitable patterns of existence; historical understanding, based on belief in human freedom, imagines the possibility of alternative outcomes in the past.
It may be that reductionism has an important role to play within the sciences, though it is a contested view, certainly in its imperial manifestation, as I have indicated in my reference to Gould's and Lewontin's critiques of sociobiology. When, however, reductionism is extended to the humanities and the social sciences, it displays a singular lack of understanding and tact. Reductionism takes several forms. In the humanities, literary works are often reduced to ideological motives that have to do with gender, class, or race. While it is one thing to acknowledge, interpret, and evaluate these factors’ significance in a work of literature, it is quite another to reduce the work to its supposed ideological message. In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Prospero may refer to his daughter as "his foot" in a flash of resentment when she begs him not to treat her beloved Ferdinand too harshly, and his treatment of Caliban appears to be that of the colonial oppressor. But an exclusive and obsessive focus on Prospero as a Eurocentric imperial man, Miranda as protofeminist consciousness, and Caliban as the voice of postcolonial oppression displaces focus from the deep affection and concern father and daughter have for each other and from the play's realism about human relationships at the time. What we have instead in various reductionist readings is a kind of retrospective moralizing about the play based on contemporary standards of justice and decency. What suffers in the process is our perception of the literary achievement.
4.
I have alluded to Wilson's adversaries within his own discipline. Sociobiology has another adversary in the radical skepticism of postmodernism, which denies the natural sciences, as it does to other discourses, any claim to objective knowledge, despite the amazing progress sciences have made in, for example, our understanding of the genetic makeup of living creatures. (I place "our" in quotation marks because we delegate scientific understanding and conviction to scientists. Our faith or trust in them–these modern-day Prosperos, if you will–is based in part on the evidence of the technology and medical advances that have come out of science.) One is not required to defend the scientism of Wilson and Diamond to affirm the scientists’ claims for the objectivity of their discoveries. It is, of course, true that scientific claims are always provisional and can be superseded by new knowledge. But there are claims that have been consolidated and not superseded, and those claims that have been superseded can be placed on a curve of progress to a better understanding of phenomena. My purpose here, however, is not to defend science–for it needs no defending–but rather to reflect on the opposition between two isms: scientism and radical postmodernism. Both are, in my view, detrimental to the cause of science and of the humanities.
For Wilson, scientism–he calls it the Enlightenment–and postmodern epistemology would appear to be the either/or of theoretical debate in the academy. "Postmodernism is the ultimate polar antithesis to the Enlightenment. The difference between the two extremes can be explained as follows: Enlightenment thinkers believe we can know everything, and radical postmodernists believe we can know nothing." One theory aims for the unity of knowledge, the finding of ultimate explanations for everything; the opposing theory aims for a radical skepticism about the possibility of any certain knowledge. What they have in common is that both theories are grand theories–radical postmodernists would bridle at the attribution–with the ambition to account for everything. They are reductionist and therefore interdisciplinary in a bad sense, for they display an insufficient respect for the integrity and autonomy of the disciplines. Both theories are dogmatic and therefore incapable of that mixture of confidence and epistemological modesty that says, "This we can know, this we may yet know, this remains in the realm of mystery, subject to a variety of speculation and interpretation that cannot be resolved to certain knowledge."
Huxley had his adversary in Arnold, Snow in Leavis and Trilling. In both episodes, the adversaries of the proponents of science as the master discipline were the defenders of literary enterprise as a distinct and separate activity. Huxley does not deny the separate integrity of literature; nor does he conflate ethics and evolution. Even Snow, who complains about the politics of writers and literary intellectuals, and wishes they would serve the interests of a benign science devoted to alleviating human misery, assumes a distinction between literature and science. However, the case of Wilson and his postmodern adversaries is different. Wilson acknowledges the difference between literature and science, but not between the study of science and the study of literature. The project of Wilson and his supporters is to subsume all the disciplines under the aegis of the biological sciences, specifically, genetics. For Wilson, literature as well as literary theory can be understood according to the genetic rules that determine human life.
However, his postmodern adversaries in the humanities, unlike the adversaries of Huxley and Snow, do not defend the literary enterprise against scientific imperialism. They do respond to the hubristic version of Enlightenment belief that everything can be known with an equally hubristic dogmatic skepticism that all knowledge is uncertain. But they do not defend literature, because they extend to literary production the same kind of skepticism that they apply to the sciences–or else they reduce literature to ideology. It is, of course, an irony of radical skepticism that it flaunts its own certainties. The trajectory that I have been describing from romanticism to the present moment reflects a weakening of advocacy of the cause of the humanities.
In a time like the present when the interdisciplinary is the rage, one should be aware of how it can become a vehicle of reductionism, the impoverishing translation of one field into another. Political theory becomes the scientific study of statistics, history of geography, literature of ideology, religion of a scientific understanding of our origins. Too often, the desire for the interdisciplinary is a symptom of a loss of confidence in the integrity of one's own discipline. Unless it is based on mutual respect among disciplines and a sense of its own limits, interdisciplinary work becomes vacuous.
Scientific theory may not necessarily converge with the arts. It may be that each discipline has its own imperatives, which may or may not cross or converge with another discipline. And in the end, the prospect of disciplines going off in various directions or conflicting with one another, unconstrained by the demand for consilience, may bring greater intellectual rewards than the opposite and illusory prospect so tantalizing to Wilson: the unity of all knowledge.
From The Common Review Volume 1, Number 4
9.1.03
Past master
Martin Scorsese hasn't made a truly great film since GoodFellas, but the critics are still propping up the corpse of his reputation. Xan Brooks finally brings out the dead, here
Martin Scorsese hasn't made a truly great film since GoodFellas, but the critics are still propping up the corpse of his reputation. Xan Brooks finally brings out the dead, here
From an LSE leftist;
I thought it might be useful to draw your attention to the following campaigning resource . A website containing documents which assess the possible humanitarian and economic consequences of war with Iraq has been put together at:
In particular I recommend that everyone read, "Likely Humanitarian Scenarios", a draft internal UN document on possible scenarios for a war on Iraq. This is probably the most authoritative document on the possible consequences of war published to date and is useful for quotations because the figures come from the UN itself. Among its conclusions are:
In planning for the numbers that will require medical treatment, "as many as 500,000 could require treatment to a greater or lesser degree as a result of direct or indirect injuries" (para.23). A footnote bases this claim on World Health Organisation estimates of 100,000 direct casualties, and 400,000 indirect casualties. The high number of indirect casualties may be partially because "the outbreak of diseases in epidemic if not pandemic proportions is very likely." (para.25).
"It is estimated that the nutritional status of some 3.03 million persons countrywide will be dire and they will require therapeutic feeding. This consists of 2.03 million severely and moderately malnourished children under five and one million pregnant and lactating women." (para.27). A footnote identifies this as a United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) estimate.
"It is estimated that there will eventually be some 900,000 Iraqi refugees requiring assistance, of which 100,000 will be in need of immediate assistance." (para.35). A footnote identifies this as an estimate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Tom
I thought it might be useful to draw your attention to the following campaigning resource . A website containing documents which assess the possible humanitarian and economic consequences of war with Iraq has been put together at:
In particular I recommend that everyone read, "Likely Humanitarian Scenarios", a draft internal UN document on possible scenarios for a war on Iraq. This is probably the most authoritative document on the possible consequences of war published to date and is useful for quotations because the figures come from the UN itself. Among its conclusions are:
In planning for the numbers that will require medical treatment, "as many as 500,000 could require treatment to a greater or lesser degree as a result of direct or indirect injuries" (para.23). A footnote bases this claim on World Health Organisation estimates of 100,000 direct casualties, and 400,000 indirect casualties. The high number of indirect casualties may be partially because "the outbreak of diseases in epidemic if not pandemic proportions is very likely." (para.25).
"It is estimated that the nutritional status of some 3.03 million persons countrywide will be dire and they will require therapeutic feeding. This consists of 2.03 million severely and moderately malnourished children under five and one million pregnant and lactating women." (para.27). A footnote identifies this as a United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) estimate.
"It is estimated that there will eventually be some 900,000 Iraqi refugees requiring assistance, of which 100,000 will be in need of immediate assistance." (para.35). A footnote identifies this as an estimate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Tom
Better drugs laws will cut gun crime
Let's recognise reality and start selling the stuff at off-licences
Mo Mowlam
Thursday January 9, 2003
The Guardian
A series of gun-related crimes is reported in the press over the last week and, as sure as night follows day, we have an immediate response from the government that it is going to bring forward legislation to increase the penalty for possessing a gun. At a time when our prisons are straining at the seams we have a headline-grabbing policy which may in the short term look good, and in the medium term will probably be either irrelevant or counter-productive. On top of this it is announced that the prime minister is going to take personal control of a new crusade against guns. Visas will monitor Jamaicans travelling to the UK, and instant deportation will face asylum seekers found in possession of such weapons. more...
Let's recognise reality and start selling the stuff at off-licences
Mo Mowlam
Thursday January 9, 2003
The Guardian
A series of gun-related crimes is reported in the press over the last week and, as sure as night follows day, we have an immediate response from the government that it is going to bring forward legislation to increase the penalty for possessing a gun. At a time when our prisons are straining at the seams we have a headline-grabbing policy which may in the short term look good, and in the medium term will probably be either irrelevant or counter-productive. On top of this it is announced that the prime minister is going to take personal control of a new crusade against guns. Visas will monitor Jamaicans travelling to the UK, and instant deportation will face asylum seekers found in possession of such weapons. more...
6.1.03
saw mexican film "y tu mama tambien" the other day (and your mother). v similar to "lucia y el sexo", of interest when looking into benji's cultural liberation of hispanic cultural world via cutting-edge arts theory- having seen this film, i'm with him all the way! erect cock, blowjob, males kissing, its got everything even the frenchie doesn't dare say/show! check it out if you get chance- i'm looking into the realdeal, and am already getting tempted for madrid thereafter.. hehe.. or sweden maybe..
love the below..
love the below..
5.1.03
Media Year 2002, R.I.P.
By Norman Solomon
It's impossible to adequately sum up any year, and 2002 is probably more difficult than most to grasp. Bursts of militaristic fervor bracketed the 12 months, which began in the terrible aftermath of 9/11 with the United States waging a fierce war in Afghanistan. Now, an even larger war against Iraq seems about to begin.
We can try to remember the nonstop avalanche of media that came between New Year's Day and late December, but most of it is forgettable -- if we're lucky. This is a more or less constant problem in our lives as we avail ourselves of daily mass communications. Whether the medium is television, radio, print or the Internet, the vast majority of what passes before our eyes and gets into our ears is not worth remembering.
The end of a year lends itself to introspection and reminders of mortality. We don't have time to waste, and we may fear that we're wasting it anyway! An old TV Guide or a pile of yellowing newspapers is testimony to the brief shelf-life of media sizzle.
There's no doubt that the new media technologies have opened up fantastic possibilities -- and appreciable disadvantages. For example, take e-mail. By now you probably find it hard to take. If your inbox is anything like mine, most of it is filled each day with advertisements and other stuff that just seems like clutter.
Sure, I want to learn what's happening in a lot of different places, and I'm often glad to hear from people whose names are unfamiliar. But during the past year alone, the level of out-and-out commercialism via e-mail has escalated so rapidly that the computer mode of communication now often seems more like a curse than a marvel.
As for television, the critique of TV as mostly junk is nothing new. Mad Magazine was making that point quite acutely back in the 1950s. Now we have a lot more channels -- and, we assure ourselves, a great deal more sophistication. Oh, and did I mention the enhanced color and depth-of-field that High Definition television will soon confer on our great nation?
Despite the bright spots, TV viewing generally depletes much more than it gives. People want to feel connected and certainly want to be entertained. But having a large number of channels to choose from doesn't prevent the choices from remaining severely limited. And when imaginations can stretch no wider than what's been green-lighted by corporate sponsors, underwriters, and network executives, it's time to look elsewhere for the news reporting and creative artistry that can challenge and sustain us.
The numbing effects of corporatized media, it seems to me, fit in comfortably with the kind of militarism that runs through American society and gets unleashed periodically with yet another war blessed by the man in the bully pulpit at the White House. A culture accustomed to finding substantial meaning in TV commercials and an array of phony prime-time shows is unlikely to rouse itself to human connection and moral action when the nation's powers-that-be decide on yet another war. While a grisly reality prevails elsewhere, courtesy of the Pentagon, an air of unreality dominates countless living rooms. "Since no one seems to live on television," media critic Mark Crispin Miller has observed, "no one seems to die there."
It would be preferable to end the year on an upbeat note. But I don't know if I can do better than to recall the graffiti that the great Latin American writer Eduardo Galeano tells of seeing written on a wall: "Let's save pessimism for better times."
When journalists and artists take risks to do their work with integrity, the results can be energizing and inspiring. In contrast, the ultimate triumph of routine media is to make us feel anesthetized and encourage us to be passive (other than going out and buying things). Yet in the face of personal, political and social adversity, the habit of passivity is apt to be our frequent undoing.
As calendars cannot stop reminding us, change is constant. Sometimes it seems that only our awareness is static. But our perceptions, however unspoken, are also evolving. What we do with them remains to be seen.
Norman Solomon's latest book is "The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media."
By Norman Solomon
It's impossible to adequately sum up any year, and 2002 is probably more difficult than most to grasp. Bursts of militaristic fervor bracketed the 12 months, which began in the terrible aftermath of 9/11 with the United States waging a fierce war in Afghanistan. Now, an even larger war against Iraq seems about to begin.
We can try to remember the nonstop avalanche of media that came between New Year's Day and late December, but most of it is forgettable -- if we're lucky. This is a more or less constant problem in our lives as we avail ourselves of daily mass communications. Whether the medium is television, radio, print or the Internet, the vast majority of what passes before our eyes and gets into our ears is not worth remembering.
The end of a year lends itself to introspection and reminders of mortality. We don't have time to waste, and we may fear that we're wasting it anyway! An old TV Guide or a pile of yellowing newspapers is testimony to the brief shelf-life of media sizzle.
There's no doubt that the new media technologies have opened up fantastic possibilities -- and appreciable disadvantages. For example, take e-mail. By now you probably find it hard to take. If your inbox is anything like mine, most of it is filled each day with advertisements and other stuff that just seems like clutter.
Sure, I want to learn what's happening in a lot of different places, and I'm often glad to hear from people whose names are unfamiliar. But during the past year alone, the level of out-and-out commercialism via e-mail has escalated so rapidly that the computer mode of communication now often seems more like a curse than a marvel.
As for television, the critique of TV as mostly junk is nothing new. Mad Magazine was making that point quite acutely back in the 1950s. Now we have a lot more channels -- and, we assure ourselves, a great deal more sophistication. Oh, and did I mention the enhanced color and depth-of-field that High Definition television will soon confer on our great nation?
Despite the bright spots, TV viewing generally depletes much more than it gives. People want to feel connected and certainly want to be entertained. But having a large number of channels to choose from doesn't prevent the choices from remaining severely limited. And when imaginations can stretch no wider than what's been green-lighted by corporate sponsors, underwriters, and network executives, it's time to look elsewhere for the news reporting and creative artistry that can challenge and sustain us.
The numbing effects of corporatized media, it seems to me, fit in comfortably with the kind of militarism that runs through American society and gets unleashed periodically with yet another war blessed by the man in the bully pulpit at the White House. A culture accustomed to finding substantial meaning in TV commercials and an array of phony prime-time shows is unlikely to rouse itself to human connection and moral action when the nation's powers-that-be decide on yet another war. While a grisly reality prevails elsewhere, courtesy of the Pentagon, an air of unreality dominates countless living rooms. "Since no one seems to live on television," media critic Mark Crispin Miller has observed, "no one seems to die there."
It would be preferable to end the year on an upbeat note. But I don't know if I can do better than to recall the graffiti that the great Latin American writer Eduardo Galeano tells of seeing written on a wall: "Let's save pessimism for better times."
When journalists and artists take risks to do their work with integrity, the results can be energizing and inspiring. In contrast, the ultimate triumph of routine media is to make us feel anesthetized and encourage us to be passive (other than going out and buying things). Yet in the face of personal, political and social adversity, the habit of passivity is apt to be our frequent undoing.
As calendars cannot stop reminding us, change is constant. Sometimes it seems that only our awareness is static. But our perceptions, however unspoken, are also evolving. What we do with them remains to be seen.
Norman Solomon's latest book is "The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media."
'They should be big, boiled and in broth'
Kim Jong Il, the bon vivant
James Brooke/NYT The New York Times
Russian's tell-all book causes a furor at home
TOKYO President George W. Bush calls him evil and says he is building nuclear bombs. Japanese officials say his missiles are aimed at Tokyo. Human rights groups say he uses concentration camps to stay in power. Even at the movies, James Bond is being tortured by his North Korean government.
.
But to Konstantin Pulikovsky, a rare foreigner who has spent time with North Korea's secretive leader, Kim Jong Il is a fun-loving guy.
.
Drinking wines imported from France, nibbling on gourmet meals with silver chopsticks, and joining in rousing choruses of old Soviet songs with "beautiful lady conductors," North Korea's remote "Dear Leader" emerges in flesh and blood from the pages of a new memoir by Pulikovsky, the representative of President Vladimir Putin in Russia's Far East.
.
Called "Orient Express" and published this autumn in Moscow, the 200-page snapshot-laden book prompted a diplomatic protest from North Korea and teeth gnashing in Russia's Foreign Ministry. It draws heavily on a confidential report prepared by a Russian Foreign Ministry note-taker on board during Kim's leisurely one-month train ride across Russia in the summer of 2001. (Kim made a second, shorter train trip into Russia this past summer, also accompanied by Pulikovsky.)
.
"Pulikovsky published what he was not supposed to publish," said Alexandre Mansourov, once a Soviet diplomat in North Korea who now teaches at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.
.
"He violated a personal trust, not just of Kim Jong Il, but of the people who put the report together. More copies of this book have probably been bought by foreign governments and intelligence agencies than by Russians themselves."
.
The book appeared shortly after North Korean officials admitted that they had a nuclear weapons program.
.
With estimates of his nuclear arsenal ranging up to five bombs, intelligence agencies around the world are gleaning this limited-edition memoir for new clues about the North Korean leader.
.
In power for almost a decade, Kim has given few speeches at home, has rarely traveled outside his isolated country, and has granted no interviews to Western reporters.
.
"I am the object of criticism around the world," Pulikovsky quotes Kim as saying in one meeting on the long train ride. "But I think that since I am being discussed, then I am on the right track."
.
For North Korea's government, the most damaging accounts are descriptions of lengthy banquets, jarring tales for a country where as many as 2 million people starved to death during the mid-1990s. Human rights groups contend that the government diverted international food shipments to North Korea's 1.1-million-member military and to families of loyal cadres.
.
In contrast, the Russian wrote, "Kim Jong Il can be called a gourmet."
.
"It was possible to order any dish of Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and French cuisine," he wrote of the specially outfitted train that carried Kim.
.
The North Koreans made sure that live lobsters were shipped to the train to provide Kim with fresh delicacies during the tedium of crossing Siberia. Cases of Bordeaux and Burgundy red wines were flown from Paris. Even Putin's private train "did not have the comfort of Kim Jong Il's train," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
Impressed with the brown bread at a Khabarovsk restaurant, North Korea's leader had an aide fly 20 loaves to Pyongyang so that it would be fresh on his arrival. On a stop at Omsk, the North Korean rejected a plate of barrel-salted pickles, dismissing the offer as shoddily marinated cucumbers from Bulgaria, not prepared in the authentic Russian style.
.
"Then they served tiny pelmeni, kopeck-size, in a small frying pan baked under cheese and mayonnaise," Pulikovsky wrote, recalling crestfallen faces on the Siberian hosts as the Russian meat dumplings arrived. "Kim Jong Il picked at them with a fork and said: 'What kind of pelmeni are these? They should be big, boiled and in broth.'"
.
With meals on the train stretching sometimes for four hours or more, entertainment often took the form of singing Russian and Korean songs. The North Korean leader, who had left his wife back in Pyongyang, particularly enjoyed the charms of four young singers, who were introduced as "lady conductors," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
When his government ministers came into his office, "they bent deferentially in a deep bow and remained like this until there was a hardly visible sign from their commander that they could straighten their backs," he wrote.
.
Taking a skeptical attitude about the AIDS epidemic in Africa, Kim, whose government is skilled at extracting foreign aid, once commented to Pulikovsky, "Many countries just exaggerate their disasters to get more aid from the international community."
.
Some Koreans say that such remarks merely follow a 1,000-year tradition.
.
"Basically, this is a kingdom, and therefore the king is the absolute power," said Suh Dae Sook, a University of Hawaii political science professor whose ancestral village is in northern Korea.
.
Noting that Kim Jong Il's father, Kim Il Sung, became leader of North Korea in 1948, he said, "A monarchical absolute tradition of five centuries will not disappear in 50 years." Russian's tell-all book causes a furor at home
TOKYO President George W. Bush calls him evil and says he is building nuclear bombs. Japanese officials say his missiles are aimed at Tokyo. Human rights groups say he uses concentration camps to stay in power. Even at the movies, James Bond is being tortured by his North Korean government.
.
But to Konstantin Pulikovsky, a rare foreigner who has spent time with North Korea's secretive leader, Kim Jong Il is a fun-loving guy.
.
Drinking wines imported from France, nibbling on gourmet meals with silver chopsticks, and joining in rousing choruses of old Soviet songs with "beautiful lady conductors," North Korea's remote "Dear Leader" emerges in flesh and blood from the pages of a new memoir by Pulikovsky, the representative of President Vladimir Putin in Russia's Far East.
.
Called "Orient Express" and published this autumn in Moscow, the 200-page snapshot-laden book prompted a diplomatic protest from North Korea and teeth gnashing in Russia's Foreign Ministry. It draws heavily on a confidential report prepared by a Russian Foreign Ministry note-taker on board during Kim's leisurely one-month train ride across Russia in the summer of 2001. (Kim made a second, shorter train trip into Russia this past summer, also accompanied by Pulikovsky.)
.
"Pulikovsky published what he was not supposed to publish," said Alexandre Mansourov, once a Soviet diplomat in North Korea who now teaches at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.
.
"He violated a personal trust, not just of Kim Jong Il, but of the people who put the report together. More copies of this book have probably been bought by foreign governments and intelligence agencies than by Russians themselves."
.
The book appeared shortly after North Korean officials admitted that they had a nuclear weapons program.
.
With estimates of his nuclear arsenal ranging up to five bombs, intelligence agencies around the world are gleaning this limited-edition memoir for new clues about the North Korean leader.
.
In power for almost a decade, Kim has given few speeches at home, has rarely traveled outside his isolated country, and has granted no interviews to Western reporters.
.
"I am the object of criticism around the world," Pulikovsky quotes Kim as saying in one meeting on the long train ride. "But I think that since I am being discussed, then I am on the right track."
.
For North Korea's government, the most damaging accounts are descriptions of lengthy banquets, jarring tales for a country where as many as 2 million people starved to death during the mid-1990s. Human rights groups contend that the government diverted international food shipments to North Korea's 1.1-million-member military and to families of loyal cadres.
.
In contrast, the Russian wrote, "Kim Jong Il can be called a gourmet."
.
"It was possible to order any dish of Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and French cuisine," he wrote of the specially outfitted train that carried Kim.
.
The North Koreans made sure that live lobsters were shipped to the train to provide Kim with fresh delicacies during the tedium of crossing Siberia. Cases of Bordeaux and Burgundy red wines were flown from Paris. Even Putin's private train "did not have the comfort of Kim Jong Il's train," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
Impressed with the brown bread at a Khabarovsk restaurant, North Korea's leader had an aide fly 20 loaves to Pyongyang so that it would be fresh on his arrival. On a stop at Omsk, the North Korean rejected a plate of barrel-salted pickles, dismissing the offer as shoddily marinated cucumbers from Bulgaria, not prepared in the authentic Russian style.
.
"Then they served tiny pelmeni, kopeck-size, in a small frying pan baked under cheese and mayonnaise," Pulikovsky wrote, recalling crestfallen faces on the Siberian hosts as the Russian meat dumplings arrived. "Kim Jong Il picked at them with a fork and said: 'What kind of pelmeni are these? They should be big, boiled and in broth.'"
.
With meals on the train stretching sometimes for four hours or more, entertainment often took the form of singing Russian and Korean songs. The North Korean leader, who had left his wife back in Pyongyang, particularly enjoyed the charms of four young singers, who were introduced as "lady conductors," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
When his government ministers came into his office, "they bent deferentially in a deep bow and remained like this until there was a hardly visible sign from their commander that they could straighten their backs," he wrote.
.
Taking a skeptical attitude about the AIDS epidemic in Africa, Kim, whose government is skilled at extracting foreign aid, once commented to Pulikovsky, "Many countries just exaggerate their disasters to get more aid from the international community."
.
Some Koreans say that such remarks merely follow a 1,000-year tradition.
.
"Basically, this is a kingdom, and therefore the king is the absolute power," said Suh Dae Sook, a University of Hawaii political science professor whose ancestral village is in northern Korea.
.
Noting that Kim Jong Il's father, Kim Il Sung, became leader of North Korea in 1948, he said, "A monarchical absolute tradition of five centuries will not disappear in 50 years." Russian's tell-all book causes a furor at home
TOKYO President George W. Bush calls him evil and says he is building nuclear bombs. Japanese officials say his missiles are aimed at Tokyo. Human rights groups say he uses concentration camps to stay in power. Even at the movies, James Bond is being tortured by his North Korean government.
.
But to Konstantin Pulikovsky, a rare foreigner who has spent time with North Korea's secretive leader, Kim Jong Il is a fun-loving guy.
.
Drinking wines imported from France, nibbling on gourmet meals with silver chopsticks, and joining in rousing choruses of old Soviet songs with "beautiful lady conductors," North Korea's remote "Dear Leader" emerges in flesh and blood from the pages of a new memoir by Pulikovsky, the representative of President Vladimir Putin in Russia's Far East.
.
Called "Orient Express" and published this autumn in Moscow, the 200-page snapshot-laden book prompted a diplomatic protest from North Korea and teeth gnashing in Russia's Foreign Ministry. It draws heavily on a confidential report prepared by a Russian Foreign Ministry note-taker on board during Kim's leisurely one-month train ride across Russia in the summer of 2001. (Kim made a second, shorter train trip into Russia this past summer, also accompanied by Pulikovsky.)
.
"Pulikovsky published what he was not supposed to publish," said Alexandre Mansourov, once a Soviet diplomat in North Korea who now teaches at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.
.
"He violated a personal trust, not just of Kim Jong Il, but of the people who put the report together. More copies of this book have probably been bought by foreign governments and intelligence agencies than by Russians themselves."
.
The book appeared shortly after North Korean officials admitted that they had a nuclear weapons program.
.
With estimates of his nuclear arsenal ranging up to five bombs, intelligence agencies around the world are gleaning
< < Back to Start of Article Russian's tell-all book causes a furor at home
TOKYO President George W. Bush calls him evil and says he is building nuclear bombs. Japanese officials say his missiles are aimed at Tokyo. Human rights groups say he uses concentration camps to stay in power. Even at the movies, James Bond is being tortured by his North Korean government.
.
But to Konstantin Pulikovsky, a rare foreigner who has spent time with North Korea's secretive leader, Kim Jong Il is a fun-loving guy.
.
Drinking wines imported from France, nibbling on gourmet meals with silver chopsticks, and joining in rousing choruses of old Soviet songs with "beautiful lady conductors," North Korea's remote "Dear Leader" emerges in flesh and blood from the pages of a new memoir by Pulikovsky, the representative of President Vladimir Putin in Russia's Far East.
.
Called "Orient Express" and published this autumn in Moscow, the 200-page snapshot-laden book prompted a diplomatic protest from North Korea and teeth gnashing in Russia's Foreign Ministry. It draws heavily on a confidential report prepared by a Russian Foreign Ministry note-taker on board during Kim's leisurely one-month train ride across Russia in the summer of 2001. (Kim made a second, shorter train trip into Russia this past summer, also accompanied by Pulikovsky.)
.
"Pulikovsky published what he was not supposed to publish," said Alexandre Mansourov, once a Soviet diplomat in North Korea who now teaches at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.
.
"He violated a personal trust, not just of Kim Jong Il, but of the people who put the report together. More copies of this book have probably been bought by foreign governments and intelligence agencies than by Russians themselves."
.
The book appeared shortly after North Korean officials admitted that they had a nuclear weapons program.
.
With estimates of his nuclear arsenal ranging up to five bombs, intelligence agencies around the world are gleaning this limited-edition memoir for new clues about the North Korean leader.
.
In power for almost a decade, Kim has given few speeches at home, has rarely traveled outside his isolated country, and has granted no interviews to Western reporters.
.
"I am the object of criticism around the world," Pulikovsky quotes Kim as saying in one meeting on the long train ride. "But I think that since I am being discussed, then I am on the right track."
.
For North Korea's government, the most damaging accounts are descriptions of lengthy banquets, jarring tales for a country where as many as 2 million people starved to death during the mid-1990s. Human rights groups contend that the government diverted international food shipments to North Korea's 1.1-million-member military and to families of loyal cadres.
.
In contrast, the Russian wrote, "Kim Jong Il can be called a gourmet."
.
"It was possible to order any dish of Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and French cuisine," he wrote of the specially outfitted train that carried Kim.
.
The North Koreans made sure that live lobsters were shipped to the train to provide Kim with fresh delicacies during the tedium of crossing Siberia. Cases of Bordeaux and Burgundy red wines were flown from Paris. Even Putin's private train "did not have the comfort of Kim Jong Il's train," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
Impressed with the brown bread at a Khabarovsk restaurant, North Korea's leader had an aide fly 20 loaves to Pyongyang so that it would be fresh on his arrival. On a stop at Omsk, the North Korean rejected a plate of barrel-salted pickles, dismissing the offer as shoddily marinated cucumbers from Bulgaria, not prepared in the authentic Russian style.
.
"Then they served tiny pelmeni, kopeck-size, in a small frying pan baked under cheese and mayonnaise," Pulikovsky wrote, recalling crestfallen faces on the Siberian hosts as the Russian meat dumplings arrived. "Kim Jong Il picked at them with a fork and said: 'What kind of pelmeni are these? They should be big, boiled and in broth.'"
.
With meals on the train stretching sometimes for four hours or more, entertainment often took the form of singing Russian and Korean songs. The North Korean leader, who had left his wife back in Pyongyang, particularly enjoyed the charms of four young singers, who were introduced as "lady conductors," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
When his government ministers came into his office, "they bent deferentially in a deep bow and remained like this until there was a hardly visible sign from their commander that they could straighten their backs," he wrote.
.
Taking a skeptical attitude about the AIDS epidemic in Africa, Kim, whose government is skilled at extracting foreign aid, once commented to Pulikovsky, "Many countries just exaggerate their disasters to get more aid from the international community."
.
Some Koreans say that such remarks merely follow a 1,000-year tradition.
.
"Basically, this is a kingdom, and therefore the king is the absolute power," said Suh Dae Sook, a University of Hawaii political science professor whose ancestral village is in northern Korea.
.
Noting that Kim Jong Il's father, Kim Il Sung, became leader of North Korea in 1948, he said, "A monarchical absolute tradition of five centuries will not disappear in 50 years." Russian's tell-all book causes a furor at home
TOKYO President George W. Bush calls him evil and says he is building nuclear bombs. Japanese officials say his missiles are aimed at Tokyo. Human rights groups say he uses concentration camps to stay in power. Even at the movies, James Bond is being tortured by his North Korean government.
.
But to Konstantin Pulikovsky, a rare foreigner who has spent time with North Korea's secretive leader, Kim Jong Il is a fun-loving guy.
.
Drinking wines imported from France, nibbling on gourmet meals with silver chopsticks, and joining in rousing choruses of old Soviet songs with "beautiful lady conductors," North Korea's remote "Dear Leader" emerges in flesh and blood from the pages of a new memoir by Pulikovsky, the representative of President Vladimir Putin in Russia's Far East.
.
Called "Orient Express" and published this autumn in Moscow, the 200-page snapshot-laden book prompted a diplomatic protest from North Korea and teeth gnashing in Russia's Foreign Ministry. It draws heavily on a confidential report prepared by a Russian Foreign Ministry note-taker on board during Kim's leisurely one-month train ride across Russia in the summer of 2001. (Kim made a second, shorter train trip into Russia this past summer, also accompanied by Pulikovsky.)
.
"Pulikovsky published what he was not supposed to publish," said Alexandre Mansourov, once a Soviet diplomat in North Korea who now teaches at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.
.
"He violated a personal trust, not just of Kim Jong Il, but of the people who put the report together. More copies of this book have probably been bought by foreign governments and intelligence agencies than by Russians themselves."
.
The book appeared shortly after North Korean officials admitted that they had a nuclear weapons program.
.
With estimates of his nuclear arsenal ranging up to five bombs, intelligence agencies around the world are gleaning this limited-edition memoir for new clues about the North Korean leader.
.
In power for almost a decade, Kim has given few speeches at home, has rarely traveled outside his isolated country, and has granted no interviews to Western reporters.
.
"I am the object of criticism around the world," Pulikovsky quotes Kim as saying in one meeting on the long train ride. "But I think that since I am being discussed, then I am on the right track."
.
For North Korea's government, the most damaging accounts are descriptions of lengthy banquets, jarring tales for a country where as many as 2 million people starved to death during the mid-1990s. Human rights groups contend that the government diverted international food shipments to North Korea's 1.1-million-member military and to families of loyal cadres.
.
In contrast, the Russian wrote, "Kim Jong Il can be called a gourmet."
.
"It was possible to order any dish of Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and French cuisine," he wrote of the specially outfitted train that carried Kim.
.
The North Koreans made sure that live lobsters were shipped to the train to provide Kim with fresh delicacies during the tedium of crossing Siberia. Cases of Bordeaux and Burgundy red wines were flown from Paris. Even Putin's private train "did not have the comfort of Kim Jong Il's train," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
Impressed with the brown bread at a Khabarovsk restaurant, North Korea's leader had an aide fly 20 loaves to Pyongyang so that it would be fresh on his arrival. On a stop at Omsk, the North Korean rejected a plate of barrel-salted pickles, dismissing the offer as shoddily marinated cucumbers from Bulgaria, not prepared in the authentic Russian style.
.
"Then they served tiny pelmeni, kopeck-size, in a small frying pan baked under cheese and mayonnaise," Pulikovsky wrote, recalling crestfallen faces on the Siberian hosts as the Russian meat dumplings arrived. "Kim Jong Il picked at them with a fork and said: 'What kind of pelmeni are these? They should be big, boiled and in broth.'"
.
With meals on the train stretching sometimes for four hours or more, entertainment often took the form of singing Russian and Korean songs. The North Korean leader, who had left his wife back in Pyongyang, particularly enjoyed the charms of four young singers, who were introduced as "lady conductors," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
When his government ministers came into his office, "they bent deferentially in a deep bow and remained like this until there was a hardly visible sign from their commander that they could straighten their backs," he wrote.
.
Taking a skeptical attitude about the AIDS epidemic in Africa, Kim, whose government is skilled at extracting foreign aid, once commented to Pulikovsky, "Many countries just exaggerate their disasters to get more aid from the international community."
.
Some Koreans say that such remarks merely follow a 1,000-year tradition.
.
"Basically, this is a kingdom, and therefore the king is the absolute power," said Suh Dae Sook, a University of Hawaii political science professor whose ancestral village is in northern Korea.
.
Noting that Kim Jong Il's father, Kim Il Sung, became leader of North Korea in 1948, he said, "A monarchical absolute tradition of five centuries will not disappear in 50 years." Russian's tell-all book causes a furor at home
TOKYO President George W. Bush calls him evil and says he is building nuclear bombs. Japanese officials say his missiles are aimed at Tokyo. Human rights groups say he uses concentration camps to stay in power. Even at the movies, James Bond is being tortured by his North Korean government.
.
But to Konstantin Pulikovsky, a rare foreigner who has spent time with North Korea's secretive leader, Kim Jong Il is a fun-loving guy.
.
Drinking wines imported from France, nibbling on gourmet meals with silver chopsticks, and joining in rousing choruses of old Soviet songs with "beautiful lady conductors," North Korea's remote "Dear Leader" emerges in flesh and blood from the pages of a new memoir by Pulikovsky, the representative of President Vladimir Putin in Russia's Far East.
.
Called "Orient Express" and published this autumn in Moscow, the 200-page snapshot-laden book prompted a diplomatic protest from North Korea and teeth gnashing in Russia's Foreign Ministry. It draws heavily on a confidential report prepared by a Russian Foreign Ministry note-taker on board during Kim's leisurely one-month train ride across Russia in the summer of 2001. (Kim made a second, shorter train trip into Russia this past summer, also accompanied by Pulikovsky.)
.
"Pulikovsky published what he was not supposed to publish," said Alexandre Mansourov, once a Soviet diplomat in North Korea who now teaches at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.
.
"He violated a personal trust, not just of Kim Jong Il, but of the people who put the report together. More copies of this book have probably been bought by foreign governments and intelligence agencies than by Russians themselves."
.
The book appeared shortly after North Korean officials admitted that they had a nuclear weapons program.
.
With estimates of his nuclear arsenal ranging up to five bombs, intelligence agencies around the world are gleaning this limited-edition memoir for new clues about the North Korean leader.
.
In power for almost a decade, Kim has given few speeches at home, has rarely traveled outside his isolated country, and has granted no interviews to Western reporters.
.
"I am the object of criticism around the world," Pulikovsky quotes Kim as saying in one meeting on the long train ride. "But I think that since I am being discussed, then I am on the right track."
.
For North Korea's government, the most damaging accounts are descriptions of lengthy banquets, jarring tales for a country where as many as 2 million people starved to death during the mid-1990s. Human rights groups contend that the government diverted international food shipments to North Korea's 1.1-million-member military and to families of loyal cadres.
.
In contrast, the Russian wrote, "Kim Jong Il can be called a gourmet."
.
"It was possible to order any dish of Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and French cuisine," he wrote of the specially outfitted train that carried Kim.
.
The North Koreans made sure that live lobsters were shipped to the train to provide Kim with fresh delicacies during the tedium of crossing Siberia. Cases of Bordeaux and Burgundy red wines were flown from Paris. Even Putin's private train "did not have the comfort of Kim Jong Il's train," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
Impressed with the brown bread at a Khabarovsk restaurant, North Korea's leader had an aide fly 20 loaves to Pyongyang so that it would be fresh on his arrival. On a stop at Omsk, the North Korean rejected a plate of barrel-salted pickles, dismissing the offer as shoddily marinated cucumbers from Bulgaria, not prepared in the authentic Russian style.
.
"Then they served tiny pelmeni, kopeck-size, in a small frying pan baked under cheese and mayonnaise," Pulikovsky wrote, recalling crestfallen faces on the Siberian hosts as the Russian meat dumplings arrived. "Kim Jong Il picked at them with a fork and said: 'What kind of pelmeni are these? They should be big, boiled and in broth.'"
.
< < Back to Start of Article Russian's tell-all book causes a furor at home
TOKYO President George W. Bush calls him evil and says he is building nuclear bombs. Japanese officials say his missiles are aimed at Tokyo. Human rights groups say he uses concentration camps to stay in power. Even at the movies, James Bond is being tortured by his North Korean government.
.
But to Konstantin Pulikovsky, a rare foreigner who has spent time with North Korea's secretive leader, Kim Jong Il is a fun-loving guy.
.
Drinking wines imported from France, nibbling on gourmet meals with silver chopsticks, and joining in rousing choruses of old Soviet songs with "beautiful lady conductors," North Korea's remote "Dear Leader" emerges in flesh and blood from the pages of a new memoir by Pulikovsky, the representative of President Vladimir Putin in Russia's Far East.
.
Called "Orient Express" and published this autumn in Moscow, the 200-page snapshot-laden book prompted a diplomatic protest from North Korea and teeth gnashing in Russia's Foreign Ministry. It draws heavily on a confidential report prepared by a Russian Foreign Ministry note-taker on board during Kim's leisurely one-month train ride across Russia in the summer of 2001. (Kim made a second, shorter train trip into Russia this past summer, also accompanied by Pulikovsky.)
.
"Pulikovsky published what he was not supposed to publish," said Alexandre Mansourov, once a Soviet diplomat in North Korea who now teaches at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.
.
"He violated a personal trust, not just of Kim Jong Il, but of the people who put the report together. More copies of this book have probably been bought by foreign governments and intelligence agencies than by Russians themselves."
.
The book appeared shortly after North Korean officials admitted that they had a nuclear weapons program.
.
With estimates of his nuclear arsenal ranging up to five bombs, intelligence agencies around the world are gleaning this limited-edition memoir for new clues about the North Korean leader.
.
In power for almost a decade, Kim has given few speeches at home, has rarely traveled outside his isolated country, and has granted no interviews to Western reporters.
.
"I am the object of criticism around the world," Pulikovsky quotes Kim as saying in one meeting on the long train ride. "But I think that since I am being discussed, then I am on the right track."
.
For North Korea's government, the most damaging accounts are descriptions of lengthy banquets, jarring tales for a country where as many as 2 million people starved to death during the mid-1990s. Human rights groups contend that the government diverted international food shipments to North Korea's 1.1-million-member military and to families of loyal cadres.
.
In contrast, the Russian wrote, "Kim Jong Il can be called a gourmet."
.
"It was possible to order any dish of Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and French cuisine," he wrote of the specially outfitted train that carried Kim.
.
The North Koreans made sure that live lobsters were shipped to the train to provide Kim with fresh delicacies during the tedium of crossing Siberia. Cases of Bordeaux and Burgundy red wines were flown from Paris. Even Putin's private train "did not have the comfort of Kim Jong Il's train," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
Impressed with the brown bread at a Khabarovsk restaurant, North Korea's leader had an aide fly 20 loaves to Pyongyang so that it would be fresh on his arrival. On a stop at Omsk, the North Korean rejected a plate of barrel-salted pickles, dismissing the offer as shoddily marinated cucumbers from Bulgaria, not prepared in the authentic Russian style.
.
"Then they served tiny pelmeni, kopeck-size, in a small frying pan baked under cheese and mayonnaise," Pulikovsky wrote, recalling crestfallen faces on the Siberian hosts as the Russian meat dumplings arrived. "Kim Jong Il picked at them with a fork and said: 'What kind of pelmeni are these? They should be big, boiled and in broth.'"
.
With meals on the train stretching sometimes for four hours or more, entertainment often took the form of singing Russian and Korean songs. The North Korean leader, who had left his wife back in Pyongyang, particularly enjoyed the charms of four young singers, who were introduced as "lady conductors," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
When his government ministers came into his office, "they bent deferentially in a deep bow and remained like this until there was a hardly visible sign from their commander that they could straighten their backs," he wrote.
.
Taking a skeptical attitude about the AIDS epidemic in Africa, Kim, whose government is skilled at extracting foreign aid, once commented to Pulikovsky, "Many countries just exaggerate their disasters to get more aid from the international community."
.
Some Koreans say that such remarks merely follow a 1,000-year tradition.
.
"Basically, this is a kingdom, and therefore the king is the absolute power," said Suh Dae Sook, a University of Hawaii political science professor whose ancestral village is in northern Korea.
.
Noting that Kim Jong Il's father, Kim Il Sung, became leader of North Korea in 1948, he said, "A monarchical absolute tradition of five centuries will not disappear in 50 years." Russian's tell-all book causes a furor at home
TOKYO President George W. Bush calls him evil and says he is building nuclear bombs. Japanese officials say his missiles are aimed at Tokyo. Human rights groups say he uses concentration camps to stay in power. Even at the movies, James Bond is being tortured by his North Korean government.
.
But to Konstantin Pulikovsky, a rare foreigner who has spent time with North Korea's secretive leader, Kim Jong Il is a fun-loving guy.
.
Drinking wines imported from France, nibbling on gourmet meals with silver chopsticks, and joining in rousing choruses of old Soviet songs with "beautiful lady conductors," North Korea's remote "Dear Leader" emerges in flesh and blood from the pages of a new memoir by Pulikovsky, the representative of President Vladimir Putin in Russia's Far East.
.
Called "Orient Express" and published this autumn in Moscow, the 200-page snapshot-laden book prompted a diplomatic protest from North Korea and teeth gnashing in Russia's Foreign Ministry. It draws heavily on a confidential report prepared by a Russian Foreign Ministry note-taker on board during Kim's leisurely one-month train ride across Russia in the summer of 2001. (Kim made a second, shorter train trip into Russia this past summer, also accompanied by Pulikovsky.)
.
"Pulikovsky published what he was not supposed to publish," said Alexandre Mansourov, once a Soviet diplomat in North Korea who now teaches at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.
.
"He violated a personal trust, not just of Kim Jong Il, but of the people who put the report together. More copies of this book have probably been bought by foreign governments and intelligence agencies than by Russians themselves."
.
The book appeared shortly after North Korean officials admitted that they had a nuclear weapons program.
.
With estimates of his nuclear arsenal ranging up to five bombs, intelligence agencies around the world are gleaning this limited-edition memoir for new clues about the North Korean leader.
.
In power for almost a decade, Kim has given few speeches at home, has rarely traveled outside his isolated country, and has granted no interviews to Western reporters.
.
"I am the object of criticism around the world," Pulikovsky quotes Kim as saying in one meeting on the long train ride. "But I think that since I am being discussed, then I am on the right track."
.
For North Korea's government, the most damaging accounts are descriptions of lengthy banquets, jarring tales for a country where as many as 2 million people starved to death during the mid-1990s. Human rights groups contend that the government diverted international food shipments to North Korea's 1.1-million-member military and to families of loyal cadres.
.
In contrast, the Russian wrote, "Kim Jong Il can be called a gourmet."
.
"It was possible to order any dish of Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and French cuisine," he wrote of the specially outfitted train that carried Kim.
.
The North Koreans made sure that live lobsters were shipped to the train to provide Kim with fresh delicacies during the tedium of crossing Siberia. Cases of Bordeaux and Burgundy red wines were flown from Paris. Even Putin's private train "did not have the comfort of Kim Jong Il's train," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
Impressed with the brown bread at a Khabarovsk restaurant, North Korea's leader had an aide fly 20 loaves to Pyongyang so that it would be fresh on his arrival. On a stop at Omsk, the North Korean rejected a plate of barrel-salted pickles, dismissing the offer as shoddily marinated cucumbers from Bulgaria, not prepared in the authentic Russian style.
.
"Then they served tiny pelmeni, kopeck-size, in a small frying pan baked under cheese and mayonnaise," Pulikovsky wrote, recalling crestfallen faces on the Siberian hosts as the Russian meat dumplings arrived. "Kim Jong Il picked at them with a fork and said: 'What kind of pelmeni are these? They should be big, boiled and in broth.'"
.
With meals on the train stretching sometimes for four hours or more, entertainment often took the form of singing Russian and Korean songs. The North Korean leader, who had left his wife back in Pyongyang, particularly enjoyed the charms of four young singers, who were introduced as "lady conductors," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
When his government ministers came into his office, "they bent deferentially in a deep bow and remained like this until there was a hardly visible sign from their commander that they could straighten their backs," he wrote.
.
Taking a skeptical attitude about the AIDS epidemic in Africa, Kim, whose government is skilled at extracting foreign aid, once commented to Pulikovsky, "Many countries just exaggerate their disasters to get more aid from the international community."
.
Some Koreans say that such remarks merely follow a 1,000-year tradition.
.
"Basically, this is a kingdom, and therefore the king is the absolute power," said Suh Dae Sook, a University of Hawaii political science professor whose ancestral village is in northern Korea.
.
Noting that Kim Jong Il's father, Kim Il Sung, became leader of North Korea in 1948, he said, "A monarchical absolute tradition of five centuries will not disappear in 50 years."
Kim Jong Il, the bon vivant
James Brooke/NYT The New York Times
Russian's tell-all book causes a furor at home
TOKYO President George W. Bush calls him evil and says he is building nuclear bombs. Japanese officials say his missiles are aimed at Tokyo. Human rights groups say he uses concentration camps to stay in power. Even at the movies, James Bond is being tortured by his North Korean government.
.
But to Konstantin Pulikovsky, a rare foreigner who has spent time with North Korea's secretive leader, Kim Jong Il is a fun-loving guy.
.
Drinking wines imported from France, nibbling on gourmet meals with silver chopsticks, and joining in rousing choruses of old Soviet songs with "beautiful lady conductors," North Korea's remote "Dear Leader" emerges in flesh and blood from the pages of a new memoir by Pulikovsky, the representative of President Vladimir Putin in Russia's Far East.
.
Called "Orient Express" and published this autumn in Moscow, the 200-page snapshot-laden book prompted a diplomatic protest from North Korea and teeth gnashing in Russia's Foreign Ministry. It draws heavily on a confidential report prepared by a Russian Foreign Ministry note-taker on board during Kim's leisurely one-month train ride across Russia in the summer of 2001. (Kim made a second, shorter train trip into Russia this past summer, also accompanied by Pulikovsky.)
.
"Pulikovsky published what he was not supposed to publish," said Alexandre Mansourov, once a Soviet diplomat in North Korea who now teaches at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.
.
"He violated a personal trust, not just of Kim Jong Il, but of the people who put the report together. More copies of this book have probably been bought by foreign governments and intelligence agencies than by Russians themselves."
.
The book appeared shortly after North Korean officials admitted that they had a nuclear weapons program.
.
With estimates of his nuclear arsenal ranging up to five bombs, intelligence agencies around the world are gleaning this limited-edition memoir for new clues about the North Korean leader.
.
In power for almost a decade, Kim has given few speeches at home, has rarely traveled outside his isolated country, and has granted no interviews to Western reporters.
.
"I am the object of criticism around the world," Pulikovsky quotes Kim as saying in one meeting on the long train ride. "But I think that since I am being discussed, then I am on the right track."
.
For North Korea's government, the most damaging accounts are descriptions of lengthy banquets, jarring tales for a country where as many as 2 million people starved to death during the mid-1990s. Human rights groups contend that the government diverted international food shipments to North Korea's 1.1-million-member military and to families of loyal cadres.
.
In contrast, the Russian wrote, "Kim Jong Il can be called a gourmet."
.
"It was possible to order any dish of Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and French cuisine," he wrote of the specially outfitted train that carried Kim.
.
The North Koreans made sure that live lobsters were shipped to the train to provide Kim with fresh delicacies during the tedium of crossing Siberia. Cases of Bordeaux and Burgundy red wines were flown from Paris. Even Putin's private train "did not have the comfort of Kim Jong Il's train," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
Impressed with the brown bread at a Khabarovsk restaurant, North Korea's leader had an aide fly 20 loaves to Pyongyang so that it would be fresh on his arrival. On a stop at Omsk, the North Korean rejected a plate of barrel-salted pickles, dismissing the offer as shoddily marinated cucumbers from Bulgaria, not prepared in the authentic Russian style.
.
"Then they served tiny pelmeni, kopeck-size, in a small frying pan baked under cheese and mayonnaise," Pulikovsky wrote, recalling crestfallen faces on the Siberian hosts as the Russian meat dumplings arrived. "Kim Jong Il picked at them with a fork and said: 'What kind of pelmeni are these? They should be big, boiled and in broth.'"
.
With meals on the train stretching sometimes for four hours or more, entertainment often took the form of singing Russian and Korean songs. The North Korean leader, who had left his wife back in Pyongyang, particularly enjoyed the charms of four young singers, who were introduced as "lady conductors," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
When his government ministers came into his office, "they bent deferentially in a deep bow and remained like this until there was a hardly visible sign from their commander that they could straighten their backs," he wrote.
.
Taking a skeptical attitude about the AIDS epidemic in Africa, Kim, whose government is skilled at extracting foreign aid, once commented to Pulikovsky, "Many countries just exaggerate their disasters to get more aid from the international community."
.
Some Koreans say that such remarks merely follow a 1,000-year tradition.
.
"Basically, this is a kingdom, and therefore the king is the absolute power," said Suh Dae Sook, a University of Hawaii political science professor whose ancestral village is in northern Korea.
.
Noting that Kim Jong Il's father, Kim Il Sung, became leader of North Korea in 1948, he said, "A monarchical absolute tradition of five centuries will not disappear in 50 years." Russian's tell-all book causes a furor at home
TOKYO President George W. Bush calls him evil and says he is building nuclear bombs. Japanese officials say his missiles are aimed at Tokyo. Human rights groups say he uses concentration camps to stay in power. Even at the movies, James Bond is being tortured by his North Korean government.
.
But to Konstantin Pulikovsky, a rare foreigner who has spent time with North Korea's secretive leader, Kim Jong Il is a fun-loving guy.
.
Drinking wines imported from France, nibbling on gourmet meals with silver chopsticks, and joining in rousing choruses of old Soviet songs with "beautiful lady conductors," North Korea's remote "Dear Leader" emerges in flesh and blood from the pages of a new memoir by Pulikovsky, the representative of President Vladimir Putin in Russia's Far East.
.
Called "Orient Express" and published this autumn in Moscow, the 200-page snapshot-laden book prompted a diplomatic protest from North Korea and teeth gnashing in Russia's Foreign Ministry. It draws heavily on a confidential report prepared by a Russian Foreign Ministry note-taker on board during Kim's leisurely one-month train ride across Russia in the summer of 2001. (Kim made a second, shorter train trip into Russia this past summer, also accompanied by Pulikovsky.)
.
"Pulikovsky published what he was not supposed to publish," said Alexandre Mansourov, once a Soviet diplomat in North Korea who now teaches at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.
.
"He violated a personal trust, not just of Kim Jong Il, but of the people who put the report together. More copies of this book have probably been bought by foreign governments and intelligence agencies than by Russians themselves."
.
The book appeared shortly after North Korean officials admitted that they had a nuclear weapons program.
.
With estimates of his nuclear arsenal ranging up to five bombs, intelligence agencies around the world are gleaning this limited-edition memoir for new clues about the North Korean leader.
.
In power for almost a decade, Kim has given few speeches at home, has rarely traveled outside his isolated country, and has granted no interviews to Western reporters.
.
"I am the object of criticism around the world," Pulikovsky quotes Kim as saying in one meeting on the long train ride. "But I think that since I am being discussed, then I am on the right track."
.
For North Korea's government, the most damaging accounts are descriptions of lengthy banquets, jarring tales for a country where as many as 2 million people starved to death during the mid-1990s. Human rights groups contend that the government diverted international food shipments to North Korea's 1.1-million-member military and to families of loyal cadres.
.
In contrast, the Russian wrote, "Kim Jong Il can be called a gourmet."
.
"It was possible to order any dish of Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and French cuisine," he wrote of the specially outfitted train that carried Kim.
.
The North Koreans made sure that live lobsters were shipped to the train to provide Kim with fresh delicacies during the tedium of crossing Siberia. Cases of Bordeaux and Burgundy red wines were flown from Paris. Even Putin's private train "did not have the comfort of Kim Jong Il's train," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
Impressed with the brown bread at a Khabarovsk restaurant, North Korea's leader had an aide fly 20 loaves to Pyongyang so that it would be fresh on his arrival. On a stop at Omsk, the North Korean rejected a plate of barrel-salted pickles, dismissing the offer as shoddily marinated cucumbers from Bulgaria, not prepared in the authentic Russian style.
.
"Then they served tiny pelmeni, kopeck-size, in a small frying pan baked under cheese and mayonnaise," Pulikovsky wrote, recalling crestfallen faces on the Siberian hosts as the Russian meat dumplings arrived. "Kim Jong Il picked at them with a fork and said: 'What kind of pelmeni are these? They should be big, boiled and in broth.'"
.
With meals on the train stretching sometimes for four hours or more, entertainment often took the form of singing Russian and Korean songs. The North Korean leader, who had left his wife back in Pyongyang, particularly enjoyed the charms of four young singers, who were introduced as "lady conductors," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
When his government ministers came into his office, "they bent deferentially in a deep bow and remained like this until there was a hardly visible sign from their commander that they could straighten their backs," he wrote.
.
Taking a skeptical attitude about the AIDS epidemic in Africa, Kim, whose government is skilled at extracting foreign aid, once commented to Pulikovsky, "Many countries just exaggerate their disasters to get more aid from the international community."
.
Some Koreans say that such remarks merely follow a 1,000-year tradition.
.
"Basically, this is a kingdom, and therefore the king is the absolute power," said Suh Dae Sook, a University of Hawaii political science professor whose ancestral village is in northern Korea.
.
Noting that Kim Jong Il's father, Kim Il Sung, became leader of North Korea in 1948, he said, "A monarchical absolute tradition of five centuries will not disappear in 50 years." Russian's tell-all book causes a furor at home
TOKYO President George W. Bush calls him evil and says he is building nuclear bombs. Japanese officials say his missiles are aimed at Tokyo. Human rights groups say he uses concentration camps to stay in power. Even at the movies, James Bond is being tortured by his North Korean government.
.
But to Konstantin Pulikovsky, a rare foreigner who has spent time with North Korea's secretive leader, Kim Jong Il is a fun-loving guy.
.
Drinking wines imported from France, nibbling on gourmet meals with silver chopsticks, and joining in rousing choruses of old Soviet songs with "beautiful lady conductors," North Korea's remote "Dear Leader" emerges in flesh and blood from the pages of a new memoir by Pulikovsky, the representative of President Vladimir Putin in Russia's Far East.
.
Called "Orient Express" and published this autumn in Moscow, the 200-page snapshot-laden book prompted a diplomatic protest from North Korea and teeth gnashing in Russia's Foreign Ministry. It draws heavily on a confidential report prepared by a Russian Foreign Ministry note-taker on board during Kim's leisurely one-month train ride across Russia in the summer of 2001. (Kim made a second, shorter train trip into Russia this past summer, also accompanied by Pulikovsky.)
.
"Pulikovsky published what he was not supposed to publish," said Alexandre Mansourov, once a Soviet diplomat in North Korea who now teaches at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.
.
"He violated a personal trust, not just of Kim Jong Il, but of the people who put the report together. More copies of this book have probably been bought by foreign governments and intelligence agencies than by Russians themselves."
.
The book appeared shortly after North Korean officials admitted that they had a nuclear weapons program.
.
With estimates of his nuclear arsenal ranging up to five bombs, intelligence agencies around the world are gleaning
< < Back to Start of Article Russian's tell-all book causes a furor at home
TOKYO President George W. Bush calls him evil and says he is building nuclear bombs. Japanese officials say his missiles are aimed at Tokyo. Human rights groups say he uses concentration camps to stay in power. Even at the movies, James Bond is being tortured by his North Korean government.
.
But to Konstantin Pulikovsky, a rare foreigner who has spent time with North Korea's secretive leader, Kim Jong Il is a fun-loving guy.
.
Drinking wines imported from France, nibbling on gourmet meals with silver chopsticks, and joining in rousing choruses of old Soviet songs with "beautiful lady conductors," North Korea's remote "Dear Leader" emerges in flesh and blood from the pages of a new memoir by Pulikovsky, the representative of President Vladimir Putin in Russia's Far East.
.
Called "Orient Express" and published this autumn in Moscow, the 200-page snapshot-laden book prompted a diplomatic protest from North Korea and teeth gnashing in Russia's Foreign Ministry. It draws heavily on a confidential report prepared by a Russian Foreign Ministry note-taker on board during Kim's leisurely one-month train ride across Russia in the summer of 2001. (Kim made a second, shorter train trip into Russia this past summer, also accompanied by Pulikovsky.)
.
"Pulikovsky published what he was not supposed to publish," said Alexandre Mansourov, once a Soviet diplomat in North Korea who now teaches at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.
.
"He violated a personal trust, not just of Kim Jong Il, but of the people who put the report together. More copies of this book have probably been bought by foreign governments and intelligence agencies than by Russians themselves."
.
The book appeared shortly after North Korean officials admitted that they had a nuclear weapons program.
.
With estimates of his nuclear arsenal ranging up to five bombs, intelligence agencies around the world are gleaning this limited-edition memoir for new clues about the North Korean leader.
.
In power for almost a decade, Kim has given few speeches at home, has rarely traveled outside his isolated country, and has granted no interviews to Western reporters.
.
"I am the object of criticism around the world," Pulikovsky quotes Kim as saying in one meeting on the long train ride. "But I think that since I am being discussed, then I am on the right track."
.
For North Korea's government, the most damaging accounts are descriptions of lengthy banquets, jarring tales for a country where as many as 2 million people starved to death during the mid-1990s. Human rights groups contend that the government diverted international food shipments to North Korea's 1.1-million-member military and to families of loyal cadres.
.
In contrast, the Russian wrote, "Kim Jong Il can be called a gourmet."
.
"It was possible to order any dish of Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and French cuisine," he wrote of the specially outfitted train that carried Kim.
.
The North Koreans made sure that live lobsters were shipped to the train to provide Kim with fresh delicacies during the tedium of crossing Siberia. Cases of Bordeaux and Burgundy red wines were flown from Paris. Even Putin's private train "did not have the comfort of Kim Jong Il's train," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
Impressed with the brown bread at a Khabarovsk restaurant, North Korea's leader had an aide fly 20 loaves to Pyongyang so that it would be fresh on his arrival. On a stop at Omsk, the North Korean rejected a plate of barrel-salted pickles, dismissing the offer as shoddily marinated cucumbers from Bulgaria, not prepared in the authentic Russian style.
.
"Then they served tiny pelmeni, kopeck-size, in a small frying pan baked under cheese and mayonnaise," Pulikovsky wrote, recalling crestfallen faces on the Siberian hosts as the Russian meat dumplings arrived. "Kim Jong Il picked at them with a fork and said: 'What kind of pelmeni are these? They should be big, boiled and in broth.'"
.
With meals on the train stretching sometimes for four hours or more, entertainment often took the form of singing Russian and Korean songs. The North Korean leader, who had left his wife back in Pyongyang, particularly enjoyed the charms of four young singers, who were introduced as "lady conductors," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
When his government ministers came into his office, "they bent deferentially in a deep bow and remained like this until there was a hardly visible sign from their commander that they could straighten their backs," he wrote.
.
Taking a skeptical attitude about the AIDS epidemic in Africa, Kim, whose government is skilled at extracting foreign aid, once commented to Pulikovsky, "Many countries just exaggerate their disasters to get more aid from the international community."
.
Some Koreans say that such remarks merely follow a 1,000-year tradition.
.
"Basically, this is a kingdom, and therefore the king is the absolute power," said Suh Dae Sook, a University of Hawaii political science professor whose ancestral village is in northern Korea.
.
Noting that Kim Jong Il's father, Kim Il Sung, became leader of North Korea in 1948, he said, "A monarchical absolute tradition of five centuries will not disappear in 50 years." Russian's tell-all book causes a furor at home
TOKYO President George W. Bush calls him evil and says he is building nuclear bombs. Japanese officials say his missiles are aimed at Tokyo. Human rights groups say he uses concentration camps to stay in power. Even at the movies, James Bond is being tortured by his North Korean government.
.
But to Konstantin Pulikovsky, a rare foreigner who has spent time with North Korea's secretive leader, Kim Jong Il is a fun-loving guy.
.
Drinking wines imported from France, nibbling on gourmet meals with silver chopsticks, and joining in rousing choruses of old Soviet songs with "beautiful lady conductors," North Korea's remote "Dear Leader" emerges in flesh and blood from the pages of a new memoir by Pulikovsky, the representative of President Vladimir Putin in Russia's Far East.
.
Called "Orient Express" and published this autumn in Moscow, the 200-page snapshot-laden book prompted a diplomatic protest from North Korea and teeth gnashing in Russia's Foreign Ministry. It draws heavily on a confidential report prepared by a Russian Foreign Ministry note-taker on board during Kim's leisurely one-month train ride across Russia in the summer of 2001. (Kim made a second, shorter train trip into Russia this past summer, also accompanied by Pulikovsky.)
.
"Pulikovsky published what he was not supposed to publish," said Alexandre Mansourov, once a Soviet diplomat in North Korea who now teaches at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.
.
"He violated a personal trust, not just of Kim Jong Il, but of the people who put the report together. More copies of this book have probably been bought by foreign governments and intelligence agencies than by Russians themselves."
.
The book appeared shortly after North Korean officials admitted that they had a nuclear weapons program.
.
With estimates of his nuclear arsenal ranging up to five bombs, intelligence agencies around the world are gleaning this limited-edition memoir for new clues about the North Korean leader.
.
In power for almost a decade, Kim has given few speeches at home, has rarely traveled outside his isolated country, and has granted no interviews to Western reporters.
.
"I am the object of criticism around the world," Pulikovsky quotes Kim as saying in one meeting on the long train ride. "But I think that since I am being discussed, then I am on the right track."
.
For North Korea's government, the most damaging accounts are descriptions of lengthy banquets, jarring tales for a country where as many as 2 million people starved to death during the mid-1990s. Human rights groups contend that the government diverted international food shipments to North Korea's 1.1-million-member military and to families of loyal cadres.
.
In contrast, the Russian wrote, "Kim Jong Il can be called a gourmet."
.
"It was possible to order any dish of Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and French cuisine," he wrote of the specially outfitted train that carried Kim.
.
The North Koreans made sure that live lobsters were shipped to the train to provide Kim with fresh delicacies during the tedium of crossing Siberia. Cases of Bordeaux and Burgundy red wines were flown from Paris. Even Putin's private train "did not have the comfort of Kim Jong Il's train," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
Impressed with the brown bread at a Khabarovsk restaurant, North Korea's leader had an aide fly 20 loaves to Pyongyang so that it would be fresh on his arrival. On a stop at Omsk, the North Korean rejected a plate of barrel-salted pickles, dismissing the offer as shoddily marinated cucumbers from Bulgaria, not prepared in the authentic Russian style.
.
"Then they served tiny pelmeni, kopeck-size, in a small frying pan baked under cheese and mayonnaise," Pulikovsky wrote, recalling crestfallen faces on the Siberian hosts as the Russian meat dumplings arrived. "Kim Jong Il picked at them with a fork and said: 'What kind of pelmeni are these? They should be big, boiled and in broth.'"
.
With meals on the train stretching sometimes for four hours or more, entertainment often took the form of singing Russian and Korean songs. The North Korean leader, who had left his wife back in Pyongyang, particularly enjoyed the charms of four young singers, who were introduced as "lady conductors," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
When his government ministers came into his office, "they bent deferentially in a deep bow and remained like this until there was a hardly visible sign from their commander that they could straighten their backs," he wrote.
.
Taking a skeptical attitude about the AIDS epidemic in Africa, Kim, whose government is skilled at extracting foreign aid, once commented to Pulikovsky, "Many countries just exaggerate their disasters to get more aid from the international community."
.
Some Koreans say that such remarks merely follow a 1,000-year tradition.
.
"Basically, this is a kingdom, and therefore the king is the absolute power," said Suh Dae Sook, a University of Hawaii political science professor whose ancestral village is in northern Korea.
.
Noting that Kim Jong Il's father, Kim Il Sung, became leader of North Korea in 1948, he said, "A monarchical absolute tradition of five centuries will not disappear in 50 years." Russian's tell-all book causes a furor at home
TOKYO President George W. Bush calls him evil and says he is building nuclear bombs. Japanese officials say his missiles are aimed at Tokyo. Human rights groups say he uses concentration camps to stay in power. Even at the movies, James Bond is being tortured by his North Korean government.
.
But to Konstantin Pulikovsky, a rare foreigner who has spent time with North Korea's secretive leader, Kim Jong Il is a fun-loving guy.
.
Drinking wines imported from France, nibbling on gourmet meals with silver chopsticks, and joining in rousing choruses of old Soviet songs with "beautiful lady conductors," North Korea's remote "Dear Leader" emerges in flesh and blood from the pages of a new memoir by Pulikovsky, the representative of President Vladimir Putin in Russia's Far East.
.
Called "Orient Express" and published this autumn in Moscow, the 200-page snapshot-laden book prompted a diplomatic protest from North Korea and teeth gnashing in Russia's Foreign Ministry. It draws heavily on a confidential report prepared by a Russian Foreign Ministry note-taker on board during Kim's leisurely one-month train ride across Russia in the summer of 2001. (Kim made a second, shorter train trip into Russia this past summer, also accompanied by Pulikovsky.)
.
"Pulikovsky published what he was not supposed to publish," said Alexandre Mansourov, once a Soviet diplomat in North Korea who now teaches at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.
.
"He violated a personal trust, not just of Kim Jong Il, but of the people who put the report together. More copies of this book have probably been bought by foreign governments and intelligence agencies than by Russians themselves."
.
The book appeared shortly after North Korean officials admitted that they had a nuclear weapons program.
.
With estimates of his nuclear arsenal ranging up to five bombs, intelligence agencies around the world are gleaning this limited-edition memoir for new clues about the North Korean leader.
.
In power for almost a decade, Kim has given few speeches at home, has rarely traveled outside his isolated country, and has granted no interviews to Western reporters.
.
"I am the object of criticism around the world," Pulikovsky quotes Kim as saying in one meeting on the long train ride. "But I think that since I am being discussed, then I am on the right track."
.
For North Korea's government, the most damaging accounts are descriptions of lengthy banquets, jarring tales for a country where as many as 2 million people starved to death during the mid-1990s. Human rights groups contend that the government diverted international food shipments to North Korea's 1.1-million-member military and to families of loyal cadres.
.
In contrast, the Russian wrote, "Kim Jong Il can be called a gourmet."
.
"It was possible to order any dish of Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and French cuisine," he wrote of the specially outfitted train that carried Kim.
.
The North Koreans made sure that live lobsters were shipped to the train to provide Kim with fresh delicacies during the tedium of crossing Siberia. Cases of Bordeaux and Burgundy red wines were flown from Paris. Even Putin's private train "did not have the comfort of Kim Jong Il's train," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
Impressed with the brown bread at a Khabarovsk restaurant, North Korea's leader had an aide fly 20 loaves to Pyongyang so that it would be fresh on his arrival. On a stop at Omsk, the North Korean rejected a plate of barrel-salted pickles, dismissing the offer as shoddily marinated cucumbers from Bulgaria, not prepared in the authentic Russian style.
.
"Then they served tiny pelmeni, kopeck-size, in a small frying pan baked under cheese and mayonnaise," Pulikovsky wrote, recalling crestfallen faces on the Siberian hosts as the Russian meat dumplings arrived. "Kim Jong Il picked at them with a fork and said: 'What kind of pelmeni are these? They should be big, boiled and in broth.'"
.
< < Back to Start of Article Russian's tell-all book causes a furor at home
TOKYO President George W. Bush calls him evil and says he is building nuclear bombs. Japanese officials say his missiles are aimed at Tokyo. Human rights groups say he uses concentration camps to stay in power. Even at the movies, James Bond is being tortured by his North Korean government.
.
But to Konstantin Pulikovsky, a rare foreigner who has spent time with North Korea's secretive leader, Kim Jong Il is a fun-loving guy.
.
Drinking wines imported from France, nibbling on gourmet meals with silver chopsticks, and joining in rousing choruses of old Soviet songs with "beautiful lady conductors," North Korea's remote "Dear Leader" emerges in flesh and blood from the pages of a new memoir by Pulikovsky, the representative of President Vladimir Putin in Russia's Far East.
.
Called "Orient Express" and published this autumn in Moscow, the 200-page snapshot-laden book prompted a diplomatic protest from North Korea and teeth gnashing in Russia's Foreign Ministry. It draws heavily on a confidential report prepared by a Russian Foreign Ministry note-taker on board during Kim's leisurely one-month train ride across Russia in the summer of 2001. (Kim made a second, shorter train trip into Russia this past summer, also accompanied by Pulikovsky.)
.
"Pulikovsky published what he was not supposed to publish," said Alexandre Mansourov, once a Soviet diplomat in North Korea who now teaches at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.
.
"He violated a personal trust, not just of Kim Jong Il, but of the people who put the report together. More copies of this book have probably been bought by foreign governments and intelligence agencies than by Russians themselves."
.
The book appeared shortly after North Korean officials admitted that they had a nuclear weapons program.
.
With estimates of his nuclear arsenal ranging up to five bombs, intelligence agencies around the world are gleaning this limited-edition memoir for new clues about the North Korean leader.
.
In power for almost a decade, Kim has given few speeches at home, has rarely traveled outside his isolated country, and has granted no interviews to Western reporters.
.
"I am the object of criticism around the world," Pulikovsky quotes Kim as saying in one meeting on the long train ride. "But I think that since I am being discussed, then I am on the right track."
.
For North Korea's government, the most damaging accounts are descriptions of lengthy banquets, jarring tales for a country where as many as 2 million people starved to death during the mid-1990s. Human rights groups contend that the government diverted international food shipments to North Korea's 1.1-million-member military and to families of loyal cadres.
.
In contrast, the Russian wrote, "Kim Jong Il can be called a gourmet."
.
"It was possible to order any dish of Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and French cuisine," he wrote of the specially outfitted train that carried Kim.
.
The North Koreans made sure that live lobsters were shipped to the train to provide Kim with fresh delicacies during the tedium of crossing Siberia. Cases of Bordeaux and Burgundy red wines were flown from Paris. Even Putin's private train "did not have the comfort of Kim Jong Il's train," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
Impressed with the brown bread at a Khabarovsk restaurant, North Korea's leader had an aide fly 20 loaves to Pyongyang so that it would be fresh on his arrival. On a stop at Omsk, the North Korean rejected a plate of barrel-salted pickles, dismissing the offer as shoddily marinated cucumbers from Bulgaria, not prepared in the authentic Russian style.
.
"Then they served tiny pelmeni, kopeck-size, in a small frying pan baked under cheese and mayonnaise," Pulikovsky wrote, recalling crestfallen faces on the Siberian hosts as the Russian meat dumplings arrived. "Kim Jong Il picked at them with a fork and said: 'What kind of pelmeni are these? They should be big, boiled and in broth.'"
.
With meals on the train stretching sometimes for four hours or more, entertainment often took the form of singing Russian and Korean songs. The North Korean leader, who had left his wife back in Pyongyang, particularly enjoyed the charms of four young singers, who were introduced as "lady conductors," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
When his government ministers came into his office, "they bent deferentially in a deep bow and remained like this until there was a hardly visible sign from their commander that they could straighten their backs," he wrote.
.
Taking a skeptical attitude about the AIDS epidemic in Africa, Kim, whose government is skilled at extracting foreign aid, once commented to Pulikovsky, "Many countries just exaggerate their disasters to get more aid from the international community."
.
Some Koreans say that such remarks merely follow a 1,000-year tradition.
.
"Basically, this is a kingdom, and therefore the king is the absolute power," said Suh Dae Sook, a University of Hawaii political science professor whose ancestral village is in northern Korea.
.
Noting that Kim Jong Il's father, Kim Il Sung, became leader of North Korea in 1948, he said, "A monarchical absolute tradition of five centuries will not disappear in 50 years." Russian's tell-all book causes a furor at home
TOKYO President George W. Bush calls him evil and says he is building nuclear bombs. Japanese officials say his missiles are aimed at Tokyo. Human rights groups say he uses concentration camps to stay in power. Even at the movies, James Bond is being tortured by his North Korean government.
.
But to Konstantin Pulikovsky, a rare foreigner who has spent time with North Korea's secretive leader, Kim Jong Il is a fun-loving guy.
.
Drinking wines imported from France, nibbling on gourmet meals with silver chopsticks, and joining in rousing choruses of old Soviet songs with "beautiful lady conductors," North Korea's remote "Dear Leader" emerges in flesh and blood from the pages of a new memoir by Pulikovsky, the representative of President Vladimir Putin in Russia's Far East.
.
Called "Orient Express" and published this autumn in Moscow, the 200-page snapshot-laden book prompted a diplomatic protest from North Korea and teeth gnashing in Russia's Foreign Ministry. It draws heavily on a confidential report prepared by a Russian Foreign Ministry note-taker on board during Kim's leisurely one-month train ride across Russia in the summer of 2001. (Kim made a second, shorter train trip into Russia this past summer, also accompanied by Pulikovsky.)
.
"Pulikovsky published what he was not supposed to publish," said Alexandre Mansourov, once a Soviet diplomat in North Korea who now teaches at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu.
.
"He violated a personal trust, not just of Kim Jong Il, but of the people who put the report together. More copies of this book have probably been bought by foreign governments and intelligence agencies than by Russians themselves."
.
The book appeared shortly after North Korean officials admitted that they had a nuclear weapons program.
.
With estimates of his nuclear arsenal ranging up to five bombs, intelligence agencies around the world are gleaning this limited-edition memoir for new clues about the North Korean leader.
.
In power for almost a decade, Kim has given few speeches at home, has rarely traveled outside his isolated country, and has granted no interviews to Western reporters.
.
"I am the object of criticism around the world," Pulikovsky quotes Kim as saying in one meeting on the long train ride. "But I think that since I am being discussed, then I am on the right track."
.
For North Korea's government, the most damaging accounts are descriptions of lengthy banquets, jarring tales for a country where as many as 2 million people starved to death during the mid-1990s. Human rights groups contend that the government diverted international food shipments to North Korea's 1.1-million-member military and to families of loyal cadres.
.
In contrast, the Russian wrote, "Kim Jong Il can be called a gourmet."
.
"It was possible to order any dish of Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and French cuisine," he wrote of the specially outfitted train that carried Kim.
.
The North Koreans made sure that live lobsters were shipped to the train to provide Kim with fresh delicacies during the tedium of crossing Siberia. Cases of Bordeaux and Burgundy red wines were flown from Paris. Even Putin's private train "did not have the comfort of Kim Jong Il's train," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
Impressed with the brown bread at a Khabarovsk restaurant, North Korea's leader had an aide fly 20 loaves to Pyongyang so that it would be fresh on his arrival. On a stop at Omsk, the North Korean rejected a plate of barrel-salted pickles, dismissing the offer as shoddily marinated cucumbers from Bulgaria, not prepared in the authentic Russian style.
.
"Then they served tiny pelmeni, kopeck-size, in a small frying pan baked under cheese and mayonnaise," Pulikovsky wrote, recalling crestfallen faces on the Siberian hosts as the Russian meat dumplings arrived. "Kim Jong Il picked at them with a fork and said: 'What kind of pelmeni are these? They should be big, boiled and in broth.'"
.
With meals on the train stretching sometimes for four hours or more, entertainment often took the form of singing Russian and Korean songs. The North Korean leader, who had left his wife back in Pyongyang, particularly enjoyed the charms of four young singers, who were introduced as "lady conductors," Pulikovsky wrote.
.
When his government ministers came into his office, "they bent deferentially in a deep bow and remained like this until there was a hardly visible sign from their commander that they could straighten their backs," he wrote.
.
Taking a skeptical attitude about the AIDS epidemic in Africa, Kim, whose government is skilled at extracting foreign aid, once commented to Pulikovsky, "Many countries just exaggerate their disasters to get more aid from the international community."
.
Some Koreans say that such remarks merely follow a 1,000-year tradition.
.
"Basically, this is a kingdom, and therefore the king is the absolute power," said Suh Dae Sook, a University of Hawaii political science professor whose ancestral village is in northern Korea.
.
Noting that Kim Jong Il's father, Kim Il Sung, became leader of North Korea in 1948, he said, "A monarchical absolute tradition of five centuries will not disappear in 50 years."
and they'll get it too. Oh, the poor, starving Israelis...
Israel seeks US aid package
An Israeli delegation is due to arrive in Washington to try to secure an emergency aid package worth $12bn.
Israel's economy is suffering from one of the worst crises in the country's history.
The conflict with the Palestinians, together with the world economic downturn, has led to rising unemployment and falling investment.
Israel submitted the request several months ago and is now sending a senior delegation to follow it up.
It includes the head of the prime minister's office, Dov Weisglass, as well as the directors general of the finance and defence ministries.
A third of the aid package would be for military and security spending, to help Israel fight the Palestinian uprising and boost its defence preparations for a possible US-led war against Iraq.
The rest of the money would be in the form of loan guarantees.
Obvious choice
The United States is an obvious place to turn for help; it already gives its close ally $3.2bn in aid every year.
Mr Weisglass called the request part of "very deep and involved strategic relations" and said Washington was regarding it favourably.
Israeli commentators have said that even if Israel gets the money, it will not have an immediate impact on the economy.
That suggests the authorities are looking more for improved confidence and boosted credit ratings than immediate rescue.
The Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, does seem eager to get this vote of confidence, even though the dire economic situation has not had an impact on his poll standings ahead of general elections.
Israelis are much more focused on security, although a vote-buying scandal in Mr Sharon's Likud Party has cut into its once commanding lead.
Israel seeks US aid package
An Israeli delegation is due to arrive in Washington to try to secure an emergency aid package worth $12bn.
Israel's economy is suffering from one of the worst crises in the country's history.
The conflict with the Palestinians, together with the world economic downturn, has led to rising unemployment and falling investment.
Israel submitted the request several months ago and is now sending a senior delegation to follow it up.
It includes the head of the prime minister's office, Dov Weisglass, as well as the directors general of the finance and defence ministries.
A third of the aid package would be for military and security spending, to help Israel fight the Palestinian uprising and boost its defence preparations for a possible US-led war against Iraq.
The rest of the money would be in the form of loan guarantees.
Obvious choice
The United States is an obvious place to turn for help; it already gives its close ally $3.2bn in aid every year.
Mr Weisglass called the request part of "very deep and involved strategic relations" and said Washington was regarding it favourably.
Israeli commentators have said that even if Israel gets the money, it will not have an immediate impact on the economy.
That suggests the authorities are looking more for improved confidence and boosted credit ratings than immediate rescue.
The Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, does seem eager to get this vote of confidence, even though the dire economic situation has not had an impact on his poll standings ahead of general elections.
Israelis are much more focused on security, although a vote-buying scandal in Mr Sharon's Likud Party has cut into its once commanding lead.
4.1.03
looks like I have plenty to read. Here's something in the meantime. The bold letters were done by yours truly. The original text was unaltered.
S Korea steps up diplomatic effort
South Korea has stepped up efforts to defuse the growing crisis between its northern neighbour and the US over the relaunch of North Korea's nuclear programme.
In a flurry of diplomatic activity, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Hang-Kyung is currently in Moscow to discuss the issue, while Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Tae-Shik left Beijing on Friday after obtaining China's pledge to help solve the crisis "peacefully through dialogue".
In a further conciliatory move, South Korea's National Security Council met on Saturday to discuss proposals asking for concessions from both Washington and Pyongyang.
But the US has again rejected North Korea's latest call for direct talks, saying the stand-off could only be resolved if the communist state renounces its nuclear programme.
Tensions escalated last month when North Korea decided to reactivate a nuclear complex which had been out of action since a 1994 agreement with the US.
Role as mediator
BBC correspondent in Seoul, Charles Scanlon says South Korea is taking the initiative to try to find a way out of the confrontation.
"It is the government's firm principle that we should settle the North Korea nuclear issue peacefully and diplomatically by any means," a government official said on Saturday.
China is seen as North Korea's closest ally, and Russia recently signed a friendship treaty with Pyongyang which, correspondents say, gives Moscow an important diplomatic role to play in the crisis.
The South Korean Security Council's meeting is another attempt at resolving the situation - this time by formulating a compromise deal which Seoul can take to the negotiating table on Monday when South Korean officials meet US and Japanese counterparts in Washington.
North Korea is currently demanding direct talks with the US and a non-aggression pact before it agrees to give up its nuclear programme.
But on Friday the Bush administration reiterated its demand that Pyongyang make the first move.
"The issue is not non-aggression, the issue is whether North Korea will verifiably dismantle this nuclear enrichment programme," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.
South Korean newspaper reports say that Seoul may ask Washington to give North Korea a written assurance guaranteeing its sovereignty if Pyongyang first scraps its nuclear programme - thereby avoiding the need for a non-aggression pact.
But South Korea still has an uphill battle in its role as mediator.
There has been little sign of compromise so far, and the impression of discord may well have encouraged the North Koreans to press their demands, our correspondent says.
Nuclear programme
Pyongyang accepts it has broken the terms of the 1994 agreement it made with the US by removing surveillance equipment from a nuclear plant supposed to remain dormant.
But it said it needed the Yongbyon plant to generate electricity after the US stopped sending aid shipments of oil.
For its part, the US said it halted oil deliveries after North Korea had admitted carrying out banned nuclear work.
S Korea steps up diplomatic effort
South Korea has stepped up efforts to defuse the growing crisis between its northern neighbour and the US over the relaunch of North Korea's nuclear programme.
In a flurry of diplomatic activity, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Hang-Kyung is currently in Moscow to discuss the issue, while Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Tae-Shik left Beijing on Friday after obtaining China's pledge to help solve the crisis "peacefully through dialogue".
In a further conciliatory move, South Korea's National Security Council met on Saturday to discuss proposals asking for concessions from both Washington and Pyongyang.
But the US has again rejected North Korea's latest call for direct talks, saying the stand-off could only be resolved if the communist state renounces its nuclear programme.
Tensions escalated last month when North Korea decided to reactivate a nuclear complex which had been out of action since a 1994 agreement with the US.
Role as mediator
BBC correspondent in Seoul, Charles Scanlon says South Korea is taking the initiative to try to find a way out of the confrontation.
"It is the government's firm principle that we should settle the North Korea nuclear issue peacefully and diplomatically by any means," a government official said on Saturday.
China is seen as North Korea's closest ally, and Russia recently signed a friendship treaty with Pyongyang which, correspondents say, gives Moscow an important diplomatic role to play in the crisis.
The South Korean Security Council's meeting is another attempt at resolving the situation - this time by formulating a compromise deal which Seoul can take to the negotiating table on Monday when South Korean officials meet US and Japanese counterparts in Washington.
North Korea is currently demanding direct talks with the US and a non-aggression pact before it agrees to give up its nuclear programme.
But on Friday the Bush administration reiterated its demand that Pyongyang make the first move.
"The issue is not non-aggression, the issue is whether North Korea will verifiably dismantle this nuclear enrichment programme," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.
South Korean newspaper reports say that Seoul may ask Washington to give North Korea a written assurance guaranteeing its sovereignty if Pyongyang first scraps its nuclear programme - thereby avoiding the need for a non-aggression pact.
But South Korea still has an uphill battle in its role as mediator.
There has been little sign of compromise so far, and the impression of discord may well have encouraged the North Koreans to press their demands, our correspondent says.
Nuclear programme
Pyongyang accepts it has broken the terms of the 1994 agreement it made with the US by removing surveillance equipment from a nuclear plant supposed to remain dormant.
But it said it needed the Yongbyon plant to generate electricity after the US stopped sending aid shipments of oil.
For its part, the US said it halted oil deliveries after North Korea had admitted carrying out banned nuclear work.
3.1.03
Another piece of beauty by the proverbial Jhesos...
Interview With Noam Chomsky about US Warplans
by Noam Chomsky and Michael Albert; August 29, 2002
Various questions are circulating among people worried about war. On August 29, 2002, Michael Albert put some of these to Noam Chomsky, via email. Here are the questions and his responses...
1. Has Saddam Hussein been as evil as mainstream media says? Domestically? Internationally?
He is as evil as they come, ranking with Suharto and other monsters of the modern era. No one would want to be within his reach. But fortunately, his reach does not extend very far.
Internationally, Saddam invaded Iran (with Western support), and when that war was going badly turned to chemical weapons (also with Western support). He invaded Kuwait and was quickly driven out. A major concern in Washington right after the invasion was that Saddam would quickly withdraw, putting "his puppet in [and] everyone in the Arab world will be happy" (Colin Powell, then Chief of Staff). President Bush was concerned that Saudi Arabia might "bug out at the last minute and accept a puppet regime in Kuwait" unless the US prevented Iraqi withdrawal. The concern, in brief, was that Saddam would pretty much duplicate what the US had just done in Panama (except that Latin Americans were anything but happy). From the first moment the US sought to avert this "nightmare scenario." A story that should be looked at with some care.
Saddam's worst crimes, by far, have been domestic, including the use of chemical weapons against Kurds and a huge slaughter of Kurds in the late 80s, barbaric torture, and every other ugly crime you can imagine. These are at the top of the list of terrible crimes for which he is now condemned, rightly. It's useful to ask how frequently the impassioned denunciations and eloquent expressions of outrage are accompanied by three little words: "with our help."
The crimes were well known at once, but of no particular concern to the West. Saddam received some mild reprimands; harsh congressional condemnation was considered too extreme by prominent commentators. The Reaganites and Bush 1 continued to welcome the monster as an ally and valued trading partner right through his worst atrocities and well beyond. Bush authorized loan guarantees and sale of advanced technology with clear applications for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) right up to the day of the Kuwait invasion, sometimes overriding congressional efforts to prevent what he was doing. Britain was still authorizing export of military equipment and radioactive materials a few days after the invasion. When ABC correspondent and now ZNet Commentator Charles Glass discovered biological weapons facilities (using commercial satellites and defector testimony), his revelations were immediately denied by the Pentagon and the story disappeared. It was resurrected when Saddam committed his first real crime, disobeying US orders (or perhaps misinterpreting them) by invading Kuwait, and switched instantly from friend to reincarnation of Attila the Hun. The same facilities were then used to demonstrate his innately evil nature. When Bush 1 announced new gifts to his friend in December 1989 (also gifts to US agribusiness and industry), it was considered too insignificant even to report, though one could read about it in Z magazine at the time, maybe nowhere else. A few months later, shortly before he invaded Kuwait, a high-level Senate delegation, headed by (later) Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, visited Saddam, conveying the President's greetings and assuring the brutal mass murderer that he should disregard the criticism he hears from maverick reporters here. Saddam had even been able to get away with attacking a US naval vessel, the USS Stark, killing several dozen crewmen. That is a mark of real esteem. The only other country to have been granted that privilege was Israel, in 1967. In deference to Saddam, the State Department banned all contacts with the Iraqi democratic opposition, maintaining this policy even after the Gulf war, while Washington effectively authorized Saddam to crush a Shi'ite rebellion that might well have overthrown him -- in the interest of preserving "stability," the press explained, nodding sagely.
That he's a major criminal is not in doubt. That's not changed by the fact that the US and Britain regarded his major atrocities as insignificant in the light of higher "reasons of state," before the Gulf war and even after -- facts best forgotten.
2. Looking into the future, is Saddam Hussein as dangerous as mainstream media says?
The world would be better off if he weren't there, no doubt about that. Surely Iraqis would. But he can't be anywhere near as dangerous as he was when the US and Britain were supporting him, even providing him with dual-use technology that he could use for nuclear and chemical weapons development, as he presumably did. 10 years ago the Senate Banking Committee hearings revealed that the Bush administration was granting licences for dual use technology and "materials which were later utilized by the Iraq regime for nuclear missile and chemical purposes." Later hearings added more, and there are press reports and a mainstream scholarly literature on the topic (as well as dissident literature).
The 1991 war was extremely destructive, and since then Iraq has been devastated by a decade of sanctions, which probably strengthened Saddam himself (by weakening possible resistance in a shattered society), but surely reduced very significantly his capacity for war-making or support for terror. Furthermore, since 1991 his regime has been constrained by "no fly zones," regular overflights and bombing, and very tight surveillance. Chances are that the events of Sept. 11 weakened him still further. If there are any links between Saddam and al-Qaeda, they would be far more difficult to maintain now because of the sharply intensified surveillance and controls. That aside, links are not very likely. Despite enormous efforts to tie Saddam to the 9-11 attacks, nothing has been found, which is not too surprising. Saddam and bin Laden were bitter enemies, and there's no particular reason to suppose that there have been any changes in that regard.
The rational conclusion is that Saddam is probably less of a danger now than before 9-11, and far less of a threat than when he was enjoying substantial support from the US-UK (and many others). That raises a few questions. If Saddam is such a threat to the survival of civilization today that the global enforcer has to resort to war, why wasn't that true a year ago? And much more dramatically, in early 1990?
3. How should the problem of the existence and use of weapons of mass destruction in the world today be dealt with?
They should be eliminated. The non-proliferation treaty commits countries with nuclear weapons to take steps towards eliminating them. The biological and chemical weapons treaties have the same goals. The main Security Council resolution concerning Iraq (687, 1991) calls for eliminating weapons of mass destruction and delivery systems from the Middle East, and working towards a global ban on chemical weapons. Good advice.
Iraq is nowhere near the lead in this regard. We might recall the warning of General Lee Butler, head of Clinton's Strategic Command in the early 90s, that "it is dangerous in the extreme that in the cauldron of animosities that we call the Middle East, one nation has armed itself, ostensibly, with stockpiles of nuclear weapons, perhaps numbering in the hundreds, and that inspires other nations to do so." He's talking about Israel of course. The Israeli military authorities claim to have air and armored forces that are larger and more advanced than those of any European NATO power (Yitzhak ben Israel, Ha'aretz, 4-16-02, Hebrew). They also announce that 12% of their bombers and fighter aircraft are permanently stationed in Eastern Turkey, along with comparable naval and submarine forces in Turkish bases, and armored forces as well, in case it becomes necessary to resort to extreme violence once again to subdue Turkey's Kurdish population, as in the Clinton years. Israeli aircraft based in Turkey are reported to be flying reconnaisance flights along Iran's borders, part of a general US-Israel-Turkey policy of threatening Iran with attack and perhaps forceful partitioning. Israeli analysts also report that joint US-Israel-Turkey air exercises are intended as a threat and warning to Iran. And of course to Iraq (Robert Olson, Middle East Policy, June 2002). Israel is doubtless using the huge US air bases in Eastern Turkey, where the US bombers are presumably nuclear-armed. By now Israel is virtually an offshore US military base.
And the rest of the area is armed to the teeth as well. If Iraq were governed by most Gandhi-like of foreseeable leaders, it would be developing weapons systems if it could, probably well beyond what it can today. That would very likely continue, perhaps even accelerate, if the US takes control of Iraq. India and Pakistan are US allies, but are marching forward with the development of WMD and repeatedly have come agonizingly close to using nuclear weapons. The same is true of other US allies and clients.
That is likely to continue unless there is a general reduction of armaments in the area.
Would Saddam agree to that? Actually, we don't know. In early January 1991, Iraq apparently offered to withdraw from Kuwait in the context of regional negotiations on reduction of armaments, an offer that State Department officials described as serious and negotiable. But we know no more about it, because the US rejected it without response and the press reported virtually nothing. It is, however, of some interest that at that time -- right before the bombing -- polls revealed that by 2-1 the US public supported the proposal that Saddam had apparently made, preferring it to bombing. Had people been allowed to know any of this, the majority would surely have been far greater. Suppressing the facts was an important service to the cause of state violence. Could such negotiations have gotten anywhere? Only fanatical ideologues can be confident. Could such ideas be revived? Same answer. One way to find out is to try.
4. Some argue that there is ample justification for treating Iraq's potential for weapons of mass destruction differently from those of other countries because, under the terms of Security Council Resolution 687, agreed to by Saddam Hussein, Iraq is to be disarmed, in part as punishment for its flagrant violation of international law in invading Kuwait. Is the international community justified in trying to restrict Iraq's weapons of mass destruction? If one accepts this argument, as put, what would be the international ramifications? Is there a different version of this argument with better logic and methodology, and what would be its implications?
As noted, 687 has other provisions, rather significant ones.
The invasion of Kuwait is one of Saddam's lesser crimes. It is not very different from one of the footnotes to US crimes in its own traditional domains: the invasion of Panama a few months earlier, which didn't have even a marginally credible pretext. The main difference is that the US could veto Security Council resolutions condemning the invasion, disregard the harsh condemnations from the Latin American democracies (barely reported), and basically do what it liked. It's all removed from sanitized history for the same reasons. As I mentioned, Washington feared that Saddam would emulate the Panama invasion and worked hard to prevent it. In the region itself, the invasion of Kuwait, criminal as it was, doesn't compare with the US-supported Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which left some 20,000 dead. And it's embarrassingly easy to continue with much worse cases that we all know.
That aside, these arguments are somewhat beside the point. Those who believe that the Security Council resolutions of a decade ago (which said nothing about use of force) indirectly authorize an invasion have a very easy way to prove that they are serious in that claim: they can urge the US to approach the Security Council for Chapter VII authorization to use force. That will settle the matter. Authorization could probably be obtained: a veto is unlikely. But the US does not want such authorization, at least now, just as it refused it when it chose to bomb Afghanistan, though authorization would surely have been given. For such reasons alone, these discussions are irrelevant.
As for the "international community," in practice, it means the US and whoever will go along with it.
More generally, it would make good sense to try to implement the non-proliferation treaty, the chemical and biological weapons treaties, and the relevant provisions of 687. And to proceed with more serious efforts at disarmament across the board. But any such steps would require US acquiescence, a remote contingency unless there are significant changes here.
5. Hasn't the history of previous weapons inspections shown that weapons inspectors can be fooled, delayed, and otherwise prevented from actually accomplishing their task? Is there a viable inspections method or related policy, and could it be applied universally?
Sure they can be fooled. However, the weapons inspections were vastly more effective than bombing in destroying Iraq's military capacities, and appear to have been largely successful. Going a step beyond, when was the last time there was a meaningful (or any) international inspection of Israel's nuclear and (probably) chemical weapons facilities? Or those of the US? Inspection regimes should be established, and universalized, but that again requires US acquiescence.
6. During the recent Congressional hearings on Iraq, one witness stated that for inspections to be truly effective, a rapid reaction military force would be needed, so that Saddam Hussein could not prevent the inspectors from making a surprise visit to some site where improper activity was going on. The witness said there's no way Iraq would agree to this, but by demanding such a force the U.S. would seize the high moral ground. Is such a force a necessary component of an effective inspection regime? Would the U.S. be on high moral ground? What reciprocal demands might others reasonably make of us?
Is the goal propaganda ("seizing the high moral ground")? Or reducing the threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)? If the former, we can dismiss the matter. If the latter, some obvious questions arise. Weapons inspection appears to have been highly effective, even if imperfect. Scott Ritter's testimony on the topic is compelling, and I know of no serious refutation of it. Those who want to reduce the threat of WMD will, therefore, try to create the conditions for meaningful inspection, as required by resolution 687 and earlier ones, and supported by the actual international community. For some years, the US has sought in every way to block such eventualities. The inspections were used as a cover for spying on Iraq, with the open intent of overthrowing the regime and probably assassinating the leadership. Apart from the violation of elementary norms, these practices were sure to undermine the inspections regime, and to sharply reduce the likelihood that Iraq would accept inspections. Would Israel agree to inspection of its military facilities by spies for Hamas? In 1998, Clinton withdrew the inspectors in preparation for bombing -- acts that have been reconstructed in propaganda as Iraqi expulsion of the inspectors. The US-UK bombing was carefully timed to coincide with an emergency meeting of the Security Council on inspections, hence to demonstrate the utter contempt of the enforcers for the UN. And the bombing was another blow to the renewal of inspections. Since then, Washington has been insisting that even if Iraq accepts the most intrusive inspections by American spies seeking to prepare the ground for invasion, it will not make any difference. In Cheney's recent version, "A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of [Saddam's] compliance with U.N. resolutions." This stance amounts to pleading with Iraq not to accept inspectors. It has been reported, not implausibly, that one reason why Washington forced out the highly respected director of the UN Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Jose Bustani, was that he was seeking to arrange inspections of chemical weapons in Iraq, thus interfering with Washington's efforts to prevent WMD inspections. The hypocrisy was particularly stunning, mainstream commentators pointed out, after the Bush administration undermined the Chemical and Biological weapons conventions by refusing at the last minute to ratify enforcement protocols, in part because of its opposition to arms agreements, in part to protect commercial secrets of US corporations, and possibly in part to keep its own violations of the conventions from too much exposure (though some has already leaked).
So back to the first question: is the goal to block inspections, or to expedite them? The witness, as quoted, evidently seeks to block them, and therefore need not be taken seriously. If, in contrast, the goal is to expedite inspections, then it's necessary to address the US government as well as Iraq.
Just to summarize quickly, WMD programs make the world a more dangerous place, Saddam's in particular. And the problem should be addressed in such a way as to make the world safer. The best approach would be global: treaties with meaningful provisions, and universal inspections to verify adherence to them. The next best approach would be something similar at a regional level. Both approaches would require US acquiescence, but that's a remote contingency, at least right now. Sensible people should try to change that. The next best approach is to return inspectors to Iraq, alone. Every effort should be made to achieve that result -- at least by those who hope to reduce serious threats, not just to find a pretext for war. The worst approach would be to try to prevent the return of inspectors along the lines just discussed. That continues to be US policy, in an effort to set the stage for an invasion. The planned invasion will strike another blow at the structure of international law and treaties that has been laboriously constructed over the years, in an effort to reduce the use of violence in the world, which has had such horrifying consequences. Apart from other consequences, an invasion is likely to encourage other countries to develop WMD, including a successor Iraqi government, and to lower the barriers against resort to force by others to achieve their objectives, including Russia, India, and China.
7. It is sometimes said that Saddam Hussein wouldn't be crazy enough to launch a nuclear weapon at the U.S. or (more realistically) Israel, knowing the inevitable consequences. But wouldn't a nuclear-armed Iraq be able to conventionally attack weaker neighboring states, knowing that his victims could not successfully call on the U.S. (or even the UN) for assistance, because Washington would fear a nuclear strike on Tel Aviv?
All sorts of outlandish possibilities can be imagined. That's kept many people employed at Rand and other think-tanks ever since WMD became available. This is hardly one of the more credible examples. One reason is that the situation will almost certainly not arise. The scenario assumes that Saddam has provided credible evidence that he has WMD available and is capable of using them. Otherwise, such weapons are not a threat or a deterrent at all. But if there ever is any indication that he does have significant WMD capacity, he'll be wiped out before he can threaten anyone with invasion. Suppose, however, just to play the game, we accept the absurd assumption that the US and Israel will just sit there quietly while Saddam brandishes WMD as a potential deterrent, in advance of the invasion of some.other country. Then the US and Israel would instantly respond to the invasion, expelling him (and probably destroying Iraq). His WMD would be no deterrent at all. A sufficient reason is that to allow his invasion to succeed would leave him as a far greater threat. Furthermore, it would be assumed that he would not use whatever WMD capacity he has because that would mean instant suicide, and if he was bent on suicide he would have used his WMD against Israel (or someone else) even before invading another country. The scenario has such slight plausibility that it is hardly worth considering in comparison with real problems that do not have to be conjured up by fevered imaginations.
If one wants to play such games, why not take some more plausible scenarios. Here's one. Suppose that the US shifts policy and joins the international consensus on a two-state Israel-Palestine settlement. Suppose, for example, the US endorses the recent Saudi plan adopted by the Arab League. Suppose Israel reacts by threatening the US -- not threatening to bomb it, but in other ways. For example, suppose Israel sends bombers over the Saudi oil fields (maybe nuclear armed, but that's unnecessary), just to indicate what it can do to the world if the US doesn't get on board again. It would be too late to react, because Israel could then carry out its warnings. That scenario has a certain plausibility because apparently it actually happened, 20 years ago, when the Saudi government floated a similar plan, violently opposed by Israel. According to the Israeli press, Israel reacted by sending bombers over the oil fields, as a warning to the US, but one that was unnecessary because the Reagan administration joined Israel in rejecting that possibility for a political settlement, as it has consistently done. True, Israel might have been facing destruction, but one might argue that Israel's strategy allows that possibility. As far back as the 1950s, leaders of the then-ruling Labor Party advised that Israel should "go crazy" if the US wouldn't go along with its demands, and the "Samson complex" has been an element of planning -- how seriously, we don't know -- ever since. So we should bomb Israel right away, before it has a chance to carry out these evil plots.
Do I believe any of this? Of course not. It's nonsensical. However, it doesn't compare too badly with the scenario about Iraq.
It should be added that there are circumstances under which Saddam might use WMD, assuming he has the capacity. If Iraq is invaded with the clear intention of capturing or more likely killing him, he would have every incentive to go for broke, since he'd have nothing to lose. But it is hard to imagine other circumstances.
8. How will the Iraqi people react to a U.S. attack on Iraq? What are the likely humanitarian consequences of a U.S. war?
No one has a clue. Not Donald Rumsfeld, not me, no one. One can imagine a delightful scenario: a few bombs fall, the Republican Guards rebel and overthrow Saddam, crowds cheer as US soldiers march in while the band plays "God Bless America," the people of the region hail the liberator who proceeds to turn Iraq into an image of American democracy and a modernizing center for the entire region -- and one that produces just enough oil to keep the price within the range that the US prefers, breaking the OPEC stranglehold. And Santa Claus smiles benignly from his sleigh. One can easily imagine rather more grim outcomes. That's a normal concomitant of the decision to resort to massive violence, and one of the many reasons why those who advocate that course have a very heavy burden of proof to bear. Needless to say, neither Rumsfeld nor Cheney nor any of the intellectuals urging war against Iraq have remotely begun to meet this burden.
9. What in your view are the true motives propelling a possible war?
There are longstanding background reasons, which are well known. Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world. It has always been likely that sooner or later, the US would try to restore this enormous prize to Western control, meaning now US control, denying privileged access to others. But those considerations have held for years. 9-11 offered new opportunities to pursue these goals under the pretext of a "war on terror" -- thin pretexts, but probably sufficient for propaganda purposes. The planned war can serve immediate domestic needs as well. It's hardly a secret that the Bush administration is carrying out an assault against the general population and future generations in the interest of narrow sectors of wealth and power that it serves with loyalty that exceeds even the usual norms. Under those circumstances, it is surely advisable to divert attention away from health care, social security, deficits, destruction of the environment, development of new weapons systems that may literally threaten survival, and a long list of other unwelcome topics. The traditional, and reasonable, device is to terrify the population. "The whole aim of practical politics," the great American satirist H. L. Mencken once said, is "to keep the public alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." In fact the menaces invoked are rarely imaginary, though they are typically inflated beyond all reason. That's a good part of the history of "practical politics," not only here of course. It doesn't take much skill to evoke an image of Saddam Hussein as the ultimate force of evil about to destroy the world, maybe the universe. And with the population huddling in fear as our gallant forces miraculously overcome this awesome foe, perhaps they won't pay attention to what is being done to them, and may even join the chorus of distinguished intellectuals chanting praises for Our Leaders. The US preponderance of power is so extraordinary that there will be plenty in reserve if things seem to be going wrong. And if that happens down the road, it can all be shovelled deep into the memory hole, or blamed on someone else, or maybe on our naive faith that others are as benign as we are. It's pretty easy: there's a treasure trove of experience to draw from.
10. Some advocates of war have suggested that if the economic sanctions on Iraq are as horrible as the left claims, then a war, even a war that killed 100,000 civilians, would be a humanitarian blessing, since, presumably, after a U.S. victory there would be no more sanctions. How do you answer this argument?
I've heard some zany arguments in the past, but this must break some new records. I suspect it was offered tongue in cheek. Note first the conception of "the left": the UN's humanitarian coordinators (Denis Halliday, Hans van Sponeck) who know more about the country than anyone else, UNICEF, etc. It's a bit like saying that the left is concerned about global warming -- and tells us something about where those who question "the claim" place themselves on the political spectrum.
But that aside, the argument does have appeal. For example, we could offer Iran assistance in conquering Israel and carrying out appropriate "regime change," so that suicide bombings would stop. Since the war advocates doubtless regard suicide bombing as atrocious, they should be calling for that. Or, we could help Russia grind Chechnya to dust, so that Chechens would no longer have to suffer Russian terror and atrocities. The possibilities are endless.
11. What will the implications of war be in the Mideast, and also other parts of the world? Do U.S. elites care?
Elites of course care, though the small group that holds the reins of power currently may not care very much. They evidently believe that they have such overwhelming force at their command that it doesn't really matter much what others think: if they don't go along, they'll be dismissed, or if they are in the way, pulverized. The thinking in high places was made pretty clear when Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia visited the US in April to urge the administration to pay some attention to the reaction in the Arab world to its strong support for Israeli terror and repression. He was told, in effect, that the US did not care what he or other Arabs think. A high official explained that "if he thought we were strong in Desert Storm, we're 10 times as strong today. This was to give him some idea what Afghanistan demonstrated about our capabilities." A senior defense analyst gave a simple gloss: others will "respect us for our toughness and won't mess with us." That stand has precedents that need not be mentioned. But in the post-9/11 world it gains new force. Are they right? Could be. Or maybe the world will blow up in their face, perhaps after a "decent interval," as it's called in diplomacy. Again, resort to large-scale violence has highly unpredictable consequences, as history reveals and common sense should tell us anyway. That's why sane people avoid it, in personal relations or international affairs, unless a very powerful argument is offered to overcome "the sickly inhibitions against the use of military force" (to borrow the phrase of Reaganite intellectual Norman Podhoretz, paraphrasing Goebbels).
12. Christopher Hitchens makes the point that while Saudi Arabia, Scowcroft, and Kissinger oppose war with Iraq because of its potential destabilizing effect in the region, the left should not care about the stability of the reactionary and corrupt regimes of the Middle East. Does this refute a commonly-heard objection to war?
It is hard to imagine what the point is supposed to be. The left has always been strenuously opposed to US support for "the reactionary and corrupt regimes of the Middle East," and would of course welcome their "destabilization" in favor of something better. On the other hand, if "destabilization" brought to power something even worse -- say, what Hitchens calls "Islamic fascism" -- then the left would oppose it, and I presume he would too. So what is the point?
I don't see how these considerations bear on any "objection to war," commonly heard or not, at least from the left. What Scowcroft and Kissinger may have in mind is another matter.
Interview With Noam Chomsky about US Warplans
by Noam Chomsky and Michael Albert; August 29, 2002
Various questions are circulating among people worried about war. On August 29, 2002, Michael Albert put some of these to Noam Chomsky, via email. Here are the questions and his responses...
1. Has Saddam Hussein been as evil as mainstream media says? Domestically? Internationally?
He is as evil as they come, ranking with Suharto and other monsters of the modern era. No one would want to be within his reach. But fortunately, his reach does not extend very far.
Internationally, Saddam invaded Iran (with Western support), and when that war was going badly turned to chemical weapons (also with Western support). He invaded Kuwait and was quickly driven out. A major concern in Washington right after the invasion was that Saddam would quickly withdraw, putting "his puppet in [and] everyone in the Arab world will be happy" (Colin Powell, then Chief of Staff). President Bush was concerned that Saudi Arabia might "bug out at the last minute and accept a puppet regime in Kuwait" unless the US prevented Iraqi withdrawal. The concern, in brief, was that Saddam would pretty much duplicate what the US had just done in Panama (except that Latin Americans were anything but happy). From the first moment the US sought to avert this "nightmare scenario." A story that should be looked at with some care.
Saddam's worst crimes, by far, have been domestic, including the use of chemical weapons against Kurds and a huge slaughter of Kurds in the late 80s, barbaric torture, and every other ugly crime you can imagine. These are at the top of the list of terrible crimes for which he is now condemned, rightly. It's useful to ask how frequently the impassioned denunciations and eloquent expressions of outrage are accompanied by three little words: "with our help."
The crimes were well known at once, but of no particular concern to the West. Saddam received some mild reprimands; harsh congressional condemnation was considered too extreme by prominent commentators. The Reaganites and Bush 1 continued to welcome the monster as an ally and valued trading partner right through his worst atrocities and well beyond. Bush authorized loan guarantees and sale of advanced technology with clear applications for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) right up to the day of the Kuwait invasion, sometimes overriding congressional efforts to prevent what he was doing. Britain was still authorizing export of military equipment and radioactive materials a few days after the invasion. When ABC correspondent and now ZNet Commentator Charles Glass discovered biological weapons facilities (using commercial satellites and defector testimony), his revelations were immediately denied by the Pentagon and the story disappeared. It was resurrected when Saddam committed his first real crime, disobeying US orders (or perhaps misinterpreting them) by invading Kuwait, and switched instantly from friend to reincarnation of Attila the Hun. The same facilities were then used to demonstrate his innately evil nature. When Bush 1 announced new gifts to his friend in December 1989 (also gifts to US agribusiness and industry), it was considered too insignificant even to report, though one could read about it in Z magazine at the time, maybe nowhere else. A few months later, shortly before he invaded Kuwait, a high-level Senate delegation, headed by (later) Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, visited Saddam, conveying the President's greetings and assuring the brutal mass murderer that he should disregard the criticism he hears from maverick reporters here. Saddam had even been able to get away with attacking a US naval vessel, the USS Stark, killing several dozen crewmen. That is a mark of real esteem. The only other country to have been granted that privilege was Israel, in 1967. In deference to Saddam, the State Department banned all contacts with the Iraqi democratic opposition, maintaining this policy even after the Gulf war, while Washington effectively authorized Saddam to crush a Shi'ite rebellion that might well have overthrown him -- in the interest of preserving "stability," the press explained, nodding sagely.
That he's a major criminal is not in doubt. That's not changed by the fact that the US and Britain regarded his major atrocities as insignificant in the light of higher "reasons of state," before the Gulf war and even after -- facts best forgotten.
2. Looking into the future, is Saddam Hussein as dangerous as mainstream media says?
The world would be better off if he weren't there, no doubt about that. Surely Iraqis would. But he can't be anywhere near as dangerous as he was when the US and Britain were supporting him, even providing him with dual-use technology that he could use for nuclear and chemical weapons development, as he presumably did. 10 years ago the Senate Banking Committee hearings revealed that the Bush administration was granting licences for dual use technology and "materials which were later utilized by the Iraq regime for nuclear missile and chemical purposes." Later hearings added more, and there are press reports and a mainstream scholarly literature on the topic (as well as dissident literature).
The 1991 war was extremely destructive, and since then Iraq has been devastated by a decade of sanctions, which probably strengthened Saddam himself (by weakening possible resistance in a shattered society), but surely reduced very significantly his capacity for war-making or support for terror. Furthermore, since 1991 his regime has been constrained by "no fly zones," regular overflights and bombing, and very tight surveillance. Chances are that the events of Sept. 11 weakened him still further. If there are any links between Saddam and al-Qaeda, they would be far more difficult to maintain now because of the sharply intensified surveillance and controls. That aside, links are not very likely. Despite enormous efforts to tie Saddam to the 9-11 attacks, nothing has been found, which is not too surprising. Saddam and bin Laden were bitter enemies, and there's no particular reason to suppose that there have been any changes in that regard.
The rational conclusion is that Saddam is probably less of a danger now than before 9-11, and far less of a threat than when he was enjoying substantial support from the US-UK (and many others). That raises a few questions. If Saddam is such a threat to the survival of civilization today that the global enforcer has to resort to war, why wasn't that true a year ago? And much more dramatically, in early 1990?
3. How should the problem of the existence and use of weapons of mass destruction in the world today be dealt with?
They should be eliminated. The non-proliferation treaty commits countries with nuclear weapons to take steps towards eliminating them. The biological and chemical weapons treaties have the same goals. The main Security Council resolution concerning Iraq (687, 1991) calls for eliminating weapons of mass destruction and delivery systems from the Middle East, and working towards a global ban on chemical weapons. Good advice.
Iraq is nowhere near the lead in this regard. We might recall the warning of General Lee Butler, head of Clinton's Strategic Command in the early 90s, that "it is dangerous in the extreme that in the cauldron of animosities that we call the Middle East, one nation has armed itself, ostensibly, with stockpiles of nuclear weapons, perhaps numbering in the hundreds, and that inspires other nations to do so." He's talking about Israel of course. The Israeli military authorities claim to have air and armored forces that are larger and more advanced than those of any European NATO power (Yitzhak ben Israel, Ha'aretz, 4-16-02, Hebrew). They also announce that 12% of their bombers and fighter aircraft are permanently stationed in Eastern Turkey, along with comparable naval and submarine forces in Turkish bases, and armored forces as well, in case it becomes necessary to resort to extreme violence once again to subdue Turkey's Kurdish population, as in the Clinton years. Israeli aircraft based in Turkey are reported to be flying reconnaisance flights along Iran's borders, part of a general US-Israel-Turkey policy of threatening Iran with attack and perhaps forceful partitioning. Israeli analysts also report that joint US-Israel-Turkey air exercises are intended as a threat and warning to Iran. And of course to Iraq (Robert Olson, Middle East Policy, June 2002). Israel is doubtless using the huge US air bases in Eastern Turkey, where the US bombers are presumably nuclear-armed. By now Israel is virtually an offshore US military base.
And the rest of the area is armed to the teeth as well. If Iraq were governed by most Gandhi-like of foreseeable leaders, it would be developing weapons systems if it could, probably well beyond what it can today. That would very likely continue, perhaps even accelerate, if the US takes control of Iraq. India and Pakistan are US allies, but are marching forward with the development of WMD and repeatedly have come agonizingly close to using nuclear weapons. The same is true of other US allies and clients.
That is likely to continue unless there is a general reduction of armaments in the area.
Would Saddam agree to that? Actually, we don't know. In early January 1991, Iraq apparently offered to withdraw from Kuwait in the context of regional negotiations on reduction of armaments, an offer that State Department officials described as serious and negotiable. But we know no more about it, because the US rejected it without response and the press reported virtually nothing. It is, however, of some interest that at that time -- right before the bombing -- polls revealed that by 2-1 the US public supported the proposal that Saddam had apparently made, preferring it to bombing. Had people been allowed to know any of this, the majority would surely have been far greater. Suppressing the facts was an important service to the cause of state violence. Could such negotiations have gotten anywhere? Only fanatical ideologues can be confident. Could such ideas be revived? Same answer. One way to find out is to try.
4. Some argue that there is ample justification for treating Iraq's potential for weapons of mass destruction differently from those of other countries because, under the terms of Security Council Resolution 687, agreed to by Saddam Hussein, Iraq is to be disarmed, in part as punishment for its flagrant violation of international law in invading Kuwait. Is the international community justified in trying to restrict Iraq's weapons of mass destruction? If one accepts this argument, as put, what would be the international ramifications? Is there a different version of this argument with better logic and methodology, and what would be its implications?
As noted, 687 has other provisions, rather significant ones.
The invasion of Kuwait is one of Saddam's lesser crimes. It is not very different from one of the footnotes to US crimes in its own traditional domains: the invasion of Panama a few months earlier, which didn't have even a marginally credible pretext. The main difference is that the US could veto Security Council resolutions condemning the invasion, disregard the harsh condemnations from the Latin American democracies (barely reported), and basically do what it liked. It's all removed from sanitized history for the same reasons. As I mentioned, Washington feared that Saddam would emulate the Panama invasion and worked hard to prevent it. In the region itself, the invasion of Kuwait, criminal as it was, doesn't compare with the US-supported Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which left some 20,000 dead. And it's embarrassingly easy to continue with much worse cases that we all know.
That aside, these arguments are somewhat beside the point. Those who believe that the Security Council resolutions of a decade ago (which said nothing about use of force) indirectly authorize an invasion have a very easy way to prove that they are serious in that claim: they can urge the US to approach the Security Council for Chapter VII authorization to use force. That will settle the matter. Authorization could probably be obtained: a veto is unlikely. But the US does not want such authorization, at least now, just as it refused it when it chose to bomb Afghanistan, though authorization would surely have been given. For such reasons alone, these discussions are irrelevant.
As for the "international community," in practice, it means the US and whoever will go along with it.
More generally, it would make good sense to try to implement the non-proliferation treaty, the chemical and biological weapons treaties, and the relevant provisions of 687. And to proceed with more serious efforts at disarmament across the board. But any such steps would require US acquiescence, a remote contingency unless there are significant changes here.
5. Hasn't the history of previous weapons inspections shown that weapons inspectors can be fooled, delayed, and otherwise prevented from actually accomplishing their task? Is there a viable inspections method or related policy, and could it be applied universally?
Sure they can be fooled. However, the weapons inspections were vastly more effective than bombing in destroying Iraq's military capacities, and appear to have been largely successful. Going a step beyond, when was the last time there was a meaningful (or any) international inspection of Israel's nuclear and (probably) chemical weapons facilities? Or those of the US? Inspection regimes should be established, and universalized, but that again requires US acquiescence.
6. During the recent Congressional hearings on Iraq, one witness stated that for inspections to be truly effective, a rapid reaction military force would be needed, so that Saddam Hussein could not prevent the inspectors from making a surprise visit to some site where improper activity was going on. The witness said there's no way Iraq would agree to this, but by demanding such a force the U.S. would seize the high moral ground. Is such a force a necessary component of an effective inspection regime? Would the U.S. be on high moral ground? What reciprocal demands might others reasonably make of us?
Is the goal propaganda ("seizing the high moral ground")? Or reducing the threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)? If the former, we can dismiss the matter. If the latter, some obvious questions arise. Weapons inspection appears to have been highly effective, even if imperfect. Scott Ritter's testimony on the topic is compelling, and I know of no serious refutation of it. Those who want to reduce the threat of WMD will, therefore, try to create the conditions for meaningful inspection, as required by resolution 687 and earlier ones, and supported by the actual international community. For some years, the US has sought in every way to block such eventualities. The inspections were used as a cover for spying on Iraq, with the open intent of overthrowing the regime and probably assassinating the leadership. Apart from the violation of elementary norms, these practices were sure to undermine the inspections regime, and to sharply reduce the likelihood that Iraq would accept inspections. Would Israel agree to inspection of its military facilities by spies for Hamas? In 1998, Clinton withdrew the inspectors in preparation for bombing -- acts that have been reconstructed in propaganda as Iraqi expulsion of the inspectors. The US-UK bombing was carefully timed to coincide with an emergency meeting of the Security Council on inspections, hence to demonstrate the utter contempt of the enforcers for the UN. And the bombing was another blow to the renewal of inspections. Since then, Washington has been insisting that even if Iraq accepts the most intrusive inspections by American spies seeking to prepare the ground for invasion, it will not make any difference. In Cheney's recent version, "A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of [Saddam's] compliance with U.N. resolutions." This stance amounts to pleading with Iraq not to accept inspectors. It has been reported, not implausibly, that one reason why Washington forced out the highly respected director of the UN Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Jose Bustani, was that he was seeking to arrange inspections of chemical weapons in Iraq, thus interfering with Washington's efforts to prevent WMD inspections. The hypocrisy was particularly stunning, mainstream commentators pointed out, after the Bush administration undermined the Chemical and Biological weapons conventions by refusing at the last minute to ratify enforcement protocols, in part because of its opposition to arms agreements, in part to protect commercial secrets of US corporations, and possibly in part to keep its own violations of the conventions from too much exposure (though some has already leaked).
So back to the first question: is the goal to block inspections, or to expedite them? The witness, as quoted, evidently seeks to block them, and therefore need not be taken seriously. If, in contrast, the goal is to expedite inspections, then it's necessary to address the US government as well as Iraq.
Just to summarize quickly, WMD programs make the world a more dangerous place, Saddam's in particular. And the problem should be addressed in such a way as to make the world safer. The best approach would be global: treaties with meaningful provisions, and universal inspections to verify adherence to them. The next best approach would be something similar at a regional level. Both approaches would require US acquiescence, but that's a remote contingency, at least right now. Sensible people should try to change that. The next best approach is to return inspectors to Iraq, alone. Every effort should be made to achieve that result -- at least by those who hope to reduce serious threats, not just to find a pretext for war. The worst approach would be to try to prevent the return of inspectors along the lines just discussed. That continues to be US policy, in an effort to set the stage for an invasion. The planned invasion will strike another blow at the structure of international law and treaties that has been laboriously constructed over the years, in an effort to reduce the use of violence in the world, which has had such horrifying consequences. Apart from other consequences, an invasion is likely to encourage other countries to develop WMD, including a successor Iraqi government, and to lower the barriers against resort to force by others to achieve their objectives, including Russia, India, and China.
7. It is sometimes said that Saddam Hussein wouldn't be crazy enough to launch a nuclear weapon at the U.S. or (more realistically) Israel, knowing the inevitable consequences. But wouldn't a nuclear-armed Iraq be able to conventionally attack weaker neighboring states, knowing that his victims could not successfully call on the U.S. (or even the UN) for assistance, because Washington would fear a nuclear strike on Tel Aviv?
All sorts of outlandish possibilities can be imagined. That's kept many people employed at Rand and other think-tanks ever since WMD became available. This is hardly one of the more credible examples. One reason is that the situation will almost certainly not arise. The scenario assumes that Saddam has provided credible evidence that he has WMD available and is capable of using them. Otherwise, such weapons are not a threat or a deterrent at all. But if there ever is any indication that he does have significant WMD capacity, he'll be wiped out before he can threaten anyone with invasion. Suppose, however, just to play the game, we accept the absurd assumption that the US and Israel will just sit there quietly while Saddam brandishes WMD as a potential deterrent, in advance of the invasion of some.other country. Then the US and Israel would instantly respond to the invasion, expelling him (and probably destroying Iraq). His WMD would be no deterrent at all. A sufficient reason is that to allow his invasion to succeed would leave him as a far greater threat. Furthermore, it would be assumed that he would not use whatever WMD capacity he has because that would mean instant suicide, and if he was bent on suicide he would have used his WMD against Israel (or someone else) even before invading another country. The scenario has such slight plausibility that it is hardly worth considering in comparison with real problems that do not have to be conjured up by fevered imaginations.
If one wants to play such games, why not take some more plausible scenarios. Here's one. Suppose that the US shifts policy and joins the international consensus on a two-state Israel-Palestine settlement. Suppose, for example, the US endorses the recent Saudi plan adopted by the Arab League. Suppose Israel reacts by threatening the US -- not threatening to bomb it, but in other ways. For example, suppose Israel sends bombers over the Saudi oil fields (maybe nuclear armed, but that's unnecessary), just to indicate what it can do to the world if the US doesn't get on board again. It would be too late to react, because Israel could then carry out its warnings. That scenario has a certain plausibility because apparently it actually happened, 20 years ago, when the Saudi government floated a similar plan, violently opposed by Israel. According to the Israeli press, Israel reacted by sending bombers over the oil fields, as a warning to the US, but one that was unnecessary because the Reagan administration joined Israel in rejecting that possibility for a political settlement, as it has consistently done. True, Israel might have been facing destruction, but one might argue that Israel's strategy allows that possibility. As far back as the 1950s, leaders of the then-ruling Labor Party advised that Israel should "go crazy" if the US wouldn't go along with its demands, and the "Samson complex" has been an element of planning -- how seriously, we don't know -- ever since. So we should bomb Israel right away, before it has a chance to carry out these evil plots.
Do I believe any of this? Of course not. It's nonsensical. However, it doesn't compare too badly with the scenario about Iraq.
It should be added that there are circumstances under which Saddam might use WMD, assuming he has the capacity. If Iraq is invaded with the clear intention of capturing or more likely killing him, he would have every incentive to go for broke, since he'd have nothing to lose. But it is hard to imagine other circumstances.
8. How will the Iraqi people react to a U.S. attack on Iraq? What are the likely humanitarian consequences of a U.S. war?
No one has a clue. Not Donald Rumsfeld, not me, no one. One can imagine a delightful scenario: a few bombs fall, the Republican Guards rebel and overthrow Saddam, crowds cheer as US soldiers march in while the band plays "God Bless America," the people of the region hail the liberator who proceeds to turn Iraq into an image of American democracy and a modernizing center for the entire region -- and one that produces just enough oil to keep the price within the range that the US prefers, breaking the OPEC stranglehold. And Santa Claus smiles benignly from his sleigh. One can easily imagine rather more grim outcomes. That's a normal concomitant of the decision to resort to massive violence, and one of the many reasons why those who advocate that course have a very heavy burden of proof to bear. Needless to say, neither Rumsfeld nor Cheney nor any of the intellectuals urging war against Iraq have remotely begun to meet this burden.
9. What in your view are the true motives propelling a possible war?
There are longstanding background reasons, which are well known. Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world. It has always been likely that sooner or later, the US would try to restore this enormous prize to Western control, meaning now US control, denying privileged access to others. But those considerations have held for years. 9-11 offered new opportunities to pursue these goals under the pretext of a "war on terror" -- thin pretexts, but probably sufficient for propaganda purposes. The planned war can serve immediate domestic needs as well. It's hardly a secret that the Bush administration is carrying out an assault against the general population and future generations in the interest of narrow sectors of wealth and power that it serves with loyalty that exceeds even the usual norms. Under those circumstances, it is surely advisable to divert attention away from health care, social security, deficits, destruction of the environment, development of new weapons systems that may literally threaten survival, and a long list of other unwelcome topics. The traditional, and reasonable, device is to terrify the population. "The whole aim of practical politics," the great American satirist H. L. Mencken once said, is "to keep the public alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." In fact the menaces invoked are rarely imaginary, though they are typically inflated beyond all reason. That's a good part of the history of "practical politics," not only here of course. It doesn't take much skill to evoke an image of Saddam Hussein as the ultimate force of evil about to destroy the world, maybe the universe. And with the population huddling in fear as our gallant forces miraculously overcome this awesome foe, perhaps they won't pay attention to what is being done to them, and may even join the chorus of distinguished intellectuals chanting praises for Our Leaders. The US preponderance of power is so extraordinary that there will be plenty in reserve if things seem to be going wrong. And if that happens down the road, it can all be shovelled deep into the memory hole, or blamed on someone else, or maybe on our naive faith that others are as benign as we are. It's pretty easy: there's a treasure trove of experience to draw from.
10. Some advocates of war have suggested that if the economic sanctions on Iraq are as horrible as the left claims, then a war, even a war that killed 100,000 civilians, would be a humanitarian blessing, since, presumably, after a U.S. victory there would be no more sanctions. How do you answer this argument?
I've heard some zany arguments in the past, but this must break some new records. I suspect it was offered tongue in cheek. Note first the conception of "the left": the UN's humanitarian coordinators (Denis Halliday, Hans van Sponeck) who know more about the country than anyone else, UNICEF, etc. It's a bit like saying that the left is concerned about global warming -- and tells us something about where those who question "the claim" place themselves on the political spectrum.
But that aside, the argument does have appeal. For example, we could offer Iran assistance in conquering Israel and carrying out appropriate "regime change," so that suicide bombings would stop. Since the war advocates doubtless regard suicide bombing as atrocious, they should be calling for that. Or, we could help Russia grind Chechnya to dust, so that Chechens would no longer have to suffer Russian terror and atrocities. The possibilities are endless.
11. What will the implications of war be in the Mideast, and also other parts of the world? Do U.S. elites care?
Elites of course care, though the small group that holds the reins of power currently may not care very much. They evidently believe that they have such overwhelming force at their command that it doesn't really matter much what others think: if they don't go along, they'll be dismissed, or if they are in the way, pulverized. The thinking in high places was made pretty clear when Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia visited the US in April to urge the administration to pay some attention to the reaction in the Arab world to its strong support for Israeli terror and repression. He was told, in effect, that the US did not care what he or other Arabs think. A high official explained that "if he thought we were strong in Desert Storm, we're 10 times as strong today. This was to give him some idea what Afghanistan demonstrated about our capabilities." A senior defense analyst gave a simple gloss: others will "respect us for our toughness and won't mess with us." That stand has precedents that need not be mentioned. But in the post-9/11 world it gains new force. Are they right? Could be. Or maybe the world will blow up in their face, perhaps after a "decent interval," as it's called in diplomacy. Again, resort to large-scale violence has highly unpredictable consequences, as history reveals and common sense should tell us anyway. That's why sane people avoid it, in personal relations or international affairs, unless a very powerful argument is offered to overcome "the sickly inhibitions against the use of military force" (to borrow the phrase of Reaganite intellectual Norman Podhoretz, paraphrasing Goebbels).
12. Christopher Hitchens makes the point that while Saudi Arabia, Scowcroft, and Kissinger oppose war with Iraq because of its potential destabilizing effect in the region, the left should not care about the stability of the reactionary and corrupt regimes of the Middle East. Does this refute a commonly-heard objection to war?
It is hard to imagine what the point is supposed to be. The left has always been strenuously opposed to US support for "the reactionary and corrupt regimes of the Middle East," and would of course welcome their "destabilization" in favor of something better. On the other hand, if "destabilization" brought to power something even worse -- say, what Hitchens calls "Islamic fascism" -- then the left would oppose it, and I presume he would too. So what is the point?
I don't see how these considerations bear on any "objection to war," commonly heard or not, at least from the left. What Scowcroft and Kissinger may have in mind is another matter.
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