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Contents HOOVER DIGEST · 2011 · NO. 1 · W I NTE R
T he E cono my
28 Amnesia à la Keynes
Heaping up massive peacetime deficits has never helped rebuild an
economy, and it won’t now. By niall ferguson.
P ol itics
44 Poison Pill
Letting the government play doctor is bad medicine. By scott w.
atlas.
S ocia l Securit y
54 Days of Reckoning
Social Security is sinking while its would-be rescuers squabble over
how to save it. Time to make common cause. By charles blahous.
P roperty Rights
T errorism
85 Gitmo Breakout
There is no quick way to dispel the legal murk surrounding
terror detainees. But these five ideas could let in some light. By jack
goldsmith.
T he Mi l itar y
I s la m ism
I ra q
T he Middle E ast
E g y pt
I nterviews
V a lues
H oover A rchives
America’s financial crisis, deep recession, and anemic recovery have been
driven largely by economic policies that have deviated from proven,
fact-based principles. To return to prosperity, we must get back to these
principles.
Since the financial crisis began, annual federal spending has increased
family.
Moreover, when higher taxes reduce the reward for work, you get less of
it. Nobel Prize–winning economist Edward Prescott showed this when he
examined international labor market data and demonstrated that chang-
es in tax rates on labor are associated with changes in employment and
hours worked. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the effective tax rate on work
increased by an average of 28 percent in Germany, France, and Italy. Over
that same period, work hours fell by an average of 22 percent in those
three countries.
Long-lasting economic policies based on a long-term strategy work;
temporary policies don’t. The difference between the effects of per-
manent tax rate cuts and one-time temporary tax rebates is also well
documented. The former creates a sustainable increase in economic
output, the latter at best only a transitory blip. Temporary policies
create uncertainty that dampens economic output as market partici-
pants, unsure about whether and how policies might change, delay
their decisions.
As Milton Friedman famously observed, nobody spends somebody
else’s money as wisely as he spends his own. Having “skin in the game”
leads to superior outcomes. When legislators put other people’s money at
risk—as when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bought risky mortgages—
crisis and economic hardship result. When minimal co-payments and low
deductibles are mandated in the insurance market, wasteful health care
spending balloons.
Rule-based policies provide the foundation of a high-growth market
economy. For most of the 1980s and 1990s, monetary policy was con-
A wealth of evidence shows that high tax rates retard investment and
The departures from sound principles continued when the Fed and the
Treasury responded with arbitrary and unpredictable bailouts of banks,
auto companies, and financial institutions. They financed their actions
with unprecedented money creation and massive debt issuance. These
frantic moves spooked already turbulent markets and led to financial
panic.
More deviations occurred when the government responded with inef-
fective, temporary stimulus packages. The 2008 tax rebate and the 2009
spending stimulus bills failed to improve the economy. Cash for clunkers
and the first-time home buyers' tax credit merely moved purchases for-
ward by a few months.
Then came the health care overhaul, which imposes taxes on savings
and investment and gives the government control over health care deci-
sions. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and their estimated $400 billion cost
to taxpayers have been given no path to resolution. Hundreds of new
• Take tax increases off the table. Higher tax rates are destructive to
growth and would ratify the recent spending excesses. Our complex tax
code is badly in need of an overhaul to make America more competitive.
For example, the U.S. corporate tax is one of the highest in the world.
That’s why many tax reform proposals integrate personal and corporate
income taxes with fewer special tax breaks and lower tax rates.
But in the current climate, with the very creditworthiness of the United
States at stake, we would keep the present tax regime in place while avoid-
ing the severe economic drag of higher tax rates.
• Enact a moratorium on all new regulations for the next three years,
with an exception for national security and public safety. Regulations
should be transparent and simple, pass rigorous cost-benefit tests, and rely
to a maximum extent on market-based incentives instead of command
and control. Direct and indirect cost estimates of regulations and subsi-
dies should be published before new regulations are put into law.
Off-budget financing should be ended by closing Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac. The Bureau of Consumer Finance Protection and all oth-
er government agencies should be on the budget that Congress annu-
ally approves. An enhanced bankruptcy process for failing financial firms
should be enacted to end the need for bailouts. Higher bank capital
requirements that rise with the size of the bank should be phased in.
Robert J. Barro is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Paul M.
Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University.
unhelpful manner.
Double Dips . . . or
More
Economic recovery often means multiple ups and downs. Harmful
short-term policies only make the ride worse. By Michael J. Boskin.
The optimism that emerged in the early stages of the recovery from the
financial crisis has given way to more sobering assessments of the chal-
lenges to the global and national economies.
In many countries, people fear a prolonged period of slow and occa-
sionally negative growth, persistent obstacles to reducing unemployment,
and continued economic anxiety; worse, a Japanese-style “lost decade”
with multiple recessions; or, even worse, a depression (a fear that politi-
cians and intellectuals have stoked in an attempt to justify massive govern-
ment intervention for years to come).
Are multiple downturns unusual in periods of severe economic dis-
tress? It would be useful to know before trying repeatedly to pump up the
economy in the short run with costly policies that might worsen longer-
run prospects.
The global recession was severe, unmatched since World War II, with
the possible exception of the early 1980s (when, for example, the U.S.
unemployment rate soared to 10.8 percent as a byproduct of the disin-
flation from the double-digit price growth of the late 1970s). From the
beginning of the crisis in December 2007 to the apparent end of the reces-
quadruple-dip recession.
The point at which the economy stops growing is called the peak and
the point at which it stops contracting the trough. The period from the
point at which the economy starts to grow again until the point at which
it reaches the previous peak is called the recovery. Thereafter, growth is
labeled an expansion.
For economists, a recession is over when the economy starts to grow.
The economy falls to the bottom of a well, and then, as soon as it begins
to climb out, the recession is declared over, even though it may be a long
climb back to the top. Little wonder, then, that ordinary citizens consider
a recession over only when the economy has returned to “normal,” a point
when incomes are rising and jobs no longer desperately scarce.
A common rule of thumb is that two consecutive quarters of falling
real GDP constitute a recession. But sometimes recessions don’t satisfy
this rule. Neither the 2001 nor the 1974–75 U.S. recessions met that
criterion. In addition to real GDP, experts consider employment, income,
and sales, as well as the depth, duration, and diffusion of the downturn
throughout the overall economy.
The economy falls to the bottom of a well, and then, as soon as it begins
to climb out, the recession is declared over, even though it may be a long
Around the same time, Germany had this type of double dip and Brit-
ain a quadruple dip. In the early 1980s, Britain, Japan, Italy, and Germany
all had double dips. America’s 2001 recession was one brief, mild double
dip. Within the current recession, we have already had a double dip; a dip
at the beginning of 2008, then some growth, then another long, deep dip,
then renewed growth. If the economy declines again—a highly plausible
prospect—we would have a triple dip, although perhaps not an outright
second recession.
History thus suggests that economies seldom grow out of recessions
continuously. Double dips, triple dips, and quadruple dips have been
Many lawmakers have fallen into a logical trap of their own making.
Although they recognize that tax increases hurt the economy, they argue
that our huge deficit requires Congress to raise revenue through a tax hike.
This argument rests on the flawed premise that we can reduce the defi-
cit only by increasing taxes, as if high levels of spending are a given. Not
so.
To reduce spending and reignite growth, Congress should take two
actions. First, immediately cut the level of spending that has been increased
so dramatically since 2008. Second, institute an “inflation-minus-one”
rule to constrain future spending increases.
Much public discussion focuses on the deficit, which is indeed at criti-
cal levels of around 10 percent of GDP. But even if President Obama
succeeds at lowering the deficit to 4 percent of GDP by 2013, our public-
debt-to-GDP ratio will still be dangerously high, at over 70 percent, or
nearly twice what it was during the Bush years. As the economists Car-
men Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have shown in the journal American
Economic Review, such high debt-to-GDP ratios are associated with low
growth.
Edward P. Lazear is the Morris Arnold Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover
Institution and the Jack Steele Parker Professor of Human Resources Management
and Economics at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.
Amnesia à la Keynes
Heaping up massive peacetime deficits has never helped rebuild an
economy, and it won’t now. By Niall Ferguson.
Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Laurence
A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University.
Keynesians appear to have learned nothing from all that has happened in
The Keynesians say the bond vigilantes are mythical creatures. The
anti-Keynesians (notably Hoover senior fellow and Harvard economics
professor Robert Barro) say the real myth is the Keynesian multiplier,
which is supposed to convert a fiscal stimulus into a significantly larger
boost to aggregate demand. On the contrary, supersized deficits are dent-
ing business confidence, not least by implying higher future taxes.
And so the argument goes round and round, to the great delight of the
financial media.
In some ways, of course, this is not an argument about economics at all.
It is an argument about history.
When Roosevelt became president in 1933, the deficit was already run-
ning at 4.7 percent of GDP. It rose to a peak of 5.6 percent in 1934. The
federal debt burden rose only slightly—from 40 percent of GDP to 45
percent—before the outbreak of the Second World War. It was the war
that saw the United States (and all the other combatants) embark on fiscal
expansions of the sort we have seen since 2007. So what we are witnessing
today has less to do with the 1930s than with the 1940s: it is world war
finance without the war.
But the differences are immense. First, the United States financed its
huge wartime deficits from domestic savings, via the sale of war bonds.
The evidence is very clear from surveys on both sides of the Atlantic.
People are nervous of world-war-sized deficits when there isn’t a war to
Western governments discovered the hard way that deficits could not
save them.
The remedy for such fears must be the kind of policy regime change
Sargent identified thirty years ago, and which the Thatcher and Reagan
governments successfully implemented. Then, as today, the choice was
not between stimulus and austerity. It was between policies that boost
private-sector confidence and those that kill it.
Reprinted by permission of the Financial Times. © 2010 Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved.
The Unbearable
Heaviness of Governing
At midterm, the Obama age has become something no one expected:
an ordinary presidency. By Morton Keller.
T H E U S E S O F A NALOGY
A president as distinctive as Obama attracts an unusually large flow of
analogy with his predecessors. To some degree this feast of comparison
has stood in the stead of attempts to define Obama’s presidency in more
self-referential terms, as was the case with FDR and LBJ (or, for that mat-
ter, Eisenhower, Reagan, and the Bushes). At the same time there has been
strikingly little discussion of the meaning and implications of his chosen
theme of the New Foundation, in vivid contrast to FDR’s New Deal and
LBJ’s Great Society. In the course of 2009 and the first half of 2010,
the New York Times and the Washington Post linked “Obama” and “New
Foundation” only forty-two times.
The Obama administration is most notable for its ordinariness: for falling
Analogies with Jimmy Carter are fewer but make more sense. Both
Carter and Obama came to the presidency all but out of nowhere: Carter’s
two terms in the Georgia Senate and single term as governor were of a
piece with Obama’s brief stint in the Illinois Senate and a truncated term
in the U.S. Senate. Both ran campaigns that capitalized on widespread
distaste for the presidential leadership that preceded them (Nixon-Ford,
Bush II). And both spoke appealingly of rising above partisanship and
restoring honesty, competence, national unity, and self-confidence to
American public life.
Carter and Obama began their terms in office with full agendas of
issues and programs: the accumulated wish list of post-1960s liberalism
in Carter’s case, the agenda of post-1990s liberalism in Obama’s case. (It
is notable how much overlap there is: health care, energy, the economy, a
new and softer approach in foreign policy.) And both ran into unexpected
political turbulence in their first year in office.
Conservative commentator Philip Jenkins saw Obama’s election not
as an echo of FDR in 1932 or LBJ in 1964, but of Carter in 1976. He
foresaw no replay of the New Deal or the Great Society: “In three or four
years, the main political fact in this country could well be a ruinous crisis
of Democratic liberalism.”
It is accepted that Carter’s response to adversity was to hunker down:
to stick to his policy guns in the face of mounting evidence that they
Why is a president of whom so much was expected, and who came into
Gilbert and Sullivan’s observation in Iolanthe that “every boy and every
gal/That’s born into this world alive/Is either a little Liberal/Or else a little
Conservative” needs a second look. For some years now, self-described
independents have been at least equal to and often more numerous than
self-described Democrats or Republicans. The role of independents in the
elections of 2006, 2008, and beyond is widely held to have been decisive.
The will-o’-the-wisp of a permanent party majority continues to lure
political pundits and gurus. But the electoral and cultural basis for that
scenario is weak. The more accurate contemporary template is of an elec-
torate with partisan and ideologically committed bell curve tails, and a
substantial, growing, and politically determinant middle that is inclined
to vote on the basis of the candidate and/or the issues more than the party.
T H E N E W P O L I T ICAL CULTURE
What about that other distinctive new feature on the political scene: vocal
and well-financed special interests? Ideologically minded advocacy groups
are widely regarded as the most conspicuous new force in American poli-
tics. Their political action committees and so-called 527 organizations
reached a peak in money spent and attention garnered in the 2004 elec-
tion. But the 2008 contest, and political developments since, highlight the
volatility of contemporary American political culture. Left-wing fat cats
such as George Soros and politically ambitious bloggers such as Markos
Moulitsas and his Daily Kos, and Arianna Huffington and her Huffington
Post, turned out to be flash-in-the-pan influences.
touted game-changers.
It is in this new political world that Obama brilliantly made his way to
the presidency. And it is in this world that he must deal with the ideo-
logical, policy, and political realities that make governing so heavy a weight
to bear.
Excerpted from The Unbearable Heaviness of Governing: The Obama Administration in Historical
Perspective, by Morton Keller (Hoover Institution Press, 2010). © 2010 The Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
Poison Pill
Letting the government play doctor is bad medicine. By Scott W.
Atlas.
Medical care in the United States has been loudly derided as inferior to
health care systems in the rest of the developed world in highly publi-
cized rankings, most notably the World Health Organization’s World
Health Report, which looked at care in almost two hundred nations. These
rankings have gained tremendous traction despite being exposed in lead-
ing academic journals for gross distortions from methodological flaws,
including huge measurement errors that produce results with no statistical
significance, data missing from dozens of countries, biased assumptions,
and extreme subjectivity. Government officials, policy makers, insurers,
and even many academics have used this pseudo-data to justify their per-
sonal agenda: centralizing government power over health care by impos-
ing the radical changes in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
(also dubbed ObamaCare) on a largely unwilling public.
Much of the American public assumes the criticisms of our system are
sound—the calls for change have been so ubiquitous and the topic so
complex. Indeed, a large majority have repeatedly concurred that their
health care system needs “fundamental change” or “complete rebuilding.”
But despite that general opinion, multiple studies show that more than
80 percent of Americans are satisfied with the quality of their own health
When patients know how much procedures cost, physicians and hospitals
A T U R N I N G POINT
While our senators and representatives, under the direction of the Obama
administration, debated their ideas to remake America’s health care system
at a massive cost to our children and future generations, they continued
to deny the existence of clear alternative reforms that would lower health
care costs, increase choice of insurance, and maintain the excellence of
our medical system. Cloaked with the argument that “doing nothing is
simply unacceptable,” our government embarked on a sweeping takeover
of American health care. The result included government mandates and
penalties on individuals and businesses, a dramatic expansion of already-
unsustainable government insurance programs, and new government
authority to regulate access to medical care, physician-patient decision-
making autonomy, and insurance benefits.
It may shock many Americans that the same health care systems held
up as models for an American overhaul are held in poor regard by the very
people who live under them. Meanwhile, evidence shows that countries
with heavy-handed, government-run health care systems have failed to
control escalating costs. Even welfare-burdened nations like Sweden are
introducing privatization as part of their solution to the economic chal-
lenges of health care.
Consider that 80 percent of Americans say that access to the most
advanced tests, drugs, and medical procedures and equipment is “very
Much of the urgency for reform was pressed on the American people by
distorting problems with the system and ignoring facts that point to the
excellence, indeed superiority, of American medical care. While the eco-
nomic failures of the growing burden of health care spending are enor-
mous and fearful to contemplate, the more dangerous consequences of the
impending radical transformation of America’s health care system also
menace our families. The leadership position of American health care,
with all its flaws, is at serious risk. All who value control of their own
health decisions, access to highly trained subspecialty doctors of their own
choosing, continued advances in new diagnostic methods, and safer, more
effective treatments must recognize what they are about to lose. We need
creative, bold leadership to stop the slide to nationalization of health care
that has been proven worldwide to reduce choice, restrict access, and harm
patient outcomes. If allowed to stand, this shift of power from patients
and their doctors to government bureaucrats would mark the end of
health care as we know it.
Adapted from Reforming America’s Health Care System: The Flawed Vision of ObamaCare, edited by Scott
W. Atlas (Hoover Institution Press, 2010). © 2010 The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior
University.
Days of Reckoning
Social Security is sinking while its would-be rescuers squabble over
how to save it. Time to make common cause. By Charles Blahous.
Charles Blahous is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and one of two
public trustees for the Social Security and Medicare programs.
We must decide together what kind of system we want, and then deter-
mine how to make it a reality.
Social Security is by no means the only area of mutual perplexity in our
national political discussion. From health care to energy, different individ-
uals’ prescriptions are shaped by different philosophical goals. Social Secu-
rity is nevertheless distinct. For example, individuals with the same philo-
sophical viewpoint will reach different policy conclusions if they happen
to look at different numbers. Just as readily, individuals can be confused
by the program’s complex accounting into taking positions whose sub-
stantive effects would run counter to their own philosophical inclinations.
Without better understanding Social Security’s relevant recent history as
well as a bit about its scorekeeping, we will be confused not only about
others’ positions, but even about our own.
Many now wrongly assume, for example, that the crafters of the 1983
legislation deliberately built up a significant trust fund to pre-fund a por-
tion of the baby boomers’ Social Security benefits. Given the substantive
consequences of the 1983 reforms, this misperception is understandable.
The historical record is clear, however, that no such pre-funding has actu-
ally occurred and indeed there was no such intent. Today’s large trust fund
We must do more than listen to one another. We must be candid about the
L E T D O W N B Y T HE EXPERTS
If there is a part of society whose conduct on Social Security has been
most disappointing, it is probably the community of experts within think
tanks and academia. Ideally, they would bend the least to external politi-
cal or parochial pressures and be the least susceptible to a herd mental-
ity. However, intellectual shortcuts, whether willful or accidental, are
common and foster profound misimpressions. Too often, “experts” have
fueled the ill-founded prejudices of their surrounding communities, bent
to the predilections of their funding sources, and slanted their messages
for political advantage. Perhaps more than any other group, the intel-
lectual class has poorly served American citizens in the Social Security
debate.
There is no excuse, for example, for credentialed academics and think
tank experts to continue to write that the projected Social Security prob-
lem is merely a figment of overly conservative projections. Nor is there any
Perhaps more than any other group, the intellectual class has poorly
You’ll always get a laugh with this announcement: “Trust me. I’m from
the government and I’m here to help you.” The laugh, of course, is cyni-
cal. It signals the shared belief of speaker and listener that the government
official who utters such a line has no clue how he is perceived by others.
This line could have provoked the same response at any point in our
political history; such is the durability of our distrust. Naturally, whenever
tales of corruption loom large, the government officials involved become
the target for such cynicism. But today the loss of trust in our public insti-
tutions does not stem from fear of corrupt actions by this or that dishon-
est official. Rather, the weariness arises from the deep conviction that we
should worry about conscientious government officials who are on a fool’s
errand. Global confidence is down. News stories bear headlines about how
“optimism fades,” or that “earnings are down,” or how even “the rich” are
cutting back and tightening the belt. The American dream is under siege.
This uneasiness about public trust would not be news if it were con-
fined to libertarians and other small-government types who resent any
state intrusion into private affairs. But the public malaise runs far broader.
Richard A. Epstein is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution and a member of Hoover’s John and Jean De Nault Task
Force on Property Rights, Freedom, and Prosperity. He is the Laurence A. Tisch
Professor of Law at New York University Law School.
Amid this skeptical public mood, each expansionist move of the Obama
murmur before bed each night, “Those who govern best govern least.”
Finding Optimism
Again
Our characteristic hope for the future has been shaken. Growth in per
capita income can revive it. By Gary S. Becker.
The great majority of parents would like to see their children grow up
into a better standard of living. Yet polls suggest that in the United States
neither parents nor children are confident that this progress will happen.
These polls have been much remarked upon, but little systematic analysis
has delved into whether the average child will be better off than the aver-
age parent, and why pessimism about such progress has apparently been
growing.
The relationship between the earnings of adult children and those of
their parents at comparable ages depends on many factors unique to any
family. The abilities and health of the children relative to those of their
parents, the luck of both children and parents in occupation and other
choices, the level of parental concern to ensure that their children will
become better off, and many other considerations are special to that fam-
ily. Regardless of individual family idiosyncrasies, there are ways of assess-
ing how well the average person in one generation fares next to an average
person in his parents’ generation.
Gary S. Becker is the Rose-Marie and Jack R. Anderson Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution and a member of Hoover’s Working Group on Economic
Policy and Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on Energy Policy. He is also the
University Professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of Chicago. He
was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1992.
The rate of growth in per capita income is by far the most important
variable in determining whether children will be better off than their par-
ents. If per capita income is stagnating over time—the lot of the world for
almost all of history—the average person in one generation will tend to be
about as well off as the average person in his parents’ generation. It would
have been atypical to expect during this long period that children would
be better off than their parents.
Yet during the past couple of centuries, much of the world has experi-
enced systematic growth in per capita income that has radically changed
such expectations. For example, if income per capita were growing at only
1 percent per year, the average individual in the next generation would
have about a 30 percent higher income than the average individual in the
present generation (I assume that generations differ by about twenty-five
years). From about the middle of the nineteenth century to the beginning
of the twenty-first century, per capita incomes in the United States grew
pessimism.
Glimpses of Economic
Liberty
Bit by bit, courts are being forced to ponder the laws and licenses
that stifle people’s freedom to work. By Clint Bolick.
In one of the first economic-liberty cases I argued, the judge lamented that
the oppressive regulatory barriers that my client faced sounded more like
Russia than the United States. I replied that in fact we might have to seek
economic asylum for our clients in Russia, because these days there are fewer
barriers to entry in Russia than in our country. The judge laughed ruefully.
And then, shortly thereafter, he ruled against us. Not because he wanted to,
but because the weight of case law against economic liberty was too great.
Such was the state of economic-liberty jurisprudence as we entered this
millennium. Economic rights are consigned to the lowest level of judicial
scrutiny—the so-called “rational basis” test. As most courts have applied
it to economic regulations over the past eighty years, it has two features.
First, the regulation doesn’t have to be rational. Second, it doesn’t have to
have a basis.
It’s not much of a test, and almost no contested regulations ever flunk
it. As a consequence, law students are taught that when the rational-basis
test applies to a particular controversy between an individual and the gov-
ernment, the government always wins.
Leroy Jones had never heard about the rational-basis test, much less the
privileges or immunities clause, when the government tried to destroy his
Clint Bolick is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and the director of
the Center for Constitutional Litigation at the Goldwater Institute.
The rules of the game were rigged decisively in favor of the three exist-
ing taxicab companies. A new applicant had the burden of showing not
that there was a market need that was unserved, but that there was a need
that could not be met by the existing companies. It was an impossible
burden, exacerbated by the fact that the existing companies could inter-
vene in the proceedings and bleed their aspiring competitor to death with
massive and endless documentation demands.
Leroy Jones and his partners were denied the opportunity to pursue
their business for the most arbitrary and protectionist reasons. One could
hardly imagine a greater injustice. Yet when they went to federal court,
they lost. Once again, there simply was not enough case law for the judge
to render a favorable ruling. Having now been fired from the yellow cab
company, Leroy Jones ended up selling cold drinks under the hot sun at
Mile High Stadium, his dream of starting his own company crushed by
his own local government. (Lest the reader get too depressed, this story
has a happy ending—but I won’t reveal it until later.)
L I C E N S E D T O E XCLUDE
Most of the stories in similar circumstances, however, do not have happy
endings. One of the saddest and most frustrating cases I ever litigated
was on behalf of Junie Allick, a native Virgin Islands sailor. He made a
living shuttling tourists to the beautiful coral reef at Buck Island. He was
the only sailor in the business skillful enough to operate only with sails,
as opposed to the gasoline engines that polluted the reef. But after the
National Park Service assumed jurisdiction over Buck Island, it instituted
an “attrition” policy to reduce the number of boat trips to Buck Island.
For the first time, Allick had to navigate not only the waters off St. Croix
When we brought Junie Allick’s case to court, the federal judge was
incredulous that someone would waste the court’s time over a business
dependency.
S A F E G U A R D I NG A RIGHT
Such special-interest legislation greatly concerned the framers of our Con-
stitution, who sought to prevent it. James Madison argued in The Federal-
ist No. 10 that one of the strongest arguments for republican government
is “its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.” By faction
Madison meant what today is called a special-interest group: “a number
of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole,
who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of
interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and
aggregate interests of the community.” One means to limit the evil of fac-
Frequently, professions turn to the state to fix high barriers to entry, and
gain power over the property of others and restrict their liberty.
The property which every man has in his own labor . . . is the original
foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable.
The patrimony of the poor man lies in the strength and dexterity of his
own hands; and to hinder him from employing this strength and dexter-
ity in what manner he thinks proper, without injury to his neighbor, is a
plain violation of this most sacred property. It is a manifest encroachment
upon the just liberty both of the workman and of those who might be
disposed to employ him. As it hinders the one from working at what he
thinks proper, so it hinders the others from employing whom they think
proper.
1. “Equal protection is not a license for courts to judge the wisdom, fair-
ness, or logic of legislative choices. In areas of social and economic
policy, a statutory classification . . . must be upheld against equal-pro-
tection challenge if there is any reasonably conceivable set of facts that
could provide a rational basis for the classification.”
4. Because the government does not have to articulate its rationale, “it is
entirely irrelevant for constitutional purposes whether the conceived
reason for the challenged distinction actually motivated the legislature.”
Eric A. Hanushek is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover
Institution and a member of Hoover’s Koret Task Force on K–12 Education.
It’s increasingly accepted that the interests of teachers’ unions aren’t the
We are seeing not a war on teachers, but a war on the blunt and
There is a place for an enlightened union that accepts the simple prem-
ise that teacher performance is an integral part of effecting reform. As the
late Albert Shanker said in 1985, when he was president of the American
Federation of Teachers: “Teachers must be viewed . . . as a group that acts
on behalf of its clients and takes responsibility for the quality and perfor-
mance of its own ranks.”
The bottom line is that focusing on effective teachers cannot be taken
as a liberal or conservative position. It’s time for the unions to drop their
polemics and stop propping up the bottom.
Reprinted by permission of the Wall Street Journal. © 2010 Dow Jones & Co. All rights reserved.
Gitmo Breakout
There is no quick way to dispel the legal murk surrounding terror
detainees. But these five ideas could let in some light. By Jack
Goldsmith.
Nine years after the 9/11 attacks and two years into the Obama presidency,
our nation is still flummoxed about what to do with captured terrorists.
The Obama administration is stuck roughly where the Bush administra-
tion was, with little hope in sight.
Guantánamo Bay has proved harder to close than the administration
anticipated. Many terrorists in that prison are too dangerous to release
and, for a variety of evidentiary reasons, cannot be brought to trial. Our
allies have accepted fewer detainees than we would like. These men will
thus have to continue in U.S. custody, but neither lawmakers nor the
American people are keen on transferring them to the United States.
Military commissions have not worked well, either, as recent difficul-
ties with the trials of an alleged USS Cole bomber and a Canadian child
soldier showed yet again. Commissions still pose novel legal and political
issues; many in the military charged with operating them don’t like them;
and they bring few legitimacy benefits, especially abroad, because they
lower civilian justice standards and apply only to non-citizens.
Civilian trials for terrorists have also proven difficult. They gathered
disfavor when Attorney General Eric Holder said he would prosecute
still raises hard legal questions, about which Congress has said practically
nothing. As a result, unaccountable judges are making fateful detention
decisions, demanding release of some who the administration thinks are
dangerous terrorists. President Obama pledged to seek congressional clar-
ity on detention but has yet to follow through.
The abundant dysfunctions in our system for incapacitating terrorists
have led to increased reliance on targeted killings and outsourced rendi-
tions. Neither tactic is optimal from an intelligence-gathering perspective.
Meanwhile, Khalid Sheik Muhammad spent time in military detention
sought-after martyrdom.
These proposals, especially the last, are politically difficult. But not
taking bold steps to resolve our terrorist-detention quandary will leave
the nation in the increasingly unfortunate place it has been for nearly a
decade.
Reprinted by permission of the Washington Post. © 2010 Washington Post Co. All rights reserved.
Our Double-Edged
Sword
The military’s “indirect approach”—battlefield restraint, cultural
savvy, the use of local troops—means a big shift in the way U.S.
forces operate. It demands a close look. By Thomas H. Henriksen.
The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but
it does not remove the necessity of subduing again; and a nation is not
need for the United States to ensure its own defense. Yet America cannot
intervene directly into every ungoverned space to eliminate terrorist nests.
Direct expeditionary intervention with a large conventional military foot-
print, accompanied by high-cost state-building undertakings, would lead
to America’s exhaustion and insolvency. The costs in blood, treasure, and
moral authority would be too steep.
Faced with an expanding list of undergoverned spaces in dysfunctional
states around the globe beckoning to local extremist cells or Al-Qaeda-
franchised terrorists, the United States urgently needs an effective and
reasonably inexpensive strategy.
The current version of the indirect approach borrows heavily from
the revamped counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy of the U.S. Army and
Marine Corps. Local armies and police are trained in current U.S. pop-
T H A N K S F O R T H E “SURGE”
The new version of the indirect approach owes its rebirth to the “surge”
tactics employed in the spectacular turnaround in the Iraq War starting
in early 2007. To calm the raging Iraqi insurgency, the United States
military liberally paid, equipped, protected, and guided Sunni tribal
militias, which broke with the Al-Qaeda movement in Iraq because of
its near-indiscriminate violence and imposition of draconian religious
practices. This central dimension of the Iraqi COIN breakthrough,
along with the additional 28,500 combat personnel associated with
the surge operation, reshaped U.S. military thinking more profoundly
than any other event since the Vietnam War. Thus the indirect way
of war is in full tilt also in North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and the
Philippines.
The Al-Qaeda network, the Taliban, and other radical adversaries fight
fiercely against these American-led social re-engineering schemes for a
globalized planet. Their backward-looking ideology espouses a violent
separation from the outside world, not integration into it. In the middle
live the bulk of the people, who wish a plague upon both houses so as to
return to life before the conflict.
This new strategy, force, and military training rose to front-rank impor-
tance during the initial phase of the Afghanistan intervention and then
again after the stalemated Iraqi occupation of 2003–6. One recent, well-
publicized example is the Army-Marine alliance with the Sunni Awaken-
ing Councils (Sons of Iraq) movement in early 2007 against extremists
and the Iraqi branch of the Al-Qaeda network. Now the principles of
COIN—winning the hearts and minds of populations under insurgent
threat, gathering detailed intelligence on foes, wielding psychological car-
rots more than military sticks, and working through, with, and by non-
U.S. partners—are accepted in the uppermost reaches of the Pentagon.
“Success in the long term, more importantly, will be when the people
The stakes for America’s COIN response are high and the risks cannot
be ignored. While COIN tactics—especially allying with former insur-
gents—enabled the United States first to topple the Taliban regime in
Afghanistan and then to turn the tide of the insurgency in central Iraq, the
history of conducting antiguerrilla campaigns is fraught with complexi-
ties and unintended consequences. Culture, politics, and local conditions
confound any rigid application, the creation of any template, to neutral-
central Iraq.
At this juncture, U.S. and NATO forces are battling to establish suf-
ficient security in the violent southeastern belt to enable leaders to line up
their communities against the Taliban insurgents. Some notable break-
throughs have taken place. In early 2010, the Shinwari people—a subtribe
of the Ghilzai tribal confederation—joined with the central government
in its anti-Taliban campaign. Their cooperation marked a key realign-
ment; it points toward other Ghilzai subtribes taking the same step. West
of Kabul, in a less violent arena, the public protection programs (PPPs)
have begun to marshal community self-defense units, known as Guard-
ians, against the insurgents. The PPPs, begun in early 2009, will face a
daunting environment in the Taliban-contested zones along the Pakistani
border, across which the insurgents enjoy sanctuaries for recruitment,
training, and regrouping.
Backing and relying on tribal elements or village forces is a double-
edged sword, it could be argued, because the policy cuts at cross purposes
with the overarching goal of forging national institutions, such as multi-
From his travels last fall to the Persian Gulf—sponsored and paid for
by the State Department—Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf returned with a
none-too-subtle threat. His project would have to go on. Canceling the
proposed Islamic center near ground zero would risk putting “our sol-
diers, our troops, our embassies and citizens under attack in the Muslim
world.”
Leave aside the attempt to make this project a matter of national secu-
rity. The self-appointed bridge between America and the Arab-Islamic
world bore false witness to the sentiments in Islamic lands.
The truth is that the trajectory of Islam in America (and Europe for
that matter) is at variance with the play of things in Islam’s main habitat.
A survey by Elaph, the most respected electronic daily in the Arab world,
gave a decided edge to those who objected to the building of this New
York mosque—58 percent saw it as a project of folly.
Elaph was at it again in the aftermath of Florida pastor Terry Jones’s
threat to burn copies of the Quran last fall. It queried its readers as to
whether America was a “tolerant” or a “bigoted” society. The split was 63
percent to 37 percent in favor of those who accepted the good faith and
pluralism of this country.
N O G A I N F R OM BELLIGERENCE
To this kind of sobriety, Muslim activists and preachers in the diaspora—
in Minneapolis and in Paterson, New Jersey; in Copenhagen and Amster-
dam—appear to be largely indifferent. They are forever on the lookout for
the smallest slight.
Islam in America is of recent vintage. This country can’t be “Islamic.”
Its foundations are deep in the Puritan religious tradition. The waves of
immigrants who came to these shores understood the need for discretion,
and for patience.
It wasn’t belligerence that carried the Catholics and the Jews into the
great American mainstream. It was the swarm of daily life—the grocery
store, the assembly line, the garment industry, the public schools, and the
big wars that knit the American communities together—and tore down
the religious and ethnic barriers.
There is no gain to be had, no hearts and minds to be won, in Imam
Rauf insisting that ground zero can’t be hallowed ground because there is
a strip joint and an off-track betting office nearby. This may be true, but
it is irrelevant.
A terrible deed took place on that ground almost ten years ago. Nine-
teen young Arabs brought death and ruin onto American soil, and discre-
tion has a place of pride in the way the aftermath is handled. “Islam” didn’t
commit these crimes, but young Arabs and Muslims did.
There is no use for the incantation that Islam is a religion of peace. The
incantation is false; Islam, like other religions, is theologically a religion of
Sly preachers and their foot soldiers “weaponized” the faith and all but
devoured what modernists had tried to build in the face of difficult odds.
The first Arabs who came to America arrived during the time of the
Great Migration (1880–1920). Their story is told by Gregory Orfalea in
his book The Arab Americans: A History (2006). The pioneers were mostly
Christians on the run from the hunger and the privations of a dying Otto-
man empire. One such pioneer who fled Lebanon for America said he
wanted to leave his homeland and “go to the land of justice.” Ellis Island
was fondly named bayt al-hurriya (the house of freedom). It was New
York, in the larger neighborhood of Wall Street, that was the first home of
the immigrants.
Restrictive quotas and the Great Depression reduced the migration to a
trickle. This would change drastically in the 1950s and ’60s. The time of
Islam in America had begun.
A T A L E O F D I S C RETION
It was in 1965, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf tells us, that he made his way to
America as a young man. He and a vast migration would be here as Ameri-
can identity underwent a drastic metamorphosis.
The prudence of days past was now a distant memory. These activ-
ists who came in the 1990s—the time of multiculturalism and of what
There is a great Arab and Islamic tale. It happened in the early years of
Islam, but it speaks to this controversy. It took place in AD 638, the time
of Islam’s triumphs.
The second successor to the Prophet, the Caliph Omar—to orthodox
Muslims the most revered of the four Guided Caliphs for the great con-
quests that took place during his reign—had come to Jerusalem to accept
the city’s surrender. Patriarch Sophronius, the city’s chief magistrate, is by
his side for the ceremony of surrender. Prayer time comes for Omar while
the patriarch is showing him the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
The conqueror asks where he could spread out his prayer rug. Soph-
ronius tells him that he can stay where he is. Omar refuses, because his
followers, he says, might then claim for Islam the holy shrine of the Chris-
tians. Omar steps outside for his prayer.
We don’t always assert all the “rights” that we can get away with. The
faith is honored when the faith bends to necessity and discretion.
Reprinted by permission of the Wall Street Journal. © 2010 Dow Jones & Co. All rights reserved.
Seeing Islamism
Clearly
Americans are starting to grasp what radicalism means—and to
understand that moderate Islam is not the enemy. By Daniel Pipes.
The recent furor over the Islamic center in Manhattan, variously called the
ground zero mosque, Cordoba House, and Park51, has large implications
for the future of Islam in the United States and perhaps beyond.
The debate was as unexpected as it is extraordinary. One would have
thought that the event to touch a nerve within the American body politic,
making Islam a national issue, would be an act of terrorism. Or the discov-
ery that Islamists had penetrated U.S. security services. Or the dismaying
results of survey research. Or an apologetic presidential speech.
But no, something more symbolic roiled the body politic: the prospect
of a mosque in close proximity to the World Trade Center’s former loca-
tion. What began as a local zoning matter morphed over the months into
a national debate with potential foreign-policy repercussions. Its symbolic
quality fit a pattern established in other Western countries. Islamic cover-
ings on women have spurred repeated national debates in France since
1989. The Swiss banned the building of minarets. The murder of Theo
van Gogh profoundly affected the Netherlands, as did the publication of
cartoons of Muhammad in Denmark.
Oddly, only after the Islamic center’s location had generated weeks of
controversy did the issue of the individuals, organizations, and funding
with foes, and ignores the fact that Muslims alone can offer an antidote to
Islamism.
I was fighting Islamists back then, and things went badly. It was, in
practical terms, just Steven Emerson and me versus hundreds of thou-
sands of Islamists. He and I could not find adequate intellectual sup-
port, money, media interest, or political backing. Our cause felt quite
hopeless.
My lowest point came in 1999, when a retired U.S. career Foreign
Service officer named Richard Curtiss spoke on Capitol Hill about “the
potential of the American Muslim community” and compared its advanc-
es to Muhammad’s battles in seventh-century Arabia. He flat-out predict-
ed that just as Muhammad once had prevailed, so too would American
Muslims. While Curtiss spoke only about changing policy toward Israel,
his themes implied a broader Islamist takeover of the United States. His
prediction seemed unarguable.
September 11 provided a wake-up call, ending this sense of hopeless-
ness. Americans reacted badly not just to that day’s horrifying violence
but also to the Islamists’ outrageous insistence on blaming the attacks on
U.S. foreign policy and, later, their blatant denial that the perpetrators
were Muslims.
No soldier wants to be the last one to die in a war, according to the old
saw. In Afghanistan, make that “no coalition member wants to be the
last one to quit.” And so competitive withdrawal has practically begun.
According to President Obama, the United States will start drawing down
this year. Canada is preparing to exit. Poland is talking complete with-
drawal by 2012. Britain wants to end it all by 2015.
This is no way to win. It’s like a trainer announcing in round three
that he will throw in the towel in round six. His man will take no more
risks, while the other boxer will wait it out or go for the knockout
punch.
Already, President Hamid Karzai seems to be preparing for our depar-
ture by catering to the Taliban. And with every platoon that heads home,
our wards will increase their bets on whoever they think will step into the
vacuum—the Taliban, the warlords, the Iranians, or the Pakistani ISI (the
intelligence service that practically invented the Taliban in the days of
Charlie Wilson and the Soviets).
Josef Joffe is the Marc and Anita Abramowitz Fellow in International Relations
at the Hoover Institution, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli
Institute of International Studies, and publisher-editor of the German weekly
Die Zeit.
The “bad guys” fight where they live, and have nowhere else to go. We
can always ship out. The locals—be they wards or warriors of God—
know it.
Our advantages are technology and training: skilled soldiers, “eyes in the
sky,” information processing, and standoff weapons ranging from drones
to aircraft carriers and long-range bombers. Civil War General Nathan
Bedford Forrest is (erroneously) credited with the counsel to “git thar fust-
est with the mostest” as a guarantee of military success. Today, the key is to
“git thar fustest with the bestest”—be swift and precise. Keep enemies off
balance, exploit surprise, rely on air- and space-borne intelligence, disrupt
their command and logistics networks (yes, even irregulars have supply
lines), immobilize them, keep them from massing, avoid “collateral dam-
age.” Deny them sanctuaries and stay away from the population, which
also means: forget nation-building. There is no nation in Afghanistan.
No, you can’t “win” that way—in the sense of enshrining a preferred
political order or routing the enemy for good. But you can constrain and
deter your foes by maximizing their costs and minimizing yours. Best of
all, a combination of watchful presence and nimble offensive can be sus-
tained indefinitely. And indefinite the twenty-first century’s “Great Game”
will be. The tactical payoff is the enemy’s growing conviction that we
won’t go home. The strategic benefit is that he might eventually recon-
sider and start talking in earnest. That’s the best we can do, but it’s better
than throwing in the towel in round six.
Reprinted by permission of the New Republic. © 2010 New Republic (www.tnr.com). All rights reserved.
Unfinished Business
How America should carry out its new post-combat role. By Kori N.
Schake.
Last summer, when Israeli and Palestinian leaders agreed to the Obama
administration’s plan to renew face-to-face negotiations without precondi-
tions, most opinion makers reacted with deep skepticism. They and most
Middle East experts quickly lined up to dub the negotiations a frivolous
confrontation between an Israeli leader who wants no agreement and a
Palestinian leader too weak to get one.
Before my most recent visit to the region last June, my own instincts
would have mirrored those of my colleagues in the media. I covered Israel
for ABC News in 1984–86 and had returned to the area on writing assign-
ments three times between 2002 and 2007. Like many other journalists,
I had a sense of hopelessness produced by my experiences in the region.
After all, this conflict has survived war, peace negotiations, terrorist assaults
on civilians, an authorized suicide-bombing campaign, presidential arm-
twisting, even proximity talks. So it was with no great optimism that I
undertook another journey.
Yet I was surprised at how different the situation seemed. And although
I returned well versed in the reasons to be skeptical of an agreement, I part
company with colleagues who believe that the face-to-face talks will settle
nothing.
So what is different now? I offer the following observations based on
many interviews with senior diplomats, government officials, legislators,
• The Israelis and the majority Fatah wing of the PLO now share a vital
interest in the containment of Hamas—the Iran-backed radical Sunni
group—which, during the summer of 2007, violently seized control of
the Gaza Strip.
• Led by its widely respected prime minister, Salam Fayyad, and others,
the Palestinian Authority (PA) is finally developing an infrastructure of
statehood, which has generated cautious hope among many Israelis that
a Palestinian regime could be a source of stability and democratic values
in the region.
• The parties are much closer to agreement in such key areas as refugees,
land swaps, and post-accord security arrangements than is generally
reported. In addition, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
who in the opening weeks of his administration evidenced ambivalence
about the two-state solution, is now firmly on board.
• Finally, after more than a year of erratic diplomacy, the Obama admin-
istration appears to appreciate the necessity to the peace process of
face-to-face negotiations. Issues such as the move of Israeli Jews into
contested East Jerusalem may rankle, but the White House seems to
realize that at this stage of affairs, giving the parties excuses for avoiding
such talks is counterproductive.
The Israelis and the majority Fatah wing of the PLO now share a vital
to sit and discuss the future of this table, but as we talk you are slicing
While both sides agree that Hamas must be dealt with, however, the
question of tactics remains touchy. Most of the Israeli leadership main-
tains that the Palestinians themselves must dislodge Hamas before any
final settlement can be achieved. But the more reflective Palestinians sug-
gest that Israel is once again asking the PA to treat the symptoms while
ignoring the disease.
“How do you get rid of Hamas?” the PA’s minister of planning, Ali Jar-
bawi, asked rhetorically in our conversation. “Produce results in the peace
process! Hamas is a symptom, not a reason. It flourishes on the lack of a
peace process.”
Nasser al-Kidwa, Yasser Arafat’s nephew, member of Fatah’s governing
central committee, and for many years the quite able Palestine Liberation
Organization representative to the United Nations, was equally vehement:
“We lost elections because we failed to deliver on promises to our people.
We failed to deliver a Palestinian state. We failed to deliver independence.
The overwhelming majority of people would definitely support a reason-
able settlement that offers peace, that offers a better life.”
Blair, too, insisted that the Hamas problem would solve itself under the
right circumstances. “I think to deal with Hamas you must create a strong
momentum toward progress on the West Bank,” he said in our telephone
“How do you get rid of Hamas?” Ali Jarbawi asks rhetorically. “Produce
A senior Western diplomat who has observed the situation closely dur-
ing the past five years warns, “The notion that a deal will come along
that forces Hamas to go along with it . . . I think that vision is pretty far
off, particularly given the makeup of the Israeli government. Meanwhile,
Hamas is getting paid by the Syrians and the Iranians. They’ll face tough
consequences if they stick their necks out.”
The man serving as the national chief of police in the West Bank is
Hazem Atallah, a remarkably fit fifty-six-year-old Jordanian-trained for-
mer paratrooper who coordinates closely with Israel’s military and clan-
destine services and calls Israelis “cousins” because, as he puts it, “We are
all sons of Abraham.” In our talk he admitted that “there is coordination
with Israelis,” adding, “We are not ashamed. We try to show people, do it
in the sunlight because we believe it’s good for our people.”
The peace process falls under Abbas’s jurisdiction, and there have been
rumors of dissension, or at least coolness, between Abbas and Fayyad. Nor
is Fayyad, a member of the “Third Way” splinter party, certain to win
the support from Fatah that he will need to serve another term. What is
important is that Abbas and Fayyad present Palestine as a viable state, able
to navigate the rapids of independence and find a way to reunite Gaza
with the West Bank.
Fayyad’s internal reforms and endorsement of international nonvio-
lence play well with many Israelis. Many cite him as the sort of Palestinian
who will be necessary to the development of good bilateral relations. A
number of Israeli officials have even compared him to Israel’s own found-
ing father, David Ben Gurion, who is credited with developing the politi-
cal, military, economic, and social institutions of nationhood before full
statehood itself became possible. But he has also shown a sharp tongue
interest, definitely.”
Before long, Oslo had receded from memory, becoming part of the history
He was there on the reviewing stand on October 6, 1981, when the assas-
sins struck down his flamboyant predecessor, Anwar Sadat. Few thought
that Hosni Mubarak, an unassuming military officer, would survive the
tumult of Egypt’s politics. The country was on the boil, the assassins who
took Sadat’s life had been brazen beyond imagination. They had stormed
the reviewing stand on the eighth anniversary of the October War of
1973. Lieutenant Khalid Islambouli, the leader of this band of assassins,
told Mubarak to get out of the way, for they had come only after “that
dog.”
Mubarak was spared that day, and still, three decades later, he rules.
Rumors of poor health swirl around him, and the Egypt he has dominated
for so long is a crowded, broken country. “I shot the Pharaoh,” Lieutenant
Islambouli said, without doubt or remorse. He and his band of plotters
had no coherent plan for the seizure of power. They would kill the defiant
ruler, for them an apostate, make an example of him, and hope that his
successors would heed his fate.
A L U K E W A R M PEACEKEEPER
Mubarak was at one with the vast majority of Egyptians in his acceptance
of peace with Israel. He hadn’t made that peace. It was not for him the
burden it was for Sadat. Egypt was done with pan-Arab wars against Israel.
She had paid dearly in those campaigns. Her national pride had been bat-
tered, her scarce treasure had been wasted, and the country had become
an economic backwater. And so Mubarak honored the peace with Israel,
© ITAR-TASS/Vasily Smirnov
Mubarak would take U.S. aid. There would be joint military exercises with
U.S. forces. But the Egyptian ruler was keen to show his independence
For Mubarak, the appetite grew with the eating. The modest officer
of yesteryear had become a pharaoh in his own right. He flew under the
radar, as Egyptian authoritarianism was never on a par with the kind of
terror unleashed on Libya, Syria, or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. He has refused
to give his country an orderly process of succession. He would never name
a vice president, even as his country clamored for one. By his own lights
a patriot devoted to his country, he left it prey to the doubts and dark
thoughts that cripple the life of “Oriental despotisms.” He let loose on
Egyptians the steady speculation that he had in mind dynastic succession,
bequeathing a big country to his son.
Egyptians with a feel for their country’s temperament have long main-
tained that Mubarak is a creature of his social class. He hails from middle
peasantry. He made his way to the armed forces and remains at heart a
man of the barracks. He has never trusted crowds and the disputations
of politics. (Sadat was formed in the 1930s and 1940s when Egypt was
a veritable hothouse of political ideas, with doctrines and opinions at the
ready.)
In the police state he rules, radical Islamists are hunted down or impris-
oned. The prisons are notorious for their cruelty. In time, Islamists from
Egypt, survivors of its prisons, would make their way to the global jihad.
They hadn’t been able to topple the Mubarak regime, so they struck at
lands and powers beyond.
Egyptians had led the march of Arab modernity, and for decades they
lived on that sense, and memory, of primacy. All this is of the past. Other
Arabs have gone their way and negotiated their own terms with the world.
A sense of disappointment now suffuses Egypt’s political and cultural life.
There is peace with Israel, but it is unloved. There is a dependency on the
United States, but one of bitter resentment on the part of most Egyptians.
There are ideas of a big country at the crossroads of three continents, but
the reality of an unimaginative autocracy.
China Backpedals
State-owned companies are cramping the private sector—and
putting a nascent market economy in jeopardy. By Jialin Zhang.
Those who speak for China’s government insist that during the past thirty
years the state and private sectors have been “flying wing to wing.” They
officially deny that state-owned enterprises have expanded at the expense
of private enterprise, pointing out that the private sector’s share of produc-
tion value, profit, employment, and growth rate exceeds that of the state.
Hybrid and interlocking asset ownership by state, non-state, and foreign
capital is still encouraged, they assert.
But most academics and journalists contend that such economic fig-
ures are unreliable and selective. Thus we are witnessing a heated debate
in China on whether the state sector is making a comeback after decades
of official encouragement of private enterprise (a reversal dubbed guojin
mintui, or, the state advances as the private sector retreats), and if so, what
the implications are for China’s economy.
The advance and retreat show themselves in many ways. The state still
refuses to let private companies enter many key industries, especially those
monopolized by state-owned enterprises; the government recently has
intervened more vigorously into the economy; the government has allo-
cated more resources to state firms than to private companies; and state
firms have expanded into competitive industries and grown bigger.
The Chinese government began encouraging private-sector growth
in the national economy, while downgrading the role of state-owned
enterprises (SOEs), with the introduction of market-oriented economic
borrowing terms.
B I G E N T E R P R I S ES GET BIGGER
As the global financial crisis weighed on China’s economy, exports declined
and bankruptcies and the unemployment rate rose. Beijing issued a “Plan
on Revitalization of Ten Industries” in early 2009 to encourage large
SOEs in steel, automobile, shipbuilding, equipment, and other industries
to merge with medium and small private enterprises, thus transforming
them into giants that could compete in the world market.
The SOEs, supported by financing from central and local governments,
made an impressive comeback after 2008. Among the major mergers and
acquisitions in 2009:
Such SOE acquisitions and mergers have taken place in almost every
industry, including automobiles, shipbuilding, civil aviation, and finance.
Currently, the SOEs enjoy a monopoly over almost all of China’s resource
industries—petroleum, telecom, electricity, tobacco, coal, civil aviation,
finance, and insurance—forcing out private enterprises.
Furthermore, these SOEs have priority in going public and hav-
ing access to financing. Most centrally controlled SOEs are listed in the
Shanghai and Shenzhen composite indexes. Their capitalization has risen
rapidly. With abundant financial resources and backed by political power,
these special-interest groups can easily merge with and acquire other com-
panies and exercise monopoly behavior in many markets. In addition,
their growing liquidity has flowed to property and stock markets, thus
inflating a bubble economy.
Since the Beijing government liberalized the real estate market in 1992,
the nonstate sector has been the major player in this market. But the share
held by SOEs has been gradually rising—from an initial 8 percent to 60
percent. Many central and local SOEs that were never before involved
in real estate have been competing for a share of this booming market.
According to official data, over 70 percent of the 136 centrally controlled
SOEs, including China Chemical, China Railroad, and China Metallur-
gy, have entered the real estate market.
In the wake of the global economic slowdown, most Chinese manu-
facturing companies have experienced overcapacity. Their executives saw
China’s new “land kings” are not rushing to resell their land to
housing.
These new landlords are not rushing to resell their land to developers
for residential construction. Because the supply is limited, these land kings
usually hoard real estate and attempt to corner markets, expecting their
holdings to grow further in value. As a result, land in many urban areas
lies idle even as housing remains scarce. According to recent news reports,
the vacancy rate for new condominiums in many major cities exceeds 50
percent, while 85 percent of residents cannot afford to buy even a single
unit. Over the past four or five years, China’s land and resources prices
have quadrupled or more. Housing has become a source of social turmoil,
an unstable factor in society.
• The SOEs pay high salaries and bonuses to their executives and employ-
ees, which means less money for the government and shareholders.
• Because many SOEs have invested in risky projects, bad loans will
increase if the bubble bursts and triggers a bank crisis.
At the same time, Li Rongrong, head of the SASAC, has pledged that
state-owned enterprises will gradually retreat from competitive sectors to
make way for private enterprises to expand.
If all these new policies are implemented, some analysts say, it will
reverse the trend of “advance of the state, retreat of the private sector.”
Some $6.7 trillion in private capital would replace the government stimu-
lus plan and become the new engine for China’s post-crisis economic
growth.
Special to the Hoover Digest.
“Looking out at where they want China to be in ten or twenty years, they
That pain must involve both tax increases, partly to increase public-
sector investment in infrastructure that has been way too low, and budget
cuts in some government services to help further finance those same infra-
structure investments. Tax cuts, only if they stimulate job creation, must
also surely be part of the mix.
What worries me most is that as we—so far, unsuccessfully—try to
gather the political consensus to take decisive action, opportunities for the
younger generation are shrinking. They are going to pay a high price in
the short and medium term.
Gardels: Fifty years ago, California made the kind of massive public
investments—in a world-class university system, a vast road grid, and
canals to bring water from north to south—that China is making today,
from the world’s fastest trains to the cutting edge of clean-energy tech-
nologies. Yet, as we speak, California, like the United States as a whole, is
mired in debt and political gridlock.
In your final Commission on Growth and Development report, you
wrote in 2008 with China in mind that “experience suggests that strong,
technocratic teams focused on long-term growth can provide some insti-
tutional memory and continuity of policy”—in short, effective govern-
ment. “Leadership,” your report says, “requires patience, a long planning
horizon, and an unwavering focus on the goal of inclusive growth.”
Perhaps the Western consumer democracies, where the feedback sig-
nals of politics, the media, and the market all tend to steer society toward
immediate gratification, could learn something these days from China?
“America has clearly not yet come to terms with the fact that a healthy
It doesn’t work that way. And it never has, even in the United States. It
takes a commitment of resources and a long-term perspective. It is a bit
like the way venture capital works. You don’t know exactly how things will
unfold, but you have to have a portfolio of projects to try to create and
capture emerging opportunities.
In the developing countries that are successful, they think more in terms
of a complementary relationship between the public and private sector.
Gardels: Is there a cultural issue here? Do societies dominated by a con-
sumer mentality have the political gumption anymore to save and sacrifice
for the longer term?
Spence: I’m not sure I understand the underlying forces that have led us
to short-termism and underinvestment. But I do know changing that is
above all a political process of building consensus for responsible gover-
nance. Those who think all you need to do is cut taxes and everything else
will fall in place are wrong.
For a country of our level of income and wealth, the state of the infra-
structure has become an embarrassment. Why can’t we set a goal in Amer-
ica of having first-class infrastructure in fifteen years?
“It is a bit like the way venture capital works. You don’t know exactly
how things will unfold, but you have to have a portfolio of projects to try
Many are worried about the stubbornly high U.S. unemployment rate,
but believe we will get back to normal after the recession is over. But going
back to where we were is not realistic. The emerging economies are going
to be more than 50 percent of global GDP in the not-too-distant future.
It is a changing world. We can’t afford to stand still and settle for endless
political gridlock.
I think the United States can change, but, to be honest, I just don’t see
the political will at the moment.
Reprinted by permission of the Global Viewpoint Network. © 2010 Tribune Media Services. All rights
reserved.
Hoover senior fellow Peter Berkowitz was interviewed for the blog FiveBooks
(www.fivebooks.com), whose mission is to “invite international experts to
recommend the best reading in their given fields of interest.”
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover
Institution, the chairman of Hoover’s Koret-Taube Task Force on National
Security and Law, and co-chairman of Hoover’s Boyd and Jill Smith Task Force
on Virtues of a Free Society. Jonathan Rauch writes for the blog FiveBooks.
“Many people have opinions about Leo Strauss, but only a small portion
of those who have opinions have spent much time reading his books.”
Rauch: Which is a little bit odd if you read this book, right?
Berkowitz: Yes, this is a book of essays, but it is characteristic. Most of
the essays represent interpretations of classic works of political philoso-
phy—of a Platonic dialogue, of Lucretius. There’s an essay on the lib-
eralism of ancient political philosophy. What I was especially interested
in for this conversation, though, were the essays on religion and his two
essays on the importance of liberal education to liberal democracy.
Rauch: In the book he says that liberal education consists of listening to
the conversation among the greatest minds and also in reminding oneself
of human excellence, of human greatness. Is that what attracts you?
Berkowitz: I’m glad you mentioned those lines. There is much more
to it, but let’s start with the important lines that you’ve selected.
What does he mean by those lines, and what are the implications? He
means that the history of literature, the history of philosophy, and so
on is really a debate. Differences of opinion about what constitutes
human flourishing and how we should live our lives, what is justice,
what is injustice, what are the virtues that constitute a good life, and
so on; studying that conversation is the essence of the highest form
of education that our civilization offers. In other words, the educa-
tion that he recommends is anything but dogmatic. It’s sometimes
mistaken for a canonical education but the canon he is interested in
is a canon that is constituted by disagreement over these important
questions.
♦♦♦♦
“I can affirm that government has a very limited role and still believe
♦♦♦♦
Rauch: Your next two books are both very recent books, and they’re not
by people who are thought of as very conservative writers. First is Walter
Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the
Modern World, 2007. It’s a grand sweeping theory of history, a rumina-
tion on the history of U.S. power which, as I understand it, argues that
Americans and others in the Anglosphere keep imagining that liberalism
and capitalism will bring about a day of peace and prosperity around the
world, yet history keeps tripping them up. Why Walter Russell Mead?
Berkowitz: Definitely not because he’s a conservative, because you’re
right, he’s not a conservative. I think it’s important for conservatives to
“Walter Russell Mead does not make the argument that America’s
success has been foreordained; he makes the argument that it’s been
good for the world. . . . America has certainly also been guilty of hubris.”
♦♦♦♦
Rauch: Your last book is very recent, Paul Berman’s The Flight of the
Intellectuals, published in April 2010. Berman is someone I tend to think
of as being on the liberal side of things, though I could be wrong.
Berkowitz: No, you’re right.
Berkowitz: Well, that’s easy, yes. The final chapters of Berman’s book
deal with the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She was very severely attacked by
two distinguished journalists as an “enlightenment fundamentalist.”
She was dismissed as a woman who fled from one dogma, the dogma
of extremism, to the dogma of enlightenment, whose attacks on Islam
were extreme if not unhinged—whereas Tariq Ramadan was treated
with great respect. What Berman attempts to show is that we have very
good reasons to be a great deal more skeptical about Tariq Ramadan,
although it’s a complicated case. People should read Berman’s book
because he draws no easy conclusions about Ramadan.
♦♦♦♦
Rauch: Themes often emerge in these interviews and in your case, with
the exception of Walter Russell Mead, four of your five books, in their very
different ways, argue for pushing back against a kind of creeping relativ-
ism. They argue for regrounding classical liberalism, Enlightenment liber-
alism, as a fighting cause for certain virtues and values that we hold dear.
Berkowitz: I would say that is what has interested me about all these
books and especially in bringing them here to discuss with you. All five
of these books teach us something important about how we, today, are
failing to understand, appreciate, and defend our liberty.
Reprinted by permission of the blog FiveBooks and its series on American conservatism (http://fivebooks.
com/america-conservatism). © 2010 The Browser Publications, AG. All rights reserved.
America, Dismantled
Hoover fellow Thomas Sowell digs in his heels against American
decline. By David Hogberg.
Thomas Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public
Policy at the Hoover Institution. David Hogberg writes for Investor’s Business
Daily.
look at the imbalance of power between the United States and Iran, while
Hogberg: One big trend leading to America’s decline that came through
in the book was how politicians and activists use rhetoric.
Sowell: It’s partly that, but it is also that the education system has not
taught people how to see through rhetoric. Somewhere, Oliver Wendell
Holmes says that the purpose of education is to create a mind that can-
not be humbugged by words. Well, that is not the purpose of American
education now. Much of the humbugging by words takes place inside the
educational institutions themselves. Students are not generally taught to
see both sides of an issue and learn how to analyze in such ways to see what
the differences are and how you would sort it all out. Instead they’re given
one side and they’re told that one side is it.
Schools all around the country have shown Al Gore’s An Inconvenient
Truth. But I doubt that one-tenth of students have seen the British Chan-
nel 4 production called The Great Global Warming Swindle.
Hogberg: So if children are taught only one side as unquestioned truth,
what’s the value of experience and wisdom?
Sowell: At one time students were taught, “You’re young, you’re inex-
perienced, you have a lot to learn. It’s not up to you to make sweeping
conclusions about society.” Today that is not the message. Today when I
see young kids, sometimes elementary students, carrying banners for some
crusade, someone ought to tell them that you don’t even know anything.
Or you hear they are writing letters to the president on nuclear policy and
so on. Within the past week, I got a letter from a high school senior who
was about to inform me about economics in general and about the reason
“There was a time when we understood the judge’s job is not to have
empathy; his job is to carry out the law as written. And if it was a bad
Sowell: I’m sure it’s one of the elements. I think one of the things more
important than the tea parties is that so many people who were not polit-
ical activists before have been spurred into action by the kinds of things
that have been done and the dangers they see. The biggest danger is not to
see the danger. There are increasing numbers of people who see the dan-
ger. There are increasing numbers of people, according to the polls, who
have no confidence in the media. I was delighted that Newsweek magazine
is having so much trouble because they richly deserve it. There was a time
I wondered who they were going to put on the cover once the Obamas
were gone. So there are those signs, and as the great philosopher Yogi
Berra said, “It’s not over till it’s over.”
Reprinted by permission of Investor’s Business Daily (www.investors.com). © 2010 Investor’s Business
Daily, Inc. All rights reserved.
Decline Is a Choice.
Let’s Reject It
America can decide to be itself again: free, fair, and thriving. By
Victor Davis Hanson.
Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution.
A R E N E W A L Y E T TO COME
These truths transcend space and time, and they trump race and nation-
ality, weather and climate, resources and geography. The notion that we
are doomed and the Chinese fated to prosper is not written in stone. It is
simply a matter of free will—theirs and ours. They must deal with a new
era of coming suburban blues, worker discontent, unions, environmental
discretion and regulation, an aging and shrinking population and greater
personal appetites, social protest, and nonconformity—in the manner
that industrializing Western nations did in the early twentieth century.
We in turn can easily outdistance any country should we remain the
freest, most law-abiding, and most economically open society, as in our
past. A meritocracy blind to race, gender, and ethnicity; equal applica-
tion of the law; low taxes; small government; and a transparent political
and legal system are at the heart of that renewal. America could within a
The more free the individual and flexible the markets, the more likely
disasters.
S H R U N K E N BY ENVY
I, like most Americans (I hope), don’t care whether Bill Gates lives in a
mansion or Warren Buffett flies in a huge private plane or George Soros
has billions to give away to progressive causes or even that John Kerry
has millions to spend on power boats and sailing ships. The system that
created these excesses, if we even call them that, also ensured that my hot
water—and the hot water in nearby, rather poor, Selma—is no cooler
than theirs. My Honda and hundreds in town run as well as their lim-
ousines. Last time I went to the local Wal-Mart I counted a hundred cell
phones, and I doubt Al Gore’s gets any better reception. The better off
may or may not “at a certain point . . . (have) made enough money,” to
quote the president, but I have no idea where that certain point is (or
whether it includes vacations to Costa del Sol). I do know that once our
technocracy starts determining that point, there is a greater chance that
my town will not have as much hot water as the rich or Hondas that run
as well as their luxury cars.
Study the collapse of complex societies, and rarely is the culprit the
environment or the enemy across the border. Walls may be torn down,
rivers silt up, and volcanoes erupt, but social collapse hinges on the exist-
In 1521, a brutal Hernán Cortés could never have taken Britain with
his 1,500 conquistadors, but he quickly figured out how to destroy an
empire of 4 million with that same force. The test for the command econ-
omy of the Soviet Union—which it failed—was not just to repel a Nazi-
led invasion 3 million strong but to do so without losing 20 million of
its own, while creating a prosperous, sustainable postwar order inside the
USSR and at its periphery.
“Spread the wealth” and “redistributive change” occur only when the
enterprising, gifted, lucky, or audacious among us feel that they have a
good chance to gain something for themselves (and keep most of it) or to
extend to others something they earned—more often relying on both
motives, self-interested and collective. Deny all that, shoot their bigger
cow, so to speak, or burn down their towering grain, and we will end up
as peasants and serfs fighting over a shrinking harvest.
Reprinted from the blog Works and Days (http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson).
A Communist Rogues’
Gallery
His new Dictionary of 20th-Century Communism is no closed book.
Hoover fellow Robert Service says the movement that claimed tens
of millions of victims has “a living legacy, alas.” By John J. Miller.
Hoover senior fellow Robert Service discusses his new book, A Dictionary of
20th-Century Communism (Princeton University Press, 2010; Silvio Pons,
co-editor), in a podcast for National Review Online.
“The idea that you could start poor but end up wealthy is so much
stronger in the United States than elsewhere. And I think that tended to
the world today might not be communist, but they have certainly picked
Service: I always bat this question back, because we don’t even know
exactly how many victims Stalin had in the 1930s. And why is that?
Because he brought about the deaths not only of the people that he put
up against the wall and shot, not only the people whom he starved to
death in the gulag system of labor camps, but also the people that he
deported—sometimes whole nationalities. The people he also forced to
undertake resettlement in inhospitable parts of the country. And what
about all those poor farmers who had their land taken away from them
and who had no grain to sow to sustain life? So the number of deaths
cannot just be calculated on the basis of those whom he shot and impris-
oned. The millions whose lives he ruined and brought to an end are
probably even greater than the number that you indicated. If you take a
global picture all around the world—if you add the USSR to Eastern
Europe to China—now there’s a terribly oppressive regime in the 1950s
and 1960s. Communism has had a very, very, very terrible record in
twentieth-century world history.
Reprinted by permission of National Review Online. © 2010 National Review Online, Inc. All rights reserved.
Stalin’s Genocides
Yet another crime the Soviet dictator got away with: defining genocide
to exclude what he did. Hoover fellow Norman M. Naimark tells how
it happened. By Cynthia Haven.
Mass killing is still the way a lot of governments do business. The past
few decades have seen terrifying examples in Rwanda, Cambodia, Darfur,
Bosnia, and elsewhere. Murder on a national scale, yes—but is it genocide?
“The word carries a powerful punch,” says Hoover senior fellow Norman
Naimark, a history professor at Stanford. “In international courts, it’s con-
sidered the crime of crimes.”
Nations have tugs of war over the official definition of the word genocide,
which mentions only national, ethnic, racial, and religious groups. After all,
how it’s defined can determine international relations, foreign aid, and nation-
al morale. Witness the annual international tussle over whether the 1915
Turkish massacre and deportation of the Armenians qualifies as genocide.
Naimark, author of the new book Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2010), argues that the world needs a much broader definition
of genocide that includes nations killing social classes and political groups.
His case in point: Stalin, perpetrator of the multiple examples behind the
book’s plural title.
Naimark argues that the Soviet elimination of a social class, the kulaks
(higher-income farmers), the subsequent killer famine among Ukrainian
Both Hitler and Stalin, Naimark says, “chewed up the lives of human
The destruction of the kulak class triggered the Ukrainian famine, dur-
ing which 3 million to 5 million peasants died of starvation.
“There is a great deal of evidence of government connivance in the
circumstances that brought on the shortage of grain and bad harvests in
the first place and made it impossible for Ukrainians to find food for their
survival,” Naimark writes.
We will never know how many millions Stalin killed. “And yet some-
how Stalin gets a pass,” Ian Frazier wrote in a recent New Yorker article
about the gulags. “People know he was horrible, but he has not yet been
declared horrible officially.”
Time magazine put Stalin on its cover eleven times. Russian public
opinion polls still rank him near the top of the greatest leaders of Russian
history, as if he were just another powerful but bloodthirsty czar.
There’s a reason for Russian obliviousness. Every family had not only
victims but perpetrators. “A vast network of state organizations had to be
mobilized to seize and kill that many people,” Naimark writes, estimating
that tens of thousands were accomplices.
“How much can you move on? Can you put it in your past? How is a
national identity formed when a central part of it is a crime?” Naimark
asks. “The Germans have gone about it the right way,” he says, pointing
out that Germany has pioneered research about the Holocaust and the
crimes of the Nazi regime. “Through denial and obfuscation, the Turks
have gone about it the wrong way.”
Without a full examination of the past, Naimark says, it’s too easy for
it to happen again.
Time magazine put Stalin on its cover eleven times. Russian public
opinion polls still rank him near the top of the greatest leaders of Russian
history.
What did the KGB do when it was shielding the Soviet state? In Lithu-
ania, KGB resources were spent on surveillance, information gathering,
and analysis. The information gathered was used in many ways, but one
important application was profilaktika.
The word profilaktika translates directly as “prophylaxis” or “preven-
tion.” In medical science, prophylaxis means the prevention of disease.
Soviet rulers correctly believed that their power was stabilized by mass
conformity to a fixed set of “healthy” ideas and behaviors. The KGB saw
oppositional ideas and behaviors as a disease that could be spread from
person to person through contagion. They developed the technique of
preventive warnings to isolate “unhealthy” expressions and prevent them
from spreading.
A contagion model of the spread of political ideas and national and cul-
tural identities has some foundation in behavioral science. Human beings
Soviet rulers correctly believed that their power was stabilized by mass
propositions.”
A Q U A R A N T I N E OF UNWELCOME IDEAS
The KGB issued preventive warnings in many cases that do not look polit-
ical at first sight. A large number, the largest single category in some years,
involved young Lithuanian women who were looking for a good time,
and found it by going down to the port of Klaipėda. Foreign sailors were
continually in and out of the port, handling Western currency and goods.
These women found themselves on the edge of petty currency violations,
low-level black marketing, and casual prostitution. The KGB aimed to
pick them up and warn them off, sometimes singly, sometimes in groups.
The point of this was not to control petty crime or prostitution as such,
however; what the KGB cared about was the women’s contact with for-
eigners.
A similar stream of cases was provided by Lithuanian sailors who
returned from the West with goods and currency. These gave them entry
The subject was made to understand that the KGB knew everything about
him. This could be true only if those closest to him were informers.
Young people were a special problem. While some just wanted more
fun than could be found in official youth clubs, others developed roman-
tic feelings about political freedom and national identity. The KGB was
continually treading on the heels of groups that discussed independent
Lithuania, read nationalist poetry, or planned escapades involving leaflets
and slogans. These were often students. The 1960s and 1970s were a time
of student revolution; if in Paris or Prague, why not in Vilnius? Some stu-
dents were children of the Lithuanian party elite; the party wanted them
to aspire to lead Soviet Lithuania, not independent Lithuania. Sometimes
they needed to be taught a lesson, firmly but carefully, so that they would
return to the path of “healthy” ideas and behavior.
Most preventive warnings were conducted in the privacy of the KGB
offices, but another version of the drama was enacted in semipublic meet-
ings in schools and colleges, offices, or neighborhoods. This was some-
times applied to groups, for example student networks embarking on
H O W W E L L D I D IT WORK?
Preventive warnings seem to have been very effective. In eight years of the
late 1960s and early 1970s, according to KGB figures, more than 120,000
people were “treated” by profilaktika across the entire Soviet Union; only
150 were subsequently taken to court for an actual offense. There is no
way of auditing such figures, but a tenfold or even fiftyfold underestimate
would still represent a recidivism rate that Western penal systems can only
dream about.
On occasion, the system failed. In Lithuania in 1972, for example,
some of the KGB’s worst fears were realized. In March, a petition for
greater religious freedom that had circulated within the church reached
the West, with an astonishing total of 17,000 signatures. Things got worse
in May: a student, Romas Kalanta, burned himself to death in front of
the Kaunas Musical Theater, where the incorporation of Lithuania into
the Soviet Union had been announced in 1940. According to rumor, he
belonged to a nationalist student network, and the members had drawn
lots to decide who should do this. The KGB’s attempts to pre-empt funer-
al demonstrations only inflamed things, and two days of public disorder
took place. This was exactly what KGB surveillance and prevention were
supposed to forestall.
After the event, the KGB had to deal with hundreds of people who had
taken part in demonstrations. Some were demoted at work or taken into
the Soviet army. But the main emphasis fell on putting several hundred
people through the process of profilaktika. A report notes: “A number
were punished administratively. Warning conversations were held with
the majority by the city KGB and internal affairs (i.e. police) agencies.” In
other words, the government acted on the belief that most of those who
took part in the troubles could be put back on the right path.
Another report notes that most of those receiving warnings were young-
er than twenty-five, including many members of the Communist Youth
League. In nearly all cases, it was said, the warning was enough to change
leaders.
After this time, Lithuania became quiet again. The KGB returned to
routine operations but continued to watch Lithuanians warily, especially
after the rise of Solidarity in neighboring Poland. This risk assessment was
essentially correct, because a mass opposition suddenly appeared again in
1988, spread widely among Communist Party and Youth League mem-
bers, and led directly to national independence in 1990.
understood “how harmful to Kenya was the man who saw only good in
his own people and only evil in those of the other tribes.”
Hoover Archives
type of national political organization can be developed.”
A P A R T N E R S H I P FOR DEMOCRACY
Scheinman’s growing closeness to Mboya presented an opportunity offered
to very few Americans since the Revolutionary War: to positively influence
the course of a nation struggling to be born. What Mboya obtained from
Scheinman can be seen in his inscription on Scheinman’s copy of Freedom
and After: “To Bill: For everything—encouragement and assistance during
our struggle and especially for the ideas, aims, and goals that we have so
very much in common for democracy and humanity.”
On May 17, 1957, Mboya reported to Scheinman that he had become
the de facto leader of the African elected members, but had also begun
to be attacked in the press. Over the next years, Scheinman continued to
push Mboya and compatriots to “lay down a specific, step-by-step pro-
gram and timetable covering the major outstanding issues such as redis-
tribution of the land, constitutional reform, etc., and ending with the
complete attainment of freedom,” and made detailed recommendations,
many of which were ultimately adopted.
Scheinman felt he and his friend were practicing tusikosane, a Swahili
word that meant “let us not misunderstand one another,” as they con-
veyed to each other their innermost hopes and fears. When Mboya and the
elected members returned to Nairobi from a quick trip to London, during
which the group obtained promises from the new colonial secretary, they
were welcomed by tens of thousands, and Tom wrote Bill that “my people’s
affection, trust, and confidence in all its simplicity” was sobering as well
as exhilarating, as it “revealed to me the nature and extent of our respon-
sibility. It revealed to me very clearly that I must never let them down.”
but also because I know that you are a leader who will not compromise for
reasons of expediency or personal advantage. In the midst of the atomic
age and the Cold War perhaps the world at large needs the idealism that is
present in the struggle now taking place in Africa. . . . History has placed
a particularly heavy burden on your shoulders because it would seem that
the manner in which the situation in Kenya works out will also determine
the future of all of East, Central, and South Africa—and wherever a set-
tler minority presently dominates.
Africa was a series of battlegrounds in the Cold War, and Soviet influence
was rising.
discuss bringing many more East African students to the United States.
The best and most economical way, Scheinman suggested, was to charter
a plane. The AASF would underwrite that charter, shepherd the students
to their college destinations, and help them during their stays in America.
Mboya, Kiano, and Kariuki Njiiri would choose the students. Return-
ing to New York, Scheinman asked Frank Montero to assist, and he in
turn recruited labor lawyer Theodore W. Kheel, president of the National
Urban League, and, as student liaison, young Cora Weiss, wife of ACOA
board member Peter Weiss. Cora Weiss would later serve as the organiza-
tion’s executive director.
The Nairobi and New York organizers knew very well why the “airlift”
was necessary. The British colonial educational system, a terribly narrow
pyramid, produced only a few hundred high school graduates every year
from a population of 6 million Kenyans, and then sent only a dozen or so
on to higher education. Higher education had to be done abroad because
East Africa had no true colleges, only a technical institute in Uganda. An
independent Kenya would require a cadre of well-educated native bureau-
crats, educators, businessmen, doctors, lawyers, and engineers; in Ghana,
because such a cadre did not exist, Nkrumah had to retain many white
“I know that you are a leader who will not compromise for reasons of
and to have the AASF administer those scholarships. Martin Luther King
Jr. and groups in New York City, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Berkeley
pledged to provide room and board for groups of students during their
stays in the United States.
Among the Kenyans considered for AASF assistance, Mboya wrote to
Scheinman on July 16, 1959, were “two for Hawaii.” One of those—
although Mboya did not mention him by name in the letter—was a fel-
low Luo named Barack Obama. Because Obama was going to Hawaii, he
would not be on the plane with the eighty-one going to New York, but
thereafter in Hawaii would receive one of the Jackie Robinson scholar-
ships and additional small grants from the AASF.
P L A N E L O A D OF FUTURE LEADERS
Mboya and Scheinman were adamant that this must be a self-help enter-
prise. The students had to obtain their own scholarships, and, to satisfy
Clippings recounting the 1959 arrival are part of the Scheinman archive;
they include a comment from the Chicago Daily News that was typical of press
Hoover Archives
reaction, calling the airlift program “mud-in-the-eye to the white-supremacy
specialists in Africa who prefer their Africans docile and uneducated. It is
also a powerful rebuttal to Communist propagandists selling the fiction that
Americans are somehow linked with African white supremacists.”
Seventeen colonies in Africa were to become independent in 1960, but
Kenya would not be among them, the British still refusing to cede power.
However, progress was expected at a Constitutional Conference in Lon-
don scheduled for January 1960. Believing that Mboya and his fellow
Kenyan delegates would need a helping hand from the U.S. civil rights
movement, Scheinman recommended Thurgood Marshall, chief counsel
for the NAACP and one of the foremost constitutional lawyers of his day.
Scheinman underwrote Marshall’s participation and accompanied Mar-
shall to London. The conference, and the future Supreme Court justice’s
work on it, was later credited as essential in outlining the steps by which
the British worked with the Africans toward full Kenyan independence.
The success of the 1959 airlift allowed the AASF to dream of bringing
over three or four planeloads of East Africans in 1960. A letter asking
several hundred U.S. colleges for scholarships, sent out by the AASF over
the signature of Mrs. Ralph Bunche, wife of the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize
laureate, was answered enthusiastically and positively. Many institutions
of higher learning were now eager to have East Africans on campus.
Since donations from individuals would not cover the cost of three
planes, the organizers believed that only the U.S. government or large
private foundations like Ford or Rockefeller could make an expanded pro-
gram a reality. Jackie Robinson, now on the AASF board, was close to
Vice President Richard M. Nixon, the presumptive Republican candidate
Singer Harry Belafonte, baseball player Jackie Robinson, and actor Sidney
The AASF then turned to Senator John F. Kennedy, chair of the Africa
subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Scheinman
flew Mboya and his brother to Hyannisport in his own plane on July 26,
1960, a few days after Kennedy had become the Democratic presidential
standard-bearer, to tell the candidate the airlift story and ask for support.
Kennedy pledged to have his family foundation pay for the airlift, but
wanted the pledge kept quiet. However, the AASF board was informed,
and someone—Robinson, Scheinman believed—reached the Nixon cam-
paign and, over a weekend, a Nixon associate persuaded the State Depart-
ment to reverse its policy and offer to transport the students. Mboya,
given a choice between the two offers, told Scheinman to take Kennedy’s,
as it was more certain.
On the Senate floor, Nixon ally Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania
accused Kennedy of using his money for the airlift in an effort to buy
black votes. Scheinman and Montero supplied Kennedy with materials
for a speech refuting Scott’s claim that the AASF was cavalierly refusing
the State Department’s money. During the presidential campaign, the
Hoover Archives
propagandists selling the fiction that Americans are somehow linked with
Board of Overseers
Marc L. Abramowitz Herbert M. Dwight
Victoria (Tory) Agnich William C. Edwards
Frederick L. Allen Gerald E. Egan
Esmail Amid-Hozour Leonard W. Ely
Jack R. Anderson Charles H. (Chuck) Esserman
Martin Anderson Jeffrey A. Farber
Javier Arango Clayton W. Frye Jr.
George L. Argyros Stephen B. Gaddis
Robert G. Barrett James G. Gidwitz
Frank E. Baxter Cynthia Fry Gunn
Donald R. Beall Arthur E. Hall, CFA
Stephen D. Bechtel Jr. F. Philip Handy
Peter B. Bedford Everett J. Hauck
Peter S. Bing W. Kurt Hauser
Joanne Whittier Blokker John L. Hennessy*
William K. Blount Warner W. Henry
James J. Bochnowski Heather R. Higgins
Wendy H. Borcherdt Kenneth H. Hofmann
William K. Bowes Margaret Hoover
Richard W. Boyce Allan Hoover III
C. Preston Butcher Preston B. Hotchkis
Richard Call Philip Hudner
James J. Carroll III Leslie P. Hume*
Robert H. Castellini William J. Hume
Joan L. Danforth Walter E. Hussman Jr.
Paul L. Davies Jr. George B. James II
Paul Lewis (Lew) Davies III Gail A. Jaquish
John B. De Nault Charles B. Johnson
Kenneth T. Derr Mark Chapin Johnson
Dixon R. Doll Franklin P. Johnson Jr.
Susanne Fitger Donnelly Tom Jordan
Joseph W. Donner Steve Kahng
William H. Draper III Mary Myers Kauppila
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